Far North - Michael Ridpath [61]
Of course, that was the real reason she had liked to hang around the harbour, to be near him. She didn’t see him for days at a time. He would often arrive home after she had gone to bed, and be off again before she had woken up. But he loved her. His love for her was always unquestioning. It was to please him that she had worked so hard at school, that she had got a job in a bank, that she had earned so much money.
She was amazed that he had forgiven her for losing him all his savings. He had a hot temper and bore grudges, and his money was extremely important to him. She had been terrified that he would never forgive her.
But he had. Over time she realized that he had decided that she had been duped as well, that in his eyes she was just as much a victim as him. While this wasn’t true, Harpa was extremely grateful.
She looked at her watch. Only ten minutes until she was due back at the bakery. She didn’t want to abuse Dísa’s kindness, so she hurried to the bus stop and caught a number 13 back to Seltjarnarnes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MAGNUS’S SPIRITS ROSE as he drove north from Reykjavík. The clouds were blown away and the sun shone out of a pale blue sky. It felt good to fly along the open road, away from the people and the bustle of the city, the grey sea shimmering to his left, the mountains looming on his right.
The road plunged deep under Hvalfjördur, Whale Fjord, one of the deepest fjords in Iceland, swung through a valley between two fells and then crossed Borgarfjördur, its surface creased by strong currents. Just beyond the little town of Borgarnes, the road forked to the left. A couple of kilometres outside the town was the church of Borg, where Egill had lived, the hero of one of Magnus’s favourite sagas.
The sagas were like the great architectural monuments of other countries. In a land with no great settlements and precious few sizeable buildings, Icelanders looked to their literature for a sense of their identity, of their past. During his adolescence in America, and then later into adulthood, Magnus had read and reread these medieval tales obsessively, conjuring in his mind’s eye the heaths and fjords of Iceland in the tenth century.
They had become a refuge for a lone Icelandic kid who found himself overwhelmed by his big American Middle School. Egill was one of the most extraordinary characters from the sagas: a brave and cruel warrior, who fought against great odds in Norway and England, before returning to his farm at Borg. But he was also a poet, whose elegy to his drowned son Magnus knew by heart. It was kind of cool to be driving past his farm now.
It was a good road, almost empty of traffic. The flanks of the fells glowed orange and gold in the low autumn sun, and the sheep were rounded balls of wool, ready for the oncoming winter. Soon the Snaefells Peninsula approached, a backbone of ragged mountains with the Snaefells glacier itself a white dome at the western end capping a slumbering volcano. The entrance to the Centre of the Earth in Jules Verne’s book. Magnus took the turning at Vegamót up the pass and into the mountains. The road wound upwards, until he cleared the pass and Breidafjördur opened out before him.
He pulled over.
Beneath him was the Berserkjahraun, a frozen stream of rock spilling down towards the sea in dramatic folds of grey and green. In the foreground Swine Lake twisted around the edge of the lava, its water level low at this time of year. Then down by the seashore was the farm of Hraun, and on the other side of the little cove, nestling under its own huge fell, Bjarnarhöfn.
Magnus’s good spirits evaporated as he felt icy fingers clutch at his chest.