Read Online Iceland's Bell by Halldór Laxness - Free Book Online Page B

regard to lodging. All sorts of other folk had congregated here as well, especially those who were forced to spend their lives endlessly roving in search of sustenance, which ill luck guaranteed to be always on the other side of the mountain. This group included paralytics and other invalids, poets, branded thieves, eccentrics, half-wits, girls, preachers, hunchbacks, fiddlers, and lunatics. One family came from out east in Rangárvellir, a man and his wife and five children; they’d squandered their livelihood and were on their way to their kinfolk south in Leira in the hope of fish. One of the children was at death’s door. They reported that the carcasses of itinerant vagrants lay scattered before men’s doors throughout the entire countryside to the east. Nineteen thieves had been branded at Rangárvellir in the winter and one hanged.
    The men from the packtrains had to stand guard over their loads of stockfish wherever they took lodging for the night. Tramps hung about on the footpaths and walls and provided various types of entertainment for anyone who wanted to listen, while the lepers reached out with their bare fingerbones and praised God. One particular fool stood up on a gablehead and performed a dismal routine that he called “The Ballad of Breaking Wind,” and he even charged small change for it. A preacher put on a woman’s riding frock and intoned for his in-laws, in the voice of the bishop of Skálholt and through a hardened cod-gill, the so-called
Gospel of Mark in the Midhouses,
about two daughters and two casks of whale suet: “. . . whoever dishonors my daughters at Yule will not get to see their glory at East-e-er.” Then he switched to the voice of the bishop of Hólar and sang: “The mouse jumped up to the altar and bit the candle with his long gray tail and his dark red sho-o-oes.” And in his very own voice he chanted:
    “Drat it, confound it, and fie,
What a piteous creature am I,
The loon waddles off in retreat,
Flapping on fumbly fe-e-ee-e-eet.”
    No one wanted to see or hear the fiddler, so they cut his fiddle strings.
    Finally the old woman asked the way eastward over Hellisheiði and said that she was thinking of continuing on that night.
    “Where’re you going?” somebody asked.
    She said she had a trifle of an errand with the bishop’s wife in Skálholt.
    The men stared at her vacantly. One said:
    “Didn’t two vagrant old crones die out on Hellisheiði on Easter night earlier this spring?”
    Another said: “The bailiffs have forbidden any further transport of beggars eastward over the great rivers.”
    A third, who seemed to be a beggar himself, said: “The tightwads to the east are in the mood for murder, my dear lady.”
    As evening wore on clouds gathered and it started to drizzle. The woman’s feet were sore. The birds twittered gladly and vigorously in the luminous night and the warm moss covering the lava was so lushly green that it illuminated the mist. The woman walked for so long that in the end her feet were no longer sore, but benumbed. She crept into a small hollow near the path and tried to rub some life back into them, then ate a bit of hardfish and recited a penitential hymn.
    “Oh, well then, so what if they did get caught out here on Easter night, the two old dears,” she murmured to herself between verses. “Oh, well no, so that’s the way it was, you poor old creatures.”
    In a moment she was fast asleep, her chin resting on her knees.
    Toward evening of the next day, when she’d come as far east as the Ölfus River, she found that everything she’d heard south of the heath was true: travel permits were being demanded of dubious individuals at the ferry landing. Waiting in a swarm of terns on a sandbank at the edge of the river were six vagrants, amongst them one corpse. The ferryman said no. One of the vagrants said that he’d tried to beg for milk at the nearest farm, but was told that the salmon were sucking the cows. He said he’d offered