Independent People (17 page)

Well, well. Bjartur had set out on a trip after sheep right enough, but this was becoming something more in the nature of a voyage. Here he was sitting neither more nor less than up to the waist in Glacier River, and that on no ordinary steed, but on the only steed that is considered suitable for the most renowned
of adventures. But was Bjartur really proud of this romantic progress? No, far from it. He had at the moment no leisure to study either the distinctive features of his exploit or the rarity of its occurrence, for he had as much as he could do to hold his balance on the reindeer’s back. Desperately he hung on to its horns, his legs glued to its flanks, gasping for breath, a black mist before his eyes. The rush of the water swept the animal downstream for a while, and for a long time it seemed as if it intended making no effort to land. Across the river the banks, which rose high and steep out of the water, showed intermittently through the snow, but in spite of the nearness of land Bjartur felt himself as unhappily situated as a man out in mid-ocean in an oarless boat. Sometimes the cross-currents caught the bull, forcing it under, and then the water, so unbearably cold that it made his head reel, came up to the man’s neck and he was not sure which would happen first, whether he would lose consciousness or the deer would take a dive that would be the end of him. In this fashion they were carried down Glacier River for some time.

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long last it began to look as if the bull was thinking of landing. Bjartur suddenly realized that they had neared the eastern bank of the river and were now not more than a yard or two from the jagged fringe of ice that formed the only shore. They were carried downstream along by the ice for a while longer, but as the banks rose everywhere with equal steepness from the ice edge, the matter of effecting a landing remained a most unattractive project. Bjartur nevertheless felt that his best course, if the bull neared the land sufficiently, would be to seize the opportunity and throw himself overboard, then try to haul himself up on the ice, for this stay in cold water was becoming more than he could stand. He realized, of course, that it would be a death-jump that could only end in one of two ways. Finally there came a time when the bull swam for a few yards not more than half an arm’s length from the ice, and the man watched his chance, let go of the antlers, heaved himself out of the water, and swung the upper part of his body on to the ice; and there Bjartur parted from the bull, never to set eyes on it again, and with a permanent dislike for the whole of that animal species.

There occurred moments, both then and later, when it struck Bjartur that the bull reindeer was no other than the devil Kolumkilli in person.

The ice was thin and broke immediately under the man’s weight, so that he was near to being carried away with the fragments; but as his days were not yet numbered he managed somehow to hang on to the unbroken ice, and succeeded finally in wriggling his lower limbs also out of the water. He was shaking from head to foot with the cold, his teeth chattering, not a single dry stitch in all his clothes. But he did not feel particularly safe on this narrow fringe of ice and began now to tackle the ascent of the river bank. This in itself was a sufficiently hazardous undertaking, for the bank was not only precipitous, but also covered with icicles formed by the rising of the river, and there could only be one end to a fall if hand or foot should lose its grip. As he was fatigued after his exploit in the water, it took him longer to work his way up to the top than it would otherwise have done, but finally the moment arrived when he was standing safe and sound on the eastern bank of Glacier River—on the far pastures of another county. He took off his jacket and wrung it out, then rolled about in the snow to dry himself, and considered the snow warm in comparison with the glacier water. At intervals he stood up and swung his arms vigorously to rid himself of his shivering. It was, of course, not long before he realized to the full what a trick the bull had played on him by ferrying him over Glacier River. In the first place he had cheated him of the quarters he had proposed to use for the night, the shepherds’ hut on the western side of the river. But that actually was only a trifle. Altogether more serious was to find himself suddenly switched to the eastern bank of Glacier River, for the river flowed north-east, whereas Bjartur’s direction home lay a trifle west of north-west. To cross the river he would therefore be forced to make a detour in an opposite direction to Summerhouses, all the way down to the aerial ferry in the farming districts, and this was not less than a twenty hours’ walk, even at a good speed, for the nearest farm in Glacierdale was at least fifteen hours away. Though he were to travel day and night this adventure of his would thus delay him almost forty-eight hours—and that in weather like this, and his lambs still out.

He was pretty well worn out, though loath to admit it to himself, and his wet clothes would be a poor protection if he decided to bury himself in the snow in this hardening frost. The snowflakes
grew smaller and keener; no sooner had they fallen than the wind lifted them again and chased them along the ground in a spuming, knee-deep smother. His underclothes remained unaffected by the frost as long as he was on the move, but his outer clothes were frozen hard and his eyelashes and beard stiff with ice. In his knapsack there remained one whole blood pudding, frozen hard as a stone, and half of another; he had lost his stick. The night was as black as pitch, and the darkness seemed solid enough to be cut with a knife. The wind blew from the east, sweeping the blizzard straight into the man’s face. Time and time again he tumbled from another and yet another brink into another and yet another hollow where the powdery snow took him up to the groin and flew about him like ash. One consolation only there was: happen what might, he could not lose his way, for on his left he had Glacier River with its heavy, sullen roar.

He swore repeatedly, ever the more violently the unsteadier his legs became, but to steel his senses he kept his mind fixed persistently on the world-famous battles of the rhymes. He recited the most powerful passages one after another over and over again, dwelling especially on the description of the devilish heroes, Grimur
Jegir
and Andri. It was Grimur he was fighting now, he thought; Grimur, that least attractive of all fiends, that foul-mouthed demon in the form of a troll, who had been his antagonist all along; but now an end would be put to the deadly feud, for now the stage was set for the final struggle. In mental vision he pursued Grimur the length of his monstrous career, right from the moment when Groa the Sibyl found him on the foreshore, yellow and stuffed with treachery; and again and again he depicted the monster in the poet’s words, bellowing, wading in the earth up to the thighs, filled with devilish hate and sorcery, fire spouting from his grinning mouth, by human strength more than invincible:

For this fiend there was not a shred of mercy in Bjartur. No matter how often he sprawled headlong down the gullies, he was up again undaunted and with redoubled fury making yet another attack, grinding his teeth and hurling curses at the demon’s gnashing jaws, determined not to call a halt before Grimur’s evil spirit had been hounded to the remotest corners of hell and the naked brand had pierced him through and his death-throes had begun in a ring-dance of land and sea.

Again and again he imagined that he had made an end of Grimur and sent him howling to hell in the poet’s immortal words, but still the blizzard assailed him with undiminished fury when he reached the top of the next ridge, clawed at his eyes and the roots of his beard, howled vindictively in his ears, and tried to hurl him to the ground—the struggle was by no means over, he was still fighting at close quarters with the poison-spewing thanes of hell, who came storming over the earth in raging malice till the vault of heaven shook to the echo of their rush.

And so on, over and over again.

Never, never did these thanes of hell escape their just deserts. No one ever heard of Harekur or Gongu-Hrolfur or Bernotus being worsted in the final struggle. In the same way no one will be able to say that Bjartur of Summerhouses ever got the worst of it in his world war with the country’s spectres, no matter how often he might tumble over a precipice or roll head over heels down a gully—“while there’s a breath left in my nostrils, it will never keep me down, however hard it blows.” Finally he stood still, leaning against the blizzard as against a wall; and neither could push the other back. He then resolved to house himself in the snow and began looking for a sheltered spot in a deep gully. With his hands he scooped out a cave in a snowdrift, trying to arrange it so that he could sit inside on his haunches to pile up the snow at the mouth, but the snow, loose and airy, refused to stick together, and as the man was without implements, the cave simply fell in again. He had not rested long in the snowdrift before the cold began to penetrate him; a stiffness and a torpor crept up his limbs, all the way to his groin, but what was worse was the drowsiness that was threatening him, the seductive sleep of
the snow, which makes it so pleasant to die in a blizzard; nothing is so important as to be able to strike aside this tempting hand which beckons so voluptuously into realms of warmth and rest. To keep the oblivion of the snow at bay it was his custom to recite or, preferably, sing at the top of his voice all the obscene verse he had picked up since childhood, but such surroundings were never very conducive to song and on this occasion his voice persisted in breaking; and the drowsiness continued to envelop his consciousness in its mists, till now there swam before his inner eye pictures of men and events, both from life and from the Ballads—horse-meat steaming on a great platter, flocks of sheep bleating in the fold, Bernotus Borneyarkappi in disguise, clergymen’s wanton daughters wearing real silk stockings; and finally, by unsensed degrees, he assumed another personality and discovered himself in the character of Grimur the Noble, brother of Ulfar the Strong, when the visit was paid to his bedchamber. Matters stood thus, that the King, father of the brothers, had taken in marriage a young woman, who, since the King was well advanced in years, found a sad lack of entertainment in the marriage bed and became a prey to melancholy. But eventually her eyes fell on the King’s son, Grimur the Noble, who far outshone all other men in that kingdom, and the young Queen fell so deeply in love with this princely figure that she could neither eat nor sleep and resolved finally to go to him at night in his chamber. Of the aged King, his father, she spoke in the most derisive of terms:

Grimur, however, found this visit displeasing and relished even less such shameless talk, but for some time he retreated in courtly evasion of the issue. But

And before Grimur the Noble had time to marshal his defences, there occurred the following:

But at this moment there dawned upon Grimur the Noble the full iniquity of what was taking place, and springing to his feet in a fury, he turned upon the shameless wanton:

“To hell with me, then,” cried Bjartur, who was now standing in the snow after repulsing the seductive bed-blandishments of the lecherous Queen. Did the heroes of the rhymes ever allow themselves to be beguiled into a life of adultery, debauchery, and that cowardice in battle which characterizes those who are the greatest heroes in a woman’s embrace? Never should it be said of Bjartur of Summerhouses that on the field of battle he turned his back on his foes to go and he with a trollopy slut of a queen. He was in a passion now. He floundered madly about in the snow, thumping himself with all his might, and did not sit down again till he had overcome all those feelings of the body that cry for rest and comfort, everything that argues for surrender and hearkens to the persuasion of faint-hearted gods. When he had fought thus for some time, he stuck the frozen sausages inside his trousers and warmed them on his flesh, then gnawed them from his fist in the darkness of this relentless winter night and ate the driving snow as savoury.

This was rather a long night. Seldom had he recited so much poetry in any one night; he had recited all his father’s poetry, all the ballads he could remember, all his own palindromes backwards and forwards in forty-eight different ways, whole processions of dirty poems, one hymn that he had learned from his mother, and all the lampoons that had been known in the Fourthing from
time immemorial about bailiffs, merchants, and sheriffs. At intervals he struggled up out of the snow and thumped himself from top to toe till he was out of breath.

Finally his fear of frost-bite became so great that he felt it would be courting disaster to remain quietly in this spot any longer, and as it must also be wearing on towards morning and he did not relish the idea of spending a whole day without food in a snowdrift miles from any habitation, he now decided to forsake his shelter and leave the consequences to take care of themselves. He forced his way at first with lowered head against the storm, but when he reached the ridge above the gully, he could no longer make any headway in this fashion, so he slumped forward on to his hands and knees and made his way through the blizzard on all fours, crawling over stony slopes and ridges like an animal, rolling down the gullies like a peg; barehanded, without feeling.