The Pirate Queen (30 page)

Far off the coast of Iceland, where I would not venture on
this trip, midway between Snæfellsnes and Cape Farewell on Greenland, was such an ocean whirl. Sailing directions from the nineteenth century mention that the sea broke strongly in that area and the cause was believed to be volcanic. When Eirík the Red and his followers sailed to Greenland in the first colonizing effort, only fourteen of the twenty-five ships made it. The rest were lost at sea, perhaps caught up in the ocean whirl and destroyed.

I preferred thinking of a whirlpool as the
umbilicus maris,
“the navel of the sea.” Even though the vortex led downward, perhaps to the hollow center of the earth, perhaps to Ran's realm, it was the spiral shape the stirred waters made that intrigued me. So often when I imagined the shape of a whirlpool, I seemed to see it from above, its coils resembling a labyrinth, a circular path leading to a center. It was that inevitable center that fascinated me. In a labyrinth you picked your way closer to the heart of things, via paths that often dead-ended. In a whirlpool you were funneled along with the flotsam and jetsam of your life into the core depths. Either way, you came to the center, or as close as you were able.

Did I believe in destiny? I thought back to my arrival on the west coast of Ireland over two months before, to my first glimpse of Clew Bay and my sense that, beginning with Grace O'Malley, I had so many lost and forgotten stories to discover along these northern coasts. I thought back even further, to a day by the tide pools of Cape Cornwall, when I lay on the warm rocks in the September sun and read a book about women pirates. Where are the stories of women and the sea? I want to know them, I'd decided.

Had fate spoken to me then? Had the Norns made me take my journey around the North Atlantic? Had they brought me
all the way to Iceland to show me something important? The Norns were said to be present at birth. They were the name givers; they decided what would happen to you. My practical, prosaic side reminded me that it was a film option on one of my books that had given me the resources to make this trip. I believed in daydreams, I believed in risk taking; I didn't really believe in destiny. It was easier to believe that I'd been handed a ball of thread, a clew, and that my work was to follow it and see where it led. If I looked hard, I could just see the faintest thread of gold down in the darkening waters of Heimaey's harbor. Was I making my fate or was my fate making me? Or was I perhaps weaving a net myself, a net of clews? I listened for the unexpected voice inside that had told me so recently to change my name. But for now it was silent.

CHAPTER XIII

ICEBERG TRAVEL

Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Iceland

T
HERE WERE
once two sets of cousins. Helga and her sisters were the daughters of Bard. Red-cloak and his brother were Thorkel's sons. The cousins grew up together on the lava-licked edge of the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in the far west of Iceland. There was rivalry between them. “The sons of Thorkel wanted to rule the roost because they were stronger, but the daughters of Bard would not allow themselves to be subdued any more than they were able,”
Bard's Saga
tells us.

One winter's day, the cousins were playing down on the beach, and the playing was fierce as always, especially between Red-cloak and Helga. An ice field was just offshore and a floe had broken away and drifted very near land. Helga and Red-cloak pushed each other back and forth until he shoved her onto the floe. There was a thick fog that day and a strong wind. Just as Red-cloak pushed Helga onto the chunk of ice, a gust caught the floe and she was carried out to the ice field. That night the entire ice field moved away from the coast and out to sea. Helga had no choice but to cling to the ice as it drifted. But, as the saga tells us calmly, with no hint of the miraculous, the ice field drifted so quickly that within a week Helga arrived in Greenland, where she was rescued by Eirík the Red. The historical Eirík, the father of Leif Eiríksson, had led the colonization of Greenland in 985, which would put Helga's purported voyage about a thousand
years ago. You could argue that Helga was the first woman to make a solo crossing of the North Atlantic, however accidental the journey and unorthodox the vessel.

“And this,” said Gulli Bergmann dramatically, “is Deep Lagoon, the very beach where Helga was pushed onto the iceberg!” Black pebbles like a million hard droplets from the dark center of the earth covered the half-circle of the bay. Behind us was an alien forest of grotesque and gorgeous lava formations through which Gulli had just led me and a German couple and their teenage son. At our feet were crusty orange tangles of seaweed that glowed vividly against the black pebbles when wet. The air was so clear, so bright that I lost depth perception, couldn't judge whether anything was distant or close.

“Amazing,” I said. “Wow.” I frequently said these paltry words in Iceland, though today I'd stopped gasping, “Wonderful,” since that always caused Gulli to burst into song: “It's wonderful, it's marvelous. . . .” He was a great fan of Frank Sinatra and other crooners as well as of Broadway musicals.

We stood back from the waves as they crashed and pulled at our feet. The ocean was rough here, and vast, and Greenland was far away. Although I'd come to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula in great part because of this strange saga episode, now that I was here, I could still scarcely picture it. The story began in the same sort of gender rivalry I remembered from my own childhood, when I tussled with Johnnie next door over which of our imaginary race-cars was fastest; yet Helga's tale quickly veered into the fantastic.

“Is there any basis in history for Helga's voyage to Greenland?” I asked Gulli.

“No,” he said, amending, “Well, who knows? The whole of
Bard's Saga
is a mix of the supernatural and the ordinary. Bard was the son of a troll mother and of Dumbur, a giant king from
up in northern Norway around the Barents Sea. He grew up living in caves in the Norwegian mountains. He lived in a cave when he first came to Snæfellsnes.
Bard's Saga
explains why Iceland has the energy it has, the mysticism. It wasn't just Norwegians who came here. It was Sami, the Laplanders, from the far north of Norway. Anytime you read about a troll, for instance Bard's mother, you know it's a Sami person. And then there were the Celts; you know Celts don't just mean the Irish. The Celts go back to Babylon, when Nebuchadnezzar threw the tribes out of Babylon and one of the tribes got lost. Somehow these people, Celtic-Jewish people, ended up—after some centuries in Russia—in Iceland, as slaves brought from Ireland. What do you think of that?”

“Wow.”

Gulli was in his late fifties, a big-hearted, irascible, red-faced bear of a man who had once had a successful clothing business in Reykjavík and now, with his wife Gudrún, ran a small New Age resort at Hellnar on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. Last night, just having arrived, I'd been seated next to Gulli at the long dinner table, and after an hour, I'd been worried how our excursion today would go. He'd begun with Schumacher's
Small Is Beautiful
and had ended up ranting about the intractable nature of human greed. “What we have to deal with constantly is the beast in man,” he said several times. “I tell you, the beast in man is our worst problem. Not pollution, not AIDS, not murder and rape. These are all results of the beast. The beast is what we must recognize.” His face turned a violent tomato and his blue eyes flashed. The Germans, a photographer and his wife and son, looked as taken aback as I felt. Gulli's views were certainly not the droopy, feel-good type of New Age wisdom. He was a Communist for one thing, and a passionate environmentalist.

Gudrún had smiled reassuringly at me last night, and had rolled her eyes slightly when Gulli got to the part about the beast in all of us. She was a classic beauty—a softer, more tranquil Vanessa Redgrave—with a long braid of silvered blond hair. She believed that the ancient conical volcano covered by a glacier that loomed above their community was a power plug and a potential source of the spiritual awakening of humanity. She'd written a small book about this mountain, full of references to Egyptian pyramids, ley-lines, and psychic research. In spite of this, she was a practical sort. At this moment she was back at the resort, wearing her bright blue overalls and wielding an electric saw. She was building another new cabin for visitors, while Gulli took me and the Germans out for the day to places of interest nearby.

“After Helga was pushed onto the ice floe, her sisters went home to Bard,” said Gulli, rattling black stones in his meaty palm. “Bard went looking for his nephews. They were only eleven and twelve, but he showed them no mercy. He threw one of them into a ravine and the other off a cliff. Then he got into a big fight with his brother Thorkel, and Bard broke Thorkel's leg. At the end of his life, Bard disappeared into the Snæfellsnes glacier. He's still in there, people believe. He's the guardian of the mountain, of the glacier, a nature spirit.”

“Do
you
believe he's still in there?”

“Of course.”

Neither Gulli nor Gudrún were unusual in Iceland in their supernatural beliefs, though they were probably among the few to attempt to run a New Age resort. The Icelanders are a worldly and sophisticated population; people travel abroad regularly, and almost everyone is linked to the Internet and plugged into a cell phone. Literacy is universal and the per
capita consumption of books is the highest in the world. Yet there is a persistent belief in nature spirits—elves, fairies, gnomes, and other hidden people—who inhabit the landscape, particularly lava beds and formations. In a town not far from Reykjavík, Hafnarfjördur, where I'd recently visited the maritime museum, the tourist bureau was selling a colorful hand-drawn map of the town's environs, with all the places where the hidden people live. Most remarkable, perhaps, was that the map included a message from the mayor, which blithely stated,

In Hafnarfjördur, we have known for a long time of another society coexistent with our human one, a community concealed from most people with its dwellings in many parts of the town and the lava and cliffs that surround it. We are convinced that the elves, hidden people and other beings living there are favourably disposed towards us and as fond of our town as we are.

I'd seen lava in Hafnarfjördur, but it was very wet the day I ventured there, and the hidden people must have been inside, reading a nice book (or did they now have elfin computers to send and receive email?). Here in Snæfellsnes, in the thin bright air, the lava was shockingly vibrant and alive. There was so
much
lava, too. Some of it, the agglomerations above the Deep Lagoon, looked like flames of frozen rock. The cliffs at the edge of the land were basalt, the hardest lava, Gulli told us; it came from the center of the crater. A more crumbled lava made up the fields below the huge mountain; it had spewed from the volcano or been crushed by the advancing and retreating glaciers and spread across the plain. Imagine churned-up, jackhammered asphalt stretching as far as the eye could see. Lurid with
yellow-green lichen, the land pulsed like a painting under black light. The shore was lava, too, but eroded into a slope of smooth ball bearings. The surf rolled in, white over black pebbles, and when it rolled out, all the pebbles, every single one, moved and knocked together.

The German family with us picked their diligent way along the crunchy black beach—the father taking photographs, the boy climbing lava aggregate, the mother looking slightly worried—while Gulli stared at them pensively. Earlier this morning he'd made an anti-German joke, then asked if they were offended.

“To be honest,” the mild-mannered German photographer had said, “yes.”

“Things never went too well for Helga, starting from being pushed onto the ice,” said Gulli to me now. “In Greenland she fell under the protection of Skeggi, one of Eirík the Red's men. She lived with him there and helped him fight off a troll attack; later she traveled with him to Norway. But when they returned to Iceland, Skeggi went back to his farm and got married to someone else. Helga was heartbroken and never recovered. Her father came and got her, but she couldn't stand the sight of him. She was a poet. She said this verse:

       
Soon will I seek to leave.

       
My sorrow does not fade

       
for the waster of wealth.

       
I must wither away

       
for with passion hot and heavy