Iceland's Bell

by Halldor Laxness

  This they didn’t know for sure.

  The Dane pointed at Jón Hreggviðsson and asked, huskily and sullenly:

  “What has this man done?”

  “He killed the king’s hangman,” they said.

  “This old man,” said the Dane. “Where does it say that?”

  They said they thought it would have been in the letters, but no matter how these were read they could find no corroboration for such a charge. The Dane said that no bailiff in Iceland could get him to take folk on pleasure cruises on his ship.

  “What’s a pleasure cruise?” said the men.

  The captain said that if an Icelandic man sailed out on his ship without it having been proven that he was a thief or a murderer, it was a pleasure cruise. “It’s quite a different case,” he said, “if along with the man come the proper court documents affixed with the seal of the authorities at Bessested, as well as a signed receipt from the Treasury, guaranteeing payment for transport.” As far as the man whom they’d dragged hither was concerned, there wasn’t a single word in these letters that said he’d stolen as much as a lamb, much less murdered a man.

  The captain could not be persuaded. The only way he’d take the man was if they first rode to Bessastaðir and secured the proper documents. And with that he walked away.

  The journey from Ólafsvík to Bessastaðir would take no less than three days each way. The prisoner’s wardens decided that their best alternative would be to try to appeal to the local district authority, the bailiff on Snæfellsnes, and see if they could get a warrant from him confirming that the man they were transporting had been sentenced at the Alþingi. They tried to find lodging for the night in Ólafsvík, but Snæfellsnes was under the grip of famine and hospitality was somewhat lacking in the few places where there was fish to be found in the shed or butter in the pantry; in fact many of the farms there had been cleared out by the pox, the inhabitants dead and buried.

  The Company was the only entity on Snæfellsnes that owned a house made of wood instead of turf. Usually the house stood empty, its window shutters closed, except during the few weeks in the summer when trade was carried out. Jón Hreggviðsson’s wardens went to see the merchant and asked whether he could house one prisoner and two men. The merchant answered that the Danes were under no obligation to house any Icelanders other than convicted criminals; this was certainly not the case here; they were fools and liars; they should look after themselves. They asked whether they could shove the prisoner into an outhouse or storage shed, since it was raining. The merchant said that the Icelanders defecated wherever they felt like it, besides the fact that they left lice behind wherever they went; such people weren’t good enough for a Danish outhouse. With that the merchant was gone. A pleasant Danish warehouse-boy, however, gave the Icelanders plugs of tobacco, though they had no food. It was late in the evening. A little later the captain boarded his ship and went to his cabin to sleep. The merchant’s house was locked. The wardens stood on the gravel outside the trading booth and talked things over. The prisoner stood a short distance away, clad in his cord, drops of water leaking from his knitted cap onto his hoary head. In front of the booth was a horseblock, fastened to the ground with a massive iron hook. Finally the wardens turned to their prisoner, pointed at the stone to indicate that he should come over to it, and said:

  “Here’s where we’re going to tie you.”

  They unfastened the old man’s cord and used it to bind his hands and feet, then looped the remainder around the hook and tied it. When they were gone the farmer moved slowly around to the sheltered side of the stone and leaned up against it, but he made no attempt to free himself though it would have been an easy thing for him to do, since the fetters were more symbolic than real; he was no longer as energetic a fugitive as he’d been twenty years ago, nor did he curse troll-women in his dreams at night. Now sleep sank over the exhausted man as he sat unmoving against the horseblock before the Danish booth during the night. And as he sleeps there against the stone in the night rain, a messenger, mild and gentle, appears to him, just as books describe the way that angels come through prison walls to visit captives, and it puffed in his beard and licked his closed eyes. It was the dog.

  “Aw, is that you there, damn it all,” said the man, as the drenched dog jumped on him and trampled him and wagged its tail and whined and licked his face. Since the man was bound, he couldn’t beat the dog away.

  “You’ve eaten a foal, you piece of shit,” said Jón Hreggviðsson, and there is nothing worse that one can say to a dog. But the dog’s joy remained the same, and finally it started running in rings around the stone to which the man was tied.

  At dawn the man was sleeping against the stone and the dog against the man. Other men and dogs started moving about: lordly Danes stood upon the booth’s steps bulging and satisfied after their morning brennivíns and their breakfasts, but the dreary residents of Ólafsvík loitered at a distance like wraiths, wearing tattered jackets, shoulderless and too long in the back, looking like fish-skin scare-crows out in the nesting grounds. The latter folk stared vacantly at the dog and the man; one said he knew all about the captive and his kin, another couldn’t resist estimating the length of the cord binding him. Both spoke in shrill, rasping falsettos that bore no resemblance to human voices. The Danes standing in the doorway of the booth made witty remarks and laughed haughtily.

  The wardens were nowhere to be seen and no one had a clue as to their whereabouts. Presently the Danes went off to their various tasks, but the locals remained behind and stared apathetically at the man and the dog. The idea that they should walk over and free the captive never crossed their minds, any more than anyone had ever thought to go and free the Fenris Wolf * or attempt any other task appertaining to the gods. On the other hand, one Dane who worked as an apprentice textile trader wanted to set the man free in order to harass the authorities and to watch him run, but when he came near, the dog bristled and made ready to defend its master and the cord binding him. Soon the locals returned to their work of loading the stockfish the fishermen had brought in, and no one gave any further thought to the murderer secured to the stone, except for a poor woman who, by the grace of God, came over and held a pail of milk to the man’s lips and gave the dog slices of fish-skin.

  And the day passed by.

  It was late in the evening and the loading was finished. The ship lay prepared for departure. The wardens had returned and untied the farmer. They waited, loitering by the house of the merchant in Ólafsvík in the hope that a message from some royal personage or other would be brought, and that the ship’s captain would accept it as valid. They had sent a dispatch during the night to the Snæfellsnes bailiff to procure written testimony that Jón Hreggviðsson was a convicted criminal.

  Around midnight the prisoner’s dog started barking, and in a moment came the din of hooves at full speed. The wardens straightened up in anticipation of the arrival of the bailiff, but instead watched as a number of foaming horses came galloping over the gravel, bearing a noblewoman and her attendants. The woman was darkly clad and wearing a hat. She jumped down from the saddle without any help, grabbed up a handful of her full-length riding frock to avoid trampling the hem, hurried lightly over the gravel, and went straight in to join the Danes in the merchant’s house without knocking upon the door. Her attendants set about catching hold of the unsaddled horses to lead them to grass.

  The stranger remained in the house for some time. When she emerged her hat was at her neck, and the night breeze blew in her hair. The merchant and the captain followed her outside and bowed to her, and her teeth gleamed as she smiled in the twilight. Her attendants walked her charger over and held it steady as she mounted, a few arm lengths away from where Jón Hreggviðsson sat upon the stone.

  The prisoner opened his mouth:

  “My lady rides higher tonight than the time when Jón Hreggviðsson threw a rixdollar into her lap,” he said.

  She shot back from the saddle:

 
“The one you give alms is your enemy.”

  “Then why couldn’t I get my head chopped off twenty years ago when it still had black hair on it and when my neck was thick enough to be pronounced fit to offer to your father and the king’s ax?” he said.

  She said: “You try to do good for a pauper out of pity, but as soon as you turn your back your birthright is sold away. That was my error. I gave you your head in charity: and my father’s head, the country’s head, was forced to droop dishonored. Now the foot’s going to kick back, even though it’s weak.”

  “I’m an old man,” he said.

  “You will never have power over my father in this country,” she said.

  “I won’t beg for mercy,” he said, suddenly standing up from the stone, his knitted cap hanging down over his hoary head and his cord around his waist. “I have a friend, as I’m sure my lady his elf-wife knows.”

  “His whore,” she corrected, and she laughed and rode away.

  When she was gone the captain called out to the wardens and told them to bind the prisoner and bring him aboard.

  8

  And when the ship arrives in Copenhagen in August, the captain sends word to the civil authorities that he has a villain from Iceland aboard. Armor-clad soldiers were immediately sent from the castle to take custody of the man, to seize his accompanying papers, and to escort him to the place in Denmark most familiar to Icelanders at that time. The castle of Bremerholm stood, as its name indicates, upon what was once an islet in a harbor of the city, its thick walls rising up out of the sea and its deep cellars full of water, with artillery men stationed on top to fire cannons at the Swedes. The criminals’ quarters in the castle were reserved exclusively for men, who lay there in a vast common room by night and slaved away in a workhouse by day. If the men were timid and behaved well, they earned the trust of their jailers and were allowed to spend the nights unshackled, but if they were intrepid and expressed their opinions or talked back, they were immediately shackled by their masters and kicked at and chained to the wall, each next to his own sleeping place.

  It was not long before the Icelanders in the city started rumoring that the Öxará court’s sentencing of the farmer from Rein to incarceration at Bremerholm had been out of the ordinary, and that the decision to retry the aforementioned farmer there at home had been an improvidential one, to say the least. The rumors quickly found their way to the Chancery. And when a certain party who found it somehow worthwhile to make a fuss about this knave’s ugly head investigated the court documents, all that turned up in the farmer’s case was a cursory and unauthorized copy of the haphazard and hasty verdict that had been passed over him in the spring at the Alþingi in an unprosecuted and undefended case. The document said that since the farmer was renowned for his rude treatment of others and was in fact accused of murder, but had fled the assembly without having answered the accusations, he was to be sent to Bremerholm. That was all.

  As a rule, the only way that anyone could escape from the castle of Bremerholm was through a dead-ended opening: namely, the grave. Very few at all who came to Bremerholm were able in the long run to stand the weight of the burdens bound to them by justice. A few Icelandic prisoners incarcerated for various crimes thought it was high time that Jón Hreggviðsson had come to join them for good, and that it was unlikely that this old lash-scarred rascal, infamous for his numerous misdeeds, would ever get the chance to get out now that they’d been able to drag him this far. It was therefore not astonishing that his fellow inmates’ eyes widened when the chief warden walked into the labor ward one day and called out for Regvidsen, the rogue who had killed the king’s hangman, an act tantamount to cutting off the right hand of His Grace our Most Clement Highness. The warden ordered Regvidsen to follow him.

  Jón Hreggviðsson wasn’t taken to the mainland by way of Dybetsgade, but instead was ferried from the castle over the Bremerholm canal. The Danes had given him a shabby pair of trousers to put on over the underclothes he was wearing when he was arrested, but his cord had been confiscated. He was busy pestering the ferryman about getting his cord back when they made land on the city side of the canal, and he was ordered like a dog to go ashore. Standing there was a lanky man in a patched-up dress coat, stooping forward and twitching nervously. He stepped forward to meet the farmer and extended a blue hand with a gigantic backward-bending thumb. He seemed slightly distracted, but otherwise was the very picture of seriousness in his bearing.

  “Greetings, Jón,” said the dress-coated man in Icelandic.

  Jón Hreggviðsson looked at the man scowlingly and scratched his head—“Who’re you again?”

  “Studiosus Antiquitatum am I, and am called Joannes Grindvicensis, Jón Guðmundsson, born and raised in Grindavík.”

  “Oh, right, you’d think I would’ve recognized you, the man who came to the door of that renowned mansion when one of the king’s soldiers was standing there—and greetings and best wishes to you also, my dear Jón.”

  The scholar from Grindavík snorted a few times and rubbed his nose for a moment.

  “My lord and master wishes to grant you succor, Jón Hreggviðsson,” he said. “And I’ve been standing here, at his request, since the bell in St. Nicholas’s churchtower tolled the Angelus this morning. Soon they’ll be ringing the Spiritus Sanctus. You must know that I am cold and thirsty.”

  “They took me away from my scythe as I was standing there in my underwear and I haven’t got a single tuppence for beer,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “And the Danes have stolen my cord.”

  “Good, good,” said the scholar, thus destroying this thread of conversation. “In the name of Jesus then, and with our throats dry, what’s the news from Iceland?”

  “Oh, you know, things are decent enough over there,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “Though it was pretty stormy during the fishing season last year. But the grass came up a little better in the summer.”

  “Good,” said the scholar. He thought for a moment, then added: “I hear that you’re still the same old criminal.”

  “Is that so,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

  “Is it true?” asked the Grindavíkian.

  “I’d say I’m something of a saint,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

  The scholar from Grindavík did not find this amusing at all: “It’s a dreadful shame to be a criminal,” he said, in a tone of moral probity.

  “Actually, I’m just a thief,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

  “That is exactly what one should not be,” said the man from Grindavík.

  “I stole a tiny piece of cord from someone almost twenty years ago,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

  “That is exactly what one should not do,” said the Grindavíkian.

  Jón Hreggviðsson said: “When’s there ever been a decent saint who didn’t start out as a thief?”

  The scholar snorted and gaped for some time and stood upon his left leg in order to scratch his left calf with his right instep.

  “As I was saying, good,” he said finally, like a schoolteacher. “But what I really meant to ask was: has nothing happened in Iceland, nothing come to pass?”

  “Not that I recall,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “At least not anything in particular. Not these past few years.”

  “Nothing at all remarkable?” asked the scholar from Grindavík.

  “No, nothing remarkable’s happened in Iceland for a long time,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “Not one single thing. Unless someone wants to call pulling up a howling ray last year in Skagafjörður news.”

  “I would call that more than just a little newsworthy,” said the scholar. “What did you say, it was howling?”

  “Oh, so maybe you haven’t heard about this either, pal: three years ago men appeared in the sky over Iceland,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

  “Men appeared in the sky,” said the scholar, slightly less enthusiastically. “Good.” After performing his tricks several times, including once wryly rubbing his nose, he spoke up again, saying:

  “
Might I remind my compatriot, that since you are just a common knave speaking with a learned man, even though I might be, as the lay brother Bergur Sokkason* phrased it, the most insignificant deacon in God’s Christendom, it does not suit you to comport yourself too freely toward me and address me informally like I am some dog, or to call me your pal. And I am not speaking now on my behalf alone—I know that my lord and master would never tolerate such effrontery from a commoner toward a member of the learned class. And when he sent me home to Iceland last year to copy those twelfth-century apostles’ lives found at Skarð, and when those Skarðsmen said that they would never allow it even for gold, he gave me a letter to carry with me, specifying that I should never be addressed with a title lower than monsieur there at home.”

  Jón Hreggviðsson answered:

  “I’m nothing but a feebleminded cotter who’s never met a decent man outside of my householder Jesus Christ, since I can’t rightly mention that fleabag of a dog who followed me all the way west to the Ólafsvík trading-station horseblock where I lay tethered to a hook. But since Your Highly Learned Lordship wants to do me some favors, then I promise to henceforth comport myself according to the example of Your Learnedness except at those times when my unmanageable unwisdom gets in the way.”

  The Grindavíkian said:

  “Though you and your kin are entirely under Moria’s power,* my master would never hold it against you; he has always had a soft spot for your mother, who blindly saved what others had lost. Because of this he has gone to a great deal of trouble and expended no little energy negotiating with the authorities to have you pulled out of that castle, from which no man emerges alive; because of this he invites you now to come to see him. Now it remains to be seen what sort of man it is he has saved. However, I will warn you right now, for the safety and health of your life and soul: have no dealings whatsoever with Jón Marteinsson while you are here in the city.”