‘I think you’re going to have a good memory, Jónas …’
Grandfather squatted on his heels, levelling out the difference between us and, reaching for the feather, held it for a moment between his fingers before poking it into the hair above my right ear:
‘And now we must teach you to read …’
I used this purple-grey feather of yours as a pointer all the time it took him to teach me to read … And this happy meeting between child’s hand and quill also served to define the difference between boy and bird … For although the tip of the quill touched the parchment as I stumbled from word to word, none of the wisdom found its way into you, sandpiper, but engraved itself entirely on my childish mind … Though until the moment when I bent to my books our understanding had begun and ended in the domain of the flesh; in how our two minds interpreted the wind and the rain … Oh, that I had never learnt to read! There old Jónas began his long march of torment over the libertine earth, scorched by the twilight portents of the Reformation, by the burning of holy crucifixes and the destruction of old books, while the little sea mouse lives on in innocence and blessed ignorance … I do not doubt, feathered earth apple, that God’s mother will look kindly on you, whether the Blessed Orb splinters into a thousand suns in the Easter dew on the wing that hides your simple head or the moon whitens your snowy breast during the vigil on Christmas night: remember this in the wild joy of the high tide and the despair of the spring ebb …
‘Twit-tweet …’ comes my answer from the beach and the sandpiper flies off the rock … It flaps its stubby wings rapidly, heading out to sea, then veers abruptly and returns to shore, and in the brief instant that my eye follows its flight I catch sight of the blue rim of the mainland … Otherwise one cannot see it from my seat here on top of the Gold Mound … No, I prefer not to point so much as my cold nose in that direction … How the sight perturbs my mind! It is too painful to smell the mingled perfume and putrid stench that emanate from that quarter … I was ordered to clear off to this rock and from here there is no going back … It is my home now … On the blue horizon nothing but torture and thumbscrews await me; cudgels and slander, poisonous powder and serpents split to the groin so that they appear to walk on two legs …
SEA-SPECKLE: the smallest species of bird, known as the sea-speckle, scarcely measures a third of a sandpiper in size. It is spotted white and black, and thus we speak of speckled earth when the snow lies patchily on the ground. Men have at times hauled up a kind of seaweed, four or five fathoms long without its root, from which a little bird has hatched, though whether this is the sea-speckle or some other species we cannot tell.
Four summers ago the serpent brothers condemned me to exile, decreeing that anyone who offered me a helping hand would suffer the same punishment … On that terrible day, the site of the court was shrouded in libertine twilight … I noticed one man turn away when the sentence was read out; the blessed vice-principal Brynjólfur Sveinsson, a handsome, promising man who was only a guest there, though prepared in all humility to assume the office of the late venerable Bishop Oddur Einarsson, one-time disciple of Tycho Brahe and student of astronomy at his observatory in Hven … But the men of the south did not wish to accept the learned Brynjólfur’s offer of service in God’s acre, any more than they would suffer poor Jónas to administer his little spiritual plasters to the earthly afflictions of his neighbours … For a brief instant there was a gleam of sunlight through the darkness that loured over that assembly of wolves … As Nightwolf Pétursson’s hired thugs were driving me from the court with blows and ape-like howls, the younger brother of my old enemy, Sheriff Ari Magnússon of Ögur, saw his chance to trip me up at the gate, for the further amusement of the hyenas … A fall was prepared for me, but even as I was flying headlong into the mud, I felt a soft hand stroke along the chain where the irons chafed worst, and I was able to leave the court with my head held high … Throwing a quick glance over my shoulder I spotted Brynjólfur’s right hand vanishing into the sleeve of his cloak, for he it was who stood by the gatepost, but I could not fail to see that his wrist was guided by another hand, of milk-white maternal perfection: it was the Virgin Mary who led him to perform this act of mercy towards the miserable wretch for whom all succour was now banned by the law of the land … Blessed is he who is chosen as her instrument … That night all my wounds ceased their bleeding and filled the whole dungeon with the sweet scent of the lily … Jónas is the exile who cannot go anywhere … Twit-tweet … Whereas the sandpiper can fly away if his courage fails … But what might his piping ‘twit-tweet’ signify? Nothing, fortunately; he is only saying good day … A bird with such trivial news to impart surely harbours no bezoar in his skull … Twit-tweet … His low-lying brain-pan has nothing to offer the natural philosopher … No one would bother to ensnare him in order to char his little head since there is nothing of value concealed there: no healing stone or philosopher’s stone, no stone of any kind to protect against disorders of the blood or mind … No, there is no bezoar there … Bezoar! But I was not going to think about bezoar today … Bezoar! Bezoar! Bezoar! A volume containing scraps of wisdom from the works of Master Bombastus Paracelsus, translated from the German to Icelandic and inscribed with the name of the old schoolmaster at Skálholt, which arrived in Steingrímsfjord by crooked paths and was always hidden under my grandfather’s bed when strangers came to visit; this was the book from which I learnt to read and the first I learnt by heart … After which I read the old Saga of Bishop Gudmundur Arason … In that order … And things went as they did … For that is how my trials began, and who could have guessed that I would end up on this bird-fouled rock, this dance floor of seals? … But oh, what a joy it was to read! Once the letters had acquired their correct sounds and arranged themselves into words which I knew from my own speech and that of others; when the conjunction of the words begat all the explanations of the world and stories that together furnished my head from within, as if its bony vault were the walls of the gallery and libraries of the University of Copenhagen … places I will never see … For I am condemned to sit here alone, chattering to the foolish bird that most closely resembles me … Yes, sandpiper, let us not deceive ourselves about the rung we occupy on the ladder of human society … Although you can spread your wet wings and capture with them the far-travelled sunbeam, and I can hold up my thumb and forefinger till the moon is pinched between their tips like a pearl, neither of us will be able to hold on to our lucky catch … Enough of that, enough about you and enough about me; there is another they wish me to address and he is as grim as you are tender … I will not do it … No one can be expected to escape alive from wrestling with ancient revenants of dreadful power … I escaped from such an ordeal once before and doubt I could do so again … I would have done better to have kept quiet, kept my damned trap shut, instead of going around spewing out everything that shot up to the surface of the bottomless well of information and useless ideas that book-reading had etched in the leaf-mould of my mind, all boiling and bubbling like a potion in a magic cauldron … But no, of course I could not be quiet … I was forever blathering of bezoar … whose name alone is as intoxicating as the scent of the forbidden blossom on the Tree of Knowledge … I was drunk on the very idea of such a stone that could not only heal all human ailments but also prove useful to alchemists wise in the ways of converting base metal to gold … Wherever I went, wherever I broke my journey, I would ask after the carcass of a raven … Had anyone chanced upon a dead raven in the last few days or weeks? Yes, that is how it began … And should anyone remember having seen a dead raven, I would be off in a trice to examine it … Then one could find the child Jónas crawling into holes or scrambling up crags to retrieve the rotting hide of Corvus islandicus … For it was and still is my belief that the bezoar must be much more potent in the Icelandic raven than in its namesake elsewhere, on account of its affinity with that King of Fools, Odin, and his heathen tribe here in the north of the world … At any rate, I was nine years old when I began my quest for the cranial stone, which has now lasted fifty-three winters with no sign of success …