The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  ‘But then I think about a new stitch, Mamma. Or I think about the stone I found, the blue one that I keep beside me here, and how well the sea has polished it. Look, here it is.’

  She reached below the blanket, and Ásta felt a cool pebble pressed against her lips in the dark.

  ‘Feel how shiny it is. Let’s make up a story about it, Mamma, and we can tell Jón in the morning.’

  Ásta kissed the stone and stroked Marta’s downy cheek, smiling fondly at her daughter’s artlessness, before she remembered that Marta, even at six, was never artless. Then she prayed over the girl and her slumbering brother and tried to quell the dread, never far from the surface, that she would lose them both one day, not only in this life but, worse by far, the next.

  Nothing, but nothing, is to be gained by Ólafur knowing this.

  Nor is it her place to tell him about Anna Jasparsdóttir, who wasted little time before converting to the infidel faith herself and marrying the man who bought her. Ásta hardly dares conceive of how this news would go down in Iceland, where adultery is deplored by Church and state with a zeal she remembers Ólafur’s sermons reflecting only too energetically. It is hard to imagine the category of sinfulness in which a captive Christian wife voluntarily marrying her Muslim owner might belong.

  Anna protests that she is only making the best of the life forced upon her and has married, by the way, a good man. See how quickly her new husband, a Moor by the name of Jus Hamet, settled the ransom on her dear father, enabling Jaspar to be released to make his way home. But Anna’s swift overlooking of the husband awaiting her in the croft at Stakkagerdi still takes Ásta’s breath away. If Anna has given a moment’s thought to ardent, red-faced Jón Oddsson, there is no sign of it. And if she has suffered a moment’s doubt over placing her soul in immortal danger, Ásta is yet to discern it.

  ‘She’s pretty, your little Marta,’ Anna said the other day, watching the child hum quietly to herself as she sewed on the roof garden while Jón scampered around their feet, pretending to be a horse. Now that she is a free woman Anna can pay visits as she chooses, and Ásta is permitted to receive her as long as her own less than indefatigable hemming is not interrupted.

  ‘I know you get distressed to watch her at prayer, but only think how easy it would be for you to take the step that I did,’ Anna said, patting the belly that has begun to swell beneath the folds and pleats of silk about her waist. ‘As a Muslim you could hold on to her and little Jón forever, honoured one day in the families they will make here in time. You must know there is little chance of children being released. I have never heard of it.’

  ‘Hold them forever?’ Ásta cried. It was clear that Anna had never attended to a word she had heard in church. ‘Forever is separation from God and burning in the fires of hell. Forever is seeing none of them again in the life that comes, a life that will be better than this one, Anna, let me assure you.’

  Anna’s clear, blue-green eyes studied her thoughtfully. Ásta always became prim when the conversation turned to faith: it was only to be expected, being married to a priest. ‘You sound like Ólafur, Ásta mín. Not,’ she added hastily, ‘that there is anything wrong with that. Only I’ve come to wonder myself if it is always so simple and whether God himself has no discretion in the matter of who goes to dwell with him.’

  ‘Of course he has discretion. God asks only that we believe in him through Jesus Christ and judges us accordingly,’ Ásta snapped, sounding to her own vague annoyance even more like Ólafur. ‘Do you not believe in heaven?’

  ‘I do. And you would be amazed at how many Moors and Turks and Berbers believe they are going there too, and pray to that effect. Of course I don’t understand exactly what they pray, but I have to admit’ – she gave Ásta one of her enchanting smiles – ‘that I never understood Ólafur’s prayers much either.’

  All in all, there is much that has not gone into the letter that Ásta is holding as tightly as if it might somehow gust from her grasp in the airless streets. But there is much of herself that it does carry. She skips down the last of the cobbled steps with a feeling that might even be happiness to think that one of those ships in the harbour, their masts pricking the hazy morning mist, will bear her heart to Ólafur.

  On the quayside an unsmiling sailor is accepting coins to have letters thrust into his hand. A cluster of men have handed theirs over already, all slaves by their rough attire and no Icelander among them. The sailor glances at her coin, begged from Anna who has plenty.

  ‘Others have paid better,’ he grumbles in the common tongue.

  She ignores him. ‘Livorno?’ The Italian port is only a week’s sail away, and it is from there that letters have their best chance of being carried north.

  ‘Thereabouts,’ he replies, sneering a little.

  With a dozen papers stuffed under his shirt the sailor strides up the mole, at the end of which a double-masted ship is preparing to take breath. The group watch every footstep.

  As the wind catches the sails, a flock of white birds flies upwards, rising from the deck and then fluttering one by one to the water. Surprise ripples through Ásta’s companions on the quayside. One man points, babbling to himself in his agitation. Another shouts, then starts to run uselessly up the mole, hurling foreign curses across the water. Very quietly, without realising she is doing it, Ásta begins to weep.

  She is the last of the group to turn away. All those words lost, and with them the imagining. If the wretched sailor had only waited until the ship was out of sight before he opened his jacket into the sea, she could have feasted for months and months. How it would have sustained her, deciding which port her letter lay in now, making a story of who carried it next, picturing Ólafur’s expressions as he read.

  Without sea and masts to guide her, finding the way back proves harder than it was to reach the harbour. The city is flat along the front before it begins its steep rise, but even here the streets are full of confusing twists. She is hurrying now, although her head-to-toe covering makes for ungainly progress. The outer cloth is fastened under her chin and beneath one arm, then tugged over her hair and down her forehead. Her lower half is so amplified by the voluminous trousers beneath that she feels as awkward as an earthbound gannet. In her haste to be there and back before Alimah notices, she has pulled the muslin veil too tight across her nose and around her ears. It is now half covering one eye.

  Frustratingly, the first street she tries brings her out near the sea again, only further along this time, on the other side of the mole. Ahead of her is a row of five large white villas curving along the water’s edge. They are blank-walled at the back, with barely a window between them, but on the side facing the sea each has an arched opening into which the water is lapping. From where she stands, it looks as if the sea is swirling inside the houses themselves.

  As she tries to get her bearings, the prow of a small boat noses out from the nearest villa into the misty sunshine. A pale, heavyset man is at the oars, rowing powerfully. She feels instantly sick. That tongue on the cracked lips, the sudden glint of lust: she has not forgotten. The man is looking over at her now, rowing parallel to the mole, his back to the open sea.

  Surely he cannot recognise her. Her hair is well tucked – she puts a hand up to check, dashing a couple of escaped strands back under wraps – and with her veil askew there must barely be two eyes visible. Ridiculous to think anyone could guess who she is. She turns away and rushes back the way she came, skin crawling. The man rests up his oars.

  In the vestibule of Cilleby’s house she leans against the cool tiles to catch her breath, fiery-faced and panting from taking the hill too fast. The panicky sense of pursuit is ebbing and she is ready to laugh at herself for imagining it. Her attention is already adjusting to the pile of punishment waistcoats she must expect upstairs. As the door creaks behind her on its clever pulley she thinks, with a swift stab of longing, of Ólafur. Tugging off her veil, Ásta steps into the courtyard.

  Cilleby is half leaning aga
inst a pillar, arms folded. His burnous is hanging open, the hood loose about his shoulders. A plain, white cloak is the mark of the Moor in this peacock city, so Anna says, although she has also been at pains to assure Ásta that Ali Pitterling Cilleby, while regrettably richer than her own husband and boasting his own fountain, is not a real Moor. ‘My Jus Hamet can trace his family on both sides straight back to Spain, but Cilleby has the blood of the renegade in him,’ she confided once, lowering her voice so conspiratorially you would have thought the whole roof garden spoke Icelandic. ‘His father was an Englishman or a Dutchman or some such. Probably the owner of a corsair ship, because that’s where they make all their money. Or was it, let me see, his grandfather? He has a Moorish lineage – but not as pure as some, I can tell you, for all that he strides around in white.’

  Ásta lowers her eyes and makes to scuttle past.

  ‘I would talk to you,’ he says. The common tongue sounds strange and formal on his lips; she has heard only Arabic from Cilleby in the harem.

  He takes a step towards where she is rooted to the floor. It is so long since a man of any kind has addressed her directly about anything, unless you count today’s scoundrel sailor and the garlic seller round the corner, that she feels all of a sudden girlish and fluttery.

  The moment does not last.

  ‘Come to my chamber before sunset,’ he orders, addressing her chin.

  15

  The day that Ásta watches her letter drown dawns sharp and blue on the Westman Isles. It is just the sort of bright day on the cusp of winter that she used to love, which is why Ólafur has placed himself outside Ofanleiti with his hands clasped behind his back and is picturing her enjoying it. Ásta would be out without her shawl, of course, heedless of the chill in the air. She would be gazing around to see if any more of the migrant birds were on their way south today or if the first flock of Iceland gulls had gusted in yet from the north. She would be listening for the autumn-pale golden plover fluting among the tussocks, and would rejoice (as he does now, for her, although he would hardly have paid attention on his own account) to find it here yet, still dashing about for the last worm while the earth is soft, still seeking out trembling spiders’ webs to invade before it is time to leave. And then – Ólafur smiles to himself ruefully – she would run back inside because another pot was sure to be burning dry.

  There are no burned pots at Ofanleiti any more. Thorgerdur’s meals are sparing but never ruined. Ólafur’s firstborn daughter has done her best to keep three children, a feckless husband and listless father in a house that is a poor shadow of the old Ofanleiti. She is fond of her father but would be glad to see some of his old energy again. Back more than two years now, he does little but stare at the islands or sit inside using up the oil to write. There has hardly been a decent hour’s work from him around the croft since he returned and Gísli is still supervising much of the church business on his own. Not that there is a church any more, with the ashes of Landakirkja long scattered to the sea.

  Thorgerdur bustles to his side now, a big-boned woman with a face that was not made to express joy and a life that rarely supplies it.

  ‘Father, you’ve been standing there an hour. Will you not at least look to the cattle?’

  ‘I was thinking of Ásta,’ he says, exhaling in a manner that strikes Thorgerdur as indulgently mournful. ‘It is three years since we parted – just a little over – and today I have been feeling it keenly. Forgive me, daughter. I am no longer the man I was.’

  With a sniff intended to convey that whatever man he might be the cows will not attend to themselves, Thorgerdur stomps off to do it. Her father’s grief is wearing.

  Thorgerdur and her husband have been back at Ofanleiti since the spring of 1628, when the Reverend Gísli Thorvardsson, a Heimaey boy himself originally, was despatched from the church at Torfastadir to take over religious duties on an island that had lost both its priests. Gísli had been a charming, floppy-haired youth in his time, popular with women and quick to take up with young Thorgerdur Ólafsdóttir when she arrived on the mainland to do battle with the grime in Torfastadir. Ólafur had given the marriage his blessing with some reluctance: everyone knew the rumours that Gísli had fathered a child out of wedlock. But the young man was a trained priest, well enough educated if inclined to be casual with his responsibilities, and Thorgerdur could be forceful.

  On their return to the crushed island Thorgerdur and Gísli set about rebuilding Ofanleiti. It was poorly done and she knew it. Yet how could it have been otherwise, with hardly a soul to help cut the turf and every piece of wood that drifted ashore fought over for a new frame or rafter? They struggled for food, as did everyone with so many men gone. Few parishioners had fish spare to pay the priest and they lived on what Gísli, never a practical man, could catch himself. Ólafur returned later that summer to find Thorgerdur whisking around a diminished croft with desperate vigour and Gísli more prone than ever to gulp down his troubles too fast.

  Ólafur sighs and waves a hand to young Magnús Birgisson, passing on his way to climb Helgafell. The lad is on watch duty today. He will join another man up there, and the pair will scan the sea for pirate ships and build a cairn to show the island they have not fallen asleep. The men who come tomorrow will pull down that cairn and build another, and people will look to Helgafell to see the stones rise and fall with the tides and thank God to be safe another day.

  Magnús waves back. He is hoping the reverend will be waiting for him with a hunk of dried fish when he comes down at sunset, and a story or two from his travels. Bonded in a way that neither has found it necessary to express, they have formed the habit of sharing the last of the light together at the end of these fast-shortening days. Ólafur looks forward to the boy’s undemanding company. Sometimes he can almost imagine him to be Egill, sitting there in the gloaming with his eyes wide and the soft suspicion of hair on his lip.

  They have sought each other out often, these two, since Ólafur’s return from Algiers. When he was rowed ashore from the Danish ship two summers ago, Magnús’s was the face at the harbour that told Ólafur he was really home. That day was the sixth of July, 1628, a year after the Turkish raid. It was the end of a journey that had taken him more than nine gruelling months by sea and by foot. When he thinks back on his humiliating struggles in one port after another to raise the fare for onward passage, the days without food, the roads so dangerous he walked in fear of his life and finally – finally – at the end of his two months in Denmark a full thirty-one days on the North Sea with barely a breath of wind, Ólafur still thanks God in genuine wonderment that he made it here at all.

  Everyone rushed to see him of course, shouting the news from house to house and from cliff to cliff that their lost priest had returned. Ólafur dreaded having to face them. Bouncing through the waves towards the quayside with the rain slicing his cheeks, he could not decide whether what he did know or what he did not would burden these people more. What were the names of the thirty-one in the Algiers cemetery, and surely by this time more? He couldn’t say. How were their loved ones being treated in Algiers? He didn’t know. What should he tell Jón Oddsson, lumbering down from Stakkagerdi to inspect some piece he had ordered from Copenhagen, about his wife Anna? That Ólafur had last seen her being led away from market by a heathen, black-skinned Moor? And as if all that were not difficult enough, what (may the Lord give him wisdom) was he supposed to tell them about the king?

  He stepped from the boat, conscious of the poor, gaunt figure he must cut. The shirt he got from that blessed man who had taken pity on him in Kronborg was too short in the arms, and the frayed priestly collar, another gift, had been made for a plumper neck. Ólafur swallowed nervously when he saw how expectantly people were gazing at him. More and more were arriving to join the throng, shouting questions as they approached.

  ‘Why are you alone, Ólafur?’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘What news of my son?’

  ‘Do you have letter
s?’

  The weight of hope pressing on him was too much. Ólafur passed a hand over his eyes and cleared his throat. ‘My friends, I intend to travel tomorrow to the mainland, where I will visit the bishop at Skálholt.’ The plan had just that minute come to him. ‘It is right that I should speak to him first.’

  ‘Have you been ransomed?’ called a farmer at the back. A hush fell. Everyone looked avidly at Ólafur.

  He was not to know that the island considered itself an expert on ransoms. There was hardly a merchant of Lübeck or seaman from Leith who had been allowed to drink his ale in peace this last year without being badgered for gossip by anyone who could dredge up a foreign phrase and make sense of the reply. Before long the depleted island had been discussing with airy authority which countries paid best to bring their people back from the Barbary. England, it was confidently asserted, would pay no ransom on principle in case this encouraged more piracy, while both Church and Crown in France had organised the return of thousands of their people. All year it had not been the weather or the price of a codfish that the islanders had debated as they tried to order their lives again, but which way the wind might be blowing in Copenhagen for the Icelandic captives.

  Ólafur tried to raise his voice and found it no longer carried.

  ‘I was set free by my captors in order to secure a ransom from the king,’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘To this end I sought an audience with our gracious majesty King Christian. My friends, the situation is complicated. I beg you are patient until I have explained it to the bishop. In the meantime let us thank God for his many mercies.’

  With that he began to walk forward and the crowd parted for him with a quiet sympathy that nearly unmanned him. Magnús Birgisson came over to speak then, offering to walk him home.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ólafur said. ‘You’ve grown tall this last year, Magnús.’