Paradise Reclaimed (9 page)

13

Of emperors and kings

Steinar of Hlíðar did not return to Iceland with the last boat of the autumn. Finally his wife saw no alternative but to turn to the pastor.

She rode to see him and said, “I have come here because you stand closer to Providence than anyone else, even the sheriff. Do you think my husband is still alive?”

The pastor replied that although the autumn ship had arrived without him, no one had heard any suggestion that he was dead when the ship left Copenhagen.

“Could he possibly be dead, nonetheless?” she asked.

“Ahem, not exactly,” he said. “Not entirely.”

The woman said, “Well now I ask you, because my ignorance is immense and never more so than now, and your wisdom correspondingly profound: can it be that he is perhaps not entirely alive, either?”

“There could well be something in that,” said the pastor.

“So you think there could be something in that?” said the woman, and stared out into the blue, while deep within her the tears froze.

“Perhaps not more than is necessary,” said the pastor.

“It’s no joke being a simple-minded creature,” said the woman. “So I ask you to overlook my folly if I ask: if my husband Steinar is not exactly and perhaps only to a certain extent dead, what entry is to be made in the parish register? On the other hand, if there may be something in the possibility that he is dead, even if it is only just a little bit—how much is that to be reckoned in tears?”

“I know that it is all a question of tears, dear lady,” said the pastor. “How many, how large. In this instance I would say: ahem—should we not leave the matter open until spring?”

Then he leant across to the woman and whispered, “I have heard it hinted that your husband Steinar is one of those who have met a Mormon. I understand it happened over in the west in the summer the king came over. Some say that he released a Mormon who was tied to a boulder.”

About a month before Christmas, when the tears at Hlíðar had ceased to be merely a film of hoar-frost and had become solid ice, a letter arrived from father. It had been written in Copenhagen late in October and posted with the last autumn sailing, but there had been no one to speed its delivery once it arrived in Iceland; it was now crumpled and soiled from having often been passed from hand to hand.

“There are many rivers on the way out east to Steinahlíðar,” said the woman. “Good news travels slowly but arrives in the end, thank goodness. Bad news always arrives a day too soon.”

Steinar wrote that unforeseen delays prevented him from travelling on the autumn boat as planned. It was also too late to pen much news, except perhaps about the casket, just for fun; and also a brief description of his meeting with Krapi. In addition, thanks be to the Lord for keeping the writer of these lines safe in His keeping from the time he rode from home until the writing of these words.

There followed an account of how they came to Scotland, to a place called Leith. Gold-braided officials of the British queen were there to pry into their luggage in order to prevent unlawful goods being smuggled in. They caught sight of Steinar’s bedding-roll and asked what it was; he replied, “That is mainly my eiderdown.” They felt it all over and asked what was inside it, and wanted to see. It was the aforementioned casket. “What infernal contraption is this?” they asked, and tried to open it, which was sooner said than done. Then Steinar brought out the Poem for Opening a Casket and showed them the way to do it, and the casket opened. They asked him how much he wanted for it, but he made no reply and closed the lid. More Customs men of higher rank arrived, and the bids for the casket rose in proportion. Finally the highest-ranking official and head of the whole Customs service in Scotland arrived, and offered English gold to the value of two cows for the casket, and tried for a long time to open it by fiddling with the studs, because he realised that there was no key to it. But the more he fiddled, the more securely locked the casket was. Then Steinar told the interpreters to say that it could only be opened with a poem. A cow’s-price for the poem, said the captain; but when he looked at the poem his face grew doubtful. Steinar laughed and patted this nobleman on the shoulder and said through the interpreter that the British queen was a real treasure, but that the whole British Empire could not afford the price of this casket; this was one occasion when gold was impotent. Then he wrapped the casket in his eiderdown again, and the British cursed him roundly and soundly.

There was nothing further to relate of Steinar’s journey until he arrived with his casket in Copenhagen. A messenger from the king was at the quayside with a letter which said that Steinar should lodge in the Seamen’s Home, at Vestergade 5, in Kristianshavn, where an Icelandic student would meet him and show him the city. Inside the letter was a sum of money for meals in restaurants, for in Copenhagen one could not eat without paying.

“There is no time to say much about Copenhagen, which one could nevertheless write a book about,” said Steinar in his letter. “There is one bridge in particular which opens of its own accord, I do not understand how, and big ships sail through it; a remarkable phenomenon. Then there is Thorvaldsen’s beautiful workshop with smooth-limbed goddesses and slim-waisted youths; and also some extremely shapely horses ridden by warlike knights. One must also mention the gasworks, one of the finest masterpieces in the country; it provides light and heat for the people. It contains a huge furnace, from which run pipes that go under the ground into the city and up through the walls into the houses. If one now wants to have light or a fire, one unscrews a tap in a brass pipe in one’s room and applies a match, and it begins to burn. Many people find this unbelievable, which it is; but it is quite true, and very remarkable. I have not yet mentioned Tivoli, which the Danes have created to resemble heaven and the joys of paradise, although I did not particularly care for it myself,” said Steinar. “In my youth I would hardly have been allowed to perform such frolics in public as are practised there, nor would I like to see my children taking part in such games. Several people swarmed like cats up perpendicular poles and then performed all kinds of pointless acrobatics and posturings on bars and ropes; mercifully there were no accidents. There was also a playhouse where some rather pitiable people appropriately tricked out in the weirdest garb entered and frolicked about with somersaults and whacks and various other foolish antics. Some were very scantily clad, particularly the women. I asked what people these might be and was told that the husband was called Harlequin and the wife Columbine; there was also a fellow called Pantaloon making up to the wife. They seemed to me to be altogether rather undependable people. It was all meant to be fun, to be sure, but it is only for those who are not too particular.

“The king’s hunting-lodge,” said Steinar, “lies in the heart of a fine forest. There are many fallow-deer to be seen running among the trees; they stretch their necks and nibble the branches with neat, dainty mouths rather like lambs’ mouths, and their jaws work remarkably fast; tiny muscles in their jaws ripple prettily when they chew. They bound so lightly and gracefully that one can scarcely see their feet touch the ground. How strange that noblemen should go out and destroy such delightful creatures for amusement. But in the olden days,” wrote Steinar, “slaughtering was held to be a sacred task and those who performed it were considered to have a special covenant with God; it thus becomes part of a king’s high office to go out and slaughter animals. I could not bring myself to go into the palace before I had tried to count these animals.”

Steinar then described in his letter how he and his companions went through the gates of the palace. “Here we found dragoons sitting on their horses in full armour,” he wrote, “looking very fierce; but, said one of my companions, if one does not try to bid them good morning or anything like that, they leave one in peace.” On the lawns round the palace there were some courtly gentlemen and fine ladies playing games with bat and ball, and some lieutenants who were strutting about on the paving in gold-trimmed attire asked who these visitors might be. Steinar replied that it was a man from Iceland who had been invited by the king to meet a horse.

“Is that an infernal contraption you have there?” they asked.

“It can hardly be called that,” said Steinar. “This is just a little casket, and there is a poem to go with it.”

Then they let them in.

The king was in his salon. He came over to meet his guests and greeted them graciously, although he seemed a little preoccupied and slightly weary underneath it all. He first asked how Steinar and his family were keeping. Then he thanked Steinar for the pony Pussy, which he said was a very good pony, and a great favourite with the royal grandchildren when they came there on holiday; he was used for drawing a little pony-trap in the royal flower-gardens, and could easily pull three children, or even four. Steinar asked whether there were no riders at court who enjoyed giving a mettlesome horse a good gallop over the Zealand plains. One dignified gentleman replied that some of the younger lads might mount Pussy on occasion but that it was safer to lead him by the bridle because he had a tendency to kick out and bolt. But in Denmark, said the king, referring to that country as if it were some peculiar foreign place he was not very familiar with—in Denmark it is considered cruelty to animals if adults ride ponies. Quite recently someone was convicted in court because he had been seen riding an Icelandic pony through Copenhagen. “But,” said the king, “we who have ridden these little creatures ourselves in Iceland laugh at that sort of thing.”

When the king and his visitor had exchanged a few words about the pony, Steinar spoke up and said that he had a gift he wished to present to the king, a box that he himself had put together for holding gold, precious stones and secrets. Then he laid the casket before the king and opened its intricate lock in a trice. The king gave thanks for the gift and praised Steinar’s ingenuity profusely. “But the poor fellow rather found himself in difficulties when he tried to open it himself,” wrote Steinar.

“This is something I must show Valdemar,” said the king.

He called his son, Prince Valdemar, over and made him greet this farmer from Iceland, which the prince did most graciously, and then began to talk about the pony Pussy, saying that he was very fat but rather restive, like all Icelanders if they were not handled correctly. Prince Valdemar then tried his hand at the casket, but could not get the knack of it. After a while he said that it was the devil’s own job to open it, and it was best to let the Tsar of Russia deal with this sort of apparatus. He went out on to the veranda and summoned the king’s guests, the people who had been playing out on the lawns, and said that a man from Iceland had arrived with a fiendish puzzle which demanded even more intelligence than playing croquet. The mention of Iceland roused great mirth outside. Soon a host of people came streaming into the salon, and these were certainly no flea-bags or parish paupers or work-house orphans, according to Steinar; he wrote in his letter that he would have thought that his leg was being pulled a bit too hard if anyone other than Kristian Wilhelmsson, who was an honest and upright man, had told him the names of the new arrivals.

It so happened that just at this time King Kristian’s children and their families had all come to visit him for a holiday. “These children,” wrote Steinar, “have become kings and queens in their own right throughout the world, or have a crown on the way. I shall mention first the one who rules the Greeks, for he came over to me and offered me his hand—an exceedingly courteous and kindly man,” said Steinar, “bald and with a long beard. Next came the Prince of Cymru or Wales, who is married to Kristian’s daughter Alexandra and is the man destined to rule the British Empire and also become emperor of India; he often rules the country when his mother, Madame Victoria, is away enjoying herself. He did not trouble to greet me, which one could hardly expect anyway. He was the first of the crowd to go over to the casket and now he started examining it, but rather petulantly. This Edward is a venerable-looking young man with extremely well-groomed shiny hair and full cheeks; but I can well understand why anyone who will have to rule the British Empire does not look too cheerful. Then came a brisk-looking man with a bald head and rather kindly eyes, and a beard not unlike Björn of Leirur’s: he was dressed like someone who had never been associated with warfare, but most people would be inclined to think that he had more gold braid than anyone else and wore sword and topboots night and day, for this was no other than Alexander the Third, Tsar of Russia. He was the only one of the company who said a few words to me,” wrote Steinar, “and my companion translated for me afterwards what he had said. The tsar said he had met all kinds of barbarians in the Russian empire and beyond, including a Tibetan, but never an Icelander until now. In his opinion no barbarians looked alike, except perhaps Icelanders and Tibetans; this, he thought, was due to the fact that they were the two most isolated races on earth, the Tibetans surrounded by too much land and the Icelanders by too much water. Icelanders, however, were much more of a rarity than Tibetans, yes, so exceptional, in fact, that he, the tsar, was going to put a cross in his diary for that day. And when the tsar saw the future king of Great Britain stooping over the casket, he said to me that he would have to build himself a palace round his tsardom out in Moscow that would be just as hard to get into, so that the British king could not prise it open. I must say that I found the Russian Tsar a most affable person. And now in swept a group of famous ladies, queens and empresses who all wanted to have a look at the strange barbarian from Iceland. One would certainly have thought some of them generously-built, back home in Steinahlíðar, but there was one, I felt, who outweighed all the others— the lady from Greece, the Grand Duchess Olga Konstantinovna, if I have the name right. She gave me a souvenir medallion. The Tsarina of Russia, Kristian’s daughter Dagmar, was also there. Behind them came an army of earls and lords and marquises and their ladies, who are always in the train of emperors and kings and are rated by them no higher than farm-servants and are kept, so I’m told, to help them off with their clothes and even hold them on their pisspots, if you’ll pardon the expression. But these all seemed to be pleasant and good-natured people, thank goodness. They all spoke in German, which is the principal language in Europe; Danish they call Low German, and hold in contempt.”