From the Mouth of the Whale Read online

  SEA MONSTER: of sea monsters I will say nothing, for I have not read much about them, though I had seen a fair number until they disappeared during the great winter of famine, Anno Domini 1602, the winter that men of the West Fjords refer to as ‘Torment’ and others as ‘Cudgel’.

  Sorcery-Láfi was neither whip-thin nor starving. He was short of leg and wide of hip, with a premature stoop, plump cheeks, lively watery blue eyes set in a round head and black hair that always looked wet, as if newly washed, from the fish-liver oil he dressed it with. He was so light of heart that his behaviour bordered on the idiotic. He was forever clicking his fingers and whistling as he walked, spinning suddenly on his heel, clapping his hands together and declaring:

  ‘Heigh-ho, the sun and snow!’

  Or some other such harmless nonsense. He was an amusing fellow, with a poetic tongue that served him well in his dealings with the squires out west, helping him to ingratiate himself and sell them his services, which consisted mainly of escorting them on journeys, telling them jokes and composing comic verses whenever the opportunity arose. Also preparing hot poultices for their swellings, bleeding them, trimming their beards and singeing the hairs from their ears. And last but not least, being alert to the possible scheming of rogues who might pay witches to raise demon familiars against them. Now Láfi had summoned me to help him lay a ghost which had been running riot in the coastal district of Snjáfjöll. The spirit was so devious that Láfi had given up trying to tackle it on his own. It was thought to be the shade of a parson’s son who had been cruelly treated by his father and stepmother, beaten and mocked and finally forced out in a violent storm to bring home some sheep that were in fact quite snug in a cave on the mountain above the farm. Since the shepherd had given up trying to drive them home, the parson put pressure on his son to prove himself the better man. It was not unkindly meant: both shepherd and parson’s son happened to have their eye on the same maidservant, and it was clear to all that she preferred the shepherd, who had the stronger grip and the bushier whiskers. The parson’s son, on the other hand, was a delicate youth who minced rather than walked, as unfit for physical work as he was for spiritual labours. He had been deeply attached to his late mother and used to help her with the needlework. Now he was wrapped up in layer upon layer of coats, with sturdy boots on his feet, a hat of polar-bear skin on his head and an iron-shod staff lashed to his right hand. Thus equipped, he set out on tiptoe over the hard-frozen snow. Onlookers made fun of his ridiculous high-stepping gait as it took him the best part of a day to clamber up to the top of the slopes, a point any other man could have reached in two hours. There he vanished from view and shortly afterwards fell over a cliff, broke his leg in three places and died of exposure. It was not long, however, before he returned to wreak vengeance on his father and neighbours, becoming the most palpable ghost ever to haunt the district; many were injured by his blows and stone-throwing when he ambushed them in the winter darkness. If a lamp went out in the living room during supper, he would have licked out all the bowls by the time it was re-lit. But it was no better when he satisfied himself merely with pinching women in the crotch and kicking men in the balls, hoping by this to castrate the district until it fell into dereliction. He had given Láfi such an almighty kick in the groin that one of his testicles had been squashed flat like a blueberry between the teeth, as I was permitted to see and feel for myself. Yet Láfi’s attempts to exorcise the phantom parson’s son had not been entirely unsuccessful. For the first few months afterwards the ghost had kept a low profile, hardly laying a finger on anyone, though he could be heard from time to time howling down the kitchen chimney. But when summer came round and the ghost was discovered to have pushed a shepherd boy flat on his face and torn off his breeches, Láfi admitted defeat: a ghoul that did not require the cover of darkness to commit its foul deeds was beyond his powers. So here I was, come to help him lay its body in the grave – where the spirit departed after that was not within our power to decide. Láfi was to be paid a fee for the ghost-hunt, and this he would share with me. We were well provided with food and drink and made tolerably comfortable at the parsonage of Stadur. But as the weather was exceptionally fine that year, we slept outside for most of the summer, using a tent that Láfi had acquired from a Spanish whaler. We began our quest by travelling from farm to farm, enquiring whether the spook had been there and, if so, how it had behaved. We were given a warm welcome and in return entertained the locals with our ballads and riddles, and my tales of people from my home district far away. It was on this investigative journey that we composed the ‘Bird Verses’ which every Tom, Dick and Harry now knows. We were of one mind during those sunny days and nights on the coast of Snjáfjöll. Láfi had begun the poem, the first three stanzas were his, but had run out of birds and inspiration by the time I turned up. As we walked from farm to farm we took to chanting the poem together. He recited the first verses, which he had knocked together with some skill, and I slid into the metre – slipped into it like a tongue into the eye socket of a well-boiled sheep’s head. We composed like fury, casting one bird after another into the air before slotting it into place in our list. The light summer days and nights merged into one and, free from any timetable, we took no rest when the muse was upon us but allowed it to seize us and lift us to that higher plane of the poet’s art that is sometimes called poetic ecstasy and resembles nothing so much as delirious happiness, for those under its influence tend to move with quick jerks of the limbs, rocked by gales of laughter and prone to madcap fits, such as rushing off, yelling words into the blue, one to the west, another to the east, the third up in the air, the fourth behind one, the fifth in front and the sixth at the ground, before plumping down on top of it, as if to crush any devil that might pop up its head at the unexpected message, and sit tight, rocking to and fro, babbling gibberish as one juggled the six words together until they formed a clever, well-crafted line. And so on until we nodded off with a half-made line of verse on our lips and slept where we fell, often till well past midday. Unfortunately, though, it was not always so, and most of the verses came into being like any other discussion between learned men. I even slipped in several alien bird species that Láfi had never heard of, like the noble pelican which builds a nest for its young in its beak and gives birth to them from the blood of its breast, or that Babel bird the parrot that speaks every tongue on Earth. When he cast doubt on the existence of such freaks, I answered his objections by saying:

  ‘Who’s to say that they haven’t been blown here by the wind some time, cast ashore by gales or in the baggage of one of those foreign ships’ captains who are forever turning up in Iceland with all kinds of odd cargo? Really, do you think anyone who ran into us in our madness would find it any stranger to hear of a sky-blue bird with red wings prating in Latin than to learn that men such as ourselves thrive in this land?’

  ‘Well …’, Láfi replied, ‘surely there’s no such thing as the ostrich; one minute a flightless giant, the next a kind of bush?’

  In the end the final verse came together just as we reached the part of the coast where the ghost was wreaking the greatest havoc. I doubt my tongue would have been as agile as it proved when our paths crossed, the living Jónas the Learned and the dead Phantom Jónsson, had I not oiled it with the Bird Verses during the previous week.

  Where was it that we first encountered the boy? Ah yes, we were asleep in a grassy dell beneath a black crag, known as the Hafsteinn or Sea Rock, and I would sooner have expected a mysterious visitor from its bowels than the one who emerged from his cold grave to harass us. We were lying comatose after one of our poetic fits when I was roused by a movement in the scree above us to the east, as if little stones had been dislodged by a foot and rolled down the gravel bank with a dry rattle. Assuming it was a fox on the prowl, I closed my eyes and lay without moving, waiting for the animal to complete its journey across the scree. But when there were no further noises, I thought it wiser to take a look at this traveller. Holding my br
eath, I strained my ears. For a long moment there was no sound but the piping of the newly wakened oystercatcher, strutting along the beach of the cove below us. Then I heard something tread warily into the thick moss on the other side of the rock. I realised at once that it must be the ghost come to meet us since no mortal creature could descend in a single stride from the scree to the heathery slope where Láfi and I were lying. I imagined it standing with one foot on high, the other down in the moss beside the rock, legs akimbo like a wishbone. I waited and the thing waited. I breathed out cautiously, without making a sound. There was a crack as the ghost’s upper leg whipped down and smacked into its lower leg. Clacking knees like that would have been painful for a living man but the dead one uttered not so much as a whimper. Láfi was woken by the crack. He raised his head from the ground, about to start his sleep-drugged ‘wha-wha-wha?’ when I signalled to him to be quiet. He obeyed, turning his head towards me so that I could give him further indication as to what was afoot. As imperceptibly as we could, and with utmost slowness, we now turned our heads towards the corner of the rock in whose lee the demon was standing. I thought I saw a shadowy human shape moving there; evidently the ghost was waiting and watching us too.

  Now the patience of the players was tested. The dead generally possess more fortitude than the living, as is clear by the way they lie still in their graves while man scurries around like a frightened field mouse, trembling and quivering in the rare moments that he pauses, resembling a mouse in that as well, but this time a house mouse that has fled from a cat into a crack in the wall and is listening for its footsteps, hoping that it will give up and leave, but unsure whether the cat is there or has gone, because a feline can also stand motionless for long periods without its knee-joints stiffening up. Láfi and I could expect Reverend Jón’s dead son to vanquish us in any battle that is won by the player who waits longest. I heard Láfi sigh and saw his eyes darting around in his head, from the rock to the sky, while I disciplined myself to wait for what was to come. And it came, a horrible sight that hung in the air for a split second, like the face of the fellow who shares one’s quarters, which floats before one’s eyes in the darkness like a purple mask after the candle has been blown out: one, two, three and it is gone. So the apparition’s loathsome head appeared and disappeared again as it craned it round the rock wall and scowled into my face. White skin, with a fist-sized bruise from the temple to the right-hand corner of its mouth, mouldering cheeks, hair straggling claw-like over its forehead above rolling, red, bestial eyes. The evil youth opened wide his skate’s jaw, inside which all the teeth were broken at the root or smashed in from the fall that had sent him to his death on the slab of rock; he clicked his tongue loudly and vanished the instant Láfi looked his way. Láfi turned to me and started gasping and whining with fright, for the vision had left behind an expression of such terror on my face that it was more than enough to unman him. I understood now why he had been unable to tackle the task alone. But before I could pursue this thought any further, and before Láfi had finished his wailing, the ghost launched its attack. The parson’s dead son sprang on to the crag, squatted on the edge and loosed the back flap of its breeches. Before we could dodge, it released a torrent of almost every imaginable kind of human filth: the excrement of men and livestock, human faeces and horse manure, lamb droppings, rotten eggs and animal bones, maggoty bird skins, the squitters of babes and fish guts, dead men’s rags and all kinds of other muck. Under this deluge we scrambled to our feet, flinging out our arms to ward off the seemingly endless diabolical flood that continued for a good while even after we had fled on to the moor. My reading glass was buried under this colossal dung heap but I could not bring myself to dig it out of the filth, nor could Láfi be persuaded to do it for me. Many years would pass before I found another lens as handy, and you can imagine how this hindered me in my philosophical studies. From up on the crag the ghoul let out a rending screech as it finished. Shall we concur that the sun shone from a cloudless sky as we were drenched in the hideous downpour, and the moors smelt as sweet as moors can do on the loveliest summer’s day? Well, I myself now reeked like the belch from a dead man’s gullet. Stripping off by the nearest stream, we rinsed the ordure off ourselves and our clothes, and while they were drying we ate some breakfast and discussed what to do. The ghost was clearly ungovernable, bound neither by the rules of men nor those of higher powers; it had not only been banished from the realm of the living but also from that of the dead. We had to make it clear to the ghost where it belonged, now that it was deceased.

  ‘It seems to me that the best way to go about it would be by the sort of exorcism that good priests used to perform in papist times, that is, to tell the ghoul the history of the world, of spirits and men, both evil and benevolent. In that way it will eventually see where it fits into God’s great mechanism and realise that it is in quite the wrong place. For how is a dead man to tell the difference between himself and the living if he is still able to walk around, participate in fights and run errands? For that matter, how is he to know that he is not one of the elves? Both live outside human society. How is he to know that he is not a piece of driftwood? The flesh of both is equally rotten and stinking. Or a stray dog? Both are shooed away. Or merely a rock that rolls down the mountainside, causing men to dodge?’ I said, and persisted doggedly:

  ‘No, we must find this walking corpse a suitable resting place, we must find it the right shelf in the world’s museum of curiosities, we must place it beside its peers, so that both it and any passer-by may see what kind it is, and thus both we and the ghost will be free of all fear and suffering. For when a thing has been classified correctly, it is tamed.’

  Yes, Láfi and I would impress upon the corpse of the parson’s son the workings of the world and its own place within it, after which it would hopefully find its way to the right door, in this case the coffin lid. But for this to work, I would have to browbeat it. Láfi glanced out of the corner of his eye and nodded, signalling that the ghost was sneaking up behind me. I spun round. Yes, there it stood, mouldering and hideous. I began the browbeating:

  Christ’s death upon the holy cross

  has brought mankind salvation.

  Twixt thee and me this fact I toss,

  thou creature of damnation …

  And still I intoned:

  All day we’ve knocked this fiend about

  and harried him with our verse;

  may it strike his jaw like a bloody great clout