The Sealwoman's Gift

by Sally Magnusson

  Cilleby raises a theatrical eyebrow.

  ‘Yes, all right, people were being used for bargaining. The king was trying to bring the Christian faith to Iceland in quite an, er, forcible way, and thought holding Kjartan would be the way to do it – with a little, you know, pressure. Oh, I don’t know. It’s a long story.’

  This time both of Cilleby’s eyebrows take flight. He is as relieved as she to return to the world of her stories and the old sparring game in which they are both at ease.

  Ásta describes how the princess Ingibjörg presented Kjartan with an embroidered gold headdress to take home to Gudrún as a wedding gift, telling him she wanted everyone to see that the woman he had been keeping company with in Norway was not descended from slaves.

  ‘You see,’ Ásta cannot resist adding, ‘even Kjartan, blessed with every favour a man could have, could not remove the stain of being the grandson of a slave. Melkorka, the Irish slave, remember? I told you about her a long time ago.’

  ‘I could hardly not see, since you mention it so often,’ Cilleby replies sleekly, his good humour thoroughly restored, ‘but I hope you in turn will remember how many slaves there are in these great sagas of yours before you next choose to lecture me on the subject.’

  ‘That is quite different. What you do is different in every possible way.’

  ‘If you say so. Now before you become any more red in the face and your voice rises even higher, tell me what happened when the golden Kjartan came home at last. You see, I’ve been listening.’

  ‘Oh, by the time the new faith was accepted in Iceland and Kjartan was allowed home, Gudrún had tired of waiting and married Bolli. She was reluctant at first, but her family persuaded her. And from this moment the saga is set for tragedy.

  ‘It’s said that Kjartan showed no emotion at the news that Gudrún had married his best friend, but people noticed he was rather moody that winter. In no time at all he went and married another woman – she was called Hrefna – and gave her the headdress he had meant for Gudrún. I need hardly tell you that the two couples did not get on well.’

  Cilleby puffs thoughtfully while Ásta loses herself in the saga. She recounts the jealousies and petty humiliations that followed, and how the spite went too far until Gudrún finally goaded Bolli into killing Kjartan. Then Kjartan’s family took their revenge by slaying Bolli. They ambushed him in his summer shieling when Gudrún was big with his child.

  ‘It is said, you know, that Gudrún Ósvífursdóttir surpassed all women in courage and resolution. But to be honest I wouldn’t say she came out of these killings well.’

  Ásta has given Gudrún’s character more thought since Oddrún spoke her strange warning on the slave-ship another life ago. She was an extraordinary woman, bestriding the saga with the force of her mind and the strength of her passions, but she could be cruel. After Kjartan’s death, she gloated, ‘What I like best is that Hrefna will not go laughing to bed tonight’, which can only be described as nasty.

  ‘Don’t do as Gudrún did,’ Oddrún whispered as she lay dying. Ásta can see the old woman now: the shadows on her face as the ship rolled and the lamps swung, the sour breath, the urgent grip of her fingers. What was that all about, Oddrún? Ásta is happy to affirm to herself that she has no more intention of arranging for the murder of anyone than she ever did. That someone was considerate enough to hasten the captain on his way was nothing to do with her. Really, Oddrún, what did you mean?

  She has lost the thread of her story in the remembering. Ólafur is there again in the ship with Oddrún’s head in his lap. But his face is smudged and lacks definition. With a slight catch of panic, Ásta realises that she cannot bring any of it properly back: the shape of his nose, the way his skin felt, the lines around his eyes when he smiled. And his voice – not a single thing can she remember about Ólafur’s voice. Where has it gone? Where has he gone?

  ‘Have we reached the end?’ Cilleby asks politely. He likes to watch her eyes going to some faraway place in the middle of a story, the details of which frequently pass him by in a way that does not trouble him in the least. He would like to kiss those eyes. He has not waited so long for anything in his life.

  ‘Not quite the end. There was blood still to be spilled.’

  Ásta blinks away Ólafur’s rubbed-out features to focus on a face that lacks no definition. She is acquainted (so she feels) with every variety of scowl in this one, the range of blue stares, the full set of bewildering emotional nuances that the black brows are so quick to convey.

  ‘But remember I was telling you about the son whose father was killed while he lay in Gudrún’s womb. The son’s name was also Bolli. Many years later, a grown man, he went to visit his mother. She was a very old woman by that time. And it was then that he asked Gudrún the most famous question in all the sagas.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘I’ll tell you next time.’

  He laughs, and so does she, and the earlier tension is quite gone.

  But Ásta, darting out of the flowered door while Cilleby resumes his brooding, knows that next time will require an answer to a different question.

  25

  In all these years Ásta has not felt the lack of a friend more than now. Confined to the house from dawn to dusk, with the children always busy and Anna forgetting to visit, she ponders her answer to Cilleby on her own.

  Is this what it is like for other captives in the city, too, loneliness furring their judgement as everything they thought they knew is challenged? Have they, too, discovered that their enemies cannot be demonised forever but begin to be regarded, in whatever guise, as human? Do they find themselves reluctantly understanding motives for actions they abhor? Are they waylaid by unexpected kindnesses? Are they tempted to grasp at whatever sliver of happiness offers itself because the reasons for doing otherwise become less and less obvious? She thinks of Jón Westman, the Muslim corsair; Anna, the contented wife of Jus Hamet; the lad Jón Ásbjarnarson running the Algiers civil service. How many other Icelanders must there be – and those of other nations, too – who have had to work out a new way of living for themselves, alone, and made choices with which those back home could not begin to sympathise?

  No doubt Anna would put her finger on the nub of the question and force her to decide by saying something outrageous. But Anna, with an expanding family and a slipping grasp on old allegiances, has not visited for a long time. Where else might she turn? To Flower, who last saw her own home when she was six? A thousand and one nights would not be enough to explain Ásta’s scruples to Flower. To Husna, who shoots swift, questioning glances from whatever story she is in when Ásta returns to the roof garden of an evening? Ásta has no idea how much Husna knows of her relationship with Cilleby, only that she cocoons herself inside her own unhappiness and cannot be reached. As for Alimah, who with easygoing malice has removed all but the least pleasurable of the tasks that gave a focus to the day and would surely have her out of the house altogether if Cilleby let her, there will be no friendly advice from that quarter.

  An Icelandic maidservant has lately joined the household. Sold on in the ebb and flow of the city’s trade, young Gunnhildur Hermannsdóttir from the east fjords has had two different owners already and Ásta cannot think why she has fetched up here. With Marta now fully trained and impeccably assiduous in her duties, there hardly seems need of more help. Still, Gunnhildur is a welcome addition to Ásta’s shrunken world, insouciant and talkative. She rarely returns from an errand to the market without a snippet of news from some compatriot she has bumped into, who has heard it from another through another. Ásta marvels at how the girl manages this, bundled to the eyes and supposed to be hidden from all men. She would no more confide in her than the muezzin on the corner.

  Gunnhildur must have been barely out of childhood when she was abducted and looks young still. She has an unusually flat face, on which all her features appear stretched and elongated, a pair of lively eyes pulled into a slant, a wide mouth that lau
ghs easily and a squashed nose, which, as she explains with a shrug, was broken by her last mistress. Looking over the gallery from the harem, Ásta watches her ungainly progress across the courtyard under an armful of laundry and wonders if the way Gunnhildur looks is significant. What were Cilleby’s purchasing instructions this time? Was he requested to scan the slave-market for the woman Alimah would find least objectionable? Ásta feels herself flushing as a new understanding dawns. Is this what Alimah instructed Cilleby to look for last time as well, when the ship from Iceland spilled its cargo into the white city? Get me a seamstress, Cilleby, but make sure she’s plain. Was that it? And not too young either.

  Well, it didn’t work, did it? She thinks of the way he touched her cheek and said he liked her freckles, the way his eyes caress her sometimes, even when they are arguing. Especially when they are arguing. Resting her arms on the polished rim of the gallery, she wonders how it would feel to lean over the table and touch the hollow just below his cheekbones where there is no beard. How smooth and vulnerable the skin is under her stroking fingers. Like the breast of a young gull.

  And in the elation of that imagining there comes a sudden rush of magnanimity for Alimah. How much household power can make up for having to share, over and over, the man who chose you first? Might thwarted loving also be what makes Husna so silently unhappy? Both have grown up expecting nothing less from a man, and nothing more, but a woman’s heart is not always to be tamed by convention. Perhaps it is their attachment to the maddening Ali Pitterling Cilleby that gnaws at them both.

  It takes a few moments for the damper thought to present itself that the prospects for Cilleby’s third wife are, by the same token, not very encouraging.

  It is from Gunnhildur that Ásta learns that Anna has given birth to a fourth child and that a Dutchman, boasting of money in his pocket to redeem hostages, is in town.

  ‘To ransom Icelanders? You cannot mean this, Gunnhildur.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. I nearly danced on the street to hear it myself, but the man who wrote the petition (he comes from Grindavík) says there is nothing to get excited about. He says this Dutchman is not the first to have come to Algiers chattering about ransoms for our people. The first one exchanged the money for animal skins and the second sailed away laden with chests of sugar. Not a single captive released.’

  ‘And what petition are you talking about?’ It is always hard to keep up with Gunnhildur.

  ‘Oh, that’s a different thing. Some men have sent another petition to the king. Such flowery language they used, I had to laugh. Our Grindavík man says they accused the lords of Copenhagen of “hardening their hearts against our mortal peril and anguish, the bloodstained birch of Christ on us, and the punishments hanging over us”.’ She declaimed the words in an exaggerated fashion. ‘What’s a birch, by the way?’

  Gunnhildur has acquired a breezy resilience during her time in Algiers, along with immunity to religious torment of any kind. Ásta can imagine only too well what she would say about Cilleby’s proposition. Live on in this city, cavernously lonely, traded down the ranks of household servitude and away from the children until one day you lose your teeth to an owner like Margrét’s? Or sew yourself a prayer mat and marry Cilleby? Is this what you are calling a dilemma?

  As the summer swelters on, Ásta weighs her decision and waits for the call upon which she must give her answer. Night after night she sits under the stars, drenched in the perfume of jasmine and grateful for the smallest puff of breeze from the sea, trying with only patchy success to concentrate on Sympathy the Learned, a slave-girl unequalled in beauty and learning who, courtesy of the wizened aunt, has been outwitting the sages of Baghdad for many, many nights. Sometimes she catches Marta’s eye – Marta, the still centre of her life – and they smile at each other.

  On the evenings when one woman or another slips from the roof garden and does not return, she tries not to notice. She knows her answer.

  He receives her cross-legged on the rug, the red waistcoat replaced this time by his cream tunic with the orange stitching, open at the neck. The pipe is there on the table, but not lit. His greeting is tight, and from the set of his shoulders alone she can tell he is ill at ease. Ásta sinks on to the damson cushion and smiles encouragingly. Perhaps he is nervous to hear what she will say.

  He holds up a peremptory hand, as if to stop her from venturing on to that ground until he has cleared another.

  ‘Before we proceed further I have news for you, Ásta, and I am sure,’ he begins in the tone of one who is not, ‘that you will agree it is good news.’

  ‘The ransom? Is the ransom come at last?’

  He hesitates, but only briefly. ‘No, there is no ransom. Please put that thought from you.’

  ‘Then what?’ Her smile recovers, unencumbered by any twinge of regret at the continued absence of the ransom. She will remember this later. ‘What is your news?’

  He takes a quick breath before speaking. ‘I have secured a place for your daughter with the sultan in the city you know as Constantinople.’

  There is a beat of silence, during which a tirade of cursing from a donkey driver wafts in from the street. Ásta stares at Cilleby, her smile draining. The sultan?

  ‘It is the highest honour and the best position in the Ottoman Empire, the very best.’

  Looking even more uncomfortable, he begins to fiddle with his pipe. This is proving as difficult as he feared. ‘In al-Qustantiniyah she will have everything money can buy. Your daughter will live in luxury for the rest of her life.’

  ‘She is to be … a concubine?’ Ásta can hardly speak the word. ‘Cilleby, she is not yet eleven years old.’

  He makes an effort to lighten his voice. ‘But remember it may be some time before she meets the sultan,’ he says, overdoing the lightness and making it sound as if Marta will be calling into Constantinople on a social visit. ‘And there are so many girls in the sultan’s palace, so many hundreds, that she may never meet him in her life. But I cannot stress enough what an honour it is to live there. Even the Christian families of Venice vie to get their daughters in.’

  Murad IV, ruler of the Ottoman Empire. Strong in battle and cruel at home. A man of such violent, unpredictable rages that there is no one who has not heard of the corpses strung on street corners, the slaves impaled with a spear thrust between their legs and out through their head, while Murad watches.

  ‘He’s a brute,’ she cries. ‘Everyone knows it. How can you send my child to that man?’

  Cilleby reaches across the table and tries to take her shaking hand in his. This is not going well. Alimah assured him that any woman would be honoured to have her daughter appointed to such a role. Taking in Ásta’s white, angry face and remembering the pained scowl when he told Alimah he intended to marry again, it occurs to Cilleby that he might have missed something, and that there may be reasons other than lack of wealth why so many men in this city choose to confine themselves to one wife at a time. Ásta flings his hand away.

  ‘And you’ll get an excellent price for her, I suppose?’

  Cilleby’s patience is waning. ‘There has been a transaction, of course, but I thought you would be pleased. Think of the size of the empire and how few girls receive this opportunity. Only the most beautiful and accomplished.’

  ‘You dare to imagine you know what I feel,’ she bursts out, trembling with fury. ‘You thought I would be pleased to have my beloved girl shipped across the sea to be abused by that monstrous man?’ She eyes his pipe with a view to throwing it at him. ‘You don’t know me at all, do you? You will never know me. And I don’t know you.’

  But you were nervous, Cilleby. You didn’t want to tell me. You knew that much. Does that make it worse, or better?

  He watches her inscrutably, only taking the modest precaution of placing his hand over his pipe.

  ‘What a fool you’ve made of me to think I did, even in the smallest part.’

  She lays her head on the table, flings her arms on eit
her side and collapses into a storm of weeping. Not in all these eight years has she cried like this. Not when her uncle was murdered or Kristín harried to her death on the hill. Not when the ship sailed past the cliffs of Heimaklettur into exile. Not when Egill was taken. Not when Ólafur left. Not when the captain hurt her. Riven with groaning, gulping sobs, she howls like an animal for all that has been taken from her and everything she can no longer bear.

  When she is done, shivering and snuffling into the wet table with her eyes stuck shut, she becomes aware of arms gripping her. She feels herself lifted, carried, laid down. Her clothes are expertly attended to – pantaloons loosened, bodice unbuttoned – in one fluid movement: even with her eyes closed she can tell he is good at this. But he is also whispering ragged endearments in Arabic as he undresses her, kissing every inch of revealed skin with a hungry tenderness that makes her open her sore eyes to search out his. And what she sees there, when he lifts them to her, she will never forget. Even after what follows in the morning and everything it will lead to, she will not forget.

  There on the satin quilt, her body still shaken by after-sobs, Ásta finds her way to the place where his face is soft as a bird and strokes it with wondering fingers. Her mouth reaches for his. She licks tears from his eyes and tastes the salt in them and will never be sure, never as long as she lives, if they were her tears or his. He is holding back: that too she will remember with an inextinguishable flicker of the same grateful surprise. At the last it is Ásta who guides into herself the man who has sold her precious child to the sultan. And in the moment that he spends himself within her, she cries out that she loves him too.

  26

  Wilhelm Kifft is hot. This infernal city will be the death of him. He should be on the home strait to Amsterdam by now, the wind cooling his face, his fee in his pocket and the quiet satisfaction of a job accomplished bolstering his spirits, which, there is no need to remind himself, are currently much in need of bolstering.