“Yes, and the kid can learn, but he only wants to do one thing at a time. He could spend days on end hunched over just one page of a botany book and then wouldn’t talk about anything else. Then the next week it would be astronomy. He’s become reasonably literate, though, and he’s not bad at math either.”
Hogni gazed back at the land and then continued: “Valdi, little Nonni’s dad, is also one hell of an eccentric. He’s always scribbling worthless notes into a copybook. Details about the weather, who comes or goes on the mail boat, who attended mass and who didn’t. And I think the old man, Jon Ferdinand, is going senile. He’s also half deaf. Valdi’s wife, Thora, has given up on them all. She works as a cook for a team of roadworks men on the mainland and never comes home. She just sends them money to buy some milk for little Nonni and some clothes.”
Kjartan noticed that the boy was holding some glistening object to his eyes and that he watched their boat for a while until he suddenly stood up, ran to the croft, and disappeared inside.
Next the new pier and fish factory came into view. Three open motorboats were moored there, as well as a bigger boat with a pilot house. The smallest boat was black, and the others were painted white.
“Those fishing men haven’t been able to catch anything recently,” said Grimur. “They obviously didn’t feel like going out this morning.”
“They can’t afford the fuel,” said Hogni. “I can’t imagine the co-op giving them more of an overdraft.”
“They should use their sail then,” said Grimur. “The Ystakot clan still know how to do it. They can raise the sail if they can’t afford the fuel for the engine. Their boat is that black one there. It’s called Raven.”
“Yeah, they sure know how to sail, those people,” said Hogni. “Old Jon Ferdinand was one of the most reliable foremen in Breidafjordur when he was still at the top of his game in the olden days. There weren’t many who could steer sails better than he could. He could play ducks and drakes with those boats when the winds were good. They once sent him on a sailing boat to collect laborers in Kroksfjardarnes. He had strong southeasterly winds in his sails on the way back and reached Flatey in only four hours. Even if the currents were with him, I don’t think there are many people would have been able to handle it the way he did.”
They soon reached Flatey’s outermost reef and started to sail south toward a cluster of barely visible islands in the distance.
Kjartan dreaded reaching their destination. He had seen a dead person before, but it remained an uncomfortable memory. The task that awaited them was probably even grimmer. He nevertheless tried to feign interest as Grimur pointed out landmarks to him on their way-islands, skerries, and mountains in the distance, as well as the Svefneyjar islands behind them and Mount Klofningur on the mainland ahead.
As they approached Ketilsey, a great black-backed gull flew up and squawked. The sea splashed against the rocks as seals plunged into the ocean.
“They have this agreement between them,” said Grimur. “The black-backed gull wakes up the seals when they’re sleeping on the reefs. In return he’ll get a good piece of the catch when the seal is fishing. His favorite part is the liver.”
“…When ancient tales were written down on sheets of vellum, they were just one of many versions. Prior to that they had been passed down orally or written into older manuscripts. Each generation told the tales in their own way. My father told me stories from this book like fairy tales when I was a child. Since then I’ve trained myself to recount my favorite stories in my own way…”
CHAPTER 5
Ketilsey wasn’t a big island, but finding the body wasn’t easy. They had walked the full perimeter of its shore and then moved slightly higher. The district officer and the teacher were tired of searching.
“We should have taken Valdi with us and let him show us the spot,” said Hogni.
Grimur had his doubts. “Then the old man would’ve had to come along and probably the boy, too. They’re practically inseparable.”
He took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his brow with a red snuff handkerchief.
“Didn’t the man say anything about where we should look?” Kjartan asked.
“No, damn it. I thought the corpse would just be lying there on the shore by the slip and that we would have been able to just follow the smell,” Grimur answered.
“Could he have floated back into the sea?” Kjartan asked.
Grimur shook his head. “No, the tide is neap and the waves have barely moved since those men were here.”
Hogni glared at some of the black-backed gulls spiraling above them. “Do you think those bloody seagulls finished him off?” he asked.
Kjartan had almost given up on finding the body when he walked between some rocks. The green of the parka blended with the color of the patches of grass, and its hood was drawn over the skull so that only a portion of some bare facial bones were visible. Pants and shoes concealed the lower part of the body. A rotting stench lingered in the air, and a cluster of flies hovered above.
“He’s here,” Kjartan called out in a voice that he did not recognize as his own.
The men swiftly rushed to the scene, the district officer first.
“Not that I was expecting the smell to be pleasant,” Grimur said, coughing.
“So this is where he was all along,” Hogni said in surprise, once he had examined the scene. “The sea must have been bloody wild this winter if it managed to chuck him all the way up here.”
“No way,” said Grimur. “There’s no wreckage up here. The nearest pieces of driftwood and seaweed are thirty fathoms below.”
Hogni was taken aback. “Could it be that…” His voice trailed off.
Grimur looked around. “Yeah, he must have had some life left in him when he reached this island.”
He scrutinized the man’s body for a brief moment and then started to walk and look around.
“Look,” he called out. Hogni and Kjartan looked in the direction he was pointing.
It was a slanted crag against which several pieces of driftwood had been diagonally arranged. Stones and seaweed had then been piled onto the wood to create a small shelter. One man could have crawled into it and lain there lengthwise and been reasonably shielded.
“The man must have built this when he landed here. The Ystakot lads would never have done a botched job like this.”
“Couldn’t he have attracted someone’s attention?” Kjartan asked. It was uncomfortable to think that the man could have been stranded there for some time, maybe in the heart of winter.
“No,” Grimur answered, “that would have been difficult if he had nothing to make a fire with. The sailing routes are far west, and the next inhabited area is miles away. There are no fishing grounds around here, so no one comes until the Ystakot clan comes here to collect the eiderdown from the nests and hunt seal. There’s nothing else that would draw anyone here.”
“So did he starve to death?” Kjartan asked.
“Yeah, and froze. He wouldn’t have been able to keep any heat in here without any fire. Especially if he crawled up here after being drenched in the sea.”
“How the hell did he get all the way out here?” Hogni asked. “There’s no boat he could have come on. There’s no regular sailing route that passes through here, so he could hardly have fallen off some ship.”
“He must have come out here on a boat and lost it,” Grimur answered. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“It would have been noticed if a man and his boat had gone missing from the fjord,” said Hogni.
“Unless he’s from further afield,” said Grimur.
“Doesn’t matter. He still would’ve been missed,” said Hogni categorically.
“There was a shipwreck this winter in the distant west coast. Some men were presumed dead. Maybe one of them reached here on a lifeboat that drifted into the fjord and landed here.”
“And the boat?”
“He could have lost it again.”
; “No,” Hogni disagreed. He stooped over the body and examined the clothes. “This is no sailor. Look at his shoes. These are the type of hiking shoes that tourists wear, leather.”
“Right then,” said Grimur, “this needs to be better investigated. Let’s get him into the casket and head straight back to Flatey.”
They fetched the casket and laid it by the side of the body. Next Grimur and Hogni hoisted the body up with their shovels while Kjartan held the casket. Then they turned the casket so that the body rolled into it facedown. The patch of grass that appeared under the body was yellow and withered, apart from the swarm of maggots squirming in the roots of the grass.
“Shouldn’t we turn him the right way around in the casket?” Kjartan asked.
“No,” Grimur answered. “He won’t be too bothered about which way he lies on such a short trip.”
He took a glass receptacle out of his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and sprinkled it inside the casket. “I got this from the doctor,” he said. “It’ll reduce the smell and kill the flies and maggots.”
The lid of the casket was lined with a rubber seal strip, designed to block out any air once it had been tightly screwed to the box.
They systematically combed the island for signs of the man’s stay there. On a patch of grass at the tip of the isle, some flat stones had been arranged to clearly read as SOS, and each letter was about ten feet long. By the shelter they found an open plastic flask with a thin layer of water and some broken shells. There was nothing inside the shelter itself, however. Every possible crag was examined for any trace of information that the man might have scratched onto flat surfaces, but they found no marks that could have been left by a human. On one flat rock there were many small pebbles that seemed to form letters, although some of them had now been scattered by the forces of nature. Nevertheless, Kjartan drew a picture of them on a piece of paper, as precisely as he could, and readjusted two stones that seemed to have been thrown out of alignment and tried to form a word:
Grimur and Hogni watched with interest. “Lucky? Does that have any special meaning around here?” Kjartan asked.
“No,” Hogni answered. “Although there’s a stud bull in Hvallatrar called Lucky. The bull was given the name when he was young and got stranded on a skerry flooded at high water and had to swim to survive. It was a long way to land, and he probably wouldn’t have survived if some people from Skaleyjar hadn’t been passing there on their way to a dance in Flatey. At first they thought it was a seal that was swimming there, but then his ears popped up. They had never seen a seal with big ears in Breidafjordur before, so they swiftly hauled the calf on board. He got to travel with them to Flatey, and he was kept in a barn until he recovered from his ordeal.”
Grimur and Hogni fetched the casket and placed it on board the boat. Then they set off toward Flatey.
“Has anything like this ever happened on the islands before?” Kjartan asked as Hogni was tying the casket to the thwart with some rope.
“There’ve been stories of people who were found frozen to death on the islands long after they were considered to have been lost at sea,” Hogni answered. “But they were known to be missing along with their boats and the rest of their crews. But this man was stranded on the island without anyone having the slightest idea that everything wasn’t as it was supposed to be. I’ve never heard of anything like that in the fjord.”
Although the casket had been painstakingly sealed, Kjartan could feel the stench clinging to him all the way at the back. He got very seasick, even though there was little movement from the waves, and repeatedly threw up over the gunwale. The islanders, on the other hand, snorted snuff with unusual frequency.
“…In the last decades of the fourteenth century there was a wealthy farmer in Vididalstunga in the district of Hunavatnssysla, who went by the name of Jon Hakonarson. We contemporaries know very little about this farmer, and he would, of course, have been forgotten today if he had never had the idea to create this majestic manuscript, which many years later came to be referred to as the Book of Flatey. The writing of the manuscript took many years and was mostly completed in 1387. Some sections were then added in the years that followed, since the annals at the end of the book terminate in 1394.
“It is impossible to say what led the farmer Jon Hakonarson to have these stories written down, but perhaps the manuscript was intended as a gift to a young man who at the time was taking over the kingdom of Norway, which at that time included Denmark and Sweden, and who bore the same name as two great kings who had reigned long before him-Olaf. He was the third Norwegian king to bear that name, and the expectations that were placed on him were clearly high. The vellum manuscript was also a veritable treasure that would have brought great honor at the royal court. But this Olaf died or vanished in Denmark at around the time the book was being completed, and his death marked the end of Norwegian king Harald Fairhair’s lineage. Olaf’s mother, Margret Valdimarsdottir, ascended to the throne and ruled until 1412…”
CHAPTER 6
I t was close to seven o’clock by the time Grimur steered the boat toward Eyjolfur’s pier in Flatey. Thormodur Krakur was standing on its edge, clutching his hat in his hands, with a large wooden cart by his side. Standing close to him was a priest in a cassock with a psalmbook in his hands. But apart from them there wasn’t a soul in sight. The swarm of kids that had been so conspicuous earlier that day was nowhere to be seen, nor were there any curious faces peeping through the windows. The village seemed deserted.
Kjartan was stunned. “Where is everybody?” he asked Grimur. “Does everyone eat dinner at the same time around here or what?”
Grimur glanced across the village. “No, that’s not the custom here. But people find events like these a bit disturbing. Death isn’t much of an attraction around here, and people prefer to shun it.”
“So people lock themselves inside then?” Kjartan asked.
“The adults avoid spectacles of this kind, and the children are kept indoors to avoid any inappropriate behavior,” the district officer answered gravely.
Hogni tied the boat to the pier, and Grimur and Kjartan carried the casket up the steps between them and placed it on the cart.
The priest, who was around seventy, possessed a solemn air, long gray sideburns, round glasses, and a bald head. He bowed and muttered something over the casket, which Kjartan neither heard nor understood. The priest then nodded at Thormodur Krakur, who put on his hat and started dragging the cart away. Grimur and Hogni walked behind it, also helping to push it along. The priest followed behind, then finally Kjartan.
The path led up a slope, which proved to be no difficulty, because the load was light. Thormodur Krakur was obviously strong and capable of dragging the cart on his own without any great effort. The others nevertheless gently pushed behind as a token gesture. They took slow and dignified steps as the cartwheels screeched faintly to the rhythm of the silent march. It was a short distance to walk, but Kjartan felt it was taking them ages to reach their destination.
Thormodur Krakur opened the church doors with a large key, and the casket was borne inside. Two trestles has been prepared in the middle of the floor, and they lowered the casket onto them. Once this had been done, they walked outside again to breathe in some fresh air.
The village was suddenly bustling with life again. Children ran between houses. Three men were chatting at the bottom of the slope and occasionally glanced up at the church. Women unpegged their washing from the clotheslines. A young boy was escorting three cows at the bottom of the slope. The stillness had been magically dispelled.
“I asked Johanna, the doctor, to come over and take a look inside the casket,” Grimur said. “She’s more used to this kind of stuff than we are…I think.”
The priest seemed eager to leave. “Remember to lock the door before you leave now, Krakur,” he said over his shoulder as he rushed off.
“Reverend Hannes doesn’t want to lose his appetite before dinner if he can avoid it,” sa
id Grimur, watching the priest speed away.
“I met a man once,” said Hogni, “who’d been sent to Oddbjarnarsker to fetch a body that had been washed up on the shore. It gave off such a terrible stench that he lost his appetite for three days, even though he felt hungry. He just couldn’t keep the food down. Then they made him sniff some ammonia and he recovered.”
“Does the doctor know we’ve arrived?” Kjartan asked.
“Everyone knows we’ve arrived,” Grimur answered. “Johanna is bound to be here any second now.”
“Isn’t it difficult for a woman to be a doctor with transport being as difficult as it is on these islands?” Kjartan asked.
Grimur blew his nose before answering: “Hasn’t been a problem so far. No one’s had any sudden illnesses, and there are no pregnant women here. Anyone who’s really sick gets sent to the hospital in Reykjavik. The main stuff she has to deal is arthritis, hemorrhoids, and toothaches. She’s got strong hands and is quick at pulling out a tooth if she has to. She also learned how to drive a motorboat as soon as she moved to Flatey. She wants to be able to visit patients between the islands on her own if the weather’s OK, without having to drag anyone away from their work.”
“There’s nothing new about a woman handling a boat on these islands,” Hogni added. “My great-grandmother, for example, used to be a foreman in the spring in Olafsvik, so my grandfather was born in a fishing hut between trips.”
“…In the decades before the manuscript was written, the black death had swept across Europe, and transport to Iceland was greatly reduced. The language of the Norse was changing, and they had probably lost the ability to be able to read the manuscripts that had previously been brought from Iceland. The sagas had largely been written to be exported and were obviously precious trading assets in the period in which the language spoken in Norway and Iceland remained the same. The Nordic countries were a single book market, as it were, and Snorri’s Heimskringla, or History of the Kings, was probably a best seller in Norway back then, just as much as it was after printing was invented. Jon Hakonarson’s majestic manuscript was slow to get off the ground, on the other hand, because the Norse couldn’t read their old language anymore, so it remained in Iceland for many centuries.”
The Flatey Enigma Page 3