From the Mouth of the Whale (3 page)

‘Ooh! He’s not touching me there again – not unless he marries me!’

With that my youthful innocence was laughed away … The time of the laying on of hands was over … I had to find a new way to ingratiate myself with the old ladies who always had a raven’s head ready to slip into the hand of a budding naturalist …

MOONWORT
:
Botrychium lunaria. One of the most potent of the herbs used in childbirth: to be laid on the cervix, the secret door or private parts, when a woman is about to deliver, and snatched away the instant the child is born to prevent the intestines or other parts from following. When administered to a patient it prevents lethargy and intensifies pleasure and recreation. Some believe it to have the virtue of opening locks. It is often found growing on old hayfield walls or ruins, but never in wetlands, and grows to half a finger in height. It proved of greatest virtue to me long ago when I was laid low with an intolerable whooping cough. I chewed it as small as I could, mixed with aqua vitae and thyme, no more than a tiny morsel at a time, but even that was enough. After that I did not catch a cough or cold for five years. It is more frequently used than other digestive herbs for internal cures but not for complaints of the flesh or skin. The moonwort bears sometimes twelve, sometimes thirteen leaves on one stalk, depending on the number of moons in the year when the earth is temperate; and seeds on the other, as many as the number of weeks that a mother carries her unborn child. Herbs should be used with caution.

It was the custom at Grandfather Hákon’s house for extracts to be copied from those among the books that found their way there which he judged to be most interesting and of most enduring value … His method was to collect in one place all the lore and verses or tales true or invented touching on a particular subject that were found scattered among the various books he borrowed … This amounted to something of an industry on Grandfather’s part and his scriptorium consisted of a reader, a scribe and an ink-maker, the last-mentioned of whom concocted the ink as well as cutting the feathers for quills … I was appointed special assistant to the ink-maker, ‘Squinting’ Helgi Sveinsson; a work-shy half-cousin of ours who had turned up on my grandparents’ doorstep with a group of wandering beggars … Even in that company he had managed to rub people up the wrong way and the beggars left him behind when it transpired that his family could be half traced to that of the householder … My grandfather used to make all the paupers who boarded with him contribute something towards their keep … Much of this was of limited value as the wretched people had small aptitude for anything, but every little counts in a large household; the cat may seem inclined to do nothing but lick her fur but we would soon be overrun by mice if we hanged her for her vanity … On account of this half-cousin’s feeble nature, the division of labour between us was quite contrary to what might be expected between a full-grown man and a boy … I was the master and he the apprentice, but we took great care not to let it show who ruled the roost when it came to preparing the ink, and no one found out until I was moved up a rung in the scriptorium and seated in one of the scribes’ chairs … There I took a new, more ominous step on the path towards the evil destiny that finally forced me into exile in my own country … Though what kind of exile is it, pray? I am condemned to forsake my homeland, no one may offer me a helping hand, wherever I am seen people are duty bound to arrest me and I may not linger for any space of time in any place without violating my sentence – which would give the villains an excuse to make my penalty even harsher, until ultimately I advance shrieking into the fires of hell …

‘Jónas Pálmason, by some called Jónas “the Learned”, that is I, and may God bid you good day, Captain Sir … I hear that you are sailing for England with a cargo of homespun cloth belonging to the Sheriff of Ögur – er, you wouldn’t happen to have room for a homeless vagabond like me aboard this fine vessel of yours?’

Flat refusal … No one is willing to transport Jónas from these shores … Not even if he composes handsome verses about the rotting hulks that he longs with all his heart would take him away from Iceland … For even so can a poet describe a ship that balances on nothing but a leaking, tarry hull:

The sail swells on the sea lion,
canvas cracks and sheets strain,
shrouds sing aloud to the wind’s wild refrain.

Even foundering in the monster-filled deep in a tub like that would surely be better than languishing as a prisoner at home … I long more than anything to go abroad … I have so often visited foreign lands in my dreams, whether waking over illustrations in books or asleep in my bunk, only to find myself in that very city, usually on my way to a meeting with the wise men of the place … With a long parcel in my hand; no mean gift and one that would look well in the chambers that house the finest treasures in the land … Then a voice calls out in Icelandic: ‘Look at Jónas!’ And in that instant the outer appearance of the countrymen is transformed and they turn into grey maggots, crawling towards me, hissing foolishly: ‘Look at Jónas!’ … And each of the slitherers has three human faces, one named Nightwolf, one named Ari, that is Eagle, and the third named Ormur, that is Serpent … More bearable were the daydreams, glimpses through the windows of books that I once owned, although the desperate longing to go there in the flesh never resulted in anything more than mournful sighs over the wretched fate of being Jónas the Learned … Perhaps my nature is bound to these icy shores … Even if all the sheriffs and beggars in the land, all the judges and thieves, bishops and whores, squires and crofters clubbed together to apprehend the fellow and drive him out to sea, even then the ship would not travel far from shore with this sorry cargo before the crew would be forced to put out their boat and convey Jónas back to land … For he would be assailed by an overwhelming attack of homesickness … Ah, did you think I had forgotten you, sandpiper, or how my nature seems bound to yours, you Jónas of the bird world? No, hardly have you set your course out to sea than you turn back … You did so a little while ago and now I see you repeating the game … And then I remember that I have been sitting here far too long … In England you are known as sandpiper. What should I be called there, I wonder? Jonah Palmson the Learned? I would like to fly there … England has been described to me as the land where the Virgin Queen reigned with such modesty that her subjects thought they had acquired a new mother after gentle Mary had been taken from them … A well-travelled man who had visited London told me that he had met an old man there, Benjamin Jonson the actor, a quarter Icelandic and as well-informed about life in the palaces as on the streets of the capital … He drew a fair picture of the queen, saying that the noble Elizabeth lived like a holy maid on her throne, for her flesh was never sullied by any man; her insides were innocent of all male outpourings … And no lord dared so much as raise a finger against her for fear of drawing down upon himself the ire of the people … For although her delicate virginal breasts were quite unlike the divine bosom of the Holy Mother, and devoid of the white balsam that heals the deepest wounds, yet such sisterly mildness shone from her breast that even her most inveterate enemies would shed tears and fall to their knees with clasped hands … They thanked her even as their heads were lopped from their bodies … But she was harsh to papists – and she will not be forgiven for that – although the Bishops’ Church in her English realm is not shrouded in the same fetid, satanic darkness as ours here in Iceland, nevertheless it was just as ugly a deed to deprive the people of their saints … For to whom is a person to turn when the powerful break the law in their dealings with the innocent, caring neither for their honour nor for the final reckoning on Doomsday? At times like that it was a comfort to be able to turn to the blessed Virgin Mary, and John the Apostle, and Saint Barbara, or to Luke who will do anything for a painter, or to those chaste maidens, Agatha with her veil and tongs, and Lucy with the cord and her eyes on a silver dish … Who is now to step forth on the cloudy floor of the high chamber in the city of Heaven and present the complaints of the downtrodden? Often the matters for which we seek redress are small, sometimes no more than a stubborn swelling in the armpit, though mostly it is by our fellow men that we are oppressed and ill-treated, both in flesh and in spirit … He who has been flogged and starved and flogged again for trying feebly to procure food, and flogged yet again, this time much longer and harder because the name of Saint Dismas, protector of prisoners, came to lips bloody from a slit tongue; he is proof that in his defencelessness a cruelly beaten man needs the help of an intercessor in Heaven … But, saddest of all, the very reason the man is in prison is due to his belief in the intercession of which he has been deprived … Out of sight does not mean out of mind, however … Saint Thorlákur still walks among his poverty-stricken countrymen and they still call on him to mention their names when he stands under the cascade of light that streams from Christ’s four nail wounds and the hole in his side and from his battered head where the thorns pierced the skin to the bone … But only those who have learnt the tongue of angels can tell how one’s name will sound in the language of light … So there is little to be gained by craning one’s neck to the skies and combining one’s name with prayers; that twittering will be of no more use than the croaking of a soulless Great Auk if there is no intercessor up there to interpret the mortal name of the one who prays and translate it into the language of Heaven … We need the glorious Saint Thorlákur and Gudmundur the Good to translate the names of us poor sinners for the wondrous race above … My name is Jónas Pálmason in Icelandic, Jonas Palmesen in Danish, Jahn Palmsohn in German, Jonah Palmson in English, and could be Johannes Palmensis in Latin, but what I am called in the language of eternity I will not learn until Doomsday … I hope the call comes from above, because it is also said that everyone has another name in hell and I will be damned if I ever want to learn what they call me in that hideous place … Ah, but you, sandpiper, have nothing to fear, for you have no name besides what people call you at any given moment, and those are all earthly names … Heaven only has room for good men … I suppose I will miss you when I get there … Yes, just as those with the second sight can sense the presence of elves in the landscape despite never having set eyes on them, so true souls can experience the presence of the saints, despite the fact that the Church has been stripped of their images …

JERUSALEM HADDOCK:
nine ells long, the fairest of all fish, with a girth almost equal to that of a flounder. Its flesh is sweet and exudes a great pile of fine, handsome butter in the dish, especially when chilled over night. One such fish was cut off by low tide with some trout in a river estuary on Skardsströnd, but no one dared to taste it until I did, who knew it well.