Steina bent down and helped Margrét pull out a painted trunk. ‘Put it on the bed there, next to Jón.’ With some difficulty, Steina heaved the wooden trunk onto the blankets. Dust rose into the air. She watched as Margrét undid the iron latch. Inside the trunk were clothes.
Margrét cast a glance at Agnes shaking against the Reverend’s side, reached into the trunk and took out a fine woollen shawl. Without a word she walked to her bed and, nodding to Tóti, leant down and wrapped it about Agnes’s shoulders.
Tóti looked up at Margrét’s face in the dim light and gave a tight smile, his face wan.
The rest of the family watched as Margrét continued to rifle through the trunk, her lips pressed together firmly. She took out a dark skirt with an embroidered pattern about the hem and laid it carefully on the blankets beside her. Then she did the same with a white cotton shirt, an embroidered bodice, and finally a striped apron. She smoothed the wrinkles out of the folds of material with both hands.
‘What are you doing, Mamma?’ Steina asked.
‘It’s the least we can do,’ Margrét replied. She looked around the room, as if waiting for someone to object, then she snapped the lid of the trunk closed and motioned for Steina to put it back under the bed.
For a moment Margrét stood still, looking across the room to where Lauga sat on her bed. Then, in a few quick strides, she crossed the badstofa and held out her hand.
‘Your brooch,’ she said. Lauga looked up, her mouth falling open. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she got off the bed and bent to the floor. She slowly handed her mother the clasp and sat back down, blinking away tears. Margrét turned, placed the silver brooch on the bodice spread out over the bed, and picked up her knitting.
THE WORLD HAS STOPPED SNOWING, stopped moving; the clouds hang still in the air like dead bodies. The only things that move are the ravens, and the family of Kornsá, but I cannot tell which is which: they are all in black, jerking in circles around me, waiting to be fed. Where did time go? It left with summer. I am beyond time. Where is the Reverend? Waiting by the river at G?ngusk?rd. Looking for a skeleton amongst the moss, amongst the lava, amongst the ashes.
Margrét is reaching out to me and she takes my hand in hers, clasps my fingers so tightly that it hurts, it hurts.
‘You are not a monster,’ she says. Her face is flushed and she bites her lip, she bites down. Her fingers, entwined with my own, are hot and greasy.
‘They’re going to kill me.’ Who said that? Did I say that?
‘We’ll remember you, Agnes.’ She presses my fingers more tightly, until I almost cry out from the pain, and then I am crying. I don’t want to be remembered, I want to be here!
‘Margrét!’
‘I am right here, Agnes. You’ll be all right, my girl. My girl.’
I am crying and my mouth is open and filled with something, it is choking me and I spit it out. On the ground is a stone, and I look back at Margrét, and see that she did not notice. ‘The stone was in my mouth,’ I say, and her face creases because she does not understand. There is no time to explain, she has passed my hands on to Steina, as though I am a token, or a piece of bread and they are all taking communion of me, and Steina’s fingers are cold. She lets go of my hands and wraps her arms around my neck. The sound of her sobbing is loud in my ear, but I cling to her because her body is warm and I cannot remember when someone last held me like this, when someone last cared enough to lay their cheek next to mine.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I hear myself say. ‘I am so sorry.’ But I don’t know what I am sorry for. Everyone is speaking in bubbles of air and it is taking everything not to cry, my spine is cramped from not crying, but I am, the tears are here on my face, I don’t know, perhaps they are Steina’s. Everything is wet. It is the ocean.
‘Will they drown me?’ I ask, and someone shakes her head. It is Lauga. ‘Agnes,’ she says, and I say, ‘That is the first time you have called me by my name,’ and that is it, she collapses as though I have stabbed her in the stomach.