From the Mouth of the Whale

III (Winter Solstice, 1637)

Evening has fallen on the shortest day of the year and, dear God, the longest night lies ahead. How many hours of light did I get? Two? Three? One? It was a dismal day, after a bad beginning. When morning finally came I was cheated of what meagre share of daylight I could hope for. Thick banks of cloud hung over the island, as low as could be, tinged black at the crown; a heavy, merciless weight, shedding neither rain nor snow. The dreariest kind of clouds, which drain one of vigour, clamping their iron-grey fists around one’s skull, digging their talons deep into eyes and ears, forcing them into mouth and nose in an attempt to fill one’s head with grey sleet, to burst it from within and crush it from without. With effortless strength they depress one’s humour into the coldest wells of thought and imprison it there, but unlike the cloud of smoke that drives occupants of a burning house to the floor in the hope of snatching a breath of life-giving air, nothing awaits one at the bottom of that pit of despair but a mouthful of acrid yellow gall. There is no gleam of hope, no mercy to be found on this frozen tundra; the ground is as hard as stone underfoot, the frost reaches down to the very bedrock. The sea has frozen halfway from the island to the mainland and the ice is stained a dirty black following the sandstorm at Martinmas. Not that I can see the shore, for the mountains are as dark as the sky — assuming they are still there. What do I know? Damn the mountains. Above them hangs a pall of black gloom, like the lid of a narrow iron casket. So this day began, and it only grew worse. When the tangle of clouds finally began to unravel it was not the sun that appeared from behind them, no, it was the feeble glimmer of the moon. Was I supposed to be grateful? After all, light is light, is it not? Ah no, the cold moonlight was nothing but a bitter reminder of what I was missing: the winter sun. Her weak rays may lack the power to disperse the sea ice, waken the growing things in the soil or inspire the bunting to sing, yet even so her pallid face fills one’s breast with faith in her ability to do these very things. A faith that warms the cockles of one’s heart. Even more than the sunlight itself, it was this spark of hope that was denied to me. It was not as if I needed strong light to perform the chores that awaited me when I crawled out of my lair at noon; for those, even the moon’s sullen grin was superfluous. What need had I to venture outside in the loathsome winter weather? Well, to empty my chamber pot of its paltry contents that had frozen solid in the night. Where little goes in, little comes out: no more than two droppings in this case, congealed in a single splash of piss. There are many reasons for this: firstly, I am such an old wreck nowadays that my bowels have become sluggish; secondly, in recent weeks the weather has been so stormy that I do not leave the hut unless it is unavoidable, and as I hardly move at all, I need less food; and thirdly, I have scarcely anything left to eat. And I have nothing with which to counter any of this: old age, the time of year or dearth of food. The sheet of ice has its beginning halfway down the beach and surrounds the whole island with its sudden creaks and eerie groans, pleated like one of the Lord Chief Justice’s starched ruffs. On the beach all life has been scorched by the cold; the sand is as hard as stone, the seaweed withered. Haddock and cod lie under the furthest rim of the ice, if they have not frozen to death too, but I have neither the strength nor the nerve to go out there, lacking a boat. What would I do there anyway? Talk the fish up through the ice? I have little fishing tackle and am too frail to hack a hole in the ice for my line. There is nothing here for the gulls but the boulders on which they rest before resuming their search for food with feeble flaps of their wings and famished cries. Even if I had a piece of string to snare them with, I do not have any bait for my trap apart from the flesh on my own bones, because I am not going to start feeding scavengers from my scanty stores — all I have left to last me till spring is a bundle of dried trout, some soup bones, a bunch of dried dulse, half a bag of flour, the butter that has not yet been scraped off the sides of the barrel — and I hardly think it would be wise to habituate the gulls to the taste of myself. Not that such a thing would be necessary; I expect Master and Mistress Seamew already have plans to feast on my corpse if I freeze to death on one of my trips to empty my piss pot. Well, if that is how my life is to end, the pickings will make a meaner banquet than the gulls anticipate: I wish them good cheer. But the worst was still to come; this brutal day had yet to play its cruellest trick; God in His wisdom had resolved to test me still further. I had just started to chip away at the contents of my piss pot when I noticed that the moon seemed to have changed shape: its left-hand side was dented, like a cheek yielding before Famine’s spectral finger. At first I assumed the heavy clouds were closing in on it again, and thought it a damned shame that they would not leave it to hang there in peace, but on closer inspection I noticed that the clouds had, if anything, thinned. I carried on banging the pot on a rock. Although there was little in it, I had to be careful not to bang it too hard as the wooden strakes had been eaten away by the urine and I could not afford to break it. Against the background of that hollow banging I watched as a quarter of the moon was gnawed away. Fear and trembling! Through my winter lethargy I grasped what was happening: a lunar eclipse. The moon, the only source of light meanly allotted to me in my solitary state on this gloomiest day of the year, was darkening. Behind me the sun crept as furtively as a fox beneath the rim of the horizon, casting the Earth’s shadow over her wretched brother. In doing so she put us both in our place, reminding the moon that without her he was nothing but a dreary, lightless mountain of basalt, and ordering the beggar Jónas Pálmason to clear off back inside his hovel. Insignificant humans were not welcome at the heavenly bodies’ cheerless family farce. If I stood there one minute longer with my nose pointing at the darkened moon, I would drop dead on the spot and be found in spring, lying there lifeless with my rigid hands still clamped round the piss pot. I saw now that this day no longer deserved the name; it would be better to tear it out of the calendar and file it where it belonged between the pages of Satan’s black book as ‘Night’. Obeying the command of the wrathful sun, I hastened inside, barred the door, crawled into the kitchen, put the chamber pot by the bed and lay down, pulling up the blanket and making the sign of the cross. And here I lie still. Oh, is it not just and true what those foreign mountebanks write in their many widely read travel accounts about the vileness and absurdity of Iceland, this condemned island of the dead — however much her educated citizens may revile and rant at them? Old Arngrímur Jónsson blew raspberries at such accounts in two books, both of which found their way into print; in one he included a portrait of himself, in the other a fine drawing of a monkey. Bishop Oddur Einarsson also compiled a book, of which copies can be found here and there, though minus illustrations; and Bishop Gísli, Oddur’s son, has two small pamphlets in the making, although there is little enthusiasm for them. I have not read any of these counterblasts, for they are all in Latin, which I do not know, but I have no doubt they play fast and loose with the truth, being at the same time tediously written and dull to read, since none of these three is to the popular taste or known for his poetic skills. On the other hand, various titbits from the controversial travellers’ tales have been passed on to me, though I have not seen any of them myself since the lords of our land place them on a par with murder. But even from these scraps I can tell that although, naturally, they get most things wrong, tell many lies, exaggerate and fill in the blanks with fantasy — indeed, wise men tell me that it is evident from their works that scarcely a man of them has ever set foot in this country — nevertheless one fact stands out from all their foolish nonsense: they come close to the truth when they state that Iceland is no paradise in winter: on the contrary, it is hell. The Englishman Thomas Nashe apparently says in his Terrors of the Night: ‘Admirable (above the rest) are the incomprehensible wonders of the bottomless Lake Vetter, over which no fowl flies but is frozen to death, nor any man passeth but he is senselessly benumbed like a statue of marble.’ Of course there is no lake in Iceland called ‘Vetter’, and there is precious little admirable about these horrors, and whether some of our larger lakes are bottomless I would not like to say. But what the foreign gentleman manages better than I, or any of my highly educated countrymen, is to describe the bitter helplessness and numbness I feel on this midwinter’s day on the Corpse Strand, far from the sun. I know it, I am there. And so it is with all the far-fetched tales that wind up the Arngrímurs of this world with their uncouth exclamations about endless nights, burning snow, whales the size of mountains, trumpet blasts of the dead from volcanoes and icebergs, witches who can sell sailors a favourable wind or send their sons to the moon; in some strange way they come close to the stories that we ordinary, humble folk tell ourselves in an attempt to comprehend our existence here and make it more bearable. Now that I give it more thought, how do I know that there are no lakes here like those described by Master Nashe? None of Iceland’s leading men were willing to pay me to explore this land; they turned a deaf ear to the news I gathered about silver sand, veins of gold and nests of gems. No, they are too busy growing rich on what this libertine Earth has to offer, passing corrupt judgements, hindering honest men from supporting their offspring, breaking up their families, cutting off their fingers and ears. In the same passage in Gentleman Thomas’s book we can read: ‘It is reported that the Pope long since gave them a dispensation to receive the sacrament in ale, insomuch as for their incessant frosts there, no wine but was turned to emayle as soon as ever it came amongst them’, and also ‘they have ale that they carry in their pockets like glue, and ever when they would drink, they set it on the fire and melt it.’ He who is omniscient knows that in this miserable hour it would be a comfort to me to be able to reach into my pocket and fetch out a beakerful of warm, consoling ale. But here, alas, old Tommy is telling a flat lie.

WHITE WHALE: from this creature is derived the proverb that ‘the white whale seldom fails on the fishing grounds’, for it is considered very wise and can often be found near fishermen, although it hides itself from view and rarely breaks the surface. The story goes that once all the crew but one were asleep on a shark-fishing vessel when a white whale surfaced and stayed beside the ship. The vigilant man reacted quickly and struck it with a club. When the rest of the crew awoke, they warned that he could expect retaliation, and heeding their warning, the man took to the hills. He stayed away from the sea for thirteen years. But at the end of that time, believing the white whale to be dead, he returned to the same fishing ground. A white whale appeared at once and seized him alone from the ship, and neither fish nor man was ever seen again. This is the origin of the saying about a man with a long memory: ‘he holds a grudge longer than a white whale’.

The kitchen is the smallest room in the hut; it is easiest to keep warm in here — if one can call it easy, or warm, for that matter. To fit the bed in here I had to pull the frame off the doorways between hall and living room, and between kitchen and hall. I did not replace the frames: they went on the fire. This is poor workmanship, I know — the hut will fall in on my head — but I needed the warmth after all my efforts. The kitchen doorway proving still too narrow, I had to break the legs off the bed in order to manhandle it through at a slant, and once it was inside I found it impossible to replace them, so I burnt them too. And since the base of the bed frame proved too long for the kitchen, I had to prop it up against the wall to the right of the door and jam the other end hard against the stones of the hearth. As a result, my bed tilts rather, meaning either my head is halfway up the wall and my feet by the hearth, or else my feet are up and my head is down, so when the pot is on the fire either my head boils and my feet freeze, or vice versa. I am continually turning round in bed, spinning back and forth like a top, which does my rheumatism no good at all. Thus I huddle by the hearth like a stay-at-home hero, edited out of my own story, too thoroughly buried and forgotten to be called on to perform unexpected feats of courage in a far-off kingdom. Yet I proved a useful guest in the realm of that busy monarch, Christian IV. Last summer I returned from Denmark in triumph, bearing a royal writ signed by His Majesty’s own hand and witnessed by many long-tailed seals, in which he enjoined his subjects, my countrymen, to accede to his wishes and revoke the foolish, brutal sentence they had passed on me at their libertine court in the mud of Thingvellir in 1631. With his own hand he had attached to his letter a sincere recommendation by the most learned men in the Danish realm, who had subjected me to a whole day of the strictest interrogation under the guidance of their rector and most erudite principal, Ole Worm. That throng of luminaries had gathered in the University Council known as the Consistorium, which for the infallibility and fairness of its judgements is respected and admired by all the nobles of that land, and thus these most skilled practitioners in the art of learning confirmed that Jónas Pálmason of Strandir had done nothing more heinous than compile an anthology of harmless ancient lore, of uneven quality to be sure, as with any human endeavour, and most of it outmoded, but the man himself far from being a sorcerer was a curious and diligent scholar of the arts of the mind and hand, although unschooled. Clutching this fine testimonial and the writ signed by the king, I boarded ship at Copenhagen last spring, confident that once home on Icelandic soil I could expect justice to be restored. But my happiness proved short-lived, for among my fellow passengers were the emissaries of that slanderous forked tongue that had so softly licked the ears of certain men in Denmark the autumn before and had me thrown in gaol. Their ringleader was the nephew of Sheriff Ari Magnússon, easily recognised by the family trait, a birthmark at the corner of his left eye. These little vipers won over the young captain who had been commissioned to carry me home, tricking him into believing that I was to blame for the winds that stirred up the sea and drove huge waves at his ship. They worked so well on his simple soul that when we reached the coast of Iceland near Rosmhvalsnes and sea devils, ratfish, malign mermen and other monsters raised a six-day storm that prevented us from going either forward or back, the captain, in the belief that I was stirring up the sea by sorcery, ordered his crew to throw me overboard. But no sooner had they dragged me up on the gunwale than the storm abruptly subsided, so there was no need to drown me on that occasion. After this the poor merchant and his crew were more convinced than ever that I was a sorcerer, but so in awe were they of my powers that I was left in peace for the remaining two days of the voyage. Naturally, it did not occur to any of them that blessed Providence might have intervened to save them from killing an innocent man. The vipers, meanwhile, slithered in among the coils of rope on deck and lay low until we reached land. The merchant vessel had barely cast anchor in Hafnarfjord before the slander-mongers put out a boat and rowed to shore. This did not bode well. Before I knew it, the governor’s executioner was being ferried out to the ship, accompanied by a second man and a neck iron, with the obvious intention of arresting me. I fled the executioner by swarming up the mast, from where I yelled that I would rather jump in the sea than set foot in my native land in chains. At which point it transpired that those same crew members who had been most eager to throw me overboard now wished by all means to prevent me from drowning of my own accord. Taking courage from the presence of the executioner, they chased me up the mast, dragged me down on deck and held me fast while he clamped the iron round my neck. And so I went ashore chained like a savage dog, which was a fitting preliminary to the brutal treatment that my tormenters had in store for me: they clapped me in irons, tied me backwards on an ancient mare and made me ride in front so that whenever we approached a farm on our way to Thingvellir the dogs would get wind of me first and run barking and baying around the mare, to be followed by a pack of crowing urchins and adults who abused me with ignorant insults and cat calls. Yet none of them knew of what crime the alleged felon was accused. When we reached court, the judges flouted the royal request, ignored the University Council’s words and confirmed their former sentence of outlawry. What made it all the more poignant for me was that the judges called themselves king’s men, a number were divines and others professed themselves Christians, and many of them had on their travels to Copenhagen been generously received at the home of the hospitable Worm and continued to enjoy his kindness after their return to Iceland. I had with my own eyes seen how these false friends plagued the learned doctor with letters importuning him to acquire for them all kinds of perishable items, from aqua vitae to Sunday breeches, or to mention their name at court, or to provide medical advice for their own or their mothers-in-law’s haemorrhoids, their wives’ tooth-ache and their children’s constipation — all of which ailments stemmed from the attempts of these homespun ‘aristocrats’ to ape the lifestyle of court in the Icelandic countryside, with the attendant idleness, intemperance and indulgence in sweet-meats in the Danish fashion. It was not enough that they required him to turn a blind eye to the indolence of their sons who were supposed to be studying at the university — the funds that were wasted on paying for those oafish gallants’ carousing and unheard-of extravagance in clothes would have been better spent if the Church could have commandeered them for the herd of barefoot beggars who were daily turned away from the kitchen doors at the childhood homes of these finely tricked-out drunkards — no, as if that were not enough, the most importunate among these petitioners actually expected Master Worm to take the time to compose obituary poems for them, though to lighten his burden they themselves provided the praise. In return for his trouble they sent him old books, healing stones and natural objects that seldom arrived in one piece: maggoty bird skins, rotten skates, shells and eggs in a thousand fragments, and stones of invisibility, clumsily faked. Preceptor Worm and I used to make fun of all this rubbish when I visited him, laughing aloud, the university man and the poet. Yet he put up with this one-sided trade with the Icelanders because just occasionally they would by accident send him something of value, such as the gaming piece of whale ivory, pretty old and decently carved, which is not surprising since it was a gift from that worthy fellow Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás. Although Ole Worm’s treacherous correspondents included honest men, like my Laufás kinsmen, none of this better group was among the judges who treated me so scandalously for a second time. If anything, their hatred was even more venomous than before as they were smarting over the fact that the University Council’s verdict declared in effect that their judgement of me had been ill-founded and deserved to be thrown out. Moreover, my friendship with the learned doctor had filled their hearts with envy and fear that I would tell him the truth about them: like the prankster who pisses on the calves after being flogged for throwing stones at the cows, they chose to compound their disgrace. Thus they reinforced my sentence by adding a clause that until someone was willing to give me passage abroad, I was to languish in irons in the dungeon at the governor’s residence in Bessastadir, in the full knowledge that no captain would be found for that passage any more than last time and I would have to end my days in the black hole, a prospect they found sweet. There I relived my nightmare of six years earlier, though now there was no Brynjólfur Sveinsson with his gentle touch. To the accompaniment of mocking jeers from the crowd I was tied on the mare’s back again and the executioner was just about to strike her when his master, the governor’s deputy Jens Söffrinson, steward of Bessastadir, called for silence. He beseeched the court to show mercy and spare him the burden of housing an ugly customer like Jónas Pálmason. The deputy’s words led to a good deal of tittering and sniggering, with accompanying hand gestures, head-tossing and tutting. However, once everyone had remembered their hands and wiped the froth from their lips, they acceded to his request and back I was sent to this island.

And there she lay, in the patch of heather beside the path leading to our hut, a plaything of the wind and weather: my wife, Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir, now nothing but a heap of black rags. Throwing down my belongings, I ran to her, fell on my knees and flung my arms around her, crying: ‘Sigga, Sigga!’ Only to recoil at once, for a chill emanated from her body like the draught from a passageway. I raced in the direction of the landing place, waving and calling for help, but the lad who had ferried me to the island was out of earshot by now, bending to his oars off the north bank, and either did not or feigned not to see me. Running back, I took Sigga in my arms again, pressing her against me, but under the shawls she was nothing but bones. I struck my brow with my clenched fist: my God, oh my God! The damned swine had betrayed her; no one had helped her with the autumn chores or bothered to bring her supplies before Christmas or cared to see how the old woman on Gullbjörn’s Island was coping. I consigned them all to hell. Her shawl was pulled down over her nose and nothing could be seen of her face but the pursed lips and stubborn chin. I drew the cloth gently back over her brow; the bluish-yellow flesh was icy cold yet seemed unblemished, apart from a sprig of flowering thyme that sat fast in her right cheek. But where were her eyes? Had the ravens been at her? I fumbled at her eyelids; thank God, there was substance under them; I had been misled by their black appearance. I wept. It began to rain, then stopped. I wept on: for now I had killed my Sigga too. Evening fell and the rain started again. I carried her into the hut, laid her body on the bed in the living room, knelt down beside her and begged her to forgive me for all the wrongs I had done her, both great and small: for the trials she had been forced to endure on account of my obsessive curiosity and delving; the collecting mania that had filled all our chests with unidentifiable berries, fool’s gold and deadly poisonous plants, and books in languages that neither of us could read, while a cold wind blew among the empty cooking pots; the endless gabbling of elves and trolls; the evening I spoke harshly to her in front of the children; the hare-brained schemes and worthless conceits my mind constantly spewed forth that were to cost us so dear; the prospect of fame that dragged us from place to place, constantly on the move, from one side of the country to the other, only to end up in a bottomless well of debt to the very people who were supposed to make me rich, with the result that our home had to be broken up yet again. I begged her forgiveness for the deplorable sufferings I had caused her through my meddling in affairs too deep for a poor poet, by which I had provoked the enmity of powerful men with whom I could not contend, failing to realise that they were jackals, not lions, that they would not be satisfied until they had severed my head from my body. The silence that followed was overwhelming, unbroken this time by the quick retort with which Sigrídur had in recent years responded to any discourse of mine, regardless of topic:

‘That’s the sort of nonsense that got us here in the first place!’

Whenever I heard those words all the wind would leave my sails; they seemed to strike at the very root of my impotence. It was only too true that my nonsense had driven us here and there, hither and thither, back and forth. We had been forced to dwell in so many ‘here’s against our will on our constant flight from my enemies, from the predatory silver-plated claws that clutched after me and my loved ones. Me and all I held dear. There were spies at every turn, ready to betray a poor vagabond in the hope that his powerful foes would throw them a morsel. Ah, Judas’s pleasure was short-lived and his remorse scalded and stung, but these scoundrels had no conscience; they bragged of getting the outlaw Jónas the Learned arrested for their own amusement and a reward of thirty brass farthings. My children’s despair is still etched in my memory as they watched their father being thrown in the mud, beaten and belaboured with fists and clubs, before being flung, helplessly, head first into the black hole of prison. I can still hear the poor little darlings’ sad wails as they embraced one another outside the prison wall, laying their tender ears to the stone in the hope of hearing their father say that everything would be all right. On the other side of the wall I writhed in my chains, throwing up my hands and calling out just that: ‘All will be well, dear children, with God’s help all will be well, when the Lord hears your prayers and my pleas, all will be well.’ Yet things did not improve, they only got worse. I ran my fingers gently over Sigga’s brow, down her nose and cheek, avoiding the sprig of thyme. The last time I heard her refer to ‘us’, she meant only herself and her old man, me, the two sad wretches on Gullbjörn’s Island. But once it meant ‘the two of us and our four children’, then ‘us two and our three children’, and later ‘us two and our two children’, until finally it was only ‘us two and Little Gudmundur’, for only the eldest, Pálmi Gudmundur, survived into adulthood, benefiting no doubt from being named after the good Bishop Gudmundur Arason. His brothers and sisters all fell to the scythe, slender shoots, withered before their time. One never becomes used to it. The ewe runs faster than the lamb, the swan takes to the air sooner than the cygnet, the char darts through the water quicker than the minnow, and little children tire before their parents. Father and mother look on helplessly as their babies die. ‘That’s the sort of nonsense that got us here!’ The speaker of that bitter truth had departed this life, the word ‘us’ now referred to me alone, and in that dark hour I would gladly have given my own life to have heard it once more from her living lips. A tear gleamed in the corner of her left eye. For a moment I was ecstatic with joy — Sigga was not dead, she had merely swooned from hunger; I would nurse her, cook medicinal herbs for her, rub the warmth back into her stiff hands, help her walk over the rough ground until she recovered her strength — but my world grew dark again when I realised it was only a tear that had fallen from my own eye on to hers. Sigrídur lay on her side with her legs drawn up under her, as if taking a nap, for thus had her body stiffened. I climbed into bed behind her, laying my arm over her body, resting my cheek against the back of her neck; her shawl smelt of moss campion and crowberry. I whispered:

‘So you have gone now to the kingdom beyond the clouds, beyond sun and moon and sky, to the land where all grief is comforted with eternal radiant mercy at the footstool of Christ. Where your children will greet you, running to their mother with outstretched arms …’

I could say no more, my throat tightened on the last word. If our dead children had been allowed to live they would have been grown-up by now, with many children of their own. They would have given old Grandpa Jónas and Grandma Sigga shelter in their homes; for he who has once dwelt in his mother’s body and his father’s heart is bound to provide them with a roof over their heads in their old age. But it was not to be, it will never be. I was seized by a bitter rage. Clenching my fists, I prayed:

‘Dear God, take that black-hearted knave Night-wolf Pétursson and give back to me little Hákon, who was always as gentle as a girl; merciful Father, take Ari Magnússon of Ögur and return to me quick-handed Berglind, who inherited her father’s gift for carving; heavenly Creator, take that foul-tongued slanderer, Reverend Gudmundur Einarsson, and give me back the little lad Klemens, with one moss-green eye and one blue; dear Lord, take the whole legion of good-for-nothings who every day outlive their victims, sprawling in their high seats and thrones, gorging themselves on meat, dripping with grease, from the livestock that grew fat on the green grass in meadows tended with diligence by innocent, God-fearing souls; congratulating themselves on having stripped this man of his livelihood and that woman of her breadwinner — when they can speak between ill-gotten mouthfuls; enjoying to a great old age the fruits of the wicked deeds they committed during their days on Earth with the blessing of bishops, and convinced that the despicable acts that they refer to as “a good day’s work in the Lord’s vineyard” will have paid for their place in Heaven; dear God, snatch them away and do with them what you will, but give back to me Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir, a pious woman, a loving wife and a caring mother who never asked for anything for herself but prayed for mercy and good fortune for friends and strangers alike.’

These terrible curses poured in torrents from my mouth. They were so dire that when I came to my senses I hoped that the good Lord in His mercy and deep understanding of human frailty would pretend that His great all-hearing ears had been closed in that dark hour. As yet He has not brandished His rod of punishment over my head — indeed, what more could He do to me? I held Sigga’s withered hands, feeling every sinew and knuckle, tracing the bones with my fingertips, and the sunken flesh between them, for she had starved a long time before she died. In spite of my attempts to dissuade her she had insisted on staying behind on the island. But how could a lone female survive a whole winter on this cursed rock? Not even the resourceful Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir could do that. And who knows what will become of me? She had clasped her hands in her hour of death and I found with my forefinger that she was holding something between them. I rose up on my elbow; the corner of a piece of brown cloth peeped from her fist. The cloth turned out to be wrapped round a gift from our friend Peter the Pilot, the confessor and helmsman on the whaler Nuestra Señora del Carmen. It was a holy relic: four little wood shavings, no larger than nail clippings, reddish in hue.

AIR SHIP: a strange event occurred in the western quarter: a rope with an anchor on the end fell from the sky and caught in the church pavement. The whole congregation could see and touch it when they came out of the service. After a while a man came down the rope and tried to free the anchor, but when people touched him he became as weak as a fish out of water and the mark of death was straight away seen upon him. The minister forbade anyone to touch the man again and ordered them to free the anchor. Then everything was hauled up, man, rope and anchor, and never seen again.

They came gliding over the sea like cathedrals under their white sails: church ships, launched from a southern shore, their three masts bearing fluttering Christian flags and banners, their prows decorated with artfully painted figureheads, glaring with admonishment at any sea monster that dared to venture near, and crosses carved on both bows, while from the stern rose a statue of the Virgin Mary with arms outstretched in a maternal embrace that encompassed both vessel and crew. On their sterns they bore the names of the most holy and beneficent churches in their homeland: Nuestra Señora de la Paz, Nuestra Señora de la Estrella and Nuestra Señora de la Inmaculada Concepción — and when the wind stood from the sea one could hear the ship’s bell singing:

‘Peace, star, immaculate … Peace, star …’

Sigrídur and I had only been living at Litla-Vík for two months when we saw them coming in from the sea. It was early summer of the year 1613. She was tending to the ewes, I sat in the smithy, supposedly carving a picture story on a bull’s horn, a commission I had already been paid for and which was now overdue, but in fact struggling my way through a collection of Aesop’s Fables in German. Pálmi Gudmundur sat in the smithy doorway, playing at piling up some bones that I had painted in different colours for him. Then Sigga came running in, grabbed up the boy in her arms and called to me to come and see something rather remarkable. We stood on top of the farm mound, shielding our eyes with our hands. The sight was remarkable indeed; there was no ‘rather’ about it. I raised my brows and looked at Sigga enquiringly; she was smiling dreamily. I was greatly relieved, for she had been reluctant to move here from Ólafseyjar — although she had not exactly been happy there, particularly after the locals cheated me of my fee for laying the ghost of Geirmundur Hell-skin, claiming falsely that I had promised to find his buried treasure too — but I had managed to persuade her that we would be better off in the place where my fame was greatest, that is, my birth district of Strandir, bounded to the west by the Snjáfjöll coast. Yes, the marvellous spectacle floating out there on the summery sea boded well for our sojourn here. But when it became clear that these wondrous craft were heading out of sight, east round the headland and into the neighbouring fjord, we agreed that early next morning we would follow them. We set out on horseback, riding beasts given to us by my benefactors; I carrying our little boy in front of me. Our eagerness to see the ships was so great that it seemed to infect the horses, which bounded along with such lightness of foot that before we knew it we had reached Reykjafjord. But no sooner had we arrived than we began to have misgivings. There were fires burning all over the place and when we neared the farm, it became apparent that all the loose furnishings had been piled up and set alight. The buildings stood empty, evidently abandoned in haste, for pots and other household utensils lay broken in the kitchen and various other small objects were strewn around the living room and passageways. Everything indicated that the fair vessels were sailing under false pretences, that they had brought destruction and slavery to the inhabitants. Sigrídur sat rigid in her saddle, gripped by dread, Pálmi Gudmundur hid his face in my chest and I had to fight back my tears, not from fear but because it seemed such a miserable end to our expedition. We decided to turn back. Then Pálmi Gudmundur burst out laughing. He pointed up the hillside, giggling:

‘Fuddy man …!’

Quite right; in the hayfield above the farm lay a pale bundle, of human appearance, furnished with both arms and legs, though not in the right places. I dismounted, placed the boy in Sigrídur’s arms and went to take a look at this novelty. It turned out to be an unfortunate old lady who had caught her petticoat on a jutting piece of stone while climbing over the wall. She had been hanging there with her legs in the air since the day before. I released the poor dear and turned her the right way up, and once she had recovered her wits she was able to tell us the truth about the wrecked and abandoned settlement. When they saw the approaching ships the locals had panicked, and to prevent the supposed corsairs from getting anything for their pains, they had smashed and destroyed everything they could, burning their belongings or sinking them in bogs, before running away to hide among the stony wastes and moors. So great had been the panic that she herself had been left behind, hanging upside down like a nightdress on a washing line. When questioned, the old woman was fairly certain that although she had been watching them from the wrong way up, the supposed corsairs had held their course due south, sailing on towards Steingrímsfjord. This was the first indication we had of how the arrival of great ocean-going ships could terrify our neighbours in that district. At around nine o’clock that evening we rode down off the moors into the Selárdalur Valley. Out on the fjord before us the magnificent craft lay at anchor. A tent had been pitched in the hayfield belonging to Reverend Ólafur of Stadur, from which carried a delicious smell of roasting meat, accompanied by the lively sound of musical instruments and voices with a strange inflexion. They were Basques, come from Spain to try their luck at harpooning whales in the Icelandic fjords. In the following weeks the new arrivals set about building a whaling station. It would appear that the ships had accommodated a whole village in their bellies, for in no time at all there arose a harbour and forge, kitchen huts and laundries, timber and rope workshops and ovens for rendering oil, built of wonderfully regular bricks. I paid Reverend Ólafur frequent visits to observe how they conducted the whaling and rendered the oil. The minister, who was on good terms with the whalers, willingly showed them to the hunting grounds, for he said it was a kindness on their part to cull the monsters, since the Icelanders themselves had lost the knowledge of how to harpoon whales. It was sheer pleasure to watch how nimbly the Basques killed the beasts, with a combination of cunning, daring and enviable skill. There was often good cheer among us on shore as we watched the harpooners’ small boats rocking on the red foaming crests of the waves while the titans wallowed in their own blood. The news quickly spread that the Spaniards only made use of the animals’ blubber, and now the foolish people who had made themselves destitute by destroying their farms when the ships arrived began to flock to the station. The whalers showed great generosity, selling the whale meat, with the minister as middleman, for whatever small items the locals had to barter, such as stockings and bone buttons, which saved the lives of the hapless beggars. Most notable of all, however, was the visit by the new sheriff of the West Fjords, the young Hamburg-educated Ari Magnússon. After inspecting the station and questioning the foreigners and locals about their trade, he struck a deal with the captain of the Basque fleet, Señor Juan de Argaratte, that the fee for whaling should be a tenth part of each catch, to be paid to the sheriff’s office in barrels of whale oil or their equivalent value in silver. It was a bargain to the satisfaction of both, but the Spaniards asked the Minister of Stadur to look after their copy of the licence, as it would be best placed with him should different captains sail to the whaling station the following year. Seventeen whales were caught that summer and the whalers were happy men. Come Michaelmas they dismantled the station and put out to sea. All reached home safely and their voyage was celebrated throughout the Basque country, where the news soon spread that in the far northern oceans off Iceland there was an inexhaustible supply of whales. In May of 1614, twenty-six whaling ships put out to sea from many different places on the north coast of Spain, though after an attack by English pirates only ten ships reached their destination. As before, the whalers set up camp and built their rendering ovens in Steingrímsfjord, though some occupied the bays and coves further north on the West Fjords peninsula. The friendly relations between the foreigners and locals continued; good service was provided and there was plenty of trading. The farmers, who had better wares to barter than the year before, were able to lay in stores of whale meat for the winter, dried or cured in brine, while in return the Spaniards received live sheep and calves, warm milk and fresh butter. Then Reverend Ólafur of Stadur died. His funeral was a memorable affair. The service held for him in his own church was Lutheran, but outside the Basques sang a Catholic mass for their benefactor. The service was led by Peter the Pilot, a Frenchman from the fleet captain Juan de Argaratte’s ship, Nuestra Señora del Carmen, and he gave me permission to attend the mass. But because such heathen popish practices had not been seen in Iceland for a lifetime, it caused a mixture of scandal and fear. There was a great deal of coming and going from the church. Men pleaded the call of nature but then sat with their breeches round their ankles by the churchyard wall; they may have had difficulty in emptying their bowels but they had none in using their eyes. When they went back into church they made a great show of shuddering and banned their wives and children from going outside lest they be corrupted by the heretics’ wicked ways. But not everyone had turned up in Stadur to pay their respects to the peace-maker, Reverend Ólafur. While the perfumed smoke rose from the Catholic priest’s incense, some crofters had made their way to a cove further down the fjord and were busy stealing meat from a half-flensed whale that the Basques kept on the beach there. With that the peace was at an end and there was no one left to hold back the rabble but the Sheriff of Ögur. He, however, ignored the captains’ complaints about the theft of meat, calling them ‘lying heathens’, for he had a scheme by which to make a better profit from the foreigners than he had done before. That coming winter Ari Magnússon intended to ask for the hand of Kristín, daughter of Bishop Gudbrandur of Hólar, and in order to be a worthy match he needed to increase his means substantially. The office of sheriff had provided leaner pickings than he had anticipated and although the whale tithe was considerable, it was not enough. The master of Ögur now banned all trade with the whalers, citing the same king’s law that he himself had broken when he made a deal with the Basques over the whaling licence. At the same time he began to spread tales of their overbearing behaviour. For their voyage south they were forced to buy provisions from him alone. The whale meat he received from them in return for his sheep and dairy products he sold on to the common people at a vastly inflated price. This trade was resented by everyone except the man responsible.

A sledgehammer, three nails, a tree trunk and a crosspiece. When did a skilled craftsman first fiddle with a nail between his fingers, then happen to glance at the hammer that hung heavily at his side and see not the carpentry job in front of him but his brother nailed to a cross? What fisherman first toyed with the idea that it would be an excellent thing to stick large and small hooks in a man’s flesh? What blacksmith first raised his glowing tongs from the fire and was filled with the urge to crush his sister’s breast? What was he called, the horse-breaker who first used his whip on the back of the errand boy or lent his unbroken beasts to the authorities to tear the limbs from living people? What natural historian sees in water and fire the means by which to drown or burn a person, sees in the wind and plants the means to kill him by thirst or poison? Who first thought of employing all these useful objects to torture their fellow men to death? And why are they so easily converted into lethal instruments in the hands of man? Why may a knife not simply be a knife for carving wood, for slicing mutton from the bone or harvesting angelica? Why does the sharp blade invariably find an easy path to the jugular vein of one’s fellow man? And how can the bloody instruments of murder then return to the world of practical use? Nobody knows, least of all me. One can still find tools in the Strandir district that today play an indispensable role in people’s lives but twenty-two years ago were used for unspeakable atrocities, like the men who wielded them. Auger, awl, shovel, axe and spade, all turned to weapons in their hands. I am assailed by such terrible images of my Basque friends’ fate that they heat up the inside of my head like flames in a furnace. Flinging off the sheepskin, I roll out of bed on to the kitchen floor, clamber to my feet and run out of the hut in nothing but my shirt and stockings. The winter night administers an icy slap of snow and for one blessed moment the searing memories subside. Only to flare up again with tenfold force, and over the unbearable, ghastly scenes I hear sung the words of ‘The Spanish Ballad’ that my old friend Sorcery-Láfi composed in the New Year of 1615 at the instigation of Ari Magnússon, who then sent his poet out to recite this travesty at evening entertainments throughout the district. Which that wretch Láfi did in his squeaky, insistent voice, sucking on his blackened teeth between verses:

Wherever they go these villains are always the same,

rustling cattle and stealing sheep is their game,

and not so much as a penny they’ll leave to your name.

Filching butter and flour and every fish that we own;

the poor man’s flesh was stripped from his bone,

while the frost hardened and wind did moan.

Aghast at these antics men and women did gaze

but fearing the tyrants, no protest dared raise;

’tis shocking to see how such wickedness pays.

Thus the big man of Ögur incited poor Láfi to blow on the flames of the locals’ prejudice and hatred of Spaniards. If the whalers ever returned to the West Fjords, they would have nowhere to turn for their trade but to the tyrant himself. And so often were the polemical verses recited that by the beginning of summer people had come to believe them better than their own stories of fair dealings with the foreign heroes of the deep. Alas, at the beginning of June three whaling ships reached land after a perilous journey through the sea ice which still loomed off shore although the almanac showed it to be summer. At first the odd farmer ventured to trade with the Basques but this soon stopped because wherever Ari Magnússon went he sniffed at people’s cooking pots and the smell of whale meat was hard to disguise. The captains of the two smaller ships, Domingo de Arguirre and Esteban de Tellaria, put up with this state of affairs, having no doubt experienced harsher conditions in their whaling stations on Jan Mayen. But the third captain was on his first trip to Iceland and found it hard to understand why his fellows and the servile local peasants should respect Ari’s ban on trade. His name was Martinus de Villefranca, a young man of great promise who had taken over Nuestra Señora del Carmen on this voyage. To support him he had my good friend Peter the Pilot, but no doubt he took the occasional sheep from the mountainside in spite of the pilot’s warnings. Martinus was not only handsome but unusually hardy and did what no other captain had done before: he went out himself on the harpoon boats. So the summer passed, with few whales, frequent accidents and monotonous fare. But the first real test of the master of Ögur’s new dictate came that autumn when the whalers prepared to return home to the Basque country with their meagre haul. By then the weather resembled midwinter, ice lay right up to the head of the fjord and for weeks the sky had been upholstered in black from dawn to dusk. I wade through the snow from the door of my hut, abandoning the little shelter that the hovel provides against the north wind, and trudge down to the foot of the mound where the buffeting is even worse, though it would take more, much more, to blow out the fires of my nightmare. The blizzard lashes me from without; a bonfire consumes me from within. The Tuesday after Saint Matthew’s Day, that is the nineteenth of September, the whaling ships assembled in the fjord which is now known as Reykjafjord, Smoky Fjord, but used to be called Skrímslafjord or Monster Fjord. There the captains divided up the haul and prepared their vessels for the homeward voyage. Although the catch could have been better, the fishermen were glad that the season was over and singing carried across the water from their ships towards dawn. Then the wind began to pick up and blew into a terrible tempest. During the night icebergs had drifted into the path of Esteban’s and Domingo’s vessels and before they could prevent them their ships broke their moorings and were driven by the icebergs towards the cliffs where their hulls crashed together. Nevertheless, by quick thinking the veteran captains managed to free their vessels from one another and eventually made it out to sea. The young Martinus, on the other hand, succeeded in raising his anchor and sailing down the fjord, but there he had to admit defeat and his great ship drifted out of control before the incredible wind, running aground on a stony beach where it rocked to and fro until the timbers of the hull eventually gave way under the strain and split with a loud groan. First the helm broke, then the ship was holed below the waterline and the sea poured in. The crew members pulled out their prayer books and prayed aloud with much shedding of tears. When Ari of Ögur heard what had happened he sounded the trumpet for battle against the shipwrecked men, ordering the farmers to take part at their own expense, against the promise of a share in the booty as a reward for each man they overcame. I alone of the Strandir men excused myself from the call-up, claiming that I had business south on the Snæfellsnes peninsula and would rather pay a fine for shirking the fray than let down the man who awaited me there. I lacked the courage to condemn the campaign as a heinous crime, but my action was enough to earn me threats and curses from the commander, who later made sure they all came true. Naturally Ari would have had me killed there and then had he known that following the death of Reverend Ólafur I had become custodian of the contract that he had made with the whalers, whom he had first cheated by deceitful wiles and now intended to deprive of both life and property. While the Basques struggled ashore in the dire conditions, some swimming or dog-paddling among the wreckage, others crawling on to the ice and razor-sharp rocks, the peasants armed themselves with tools, calling them weapons, and set out to meet the shipwrecked men. They caught Peter the Pilot first, along with a small group who had sought shelter in an abandoned fisherman’s hut. They were ambushed in their sleep; Peter’s head was resting on a psalter when it was smashed by a hammer blow, followed by a thrust from a knife through the heart and into the spine. Beside the pilot lay his burly companion, Lazarus, who, woken by the thud of the blow, tried to escape. He was slashed across the kneecaps, then set on by all who could reach him, yet he managed to keep them busy for quite a while. In an inner room they found the barber, stoker and washer boy, whom they also hacked to pieces. After that the bodies were stripped of their clothes and laid naked on stretchers. It was then that two objects were discovered on Peter’s breast, the holy relics and his crucifix, which the warriors claimed were instruments of black magic, and even though they had failed to save him, none of them dared touch them. The dead were carried to the edge of a cliff, where they were lashed together and their naked, bloody corpses were sunk in the deep like heathens rather than poor innocent Christian men. When a great fork of lightning in the likeness of a sword struck the mountain, the leader declared that his followers should construe it as a sign of victory. After sailing back up and across the sound, in a tempest so fierce that it was barely possible to stay afloat, the mob reached the deserted farm where Martinus de Villefranca had taken refuge. He could be seen through the window, sitting beside a small fire with some of his men, while the rest were in the main room around a larger fire, over which they were drying their clothes. A man was set to guard every window and door, and when the leader gave the signal, many shots were fired inside. Martinus was heard to cry that he had not been aware that his crimes were so great that he and his men deserved to be shot down. Among the war band was the Minister of Snjáfjöll, Reverend Jón ‘the Ghost-father’, who was made to address the captain in Latin. In the end Martinus emerged from the hut, crawling on his knees with his hands in the air, and with tear-soaked face thanked Master Ari Magnússon for granting him and his men quarter. At that moment a man leapt forward with a great axe and struck at Martinus, aiming for his neck but hitting his collar bone instead and making only a small gash. Recoiling violently from the blow, Martinus took to his heels and fled from the hut down to the sea. It looked as if he was lying on the waves, stroking his head with one hand and his thigh with the other, swimming sometimes on his back, sometimes with arms whirling in the air, sometimes on his front, turning his head from side to side. A boat was launched with great palaver, containing men, weapons and stones, to defeat this Viking. When Martinus saw this he swam further out to sea, chanting in Latin all the while. Many thought it a wonder to hear his skill at singing. Those in the boat chased him with grim determination but he swam like a seal or fish, though one man boasted of having struck him with a spear while he was diving under the keel. Only when a farmer’s boy managed to hit the swimmer on the forehead with a stone did his strength at last fail, and not until then. He was towed to the beach and stripped of all his clothes. As the man lay stark naked on the sand, eyes closed and groaning, one of the heroes stabbed him with his knife, cutting him in one slash from breastbone to groin. Martinus jerked violently, coiled up, then managed to get up on all fours, at which his guts fell out and after that he moved no more. The war band roared with laughter and many jostled close to see the man’s insides but their view was obscured by the blood. Afterwards Martinus’s hacked-apart body was sunk in the sea. At that the storm dropped, giving way to a calm which men attributed to the power of the foreign necromancer’s body. Now an assault was made on the remaining Basques, after which none of the shipwrecked men from Nuestra Señora del Carmen had any need to beg for quarter. Guards were placed on all the exits and a hole was made in the turf roof. The sheriff’s younger brother climbed up on to the wall and picked off the enemies one by one with his pistol. As their numbers dwindled, the remaining men tried to hide in nooks and crannies or under beds. At this point a warrior was sent inside with a pitchfork to drive them out of their hiding places into the middle of the room where it was easier to put a bullet in them. The battle ended with every man falling, including the big Spaniard who many had feared would be hard to handle even unarmed. Finally, when all were thought to be dead, feeble-minded Martin was discovered in the cowshed; a cooper from Martinus’s ship, known for his simple nature, who had been hiding in a manger all night. The man who found him did not have the heart to kill him, so he led him out to the mob. As the poor soul knelt there, mixing up his ‘Christus, Christus’, and imploring them not to kill him, Ari Magnússon replied that he should be given quarter and taken into custody. But instead of taking him away, the guards led him into the thick of the mob where one of them split open his forehead with a poker while another struck him from behind with a dung shovel, and with the latter blow that caught him on the back of the neck, feeble-minded Martin fell down dead. This blow signalled the end of the battle, with victory to the Ögur band. The warriors were now eager to divide up all the spoils they had been promised, but at this point there was a change of tune and suddenly all valuables that remained in the wreck or were washed up on shore were declared Crown property and no one was permitted to touch them except Sheriff Ari Magnússon. They were welcome to keep the slain men’s bloody rags but Martinus’s large, heavy treasure chest and other flotsam salvaged from the shore were taken back to Ögur. As before, the naked corpses of the slain were sunk in the sea, though first various indignities were visited on their bodies, since the commander had announced that the warriors could do what they liked with the dead. So their genitals were hacked off, their eyes put out, their throats cut, their ears sliced off and their navels pierced. After this, holes were bored in the necks and hips of the dead and they were lashed together with rope like stockfish on a string, yet still they kept washing ashore, though they were thrown out to sea again and again for it was forbidden to bury or raise a mound over them, on pain of flogging or being stripped of one’s worldly goods. Even the place names of the battlefield were changed for the worse, their beauty fading to match the consciences of those who slew the Basques: where previously the valley had been called Unadsdalur, or the Valley of Delight, now it was merely Dalur, or Valley. Sólvellir, the Sunny Plains, are now Hardbalar, the Hard Pastures. Bjartifoss, the Bright Falls, is now Magrifoss, the Lean Falls. The rocky hillside with its flowery ledges, once known as Sunny Slope, is now the Black Crag. And today at Ögur they call the spit Óbótatangi, the Spit of Infamous Deeds, where once it was the Boathouse Spit, for it was there that most of the bodies washed ashore and long drifted back and forth by Master Ari’s landing place, a gift for scavengers and a warning to the servants. Alas, such are the visions that drive an old man outside in nothing but his shirt and stockings into the searing cold of the blizzard on this, the blackest of all nights. But it does not help; the visions will not go away.

THE RED POISON NEEDLE: a dangerous creature of the shore, slender as a piece of straw. It often lurks in wet seaweed, wriggling and writhing, with jagged stings which can pierce the flesh like a needle. It has been known to cause instant death to young people out gathering seaweed.

I am swimming. Swimming with strong strokes of my arms, lying just below the surface, the moonlight glittering on my shoulders as they rise briefly from the waves. I turn my head from side to side, breathing in over my left shoulder, breathing out over my right. I kick the water with my feet, sending it foaming about my legs, splashing up from my ankles. I am out in the middle of the fjord, the open sea is ahead; on either side sheer snow-capped mountains tower over stony black beaches. Through the roaring of the sea I hear shouts and yells behind me but I must not slow my pace, I have no time to stop and check how fast the men in the boat are gaining on me. The sea is cold, the current strong, one moment carrying me swiftly forward, the next dragging me many strokes back — I have to know whether I have any chance of reaching shore before them. I stop swimming and tread water for a moment: they are in a trusty eight-oared boat, with a man to every oar and five on the look-out for me, two in the stern and three in the bows, all armed with stones except the fine fellow standing by the mast, balancing easily in spite of the waves. It is this man, Ari Magnússon of Ögur, his fist clenched on a stolen harpoon, who is directing the pursuit. The white breast of my shirt gleams as I roll over on my stomach and start swimming again. I hear a triumphant cry from the boat and a moment later stones begin to rain down around me. One of them hits my right shoulder, bouncing off with a dull thud, but I do not feel it, I am too cold for that. There is only one way to go and that is down. I fill my lungs and dive. Abruptly the world is muted, the strident calls of my pursuers replaced by the underwater hum, the sucking of the waves and my own effortful groans. I dive like an auk, flying through the water with great strokes, like a guillemot beating its wings in the clear shallows on a summer’s morning. Deeper and deeper, though the winter sea is not bright but a murky grey — deeper, yes, ever deeper — until I have dived so deep that the air seeks to burst from my lungs and the surface is now too far away. But instead of releasing my breath, I squeeze my throat tight and continue to swim down, though every muscle is on fire as if struck by a sledgehammer. Then the depths in front of me begin to pale; slowly but surely a feeble grey light is filtering up through the soupy sea, and the lower I swim, the brighter and livelier become the motes that whirl up through the water until they shoot past my eyes like sparks from an anvil, three thousand dazzling suns that sting my face like a sandstorm. I give up, abandon my dive. Righting myself in the water, I open my mouth wide, clamp my fists on my breast and shriek as the air is squeezed from my lungs: ‘Oh Lord, have mercy upon me …’ When the burning salt sea has ballooned out my body, filling me up to the lips, I am overcome by fatigue and begin to sink. I slip down through the watery greyness, as listlessly as a man picking his way through a bank of cloud on his way down a mountain. High above me, the eight turns towards the shore; Ari of Ögur and his war band have given up the chase. Suddenly it is as if a veil has been stripped from my senses. I can see far and wide through the bottle-green depths of the ocean, far out into the Greenland Sea and in along the bottom of the fjord. There, at the foot of the crag in the middle of the bay, right beneath my feet, is the source of the light: a heart the size of a bunting’s egg. It is carved from ebony, polished and girt about by thorns made of horn, with a bronze fire blazing at the top of the join where the two halves fit together — for the ebony heart is half open and inside is the source of light: a tiny crucifix, hung with gilded droplets and stamped with a silver cross. This minute object emits rays so powerful that they illuminate the dreary resting place of the man I have come to find: Peter the Pilot, whose earthly remains lie pinned beneath his sea-smoothed tombstone, a slab of basalt that his murderers threw over the cliff on top of him. His stone-grey hair swirls round his gaping crown where he was struck by the axe, his locks dancing with the deep-sea current like the seaweed entwined among his shattered ribs, which clutches with its weedy many-jointed fingers at the treasure on his gnawed-away breast. He will be able to show this sign at the Pearly Gates on Judgement Day while his tormenters stand empty-handed but for the blood of their victims flowing between their fingers. The moment my feet touch the silt of the seabed, the dweller of the deep stirs. He turns his battered head towards me and bids me good day, although it is past midnight:

‘Angetorre!’

I return his greeting half-heartedly, for my errand here is never a happy one, muttering a low ‘Good evening’.

My meetings with Peter the Pilot always begin the same way: he shoots out the tip of his black tongue, runs it rapidly round his lips, and says quickly:

‘Presenta for mi berrua usnia eta berria bura.’

I answer sternly: ‘Neither warm milk nor fresh butter will be of any use to you here.’

He sighs: ‘Long must a dead man wait for a bite to eat …’

At this point the custom is for me to make the sign of the cross over us and say: ‘May the wait for a seat at Our Father’s table prove short for us,’ thus concluding the formalities. Only this time instead of concurring with the pilot’s words, I take out the little brown bundle of canvas containing the splinters of the Cross and hold it up for him to see before tying it to the cord beside the shining pendant. Peter watches me in silence, waiting until I have finished my task and am sitting on the rock beside him, before beginning to speak:

‘I am grieved that Señora Sigrídur is dead, my friend. I offer you my condolences …’

I mutter my thanks.

He continues:

‘Yet again the blow has fallen on the same trunk, yet again an innocent person has paid with her life for the support that you gave to me and my comrades, yet again you have been made to bleed for your compassion and courage — no doubt you must find it a perverse sort of gratitude and a poor reward for your good deeds to watch that man of blood growing fat in his high office while your loved ones, great and small, are gathered to the earth … Long ago you told me that Señora Sigrídur had praised you for refusing to answer Master Ari Magnússon’s call to arms against us defenceless shipwrecked sailors, and later for writing a true account of the cruel attack by your neighbours who followed the Sheriff of Ögur — saying that by this action you had kept alive the fine upstanding Jónas Pálmason who had captivated her in her youth.’

‘Certainly she was more impressed by this than by my famous deed of laying the Snjáfjöll ghost. Why, she called me the Devil’s muck-raker when I exorcised the evil spirit that Reverend Jón had, by his own heartless behaviour, raised up against himself …’

‘She was a good and just woman …’

‘And unsparing in her sense of justice. No doubt I deserved it.’

‘You showed courage by turning your back on the very men who had praised and flattered you most for the exorcism; you heeded the call of justice when you bore witness to the atrocities that the perpetrators were confident men would forget … And by putting your account on paper, you not only recorded the events as they truly occurred, but gave us withered corpses back our vocal cords that the war-frenzied peasants had torn from our throats with their blunt implements … You sided with the slain against their killers, you stood up to the evil … As we will testify on the Day of Judgement when the honourable couple, Señor Jónas and Señora Sigrídur, will be rewarded in full for their charity … Pardon …’

A crab crawls out of Peter the Pilot’s mouth. He coughs and is about to speak again when another, larger crab crawls out. Peter spits up sand. When the third and largest crab begins to force its way out between his lips, it is clear that my meeting with the pilot is over. I kick against the seabed, shoot up from my dive and surface by the cliffs, where I heave myself out on to the rocks. The grey seawater spurts in spasms from my nose and stomach. I start awake: I am lying head down in bed by the hearth, vomiting up my half-digested supper. It is still the longest night of the year.