The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  ‘Does it allow you to chase a woman with child until she gives birth to it on the grass, dead?’ The words are out before she thinks them, but she is glad to say it at last. ‘Does it allow you to murder a priest who has harmed nobody and is only sheltering with his family in a cave?’

  ‘I do no such thing.’

  ‘Well, I invite you to consider that you as good as do it. You have carved and tiled and marbled this house with the blood of the innocent.’

  He stands up and flings his pipe on the table. The back he turns to her is rigid with an emotion she expects to see flying from his fists at any moment. She clenches her jaw and glares at the soft folds of his tunic. Let him do it then.

  When he turns back his brows are still mated, but there are no flying fists. Indeed the sight of her glowering at him makes him want to laugh a little. He must not let her disorder him like this.

  ‘Ásta, women cannot be expected to understand how the world goes,’ he says, sounding to himself near-miraculously reasonable. ‘I realise this. Women are set apart and see little. I have talked to you more than any woman in my life before and shown more patience than I have ever had to command in my own house.’

  ‘Yes, why is that?’ She has been curious about this.

  Cilleby has the familiar sensation of being disarranged on a wave of seaweed. You may well ask.

  ‘Stand up.’

  She scrambles inelegantly to her feet, and he comes round the table to place himself directly in front of her, so close that she can see dark stubble under the skin of his head and catch a whiff of scented oil. He raises a hand towards her face and pushes a strand of hair lightly from her forehead.

  ‘What are these marks on your nose and cheeks?’

  Dear God, the shock of these words. She is back in the slave-market, turned about like butcher meat and inspected for blemishes. The Moor is there in the white cloak assessing assets from the shadows. The captain whispering to him. The sea-villa. The sash. Unravelling.

  She staggers backwards, panic snagging her breath. Her shoulders start to jerk. Her teeth are clattering in her mouth.

  ‘Ásta, are you ill? Speak. You’re shaking.’ May Allah preserve him from irrational women. What is he supposed to have said now?

  ‘Is it kohl?’ she mutters, suffused with humiliation. ‘I was helping Husna to adorn her eyes. Forgive me. I thought I had washed.’

  He stares at her. Kohl? ‘Your skin is very fair, Ásta, but these marks are like kisses of the sun. I like them. It is all I meant to say.’

  She looks up sharply, and finds in his face neither judgement nor mockery, but only a bemused earnestness on the edge of taking offence.

  ‘I don’t know the name in this language,’ she says with bad grace, making an effort to regain her composure. She is belatedly aware that he intended something in the nature of a compliment. ‘In Icelandic we call them freknur.’

  ‘Freckles,’ he repeats. It sounds funny on his lips and despite herself she gives him a weak smile.

  ‘Well, Ásta,’ he says with a warmer smile in return than he intended, out of the relief of seeing hers. ‘To answer your question, I don’t know why I continue to seek out your company under the most severe provocation. The truth is I have not the faintest idea. You make me very angry and seem intent on misrepresenting me at every turn.’

  He begins to pace the room.

  ‘But here is my dilemma. The next minute, the very next minute, there I am studying these freknur of yours, and the way the shade of your eyes alters with the light in the room. And I start wondering what you are going to say next and find myself in the even more unlikely position of wanting to hear it.’

  Up and down, past the bed with the satin quilt, over to the window, round the table, back again, acutely conscious of those steady grey eyes watching him all the way. He stops in front of her.

  ‘And – very well, here is what I am trying to say. I find myself thinking that if I force you to do … anything … you will close up, just as you started to do there, and I will lose something I have not experienced before.’

  He looks as if he is tempted to say more. But he only brushes her cheek once with his finger and concludes the audience abruptly, saying he will present the idea he mentioned once she has had time to consider the adjustment required to her adherence to Christianity.

  The house is waking. From the roof garden Ásta can hear the slave-boys (perhaps Jón is among them) scuffling down to stoke the kitchen fires and fetch water from the courtyard well. Soon the aroma of baking bread will fill the house. Across the rooftops the city is being called to prayer: to prayer that is not her kind of prayer, in the name of a deity who is not her God. She strokes her cheek where Cilleby touched it. She cannot be sure what is behind this thing she will call to herself tenderness, but it is dangerous. It is tempting her from the faith on which her eternal future and her entire understanding of her place on earth is built.

  Yet is she not halfway there already? She has long been able to watch Marta praying without being tortured by images of damnation. When Jón went off to be circumcised with his head held high, she hardly bothered deploring it. He was excited and happy, as he usually is when she can pin him long enough on the stair to assure herself of it. When he told her proudly that he was learning to read Arabic at the mosque, she was only glad for him. The truth is that it has become too wearying to imagine future consequences all the time, when there is nobody to remind her of them and nothing to be done. Ólafur cannot help. In fact, she no longer silently consults Ólafur over what to think about anything. Ásta is in truth rather tired of thinking.

  But tenderness brings other hazards. This too she understands, looking out over the roofs of the waking city to the flushed sky. The sea may be flowing on like Bishop Gudbrandur’s map to other places and other times, but her mind no longer attempts to follow. These days it strains only as far as a room with carved blossoms on the door and wonders what it might be like to wake up inside. Clearly it is not her soul alone that must look to its defences.

  Once before in her life Ásta has been in this place. Not that being tempted to vanish in the arms of an elfman is quite the same as her present situation, but it was certainly another brink, and what she felt when she stood upon it is something she never experienced in all the loving of Ólafur.

  It was the day she heard she was to marry him. She left the house that afternoon, telling him she would not be long. Glad of the biting air on her face, she walked far down to that part of the shore where enormous plates of light-coloured stone lie piled and broken amid tumbled black rocks and flaming beds of seaweed. She had once suggested to Ólafur (who told her not to be silly) that a bad-tempered troll must have spent an evening smashing dishes there after a disagreeable dinner. The light was draining so fast that the outlines of Sudurey and Álsey had already faded. She sat on a broken platter at the sea’s edge, nudging the seaweed with her toes and wondering what was missing that made everything feel as grey as the islands when she was about to become mistress of Ofanleiti and ought to be happy.

  It started to rain. Ólafur would be wondering where she was. She slid off the dinner plate, tied her shawl more tightly around her waist, turned to go back – and nearly yelped with fright. There in front of her was a figure clad in rough-sewn fishskin waterproofs. A clump of wind-shredded grass had braved its roots in the black sand and the curly-haired young man was standing, legs stoutly apart, in the middle of it.

  There could be no doubt he was one of the hidden people, although Ásta struggled afterwards to know why she was so certain. Collecting herself faster than he did (he looked as if he was already regretting his appearance), she asked who he was.

  ‘A fisherman,’ he replied, tapping the necklace of herring that glistened around his neck and looking awkward. ‘I’ve just come from the boat. I live not far from you.’

  Hands on hips she looked him over. She was confident of knowing every fisherman on the island, and his discomfited air suggested th
e point had not escaped him either. He could not have been much older than she was – nineteen or twenty perhaps – and still looked more boy than man, his cheeks downy fair, lips full and delicate as a child’s.

  ‘Then you must live in that grassy rock on the slope below the Ofanleiti farmhouse,’ she said gleefully. ‘Are you going to spirit me away?’

  That, he said, recovering his confidence but still with an attractive gaucheness, would please him very much, since he had been drawn to her since she first arrived at Ofanleiti. He explained this with what she decided was a blush, although as the light was poor and the rain now pelting down, she might have imagined this detail. He told her he had observed the liveliness and the thinking in her. (Ásta was enormously flattered to hear this.) She had an air of being in touch with things that lie beyond what other people see. (Ásta swelled further.) Also, he went on gravely, he liked the gold in her hair. Feeling she could listen to this all night, Ásta wondered if he also liked her eyes, which Ólafur said were … no, this was not the moment to be thinking about Ólafur. Such a longing had come upon him to meet her face to face, he added with a most endearing grin, that he had, well, he had sought her out and here he was. This too delighted her. He had a cheerful smile and spoke Icelandic with a pleasingly old-fashioned idiom (‘A longing came upon me’), which she wanted to hear more of, especially about the longings. On the other hand, she had wit enough left to remember how these stories usually end and knew she must beware.

  It was about then – she cannot recall the moment, although she went over it for years afterwards, only that it was sudden and overwhelming – that she realised she wanted him. It was so powerful, this feeling, so urgent, so entirely novel and pleasurable and achy and impossible to resist, that she really had to touch him. So she put her finger, just one finger, on his lips, which were so beautifully curved and appealingly moist with rain. And as she did she thought, I could go with him now. I am ready. If he touches me in return, only so much as one nibble of this finger, one breath in my ear, I will go with him.

  He didn’t move. Indeed she realised he was trying very hard not to move. She had a feeling that his fists were clenched and his head all but bolted into position so that he would not reach for her. The wind kept whipping her hair over her face and the glassy-eyed herring dripped with rain and they stood there motionless, her finger to his wet lips, until the light was almost gone and the rockpools were black as the sand and the boy’s face was dimming and she shivered and suddenly thought of Ólafur waiting for her at home, Ólafur who made her feel loved. And she lifted her finger. It was so heavy. It didn’t want to come. She felt as if she were pulling out a living root.

  Then she turned away and flew home without stopping once, though it was uphill most of the way. She ran and ran and did not look back.

  She never saw the young man again. But sometimes she would spy a silver trail across the empty sea and think, There he is, bringing home his catch, and remember the glister of fish about his neck. From time to time she thought she could sense his presence at Ofanleiti. It was a slight change in the air, no more, but she was sure he was there, watching out for her.

  And now, a million miles away and a girl no longer, it is as if she is standing on another blustery shore, bareheaded to the wind and exposed again. Only this time she is not dealing with a boy and Ólafur has not the power to draw her home. Wherever her husband is – floating in the ocean, his bones long ago washed white by the tides; under the mossy floor of some German forest; buried on Heimaey in a sanctified grave; or maybe, just possibly, still alive and seeking oblivion in the arms of some fat widow who will never make him laugh – in whichever of the situations she has ever imagined him, Ólafur is not here and she is at the sea’s edge again.

  24

  Cilleby presents his plan with a reversion to the stiff-backed formality of the harem. He is wearing his red waistcoat over the big-sleeved linen shirt and has in Ásta’s view rather overdone the rosewater. Instead of inviting her to sit down, he leaves her standing just inside the chamber door.

  ‘Have you considered what I asked you?’

  ‘I have,’ she says, wishing she could go and sag to the floor as usual. It is unnerving to have him both so close and so distant.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It is difficult for me.’

  So difficult that she has no idea how to tell it. One day she is almost able to convince herself that what is required is no more than a rearrangement of mental furniture: a prophet moved here, another one to the back, a few extra rituals. This is Cilleby’s view of it, doubtless based on what he breezily imagines his father’s conversion to have been (and let us see what he would say if it were the other way round). But for all that she may be halfway there, the other half is proving harder. Ásta has not listened since infanthood to three Lutheran priests, each aflame with certainty, without the horror of being banished from paradise and punished more severely than any hardship to be endured on earth carving itself deep. How can Cilleby imagine this is easy?

  She opens her mouth to speak and closes it again. Cilleby, deciding that where Ásta is concerned silence may be taken as assent, stiffens his back further and launches forth.

  ‘In the event of your conversion I have decided to make you my wife,’ he says to her neck, pausing again for a response.

  When she continues to say nothing he surges on, his delivery ever more portentous as it begins to dawn on him that she is neither stunned by the magnitude of this announcement (Ásta can be unpredictable but he did expect her to understand what it means for a man of his standing to make it), nor sinking to her knees with gratitude.

  ‘As soon as you have adopted the Muslim faith we will be wed according to our laws and customs, and you will take an honoured place in my household beside Alimah and Husna. I trust you agree that I have always treated you with the respect due to a future wife.’

  In her earlier years in Algiers the shock of receiving an offer of marriage from a Moorish slave-trader might well have robbed Ásta of the power of her legs. But she must be becoming inured to shocks, for this one, so solemnly delivered, only makes her want to laugh. His haughty air of bestowing an honour that any woman might collapse to receive does not help. To be sure, the sound that emerges from her is more of a nervous giggle, but the offence it delivers is so complete that Cilleby is at a loss. Since she has no menfolk to act for her and he is himself her legal owner, he has already placed himself in a most uncomfortable position, and mockery is so far from what he expected that a shadow of uncertainty passes across his face. Ásta, instantly penitent, assumes a grave air. Worse for Cilleby, who has a proud man’s acute antennae for pity, she is now feeling sorry for him.

  After an embarrassing period of silence, interminable to both and in which neither is sure how to proceed, Cilleby makes up his mind. He clenches the hands crossed behind his back as he feels his temper rising, but having learned over time where patience may take him with Ásta that command will not, succeeds in biting back his chagrin. His eyes revert to her face.

  ‘Ásta, go and sit down, will you,’ he says with an ostentatious weariness that is only partly acted. ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened when the most beautiful woman in all Iceland was let down by the most handsome man in all Iceland. Isn’t that where we had got to?’ He manages a dry smile. ‘I thought I could contain my enthusiasm, but I find, after all, a pressing desire to learn what happened next. We will talk of the other matter when we next meet, by which time I hope your amusement will have abated.’

  Ásta takes herself off to the table with the smallest suggestion of a flounce, obscurely nettled that he has not tried harder to persuade her. A damson cushion in embroidered silk, never seen before, is waiting in her usual place on the floor. Is this a token of the new status she was supposed to have assumed by now? Or has he merely noticed at last how she fidgets on the floor? As she sinks into the plump softness of it, the thought that placing this cushion here might have been a gesture of simpl
e thoughtfulness by a man with more delicacy of feeling than she generally allows moves her. Indeed it moves her more than any stiff declaration of marital intent, and her eyes prickle with sudden tears. More prone to weeping since the captain’s assault, she blinks them back fiercely. Cilleby wonders what he has done now, and if he will ever understand this woman and, for the hundredth time, why he bothers.

  ‘You were telling me before about the heroine of your Laxdaela saga. You will forgive me if I don’t attempt her name,’ he says, picking up his pipe.

  And Ásta drags her attention back to Iceland in the year 1000 and the doomed loves of the beautiful and imperious Gudrún Ósvífursdóttir.

  ‘You will recall that Gudrún and Kjartan met at the hotspring baths and became very friendly. One day Kjartan announced that he was going to Norway. He asked Gudrún to wait for him for three years, but she refused to make any such promise. She was piqued that he wouldn’t let her come along too. So Kjartan and his foster-brother Bolli sailed off to Norway.

  ‘Bolli and Kjartan were the closest of friends, but Bolli resented Kjartan a little, handsome as he was and so good at everything. As the saga tells, Bolli arrived home from Norway before Kjartan and began to show an interest in Gudrún himself. He went out of his way to tell her that he had left Kjartan enjoying the company of the princess Ingibjörg (the King of Norway’s sister and, I need hardly say, the loveliest woman in Norway). Having designs of his own, he also told her he had an idea the king would prefer to give his sister to Kjartan in marriage than let him return to Iceland. Gudrún appeared unmoved to hear this, but people noticed how deeply she flushed and the abrupt way she dropped the subject.’

  ‘Why didn’t Kjartan come home, then?’ Cilleby’s head is beginning to spin.

  ‘Oh, did I not mention that he was being held hostage in Norway? He was treated with great honour by the king, but he was a hostage none the less.’