Beyond the hum of insects and the rhythm of the horses at their walk, I hear a distant roar. Maybe it’s the ocean – the constant thundering of waves hitting the sands of Thingeyrar. Or perhaps I am imagining it. The sea gets into your head. Like Natan used to say, once you let it in, it doesn’t leave you alone. Like a woman, he said. The sea is a nag.
It was that first spring at Illugastadir. The light had arrived like a hunted thing, all wide-eyed and trembling. The sea was blank – Natan pushed the boat along its silvered skin, plunged his oars in its side.
‘As quiet as a churchyard,’ he had said, smiling, his arms heaving with the pull of water. I heard the creak of wood and the whispered cuss of the oars slapping the surface of the sea. ‘Be good when I’m gone.’
Don’t think of him.
How long have we been riding? An hour? Two? Time’s as slippery as oil. But it can’t have been more than two hours. I know these parts. I know we are now heading south, perhaps towards Vatnsdalur. Strange, how my heart grips to my ribs in an instant. How long has it been since I last saw this part of the country? A few years? More? Nothing has changed.
This is as close to home as I’ll ever be now.
We are passing through the strange hills at the mouth of the valley and I hear the caw of ravens. Their dark shapes look like omens against the brilliant blue of the sky. All those nights at Stóra-Borg, in that damp, miserable bed, I imagined I was outside, feeding the ravens at Flaga. Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness. As a child, I watched the ravens gather on the roof of Undirfell church, hoping to learn who was going to die. I sat on the wall, waiting for one to shake out his feathers, waiting to see which direction his beak turned. It happened once. A raven settled upon the wooden gable and jerked his beak towards the farm of Bakki, and a little boy drowned later that week, found swollen and grey downriver. The raven had known.
Sigga was unschooled in nightmares and ghosts. One night, knitting together at Illugastadir, we heard a raven’s shriek coming from the sea that chilled us to the core. I told her never to call out to, nor feed a raven at night. Birds heard cawing in the dark are spirits, I said, and they would murder you soon as look at you. I scared her, I’m sure, or she wouldn’t have said the things she said later.
I wonder where Sigga might be now. Why they refused to keep her with me at Stóra-Borg. They took her away one morning when I was in irons, not telling me where she was held, although I asked more than once. ‘Away from you,’ they said, ‘and that is enough.’
‘Agnes Magnúsdóttir!’
The man riding beside me has a hard look on his face.
‘Agnes Magnúsdóttir. I’m to inform you that you’re to be held at Kornsá, until the time of your execution.’ He is reading something. His eyes flicker down to his gloves. ‘As a criminal condemned by the court of this land, you have forfeited your right to freedom.’ He folds the piece of paper and slips it in his glove. ‘You’d do well to wipe that scowl off your face. They’re gentle people at Kornsá.’
Here, man. Here is your smile. Is it a good one? Do you see my lips crack? Do you see my teeth?
He passes my mare, and the back of his shirt is damp with sweat. Have they done it on purpose? Kornsá, of all places.
Yesterday, when I was shut up in the storeroom of Stóra-Borg, Kornsá would have seemed a heaven. A place of childhood, the river, the bright grass, the hillocks of turf oozing water in spring. But I see now that it will be a humiliation. People will know me in the valley. They will remember me as I was – as a baby, as a child, as a woman running from farm to farm – and then they will think of the murders and that child, that woman will be forgotten. I can’t bear to look about me. I gaze at the horse’s mane, at the lice crawling about the hair, and I don’t know if they are from the mare or from me.