Iceland's Bell (37 page)

“I’m an old man,” he said.

“You will never have power over my father in this country,” she said.

“I won’t beg for mercy,” he said, suddenly standing up from the stone, his knitted cap hanging down over his hoary head and his cord around his waist. “I have a friend, as I’m sure my lady his elf-wife knows.”

“His whore,” she corrected, and she laughed and rode away.

When she was gone the captain called out to the wardens and told them to bind the prisoner and bring him aboard.

8

And when the ship arrives in Copenhagen in August, the captain sends word to the civil authorities that he has a villain from Iceland aboard. Armor-clad soldiers were immediately sent from the castle to take custody of the man, to seize his accompanying papers, and to escort him to the place in Denmark most familiar to Icelanders at that time. The castle of Bremerholm stood, as its name indicates, upon what was once an islet in a harbor of the city, its thick walls rising up out of the sea and its deep cellars full of water, with artillery men stationed on top to fire cannons at the Swedes. The criminals’ quarters in the castle were reserved exclusively for men, who lay there in a vast common room by night and slaved away in a workhouse by day. If the men were timid and behaved well, they earned the trust of their jailers and were allowed to spend the nights unshackled, but if they were intrepid and expressed their opinions or talked back, they were immediately shackled by their masters and kicked at and chained to the wall, each next to his own sleeping place.

It was not long before the Icelanders in the city started rumoring that the Öxará court’s sentencing of the farmer from Rein to incarceration at Bremerholm had been out of the ordinary, and that the decision to retry the aforementioned farmer there at home had been an improvidential one, to say the least. The rumors quickly found their way to the Chancery. And when a certain party who found it somehow worthwhile to make a fuss about this knave’s ugly head investigated the court documents, all that turned up in the farmer’s case was a cursory and unauthorized copy of the haphazard and hasty verdict that had been passed over him in the spring at the Alþingi in an unprosecuted and undefended case. The document said that since the farmer was renowned for his rude treatment of others and was in fact accused of murder, but had fled the assembly without having answered the accusations, he was to be sent to Bremerholm. That was all.

As a rule, the only way that anyone could escape from the castle of Bremerholm was through a dead-ended opening: namely, the grave. Very few at all who came to Bremerholm were able in the long run to stand the weight of the burdens bound to them by justice. A few Icelandic prisoners incarcerated for various crimes thought it was high time that Jón Hreggviðsson had come to join them for good, and that it was unlikely that this old lash-scarred rascal, infamous for his numerous misdeeds, would ever get the chance to get out now that they’d been able to drag him this far. It was therefore not astonishing that his fellow inmates’ eyes widened when the chief warden walked into the labor ward one day and called out for Regvidsen, the rogue who had killed the king’s hangman, an act tantamount to cutting off the right hand of His Grace our Most Clement Highness. The warden ordered Regvidsen to follow him.

Jón Hreggviðsson wasn’t taken to the mainland by way of Dybetsgade, but instead was ferried from the castle over the Bremerholm canal. The Danes had given him a shabby pair of trousers to put on over the underclothes he was wearing when he was arrested, but his cord had been confiscated. He was busy pestering the ferryman about getting his cord back when they made land on the city side of the canal, and he was ordered like a dog to go ashore. Standing there was a lanky man in a patched-up dress coat, stooping forward and twitching nervously. He stepped forward to meet the farmer and extended a blue hand with a gigantic backward-bending thumb. He seemed slightly distracted, but otherwise was the very picture of seriousness in his bearing.

“Greetings, Jón,” said the dress-coated man in Icelandic.

Jón Hreggviðsson looked at the man scowlingly and scratched his head—“Who’re you again?”

“Studiosus Antiquitatum am I, and am called Joannes Grindvicensis, Jón Guðmundsson, born and raised in Grindavík.”

“Oh, right, you’d think I would’ve recognized you, the man who came to the door of that renowned mansion when one of the king’s soldiers was standing there—and greetings and best wishes to you also, my dear Jón.”

The scholar from Grindavík snorted a few times and rubbed his nose for a moment.

“My lord and master wishes to grant you succor, Jón Hreggviðsson,” he said. “And I’ve been standing here, at his request, since the bell in St. Nicholas’s churchtower tolled the Angelus this morning. Soon they’ll be ringing the Spiritus Sanctus. You must know that I am cold and thirsty.”

“They took me away from my scythe as I was standing there in my underwear and I haven’t got a single tuppence for beer,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “And the Danes have stolen my cord.”

“Good, good,” said the scholar, thus destroying this thread of conversation. “In the name of Jesus then, and with our throats dry, what’s the news from Iceland?”

“Oh, you know, things are decent enough over there,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “Though it was pretty stormy during the fishing season last year. But the grass came up a little better in the summer.”

“Good,” said the scholar. He thought for a moment, then added: “I hear that you’re still the same old criminal.”

“Is that so,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“Is it true?” asked the Grindavíkian.

“I’d say I’m something of a saint,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

The scholar from Grindavík did not find this amusing at all: “It’s a dreadful shame to be a criminal,” he said, in a tone of moral probity.

“Actually, I’m just a thief,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“That is exactly what one should not be,” said the man from Grindavík.

“I stole a tiny piece of cord from someone almost twenty years ago,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“That is exactly what one should not do,” said the Grindavíkian.

Jón Hreggviðsson said: “When’s there ever been a decent saint who didn’t start out as a thief?”

The scholar snorted and gaped for some time and stood upon his left leg in order to scratch his left calf with his right instep.

“As I was saying, good,” he said finally, like a schoolteacher. “But what I really meant to ask was: has nothing happened in Iceland, nothing come to pass?”

“Not that I recall,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “At least not anything in particular. Not these past few years.”

“Nothing at all remarkable?” asked the scholar from Grindavík.

“No, nothing remarkable’s happened in Iceland for a long time,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “Not one single thing. Unless someone wants to call pulling up a howling ray last year in Skagafjörður news.”

“I would call that more than just a little newsworthy,” said the scholar. “What did you say, it was howling?”

“Oh, so maybe you haven’t heard about this either, pal: three years ago men appeared in the sky over Iceland,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“Men appeared in the sky,” said the scholar, slightly less enthusiastically. “Good.” After performing his tricks several times, including once wryly rubbing his nose, he spoke up again, saying:

“Might I remind my compatriot, that since you are just a common knave speaking with a learned man, even though I might be, as the lay brother Bergur Sokkason* phrased it, the most insignificant deacon in God’s Christendom, it does not suit you to comport yourself too freely toward me and address me informally like I am some dog, or to call me your pal. And I am not speaking now on my behalf alone—I know that my lord and master would never tolerate such effrontery from a commoner toward a member of the learned class. And when he sent me home to Iceland last year to copy those twelfth-century apostles’ lives found at Skarð, and when those Skarðsmen said that they would never allow it even for gold, he gave me a letter to carry with me, specifying that I should never be addressed with a title lower than monsieur there at home.”

Jón Hreggviðsson answered:

“I’m nothing but a feebleminded cotter who’s never met a decent man outside of my householder Jesus Christ, since I can’t rightly mention that fleabag of a dog who followed me all the way west to the Ólafsvík trading-station horseblock where I lay tethered to a hook. But since Your Highly Learned Lordship wants to do me some favors, then I promise to henceforth comport myself according to the example of Your Learnedness except at those times when my unmanageable unwisdom gets in the way.”

The Grindavíkian said:

“Though you and your kin are entirely under Moria’s power,* my master would never hold it against you; he has always had a soft spot for your mother, who blindly saved what others had lost. Because of this he has gone to a great deal of trouble and expended no little energy negotiating with the authorities to have you pulled out of that castle, from which no man emerges alive; because of this he invites you now to come to see him. Now it remains to be seen what sort of man it is he has saved. However, I will warn you right now, for the safety and health of your life and soul: have no dealings whatsoever with Jón Marteinsson while you are here in the city.”

“Oh, did I hear Your Learnedness right? Is he still above ground, that fiend who drank the king’s boots off me here all those years ago when I served under the king’s flag?” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“Yes, and what’s more, he has stolen the
Skálda
itself, fourteen pages of which were discovered in your deceased mother’s den at Rein on Akranes.”

“Hopefully at some point he’s stolen something a little less good-for-nothing,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “My mother couldn’t have used that rubbish to make as much as one patch for my jerkin.”

“My master has offered Jón Marteinsson the book’s weight in gold if he returns the stolen booty; he has offered to procure for him an estate and an official post in Iceland. He has had spies out for days on end to keep steadfast vigil over the thief, to catch him in a drunken moment and see if he says anything about the book; but all of this has come to nothing.”

“Hm,” said Jón Hreggviðsson, “I wonder if I, with God’s help, wouldn’t be able to make a little profit by becoming a thief here in Copenhagen.”

The scholar from Grindavík gaped like a fish several times, but said nothing.

“I mean,” said Jón Hreggviðsson, “since such men are offered gold, official posts, and estates; and are given brennivín to boot.”

“He who pledges his soul to Satan will surely be rewarded as a lucky thief, until the day comes when mankind awakes to the sound of trumpets,” said the scholar. “How else does it happen that no one ever catches Jón Marteinsson naked in bed? It is because he clothes himself in the skin of a dead man.”

“Oh, yes, the poor fellow—it doesn’t sit well with me to criticize him even though he drank my boots off me, because it’s pretty clear he had something to do with getting me out of the Blue Tower here a few years ago. And word’s gotten around in Iceland that he managed to get that pitiful scoundrel Mangi from Bræðratunga acquitted, after he’d been rejected by both God and men.”

“And I say he drowned the man in the canal the same night he got him acquitted,” said the Grindavíkian. “Anyone saved by Jón Marteinsson is lost.”

“All the same, I remember pretty clearly that Your Learnedness thought it might be nice to stop in at a tavern with our namesake,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“Good, good,” said the scholar from Grindavík, and he performed all his stunts one after another: he snorted, gaped, rubbed both sides of his nose, stood in place and rubbed his left instep against his right calf and vice versa.

“I’m just going to stop in at St. Nicholas’s,” he said, “to say my prayers. You stand out here in the meantime and try to recollect something worthwhile.”

In a short time the scholar stepped out of the church and stopped on the doorstep to put on his hat.

“Did you say that men appeared in the sky in Iceland?” he asked.

“Yes, and birds to boot,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“Birds? In the sky?” repeated the scholar. “I would call that rare— sine dubio* with iron claws. I must put this down in my memoranda. And as far as your saying that I’ve gone to a tavern with Jón Marteinsson, it is neither dignum neque justum, true nor correct, for a common scoundrel from Bremerholm to say such a thing to my lord’s scriba and famulus.* And let me tell you this: my lord is the kind of lord and master who ever and ay forgives his servant of his frailties, knowing, as he does, that I have very little money and that Jón Marteinsson clothes himself in a dead man’s skin.”

9

Over verdant lowlands cut by the deep streamwaters of the south hangs a peculiar gloom. Every eye is stifled by clouds that block the sight of the sun, every voice is muffled like the chirps of fleeing birds, every quasi-movement sluggish. Children must not laugh, no attention must be drawn to the fact that a man exists, one must not provoke the powers with frivolity—do nothing but prowl along, furtively, lowly. Maybe the Godhead had not yet struck its final blow, an unexpiated sin might still fester somewhere, perhaps there still lurked worms that needed to be crushed.

The center of domestic prosperity, the head and glory of the life of the nation, the see of Skálholt, tottered in its foundations. The inhabitants of the south were known to grumble from time to time about their episcopal seat depending upon who occupied it, but come what may, the office of bishop belonged here and would never be diminished though the king might strengthen his grip around it: here was the school, the hearthfire of learning and the learned, here the tithes of the diocesan estates were paid, here travelers were given alms so that they might cross over the streamwaters. Even when the wife of one particular bishop ordered the stone bridge over Hvítá demolished, impoverished men and wayfarers died on the river’s eastern banks in the belief that the light of Christianity still shone on the river’s western side.

But the sins of the nation had grown so great that not even the diocese could be defended. In its wrath the Godhead had also struck down the episcopal throne. When simple underlings at the see were forced to bend their necks beneath the scythe of punishment it was not beyond most people’s comprehension. But now, when both its clerics and its learned teachers, its promising schoolboys and virtuous young damsels were whisked speedily away, and when the country’s Christian patriarch, the bishop himself, and finally the perfumed honor of our land, the bishop’s wife, who in her one person represented a consolidation of all the best lineages in the land, were called away to sleep in the bloom of their lives, it was clear that the rose had been cruelly cut down by this sudden storm, and all of clerkdom’s foremost teachings on mankind’s sins and God’s wrath were turned into prophecies proven true.

A synod of the surviving priests in the diocese has entrusted the archpriest Sigurður Sveinsson with the custodianship of the office of bishop, and he has moved his books and other belongings from his small cold room within the servants’ quarters to the bishop’s residence. The abominable wooden crucifix hangs now in the green room, the Grand Salon.

Autumn brought cloudless days and hoarfrost at night. One day snorting horses stop upon the dry flagstones outside the bishop’s residence; they rub their bridle bits impatiently against their legs after their riders slacken the reins and dismount. There is no knock upon the door. The one visitor who does not knock at others’ doors has arrived. The outer door is jerked open as if by a sharp wind; there are light footsteps in the vestibule; the door to the Grand Salon is shoved open.

“Good day.”

She stands in the doorway, slim and straight, wearing a dark riding frock wet with her horse’s sweat and muddied somewhat at the hem, crop in hand. This full-grown woman’s face has of course lost its blossomy texture, and her teeth jut out just enough to prevent her mouth from being called lovely, but her elegance has assumed the type of authority that arises when the particular is discarded and replaced with the absolute. And just as before, day dawns anew wherever her eyes shine.

The electus* looked up from his books toward her. He walked over to her and greeted her ceremoniously.

“What bonis auguriis*—?” he asked.

She said that she had ridden to Hjálmholt a week ago at the invitation of old Vigfús Þórarinsson the bailiff, and was now returning to her home, out west in Breiðafjörður; since she was passing this way she thought it a good idea to pay her old friend and suitor a visit.

“Besides,” she added, “I have some small business with you, my dear Reverend Sigurður.”

He proclaimed it to be the happiest of days when she required his services in any way, made enquiries concerning the condition of her life and soul, and expressed his sympathy that she should now be forced to mourn as a widow, recounting for her the news carried to Iceland last summer, that Magnús, his schoolmate and close acquaintance, that extraordinarily unfortunate man, had passed away in Copenhagen, though he had indeed won his lawsuit first.

She smiled.

“One man was certainly defeated in that lawsuit,” she said. “But in times like these it’s hardly worthwhile to trouble oneself with small details. That’s why I haven’t bothered to secure compurgators to support my abjuration of the charges brought against me by the Supreme Court. And you, my dear Reverend Sigurður, dishonor my disgrace by refusing to have me prosecuted according to the laws of the church and drowned in Öxará.”

“Misdeeds that are repented no longer exist,” said the episcopal vicarius.* “Any type of mortal punishment for them would only be conceit, since the Lord has erased them from His book.”

“We’ll put aside all this conceit,” she said. “On the other hand, there’s one thing that I find amusing in all this mess: the cottage at Bræðratunga here east of the river was reconfiscated from the king, along with its chamber pots and churns. Old Fúsi gave me a valid deed for all of it.”

“The defeat of the powers that work affectionately for the Lord is but a momentary deception,” said the episcopal vicarius. “The course that these affairs have taken is doubtless more in accord with God’s will now than ever before. It may also be that the measure intended by the Lord for this poor land has already been filled up and poured out.”

“Doubtless,” she said, “since only I, a degenerate, am to survive my kinfolk.”

“A certain itinerant poet hid a little maiden in his harp,” said the episcopal vicarius. “Her noble kin had been wiped out. And when the maiden cried the poet struck the harpstrings. He knew that it fell to her lot to uphold the honor of her people.”*

“I only hope that you won’t be carrying an old pox-scarred widow, especially one who’s been branded a whore, in your domiciled harp of Latin poetry, my dear Reverend Sigurður,” she said.

“The true poet loves the rose of roses, the maiden of maidens,” said the episcopal vicarius. “She whom my master Lutherus was never allowed to see, neither awake nor in dreams, never a daylight or midnight visitation, the poet loves her and her alone, the eternal rosa rosarum and virgo virginum who is virgo ante partum, in partu, post partum, so help me God, in Jesus’ name.”*

His guest said:

“I have known for quite some time that there is no field of study more obscene than theology, if it is taught correctly: a girl before she gives birth, a girl as she gives birth, a girl after giving birth. I blush— the old widow. In Jesus’ name, help me back down to earth, my beloved Reverend Sigurður.”

He had started to pace the room, his hands gripped together palms downward, his eyes fiery and black.

It was she who started the conversation again:

“Once you came to me eastward over the river, Reverend Sigurður, three years ago, and spoke words that meant nothing to me at the time. But since then events have occurred that once again confirm the old saying that the greatest exaggerations are always closest to the truth. You said you knew for certain that my father would be deprived of his honor and possessions. I laughed. And then you spoke those words.”

He asked what words these were.

“You said, ‘I offer you my wealth and my life; my last hundred of land.’ ”

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“I need money, cash, silver, gold.”

“For what?” he asked.

“I didn’t think my friend would need to ask,” she said. “Especially a friend of my father.”

“I was once of the opinion that you yourself possessed a certain amount of ready cash,” he said.

She said: “I did have a tiny bit of minted silver. When news got out about Magnús’s death and his success in winning his lawsuit, people came flocking to me from various directions with claims for payment. I repaid whatever was demanded of me. I’ve already spent far too much. But still my blessed husband’s creditors continue to arise.”

“Men have always been in the habit of trying to extort money from women whom they know to be defenseless,” said the episcopal vicarius. “The claims should have been investigated. You would have been much better off by coming to me earlier. Truth to tell, I doubt that you are the appropriate party to close on some of the deals made by the blessed Magnús.”

She said that she had no desire to discuss this topic any further— these obligations were trifles compared to others she still had to fulfill. And with that she turned to the purpose of her visit.

She desired that her father’s case be reopened and that a new investigation be made into the so-called execrable cases, the cases involving landlopers and skulkers that her father had supposedly been too rigorous in adjudging, and for which he had been prosecuted and condemned. Now as far as most of these men were concerned, if they were not already dead then they were such small-fry that it was absolutely pointless to retry their cases, except for one of them, the murderer Jón Hreggviðsson, whose case had weighed so heavily in the judgment passed against her father. She said that certain men well versed in law had assured her that his guilt in the matter had never been in doubt, but his case had been poorly prosecuted, and if it were possible to try him properly, even at such a late stage, it might provide sufficient pretext to force a retrial of Magistrate Eydalín’s case. She now informed the electus that last spring she had been able, under no small financial burden to herself, to persuade the country’s high court to convene a hearing concerning the old man’s case, but of course he’d slipped out of their grasp just as he’d done in the past, without having been examined, though in the end they handed down some sort of pro forma ruling and sentenced him to incarceration at Bremerholm. “But as one might have expected,” she said, “that dismal congregation of drinking partners wasn’t able to write up a formal document spelling out the court’s conclusions, so that when the old man was brought to the ship, the best the Danes could understand from his papers was that he was supposed to be taken for a pleasure cruise. After negotiating with the bailiff on Snæfellsnes I rode by night to Ólafsvík,” she said, “where I had to bribe the Danes to transport the old man abroad.”

Then she told the vicarius that folk aboard the newly arrived autumn ship had brought news of the old man’s lawsuit. Powerful forces in Copenhagen had worked long and hard to try to exonerate this old lawbreaker who had been treated so leniently by her father, a mistake that cost her father his honor and the honor of his country. Jón Hreggviðsson hadn’t stayed but a few nights in Bremerholm Castle before these intercessors managed to secure his release, and the last she heard was that the old man was having a grand time of it in the home of a renowned man in Copenhagen. Everything that she had worked so hard to accomplish by manipulating this man’s case had been ruined. Those who preferred to see her father convicted and Jón Hreggviðsson acquitted still wielded more power.

To sum up, it was her intention to travel to Denmark as soon as expediency allowed, to meet with the lord whom the king had granted Iceland as an enfeoffment and whom she believed to be Iceland’s friend, to ask him to persuade the king to retry the case involving Magistrate Eydalín’s honor before a valid court of law. “But,” she said, “to defray the costs of such a voyage I need silver.”

The episcopal vicarius stood with his head bowed as she spoke. He raised his eyes a few times from the floor up along the person conversing with him, though never any higher than just above her knees. Again and again an involuntary contraction gripped his upper lip, and he clenched his fingers so tightly that the knuckles on his blue hands whitened.

When she finished stating her case he cleared his throat in all earnestness, pulled his hands apart once, then locked them together again. He gave her face a glance quick as fire, his eyes burning, his own face quivering—he looked like a beast on the verge of howling. Yet when he started speaking his words came slowly and sedately, with an immense weight of gravity suited only to the most extreme sorts of reasoning.

“Forgive me,” he said, “that the immutable lover of the health of your soul by our Lord God’s holy name asks this one question before any other: Have you at any time in your life kissed Arnas Arnæus with the so-called Third Kiss, the kiss that the auctores have named suavium?”*

She gave him a capitulatory look, like a man who crosses a vast stretch of desert and finally finds a pool whose waters are putrid. She bit her lip and turned away, looking out the window to where her attendants had hobbled their horses on the flagstones while they waited for her. Finally she turned back toward the bishop-elect and smiled.

“I ask Your Piety not to misunderstand me—I have no intention of denying the charges made against my pitiable flesh,” she said. “Just a few days and nights, and this dust will cease to stir. But, my dear Reverend Sigurður, since you are the lover of my soul, and since my soul is now defenseless, would it really matter at all whether the dust is kissed with the first, second, or third kiss?”

“I must warn you again, beloved soul, against giving answers that imply heavier sins, if true, than the sins you might deny,” he said.

“A man is instantly reduced to a clawed imp by engaging in debate with such a holy man as Your Piety, Reverend Sigurður,” she said. “I have long known that the more words I spoke with you, the more steps I would take down to deepest Hell. But just as before, I have come to you.”

“My love for you remains the same, now and forever,” said the electus.

“I have come to you because no one can find a more secure refuge in your pierced Christ than the lowest child of Hell. If I ever spoke disrespectful words about your idol in your ears it was not because I misunderstood his might. And it is my belief and my sincere acknowledgment that if this dreadful redeemer exists anywhere in our country, it is in your heart.”