Iceland's Bell (14 page)

THE FAIR MAIDEN

1

The Tunga River flows on, placidly and broadly, its current heaviest in branches pouring into Hvítá, the glacier river, east of the see of Skálholt. On the headland between the rivers is a wide marsh of sedge, then the land rises and a great settlement begins, lorded over by a landed estate, surrounded by tenant farms. The place is called Bræðratunga. Seated there in her bower is a blue-eyed woman, her complexion golden-cast, embroidering upon a cloth the ancient wonder of how Sigurður the Völsung destroyed the worm Fáfnir and carried its treasure away.*

Polished glass gleams in the window of her loft. Through it can be seen folk traveling through the district, their paths lying across the open plains and down along the riverbanks to ferries that cross in various directions. Skálholt itself remains hidden from view, lost behind Langholt. She is seated in a carved chair, a stool at her feet, encircled by flossy pillows. Drawn before her bedcloset is a curtain woven with ancient images. Against the wainscoting opposite, close beneath the slope of the ceiling, are her clothes-chest, painted green, and a stout birchwood bureau. On a frame near the door sits her saddle, the greatest of treasures, a high-bowed side-saddle bedecked in repoussé, bow and boards clad in brass and embellished with diverse designs, dragons, men, and angels between the bosses, maker’s name and year engraved on the endboard, embossed leatherwork fastened down with studs, and lying over the seat a beautifully crafted blanket, folded neatly, the bridle hanging from the bow: it seems the woman is ready to leave. A fragrance hangs over her still, foreign, somewhat thick.

Several men approach from the direction of the Hvítárholt ferry, which one takes to go down to Bakki.* Three are on horseback, two on either side of the third, holding him up on his horse; a fourth walks before them, leading the center horse by the reins. The man upon this horse is apparently the pivot-point of this expedition, yet his head hangs down to his chest, and his hat hangs over his face. The man’s peruke sticks out from a pocket in his cloak. He had evidently been rolled up out of a clay pit, if not something worse. These men head toward Bræðratunga.

When one looks toward the farmstead from the thoroughfares its features magnify: fifteen gabled houses, some garreted, facing south-west, a timbered houseroom farthest out with two wood-paneled end-walls, the manor house towering beautifully over the green, level land on a bright spring day like today, when sunshine glows off the planking and the roofs.

But if the traveler breaks the spell of distance a different view meets his eyes. Proximity is the true enemy of these houses. Here desolation has its home. All the buildings are on the verge of collapse, the walls sunken or fallen like swathes of grass ripped from their roots by the elements, the turf dug away by water and stones rolled off their stacks, gaps under the wall plates, the roofs warped or tumbled down, giving shelter to fungus, not men or beasts, the planking, the bargeboards, the door-frames and other timberwork either rotten or broken into pieces, snippets of turf stuffed into the worst of the chinks, in all the houses only a single windowpane whole, the others everywhere cracked, broken open, and stuffed with saddlecloths or hairsacks filled with hay, the flagstones either sunken, set askew, or standing on their edges. For such a large residence incredibly little man-life was on the move. Two fat workmen sleep in the midday calm beneath the homefield wall, their caps over their faces, around them twittering birds, while an old woman in a short skirt, her legs like sticks of wood, rakes rubbish off the grounds; she is, however, too late—the grass is already too high.

The housekeeper knocks on the door, then thrusts her head through the housewife’s doorway:

“Oh, my dear Snæfríður, the squire has come; three farmers are here with him from the south, from Flói.”

The housewife continued her needlework without looking up, so insignificant did she consider the news, and answered as disinterestedly as if she were talking about the calf:

“Tell them to carry him to his bed in his houseroom, then put a bowl of whey beside him and lock the door from the outside.”

“And if he leaves through the window?” said the woman.

“Then our whey is still not strong enough for him,” said the housewife.

“Shouldn’t we do something for the others?”

“Give them a sip of blanda* from the pitcher if they’re thirsty,” said the housewife. “I’ve had more than enough of regaling folk who drag him home.”

After a short time the expedition members turned back, this time spitting in contempt. The third member, who had been leading the horse by the reins, was now on horseback—the fourth, the man riding in the middle, had been left behind. Upon leaving they took the trouble of skirting the footpath and riding furiously through the home-field, tearing up the sward beneath the horses’ hooves. The workmen continued sleeping beneath the homefield wall. A shout was heard from the farmhouse.

In a moment the loft stairs shook and the door was shoved off its post. The housewife bent a bit more deeply over her work, and from her cloth plucked burls that perhaps were not there. The man stood laughing in the open doorway. She let him laugh for a moment before she looked up. Then she looked up. His beard was more than a week old and he had a black eye, in addition to a slanting, scabby, blackened gash across his cheek and nose. He was missing two front teeth. His hands were scratched. He laughed, scowling furiously, and stumbled and pitched backward and fore, making it hard to tell which direction he would fall, into the loft or out of it.

She said: “There is much I could have forgiven you, Magnús mine, if you had not let those two front teeth be beaten out of you last year.”

She looked back down at her work.

“How dare you address the squire of Bræðratunga directly?” he said. “What hussy are you?”

“Your wife,” she said, and continued her needlework.

He twisted and pushed his way into the room, threw himself down upon her clothes-chest, kneeled against it in a lifeless heap for a time, then finally made an effort and raised his head; his eyes were white specks amidst black swelling, every human feature upon him obliterated.

“Am I not perhaps the most noble and well-bred man in the entire country? Am I not the son of the legislator in Bræðratunga, the richest of men in three districts? Did my mother not weigh over two hundred pounds?”

She said nothing.

“It may be that you’re higher-born than me,” he said. “But you’re a soulless woman; and what’s more—you’ve got nothing for a body.”

She said nothing.

“The matrons here in Bræðratunga have always been fat,” he said. “And my mother had a soul besides. She taught me to read in the
Book of Seven Words.
* But what are you? An elf-woman; a color; a mirage. What am I, knight, squire, and cavalier, supposed to do with this slender waist; with these long thighs? And you came here spoiled from your father’s house, sixteen years old. A girl who falls in childhood never ripens. Damn it! I want a woman. Get out of here! Come here.”

“Try going down to your room to sleep it off, Magnús mine,” she said.

“Next time I need brennivín I swear I’ll sell you,” he said.

“Do it,” she said.

“Why don’t you ever ask me what’s new?” he said.

“When you wake up I’ll ask you—if you don’t cry about it too much.”

“Don’t you even want to know who’s come?” he said.

“I know that you’ve come,” she said.

“You lie,” he said. “I’m gone. Someone else has come.”

Then he shouted, “He’s come!” and sank back into a heap as if he had expended his last bit of strength in expelling this cry. He paused, then began muttering to himself: “He has finally come to land—on the Bakkaship.”

She looked up sharply and asked: “Who has come to land?”

He continued muttering to himself for a while, then started shouting again:

“Who else but the man who shall annul all the verdicts! Who else—but the one man whom the magistrate’s daughter loves! He whom this soulless woman lets cuckold me! He whom this girl slept with in her father’s house before she could bear children! He whom this slut—the man she will never have, he has come!”

She looked up and smiled:

“It should comfort you some to know, my dear Magnús, that I wasn’t forced to accept you. Many excellent men were making offers for me,” she said.

“Whore,” he said. “You haven’t lived a single day with me without loving another man”—he staggered to his feet, tore the cloth from her hands, and struck her in the face, but was far too drunk to beat her in any way that would make a difference. She gave him a timid shove and said, “Stop beating me now, dear Magnús—you’ll regret it more when you wake,” and he fell backwards onto the chest, his coarse words slowly dying out on his lips as he sat there cowering beneath the ceiling-slope, his chin hanging low, his mouth slack. In a moment he had begun to snore. She watched him sleep, and not a single quiver on her lips betrayed her thoughts. Finally she laid aside her work and rose from her seat. She fetched a tin cup of water and lye, then moved the man around until he was lying with his feet hanging over the end of the chest. She pulled off his boots and slipped off his clothes by lifting him here and there, then cleaned him carefully and finished by washing his feet.

When this task was finished she pushed the man-covered chest slowly up to her bedcloset, pulled the curtain aside, took the quilt off the bed and raised the duvet, then rolled the man off the chest and onto her bed and spread the sheet, white as driven snow, over him. She pushed the chest back to its place, drew the curtain, sat back down in her chair, and continued to embroider her ancient scene.

2

The squire spent the next day in bed; he was still lying there when visitors showed up at the farm. There were four of them altogether: Vigfús “the Wealthy” Þórarinsson, bailiff in Hjálmholt; his son-in-law Jón from Vatn, smuggler, the only man in the Árnes district who had brennivín to trade for men’s money or property when the trade manager in Eyrarbakki had run out himself; and finally two other farmers of the more privileged class, besides some grooms. The behavior of these visitors was striking. They made themselves at home, dismounting at the edge of the homefield and telling their servants to allow the horses to graze inside the wall, a short distance from the place where the workmen had lain down to sleep in the clement noonday weather, just like yesterday and the day before; they then proceeded to poke about in the hovels. They tested the rotten wood with their knuckles, tilted their heads left and right before numerous doorless doorways, and finally headed to the farmhouse to undertake the same investigation there; in no time at all they were walking down the main passageway, without having once thought to knock on the door. The housewife had been standing at the window, and now she called over to her husband, who lay sick in her bed, and asked: “What does the bailiff want here?”

“For sure I’ve done something wrong,” mumbled the squire, without moving.

“He’s not here looking for me,” she said.

The squire pulled himself forward off her bright bed, looking like a man who has begun to rot in his grave, and she draped a piece of clothing over him; then he went down to greet the visitors.

It turned out that the squire had sold his homestead and patrimony, Bræðratunga, in all its fixed and liquid assets, to Jón from Vatn, the bailiff’s son-in-law, and the new owner, along with the bailiff and the assessors, had stopped in on their way to an assembly in order to fix the value of the livestock and buildings, as this had not been completely agreed upon on the day of the sale. On that day a portion of the price had been duly paid and the farmer from Vatn

agnús Sigurðsson’s acknowledgment for it; today he had brought with him the amount that was to be paid out according to their agreement. They entered the squire’s timbered houseroom at a spot where the planking had burst, where debris from the walls— earth, rocks, water—had tumbled through. They took their seats, one or two on a chest, the others on a worn-out old bed, then drew forth the contract and presented it to him. It was all as they said; the document was in all respects legal and valid, written in Eyrarbakki, signed and authenticated by witnesses. He had sold his estate, eighty hundreds of land, for a hundred and sixty rixdollars, forty paid, forty to be paid at the transfer of the land, which was to take place today, the remainder to be paid over the next ten years. The farmer from Vatn had the right to purchase the buildings and livestock at the price he set, and they began now to question the squire concerning the value of these goods. The squire, for his part, answered little, saying that he hadn’t been in the habit of counting livestock. If it was cattle, they should ask the old maid who worked in the cowshed; as for the sheep, they could go and take a look in the fields if they wanted. They asked whether he would like some brennivín, but he refused.

The estate at Bræðratunga had from time immemorial been the allodial tenure of the same aristocratic family, comprised of chieftains, bailiffs, and other royal officials, some of them ennobled—and hence the title “squire,” which usually became bragging material when the men of that family had drinks in their hands. When Magnús Sigurðsson inherited the land from his deceased father, the legislator, the property was still worth something. The family line, however, had suffered a decline. The siblings of the young squire Magnús had died young, of consumption. He himself grew up coddled and undisciplined in his father’s house, and when he was later sent to Skálholt for schooling he wasn’t able to accept the constraints of discipline nor consign himself to the exertions that grammatica* demands of Minerva’s sons. Instead all his vital motions inclined themselves downward, toward sloth and torpor, and retreated before any form of trial. The man was well-off, there was no doubt about that—his easy life had made him sleek, handsome, and svelte, but he was bashful even from an early age, with a moping expression as if it were too much of a burden for him to look up at people. He was standoffish toward others and spoke with a slight whine; women said he had the fairest eyes of all men. He was an aristocrat. But there in the land where emaciation is the most common cause of death during the spring, the aristocrat was never born who, though his own pantry-shelf might bend under the weight of butter and cheese, was not himself touched by communal infirmity.

Now the legislator in Tunga* was informed by the schoolmaster that there was very little chance that his son would ever distinguish himself through book learning, but since the boy had seemed not to be ill-tempered toward certain types of artifice it was decided that he should be sent to the city of Copenhagen, there to study, if possible, some sort of craft befitting an Icelandic nobleman. Members of this family had always been good craftsmen, though they were usually sent for book learning to satisfy the demands of their age, but the young Icelandic aristocrat, keeping company with the dandies out in Copenhagen, ascertained quickly that in foreign countries craftsmanship was no longer considered to be as suitable for magnates as it had once beseemed Skallagrímur,* while apprentices to the trade were not regarded as anything better than tramps, and were perhaps lower still, since they were in many ways simply slaves of their masters, receiving only one glass of brennivín on Sundays and forced to rise at dawn to tend the pigs or run the housemaids’ errands; they were late to bed, and were beaten by their masters and scorned by the servants.

For half a year Magnús from Bræðratunga contented himself with learning to make saddles, and for the other half with silversmithing, but for the next two years either drank or was sick; after three years he went home. He did, however, make the most of the superficial knowledge he had gained in his two crafts ever afterward, and in the first years of his marriage he would occasionally, during periods of calm between binges, occupy himself by constructing a saddle or embossing latten. He engaged in these tasks with a peculiar precision and the type of meticulousness that mediocre hobbyists often employ in greater measure than trained craftsmen, besides following his own innate good taste, which approached the level of artistry; the fruit of his between-bout penitential labor was the emergence of a reputation for genius in craftsmanship, and his fame traveled more widely than that of true smiths. Later the length of time between his drinking bouts decreased so much that he gave himself no opportunity to cultivate his skill other than to refurbish the buildings and farm implements, but even this amounted to little.

At home he was always sober. Every bout began with his disappearance from home, which most commonly occurred when a so-called vital errand compelled him to go south to Eyrarbakki. He would start off every expedition in the company of Danes, casual tradesmen who were gradually attaching themselves to the place, the trade manager on the first day, the clerk on the next. By the third day he would usually have landed in the company of the agent or even the warehouseman. But as the bouts wore on his companions dwindled; presently he would find himself plunged into the company of drunken priests from Flói or Hreppir, but these also disappeared before he knew it. Then he would fall in with the cotters in Bakki and other common louts, and after them beggars, and sometimes the game took place in other districts by mysterious means, since one of the particular marks of these bouts was that they were accompanied by an unclear but eternal movement, a journey in which there was little apparent connection between the places where he eventually ended up. On occasion the squire would come to his senses out in the middle of nowhere, on some unlikely gravel bank or under a wall in another district, or else on an unknown mountain track whence it took him more than an entire day and night to wander back to the settlements; sometimes he ended up athwart some dirt road, jumping up from sleep with a vagrant dog pissing in his nose and mouth. He would wake at times half-sunk in a stream or waterhole, or on an island out in a river. Sometimes he was lucky and awoke in a tenant farmer’s hovel, now in his own vomit and other men’s spit out on a bare earthen floor, now in the bed of a pauper, who was more than likely leprous, or else alongside some mysterious hussy, though every now and then, by the grace of God, in an unfamiliar marriage bed. After such toilsome periods of captivity he would finally make it home, sometimes carried on or tied to a horse-drawn litter by people who took pity on him, since his own horses would either be lost or sold for brennivín, sometimes crawling along on his hands and knees by night, wet to the bone, usually sick, quite often beaten to a pulp, bloody and bruised, sometimes broken-boned, always lice-ridden. His wife would usually bring him in and clean him off like something dead, pick the lice from him and lock him in his houseroom where he slept. If he were in particularly poor condition she would let him lie in her own bed in the loft for a time. When he regained consciousness he could scarcely bear himself up for long, and she would give him strong moss-tea or other medication to stop his weeping. After several days he would rise from the dead, pale, comely, and transfigured, sorrowful and slightly bearded, his eyes lustrous, having in truth caught a glimpse behind death’s curtain, not unlike some of the saints as they are painted on altarpieces. He had always been taciturn, of course, except at those times when he worked his way down the long row and came to the glass called Hilarius,* and on most days not a sound came from him but a murmur and a mumble; he was never more silent, however, than at the end of an expedition. This spring was cruel like every other spring, the sheep spring-meager as usual; the cows were skin and bones and could barely stand, much less give milk throughout the summer, the horses weren’t strong enough to transport hardfish, and what was there to trade anyway? The squire answered his workers one by one as they came to report the situation on the farmstead: You’re the shepherd, aren’t you? Don’t you work in the cowshed? If you want hardfish, ask the housekeeper, I don’t dish out the meals.

The housekeeper Guðríður Jónsdóttir had been sent directly to Bræðratunga by the wife of Magistrate Eydalín at the start of the first year of Snæfríður’s married life to make sure the young matron would not be reduced to begging for her sustenance; this woman acted as if she had no other obligations to God or men. In spite of the fact that Guðríður Jónsdóttir prided herself on being in the service of Madam Eydalín, or, closer to the truth, on being her legate to another quarter of the land, and a poor one at that, almost all the household management of this foreign home was relegated to her, since her mistress Snæfríður paid heed to no work other than her embroidery—she had never once attempted to manage the domestic affairs, nor had she ever shown the slightest concern for the household finances. Thus it happened that this daleswoman, a domestic from a different quarter, was obliged to become, completely counter to her own will, governor and chancellor of a reputable southern estate—anything less and she might not have been able to fulfill the duties entrusted to her by the madam, to see to it that her daughter be provided with the necessary sustenance and service at table and bed, and that her bedroom remained weatherproof and heated during cold spells by a small stove.

When the squire regained his health after a drinking expedition he would usually see to his wife’s loft—he would climb up to the roof to inspect whether the turf was in place, or to add a beam or plank if the wood appeared rotten anywhere, because he loved his wife passionately and feared only the single threat that Gudda would leave and take his wife with her. Sometimes before the next breaker crashed over him there was sufficient time for the squire to commence repairs elsewhere on the buildings, but unfortunately the times were so tough that he scarcely ever owned a serviceable piece of wood. Seldom was the squire domiciled for many days after an expedition before he was visited by all sorts of authorities: the bailiff, the parish administrator, priests, and summoners, whose job it was to inform him of his liability for various misdeeds committed during his most recent expedition, or to induce him either to close on various deals he had made or to fulfill various obligations he had accepted, as spelled out in the legal documents produced during the same expedition. It would then emerge that he had perhaps sold a portion of his lands, with the result that he had forfeited most of them by now, and during the previous winter he started cutting into the estate itself by selling off tenancies. Sometimes he would sell a horse or livestock. Usually whatever profit he made would have mysteriously disappeared by the time he found out about the sales from the contracts he himself had signed. He frequently sold his own hat and boots on these expeditions and once he arrived home without any breeches. Sometimes during an expedition he would buy horses, livestock, or land, and men would show up at his door, valid contracts in hand, demanding payment. More often than not compensation would be claimed from him for various types of damage he inflicted on others during an expedition—he would frequently destroy other men’s hats or tear their clothing. Sometimes redress was demanded of him for having lodged with cotters in Bakki and having had intercourse with their wives. Others had been forced to endure his slander, having been called thieves or dogs or even thief-dogs and threatened with murder in the presence of witnesses. In the end the man became enwrapped in a ceaseless series of lawsuits and fines.

As a matter of fact, when he was sober Magnús Sigurðsson was a reticent man, averse to quarreling with others, and timid, most resembling an animal that longs only to cower in its hole undisturbed. He desired more than anything to be able to buy himself peace soberly, and he was eager to pay back everyone with something for his drinking transgressions, especially if it could be accomplished without too much discussion. If he had any money he would hand it over to his claimants; otherwise he paid with livestock living or dead, or even with farm implements taken from his workers’ hands if the demands were not too lavish. He gladly yielded several lengths of rope to the man whose wedded wife he had regaled contrary to the Ten Commandments, and even plucked off his own rags of clothing to make up for having called someone from Bakki a thief or someone from Flói a dog, all without looking up, and with no desire whatsoever to prolong discussion of the matter. Some said they would be completely satisfied if he were to beg their forgiveness openly, and he considered this the gravest obligation. When the claimants finally left him he would often wind his way silently up to his wife’s bower and weep there without saying a word, sometimes entire nights, until daylight rose.