Iceland's Bell (16 page)

“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.

The squire rode up through the field, but the farmer was surly and told the recreant to clear off his unmown grass.

“Do you have any brennivín?” asked the squire.

“Yes I do,” said Jón from Vatn. “What’s it to you?”

The squire asked the farmer to sell him some brennivín, saying that he would absolutely pay him, but that he had no silver handy at the moment.

“Even if all the lakes in the land were to turn into one great sea of brennivín under my name,” said Jón from Vatn, “and all the dry land were to turn to silver marked Magnús Sigurðsson from Bræðratunga, I’d more than likely be lying out dead somewhere before I’d see as much as half an ounce of your silver for a glass of my brennivín.”

The squire said that even if he hadn’t ever ridden a fat horse away from one of their business meetings, his most recent memory was of drinking himself into beggardom on the brennivín of the farmer from Vatn, and that his wife was most certainly being evicted from the cottages at Bræðratunga at that very moment.

Then the reason why the farmer from Vatn was so sullen toward the squire was revealed: two days ago the farmer’s father-in-law Vigfús Þórarinsson had sent word for him to come to the Alþingi, where Magistrate Eydalín had pressured father- and son-in-law, under threat, to resell Bræðratunga to him for a disgraceful price, and had then awarded the land to his daughter Snæfríður by special decree. It made no difference even when the squire held up the title deed for the plot of land in Selvogur—the farmer from Vatn would not place his reputation in any further jeopardy by doing business with the magistrate’s son-in-law. The squire sat down in the new-mown hay and wept. Jón from Vatn continued to mow. When he came near to where the squire was sitting he ordered him once again to clear off, but the squire pleaded: “In Jesus’ name, take your scythe to my neck.”

The brennivín-dealer took pity on the man and out of the goodness of his heart invited him to a storehouse, where he poured him a measure of brennivín and cut a slice of brown shark meat for him with his clasp knife. The squire began to revive slowly. After he’d slopped a sip from the measure and gulped down the shark meat he remembered that his father had been a notary, legislator, cloister steward, and much more, and his great-grandfathers on both sides of the family grandees, some of them ennobled; he said he wasn’t accustomed to pulling off fistfuls of shark meat in an outhouse like a rustic, and that he’d feel much better being escorted to the sitting room in the farmhouse, where he could be served at table and in bed by the housewife or the farmer’s daughters, as befitted his social class. The farmer from Vatn said that it hadn’t been that long since the squire was sitting weeping in the field, begging to have his head cut off. The opinions of guest and host now began to diverge sharply, and the former looked as if he were likely at any moment to lay hands upon the latter due to what he considered the latter’s inadequate hospitality. The host was a weak man and knew nothing about brawling, so he yelled for his farmhands and told them to tie up his guest and put him in a sack. They put the squire into a hairsack and bound it tightly, then took him out onto the field with them. The squire spent the rest of the day in the bag, either screaming or kicking, but in the end he fell asleep. At day’s end they untied the ropes and dumped out the bag, put the man upon a horse, and sicked four horrendously ferocious dogs after it.

By evening he was back in Eyrarbakki. He knocked at the merchant’s and the clerk’s, then tried to get himself rowed out to the merchantman to meet with the captain, but the Danes refused to have anything more to do with him. Even the boothkeeper wouldn’t answer him. He was very hungry, but famine had hit Eyrarbakki and the neighboring farmlands. A poor widow, however, gave him a bowlful of whipped milk and a handful of dulse, along with a hardened codhead, which she had to tear into pieces for him because he suddenly recalled that he was too great an aristocrat to tear up hardened codhead.

The trading booth was still closed, and the men who had traveled in packtrains from distant places, some from Skaftafell in the east, had found it necessary to pile their wool and other wares in stacks along the wall, while the merchant sat alone inside eating steak and wine, having given orders that he was not to be disturbed. Peculiar countryfolk stood outside the warehouse doors, examining the king’s seal. Others started in on making a ruckus, especially boys and casual workers. Still others were in tears as they talked about writing up a petition, several were capping verses or trying their strength at picking up huge stones on the seashore. Some farmers from Öræfi in the east, a journey of thirteen days away, decided to try their luck at pressing their packtrains southward over the heaths before nightfall, hoping they’d still be able to trade in Básendar. Eyrarbakki was dry; not a drop trickled out of the storehouse, but a single prosperous man who had brennivín left over from the previous year’s stores gave the squire a sip, which only made him mad with hunger for more. By midnight the place was deserted; they’d all dragged themselves off somewhere to their own grief, some beneath the walls along with their starving dogs. The squire was the only one who remained, besides the white and crescent moon over the sea, and there was no more brennivín.

Suddenly Þórður Narfason—otherwise known as Túre Narvesen— arrives; his movements are jerky, his face tarred. He has white teeth, red eyes, a lopsided nose, and large fists. When he saw the squire he took off his tattered and ugly knitted cap and fell to his knees before him. In his youth he’d been an attendant to the bishop in Skálholt, but was expelled from the post due to certain affairs he’d had with the girls. Even so, he could recall several Latin words ever afterward. He’d murdered his best beloved—some said two—though it was apparently through no fault of his own. One thing was certain, he hadn’t been executed, but rather sentenced to hard labor—he was well acquainted with Bremerholm. He was a great artist, a poet and a writer, a good drinker, and an excellent ladies’ man, and he spoke Danish so well that he got along with the Danes as if he were one of them. He was a knave and worked as an errand-boy for the trading company and was allowed to sleep in the pigsty; since he was an artist he often assisted the cooper during the autumn, and he called himself a cooper when he was in the company of Icelanders, though he was considered only a half-cooper by the Danes. Around this time Túre Narvesen was some sort of Royal Majesty’s Master of the Watch over the place, it being his duty to stand guard at night to hinder the work of anyone who showed any desire to set fire to the buildings or to violate the king’s seal.

The squire drove his foot into this courtly man’s chest as he knelt there on the ground, the grimiest of the charmers whom a girl in Iceland has at some point called her angel before the very same man put her to death.

“Give me brennivín, you devil,” said the squire.

“My honored lord. Brennivín—at this pernicious hour?” said Narvesen, shrilly.

“Do you want me to kill you?” said the squire.

“Aye, your grace, it makes no difference: the world is perishing, no matter what.”

“I’ll give you a horse,” said the squire.

“My dear squire would give a horse,” said Túre Narvesen, and he stood up and embraced the squire. “Salutem.* Long live my lord.”

He started to walk away.

“You’ll own land in Selvogur,” said the squire, and he grabbed a handful of Túre Narvesen’s rags and held on to him with a convulsive, locking grip. When the man realized that there was little possibility for escape he embraced the squire again and kissed him.

“Haven’t I always said a gentle heart wins the world?” said Narvesen. “And since such great things are happening I don’t think we could do any better than to go to meet the swineherd.”

The squire followed Túre Narvesen to the pigsty. Housed there were the animals that alone of all creatures lived in comfort and decency in Iceland, not least since the king’s specially appointed representative had tyrannically banned two-footed creatures from eating maggots and grubs. Farmers were sometimes graciously allowed to take a look at these wondrous creatures through the grating, and they would generally become nauseated at the sight, particularly since the beasts were the color of naked folk, the folds of their flesh the same as in rich men, looking out over these folds with the wise eyes of poor men; many a man spewed gall at such a vision.