Burial Rites(42)

Agnes gazed straight at Tóti, her finger still against her forehead. He was unnerved by the glitter in her eyes, her bloody lip, and wondered if the news of Sigga’s appeal had, in fact, made her a little mad.

‘What happened?’ he asked.





CHAPTER SIX





IN THIS YEAR 1828, ON the 29th of March, we, the clerks stationed at Stapar at Vatnsnes – transcribing District Commissioner Bl?ndal’s oral description – write up the value of the possessions of prisoners Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Sigrídur Gudmundsdóttir, both workmaids at Illugastadir. The following assets, ascertained as belonging to the aforementioned individuals, have the following value:





We stamp and certify that the above assets comprise the total belongings of the aforementioned prisoners.

WITNESSED BY: J. Sigurdsson, G. Gudmundsson





THIS IS WHAT I TELL the Reverend.

Death happened, and in the usual way that it happens, and yet, not like anything else at all.

It started with the northern lights. That winter was so cold that I woke every morning with a fine dust of ice on my blanket, from my breath freezing and falling as I slept. I was living at Kornsá then and had been for two or three years. Kjartan, my foster-brother, was three. I was only five years older.

One night the two of us were working in the badstofa with Inga. Back then I called her Mamma, because she was as much to me. She saw I had an aptitude for learning, and taught me as best she could. Her husband, Bj?rn, I tried to call Pabbi also, but he didn’t like it. He didn’t like me reading or writing either, and was not averse to whipping the learning out of me if he caught me at it. Vulgar for a girl, he said. Inga was sly; she waited until he was asleep and then woke me, and then we would read the psalms together. She taught me the sagas. During kv?ldvaka she’d tell them by heart, and when Bj?rn fell asleep she’d make me recite the stories back to her. Bj?rn never knew that his wife betrayed his orders for my sake, and I doubt he ever understood why his wife loved the sagas as she did. He humoured her saga stories with the air of a man humouring the unfathomable whim of a child. Who knows how they had come to foster me. Perhaps they were kin of Mamma’s. More likely they needed an extra pair of hands.

This night Bj?rn had gone outside to feed the cattle, and when he returned from tending them, he was in a good mood.

‘Look at you all, squinting by the lamp, when outside the sky is on fire.’ He was laughing. ‘Come see the lights,’ he said.

So I put my spinning aside and took Kjartan’s hand and led him outside. Mamma-Inga was in the family way, so she didn’t follow us, but waved us out and continued her embroidering. She was making me a new coverlet for my bed, but she never got to finish it, and to this day I don’t know what happened to it. I think perhaps Bj?rn burnt it. He burnt a lot of her things, later.

But on this night, Kjartan and I stepped out into the chill air, our feet crunching the snow upon the ground, and we soon understood why Bj?rn had summoned us. The whole sky was overrun with colour as I’d never seen it before. Great curtains of light moved as if blown by a wind, billowing above us. Bj?rn was right – it looked as though the night sky was slowly burning. There were smears of violet that swelled against the darkness of the night and the stars that were littered across it. The lights ebbed, like waves, then were suddenly interrupted by new streaks of violent green that plunged through the sky as if falling from a great height.

‘Look, Agnes,’ my foster-father said, and he turned me by the shoulders so that I might see how the brilliance of the northern lights threw the mountain ridge into sharp relief. Despite the lateness of the hour I could see the familiar, crooked horizon.

‘See if you can’t touch them,’ Bj?rn said then, and I dropped my shawl on the snow so that I could raise my arms to the sky.

‘You know what this means,’ Bj?rn said. ‘This means there will be a storm. The northern lights always herald bad weather.’

At noon the following day the wind began to whip around the croft, stirring up the snow that had fallen overnight, and dashing it against the dried skins we’d stretched across the windows to keep out the cold. It was a sinister sound – the wind hurling ice at our home.

Inga wasn’t feeling well that morning and had remained in bed, so I prepared our meal. I was in the kitchen, setting the kettle upon the hearth, when Bj?rn came in from the storehouse.

‘Where is Inga?’ he asked me.

‘In the badstofa,’ I told him. I watched Bj?rn take off his cap and shake the ice into the hearth. The water spat on the hot stones.

‘The fire’s too smoky,’ Bj?rn said, frowning, then left me to my chore.

When I’d boiled some moss into porridge, I took it into the badstofa. It was quite dark in the room and, once I’d served Bj?rn his meal, I ran to the storehouse to fetch some more oil for the lamp. The storehouse was near the door to the croft and as I approached it I could hear the wind howling, louder and louder, and I knew that a storm was fast approaching.

I’m not sure why I opened the door to look outside. I suppose I was curious. But some strange compulsion took me and I unlocked the latch to peek out at the weather.

It was an evil sight. Dark clouds bore down upon the mountain range and under their smoky-blackness, a grey swarm of snow swirled as far as you could see. The wind was fierce, and a great, icy gust of it suddenly blew against the door so hard that it knocked me off my feet. The candle on the corridor wall went out in an instant, and from within the croft Bj?rn shouted what the Devil I thought I was doing, letting the blizzard into his home.