The journey is arduous. The effect of long walks in wet clothes, of chill nights, poor fare and the strains of constant danger from piracy prove too much for some who are already weakened by the conditions of their captivity; as the weeks pass, the thin band of Icelanders becomes further depleted. But those with the strength to survive the rigours do occasionally find their experiences exhilarating. In the days when she and Ólafur sat in an Icelandic turf-house trying to imagine a bigger world, Ásta would have been stunned to think she might one day encounter sights like these. She wonders if Ólafur, on the journey he made all those years ago himself, was also awed by the immense cathedrals, heady with incense and lush with relics and gilt, which are so different from the diminutive starkness of any church in Iceland. Did he too sail past baleful fortresses guarding the coasts of a Europe always at war and observe to himself, as she has, that they are no match for the Algerine pirates who sniff out bare inlets and empty bays like dogs a bone? Perhaps he also marvelled at all the neatly tilled fields of waving grain, with never an elf-mound or lava stone among them, and admired (he who always had an eye for the way people dress) the costly clothing that women wear in the grander towns, their bodices inset with gold and silver buttons, their dresses so gaudily different from the grey weaves of home. Ásta feels her mind enlarging as her heart shrivels.
There are no women wearing veils in the lands they pass through, but it takes Ásta weeks not to feel undressed outdoors without one. Every woman confesses to feeling the same. Nor will all the years of life left to her be enough to set aside fond thoughts of her baggy harem pantaloons, tied at the ankle, in which she could run up stairs as easy as a man. She will find herself remembering the freedoms of captivity: the freedom to withdraw from the gaze of men under a veil, the freedom from skirts that trip you in the rain and soak up the mud.
But memory is like that, always so eager to aid you in missing what you can no longer have and forgetting the rest. It is not Cilleby’s scowl she sees when she thinks of him (as she does most of the time, no matter how often she instructs her thoughts towards Ólafur), nor the invincible arrogance, nor his refusal to acknowledge the iniquity of his trade and the many ways it has hurt her. No, memory parades a man patting his small daughters and sipping a civilised coffee. It insists she hears the note of irritated tenderness in the moonlit courtyard the night Jón Westman brought her home. It invites her to smile with him over the complexities of saga plots and names that end in dóttir. It bids her remember his renegade eyes and his warrior brows and his rumble of a laugh and his scented baldness and the endearments wrung from him in the satin bed.
She dreams sometimes on her travels, although not about him. Fitfully asleep among the scurrying rats in the hold of yet another merchant ship, she is visited by Marta, crying out to her from a bed of flowers while hairy hands grope her smooth young body. Another night it is Egill who comes to her, backed against a white wall, his eyes wide with terror as the thick lips of the pasha pout towards him. Only Jón dances and laughs for her still. In her dreams she is joyful in his company, although there is always the growling of danger in the background, a sense she cannot pin down that there is a reason why she is surprised to be with him. When she wakes, the absence of him aches and burns like the stump of another lost limb.
When they arrive in Amsterdam on the eighth day of August, Kifft, having chased his flock purposefully to the docks, announces – hat in hand and with a bow that sends his plume sweeping through the dust – that he is to accompany them no further. It has been a singular honour to arrange the freedom of the Danish majesty’s most lamentably detained subjects and to guide them thus far, but he hopes they will be kind enough to recall that it is considerably more than a year since he left Amsterdam. It being the case that the time stipulated in his contract has been much exceeded, they will understand, good people as they are, that, much though he would wish it otherwise and inconsolable as he is that they should be departing without him, he really ought to be getting home. A ship awaits to carry them to the realm of Denmark. He can assure them they will be amply taken care of in Glückstadt, where King Christian is currently in residence and is minded – so his most gracious majesty has intimated to his most humble servant – to receive his subjects personally. From there they will be conveyed by sea to Copenhagen, where those who are to journey onwards to Iceland will be given passage home.
Then Wilhelm Kifft clamps his hat back on his head and almost runs from the quayside, in such manifest relief to be rid of his charges that, watching him fly, they enjoy their heartiest laugh for a long time.
Christian IV, King of Denmark, Norway and Iceland together with the Westman Islands (although not, to his profound regret, and certainly not for want of trying, of Sweden) has scarcely laid eyes on a more dreary band of travellers than the group who straggle ashore at Glückstadt on the nineteenth of August. They are women mostly, as far as he can see, although much too drab to set the royal pulse racing.
A man who inclines to joviality himself, Christian has tended to regard the Icelanders, when he has spared them a thought at all, as the dourest of his subjects. Not that he has ever been to Iceland, or (come to that) the Westman Islands, although the fishing revenue is of course excellent, but there are always a few of them hanging around Copenhagen. They have a preposterous air of intellectual superiority (solely based, as far as he can gather, on their distant ancestors having written sagas and histories) and are forever grumbling about unfair pricing, making no allowance for the way his monopoly for Danish merchants has secured the only business Iceland’s poorest trading harbours enjoy. Hardly the people he would seek out for a party.
However, he does concede, stroking his pigtail and wondering about lunch, that these unfortunates trailing up to the palace have had a hard time of it. That man at the front – is it possible he doesn’t possess a nose? Hideous sight, poor fellow. Yes, a good feast should cheer everyone up, himself included, and if any of the men have wits left after their ordeal, he might be able to get some useful naval intelligence out of them.
Christian is proud of Glückstadt. He has had it reclaimed from marshland to compete for trade with Hamburg further up the Elbe and is particularly fond of his new palace, designed with the combination of pink brick walls and twirly gables to which he is most joyously attached. Approaching it from the heavily fortified pier, the Icelanders peer curiously around. Their sovereign is a legendary builder of palaces, towns, fortifications, castles and naval ports the length and breadth of Denmark, all at the ready (so Kifft never tired of complaining) for whatever misguided war Christian might take it upon himself to dabble in next. In Kifft’s gloomy opinion as a man of business, all this construction could only be impoverishing the Danish state and making it less likely that he would see payment of his expenses.
Christian is awaiting them in front of the palace in a scarlet riding jacket and black boots, looking, as Ásta whispers to Gunnhildur, as if he has just leaped from his horse. ‘Pity the horse,’ Gunnhildur giggles. Einar, who is gazing at his stout sovereign with loyal awe, shoots her a warning frown.
The king offers brandy-breathed enquiries after their health, and is soon showering them with copious ale and the finest fare the Glückstadt kitchens can provide. The food unsettles many a stomach unused to being so richly filled. There were days when Kifft had claimed his purse would not stretch to any food at all, and the privations of the journey are plainly written on every face around the king’s table. The latest to succumb was old Halldóra Jónsdóttir, who survived abduction from Heimaey, nine years in an Algiers kitchen (afterwards declaring roundly that she would die happy if she never had to sieve another grain of couscous again) and every rigour of the homeward trek, only to return to her maker on a ship within sight of Glückstadt with frost in her hair. At least she never did see couscous again and may be presumed to have departed happily.
Christian presides genially over the feast, giving no sign that his capacity for carousing has diminished wit
h advancing years. His drinking prowess has been the talk of Europe ever since a riotous state banquet in England in 1606, at which the young Danish king drank the famously incontinent court of his brother-in-law King James under the table: rumour has it that upon his finally falling at the feet of a tipsy young woman playing the Queen of Sheba, it was necessary to carry the insensible monarch out of the hall to sleep it off. In Iceland news of their sovereign’s antics had spread with surly mirth. Einar knows the stories, but he is impressed all the same. The king is a lively host, friendly and curious and able to hold his drink quite well enough to pose a string of keen questions about their life in Algiers. Einar struggles manfully in his limited Danish with some pointed enquiries about the number of ships the Turks had and the position of their defences.
Much restored by pork and ale, the king’s affability reasserts itself further when he sees how grateful his poor subjects are to be ransomed. As he listens, he strokes the beard that flows down the middle of his chin like a tidy grey waterfall and occasionally lets a finger rest on his pigtail. This confection – quite astonishing, Ásta thinks, unable to keep her eyes off it – reaches to his shoulder, where it is prettily tied with a scarlet ribbon.
Well, Oddrún, you missed that pigtail.
Ásta is a little shaken to realise that Oddrún was more or less correct in her dying description of the king. True, the gold medallions on a chain hanging beneath the voluminous lace collar are not buttons exactly, but they could pass for them at a distance. And the jacket is undoubtedly very red. If Ásta ever manages to puzzle out the sealwoman’s final riddle and work out what she is on no account to do, Oddrún’s occasionally being right will have to be borne in mind.
Some days later the king sends them onwards to Copenhagen with hearty wishes for the future. Merchant ships will be put at their disposal there to take them to Iceland. While awaiting these, might he suggest they admire the many wonders of Copenhagen? They will assuredly gasp at his new Børsen trading exchange, its spire coiled with the sculpted tails of four mighty dragons. Beyond the city walls they will spy his delightful summer palace of Rosenborg, built (he confides) to escape the dank old castle by the sea. And his new ring of bastioned defences around the city – a wonder to behold.
As it transpires, Iceland’s weary hostages will have more than enough time to study the architecture of Copenhagen, and much besides. Disembarking there on a whey-faced afternoon at the end of August, they learn that the last ship of the summer has already left for Iceland and there will not be another until spring. It will be many months yet before they can sail for home.
32
The cathedral known as Vor Frue Kirke is set on what the residents of Copenhagen, who have plainly never visited Algiers, are pleased to call a hill. It does lie high enough to see across to the town’s many islets and canals, taking in the numerous small-bricked buildings that the king has been so energetically constructing, all of which throw into sorry relief the miserably dark streets and ramshackle dwellings in which the Icelanders are obliged to see out their first northern winter for a long time.
The Church of Our Lady is much more austere than the cathedrals Ásta admired in France, which had not been smashed and stripped of their Catholic adornment in the name of Martin Luther’s Reformation. She likes the bare, vaulted airiness of it, although in truth it is not the building that draws her attention so much as the young man who is leading them through it. He has big, sloping shoulders and long, wavy hair, and he holds himself somewhat self-consciously as he walks. She wonders, because she always does, if Egill would look anything like this now with twenty years upon him.
She will learn that Hallgrímur Pétursson is from Skagafjördur in the north of Iceland and had been studying at the Latin school in Hólar when a chance meeting with a couple of German merchants took him to Denmark. While labouring as a blacksmith’s apprentice, he was spotted by the provost of Roskilde University, an Icelandic scholar by the name of Brynjólfur Sveinsson, who sensed intellectual talent in the boy and persuaded him to train for the Lutheran ministry. Now in his final year in the seminar attached to Vor Frue Kirke, Hallgrímur has been tasked with ‘refreshing’, as his superior put it to him, the faith of those who have been separated from wholesome Christian influence for an alarming number of years. In what better way might Iceland’s redeemed hostages fill the hours of enforced winter idleness in Copenhagen than by re-learning the doctrines of the Lutheran church?
The young man has been explaining this somewhat diffidently to his compatriots, their number down to twenty-seven, as he leads them through the cathedral for their first religious class.
No, Egill would look nothing like this man, his bones so big and his features dark and heavyset. Ásta thinks of Egill’s thin white arms and is cuffed by the usual wave of longing. But there is something about this awkward lad all the same. Something in the sensitive eyes, the long arms he looks as if he doesn’t know what to do with either, with the youth of him and the earnestness of him, that reminds Ásta of her firstborn son.
Hallgrímur himself is wondering nervously what he is going to do with all these people who have seen more than he can begin to imagine and endangered their souls in a multitude of ways it is incumbent on him to correct. Halting by the plain altar, he glances around the group from beneath a tongue of dark hair. Old, young (but no children – how strange) and for the most part as poor-looking and unkempt as he, they are regarding him with a range of expressions. Tired resignation is what he mostly discerns, along with varying shades of wariness. He also takes note of an encouraging beam from a flat-faced girl with a large mouth; a fond, maternal smile from a grey-eyed woman in her forties who is gazing at him with a faraway expression; open hostility from a fiery-looking man with a grotesquely mutilated visage; and from a striking woman with a sad, hunted face and eyes black as an anvil, a look of frank interest that makes him blush to the roots of his hair.
All in all, it may be said that his preliminary survey of the first pastoral flock of his ministry makes Hallgrímur Pétursson long fervently to be back with his books in the draughty library on the other side of the quadrangle. He is charged with reforming these people, and it is soon clear there is much work to be done. He is not to know that by the end of the winter the life to have altered most will be his.
For a part of each day, as these grow ever shorter and more wet, Hallgrímur addresses his class from the front of a chilly inner room of the cathedral. The stone walls are glossy with damp and he has no means of providing a fire. In minute detail he leads them through Luther’s catechism and every one of the ten commandments of Moses. Sometimes he also listens, leaning his cheek against a hand like a sheep’s haunch as one person or another makes a stumbling attempt to explain the agonies and temptations they met in another world.
By the following spring he has heard things he will not forget in a lifetime. Here are people who were preserved from going mad by convincing themselves that their children could pray the wrong way and still go to heaven. People who have come close themselves to surrendering to a different creed. People who have asked whether churchmen are always right about everything. People who wonder yet if there might be more to heaven and earth than even Martin Luther knew.
Hallgrímur Pétursson has his answers, but never again will they arrive in his mouth, or grace the poetry to which he is beginning to turn a hand, quite as glibly after the winter of 1636.
Hallgrímur also has other matters on his mind. It is Gunnhildur, beside herself with excitement, who first reports a suspicious overnight visit to the house where black-eyed Gudrídur Símonardóttir is boarding. The attraction between the two is plain to see (so Gunnhildur declares) and as romantic as anything in the stories of Scheherazade, although for her personal taste she could have wished Hallgrímur better looking and a shade less intense. And of course Gudda is old enough to be his mother.
Everyone keeps an eye open for stolen looks and the casual brushing of hands, and everyone is amply rewa
rded. Some among the group are angry and others merely amused to observe their appointed religious mentor in such poorly disguised combat with one of the very commandments in which he is so earnestly instructing them. Ásta goes so far as to wonder whether the Almighty himself might be displaying a sense of humour in this regard. But all are alert to the dangers of this improbable coupling. It is well known that Gudda is returning to a husband on Heimaey.
The days are beginning to lengthen again when Gudda whispers to Ásta that she is expecting a child. They are sitting on a bench in the dank cathedral room, rubbing their cold hands as they wait for the day’s class to begin.
Ásta blows out a long breath, which lingers white in the gloom. ‘You must know this is serious?’ The penalties for adultery are severe and there will be no hiding it now.
‘I do, but I can’t be sorry. That’s the worst of it, Ásta. I was content enough being married to Eyjólfur. At least I think I was. It was so long ago, so far away, I can barely remember what I felt then.’
Hallgrímur enters the room in a flurry of threadbare black robe and settles his books on the table, still with that pleasing shyness about him and the thinking behind the eyes that remind Ásta so much of Egill. Gudda’s dark eyes follow him.
‘He has come to me like a kind of blessing,’ she whispers. ‘Can you understand that, Ásta? I’ve been with many men these last years, sometimes forced to it, sometimes enjoying what I should not. What does a commandment of Moses have to say to such as me in the life we have been made to live?’
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