Hannah Kent - Burial Rites

He took me from that awful room, and other men joined us as he led me through the unlit corridor. They were silent, but I felt them behind me; I felt their stares as though they were cold handgrips upon my neck. Then, after months in a room filled only with my own fetid breath and the stench from the chamber pot, I was taken through the corridors of Stóra-Borg into the muddy yard. And it was raining.

How can I say what it was like to breathe again? I felt newborn. I staggered in the light of the world and took deep gulps of fresh sea air. It was late in the day: the wet mouth of the afternoon was full on my face. My soul blossomed in that brief moment as they led me out of doors. I fell, my skirts in the mud, and I turned my face upwards as if in prayer. I could have wept from the relief of light.

A man reached down and pulled me from the ground as one wrests a thistle that takes root in a place it does not belong. It was then that I noticed the crowd that had gathered. At first I did not know why these people stood about, men and women alike, each still and staring at me in silence. Then I understood that it was not me they stared at. I understood that these people did not see me . I was two dead men. I was a burning farm. I was a knife. I was blood.

I didn’t know what to do in front of these people. Then I saw Rósa, watching from a distance, clutching the hand of her little daughter. It was a comfort to see someone I recognised, and I smiled involuntarily. But the smile was wrong. It unlocked the crowd’s fury. The servant women’s faces twisted, and the silence was broken by a sudden, brief shriek from a child: Fjandi ! Devil! It burst into the air like an explosion of water from a geyser. The smile dropped from my face.

At the sound of the insult, the crowd seemed to awaken. Someone gave a brittle laugh and the child was hushed and led away by an older woman. One by one, they all left to return indoors or to continue their chores, until I was alone with the officers in the drizzle, standing in stockings stiff with dried sweat, my heart burning under my filthy skin. When I looked back, I saw that Rósa had disappeared.

Now we are riding across Iceland’s north, across this island washing in its waters, sulking in its ocean. Chasing our shadows across the mountains.

They have strapped me to the saddle like a corpse being taken to the burial ground. In their eyes I am already a dead woman, destined for the grave. My arms are tethered in front of me. As we ride this awful parade, the irons pinch my flesh until it bloodies in front of my eyes. I have come to expect harm now. Some of the watchmen at Stóra-Borg compassed my body with small violences, chronicled their hatred towards me, a mark here, bruises, blossoming like star clusters under the skin, black and yellow smoke trapped under the membrane. I suppose some of them had known Natan.

But now they take me east, and although I am tied like a lamb for slaughter, I’m grateful that I am returning to the valleys where rocks give way to grass, even if I will die there.

As the horses struggle through the tussocks, I wonder when they will kill me. I wonder where they will store me, cellar me like butter, like smoked meat. Like a corpse, waiting for the ground to unfreeze before they can pocket me in the earth like a stone.

They do not tell me these things. Instead, they set me in iron cuffs and lead me around, and like a cow I go where I am led, and there’s no kicking or it’s the knife. It’s the rope and a grim end. I put my head down, go where they take me and hope it’s not to the grave, not yet.

The flies are bad. They crawl on my face and into my eyes, and I feel the tiny ticking of their legs and wings. It’s the sweat that draws them. These irons are too heavy for me to swat them away. They were built for a man, although they screw tight enough against my skin.

Still, it is a consolation to have movement, to have the warmth of a horse under my legs: to feel the life in something and to not be so cold. I’ve been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow. Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones. So yes, it’s better to be outside now. Even with the air full of flies it’s better to be going somewhere than rotting slowly in a room like a body in a coffin.

Beyond the hum of insects and the rhythm of the horses at their walk, I hear a distant roar. Maybe it’s the ocean — the constant thundering of waves hitting the sands of Thingeyrar. Or perhaps I am imagining it. The sea gets into your head. Like Natan used to say, once you let it in, it doesn’t leave you alone. Like a woman, he said. The sea is a nag.

It was that first spring at Illugastadir. The light had arrived like a hunted thing, all wide-eyed and trembling. The sea was blank — Natan pushed the boat along its silvered skin, plunged his oars in its side.

‘As quiet as a churchyard,’ he had said, smiling, his arms heaving with the pull of water. I heard the creak of wood and the whispered cuss of the oars slapping the surface of the sea. ‘Be good when I’m gone.’

Don’t think of him.

How long have we been riding? An hour? Two? Time’s as slippery as oil. But it can’t have been more than two hours. I know these parts. I know we are now heading south, perhaps towards Vatnsdalur. Strange, how my heart grips to my ribs in an instant. How long has it been since I last saw this part of the country? A few years? More? Nothing has changed.

This is as close to home as I’ll ever be now.

We are passing through the strange hills at the mouth of the valley and I hear the caw of ravens. Their dark shapes look like omens against the brilliant blue of the sky. All those nights at Stóra-Borg, in that damp, miserable bed, I imagined I was outside, feeding the ravens at Flaga. Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness. As a child, I watched the ravens gather on the roof of Undirfell church, hoping to learn who was going to die. I sat on the wall, waiting for one to shake out his feathers, waiting to see which direction his beak turned. It happened once. A raven settled upon the wooden gable and jerked his beak towards the farm of Bakki, and a little boy drowned later that week, found swollen and grey downriver. The raven had known.

Sigga was unschooled in nightmares and ghosts. One night, knitting together at Illugastadir, we heard a raven’s shriek coming from the sea that chilled us to the core. I told her never to call out to, nor feed a raven at night. Birds heard cawing in the dark are spirits, I said, and they would murder you soon as look at you. I scared her, I’m sure, or she wouldn’t have said the things she said later.

I wonder where Sigga might be now. Why they refused to keep her with me at Stóra-Borg. They took her away one morning when I was in irons, not telling me where she was held, although I asked more than once. ‘Away from you,’ they said, ‘and that is enough.’

‘Agnes Magnúsdóttir!’

The man riding beside me has a hard look on his face.

‘Agnes Magnúsdóttir. I’m to inform you that you’re to be held at Kornsá, until the time of your execution.’ He is reading something. His eyes flicker down to his gloves. ‘As a criminal condemned by the court of this land, you have forfeited your right to freedom.’ He folds the piece of paper and slips it in his glove. ‘You’d do well to wipe that scowl off your face. They’re gentle people at Kornsá.’

Here, man. Here is your smile. Is it a good one? Do you see my lips crack? Do you see my teeth?

He passes my mare, and the back of his shirt is damp with sweat. Have they done it on purpose? Kornsá, of all places.