Meltwater (20 page)

Magnus pulled up next to the machine and jumped out.

‘Any sign of the
jökulhlaup
?’ Magnus asked the operator. ‘We just missed one back there.’

‘It’s on its way,’ said the Caterpillar driver, not pausing at his controls.

‘Do you know if it’s reached the little bridge up river?’

‘No. You shouldn’t hang around here, you know.’

‘Should you?’

‘Almost done,’ the guy said. ‘I’ve punched a few holes in the dyke to ease the pressure on the bridge. Once I’ve done this stretch it should hold the flood.’

‘Good work,’ Magnus said. He jumped back in the Range Rover and drove north along the track along the bank.

The river looked calm.

‘God, there it is!’

Ahead of them a broad ridge of brown water about six feet high surged down the river. From what Magnus could see, the
jökulhlaup
was contained within the river’s banks, and the road on which they were driving was sufficiently high to keep above the flood. He hoped.

They could see the narrow concrete bridge ahead when the flood hit it. Remarkably, the bridge held. The water came thundering down towards them and then swept by towards the sea and the lone Caterpillar. Magnus hoped the guy had done his calculations right.

Behind the initial surge the river had set up a strange undulation of what seemed to be a spine of static waves in the middle of the flow.

Magnus reached the little bridge and slowed down. On the other side was another patrol car. A policeman jumped out and waved, both arms crossing above his head.

The message was clear. Stay back.

‘What are you going to do?’ Mikael Már asked. ‘The flood will have weakened the bridge.’

‘I’m going across. Coming? You can get out if you want.’

Mikael Már shook his head. ‘What the hell. Go for it.’ He grimaced and put his hands over his eyes, fingers splayed open so he could see through them.

Magnus put his foot hard down on the accelerator and the Range Rover surged forward. Magnus had a hunch the faster he went the more likely he would be to avoid falling in if the bridge collapse. They hit the bridge and in less than ten seconds were over the other side. Mikael Már let out a whoop.

The policeman’s hands had stopped waving and were now raised in a stop sign. Magnus slowed. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said to the face red with anger. ‘Got to get back to Reykjavík. Give my regards to the chief superintendent.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

J
ÓHANNES WAS PLAYING
hooky and he was loving it. He got up at what for him was a late hour, eight-thirty, and ate a leisurely breakfast in the hotel dining room, with its wonderful view over Faxaflói Bay. It had been cloudy all night, but a northerly wind seemed to be ushering the bad weather off to the south. He decided not to call the school. After all, what could they do? Fire him?

There was a flurry of conversation in the dining room about a new eruption on Eyjafjallajökull, 250 kilometres to the southeast, evacuations and possible flooding, but there was nothing in the morning paper, or at least the edition that had made it to Búdir. He went for a brisk walk along the beach, letting the rhythmic sounds of the waves wash over him, and then got into his car for the drive to Stykkishólmur. He had rung his old aunt Hildur and agreed to meet her later that morning.

It was a glorious morning. He sang to himself as he drove up over the Kerlingin Pass, crossing the mountain ridge that formed the spine of the Snaefells Peninsula. He was a member of a choir, a baritone, and a year before they had given a concert of seventeenth-century hymns. They were quite catchy, and Jóhannes had taken to singing them when alone and out of earshot of other people. ‘Lánid Drottins lítum maeta’, a song about drinking too much wine at the wedding at Cana, was one of his favourites.

That was the glory of the Icelandic countryside. It was very easy to be alone and out of earshot of other people.

He crested the summit of the pass and in a few moments a broad view stretched out before him. He paused, and drove into a lay-by. He walked a few metres away from the car and sat on a stone to look.

It was a view he remembered well. He had sat close to this very spot with his father when he was about ten. They were driving to see his grandmother in Stykkishólmur, just his father and him, when they had pulled over. He and his father had already read
The Saga of the People of Eyri
together at least twice, in the original version of course, and Benedikt wanted to show his son where it had all happened.

In the foreground was Swine Lake, walled in by the several kilometres of congealed lava which was the Berserkjahraun. Beyond that was Breidafjördur, a long, broad fjord between the Snaefells Peninsula and the West Fjords, sixty kilometres to the north. Along the coast were two farms. One, nestling under its own fell, with a little black church in the home meadow just beneath it, was Bjarnarhöfn. This was where Björn the Easterner, the son of Ketill Flat Nose and one of the first settlers of Iceland from Norway, had landed eleven hundred years before. It was where Vermundur the Lean had brought the two berserkers back from Sweden.

It was also where Hallgrímur had lived. Still lived from what Hermann was saying.

A couple of kilometres to the east was Hraun, now, as it was a millennium ago, a prosperous farm. This was where Vermundur’s brother Styr had lived, whose daughter one of the berserkers had demanded to marry. Styr had promised the Swede that he could do this as long as the berserkers hacked a path across the lava field to Vermundur’s farm at Bjarnarhöfn. This they did, collapsing in exhaustion in their master’s brand new stone bath-house afterwards. They were steamed out by Styr, who ran them both through as they emerged. The path was still there, winding its way through the rearing waves of lava, as was the cairn where the berserkers were buried.

Jóhannes remembered the verse Styr spoke at the cairn:

Hraun was where Benedikt had been brought up.

In fact, throughout the whole plain before Jóhannes, signs of the saga persisted, one thousand years later. To the north-east was Helgafell, the holy mountain, although it was little more than a knoll, less than a hundred metres high. Here Snorri Godi and later Gudrún had lived, two of the leading figures of the sagas. And most of the farms that were so familiar to Jóhannes were still inhabited, as they had been in the days of Arnkell, Thórólfur Lame Foot and the other characters of the sagas.

He remembered his father pointing out all these locations to him from this very vantage point.

‘Do any of the farmers still fight each other, Daddy?’ Jóhannes had asked.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ his father had answered.

‘Why not?’

‘Because people don’t do that any more. They would go to jail.’

‘But what about honour?’ the ten-year-old Jóhannes had asked. ‘And revenge. In the sagas they always have to take revenge. Why not today?’

Then his father had said something that had stuck with Jóhannes all his life. It was his father’s sudden expression of seriousness tinged with sadness that emblazoned the words in Jóhannes’s memory. ‘Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do.’

What had he meant? Jóhannes had asked himself that question many times over the years. What had he meant?

Jóhannes drove down past the Berserkjahraun and on through the ancient farmland to the fishing village of Stykkishólmur, on a spit of land a few kilometres north of Helgafell.

He remembered his aunt Hildur’s house. It was a few metres back from the harbour. It was tiny, and it was about a hundred years old, ancient by Icelandic standards. It had a red corrugated iron roof and a red-painted picket fence surrounded it. The walls, also of corrugated metal, were painted green. Various elves peeked out behind net curtains.

Jóhannes had loved visiting his aunt Hildur when he was a kid. There was a particular kind of toffee that she always seemed to possess in large quantities with which she was very generous. She was already a widow – her husband, a fisherman, had gone the way of many local men to the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Jóhannes was looking forward to seeing her.

He rang the doorbell. In a moment a tiny woman with a crooked back and bright blue eyes appeared. She had shrunk considerably since the last time Jóhannes had seen her.

‘Jóhannes! Come in, my dear, come in.’

He bent down to kiss his aunt and followed her into a cosy sitting room, stuffed with knick-knacks of all descriptions, among which were a fair few little Icelandic flags. A grey-haired woman of about his own age stood to greet him. He recognized Unnur, who was Hildur’s husband’s niece, if he remembered correctly.

‘I asked Unnur to be here when you visited,’ Hildur said. ‘I knew she would want to see you. She has a couple of free periods this morning, so she said she could come along.’

This surprised Jóhannes. He had a number of cousins scattered around Stykkishólmur and the Snaefells Peninsula, but he wasn’t close to any of them. He remembered being impressed by Unnur. Like him, she was a teacher. And she had been quite beautiful when she was younger; in fact she was still attractive, with her smooth skin, her fine cheekbones and her air of composed gracefulness.

Hildur fussed over coffee. She must be closer to ninety than eighty, Jóhannes thought, but she was still sprightly. He wondered whether she still had the toffee: he was tempted to ask for some.

‘I’ve forgotten what you teach,’ he said to Unnur.

‘English and Danish,’ she said. ‘You teach Icelandic, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ said Jóhannes. ‘Or indeed I did until yesterday.’

Unnur’s eyebrows rose. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You could say I lost my job.’

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Hildur. ‘How dreadful.’

‘What happened?’ asked Unnur. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’

Jóhannes explained his strong views on how Icelandic literature should be taught and how these did not fit in well with the syllabus. He was gratified with Unnur’s response – she agreed with him forcefully. She was angry that Shakespeare had almost disappeared from the English syllabus at high school – in her day they’d had to study it in the original.

Jóhannes remembered why he liked her.

‘So what brings you up here?’ Unnur asked. ‘Aunt Hildur said you are researching Benedikt’s death?’

‘Yes,’ said Jóhannes. He recounted his impulsive trip to Búdir and his conversation with Hermann, the head groom.

‘I remember Hallgrímur,’ said Hildur. ‘An unpleasant boy. He was our neighbour when we were at Hraun. He and your father were the best of friends when they were little, they used to play together all the time, but then they grew apart. Which pleased me. Your father was a good boy, and Hallgrímur wasn’t. He was stupid and he used to try to bully Benni.’

She sighed. ‘After your grandfather died, it was hard work on the farm. In the end we sold up and moved here. You remember the shop that your grandmother ran?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Jóhannes. The shop itself hadn’t interested him much, his grandmother sold and mended women’s clothes, but he had enjoyed the warm atmosphere that his grandmother and her friends who staffed the shop gave the place. ‘And what was Hallgrímur like as an adult?’

‘He didn’t really grow up well. He was notorious for his bad temper. His wife and children were scared of him. I tried to avoid him; in fact I haven’t seen him for many years. But he is a good farmer, I’ll give him that, and they say that his son is just as good. Bjarnarhöfn has always been a prosperous place.’

‘I’ve read
Moor and the Man
and I’ve heard the rumours that the novel implied Hallgrímur’s father killed my grandfather because he slept with Hallgrímur’s mother.’

‘Oh, those,’ said Hildur. ‘There’s no stopping gossip.’

‘Do you think they were true?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, dear. People had all sorts of strange ideas about Father’s disappearance. That he went to America. Most people think he must have fallen into the fjord and been swept out to sea. The truth is no one knows.’

Jóhannes persevered. ‘Is that really the truth?’

Unnur glanced at their aunt. Jóhannes knew she wasn’t telling him something.

‘Did my father ever talk to you about it?’ Jóhannes asked.

‘No,’ said the old woman. ‘Not in so many words. But when I read that book, it explained a lot.’ Hildur smiled at her nephew. ‘Benedikt was always an honest boy. I think that was his way of telling the truth.’

‘I see,’ said Jóhannes. ‘The groom at Búdir mentioned another story that my father wrote just before he died. He suggested that that might be why Hallgrímur was so upset with him. I think that story might have been “The Slip”
.
It’s about a boy who kills the man he accused of raping his sister by pushing him off a cliff.’

‘I think I remember that one,’ said Hildur.