The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  Ásta stalks to the door, shaken but holding her chin high. Differences so profound and visceral cannot be swept under a pleasant conversational rug the way Ólafur managed so handily with the captain. Still seething, she bursts into the roof garden in the middle of a story by the papery aunt and flings herself to the ground beside Marta, ignoring the curious glances. She is well aware of having overstepped a boundary with Cilleby, but she is not, she is emphatically not, going to allow herself to regret it. She cannot be true to the people she has loved – to Kristín, her uncle Jón, Margrét in her chains, Ólafur driven from his family, her precious, lost Egill – by staying silent. She cannot.

  Marta lays a cool hand on her arm.

  20

  The balmy spring day is a good time to escape. The wives, gorgeously arrayed and teetering under golden headdresses it has taken Ásta hours to secure, have been despatched to a wedding. Cilleby has been silent for months and the effort not to regret that has proved rather more taxing than she expected. But today her thoughts are only on Egill. And on what she has learned from Anna.

  By late afternoon a breeze is sneaking through the streets. She lets the door latch itself behind her and hurries off in full white-bird regalia towards the pasha’s palace.

  Anna has spoiled everything. The red apple, the black horse, the happily occupied boy – all the elements of a story painstakingly constructed to fend off the agony of not knowing – have been torn down and smashed, and she is left defenceless.

  For Anna’s husband has been telling her what he should not.

  ‘Such horrors as I’ve heard, Ásta,’ she blurted, barely pausing to unpin her veil. ‘You won’t guess what those powerful men like the pasha and the wealthier Turks do with the pretty European boys here. Well, it’s got nothing to do with wealth really, I suppose. Between you and me, I didn’t even know it was possible.’

  Anna rarely thinks before she speaks. And as one who guards her own tongue less tightly than is wise, Ásta has never been inclined to blame her. But at those words she felt as if Anna had pushed her off a cliff. The low white walls of the roof garden span and every wisp of breath was sucked from her lungs.

  Anna was immediately ashamed. After so many years in Algiers she rarely gives a thought to her old life. It is an effort sometimes to remember how unhappy Ásta still is or that she ever had another son.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, her limpid eyes filling with tears. Her husband’s stories had genuinely horrified her. ‘There is nothing to say that Egill is one of these boys. Nothing at all. It’s just the stories men tell.’

  Today Ásta winds her way down through the city with a new pulse of panic. She knows too much; she doesn’t know enough. The knowledge that is not knowledge but might be is clawing at her insides. She takes up her usual position on the other side of the street from the pasha’s palace, hugging the corner shadows as she prepares to watch and wait. But as the hours pass there is nothing to see beyond the occasional janissary guard swaggering in or out. Where, then, can she try next? Where has she not looked? Instead of turning back for home she decides to walk further down the hill, around the back of the empty slave-market and on towards the seafront.

  In the gathering dusk the harbour is a dim forest of gently swaying masts. The fishmarket by the quayside is silent. With a swoop of optimism it occurs to Ásta that she has never yet approached a fisherman about Egill. What could be more likely than that the pasha sends him to seek out the tastiest fish in the ocean for his plate, or that he has been sold on to help the owner of one of these sleeping smacks to bring in the catch? Egill would be good at it. Think how agile he is and quick to learn, how the sea runs in his blood. Why has she not considered this before? She should have been pacing the fishmarket. She should have been asking around the alleys on the other side of the mole. Can it be that she has allowed the memory of the last time she was this far down the city to constrain her: the boat nosing out of the waterfront villa, the chill sensation of being wrapped to the eyes but utterly exposed? With the light dwindling it would be well-nigh impossible for anyone at sea to make her out this time. And there is hardly a thing to be seen on the water in that direction in any case, except for a flaring of lights much further out.

  A small crowd has gathered nearby to watch this vessel, whatever it is, drawing closer. Among them she recognises the skinny bare legs and threadbare tunic of the wiry man who drove Ólafur’s group around the slave-market with a stick all those years ago. She also notices, with a faint prickling of alarm, that there are no women in this crowd. Clearly this is not the time to be asking strangers if they have seen a reddish-haired lad. She will come earlier in the day next time.

  She turns to make her way back. Behind her, a figure detaches itself from the crowd.

  Ásta has heard of people fainting with shock. Margrét used to claim, improbably for a woman of her stern constitution, that she had fainted clean away on discovering that a sock knitted by Ásta actually fitted one of the children. But she has never, until this moment when an unseen hand grabs her arm from behind, had the slightest sensation of collapsing herself. As her head swims and the world whirls around her, it is only the man’s implacable grip that holds her upright. That and the Icelandic voice.

  ‘Ásta. It’s Ásta, isn’t it?’

  He is big and wide-shouldered, with a flamboyant turban covering a head that she remembers thatched with fair hair. The face has coarsened. Difficult to say how at first glance, but he looks harder around the eyes. Perhaps it is only age. He must be twenty now at least, although his blond beard is still serving an earnest apprenticeship. He has a look of his father. If she were to imagine a young, muscular Jón Thorsteinsson, burnt brown and swinging with weapons, he would be something like this.

  ‘Jón Jónsson,’ she says delightedly, recovering at once. ‘How did you recognise me?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure at first, but you don’t see many Algerine women with fair hair peeping out of their niqab. It made me look twice. Then I thought I knew your eyes.’ He laughs – a big, hearty sound that reminds her so exactly of her uncle that she has to stop herself flinging her arms around him in the middle of the quayside. ‘If you remember, we spent that voyage squeezed very close.’

  ‘But what are you doing now? Why are you here tonight? Have you news of your mother?’

  The questions stream so fast that he laughs again. ‘Come over here and we’ll watch this barge coming in and I’ll tell you everything.’

  As the lights on the water draw nearer, Ásta can make out a flat-bottomed vessel manned by several oarsmen, with a figure reclining in the centre on what could pass for a throne. Even for this garish land the man is dressed to dazzle. His turban is even more ostentatious than the pasha’s, both in width and in the size of the inset jewels, each one big as a gull’s egg. His damson cloak is so fabulously adorned with gold, shimmering and flaring in the torchlight, that Ásta (ever grateful for the modesty of Cilleby’s sartorial tastes) spares a thought for the seamstresses. The oars drip silver as they rise from the water, and plunge and rise, so that the barge drifts in under the darkening sky like a floating palace, all a-glitter. Smiling and waving to the waiting crowd, the man on the throne looks as if he could not be more delighted to be here. In the light of the flaming torches his huge beard seems to burn with real gold. He looks – there is no other way to describe him – magnificent.

  ‘Who in the world is that?’

  ‘Murat Reis,’ breathes the young man at her side, with a reverence his father reserved for the creator of the universe. ‘The finest admiral in the world. The man I work for.’

  Ghastly in the torch-shadow, the admirers on the quayside cluster around the burnished barge to pay court to the pirate chief of all the Barbary. A trumpeter offers a celebratory blast or two from the prow, upon the conclusion of which the former Jan Janszoon leaps to his feet, to the alarm of his oarsmen, and launches into a regal speech with much waving of his gold-clad arms.

  Ásta pa
ys the performance little heed. ‘So you’re a corsair now?’ she says dully. How many more shocks is life going to bring?

  ‘Yes,’ he says, without a trace of embarrassment. ‘I learned my trade on the galleys and I captain a ship of my own now. I follow that man there. These days they call me Jón Westman, after our islands. I like the name, don’t you?’

  Ásta tries to keep her voice casual. ‘Follow him where, Jón?’

  ‘Oh, all over the place. Sometimes carrying freight to the eastern provinces – rugs, linen, animal hides and the like – and sometimes on, um, coastal raids.’

  He pauses at the edge of difficult waters. A burst of cheering reaches them from the barge. She can no longer disguise her anger.

  ‘Your father was murdered in a raid commanded by that man. And who knows how many other fathers, and mothers too. What were you thinking of?’

  The air between them quivers with hostility.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Ásta,’ he says coldly, ‘Murat Reis had nothing personally to do with the death of my father. The man who did is not someone I admire. But I won’t pretend the admiral is other than he is, and I also won’t stand here and tell you I regret the turn my own life took when I was brought here. What would I have been doing at home? Catching fish for Danish merchants to profit from? Hanging on a rope for a paltry egg? Freezing for half the year? Never seeing a tomato or a grape or a spice or so much as a grain of corn to eat with our endless bloody puffin meat?’

  ‘And I suppose you’re a Muslim now?’

  ‘I am. It was necessary.’

  ‘Necessary?’ She could slap him for his smugness. ‘How cheap did you sell the faith your father died for, then?’ His eyes, piercingly blue in his sunburnt face, regard her icily. ‘How could you, Jón? What would your mother say?’

  He brings his face very close. It smells of musk. ‘Let me tell you, Ásta, since you’re so keen to preach to me about my family, exactly what my mother did say.’

  ‘Margrét? You’ve seen Margrét?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she said thank you.’

  ‘Thank you! Thank you for sailing off to abduct other people from their homes? Thank you, dear son, for putting others in fetters like mine? I don’t think so, Jón.’

  He looks now as if he would like to shake her. But there is pain as well as anger in the tightening of his eyes, and he won’t speak. She says at last, ‘I’m sorry. Tell me about your mother.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell.’ He steps back from her and looks away, past the burnished barge and out into the dark. ‘Perhaps you would find it useful to know that slaving on the galleys is the worst job on earth. Chained to your seat so you have to row for hour after hour, sometimes in your own mess. Your back flayed by the whip till it’s nothing but blood and torn flesh. Your shoulders scorched by the sun. Your stomach aching for food. Your head screaming for shelter. I spent every second plotting how I would get away. I suppose my father would have died at that oar with a prayer on his lips: it’s the kind of man he was and we both honour him for it. But in circumstances you haven’t asked to be in, is it better to perish nobly at the oar or talk your way to the helm? That is what I asked myself.

  ‘So I made myself indispensable. Strong, tough, full of ideas, good at navigation, skilled in getting men to do what he wants – that’s Jón Westman. Before long I was being trusted to command others. I converted to the faith that would let me operate as a free man and then offered myself as a corsair. That way I could set about earning the money to ransom my mother.’

  ‘Margrét is free?’ It is Ásta’s turn to clutch his arm.

  ‘She was.’ His bark of a laugh is wholly without mirth. ‘For about a week. I took her to live with me but she was too damaged. She was always so tiny. My father used to say she could have fitted inside her own thimble.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘But when I found her, she was nothing. Nothing, Ásta. I carried her home easier than a sack of feathers. The weals from the chains were livid and weeping. I brought a woman to wash her and a doctor to dress her wounds. I had the softest lamb stew made for her, with zucchini in, and ripe tomatoes, and tiny onions, and I softened the couscous myself in milk. I tried to get her to sup from my hand, because every one of her teeth had been beaten out of her long before and she couldn’t chew, nor tolerate a spoon. And I stroked her hair, which was nearly all gone, and spoke Icelandic to her, and tried to think of stories from my childhood that would bring her comfort. Day and night I rocked her in my arms. But she was too hurt. She couldn’t survive being happy.’

  The trumpet has begun again, singing over the water. Jón turns further so that his eyes are hidden. She gazes at his back. She cannot speak.

  ‘And do you know all she ever said, that whole week? Do you want to know, Ásta?’ Still he will not look at her. ‘All my mother said to me was “Takk, my love”.’

  The streets are dark as she turns to make her way back. Jón Jónsson offers to accompany her home, but she can see he is done with talking and his attention is on the barge. It seems the refulgent Murat Reis is not disembarking here but, having received the obeisance of the people, is to be rowed to the sea-captain villas, one of which belongs to him. Jón means to meet him there.

  ‘It is kind of you, but I’m used to walking alone. I even know my way these days,’ she says, trying to strike a lighter note.

  He nods her a curt farewell, and she walks quickly away, her thoughts in disarray. She is sick to hear of Margrét’s end and dazed by the son’s actions. How is she to look at this? Is there no judgement to be reached with ease any longer? Suppose she were to have the chance of freeing Egill into her own ravenous arms, would she not be tempted to capture a whole village herself to pay for it? Would she not utter any vow to make it happen, pausing only to append to her conscience a small note that repentance could be settled later, as she has no doubt Margrét’s son has done?

  She scurries along the street leading away from the mole, wishing she could ask Ólafur what he thinks and at the same time treacherously glad she can’t, because does she not know already? It is as if a crack has been opening in the ground before her, one of those ancient clefts in Iceland’s lava. Cilleby has done his share of enlarging it, Anna too, and the children with their innocent prayers. And here now is Jón Westman, the Icelandic corsair whose father was eaten by flies. Little starred flowers grow inside a cleft like this, and moss smoothes the hardest edges, but the crack is growing and tonight the sides feel too far apart for one woman to bestride.

  Ásta turns a corner and puts a foot on the first of a bank of steps leading up to the steeper part of the city. The sandalled tread behind her makes no sound. The voice that tells her to be silent or this knife will be inserted into her neck does not come from Iceland.

  21

  ‘I’ve got her, Captain,’ says the thin-legged man, poking his face around the door. ‘Found her outside by herself again, down watching the return of Murat Reis.’

  ‘Prick,’ the captain grumbles, wiping olive oil from his lips with the back of his hand and waving for the plates to be collected. ‘No, not you, Zafir. Bring her in. And make sure you remove the swaddling clothes. I want to see what you’ve brought me.’

  Fleming heaves himself to his feet. A decent-sized table and chair will be at the top of his list when he gets to Rotterdam. The door opens again and a woman is thrust in.

  Ásta finds herself in a severely furnished room lit by a couple of smoking bronze lamps. She takes in – just enough to recall them for the rest of her life – the mattress of blankets overlaid by a green coverlet, the low table from which one of the lamps is flinging a hulking shadow on the bare wall opposite, the high, dark window through which the faint lapping of water can be heard.

  Or perhaps it is only later that she will notice the sound of the water. When the subdued swishing of the waves on the other side of the wall takes her mind to the islands at home and she begins to
count.

  The chill that began at her neck is frosting its way down her spine. She knew it would be him. Knew as soon as she saw which of the sea-villas she was being pressed into.

  ‘Why have I been brought here?’

  She hears the tremble in her voice and despises herself for it, because there he goes, smiling to hear it too. There are traces of oil in his moustache, a scab gleaming on his scalp. His eyes look unwontedly dark in the light cast upwards from the lamp. His tongue is still moistening those dry lips.

  ‘Oh, I think you know that.’

  He begins to unwind his sash, in which there are tonight no weapons. Fear is thudding in her ears but she feels curiously detached, too, and able to think. Marta and Jón need her, and Egill will too when he is found. That means she can either resist and perish, or she can try to preserve for them a mother. Afterwards she will wonder at how obvious, as the interminable scarlet sash unwound, this choice appeared to her. By that time she will be drowning in shame. Shame that she allowed herself to be pushed to her knees before him. Shame that she looked straight up at his face when he commanded it. Shame that she did not bite with all her strength, as Margrét would have done.

  ‘That’s right,’ he grunts. ‘Fuck me, that’s good.’

  Those eyes, staring into his very soul. He could look at them until his dying day. Which, as it happens, he does.

  It is recorded in the minutes of the ruling council, sitting in its judicial capacity as a court, that on the night in question the slave-woman A. Th. was brought home by her kinsman, the Algerine corsair Captain Jon Westman. He gave evidence that he had found her wandering near Captain Wahid Fleming’s house in a confused and unbecoming manner, without the proper outdoor apparel. He had spent the evening with his employer, the honoured admiral Murat Reis, and they had heard no sign of disturbance from the neighbouring villa. He testified that, although the woman was dishevelled and appeared lost, there was nothing about her demeanour to suggest she had murdered anyone, nor could he imagine such a thing, as she was a slight woman and Captain Fleming had been a most powerful man. On returning the slave-woman to her home, he had informed her owner, Ali Pitterling Cilleby, an esteemed member of this council, of the circumstances in which he had found her.