From the Mouth of the Whale (17 page)

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.

The island rises … It emerges from the deep as the flood tide strips the waters from its shores … Fish flee the dry land, out to the dark depths … Shore birds, newly arrived, follow the ebbing tide, scurrying along the water’s edge, pecking around their feet … The tide-mark retreats rapidly, like a silk glove drawn off a maiden’s hand … A bank of liver-coloured seaweed glitters in the morning sun, swollen and vulnerable … Ever more is revealed of the neck of black bedrock on which the island sits … Seaweed flows down over its shoulders … All around me the world is turning green … Sap is flowing through the plants, swelling their veins … Grass that was dull and muted yesterday now ripples on the island’s head like brilliant green fire … The balmy breeze carries the promise of dandelions yellow as suns … Meanwhile the sea is sucked ever further from the island, swept from the shallows … The sparse white hairs lift themselves on my skull, blowing down over my brow and into my eyes … The breeze is freshening … It is blowing from the east, and just a touch to the south, into Trévík Cove … Conditions will soon be perfect for what is to come … I crawl forward to the edge of the Gold Mound and look over … Today I am hoping to see the island sing, to hear the sound of its form – to confirm that it is a string, pitched in harmony with its Maker … And why should it not be? Everything here was ordered according to the same rules as everything else that came into being in those six days; yes, even here one is in a harmonious place … It is easy to think this way when the wind sounds so gentle that it is hard to know whether the whisperings one hears are snatches of its conversation with the grass or addressed to oneself as it wafts past the ear with a soft, soothing murmur … For it cannot tell the difference between human beings and tiny flowers, as becomes apparent when it blows up a storm … Now, would it be better to stand here or there? At the highest or lowest point? Up on the Gold Mound or down by Gullbjörn’s Cave? Where the island draws breath or where it exhales? But what is that plaintive bleating? I cannot be doing with that … Where is it coming from? Baaaa … I leap up and peer around … A sheep is trapped on its back down by the Elf Knolls … A stranded black sheep … Baaaa … The symphony is about to begin … It must not be ruined by the bleating of a stranded sheep … I run down off the mound, if you can call it running, and ramble through the tussocky dells, if you can call it rambling … I reach the knolls somehow … The sheep is thrashing around on its back, kicking wildly in the air, and glares at me with malignant yellow eyes before trying to strike at me with its cloven hooves … I approach the animal from the side and roll it back on to its legs again … It was its own fault that it got into this mess … What was it doing grazing in a place like this? The sheep lowers its head, grunting angrily as if I were somehow responsible for its plight … There is nothing as wrathful as the glare of a sheep that believes it has a grudge against one; no animal seems to believe as unconditionally as the sheep that we govern the world and that every mishap that befalls it should be laid at our door … The sheep snorts … I snort back … Abandoning the idea of butting me, it bounds away towards the shed … Never mind the music of a whole island, I must make amends for the animal’s behaviour … I clasp my hands over my stomach:

Hidden the house, the mound is green,
wherein the hayfield’s treasures sleep.
Well may you prosper, race unseen,
now as ever, rewards to reap.