Iceland's Bell (29 page)

17

As evening came on a rainstorm approached from the south. It rained all night and throughout the next day. The main doorway became completely impassable; only wind and water had free passage through the house. Later that evening the storm subsided.

Several days passed and then a visitor arrived, riding a fat black horse. He inquired after the housewife. When she heard that the archpriest was outside she sent word that she was not entirely healthy and was therefore uninclined to receive guests, but she ordered that he be given whey. His response was that he had not come for a social visit, and would willingly speak to the housewife by her bedside if she was too weak to stand. She said in that case it would be best to drag the archpriest in through the hole in the wall at the back of the kitchen, then show him into the houseroom. She continued to embroider for some time. When she finally came down she was wearing a lace-trimmed mantle, beneath which could be seen a belt of golden bands.

The whey stood untouched where the housemaid had left it upon the table before the guest. When she came in he stood up and greeted her.

“I am delighted to see that my friend from youth is not too sickly to come down,” said the archpriest.

She bade him welcome, but said she regretted that visitors could not be invited in through the front door; she would have had the entryway cleared out if she had expected the archpriest, but he had come without warning. Would he please take a seat?

He bent his head, coughed slightly, and let his eyes wander about the room, though his gaze never reached any higher than about knee-high off the floor. Finally they came to rest on the pitcher on the table before him. He said:

“Will my friend please have this whey removed.”

She took the pitcher immediately and splashed its contents out through the door.

He remained seated, letting his eyes wander. She did not sit down.

“Hm—I had planned to start with a suitable preface to this business,” he said. “But I can no longer find the words. When a man beholds you, a man forgets what he was going to say.”

“Then it must not have been important,” she said.

“It was,” he said.

“Then you reduce the damage by forgetting the preface,” she said. “I never understood prefaces. What do you want?”

“It is very difficult,” he said, and he took a deep breath to gather his strength for this trial. “But I am here. Therefore I must speak.”

“Cleverly spoken,” she said. “Sum, ergo loquor.”*

“It is useless to mock me though I might deserve it,” he said. “You know that I stand defenseless before your ice-cold innuendo. I have come to you after keeping long vigil.”

“People should sleep more at night,” she said.

“The petition, hm,” he said, “which I was persuaded to read in the choir doorway at the synod: for that I owe you my apologies. It was, however, not done out of the blue, but rather after long invocation of the Lord, who most definitely withholds His grace from you, but who preserves your beauty in order to honor a destitute land.”

She fell silent and looked at him from such an extreme distance that she might have been a man looking down upon an overturned giant’s ox.

It did not take him long, however, to right himself and continue, though he was careful to look in any direction other than where she was sitting so that he would not forget what he had been planning to say: he said that above all else he wanted to assure her that the words he had spoken to her in the winter, concerning the nature of the Tempter and women’s dealings with him, according to Holy Scripture and the auctores, had not in truth been spoken in order to reproach her, but had sprung from sorrow, “or should I say, rather, from resentment,” over the fact that she, Iceland’s sun, should run the risk of putting her soul’s health in jeopardy by taking delight in the presence of sin. Despite his grief and resentment it was his belief that as far as she was concerned nothing had occurred in Skálholt that could be viewed as disgraceful for an esteemed female personage or that divine grace would be unwilling to repair, especially if faith and repentance were to take its place. Then he turned back to the petition. “If,” said he, “your confessor intervened in this case in a manner disagreeable to you, he did it only out of concern for your beloved soul. Though all hope of gaining your favor might have been spoiled because of it, he was with God’s support eager to pay even this price, if it meant that it would work to drive the sinful presence away from the soul he esteemed above all other souls—which did indeed happen the day after the letter was read.”

Afterward many things had been tangibly proven by the occurrence of certain events, just as he had tried to explain to her before concerning the nature of things, though she had always turned a deaf ear to his teachings. As a case in point he named the attacks now being made upon Iceland’s honor, with summonses being served against the country’s elders, our overseers, so beloved by God.

By the time he reached this point in his story his rhetorical skill had blossomed, and he delivered a sermon about what would happen in the country if the Christian authorities were to be forced from their seats, where they had been placed by God to discipline the masses, who invested themselves in nothing other than the satisfaction of their wicked lusts, searching for opportunities to perpetrate sedition and trample morality underfoot. He proved, with examples from the doctors and other sources, that only one man out of a thousand was worthy of redemption, and even so, that this would happen only through grace. He cited the example of the Greeks and Romans, under what impossible circumstances their republics arose, and said that one could draw analogies from this to what would happen to our miserable people if thieves, murderers, and beggars were to gain power, while the Christian authorities suffered attack, injury, and ruin, and were finally held captive in infamy and shame. “If the rabble succeeds in rising against its overlords, it is always due to the work of one man sent by Satan to confound the simpletons and betray the king. No one doubts the intelligence of Arnas Arnæus. But his mission is the same. He wants to wipe his wretched fatherland from the face of the inhabited world, and he shirks from any other remedy. First he sheared the land of any remnant of its golden age by duping our penniless scholars into giving up the literary gemstones that comprise our crown, offering payment for some and allurements for others, mostly for a mere pittance, as if they were old frocks or worn-out perukes; these he shipped off or had sent to him in Copenhagen. Next in line are our ancient laws and our fathers’ ordering of our government, and the evil spirit has appeared here as well, this time with judicial authority the likes of which no one has ever seen in this country, carrying letters that no one dares to impugn, letters that supposedly give him the right to appoint himself litigator in whatever case he chooses and to adjudge one and all according to his whims. Consequently, the authorities shall be overthrown, the aristocrats’ estates seized and they themselves hounded into ignominy, the courts’ rulings annulled, lawbreakers and vandals exalted. And it is plain who will be first to be forced to bow down in the dust before the rabble’s feet.”

She said: “I would be terribly disappointed if my father were to feel any consternation over the fact that the king sends a man to make inquests into the proper fulfillment of his duties; he will remain standing upright though he might have faltered once. That is only human. Otherwise, he has conducted himself in his lifelong work in a manner beyond reproach.”

“The court will deprive your father of his estates and his honor within a few weeks,” said the archpriest, and his mouth quivered as he glanced sharply at her face. They said nothing for several minutes. His face continued to quiver.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

“I am your suitor,” he said—“the black sheep in the fold.”

“I have come home to my husband Magnús,” she said.

“District court has already passed sentence against Magnús Sigurðsson for his letter,” said the archpriest. “He is an ignominious man. His assets, including this estate given to him by you, have been seized by the king.”

“Then it’s good,” she said, “that it was a man who appeared in court.”

“Yesterday a messenger came to me from Flói to request that I see to it that Magnús Sigurðsson be held liable for his conduct there the other night. This is of course not the first time that I have acted as arbitrator in such matters—on behalf of the person who respects me least of all men.”

“On my behalf?” she asked.

“On behalf of her beloved personage, cotters have occasionally been done slight favors by good men in order to prevent cases such as this from undergoing further litigation. However, mercy of this kind can most certainly be reckoned according to philosophy as an unreasonable act of charity, equivalent to sin.”

The archpriest then explained to the housewife how her husband had, two nights ago, ridden down to a certain cottage in Flói, thrown the man out of bed, and committed adultery with his wife.

She smiled and said that the money being used to prevent such good news from reaching her was being wasted; her husband had always been a great cavalier. “And I am proud to hear,” she said, “that I am wed to a man who still enjoys women after submersing himself in brennivín for thirty years.”

The archpriest stared into the distance, without moving or giving any other sign to acknowledge that he had heard this frivolous answer.

“My dear Reverend Sigurður,” she said. “Why don’t you ever smile?”

“This so-called marriage,” he said, “has scandalized good men in this country for too long, and it is high time for it to be dissolved by the grace of God and the church’s consent.”

“I can’t see how that will change anything,” she said. “I’ll always be saddled in the public’s eyes with a charge of adultery, with no possible chance to refute such calumny—divorcing my ignominious, plebeian husband will do nothing to rectify that. And it is useless to seek support from my father, since, according to you, even he is going to be reduced to the level of pauper—a miscreant in the sight of all in his old age.”

“Last winter I stood in anguish outside your window by night, often in frost and storm,” he said. “I offer you my wealth and my life. My last hundred of land is yours to use to reclaim your father’s honor, if you so desire.”

“What does that pierced troll say, whom you wished to appoint as my judge last winter?”

Her blasphemy seemed to touch him no longer:

“My Redeemer’s immortal witness, Reverend Hallgrímur Pétursson, had a pagan wife.* I am not in a worse position than he was.”

“And what do the church ordinances say, which are far more binding than the crucified one himself ever was?” she asked. “How long can a priest retain his vestments, when he is wed to a runaway wife with a reputation for adultery on top of everything else?”

“May I speak to you in confidence?” he asked.

“Do as you please,” she said.

“I have come here with the full support of the man who is second only to your father in his embodiment of our country’s honor, the aristocrat to whom both you and I can safely entrust our lots.”

“The bishop?” she asked.

“Your sister’s husband,” he said.

She laughed coldly. Then, silence.

“Ride back home to your troll, Reverend Sigurður,” she said. “My sister Jórunn and I are better able to converse without a go-between.”

A few days later the squire was carried home on a horse-drawn stretcher. His body was stark with blood. His internal organs, or at the very least several ribs, had likely been damaged. He could move neither his body nor his limbs, and he did not have the power to speak. He was edged carefully in through the hole in the kitchen wall and put to bed in his houseroom. It had been a cruel turn of events.

When he had recovered enough to speak he asked to see his wife, but was told that she was ill. He demanded to be carried up to her, but was told that she had ordered that her door be bolted from the inside.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “She’ll open the door anyway.”

He was told that the daleswoman Guðríður never moved from her place beside Snæfríður’s bedcloset, night or day.

Things were not looking well for him. He asked what his wife’s symptoms were and the answer came back that she had gone down bedecked in finery to receive a visitor a week ago, had chatted with him for some time and had cheerfully bidden him farewell, then had stepped lightly back up to her room. She hadn’t been up and about since then. She could endure neither the sunshine nor the incessant noise of birds twittering around the farm day and night at this time of the year, and so she had a curtain of black wadmal drawn before her window.

18

On either side of a crag in Almannagjá stand two old tents, battered-looking and torn in places, though imprinted with the crown of our Most Gracious Majesty. Men occupied the tent on the Brennugjá side, women the one nearest Drekkingarhylur. Some of these people had been summoned to Þingvellir to testify in court, but most were convicted criminals who’d been punished physically, either recently or at some time in the past: they’d been branded, flogged, had their hands chopped off. The king’s special envoy had called them hither this time to retry their cases. Today they were waiting for their portion of the king’s soup, prepared by a cook from Bessastaðir.

“This company’s far too sluggish for my liking, considering justice is finally about to be done,” said one man. “I’m amazed no one’s even up to giving us a ballad.”

Most were in tatters, their feet either bare or wrapped with layers of rags, their chins shaggy, their scraps of clothing bound with bits of rope-ends or bands of unspun wool. They had no belongings, though some who still had hands carried broken rake-shafts for walking sticks. Some individuals in the group actually owned milch cows, wranglers who had at some time or other been punished by the authorities and who had never been able to forget it—these stayed up at night muddling over their lot, relentless in their ability to complain, lay blame, and curse. One of these men now said, since it looked as if he was about to be exonerated:

“I demand a day’s wages for being torn away from my spring work and dragged up here.”

Another man felt that the costs of the trip to Þingvellir would never be fully compensated until he got the chance to watch his bailiff being flogged.

A holy man who’d been branded for stealing from the poor box said:

“In my opinion, these demands are being made out of little love for the folk who were burned here in Brennugjá, hanged at Gálgaklettur,* or sunk in Drekkingarhylur, alone and abandoned, either because they couldn’t swear a counteroath against false charges or because the devil showed up in a dogsbody and testified against them. Are we more pitiable than them? Why not you and I?”

Jón Hreggviðsson from Rein, who was sitting out in front of the men’s tent with a gray beard in place of his black one, wearing muddy skin-stockings, a thick wadmal smock begrimed with dirt and horsehair, and a piece of cord about his waist, cried out:

“A long time ago they brought me here eastward over the heath, along with one Jón Þeófílusson from the Westfjörds, who was burned after the devil testified against him. And I’ve got one thing to say about that: a ladies’ man like him, who could sit up in the gables an entire night holding on to a Blusterer while his girl was in bed with another man, didn’t deserve any better, and that’s why I told him so many times in the black pit, ‘You’ll definitely be burned, dear Jón.’ ”

“A lot of folks might say there’d never have been such trouble these days if they’d have cut your head off back then, Hreggviðsson,” said a handless thief.

“Why wasn’t my head cut off, why wasn’t I hanged? I wasn’t better than any of them,” said the saint who’d stolen from the poor box.

A certain soft-spoken man who’d been spared execution for incest said this:

“My sister was drowned, as everyone knows, and by God’s grace I was sentenced to outlawry and banished to another quarter where I had to lie about my name. My first job was to snitch on thieves to the bailiff, and he flushed them out and stoned them. Of course my identity finally came out, and for ten years everyone’s known it was me. For ten years I’ve been walking repentantly from house to house, and the countryfolk have long accepted me as their own and God’s lawbreaker and have treated me kindly. And now, after ten years, it turns out it was a completely different man and a completely different woman who’d had the child that they drowned my sister for supposedly having had with me. Who have I been all these years and who am I now? Will anyone treat me charitably after this? Will anyone take me in in the spirit of mercy and forbearance after this? No, they’ll laugh at me throughout all of Iceland. No one’ll ever throw me as much as a single fish-belly. They’ll send the dogs after me. My God, my God, why did you take my crime from me?”

“When I was a child I was taught to look up to the gentry,” said an old tramp who was on the verge of tears. “And now in my old age I have to watch four of the good bailiffs who had me flogged dragged into court. If there’s no one around to flog us anymore, who’s a man supposed to look up to?”

“To God,” said someone.

“Well said,” said a blind criminal. “What did Reverend Ólafur from Sandar mean in his venerable verses when he begged our Lord Jesus to defend the authorities?”

“I would never think to put all authorities together in the same boat,” said the man missing a hand. “I was flogged at Rangárvellir for the same crime they cut my hand off for down south by the sea.”

“Are you suggesting,” said the blind man, “that our Redeemer ought to defend certain authorities, certain good authorities, for example those authorities who allow men’s hides to be tanned, but not those who cut off men’s hands? I don’t think the dear reverend in his fair verse meant to leave anyone out: his prayer was that the Redeemer might defend all the authorities, those who chop off men’s hands no less than those who tan men’s hides.”

“Reverend Ólafur from Sandar can eat shit,” said one man.

“It’s not for me to say what Reverend Ólafur from Sandar can eat,” said the blind criminal. “But I know for certain that when Master Brynjólfur had grown so old that he couldn’t understand Greek and Hebrew any longer, and had also forgotten all his dialectic and astronomy, and couldn’t remember how to decline mensa* in Latin, he always used to recite this verse by Reverend Ólafur from Sandar, which his mother had taught him when he was a child.”

“Whoever trusts the authorities isn’t a man,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “I’ve walked across Holland.”

“My king is just,” said the old, oft-flogged tramp.

“Whatever a man doesn’t take for himself a man never takes,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “I’ve landed in adventures with the Germans.”

“Blessed is the man who serves his sentence,” said the oft-flogged man.

“I spit at The Grandees when their sentences are unjust,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “But I spit at them even more when their sentences are just, because then I know they’re scared. You think I don’t know my king and his hangman? I’ve chopped down Iceland’s bell, worn a Spanish Jacket out in Glückstadt, and had the Paternoster put on my head in Copenhagen. When I came home my daughter was lying on her bier. I wouldn’t trust them to bring an innocent child over a brook without getting it drowned.”

“Jón Hreggviðsson is the very picture of Satan,” said the oftflogged man, and he quivered like an aspen leaf. “God have mercy on me for my sins.”

The blind criminal said:

“Let us keep the peace dear brothers, while we await the king’s soup. We are the rabble, the lowest creatures on earth. Let us pray for the health of each and every authority who comes to the aid of the defenseless. But there will never be any justice until we ourselves become men. Centuries will pass by. The reprieve granted to us by the last king will be taken from us by the next. But our day will come. And upon that day, when we become men, God will come to us and fight on our side.”