by Caroline Lea
Rósa sways and nearly falls, imagining the cold blade shaving her own flesh from her bones.
Jón grunts as he separates the legs from the body. ‘Go to bed, Rósa. You look ill.’ The knife flashes in his hand.
Rósa’s throat aches too much for speech. Only once she is out of earshot does she allow the sobs to escape. She bunches her fingers against her mouth to stifle the sound, but it bleeds out into the half-darkness. She crouches by the croft wall, leaning her forehead against the cold stone.
She cannot stop picturing that moment, when she had stood with the knife against her throat, when she had defied him. She had felt the strength in her own body, the hardness of her muscles, as she had stood staring at Jón. How much strength would it take to plunge that blade into her husband’s throat? Rósa shakes her head to dismiss the image, but it reels through her brain, time and again. And yet, each time, just before the knife embeds itself in her husband’s flesh, he reaches out with one hand, pins her down and she becomes the helpless fox pup under his hand as the icy metal opens her.
Jón
Near Thingvellir, December 1686
The wind is cold, even in my cave, and I haven’t eaten in days. Still, it barely matters, as long as I have energy enough to lift my knife. Besides, times past have taught me that fury, not strength, will drive a blade through flesh. And I have rage enough for ten men.
I wrap my cloak more closely about myself and watch the waxy sunlight moving over the grasses. Darkness will arrive soon.
After Pabbi died, I dragged him from the croft, dug a shallow hole on the hill and rolled his body into it. His head struck a rock and the side of his skull smashed, like an egg.
That was the only time I wanted him alive again – to feel that rock.
I covered him with the lightest scattering of soil, leaving his fingers exposed. For the next week, the nights pulsed with the yips and cries of feasting foxes.
That first night, I crept back to the croft, swept every trace of Pabbi’s mess and vomit from the floor, then curled up on the bed behind Mamma. I clasped her body, her cold flesh cooling my skin. I tried to weep, but no tears came, only a dry, hacking noise, like vomiting.
The moonlight scythed through the pockmarked walls, like God’s ever-seeing eye, and I begged for absolution. For being too small, too weak, too gutless.
When morning came, Mamma’s hair and skin were rimed with frost. When I tried to move, my limbs felt like the frozen earth beneath me. My joints crackled.
I forced myself to stand upright, to fetch a cloth and water, to rinse the mess from Mamma’s mouth, to wash her blue fingers, praying all the while.
Then I picked her up and carried her outside – the empty husk of her skin and bones – and laid her by the stream while I began to dig. It was heavy work, and before long I was sweating, my limbs shaking. Still, I knew I must make the hole large enough that foxes wouldn’t be able to reach her.
The voice from behind me made me jump. ‘I am sorry.’
I spun about. It was a woman from the settlement. Her face was sombre as she looked at Mamma’s body. I recalled her name – Katrín. She was never among those villagers who giggled and whispered, but had smiled kindly at me, when Pabbi was not looking. Mamma had once told me that, when I was a babe, she had helped to care for me until Pabbi had refused to allow anyone into the croft.
‘She was a good woman.’
I nodded, chest too tight for speech, and continued to dig.
‘You should bury her away from the stream.’ The woman’s voice was clear and she wore that same kindly smile.
I shook my head. ‘She loved to watch the water.’
‘The ground here is full of rocks.’ Katrín pointed.
‘No matter.’ I set my jaw. ‘I will bury her here.’
‘It is not only the rocks. She will . . . So close to the stream, her body will . . . It is not clean . . .’ Katrín pressed her fingers against her eyelids. Her voice was rapid and low. ‘The stream. If you bury her here, her body will poison us all.’
I felt savage, weightless, cold. ‘What of it?’
Katrín narrowed her eyes. Then she took a large rock and began digging.
We worked in silence, my mind whirling. Was she so careless of the lives of the villagers that she would watch them die? Was I?
We dug and dug. Finally I threw down my spade and turned on her. ‘Why do you help me?’
She set down her rock and wiped her hands on her tunic. Her gaze was steady. ‘You look as if the wind might snap you. Grave-digging is hard work.’
‘But you said Mamma’s body will . . . Her body –’ My throat felt raw. I clenched my jaw, then hid my face in my hands.
Katrín sat beside me and laid a hand on my shoulder while I wept.
Afterwards I sat, empty, staring at the blank stretch of the sea.
She turned to me. ‘You are angry. Your anger hurts you?’
I nodded silently.
‘You would like others to feel that pain.’
I nodded again, more slowly.
‘Then,’ she said, ‘we will bury her here. Everyone will feel your grief.’
She picked up her rock again, and began to strike at the soil.
I clutched her wrist. ‘We must bury her away from the stream.’
Katrín inclined her head. ‘That hill is beautiful. I will help you dig.’
The soil was looser and the grave was quickly finished. Still, we were both sweating heavily. We lowered Mamma’s body in together, slowly, tenderly.
Before I scattered the soil, Katrín called, ‘Stop! Look at the sea.’
I wiped my forehead and looked out at the horizon, where the sea was indistinguishable from the sky. Both were endless and old as the earth. The sea whispered – silver and savage and cold.
‘She will be near water always,’ Katrín said.
‘Thank you,’ I whispered. I asked again, ‘Why do you help me?’
The reflection of the sea in her eyes made Katrín’s expression uncanny, as if she could see some other, secret, world beyond this one.
‘Your mamma was a good woman. You will be a good man. I know it.’
After I had buried my parents, I cleaned the croft and washed my clothes. I walked down to the village daily but the people stared at me, lips curled in revulsion.
I set to work alone, repairing Pabbi’s fishing boat – it took weeks of foraging on the beach for driftwood, even though the boat was only a small, two-oar vessel.
At night, I studied the Bible and used a stick to scratch out lines in the dirt, teaching myself to read and write by the verses I already knew from church. I practised writing phrases and numbers, only going to bed when the fish-oil in the lamp ran out, then rising before first light to work on the boat again.
I might have starved if Katrín hadn’t brought me fish and skyr every day. When I refused, she poked me in the ribs. ‘I’ll not watch you work yourself to a skeleton. Looking at your bones puts me off my own food.’
Her rough humour made my eyes sting.
The other villagers did not say a word to me but watched from afar, squint-eyed and sour.
One day, when Katrín brought me food, I gestured to the watchers. ‘Do they think I will harm you?’
‘Perhaps.’ She gave a wicked grin. ‘Although not one would lift a finger to stop you, even if you leaped upon me and cut my throat.’
I blinked. ‘They despise you too?’
‘I am well liked. But these people, Jón – whispering warms them in the dark winters. They would watch their own grandmammas drowned by a merman for the sake of a good story.’
‘My misery entertains them?’
‘Your misery is not unusual. Find me a family where a pabbi has not drowned, or a babe has not died.’
I remembered that Katrín, also, had lost a husband to the sea and a daughter to the land. I nearly reached out to take her hand, but stopped myself.
‘If I am no different,’ I said, ‘why do they stare?’
&nb
sp; ‘This land will kill you, if it can. We Icelanders are forged of different metal from the soft foreigners – even the Barbary pirates did not stay long. Have you ever known a Danish trader to winter here from choice?’
I shrugged. How did this concern me, or the people’s morbid curiosity?
‘We seem strong, Jón, all of us, but we are like grass – we bend so the wind will not break us. You are like the sea: you surge forward again and again. See yourself now. Your parents are dead, your croft is falling apart and your boat is riddled with holes, yet you don’t stop.’
I spread my hands. ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘You want to live. You want a better life than the one you were given.’
The sea hushed on the sand below.
‘You offer hope, Jón. You show them that life can be more than survival.’
Through the next three months, Katrín fed me, while my nights were lived upon the boat, and my days spent working the fields. That autumn, I caught enough fish to begin trading and I sowed grass seed, in the hope of harvesting hay, rather than thistles, from the land Pabbi had neglected.
By the following year, many of the women relied on me for food. Their own husbands had drowned or disappeared into the hills years ago. Stykkishólmur was a place of women, children and feeble old men. The village was in search of a leader: the old goði’s greed had smothered the people. But gifts of food, I discovered, ensured people’s loyalty.
My reputation grew. I took little in return for the fish, only asking that whatever driftwood was found on the beach should come to me. I lined the walls of the croft with wood; later, I added boards over the baðstofa, creating the loft.
Later, Anna’s behaviour forced me to add doors and locks, costly but essential.
My first dealings were modest. I traded with farmers in the neighbouring settlement, and after three years of hard work, I acquired a small flock of sheep and supplied the people with milk, skyr and wool. After trading the two gyrfalcons, I gained both riches and a reputation with the Danish traders: they visited Stykkishólmur often, and I was able to provide for the people – my people, as they began to seem.
Katrín thought it odd that I did not expect more from them, but I said, ‘There is no need to demand more.’ And, at that time, it was true.
My whole life, people had whispered about me behind their hands, or sneered openly. Now they bowed and curtsied, and called me ‘Master’. I kept them at a distance and demanded they ask permission before entering my croft. Sometimes I saw them flinch as I passed, and it made me walk taller. Perhaps I could have smiled at them, but I did not.
When the stale-breathed old chieftain died, the village was unanimous: they wanted me as goði, the man to whom they would pay taxes – though I never demanded that they do so – the leader to whom they tied their fate. I was recognized as a generous goði and a merchant of standing, my name known through much of Iceland.
And at night, when I lay down to sleep, I tried not to think of all the parts of myself that I must keep hidden to survive.
Darkness has fallen in the cave; the last thin skein of sunlight unspools over the horizon. The sky is alive with stars. I hold my hand in front of my face and flex my fingers, then wrap them around the handle of my knife and squeeze, as if I am wringing the last tatters of breath from some newly dead thing.
Enough. It will be enough.
Part Four
When the storm abates, the waves roar.
Icelandic proverb
Rósa
Stykkishólmur, November 1686
A thickening rime of frost glitters on the earth and Rósa is increasingly confined to the croft, sometimes with the men, sometimes without. But even when she is alone, she feels eyes upon her. She starts to dream that Jón is standing over her, cloaked and hooded, a knife in his raised hand. In the day, she watches him talking and laughing with Pétur and Páll, with a crushing sensation in her chest and around her skull.
It grows colder still. Beneath bulge-bellied clouds, the ground groans.
One night, the snow falls in great white sheets; the air is opaque and tangible within the wall of ice. In the morning, when Rósa steps into the blizzard, she cannot catch her breath. The snow is flung from every direction. It falls downwards, as snow should, but it also seems to rise up from the ground, so that the cold clasps her nose and mouth, leaving her gasping. Where the ice touches, it burns.
She slams the door and takes shelter in the kitchen. She is alone. The men are in the barn and she is entirely cut off. She holds her breath, listening to the muffling silence of the blizzard. The roof moans under the weight of the snow, and the light that usually seeps through the thinly stretched sheepskin windows is muted. The fragile lantern flame flickers.
Rósa bolts upright: the men must be trapped in the barn with the animals. She imagines the hot bodies of cows and sheep, confined in sudden darkness, under the groans of the bulging roof: they will be wild with panic.
Páll!
She takes a lungful of air and hurls herself headlong into the snow again. It is stifling: ice in her nostrils, gusts of wind snatching her breath, cold serpenting into her flesh and burrowing into her bones. She knows what Mamma would say: ‘Ullr, the snow god, is having a tantrum.’ Rósa shakes her head to dispel the thought. Only God controls the weather.
But if that is true, then perhaps He is in a fury too.
She staggers through the drifts, sinking up to her waist. She trips, falls, heaves herself upright, skirts weighted with ice, and forges onwards. The barn is dim through the unyielding wall of snow.
Then she hears a voice on the air, bellowing, ‘Rósa! Rósa!’
She surges forward. Great drifts of snow tower in front of the barn. She can see a tiny chink of darkness where the men have tried to open the door, but they haven’t been able to shift the snow more than a finger’s width. She starts to dig at the wall of white with her hands and feet, throwing it to one side.
‘I am here!’ she gasps.
‘Hurry!’ The voice sounds fearful.
As Rósa clears the snow, she sees, with horror, a ribbon of red snaking from under the barn door. It mingles with the white snow, turning into a lurid pink slush.
She digs faster and harder until, finally, she is able to yank the door open enough to squeeze through the gap, into the fuggy darkness.
A single oil lamp forms a circle of light. The air is thick with a coppery stench. Rósa can hear ragged panting and a moan of pain. Pétur and Páll are hunched over Jón’s body, which is curled in the straw: foetal and bloody.
Pétur presses his hand against Jón’s side where there is a wound that lays his entrails bare. She claps her hands over her mouth, remembering her desire to hold the knife, to stab him. It is as though, by wishing for it, she has made this happen.
Jón is still conscious. ‘By your face, I am a dead man.’
Pétur’s eyes are pleading, as if he expects Rósa to perform some sort of magic. ‘A ewe,’ he chokes, his voice raw. ‘She panicked. Jón tried to hold her. I told him to let go.’
Rósa gapes at the corrugated rents in his flesh.
The blood plumes from his body and his eyes are glazing. She thinks of the fox again. Would a hunter decide it was a kindness to end his suffering?
Pétur’s voice cuts through her thoughts. ‘Rósa. Rósa! The wound. Quickly!’
Of course! She hurls herself into the snow, wades across the yard and searches around the baðstofa until she finds her sewing basket. What is the right thickness of needle, the right strength of thread to stitch a man together?
Briefly, she imagines sitting in the kitchen and letting the snows bury the croft while, out in the barn, Jón slowly bleeds dry.
Sweet Jésu, what am I becoming?
She stumbles back to the barn, pulling her tunic up around her nose and mouth so she can breathe. Her tears mingle with the snow.
When she finally reaches the barn, she expects Jón to be dead. Perhaps, for a moment
, she hopes for it. But no: he is still wheezing. There is more blood and the other men are pale, trembling.
She works quickly, threading the needle and pressing the skin together. Jón moans, but she doesn’t stop. Underneath her fingers, a man’s torso – whole and intact – emerges. The stitching is large and ungainly, but the bleeding stops, except for a whisper, which she smudges away with the hem of her tunic.
‘Good work,’ Pétur mutters.
Jón is unconscious now, mouth slack; his skin is the translucent white of frozen petals, blue tracery of veins visible underneath. She presses her head against his chest, listening to the frantic whump-whump of his heart. She is relieved – at least, she thinks she is.
Outside, the snow plummets in a thick shroud; the world is silent as a tomb. They lift Jón between them – Rósa supports his lolling head – and struggle to the croft. The sharp splatter of cold flakes makes him writhe and moan.
‘Hush,’ she murmurs, as she would to a feverish child. ‘Hush.’
That night, they take turns to sit with him; the hours are punctuated by his whimpering. Outside, the snow covers their tracks, obliterating the path they made to the barn and burying the frozen drops of Jón’s blood.
In the morning, they are all grey-faced. Jón’s skin is slick with sweat; his breathing is rapid and shallow. Rósa examines the wound: it is red and angry.
He groans, and a string of spittle spills from the corner of his mouth. Pétur wipes it away with the corner of his tunic. A brisk gesture of everyday love, of the sort Rósa has seen between mothers and their grubby-faced children.
Pétur sees her watching and raises an eyebrow, then curls his lip. The expression makes him look more monster than man.
She swallows. ‘Katrín has angelica.’
‘He doesn’t have a cough, Rósa.’ Pétur’s scowl deepens. ‘Katrín’s weeds will not help him.’
‘He can’t stay in the baðstofa. The air from the kitchen is foul – just look at the smoke.’ She indicates the spiralling soot, a black reflection of the snow outside.
‘Where, then?’ Pétur demands.