‘Hold on to the boy, he could be blown away …’
She paused in her tracks and sighed heavily before answering:
‘No, you can do that yourself, Jónas; I’m going to give birth to our child …’
After which she slid down a gully in the bank to the beach, found a cleft in the lava wall and vanished inside … Pálmi Gudmundur started to run after her but I told him to come back and look after his brother … I found the boys shelter from the storm, set down little Hákon on a tussock, tipped the chest off my back and opened it … While I was gathering together the things that might come in useful for the birth, I explained to Pálmi Gudmundur that their mother was about to undergo a long and terrible torment, that the illness now beginning was one of the toughest and most dangerous a woman could endure and she was not certain to survive, but that it was with the knowledge and will of Almighty God that she should suffer so dreadfully, for by this she was paying off an ancient debt incurred by Eve … I instructed him to lead his little brother in prayer; together they should pray to the good Lord to protect and bless that honest and God-fearing woman, their mother Sigrídur, and their unborn and unbaptised sibling who was still a foetus in her womb but at this moment wished to be born so that it could fear Him and do good deeds to glorify His Name … I said that their mother’s torments would be so great that they would hear her scream and wail, beg for help and plead for mercy, her lamentations would be shrill and unceasing, she would howl like a wounded beast, so the brothers must pray fervently, raising their thin, boyish voices as loud as they could … I closed the chest … Before descending the bank to see how my wife was doing, I made our sons sit on the chest, and there they perched, those two little fledglings of the Lord, Pálmi Gudmundur and Hákon, with their thin shoulders and heads bowed over their clasped hands, piping to God to have mercy, shedding tears and singing psalms to save their labouring mother … She, meanwhile, was lying propped against the wall at the back of the cave, having braced herself against the rock with her heels in the wet shingle … Fronds of seaweed fell in a tangle from every outcrop, tiny dog whelks studded the roof like stars in heaven, fragments of mussel shell lay strewn all over the floor, with the odd starfish among them; it was well sheltered from the wind … Sigrídur had pulled up her skirts; she was silent but sweating profusely … Eventually, when I had spread out the sheet underneath her and was about to lay the birthstone on her groin, she opened: the child came to the door … It was the little girl, Berglind, who leapt from her mother’s womb like a spring from a rock … Once the afterbirth had come out and the child’s umbilical cord had been cut and tied, I fetched the little lads from their seat on the chest lid and showed them their sister … They found it an extraordinary notion that such a tiny minnow could endanger the life of a full-grown woman like their mother … We waited there in the lee of the lava until the wind had dropped and mother and child had recovered their strength, by which time it was morning … The fervent and effective hour of prayer on the shingle bank had made such a deep impression on Pálmi Gudmundur that he was called to his holy vocation, the ministry … But how it touched Hákon we were never to know, because before it could become apparent we lost him and his little brother Klemens during our desperate travels in the winter of 1621 … It still pierces my heart to think how few days of our lives Sigrídur and I were allowed to share with our little boys … Yet I am grateful and happy that the glorious Heavenly Father should have taken pity on them and pressed them to His nourishing breast when their earthly father was denied all succour and everywhere turned away from the homes of his countrymen with pitiless curses and hissing … It was no mystery what lay behind those closed doors: they housed cold hearts, as tightly locked as the fist of an executioner about the handle of a whip … When Sigrídur rose from her sandy-pillowed bed, I noticed that during the birth reddish-coloured pebbles had mingled with the sand under her hips … I gathered several handfuls of them, which I put in our chest, and they turned out to be brother of haematite … Right up until the day that we were robbed of the chest, Sigga would use these healing stones to ease the birth pangs of many a woman … For just as the human foetus dwells and grows in its mother’s secret womb, unknowable and as likely to take on the form of a beautiful girl as the most misshapen wretch, so nature breeds in its lap both unimaginable horrors and precious gems … And the anterooms of their birth chambers are the clefts and fissures in the body of the Earth, caves like the one in which my little Berglind was born … I lean back in bed, stretching my arms and cracking my joints … The mouse is still huddled cosily by the fire; it is quite extraordinary how she puts up with my ramblings … The vetch porridge has hardened in the bowl; I scrape out the leftovers and scatter them on the floor … In a place of entertainment like this it is the storyteller who must pay his audience rather than the other way round … Mousey nibbles at the food, pricking up her ears at my voice …
CONCH SHELLS: several species of conch are found in Iceland. Wise men make use of our edible conches by burning them until they glow, then quenching them in ox urine and giving the fish to the patient to consume in food or drink without his or her knowledge; it protects the maid against man’s lechery and the lascivious against intemperate fornication. Also, those afflicted with seasickness may go secretly to the beach and swallow the raw fish out of the shell three times during the waxing and then the waning moon, with a sip of seawater each time. If people eat a lot of them, they will become too drunk to stand; a condition that we call ‘conch totters’, which can be slept off. The conch mostly crawls up out of the deeps from the middle of Pisces onwards.
A rock cavity can also be called a cave … Shallow caves are often known as grottos, from the Latin word grotto, which also means ‘small cave’, and grotto is the stem of the word used in southern countries to describe a particular kind of decorative picture or grotesque … I saw many such pictures in Ole Worm’s library … They appeared in the frontispiece of large tomes of learning, in the margins, in chapter openings or between sections … For the modern master printers think like the scribes of our old Icelandic manuscripts, who wove sphinxes and chimaeras into their illuminated capitals and the decorated borders of their books … A centaur here, an old woman with bird’s feet there, a three-headed dog … Bibliophiles as they were, the scribes understood better than anyone that little curios like these provide longed-for staging posts for the readers’ eyes on their monotonous descent down the ladder of the pages, word by word, from left to right, along one line and down to the next … And offer the mind respite from the matter … If one watches a river of lava, or clouds of steam or great torrents, or a field rippling in the wind, the eye and mind will not rest until they have tracked down familiar images in the flow … Even though these figures are never still, never clearly defined, never whole, never the same, one’s mind can grasp them merely by blinking … Then time ceases to flow like a river and becomes instead a series of moments which may follow fast upon one another’s heels yet each has its own unique form … The grotesques are just like those fleeting images that I myself have often perceived in smoke, lichen or clouds … It is as if the artist has transferred the image from the surface of his eye to the page without stopping to wonder whether it is believable or scientifically accurate … Pictures the draughtsman saw with his eyes and thought up in his imagination have become in an instant part of our visible world … Oh, those pictures! … Oh, those thousands of freaks and interwoven absurdities that invigorated me when I was stumbling my way through the thick volumes in the Museum Wormianum … One never knew where one creature began or ended … A goat’s hind legs might, on closer inspection, turn out to be the beginning of a flower stalk … But the stalk sprouted not petals but stork feathers, on top of which sat a cluster of butterfly wings … Nor was it certain whether the goat’s body was made of flesh, mineral or vegetable … And even if one was fairly sure that the lower half of its body was made of marble, it was just as certain that blood flowed through its stony veins … Was the blood red and hot or green and cold? Everything grows from something else, as if nature were forever having second thoughts, pausing, pursuing a new idea or changing its mind halfway: a blue bird’s wing extends from a small boy’s temple, but by the time one reaches the tip of the wing the feathers have changed into bright green cabbage leaves with foam bubbling over the edges … A cat sits not on hindlegs but on a tail, which swells from the hip and curls up under its breast in countless joints like a lobster tail, while the cat’s nose is formed from a bunch of berries and about its neck is a collar studded with precious gems … And one asks oneself: if the pet is this odd, what on earth can the owner be like? A crown of flies’ wings rests on the head of a woman with nine udders dangling from her chest and stomach; she has no arms and her legs are like two scaly serpent bodies twined together … The old Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson would not have approved … For as he says in his Skálda, or Handbook of Poetry: