‘I have met others here in this valley who say he was a sorcerer, that he got his name from Satan,’ Tóti said.
‘That’s a very popular story. And plenty believe it too.’
‘Do you believe it?’
Agnes smoothed the length of the unfinished stocking out across her knees. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘Natan believed in dreams. His mother had foresight and her dreams often came true. His family is famous for it. He made me tell him my dreams and put a lot of store by them.’
Agnes stopped running her palm over the stocking and looked up. ‘Reverend,’ she said quietly. ‘If I tell you something, will you promise to believe me?’
Tóti felt his heart leap in his chest. ‘What is it you want to tell me, Agnes?’
‘Remember when you first visited me here, and you asked me why I had chosen you to be my priest, and I told you that it was because of an act of kindness, because you had helped me across the river?’ Agnes cast a wary glance out to the group of people on the edge of the field. ‘I wasn’t lying,’ she continued. ‘We did meet then. But what I didn’t tell you was that we had met before.’
Tóti raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry, Agnes. I don’t remember.’
‘You wouldn’t have. We met in a dream.’ She stared at Tóti, as if worried he would laugh.
‘A dream?’ The Reverend was struck again by the contrast of her dark lashes against the lightness of her eyes. She is unlike anyone else, he thought.
Satisfied that he wasn’t going to laugh, Agnes resumed her knitting. ‘When I was sixteen years old I dreamt that I was walking barefoot in a lava field. It was covered with snow and I was lost and scared – I didn’t know where I was, and there was no one to be seen. In every direction there was nothing but rock and snow, and great chasms and cracks in the ground. My feet were bleeding, but I had to keep going – I didn’t know where, but I was walking as fast as I could. Just when I thought I would die from fear, a young man appeared. He was bareheaded, but wore a priest’s collar, and he gave me his hand. We kept going in the same direction as before – we didn’t know where else to go – and even though I was still terrified, I had his hand in mine, and it was a comfort.
‘Then suddenly, in my dream, I felt the ground give way beneath my feet, and my hand was wrenched out of the young man’s, and I fell into a chasm. I remember looking up as I fell into the darkness, and seeing the ground close back up over my head. It shut out the light and the face of the man who had appeared. I was dropped into the earth, buried in silence, and it was unbearable, and then I woke.’
Tóti felt his mouth go dry. ‘Was I that man?’ he asked.
Agnes nodded. She had tears in her eyes. ‘It terrified me when I saw you then, at G?ngusk?rd. I recognised you from my dream, and I knew then that you were bound to my life in some way, and it worried me.’ Agnes wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘After we parted I found out your name. I heard that you were to be a priest like your father, and that you were going south to the school there, and I knew then that my dream was real, and that we would meet for a third time. Even Natan believed that everything comes in threes.’
‘But you are not down a chasm, and it is not yet dark,’ Tóti said.
‘Not yet,’ Agnes replied quietly, swallowing hard. ‘Anyway. It wasn’t the darkness in the chasm that scared me. It was the silence.’
Tóti was thoughtful. ‘There is a lot in this world and the next that we don’t understand. But just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean we have to be afraid. We can be sure of so little in this life, Agnes. And it is frightening. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t frightened by what I did not know. But we have God, Agnes, and more than that, we have His love and He takes our fear away.’
‘I can’t feel sure of anything like that.’