He threw a handful of grass at her. Then he grabbed her and swung her in the air, round and round with her hair streaming and her skirts flying until she shrieked for mercy. It is a long time since she has thought of it.
A silver sky is beginning to emerge from the mist, and islands and skerries are recovering their shape. Closer to shore a group of seals is starting to flop back into the sea from a ledge so nearly the same muddy grey as themselves that only the movement gives them away. One remains alone on the rock, gazing straight across the water.
‘Speak to me, then, Oddrún,’ Ásta shouts, cupping her hands over her mouth. ‘You always had a mind to speak when I wasn’t listening. Well, I’m listening now.’
The seal regards her levelly out of big wet eyes.
‘Come on, Oddrún, you told me a riddle once. You told me not to do what Gudrún did. Not do what, Oddrún? There won’t be a better moment for me to know.’
They stare at each other, Ásta and the seal, until the last wisps of vapour have trailed to nothing. Then the seal turns its back, lumbers wetly over the lip of the rock and disappears into the waves. By which time it has come to Ásta how the saga ends.
The mist leaves behind a sparkling April day. The sky is the colour of the polished ceramic beakers in which she used to serve Cilleby his coffee, an intense, eye-watering blue stippled with a few lazy clouds that the breeze has not the energy to shift. The grass is still dimpled with snow, but the air is scented with spring.
Walking back across the heath she catches sight of Ólafur in the distance, making for Ofanleiti from the direction of the harbour. Shrunk into himself with his head down, he doesn’t notice her until she is almost upon him. His smile of greeting is so bleak that it forgets to be wary.
‘May I walk with you?’ she says and, without waiting for a reply, turns about and settles into his tired step. They walk side by side in silence until Ólafur, continuing to look straight ahead, says, ‘Do you really think I haven’t known the soul’s anguish?’
She says nothing.
‘In the years without you I pored through the holy texts. I brought to mind example after example from the prophets, the apostles, the martyrs, every saint I could think of and, of course, our Lord himself. And still there was no peace. Every day I had to find words of comfort and explanation for others, but could find none for myself.’
The headland of Stórhöfdi can be seen to the south now, and the further islands, slumbering in the sunshine. Ólafur looks over at them, speaking so quietly she has to lean in to hear.
‘I tried to be like Jón Thorsteinsson, always so steadfast in his convictions. You observed once – do you remember? – that he had no mountains to climb in the mind. Well, it’s true. And that is because he knew the truth and proclaimed it without a waver.’
Ásta ponders this. ‘Did you hear, Ólafur,’ she says carefully, ‘that the Reverend Jón’s son has become a renegade corsair? They call him the Westman.’
Ólafur inclines his head. He has heard about a lot of things since the hostages returned. More than she knows.
‘Then you will know that licensed piracy – exactly what robbed him of his father – is how he earned the money to ransom his mother from her chains. Our dear Margrét breathed her last in the arms of her Muslim son, grateful to be there. Now, let me ask you this: would that not have presented mountains, and ravines too, for Jón Thorsteinsson the husband, Jón Thorsteinsson the father? What poem might he have written about that? What dream would serve to make sense of it?’
Ólafur stops walking and turns to look at her directly.
‘I don’t mean to make light of this, Ólafur,’ she adds quickly. ‘You know I loved my uncle dearly.’ Then, carefully again, the way being strewn with eggshells: ‘I only wonder if it may sometimes be easier to die a visionary and a martyr than to live a feeling man and an honest priest.’
Ólafur gives a short, mirthless laugh. ‘You know, I have even been jealous that he died the way he did – passing into eternal life from an infidel blow with the name of Jesus Christ on his lips, ripe for legend before he was even in the grave. Now when people suffer on this island, they remember Jón Thorsteinsson and feel themselves stronger. While I …’
He hesitates and looks down again. His clasped fingers are working restively.
‘Go on, Ólafur. I’m listening.’
‘I failed.’
He looks up again, but not quite into her eyes. Ólafur has told himself he will speak to her only the truth, will hold back nothing of his own weakness, whether she despises him for it or not. But this unexpectedly gentle encouragement is threatening to unman him more than her scorn.
‘I could not bring my family back. That was the biggest failure. But I also failed to bring comfort to others, although God knows I tried. My preaching sounded hollow in my own ears. I filled nearly every page of my book with the sacred promises on which we rest our hope and they were words, words, words, because what I really felt was despair.’
She takes his arm in silence and they go on a little way.
‘You will recall hearing that when I and the others were in Copenhagen on the way home last year, we received classes from a priest in training by the name of Hallgrímur Pétursson.’
Ólafur nods. ‘I hear he lives a hard life now for a man with such a fine mind. He and Gudrídur received permission to marry in the end, I am told.’
For a priest she recalls being stern about adultery, he too is taking trouble with the eggshells.
‘You would like him, Ólafur. He was rather wet behind the ears and extremely rash in his ardour, but he reminded me of our Egill as he might be as a young man – a thinker, you know, seeing more than he says.’
Ólafur smiles to himself, imagining Egill as the priest he thought he would be by now, climbing the pulpit of Landakirkja in a black robe with a white ruff at his neck. Ásta sees the thought passing across his eyes and hurries on before it can lead him into shadow.
‘It was a lot to expect of this young man that he would be able to draw us easily into the fold again, as if we had just wandered off to crop on the wrong kind of grass for a few years. But he did have a knack of saying simple things that struck deep. He told us that God in the person of Jesus Christ had himself been where we were, abandoned and in despair, and that there is where he would meet us. I have a feeling Hallgrímur would say something of the kind to you. He might even suggest that it is in your very weakness that you manifest your God most truly to others, not in the unassailable strength of the martyr.’
She shrugs and casts down her eyes. Humility is not Ásta’s strongest feature but she is trying very hard. ‘Of course, that might just be me speaking.’
Ólafur gives her one of the mild but searching looks she has been finding so irritating of late. She puts up with it meekly enough and is congratulating herself on her forbearance when he says, not mildly at all but with some asperity, ‘It’s good to hear you speaking at all, Ásta. After yesterday I thought you might not address another word to me again.’
A wan smile accompanies this, which softens the accusation and makes her think twice about pointing out how very annoying it is to be preached at when you long only to be understood.
‘I was at fault, Ólafur,’ she says instead. ‘You have done nothing to deserve the way I’ve treated you, and I don’t have the words to explain it. Except to say that I used to belong in this place, I used to know who I was. And then I went away.’
They continue meandering home under her lapis lazuli sky. It is Ólafur who breaks the silence.
‘Sometimes, when you were away, I would walk to Stórhöfdi. People thought I had taken leave of my senses to labour all the way up there for nothing, but I had such a longing to get as close as physically possible to where you were. I would pray then for you and the children, that you might be treated well. My prayers seemed to flow easier up there in the wind, and they were invaded less often by the man who bought us.
‘He came to me over
and over again, the Moor in the shadows. There he would be, in my prayers and in my sleep, standing before me in the white cloak he had on when he sent me to the king. But he never had a face. Always that white hood and no face.’
Ásta keeps her gaze on the sea, glad he cannot see her own face.
‘The name of Ali Pitterling Cilleby was not known for cruelty. I learned that much when I was there. Jaspar and I were fed well and never beaten, and I tried not to let myself forget that. Over the years of our separation Cilleby’s name rang in my head like a forge hammer, but I held on to that – that he was not cruel.’
‘Ólafur, I must tell you … I have to tell you something.’
His eyes stay fast to the islands. She does not know how to say it. It was another world.
Ólafur turns towards her and lays his two hands on her shoulders to bring her round to face him. Then he gently tips up her chin until she is forced to look at him.
‘Mín kaera Ásta, do you think I have lived all these years on this island, watching forbidden love filling one empty hearth after another, without wondering about you?’
Wondering all that time? Fearing? Had he really? She has never thought about it.
‘And what about you, Ólafur?’ she asks with studied airiness. Although she knows fine there has been no fat widow squeezed into Ofanleiti, it is a relief to be diverted from what she is going to have to tell him. ‘May I be permitted to wonder also?’
‘As you rightly observed yesterday, I am some small way past my prime,’ he replies, very dry. ‘And two wives are enough for any man, don’t you think?’
Goodness, she is going to laugh. She can feel it on its way, the old bubble rising at the wrong time. He sees it and doesn’t know what to do, and the laughter dies in her throat as fast as it arrived.
‘Yes, Ólafur, on reflection I do think two wives are probably quite enough for any man,’ she says soberly. ‘But I do need to tell you something.’
‘Tell me nothing.’
He begins to walk again. His step is so much quicker than before that she has to run a little to catch him and cannot see his eyes.
‘You came home, Ásta. That is enough.’
38
Something in the air around them has shifted. To be sure, nothing happens that garrulous young Inga judges worthy of reporting to the rest of the island. The passage between their beds remains too wide for an arm to reach across in the night. Nor do they say much, cleansed of words as both feel themselves to be. But something has changed. It reminds Ásta of the fugitive breeze that used to escape the sea on a stifling afternoon and creep through the white city to refresh the roof garden; somehow, from somewhere, it has stolen into Ofanleiti. Ólafur, dazed with thankfulness, feels it as the breath of life in Ezekiel’s vison, arriving to revive a valley of dry bones.
A few days after their walk, he comes hurrying home and whispers that there is something he wants to show her.
‘What – now?’
‘Exactly now. The light will be with us a while yet this evening. Come on. I promise you’ll be glad of it.’
He sets off at once and Ásta trips across the springy heathland behind him. Spring is blooming among the grass and stones, although you would have to look closely to see the tendrils of snowy pearlwort and the furled pink buds no bigger than a newborn’s fingernail.
‘Ólafur, slow down. Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see.’
He leads her along the cliff path to a stout rock hollowed on one side and cushioned with greenery. ‘Here, this will do. Make yourself comfortable, and look over there.’
Two diminutive puffins are standing side by side on a grassy ledge just below the cliff-top, their heads twisting this way and that, as if unable to contain their curiosity about the world to which they have returned. As Ásta watches, one flies off and the other potters alone, making space on the ledge again when the mate returns. Far below, the sea is pimpled with black heads.
Ólafur smiles to see her smile. ‘There, I thought you would like to see them back.’
They sit watching the birds in silence, while Sudurey, Álsey and Brandur doze to the west and the setting sun lays down its path on the water. Then they stroll home together.
Seeing how she struggles with so much that never ruffled her before, Ólafur does his best all summer to show her other things. He points out the tiny green sandwort roses blooming white out of black gravel. He makes her look more closely at the lava they walk on every day, so deep buried under roots and crumbly earth in places that the rocks themselves seem to have feelers in the land. One day he even gives her a turn by patting the big stone at the foot of the Ofanleiti slope and suggesting, with barely an eyebrow disturbed, that she should take a look, for if ever there were a rock that looks like an elf-home it is surely this one. ‘Ólafur, are you being serious?’ she gasps, wondering if anyone else is fainting clean away to hear this too. He revels in her pleasure. He is much restored.
When a letter makes its way across the water from Finnur Gudmundsson, they pore over it together for news of Helga, and when Ásta’s eyes fill with tears to read it, he strokes the back of her hand with one careful finger. Helga’s latest born infant lived only weeks; she is already confined with another.
In the autumn he hustles her off to pick blueberries. ‘Try this,’ he says, shattering a spider’s web to pluck one and rolling it for her in the palm of his hand. ‘See how perfectly round it is. Look at the shine on it. So dark you think it’s black, but tip it in the light like this and, see, it’s a dusky blue.’
That colour. She puts the berry in her mouth and bursts the smooth skin between her teeth, savouring the flesh, remembering his taste.
Ólafur is watching her a little sadly. He always knows when she leaves.
She catches herself and smiles to him. ‘It’s all right. I’m back.’
‘I know,’ he says, so gently she could weep.
‘I always come back.’
‘I know.’
She puts her hand to his worn cheek and strokes it. Then they begin to fill their basket with fruit.
Sometimes there is no simple answer to a question: not one that will serve the truth at any rate. That is what Gudrún tries to tell her son at the end of the Laxdaela saga. She is a very old lady by then, having outlived her lovers and withdrawn into, of all things, religious seclusion. Her son Bolli Bollason, by the husband she goaded into murdering Kjartan Ólafsson, comes to visit her and asks a question that has obviously been much on his mind: which man of them all did his mother love the most?
Evasively, the old woman mentions her four husbands and their qualities or the lack of them, hoping this will suffice. But her son is persistent. ‘You still haven’t told me which man you loved the most. There is no need to conceal it any longer.’
Then Gudrún gives her answer. ‘I was worst,’ she says, ‘to him I loved the most.’
And was that Kjartan, the man she wanted but could not have? Or was it Bolli, the father of her son? The saga does not tell.
Do not treat worst the one you love best. I hear you, Oddrún. But that still leaves a question the saga does not ask. It may be that the sealwoman had it in mind that an answer should be sought to this, too. Is it by the wanting that we measure love, or by something else?
The summer of 1638 is followed by an especially tough winter. Usually the sea-wind sweeps the worst of Heimaey’s snow away before it has time to pile against doors and block out what light is left. But this winter it has stayed.
Ólafur has developed a cough he cannot shake. In January his legs nearly fail him as they trail back through the snow from Landakirkja. He keeps having to stop to catch his breath and spit.
‘Lean on me a moment,’ Ásta says.
He puts his hand to her shoulder and she an arm around his waist and they rest like that on the heath, she bearing the frailness of him as the last of the afternoon light sinks over the mainland.
‘I think it is time to ask my son-in-l
aw to take over.’ His face is pale as bone and his forehead speckled with sweat.
‘Come, Ólafur,’ she says playfully, her heart the while thudding with alarm. ‘Remember what Gunnlaugur Adder Tongue said: “a man shall not limp while both his legs are the same length.” Our Jón loved to hear that story.’
Ólafur manages a wry smile. ‘My legs are the length they always were, but I’m afraid they are not going to carry me much longer.’
Since then he has barely left the house. Day by day the winter saps his strength, the snow seeming to smother the life in him, the wind sneaking through the walls to steal the warmth from his blood. His chest heaves with coughing and his eye is too bright.
‘He should be in the master bed,’ Thorgerdur says to Ásta. ‘I have spoken to Gísli and he agrees. It really is time.’
Ásta draws aside the grey wool curtain that droops across the far end of the badstofa and helps Ólafur into the bed. His head sinks gratefully on to the pillow and he shuts his eyes. She pulls the curtain across.
‘Move over,’ she says, and his lids fly open.
Obediently he shuffles towards the wall and she clambers in beside him, primly arranging the covers around them both. The duvet smells of Gísli. After a moment or two Ólafur stretches out a tentative arm and she lets her head fall into its crook. She turns her body towards him. Their feet embrace, sock to sock.
‘You’re lovely and warm, dearest,’ he murmurs.
After that Ásta sets the curtain aside by day, so that Ólafur can feel part of the winter activity of the household, the making and the mending, weaving cloth and weaving stories, while children with stomachs becoming emptier as the stores go down squabble over fishbones. When the room becomes so dark that nobody can see their hands any longer, Thorgerdur lights a grudging lamp with the oil she guards like a troll in case it too should run out before spring. And then the tales begin.
Ásta and Ólafur have taken to holding their own private kvöldvaka behind the curtain, while Gísli drones at the other end. One evening Ólafur asks if she ever heard any stories in ‘that place’.
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