The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  ‘Listen, my friend.’ He speaks slowly and carefully but Gísli does not miss the quaver. ‘We cannot know what has happened to our compatriots over so many years. We have no idea how many have abandoned their faith or how many have died. But I do know that there will still be some calling out to us for liberation. It is our duty – our godly duty – to try and save them.’

  He flings himself on to the nearest empty bed and begins to peel off his trousers. ‘You must do as you see fit, but Bishop Thorlákur is right and I believe we must take our lead from him. I can assure you that the people of the Westman Islands will contribute what they can from the little they yet have.’

  His voice has steadied in the course of this speech. He drops his wet trousers on the floor and shoots his superior a rebellious look. ‘I warn you that I won’t rest until we’ve done it, Gísli, whether you approve it officially or not.’

  He is asleep five minutes later. Gísli Oddsson sits watching him awhile in a storm of thinking. As bishop he should not allow his decisions to be swayed by one man’s emotions. He has those at home to think about, and the wider health of society if people return to infect it with ungodly heresies. Ólafur clearly has no intention of giving this a moment’s thought, but he himself must.

  Nevertheless he is moved by his friend’s tormented passion. Some time later, when the Bishop of Skálholt decides to set aside his misgivings and tacitly sanction fundraising in the south, it is Ólafur’s gaunt face, reignited with hope and determination, that Gísli Oddsson will have before him.

  On the ride back to the coast from Skálholt Ólafur is brimming with plans. He will walk the length and breadth of Heimaey, urging people to knit for the hostages. Socks and mittens will pile up in the new warehouses. Fishermen will contribute a catch. The Westman Islanders will lead Iceland with their selfless generosity, leaving the rest of the southern diocese no option but to follow suit.

  Long before his horse has picked its way on to the beach below the Eyjafjalla glacier, crowned today with streamers of lightest grey cloud, Ólafur has the island repopulated and his family back at Ofanleiti.

  The oarsmen prepare to push the fishing boat down the shingle. Humming to himself while he waits, Ólafur contemplates the dark humps and shadowy peaks that will resolve themselves in the next hours into the green and silver hues of Heimaey. How few of its secrets it reveals from a distance, this island. You see nothing of the delicate colours, the gouged cliffs, the wheeling birds. Nothing of the hurt people within.

  Pondering this, Ólafur is suddenly struck by a set of difficulties quite different from those outlined by the bishop, and it is enough to silence his tune in an instant. What he remembers is that the Heimaey curled within those humps and shadows is not the place the captives left behind. As the years have gone on, the bruised community has attempted to heal itself. People have adapted to their losses. Thoughts have turned to the need for children to work the crofts and look after them when they are old. And here is the chief source of Ólafur’s new-spun anxiety: many who were rent from spouses have sought comfort in the arms of others.

  The Church is not in a position to remarry people without proof that the original spouse is dead or at least beyond all possibility of coming home. Ólafur has explained this ad nauseam.

  Ad nauseam. Into the very midst of the thought flits Ásta. How she would enjoy that phrase. Ásta, Ásta. Ólafur sags under the swift assault of grief, the air pressed from his chest by the memory of her poring over Latin declensions in the lamplight long ago, lips moving in solemn repetition while the meal cooked itself dry.

  With an effort he corrals his attention again. He must think this through. Some people have gone ahead and made new families anyway, with infants born so flagrantly outside marriage that the fisherman Eyjólfur Sölmundarson alone has fathered four children by three different women. As Ólafur has spent much of his priesthood reminding parishioners, adultery is a serious matter. Not only is it one of the graver sins, but the ultimate penalty under the criminal law is execution by beheading.

  Or it was until recently, when the king sent a letter to his representative on the Westman Islands, announcing that Icelanders whose spouses lay captured in the Barbary should be treated as a special case. ‘We graciously feel that their crime should not be punished as hard as someone who has not been through the same difficulties,’ Christian had written from his castle at Skanderborg. ‘Therefore none of the people who have engaged themselves with other married people should be regarded as having committed a crime.’

  That has certainly allowed Ólafur to sleep more easily of late. The sin remains, of course, but it is a relief to be rid of the worry that half your parishioners are going to lose their heads. And the truth is that even before the king’s missive Ólafur was wearying of his own pulpit rebukes and perfunctory pleas for penitence. Every person on the island has been struggling to find a way to live again. These days the priest of Ofanleiti finds the taste for judging anyone bitter on his tongue.

  Settling himself in the boat, he addresses himself to the thought that has so suddenly dashed his spirits. What are all these adulterers, safe in their legal impunity, going to think when they hear that a ransom is to be raised to bring home their spouses? Nobody is going to know how many will return, or when, or if, or who they will be – and it is bound to stir all kinds of uneasiness and anxiety. It is not hard to imagine the agony in some breasts, the fear in others, the remorse, the defensiveness. How much effort is a man like Eyjólfur going to put into bringing home his fiery wife Gudrídur, when he has been so deplorably free with his seed in her absence? There can be no doubt that in some homes on Heimaey the knitting may proceed with a degree of reluctance.

  The boat dips and dives through the sullen waves. Ólafur, now thoroughly dejected, watches gloomily as the sleek back of a minke whale curves gracefully through the drizzle.

  Think what happened when Jaspar suddenly arrived back years ago from Algiers and poor Jón Oddsson learned from him that his wife Anna had gone through a Muslim marriage ceremony and had no intention of coming home. That was an excruciating situation. Called upon to minister both to Jaspar, whose beloved daughter was quickly branded a whore by the scandalised island, and also to the bewildered and angrily wronged husband, Ólafur’s chosen course of action was to urge them both to surrender to the will of God – advice that neither one nor the other considered helpful. Jón Oddsson had a woman moved into Stakkagerdi within weeks, and island gossip was as quick to insist that housekeeping was the least of her duties. At least, Ólafur reflects morosely, Jón Oddsson is one man who won’t have to worry about his wife coming home.

  The next day dawns sunny and warm on Heimaey, and Ólafur’s optimism is back. When Magnús Birgisson’s mother passes him on her way for water he is making for the Stórhöfdi headland, walking so fast and doffing his hat so blithely you would have thought the dear reverend had shed ten years since returning from the mainland.

  ‘On a hot day like this too,’ Agnes reports to her husband. ‘I swear he was skipping like a boy.’

  Ólafur, though with an unmistakeable jauntiness to his step, is actually as far from skipping to Stórhöfdi as Agnes is from telling a dull story. He has to stop many times to rest on the way up, especially on the steepest part where the puffins have staked out their burrows in the knobbly slopes above the sea. From there, panting heavily and bent double with the stitch in his side, he presses on to the top and looks out to sea. He has removed his hat, since even on a day as fine as this the winds up here are vicious, and his finely silvered hair is blowing across his eyes. Thorgerdur, more worried about her father being carried away than his hat, has instructed him to be sure and not venture too near the edge.

  Ólafur stands like this for a long time, a frail figure under a vast, azure sky at the most southerly point of inhabited Iceland. It’s the place he always feels closest to his wife: a mere ocean away, after all. Today the sun has woven a brilliant sash of jewels right through the sea and
far to the horizon. In a flight of fancy he would once have left firmly to Ásta, Ólafur imagines himself walking along it all the way to Algiers.

  He cups both hands around his mouth and shouts as hard as he can: ‘Ásta! Egill! Marta! Jón! We’re coming for you!’

  Promise after promise he sends down that shimmering path to the south. Whatever the problems in raising a ransom, Iceland will do it. If some on the island are reluctant, others will knit more. If middlemen deplete one ransom, Icelanders will raise another. If that goes astray they will produce more gloves and catch more fish until they have another, until one day, may it please God, enough money will reach the Barbary to bring everyone home. He will take up the knitting needles himself, if he can only force his gnarled fingers around them. He will organise the island’s effort by day and knit his own family home by night.

  Tears are streaming down his face. It might be the wind. He is not sure himself.

  ‘I will do it. Don’t despair. I will do it.’

  He stays on the headland for so long that Agnes sends her son up to see what has become of him. Magnús finds him asleep in the sunshine by the puffin burrows, his head resting on one hand and his hat clutched in the other, with such a look of contentment on his face that Magnús is loath to wake him and goes off to net a few birds instead.

  Thorgerdur has already resigned herself to seeing her father washed up on the shore when Ólafur breezes back into the house and tells her to start knitting at once.

  23

  She has always liked to rise early and drink in the sea-dawn. Elbows resting on the limewashed sill of the roof garden, chin cupped in her palms, this is where Ásta used to feel closest to Iceland. Behind those pink cloud-mountains weighing down the horizon is Ofanleiti, she would say to herself. The same tides are pushing and pulling those same waters: only follow them and you are home.

  And follow them she did, inside her head and wrapped in gilded fancy. There, pouting at her through a cloud of twirling puffin feathers, was Helga, returned to keep house for her father in an Ofanleiti rebuilt and snugly lined with polished wood from the dark forests of Norway. There was Ólafur, out for an evening stroll with the elfman she met on the afternoon they were betrothed, questioning him eagerly about how the hidden folk build their churches. A sleek grey head was bobbing just beyond the shallows. ‘Oddrún,’ Ásta would murmur to thin air and any passing seagull, ‘keep an eye on him for me, won’t you?’

  At what point in all the years past – is it seven now? Eight? – did the fancies evaporate? Are time and continued disappointment by themselves enough to ravage a mind’s capacity to imagine? She can easily believe it, just as she understands that the captain’s assault on her self-respect has in a different way weakened her will to hope and to dream. But this morning, watching the sun rise over the white city, she knows there is more to the ebbing of her old imaginings

  Bruises of the spirit do not heal quick and clean like a swollen eye; but they do respond to kindness. In the months since the sea-villa incident Cilleby, in his infuriating, self-justifying way, has been kind – as Alimah, who banned her at once from leaving the house and handed over most of her personal duties to Marta, has not. Kindness is hard to resist. Harder than anything in the world, Ásta sometimes feels. Except, perhaps, for the thing that is more than kindness.

  ‘There has come no ransom,’ he begins pleasantly. He is sitting cross-legged at the table, smoking.

  It is an energising feature of their encounters that Ásta never knows whether his opening gambit will be to ask for a saga, enquire after an abstruse point of Icelandic genealogy (‘Now, I’ve been puzzling over this daughter of Egill Skalla-whatever-it-is, the poet. Is she the one who married the Peacock fellow?’), or request enlightenment on a finer point of Danish maritime politics. About this last he well understands she knows nothing, but merely does it for the baiting and to observe her reaction. It has been some time, however, since mention was made of the ransom.

  ‘No,’ she concedes, wondering where he is going now and readying herself to resist.

  ‘It is nearly eight years since we sent for it.’

  What is there to say? She can hardly deny it.

  ‘So I have decided it is time you adopted the faith of Islam. Then you may look ahead to the life of a free woman in Algiers.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ This she has not expected. ‘Free? But you will receive no money for me.’

  Another suck on the pipe, the smell of it sweet and heavy. Cilleby looking pleased with himself.

  ‘It seems I will receive little enough money in any case. Not only is there no sign of payment from Denmark, but Alimah tells me your embroidery skills are also unlikely to command a fortune.’

  He chuckles, and Ásta flushes to realise he is laughing at her. In fact, he has made the joke and forced the laugh to cover his unease about what Alimah actually said about Ásta’s sewing, along with much else. In a rare but wide-ranging burst of temper his wife also drew attention to his continued reluctance to send the slut who had brought shame on the household by her brazen antics with the late Captain Fleming back to the slave-market.

  ‘However, I will confess I have been forming an idea of my own,’ he continues. ‘I will explain myself at the proper time. But first I require you to convert.’

  ‘I thank you for this offer,’ Ásta replies carefully, ‘which is generously meant.’ She has no idea what he means but will give him the benefit of the doubt on generosity. The word convert she does understand, though. ‘But I cannot possibly do what you ask of me.’

  ‘Come now. You believe in God, don’t you, whom we call Allah?’

  He is settling back for a debate. Sagas, piracy, abduction, faith: they are all a talking game for him. She draws herself up straight and he in turn watches to see if the small chin, of which he has become bafflingly fond, will arrange itself for combat and the nostrils flare.

  ‘I believe in my God, the creator of all things, who revealed himself in Christ Jesus and died upon the cross to save us all from sin.’

  Yes, there goes the chin. ‘Of course you do,’ he replies airily. ‘Your Jesus was a good Muslim and an important prophet. I hope you are aware that we pay him due honour.’

  Heresy delivered in such a reasonable tone makes her head swim. In a city where men can be strung upside down and beaten on the soles of their feet to recant, here is a velvet tongue showing how it should really be done. Where are the beautiful certainties of the Lutheran catechism when she needs them? Where are the phrases that will stop the foundations of her life shaking? All those Sunday sermons and home prayers – near a lifetime of them and her mind is empty. She stares at him wordlessly for a moment, and then closes her eyes. She is at Mosfell, reciting to her father. She is bending over the darning at Ofanleiti, listening to Egill lisping the same words while Ólafur frowns at the stumbles.

  ‘I believe … I believe that Jesus Christ, true God, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord, who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sins, from death and from the power of the Devil, not with gold or silver, but with his holy, precious blood and with his innocent suffering and death, in order that I may be wholly his own and live under him in his kingdom, and serve him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness, even as he is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity.’

  The words wash over her as she speaks them, bringing great balm. When she opens her eyes she finds Cilleby’s own upon her. The softness of the look surprises her.

  ‘Your language sings very prettily, Ásta, but I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea what you were saying.’

  She didn’t realise she was speaking Icelandic, although she could not have recited the catechism in any other tongue. He nods as if she has spoken.

  ‘I must tell you that a Muslim cannot accept that a human being can also be God and the creator of all things. It really is an outlandish
belief. But when I bow to Allah and worship him as the one sovereign being, might it not be that my prayers ascend to the same place as yours?’

  Her face burns. ‘My prayers,’ she says hotly, ‘are said in the power of Jesus Christ, who came to redeem us. Holy scripture tells us he is the only way to God.’

  ‘Well, we differ there,’ he replies carelessly. ‘But have you considered that all these religions, mine and yours and the Jews’ and the others of which travellers tell, may be attempts to grasp a mystery so big that it can never be completely understood?’

  He leans forward and she thinks how close to black at times are the eyes resting on hers. The blueberries that litter the hills at home in early autumn are that colour, and the sheen on a magpie’s wing.

  ‘This is not a question I would under any circumstances pose in the mosque,’ he is saying. ‘I will grant you that. But I invite you to consider it. Might there not be more on this earth and beyond it than any of us know?’

  Here is another surprise. It is just the sort of question she used to pose to Ólafur. Other worlds, different ways of seeing. Into her mind saunters the elfman, his neck hung about with fish, the rain on his lip.

  ‘But if you are so sensitive to such things’ – she gathers her courage for a leap into more dangerous seas – ‘how can you live as you do, trading in human beings, taking women to your bed who are not your wife, having two wives … all of that?’ She trails off, suddenly conscious of the actual bed behind him, its vibrancy subdued in the evening gloom. She has never dared so far before.

  But he declines to rise to it, only saying with some stiffness, ‘My religion allows me to keep slaves, and it is my understanding that your own leaves considerable latitude in this area. It also permits me to have a number of wives and concubines. We have discussed this before.’