Iceland's Bell (30 page)

19

On the same day that the king’s poor innocents sat waiting for the king’s soup at Þingvellir by Öxará this newsworthy event occurred in Bræðratunga: the housewife rose from bed, summoned her farmhands and ordered them to round up some horses, then announced that she was leaving. They said that the master of the house had ridden from home for the time being and none of the horses remaining was ridable. She said:

“Do you remember the horse that stood here tied to the horseblock last spring, the one I ordered you to slaughter?”

They looked at each other, smiling sarcastically.

“Go to Hjálmholt, where you will find this horse in the bailiff’s pastures, and bring it to me,” she said.

They returned with the horse around midnight, to find her waiting and ready to leave. She ordered them to bring out her saddle and put it on the horse, then threw on a great, hooded wadmal cloak to protect herself against the incessant rain and assigned one of the men to accompany her westward over the river. She planned to ride the rest of the way alone that night. The weather was calm and mild, with dense drizzling rain.

No sooner had her attendant crossed back over the Brúar River than her horse grew restive. She lashed at it for a short time before it suddenly jumped with a start into a gallop, nearly throwing her off. It tore along at a tremendous pace for a while and it took her everything she had just to stay in the saddle, her hands locked in a death-grip around the saddle horn. Finally it pulled the reins from her grasp, ran out onto the moor, and stood still. She started beating the horse with her crop again, and when it grew annoyed at the beating it snorted and lashed its tail, giving warning that it was going to rear. In the end it did no such thing, but instead galloped away, just as before. This time it tried to catch her off guard with some old tricks, taking eccentric turns and doing as much as possible to throw her off. She dismounted and caressed the horse, but it refused to acquiesce to her kindnesses. Finally she managed to get it moving again, but only in a fast gallop, and in between spurts of galloping it stood stock-still. Maybe she was a bad rider. In the end it entered a hollow divided by a stream and turned sharply to one side. She was thrown forward off the saddle and in a flash found herself lying on the ground. She stood up and wiped off the dirt and the mud; otherwise she was unhurt. A whimbrel cried out sharply and energetically through the haze. The horse grazed by the bank of the stream. She remounted halfheartedly, struck at its groin, jerked at the reins, and shouted “Ho!” but it was all for nothing. Maybe she knew nothing about beating horses. One thing was certain: it wasn’t going to move. It went against everything in its constitution to continue on in this way. It gave a few ponderous starts, then reared. She dismounted, walked up along the shoulder of the hollow, sat down upon a moss-covered hillock, and stared at the horse through the rain.

“I should’ve known that a horse given to someone by a crook as compensation for injury wouldn’t turn out to be any better than you, you sluggard,” she said to the horse.

Luckily there was no one to witness her stop-and-start journey, since it was near daybreak and the countryside was asleep. It seemed to her as if the haze was brighter than it had been a short time ago, so she knew that the sun must have risen.

She straightened out her cloak and pressed onward. A fog lay over the hills and the heather glistened with moisture. A gray web of mist glistened upon the turfless patches. The birch was partly in bud and smelled almost sickly sweet in the warm and tranquil drizzle. She was poorly prepared for walking: her boots quickly became waterlogged and her skirt soaked and heavy as her feet were entangled by the dripping copsewood, besides the fact that she had only newly risen from her sickbed and was lacking somewhat in strength. She fell several times, but forced herself up again and pressed on. She was thoroughly drenched by the time she made it through Bláskógar.

When she finally reached Öxará it was late enough that the drunks had gone to sleep. The purl of the cold river seemed to be frozen in the break of the fog-enshrouded day, distant even to the ears of someone standing at its bank. Several sleeping horses stood hobbled in the pasture, their heads drooping.

Standing here and there near the courthouse were a few tents, and she spied the canopied magistrate’s booth and made her way toward it. The booth had a double canopy of a protective outer tarp and an inner lining, and its walls had been rebuilt. Three stone steps led up to a practical door set in a comely doorway in the paneled front wall. She rapped on the door. One of her father’s attendants came out, drunk with sleep, and she bade him wake the magistrate. The old man turned over in bed and asked hoarsely who was outside.

“It is I, dear father,” she said softly, in a melancholy tone, and she leaned up against the doorpost.

The tent’s inner lining was dry in spite of the rain and there was a removable wooden platform for a floor. Her father was lying in a sleeping bag made of skin, beneath him a pad smelling of manured hay, which was a princely fragrance on spring days when no one had any hay. He raised himself halfway, clad in a thick wadmal nightshirt, with a scarf around his neck, blue-faced, quite bald, his nose overly large and his eyebrows appallingly thick. Old age had made him noticeably emaciated and his cheeks were sagging; a dewlap had replaced his double chin. He looked at her apathetically.

“What do you want, child?” he asked.

“I wish to speak with you in private, father,” she said, the same dusky tone in her voice. She did not look at him, but continued to lean tiredly against the doorpost.

He told his attendant to go to the servants’ tent for the time being, then asked her to wait at the threshold while he dressed. When she was finally allowed in, her father was on his feet, having put on his boots and thick cloak and peruke. She noticed the heavy golden ring on his right ring finger as he took some snuff from a silver box. She went straight up to him and kissed him.

“Well now,” he said, after she finished kissing him.

“I’ve come to you father, that’s all,” she said.

“To me?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, “one has to be able to lean against someone, otherwise one dies.”

“You always were an unruly child,” he said.

“Dear father, will you permit me to stand at your side?” she asked.

“Dear child,” he said. “You are no longer a child.”

“I’ve been lying ill in bed, father,” she said.

“I heard that you were ill, but I see that you must be feeling well again,” he said.

“Father,” she said. “One day this spring I saw nothing but darkness. It engulfed me and I lost my strength and gave in to its power. All I could do was lie there in the darkness. And yet, I didn’t die. How can it be that I didn’t die, father?”

“Many people fall ill in the spring and live to tell about it, good child,” he said.

“Yesterday I heard a voice whispering to me that I should go to you. Someone said that the verdicts would be handed down today. I suddenly recovered. I arose. Dear father, in spite of this dreadful poverty, our family is still of some worth, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is,” he said. “I come from excellent folk. Your mother comes from even better folk. God be praised.”

“They haven’t succeeded in confounding us,” she said. “Not entirely. We’re still standing upright. Are we human or aren’t we, father? I’m certain that if I’m bound by any obligation, it’s to you.”

“You have proven to be a great challenge to your mother, child,” he said.

She said, “Now I’m going to ride home to her with you, as she asked me to do.”

He looked away.

“Father,” she continued. “I hope that they’re not still disputing the verdicts in court.”

He said that he wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by verdicts, since things had reached such a state that no one knew any longer where justice was to be found in this miserable country. He himself didn’t know what name he should give to the buffoonery taking place just now. Then he asked what sort of grudge she bore that could have persuaded her to transfer control of Bræðratunga back to Magnús Sigurðsson after it had become clear that he would be defamed for his libelous censure against her, instead of declaring herself divorced from the man with legal documents and witnesses. “Yet you knew,” he said, “that those who were more heedful of their reputation and honor than Magnús Sigurðsson would be prosecuted here and deprived of their names and their estates though they might have done far less to offend the country’s newest ruling power.” He said that a vice-magistrate and two bailiffs had been appointed and invested with the power of magistrate to make a ruling in the lawsuit against him, because Arnæus had announced that he could not perform his official duties until his name was cleared of this aspersion, and he had demanded that this be accomplished not just by means of the judgment of one district court, but also by means of a magistrate’s judgment. The verdict was to be announced early this morning, and then Arnæus would take over in court.

“Father,” she said. “What sort of penalty will be imposed if Magnús’s accusations are verified?”

He answered: “If a married man takes a married woman, the punishment is loss of reputation and respect, and a pecuniary fine to be paid to the crown is imposed upon each of them—and of course the fine may be paid with skin in place of cash.”

“Father,” she said, “will you permit me to come forth in court and say a few words?”

“Words are worth nothing here,” he said. “What do you want?”

“I’ll force a mistrial—the court will be brought to ruin and the judges vitiated, and good men will have the chance to send their advocates to council with the king. Perhaps if this man is forced out, they’ll think twice about appointing a successor to prosecute you into ignominy next summer.”

“I don’t know what sort of dream it is you’re living in, child,” he said.

“I’m going to request a hearing,” she said, “and demand to be called as a witness in the case against Magnús Sigurðsson. I’m going to explain to the court that Magnús was justified in writing the letter he had read in the choir doorway in Skálholt cathedral.”

“It shocks me to hear you say such things,” said Magistrate Eydalín. “Both your sister and her husband the bishop sent word to your mother that this calumny was the blackest lie that any man could conceive of. And just who is supposed to confirm such testimony?”

She said, “I’ll swear an oath to it.”

“My honor wouldn’t be worth much if I were to consider saving him from the trampling of the reputation-thieves by putting my daughter’s life and honor on the line in this judicial dispute,” said the magistrate. “Particularly and especially since the oath that you intend to swear in praejudicio Arnæi* in this case must necessarily be perjurious.”

“It’s not your business,” she said. “It’s our fatherland’s. If the few of you who stand upright throughout this time of need are to sit upon the outlaws’ bench and be condemned, if our family is to be trampled down into the mire, if there are no longer to be men in Iceland, then what was all this for?”

“If you believe that I am prepared, good child, to let someone swear a false oath in order to promote my own advantage in a lawsuit involving me, then you do not know your own father. I shudder to hear such support being offered by my child, support that even the most dishonest man would refuse to accept from a bandit. The ideas that a wretched female can come up with are incomprehensible to sensible men. I readily acknowledge that my senility has caused me to make one or two mistakes; but I am a Christian man. A Christian man holds his soul’s well-being above all other things. If someone swears a false oath with another’s consent and on behalf of that person, then both of them eternally forsake their souls’ well-being.”

“Even if by committing this crime they’re able to save the honor of the entire country?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “even for that, or so it seems.”

“You taught me once, father, to call such hairsplitting ars casuistica,”* she said. “Fie upon that art.”

He said huskily and coldly: “Your words dimly remind me of a confused girl who has through her own self-imposed tribulations forsaken her luck, lost hold of her ability to perceive the difference between disgrace and honor, and who now speaks in desperatione vitae.* This conversation must end now, good child. But since you are here, God knows why, I shall now call for the boys and bid them light the fire and heat some tea, since day is breaking.”

“Father,” she said. “Call for no one. Wait. I didn’t tell you everything: not the truth. But now I’ll tell it. I don’t need to swear a false oath: throughout the entire winter Árni and I regularly engaged in forbidden relations in Skálholt. I went to him by night”—she spoke quietly and darkly down into her lap as she sat there cowering at the door.

He cleared his throat and bellowed in a voice huskier than before:

“Such testimony would carry no weight in court, and therefore you would never be allowed to swear an oath! There are plenty of examples of married persons telling just such lies in order to obtain a divorce! In this case the court would require witnesses!”

She said: “A man working in complicity with my sister and my sister’s husband came to me in the spring to discuss this case with me. It was one of the exalted personages of the see of Skálholt, the man who read the document containing the charges against me in the choir doorway, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he even played a part in writing it, with the full consent and approval of my sister Jórunn. One thing is certain, the archpriest, Reverend Sigurður Sveinsson, is too crafty a man to read such a document in a holy place on a whim—he had good reason to do so, since he so much as caught me in the act one night. Besides this, I gleaned from both his and my sister’s comments earlier in the winter that they had sent one or more of the see’s housemaids to spy on our movements. It will be easy to find witnesses.”

He remained silent for a long moment before answering.

“I am an old man,” he said finally. “And I am your father. No such thing has ever been proven to have occurred in our family. On the other hand some of your mother’s folk did lose their wits, and if you say anything more along these lines, I’ll know that you belong to this group.”