Iceland's Bell (31 page)

“Árni will never deny this against me,” she said. “He’ll drop the case.”

Her father said: “Even if Arnas Arnæus were to father a beautiful boy with you, and even if not only the archpriest and the housemaids, but also the bishop and his wife, were to catch him in the act, that same man would stop at nothing until he had acquired decrees from princes, emperors, and popes confirming that you had begotten the child with some hangabout. I know his kind.”

“Father,” she said, looking straight at him, “would you rather I say nothing? Does your honor mean nothing to you? Are your sixty estates worth nothing to you?”

He said: “I consider it far less disgraceful to stand upright in opposition to a fop at a daytime assembly than to have a daughter who has fallen before a fop during a nighttime rendezvous, even if I knew this blemish to be a self-imposed lie. And this you know, child, that when you ran off and married the greatest scamp in the southerners’ quarter after one of the richest clerics in the land, the exceptionally learned poet Reverend Sigurður Sveinsson, had asked for your hand, I of course remained silent over this indignity; and when he sold away his patrimony and brought you to the brink of poverty I bought the property in silence. And then, when your mother found out that you had been sold to a Dane for brennivín and threatened with the ax, I excused myself from answering such foolishness. Even when you went back to him, transferring to your executioner the property that I had deeded to you, I did not open my mouth, nor for that matter my heart, to anyone. Now as before I may well have to endure the churls’ mudslinging in this the seat of my power, Þingvellir by Öxará, but that makes little difference: no one will laugh after a time. But of all the indignities that you have forced your mother and me to endure, you would do well to remain silent in this last one, if you would rather not turn your people into the greatest laughing-stocks in the history of this destitute country throughout the ages.”

In repose he still appeared to be the most active of men. But when he stood up, took hold of his staff, and walked out to order his servants to their morning work, one could see how decrepit he really was. He tottered out along the platform, short-stepped and haltingly, stooping to such a degree that the lap of his cloak dragged along the floor, and gritting his teeth to help suppress the arthritic casts that gripped him after his graceless rest in this damp, cold shed so early in the summer.

20

Shortly after the magistrate went to wake his servants his daughter also stood up and left the booth. She was tired and wet after her nightlong march in the rain and she was immediately gripped by the cold. She hurried away from her father’s booth and in no time at all found herself standing in Almannagjá, its sheer edges and crags leaning in and closing over her, the projecting rock face above her disappearing into the fog. She roamed for some time beneath the ravine walls. Her feet were in pain. Misted horses stood in the fields at the foot of the ravine, causing droplets of dew to fall as they grazed. The river murmured in the fog somewhere close by. Soon she was standing by the great women’s pool, where the river turns back on itself and drains from the ravine. She watched the water billow like eddying black velvet, deep and cold and clean at the break of day, and she noticed that her mouth was dry.

After gazing at the pool for some time she heard a pounding sound rising over the water’s murmur, and she spied a woman clad in gray with a handkerchief wound round her head standing upon a flat rock at the water’s edge, beating socks with a battledore.* She walked over to the woman and greeted her.

“Do you live here?” she asked the woman.

“Yes and no,” said the woman. “I was once supposed to have been drowned in this pool.”

“I’ve heard people say that the moon is sometimes mirrored in it,” said Snæfríður.

The woman straightened up and looked at her, took note of her dark-colored cloak, which was made from good, thick wadmal, then went right up to her and lifted the cloak’s hem, revealing a blue skirt of foreign cloth and a silver belt with a long ornamental endpiece; upon her feet she wore English boots that were rather grimy, but which would still fetch her two or three hundreds of land. The woman examined her face and eyes.

“You must be an elf-wife,” said the gray woman.

“I’m tired,” said the stranger.

The gray woman explained that there were three beldames sharing a tent here, each from a different district. One had been branded for having run off with a thief, another was to have been drowned here for having sworn she was a virgin despite the fact that she was pregnant, and the third had disburdened herself of a child north in Sléttuhlíð, but since the likelihood existed that it had actually been stillborn she had been sent from Drekkingarhylur to the Spindehus* in Copenhagen. She had labored as an inmate there for six years and had been set free when His Most Benevolent Majesty and Grace took his queen to wife. Now these women had been summoned to Þingvellir to witness the sentencing of their heaven-sent authorities to ignominy. They planned to go home today. “But,” said the woman, “since you have for some reason come to me, dear daughter-in-law, and are in need of hospitality, come into my tent with me.”

The woman’s two companions looked over the elf-wife in pious silence, and she allowed them to touch her. They wanted to treat her as hospitably as possible, since treating elves well is guaranteed to bring good luck. They were very eager to tell her their life stories, as usually happens when commoners come into contact with supernatural beings and aristocrats, but she listened to them distractedly as if their stories were wind blowing on the opposite side of a mountain. Now and then she shuddered. They asked her why she had cast off her misty veil and come here.

“I’m doomed,” she said.

They said: “Go to Arnæus, sister, he will acquit you no matter what you have done.”

“The court that will acquit me does not exist, neither amongst elves nor men,” she said.

“It exists in heaven,” said the woman who had disburdened herself and labored in the Spindehus.

“No, nor in heaven,” said Snæfríður.

They looked at her wordlessly, incredulous that the court that could acquit this criminal existed neither in heaven nor on earth nor in the world of elves.

“Don’t let that trouble you,” said the woman from the Spindehus. “The only women who were lucky were those who took their rest in the pool.”

They had gathered moss to lie upon, but had received coverlets from the king. Now they prepared a bed for her. And because she was soaking wet, they undressed her and exchanged clothing with her— she took a smock from one, a skirt from another, and a shirt from the third. The woman who had gone to the Spindehus removed her own kerchief and tied it round her head. They fetched tea and bread from the Bessastaðir cook and shared it with her. Finally they wrapped a coverlet marked with the king’s seal around her and tucked her into the moss.

In a moment she was asleep, finally. One of her many burdens during this torpid spring was that she could find no rest in sleep. But now she slept. She slept deeply and tranquilly. She slept for a long time. Slept.

When she awoke the three innocents were gone, along with any sign that they had ever been there. The tent was empty. She stood up and gazed out through the opening: the grass was long since dry, the sky was clear, the sun was sinking in the west. She had slept the entire day. She hadn’t seen the sun since sometime last year, but now she saw it shining over Þingvellir by Öxará: over Skjaldbreiður, Bláskógar, the estuary, the lake, and Hengill. Something was irritating her skin beneath her clothing and when she looked down she found that she was wearing the three innocents’ clothing: a patched-up gray smock with white bone buttons but no belt, a muddy and tattered short skirt with a frayed hem and a tear up the side, rust brown goat’s hair socks with newer foreparts knitted onto older sock-legs, shoes of untanned cowhide with holes at the toes and slits in the seams, and a gray wadmal rag tied around her head. Her legs jutted out below the hem of her skirt and the sleeves of the smock covered only her upper arms. These tatters smelled of all the unclean stenches that best distinguish a destitute folk: smoke, horsemeat, whale oil, stale body odor. She looked to see what was irritating her skin, and found it red and swollen with lice.

A lice-ridden woman in gray rags staggers away from her sleeping place. She stopped at the riverbank and drank water from the palms of her hands, then redrew her kerchief before her face. She ambled in the direction of the courthouse, but didn’t dare to enter the building; instead she stepped off the stairs and sat down in the peat a short distance from where a horse nibbled at the grass. The courthouse, Iceland’s Hall of Justice, had succumbed to ruin: its walls had collapsed, its bargeboards were broken, every single plank was out of place, the door had fallen off its hinges, the frame was warped. And there was no bell. Several dogs were fighting out front. The evening sun gilded the budding copse.

Finally a little handbell was rung within the house: court was adjourned. The first to exit were three men wearing wide cloaks, topboots, and feathered hats, and one was girded with a sword: the governor’s proxy. The others were the vice-magistrate and finally our Most Gracious Majesty’s specially appointed commissarius, Arnas Arnæus, Assessor Consistorii, Professor Philosophiae et Antiquitatum Danicarum. Following these three noblemen came their secretaries and adjutants, along with several armed Danish soldiers. The vice-magistrate and the governor’s proxy were conversing in Danish, but the commissarius followed them silently, restively, legal documents in hand.

Next came Magistrate Eydalín, tottering out of the courthouse with a servant at his side to support him. In all actuality he had grown feeble: he stretched out his hand like a child to the man leading him, instead of offering his arm. His cloak dragged along on the ground behind him.

Several middle-aged authorities followed him out of the house. They were apparently quite agitated, if one could tell by their cursing—some of them were drunk and wove about on the path. Finally came several men who had previously fallen under grave sentences but had not been executed only by sheer coincidence. These men had now been acquitted, but even so, they didn’t look any more joyful than any of the others who had come out of the house.

One of the commoners in the group turned from the path in the direction of the ragged woman sitting in the peat. He swore. She thought he might be drunk and might try to harm her, but he didn’t come over to her after all. He didn’t even look at her, but instead walked up to the horse grazing nearby. This workhorse was somewhat obstinate and at first it showed its master only its hindquarters. The obstinacy was apparently only for show, however, because in just a few moments the latter was rope-bridling the former, reciting as he did so a peculiar prefatory stanza from the seventh canto of the
Elder
Ballad of Pontus:

“March on, spare none, let there now resound
The gale of a battle mercilessly fought,
The gale of a battle mercilessly fought,
A whale white in color is the last to be caught.”

Then he took the horse from its hobble.

“Jón Hreggviðsson,” she said.

“Who’re you?” he said.

“How did it go?” she said.

“Their injustice is bad, and their justice is worse,” he said. “Now they’ve ordered me to get a new Supreme Court appeal from the king, and on top of that threatened to send me to Bremerholm right after the Alþingi this summer for not having published the old one. I don’t suppose you’re one of those they acquitted?”

“No,” she said, “I’m one of the guilty. The innocents stole my cloak.”

“I don’t believe in any justice except my own,” he said.

“What was the verdict in the case of the squire from Bræðratunga?” asked the woman.

“Those kinds of men condemn themselves,” he said. “They were grumbling something about me killing my son. So what? Wasn’t he my son? There’s only one crime that avenges itself, and that’s betraying the hidden people.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Two gentlemen stand opposite each other and each condemns the other, but they don’t know that they’re both guilty. Both betrayed the fair maiden, the slender elf-body. The squire calls the commissary a whorer in the choir doorway, the commissary answers by seizing the squire’s estate for himself and the king. But where’s my lord Arnæus’s fortune? Jón Hreggviðsson’s been a rich man ever since he entered that house. If you want I’ll give you a ride to Skagi and put you to work for me, my dear woman.”

She refused his offer and said: “I would rather beg for alms than work to support myself; I’m one of those. Give me some more news so that I have a bit of a story to think about wherever I find a bed for the night. How did it go for the authorities?”

He said that Magistrate Eydalín and three bailiffs had been deprived of their honor and rank, and that all of their property had been transferred to the king:

“There’s little left of him apart from his mouth and his voice. It’s a shame to pity a man—I’m not talking about the gentry, mind you— but today when I was sitting next to the old man, I in a new jacket and he in the old cloak he was wearing when he sentenced me all those years ago, I thought to myself, well, I guess you shouldn’t have been so good to Jón Hreggviðsson’s ugly old head after all.”

“Did you kill the man?” she said.

“Did I kill him? Either you kill him or he kills you,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “Once I had black hair. Now it’s gray. Soon it’ll be white. But whether it’s black, gray, or white, I spit at any justice other than the justice that’s in me, Jón Hreggviðsson from Rein, and the justice that’s behind the world. Here, let me give you a rixdollar, good woman. But I can’t save your head.”

He took a silver coin from his purse and threw it into her lap as he mounted his horse. Then he was gone. The beggarwoman sat there on a hillock for quite some time after he’d gone and turned the coin over in her hands absentmindedly. Then she stood up, her face veiled by her kerchief. She felt uncomfortable in the innocent’s skirt, because it revealed not only her feet with their high insteps, her thin ankles and long slender tendons, but also how her leg grew more stocky and became the strong feminine calf that no one had ever seen before. The woman felt naked. But the men whom she met at the riverbank were too caught up in their own concerns to take any notice of whether the skirt of a woman of the road was an inch too short or not. And when she saw that they weren’t thinking about her but rather about themselves, she turned her head and called out to them:

“Has anyone seen Magnús from Bræðratunga?”

But these were prominent individuals who had come here explicitly to take part in the court proceedings, and they were insulted that a beggarwoman should dare to question them about a man, if a man he could be called, especially after they had already convicted him on charges of calumny and deprived him of his estate and title, and they did not answer her. There was one young man amongst them, however, who apparently had less to think about; he simply waited on the riverbank with two saddled horses while his father bestowed parting kisses upon the cheeks of the other gentlemen close by, and he answered her thus:

“The squire in Bræðratunga is precisely the sort of man virile enough to lie down with you—he who slandered his wife, Snæfríður, Iceland’s sun, as a whore in the choir doorway.”

After this she didn’t dare mention the squire again, but when she met an old, gray-bearded groom, she came up with the clever idea of asking the whereabouts of Magnús Sigurðsson’s horses.

“Magnús Sigurðsson?” asked the bearded man. “Isn’t that the man who sold his wife to a Dane for brennivín?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And then tried to cut off her head with an ax?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And then accused her in the choir doorway in Skálholt of having slept with her father’s enemy?”

“Yes,” said the woman. “That’s him.”

“I’m pretty sure that the grooms at Bessastaðir have taken charge of his horses,” said the bearded man. “If you were planning on trying to catch them, they’re hardly on the loose anymore.”

She roamed for some time throughout this holy place, Þingvellir by Öxará, where poor men suffered so greatly that finally the cliffs themselves began to speak. The sun gleams off the black walls of the ravine and the columns of steam on the mountain across the lake ascend high into the sky. A short distance away a dog howls, cutting through the calm, its tones drawn-out, false and drawling, broken only by an apathetic bark now and then. This miserable drone had probably been sounding for quite some time before she noticed it. She caught a glimpse of the dog sitting upon a hillock at the foot of a cliff; it lowered its head, let its eyelids droop, stretched its snout upward, and howled against the sun with its mouth almost fully closed. Behind it lay a man faceup in the grass, perhaps dead. When the woman drew near, the dog stopped howling and opened its jaws wide several times with a look of despair that only a dog can make, then stood up and dragged itself toward her. Its gut was stretched tight from hunger. As it came closer it recognized who she was despite her attire, and it tried to fawn on her. She had the feeling that this was the dog from Bræðratunga.