B0046ZREEU EBOK Read online

  If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it’s shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I’ve never seen it since, but that doesn’t matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it’s not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.

  The daily business of our lives lay in Orm’s pastures and hayfields. I was taught to herd cattle when my head was no higher than their bellies, and I learned to make butter, skyr, cheese and fermented buttermilk. We kept pigs too, and poultry. Just in front of our house, before you got to the shore, there were a couple of ponds at the top of the cliff, much better than the little tarn at Laugarbrekka. Our ducks stayed all year, and we’d be woken at dawn in winter by them quacking at the door for scraps. They’d be joined on the pond by wild duck and geese, and in spring teal and mallard used to nest in the rushes. We collected the eggs from wild and farm birds alike, and if you do that the wild duck will usually lay twice, just like the seabirds. It was my job to hunt in the rushes for the eggs, wading through green water to my thighs.

  We caught mostly guillemots from the cliffs, but also kittiwakes, gulls and puffins. In winter we had one cave that gave off a queer blue light. I never noticed the noise that the sea and the birds make until I got to Eiriksfjord. Everywhere I’d lived before had been within sound of the open sea and the cliffs, and at first the fjord seemed uncannily quiet. Even here, when the gulls fly in up the Tiber and circle over the Saxon town, their cries remind me of home. Sometimes in Rome I catch a whiff of salt in the air, and find myself listening, but of course no waves break against the shores of the Vatican hill.

  When I was little I was frightened of the terns, who used to attack anyone who walked through their nesting ground. That may be why the path to Laugarbrekka was not a way I liked to go. My father’s house was barely two miles from where I lived, but somehow to my childhood self it might have been twenty. I saw my father most often when he came over to our beach, which was where he kept his boat in winter. Our beach, unlike the one at Laugarbrekka, was sheltered from the west. It was made of grey boulders, with grey and yellow sandy stretches where the boats were hauled up. When the tide was out I could scramble over seaweed covered rocks and gritty sand, the wading birds scurrying away like mice as I came near. I liked going down to the beach in the evening when the men came in from fishing, and watch the baskets being carried ashore, full of cod or mackerel or saithe, depending on the time of year. Occasionally, on a calm evening, Orm took me out to fish with a line, or to set guillemot traps, even though I was a girl. On really calm days we’d row into the beaches under the bird cliffs and come back with a load of driftwood. Once we towed a big treetrunk home behind us. At that time the beaches were still piled with wood, enough for the settlers to build houses and boats as they needed them. But it’s all gone now; you’re lucky these days to get a bit of kindling. If Orm had had a son, I suppose I’d hardly have been in a boat until we made our voyage. As it was, I could row and steer before I was seven years old, and I knew the coast around Arnarstapi almost as well as any of the boys in the place.

  Orm used to take me about the country with him too. I always loved to ride anywhere, and I liked visiting the farms around Breidavik. There were games every year just before Midwinter on our neighbour Bjorn’s land under Oxl mountain. There’s a volcano on the plain close by – on still winter days we could smell the sulphur at Arnarstapi and see the smoke curling up. It erupted when my grandfather was living at Vifilsdalur. I remember riding along the frozen beach to Bjorn’s farm by sledge one year, with the mountains vanishing into the distance as white as salt, and the crisp air smelling of sulphur. People came to the games from all over Snaefelsnes, and stayed for a couple of weeks. The men had ball games and races and, of course, horse fighting, which was still a sacred ritual to us then. The bets were often high, and there’d be fights. One year they caught a slave who’d been bribed to kill Bjorn while the feast was on, and they took him up to the pass over to Eyr and killed him there. We’d had a band of men come over earlier that year to get Bjorn, but they didn’t catch him, then or ever. That’s how it always was: even in years when things passed off peacefully, the tension of the feuds was always smouldering underneath. As I grew older my main interest at the games was to watch the young men who came to compete. I knew my father would choose my husband from the families on our side in the feuds – Bjorn’s family or the Kjallekings preferably. So I silently observed them all while they were around.

  Most of our gatherings happened in winter. There was less work to do then, and our summer weather was worse than in the Green Land, I think, although the winters were never as hard. Halldis, who came from Rif on the north of Snaefel, said when she came to Arnarstapi she found peace, and rain. It’s true we were fairly out of the feuding, living as remotely as we did, and it’s true too that from Rif or Frodriver you can often see the glacier winking in the sun, and behind it a cone of cloud like its shadow, that means on our side it’s raining.

  As a child I adored the sun. Halldis told me the story of how it was the fate of Sun and Moon to drive their chariots through the sky with the wolves chasing them. My Sun didn’t mind wolves. He was handsome and brave and godlike, and while he showed his face our lives at Arnarstapi were transformed. I remember a day – I must have been seven, eight years old – when the sun shone fiercely on the pastures, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. I lay on my back, arms and legs spread like a starfish, and felt the heat of the sun go all over me, touching my skin and my closed eyes and my hair. It seemed to reach right through to my bones. I squinted up into blue sky, and felt myself falling and falling, drowning in the splendid brightness and the heat. I was innocent, and yet I knew then what passion was. It’s only come to me rarely. Marriage has meant good company, but only passion like that at the very beginning. I love the sun still, even though in this country his favours are cheap, and the magic just a commonplace.

  After my first hungry years there was enough to eat at Arnarstapi. We even had grain some winters, which Orm used to fetch from a kinsman of his who had a farm on Reykjanes. I remember grinding the grains in the quern, and then Halldis showed me how to make dough out of the flour, and how to roll out the loaves and bake them on soapstone slabs over the fire. It took a long time, and I can still think of nothing more mouthwatering than the smell of cooking bread. The loaves would bake in black and white blotches, like the rock and snow patches on the glacier. They were flat – we never had this yeast they use in Italy – and we’d cut the round loaves into quarters and smear them with butter. I remember burning my fingers eating them, while butter dripped down my chin and over my fingers, and I used to lick it up afterwards like a cat washing itself on a Roman doorstep. By spring the grain would be long gone, and we’d be eating our butter with fish again as usual. But the loaves were my favourite, and I’ve never forgotten them.

  Late summer was the best time for food. I liked haymaking, and milking in the ring on fine evenings, and the days when we lit a fire outside for dyeing wool or boiling meat. Perhaps because I’d known hunger first of all it satisfied me hugely to see the barrels being filled for winter – layers of meat and fish laid down and preserved in sour whey; barrels of butter and skyr; dried fish and hunks of dried beef and pork and seal meat. Two – or was it just one? – lucky winters we had a whale, and then there was meat hanging to dry everywhere. I liked to see the hay brought in and piled in the barn, and know we could feed enough cattle for the eight months they’d need it, and maybe give extra to a milking cow so we’d even have fresh milk till spring. I suppose those early years have left me with an immense interest in food. I’m a good cook, though I say so myself, and I love to see guests at my table. I love to press food on them and stand over them while they eat as much as they possibly can. My sons used to laugh at me – just as
well, perhaps, because luckily they never grew fat. Snorri was always thin, and although Thorbjorn was a chubby baby he soon grew as lean and tough as his brother.

  I liked cooking the best of the indoor work. In winter we had to do mostly weaving, and that was all right, but I hated sewing. Halldis wasn’t strict; her way wasn’t to punish, but to find ways of helping me to like what I must learn. When I was nine she gave me an engraved bone needlecase to hang round my neck, with six needles of different sizes. I liked the case because it was pretty, but I still didn’t like sewing. It took me years to discover why I found it harder than other girls. I used to think I was stupid because I could never learn to thread my needle by lamplight, though sometimes I could manage if I went outside into the daylight. Oddly enough it was Freydis who first said, ‘But can’t you see?’ during that first winter at Brattahlid, when I was still trying to impress them all. ‘Look,’ she went on, and shoved a white cloth on to my lap. ‘Try that. Can you see the thread now?’ I could, too. Isn’t it strange that Freydis should realise at once that I couldn’t see, whereas Halldis, who loved me, never understood that what I saw with my eyes was different to what she saw with hers? But to this day I’ve never learned to like sewing. I used to reward my thralls for embroidering my tunics and Karlsefni’s shirts, because I gave up trying to do fine work after I married him, and I’ve never done any since. That’s shocking, isn’t it, for a wellborn woman like me to be so poor in accomplishments?

  Perhaps it was because of my sight that I always preferred to be outdoors. I’ve always loved the light, and I dread the dark of winter. I remember Arnarstapi in the light: sun on snow; the mountains of Snaefelsnes white against a slate-blue sea; moonlit snow on a winter afternoon, or green and golden summer light, with the land smelling of flowers when the hay is ripening; or the damp grey light that comes with mizzling rain. I remember the paths worn through the grass between buildings. I liked to visit the thralls in their huts, the shepherd and the cowherd families. As a child I was welcome everywhere without ceremony, and I’d always accept food at any house I visited, a bit of dried fish, usually, or a bowl of skyr that I could scrape clean with a shell.

  You mustn’t think that we were lonely, even though we were distant from the main settlements along the north shore of Snaefelsnes. The next farm along Breidavik was managed by tenants when I was small, but then Bjorn of Breidavik came home to live at Kamb again. I told you about the winter games, but between times too he often used to visit my father, and he’d call on Orm on his way to Laugarbrekka. Sometimes his brother Arnbjorn came too – he had the farm at Hraunhavn further along Breidavik. I liked Bjorn. He was fond of children, I think, and because of Thurid and Kjartan he didn’t marry – I’ll tell you about that presently – and I enjoyed the attention that he gave me. I often think now of the strange fate he met, and every day I pray for his soul. He must have died long ago, among strangers in the lands outside the world. We might so easily have shared his fate. He left Iceland about the same time as we did, and, although my father never admitted it, I think his own decision was partly influenced by the fact that Bjorn of Breidavik had been driven out of our community.

  Once Bjorn and Arnbjorn were back we heard much more about the feuds on the north shore – or perhaps it was just that as I got older I became more aware of these things. You weren’t born then, but you must have heard stories. The way I see it now, we were still trying to find a way to live in our new country. We had no king, and so we had to carve out justice for ourselves in a land without laws or precedents. We couldn’t just go on as our ancestors did in Norway; everything was different. The phrase that comes back to me, from all the talk I heard at the hearth when I was little, repeated again and again, is, ‘Of course, it’s his responsibility’. It was a man’s responsibility to get justice for his kin when they were alive, and to avenge their deaths when they were killed. That’s how I learned about the grown-up world: it was governed by fate, and you had to do your duty, although you knew you had to die for it. My father came from Vifilsdalur, and both he and his father were friends of Styr Thorgrimson of Hraun, and like him they supported Eirik Raudi. That put us against Snorri the Priest and the people from Thorsnes to start off with, and then my father’s alliance with his neighbour Bjorn, when he came home from Norway, increased the tension. Yet we all met as neighbours. I can remember Snorri the Priest talking to my father at the fair at Frodriver as if they were the best of friends. But the undercurrent was always there. I think now that Halldis was right when she said only the new God could save us from the fates that trapped us.

  When I came home with Karlsefni Iceland had changed, although I was only gone a few years. But those were the years when our land became Christian, and also the time when the Quarter Courts began to work properly. I’m not saying the feuds were over, but the strength was beginning to go out of them. A good thing, naturally, and yet – they don’t breed men now of the kind I knew when I was young. Looking back, they seem much larger than this life that we live now. In the stories, of course, they grow more formidable still. I’ve had a hand in that myself. I’m known in Glaum for my storytelling, and I’ve made sure my children and grandchildren are well educated in the story of our past. Stories have a life of their own. They grow, as children grow, and perhaps we forget the small thing they once were. But we nurture them just because we respected what was there in the beginning. I’m glad of the world I come from now, although I daresay to you it seems a savage, pagan time.

  I could tell you so much about the families living at Snaefelsnes when I was a girl. Those were dangerous years, and the men’s talk I heard then was all of fighting and killing. Hardly anyone, after Eirik left, talked of new worlds and wealth, but only of secret plans for revenge. Only the women’s talk was the same as always, everywhere – the farm and the household, summer and winter, a pattern of life that is woven year by year and never changes.

  I lived ten years at Arnarstapi. It was a quiet place to grow up, even though those were wild times. Travellers would bring news of feuds and killings, but the real things to me were the farm, and what Halldis taught me. I learned from her everything a good farmer’s wife should know. She taught me to treat the land so that it would yield well year after year. I think I was naturally practical, but it was Halldis who made me skilled. Sometimes I’ve thought of her, when I’ve used some trick she showed me:when we set up our camp at Hop, for example, or when we were making the wine out of the strange berries. But of course that wasn’t all I learned from her. I say men called her witch. All that means, I think, is that there are some who know how to stretch the boundaries of this world a little farther than most people think is possible. I knew even then that witchcraft can be turned to good or evil, like any other power. I was only six when Halldis warned me that I must use what powers I had for good. An evil witch at Holt on the other side of the mountains had been stoned to death, and Halldis used her example to impress her message on me. She succeeded; I was terrified afterwards that I might do wrong. Halldis herself taught me only good: how to see and use the things that lie at the edges of the world we know.

  When I tell you about my childhood, I find I don’t remember events, just how things were. It wasn’t a story then, it simply was. When I think of specific happenings, they’re usually things Halldis taught me. Witchcraft, would you say now? I don’t know, but for me, they were the important moments. They marked change, whereas in everything else that we did there was no change.

  Twin flames, images of one another, join where oil meets air. A soapstone lamp, and a curl of reddish hair, soft and fine.

  Gentians, their trumpets drooping, and hearts-ease, smelling of hayfields. Halldis speaks to the little girl at her side. ‘Take one of each flower, with your left hand.’

  The child reaches out and takes two flowers. ‘Now the hair.’

  She puts the lock of hair between the stems. Halldis gives her a piece of linen cloth. ‘Wrap them together.’

  The child places th
e white bundle in front of the lamp. ‘Say the words over it.’

  The child obeys, carefully pronouncing the difficult words.

  ‘Very well. Now we steep the rest in wine, and we’ll tell Thurid to dose the child at night, just before bedtime. Convulsions need a remedy to match their strength.’

  The little girl nods.

  ‘Take the spell, and put it in the safe place.’

  The child takes the linen cloth, and carries it carefully to a recess in the wall behind the loom. She places it at the back, among the other things.

  Halldis, as well as Orm, took me about with her. She made me feel like a real person when she introduced me to her friends. In my father’s house I had always seemed to be just a shadow in the background – a shadow of the wrong sex. Halldis made me feel glad to be myself.

  After the hay harvest one year she took me to a farm at Frodriver. It was a day’s journey over the hills, and the first time I had been behind Stapafel. We climbed up past the caves where the giants live, right to the glacier itself. Close to, the glacier isn’t the smooth white cone you see from out at sea. It’s streaked with spines of lava and the snow is dusty with ash. There was cloud over the mountain, where the ice disappeared into a clammy mist that caught us in its breath as we passed. Our ponies trudged through patches of snow, and picked their way among boulders through streams of meltwater. The glacier took a long time to pass. Then we climbed down by a river with many waterfalls, and across the sea to the north I could see land. ‘That’s Hvamm across Breidafjord,’ Halldis told me. ‘That’s where your grandfather landed with Aud the Deepminded, when Iceland was settled.’ I stared at the blue land across the sea: the past, about which I knew all the stories, and yet could never reach.