by Caroline Lea
Despite herself, she smiles. ‘I shall not say a word.’
‘Sensible woman.’ He winks at her and, when she starts, pretends not to notice. ‘Is Jón on the boat?’ he asks.
‘No. In the field, ploughing.’
‘I’ll take him the dagverður. But I need your help, Rósa. Will you walk to the field, wave to him and tell me when he has turned to plough the other way? Then he will expect you, and I can surprise him.’
Rósa cannot help laughing: his bright, guileless excitement is contagious.
Pétur hides behind the croft wall while Rósa strides up to the field. She sees Jón from a distance, calls and waves. He wipes his forehead with his sleeve, waves back, then continues ploughing. Pétur knows her husband so well – she pushes down a surge of what feels, ridiculously, like envy.
When Jón has turned the plough the other way, Rósa beckons Pétur from behind the wall. He starts up the hill, and, as he passes, gives her shoulder a pat. For a moment, she is left breathless.
Pétur runs up the hill, soft-footed as a stalking cat, following Jón for ten paces or more before finally leaping upon him, whooping. And, instead of growling and rebuking Pétur, Jón lets out a gust of laughter, a rich, deep sound she has not heard from him for two weeks, playfully pushes Pétur to the ground, then pulls him up and claps him on the back. Even from this distance, the delight on her husband’s face is as clear as water.
Rósa remembers the laughter she used to share with Mamma, who knew her better than anyone in the world – except, perhaps, Páll. The familiar longing to leave clutches her. Once the winter snows fall, all travel will be impossible.
She squeezes the cold glass woman in her pocket until her hand throbs. Then, suddenly decided, she runs down the hill towards the settlement.
She arrives at Katrín’s croft, panting, and is about to knock on the door when it swings open. Katrín looks at Rósa’s poised fist. ‘I hope you were not planning to insult me by knocking. Come, come.’
Katrín pushes a bowl of unfamiliar green leaves towards her. Rósa tries to refuse, but Katrín thrusts it into her hands. ‘The flesh is melting from you. These will strengthen your blood. I’m too old to carry you up that hill. Eat!’
‘I have not been hungry,’ Rósa says, lamely, taking a mouthful of the leaves. They are bitter, but delicious, and somehow warming, though they are raw. As soon as she begins to eat, she cannot stop. Katrín goes outside to pick more leaves twice, watching every mouthful and smiling, as if Rósa is her own starving daughter.
‘Anna loved these too.’ Katrín leans forward and takes Rósa’s hand. ‘You must tell me if you feel unwell. Promise you will tell me?’
Rósa feels a sudden horror. ‘The leaves are –’
‘Of course the leaves are good. But you are so pale. Jón’s croft . . . Is there anything strange, which makes you feel unwell?’
Rósa swallows, thinking of draugar. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What have you seen?’ Katrín’s tone is sharp.
‘Nothing. I –’
‘Tell me, Rósa. You must. If something dangerous is –’
‘It is nothing, or my imagination. I have heard noises.’
‘When? Where?’ Katrín leans forward, her eyes large and urgent.
‘At night, mostly. From the locked room. It is all in my head, I am sure.’
‘Locked room?’ Katrín’s hands tighten around the bowl.
‘Yes, in the loft. I am . . . He has forbidden me to go into it.’
Katrín sits back, her face tense. ‘The loft has never been locked.’ There is a silence, then Katrín stands. ‘I will go this moment, and look.’
‘No!’ Rósa gasps. ‘No, you mustn’t. Then he will know I’ve told you!’
Katrín sits again, but her mouth is tight, her jaw clenched.
Rósa whispers, ‘What do you think . . .?’
‘I don’t know.’ Katrín’s face is bloodless. ‘Eat. Please. Now.’
Rósa sits and forces herself to eat. As she chews, a chill wind squeezes itself between the wooden boards. The leaves turn into a tasteless mulch that sticks in her throat. Quietly, she puts the bowl down. ‘Pétur has returned. He seems happy.’
Katrín stirs, as if waking. ‘Good news. Trade must have been brisk – plenty of Danish merchants. Many Icelanders will have nothing to do with Pétur.’
‘Because he was a foundling?’
Katrín nods. ‘Some believe he is a demon. Or that one of his ancestors was a pirate who raped women and murdered children. People see Pétur and think violence must stir his blood.’
‘Surely not!’ Rósa protests, and yet she remembers the way her guts churn when she looks into Pétur’s copper eyes, which seem lit from within when he is angry and when he is joyful. There is a ferocity about him that makes her nerves hum.
‘Pétur ran away once,’ Katrín says. ‘But Egill sent Jón to fetch him, and Pétur chose to stay with Jón when he returned.’
‘Egill wanted Pétur to return? But Pétur told me Egill was a brute –’
‘Egill still thinks of Pétur as his own, no matter the bad blood between them.’
‘What happened?’
Katrín shrugs and looks down at the fire. And, just as when she asks questions about Jón, Rósa feels she is being told only half of the tale.
‘Gudrun says Pétur is a monster,’ Katrín murmurs. ‘She is terrified of him.’
Rósa’s skin prickles. ‘And you? Do you fear him?’
‘Of course not.’ She looks away.
‘And Anna? Did he ever hurt Anna?’
‘I . . . No.’ But then Katrín clamps her mouth shut and a little muscle twitches in her jaw.
Rósa examines the thickening skin on her own work-roughened hands – they look like the hands of a stranger, a much stronger woman than herself. They look like the hands of a woman who isn’t scared to speak her thoughts.
Katrín puts her calloused hand on Rósa’s. ‘Not everything is a tale from the Sagas.’
Rósa smiles. ‘I have read too many stories, I know.’
‘I too. And now listen to us! No wonder men do not like women reading – if more of us did it, they would be washing our clothes in the river while we feasted at the Althing. Think of Freydis in Eírík’s Saga, chasing away barbarians and threatening to cut off her breasts.’
Rósa tries to laugh and, gradually, the shadow in the room subsides. But time scythes past, and soon she must return to the lonely croft on the shoulder of the hill because her husband will be waiting.
Rósa runs up the hill, but she is late: a chink of orange light from behind the horse-skin curtain and a rumble of voices tell her that Jón and Pétur have already returned.
She is about to rush into the croft – he will be angry that she is not there and that there is no food prepared, but then she stops and listens. Jón’s voice is a low growl of frustration. She presses her ear to the door.
‘You should have tried harder,’ he says. ‘Nothing? No reports?’
Pétur’s voice is low and meek. ‘I didn’t ask directly. It would raise suspicions. Would you rather I’d –’
‘No, no. Of course not. You did well. Forgive me, I –’
‘I know. But you have nothing to fear.’
‘Unless . . .’ Jón’s voice is darker. ‘The land is full of pockets. What if –’
‘Ridiculous!’ Pétur’s voice is hard. ‘Far more probable Danish traders –’
‘You have said Denmark many times. And I have told you that circumstances do not arrange themselves to comply with our wishes.’
There is a silence, as if each man is waiting for the other to speak.
Rósa holds her breath, but the silence continues. It occurs to her that they may find her standing with her ear pressed to the door. She ducks into the light and warmth of the kitchen. Jón and Pétur stand on either side of the table.
Expecting a scolding and an inquisition, Rósa gabbles, ‘I was looking for wool scraps. I
n the barn. I will prepare the nattverður.’
‘No need,’ says Jón, without taking his eyes from Pétur. ‘You will eat alone. We must go to the boat. We will be out until morning.’
‘The boat? Now?’
‘Pétur heard a rumour of a shoal of cod.’
‘But it is night!’
‘We know the waters.’ Jón clasps Rósa in a quick, tight embrace, and she can feel his heart thudding. His breathing is laboured. ‘Come, Pétur.’
The door bangs behind them, leaving a warm, empty silence. Rósa leans against the hloðir, mulling over their words. What had he to fear? And why were they speaking of rumours and Danish traders? Pétur said he had heard nothing. But Rósa could have told them, quite assuredly, that whatever they were saying about Jón in the south would not have been recounted to Pétur.
She sighs, looks at the loaf on the table and decides she cannot bring herself to eat. Instead she sweeps the floor. She is not fool enough to believe they would go out on the boat now. They are avoiding her. They want to talk. But why abandon her? Why not sit in the baðstofa or the loft?
She holds her breath, listening to the rustling and sighing of the croft. They say Anna went mad before she died. Did she imagine noises, too? Is this what madness feels like?
Rósa pinches herself hard, then bites her lip until she tastes copper. She fetches paper, a quill and ink.
Dearest Mamma,
I am glad you are well. Everything here is strange. There are odd noises and I feel I am in danger somehow. But perhaps it is only my imagination running wild. Jón is
Rósa sighs and crosses out everything, except I am glad you are well. Then she folds up the sheet of paper into a tiny square and kneels to stuff it between the boards under the bed with the others.
Her hand closes on something cold and sharp under the bed. She recoils, then reaches with tentative fingers and grasps the object, pulling it out into the light.
A knife. The metal is dull, as if it has lain unused for many months, and when she peers more closely, she can see brownish stains on the tip of the blade. Like rust, but richer in colour. She scrapes one of the marks with her fingernail and it flakes off easily. She tastes metal and realizes she is biting her lip again.
Rósa’s mouth is dry, her heart juddering in her chest. She leans her head against the door, then takes the little glass woman out of her pocket. Cold. It is always cold, no matter that her skin should warm it.
Part Three
The nights of blood are the nights of most impatience.
Icelandic proverb, from The Saga of Viga the Glum
Jón
South of Mundarnes, December 1686
The past cannot be buried beneath a frozen sea. I became the man I am today long before that pale hand waved above the water’s surface. I would like to imagine that time is a fishing cord, that I might press along it, feeling for the moment when a wrong decision tethered me to the rock that would one day sink me. And yet, try as I may, I cannot find the moment when that rope began to fray.
Sometimes I wonder if God hears my grief. Prayers fall like pebbles from my lips, and still the Lord is silent.
Even the Creator cannot unmake the past.
I crouch in a ditch, seven days’ hard walk from Stykkishólmur. My sealskin boots are sodden; the sour stench of manure and fear burns my throat. There is a croft not fifty paces from where I squat, yet I will not move until darkness falls. Then I will creep to the barn and hope to find that the sheep have left a little grain and water. I will huddle against their warm bodies and hope for oblivion.
But I mustn’t rest long. I know the men will have begun their chase. I can imagine them, if I close my eyes, hot-breathed wolves on a scent. I need to live for three days longer. Then they can catch and kill me; it won’t matter.
I rest on my heels. The mud sucks and shifts under my weight, releasing a pungent gust. My eyes water. Before I fall asleep, my head on my chest, I mutter a prayer, although I no longer recognize my own voice.
The nights stretch out, torturous and cold; I drift in and out of sleep. Ice crawls into my belly, feathering my bones. I dare not sleep too deeply in case I wake with a knife at my throat, or don’t wake at all.
When I open my eyes, a pale winter light is swelling on the horizon. I must not be seen. I crouch in the ditch again. My fate awaits me to the south, but travelling by daylight makes the gap between my shoulder blades itch. Journeying at night brings its own risks: the earth in Iceland is a restless beast, never still, always ready to swallow unsuspecting travellers.
The sun rises, like God’s all-seeing eye. I wrap my arms around myself and try to say, ‘Amen.’
Instead I hear, in a rasping whisper, ‘Anna. Anna. Anna.’
Finally, I heave myself from the ditch and force myself onward.
Overhead, a gyrfalcon soars, sharp-eyed hunter, riding the wind. I remember when I first trapped two fledglings to sell to Danish traders. I had watched the female for weeks, while she sat on her nest, warming her eggs. She eyed me warily at first, but soon grew used to my presence and gradually, day by day, I was able to creep closer.
When the chicks hatched, I waited while she filled their shrieking beaks with fish; I watched as they fattened and feathered. Then, one cloudy day, while the mother was wheeling through the leaden sky, I climbed the rockface to the nest.
The birds fluttered their budding wings and screeched at me as I reached out and closed my hand around one, then the other and placed them in the sack on my shoulder. They were soft and warm-bodied and, as I lifted them, they struggled against the confines of my fingers, thrashing with their talons and battering their sharp little beaks against my skin. I took care not to squeeze too tightly.
Even the liveliest spirit can be tamed, but death has no recourse.
I keep walking south, though I am losing all sense of where I am, or how far I must go before my task will be complete. I have always navigated by the sun and the stars, but now the heavens themselves are turned upside down – the sun sweeps low across the horizon and the land is often in cloudy darkness, or a still and gloomy dusk. The seeping wound in my stomach throbs. My skin burns in the chill air and my legs are like loose sails, shaking with every gust of wind.
But that hand beckons always at the corner of my vision, dragging me down, promising silence and peace beneath the frozen earth.
Rósa
Stykkishólmur, October 1686
For the next five days, Rósa barely sees her husband and Pétur. They are fishing, they say, and certainly the storeroom is filling with cod, which Rósa must clean and hang to dry in the wind. The men do not even return to the croft to sleep.
‘We sleep on the boat,’ Jón says. His eyes slide from hers and he turns away.
‘The nights are long,’ Rósa replies, shrinking from the memory of the wind buffeting the groaning croft. Sometimes she climbs the ladder at night, feeling her way through the dark until she presses her hand against the locked door. She has tried prising the lock open with a knife, jamming the blade into it until the rasp of metal on metal sets her teeth on edge. She still wakes to the sound of footsteps passing her bed; she curls around her stomach and squeezes her eyes shut.
When she catches sight of her reflection in the stream, she barely recognizes the thin, pale girl staring back from beneath bruised eyelids. But she can’t tell her husband that, like a child, she is afraid of the dark.
‘I would like you . . . next to me.’ She reaches out to take Jón’s hand.
He shakes her off. ‘I cannot let the settlement starve to please you, Rósa.’
Some nights Rósa lies awake, thinking of the knife beneath the bed. It pulls her hand towards it, like a lodestone. In the darkness, she reaches out and runs her finger along the blade. Such a simple thing, a knife. It has one task and one alone.
Occasionally, she takes a breath to ask Jón about it: she will mention it carelessly. I found a knife. You must have dropped it, she will say. And then wha
t will he do? What will he ask her? What will happen to that sharp blade?
When her husband looks at her, she compresses her mouth into a fixed rictus.
One day, the wind picks up; the water is a sour and surly metal, and clouds darken the horizon.
Jón returns home late that night, grey-skinned and cold. He barely looks at her but shovels food into his mouth in silence.
Rósa takes a breath. ‘A storm is coming.’
‘I can read the weather.’
‘Then you will be at the croft tomorrow? You will stay here tonight?’ Despite his coldness, her heart lifts.
But he shakes his head. ‘We must bring the sheep and cows into the barn and will rise early to fetch the last of the hay in, before the rain. I will sleep in the barn.’
She inhales sharply and he looks up, then reaches across, puts his hand to the back of her neck and clasps it gently, but she can feel the coiled strength in his grip.
‘You do not object?’ he murmurs.
She shakes her head.
‘Good.’ He pulls his hand away to continue eating. When he has finished, he brushes his cheek against hers and leaves to find Pétur.
After he has gone, the silence in the croft expands. Rósa can hear the thudding of her blood in her skull. What if she hears more noises? She cannot suffer another night spent hiding her face under her bedlinen, imagining the cold metal of the blade under the bed.
She sweeps the baðstofa, banging the brush against the benches, as if the noise of mundane activity will ward off any malevolent presence. She wonders which bed Anna lay in as she died. There is a tradition of cutting a hole in the wall next to the body for the removal of the dead, so that their spirit will not find the door and come back to haunt the croft as a draugr. Rósa can see no sign of any hole: the wooden boards are all intact.
There is a scuffle from the loft room overhead.
Rósa starts and calls out but there is no reply. Her blood sings and she puts her hands over her ears. Still, the thought of Anna’s presence is smothering. Rósa throws down her brush and strides out into the cold.
No stars today. Helgafell and the other mountains clamp around the land and the sky, swallowing the huddled crofts.