The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  Surely there can’t be many more to come: his own hold is bursting with prisoners already. One swell at the wrong moment and he’ll have the hulls knocking and the yardarms and riggings entangled and a pretty mess to unpick. The captain helps himself to another dollop of water from the barrel and is essaying a gingerly pat on the back of his neck when he is disturbed by a piercing screech.

  The woman is down and flying across the deck towards him, screaming at the top of her voice with the janissary at her heels. The captain waves Sa’id back and folds his arms calmly, awaiting the onslaught of Margrét from Kirkjubaer, who has recognised the man who murdered her husband. She halts in front of him and squints up to release a torrent of Icelandic. After which she throws her head back, juts it forward again and fires a missile of spit. It only just clears the captain’s waist, striking above the red sash in which are secured his two daggers, scimitar and a musket of polished black walnut. With an effort he keeps his hand from straying there.

  ‘Think you can wash yourself clean, do you?’ Margrét is shrieking in a voice that has always compensated generously for what she lacks in size. ‘Well, let me tell you, you can wash from now till the coming of the kingdom and you will never be clean.’

  The captain makes a show of laughing off both the tirade and the spit, staying the impulse to knock every tooth out of the small woman’s head. On-board handling of captives who will require to be sold whole and in decent health at the other end requires a lighter touch than the raid itself. Get your planning right and the raid is the easy part. The lads race ashore and perform their wild Turk display with plenty of flags and barking and waving scimitars around. Then you deal with any resistance in time-honoured fashion and bundle up the rest. Tried and tested method. But it’s different when you’ve got them at sea: you have to keep things calm.

  Gesturing for Sa’id to remove the tiny harridan, the captain watches while she is marched below. He has an idea now where he has seen her: she’s the one who crawled over and tried to batter his knees with her fists when he took a sword to the priest – not the talkative priest (God knows, he would be only too glad to take a swipe at that one), but the insolent fellow in the cave. Well, no regrets there. The whole household trooped along like lambs afterwards. As he told the men, that is exactly the kind of example you want to make, cool and deliberate, choosing your target. Not – he had to speak to Sa’id severely about this – not going around chasing women about to give birth. Yes, she should have known better than to run, but that was just wasteful. You have to remember they sell well, the mothers with infants.

  Shouting for the ropes to be untied and the grappling irons released, Captain Fleming stomps off to the quarterdeck, gingerly feeling the back of his neck. One of these days he really must think about going home. A well-appointed house in Rotterdam, maybe. Nice wet climate. And no having to get on his knees to pray every five minutes either. It would mean licking the Prince of Orange’s arse and a tricky religious shift again, but he wouldn’t be the first renegade corsair to pull that one off.

  Fleming lobs a wandering sheep out of the way with his foot and returns his wary attention to the horizon, as the two galleons begin to strain apart.

  ‘And what did he do when you spat in his eye?’

  Ásta is propped against her rope-pillow, stroking Marta’s hair and longing for the labour to proceed with more conviction. As she well knows, this wish for brisker pains will be succeeded in short order by the most fervent prayers for them to cease at once – but that can’t be helped. All she wants now is for this child to be born.

  Margrét shrugs. The spittle, she admits, did fall marginally short of the captain’s eye. ‘But I spoke my mind. In the cave there was nothing I could do. I held Jón’s head, that’s all, and then they pulled me away. Today I did something.’

  ‘Jón would have been proud of you.’ Ásta squeezes her hand. It is still hard to believe that her big, booming uncle is dead.

  Fresh arrived from the smaller ship, Margrét has managed to insert behind the sail not only her own diminutive person but her strapping son. Never one to favour consultation, she is busy trying to tug the front wing aside. ‘Plenty of time for us to suffocate inside this thing when you’re properly on your way, my girl.’

  Ásta is too relieved to have her aunt back among them to care that she has lost even the veneer of a tent and must now look forward to fifteen-year-old Jón Jónsson’s feet up her nose in the night. With Margrét in charge she feels better able to face this birth. It’s like being back at Kirkjubaer before she married Ólafur, when Margrét ran her life.

  Margrét takes a good look at her niece. She notes the tired eyes, the matted fair hair, the slim frame that has made previous deliveries a challenge. The sweat is dripping off her in the heat down here and she looks exhausted, poor girl, before she even starts. Margrét lifts a beaker to Ásta’s lips, holding it steady in one hand and leaning for balance with the other against the swaying floor. The water is warm and brackish.

  Ásta grimaces. ‘Do you remember, Margrét, when I came to you and Jón at first, and I got such a shock that the Westman Islands had no mountain water?’

  How young she was then. She assumed that everywhere in Iceland had leaking glaciers and white rivers carrying ice-cold sweetness from the hills. But not a stream could she find anywhere on Heimaey. No water at all, in fact, except for a slimy pond in the Herjólfs valley, a couple of wells and whatever household pot or dip in the lava would hold some rain. Of which, of course, there was always plenty.

  ‘Oh, you were put out all right.’ Margrét manages a spectral smile. ‘You asked Jón most stridently, “Where is the water, Uncle? I want to wash.” And he said, “Take this pail, young woman, and go and fetch it for us, but you’ll be lucky if there’s enough left to splash on your face. The animals are thirsty.”’

  ‘And I walked from Kirkjubaer across to Herjólfsdalur, and there was almost nothing in the pond. Then when I got some into the pail at last it was all shiny and warm and swimming with insects.’

  It was nothing like her lovely Leirvogsá river back home in Mosfell, where the water ran between slopes of tumbling scree fast and clear, and cold as winter ice, and horses idled along its stony banks.

  ‘And I wanted to run away, didn’t I, Margrét, and beg someone to row me to the mainland and give me a horse to ride home. It was such a shock.’

  ‘Not as big a shock as when you said you would just go for a ride to calm yourself down. Do you remember? And Jón had to point out that we didn’t actually have a horse.’ Margrét puts on a piping, querulous voice: ‘“But Uncle, don’t be silly, everyone has a horse.” And Jón sat you down and explained that hardly anyone except the Danish merchants owned horses on the island. You were in such a temper that day.’

  She was, she was. Ásta had been told she was coming to the pearl of Iceland. Everybody said how rich these islands were, with so much food swimming in the sea and shrieking around the cliffs that the Crown of Denmark itself had set them in a league of their own and talked of ruling Iceland ‘together with the Westman Islands’. It was all she heard about: a dozen tongues at the harbour; ships flying the flags of far lands; the trading station grown into what some even boasted was Iceland’s only town. Nobody mentioned they had no rivers and drank from puddles, or thought to warn her there was so little land for grazing that old horses were pushed over a cliff into the sea with their throats slit.

  And what would she have done if she had known? Just the same, no doubt. Rushed at the opportunity her uncle offered when he arrived in Mosfell with his news, throwing open their door with a blast of rain and conviviality and planting warm, brandy-laced kisses around the room. Jón was her mother’s brother – their father, like hers, a Thorsteinn – and the house swelled to receive him. Both men were priests in the Lutheran church, Jón as big, full-haired and expansive as her father was small, neat, balding and punctilious. Thorsteinn was a scholar, Jón a poet with visionary leanings on a full stomach.


  Jón had come to tell them he had been appointed one of the two priests on Heimaey, biggest of the Vestmannaeyjar, the scattering of islands and skerries off the south coast named (somewhat ingloriously, her peaceable father always opined) after ten westmen slaves from Ireland who were slaughtered there by ninth-century settlers in revenge for a murderous mutiny of their own. Ásta served her uncle his mutton. She can see him wolfing it down now, chewing and talking and pointing his knife and waving those huge hands of his around, all at the same time. He had something else to say, too.

  ‘Thorsteinn minn, I also bring a word from Margrét.’ He had winked at his niece then, hugging her knees at their feet. ‘She asks if you might consider sending Ásta to help with the housekeeping at Kirkjubaer. There will be a lot to be done on the croft there.’

  Her father raised an eyebrow. ‘How Margrét thinks she will get any work out of this one, I dread to think. She will have to drag her out of your books.’

  ‘Oh, I think we can rely on Margrét,’ Jón beamed.

  And so it was decided.

  The stone-and-turf-house at Kirkjubaer proved to be more cramped than the one at Mosfell, and Jón’s knees reached almost to the other side of the badstofa in which they all lived and slept. But there were indeed books. Her uncle’s prized possession was a hymnal compiled by Gudbrandur Thorláksson, the bishop who barely twenty years earlier had printed the whole Bible in Icelandic on his press at Hólar in the north.

  ‘Think of it,’ Jón said reverently. ‘God’s own word in the tongue of the Icelander.’

  ‘Have you got a copy, Uncle?’

  He roared with laughter. ‘Have you three cows spare to purchase the great Gudbrands biblía? I’ve seen it, though, and wondered at its beauty. But look.’

  He picked up a small printed book, bound in stained calfskin, and ran a pudgy finger across the title page.

  ‘What do you think of his new psalm-book? Bishop Gudbrandur, may God be praised, has not rested in his efforts to reform the taste of our fellow men, whose enthusiasm, may I remind you, for bawdy rhymes and foolish folk stories is much to be deplored.’ He glanced at her suspiciously. ‘Much to be deplored, Ásta.’

  Jón leafed through the hymnal, reading out verses here and there. He showed her how most of the hymns were no more than crude translations from the German, Danish or Latin, but there were a few that had been composed in a native Icelandic style. He declaimed one or two of these with much feeling and waving of arms.

  ‘The diction is not perhaps the finest, but can you hear the difference in the craft, in the way the sounds repeat and the structure of the lines? These ones sound much more Icelandic, do they not?’

  Ásta turned the words over on her own tongue and heard the syllables answer and speak to one another. She felt the flowing tide of the lines and fancied she could discern a dim shadow of the gnarled workmanship that had so moved her at home when her father recited the poetry of the mighty saga skald Egill Skallagrímsson. And she wondered then what it would feel like to make a poem from words, as you might make a stitching needle from a sheep’s bone, or a vest from woven wool, or a rope bound so strong from slender horse hair that it could swing a man through the air across a cliff face. To tie one word to another and one line to the next and with it let one person enter the mind and heart of another – would that not be a fine thing to do?

  Jón had begun writing hymns himself. He would rise before the rest of the household, when barely enough light to see by seeped through the cloudy sheep’s uterus stretched across the window space, and pour himself around a small table. They would awaken to the scrape of his feather or a groan as he struggled for rhythm. In the winter evenings, when flame burned in the fulmar oil and she and Margrét were hard at their knitting, Jón would turn his paw of a hand to translating the psalms of David into Icelandic verse. That too occasioned much groaning, but the labour was a sacred duty.

  However, he did have a sheaf of epic rímur in his chest, written in many hands and stored from earlier times. For all that he disapproved of the narrative poems’ frivolous subjects and jaunty forms, he had not cast them away, and if Margrét had only let her, Ásta would have spent every day immersed in courtly poems about knights and lovelorn swains in foreign lands. She did nothing of the kind, of course. Margrét prodded her out to the cow, in to help with the weaving, out to gut the fish, or hang it for drying, or soak the heads, or stone the bone-hard carcasses until they were tender enough to eat with a smear of liver oil, away for water, back for plucking, out to rake hay with their toddling son in tow, a white-blond child named Jón for his father, in to melt the suet or heat the milk or boil the sheep’s blood or feed puffin bones to the kitchen fire.

  ‘Do you remember, Margrét, how you had to keep dragging me out of that chest of Uncle’s?’ she says, shuffling against the rope at her back.

  Margrét sniffs. ‘I soon had you in shape, though, didn’t I? You would have been no use as a wife to Ólafur if you hadn’t known how to soften a cod’s head in whey.’

  Margrét is near as anxious as Ásta for the labour to take hold and give her something to do. Idleness has no merit at the best of times, but to be doing nothing when her head is pounding with agonies is hard to bear. She is desperate to scour something, to sweep and scrub and straighten and clean, to hurl herself into an assault on the vomit and every other kind of filth that have assailed her afresh in this new ship’s hold. Ásta, in her exasperating way, has always embraced idleness like a puffin-down pillow. She could dream any number of hours away, that one. The Lord only knows how she is going to cope when they reach wherever they are going. She’s never been in the slightest degree resourceful – head always stuffed with more stories than sense. Ólafur was a brave man to take her on. ‘She’s captivating, Ólafur,’ Margrét remembers sighing, ‘but she’ll argue you to death and makes the worst butter in Heimaey [which – she might have added – is the least of it: you should taste her liver pudding] and you had better hide your books at once.’ Jón adored her, of course. Ásta could wind her uncle around her finger easier than she ever managed with a skein of wool.

  Jón.

  In the cave Margrét had cradled him in her lap (this same lap, this dress, brown still with his blood and smeared with other nameless bits of him), rocking him to and fro and thinking in her daze that he could be kissed back to her, that her husband might survive with half a head. (But he has no hair, she thought as she rocked him. He’ll need his hair.) For how could such a man as Jón Thorsteinsson, so large and full of life, have gone like that in an instant? One minute he was reading aloud from his psalm-book, intoning words of hope and salvation as calm and steady in that dripping cave as if the household had merely thought to gather for prayers on the shore because the weather was fine. Nobody could have told from his demeanour that they had all rushed there in a fever of panic when word came of the invasion: servants, children, anyone passing Kirkjubaer that morning. Not for a second did he falter as the whoops and shouts came nearer. She is proud of that. Jón would say pride is a sin, but so, she used to tell him, is gluttony. ‘You eat all you can, Jón minn,’ she would say, ‘and I’ll have pride enough for both of us.’

  Not even when a shot from above had the rest of them clutching each other did he pause in his reading. The next minute the pirates had leaped down to the beach and were there. The huge one in front paused to adjust his eyes to the gloom, so that there was that moment when Margrét saw him framed at the mouth of the cave like a vision from hell, dressed in flaming reds and yellows with a sickle sword in his hand. He took a second or two to assess what he saw, which was a man as big as himself, not cowering like the rest but striding forward to meet him with a book held aloft. And then he took just one step towards Jón and slashed at his head. When he fell, the man struck again, and then again. And there was the crown of Jón’s head, whipped off and discarded like a hat, and she with her shawl wrapped around him, dementedly trying to rock him back to life.

  Ma
rgrét closes her eyes, sways a little and straight away opens them. She must not think about the cave now or the flies will be back inside her eyeballs. Those flies, the bold, long-winged kind that arrive from nowhere to sniff out a mess of brains on a hot July day. She will be seeing them until the day she meets her maker herself.

  Ásta’s belly tightens again and relaxes. Even while giving minute consideration to whether that one hurt more than the last, which she rather fears it did not, Margrét’s gust of anguish is not lost on her. Her aunt’s features were always sharp – a nose like her tongue, Ólafur used to say – but her face is now shockingly thin and pecked with grief. Ásta can tell she is seeing over and over what she saw in the cave.

  Ásta’s own household at Ofanleiti had no time to escape to a cave or anywhere else. The pirates reached the farm so swiftly that there was no warning other than poor, ignored Oddrún’s, nor anyone murdered before her eyes, although she passed bodies enough later. Nor did Ólafur stride forth brandishing a prayer-book, but merely opened the door to see where the noise was coming from and was soon doubled over with a blow to the gut. Ásta does not even recall wanting to flee. In those seconds of throat-closing panic when the man in billowing yellow trousers came bounding towards her, all she can remember is a frenzied checking of the register of her heart. The names roared through her. Marta … here. Ólafur … there. Helga … away. Egill … where is Egill? Which cliff did he choose today? Is he caught? Is he hurt? Dear God, where is he?

  The man grabbed her, scattering flippers and crunching beaks underfoot. She aimed an armful of feathers at him, and then a volley of beaks, but was quickly hauled to her feet. She was sticky with puffin blood and he, perhaps, with something worse, for when the feathers floated down again they settled on them both.

  They went after Kristín next. She could easily be spied in the distance, plodding homewards across the heath with her pail. Four or five of them broke away to pound after her. She saw them coming and began to run, but they gained on her quickly because she was slow, her legs barely supporting her and the labour pains upon her. Ásta cannot bear to think of her terror. And then she went down. Ásta saw her crumple and the men gather around, but she was too far away to see what they saw. She only found out later that her beloved, light-spirited friend had died on the grass in front of them, her infant parted from her in an angry rush of blood. Ásta strokes her own belly now, feeling for the life within. She imagines Kristín’s pursuers standing around her like a gang of boys who have harried a wounded pigeon until it can flap no further and who watch, curious but without pity, the lifeblood seeping into the grass and the eyes clouding over at the last.