She and Ólafur, with Marta in his arms, were marched to the harbour and thrust into one of the wooden warehouses that the Danish merchants used for trading. Egill was captured later and thrown in to join them, his face white as death, but alive, alive. He said the pirates had set Ofanleiti on fire. He had seen them push a crippled woman into the flames. She had screamed to God for help and her body made a popping noise as she melted.
More and more captives joined them as the day wore on. The squeeze was such that nimble young Magnús Birgisson saw his chance to crawl between their legs and slip away. Ásta sank to the floor in exhaustion. There was no food or drink all day.
Drawn back to scenes neither wishes to visit, Ásta and Margrét look at each other in wordless understanding.
Captain Fleming is relishing the cooler afternoon air on his skin, his temper much improved by the successful transfer of prisoners and a spry revival of the wind. As long as the Spanish keep out of the way, this expedition is set fair to be a triumph. The moment of purest pleasure will be telling Murat Reis about the trick that won the Icelandic island. From what he hears, Murat’s own advance role in the invasion could have gone better, although that won’t stop him claiming all the glory as usual.
Fleming strolls around the quarterdeck musing cheerfully on how much he loathes the Barbary’s fêted admiral, before pausing to check on the westering sun. Hell’s teeth, it will be time for prayers again soon.
His own manoeuvres really did go beautifully. After roaming up and down the fjords in the east very productively (he will lay emphasis on this point when he sees Murat), he went on to capture the island with a perfect piece of subterfuge. Of course it stood to reason that the harbour would be fortified after the mainland raids: it’s a valuable trading post and the Danes had cannon. So, fly a Danish flag, sail on past with confidence, land the boats somewhere the locals would never think of and storm the harbour from inland. Fucking brilliant plan, even if it did have its perils. He thought his last moment had come trying to land on that promontory. Never seen surf like it.
After that he divided the men into three groups and sent them to cover the island east, west and through the middle, with orders to search every hovel, every cavern, every hollow, every dip, ledge, crevice or damn puffin-hole they came across and take the prisoners to the harbour, where the ships would sail back to meet them.
It worked like a dream. By evening the warehouses were full of captives and his ship was back, sweetly anchored outside the harbour to receive them. Sa’id had the job of harrying the prisoners to the boats, while he himself ran a last eye over them as they passed: no point in taking anyone he wouldn’t be able to sell. That’s when he had his next idea. He spied a thin, elderly-looking character in a black coat moving past. This was not the sort of man you could imagine pulling a plough with his teeth, so he shouted an order and jerked his head for him to come over and wait behind. The man turned. He had a wife with him, gross with child, who then started screaming something at the top of her voice. The husband looked at her and then turned back. Flatly disobeyed the order. Made it plain he meant to stay with her.
‘I’ll get him,’ Sa’id muttered. He looked like a fucking canary with those feathers stuck to his backside.
But there was something that made the captain hesitate. He’s glad now that he did, even if the priest is testing his patience. He watched the man resume the shepherding of his family towards the boat. Noted the easy way he swung the young child into his arms, the quick smile of encouragement for the older boy, the calming touch on that hysterical woman’s arm. There and then the captain saw there could be other uses for a man like that.
‘Leave him be, Sa’id. If he’s that keen, he might as well come.’
The idea remains a good one. If he can pull it off at the other end, it will be something else to rub in Murat’s face. Mind you, if he is interrogated by that priest one more time about the length of his sash or, God help him, how the future tense is conjugated in the common tongue, the man is going straight over the side.
Around him, with a silent instinct that has remained beyond him, the crew are beginning to drop to their knees. The captain groans.
4
Oddrún’s eyes flutter open as Ólafur bends to offer his swaying ministrations. She has scarcely raised her head since they set sail, refusing food and accepting only a sip of mead each day, but for Ólafur’s sake the old woman is making an effort.
Ásta watches the pair until the next pain diverts her. Here it comes – peaking, passing. The grip is tightening as the hours wear on, but the intervals are still so lengthy that Margrét has suggested she might try speeding the process with some light scrubbing. This is Margrét’s idea of a joke.
Oddrún is listening earnestly to Ólafur, her big eyes fixed on his. Ásta doubts if Oddrún has attended so well to anything he has had to say in all their years of ill-matched friendship. Their habit has been to speak comfortably past each other, she assenting with good cheer to every spiritual admonishment while he has tolerated a more lurid weight of dreams, visions, omens, warnings and tales of life among the sealfolk than any man of Christian conviction might be expected to shoulder. So rarely successful have her predictions been that Ólafur has spent half a lifetime caught between sympathy and irritation.
Oddrún’s most celebrated triumph was in the summer of 1614, when she came hammering at their door with a breathless report of a huge black raven flapping away with the bell of Landakirkja hanging from its beak. Ólafur packed her straight home to bed, assuring her he would keep a close eye on any passing raven and take whatever action he judged best. A few days later a band of English pirates landed on Heimaey, led by a brigand called Gentleman John. They pillaged houses and livestock and kept everyone awake for days while they caroused loudly on Danish ale stocks. After a week or so the Englishmen sailed off, carrying with them – to Oddrún’s abiding gratification – the great church bell. It has long been agreed (her most recent success having gone largely unremarked in the general misery) that this was Oddrún Pálsdóttir’s finest hour.
While Ólafur’s attitude to Oddrún is touching in its way, Ásta is not above finding her husband’s tolerance exasperating. She has frequently been stung by his readiness to offer more forbearance to an old woman’s ramblings than to any suggestion of her own that cannot be firmly located in the Lutheran catechism. Oddrún is suffered to blather on about being a seal until the cows come home – or at least until Ólafur recalls his responsibilities and invites her to ponder the pronounced absence of sealwomen in holy scripture. But one word about elves, one shudder over the ghosts that brush your face with frost in the night, and Ásta is required to submit to a very long lecture.
Her father had just as little sympathy when she was growing up at Mosfell. Lot’s wife could transform without comment into a pillar of salt, but it was ridiculous to think a night troll crossing the lava might turn to stone when the sun rises. In the Mosfell priesthouse there was scant patience for a child who looked for signs of the hidden people living invisible lives just like theirs in the ravines and grassy mounds around them, and who shivered to think she might have perched on an elven window unawares.
Her father’s own affections belonged with stories of a different kind. Although his enthusiasm was not (as he sometimes remembered to point out) uncritical, Thorsteinn had a deep partiality for the sagas about Icelandic men and women in the days long past when the country was young. The eagerness with which people in the sagas slayed each other was of course regrettable, and superstitions from the days of darkness before the country knew the truth of Christ must self-evidently be understood in their context, but his respect for the sagas could not be denied. Ásta often smiled to hear him. A roistering pagan like Egill Skallagrímsson, who in old age had also lived in the Mosfell valley, was as different a character as could be imagined from her fastidious father, who would rather leave the breaking of a cockerel’s neck to his wife and was no more inclined to roister than serv
e his own dinner. But Thorsteinn was never done telling stories about this Egill, and in the winter nights when the wind growled outside she would sit at his feet with hammering heart to hear what happened next. Heavy-browed and ugly, with a temper too spiteful for a discriminating girl to admire, Egill Skallagrímsson was hardly the stuff of romantic dreams. But you never knew what he would do next – that’s what young Ásta liked. This was a man you could not pin down, a man who surprised you at every turn, fighting and roaring one minute and composing strange, sensitive poetry the next to make pictures grow and argue in your head.
Over and over she would ask to hear how King Athelstan of England had gifted Egill two chests of treasure and how he buried them at Hrísbrú, where the old Mosfell church had stood before it was moved to the hill where her father now had his living. For years Ásta kept an eye open for the glint of silver. She would ride along the valley on her dark, shaggy-maned colt, Skími, looking for Egill’s treasure. Her plan, once she had found it, was to slip out one night and hide it again herself, just as old Egill did, and if any asked where it was she meant to shake her head with an enchanting air of mystery, taking care not to dislodge the jewel-encrusted headdress she would be borrowing from another saga.
As she grew older, Ásta began to suspect that her father was more drawn to the sagas than he felt to be entirely proper for a Lutheran priest. He had been born in 1550, the year Iceland’s last Roman Catholic bishop was summarily parted from his head for defying the reformed faith brought from Denmark, and had grown up with the country’s religious life in all sorts of turmoil. He had hymns by the fiery reformer Martin Luther in a small printed book translated from the German, and by his own hand he had copied some poems by Ólafur Jónsson of Sandur, a priest in the west fjords whose work, he noted approvingly, was thoroughly based on scripture. But it seemed to Ásta that, try as he might, Pabbi could never muster the same ardour for the devotional readings with which he solemnly ended the evening as for the sagas that were in his blood, passed through many generations, and which he told by heart with a gleam in his eyes.
Perhaps he detected a similar failing in his daughter. Perhaps he felt responsible for the way her own eyes misted more dreamily than he thought appropriate at the passions of the Laxdaela saga’s beautiful Gudrún, whose love for the impossibly handsome Kjartan went so badly wrong. At any rate he announced his intention one day to teach her the letters of the alphabet. If she was quick to learn, he might even show her the principles of Latin.
‘In this way, Ásta mín, you will be able to study the religious works for yourself and rein in the wilder excesses of your imagination as you ponder the joys awaiting us in the kingdom of heaven.’ Saga romances and hidden folk alike (she could practically hear him thinking) would be firmly assigned their place.
His stratagem succeeded to the extent that she was immediately ravished in a different way by the pleasure of working out how an Icelandic or a Latin word changed as it played its part in a sentence and how one fitted with the next to make sense. She could have spent hours at the books if she had not been constantly chivvied to work.
Her mother shook her head. No good could possibly come of a girl learning to read and write when her life was to be spent rubbing kitchen smoke from her eyes and hauling on a loom.
‘Ásta mín,’ she said, as they sat together sewing the stomachs of two newly slaughtered sheep into bags, a task requiring patience that Ásta particularly hated, ‘it is not wise to know too much. If you get a dull husband you are storing up great unhappiness.’
‘Then to be safe I will have no husband, Mamma.’ After all, the saga’s manly Kjartan Ólafsson (with whom she had lately initiated a number of chaste embraces in the privacy of an imaginary bed) was a long time gone.
‘Believe me, you will,’ Mamma said, shaking her head in the infuriating way of mothers who have forgotten what it is to dream for more and for better. ‘And whoever it is, may the good Lord help him.’
‘Amen,’ Ólafur whispers, giving Oddrún’s cap a brisk pat. Picking his way onwards between the tight-packed bodies, he answers every hungering glance with the same reassurance: suffering of any kind, even violent abduction and every indignity of their present plight, is what they are put on earth for, but they can look forward to the most wondrous happiness, to joys they cannot begin to imagine, in the next world. Pretty Anna Jasparsdóttir, who only last month secured the fond heart and well-appointed croft of Jón Oddsson, the island’s wealthiest farmer, pouts back that a little happiness in this world would not go amiss. Ólafur shakes his head wearily: Anna never did pay attention in church.
As he eases himself to his feet again, the swell throws him off balance and he sits down hard on someone else’s legs. Apologising, he hauls himself to his feet and rubs the small of his back.
Focussed as she is on contractions that have at last assumed an air of purpose, Ásta can still spare a gush of tenderness for the husband making his dogged way around the hold. It has only lately occurred to her that Ólafur must have passed sixty years. Surviving winters is more important than counting them so she cannot be sure, but at least a quarter of a century separates their births and she will have reached five and thirty herself by now, perhaps more. Yet Ólafur has never appeared old to her. The brown hair trailing over his collar is only lightly flecked with silver and he still has the lithe physique that made her uncle Jón look like a mountain beside him. Jón used to grumble about how fast Ólafur walked on their rambles between Ofanleiti and Kirkjubaer, and the wearying energy of his friend’s mind. ‘He tires me out in every way,’ Jón lamented once. ‘Do you know he spent our entire walk yesterday practising German on me?’
Only when the huge captain made to keep Ólafur behind on the first evening of the raid did it strike her, with a sickening lurch, that others might view him differently. As they were lining up to enter the boats, he was ordered to join a small group of islanders being held to one side. Every man in that group was old. In the agony of realising it, she screamed at him, ‘Don’t go, Ólafur. For God’s sake, don’t leave us alone!’ Afterwards she was so ashamed of herself. Overwhelmed by the prospect of having to do all this on her own, she had called her own husband, her own elderly husband, into captivity. Even as they were being rowed out to the great ship, the guilt of forcing Ólafur to share a fate he might have escaped was beginning to gnaw at her.
They found a large group of Icelandic men already on board. Captured days earlier in the raid on the mainland’s east fjords, they were shackled to one another on the deck. ‘Prepare yourself, Ásta,’ Ólafur muttered, placing a hand on her arm as they both reeled at the sight of their countrymen in neck-irons. ‘We must expect to be next.’ But nobody else was put in fetters, and shortly afterwards the other prisoners were released from theirs. They were all given bread and bad water, and as they ate they watched the flames of their ransacked church searing the island sky. Then they were shoved below to the hold. All the next day more islanders were caught, brought on board and thrust down to join the crush, until it came to the second evening. That was when the pirates, preparing to leave on the morning tide, set the tradehouses alight. Ásta could smell the burning from where she lay. She could taste it on her tongue.
Those who had just joined them on board could hardly speak for weeping. There had been old people still inside those buildings, they said.
‘I don’t know if the pirates knew they were there or cared,’ one woman sobbed, ‘but they’re burning. There was nobody to get them out.’
And then it was that Ólafur leaned over and whispered, ‘If I had stayed behind, I might have burned with them. You know that, don’t you, mín kaera?’
Slumped there on the splintered wood, her head cradled awkwardly in his lap and the two children squeezed beside them, Ásta wept then too. But not for those who had perished. She felt a little guilty when she realised her tears were not for them, but that she was crying with a sort of wondering gratitude that Ólafur should know her so well.
He had understood the shame she felt at her own weakness in calling him back and looked for a way to comfort her. She remembers that now, watching him with his flock and bracing for the next pain.
The ships weighed anchor the following morning. Ten days ago, that must be. The prisoners never even saw what they were leaving: those familiar cliffs topped by grassy crowns of midsummer green and streaked white with waste, the incurious fowl peering from every pock. Ásta listened for crying gulls, but all she could hear was the tumult of wood and sail. Then somebody began to wail, an eerie, unearthly cry of abandonment. It was picked up by one person and then another, until suddenly they were all doing it and the whole of the dark space swelled with the sound. Marta sat with her small hands flat over her ears and Ásta put an arm around her and held her tight. Then Ásta too opened her mouth and joined in the keening of her exiled people.
As the wind filled the sails of the departing ships, those islanders who had not been discovered began to creep from their hiding places, parched and staggering, into the light. Panic ensued among the gannets high on the cliffs as Magnús Birgisson, squinting doubtfully at the beating waves below, tested first one leg and then another and decided to attempt the climb.
The Sealwoman's Gift Page 4