Sjon - From the Mouth of the Whale

Mary went to church,

met a holy cross,

wore a key on her belt,

to unlock Heaven …

Almighty God and Peter

were singing there from books:

We shall go in summer

to visit our holy relics …

Please God, make the sun shine

on that fair hill,

where Mary milked her cow …

Then she took me by the hand and off we went to see the Peter Lamb … But when we went round the back of the farm buildings to meet Grandfather, I was met by an extraordinary sight … All the farmhands were gathered there, both men and women, as neatly combed and finely turned out as Grandmother and me … They were waiting for us … Grandfather Hákon led forward an old man with a nodding head and bent shoulders, clad in a cloak with the hood drawn down over his nose and holding a tall staff in his hand … He set off towards the mountain with us following in his wake … Grandfather Hákon went first with the menfolk hard on his heels, carrying torches which instead of being lit were painted a fiery red at one end:

‘So they won’t be seen all over the district …’ said one of the farmhands.

The women brought up the rear with us children … The man with the staff toiled up over the hayfields and no one but me fretted at his slow pace … I was wild with excitement to see the lamb … My grandmother kept a firm hold of my hand and I responded by dragging her along with all my might, leaning almost horizontally with the effort like a badly trained dog on a leash, but she would not be hurried … I thought the lamb must be one of the most remarkable creations on earth, given all this effort to make the visit so ceremonious and yet so secret … Ceremonious, for the people sang under the torches; secret, because the torches could not be lit and the singing was muted so as not to be heard beyond the procession … It was the seventh day of August and the summer nights were still light, though the shadow of the mountain had begun to turn blue in the evening and a stronger scent rose from the dewy grass of the farm mound in the morning … But the grassy farm knoll was not the only such mound in the world … When I saw where the procession was heading, I abruptly slackened my hold on my grandmother’s hand and pressed close to her skirts instead … Before us was a hummock known as the Mary Mound, near which we children had been strictly warned not to play our noisy games … We were told that it was the abode of the hidden people, who protected their home with magic spells … These warnings were invariably accompanied by tales of rash youths who in their eagerness to show off had advanced boldly into battle against the mound dwellers … All these youths lost their wits and ended their days tethered in stalls, lowing with the cattle … Some of the older children had heard human lowing of this kind on their travels to distant lands, such as the next farm but one in the valley, or even further afield, the farm beyond that, and I used to shudder when they mimicked the sound of these half-men … Now I leant backwards as I walked and dug in my heels, for from what I could tell the procession was headed to that very spot, the dreaded Mary Mound, where men went mad and were turned into beasts … How come they kept the Peter Lamb there of all places? Why on earth would they put the blessed little beast in such peril? And what might the lamb not turn into if it happened to graze on the mound and fall foul of the spells of the malevolent unseen power? My imagination gave birth to a monster as huge as the dreadful mound itself … A hairy sack that rolled inexorably along, dragging with it everything in its path … Man and beast alike were ensnared in the wet tangles of its wool and pulled inwards to the corpse-pale flesh which was covered all over with yellow sheep’s eyes, a coffin worm writhing in every one … That would be the last thing I saw before the monster rolled another ring around itself and crushed me on a rock … The material for this nightmarish vision was derived from the bloated carcass of a drowned ram that the older children had shown me at Hraunlón earlier that summer … I cried out:

‘I don’t want to see the lamb!’

And dropped into the grass … My grandmother jerked me briskly to my feet and pressed me close to her side without once breaking the rhythm of her stride or song … There was no escaping … For the remainder of the march I kept silent while the monster writhed and rolled and tumbled in my imagination … When the procession reached the Mary Mound, the crowd gathered in its lee so as not to be seen from the other farms … I had expected the Peter Lamb to greet us, bleating hungrily as is the custom of hand-reared lambs, but there was nothing here apart from the mound … The crowd fell to their knees and clasped their hands, all except Grandfather Hákon, the old man in the hooded cloak and two farm workers; I myself naturally copied my grandmother’s every move … Peeping over my clasped fingers, I cast around for the lamb … Instead I saw the farmhands remove spades from under their coats and, on my grandfather’s orders, start to break soil on the mound … They inserted the spades into gaps between the tussocks and sliced the turf crosswise, top and bottom, then down the slope from the middle of the upper cut to the middle of the lower one, until it resembled nothing so much as a pair of church doors as tall as a man … Now each of the farmhands stuck his spade deep under a door, thereby loosening the turf from the soil … After this, they peeled aside the doors, laying them back on the slope on either side like the panels of an altarpiece, revealing a rectangle filled with black earth … I was deeply unimpressed by my grandfather’s foolhardiness and could not understand why the good man should amuse himself by disturbing the peace of the cruel forces that dwelt in the Mary Mound, but then things took a turn for the worse … Grandfather fetched from his pouch a thick hog-bristle brush and began to sweep it along the soil at head height … I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my forehead against my clasped hands: the spirits would not like this … At that moment I heard a new sound: the gentle clacking of wooden beads … Rosaries dropped from the sleeves of the people in the crowd and they began to tell them with sighs and moans, calling forth in my breast a mixture of laughter and anguish which I had never before realised could exist in the same place … The brush whisked in my grandfather Hákon’s hand … The man in the cloak drew back his hood and at last I could glimpse something of his face: nose and eyes … a tuft of hair on the nose, the blue eyes vacant … Thrusting his staff into the spongy ground, he leant on it with his left hand while producing a small book from his scrip with his right … The brush sent the last crumbs of the thin layer of earth whirling away to reveal underneath a layer of mottled sand from the seashore … Grandfather wielded the brush on the sand with the same dexterity, working faster the deeper down he got … Meanwhile, in a reassuring and unexpectedly boyish voice, the hairy-nosed, poached-eyed man with the staff began to read aloud from the little volume that lay open in his hand, without once looking at it:

‘ Transitus Mariae … On the day when the glorious Queen of Heaven and Earth, the Holy Mary, passed away, all the Lord’s apostles were present … And wise authorities tell us that wherever each of the apostles had been standing previously, he was raised from there by angelic power and set down on the spot where the Holy Mary died … For God’s angel was sent by the Lord to raise up each of the apostles and carry him many days’ journey through the air in the winking of an eye to bring him to this place …’