The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  The details of this story vary, but any version will do when she is staring at that great wooden door, willing it to open and a thin-armed boy to stroll out – tall, perhaps, like Ólafur. Yes, at seventeen he will be tall, with a straggly beard perhaps; yes, definitely a beard. And he will look across and catch sight of her, and his eyes will light up – she’ll see the light from here, so radiant and lovely it will be – and he will bound over and take her in his arms and she will crush the breath from him with hers.

  Only, she has never seen him. One day she was in time to catch the pasha himself processing up the hill to the palace, feather aloft, and was able to inspect every member of his retinue from her vantage point, but Egill was not among them. Not one word has she heard of her elder son in six years. She asked Cilleby once if he knew anything, confident enough in his company by then to hazard a hint that he might care to find out. But he only replied irritably that he could hardly be expected to know the fate of every slave in the city. He gave her a look as he said it that she found hard to read. Impenetrable expressions are the currency of their discourse, but the look made one thing clear: he does not care much for the pasha.

  Marta has begun entertaining the women with Icelandic stories in Arabic. Perhaps recognising a fellow talent, Husna invited the child one night to speak.

  ‘What shall I tell them, Mamma?’ Marta whispered, not flustered in the least by the expectant eyes upon her in the gloaming.

  ‘Tell them about the girl at the shieling who was loved by an elfman,’ Ásta whispered back, feeling there was nothing in the story that devotees of One Thousand and One Nights would not take in their stride.

  Then Marta folded her hands and in her high voice took the women to a land of lava fields and elf-mounds that she cannot remember and they delight to imagine.

  Jón has an altogether grosser taste in stories. ‘Tell me about Gunnlaugur,’ he will say when it is time to sleep. And Ásta tells him again about Gunnlaugur Adder Tongue, the Icelander who was visiting a Norwegian earl and had such a sore foot that he trailed pus over the earl’s grand floor.

  ‘Yeuch.’

  ‘In fact, his foot looked so very sore that the earl asked him why he wasn’t limping. And what did he say, our friend Gunnlaugur?’

  Jón always giggles here and pretends to be Gunnlaugur addressing the earl in a deep voice: ‘Men do not limp while their legs are the same length, sire.’

  The night before he leaves her Ásta adds on a whim. ‘If life ever becomes in the smallest way hard, Jón minn, remember Gunnlaugur.’ She keeps her voice light. ‘There might come times when you must just walk forward and make yourself forget you should be limping.’

  ‘I’ll remember, Mamma,’ he says, inspecting his legs and feet solemnly. ‘I’ve got strong legs. See.’ He hops to his feet and marches about the room until the sleepers begin to stir and she tugs him to her side for the last time.

  When he is fetched next day to go and live upstairs, Ásta refuses to be sad. Nothing, but nothing, is going to persuade her to cry about losing a child to a well-fed life only one floor above, separated by a curved staircase on which she is bound to meet him as she passes up to the roof garden or down to the kitchen, and in the courtyard too if she keeps a close watch. There are worse sorrows.

  ‘Go on with you,’ she smiles gaily, with a flick of his hair. ‘I’ll look out for you tomorrow.’

  He trots up the stairs behind the manservant, waving cheerfully before it bends out of sight. That night Ásta sobs herself to sleep.

  19

  Could it be, could it possibly be, that a man with too many women likes nothing better than to relax with a pipe and an Icelandic saga? Considering the matter, as Ásta not infrequently does, it is a challenge to think of another reason for this bemusing man’s continuing pleasure (although that hardly seems the right word, since she manages so often to annoy him) in their chaste encounters. With wives to serve twice a week by law and others besides, perhaps Cilleby finds it all exhausting at times.

  What the rest of the harem thinks of this arrangement can only be guessed. Sometimes she wonders if Alimah, watching her slip away with the usual half-smile, knows how little goes on behind the forbidden door, or if she ever asks Cilleby why this one woman always returns so early. And then Ásta wonders what he tells her, and whether they laugh about it, and how much he loves his number one wife anyway. And what kind of question is that?

  Three years or more they have been meeting whenever it suits him. Sometimes she might be required for an evening two or three weeks in succession, a demand she would gladly put down to her captivating flair for telling a story, were it not that she may then wait so many weeks to be called again that they have both forgotten where they were. She is perplexed to realise that waiting is precisely what she is doing much of the time, as if she did not have more important things to wait for, and she deeply resents every minute spent wondering when the next summons, usually by way of some insolent manservant, will arrive. Looking forward to these sporadic encounters is not, Ásta tells herself, wholly surprising in a life without event.

  She has retained her early knack of pressing Cilleby to the edge of his tolerance and he of sending her close to the precipice on which her own temper rests. Dangerously close, in fact, because her tendency to erupt is as unpredictable as Hekla’s and his power to hurt her remains a constant undercurrent of their exchanges. They are on relatively safe ground with the sagas, of which her supply remains plentiful, but it is becoming ever easier to stray.

  One evening Cilleby mentions that he is proud – proud! – of the opportunities that exist for young male slaves who have converted and proved their worth to advance in the city. He boasts that a leading official on the ruling council has taken as his personal adviser a youth who started life as a farmhand in Iceland.

  Ásta knows of this boy from Anna. His name is Jón Ásbjarnarson, an amiable, sharp-witted lad from the east fjords who kept company with Egill on the ship. Since arriving in Algiers he has risen in such favour with his master that he has been able to ransom the farmer who once employed him in Iceland.

  ‘And how does that justify you people stealing Christians from their own country to bring them here in the first place?’ she demands, infuriated by his self-satisfied air.

  ‘You people,’ he repeats mockingly. ‘Can you be so ignorant, Ásta, as to think it’s only Muslims who do this? Well, yes, I suppose you are.’

  He sighs in a heavy, obvious way that makes her teeth grate. ‘I take it you haven’t been to Trieste or Livorno, which open their markets to slaves of any colour? You haven’t heard of the Knights of Malta, who have plundered people all along our coast? The names of Marseilles, Madeira, Genoa, Gibraltar, Villefranche, Nice, Saint-Malo mean nothing to you either, I assume? You can take it from me there is hardly a Mediterranean state that doesn’t have privateers operating out of it and galleys manned by captured Muslims and Christians alike. Really, I think you can hardly blame the Algerines for learning the seamanship and construction skills to do it on a bigger scale.’

  ‘Strange to say,’ she retorts, wondering how she should make sense of all this, ‘I have not had the opportunity to see the sights of the Mediterranean. I was otherwise engaged in the hold when I crossed that particular sea.’ He listens impassively. ‘But whoever else is doing it – and don’t talk to me about the early Icelanders: that was hundreds of years ago – ruffians licensed by your state, your council, slaughtered innocent people in my country. They broke up families and carted hundreds of us off like sacks of sugar, things to be weighed and measured and kept or discarded. All to keep your houses in fountains and your wives in silk.’

  She sees her mistake at once. She has made this personal. The brows collide and she waits for the explosion. But she also sees, or thinks she does, signs of a tussle behind those eyes. (Really, the rainy blue of them never ceases to startle. Where has she seen a colour like that before? The bilberry, perhaps? The darkening sky on a clear northern ev
ening?)

  Cilleby is indeed angry. But he is also conscious of the competing impulse to justify himself that in Ásta’s company is his particular weakness.

  ‘Do you know who the Moors are?’

  ‘I know you’re one,’ she mutters gracelessly.

  ‘Well, next time I’ll tell you a story.’

  She is at Ofanleiti. Egill is swinging his legs on the wall and Ólafur is talking to him and pointing to the islands. She sees a man creeping up behind them with a curved sword and tries to shout out to warn them. But she can’t get the words out because there is another man’s hand over her mouth. She can’t breathe. She struggles and struggles to pull the hand away, until at last it begins to loosen its grip. She seizes the hand. The back of it is lightly covered with black hair. She pulls it to her lips and begins to kiss it. Over and over.

  In the morning she cannot think of the dream without nearly expiring with shame.

  ‘A long time ago,’ he begins, ‘an army of Berbers from North Africa crossed the Mediterranean and conquered Spain. They created a civilisation that would last there for more than seven centuries. It was Islamic, which is what we call the Muslim religion, but also Spanish. The people became known as Moors and their land was Al-Andalus.’

  Ásta shuffles on her side of the table. All these years and still not comfortable on the floor. He is sitting straight-backed across from her. She can smell the rosewater on his skin.

  ‘Cordoba was the capital. Jews and Christians lived under the Moors there in harmony – a measure of harmony, at least – and were able to practise their own religions. Out of this mix came a great flowering of Islamic and Jewish culture. I was taught to think of this as our golden age. Poetry blossomed, and philosophy, and medicine, and the study of numbers and the stars. Our holy Koran was translated into Latin there.’

  Latin. Perhaps she can read this book one day and learn from it what her children are being trained to believe.

  ‘But the Christian kingdoms of Europe would not rest until we were gone. The Moors were expelled from Spain, and the Jews too. The last order to convert or depart came little more than twenty years ago. Over that time many hundreds of thousands of my people had to flee their homes. Some trekked across the mountains into France, and others poured back to the lands from which their Berber ancestors had first set sail all those centuries ago.

  ‘My ancestors came to Algiers as refugees with nothing but their skills of hand and brain. They made silver jewellery. They found ways of leading water from the mountain streams straight into their houses, and from there they looked back across the sea and remembered their fertile lands in Granada, and the gardens there, beautiful gardens, with fragrance all year round and carved arches and the most lovely fountains.’

  Ásta, lost in the imagining of it, bristles to attention. The cheek of him to look wistful and drop his voice for some Spanish idyll he has never seen. Has this man not considered that his slaves do exactly the same from his own rooftops?

  ‘My father came from another place altogether. He was not a Moor.’

  ‘So I see,’ Ásta murmurs, hoping this sounds worldly and flippant. Is this how a son of Egill might look one day, betraying his migrant stock with every blue glance? Egill, Egill, where are you?

  ‘Am I boring you, Ásta?’

  The evening shadows are beginning to soften the room, muting the wanton vibrancy of the bed, dulling the ceramic orange flowers fringed with trailing green leaves that frame the window. The air from outside is cool.

  ‘Pray continue. Where did your father come from?’

  ‘Here is a clue.’ He leaps to his feet with a fluid unfurling of legs, an agile ascent from the floor that she can only admire, not having mastered it herself. On the other side of the room he taps a wall tiled to the height of his waist with pictures quite different from the blooming squares around the window. She has never paid these blue ships sailing across the far wall much heed. Now she sees that some lie placidly under a single sail; others are galleons, carried along with fluttering banners on stormy blue waves.

  ‘My father brought these to the house. They were made in Holland in the Chinese style, Utrecht or Delft or some such place. I never learned whether he traded for them in Amsterdam or took them on the seas as booty, but he used to arrive home with more tiles than one mule could carry up the hill, until my mother had to point out that many of them had human figures in them, men on horseback or children playing, and could under no circumstances be displayed in an Islamic house. I suppose my father liked them because they had something of his old life in them, and he never was quite secure about what he might or might not be permitted to do as a Muslim. These lonely ships here have no people within them, so my mother relented.’

  He runs an elegant finger along his blue and white fleet.

  ‘So your father was a Dutchman?’

  ‘He was. Johann Pitterling was his name.’ Cilleby strolls back to the table and picks up his pipe. ‘He was raised in the same seaport of Haarlem as the famous corsair admiral Murat Reis. You have heard of him?’

  Of course she has heard of him. Does this obtuse man think she has forgotten who commanded the raid on Iceland?

  ‘His name was Jan Janszoon, was it not?’ she says coldly.

  ‘Indeed,’ he replies, oblivious or pretending to be.

  He really is insufferable.

  ‘My father was older than Janszoon, but they both took a path open to lively boys from poor families. They went to sea and were licensed as privateers by the Dutch government, which was fighting to become independent of the King of Spain. My father was busy ambushing a Spanish vessel for the loot it had itself stolen from the Americas, when he was captured by corsairs from Algiers. Just as happened to Janszoon later on. My father came to the conclusion quite quickly that it was no worse a fate for a Protestant Hollander to be captured by Algerine Muslims than by Spanish papists. He was soon back at sea on the other side.’

  ‘And how did such a principled Christian manage to turn around his faith so easily?’

  Caught up in his story, Cilleby ignores the sarcasm, which is annoying.

  ‘I wasn’t there at the time, obviously, but it never struck me that he had felt much enthusiasm one way or another. He used to say there was much that was similar to Christianity in the Muslim faith, much that was not and much that confused him either way. He took the view that it was power and greed and, often as not, revenge that drove men to fight in the name of making other men believe exactly as they did.

  ‘It was my mother who was the truly religious one. My father did enough to court and marry her correctly, but she is the one who brought me up to honour the traditions of the Moors and the laws of Islam and to eschew the renegade preening that goes on in this city. She died when I was still a boy and it pains me how little I remember of her, except her beauty.’ He smiles, looking past her. ‘Perhaps a boy always remembers his mother as beautiful.’

  Is that how Egill remembers her? Does he think of her face? What scenes does he see?

  ‘I care for her two older sisters, as you know, and beautiful is not how I would describe either of them, so perhaps I delude myself. But I do know I was happy. My father was often at sea, but we wanted for nothing, and he would make my mother laugh with the presents he brought her. He kept producing golden slippers that never once fitted her.’

  He trails off. Ásta too is somewhere else. She sees this Johann Pitterling playing as a boy among the ropes on the quayside at Haarlem and then sailing off to bequeath his Dutch eyes to the man who now holds her and her children in bondage. And then she sees that other boy of Haarlem, Jan Janszoon, also dreaming of going to sea to fight the Spanish. She imagines him being captured and led to Algiers, then turning his fate around to become such a great admiral that one day he will lead a fleet of ships all the way to Iceland. Here, then, is a question. If her family is in this place now by the will of the Almighty, must she suppose that God personally agitated the minds of kings to fight on the
high seas and entice those Dutch boys to a life of piracy? Could he not have arranged for both of them to go and work in an Amsterdam counting house and leave her country in peace? Or was it all, as her uncle Jón believed, a divinely inspired plot, long in the hatching, to punish Icelanders for their sins?

  For a while they are both quiet. Ásta, who has never learned when silence might serve her better, is the first to speak.

  ‘But don’t you blush with shame that your father’s wealth, and your own riches, come from capturing your fellow men and enslaving them? It cannot be right to treat people like that.’

  Cilleby removes his gaze from the window and turns to her with one of his most louring scowls.

  ‘I have told you before, Ásta, that this is done the world over. There are some who believe themselves on a religious jihad to wreak revenge upon Christendom for the way it has treated Muslims in Spain and elsewhere, but for me, I can assure you, it is purely business. My father left me good things, as any father will if he can, and I have built on them. I have broken no law of this city and treated nobody in my possession in a way that would cause my mother to be ashamed of me.’

  She could scream. ‘Don’t you see? If it wasn’t for men like you buying us, there would be no trade at all.’ Seething with frustration, she realises too late that she is shouting. ‘You think yourself a good Muslim, but you’re no better than a thief.’

  She knows she has gone too far. You hear the thunder coming and the sky is suddenly crackling with danger. His hand rises and she flinches. Then it comes crashing down so hard that the table bounces.

  ‘Get out,’ he says, very slow and breathing hard. ‘Get out this minute.’