Sjon - The Whispering Muse

‘On the appointed day, Gudrun Gjukadottir went to the palace, armed with an axe and a large cauldron. She sat herself down in the middle of the banqueting hall, filled the cauldron with herbs and water and lit a good fire underneath. Then she led a black billy goat into the hall and chopped it up into seven pieces with the axe, hacking head and limbs from the trunk, which she then cut in two and placed in the pot. As the cauldron boiled, bubbled and flashed red in the steam, the witch chanted her ancient incantations, stirring the soup all the while. After a brief space she thrust an arm into the cauldron and drew out a bleating kid. It was black, with the same white star on its forehead as the old billy goat that seemed to have been reborn before the eyes of those present. The princesses clapped their hands and twirled around: the time had come for their aged father to be rejuvenated by the same charm.

‘The daughters of Lemnos gloated over his fate but it pierced our Argonaut hearts to hear such gruesome events treated as entertainment. However, mindful of the women’s unspoken, and far from guaranteed, promises of unconditional compliance, we took care not to offend them with our dismay.

‘The poetess was darker than our Lemnian hostesses. Her skin took on a blue sheen as she plucked the pearl-inlaid lyre, her body swaying back and forth with the rhythm, the shawl at times veiling the fair-voiced poetess and her instrument like a coal-green wave. And so the third part of the story began. The woman’s deep voice resonated from within the gossamer twilight of her veil as she performed for us the denouement of the tale:

‘Sigurd Fafnir’s-bane and Gudrun Gjukadottir were living in exile after the murder of Attila. Gudrun was content, having borne him two promising sons, Hogni and Gjuki, but Sigurd resented their poverty. He met Princess Brynhild while out walking one day and fell in love with her. She in turn was greatly impressed that such a widely renowned dragon slayer should want her for his wife. Together they convinced her father Grim that Sigurd had taken no part in Gudrun’s appalling crimes and that he was a fitting guest for the royal palace and a worthy husband for Brynhild. As the poetess described the moment when Sigurd informed Gudrun of his intention to divorce her and send her away as he was going to marry Brynhild and keep their sons, we men assumed that a lively marriage farce would now ensue in place of the gory tale of horror, so we laughed even louder than the women.

‘What none of us knew that evening on Lemnos was that the song in which the dark poetess’s voice was raised prophesied the fate of our beloved captain Jason — the hero who lost everything was none other than he.

‘The day before Sigurd and Brynhild’s wedding, Gudrun gave her sons by Sigurd a gift for their father’s new bride; a deadly poisonous robe that would slay first Brynhild and then King Grim when he tried to save his daughter. It must have been the saddest hour of my life when I saw the flash of laughter in Jason’s eyes, yes, he laughed out loud with Queen Hypsipyle when the song reached its climax in the description of how the scorned wife murdered her own children. For this deed Gudrun employed no sorcery, merely locked herself in the house with Hogni and Gjuki, Sigurd’s sons, and hunted the little boys down before hacking them both to death with their father’s halberd. After this Gudrun wrapped herself in the swan’s-feather cloak and took to the skies, gleaming silver-white against the newly kindled winter moon. Sigurd Fafnir’s-bane, meanwhile, gave way to despair and ended his days a beggar.

‘Overcome with giggles, the sisters of Lemnos chimed in with the dusky poetess as she sang the final lines:

Unquenchable and terrible is the hate

that quickens when the fires of love abate.

‘Of course, Jason was intoxicated with wine and the presence of the queen who lay pressed to his side, entwining him in her white arms and raising her left knee to lay it against his inner thigh — but in my heart I hope that he heard an echo of his future in the poem and hid his dread with this pretence so that the rest of us would not be daunted. Yet if it occurred to any of the sailors that the events of the poem had a strange resonance with the destination of the Argo and her valiant captain, the thought had evaporated like yesterday’s rain shower by the time the men rose, befuddled and satisfied, from their couches. It was not until years later when we finally learnt the truth about the terrible fate of the men of Lemnos that we understood why their womenfolk’s humour was so black.

‘That same night while the crew of the Argo lay with Hypsipyle’s court ladies, the men who were guarding the ship witnessed a strange event. The lad Hylas, page of Heracles, told how at midnight a tall, dark, slender-limbed woman appeared on the shore. She walked with light steps to a bank of seaweed, drew from beneath it a silver-grey sealskin, swept it around herself and made for the sea. A wave greeted her, enveloping the supple body like a green-black shawl, and the seal slipped away through the sea like a note leaping from the string of a lyre.

‘This was the seal woman Psamathe, sister to the sea nymph Thetis, the same who piloted the Argo on her homeward voyage through the Straits of Messina where the she-monsters Scylla and Charybdis lay in wait beneath the cliffs on either side, eager to feast on our flesh.’

ON 13 APRIL I noted in my diary that the weather was fine though a little nippy. I imagine there’s a calm here most of the year round since we are enclosed by mountains and I have difficulty working out where the wind could come from. It’s as if we were in a funnel where only the upper airs are visible — and tangible, for here it can really bucket down with rain, as I discovered at noon when I came up on deck intending to fish for more cod.

Even if it hadn’t been raining, any further attempt at fishing would have been hampered by my inability to find my tackle, though I had conscientiously put it away in a box full of marlin spikes and other such paraphernalia that stood in the corner behind the big capstan. I suspect the purser’s lady friend of having a hand in this, as ever since our slap-up dinner yesterday evening she has been distinctly crabby, even actively hostile towards me. This morning when I came to the breakfast table she got up at once, asked the company to excuse her and walked out of the saloon without a glance in my direction.

Her change of heart occurred after she saw me give the ship’s cook (or ‘chef’, as he’s called) the big cod, which he then prepared and served according to my instructions. Today at lunchtime a soup was made from the head and bones, the chopped-up cheeks floating in stock with carrots, bay leaves, peppercorns and onion, and yet there was still more than enough left over to make a fish stew for tonight’s supper.

Anyway, the purser’s lady friend seemed to regard this contribution of mine to our little community on board the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen as a criticism of her boyfriend’s job. And of course she was right that my actions were motivated by more than a mere appetite for seafood: I felt that on the maiden voyage of this new vessel of the Kronos line it would have done the purser credit to have been guided by Jung-Olsen and his son’s ideals when it came to buying in provisions — and he himself certainly took the hint and swallowed it without rancour. If anything, I would have expected his lady friend to be grateful to me for eking out their stores, thus enabling them to profit still further from the illicit trade in which they and the cook were engaged.

Last night I started awake at the sound of voices in the saloon. Although they were trying to be quiet, I overheard a business transaction that would not have tolerated the light of day: strange voices were haggling over the price of tinned ham but the purser’s lady friend wasn’t budging an inch. Apparently the problem is rife among the prosperous Danish shipping lines whose pursers and cooks make a killing by selling off provisions on the side; many of them even have regular customers in foreign ports. I don’t know what the woman would do if she knew I had overheard the couple’s secret commerce.