Iceland's Bell (36 page)

“This is another one of your damned deceptions; false; a scheme; a plot; you’ve duped the king; there’s not a single Danish counselor or dignitary who would advise the king to sell Iceland, for the simple reason that no matter how high a price he could get for it this once, he could make much more profit from it in the long run through fair trading practices.”

“We must first attend to our most pressing needs,” said Arnas Arnæus. “The costume balls must go on; this costs money. An excellent costume ball gulps down all the revenues gathered in one year from all the Icelandic cloisters, your Benevolence. In addition, our Grace must make war upon the Swedes in order to increase Denmark’s renown; this also costs money.”

“And the Icelanders themselves,” gasped the statesman, somewhere between rage and terror, “what do they have to say?”

“Icelanders,” said Arnæus. “Who wants the opinion of an ignominious folk? Their one and only task is to retain their stories in memory until a better day.”

“Your Excellency must excuse me,” said the statesman in conclusion, “but urgent business calls me out into the city. I have, to wit, come into possession of a new mistress. Would my lord perhaps like to ride with me?”

Arnas Arnæus had stood up, and had stopped smoking.

“My carriage is also waiting outside,” he said.

“By the way, with regard to the shipment of fishing line on the Hólmship,” said the statesman, as he put on his cloak, “I shall look into the matter. The Chancery has always been willing to take into consideration the Icelanders’ requests for pig iron, sacramental wine, and cord. It might even be possible to get more ships to sail this year than last.”

6

In the spring following the epidemic the Alþingi was so poorly attended that the court cases were left unadjudged. From many districts not a single man came to the assembly. It became necessary to postpone the executions of criminals, since their Christian executioners had also been swept away by the sudden terror of the pox, and the offers made by crazed youths to behead the men and drown the women for their own amusement were not taken seriously there by the river that takes its name from the ax of justice. One woman from the Múli district out east was done away with, however, a certain Hallfríður who had had a child by a man named Ólafur who had been beheaded the year before, but no others from the same district had shown up except for the man who had escorted the woman to the assembly, and he absolutely refused to take her all the way back to the opposite end of the country alive, over so many lakes and rivers. Prudent men solved his problem by drowning the woman in Drekkingarhylur.

Now the story turns back to old Jón Hreggviðsson, sitting at home at his farm on Rein. It was no great wonder, considering the current circumstances, that he was in no hurry to obtain a new Supreme Court appeal as he’d been ordered to do by the Commissarial Court. Other things occupied his mind. Those blundering authorities who still showed signs of life also had other matters besides Jón Hreggviðsson to attend to for the time being. Seasons passed. Finally, however, when the decimation slackened and the countryfolk’s pain was momentarily alleviated, the farmer heard rumor that the authorities who had replaced their fallen comrades hadn’t completely forgotten his old case. No one in the country doubted that the commissary’s mission had been of a peculiar nature: he’d been made the judge of judges, and his verdicts could not be appealed. Those whom he convicted had no hope whatsoever of being exonerated. Those whom he exonerated were to suffer no further harm. Things proceeded in such a way that by the time his work was concluded it was more obvious who had fallen than who had been redeemed. The redeemed had disappeared. The fact that they had been freed was evidenced nowhere. The man who had lowered the high to raise the low was accorded not a single public show of gratitude. People did, however, bemoan the repudiation and fall of Magistrate Eydalín.

At the conclusion of the Commissarial Court convened at Öxará during the spring before the epidemic, Jón Hreggviðsson was the only man who returned home less sure of his fate, since he’d been both acquitted and convicted at the same time. His case was without a doubt the basis for one of the heaviest charges made against Eydalín and nothing else played such a significant role in the magistrate’s repudiation than the death sentence he had passed ages ago against this man, based on evidence that could be considered dubious at best. On the other hand, there was not a single shred of positive evidence to support the charges made by the commissary against Eydalín, that he had, sixteen years ago, made an arrangement with Jón Hreggviðsson not to make public the Supreme Court appeal that he’d brought home with him from Copenhagen. And because there were no witnesses to testify to this arrangement, Christ’s farmer had been ordered to procure a new Supreme Court appeal so that his case could be reopened and retried.

After Eydalín had fallen and the pox had sheared the see of Skálholt of its adornment and honor by putting to rest the bishop and his wife, the magistrate’s daughter, and after a number of other noblemen who were in any position to prosecute him further had disappeared, Jón Hreggviðsson felt that there were few remaining who would blame him if he were to take his time in procuring a new appeal. As it happened, however, things didn’t turn out quite as the farmer expected.

The second spring after the epidemic an assembly was held at Öxará, and this time enough manpower was present to facilitate the execution of criminals and the drafting of a new petition to the king. The country’s high court was presided over by Jón Eyjólfsson, vice-magistrate and bailiff, as well as the regent Beyer from Bessastaðir.

The assembly was drawing to a close and there was still no sign that old lawsuits would be reviewed this session. The spring was cruel and cold; apathy and reluctance characterized the few members of the court who had taken the trouble of riding to the assembly over the half-dead countryside, throughout which the surviving remnants of stricken humanity managed to totter along, dizzied from the force of the blow. But one night toward the end of the assembly, after the members of the court had crawled under their sheepskins, a visitor on horseback arrived at Þingvellir. It was a woman. Her entourage, consisting of three grooms and a good number of horses, had ridden in across the plain from the east, from Kaldidalur, the natural boundary between the country’s quarters. The pilgrimess dismounted near the regent’s booth and went straight in to meet Beyer, the governor’s proxy. She was there only a short time before a servant was sent to wake the vice-magistrate and escort him back to the regent’s booth. Whatever happened at this meeting was never discussed with outsiders, and the visitor rode away from Þingvellir a short time later.

One other event occurred that night: two of the vice-magistrate’s servants were woken and sent with papers west to Skagi to find the farmer Jón Hreggviðsson from Rein and to bring him to the assembly.

It was a rather beggarly set of authorities that reinstated the charges against Christ’s tenant two days later at that dreary place, Þingvellir by Öxará. Even the Danish proxy’s booth was a shambles, as if the royal power no longer gave any thought to protecting its image of authoritarian splendor against Iceland’s storms of wind and rain, which were so inseparable from its folk, crooked and frostbitten pieces of timberwood in the shape of humans. Iceland’s weather was a mill that left nothing unpulverized but for the country’s basalt peaks. It uprooted and demolished all human works, wiping away not only their color but also their form. The florid bargeboards of the royal lodging were either splintered or torn off, anything iron corroded, the door thin and warped, the windowpanes cracked, the window shutters wrenched off their hinges, the king’s seal for the most part washed away. And the governor’s Danish proxy, the regent Beyer, was completely drunk almost every day throughout the course of the assembly.

The high court was convened in the dilapidated cottage that had once been called a courthouse. Its roof had been torn off, giving wind and rain free range throughout the hall. Mire that had run from the turf walls onto the rotten floorplanks hadn’t been mucked out. Inward along the floorboards hobbled Jón Hreggviðsson from Rein, gray-haired, groaning, and puffing.

The vice-magistrate Jón Eyjólfsson asked how it came about that he had not heeded the duty prescribed to him by the Especial Royal Judiciary here at Öxará, that he appeal his case to the Supreme Court.

Jón Hreggviðsson removed his knitted cap, revealing his white hair to the bench. He stood bowed and humble before his judges, not presuming to look up at them, said that he was an old man, weak-eyed and eared and laid up by rheumatism; whatever sense he’d possessed as a youth was by now completely benumbed. He begged, due to his inability to defend himself, to be assigned an advocate. His request was denied but his response registered. They then moved hastily on to the next case, since it was now the final day of the assembly and it was urgent that the proceedings be concluded as quickly as possible before the judges became too drunk, as they usually did around nones. Jón Hreggviðsson felt fairly sure that nothing more would be done in his case at this assembly, so he took his jade and rode north toward Leggjabrjótur and home. When the judges did indeed find time to return to his case he was nowhere to be found. A ruling in his case was called for in his absence, without further argument, and the verdict issued was worded as follows: whereas this man Jón is renowned for his boorish, wicked, and dishonest behavior, and whereas he, accused of murder, has failed to comply with the stipulations set down in the letter of safe-conduct issued by His Royal Majesty and in the travel pass issued by the king’s military, and has likewise neglected to publish the old Supreme Court appeal, and finally has recalcitrantly refused to procure a new appeal as ordered by the Commissarial Court, but instead has abandoned the assembly, showing his unwillingness to fulfill his obligation to wait and defend himself in his case, the said Jón Hreggviðsson is hereby to be lawfully arrested and placed under the custody of the bailiff in Þverá and put aboard ship and transported, at the first opportunity this summer, to the Bremerholm workhouse, there to spend his days in penal servitude to the castle commandant; in addition, half of his property is hereby forfeited to His Royal Majesty.

7

One day Jón Hreggviðsson, dressed only in his underclothes, was standing out in the homefield at Rein mowing, when two men came riding in toward him over the unmown grass. The farmer stopped and stormed toward them, brandishing his scythe and threatening them with murder for trampling down the grass. His ferocious dog followed suit. The men were unmoved, and informed the farmer that they’d been sent by the bailiff in Skagi to arrest him. He shoved the scythe blade-up into the grass, walked over to them, stuck his fists together, and proffered his wrists.

“I’m ready,” he said.

They said that they wouldn’t be shackling him for the time being.

“What’re you waiting for?” he asked, annoyed at the typical Icelandic sluggishness that made them act as if they had nothing better to do than waste the day in his meadow.

“You want to go dressed like that?” they said.

“That’s my business,” he said. “Which horse do I ride?”

“Don’t you want to say good-bye to your family?” they said.

“What’s it to you?” he said. “Let’s go!”

This was a completely different man than the one who had stood bent and shaking, sighing heavily and on the verge of tears, before his judges at the Alþingi.

He jumped up onto the spare horse that they’d brought, and his dog bit at the horse’s hock.

“There will be no abductions today,” announced the man in charge—they would ride to the farmhouse and report their errand to the farmer’s kinsmen.

The farm was nestled up against the foot of the mountain, its windows as sprightly as eyes peering out from the thick, grass-grown turf walls, its doors low enough that folk had to stoop to go in or out, a paved footpath out front. Smoke reeked from the chimney. His wife was long since dead. The half-wit was nowhere to be seen—people believed that the farmer, its father, had killed it. The leprous sisters had also passed away, leaving no one on the farm to praise God. The farmer had had another daughter to replace the one whom he’d found lying on her bier when he returned from abroad, and this nearly nubile girl came out from the kitchen and stood upon the footpath; she was grimy with soot and scarred from the pox, dark-lashed and dark-browed with her father’s gleam in her black eyes, barefoot and sunburnt and clad in a short smock of wadmal, her knees fat. Her smock was decorated with ash, specks of manure, and gnarls of peat.

The men said: “We’ve been ordered to take your father into custody and to put him aboard ship in Ólafsvík.”

The dog had grown even more agitated—it bristled and yelped and pissed on the wall.

“I’d rather see you dead,” said the girl. “Can’t you see how old this man is? Look at his white hair.”

“Shut up, girl,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“Papa,” she said. “Don’t you want to put on your trousers?”

“No,” he said. “But bring me some cord.”

She knew where he kept a small amount of fishing line hidden, and returned in a moment with a decent-sized hank of this precious commodity. The bailiff’s men looked on in awe and respect. His daughter also brought her father’s jacket, which reached down to midcalf, and persuaded him to put it on as he sat there on horseback, then he wove the cord around himself a number of times with quick hand movements. His daughter stood watching him. He finished girding himself by tying a knot in the cord.

“Papa, what shall I do when you’re gone?” said the girl.

“Put the dog inside!” he ordered violently.

She called to the dog, but the dog wouldn’t be fooled and walked no more than half the distance toward her, its tail sinking. She put on a gentle face and went to try to grab it, but it slunk out to the homefield with its tail between its legs.

“I’ll kill you, Kolur, if you don’t stay!” said the girl.

The dog lay down and started trembling. She walked over to it, grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, and dragged it whining down the path to one of the outer houses, then shoved it inside and bolted the door. By the time she finished this task the men had ridden from the yard.

“Bless you, papa,” she called out after him, but he didn’t hear her. The horses trotted out along the lane leading up to the farmhouse; her father rode in front, kicking at his stirrups. Two farmhands working in the homefield, a man and a woman, stopped and watched in silence as their householder was taken away.

They stopped for the night in Andakíll at the home of the parish administrator and were given lodging in a storehouse. The two men stood guard over their prisoner and late that night tried to engage him in small talk, but he said he was old and tired of people. He said he regretted that the pox hadn’t killed everyone in the country. They asked him whether he knew any ballads.

“Not for entertaining others,” he said.

Early the next morning they pressed on. They rode with the farmer west over Mýrar, then out along Snæfellsnes, taking the path over Fróðarheiði to Ólafsvík. They arrived late in the evening in a drizzling rain. A merchantman lay at anchor in the harbor. They dismounted in front of the trading booth, announced their business to the merchant’s servants, showed their papers, and asked to see the ship’s captain. This particular individual came in his own good time, and he asked them what was new. They said they’d been sent by the bailiff in Þverá and had brought a criminal sentenced to hard labor at Bremerholm. They handed the captain the bailiff’s letters confirming this. The skipper was fat, blue-faced, and illiterate, and he summoned someone to read and translate the letters for him. When the recitation was finished he asked, “Where are the court transcripts?”

This they didn’t know for sure.

The Dane pointed at Jón Hreggviðsson and asked, huskily and sullenly:

“What has this man done?”

“He killed the king’s hangman,” they said.

“This old man,” said the Dane. “Where does it say that?”

They said they thought it would have been in the letters, but no matter how these were read they could find no corroboration for such a charge. The Dane said that no bailiff in Iceland could get him to take folk on pleasure cruises on his ship.

“What’s a pleasure cruise?” said the men.

The captain said that if an Icelandic man sailed out on his ship without it having been proven that he was a thief or a murderer, it was a pleasure cruise. “It’s quite a different case,” he said, “if along with the man come the proper court documents affixed with the seal of the authorities at Bessested, as well as a signed receipt from the Treasury, guaranteeing payment for transport.” As far as the man whom they’d dragged hither was concerned, there wasn’t a single word in these letters that said he’d stolen as much as a lamb, much less murdered a man.

The captain could not be persuaded. The only way he’d take the man was if they first rode to Bessastaðir and secured the proper documents. And with that he walked away.

The journey from Ólafsvík to Bessastaðir would take no less than three days each way. The prisoner’s wardens decided that their best alternative would be to try to appeal to the local district authority, the bailiff on Snæfellsnes, and see if they could get a warrant from him confirming that the man they were transporting had been sentenced at the Alþingi. They tried to find lodging for the night in Ólafsvík, but Snæfellsnes was under the grip of famine and hospitality was somewhat lacking in the few places where there was fish to be found in the shed or butter in the pantry; in fact many of the farms there had been cleared out by the pox, the inhabitants dead and buried.

The Company was the only entity on Snæfellsnes that owned a house made of wood instead of turf. Usually the house stood empty, its window shutters closed, except during the few weeks in the summer when trade was carried out. Jón Hreggviðsson’s wardens went to see the merchant and asked whether he could house one prisoner and two men. The merchant answered that the Danes were under no obligation to house any Icelanders other than convicted criminals; this was certainly not the case here; they were fools and liars; they should look after themselves. They asked whether they could shove the prisoner into an outhouse or storage shed, since it was raining. The merchant said that the Icelanders defecated wherever they felt like it, besides the fact that they left lice behind wherever they went; such people weren’t good enough for a Danish outhouse. With that the merchant was gone. A pleasant Danish warehouse-boy, however, gave the Icelanders plugs of tobacco, though they had no food. It was late in the evening. A little later the captain boarded his ship and went to his cabin to sleep. The merchant’s house was locked. The wardens stood on the gravel outside the trading booth and talked things over. The prisoner stood a short distance away, clad in his cord, drops of water leaking from his knitted cap onto his hoary head. In front of the booth was a horseblock, fastened to the ground with a massive iron hook. Finally the wardens turned to their prisoner, pointed at the stone to indicate that he should come over to it, and said:

“Here’s where we’re going to tie you.”

They unfastened the old man’s cord and used it to bind his hands and feet, then looped the remainder around the hook and tied it. When they were gone the farmer moved slowly around to the sheltered side of the stone and leaned up against it, but he made no attempt to free himself though it would have been an easy thing for him to do, since the fetters were more symbolic than real; he was no longer as energetic a fugitive as he’d been twenty years ago, nor did he curse troll-women in his dreams at night. Now sleep sank over the exhausted man as he sat unmoving against the horseblock before the Danish booth during the night. And as he sleeps there against the stone in the night rain, a messenger, mild and gentle, appears to him, just as books describe the way that angels come through prison walls to visit captives, and it puffed in his beard and licked his closed eyes. It was the dog.

“Aw, is that you there, damn it all,” said the man, as the drenched dog jumped on him and trampled him and wagged its tail and whined and licked his face. Since the man was bound, he couldn’t beat the dog away.

“You’ve eaten a foal, you piece of shit,” said Jón Hreggviðsson, and there is nothing worse that one can say to a dog. But the dog’s joy remained the same, and finally it started running in rings around the stone to which the man was tied.

At dawn the man was sleeping against the stone and the dog against the man. Other men and dogs started moving about: lordly Danes stood upon the booth’s steps bulging and satisfied after their morning brennivíns and their breakfasts, but the dreary residents of Ólafsvík loitered at a distance like wraiths, wearing tattered jackets, shoulderless and too long in the back, looking like fish-skin scare-crows out in the nesting grounds. The latter folk stared vacantly at the dog and the man; one said he knew all about the captive and his kin, another couldn’t resist estimating the length of the cord binding him. Both spoke in shrill, rasping falsettos that bore no resemblance to human voices. The Danes standing in the doorway of the booth made witty remarks and laughed haughtily.

The wardens were nowhere to be seen and no one had a clue as to their whereabouts. Presently the Danes went off to their various tasks, but the locals remained behind and stared apathetically at the man and the dog. The idea that they should walk over and free the captive never crossed their minds, any more than anyone had ever thought to go and free the Fenris Wolf * or attempt any other task appertaining to the gods. On the other hand, one Dane who worked as an apprentice textile trader wanted to set the man free in order to harass the authorities and to watch him run, but when he came near, the dog bristled and made ready to defend its master and the cord binding him. Soon the locals returned to their work of loading the stockfish the fishermen had brought in, and no one gave any further thought to the murderer secured to the stone, except for a poor woman who, by the grace of God, came over and held a pail of milk to the man’s lips and gave the dog slices of fish-skin.

And the day passed by.

It was late in the evening and the loading was finished. The ship lay prepared for departure. The wardens had returned and untied the farmer. They waited, loitering by the house of the merchant in Ólafsvík in the hope that a message from some royal personage or other would be brought, and that the ship’s captain would accept it as valid. They had sent a dispatch during the night to the Snæfellsnes bailiff to procure written testimony that Jón Hreggviðsson was a convicted criminal.

Around midnight the prisoner’s dog started barking, and in a moment came the din of hooves at full speed. The wardens straightened up in anticipation of the arrival of the bailiff, but instead watched as a number of foaming horses came galloping over the gravel, bearing a noblewoman and her attendants. The woman was darkly clad and wearing a hat. She jumped down from the saddle without any help, grabbed up a handful of her full-length riding frock to avoid trampling the hem, hurried lightly over the gravel, and went straight in to join the Danes in the merchant’s house without knocking upon the door. Her attendants set about catching hold of the unsaddled horses to lead them to grass.

The stranger remained in the house for some time. When she emerged her hat was at her neck, and the night breeze blew in her hair. The merchant and the captain followed her outside and bowed to her, and her teeth gleamed as she smiled in the twilight. Her attendants walked her charger over and held it steady as she mounted, a few arm lengths away from where Jón Hreggviðsson sat upon the stone.

The prisoner opened his mouth:

“My lady rides higher tonight than the time when Jón Hreggviðsson threw a rixdollar into her lap,” he said.

She shot back from the saddle:

“The one you give alms is your enemy.”

“Then why couldn’t I get my head chopped off twenty years ago when it still had black hair on it and when my neck was thick enough to be pronounced fit to offer to your father and the king’s ax?” he said.

She said: “You try to do good for a pauper out of pity, but as soon as you turn your back your birthright is sold away. That was my error. I gave you your head in charity: and my father’s head, the country’s head, was forced to droop dishonored. Now the foot’s going to kick back, even though it’s weak.”