The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  The smell of cooking meat through the high window is making Ásta’s stomach ache. She shifts the baby to the other arm, scratches a few bites and lays her head against Ólafur’s. The tang of salt is still on his hair, along with much else. He shuffles closer. They have always fitted together, the two of them: she understood it from the first. From the day she arrived at Ofanleiti she had liked the way he looked at her. True, it was not quite like being ravished with one sizzling glance by, say, the gorgeous Kjartan of saga fame, but it made her feel warm and special. She liked the way he spoke to her, most of the time. She knew she annoyed him by arguing so much, by speculating mischievously about the hidden people when she knew exactly the shade of red his face would turn to hear it. (‘When they dip their silver oars in the sea, Ólafur – just supposing – would we see the waves actually parting?’) But she could soothe him too, and make him laugh. She liked the way irritation and a grudging admiration would struggle behind his eyes for mastery. It was as if he grasped, even while thoroughly infuriated, that although she was a woman there was as much going on in her head as his.

  She remembers how she would run across the lava heath to meet him on his return from sorting out some problem at the harbour or among the farmers, so that they could walk back to Ofanleiti together. He would tell her about the people he had met that day, what new quarrels the English and the Danes were involved in, how long he had spent listening to Oddrún Pálsdóttir’s latest dream.

  She has a sudden image of him nuzzling her hair one evening as dusk was gathering. Oh, the sweetness of letting this come back to her, the beautiful bite of the frosted air.

  She had rushed headlong down the slope to greet him and could tell from his wayward stride and the suspiciously moist brightness of his eye that he had overdone it on the Danish ale. Also that he was agitated. He explained that her uncle Jón was saying that Gentleman John’s terrifying invasion of Heimaey had been divinely ordered as a punishment for the wickedness of the Westman Islanders. (It must have been 1614: she and Ólafur would have been married by then.) As if there was no debate about the matter, Ólafur said indignantly, with the hint of a sway. He lapsed into silence and stared moodily at the islands.

  As usual she had rushed out without her shawl. Folding her arms against the wind, she watched a stream of purple clouds chasing each other across the sky and waited for him to speak. She was becoming colder and colder.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said at last, blown, no doubt, into sobriety, ‘I cannot see God’s face. I know his word but I can’t tell his mind. It troubles me, Ásta. There, I’ve said it. And Jón, he just goes to sleep and wakes with a vision and it’s all quite clear to him.’

  Her uncle was famous for his visions. This time he had dreamed of a bleeding sun over the island and a man dressed in red riding across the sky. (‘Too much mutton and beer in his belly before he turned to sleep,’ Margrét had muttered under her breath.) He insisted that Gentleman John’s English pirates had been sent to punish the islanders for their sloth and complacency and that his dream was the clearest possible warning (though not in the smallest degree clear to Ólafur) of worse punishment to come if they did not mend their ways.

  Later people would remember that dream. Many on the ship blamed the entire Turkish raid, including Jón’s martyrdom, on themselves, as if they had not woes enough to face. Even Ólafur felt by then that his friend must have been right. But that evening, looking to the islands, he was perplexed.

  ‘We are punished so that we are not lost eternally. This is clear from scripture and I am not shy of proclaiming it, as you know. We must fear God’s wrath. But are our Westman Islanders really so much more sinful than the next Icelander that this English scourge should be visited so cruelly upon them? Why one and not another?’

  Ásta scanned his face gravely for a moment and decided to risk making him laugh. ‘When next you dream of finding yourself in church without your breeches on, Ólafur’ – she well knew he had dreamed nothing in his life more interesting – ‘you must put it in a sermon, too, and scare us all.’

  Ólafur looked as if he felt more like crying.

  ‘My uncle is the finest of men,’ she added lightly, ‘but he does not climb the mountains of the mind as you do. You and I both know he spends all his time scoffing mutton in the foothills.’

  Ólafur had smiled then, as she meant him to, bent his head to hers and buried his face in her hair. Arm in arm they walked together up the hill. And she laid her head against his shoulder as they went, just like this.

  He is asleep now, his snores irregularly spaced in the annoying way that always makes her hold her breath for the next one. A lick of hair has spilled over one eye, and she can see dozens of threads of silver in it, gleaming in the barred moonlight. There are surely more than a month ago. She strokes the hair back over his forehead, giving the rumbling chest a nudge with her elbow while she is at it.

  Another image. That louring afternoon when her uncle Jón clumped into the house with the news that Ólafur had written to her father to ask for her hand in marriage. The matter was settled, Jón breezed, and he knew she would be pleased. She remembers how Ólafur winked at her. After Jón left he opened his arms, and she flew in. But something was nagging at her. Now that the betrothal was real, there was a feeling she could not define; a feeling, better to say, that was not there. Assuring Ólafur she wouldn’t be long, she had hurried out into the draining light to clear her head.

  Ásta closes her eyes. She has never told Ólafur what happened on the shore that afternoon. Not once has she spoken of meeting the stranger, or of what she did, the weight of her finger on his lips. Well, obviously not. There are some places it is not wise for a wife to go, and mentioning how close you came to disappearing with an elfman is surely one of them.

  They got married, she and Ólafur, and made children, and together they struggled through the winters and told stories in the dark. They were like a couple of nesting gulls, perched on a windy ledge with their backs to the world. And now they are here, about to be lost to each other. And Egill, her heart’s delight, is gone to the pasha.

  Their diffident Norwegian guard was a mariner before his ship was seized by Algerine corsairs. He explains this to Ólafur in halting Danish as they leave the prison. Now he too is a slave, hoping for ransom one day.

  Carrying a child each, they follow him high into the city. Ásta scans the teeming streets for signs of Egill, half expecting to spot him waving shyly from a sculptor’s dusty workshop, white to the roots of his hair, or emerging from behind the baker’s honeyed stall to say, ‘Don’t worry, Mamma, I’m here. Try some cake, won’t you?’ And really why not, she tells herself, pausing to peer over a hookful of sheep’s intestines in case the butcher has a small apprentice on the other side. It is the most likely thing in the world that she will come upon Egill about the town.

  The streets are narrowing as they climb, so that the teetering buildings on each side almost touch each other at the top. Looking up you can see vines strung between the flat roofs, but no more than a slit of sky. Ólafur stares at the featureless white facades of what he takes to be houses opening straight into the alleys, pondering how little you can tell from their wooden doors of what lies within. For all the clues on the outside, they might open to the grandest mansion or any number of mean dwellings. The row of chalky sea captains’ villas along the front, which Fleming had pointed out yesterday from the ship, hoarded the secrets of their character in just the same way.

  But novelty has always raised Ólafur’s spirits. When they halt at an entrance promising access to one of these blank buildings, a rush of excitement banishes the tiredness from his legs and the weight of Marta from his arms. To reach it the guard has swung to the right along a walled alleyway set with a small number of high, square windows. Squinting up, Ólafur notices that the copper fretwork in them is moulded with flowers, quite exquisite, where the metal is joined. The alley ends in front of a great wooden door adorned with rows of iron studs and
framed by an archway of stone sculpted with more flowers, each with a disc at its centre and a fan of petals. Like the rays of the sun, Ólafur decides. (Ásta, miserable with heat and the hungry squalling at her breast, sees only a door to get through and the prospect of sitting down.) Best of all – Ólafur’s eyes sparkle with zest – is the pulley around the door, which will remain for him the city’s foremost wonder until the moment he sees limestone being boiled in four enormous kettles and understands why the buildings are white. The door closes behind them entirely by itself on a rope running along the top of the frame and attached to the latch. He nudges Ásta to show her the cleverness of it, and wishes he could open the door again and see it close. But now they are inside, in a courtyard open to the heavens.

  And at once Ólafur sees what he missed from outside. Here are the marks of status: cool marble floors, a fountain, twisting pillars, stairwells glowing with ceramic colour. Here are the gardens: trailing from earthenware tubs and pots. Here is the sky at last: right inside the house, tipping light into the courtyard past three galleried floors. An atrium. Isn’t that the Latin word? Ólafur gazes around him in awe. Is it possible that the Romans, the race of Pontius Pilate, were once on these shores and showed men how to build? Of course nobody would need to live under grass like Icelanders in heat like this. They wouldn’t need sheep and cows huddled beneath to make them warm in this land (do they even have a winter here?) but only shade and cool.

  His eyes scuttle everywhere, but there is little time to absorb it before a shaven-headed manservant is gesturing for him to place his daughter on her feet. Ásta is beckoned upstairs by a girl with a violet blossom in her hair. She is wearing wide trousers tied at the ankle. Extraordinary, Ólafur thinks, in the instant before worry about where she is leading his wife and children takes over.

  With the baby in one arm and Marta by the hand, Ásta drags herself up the marble staircase. She looks back as it curves around on itself and for a second – resigned, infinitely weary – holds Ólafur’s gaze. Then she continues out of sight.

  A boy serves Ólafur bread and grapes in a plain room off the pillared arcade, before he is unceremoniously hurried out again. Crossing the courtyard he looks up to the gallery. There is no sign of his family. On his way out he does not even notice the pulley.

  12

  The house where Ólafur will spend one unsettling month in the white city is not (he is just a little pained to discover) as grand as the one in which he left Ásta. The courtyard is too small and the height of the building too tall to admit much sky. The pillars are of rough stone, and the tiling sparse. He is made to sleep on the bare floor of a narrow room and is never offered a covering. The natives also sleep on the floor, but it is not lost on him that they do so between thick blankets. Ólafur knows that envy is a sin and is careful not to indulge it, but he cannot deny that they look snug.

  After two or three weeks a resident Frenchman takes pity on him and gives him a length of homespun woollen cloth, a litre of brandy and – joy of joys – a pair of shoes. Ólafur is so moved by this kindness that he weeps. Afterwards he muses on the oddity of tears, that they should pour down his face for a stranger’s kindness but never come to relieve the mind’s agony he wakes to every day. He is especially grateful to have a cloth to cover him because he is ill by then, tossing night and day with feverish sweats and sickness. The Frenchman brings little cheer when he reports that Icelanders are dying everywhere.

  ‘Not all have your strength to meet the bad diseases in this city, mon ami,’ he says, keeping his distance. He has counted thirty-one of Ólafur’s compatriots in the Christian cemetery already.

  When Ólafur recovers, he has to admit he is not being treated badly, despite being given no fresh clothes to wear, which means he is still in the shirt and breeches in which he left Iceland. For company he has his old friend Jaspar Kristjánsson, who arrived aboard a different ship but has been purchased by the same man, a staggeringly rich Moor whom they have never met by the name of Ali Pitterling Cilleby. Jaspar is frantic with worry about his daughter Anna, of whom nothing has been seen since the slave-market.

  Ólafur cannot puzzle out what is expected of him. He is given the freedom of the house and in time allowed to roam the streets, as long as he goes nowhere near Ásta’s house, which he would be hard put to discover anyway, since he could find his way around a maze of puffin burrows easier than this warren of a city. But he is given no labour, no occupation. Jaspar is taken out each day, along with an Icelandic carpenter who has joined them, to work on the construction of a new house, but Ólafur’s days are empty.

  His life is not materially unpleasant. The food is good: bread warm from the oven morning and evening, tasty porridge oats and as much fruit as he can eat. Any bread left at night is fed to the horses in the morning, while porridge dregs go straight over the wall or down the privy (another marvel). To a man schooled in Iceland’s poverty to lick every bowl clean and suck every fishbone dry, the abundance is amazing. It seems to him that all the fruits of the earth are here, bestowed on a people who don’t deserve it and will surely be punished some day for the evil they have brought upon others, although in which life he cannot offhand be sure.

  He misses Ásta and the babies, and tries not to imagine what might be happening to them, because he can’t do anything about it and is very easily brought low. He longs to see Egill and prays for him night and day. He wishes he had paper on which to make notes, in case he ever has the chance to write about this one day: it is much on his mind that Icelanders in generations to come should know what happened to their people when the Turks came to Iceland in the summer of 1627. Ólafur constructs instead a shelf of impressions inside his head and adds a few every day. He commits to memory the shapes of the copper dishes and washbasins, the sheen on the clay drinking cups, the way people eat with their legs straight out on the floor and don’t use a knife. He notes, wondering if it is just this house or everywhere, that there are no tables, or benches, or even storage chests. People seem to be much attached to the floor and he never does discover where they put everything. He is fascinated by the women’s dresses, which are surely of the finest silk weave in the world (not that he has seen the world, but really he can’t imagine finer). He has studied with especially beady attention the linen trousers that reach right down to their shoes, with one cuff attached to the instep and the other to the heel, blushing to think he might be accused of a prurient interest in ankles.

  To be fair, many of the Turkish people look rather fine on the lives they live here. Which actually does not seem that fair at all, when he thinks about it, until he remembers that paradise on earth counts for nothing beside what is to come, and reminds himself that it is not his place to question the inscrutable but always merciful ordering of events by his loving Father in heaven, who wills all things for good and answers every prayer, even if not always in the way his children ask.

  He looks and he listens and he has plenty of time to notice all that he notices, because Ólafur Egilsson has nothing else to do. Nothing. He has been stolen from his homeland and separated from his loved ones and fed better bread than he has tasted in his life (apples too, and grapes that smell of summer). And for what purpose he has not the slightest idea.

  On the twentieth day of September, 1627, two janissary soldiers enter Ólafur’s house and order him, none too gently, to accompany them.

  He is marched to another street, another anonymous house, a small, shaded room, in which he is astounded to be issued with a document that he is given to understand will ensure his safe conduct on the high seas. When he looks around for enlightenment, there steps from behind the seated official another man, a Moor by his appearance. The dimness of the room and the white hood pulled low over his turban keep the man’s face in shadow. Ólafur cannot make out his features.

  The Moor explains with a few curt words in the common tongue that Ólafur is being sent as an envoy to Christian of Denmark to raise a ransom for his family and as many others a
s the king might wish to see returned. He will set sail today and should endeavour to reach Copenhagen with all speed. He is strongly advised to show his pass to any ship in the Ottoman fleet that might trouble his journey. Holding out an elegant hand to be kissed, the Moor dismisses him with the lofty assurance that Ólafur will be permitted to say a brief farewell to his wife and children on the way to the harbour.

  Hours later Ólafur is on board an Italian barque bound for Livorno. For every one of his years left on this earth it will haunt him that he never saw the face of Ali Pitterling Cilleby.

  13

  September 1630

  My dear husband,

  It is three years since you left for Denmark. Three years. How can we have been parted so long?

  All this time I have been having conversations with you in my head, in which you will be glad to hear you give very sensible answers, but writing is much better. Husna, the second wife (yes, there are two of them), has brought me – after much pleading – a piece of bamboo cane, shaved to a point, and a small pot of burnt wool mixed with water. Also some paper. Unfortunately it is quite difficult to write with a stick. As you see, the letters I make are like hen-scratchings and it takes such a long time to form each word that I may be at it for weeks. Especially since I must also do this in secret from Alimah, my chief mistress, who would rather I sewed.

  I have no idea if this letter will reach you. I hear of no Icelander who has received a letter back. But it is good to speak to you all the same. This morning I am writing in the harem before the other women wake. It is pretty here at first light, when the sun spills criss-cross patterns from the window on to the wall opposite. But it is also the time I feel most the heaviness of our situation. Sometimes, even now, I awake believing I am back under our draughty pane at Ofanleiti, with you beside me and the children around, and I am winded all over again to realise I am not.