From the Mouth of the Whale (4 page)

My grandmother once said to her husband: ‘Let little Master Nosy come with us this evening to see the Peter Lamb …’ For they still kept up the custom of dedicating the first lamb of summer to Saint Peter … It was the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the day on which the Virgin Mary at the end of her life rose from Earth to Heaven like the scent of a lily blossom, encountering on her way Our Lord Jesus Christ who, for love of his mother, stepped down from his throne, descending halfway from the sublime to the corporeal sphere, bringing with him a choir of angels to make the occasion more festive. He has not come near the mortal world since, but on that occasion he embraced the soul of the Holy Virgin and escorted her to the glories of Heaven … And the old couple, my grandparents, had long been in the custom of visiting the lamb in honour of these events … In truth, they seized every opportunity to visit it, though always after I had gone to bed, but I had never been surprised by their charity towards this motherless creature, taking it for granted that they were as kind to other orphans as they were to me … After supper, Grandmother took me to my room and told me to put on my finest clothes … I obeyed, and she did the same … Then she made the sign of the cross over me and recited every five-year-old’s favourite prayer about Mary:

Mary went to church,
met a holy cross,
wore a key on her belt,
to unlock Heaven …
Almighty God and Peter
were singing there from books:
We shall go in summer
to visit our holy relics …
Please God, make the sun shine
on that fair hill,
where Mary milked her cow …

Then she took me by the hand and off we went to see the Peter Lamb … But when we went round the back of the farm buildings to meet Grandfather, I was met by an extraordinary sight … All the farmhands were gathered there, both men and women, as neatly combed and finely turned out as Grandmother and me … They were waiting for us … Grandfather Hákon led forward an old man with a nodding head and bent shoulders, clad in a cloak with the hood drawn down over his nose and holding a tall staff in his hand … He set off towards the mountain with us following in his wake … Grandfather Hákon went first with the menfolk hard on his heels, carrying torches which instead of being lit were painted a fiery red at one end:

‘So they won’t be seen all over the district …’ said one of the farmhands.

The women brought up the rear with us children … The man with the staff toiled up over the hayfields and no one but me fretted at his slow pace … I was wild with excitement to see the lamb … My grandmother kept a firm hold of my hand and I responded by dragging her along with all my might, leaning almost horizontally with the effort like a badly trained dog on a leash, but she would not be hurried … I thought the lamb must be one of the most remarkable creations on earth, given all this effort to make the visit so ceremonious and yet so secret … Ceremonious, for the people sang under the torches; secret, because the torches could not be lit and the singing was muted so as not to be heard beyond the procession … It was the seventh day of August and the summer nights were still light, though the shadow of the mountain had begun to turn blue in the evening and a stronger scent rose from the dewy grass of the farm mound in the morning … But the grassy farm knoll was not the only such mound in the world … When I saw where the procession was heading, I abruptly slackened my hold on my grandmother’s hand and pressed close to her skirts instead … Before us was a hummock known as the Mary Mound, near which we children had been strictly warned not to play our noisy games … We were told that it was the abode of the hidden people, who protected their home with magic spells … These warnings were invariably accompanied by tales of rash youths who in their eagerness to show off had advanced boldly into battle against the mound dwellers … All these youths lost their wits and ended their days tethered in stalls, lowing with the cattle … Some of the older children had heard human lowing of this kind on their travels to distant lands, such as the next farm but one in the valley, or even further afield, the farm beyond that, and I used to shudder when they mimicked the sound of these half-men … Now I leant backwards as I walked and dug in my heels, for from what I could tell the procession was headed to that very spot, the dreaded Mary Mound, where men went mad and were turned into beasts … How come they kept the Peter Lamb there of all places? Why on earth would they put the blessed little beast in such peril? And what might the lamb not turn into if it happened to graze on the mound and fall foul of the spells of the malevolent unseen power? My imagination gave birth to a monster as huge as the dreadful mound itself … A hairy sack that rolled inexorably along, dragging with it everything in its path … Man and beast alike were ensnared in the wet tangles of its wool and pulled inwards to the corpse-pale flesh which was covered all over with yellow sheep’s eyes, a coffin worm writhing in every one … That would be the last thing I saw before the monster rolled another ring around itself and crushed me on a rock … The material for this nightmarish vision was derived from the bloated carcass of a drowned ram that the older children had shown me at Hraunlón earlier that summer … I cried out:

‘I don’t want to see the lamb!’

And dropped into the grass … My grandmother jerked me briskly to my feet and pressed me close to her side without once breaking the rhythm of her stride or song … There was no escaping … For the remainder of the march I kept silent while the monster writhed and rolled and tumbled in my imagination … When the procession reached the Mary Mound, the crowd gathered in its lee so as not to be seen from the other farms … I had expected the Peter Lamb to greet us, bleating hungrily as is the custom of hand-reared lambs, but there was nothing here apart from the mound … The crowd fell to their knees and clasped their hands, all except Grandfather Hákon, the old man in the hooded cloak and two farm workers; I myself naturally copied my grandmother’s every move … Peeping over my clasped fingers, I cast around for the lamb … Instead I saw the farmhands remove spades from under their coats and, on my grandfather’s orders, start to break soil on the mound … They inserted the spades into gaps between the tussocks and sliced the turf crosswise, top and bottom, then down the slope from the middle of the upper cut to the middle of the lower one, until it resembled nothing so much as a pair of church doors as tall as a man … Now each of the farmhands stuck his spade deep under a door, thereby loosening the turf from the soil … After this, they peeled aside the doors, laying them back on the slope on either side like the panels of an altarpiece, revealing a rectangle filled with black earth … I was deeply unimpressed by my grandfather’s foolhardiness and could not understand why the good man should amuse himself by disturbing the peace of the cruel forces that dwelt in the Mary Mound, but then things took a turn for the worse … Grandfather fetched from his pouch a thick hog-bristle brush and began to sweep it along the soil at head height … I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my forehead against my clasped hands: the spirits would not like this … At that moment I heard a new sound: the gentle clacking of wooden beads … Rosaries dropped from the sleeves of the people in the crowd and they began to tell them with sighs and moans, calling forth in my breast a mixture of laughter and anguish which I had never before realised could exist in the same place … The brush whisked in my grandfather Hákon’s hand … The man in the cloak drew back his hood and at last I could glimpse something of his face: nose and eyes … a tuft of hair on the nose, the blue eyes vacant … Thrusting his staff into the spongy ground, he leant on it with his left hand while producing a small book from his scrip with his right … The brush sent the last crumbs of the thin layer of earth whirling away to reveal underneath a layer of mottled sand from the seashore … Grandfather wielded the brush on the sand with the same dexterity, working faster the deeper down he got … Meanwhile, in a reassuring and unexpectedly boyish voice, the hairy-nosed, poached-eyed man with the staff began to read aloud from the little volume that lay open in his hand, without once looking at it:

‘
Transitus Mariae
… On the day when the glorious Queen of Heaven and Earth, the Holy Mary, passed away, all the Lord’s apostles were present … And wise authorities tell us that wherever each of the apostles had been standing previously, he was raised from there by angelic power and set down on the spot where the Holy Mary died … For God’s angel was sent by the Lord to raise up each of the apostles and carry him many days’ journey through the air in the winking of an eye to bring him to this place …’

I had abandoned any attempt to understand what the grown-ups were up to … But of one thing I was sure: if you had to go through all this fuss just to set eyes on the Peter Lamb, then I was bored to death by the whole affair and determined to refuse any further invitations to visit, should they be forthcoming … I loosened my clasped hands, feeling the blood rushing to my fingers, and stretched and flexed them in the air … Grandmother gripped my skinny arm hard with a low cry … I lost my temper with her since I had done nothing to deserve such rough treatment and was about to strike off the hand that crushed my arm so mercilessly … But at that moment other people in the crowd began to emit similarly muffled cries … Yes, it must be starting: the evil spirits were entering the people and without warning each would turn on his neighbour, bellowing and beating, crushing and tearing off fingers, noses and ears … With a wail, I sprang to my feet … Experience had taught me that the best course was to run to my grandfather Hákon, but if the world was turning topsy-turvy, he must surely become the most fearsome ogre of all, so I made up my mind to run off alone into the blue …

‘Wise men say that God had previously revealed to his apostles that they would all, on the day that the glorious Holy Mother passed away, gather in the valley known as
Vallis Josaphat
…’ intoned the old man.

I could not move an inch … We were in the thick of the crowd, my grandmother and I … When the homilist fell silent I heard Grandfather Hákon say:

‘Come forth in jubilation, O Holy Mary, Mother of God, nursemaid of our Lord Jesus Christ!’

This did not sound like very monstrous talk to me so I plucked up the courage to look in his direction … The brush twirled as before in his hand, but where there had been sand there now peeped forth the finely shaped tip of a nose made of painted wood, then ruddy cheeks, and with the next swirl of the brush appeared the celestial blue eyes, turned heavenwards, of God’s Holy Mother … The third swirl swept all the sand from her countenance and the fourth dislodged it, causing it to trickle like water to her feet, revealing her robed body … My grandmother began to weep … For, as I understood later, it was a long time since she had last set eyes on the Holy Virgin, the lady who had given her strength through all the years of childbirth, childrearing and housekeeping … Her confidante in every trifling feminine concern that comes of being made not in the image of the Creator but in the image of an image, made from the substance of the male who was himself moulded from the earthly clay which became visible when the word fell from the lips of the Maker … Upon which He took the substance in His palm and made from it ever smaller worlds until He made woman and all that she contains within … The Holy Virgin knew women’s insides better than any other, being herself a daughter of Eve; the most perfect of her line, but a mortal woman nonetheless … Until the apostles saw her rise from her grave like a silver cloud which rose higher and higher until the Saviour floated to meet it, reaching a hand into the clouds and whisking his mother up to highest Heaven … Now she sits crowned at his side, pleading the cause of mortal women … It transpired that Our Lady was not the only statue in the elf-mound … For here the images of the holy saints, carved, cast and painted, from our own and our neighbouring districts had been preserved when twilight fell over the land like snow, like ash from the infernal lava-spewing Mount Hekla that is fatal to any livestock that have not been brought into shelter … For what are we but your flock, O Lord? We face the same perils as the cattle, sheep and geese that graze on grass turned an acrid black by the disaster … That is why your flock has hidden its salvation underground, and from there draws its strength, acting in secret while celebrating in its heart, until the rule of the usurpers has come to an end and the libertine hordes lie with their innards burst open like young rats that have gorged themselves in the tallow barrel … From this fair meeting with the Virgin in the Mary Mound, little Master Nosy’s childish mind became gripped with the conviction that every mound, knoll and bump in the landscape concealed heavenly wonders … Shortly before his death, my grandfather Hákon entrusted to me, then twenty-three years old, the instructions that showed where the True Believers had buried their saints … This later became my passport to the fortress of learning that is Hólar … There I exchanged the instructions for the schooling and priestly education of my son, Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur Jónasson … Not that he has had much joy of being the son of Jónas the Learned, but the poor fellow obtained his place at Hólar because I knew the hiding places of those who had escaped the twilight portents, though that was not all I had to pay towards his keep: there was also the piece of paper proving Sheriff Ari of Ögur’s treasonous dealings, that is, the contract he made with the Spaniards over the harpooning of whales, in defiance of his monarch’s strict edict banning foreign ships from entering Icelandic waters, which referred to the captains who sailed to these shores as ‘filthy thieves’ …