From the Mouth of the Whale (10 page)

The man in the boat repeated his last movement, drawing back his outstretched arm and swinging it to shore. The ground opened. The mountains soughed off their screes so that one could see deep into their bowels, where countless metals, crystals and precious stones lay on different ledges, sparkling and glittering, many ancient, others newborn, reddened by the glow of subterranean fires and bathed in the waters of underground rivers.

‘Yes, yes … Oh yes!’

Jónas Pálmason the Learned rocked on his boulder. Yes, there it was on the topmost seat, the highest ledge of all – that dearly bought metal that he had always suspected lay concealed in the unkind flesh of his motherland, the very blood of the earth: gold!

‘Did I not say so? They …’

He got no further. There was a blare of trumpets.

‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’

It is the swans, thrumming their vocal cords. The other creatures fall silent, the sea trout gently flicking its tail, the raven softly flapping its wings. The feathery trumpets sound a second time. Jónas looks up and realises that the boat is nearing land. He rises to go and meet the boatman, buttoning up his jacket, running a hand through his hair. But then he becomes aware that the fanfare was not intended to welcome the boat. Far out on the rim of the sea to the north appears a school of whales which swim rapidly south across the bay.

‘Hoo-hoo …’

The clarion call is to welcome these newcomers to the game. In a synchronised water dance they dive beneath the boat and shoot their heads out of the sea beyond: twelve narwhals from Greenland. They raise their twisted horns, seven ells long, to the sky, clash them together and cross them like the lances of a guard of honour, the whole dance conducted to the sound of high-pitched singing and a great splashing of fins. With this the vision is complete, an intricate, carefully thought-out coat of arms:

Bird in air,
mammal on moor,
fish in sea,
plant on shore.
Stone in ground,
man in the middle,
monsters of the sound,
submissive – no more?

The dazzling light played on the retinas of Jónas Pálmason the Learned, who had seen nothing so fair in all his sixty-three years on Earth. Ever since he reached manhood he had secretly longed for the good Lord to reveal to him the order of things, to allow him to examine how the world mechanism is put together. Once, when he and Sigrídur lived at Uppsandar, he thought he perceived in the sky the outlines of a colossal foot that rested on the globe of the Earth. The sole was contiguous with the surface of the sea and the heel rested on the lowland beneath the glacier, while the shape of the ankle could just be made out where the sun stood at its noontide zenith. It must have been an angel.

Jónas fell to his knees, tears welling up in his eyes, his tongue dry and cleaving to the roof of his mouth. He lay down on his side, knees drawn up under his chin; he had gooseflesh, a headache and cramps in his muscles and guts. He broke out in a cold sweat. His senses had been strained beyond what a human can bear.

‘Oh, do not let me lose my mind! I must hold on to my wits so that I can fix this revelation in a poem …’

He heard a crunch in the sand. A booted foot was planted beside his head. Jónas looked up: the man was standing over him. His boat was resting in a bed of seaweed. Nothing else of the vision remained. Man and boat, that was all. Sky and sea had recovered their true form. From Jónas’s point of view, the man was framed by clouds which darkened the lower one looked. A gull mewed. It was going to rain.

The stranger held out his hand to Jónas. It was an elegant, spatulate hand, the middle finger of which sported a silver ring engraved with an inscription. Jónas accepted the proffered hand and the man raised him to his feet. Still without releasing Jónas’s hand, he studied him curiously and said:

‘Good day to you, Jón Gudmundsson the Learned.’

Jónas did not return his look. He was so pre-occupied with trying to read the inscription on the ring that he apparently failed to notice that the man had addressed him by the wrong name. He returned the greeting absent-mindedly:

‘Yes, good day yourself …’

Before Jónas could make out a single word of the inscription, the man let go of his hand and, turning away from Jónas, said with authority:

‘I’ve come to fetch you. You’re to prepare yourself for a journey.’

Jónas stopped brushing the sand off his clothes. Had he heard right? Was he free? The man continued:

‘You’re to bring with you your drawing lead and wood-carving knife, which will come in useful where you’ll be spending the winter.’

‘And where is that?’

‘You’re going to Copenhagen …’

Jónas’s heart took a leap and he bounced on the spot, then raced off towards the hut, calling:

‘Sigrídur, we’re leaving! We’re free!’

But Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir was not there. Jónas scanned his surroundings. He bounded up the slope above the hut, which gave a view of the whole island. Sigrídur was nowhere to be seen. He called her name, again and again. The man was bending over his boat on the beach, paying Jónas no heed. Jónas ran to him and clutched at his coat, squawking repeatedly:

‘Where is she, what have you done with her?’

The man did not answer. Nor did he look up from his task. Moving without haste he placed one oar in a cleft amidships where it stood firm like a mast. This seemed such a curious arrangement to Jónas that it rendered him momentarily silent, giving the man a chance to speak:

‘Just do as I told you and fetch your gear.’

‘But what about Sigrídur?’

The stranger turned and Jónas saw his face for the first time. He backed away. The man had rather a small head with a face that narrowed towards the chin, a moustache and beard, and whiskers growing to the middle of his cheeks. Before his eyes he wore two glass lenses which sat in a frame which was fixed behind his ears. As Jónas leant forward to examine this contrivance more closely, the man shot out his left hand, caught hold of Jónas’s shirt and pulled the island-dweller close. Laying his mouth to his ear, he said quietly:

‘Sigrídur is standing in the hut doorway. You’re still caught up in your vision; that’s why you can’t see her.’

Jónas looked round and saw out of the corner of his eye that it was true. There was nobody standing in the doorway of the hut. He lost his footing, the cramp twisted his guts again and he felt faint. He wanted to lie down, to curl up on the sand. The man tightened his grip on his shirt, held Jónas upright and whispered:

‘We’ll make sure she’s still here when you return …’

With his right hand he opened the neck of Jónas’s shirt and, splaying his fingers, ran his manicured nails quick as a flash along the rib in Jónas’s right side – the fifth, whether one is counting from top or bottom – flaying skin and flesh to the bone, right round to the back where he snapped the rib from the spine, then jerked it vigorously until the front end broke off the cartilage that connected it to the breastbone. Jónas felt no pain in spite of the blood that gushed from the wound and ran along the man’s fingers and down the back of his hand to his wrist. The man brandished the bone under his nose. The rib was fattier than Jónas would have expected: the summer had been kind to him and Sigrídur. He had managed to lure away a nine-week-old seal pup from the colony that bred on the southern side of the island. It had made a good feast. In fact, they had eaten more of it than they meant to and cured less for the winter. Jónas was delighted to see how much of the seal fat had transferred itself from the pup to him.

The man flung the rib-bone away:

‘That’s where you’ll find her!’

The bone landed in the doorway of the hut and bounced from there into a bed of heather beside the path below, where it came to a standstill. The man released his grip on Jónas and, pulling out a white handkerchief, began to wipe the blood from his hand:

‘Hurry up now …’

Jónas found his footing on the shingle and fumbled at the wound which had already healed, leaving nothing behind but a pink scar and a hollow where the rib had been. Having tied up his shirt points, he hurried to the hut. He stuffed stockings, undershirt, knee breeches, a woollen jersey, hood and mittens into his haversack. Writing instruments, whittling knives, blank pages, a small dice-shaped box of seal-bone and a pocket-sized book went into his satchel. This was all he had for the long journey ahead. He donned his leather hat. The man was standing beside the boat, ready to assist his passenger aboard. Jónas trod the path down to the beach. When he came to where the bone was lying in the heather he could not contain himself. Flinging himself on all fours he pressed hot, tear-soaked kisses on his rib:

‘Good and best of wives, my darling mistress, mother of my children, Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir, may God bless you and protect you in your solitude, in the condition, unnatural to any woman, of living without male guidance … May He keep you and answer your prayers in your widowed state if pirates should take me as their prize … May He strengthen you in your anguish if you learn that I have been forced into servitude through the action of my enemies … May He comfort you if I am stabbed to death by brigands … May He wrap you in His great, merciful embrace should an evil sea serpent wind itself around my vessel and smash it to pieces, killing everyone on board and me as well … May He take pity on us and allow us to meet again in the wide halls of Heaven if, disgusted by mankind’s evil deeds, He decides to destroy His creation while we are still separated by land and sea, while you are here and I am there … May His fatherly countenance watch over you …’

It grew suddenly dark and drizzle began to fall from the sky. The man ran to Jónas, raised him to his feet and, putting an arm round his shoulders, supported him down to the water’s edge where he helped him on board the boat, settled him amidships and made him hold on to the oar that stood upright there like a mast. With the other oar he pushed off from the landing place. The keel grated on the bottom, the oar-blade creaked. Finally the boat was free, rocking gently on the swell. Pulling in the oar, the man placed it parallel to the keel and took a seat on the stern thwart.

The vessel made a south-easterly course into the swiftly falling dusk. They sailed without speaking. After a little while it occurred to Jónas that the wound in the Saviour’s side had been in the same place as that which was formed when Adam’s rib was removed. He was about to open a conversation on the subject but stopped when he saw that the man was nodding off in his seat. They could discuss it later. The dusk deepened. Jónas looked around and noticed that there was a little pennant bound to the top of the oar: a red wing on a white background. It was the handkerchief stained with Jónas’s blood, bearing the man’s handprint.

The darkness was almost complete when the man stirred and pointed with the toe of his right boot to a long, tapering box which was lashed down firmly in the bow. It emitted a disagreeable rattling croak. He said:

‘That’s for Ole Worm …’

At that the darkness turned pitch black, so black that it can only be compared to the dazzling whiteness that reigned at the outset of Jónas’s vision.

In early September 1636 Jónas Pálmason the Learned was fetched from Gullbjörn’s Island and conveyed in secret to the south of Iceland. After five days‘ riding he was brought to the trading post of Bakki on the south coast and that same evening put on board a merchant ship which was due to sail on the morning tide. He did not know who was behind his transportation but their treatment of him was gentler than what he had been accustomed to from men in authority, and conditions on board were better than a convict could hope for; instead of being confined in the prison hold he was allowed to sleep with the crew. The whole undertaking was a mystery to him. Back when his trial for the book of sorcery that he had allegedly compiled, and the school of necromancy that he had allegedly run, had resulted in the severest sentence of outlawry, with the proviso that no one was to shelter or assist him in any way, Jónas had tried in vain to leave the country. He had trekked with his wife and children from one end of Iceland to the other, to wherever a ship might put to shore, begging a passage, but no one would take them aboard. Whether this was from fear of carrying a sorcerer or from malice, or else a conspiracy by Jónas’s enemies – who might be able to secure an even harsher penalty, perhaps even death, if he violated the terms of his exile – we shall never know, but this reluctance to allow him to comply with his sentence condemned him to outlawry in his own land for five long years, until without warning or explanation he was carried on board the ship which was now rocking him to sleep on the night swell in Bakki Harbour.