From the Mouth of the Whale (2 page)

‘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 …

‘Look, here comes Hákon with his grandson; I don’t suppose he’ll be able to keep the lad quiet for long before the little fool starts harping on about where he can find some damned dead crow …’

Even when I stood silently at my grandfather’s side while he talked to the old men about the kinds of things old men talk about, I could not fail to notice the glances, the pauses, the questions in which they hoped to trap me … I used to maintain a stony silence until in the end I would tug Grandfather Hákon’s coat sleeve and ask:

‘Might I go and take a look in the kitchen, Grandpapa?’

Here was company more fitting for a youngster who had learnt to read from the writings of Dr Bombastus and acquired so great a knowledge of the abdomen that there was scarcely a female malady in existence that I did not have a nodding acquaintance with – I would always have a prescription up my sleeve for a poultice that would cure the affliction … I used to take my learning and my requests for dead ravens into the heat and smoke with the womenfolk … And from those kitchen visits I began to acquire something of a reputation as a physician … ‘Little Jónas the healer,’ they would say, for that is what the womenfolk called me, ‘give me some good news about this swelling I have …’ And the woman would grasp my hand and draw it under her clothes, laying it low down on her belly and dragging it back and forth over some lump in her flesh … I would close my eyes and summon up the book of medical art until it lay there open before my nose, the verso folio inside my left eyelid and the recto inside my right … Then I would turn the pages in my mind until I reached the part about that divinely created miniature likeness of man, woman, who must presumably obey the same laws of nature as the male, for he is a world in microcosm, made from the substance of the cosmos, and woman is made from his substance … There on the page I would find accounts of the principal female ailments and compare these to the news my hand was reading from the corporeal page of the woman whom I was to cure … Thus I read together book and woman until both merged into one and then all that was required was to read out the prescription for the medicine that accompanied the description of the disease … Sometimes the medicines were to be boiled, sometimes kneaded, sometimes hot and sometimes cold … But the examination always ended with my saying aloud:

‘That bezoar would have come in handy now …’

Once my collecting mania became known, it would invariably turn out that some old lady had chanced upon the rotting little brother of Odin’s companions, Hugin and Munin, and taken the trouble to pull off its head and keep it in her pouch ‘for Jónas’ … If a long time had passed since I last acquired a raven’s head, I would be unable to rest from the moment I laid hands on it … I would find some excuse to slip away and almost before the farm buildings were out of sight I would take out my tinderbox, gather a pile of kindling and burn the head … I went about my quest in this way in obedience to my learned master Bombastus’s instructions … Once the head had been reduced to ashes the skull would be brittle and easy to crack open, and if luck was with me there should be a single specimen of bezoar inside, like an expectant chick in its shell … But luck never was with me … And I have lost count of the ravens’ heads I have roasted and crushed in my lifetime … Yes, those were my wages for the cures I used to perform in the kitchens of the Strandir folk, and it was a useful arrangement since Grandfather had made me swear a solemn oath that no raven would die by my hand … Eventually, though, there came a time when my female patients no longer wanted my great fists fumbling under their skirts … I was thirteen years old and examining a slightly peculiar old biddy whose appointed task was to bless the cows at the croft of Hólmskot when they were let out to graze in the morning … She used to do this by calling on Saint Benedicta, and had arrived at such a good understanding with the celestial lady that the cows on that farm never failed in their yield … Nevertheless, she thought it better to let me heal her than to place her trust entirely in the protection of the saints, for although they had been her helpmeets ever since childhood they had lately been abolished by law and banished from Icelandic homes, and now mainly took refuge with useless old folk, like this Hálotta Snæsdóttir, who was fated to awaken the puppy in me … The healing session had proceeded as usual; one woman after another had received a gentle caress and diagnosis of her complaint, accompanied by good advice and hope of improvement, and now it was the turn of Hálotta who sat at the back of the room, contemplating some dried fish that was soaking there … I had no sooner sat down beside her than she trapped my youthful hand in her blotchy old claw and shoved it under her skirts … There were no surprises there, just the usual worn-out woman’s belly, though the old lady was in fairly good nick … She took charge and I sat in my physician’s pose with head inclined and eyes closed, the book hovering before my mind’s eye, but just as she was about to return my healing hand to me, my fingers came into contact with the upper limits of her
mons pubis
… It was not as if it was the first time I had touched what I had heard the women themselves call half in jest their ‘mouse’, and the contours of the creature were fairly well known to me from diagrams in the books of medicine from Hólar … But this time when my fingertips brushed so unexpectedly against old Hálotta’s garden wall, I stiffened … It was only an instant’s response but enough for her to sense it; we were, after all, both in the same part of the old woman’s anatomy … As if to be certain of my miserable predicament, she made a pretence of pulling our hands down still further but this time I resisted in earnest … Upon which she whipped my hand from under her skirt band and squealed: