Iceland's Bell (10 page)

Jón Hreggviðsson continued on in the same direction as before, but the gifts of these respectable people didn’t really help to get him anywhere. Within two days he had to hire himself out again. This time he worked for a powerful count who owned several districts in the region, and who had in his service a thousand crofters, slaves and half-slaves, servants, overseers, and viscounts, but who himself was not to be seen—everyone said he lived in Spain. Jón Hreggviðsson worked here for what was left of the summer at various jobs that required a great deal of physical strength and persistence, and he learned enough Dutch to be able to tell people how he’d come to be traveling in this corner of the world. Everyone in Holland was familiar with Hekkenfeld in Iceland, under which burn the fires of Hell, and they were very eager to hear tales of this mountain. They called the man van Hekkenfeld.

Naturally, the invisible count in Spain cheated him of his pay. The viscounts said he ought to praise God that they didn’t hang him, but several poor God-fearing men in Holland collected some small silver and copper coins for van Hekkenfeld so that he could journey onward to meet his king. When he left he stored his coins in one of his socks, and he twisted the other one around his neck like a shepherd, so that he wouldn’t lose his way. He tied the sabots together and carried them over his shoulder, one in front and one in back, but he had already lost the pearl.

14

AN ADVENTURE WITH THE GERMANS

It was well into winter by the time Jón Hreggviðsson reached Germany. He’d worked time and time again as a drudge for the Dutch in order to support himself, but still had only barely managed to scrape by. Although the Dutch were wealthy enough they were also misers, like almost all well-to-do farmers and other such reluctant wage-payers. On the other hand, a lucky man could occasionally get his hands on something decent without too much trouble—because of their prosperity the Dutch weren’t as afraid of thieves as the Icelanders. Jón Hreggviðsson himself was able to steal a pair of sturdy boots from a duke who had control of three rural districts. He’d been working as an errand-boy for this man, who was invisible like all the other important men in Holland, but he ran away because he was starving. The rich men in Holland were as stingy with food as those in Iceland. He found the boots in a pile of garbage and hid them in a thornbush for half a month before he left. He didn’t dare to put them on before he’d gone about forty miles, but instead carried them in a sack upon his back. But when the weather worsened and the going got rough the boots came in handy, because although Holland is naturally more supple, its mud is cold, especially in the fall.

The weather was drizzly and the sun was beginning to set. The traveler was soaked and the duke’s boots were waterlogged, which made the going even worse. In the cold fog and darkness ahead loomed Germany, home to the most warlike men in the world. Jón Hreggviðsson wasn’t even carrying a staff. He ached for food. The border-post consisted of a few rows of houses, a church, and an inn with provisions for long-distance travelers. Huge carriages hung with lanterns left the inn in the evening on their way to the empire, drawn by teams of eight snorting horses and full of brawny, well-dressed travelers with genteel wives and loads of cash. The womenfolk settled comfortably in their seats in nests of pillows and blankets, and the men, all of them highborn, hung their belts and swords and feathered hats on hooks over the seats and drove away. Jón Hreggviðsson had a few coins on him and was thinking of buying himself a small cup of tea, an excellent drink from Asia, but he was not allowed inside the inn.

He was standing in front of the church, cursing, when he suddenly caught a whiff of warm bread. He started looking around and followed his nose to a bakery where a man and a woman were taking loaves of bread from an oven. He bought a loaf, then knocked on the door of a poor-looking house and scrounged warm beer to wash down the bread. He ate and drank sitting upon the threshold, since the folk there could see that he was a thief and murderer and refused to let him in. The whelp yapped furiously at him from the kitchen and woke up the hens, and the cock, the hens’ husband, started crowing.

He stuck what was left of the bread under his shirt, bade the people there good night, and walked out into the rain refreshed, in the trail of the postal carriages. They drove out through a gate where two Dutch soldiers were standing with pistols and muskets, letting folk pass through unimpeded. There was a small wooded area on the other side of the gate, and beyond this stood a castle on a barren patch of ground encircled by a moat. There was a bridge over the moat, and the road ran right through the middle of the castle. Conical black lanterns hanging on either side of the castle’s huge stone portal gave off faint gleams of light, which appeared through the drizzle like golden-colored, blue-tinged wisps of wool. The road through the portal was cobbled, causing the iron-reinforced carriage wheels to clatter and spark as they rolled over the stones. The castle’s roof was flat and edged with breastwork, with gaps for the catapults and cannons. This was the gateway to Germany.

A number of men brandishing weapons stood at the portal. Behind them were several others in colored clothing, with registers, scrolls, and feathered pens, taking down people’s names and occupations. The postal carriages had gone through. The German soldiers were huge and wore enormous helmets topped with spikes shaped like spear-blades, and their twisted beards looked similar to rams’ horns. Jón Hreggviðsson stood before these men and looked through the gate, intending to continue on his way, but they immediately pointed two spears at his chest and interrogated him in German. Whatever he answered did him no good. They grabbed him and frisked him, but found nothing on him except for a few Dutch coins that they promptly divided amongst themselves. Then they blew their trumpets. Soon another man joined them: a fat, blue giant. The others wanted to hand Jón Hreggviðsson over to this man but he obviously wasn’t interested, if one could tell by the harsh tone of his reply. A heated argument followed, in which the only word that Jón Hreggviðsson understood was “hen-gen”: “Let’s hang him.” The others finally prevailed and the newcomer was compelled to take Jón Hreggviðsson into custody. He pressed the point of his sword up against the farmer’s back and drove him into the castle and up a long, dimly lit flight of steps, then along platforms and passageways out into some distant wing of the castle, until they came to a large chamber with a number of windows that let in both wind and rain. The ruffian pushed Jón Hreggviðsson through the doorway. It was dark but for the dim light of the ruffian’s lantern. When he moved to shut the door Jón Hreggviðsson thrust his foot into the doorway and demanded an explanation in Dutch. As is frequently the case amongst border-folk, this man could understand both languages when he felt like it, and he answered that Jón Hreggviðsson wouldn’t walk through this doorway a second time. Unfortunately, he said, the man whose job it was to hang people wasn’t available; he and his assistant had already hung so many people today that they were worn-out and had gone home to bed. This being said, the big lout pressed the point of his sword against Jón Hreggviðsson’s stomach to make him move out of the doorway, then bade him good night.

“Hey,” shouted Jón Hreggviðsson, in order to stretch out the conversation. “You should do yourself a favor, pal, and hang me yourself. I could probably help you.”

The other man, however, was only a sentinel, in German Wachtmeister, without the rank and privileges of hangman, and he said that no mortal power, nor our Lord God, could compel him to take another man’s duties upon his own shoulders, nor to neglect the duties allotted to the Wachtmeister by the Kaiser. “But what’s that you’ve got there in your shirt?”

“Leave it alone,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “That’s my bread.”

“What the Hell are you planning to do with bread?” said the Wachtmeister. “They’re going to hang you in the morning. I now confiscate this bread in the name of the Kaiser.”

He pointed his sword at Jón Hreggviðsson’s chest while he reached in after the bread, which he started tearing into handfuls after sheathing his sword.

“Damn, this is good bread,” he said. “Where’d you get this bread?”

Jón Hreggviðsson said, “In Holland.”

“Ja, you Dutchmen are wimps,” said the Wachtmeister. “All you think about is bread. We Germans don’t bother with bread. Cannons are worth more than bread. Listen here, you don’t happen to have any cheese in there, do you?”

He frisked Jón Hreggviðsson again but couldn’t find any cheese.

“Someday,” he said with his mouth full, “someday we Germans’ll show bread eaters like you Dutchmen what it costs to think about bread. We’ll crush you. We’ll level you. We’ll wipe you out. You don’t happen to have any money, do you?”

Jón Hreggviðsson told it as it was, that the men in colored clothing had robbed him of his last few coins.

“Ja, don’t I know it,” said the Wachtmeister. “Those toll-bastards probably aren’t leaving much behind for poor children.”

Someone outside shouted:

“Fritz von Blitz, shouldn’t we be getting back to the game?”

The Wachtmeister shouted back: “Coming!”

“Now stay put and keep quiet until the hangman gets here,” he said to Jón Hreggviðsson. “And trust me, if you try to jump out the window you’ll be killed. But now I’ve got to go. My gambling partner is starting to get bored.”

Having said this, the oaf squeezed through the doorway and locked the heavy oaken door behind him. Jón Hreggviðsson swore both loudly and quietly for several moments, then tried to feel his way around in this drafty, dismally cold abode. He kept bumping into what felt like wooden logs hanging from the ceiling, similar to the carcasses that hang in the kitchen loft. Every time he ran into one it started swinging to and fro. Luckily, the moon happened to peek for a moment through the rainy haze, casting a pale gleam upon the faces of a number of men who’d been strung up here. They hung from the rafters, tilt-headed, slack-mouthed, with swollen faces and white eyes, their hands tied behind their backs, their toes pointing straight down, in a sort of dim-witted helplessness that wakened in a man more the desire to give them a good shove and watch them swing rather than the motivation to climb up and cut them down. Jón Hreggviðsson went from one to the next and groped their feet to see if any of them might be wearing useful shoes—actually more from an old farmer’s habit than from any expectation that he’d have need of whatever shoe leather he managed to find. As it turned out, the condition of these men’s shoes was not in the least enviable.

The farmer had few ideas at all as to how he, a one-night guest, might keep himself entertained in such a dreary house. Even the
Ballad of Pontus
seemed out of place here. Still, he remembered having heard that it was profitable for a man to sit under what the Icelanders called a hangi: a gallows-pole with a dead man hanging from it. This was the custom of the evil king Óðinn and other famous elders and adepts in the old days—they’d received all sorts of revelations by doing this. Jón Hreggviðsson decided to follow the same course. He chose the ghoul that was hanging farthest away so he could lean up against the wall while having his revelation. But the farmer was so exhausted that he’d hardly sat down upon the floor before lethargy and boredom sank in upon him. In a moment he was dozing beneath the hanged man, with his chin on his chest and his shoulders against the wall. The moon had disappeared behind the gloom again and it was pitch-black in the hall. Jón Hreggviðsson had been sleeping for just a short time when suddenly he was wakened by a creaking in the rafters above him—in the next instant the hanged man frees himself from his snare and jumps down. He wastes no time at all, but goes straight for Jón Hreggviðsson. He started trampling the farmer as hard as he could, using the incredible strength that only dead men possess, and the longer he trampled, the more his strength increased. In the meantime he sang the following verse:

“Merry is the man hung once
In the hall of ghosts.
Never has a man hung twice
Known the light of day.
We’re well-hung, let’s trample
The heart in need of hanging
The acorn of the spirit
In the unhanged’s breast.
Let’s trample Hreggviður’s son,
Whose heart’s grown far too hard.”

“You’ve trampled enough!” shouted Jón Hreggviðsson, who was on the verge of suffocation from such harsh treatment. He managed somehow to break out from under the ghoul and to throw him down, but a fierce scuffle ensued and the stone floor was torn up beneath them. The other hanged men descended from their snares and started dancing clumsily around them and reciting intolerable, poorly worded poetry built on dubious assertions. This went on for a very long time, and all Jón Hreggviðsson could think was that he’d never joined in such a close dance. In the end the devil got such a tight grip on the farmer that he knew he couldn’t hold out much longer against his opponent. It was a contest of life versus death, as mentioned in the hanged man’s verse: “The hanged can’t be killed twice, no matter how much or how hard one tries.” Jón Hreggviðsson’s only chance was to try to wriggle out of the fiend’s grasp and make a break for it. And because dead men aren’t nearly as lithe as their pinches are hard, he was finally able to free himself, and he ran to the window, clambered up to the window ledge, and threw himself out headlong without caring in the slightest what would happen next. Water flew from the moat up onto the castle walls and the man sank for some distance without hitting the bottom, then he shot to the surface and started splashing about. It was just like falling into a peat-pit, except that floating here were the putrefied limbs of men instead of dogs. Jón Hreggviðsson dog-paddled his way across the moat, scrambled onto the bank on the other side, and coughed up water. His teeth started rattling. He took his bearings and decided to head back to Holland for new adventures there, rather than risk any further adventures with the Germans.

15

He made his way to the city of Amsterdam, a great trading center situated near a huge stretch of water that cuts through the northern part of Holland, called by the Dutch Zuiderzee. From Amsterdam men sailed to Asia. He had started to get a grip on the language, and thus was able to find work as a porter for a trading company that owned a warehouse alongside a canal. He was given a place to sleep at night with the man who looked after the warehouse dog. The nights were often filled with a loud howling, sometimes until dawn.

Jón Hreggviðsson said: “Your dog howls loudest of all the dogs in the warehouse yard.”

The man said, “That’s because he’s the wisest.”

Jón Hreggviðsson said: “Dogs aren’t praised for their wisdom. And only bitches howl. In the ancient sagas it says that in the old days the man was rightly chosen king who had the most vicious dog; not the one whose dog howled loudest.”

“What good’s the Danish king’s dog?” said the man.

“Your duke owns a bitch,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.

“My bitch can slice up your dog,” said the man.

“My dog may be a fleabag,” said Jón Hreggviðsson, “but the Germans, who are war heroes and real men, wouldn’t deliberate for long over what they’d do to yours.”

Jón Hreggviðsson was always mentioning the Germans, who ate men’s bread and then hanged them—at least as long as the hangman was available. He bore a shuddering veneration for this fantastic race and felt quite proud of the fact that he’d become acquainted with it firsthand. The dog kept howling. One night just before dawn, Jón Hreggviðsson went out and found a length of cord, then hanged the dog and threw it into the canal.

He wandered for a long time along the canals and over the bridges. No one was awake but fishermen and ferrymen. Steam rose from one boat where the men were heating their tea water. He shouted to them and asked them to give him some tea. They asked who he was and he said that he was from Iceland, where Hell is. They invited him out to the boat and gave him something to drink and questioned him about Mount Hekla. He said that he was born and raised at the foot of the mountain and for that reason was called van Hekkenfeld. They asked whether a man could see down into Hell from the summit of Hekla, through the swarm of noxious birds that hovers eternally, shrieking and quarreling, over the crater. He said no, but added that he’d once caught one of these birds with a hooked pole that he’d brought with him up onto the mountain; they were similar to ravens, he said, except for their claws and beaks, which were iron. They asked whether such birds could be eaten and he laughed at their foolishness, but said on the other hand that one could use the claws for hooks and the beak for a pick. “Pick?” they said. “Why not pincers, man?” “Yes, why not pincers?” he said. They offered him more tea. One of them asked whether he was planning to go back to Iceland that evening. He answered no, and said that he was planning to go to Denmark to try to meet with His Most Gracious Majesty. They said they prayed that the Danish king would never thrive and that the duke of Holland would declare war on him as soon as possible. “Watch what you say,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. They said that they would gladly fight for their duke until the bitter end and never retreat. There was a ship from Denmark anchored here in the canal, they said, and it would be true justice if they bored a hole in it. Jón Hreggviðsson thanked them and bade them farewell.

He found the Danish cutter lying at anchor in the harbor and shouted his greetings to the crew. They said that they were from Glückstadt in Holstein, fetching malt and hops, and they gave him a decent welcome. He asked to be allowed to see the captain, and told them that he was an Icelander looking for passage to Denmark. When they heard this they started insulting him, since Danes find Icelanders the most contemptible of all men. Jón Hreggviðsson fell to his knees before the captain and tearfully kissed his hand. The captain said that he didn’t need any more men, least of all an Icelander, but that he could come back in the morning. Then they gave him something to eat, explaining that the Icelanders would perish if it weren’t for the charity of foreign nations. Jón Hreggviðsson thanked them sincerely and courteously. He hung around the ship that whole day, feeling like a criminal in Holland ever since he hanged the dog, and at night the crew allowed him to sleep under a sail on deck. Then the farmer’s luck changed just as it always did, because on that very same night two of the sailors went into town to have some fun, and one of them was killed and the other maimed. The captain let himself be persuaded to put Jón Hreggviðsson to work in place of the man who’d been killed, and he was allowed to sleep below deck the next night. One day later they set sail from the harbor.

Jón Hreggviðsson was forced to pay for his nationality so exorbitantly aboard ship that when they got caught in bad weather near the coast of Friesland and were driven out to sea, they blamed him for it, and would have tied him up and cast him overboard in the hope that the sea would subside, had not the ship’s boy, who would probably have been next, crept to see the captain and begged him to see to it that this wretched devil be allowed to live.

When the weather calmed down Jón Hreggviðsson tried to make himself somewhat bigger in their eyes. In his situation it was of course useless to mention the fact that Hell burns under Hekla in Iceland, because the Danes would consider even Hell insignificant if it were located in Iceland. Instead he decided to describe for the crew his forefather Gunnar of Hlíðarendi, who was twelve ells high and lived to be three hundred years old and was such a great warrior that he could leap his own height backward as well as forward. Jón Hreggviðsson asked them if such a man had ever existed in Denmark.

“In days of yore,” they said, “we also had champions in Denmark.”

“Yes,” said Jón Hreggviðsson, “maybe Haraldur Hilditönn. But he’s also one of my forefathers.”

Jón Hreggviðsson finally achieved his goal at Glückstadt on the Elbe Estuary in Holstein, inasmuch as he had now arrived in the domain of His Most Gracious King and Hereditary Lord. The farmer stepped lightly onto land one evening, and he would have doubtlessly repaid the ship’s boy for saving his life had the captain not driven him from his sight with threats of a beating in place of payment.

Glückstadt was certainly not any great sight to see in the eyes of this well-traveled man from Holland. Even worse was the fact that he no longer understood, if it could be called that, any language, except Dutch when he got angry. Until now he had thought he could tell Danish apart from other languages, but the dialect there made it completely impossible for him to even guess at what people were saying. There was a chilling fog. He had a Dutch silver coin the size of a fingertip. He searched for lodging for the night and showed the coin, but everywhere he went he was cursed and driven out and told that his coin was counterfeit. Some people were even on the verge of dragging the farmer before a court of law because of the coin. He was hungry and the streets were slippery and the townspeople had closed the shutters on their windows and gone in to eat steaks. When anyone with a lantern approached the man, the light looked at first like a gray wad of wool, then like a blue halo, and finally like an egg yolk. The aroma of endless amounts of roasted meat continued to issue from the houses, and from the inns came the fragrance of spices, tobacco smoke, and alcohol. He realized that his best chance for lodging would be in a stable or in the loft of a cowshed behind a house somewhere.

No sooner had he started searching for such lodging, however, than he suddenly and unexpectedly bumped into a man holding a lantern. The man was energetic-looking, with a moustache, a goatee, and a feathered hat, wearing topboots and a cloak. Emanating from him was the outstanding smell of brennivín. The man greeted Jón Hreggviðsson companionably. Neither could understand the other’s language, but Jón Hreggviðsson got the feeling that the townsman had come to bring him some sort of good news, or might even offer him a tankard of beer, and he started to think that he would soon find what he’d been hoping for in this the land of his lord, which had for a time been only the land of his dreams.

They walked together to a good-sized tavern where a number of men, mostly in uniform, sat around thick oaken tables, drinking heavily. The place was very lively but only moderately comfortable. The townsman showed Jón Hreggviðsson to a seat at the end of a table in the corner and sat down by him, and the landlord, a fat blue-black oaf, brought them each an unordered tankard of beer. The townsman’s tankard was slightly smaller and had embossed illustrations and a silver lid, while the farmer was handed a plain but very large stone pitcher. Immediately afterward they were presented with brennivín—Jón Hreggviðsson’s goblet was twice normal size and made of tin, while the squire’s was dainty and made of silver.

When it became obvious to them that Jón Hreggviðsson was unable to converse in perfectly comprehensible languages, the landlord and the townsman contemplated their guest for a short time and spoke quietly together as if they were in doubt as to whether they’d found and brought the right man to this place. Nonetheless they filled the farmer’s tankard and goblet again as soon as he finished off his drink, and he, for his part, could have cared less even if they had mistaken him for someone else—he was going to drink and enjoy himself whether they called him Jón Hreggviðsson from Rein or something entirely different. Whatever the cost, they continued to fill his tankard and goblet. And whoever he was, he started singing the
Ballad of Pontus
over the crowd:

“We level our lances to pierce the hearts
Of lords arrayed for the fight—”

The squire took a piece of paper from his wallet and wrote something on it, then placed it before the farmer for him to make his mark, and the landlord came with ink and a freshly cut pen. Jón Hreggviðsson thought that the aristocrats would be disappointed if they were inviting him to set his name to something beautiful, so he resolved to continue drinking and singing while there was still a drop left in his tankard and goblet, and answered them only with the word “hen-gen,” dragging his index finger around his windpipe at the same time. By this he meant that they were welcome to hang him whether he signed or not, but if there was still anything to expect besides the gallows or any other implement of that sort, he was just as eager now as before to experience whatever it might be without signing his name.

The squire gave a signal to the uniformed men who had been sitting minding their own business at the other end of the table. They rose immediately to their feet and rushed toward Jón Hreggviðsson. The farmer wrestled a bit out of old habit, but he didn’t stop singing, and his white teeth gleamed in his black beard during the scuffle:

“We level our lances to pierce the hearts
Of lords arrayed for the fight,
Whether their mantles withstand our darts
Whether their mantles withstand our darts
Shall soon be proven ari-i-ight.”

He gave two of the men strong clouts and a third a good kick before they were finally able to subdue him, and then they gagged and bound him. Just as they were completing their work he was overcome by a pleasant numbness, causing him to remember little of what happened next.

Next morning he awoke to the sound of trumpets. He was lying on the floor of a storehouse that was dimly lit by lanterns hanging in the rafters. He watched as other men in the same boat as he was awoke from their sleep in patchy piles of haulm, and then as a supervisor moved amongst them with a cudgel and drove them to their feet. Another supervisor came and looked over the new arrival and swore by Jesus and Mary like a Frenchman at the farmer’s filthy appearance, then he dragged him out to a church where they stored their weapons and made him put on a doublet, leggings, and boots, placed a hat on his head, and girded him with a belt. This sergeant-at-arms asked him his name and nationality and first wrote this information in a book, then upon a patch of cloth that he fastened inside the farmer’s doublet. The patch read as follows: “Johann Reckwitz. Aus Ijsland buertig.”*

They were given bread, beer, muskets, and swords. Next they were made to march out onto a field in the faint gleam of morning. It was windy and rainy, just like the night before. Jón Hreggviðsson managed the march to the field, though there was a certain amount of gruff urgency on the part of the supervisor, but when they started doing various exercises appurtenant to the art of war his comprehension broke down entirely and he did everything backward. The gruff orders changed quickly into vicious threats in that difficult language, and finally into cuffs on his ears. It didn’t seem too hopeful to Jón Hreggviðsson to repay like with like in such a place, and he didn’t understand the orders any better no matter how much he was beaten. Finally the supervisor gave up and looked agitatedly at the patch inside the man’s doublet and discovered that he was an Icelander. At this everyone started laughing. After a long and exhausting day of training they were marched back to their barracks and given warm broth.

Jón Hreggviðsson was beaten and shouted at for three days before he was transferred to the mess hall and made to fetch water, chop firewood, carry out ash and garbage, and do any of the other least important jobs there. The stewards and cooks were German and could care less whether there was a country called Iceland or not, but the scullions were Danish, as was the man who turned the officers’ roast, and they smugly explained to Regvidsen time and time again that Iceland was not a country and Icelanders were not people. They insisted furthermore that the lice-infested pack of slaves that lived on that funnel of Hell scrabbled along only on whale oil, rotten shark meat, and alms from the king. Regvidsen said that in Iceland there was, as a matter of fact, one hole leading down to Hell, and that one could often hear Danish coming out of it. It was also a fact, he said, that Iceland outrivaled the rest of world, because all the men in Iceland were noble heroes and skalds. The Danes called Regvidsen a black hound. Every day the mess hall was the scene of bickering and cruel pranks.