The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  ‘I wish to lie with you,’ he says, patting the bed, thinking, Do I?

  Ásta notes again how formal the common tongue sounds on his lips. It gives the words a politeness he may not intend. She does not move.

  His eyes flicker to her face and then swiftly down again. ‘Pray come here.’

  Ásta takes a careful breath. ‘I have a husband,’ she says slowly, anxious to speak the words correctly and make her meaning clear. ‘I do not lie with other men.’

  ‘It is of no concern to me how many husbands you have. I—’

  ‘Just the one.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said I have only one husband. And you have two wives, sir.’ She was not sure if ‘sir’ was quite appropriate, but thought a signor would do no harm. ‘What do you want with the wife of another?’

  ‘Ásta – that is your name, I believe – you must know it is permitted in law for me to have four wives and as many concubines as I wish.’ Cilleby has an uneasy sense of being drawn into an explanation he is under no obligation to give. One day he will look back on this as the beginning. ‘Do you know what a concubine is?’

  Ásta has not met the word in this language, but can guess. ‘I believe there was one in the Laxdaela saga. She was the daughter of the King of Ireland. A slave, like me.’

  She sees it. She catches the exact moment that interest kindles in his eye and he forgets to look at her knees.

  ‘Sit down, would you,’ he says, less harshly than he meant to.

  She takes a couple of steps backwards and sinks to the floor on the furthest extremity of a lavish rug, clasping her hands coyly. Strange to admit, she is almost enjoying this. There is the same bubbling of excitement, impossible to distinguish from fear, that used to come upon her in Mosfell as she picked her way, stone by slippery stone, across the river when it was wild in spate. It was truly terrifying. She could fall at any moment and expect no mercy from the foaming water horses, but she had never felt more alive and on her mettle.

  He is openly studying her face now, so she studies his: the shaven head and haughty nose; the black hair trained downwards from his lip to meet a neatly clipped beard running under his chin and up to his ears. She marks with grudging approval the absence of the more twiddling kind of moustaches that always make her think of the captain. His most marked feature is a pair of thick black brows that overhang his eyes like a gannet ledge and make him look fierce.

  ‘It is my understanding,’ she says, feeling it time to take the initiative, ‘that I was not purchased as a concubine.’

  ‘No, you were not.’ There, he has done it again – justifying himself when there is no need. He has a sense of having been carried up the beach on an unexpected wave.

  She catches the hesitation and waits. Really, a whole family of gannets could nest in those eyebrows.

  ‘What is that word?’

  ‘Which word?’

  ‘Saga.’

  ‘It’s a story. Just an Icelandic word for a story. Would you like me to tell you one?’

  He stares again. Then he shakes his head, as if batting off an irritating fly, and to her astonishment lets out a rumble of laughter. ‘Who do you think you are, woman? Scheherazade?’ He folds his arms. ‘I’m right, am I not? You’ve been listening to Husna.’

  She can’t think what to say. Is this a crime?

  ‘Persian nonsense. Pay no attention. There are better stories by far.’

  ‘Indeed there are. And it’s Icelanders who tell them.’

  A light collision of brows. He is beginning to look annoyed. Ásta is afraid the novelty of having a slave-woman answer back might be wearing thin. As indeed it is. This game, he is thinking, is going too far.

  ‘Look, signor,’ she says quietly, ‘you have left me in peace thus far. Why have you called for me now? You know my husband has gone for a ransom.’

  ‘Well now, that is precisely the point.’ Cilleby relaxes. The wave has retreated and he is on firm sand again. ‘I see no ransom. Three years since your husband was sent for it, free pass and all, and I have received no word from Denmark, not one. This is not a business for impatient men, but I would have expected an approach by now. Three years is a long time to wait, you must agree.’

  Oh, she agrees. With that she can certainly agree. She closes her eyes for a moment. Her hands are damp. Cilleby presses home his advantage.

  ‘In fact, one might conclude that either your husband or your king has forgotten you.’

  ‘My husband has not forgotten me.’

  ‘And your king? Whose wars, I may inform you, are long over.’

  Ásta knows nothing about any wars. And anything she has heard of the king came, unhelpfully, from Oddrún Pálsdóttir.

  ‘My king …’ She fights to steady her voice. He is watching her carefully. ‘My king must do as he sees fit. But I will not lie with you.’

  He glares at her. ‘You will do exactly as I command. I paid a great deal of money for you and your children. You sit there in my harem, looking at me as you should not, while I am expected to receive nothing back from my investment?’

  She lifts her chin high and glares back. ‘If I have ever looked at you’ – she is furious to feel herself blushing – ‘it’s only that I am ignorant of the customs of this land and curious. It will not happen again.’

  They eye each other balefully. Cilleby is wondering when he was last challenged so cheekily in his own house and why it is not bothering him as much as it should. Making up his mind, he returns his gaze to a point near her feet.

  ‘I will give the king more time,’ he says, and waves her out with a resigned hand.

  Anna’s hand flies to her mouth.

  ‘Ásta mín, you have such nerve. He could have taken you in a second and had you killed afterwards for impudence. I hear such things of the Turks. Though of course’ – she looks thoughtful – ‘he is a Moor, of sorts, and they’re more interesting. But a man is a man, and the wealthy ones can get away with anything in this city.’

  Ásta picks in a desultory way at her sewing and lets the younger woman chatter on. Anna’s lustrous eyes in their kohl frame are full of shine and vim. She tears into gossip like a juicy fruit.

  ‘But then, he has plenty of others to pleasure him, if he so chooses. In fact, Ásta mín, I know you won’t mind my saying that it’s difficult to see quite why he wanted to add you to them.’

  ‘You mean because I have no art to make my eyes into windows like yours,’ Ásta snaps, feeling needled, and at once annoyed that she should.

  Anna touches a finger to an artfully shaped brow. ‘Well, it’s a comparison any man might make. You should be glad of it, Ásta. It may protect you yet.’

  17

  When the next summons comes, Cilleby is awaiting her not on the gold mattress but at a square table so low it is practically sweeping the floor. He is also wearing more clothes. Trousers under the tunic at least, which is encouraging. Smiling thinly at her relief, he waves her over.

  Through the lattice window above them the muezzin at the mosque on the corner can be heard calling the faithful to prayer. Inclining her head that way, Ásta raises an enquiring eyebrow. The impudence of the look takes them both by surprise. Ásta can hardly believe she has done it: if Helga had made a face like that, she would have issued a stern reprimand for cheek. And Cilleby might have done the same if he had not instead heard himself muttering, ‘I’ve prayed already,’ and been aghast to realise he had just explained himself again.

  So it is possible, Ásta reflects, to discomfit him. And without even trying.

  Since the formalities of the below-chin gaze seem to have been abandoned on this occasion and they are a mere table’s width apart, Ásta has the opportunity to study his eyes. They are a very dark blue. How strange. Even serving coffee in the harem, a role to which she has lately been promoted, she has never noticed this. Well, how could she? She has counted the black hairs on the hand curled around the beaker but not once raised her gaze. Really, though – a
blue-eyed Moor. Extraordinary. Perhaps she is gaping a little, because it is his turn to raise a fulsome eyebrow. With as little design as he a moment before, she bursts out, ‘But your eyes are blue.’

  ‘My father,’ he says shortly. How in the world have they advanced to a footing where a slave-woman feels free to comment on his appearance?

  Yet there is something in Ásta’s capacity to surprise him that Cilleby is once again finding indefinably exhilarating. It is as if the floor has shifted a fraction and he might at any moment find himself flying. Inspecting his motives (not a skill in which Cilleby is practised), he wonders if this is precisely the reason he has summoned her back at all, on the pretext of hearing a saga. A saga. What interest does he have in stories from a country nobody had even heard of before Murat Reis had his great idea? No interest at all. More interest than he could ever have imagined.

  Cilleby inspects his perfectly manicured nails and says politely, ‘Tell me this story of yours about the concubine.’ Then he lights his pipe and sits back in a haze of smoke to listen.

  So she tells him about fifteen-year-old Melkorka in the saga of the Laxdaela folk. She was the daughter of the King of Ireland, captured from her home and carried north by an Icelander who made her his concubine. The baby she gave birth to became known as Ólafur the Peacock – and would later (Ásta feels compelled to mention) become the father of Kjartan Ólafsson, the most handsome man in Iceland.

  ‘And how handsome was that?’

  ‘Oh, very.’ She is a girl again at her father’s knee. ‘He had beautiful eyes, as the saga tells, and his hair was long and curly and fine as silk. He was a good swimmer, too.’

  ‘So did Icelanders make a habit of sailing off to wrest maidens from foreign shores?’ he asks smoothly.

  She looks at him suspiciously.

  ‘And when this Peacock fellow arrived in Ireland to visit his grandfather the king – have I got this right? – in the terrifying longships you have described for me so vividly, with their shields overlapping all round the sides and a spearhead jutting out from below every rim (I think that’s what you said), how did the Irish feel about it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I merely wondered.’

  How dare he question her sagas? ‘I don’t recall any saga-teller making mention of what the Irish thought. I believe they, er, fell back at once, or something like that.’

  Gracious, she has never thought about this. She can see exactly what he is driving at, but there is no way this man is going to be allowed to claim the moral high ground for the slavemasters of Algiers and their filthy trade.

  ‘I dare say not everything in Iceland’s past was conducted as it ought to have been,’ she says, wishing she knew more about it, ‘but I was only telling a story, as you asked.’

  ‘I thought so,’ he says, with irritating mildness, enjoying her confusion.

  ‘And really it’s a very long saga and there is too much to tell you tonight anyway.’ She is now the one feeling discomposed and wondering how it happened. ‘If you are of a mind to let me depart, I could tell you more next time.’

  At that, Cilleby puts both hands on the table and roars with laughter. ‘Ásta, you really do think you are Scheherazade.’

  ‘Well, perhaps just a little.’ This is a good idea: she has sagas to last till the coming of the Lord’s kingdom, never mind the arrival of a ransom. ‘As long as you are not Shahryar and plan an execution in the morning.’

  ‘I will not execute you, Ásta, daughter of Iceland and descendent of slave-owners,’ he says, looking at her very straight and thinking that he might on the other hand do something else, yet to be decided. ‘We will talk more.’

  18

  The seasons turn and return without any sign of a ransom. As the years pass Ásta comes to appreciate them in an exact reversal of the way she used to. She longs not for spring but for the autumns that herald an end to the onslaught of the sun and the hot wind blowing fine Sahara sand into eyes and ears and over every unprotected surface of the house. She relishes the winter rains when they cascade down through the house, freshening the air and draining from the courtyard into the reservoir below to replenish their underground water supply. She loves – yes, she may in truth say she has come to love this – to look over the jumbled rooftops after a night of warm rain to the scaly palm tree that rises tall and straight from the square below and see the tasselled leaves glistening. In January and February, the months when the sun will be losing its way back to Iceland, she sometimes places her arms on the wall facing the glassy sea and watches the dawn stealing away and forgets, quite forgets, to wish for home. She will look at the hills on either side of the city then, bright with lemon and orange groves even in the middle of winter, and forget to be angry that countrymen of hers are slaving there to harvest them. After six years in Algiers she can hear the empty cry of a gull and not be instantly transported to Ofanleiti. She can go for days without thinking of Ólafur.

  The children bring her joy. Marta is her golden-skinned shadow and sturdy Jón is still permitted to trot around the harem, although not for much longer. Soon Jón will go to live upstairs with the men, and have his head shaved, and learn to pray at the mosque. Ásta is prepared for that. It is a surprise to find she can contemplate the religious life awaiting her youngest child with, if not exactly equanimity then a less visceral horror than she would once have believed possible. Over the years she has become used to Marta’s devotions. In her most honest moments she will acknowledge, as the women kneel to chant their prayers, that there is at least as much reverence on show here as in the fidgety evening worship at Ofanleiti or Kirkjubaer or Mosfell. She has even had to scold herself for lavishing more tears on little Jón’s hair than his soul. It is the same nut-brown as Ólafur’s when they married, finer in texture than Egill’s curls and silky to stroke, and she has kissed it so often and so urgently of late that she begins to worry that she will make him as anxious about losing it as she is. But Jón is not easily made anxious. He skips away with a grin, as buoyantly different as might be imagined from Egill at six, who even then had an air of being weighed down by thinking. Jón is tall for his age, lively and light of heart, and never happier than when running errands around the house or carrying small jugs of water, precipitously balanced, from the well in the courtyard to the rooms on the second floor where the male slaves and servants dwell. This house is all the life he has known, and Ásta has observed with both relief and sadness – never quite able to separate the two – the way he has come to sense his place within it and is beginning to strain away from the women, like a flower seeking out the sun. He is proud and eager to be moving upstairs, excited that he will have his head shaved like the older boys and a job to do, and Ásta has readied her mind. She will still see him: that is what matters. She will know how he lives and whether he lives, and at her side she will still have Marta.

  At almost nine, Marta has retained the precocious composure that was unnerving when she was younger but on which Ásta more and more relies. It is not only that she will lean over and quietly point out a mistake in Ásta’s embroidery, nor that her quick hands can press pastry faster than her mother and so thin that the edges fray as they are supposed to, like lace, which Ásta’s never have. What Ásta finds so deeply restful about being with her daughter is that Marta senses her emotions with uncanny intuition. She knows when Ásta is thinking of Egill and will lay a cool hand on her arm to say, ‘Tell me again the poem that the hero Egill Skallagrímsson made about his son who died.’ And Ásta will close her eyes and say:

  A storm-bowed maple,

  I sorrow for my son,

  My boy, who has bent

  His body to earth.

  Ásta will think then of the breeze dribbling through the palm tree’s wet leaves. She will remember that the old warrior knew, all those centuries ago, that grief is not a rough stone the tides will polish in time but a storm that may abate but always returns, fiercer and angrier for the lull. And then Marta w
ill repeat after her some of the verses and Ásta will be comforted to hear them.

  ‘Tell me about our Egill,’ Marta might say next. ‘I hardly remember him.’ And Ásta will tell her about how he used to squabble with Helga, and how long and white his arms were, and how he and his friend Magnús reckoned they were the best fowlers on the island. ‘Without much evidence, I have to say,’ she will smile.

  She still looks for Egill. Whenever there is an excuse to leave the house, she is off down the winding way to the pasha’s white palace, enquiring at the stalls and vegetable markets on the way. Sometimes she has stood at the street corner opposite that faceless block for as much as an hour, boring her gaze into the studded door like a poised hawk and rehearsing the story she has trained her mind to believe.

  Egill is inside the palace, carefully writing up the regency accounts. She can see him as clearly as if she were in the room beside him. He is being rewarded with a big red apple and a kind smile from the pasha’s thick lips, which are not as repugnant as they looked from a distance but merely fat and jovial like her uncle Jón’s. Egill has made friends in the palace, and they have taught him to ride a horse as he always wanted. It’s black, a mighty steed and twice the size of Skími. He keeps the other boys awake in their room at night telling tales of his valour as a fowler, when he used to swing from thin ropes above the surging sea on an island far away. His companions’ eyes shine with admiration and his with shy pride. He looks happy. He thinks of his family sometimes (well, naturally) but really he is very happy. He has not given up his faith, even if he has had to adopt rituals in which he does not believe, because he will never forget his father’s last despairing words to him. He has forgiven his mother for not lunging towards the pasha that day and throttling him with her bare hands, and thinks only of how she loves him and how well everything has worked out, all things considered.