I lie still and try to listen to the others breathe, so as to discern whether another is awake. Reverend Tóti is in the bed closest to me, having decided to sleep at Kornsá because of the lateness of the hour. But I know it wasn’t him who woke me. A priest would not wake a prisoner by whispering in her ear like a lover.
Minutes pass. Why is there so much darkness in the room? I can’t see my hands, although I hold them above my eyes. The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist. Even when I force my eyes shut, the darkness is still there, and now, too, there are awful tremors of flickering light. Are my eyes open or shut? Perhaps it was a ghost who woke me – how can I explain these lights appearing in the murk before me? They’re like flames peeling off a wall, and Natan’s face is before me, his mouth wide in screaming, and his teeth bloody and shining, and his burning body dropping flakes of charred skin on my blankets. Everything smells of whale fat and Fridrik’s knife is deep in Natan’s belly, and a scream jerks from my chest as if it had been pulled from my gut by a rope.
The lights vanish. Was I dreaming? It seems as if no time has passed.
‘Reverend Tóti?’ I whisper.
He turns over in his sleep.
‘Reverend? May I light a lamp?’
The Reverend does not wake easily – he lolls like a man addicted to drink. I shove him harder than I’d like. He’s embarrassed, I think, to wake and see me in my underthings.
‘What is it?’
‘I had another dream.’
‘What?’
‘May I light a lamp?’
‘The light of Jesus is enough for any true Christian.’ His voice is sluggish with sleep.
‘Please, Reverend.’
He has not heard me. He begins to snore.
I return to my bed then, uncomforted. I can smell smoke.
My Mamma is dead. Inga is dead.
She is lying in rags in the storehouse while the snow and ice clamp their jaws about the earth and forbid the digging of holes, the digging of graves.
So cold she has to wait to be buried.
So lonely I make friends with the ravens that prey on lambs.
I close my eyes and I am creeping down the corridor with the flickering light of my lamp and I am shaking, terrified. I hear the wind howl into the night outside and I think I can hear my foster-mother claw at the storehouse door where she is bundled and waiting to be nailed in the box and buried come spring. I stop walking and I listen hard, and under the wind I think I hear scratching, and then my name – Agnes, Agnes, calling to me. It is Inga calling me to let her out. I’m not dead, I have returned, I am come alive, I need to be let out of the storehouse, not kept like butchered meat, drying in the stale air. Kept with salt and whey and flour crawling with Danish weevils.
I stand still and I shake, scared. Then, Mamma, Mamma! I take a step to the storehouse and push open the door – there is no lock. I push open the door and I hold out the thin light of my lamp, and I see the lump of her body on the floor, her head resting upon a sack of dried fish-heads, and I weep because it is worse to know that she is really dead. Oh, my foster-mother is dead and my own mother is gone. And I sit on the floor, my legs buckled with the pure, ripe grief of an orphan, and the wind cries for me because my tongue cannot. It screams and screams and I sit on the packed earth floor, hard with cold, and smell the fish-heads, sickening, lacing the bland scent of winter with its stench of salt and dried bone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE MURDERER FRIDRIK SIGURDSSON was born at Katadalur here in the parish of Tj?rn on the 6th of May 1810, and was confirmed by my predecessor here in this parish, Reverend S?mundur Oddson, in 1823. He was described then as being in possession of ‘a good intellect’, and a good knowledge and understanding of the catechism. However, his behaviour did not answer to this knowledge and education. He girdled himself in blatant disobedience of his parents, so that they complained to me in the autumn of 1825. It was through speaking with them that I learnt of his greatly unbending character.