Iceland's Bell (38 page)

“You have made a pact with all the forces of nature to oppose me,” he said, as he kneaded his fingers together more tightly. “You have enjoined the blossoms in the fields into swearing oaths against me. Even the sun shining through cloudless skies—you have turned it into the enemy of my soul.”

“Forgive me, Reverend Sigurður,” said she. “I thought that you were my father’s friend, and that those words of yours that I repeated to you earlier had been spoken in all sincerity. Now I see that I was mistaken. All I do is anger you. I will ride away as quickly as I can. And we will forget everything.”

He stepped in front of her and said: “What moment should I have waited for all these years but that one when the most noble woman in the land should come to this poor eremite?”

“The most wretched woman in the land,” she said, “a true picture of a pitiable woman: a she-creature opposed to all your theology. Now you should allow this castaway to continue on her way, my dear Reverend Sigurður.”

“I-it’s in a cask in the wall,” he whispered. He unhooked his fingers and stood before her with his hands in the air. “Besides what little there is in the top compartment of the chest in the loft. Here are the keys. And there are two hundred rixdollars in this bureau. Guard this oblation of Satan, these faeces diaboli* which have burdened my conscience for too long; use them to drive yourself southward into the world to meet your lover. And if something is lost, whether he treats you well or poorly, it is I.”

10

Gyldenløve, the king’s kinsman and Baron of Marselisborg, Postmaster General in Norway, Governor of Iceland and Revenue Comptroller, or, as he titled himself, Gouverneur von Ijsland, owned numerous splendid estates and beautiful palaces in Denmark. He took his greatest pleasure during the summers at Fredholm Palace, due to the abundance of game to be found in the forests that began just beyond the palace canal. He had christened this palace Château au Bon Soleil, which in Danish meant Palace of the Good Sun or Villa of the Sun. The lane between the highroad and the palace bridge was nearly a mile long, and as everyone knows, the distance between highroad and palace gate is an excellent indicator of a man’s nobility. Only highborn guests riding in carriages visit such places.

On a lovely midsummer afternoon in Denmark, an old tarnished carriage, its axles poorly oiled, comes creaking down the stately palace lane. The carriage is held together in places with bits of cord, and it looks as if one of the two horses pulling it is hobbling.

At the gate to the bridge over the canal stands a dragoon armed with a musket and sword; his steed stands near a stable some distance away. He asks, “Who goes there?” and the coachman opens the carriage door for him. Sitting within is a pale woman in a dark cloak, unadorned but for an old silver spangle fastened through a buttonhole at the neckline, beneath a white ruff. She wears a silver-colored wig so finely coiffured and radiant that it appears to have been bought the day before, perhaps for this visit. On top of the wig rests a somewhat rustic wide-brimmed hat, as if she had not had enough funds for a stylish feathered hat after the purchase of such a costly wig. The woman’s bearing was magnificent. When the dragoon heard her speak stiffly in Danish, he bowed deeply to her and said that he could understand German, the language of better men, if she would rather speak unimpededly in that language. Then he marched, musket presented, salutatorily before the carriage over the canal bridge and sounded a trumpet on the palace square. A dignifiedlooking servant in red livery came out onto the square, opened the door of the carriage, and helped the visitor step out. She said:

“Inform the baron that the woman who wrote to him has arrived, bearing a letter from the regent Beyer.”

The palace facade consisted of two tremendously high towers, one cylindrical, the other quadrilateral, linked by a four-story building with a portal broad enough for a carriage to pass through. The visitor was taken through a little door at the base of one of the towers and up a long, winding staircase that led to a dimly lit vestibule on an upper floor. Double doors are opened, and the woman is invited to proceed into the governor’s hall, which is near the center of the palace, with windows overlooking the courtyard. The hall had a vaulted ceiling and its floor was of stone. Glorious weapons bedecked its walls: hanging here were not only a splendid variety of muskets, fuses, and powderhorns, but also spears, swords, and lances in bunches like flower bouquets. Coats of armor topped with helmets stood unsupported in the corners like giants. Over the doors and windows hung heraldic shields inscribed with dragons, birds of prey, and other fantastic wild beasts. The windows were fashioned from hundreds of tiny panes of glass joined together with lead and displayed images of knights upon strong-loined horses, fighting famous battles. Affixed to the walls were great racks of stag’s antlers, some with incredible numbers of points, and attached to the antlers were the skulls of the beasts to which they had belonged. Expansive benches and ironclad chests were situated along the walls, stout oaken tables before them, and on the shelves above the benches stood burnished copper tankards and enormous stone pitchers embossed with bawdy ballads and the words of God in German. On one table lay two thick books, a Bible with clasps of copper and a medical textbook on diseases of horses, as thick or even thicker. Lying on the books were two gloves and a dog-whip.

The woman stood there for some time, regarding the hall and its contents, when in walked a man clad in silken clothing and golden cords. He announced to the guest in an extremely affected tone that the Durchlaucht* had arrived.

Gyldenløve, Baron of Marselisborg, Gouverneur von Ijsland, was a tall man with a sagging chest and a large paunch, his thighs slim in close-cut trousers, resembling two fir-twigs stuck into a bowl of punch. His face was long and his cheeks slack, and a green-tinted wig hung out over his shoulders. He wore a doublet embroidered with golden thread and soiled with splotches of grease and wine. His eyes, like those of his kin, were quick and watery-clear, similar to a pig’s eyes. He was a reticent man, in every way a loner, tired-looking and slightly troubled, and he held a ramrod in one hand. He spoke in a rather abstruse language, characterized mainly by a kind of German normally used to berate soldiers, slung together with various glosses derived from other tongues. His voice was a brennivín-bass, and he rolled his “r” somewhere deep in his throat, making the rattling noise animals make as their throats are being cut.

“Bonjour, madame,” said Iceland’s governor. “Na, du bust en isländsch Wif, hombre, hew nie een seihn—so you are an Icelandic woman, man alive, I have never seen such a sight.”

He walked over to her and poked at her, rubbing bits of her clothing between clammy fingers, asking where she had bought the cloth, and who had sewn her cloak, and here was a remarkable silver pendant, he had never seen silver embossed in such a way, do they do this in Iceland? Who gives them the silver to make such things? “Hombre, now I am completely astonished, would she like to give me this necklace?”

She said that all of her silver was his if it would please him to accept it but gave no indication whatsoever that she was about to remove the brooch and give it to him. Instead she turned immediately to her errand and took out the letter she had brought from the regent Beyer at Bessastaðir. As soon as he saw the letter he was overcome by an official weariness and apathy, and he asked dispiritedly:

“Why has this not gone through the Chancery? I look at nothing that has not gone through the Chancery. I am hunting.”

“This letter deserves close attention,” she said.

“I have long since stopped reading, except from my medical text when something is wrong with the horses,” he said. “And I have no one to read it for me here. Besides, everything sent to me concerning Iceland can be learned from one book, since it’s always the same whine about cord; all my life, nothing but cord. And it’s not every year that we need fish here in Denmark. We are not predisposed toward letting people drag endless amounts of fish with endless amounts of cord.”

“I,” said she, “am the daughter of the magistrate over Iceland, who was innocently deprived of his honor and his estates in his old age. Your Excellency is governor of Iceland.”

“Yes, my old friend, your father, was a great chicaner,” said Gyldenløve. “Even so, things went for him as they did. There came an even greater chicaner. It has always been like this in Iceland. I’m tired of thinking about Icelanders.”

“I have traveled all this way to meet with Your Excellency,” she said.

“You are a splendid woman,” he said, and he cheered up again as he looked her over and forgot about his official duties. “If I were in your shoes I would not return to Iceland. I would settle down in Denmark and find a husband. Things are going very well for us—it is very pleasant here. In my time the stock here in the forest has increased to more than three hundred animals. Look at this head, isn’t this lovely?”—he stood up and pointed to the largest stag’s head hanging on the wall—“there are twenty-nine points on these horns, hombre. I killed this deer myself. Not once has His Majesty my kinsman ever shot a deer with so many points.”

“This is indeed a beautiful head,” said the visitor. “I know, however, about a certain beast that has even more points. It is called justice. I have come to speak to you about the type of justice that affects an entire country: your country.”

“Iceland, my country? Pfui deibel,”* said Gyldenløve, Baron of Marselisborg.

He did, however, agree to give the letter from his servant in Bessastaðir a hearing, if she wished to read it.

The letter stated that the woman who delivered it was the sole surviving member of the greatest aristocratic clan in Iceland. The letter’s author recapitulated the scandal that had occurred on the island when this woman’s father, the most distinguished man in all of Iceland, as well as a faithful and beloved servant of His Royal Majesty, was forced to endure the slander of that bizarre envoy Arnæus, who had been appointed by his deceased Majesty of praiseworthy memory to act as his plenipotentiary in Iceland. The letter described Arnæus’s methods, how he had tyrannized the aged magistrate and several of his colleagues by invalidating the magistrate’s rulings long after they had been made and by seizing his estates, until this aged and faithful servant of the king was reduced to an ignoble slave and pauper, and was laid upon his bier several weeks later.

The regent then stated that it had been the resolute intention of the bishop in Skálholt, the son-in-law of the old aristocrat, to travel to Denmark to attempt to persuade the highest authorities in that country to redress the situation. But the pox had swept over Iceland and had sent to their graves just over a third of its inhabitants, including a substantial portion of its clergy. The bishop in Skálholt, one of the king’s most venerable friends, was one of those called away, along with his respectful wedded wife, the gentlewoman Madame Jooren.

Of this family there remained standing, alone to pursue her father’s case, only the young lady Snefriid, the widow of the unlucky aristocrat Magnús Sívertsen. This particular lady had come to meet the letter’s author at Bessastaðir and had informed him that her duty to her honor would drive her, a destitute hermit, over the storm-tossed sea, to deliver to the governor or even to our Highness himself her most humble petition that the so-called Commissarial Verdict in her father’s lawsuit be reexamined by a higher court. Commending this honorable lady to the most charitable goodwill of the Baron of Marselisborg and Governor of Iceland, requesting that he examine carefully and take into consideration the dangerous currents introduced into Iceland by the conduct of the commissary Arnæus, and put a stop to practices whereby knights-errant were glorified for trampling down auctoritas, molesting the king’s servants, and beguiling the common folk, I remain Your Excellency’s most humble and très obéissant serviteur.*

Gyldenløve stuck the ramrod into his boot to scratch his ankle. He said:

“I have always said this to His Majesty, my kinsman: Send the Icelanders to Jylland where there is enough heather for their sheep-creatures, hombre, and sell Iceland to the Germans, the English, or even the Dutch, the sooner the better, for whatever decent sum you can get, and use the money to fight the Swedes, who have snatched your good land of Skåne away from you.”

She sat silently for a long moment after hearing his answer.

“There is a verse by an ancient Icelandic poet,” she said finally, “which goes something like this: Though a man loses his wealth and his kin, and in the end dies himself, he loses nothing if he has made a name for himself.”

“Hew ick nich verstahn,”* said the Baron of Marselisborg, Governor of Iceland.

She continued, and though she hesitated slightly at first, her spirit strengthened as she spoke:

“I ask Your Excellency: Why are we deprived of our honor before our lives? Why won’t the king of Denmark leave us our names? We have done nothing against him. We deserve no less respect than he does. My forefathers were kings of land and sea. They sailed their ships over storm-wracked seas and came to Iceland at a time when no other race on earth knew how to sail. Our skalds composed poetry and told stories in the language of King Óðinn himself, who came from Ásgarður when Europe still spoke the language of slaves.* Where are the poems, where are the stories composed by the Danes? We Icelanders even gave life to your ancient heroes in our books. Your ancient tongue, the Danish tongue that you have ruined and lost, we preserve. Do as you please, take my foremothers’ silver—” at this point she unfastened the silver pendant from her neckline, and her black cloak fell from her shoulders: she was dressed in blue with a golden band encircling her midriff—“take all of it. Sell us like livestock. Send us to the heaths of Jylland where the heather grows. Or, if it suits you, keep beating us with your whips back at home in our own country. Hopefully we have done enough to deserve it. A Danish ax rests upon Bishop Jón Arason’s neck throughout eternity, and that is fine. God be praised that he did enough to deserve all seven of the strokes it took to separate his trunk from his hoary head and his short, thick neck that would never bend. Excuse me for speaking up, excuse us for being a race of historians who forget nothing. But do not misunderstand me: I regret nothing that has happened, neither in words nor thoughts. It may be that the most victorious race is the one that is exterminated: I will not plead with words for mercy for the Icelanders. We Icelanders are truly not too good to die. And life has meant nothing to us for a long time. But there is one thing that we can never lose while one man of this race, rich or poor, remains standing; and even in death this thing is never lost to us; that which is described in the old poem, and which we call fame: just so my father and my mother are not, though they are dust, called ignoble thieves.”

The Baron of Marselisborg pulled an empty cartridge from his purse and peered into it with one eye.

“If anyone has deprived the Icelanders of their honor and reputation, it is they themselves, ma chère madame,”* he said, and he smiled so widely that his eyes sunk back and several yellow buckteeth jutted out. “When their laziness and drunkenness bring them to the brink of starvation, my kinsman His Majesty has to send them grain supplements. When they think the grain is not good enough for them they go to court and demand gold and silver. And as far as justice is concerned, ma chère, it is clear to me that the Icelanders have chosen their man, the man whom they consider best. And from what I have heard, it was this very galanthomme who deprived the honorable old magistrate, your father, of his estates and honor. It’s the same old story for you Icelanders. Learned men have informed me that Icelanders’ books say that in the old days all the better men in Iceland set about beating each other to death until no one was left but oafs and barbarians. Now, for the first time in my life, an Icelandic woman comes to me—wearing, might I add, a golden belt around her waist—and she begs for more justice. Is it not to be wondered that I ask: Wat schall ick maken?”*