“To go where?”
“Anywhere. Our mother—”
“Yes, and next you’re going to tell me that she would slaughter the calf. Thanks indeed. Go home to your mother, Jórunn, after the bishop sells Skálholt out from under you.”
“Forgive me, sister, if I speak wrongly to you—I know you are more like our foremothers than I. And that is precisely the reason why, Snæfríður, that is why it is such a grave sin, that is why it is too grievous for tears, that is why it cries out to heaven.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I did not think I would have to spell out for you that which everyone in this country has been talking about for a long time now. You know that our mother’s health is failing—the proud woman.”
“Oh, hush now, she’ll outlive all of us,” said Snæfríður. “The diocese of Skálholt is a good daughter—it keeps her in good health, even if the cottage at Bræðratunga gives her a touch of rheumatism now and then.”
“This I do know, my dear Snæfríður: the Lord always combines mercy with trial,” said the bishop’s wife. “To those who meet with misfortune he gives strength of spirit. But more than anything else, we must defend ourselves against dangers of this sort: hardening of the soul in place of the Lord’s mercy, and contempt for God and men, even for one’s own parents, in place of a humble heart.”
“I don’t take instructions for happiness from prayer books, good sister. And I doubt that there are many women in Iceland more fortunate than I,” said Snæfríður. “Least of all would I trade shoes with you, madam.”
“You are scarcely in your right mind, dear Snæfríður—we should end this conversation at once,” said the bishop’s wife.
“The widow in Lækur,” said Snæfríður, “killed her seventh child at Mary-mass last year.* It was her third illegitimate child. Now she’s to be drowned at the Alþingi at Öxará in just a few days. Last summer her children survived on horsemeat and chickweed porridge. But one Sunday in the spring, three of them, skinny and swollen, were standing in the rain on the pavements at Bræðratunga along with their ancient grandmother, staring at me as I stood there at my window. The other three were dead. I am a fortunate woman, good sister.”
“It is true, we humans cannot comprehend the Lord, my dear Snæfríður,” said the bishop’s wife. “And there is no doubt that folk in this country have lived in carelessness throughout the centuries and are now paying the penalty for it, as we hear our blessed clerics say so often. Nevertheless, God is not served when those whom he has willed to be born into a higher class subject themselves freely to his punishing rod.”
“It was in springtime—since everything here in Iceland happens in springtime—in a grassy hollow here, not far from Hvítá—they found two little girls and a pillow of cotton grass. Their household had been broken up, the estate divided, and this pillow was allotted to these twins. They had both leaned their little heads on their pillow and died. The vermin got to them. No one wanted to do anything with their bones—it was I who stepped in to have them buried. They could have been my girls. No, good sister, I am a very fortunate woman.”
“Why do you trouble yourself with tales of woe, dearest sister?” said the bishop’s wife, and by now a blush of impatience had replaced her normally cheerful-looking demeanor.
“Recently, at Cross-mass,* they finally decided to hang the sheep-thief in Krókur. He’d been sentenced many times before and had once had a hand cut off, but of course that solved nothing—he simply stole as many more sheep as he had fewer hands. The men up in Biskupstungur rode him home from the gallows to his wife and children—they threw his body across a saddle and shoved it down before his door as they rode by. No, good sister, if there is a fortunate woman in Iceland, it is I, for I weave ancient images into my fabric and sew altar cloths and priests’ copes for the churches and collect silver in my little coffer, and what’s more, God has made me barren, which is perhaps the greatest fortune that can fall to the lot of an Icelandic woman.”
“We are not going to quarrel about that, sister; though it seems to me that it is the Creator’s will that every good woman should desire to bear a healthy son. I myself took such great delight in my two sons when they were small. But if a woman is childless in her marriage, then she is not to be blamed, since God has ordained it. But if she is a high-class woman, then she does wrong, and in fact blasphemes God, if she reduces her life to the same level as beggar-folk and criminals. And you are much changed, sister, from what you once were, if even the worst suits you now.”
“I’ve always been the kind of woman who is never satisfied,” said Snæfríður. “That’s why I’ve chosen my lot—and have learned to live with it.”
“Those who live in strange fantasies never know whose playthings they are until it is too late,” said the older sister. “You married without your kinsmen’s consent, against the laws of God and the land, and the only reason that our father did not formally annul the marriage was to save you from even more disgrace. Now I do not think it unlikely that he would think twice before buying out Magnús Sigurðsson’s estate for you in exchange for the farms he had no desire to entrust you with as part of your dowry. I do know of one man, however, our devoted though reserved friend who never tires of discussing your welfare and who commends you to the Lord’s guidance night and day. The bailiff Vigfús and his brother-in-law owe this man no less a debt than they do our father. He is the man who administers to you your pastoral care, the great Latin poet and doctor, the righteous man of God, Reverend Sigurður Sveinsson, the single most wealthy man in the diocese.”
“I had been thinking of something else, that is, if my father were to fail me in this matter,” said Snæfríður.
The bishop’s wife wanted to know what her sister’s proposed alternative might be.
“I have heard rumor,” she said, “that a friend who has been away for a long time has returned.”
The elder sister’s gracious and enduring smile disappeared in an instant, involuntarily. She turned blood red. A violent look appeared in her eyes. She became another woman. She tried to speak, then stopped. She was silent for several moments, and then asked, in a musicless voice:
“How do you know he has returned?”
“You and I are both women, good sister,” said Snæfríður. “And we women have the gift of divination in certain matters. We learn things though we don’t hear them with our ears.”
“And you have thought about going south to Bessastaðir to meet him, or, if it were possible, to meet him here in Skálholt, to ask him to buy back Bræðratunga on behalf of you and Magnús Sigurðsson? Are you such a child? Is the world and everything worldly just a closed book before you? Or are you mocking me, beloved sister?”
“No, I’m not going to ask him to buy the estate for me,” said Snæfríður. “But I’ve heard rumors that he is here to investigate the conduct of the authorities. The contract that those two kinsmen, the bailiff and the brennivín-dealer, made with my husband might not be such a worthless piece of paper in the hands of a man who collects documents about Icelanders.”
“Do you know what kind of a man Arnas Arnæus is, sister?” asked the bishop’s wife, gravely.
“I know,” said Snæfríður, “that I despise the next-best, which you and my other kinfolk desired for me, more than the worst. That is my nature.”
“I shall make no attempt to decipher your mysterious expressions, sister. And I find it hard to believe that a woman of your stock here in Iceland would choose to plead the cause of criminals in direct opposition to her irreproachable old father, to defend the condemned rather than to stand with their true judge, to support those who wish to incite the commoners to confrontation with His Lordship and to tear apart the public, Christian, and proper order of the people of this land.”
“Who is doing all this?”
“Arnas Arnæus and those who support him.”
“It was my understanding that Arnæus has returned only because he carries
a higher mandate than any other authority who has ever lived in Iceland.”
“Of course he is said to be riding to the Alþingi with a letter supposedly signed by the king,” said the bishop’s wife. “And that he claims to have been appointed as judge over the merchants, and is investigating them at their trading stations in the south and either casting their wares into the sea or placing them under the king’s seal, so that poor folk are forced to come running in tears to him to get a fistful of flour or a plug of tobacco in their dire need. He proclaims himself the advocate of rogues and the prosecutor of the authorities. But those who know better truly believe him to be an operative of those in Copenhagen who have driven out the aldermen and the illustrious noblemen from the king’s council, to replace them with apprentice craftsmen, beer-brewers, and vagabonds. And report of his arrival here is hardly out and about before you express yourself more than ready to place yourself in his service, in opposition to our good father. May I remind you, dear sister, that Didrik of Münden,* who also claimed to have letters from the king, is lying under a pile of stones in Söðulholt just there on the other side of the stream.”
Snæfríður was unmoved. She stared at her sister and noticed that the madam’s cheeks were covered with seemingly permanent red flecks.
“Say nothing more to me about Arnæus, good sister,” said Snæfríður. “And nothing about Magistrate Eydalín either. And forgive me, madam, if I find in your words little love for our father, to measure his irreproachability against the pranks of a brennivín-dealer, and to call the man who impugns the deeds of wealthy Fúsi the enemy of Magistrate Eydalín.”
“I never said that the authorities can do no wrong,” said the bishop’s wife. “We know that all men are sinners. But I do say, as do all good folk, that if the Icelandic authorities are to be subjugated and castigated at Bremerholm, and the better men of this destitute land laid low, then Iceland will no longer be able to stand. The man who comes to disrupt and destroy the standards of decency and order that have up until now kept our wretched folk from being lumped all together into a single mob of vagrant thieves and arsonists, and who imprints the commoners’ flour and tobacco with the king’s seal and calls into question our good merchants’ scales and balances, when they put themselves to so much trouble to sail over the wild sea— what should such a man be called? Do not disdain me if I find myself at a loss for words when you presume to put your trust in such a man. And when you make intimations that you know him as well as you know your own father, then forgive me for asking: how can it be that you know this man so well? Granted, he did spend part of a summer with our parents out west, while he made arrangements to have the books he found, containing stories of our renowned forefathers, gathered together and transported abroad, and I recall the autumn when he accompanied us, myself, the bishop, and you, to Skálholt on his way to his ship. Can he have confounded you so completely? I rebuffed anyone who perpetrated any rumors about it—you were really nothing more than a child, with no more knowledge of men than a cat has of the Seven Sisters—he, of course, had married a rich hunchback in Denmark before the year was through. But I am eager to hear, sister, how things really went for you, since you now, after sixteen years, place your trust in this traitor rather than accept the certain support of your true and devoted friends.”
“If my father, one of the pillars of this land, has no desire to attend to the matter that I ask you now to entrust to him,” said Snæfríður, “and if, on the other hand, the man whom you call a traitor frustrates my hopes and shrinks from undoing what wealthy Fúsi has done, then I promise you, good sister, that I will declare myself divorced from Squire Magnús and assent to my suitor and faithful friend the archpriest Sigurður, your protégé; but not until then.”
A short time later they finished their conversation, one burning hot, the other skin cold. The bishop’s wife promised to bring up the matter with their father at the Alþingi, and Snæfríður rode home to Bræðratunga.
4
At the start of haymaking the squire was overcome once again with the feeling of restlessness that always led to the very same thing. His haughtiness increased, and he grew more rigid in his dealings with others. He rose early each morning but accomplished nothing, leaving the farm implements he’d been repairing untouched alongside his tools in the woodchips strewn across the floor of his workshed. One day around daybreak he was standing out on a low hill, staring into the distance; in no time at all he was up by the river, hindering travelers. A little while later he was heard singing a few stanzas of a ballad in the farm’s main passageway. He ordered his riding horses brought in, inspected them carefully, went to his smithy and repaired a horseshoe, scratched the horses for a long time, brushed off the crusted dirt and spoke to them gently, let them loose for a while but kept an eye on them, went out to the tenant farms and bristled a bit at the cotters, wandered to and fro. The daleswoman Guðríður brought food to the farmer in his houseroom, since he never ate with his servants; it was skyr, hardfish, and butter. He scowled and asked:
“Isn’t there any tripe?”
“I don’t recall my housemother, Madam Eydalín, saying anything about tripe,” said the woman.
“What about pickled testicles?”
“No,” said the woman. “The sheep that fell here in the spring gave neither testicles nor tripe.”
“Have our tenants up north stopped paying their rents?”
“I don’t know about that,” said the woman, “but there’s whey dripping from the squire’s estate.”
“Bring me soured whey,” he said, “well-soured, and cold.”
“By the way,” said the woman. “Will my housemother’s daughter be thrown out or is she supposed to leave of her own accord, and when?”
“Ask Magistrate Eydalín about that, good woman,” said the squire. “He’s withheld his daughter’s dowry from me for fifteen years.”
When the daleswoman came with the whey, the squire was gone.
He disappeared like birds die—no one knew where he went. He didn’t ride out along the walled path that led from the farmhouse to the thoroughfare, but instead meandered off along a rutted track while the workers took their midday naps. No one saw him leave for certain, but he was gone. His ax and hammer were lying on the windowsill where he had planned to install a screen, where he had even begun to repair the trimmings. Woodchips lay in the grass.
This time he brought silver with him, and even though the king’s seal was affixed to the doors of the merchant’s warehouse, brennivín could be procured easily for such a reward, along with company befitting a squire: the merchant, the ship captain, other Danes.
When such men gathered they found no shortage of things to discuss, and the newest topic was the royal envoy Arnæus. Apparently, after having arrived on the Hólmship, he had ridden to most of the trading stations in the south, lastly to Eyrarbakki, and had adjudged the merchants’ wares fraudulent: he had ordered more than a thousand casks of flour discarded, claiming the flour to be nothing more than maggots and grubs; he had proclaimed the wood fit only for the fire, the iron cinders, the ropes rotten, and the tobacco coarse. The weights and scales were also under suspicion. The starving cotters watched tearfully as the flour was carted down to the sea—they feared that the merchants would never again sail to such a thankless land.
“This business’ll go straight to the Supreme Court,” said the merchant. “The crown’ll be forced to pay. That is, if the king isn’t too good to bleed for his men in Iceland, when all he gets back from them is filth and disgrace. And not a single foreign king, emperor, or tradesman has jumped at the offer though he’s put the country up for sale plenty of times before.”
A look of fury came over the squire’s face when he heard his country slandered, since he suddenly recalled that he was one of its chieftains, and in order to prove that Icelanders were heroes and champions he drew one handful after another of shining, newly minted special-dollars from his purse and flung them around the room. He
called out for steak, demanded to sleep with the serving-girl, slammed the door as he left, and went and bought a plot of land in Selvogur. He acted the same way for the next two or three days, but since Iceland grew no greater in the Danes’ eyes despite the squire’s grandiose efforts, and since his pocket money was at an end, it came to the point where he had nothing left to use but his fists to prove that Icelanders were champions and heroes. He didn’t have long to wait before the Danes grew tired of his company. Before he knew it he found himself stretched out in the cesspool on the grounds outside the Company’s buildings.
This happened at night. When he came to he tried to break back into the merchant’s, but the doors were shut and securely bolted. He called out for the girl, but she would have nothing to do with such a man. He threatened to set fire to the house, but since there was either no fire to be found in Bakki or the squire knew nothing of the art of arson, the house remained standing. The squire shouted from midnight until matins without giving any indication that he would ever stop, until finally the clerk appeared in the window in his night-clothes.
“Brennivín,” said the squire.
“Where’s your money?” said the clerk, but the squire had nothing at hand but a sketchy deed for a plot of land in Selvogur.
“I’ll shoot you,” said the squire.
The clerk shut the windows and went back to sleep; the squire had no gun.
Toward morning the squire finally woke the boothkeeper.
“Where’s your money?” said the boothkeeper.
“Shut your trap,” said the squire.
The conversation went no further.
The squire shouted and cursed and beat on the house for almost the entire night until the drink started to wear off him, then he went and fetched his horses.
Around midmorning he arrived at Jón Jónsson’s in Vatn, and by then was fully sober but quite hungover. The farmer and some farmhands were mowing in the homefield.
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