‘I’m thirteen now,’ the boy said shyly. ‘Egill too in a few months. When will he get here, Ólafur?’
Ólafur said nothing. He took Magnús by the arm and they trudged off up the heath towards Ofanleiti in silence.
The light is dimming by the time Magnús bounds down the mountain. He is soon settling himself on a roughly assembled wall to gnaw on hard cod and a smear of butter smuggled from Thorgerdur’s dairy.
‘Have I ever told you,’ Ólafur says, leaning against the wall and watching him eat, ‘that there is so much food in the land I was in that they give what is left each day to the horses?’
Magnús nods and carries on chewing. He has heard most of Ólafur’s tales by now, but they are none the worse for the repeating and there is nearly always a new detail.
Ólafur himself finds it soothing to be with the lad at the end of the day like this. There are no tearful questions of the kind he has faced interminably these two years past, no expectations of a slick explanation of God’s role in this sorry saga, no pleas for reassurances about loved ones that he cannot give. Just a generous ear for the adventures he had on his way home, the countries he walked through, the dangers he met, the sights he saw. It is a relief to be able to talk as he used to. The jaunty confidence of old is mostly gone: lost with his son in the slave-market, lost along the lonely, dangerous byways of Europe, the last of it ground underfoot in the court of King Christian. But Ólafur has never been averse to the sound of his own voice.
‘Did I ever show you my pirate pass?’
Twice, Magnús could answer, but does not.
When he and Egill were small, Ólafur used to sit them both on these very stones, point to the islands one by one and see which boy could remember more names; it was usually Egill. Sometimes Ólafur would wave towards a pretend dot on the horizon and tell them it was Snorrastadir on the mainland, where he had grown up and dreamed of being a priest, or Skálholt, where he went to school and learned a language called Latin. There is a comfort in being with Magnús in this place.
Out from his pocket comes the safe conduct pass issued before he boarded the Italian ship. The paper is dog-eared with fingering and soakings.
‘I sailed in many ships, Magnús minn, and it was this piece of paper alone that would have saved me if we were attacked by Barbary corsairs, although I am glad to say it was never put to the test.’
‘Tell me about your travels,’ Magnús urges, sucking his fingers for butter.
Ólafur smiles. ‘Which part would you like today, then? The time when a Turkish ship chased our Italian one for two whole days and I held tighter to that pass than my hat (which flew overboard, did I tell you)? Or shall I remind you what it was like having to beg for food and money? Or being stripped to the buttocks and inspected for pestilence? Being helped by strangers (as I’ve told you often, there was much of that also, may God be thanked)? Walking all the way into Germany with the thought of making it to Hamburg, only to learn that soldiers of the Emperor were murdering travellers on the road ahead, which meant (have I told you this?) that I had to turn and walk four days back to Livorno and try a different route? Sleeping in the very first bed since before I was captured sixteen weeks before – that was when I got to Marseilles – and able to take my clothes off for the first time too?’
Ólafur smiles. ‘Or the sights, Magnús minn, the sights. Seeing a city on a distant hill aglow with lights that seemed to hang higher in the sky than the stars themselves. Gazing up for the first time at a stained-glass window and feeling a catch in my throat as the sun poured through and lit the colours. Watching a ship’s anchor being forged in a smithy where the hammers were driven – think of it – by the wind. Wondering at the clothes people wore. Do you know that in Livorno even the porters and the soldiers wore silk and velvet, and their jerkins were cut in five strings at the shoulders and their garters alone must have been worth more than anything you or I have ever worn.’
Ólafur loves to look on the lad’s eager face and watch his eyes catching light. Sometimes he thinks he might have found with these anecdotes a way of redeeming the months of penniless misery and degradation. Not in a sacred way of course – not that kind of redemption – but by forming them into a new shape, still truthful, that brings pleasure and insight to others, just as the stained-glass artist did with his scenes from the Bible. Might this also be why he has been so anxious to commit his experiences to paper: so that he can tidy the fearful disorder in his own mind of all that has happened since the pirates arrived on Heimaey? Is that what he is doing? Hoping he will be better able to convince others of divine orderliness if he can first convince himself?
‘Or perhaps, my boy, you would rather hear again about the tamed bear in Genoa, the one that walked on its hind-legs. Or the time I was so thirsty I had to drink water that a lion, an ostrich and a fair number of monkeys had drunk from and befouled before my very eyes. What do you say?’
Magnús is grinning broadly. ‘Anything you like.’
Ólafur considers a moment. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you about something I saw in Livorno. It shocked me very much. Every morning I saw at least a hundred people, maybe more, being driven about the streets in chains, shackled together two by two like horses. Every one of them was near naked, with only a cloth about the waist. I understood then that slavery and demeaning cruelty exist in Christendom too. I am still pondering this.’
Ólafur lapses into silence and Magnús, wiping his nose on a cuff, hopes any immediate pondering will not take long. The last tendrils of pink in the west have left with the setting sun and the sky has all but joined the sea. It will be a clear, cold night. There are stars out and a sliver of moon, and the verdigris lichen on the stones is already twinkling with frost. Ólafur’s long, angular face is deep in shadow.
‘Here is another thing that struck me. When I came by ship to Marseilles – that’s a great port in France – I watched fisher families in small boats working in the harbour. The wife would row while the husband stood in the bow and reached to the seabed with a corded net at the end of a long pole. He was scratching in the mud for flatfish. The wife would then let go of the oars and help him draw up the net and rinse the dirt. And what would they find in it? One flatfish. Sometimes two or three, but just as often none at all. I found it humbling to see how hard they worked for so little. I tell you, Magnús, there are poor folk in more places than Iceland. Remember this.
‘By the February of that year I was in Holland, and there I saw windmills that work night and day when the wind blows. I’ve told you of them before. Then I had passage to Denmark and by the end of March came to Kronborg, where I had a look at an immense stronghold built to see off the Swedes. I cannot tell you what a relief it was to arrive in Denmark. After so long in so many strange places, it almost felt as if I had come to Iceland.’
Magnús is turning over the names of cities and countries in his head, seeing windmills dipping and fisherfolk in a faraway town scrabbling in the mud for a paltry dab. He steals a quick glance at Ólafur. Magnús is not one to romanticise, but neither is he too young to wonder at how far and how long a man who has lived well past sixty summers could be driven by his love.
‘And the king, Ólafur?’ he asks diffidently. The reverend has never been very forthcoming about his audience and people have drawn their own conclusions. ‘What happened when you went to see the king?’
Ólafur blows out a long puff of air and stares past him to where the islands have smudged to grey and the sky beyond has begun playing with wisps of ice-green light. Wraiths, Ásta would call these, the way they swirl about and trail their fingers like smoke. Forgetting that he once lectured Ásta for a full ten minutes on the ancient phenomenon of the northern lights, Ólafur stands like this for a long time. Magnús, practising rings with his breath and shuffling a bit, hopes the old man isn’t about to cry. He should have asked him about the tame bear.
‘It’s late,’ Ólafur says at last. ‘My daughter will be opening that door any
minute and demanding to know if it’s my intention to die of cold. Go on, Magnús, while you can see your way home.’
The boy slips off the wall and lays an awkward hand on Ólafur’s shoulder. He feels himself blushing as he does, because this is the priest of Ofanleiti and what does Magnús know? Then he starts off down the slope and Ólafur watches as the shadows absorb him. The eerie green lights shift and stretch across the sky. Wraiths, Ólafur thinks. They look like wraiths.
16
Before sunset, he said. What does that mean? Five minutes before? An hour? Ásta tries to remember the point at which other women have left the roof garden of an evening, flitting from the honey cakes and the stories to the chamber behind the flowered door.
More to the point, what does the command signify? Ásta well knows that slave-women are violated throughout the city: why else the shaming inspections at auction? Nor is she blind to the ways of this household. Yet it is one thing to have noticed some pretty slave-woman who is not a wife returning to the harem in the morning, flushed or sad, and to have revelled in despising Cilleby’s appetites as heartily as the way he makes his money, but it is quite another to enter the picture herself. She assumed … well, what exactly? That she was bought for ransom before service? That in any case he has the choice of others younger than her and more beautiful? That after three years she is safe?
With thumping heart Ásta joins the rest of the women around the low table and keeps an eye on the sun’s progress towards the sea. Might she even, reviewing the matter, have misunderstood? Perhaps she is only required to serve the man his Turkish coffee.
Normally this is her favourite time of the day. Unless it is raining or the turning season has cooled the air too fast, the harem gathers on the roof, enfolded in the drowsy perfume of evening jasmine, to tell its tales. Sometimes the stories go on by starlight.
When she first arrived, Ásta was content to listen to the murmur of voices and guess how each story went by how the audience rolled their eyes or grabbed each other in fright. She quickly recognised that Alimah had neither the art nor the energy to tell a story well: she could never be bothered to spin out a web to draw the others in, and they soon began to fidget. Equally, the plump aunt with the drooping nose would have the younger girls nudging each other, as if to say, ‘Not this again’; even Ásta could tell that her quavery stories were going on for a very long time. On the other hand, the other aunt, with skin like paper and little to say at other times, revealed herself to have the gift of making everyone chuckle. Flower laughed so much one evening that she choked on a vine leaf. But it was Husna, usually so serious and withdrawn, who proved the greatest revelation. Ásta saw at once how the subordinate wife came into her own here and made her audience glassy-eyed with imagining. When it was Husna’s turn to speak, the women would lean forward and lay their chins in their hands, and she would look around them one by one, fixing them with her intense stare and drawing them in.
It began to bother Ásta that she could not share these stories. She could pick out phrases she recognised in Arabic, but it was never enough to let her grasp the plot or join the enchanted circle. One evening she became so frustrated that she shuffled closer to Flower and whispered, ‘Tell me what she’s saying.’
Flower, as eager to wrap herself in a story as Ásta, did not welcome the request. Without taking her eyes off Husna, she whispered back tersely, ‘It’s about a nightingale who loves a rose.’
Ásta had no idea about this word ‘nightingale’ in the common tongue. But she realised it must be a bird and thought of the golden plover piping its heart out in the tufted grass. As Husna told her tale, Flower listened for a while and then turned to Ásta with a rapid translation.
‘The rose was white,’ she whispered. ‘All roses were white long ago. And when the rose heard the nightingale’s song, she trembled. Like this, Ásta.’ Flower made her arms shiver. Her bracelets clattered and Husna shot her a warning look.
‘One night the nightingale came closer to the trembling rose and sang, “I love you, rose. I love you. I love you.” And when the rose heard it, she blushed pink. And in that moment were pink roses born.’
She forgot to report for a while after that. Ásta nudged her.
‘Pardon, Ásta. The nightingale, he came closer and closer, until one night the rose opened its petals and … Actually I don’t have the words for what happened. But in the cool morning the rose turned red with shame. And that is why we have red roses. Ever since then the nightingale comes to ask for love, but always the rose refuses, for Allah never meant flower and bird to mate. The rose still trembles at the voice of the nightingale, but her petals stay closed.’ She sighed. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful story?’
Ásta thought she might have missed something in the telling, which had taken Husna considerably longer than Flower and occasioned many gasps and groans from the audience. She did think the rose might have fought harder for her honour. But really she was away dreaming about the plover, and how she used to ache for its return: the first lone peep that meant winter would soon be behind them, the golden flurry of new beginnings in the puddled snow.
Mostly, though, the roof is an escape. Here she can leave behind the curling fear about Egill, the anxieties for the souls of her little ones, the never-blunted longing for Helga and Ólafur, for the frenzied bawling of an Icelandic wind, for ice in the air and decently cold rain and a draught in the badstofa. With Flower’s translations and her own smattering of Arabic, she can bury her woes under tales of magic and adventure from times as far past as the sagas and lands more exotic than any conjured in the kvöldvaka at home. There are bawdy romps (those told, to her astonishment, by the papery aunt with unblushing verve) and poems and riddles and impossible romances. Stories wind themselves inside other stories. Sometimes a tale is held up for nights while a character within it begins on another at such length that she forgets the first. There are ghouls and sorcerers and magicians and scoundrels. There are kings and princesses and supernatural creatures called jinns, who can be good or evil, just like humans, and which she is particularly glad not to have to explain to Ólafur. The jinns are supposed to live in an unseen world beyond this one, of which Ásta feels she has some experience.
Lately Husna has been enthralling the harem with a character called Scheherazade, who volunteers to spend the night with a murderous king called Shahryar. Ásta floundered for several nights before feeling in command of this plot. Betrayed by his wife, Shahryar has decided to lie each night with a different virgin (a word that caused Flower some difficulty) and to kill her the next morning before she has a chance to dishonour him (more puzzling circumlocutions from Flower). The slaughter goes on for some time, until the chief adviser eventually runs out of virgins to send to the king.
Really, the stories her father worried about Ásta hearing at Mosfell seem decidedly tame these days.
Now the adviser’s own daughter, Scheherazade, offers herself as the next bride. She has a plan. She has studied all sorts of books and histories and memorised every kind of story. She enters the king’s bedchamber and offers to tell him one. Shahryar settles down to listen and becomes so engrossed that when Scheherazade stops before the end of the tale, he graciously announces that she can stay alive for one more night and finish it next time. Off she goes. The next night she brings that story to an end but starts another, which – here is the genius – she also leaves at an exciting point, thus earning herself another stay of execution. And so it goes on, as Flower whispers, for one thousand and one nights in all.
Well, may it please God that Ásta is not around to hear the end of this one. The loss could, she feels, be borne. Husna does make a compelling Scheherazade, though. She knows just when to stop a story and make her audience beg for more.
But even a tale from the lips of Scheherazade herself would struggle to hold Ásta’s attention this evening. Especially now that the sun is beginning to dip to the sea and the light is turning to gold. She gets up and makes for the staircase. Alim
ah watches her go with a long stare, impossible to see behind, and the curling of a shapely eyebrow.
Outside the door Ásta smoothes her hair back nervously, realises what she is doing and runs her fingers through it from the back instead, returning it to what Helga once described as seeded grass. Appalled to think she almost preened for this man, she knocks on his door.
The chamber is glowing with the last of the evening sun and the expensive wall ceramics facing the window are ablaze. Mellow light is flooding the mattress of golden yellow satin that dominates the room.
At the foot of this mattress Cilleby, in a long cream kaftan, is sitting with his legs crossed, having second thoughts. What was he thinking of? The woman looks like a beggar. Is there a chance – he prickles slightly – that she has messed her hair like that deliberately?
Ásta, standing just inside the door and determined not to look at his face, is concentrating on his hands. They are clean and slim, rather lighter of skin than she has noticed before, with neatly pared fingernails. There is a whiff of rosewater in the air.
Cilleby beckons her forward with a jerk of his chin and she drags her feet in his direction like a naughty child. She has an image of standing before her father in a similarly reluctant pose the day she pulled six feathers off the cockerel. And suddenly she wants to laugh. It’s nerves, of course, but the tiniest snort does escape her, and this only makes her worse. Gaily she adjusts her gaze upwards. All of this – the satin quilt, the rosewater, the man with the shapely nails and polished head in an embroidered dress like a woman’s – all of it is ridiculous. Look at me, she feels like saying. I am Ásta Thorsteinsdóttir from Iceland. I’m a mother of four with freckles and I ought to be getting home.
Cilleby holds his gaze to a point around her knees. This was definitely a mistake. When she piqued his attention in the harem, coolly studying him from the other side of the room as if she had the right to look, she was not chuckling to herself and snorting like a madwoman. Could she be deranged? Alimah has never suggested she is mad. The worst seamstress he could have brought home if he had trawled the slave-markets for a year, but not mad.
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