From the Mouth of the Whale Read online

  ‘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:

  ‘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 to
wards 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 …