Ólafur is doing his best to stay reasonable and raise spirits. She cannot deny it, although in her present state of weepy exhaustion even his consolations are obscurely annoying. Day after day he squeezes around the hold, trying to avoid stepping on his flock as he reminds them they are only being tested, that suffering is what all people must endure in this world and they should look to the life beyond and not be discouraged.
‘Ólafur,’ she is fit to erupt, ‘may God above forgive me, but we are completely and utterly discouraged. How could it not be so?’
If Ásta were dwelling on her discomforts (which she is trying so hard not to that she is dwelling on nothing else), she might enumerate surging nausea, tightening belly, cramping leg, fisting baby and the mounting urge to pee when there is no pail to hand and no prospect of one for hours, if then. To say nothing of the grind of bare wood on her spine, the tickle of coiled rope at her neck or the fleabite on her left ankle that is impossible to reach without disturbing at least four people. Unless she can find something else to think about, that itch is going to be what shakes the ship with her roaring before the labour ever does.
But what is there else to think about that will not tear her with grief?
The smell? The dark, unspeakable stench of human beings oozing distress? Worse. She must not on any account think about the smell. (But still – might it actually be possible to die of a smell? How long would it take?) No, try concentrating on the night noises. Not the slow creak of the timbers and the sea slap – not those noises – but the sounds of the people: the lone sob, trembling away to nothing; the snores (no mistaking Oddrún’s high-pitched whistle, and that can only be Einar Loftsson’s volcanic rumble dominating many lesser efforts); somewhere nearby a grunt of furtive pleasure; further away a fart so stirring (as Ásta reflects, blinking) that it would have proved its mettle in the Battle of Jericho. The sigh of murmuring voices rises and falls. A woman is retching. A child won’t stop moaning. A man, perhaps in sleep, lets out a cry of naked sorrow. These sudden cries are the worst. All the weeping down here Ásta can tolerate: hear enough of it, do enough yourself, and you hardly notice after a while. But the howls of anguish in the night still make her heart pound with terror.
Here comes another of the tightenings, harder and harder until her belly feels like a stone you could beat and flake a dried cod on, then relaxing. They don’t hurt much yet, but nor do they make sleeping any easier. The floor undulates beneath her, making her stomach lurch and bringing bile again and again to her throat. She has never been a good sailor: even being rowed out to the Westman Islands as a girl had her hanging over the side, to the amusement of the fishermen at the oars.
It is becoming difficult to judge how many days they have been at sea. Ólafur says nine. But when the only light is from lamps swinging and clattering in the swell, it can be a struggle to tell day and night apart. Some communal instinct below has established a night-time, but it is one that Ásta’s body remains reluctant to observe.
Tentatively she stretches another leg, this time provoking a muffled yelp from the other side of the sail. Poor Oddrún. She hardly deserves to have her miseries compounded by the restless foot of a woman whose baby is past its time. The island’s greatest talker has hardly said a word since the voyage began. Day and night she lies still and forlorn, with her face turned away and her cap holding on by a thread, paying no heed to the mockers who torment her still. ‘Oddrún will be all right, seeing she’s a seal,’ they taunt, too loud, too close. ‘Lend us a flipper, Oddrún, will you, if we go down.’ But the old woman has only sunk further into herself and kept her eyes closed.
Ásta shifts again, disturbing a rat. It streaks across her fanned hair and back into the darkness beyond the lamplight. Shadows leap across the sail as the vessel dips and climbs. Ólafur’s face is buried in her back. Egill lies with his head next to hers, one arm reaching across little Marta to touch his mother’s hand. She wishes the boy would weep. When the pirates put Ofanleiti to the flame, he saw sights that no child should. He is also tormented by the thought that he was not as brave as his best friend. ‘After we were captured, Magnús managed to creep away,’ he has told her, looking at his hands and refusing to meet her gaze. ‘He asked me to come and hide on our secret gannet ledge, but I didn’t dare.’
And what can a mother say? That a part of her is glad he was not brave the way Magnús was, because otherwise she would not have him here at her side, her firstborn son, the pool from which her heart drinks? At eleven Egill is too nearly a man to want to hear this. He has never been one to speak his own heart aloud; but in the night, when no one is looking, he slips his hand in hers.
Marta is curled, neat as a mouse, in the space between Ásta’s chin and her protruding belly. By day she sits more or less calmly by her mother’s side, as if sensing there is no point in making a fuss. Ásta used to find her composure at not yet three years unsettling, especially after the bawling tantrums from Helga at the same age, but in their present calamity her stillness is a comfort.
Helga is not here. She left for the mainland earlier this summer and is surely safe. The pirates raided parts of the coast, but Torfastadir is well inland. Has Helga heard yet that her family has been seized by Turkish corsairs and carried off in a ship with great white sails to a place beyond imagining? The news must have been carried across the water by now, although it will have taken time for the remaining islanders to work out who is taken, who escaped and whose bloated body might yet be discovered on some desolate strand. Is her eldest daughter at this moment crying herself to sleep in the priesthouse at Torfastadir, wondering what will become of her? Dear, fiery Helga, so eager to get away from an island where they talked of nothing – ‘nothing at all, Mamma’ – but fish, who begged to go and keep house for her stepsister because (may God forgive the child) nothing interesting ever happened at home. The conversation in the home of Thorgerdur and Gísli will not have proved for one minute more stimulating: Ólafur’s daughter by his first wife is exceedingly dull and her husband nearly always drunk. But when Ásta said as much, Helga tossed the auburn curls of which she has always been more proud than she should be and retorted huffily, ‘You came to the island when you were not much older than me, Mamma, and wasn’t it because you were just as glad to be offered something more? Isn’t that what you told us?’
Something more. The ship rolls and bucks and Ásta fights down another wave of nausea. One child she may never see again; two with a future she dare not contemplate; another agitating to be born in a reeking prison-ship on a voyage into slavery. Dear God, how did it come to this?
2
It was a fine morning. That she will always remember – how lovely dawned the seventeenth day of July in the year 1627, the day the pirates came. It was one of those mornings when the wind breathes the scent of cut grass and the sea wrinkles like an old man’s hand. When you can see nearly all the islands dozing for miles around in the clear light. When your fingers fly so lightly to the plucking that you forget the pile still waiting. When you raise your face to the sun and it warms you and you realise – so Ásta did, tossing a feather in the air for Marta to catch – that the dread hanging over the island for weeks has gone and you are happy.
The panic the previous day when three ships were spotted off the mainland, tacking back and forth in the lee of the Eyjafjalla glacier, was over. When it drew nearer, the lead galleon had turned out to be flying a Danish flag, bringing not terror but protection at last. The pirates who had ravaged parts of the mainland and shocked the whole of Iceland to the core were gone. The Westman Islands could breathe again.
Lined up before Ásta were her beloved Small Isles. There stood neat, round Haena, jagged Hrauney and Hani, with that look of a seal in a cap that always reminded her so delightfully of someone she knew. ‘Hello, Oddrún,’ she would nod to the bulky isle of a morning. ‘What story have you for me today?’
Ásta has never told Oddrún about her nickname for the island: the old woman has strong f
eelings about being a seal and tires of jests. Long ago her sealskin was lost under the midnight sun. She is emphatic about this, her oyster eyes liquid with sincerity. She and the other sealfolk swam ashore to dance on Heimaey’s black summer sands, and there they took their skins off and laid them on the warm rocks to dry. All night long they span and they sang, their bodies lithe and golden under the unsleeping sun, until it was time to slip back into their skins and return to the sea. Oddrún made to go with them, but when she looked for hers it was gone. Stolen, she is sure. ‘Come back, come back, don’t leave me here,’ she called to the retreating sealfolk as they plunged into the waves’ bosomy embrace. But one by one they disappeared, and Oddrún was left without her skin to make a life on Heimaey, never feeling quite herself. She was young then, she insists, and her body firm and slender; but if the thief were to return the pelt now, it would no longer fit a waddling old woman. This is her particular grief. This is the point in the story when she always starts to weep fat, despairing tears.
Ásta’s sharp-tongued aunt Margrét used to explode with exasperation. ‘Oddrún,’ she cried once, ‘half the folk on this island knew your father.’
But Margrét (may God protect her wherever she is now) has never been one to look much further than her own pointed nose. She would be the last person to wonder whether Oddrún Pálsdóttir has been weeping all her life for something else.
It was not long before Oddrún arrived in person that sparkling morning, labouring up the Ofanleiti slope with her broad face pouring sweat and her cap askew. By the time she reached Ásta, she was panting so much she could hardly speak.
‘I … have … news, Ásta dear.’
Any news borne by Oddrún repays caution, having normally arrived by way of a dream, but Ásta was grateful for an excuse to let the puffin drop to her lap and stretch her stiff fingers. She straightened her back with a grunt, brushed a couple of feathers from her face and thought about trying to stand up. No, too much effort. Oddrún could join her on the grass.
‘Take a minute to get your breath, Oddrún mín. Then sit down here beside me and tell me your news.’
Egill had gone with his friend Magnús to hunt birds and Marta was serenely inspecting the vein of her feather and rubbing its softness against her cheek. Ólafur had disappeared inside the house to write.
Oddrún remained resolutely on her feet. ‘We must call Ólafur at once,’ she urged, eyeing the closed door. ‘Ásta mín, this is urgent!’
Oddrún’s news is invariably urgent. After her last dream she had come thumping at their door in the early hours to say she had seen the mountain behind Ofanleiti erupting along its eastern flank: ‘Fire pouring from one side, my friends, and the earth opening, just opening before my very eyes, in a line of flame’. Ólafur dragged himself out of bed and Oddrún stumbled over her skirts after him, and they both stood in the dawn mist taking in the sight of the implacably serene Helgafell doing nothing at all. Ólafur marched back inside in a silence that Ásta could tell was costing him dear. He has always been astonishingly patient with Oddrún, whose convictions do not accord with his own at any point. But every man has his limits, and Ásta knew he would not thank either of them for being disturbed this morning for another dream. She, on the other hand, has rarely minded listening to any story the old woman might produce. She has long been intrigued by a quality in Oddrún that is not so risible – a secret, serious, elusive thing not entirely of this world. It touches a yearning in herself that she has never been quite able to define.
‘Tell your tidings to me instead,’ she said, patting the grass.
With another wistful look at the door, Oddrún flopped down and shoved her iron curls back under the cap. And then the words came tumbling. A dream. So real. So urgent.
‘Hundreds of men, Ásta, in clothes with more colours than a puffin’s beak. They were jumping out of small boats near Brimurd. I’m sure it was there, because I recognised the surf. They were running across the island with red banners flying behind them. We have to tell Ólafur at once. They’re coming for us.’
She gazed at Ásta, her eyes huge in their pools of fat, willing the younger woman to believe her. Two strands of hair had re-emerged from the cap.
‘Brimurd?’ Ásta sat back on her heels. A small foot, or perhaps a knuckle, jabbed her in the side and she put a hand there to feel it. Brimurd was an inhospitable bay down the east coast, where the surf blasts the boulders and no fisherman would dream of hauling in a boat.
‘Nobody ever lands down there – you know that. Come, Oddrún, you mustn’t frighten us like this when we’re just starting to feel better.’
‘I’m telling you what I saw. There was a big ship in the background, with huge square sails like a Danish one, and the boats were past the rocks and these men were just pouring on to land and —’
‘Well, it probably was a Danish warship you were dreaming about then. We saw three of them yesterday, remember, come to protect Iceland at long last.’
‘If they were Danish ships,’ Oddrún said sulkily.
Oddrún was not famed for her maritime insights. Ásta, who had been scared out of her wits by the appearance of those ships, laughed easily. ‘Well, the men are all sure they were Danish galleons. They sailed right past, didn’t they?’
Oddrún was beginning to look mulish and Ásta patted her knee. ‘Look, you know the pirates are gone from Iceland. Everyone says so. And if they ever happened to show their faces in the harbour, the Danes have cannons at the ready, don’t they?’
Oddrún started to say, ‘But this ship wasn’t at the harbour …’ and then gave up. Ásta will long remember the look on her face, the not-quite-resigned sadness of it, her mouth opening as if to speak and from long practice closing again; the way she rested her whiskery chin in her hand and finally looked away, defeated. She hauled herself to her feet and Ásta watched her cap bobbing back down the slope until it was out of sight.
She finished the bird and laid its carcass on the heap next to the orange flippers and rainbow beaks that Egill had severed and piled before he left for the cliffs, grumbling that it was women’s work and Helga should be here to do it. Trying a new position on the grass, Ásta stretched her legs out (oh, to be able to do that now), smoothed her dress to the ankles and began on the next one. She had barely started when she spied Kristín plodding up the slope to collect water from the Ofanleiti well. They had grown big together these months past, she and Kristín, laughing at how long an arm they both needed to stir their pots over the kitchen fire.
Kristín came to stand a moment beside her to get her breath back. Picking a couple of feathers out of Ásta’s hair, she remarked conversationally, ‘I poured Siggi’s ale into the piss-pot during the night.’
Or was it his piss into the ale-mug? Ásta keeps trying to remember. Not because it matters – not in the slightest – but because it is nearly the last thing Kristín said to her and so perfectly typical: it was a point of agreement between them that her husband was a boor. What she does recall now, chasing sleep in the ship’s hold, is how Kristín laughed at the thought of what she had done, her curly dark head thrown back in a gust of merriment and a hand on her great belly. Then she winced and muttered something about that one being a bit sharp.
Ásta shooed her away with a laugh. ‘You’d better hurry up with that pail or you’ll be having the child here.’
Then she turned over another puffin and began on its breast, blowing Marta a whirr of white feathers now and then to keep her dancing. As her fingers found their rhythm again, she became aware of a distant noise and stopped again to listen. The sea was muttering beyond the heath and that must be a couple of plovers piping in the long grass near the elf-stone. Somewhere over by the wall she could hear a redshank – yes, there it was, flashing its orange knees in the long grass. But something else was being carried on the soft summer air, louder now, and coming closer. Dogs perhaps. But there were not enough of them on the island to make that kind of din. Not dogs.
; It was only when she turned to see a gang of vividly attired men exploding over the brow of the hill behind her in a glitter of raised swords, that Ásta thought about Oddrún and knew who they were. Lying here on the bucking timbers, she is chilled again by that cold wash of panic. It was the moment everything changed, the moment that will divide her life – she knows it for a certainty – into before and after the Turkish raid.
3
Much exercised by the whereabouts of Spanish privateers, Captain Wahid Fleming is keeping a nervous eye on the horizon. A dozen extra captives are being manhandled into his ship from the smaller one swaying next to his in the empty ocean. He has already reprimanded his fellow captain with some energy for not sorting out his numbers before they left Iceland. The last thing Fleming wants is to be surprised on the high seas grappled to another vessel, his topsail furled and a cargo worth a fortune in the hold.
He slaps another palmful of brine over his face and under the lip of his turban, wincing as it trickles down the back of his suppurating pink neck. This sun will be the death of him.
‘Put some elbow into that whip, Sa’id,’ he roars to the janissary in charge of the arrivals. ‘Nobody asked you to welcome them to our happy home. Just get them over the side and down to the hold fast.’
A tiny, sharp-featured woman looks up. She is trying to straddle the side of the new ship, her skirts making it hard to grip, the janissary flustering her with threats. But at the sound of that voice she freezes.
‘Come on, Mamma,’ urges a blond, broad-shouldered lad who has leaped to the deck before her. ‘Take my hand. It’s not far to jump.’
The captain watches idly as Sa’id flicks a desultory whip across the woman’s shoulders. There is something familiar about her, although it’s hard to say what. They all look the same, these Icelanders. Grey clothes, grey faces.
The Sealwoman's Gift Page 2