The Tricking of Freya (20 page)

"And Freya," Birdie said. "She is too grown up for her age. She doesn't
let herself act like a child."

"She does seem awfully serious, for an American girl."

I held my breath. I was afraid Birdie would reveal my whole story. And
what did Ulfur mean, an American girl? That seemed to sum up precisely
what he thought of me. I was a child, a girl, an American. He'd hardly said
a word to me directly the entire visit. I could see why Saemundur resented
him, but Birdie couldn't seem to get enough of him. I continued listening
as their conversation shifted to a discussion of where we would go on our
trip to the East to find Olafur's letters. Who to visit, where to search ...
I tried to follow, but Saemundur pulled my attention like a magnet. Even in
my blind silence it was impossible to erase his presence. I could smell him,
an intoxicating mix of stale cigarette smoke, grimy jeans, boy-sweat. Once,
his leg fell against mine. I let it stay. Warming then burning at the point of
contact. He was truly sleeping now, and I could take him in surreptitiously
through half-closed eyes. The raven-black hair that fell in waves to his
shoulders. The high planes of his cheeks. The dark slashes of his brows.
His wide mouth, set tight all morning, now loosening, lips full and slightly
parted. His moon eyes eclipsed by closed lids. And beyond him the strange
swirling land.

Then the car hit a bump and he jolted awake and caught me staring.
Flashed me a dirty-moon glare and jerked his leg back.

I must have slept too. When I woke we were driving along a lake, and for
a confused moment I thought I was back in Gimli. Except this was a lake of
a different order, a lake bordered not by sand and scrub and spruce forests
but by bare rocky plains and distant mountains.

"Thingvallavatn," Ulfur announced. "The largest lake in Iceland. It may
look calm to you at the moment, but it can turn rough in the blink of an
eye.

Lake u'eather shifts fast.

After following the lakeside for a few miles we turned onto a dirt road which eventually narrowed into a driveway. Saemundur was awake now too,
and when Ulfur stopped the car at a wooden gate, Saemundur leapt out and
opened it. He turned his face toward the lake as we drove through. Ulfur
stopped to let him back in the car, but Saemundur waved him off. Out the
rear window I watched Saemundur latch the gate and walk slowly toward
the house.

Ulfur's summerhouse was plain blond wood, set on stilts. Tall grasses
grew up around it. Out front was a tan mud-clotted jeep. Jeppi. We would
use it for touring, Ulfur explained. I peered inside. I'd never ridden in a
jeep. The keys were dangling in the ignition.

"Couldn't somebody steal it?" I asked. "When you're not here?"

Ulfur laughed. "That, fortunately, is one of your American trends we
have yet to adopt!"

Inside, everything was made of the same simple blond wood. A large
plate-glass window framed an expanse of lake and mountains. I had the feeling Birdie had been to the house before-she glanced around with a wistful
smile, then carried her things into a bedroom. I was still staring out the window. "It's beautiful here," I said, to no one in particular.

"Too bad it's sitting empty all summer," Saemundur answered, without
looking at me, but clearly in response to what I'd said. Did that count as
speaking to me?

"We're here now," Ulfur replied. "So enjoy it."

First lunch, Ulfur announced. Then Thingvellir. Thingvellir, it turned out,
was just a short drive from the summerhouse. Thing means parliament, vel-
lir means plains; Thingvellir is the site of the ancient parliamentary gathering. "Thingvellir," Ulfur proclaimed, is the single most important place in
Iceland. The history of Thingvellir," he continued, "is the history of Iceland."

Thingvellir! Birdie winked at me across the table. All through the years,
whenever we came across a reference to Thingvellir in a story or a poem or
a conversation, Birdie would say, "I'm going to take you there, elskan. Just
wait. Someday I'll take you to Thingvellir."

And now we were going. I felt a sudden burst of love for Birdie. If it
weren't for her I would never have come here, never had a chance to see Thingvellir with my own eyes. Mama would certainly never bring me,
Mama who was afraid to fly, Mama who was old before her time. With a
twinge of guilt I realized I would see something my mother never would.
Like when I was four years old, scaling the giant maple and peering down at
earthbound Mama far below.

Unlike me, Saemundur seemed not to care about visiting Thingvellir. I
watched him devour two sandwiches in large, rushed bites without speaking, without seeming to hear a single thing his father said. Then he tipped
his head back and took a long chug of milk that emptied his glass, wiped his
mouth with his sleeve, and stated that he had no desire to go to the single
most important place in Iceland. He's been a million times. He could stay
home and fish for trout on the lake and have dinner ready by the time we returned. Then he smiled, and in that smile I could see it was all a joke to
him. Suddenly, I was no longer entranced with Saemundur. I was tired of
his sulking and brooding, his surly remarks. This was my trip, not his. My
only chance to see Iceland. "Then don't come," I wanted to say. "Stay home
and fish. Drown, if you like." But of course I said nothing, and at first neither did Ulfur. Then he folded his napkin and stood up from the table. To
me and Birdie he said, "Bring warm jackets. It gets windy at Thingvellir."
Then he turned to Saemundur. "Start up the jeep. We'll be out in a minute."

When we got outside, Saemundur was sitting behind the wheel of the
jeep and Ulfur was next to him up front.

And that was that.

I want to take you to Thingvellir once I find you. Birdie would have wanted
that for you. In the meantime you'll have to make do with mere words.

Thingvellir, Cousin, is no Parthenon. There are no majestic ruins to behold; there were never any buildings in the first place: no columns, no arches,
no roofs to support. Thingvellir is simply a seam of our planet, a raw and
jagged spot on a volcanic plain, split by rocky chasms and chunky fault lines,
surrounded by distant mountains, veined by river, and bordered by lake.
Complete with the requisite waterfall. These were pagans, remember, who
held their rudimentary parliament here each summer. In bare nature they
worshiped, and so it should not be surprising that in bare nature they convened their government. But first they had to discover a need for one.

In the beginning, as Ulfur explained it to us that day, the settlers were
lawless, and proud of it. They had arrived in Iceland at the end of the ninth
century seeking freedom from Norway's tyrannical King Harald. Iceland
was empty, save for a scattering of Irish monks. The immigrants could do
what they liked. And what they liked was to be kingless. The settlers lived
together in homesteads consisting of families, servants, and slaves under
the power of local chieftains, who provided a localized sort of justice.

But after a while-maybe fifty years or so the settlers began to feel the
need, if not for a king, then for a common law. There were disputes, and no universal method of resolution. Law was necessary, they agreed, and they
set about devising not only a set of laws but a government as well.

"In the end," Ulfur continued, "Thingvellir was the spot they selected
for the convening of the first parliament, the Althing."

We were standing then, the four of us, at the Law Rock, from which the
law-speaker annually recited Iceland's laws from memory. Behind us rose
the steep wall of Almannagja (everyman's chasm), below us the remains of
the stone booths inhabited by the godi-pagan chieftains doubling as parliamentary representatives-during the two weeks of the Althing.

"And you should not imagine," Ulfur went on, raising his voice over the
rising wind, "that the annual Althing was an occasion only of solemn courts
and heated legal wrangling. There were contests of sport and wit, telling of
tales and reciting of poems, matchmaking and courting, drinking, and of
course fighting. It must have been a lively scene indeed."

I looked out across the plain. A blue tourist bus had pulled up and was
unloading passengers at the Thingvellir church, a nineteenth-century addition to the old pagan site. The dark clouds that had been stuck to the distant mountains like magnets were now being drawn toward us at dizzying
speed. I realized we were down to three. "Where's Saemundur?"

Ulfur turned and stared down the Almannagja chasm, first south no
Saemundur-then north. There he was, leaning over a bridge.

"What's he doing?"

"Visiting the Drowning Pool, I imagine. His favorite spot."

I left Birdie and Ulfur at the Law Rock. By the time I reached Saemundur he was climbing along the rocks below the bridge, his black hair
whipped by the wind. I peered into the pool of clear water, which seemed
scarcely deep enough for drowning, then followed Saemundur down the
rocks to the pool's edge, clambering as nimbly, I hoped, as a mountain goat.
Proving myself no princess. Not that Saemundur noticed. He glanced up at
me only once, then returned to staring into the pool. I squatted next to him.

"I'm looking for bones," he said at last.

"Whose? Who drowned here?"

"Many people. Women, I should say. Men they beheaded, but women
they drowned. The pool was deeper back then. They pushed the women
and held them underwater with a pole until they drowned."

"Why"
-?

"Babies out of wedlock. Sorcery. Although most of the supposed
witches in Iceland were men.

"That was how the Althing used their laws?"

"Well, by that time the Danes had taken over Iceland, so it was Danish
judges who came here and passed the verdicts of drowning."

"What about children?"

"What about them?"

"If men were beheaded and women were drowned, what happened to
children who committed crimes?"

"I don't know. I've never heard of such a thing. Children committing
crimes!" He looked at me, I said nothing. "Why, have you committed a
crime, young Freya? An innocent such as you?"

I blushed. "I'm not innocent," I mumbled, as if to imply I led a secret life
of crime-I didn't of course; that came later but I wanted Saemundur to
think so.

He threw a stone into the pool and watched it sink. Around us rose the
sound of water burbling from the stream into the pool. Farther off I heard a
louder rush. "Is that the waterfall?"

"It's upstream."

We climbed up a steep trail to the top of the Almannagja chasm. Sac-
mundur was wearing his jeans jacket with the colored patches, and as I
scrambled to keep up with him I could see that the patches represented
different countries.

"Have you been to all those places?" I asked as we climbed.

"What?" he shouted.

The wind had scattered my words far across the plains. It blew even more
wildly from the top of the chasm, where the view seemed to sprawl across
half the planet. I felt breathless, from the view and the climb and this unexpected proximity to Saemundur. I reached over and touched one of the
patches, a windmill.

"Last summer." He smiled at the memory. "Holland, France, Italy, even
Portugal."

"You saw all those places in one summer?"

He nodded.

"That's amazing."

"My parents didn't think so."

"Why not?"

"I went by myself."

"You ran away?"

"You could call it that. But I sent them postcards. I was always planning
to come back. To tell the truth, I hardly thought they'd miss me. They were
too busy fighting and divorcing and all that. I hitchhiked all over Europe by
myself."

For a moment I was too awed to speak.

"I don't know what my father was so upset about. I mean, his precious
saga character Egil Skallagrimsson took off on Viking expeditions at twelve
years of age. But my father hasn't forgiven me. He says he'll never trust me
again.

I nodded, thrilled by this sudden intimacy. Yet I couldn't imagine doing
such a thing, not telling my mother where I was, even for a few hours. A
sudden fear rose up in me: Marna! We were walking along the ridge of the
chasm, side by side, heading north to the falls. Mama knows where I am, I
assured myself. Doesn't she?

And then we were standing on the edge of the waterfall. Far off I could
see Birdie and Ulfur by the Law Rock. Saemundur leaned against a large
stone on the very edge of the falls and lit a filterless cigarette, cupping his
hand and bending his entire body around it to block out the wind. I wondered if his parents knew he smoked, even let him smoke, but I didn't ask.
I didn't want to sound like a princess.

He stood up straight, the tip of the cigarette glowing bright for a moment as he inhaled. "Ever smoke an Icelandic cigarette?"

I shook my head. Mama, of course, had forbidden me to smoke. But
Mama was far away, and Saemundur was holding the cigarette out to me. I
took it tentatively between my fingers and raised it to my lips.