Authors: Margaret Elphinstone
B0046ZREEU EBOK (2 page)
I suggest we work here every morning. The afternoons are getting so hot now I just go to sleep. At home it would be winter, and I would never waste precious daylight resting. When I was young I used to long for a sunlit day, to wake from the nightmare and the dark. Winter and night, it was then, and a sharp fragile summer, brittle in my memory now like ancient leaves.
I see your bent back, tonsured head, black robe. When we were introduced you didn’t meet my eyes, and when you speak you mutter so I can’t hear what you say. But I know who your father is; I know your family. What do you think about, as the quill scratches its way across the page? Do my words make pictures in your mind? You’re a young man and I’m an old woman. Will my words change the world you see?
Before you arrived I was sitting out there in the cloister in the shade, watching the bees over those big pots of herbs in the courtyard. We have thyme at home, of course. I asked what the others were: basil, marjoram, I forget the other, and the tree in the middle is called bay. The bees work all the time and so do the nuns. Only I have nothing to do here but find words for what is over.
My story begins far from Rome, far from this white sun that rises right above the rooftops in the middle of the day. It begins in a place that is all water and shadow, where colours melt and change, a place of space and cleanliness, a long way north of here and lost for ever in the past.
I was born into famine, and weaned on to hunger. My family didn’t starve, but there was never quite enough, and the thralls and cattle that lived on our estate were gaunt and silent in the suffering that seemed to me, knowing nothing else, to be simply what this world was. Even now I long for sweet food. Here in Rome we have honey and spices. Everything is cooked in oil, and the meat tastes better for not being boiled. We have olives and green herbs with everything, and wine every day. I eat like a child, because as a child I could not. I was weaned on to sour milk and butter, fish and meat, but never enough, and always, as I remember it, the same muddy colour.
Although when I was born Iceland lay in the grip of hunger, you mustn’t think we were poor. I come of good family, and my father inherited the estate at Laugarbrekka when he married my mother, and so he became the chieftain there. My mother’s father was Einar of Laugarbrekka. On my father’s side too, the story goes that we are descended from a princely house in Ireland. Mind you, I’ve learned not to be too impressed by claims like that. Everyone had Irish slaves when I was a girl, and it’s remarkable how many of those Irish ancestors turn out to be royalty after all. Be that as it may, my grandfather Vifil was Irish, and servant to Aud the Deepminded, and sailed with her from the Hebrides when she first settled in Iceland. He came with her to Hvamm in Breidafjord, and she gave him his freedom and an estate at Vifilsdalur. Do you know it? It’s not exactly the best land in the Westfjords. It’s a high valley running south from Haukadalur, but there my grandfather had freedom and land of his own, and there he brought up his two sons.
Both my uncle and my father married daughters of Einar of Laugarbrekka, and so they came into a better inheritance, and my father, Thorbjorn, became chieftain in his own right. Unfortunately he had no son to succeed him. It’s a pity; Laugarbrekka is a good farm, and it’s out of my family now, although our name will be attached to it for ever. I’ve never been back. It lies to the south of Snaefel – if you look north from our house the ice cap is often lost in mist – but on clear days you can see the white cone of the volcano filling the horizon. So with Snaefel lying like a sleeping giant at our backs, we faced south. Our house was set on a knoll, with a rocky
slope below it where I remember scrambling about when I was very small. We had a wide view of the sea on three sides. Sometimes we could see Reykjanes, where Ingolf made the first settlement in my grandfather’s time. Close to our shore was a single rock skerry, and almost always the surf broke over it. Laugarbrekka is exposed on all sides to sea and wind, and the weather at Snaefelsnes is the wildest in Iceland. I remember falling asleep in winter to the sound of the wind hammering against our turf roof, the beams juddering under the force of its blows. To this day wild weather comforts me, so long as I’m safe and dry indoors, with those I love. I like to fall asleep to it. Then in spring the terns used to come back, and they’d scream through the light nights like demented ghosts. Although Laugarbrekka is exposed, the farm is good. Our meadows and hayfields stretched down from the steading to the sea, where we had black cliffs rich in birds and eggs. There’s a beach, but it’s too exposed to make a good harbour, and a flat skerry – I remember it bright with seaweed at low tide – blocks the way in to the sand.
There would have been sons, I suppose, if my mother had lived. Even though there was so little to eat, she always had milk for me, and she let that starve her. I understand that; I would have done the same for Snorri or my Thorbjorn. A woman will die for her children, but not for any other reason if she can help it. It is one of the things that make us different from men. I remember my mother as milk and warmth. I slept with her at night, until the morning when I woke and she was cold and still beside me and didn’t move when I cried. Afterwards I would often wake when it was dark and start to cry. When the women couldn’t comfort me they used to threaten in whispers to put me out alone in the dark and after that I would be frightened into quiet.
Those early days come back to me like dreams, patches with no threads to sew them together. Our hall at Hellisvellir in Laugarbrekka seemed very long to my eyes. The roof beams were lost in smoke way above my head. The women’s room was up a step at the end of the hall. I remember the stone step with the marks of the sea engraved on it in a pale curve. In the women’s room were two looms like giant spiders’ webs, and the threads made shadows on the wall at night,
while the fire still flickered. In the hall there were soft hangings where I could hide away from the fire where the men would sit in the evening. I can remember evenings outdoors when the sun was low in the sky and golden, and the cows used to make their way down from the pasture to be milked. I remember the itch and smell of the hayfield, and the withered flower heads on dry stalks. I can remember the sound of the wind and the dark of winter, and snow flakes falling like silver coins into the mud.
The first outside event that impinged on my world happened when I was four years old, and Eirik Raudi came back, and stayed in our house as my father’s guest.
Red autumn beard, red hair. He tells tales of a land that is empty as the pale skies of autumn. There is space between the storms for a dream. He is a fierce, violent man, but he tells his dreams.
He sits on the table in the hall. The meal is over; women and dishes are whisked away. Children and dogs creep in to the fire and are ignored. Men’s talk drifts in the smoke around them. The little girl sees pictures in her mind as the red man speaks. He describes a land that is green, but now in Iceland it is autumn, and she cannot imagine green, only red. Red grass, red willow scrub, red bearberries and crowberries. Red hillsides the colour of his beard and hair. Only the sea is green. West over the sea there is a world that is empty and frightening. The man himself frightens her. He is full of anger. She can feel it beneath the honeyed words. The land beyond the sea is desirable, but the man is fierce and hot and red. She creeps closer, grasping at his words. She has heard many stories in her father’s hall, but never one like this. In the blue sky he describes she sees a mirror, land and sea, and a figure in the untouched landscape that seems to be herself.
At first I had Eirik Raudi mixed up in my mind with the volcano. It had always been part of my life, you see – ice and flame, snow and the smell of sulphur – another world from this earthen Italy. I grew up with Snaefel at my back, which your theologians say is the gate of Niflheim. The gates of Hel lead from heaven, the way Lucifer fell, and Laugarbrekka was a kind of precarious heaven,
before I was thrown out. So was the land I heard Eirik describing to my father.
‘A green land,’ he said. ‘Empty pastures with grass rich as emeralds, and thick with flowers ready for the sweetest hay, but no man has ever reaped there yet. More head of cattle could graze in one of those meadows than in any dale in Iceland. The winter hunt would bring you treasure kings would buy – white bearskins, fox furs, narwhal and walrus ivory. One cargo of goods from my Green Land would be worth more, weight for weight, than a shipload of spice and silks from beyond Mikligard. I’m talking about wealth you haven’t even dreamed of.’
‘And has no one else found this Green Land?’ asked my father warily. ‘They say that devil men and shapeshifters live among the ice floes beyond Gunnbjorn’s skerries, and that those lands are the borders of Jotunheim.’
‘They say!’ scoffed Eirik. ‘You must get your news where you get your breeches, off the looms in the women’s room. Haven’t I just spent three years exploring the Green Land from Gunnbjorn’s skerries to the channel that flows north to the Outer Sea? And did I find a trace of a living man? None! Not one!’
‘And of the dead?’ muttered my father.
‘If there are dead they’re not our dead, and their ghosts won’t haunt us. There are no Norse demons in the Green Land, I swear.’
‘Meaning there are others?’
Eirik shrugged. ‘Nothing that a man should fear. The land is empty now. We made sure of that. Cowards may turn their backs on riches if they like. I only deal with men.’
Most men were afraid of Eirik. I felt it even then, though I only understood the whole story later. Eirik came to Iceland when my father Thorbjorn was still a boy. They outlawed Eirik from Norway because of some killings. His first farm in Iceland was way up north in the Hornstrands, but when my father met him he was living near Vatnshorn in Haukadalur. That’s only ten miles over the hills from Vifilsdalur where my father grew up. Eirik was just the kind of man that young men admire – rash, daring and always ready to fight. He drew Thorbjorn like a magnet, and that never changed, even after all
that happened. My father never blamed anything on Eirik. Well, it wasn’t long before Eirik was in trouble again, and Thorbjorn supported him every step of the way. When Eirik was banished from Haukadalur he set up his headquarters on one of the islands in Breidafjord, and terrorised his enemies from there.
Thorbjorn was married to my mother by that time, and had moved to Laugarbrekka. You’d think he’d be happy to be out of the feuds, on a good estate the other side of Snaefel, with land and a young wife to keep him at home. Not a bit of it. He seemed to settle for a while, but as soon as Eirik summoned him again he was off, and me less than a year old. I suppose a daughter wasn’t of much interest to him. So he went to Oxney, and became embroiled in a quarrel of Eirik’s concerning the high seat pillars he had lent – so he said – to Thorgest of Breidabolstead.
If I were a man I’d avoid feud like the fever. Once you’re in you never get out again – you’re a marked man for life, and life probably won’t last that long. But Thorbjorn was lucky that time. It didn’t come to more killings. Eirik was banished at a meeting of the Thorsnes Thing, and he left Iceland for three years.
I think Thorbjorn would have gone with him then if he could. My father was a sensible man in some ways, and yet he might easily have traded a fine inheritance and a promising family for outlawry and a voyage beyond the human world with Eirik. He sailed our boat from Laugarbrekka alongside Eirik’s trading ship until they were out beyond all the islands and only Snaefel could still be seen behind them. Then Thorbjorn turned unwillingly for home, and nothing more was heard of Eirik for three years. As I’ve told you, he turned up at Laugarbrekka that winter when I was four, and in a way that marks the beginning of my own history. It’s the first event I remember, anyway, the first marker of time. Before that I had no idea that anything could ever change.
Often the volcano is visible from a hundred miles away, and sailors use it as a bearing all along the west coasts. When Snaefel itself is out of sight its hat of cloud can still signal where it lies. Underneath its cloak of ice, the mountain moves and melts, and the rocks stir, crushed between fire and snow. Under that smooth cone of white lie the doors of Niflheim, where hel rules.
Above, snow flashes in the newborn sun of spring. The slopes are pied white and mucky brown. The air is sharp and salt, pierced by the whistles of early oyster catchers.
A herd of ponies, dun and grey, pick their way along the path through the lava field between Laugarbrekka and Arnarstapi. Three of them have riders: men in woollen cloaks with hoods thrown back, swords at their belts. Two eagles soar over Snaefel; ponies and men are mouse-like specks below. The eagles rise upward on a spiral of wind, and the long peninsula takes shape below them.
Down in the lava field, the volcano is out of sight, as the path twists between lumps of lava that have dried into the twisted black shapes of giants and trolls. Hooves clink on rock, bridles chink. There is a fourth rider, much smaller than the men. Her cheeks are bright with cold and heat, her hair is a tangle in the wind. She rides like a boy, her skirt caught up over the saddle. She holds the reins in red-cold hands, which she twists in the tawny mane to warm them. She rides the pale mare, whose foal nudges alongside, the one with the lucky star. The little girl wears a brown woollen cloak, just like the men, and a dress and tunic of undyed wool, embroidered with coloured braid at wrist and throat. Her tunic is fastened by two brooches, miniature versions of a grown woman’s.
The herd of ponies come out of the lava into frosty pastures. Snaefel has disappeared behind the hill called Stapafel which looms over Arnarstapi. On the west side of Stapafel sits a great troll woman turned to stone, staring into the sea where the sun sets. One by one the horses cross a frozen stream. When the mare’s turn comes the little girl does not flinch. The mare scrambles between frozen banks. Hooves slip on ice. The mare swishes her tail and scrambles back to level pasture, the foal following. The herd moves on.