From the Mouth of the Whale (13 page)

Once Jónas and Worm had recovered from their laughter and refreshed themselves with blackcurrant juice (good for the kidneys) and spiced loaf (good for the bowels), it became apparent that Jónas was no less accomplished a natural historian than he was a runic scholar, and an experienced ivory-smith into the bargain, who had been engraving pictures on whale ivory and walrus tusks ever since he was young. He revealed that the object wrapped in velvet, far from being what it purported to be, was the tusk of the savage whale known as the narwhal, or ‘corpse whale’ because of its taste for drowned sailors, and Worm duly recorded the object in his workbook as ‘Narwhal’s Tusk’. The Icelanders had first encountered these horrid beasts when they founded a colony in Greenland around the year 1000 Anno Domini and soon began to export the tusks, labelling them as ‘unicorn horns’ according to the latest fashion. The Greenlanders and their middlemen in west Iceland grew fat on the profits of this secret commerce, which ensured the Greenlandic colony an advantageous balance of trade with foreign lands as well as laying the foundation for the wealth of the most powerful families in Iceland. The trade continued uninterrupted until the Greenlandic colony was abandoned a hundred years ago, in the year of Our Lord 1540. Narwhal tusks were now a rare commodity in the country, but people could expect to get a high price for them as long as belief in the existence of the unicorn persisted, so Dr Worm must promise not to tell his correspondents in Iceland who had spilt the beans. This promise was easily extracted. Jónas drew diagrams for Worm showing how the fish lay in the sea, wielding its tusk like a lance, and a comparison of these with the royal specimen convinced Worm that it was a narwhal skull with a tusk and nothing more. And so that day in the Museum Wormianum the unicorn’s fate was sealed: a year after his meeting with Jónas Pálmason, Ole Worm published an epoch-making article on the similarity between narwhal tusks and unicorn horns. For the next three decades the brightest luminaries of Western philosophy wrangled over the existence of the fantastic horned beast with the goat’s beard, horse’s abdomen, pig’s tail, antelope’s head and elephant’s feet, until the sceptics finally prevailed. Upon which the price of unicorn horns plummeted. This result was a remote but sweet revenge for Jónas the Learned, since many of his chief persecutors in Iceland were descended from unicorn merchants.

The professor’s delight in his new amanuensis was such that he began to make plans for Jónas’s permanent residence in Copenhagen. After consultation with Reverend Pálmi Gudmundur, who had received a satisfactory verdict in his lawsuit and was now able to return to Iceland to take up the position of curate at Hjaltastadur, it was decided that instead of going home with his son, Jónas should send for his wife Sigrídur to come to Denmark. Jónas was sixty-three years old by now and she fifty-seven; he would help Worm translate ancient texts and draw objects from his collection when required; she meanwhile could assist in the kitchens. A decent private chamber would be found for them in the upper servants’ quarters and they would finally be allowed to live in peace after twenty years of being hounded from pillar to post. Jónas Pálmason’s breast swelled with hope: although he himself had not spent any time out of doors in Copenhagen, Sigga would enjoy the novelties on display; the fireworks, the court finery and the elegant buildings would be balsam to her weary eyes.

On the May evening when he and Rector Worm shook hands on the plan, Jónas took from his pouch a small, dice-shaped box of seal-bone which contained his rarest possession, a blood-black crystal, yellow at the edges, which was at once a work of nature and a holy mystery. It was a kidney stone that had become trapped in Bishop Gudbrandur Thorláksson of Hólar’s private member, which Jónas had with his own hand removed from said member according to the instructions preserved in the saga of the medieval doctor, Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson. Having split the penis like an uncooked sausage, he picked the stones out of the urinary tract before sewing the whole thing up again. The cleric’s stone-afflicted body had given birth to three crystals, one of which Jónas had quietly pocketed and kept by him ever since. The bishop’s gratitude had secured Pálmi Gudmundur a place at the school of divinity in Hólar (with the help of a document in Jónas’s possession which proved that the bishop’s son-in-law, Ari Magnússon of Ögur, had violated the king’s law). Now, however, Jónas made a gift of the kidney stone to his friend Ole Worm in return for providing a roof over his and Sigrídur’s heads.

The following day a handwritten sealed writ arrived from His Majesty King Christian IV, in which the king concurred with the University Council’s verdict that Jónas Pálmason was not a practitioner of the black arts. Instead of acquitting him unconditionally, however, His Majesty referred the case to the court of the Althing at Thingvellir in Iceland and bade the Icelanders themselves formally revoke the sentence in the presence of the defendant.

Jónas the Learned was going home.

Evening has fallen on the shortest day of the year and, dear God, the longest night lies ahead. How many hours of light did I get? Two? Three? One? It was a dismal day, after a bad beginning. When morning finally came I was cheated of what meagre share of daylight I could hope for. Thick banks of cloud hung over the island, as low as could be, tinged black at the crown; a heavy, merciless weight, shedding neither rain nor snow. The dreariest kind of clouds, which drain one of vigour, clamping their iron-grey fists around one’s skull, digging their talons deep into eyes and ears, forcing them into mouth and nose in an attempt to fill one’s head with grey sleet, to burst it from within and crush it from without. With effortless strength they depress one’s humour into the coldest wells of thought and imprison it there, but unlike the cloud of smoke that drives occupants of a burning house to the floor in the hope of snatching a breath of life-giving air, nothing awaits one at the bottom of that pit of despair but a mouthful of acrid yellow gall. There is no gleam of hope, no mercy to be found on this frozen tundra; the ground is as hard as stone underfoot, the frost reaches down to the very bedrock. The sea has frozen halfway from the island to the mainland and the ice is stained a dirty black following the sandstorm at Martinmas. Not that I can see the shore, for the mountains are as dark as the sky – assuming they are still there. What do I know? Damn the mountains. Above them hangs a pall of black gloom, like the lid of a narrow iron casket. So this day began, and it only grew worse. When the tangle of clouds finally began to unravel it was not the sun that appeared from behind them, no, it was the feeble glimmer of the moon. Was I supposed to be grateful? After all, light is light, is it not? Ah no, the cold moonlight was nothing but a bitter reminder of what I was missing: the winter sun. Her weak rays may lack the power to disperse the sea ice, waken the growing things in the soil or inspire the bunting to sing, yet even so her pallid face fills one’s breast with faith in her ability to do these very things. A faith that warms the cockles of one’s heart. Even more than the sunlight itself, it was this spark of hope that was denied to me. It was not as if I needed strong light to perform the chores that awaited me when I crawled out of my lair at noon; for those, even the moon’s sullen grin was superfluous. What need had I to venture outside in the loathsome winter weather? Well, to empty my chamber pot of its paltry contents that had frozen solid in the night. Where little goes in, little comes out: no more than two droppings in this case, congealed in a single splash of piss. There are many reasons for this: firstly, I am such an old wreck nowadays that my bowels have become sluggish; secondly, in recent weeks the weather has been so stormy that I do not leave the hut unless it is unavoidable, and as I hardly move at all, I need less food; and thirdly, I have scarcely anything left to eat. And I have nothing with which to counter any of this: old age, the time of year or dearth of food. The sheet of ice has its beginning halfway down the beach and surrounds the whole island with its sudden creaks and eerie groans, pleated like one of the Lord Chief Justice’s starched ruffs. On the beach all life has been scorched by the cold; the sand is as hard as stone, the seaweed withered. Haddock and cod lie under the furthest rim of the ice, if they have not frozen to death too, but I have neither the strength nor the nerve to go out there, lacking a boat. What would I do there anyway? Talk the fish up through the ice? I have little fishing tackle and am too frail to hack a hole in the ice for my line. There is nothing here for the gulls but the boulders on which they rest before resuming their search for food with feeble flaps of their wings and famished cries. Even if I had a piece of string to snare them with, I do not have any bait for my trap apart from the flesh on my own bones, because I am not going to start feeding scavengers from my scanty stores – all I have left to last me till spring is a bundle of dried trout, some soup bones, a bunch of dried dulse, half a bag of flour, the butter that has not yet been scraped off the sides of the barrel – and I hardly think it would be wise to habituate the gulls to the taste of myself. Not that such a thing would be necessary; I expect Master and Mistress Seamew already have plans to feast on my corpse if I freeze to death on one of my trips to empty my piss pot. Well, if that is how my life is to end, the pickings will make a meaner banquet than the gulls anticipate: I wish them good cheer. But the worst was still to come; this brutal day had yet to play its cruellest trick; God in His wisdom had resolved to test me still further. I had just started to chip away at the contents of my piss pot when I noticed that the moon seemed to have changed shape: its left-hand side was dented, like a cheek yielding before Famine’s spectral finger. At first I assumed the heavy clouds were closing in on it again, and thought it a damned shame that they would not leave it to hang there in peace, but on closer inspection I noticed that the clouds had, if anything, thinned. I carried on banging the pot on a rock. Although there was little in it, I had to be careful not to bang it too hard as the wooden strakes had been eaten away by the urine and I could not afford to break it. Against the background of that hollow banging I watched as a quarter of the moon was gnawed away. Fear and trembling! Through my winter lethargy I grasped what was happening: a lunar eclipse. The moon, the only source of light meanly allotted to me in my solitary state on this gloomiest day of the year, was darkening. Behind me the sun crept as furtively as a fox beneath the rim of the horizon, casting the Earth’s shadow over her wretched brother. In doing so she put us both in our place, reminding the moon that without her he was nothing but a dreary, lightless mountain of basalt, and ordering the beggar Jónas Pálmason to clear off back inside his hovel. Insignificant humans were not welcome at the heavenly bodies’ cheerless family farce. If I stood there one minute longer with my nose pointing at the darkened moon, I would drop dead on the spot and be found in spring, lying there lifeless with my rigid hands still clamped round the piss pot. I saw now that this day no longer deserved the name; it would be better to tear it out of the calendar and file it where it belonged between the pages of Satan’s black book as ‘Night’. Obeying the command of the wrathful sun, I hastened inside, barred the door, crawled into the kitchen, put the chamber pot by the bed and lay down, pulling up the blanket and making the sign of the cross. And here I lie still. Oh, is it not just and true what those foreign mountebanks write in their many widely read travel accounts about the vileness and absurdity of Iceland, this condemned island of the dead – however much her educated citizens may revile and rant at them? Old Arngrímur Jónsson blew raspberries at such accounts in two books, both of which found their way into print; in one he included a portrait of himself, in the other a fine drawing of a monkey. Bishop Oddur Einarsson also compiled a book, of which copies can be found here and there, though minus illustrations; and Bishop Gísli, Oddur’s son, has two small pamphlets in the making, although there is little enthusiasm for them. I have not read any of these counterblasts, for they are all in Latin, which I do not know, but I have no doubt they play fast and loose with the truth, being at the same time tediously written and dull to read, since none of these three is to the popular taste or known for his poetic skills. On the other hand, various titbits from the controversial travellers’ tales have been passed on to me, though I have not seen any of them myself since the lords of our land place them on a par with murder. But even from these scraps I can tell that although, naturally, they get most things wrong, tell many lies, exaggerate and fill in the blanks with fantasy – indeed, wise men tell me that it is evident from their works that scarcely a man of them has ever set foot in this country – nevertheless one fact stands out from all their foolish nonsense: they come close to the truth when they state that Iceland is no paradise in winter: on the contrary, it is hell. The Englishman Thomas Nashe apparently says in his
Terrors of the Night
: ‘Admirable (above the rest) are the incomprehensible wonders of the bottomless Lake Vetter, over which no fowl flies but is frozen to death, nor any man passeth but he is senselessly benumbed like a statue of marble.’ Of course there is no lake in Iceland called ‘Vetter’, and there is precious little admirable about these horrors, and whether some of our larger lakes are bottomless I would not like to say. But what the foreign gentleman manages better than I, or any of my highly educated countrymen, is to describe the bitter helplessness and numbness I feel on this midwinter’s day on the Corpse Strand, far from the sun. I know it, I am there. And so it is with all the far-fetched tales that wind up the Arngrímurs of this world with their uncouth exclamations about endless nights, burning snow, whales the size of mountains, trumpet blasts of the dead from volcanoes and icebergs, witches who can sell sailors a favourable wind or send their sons to the moon; in some strange way they come close to the stories that we ordinary, humble folk tell ourselves in an attempt to comprehend our existence here and make it more bearable. Now that I give it more thought, how do I know that there are no lakes here like those described by Master Nashe? None of Iceland’s leading men were willing to pay me to explore this land; they turned a deaf ear to the news I gathered about silver sand, veins of gold and nests of gems. No, they are too busy growing rich on what this libertine Earth has to offer, passing corrupt judgements, hindering honest men from supporting their offspring, breaking up their families, cutting off their fingers and ears. In the same passage in Gentleman Thomas’s book we can read: ‘It is reported that the Pope long since gave them a dispensation to receive the sacrament in ale, insomuch as for their incessant frosts there, no wine but was turned to emayle as soon as ever it came amongst them’, and also ‘they have ale that they carry in their pockets like glue, and ever when they would drink, they set it on the fire and melt it.’ He who is omniscient knows that in this miserable hour it would be a comfort to me to be able to reach into my pocket and fetch out a beakerful of warm, consoling ale. But here, alas, old Tommy is telling a flat lie.