Sjon - From the Mouth of the Whale

Four summers ago the serpent brothers condemned me to exile, decreeing that anyone who offered me a helping hand would suffer the same punishment … On that terrible day, the site of the court was shrouded in libertine twilight … I noticed one man turn away when the sentence was read out; the blessed vice-principal Brynjólfur Sveinsson, a handsome, promising man who was only a guest there, though prepared in all humility to assume the office of the late venerable Bishop Oddur Einarsson, one-time disciple of Tycho Brahe and student of astronomy at his observatory in Hven … But the men of the south did not wish to accept the learned Brynjólfur’s offer of service in God’s acre, any more than they would suffer poor Jónas to administer his little spiritual plasters to the earthly afflictions of his neighbours … For a brief instant there was a gleam of sunlight through the darkness that loured over that assembly of wolves … As Nightwolf Pétursson’s hired thugs were driving me from the court with blows and ape-like howls, the younger brother of my old enemy, Sheriff Ari Magnússon of Ögur, saw his chance to trip me up at the gate, for the further amusement of the hyenas … A fall was prepared for me, but even as I was flying headlong into the mud, I felt a soft hand stroke along the chain where the irons chafed worst, and I was able to leave the court with my head held high … Throwing a quick glance over my shoulder I spotted Brynjólfur’s right hand vanishing into the sleeve of his cloak, for he it was who stood by the gatepost, but I could not fail to see that his wrist was guided by another hand, of milk-white maternal perfection: it was the Virgin Mary who led him to perform this act of mercy towards the miserable wretch for whom all succour was now banned by the law of the land … Blessed is he who is chosen as her instrument … That night all my wounds ceased their bleeding and filled the whole dungeon with the sweet scent of the lily … Jónas is the exile who cannot go anywhere … Twit-tweet … Whereas the sandpiper can fly away if his courage fails … But what might his piping ‘twit-tweet’ signify? Nothing, fortunately; he is only saying good day … A bird with such trivial news to impart surely harbours no bezoar in his skull … Twit-tweet … His low-lying brain-pan has nothing to offer the natural philosopher … No one would bother to ensnare him in order to char his little head since there is nothing of value concealed there: no healing stone or philosopher’s stone, no stone of any kind to protect against disorders of the blood or mind … No, there is no bezoar there … Bezoar! But I was not going to think about bezoar today … Bezoar! Bezoar! Bezoar! A volume containing scraps of wisdom from the works of Master Bombastus Paracelsus, translated from the German to Icelandic and inscribed with the name of the old schoolmaster at Skálholt, which arrived in Steingrímsfjord by crooked paths and was always hidden under my grandfather’s bed when strangers came to visit; this was the book from which I learnt to read and the first I learnt by heart … After which I read the old Saga of Bishop Gudmundur Arason … In that order … And things went as they did … For that is how my trials began, and who could have guessed that I would end up on this bird-fouled rock, this dance floor of seals? … But oh, what a joy it was to read! Once the letters had acquired their correct sounds and arranged themselves into words which I knew from my own speech and that of others; when the conjunction of the words begat all the explanations of the world and stories that together furnished my head from within, as if its bony vault were the walls of the gallery and libraries of the University of Copenhagen … places I will never see … For I am condemned to sit here alone, chattering to the foolish bird that most closely resembles me … Yes, sandpiper, let us not deceive ourselves about the rung we occupy on the ladder of human society … Although you can spread your wet wings and capture with them the far-travelled sunbeam, and I can hold up my thumb and forefinger till the moon is pinched between their tips like a pearl, neither of us will be able to hold on to our lucky catch … Enough of that, enough about you and enough about me; there is another they wish me to address and he is as grim as you are tender … I will not do it … No one can be expected to escape alive from wrestling with ancient revenants of dreadful power … I escaped from such an ordeal once before and doubt I could do so again … I would have done better to have kept quiet, kept my damned trap shut, instead of going around spewing out everything that shot up to the surface of the bottomless well of information and useless ideas that book-reading had etched in the leaf-mould of my mind, all boiling and bubbling like a potion in a magic cauldron … But no, of course I could not be quiet … I was forever blathering of bezoar … whose name alone is as intoxicating as the scent of the forbidden blossom on the Tree of Knowledge … I was drunk on the very idea of such a stone that could not only heal all human ailments but also prove useful to alchemists wise in the ways of converting base metal to gold … Wherever I went, wherever I broke my journey, I would ask after the carcass of a raven … Had anyone chanced upon a dead raven in the last few days or weeks? Yes, that is how it began … And should anyone remember having seen a dead raven, I would be off in a trice to examine it … Then one could find the child Jónas crawling into holes or scrambling up crags to retrieve the rotting hide of Corvus islandicus … For it was and still is my belief that the bezoar must be much more potent in the Icelandic raven than in its namesake elsewhere, on account of its affinity with that King of Fools, Odin, and his heathen tribe here in the north of the world … At any rate, I was nine years old when I began my quest for the cranial stone, which has now lasted fifty-three winters with no sign of success …

‘Look, here comes Hákon with his grandson; I don’t suppose he’ll be able to keep the lad quiet for long before the little fool starts harping on about where he can find some damned dead crow …’

Even when I stood silently at my grandfather’s side while he talked to the old men about the kinds of things old men talk about, I could not fail to notice the glances, the pauses, the questions in which they hoped to trap me … I used to maintain a stony silence until in the end I would tug Grandfather Hákon’s coat sleeve and ask:

‘Might I go and take a look in the kitchen, Grandpapa?’

Here was company more fitting for a youngster who had learnt to read from the writings of Dr Bombastus and acquired so great a knowledge of the abdomen that there was scarcely a female malady in existence that I did not have a nodding acquaintance with — I would always have a prescription up my sleeve for a poultice that would cure the affliction … I used to take my learning and my requests for dead ravens into the heat and smoke with the womenfolk … And from those kitchen visits I began to acquire something of a reputation as a physician … ‘Little Jónas the healer,’ they would say, for that is what the womenfolk called me, ‘give me some good news about this swelling I have …’ And the woman would grasp my hand and draw it under her clothes, laying it low down on her belly and dragging it back and forth over some lump in her flesh … I would close my eyes and summon up the book of medical art until it lay there open before my nose, the verso folio inside my left eyelid and the recto inside my right … Then I would turn the pages in my mind until I reached the part about that divinely created miniature likeness of man, woman, who must presumably obey the same laws of nature as the male, for he is a world in microcosm, made from the substance of the cosmos, and woman is made from his substance … There on the page I would find accounts of the principal female ailments and compare these to the news my hand was reading from the corporeal page of the woman whom I was to cure … Thus I read together book and woman until both merged into one and then all that was required was to read out the prescription for the medicine that accompanied the description of the disease … Sometimes the medicines were to be boiled, sometimes kneaded, sometimes hot and sometimes cold … But the examination always ended with my saying aloud: