B0046ZREEU EBOK Read Online Free PDF Page A

hardly have been in a boat until we made our voyage. As it was, I could row and steer before I was seven years old, and I knew the coast around Arnarstapi almost as well as any of the boys in the place.
    Orm used to take me about the country with him too. I always loved to ride anywhere, and I liked visiting the farms around Breidavik. There were games every year just before Midwinter on our neighbour Bjorn’s land under Oxl mountain. There’s a volcano on the plain close by – on still winter days we could smell the sulphur at Arnarstapi and see the smoke curling up. It erupted when my grandfather was living at Vifilsdalur. I remember riding along the frozen beach to Bjorn’s farm by sledge one year, with the mountains vanishing into the distance as white as salt, and the crisp air smelling of sulphur. People came to the games from all over Snaefelsnes, and stayed for a couple of weeks. The men had ball games and races and, of course, horse fighting, which was still a sacred ritual to us then. The bets were often high, and there’d be fights. One year they caught a slave who’d been bribed to kill Bjorn while the feast was on, and they took him up to the pass over to Eyr and killed him there. We’d had a band of men come over earlier that year to get Bjorn, but they didn’t catch him, then or ever. That’s how it always was: even in years when things passed off peacefully, the tension of the feuds was always smouldering underneath. As I grew older my main interest at the games was to watch the young men who came to compete. I knew my father would choose my husband from the families on our side in the feuds – Bjorn’s family or the Kjallekings preferably. So I silently observed them all while they were around.
    Most of our gatherings happened in winter. There was less work to do then, and our summer weather was worse than in the Green Land, I think, although the winters were never as hard. Halldis, who came from Rif on the north of Snaefel, said when she came to Arnarstapi she found peace, and rain. It’s true we were fairly out of the feuding, living as remotely as we did, and it’s true too that from Rif or Frodriver you can often see the glacier winking in the sun, and behind it a cone of cloud like its shadow, that means on our side it’s raining.
    As a child I adored the sun. Halldis told me the story of how it was the fate of Sun and Moon to drive their chariots through the sky with the wolves chasing them. My Sun didn’t mind wolves. He was handsome and brave and godlike, and while he showed his face our lives at Arnarstapi were transformed. I remember a day – I must have been seven, eight years old – when the sun shone fiercely on the pastures, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. I lay on my back, arms and legs spread like a starfish, and felt the heat of the sun go all over me, touching my skin and my closed eyes and my hair. It seemed to reach right through to my bones. I squinted up into blue sky, and felt myself falling and falling, drowning in the splendid brightness and the heat. I was innocent, and yet I knew then what passion was. It’s only come to me rarely. Marriage has meant good company, but only passion like that at the very beginning. I love the sun still, even though in this country his favours are cheap, and the magic just a commonplace.
    After my first hungry years there was enough to eat at Arnarstapi. We even had grain some winters, which Orm used to fetch from a kinsman of his who had a farm on Reykjanes. I remember grinding the grains in the quern, and then Halldis showed me how to make dough out of the flour, and how to roll out the loaves and bake them on soapstone slabs over the fire. It took a long time, and I can still think of nothing more mouthwatering than the smell of cooking bread. The loaves would bake in black and white blotches, like the rock and snow patches on the glacier. They were flat – we never had this yeast they use in Italy – and we’d cut the round