Paradise Reclaimed (3 page)

3

Romanticism
comes to Iceland

Life in Iceland had not yet grown so romantic that country folk would go for Sunday outings on horseback in summer, on the lines of the forest-trips in Denmark; that came later. In those days it was still considered wicked out in the country to do anything simply because it was enjoyable. More than a century previously the Danish king had abolished by decree all forms of entertainment in Iceland. Dancing was the devil’s work, and had not been performed in Iceland for many generations. It was not considered seemly for young unmarried people to tramp on one another’s toes except at most, perhaps, in order to have illegitimate children. All life had to serve some useful purpose and the glory of God. But the year had its festivities, all the same.

One of the main festivities was when the lambs were weaned and separated from the ewes; this took place around midsummer, when the sun shone all night long. Man and sheep took part in a night-and-day marathon agreeable to God, and the air vibrated with shrill bleating; for sheep lament in the major. The dogs had their tongues lolling out all day long, and many of them lost their bark. When the lambs had been separated from the ewes for a few days they were finally driven far up into the mountains. It was a wonderful excursion for everyone except the lambs themselves.

The herding went on all night, for the most part up along the river from ridge to ridge until the highlands opened out, unfamiliar mountains with unfamiliar waters in between and unfamiliar skies mirrored in them. This was the world of the wild geese, and with them the lambs were to share the sweets of the wilderness for the rest of the summer. Here one could feel the cold breath from the glaciers, and Snati the farm-dog started to sneeze.

A few of the farms in Steinahlíðar always combined forces for this lamb-drive. Women were sometimes allowed to come too; devoted serving-girls had been looking forward to this glorious occasion ever since the previous year, for the monotony of a man’s life was as nothing compared to a woman’s. Some young folk were allowed to come too, down to more or less grown-up children. One of those was the fair-haired boy from Drangar who had just spent a spring season at the fishing down at Þorlákshöfn and had visited Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar on his way home. He lived a few farms away to the east, where some solitary cliffs had parted company with the mountainside and stood aloof. Little Steina, Steinar’s daughter, had been confirmed that year, and to celebrate the fact that she was now a big girl her father had lifted her up on to Krapi’s back without saying a word—and this was something that had never happened before; he assumed that the pony would not bolt with her, since the speed of the company was dictated by the sorrowing lambs.

Love, as we now call it, had not yet been imported to Iceland. People mated without romance, according to the wordless laws of nature and in conformity with the German pietism of the Danish king. The word
love
survived in the language, certainly, but only as a relic from a distant unknown age when words meant something quite different from now; perhaps it had been used about horses. But nature got its own way nonetheless, as has been said already; for if a boy and a girl were not given the chance to make eyes at one another under the long German sermons about pietism, or at the sheep-pens where the bleating is the loudest in the world, they could hardly fail to touch one another accidentally when they were binding hay together in the summer. And although only the soliloquy of the soul was permissible, and the nation’s poets could never reveal more of their inner selves in a poem than to say that they laughed at destiny, people had everything in the right place, one feels, even in those days. By covert sign-language and cryptic talk it was still possible to maintain ordinary natural human life in whole districts. Thus, throughout the lamb-drive, Steinar’s daughter never once looked at the fair-haired boy from Drangar; always she looked in exactly the opposite direction. But she sat her white pony as securely as if she had never ridden any other.

When they had gone so far into the highlands that Snati had begun to sneeze they came upon a large sunlit lake from which there breathed an eerie coldness. Suddenly the boy rode right up to her side and said, “Weren’t you confirmed this spring?”

“Yes, I was a year behind. I was to have done it last year, but I would have been a little too young then.”

“When I called at your place on my way home from the fishing, and saw you, I could scarcely believe my eyes.”

“Oh, I’ve probably become a horribly big and ugly fool now. The only consolation is that I’m small inside.”

“I’ve also got plenty of time left to learn some sense, although I learned a lot from going to the fishing, come to that,” he said.

“I still believe a lot of things which perhaps aren’t true,” she said. “And the rest I don’t understand.”

“Listen,” he said, “why don’t you let me have a quick ride on the white horse? Your father can’t see us behind this hillock.”

“Are you out of your mind? Imagine my letting you have this horse up here on the moors, with lakes all round us! He’s a water-horse.”

“A kelpie?” he asked.

“Didn’t you know that?” she said.

“His hooves aren’t turned backwards, as far as I can see.”

“I never said he was a kelpie on both sides,” said the girl. “Just a minute, I think someone’s calling us.”

“I’ll talk to you later. Soon. I’ll come and call on you,” he said.

“No, please don’t, for heaven’s sake. I’d be much too scared. You don’t know me at all, anyway. And I don’t know you at all, either.”

“I didn’t mean I was going to come at once,” he said. “Not today, and not tomorrow. And not the next day, either. Perhaps when you’re seventeen. I’ll be nearly of age then. I hope you won’t have sold this colt to Björn of Leirur by the time I come.”

“I’d be so shy I’d hide in a cupboard,” she said, and with that she turned her horse away from the boy so that she would not have to look at him; and besides, their fathers had just about ridden up to them.

“We must not let the outside flank of the drive fall behind, my dears,” said her father.

The other farmer said, “I’d be very surprised if those two haven’t started thinking some rather pleasant thoughts.”

4

The pony and fate

A lamb-drive at midsummer on a pony descended from kelpies, and a breath of air from the glaciers—those who have been on such a journey in their youth dream of it forever afterwards, however long they may live, and finally with the wordless emptiness of regret and resignation to death. She only rode Krapi this once; why not always from that day onwards?

“I mentioned last year, Steinar, that you should let me have the white horse this summer when I ride west to welcome royalty,” said the sheriff. “It is of no little importance to arrive at Þingvellir* well-mounted on such an occasion—as much to impress other districts as the Danes themselves.”

Steinar of Hlíðar laughed his high-pitched titter. “I have often admired the sheriff’s horses,” he said. “Wonderfully reliable beasts, and fine at fording rivers, no half-measures about that. I can say nothing about the king, of course, but I would dearly love to see the sheriff in this country who would be better mounted.”

“Yes or no?” said the sheriff. He was in a great hurry, like all officials, and had no time to listen to evasions.

“Hmmm,” said Steinar of Hlíðar, swallowing carefully. “The point is, my dear friend, that this pony you refer to is completely untried and scarcely even fully broken in. But it so happens that he has become a fairy-tale horse for the children here, and his value, if he has any, is what he is in the eyes of the children while they are young and small.”

“It is downright dangerous to let children ride unbroken horses,” said the sheriff. “Children should be strapped on to docile old hacks.”

“I have not really made much of a habit so far of letting them ride him,” said Steinar. “But, if you will allow me to say so, I like to use our Krapi as a model when I tell them stories of grander creatures, like the horse Grani that Sigurd the Dragon-Killer rode when he went to fight the dragon Fafnir, or the late Hrafnkell Freyr-Goði’s horse Faxi, the beast that the god Freyr inhabited on the strict understanding that whosoever rode him, apart from Hrafnkell himself, should forfeit nothing but his life;* nor am I accustomed to forget Sleipnir,* who pounds along the Milky Way so hard with his eight legs that the stars are sent flying; or else I tell them that the colt is perhaps a kelpie that came straight from the creek there.”

The sheriff lit his pipe. “It is no use serving up old legends for me, my lad,” he said. “I can invent my own fairy-tales, thank you. You peasants always forget that Sigurd the Dragon-Killer went to hell a long time ago with the dragon and all the rest of the paraphernalia. But you allow Björn of Leirur to rob you of anything he likes, even your souls if you had such things and he happened to want them.”

“I cannot say I had thought of letting old Björn ride very far on our Krapi,” said Steinar. “Not but what Björn has deserved nothing but good as far as I am concerned.”

“The day may come, my friend, when you will part with this pony for less than nothing, and you will have cause to regret your refusal to sell him to me,” said the sheriff, and mounted.

Steinar of Hlíðar once again laughed his squeaky titter as he stood on the paving. “I am well aware that it has never been thought proper for a poor man to own a fine horse,” he said. “And I realise that this is why you important people are now making so much fun of me, bless your hearts. One must just take it as it comes. But the fact of the matter is that it may not be so very long before this horse ceases to be more remarkable than any others; and perhaps that day has already arrived, even though I am reluctant to believe it.”

Once again it was borne out that the more insistent the demands on Steinar of Hlíðar became, the more amiable became his falsetto giggles; but the Yes which was anyway the most alien of words to him always withdrew farther and farther until it disappeared entirely into that infinity where the word No belongs.

But Steinar of Hlíðar liked to have his little joke just as much as the eminent did. There were more than a few smiles when word got around that he had refused to sell both to the sheriff and to Björn of Leirur a pony for riding to Þingvellir—but was now letting it be known that he intended to ride there himself after the hay-making in order to pay his respects to the king.

It had long since been decided what gentry from the district were to ride west in the sheriff’s party, and it goes without saying that Steinar of Hlíðar was not one of them; but he seemed to have no misgivings about going on his own.

It was undeniable that there was something about this horse which contrasted sharply with other horses and made them look inferior: something about his gait, his bearing, the look in his eyes and the quality of his responses which at the very least suggested that it was not quite right to say that the horse, as a species, had ceased to evolve ever since the unicorn’s horn was lost . . . that its development was not entirely finished even though there had evolved on it just about the most perfect form of foot ever known, one toe in a fixed shoe. This particular horse was at least in his own way rather like the Pope: not only above other horses, but above all his surroundings—meadows, waters, mountains, everything.

There was no doubt at all that this was the horse that Steinar of Hlíðar was going to ride to see the king—or rather, as he put it to his neighbours with his usual modesty, “Our Krapi is going to Þingvellir to greet the king, with the fellow from Hlíðar on his back.” But there was no lack of wits in the district to turn the phrase round and say that the white horse from Hlíðar was going to ride on his master’s back to Þingvellir to see the king.

Although Krapi was as gentle as a babe in the farmyard, and felt quite content when he was haltered in the home-field, he was a very different creature when it came to catching him out in the pastures. Near the farm he behaved like a model prisoner who deserved every privilege, even the privilege of being released at the earliest opportunity. But out in the open spaces he was his own master. If anyone tried to fetch him from the grazing down by the sands when he was with the other ponies, he would glide away from his pursuers like a breath of air; the more they tried to approach him, the farther he left them behind; and the faster they came at him the more he resembled the wind itself and went sweeping away over scree and mud, water and earth-slips, as if they were level plains; and when he grew bored with the game he would head straight for the mountains. And that was how it was on the day that Steinar of Hlíðar went out to the pastures with a bridle behind his back to catch the colt unawares on the day before he was due to set off. The pony bolted, tossing his head in all directions as if something had frightened him, then galloped perilously up the steep mountain-slope and disappeared over the ridge. It meant that Steinar now had to comb the mountains with the help of his family to drive all the ponies down so that Krapi could be captured in the corral. When they had chased the pony up over the Brows they saw him standing alone high on a knoll, looking towards the glacier and neighing loudly.

“Have a good long neigh at the glacier, my lad,” Steinar shouted at him, “for you may be having a change of scenery soon.”

The dust of the delegation of dignitaries and notables had long since settled on all the tracks of Steinahlíðar, and the sound of their hooves had mingled with that of other notables and royalists from farther west. Government officials were to welcome the king when the royal ship docked at Reykjavík, and sheriffs and members of Parliament were self-appointed guests at the forthcoming royal banquets in the capital. On a peaceful late-summer day, when nothing moved except for an occasional tern drowsing on the track and an oyster-catcher stepping elegantly through the meadows, right in the midst of the hush that falls upon those who remain behind when the great have ridden off to their revelry, the farmer of Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar saddled his pony and rode off by himself. Snati the farm-dog was locked indoors. The wife stood on the paving and wiped away a dutiful tear as she watched her husband ride off down the path, and the children stood on either side of her, having put their arms round the pony’s neck and kissed him on his fragrant muzzle for the last time. They did not move until their daddy had crossed the screes and disappeared to the west behind the shoulder of the hill.