‘Fridrik Sigurdsson visited Illugastadir soon after I arrived. I’d never met him before, but Sigga had told me about him, and she’d said that he and Natan were acquaintances of sorts. She was always as pink as a skinned lamb when she spoke of him. But Fridrik unsettled me. There was something off-balance in Fridrik. And Natan, too. They both got into moods and the feel of a room would fall from high spirits to a glowering in an instant. It was contagious, too. With them you’d feel every small injustice done against you like a thorn in your side. Fridrik, I thought, was a daring sort of boy, desperate to prove himself a man. He was easily offended. I suppose he thought the world against him, and raged at it. I did not like that in him, the way he looked for a reason to anger. He liked to fight. Liked to keep his knuckles bruised.
‘Natan was different. He did not think he had to prove himself to anyone. But superstitious signs troubled him. And, what I admired in him, his way of seeing the world, and yearning for knowledge, and his easy way with those he liked, had a darker underbelly. It was a matter of enjoying the bright skies all the more, so as to endure the sloughs when they came.’
Agnes paused as Tóti grimaced, stroking his neck with his hand.
‘Does something trouble you?’ she asked.
The Reverend cleared his throat. ‘The air is rather close in here, is all,’ he said. ‘Go on. I’ll fetch some water in a little while.’
‘You look pale.’
‘It is only a slight chill from going to and fro in the weather.’
‘Perhaps you ought not return to Breidabólstadur tonight.’
Tóti shook his head, smiling. ‘I’ve felt worse,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Please go on.’
Agnes gave him a careful look, and then nodded. ‘Well, then. The first time I met Fridrik Sigurdsson I was hauling water from the stream. I heard a shout, and saw a red-headed young man and his horse trotting along the mountain path. There was a woman also. Natan peered out of his workshop window at the noise, and didn’t waste time stepping out and locking the door behind him. Not many folks visited Illugastadir, and Natan seemed to prefer it that way.
‘Natan introduced the boy as Fridrik, and Fridrik told me he was the son of the farmer Sigurdur at Katadalur, a farm just up over the mountain. He said he’d been away for the winter, and then he introduced his companion, Thórunn, a servant woman with very bad teeth, who grinned at everyone. I noticed that Sigga was anxious when she first saw Thórunn. To tell you the truth, Reverend, I didn’t like either of the pair on first meeting. I thought Fridrik a braggart and a show-off. He talked aimlessly, speaking of how he was going to make his father a rich man, and he’d fought three men in Vesturhóp and given them all black eyes and worse. All the dull lies you’d expect to hear from a boy of that age. I don’t know why Natan bothered to listen to Fridrik’s boasting – he didn’t often care to hear that sort of thing, although he wasn’t shy about trumpeting his own good fortune. But I supposed that he was a mentor to Fridrik, as he told me he was trying to be to Sigga.
‘That day Natan invited Fridrik and Thórunn inside. I was not particularly interested in my new neighbours, but I gathered that Fridrik’s family was quite poor. He gobbled down his fish like a starveling. I thought him an odd friend for Natan.
‘When Fridrik left, Thórunn trailing like a puppy after him, Natan disappeared. When I found him again, I asked him where he’d been, and he smiled and said that he’d gone to check his belongings. When I asked him why, he told me that Fridrik had long fingers, and only ever called on him to try and discover where he kept his money.
‘I asked Natan why on earth he let Fridrik step foot inside his house if that was the case, and Natan laughed and said he never kept his money in the croft anyway, and besides, he liked the game of it. Theirs was not a true friendship, but a strange rivalry with one another, borne out of boredom. Fridrik thought Natan rich and wanted to take a little of what he had, and Natan encouraged him for his own private amusement, knowing all the while that Fridrik would never find his money. At the time I told Natan I thought it dangerous to provoke a man like that, but Natan laughed and said Fridrik was hardly a man, only a foolhardy boy. But it troubled me. I argued that Fridrik was twice his size, and could easily overpower him if it came to it. Natan did not like that. We had our first row, then.’