wasted on worrying about my belly, and that I would instead have more leisure to devote to pondering matters of importance, to fixing them in my mind. For they stick better if I have someone to lecture to. But these days Sigrídur gets all cross and perverse when I try to impart my ideas, and tempers are lost.
‘There he goes again!’ she says, turning away as if I have produced a stream of piss. I make no attempt to respond. Yet what ensues is inevitable:
‘That’s the sort of nonsense that landed us here in the first place.’
What she says is true, though she should know better than to call it nonsense; it would be more correct to say that it was my intellectual gifts that marooned us here. Or rather, exiled
me
here; it was her decision to make them row her over to share my fate. Poor woman. But it is probably the lesser of two evils to be the wife of Jónas and share a barren rock with him than to live among strangers. Or so I gathered from the way people spoke to her on the mainland. The saddest thing for me is that her loyalty is misplaced. I have done this woman nothing but harm. She was opposed to my heeding the summons of Wizard-Láfi Thórdarson, alias the specialist and poet Thórólfur, when he asked me to go out west with him and exorcise the troublesome ghost. For that was the beginning of my misfortunes. That is how we came to lose everything. How did our paths cross? It was during the eclipse of the sun, if I remember right. I do not dare ask her; women think men ought to remember that sort of thing. Last time she was scolding me for my madcap ideas, I asked her why she had come back to me if not to take up the thread where we left off when I had to crawl alone into hiding due to the persecution by the Nightwolf and Sheriff Ari of myself Jónas the Learned and my son Reverend Pálmi. Indeed, why was she here if not to assist me in my investigations into the workings of the universe? For that is how it used to be. Now it is as if my enemies have given her the task of ‘bringing me to my senses’, as more than one, indeed several, of my tormentors call it. Yet that is not fair, for when I hinted as much the other day, she responded:
‘If anyone knows there’s no chance of bringing you to your senses by now, Jónas Pálmason, it’s me.’
Sigga was the bonniest lass I had ever met. I first heard of her when a visitor told my grand father Hákon and me that they were having problems with a girl down at Bakki in Steingrímsfjord. She was moonstruck, but not like those familiar crazed fools who are best off begging. No, her lunacy rendered her calm and sensible, while at the same time obsessed with the light of the moon and its path across the firmament, its size and phases. When found to be missing from her bed, she was tracked down at last by the cowshed wall, thumb in the air, calculating how the moon’s shadow had grown from the day before. And if she could lay hands on paper and writing materials, she would begin at once to scribble down numbers and lines. Indeed, the minister who was called to examine her said she seemed to possess a sound knowledge of arithmetic. However, she could not be persuaded to tell where she had acquired this learning, for she can hardly have got the hang of it alone and unaided, and the people of the house were pretty sure that some vagabond must have passed on the knowledge to her: ‘In return for goodness knows what payment.’ But her girlish head had been unable to cope with the arithmetic and she had lost her wits, as was proven by the fact that she had become enamoured of that work of nature, the moon, which invariably attracts an ailing mind. The perpetrator of this wicked deed was never found, though people suspected a failed student from Hólar, who had been expelled for striking the bishop with the Easter sacrament: one Thórólfur Thórdarson, known to all as ‘Wizard-Láfi’. This was the first occasion on which Láfi was to play a fateful role in my
‘There he goes again!’ she says, turning away as if I have produced a stream of piss. I make no attempt to respond. Yet what ensues is inevitable:
‘That’s the sort of nonsense that landed us here in the first place.’
What she says is true, though she should know better than to call it nonsense; it would be more correct to say that it was my intellectual gifts that marooned us here. Or rather, exiled
me
here; it was her decision to make them row her over to share my fate. Poor woman. But it is probably the lesser of two evils to be the wife of Jónas and share a barren rock with him than to live among strangers. Or so I gathered from the way people spoke to her on the mainland. The saddest thing for me is that her loyalty is misplaced. I have done this woman nothing but harm. She was opposed to my heeding the summons of Wizard-Láfi Thórdarson, alias the specialist and poet Thórólfur, when he asked me to go out west with him and exorcise the troublesome ghost. For that was the beginning of my misfortunes. That is how we came to lose everything. How did our paths cross? It was during the eclipse of the sun, if I remember right. I do not dare ask her; women think men ought to remember that sort of thing. Last time she was scolding me for my madcap ideas, I asked her why she had come back to me if not to take up the thread where we left off when I had to crawl alone into hiding due to the persecution by the Nightwolf and Sheriff Ari of myself Jónas the Learned and my son Reverend Pálmi. Indeed, why was she here if not to assist me in my investigations into the workings of the universe? For that is how it used to be. Now it is as if my enemies have given her the task of ‘bringing me to my senses’, as more than one, indeed several, of my tormentors call it. Yet that is not fair, for when I hinted as much the other day, she responded:
‘If anyone knows there’s no chance of bringing you to your senses by now, Jónas Pálmason, it’s me.’
Sigga was the bonniest lass I had ever met. I first heard of her when a visitor told my grand father Hákon and me that they were having problems with a girl down at Bakki in Steingrímsfjord. She was moonstruck, but not like those familiar crazed fools who are best off begging. No, her lunacy rendered her calm and sensible, while at the same time obsessed with the light of the moon and its path across the firmament, its size and phases. When found to be missing from her bed, she was tracked down at last by the cowshed wall, thumb in the air, calculating how the moon’s shadow had grown from the day before. And if she could lay hands on paper and writing materials, she would begin at once to scribble down numbers and lines. Indeed, the minister who was called to examine her said she seemed to possess a sound knowledge of arithmetic. However, she could not be persuaded to tell where she had acquired this learning, for she can hardly have got the hang of it alone and unaided, and the people of the house were pretty sure that some vagabond must have passed on the knowledge to her: ‘In return for goodness knows what payment.’ But her girlish head had been unable to cope with the arithmetic and she had lost her wits, as was proven by the fact that she had become enamoured of that work of nature, the moon, which invariably attracts an ailing mind. The perpetrator of this wicked deed was never found, though people suspected a failed student from Hólar, who had been expelled for striking the bishop with the Easter sacrament: one Thórólfur Thórdarson, known to all as ‘Wizard-Láfi’. This was the first occasion on which Láfi was to play a fateful role in my
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