And there she lay, in the patch of heather beside the path leading to our hut, a plaything of the wind and weather: my wife, Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir, now nothing but a heap of black rags. Throwing down my belongings, I ran to her, fell on my knees and flung my arms around her, crying: ‘Sigga, Sigga!’ Only to recoil at once, for a chill emanated from her body like the draught from a passageway. I raced in the direction of the landing place, waving and calling for help, but the lad who had ferried me to the island was out of earshot by now, bending to his oars off the north bank, and either did not or feigned not to see me. Running back, I took Sigga in my arms again, pressing her against me, but under the shawls she was nothing but bones. I struck my brow with my clenched fist: my God, oh my God! The damned swine had betrayed her; no one had helped her with the autumn chores or bothered to bring her supplies before Christmas or cared to see how the old woman on Gullbjörn’s Island was coping. I consigned them all to hell. Her shawl was pulled down over her nose and nothing could be seen of her face but the pursed lips and stubborn chin. I drew the cloth gently back over her brow; the bluish-yellow flesh was icy cold yet seemed unblemished, apart from a sprig of flowering thyme that sat fast in her right cheek. But where were her eyes? Had the ravens been at her? I fumbled at her eyelids; thank God, there was substance under them; I had been misled by their black appearance. I wept. It began to rain, then stopped. I wept on: for now I had killed my Sigga too. Evening fell and the rain started again. I carried her into the hut, laid her body on the bed in the living room, knelt down beside her and begged her to forgive me for all the wrongs I had done her, both great and smalclass="underline" for the trials she had been forced to endure on account of my obsessive curiosity and delving; the collecting mania that had filled all our chests with unidentifiable berries, fool’s gold and deadly poisonous plants, and books in languages that neither of us could read, while a cold wind blew among the empty cooking pots; the endless gabbling of elves and trolls; the evening I spoke harshly to her in front of the children; the hare-brained schemes and worthless conceits my mind constantly spewed forth that were to cost us so dear; the prospect of fame that dragged us from place to place, constantly on the move, from one side of the country to the other, only to end up in a bottomless well of debt to the very people who were supposed to make me rich, with the result that our home had to be broken up yet again. I begged her forgiveness for the deplorable sufferings I had caused her through my meddling in affairs too deep for a poor poet, by which I had provoked the enmity of powerful men with whom I could not contend, failing to realise that they were jackals, not lions, that they would not be satisfied until they had severed my head from my body. The silence that followed was overwhelming, unbroken this time by the quick retort with which Sigrídur had in recent years responded to any discourse of mine, regardless of topic:
‘That’s the sort of nonsense that got us here in the first place!’
Whenever I heard those words all the wind would leave my sails; they seemed to strike at the very root of my impotence. It was only too true that my nonsense had driven us here and there, hither and thither, back and forth. We had been forced to dwell in so many ‘here’s against our will on our constant flight from my enemies, from the predatory silver-plated claws that clutched after me and my loved ones. Me and all I held dear. There were spies at every turn, ready to betray a poor vagabond in the hope that his powerful foes would throw them a morsel. Ah, Judas’s pleasure was short-lived and his remorse scalded and stung, but these scoundrels had no conscience; they bragged of getting the outlaw Jónas the Learned arrested for their own amusement and a reward of thirty brass farthings. My children’s despair is still etched in my memory as they watched their father being thrown in the mud, beaten and belaboured with fists and clubs, before being flung, helplessly, head first into the black hole of prison. I can still hear the poor little darlings’ sad wails as they embraced one another outside the prison wall, laying their tender ears to the stone in the hope of hearing their father say that everything would be all right. On the other side of the wall I writhed in my chains, throwing up my hands and calling out just that: ‘All will be well, dear children, with God’s help all will be well, when the Lord hears your prayers and my pleas, all will be well.’ Yet things did not improve, they only got worse. I ran my fingers gently over Sigga’s brow, down her nose and cheek, avoiding the sprig of thyme. The last time I heard her refer to ‘us’, she meant only herself and her old man, me, the two sad wretches on Gullbjörn’s Island. But once it meant ‘the two of us and our four children’, then ‘us two and our three children’, and later ‘us two and our two children’, until finally it was only ‘us two and Little Gudmundur’, for only the eldest, Pálmi Gudmundur, survived into adulthood, benefiting no doubt from being named after the good Bishop Gudmundur Arason. His brothers and sisters all fell to the scythe, slender shoots, withered before their time. One never becomes used to it. The ewe runs faster than the lamb, the swan takes to the air sooner than the cygnet, the char darts through the water quicker than the minnow, and little children tire before their parents. Father and mother look on helplessly as their babies die. ‘That’s the sort of nonsense that got us here!’ The speaker of that bitter truth had departed this life, the word ‘us’ now referred to me alone, and in that dark hour I would gladly have given my own life to have heard it once more from her living lips. A tear gleamed in the corner of her left eye. For a moment I was ecstatic with joy — Sigga was not dead, she had merely swooned from hunger; I would nurse her, cook medicinal herbs for her, rub the warmth back into her stiff hands, help her walk over the rough ground until she recovered her strength — but my world grew dark again when I realised it was only a tear that had fallen from my own eye on to hers. Sigrídur lay on her side with her legs drawn up under her, as if taking a nap, for thus had her body stiffened. I climbed into bed behind her, laying my arm over her body, resting my cheek against the back of her neck; her shawl smelt of moss campion and crowberry. I whispered: