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

jug—and then the men turned to leave. They climbed out of the hole, dragged the ladder up behind them, closed the shutters and drove home the bars, then turned the keys in the locks. Afterward everything was quiet. It was pitch-black; not a thing could be seen. Jón Hreggviðsson sang:
    “The soldier entreated and got his way
A maid to lie in sport and play
Increased our love as there we lay
Increased our love as there we lay:
—Though at first she answered ‘nay.’ ”
    Jón Hreggviðsson sat in this prison and sang the
Elder Ballad of
Pontus
throughout the whole winter and on into summer.
    Time did not pass by in the usual three-hour intervals in this place, so the days could not be counted; there was in fact no way to distinguish day and night, and the prisoner had nothing to do to while away the hours. A basket of food was lowered down to him once a day, sometimes twice, but beyond this he had little contact with the outside world.
    In all actuality he had almost completely forgotten what humans were when the first guests were sent to join him, so he was overjoyed to greet them. There were two of them, melancholy-looking fellows, and they received his greeting coldly. He asked them who they were and where they lived but they were reluctant to answer. When he finally managed to get them to talk he found out that one of them was called Ásbjörn Jóakimsson, from Seltjarnarnes, and the other, Hólmfastur Guðmundsson, from Hraun.
    “Well now,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “The men of Hraun have always been damned criminals. But I always thought that folk from Seltjarnarnes were good-natured.”
    Both men had been sentenced to flogging. It was apparent, not only from their reluctance to answer and their haughty way of speaking, but also from the earnest way in which each pondered his own lot, that these were well-to-do men. Jón Hreggviðsson continued to interrogate them and to prattle. It turned out that this Ásbjörn Jóakimsson had refused to row one of the regent’s messengers over Skerjafjörður. Hólmfastur Guðmundsson, for his part, had been sentenced to lose his skin for having traded four fish for some pieces of cord in Hafnarfjörður, instead of having delivered the fish to the merchant in Keflavík—his farm belonged to the Keflavík trade district according to the king’s new regulations relegating control of the trade monopoly to district authorities.
    “What was your excuse for not delivering the fish to the merchant in the district where my Most Gracious Sire commanded you to do business?” asked Jón Hreggviðsson.
    The man said that he couldn’t get any cord from the king’s merchant in Keflavík—nor, for that matter, from the merchant in Hafnarfjörður, though a most considerate man at the trading booth had let him have a tiny piece. “And to think that this should have happened to me, Hólmfastur Guðmundsson,” said the man in conclusion.
    “You’d have done better to use the cord to hang yourself,” said Jón Hreggviðsson.
    Ásbjörn Jóakimsson was less of a talker than his brother-to-beflogged.
    “I’m tired,” he said. “Isn’t there any place here for a man to sit down?”
    “No,” said Jón Hreggviðsson. “This is no parlor. This plank is for me alone and I won’t give it up. And don’t you be roving around there by the chopping block—you might knock down my jug, which is holding my water.”
    There was a moment of silence, until someone sighed heavily in the darkness.
    “But my name is Hólmfastur Guðmundsson.”
    “What about it?” said the other. “Don’t I also have a name? Doesn’t everyone have a name? I have the feeling that it doesn’t really matter what we’re named.”
    “When has anyone ever read in the old books that the Danes sentenced a man with my name to the whip, in his very own land, Iceland?”
    “The Danes beheaded Bishop Jón Arason* himself,” said Ásbjörn Jóakimsson.
    “If someone here wants to start slandering my