He Who Wore the Name

The house at Barð was a long ridge of turf and driftwood and stone, built against the slope of a hill on the cold side of the fjord. The walls were stone to the knee and turf above the stone, cut from the bog below the home-field and laid course upon course, six feet through at the base, and the roof timbers were driftwood — gray wood the sea had peeled and salted and left on the black beaches to the north for men to haul home behind horses. Below the home-field the land went down in hummocked grass to the water. Three rooms joined by a passage, a fourth that was a kitchen, a narrow side-chamber where a woman might, if she had reason, lie down unseen. At the lower end of the ridge, separated by a door of thick fir planks, was the stable.

She was Kristín Einardóttir. She was twenty-four that autumn, and she was not from that part of the country. She had come from the east, over the hill road in the last week before the snow, with a wooden trunk on a borrowed horse and a thin shawl of her own weaving folded on top of the trunk. She had married, the summer before, a man named Jósef Jónsson — tall, strong, capable, as the phrase went, of the work of two. Duglegur maður. A hard-working man.

She was not welcomed there. The old woman in the main house would not say her name. The cousins would not sit beside her at a meal. She noted all of it. She did not complain. Her arthritic hands were already, at twenty-four, the hands of a woman of forty. The black sand of the beach two miles away, which she had walked barefoot in her second week because a ewe had gone into the surf, had made her shout aloud when she walked on it. She had gone the two miles at a half-run with her boots in her hand, and waded to the waist in the surf, and taken the ewe by the wool of its neck and hauled it out, and stood on the black sand with the animal coughing at her feet, and the sand had burned her bare soles like a cold iron.

She had shouted once, on the beach, into the wind.

Nobody had heard her.

In the summer of 1883, when her labor came, it came suddenly. It was the twenty-eighth of July. The hay stood ready on the home-field, the sheep had been up on the hill pasture since June, and she had gone down to the well below the house for water, as she went every morning. The morning had a thin wind off the fjord, and the fjord was gray, and the mountains across it had kept their snow. She had drawn the water and taken up the bucket, and the bucket was oak, iron-hooped, and heavy when it was full. She set down the bucket of water she was carrying from the well, she straightened, and she knew. The pain went over her and away and left the morning standing where it had been. She did not say anything. She bent and turned the bucket square in the grass so that it would not tip, and she stood a moment with one hand on the small of her back, looking up at the house.

Smoke stood off the kitchen roof and bent away east. From the yard she could hear the house going about its forenoon — the small dry turning of a spinning wheel, a voice saying something to another voice, the words lost in six feet of turf. A dog lay in the yard with its chin on its paws. The house had a place for what was coming. The side-chamber off the passage was narrow and dark and there was a bed in it, and the women of the house knew the work; they would have come, the old woman and the cousins, with water and cloths and their hands.

She went in at the near end of the passage, took the shawl from the peg by her bed, and the spinning wheel did not pause. She walked calmly down the passage and out the kitchen door and along the turf wall to the stable, and she opened the stable door, and she went inside. The door was heavy on its iron hinge, and she moved it slowly, and it did not sound.

The stable smelled of the animals. The cow and the horse were out at grass below the home-field, as they were turned out every summer morning, and the stalls stood empty — the cow's stall, the horse's, the low pen kept for the ewes at lambing — but the smell of them had gone into the earth floor and into the wood and stayed: hay and dung and warm hide, a night smell keeping through the empty day. A slant of light came in through a chink in the roof boards. Dust hung in the slant. Along the wall under the rafters ran the manger, a trough of gray driftwood planks, its rail worn smooth by the necks of cows. In the rafters, tight against a crossbeam, was the moss-cup of a wheatear's nest, with a mother bird in it, small-bodied, bright-eyed, unmoving. She looked at the bird. The bird looked at her.

The wheatear did not fly.

Kristín closed the door. The latch went down without a sound, and the light in the stable came down to the one slant from the roof and the seams of brightness around the door planks. She walked across the stable floor to the back wall, where the straw was banked against the wood, and she sat down. She took the shawl — the shawl of her own weaving — and she laid it in her lap.

Then she did what women in that country, in that century, had done in stables for a thousand years.

She labored alone.

The pains came at first with long ground between them. In the ground between them there was time, and she used it. She pulled more straw down off the bank and packed it under her hips and in against the small of her back. She set her heels into the floor and found the places where the packed earth would hold them. She put her hair up off her neck and bound it with its own end, and undid the laces at her sides as far as they needed undoing. She put the shawl off her lap, folded once, onto the straw beside her, where her hand would find it without looking, and her fingers went out along its edge, along the selvage she had woven, and came back. Then she sat with her hands open on her knees and watched the slant of light where it stood on the floor by the door. It was the only thing in the stable that moved.

Between the pains the stable was still. The light stood in its slant. The bird sat her nest. The straw ticked under her when she shifted her weight, and settled, and was quiet, and her breath came back down to its own pace, and she sat and listened. The sheep, far off. The birds. The small wind working at the chink. Then the next pain stood up in her back and came around her, and she put her heels into the floor and went back to the work.

When the next pain had gone over her she got up and walked. Four steps took her from the straw bank to the cow's stall, and four steps took her back, and she walked them, one hand trailing along the rail of the manger, down and back, down and back. Standing was better than sitting while the standing lasted. When a pain came she stopped and took the rail in both hands and put her head down between her arms and stood into it, and when it had gone she walked again. The rail was smooth under her hand the whole length of the floor. A pain was eight breaths long. She breathed the eight. The slant of light had moved the width of a hand along the floor before the walking was done. Above her the wheatear kept the nest.

Outside the wall the sheep called to one another on the hill, and were answered, and moved on. There were birds in the grown grass of the roof and in the angelica below the wall, and they sang; it was the end of July, and they went on with it through the whole of the day. Once, the wind shifting, the smell of the kitchen fire came in through the chink — peat smoke, and under it boiled fish — and went away again. The house was at its midday meal. Of the house she could hear nothing. The house could hear nothing of her.

The ground between the pains shortened the way dry sand shortens ahead of a making tide — each reach of water a little farther up the shore than the reach before it, until there is no dry sand left and the work is all one work. She went back into the straw when the pains no longer let her up, and put her back against the bank and her heels into the floor. When a pain came she let it go over her, and her breath went down low with it. The sounds she made were not words. They were the sounds of heavy work — of a weight taken up at the bad end of a plank, held, and set down — and the turf took them, and the stable kept them. The pains were twelve breaths long now, and deeper, and she left off counting them. Between one pain and the next she watched the light. The slant had come off the doorsill; it lay along the floor now, reaching toward the cow's stall, and the dust turned in it. She was thirsty. The water she had drawn that morning stood in the grass by the well, fifty steps and a turf wall away. She breathed, and waited for the next one, and the next one came.

The birds sang through all of it.

The work took her onto her knees. She knelt in the straw with her forearm on the rail of the manger and her head down on her forearm, and her hair came loose of its binding and hung past her face, and she let it hang. Sweat ran on her back and went cold between her shoulders. The pains had no ground between them now; the water was over the last of the sand. Her arthritic hands closed on the worn rail, and the rail held. She pushed. She breathed. She pushed.

When the baby came, she caught him.

He was blue, and then red, and then a color that was neither. She cleared his mouth with the pad of her smallest finger. He coughed once, and then he cried, and the wheatear in the rafters finally shifted, a half-inch, on her nest.

The cry was thin, and the stable held it, and over the cry, in the roof and in the grass outside the wall, the birds went on singing as they had sung all day.

Kristín wrapped him in the shawl. She waited for the afterbirth, and that was its own waiting, and she did it as she had done the rest, with her back against the wood. When it came, she wrapped it separately in a piece of sacking and set the sacking aside in the straw. Her hands were slow now, and she let them be slow, and they did each thing in its order. A shaking came over her then, hard, the way cold came, though she was not cold. She held the baby through it and it passed.

She sat in the straw against the back wall, with her son wrapped in the shawl of her own weaving, and she stayed there for a long time. The light moved off her knee and up the opposite wall. The baby was warm. The sweat dried on her back. The ache stood up in her hands, and she let her hands lie open in the straw. Once she opened the shawl and looked at him, the whole of him, and wrapped him again. The smell of the stable had blood in it now, and under the blood the old smell of the animals, and the straw, and the summer coming in through the chink with the light. The slant left the floor altogether and stood on the wall, and went slowly up it, and turned the color of late day. The singing outside thinned to single voices and the sheep on the hill went quiet, and the wind off the fjord dropped, the way it dropped on that coast at the end of an afternoon. Up in the rafters the wheatear sat her nest as she had sat it all day. Down at the house the dog barked once, and stopped. By the well the bucket stood full in the grass where she had set it down that morning. She was still thirsty. She stayed where she was. The baby breathed against her, small even breaths, and the breaths were the loudest sound in the stable.

She did not weep. She did not pray. She sat, and she watched.

What she thought, in those hours, belongs to her.

Her husband found them at dusk.

He was thirty. He had gone down to the harbor at Oddeyri early, and he had worked the full day there, loading salted fish into the hold of the Danish trading ship. The fish came off the dock stacked like cordwood. The sling went out over the water, and down into the hold, and came up empty, and was filled again. Down in the hold the fish were stacked again, tier on tier, in a dark that smelled of brine and tar, and a man's eyes came up out of that dark into the day and went back down into it, hour after hour. It was work that did not change from hour to hour — lift, carry, lower, turn — and by noon a man stopped counting slings, and by evening the counting was in his arms instead. When the last sling came up empty he started home. The slope took him up out of the harbor's noise, past the home field where the cow and the horse stood waiting at the wall to be taken in for the night, and they came up the slope behind him, and the day was still in his body as he climbed. It was in his forearms. It was in the small of his back. It was in his hands, which had held wet rope since morning and were slow to be anything else. He came up the slope smelling of tar and salt and wet wool, and the light went as he came, taking the colors first and the shapes after.

The stable door was closed.

He stood for a second looking at it. The stable door was not, on an ordinary evening, closed. He had come up that slope on a thousand evenings, and on the ordinary ones the door stood open or stood ajar, and the sound of the animals came out of it into the yard. Now the yard was quiet. The house behind him was quiet. He listened, and heard nothing he could name. Nothing in his day had told him anything, and the door stood in the dusk with the last of the light on the grain of its boards and told him only that it was closed. He put his hand on the latch. The latch was cold, and worn smooth where hands had worn it. He opened it.

He saw the straw. He saw his wife against the back wall. He saw the shawl.

He saw the baby.

The stable at that hour held more dark than light. The cow came in past him to her stall, and the horse after her, the way they came in every evening of their lives, and their warmth went with them into the dark and stood there like a second room inside the first, and the stable smelled of the animals, of the day's hay, and, under them, faintly, of blood. The shawl he knew; it was the shawl of her own weaving. What the shawl held he had never seen before. In the rafters the wheatear sat her nest and did not fly. One of the animals shifted its feet in the bedding and was still.

He did not speak at first.

He stood in the doorway, in his boots, a big man against the dim light outside, and something happened in his face that was not of his usual faces — the harbor face, the in-laws face, the drinking face. There was, for a second, only the man who had been a boy once, and who had a son now.

For the space of a few breaths nobody moved. The man stood in the door with the dusk behind him, and the woman sat in the straw with the child, and the animals stood in their places, and the bird sat in the rafters, and nothing in the stable moved. The dusk came in past him at the door and lay down the middle of the floor.

Kristín watched him from the straw. She had been in the stable since morning. Her back ached where the wall had held it, and her arms ached where the labor had been, and the tiredness in her was past the kind that asks for anything. She sat where she had sat all day, with the baby in the shawl at her breast and the wool of it rough against the inside of her arm, and she watched her husband in the doorway, and waited to see which of him had come in. The open door had let the cool of the evening in with him, and the cool reached her across the floor, and she drew the shawl closer around the baby.

He crossed the floor and knelt in the straw beside her. For a big man he came down quietly. He did not say anything.

He reached. Then he stopped, and wiped his hands on his trousers, one and then the other. The wiping did not change them much. His hands came out, rope-scarred, thick-fingered, the knuckles crusted with the fish-pickle. He had not washed. They were hands that had moved some tons of fish since morning. He took the baby from her — one hand under the head and one under the legs, her arms giving up the weight slowly, his taking it slowly — and he lifted the baby up into what was left of the light.

The light was nearly done. What there was of it came in at the open door behind him and down through the chink in the roof boards, grey, with the red already out of it. He held the baby up into it. The baby weighed less than any one thing he had lifted that day. He held him braced, and the brace had nothing to do, and he knelt there with his arms ready for a weight that did not come. He turned a little on his knees, to bring the small face around into the grey of the door. The face was dark red, and creased, and the eyes were shut tight, as if the light, even that little of it, were a thing to be kept out.

He looked at him for a long time.

The stable made its sounds. The animals breathed in the dark, and shifted, and were still again. The wheatear did not move. The baby did not cry; he worked his mouth, and brought one fist up beside his face, and was still. The man's breathing slowed. It had been quick from the slope, and it slowed, and as his breathing slowed his arms settled, until the baby lay in the air on two steady hands. The arms had been tired when he came up the slope. Holding the baby, they were not tired. That was a fact he did not examine. He knelt in the straw with his son held up into the grey of the doorway, and the light went a shade further down while he knelt there, and the long time went on, and nothing in the stable asked it to end. The light kept going while he knelt. The grey at the door thinned, and the straw lost its color, and the cool of the evening lay along the floor where the dusk had lain. His knees took the cold of the floor through the straw, and the day pulled in the small of his back, and he stayed down. One of the animals let out a long breath in the dark, and shifted its feet in the bedding, and was still. He did not bring his arms down. The arms held, and the light went, and he knelt there with his son in the air between his two hands. Kristín watched her husband hold her son. She could see his face from where she sat. She could see the thing that was happening in his face and the way it was trying not to happen. She saw him blink twice.

Then he laughed.

It was one short ragged laugh, the kind of laugh a man makes when a thing is too much for him and he is making a noise to get the too-much out of his chest, and he said —

Jói Kempan.

Little Jói. The champion.

The baby, being half a day old, did not respond. The wheatear above them shifted on her nest and made a small chipping sound and settled again. Nobody said anything after that. The animals went on breathing. The two words stayed in the stable, where they had been said.

Kristín, in the straw, heard the two syllables, and she understood something her husband did not know he was telling her. She understood that what he had just said to his son was the tenderest thing he knew how to say, and that he had said it because the child was too new to have disappointed him. He had given it at half a day old, in a stable, with no witnesses except her and a nesting bird. So Jósef, in the stable, had laughed and said the sweetest name his mouth knew how to say, and then he had stopped.

It was the first tender thing.

He handed the baby back to her — the same two hands, one under the head, one under the legs, the weight going out of them as carefully as it had come in. He looked at her face for a moment, as though he might say something else, and then he did not say anything else. He stood up, and his knees took him up heavily, like the end of a second day's work. He said he was going to get her some broth. He walked out of the stable into the last of the light and closed the door behind him. The latch fell. Through the wall she heard his boots going down the yard, quick.

She sat with her son against the back wall, and she did not cry.

The broth came, eventually, in a bowl with a cloth over it. She drank it with one hand, the other under the shawl. It was hot, and she was glad of it, and she did not say so. So did a candle come, and a blanket, and the old woman from the main house, who sat on an upended crate and said four words in two hours and none of them her name. She did not ask to hold the baby. She sat. So did the cousins come, in a kind of procession, two at a time, smelling of the kitchen they had just left. None of them stayed long, and none of them brought anything for the child. They stood at the edge of the straw with their hands at their sides and looked at the baby, the way people look at something that has happened rather than something that has been done, and the stable was a stable, they said; it was no place to have a baby.

You ought to come inside, one of them said.

She did not come inside.

The cousins went, two at a time, the way they had come. The old woman went last, and pulled the door to behind her, and the latch fell. The candle stood on the crate and burned. Its light reached the rafters and put a small shadow under the wheatear's nest, and the bird sat above the light the way she had sat above the labor, unmoving. The warmth of the animals held the room. The baby fed and slept against her, and woke, and fed, and slept. Outside, the yard went quiet, and then the house beyond the yard went quiet, and what was left was the stable — the candle, the straw, the breathing of the animals, the small breathing inside the shawl. At some hour the candle went out, and she let it go. The night, in that season, did not go fully dark; the chink in the roof boards held a grey that was neither evening nor morning, and the stable held its warm dark with breathing in it. The baby woke her twice more, and fed, and slept. The hours were the candle, and then the grey in the chink, and they did not need counting. Once in the night one of the animals knocked the wall with a hoof, and the sound went around the stable and settled, and the baby did not wake. The wheatear made no sound. Toward morning the cold came down off the mountain and stood against the stable walls, and the warmth of the animals held it off, and in the straw against the back wall the woman and the baby were warm. Then there were sounds from up at the house — a door, a bucket at the well, a voice that was not raised — and the grey in the chink turned to a color, and the morning was there.

She came inside the next morning, when she was ready. She got up from the wall slowly, in stages, and she went back the way she had come — along the turf wall, in at the kitchen door — with the shawl over her shoulder and the baby at her breast. The kitchen was warm with the morning's fire. She laid the baby in the cradle that had been, until that morning, in the side room waiting for him. Nobody said who had carried the cradle out.

They named him Jóhannes, for a grandfather.

His mother called him Jói. His father called him, in the good times, Jói Kempan. In the bad times he did not say the name at all.

His first memory was of his mother at a washtub at Hamarkot, her hair long enough to touch the water when she leaned forward, her hand tucking it back behind her shoulder. Whatever she said was true.

He was three, or perhaps he was almost four, when a stranger came to the farm and named him.

It was a late morning in summer, with high thin cloud and no wind. The boy was in the dooryard, at nothing in particular, when the stranger first showed on the hill road from the east — a dark mark coming down over the shoulder of the hill, too slow for a rider, too steady for a neighbor's dog. Watching the road was a thing to do, so the boy stood where he was and watched it. It takes a walking man a long time to come down a hill road, and the boy watched him the whole way. The mark became a coat. The coat became an older man in a dark coat, with a stick in one hand and a bag slung from his shoulder, who walked the way old men walk on roads they know, without hurry and without stopping, and the stick touched the ground at every second step with a small dry knock that came up the field ahead of him. Once, halfway down, he stood still on the road for the space of a few breaths, looking at the farm below him, and then he came on. The boy heard the knock of the stick before he could see the man's face, and counted his own breaths against it without knowing he was counting.

He came to the house and he knocked on the doorframe in the manner of a traveler who wished to be given water and a place to sit for an hour. He was given both. He drank the water first, standing, in one long draught, and handed the cup back before he sat. Jósef was not home. Kristín put bread and cold fish on the kitchen table and the stranger sat, and he ate, and he spoke a little with Kristín in the slow measured way old men speak with young mothers when there is time to pass.

The boy stood in the doorway and watched him.

Men came by the farm in summer — neighbors, men from the trading place below — and his mother said their names to them at the door before they were through it. No name had been said at this man's knock. His mother had given him bread anyway, because bread was what was given. The boy stayed in the doorway because of it.

The stranger ate slowly. His boots were white with the dust of the road, and the coat was a winter coat worn in summer, the way travelers wear what they own. He had set the bag down against his boot and leaned the stick against the end of the table, where his hand could find it without his eyes going to it. He broke the bread small, and he took the fish off the bone with his fingers and laid the bone straight along the rim of the plate, and between one piece and the next he set both hands flat on the table and rested them. The hands were big in the knuckles and brown. When he chewed, the whole beard moved. The talk between him and the mother was slow and small — the road, the hay, the dry month — and there were long stretches where neither of them said anything, and the stranger ate, and the quiet did not seem to trouble either of them. The boy watched all of it from the doorway with his shoulder against the frame.

The stranger noticed.

He stopped eating, after a while, and he turned on his bench and he looked at the boy. He was not a large man. He had a very long beard, grey at the lower end and still dark at the chin, and he had one eye that wandered and one eye that did not. The wandering eye went its own way about the kitchen — to the window, to the cloth in Kristín's hands, to the doorframe over the boy's head — and the still eye stayed on the boy. The boy could not decide which of the two was the eye the man saw with. He stood and let himself be looked at.

Come here, he said.

The boy walked over. He had learned already, at three, that when a grown man who was not his father called him forward, he went forward. He stopped a pace in front of the stranger. The stranger did not bend down. Grown people bent down to him; his mother came down to his height, and visitors put their hands on their knees and brought their faces down level with his. This man sat as he sat. The boy tipped his head back and looked up past the beard at the still eye.

What is your name?

Jói.

His voice came out small in the kitchen. The stranger did not ask him to say it louder.

Jói what?

Jói Kempan.

The stranger laughed, not unkindly. The wandering eye wandered.

Do you know what that means?

Yes.

He did not know what it meant. He knew his father had said it, once, in a stable, and that his mother had not contradicted his father when he said it, and that therefore it was his name. That was what it meant.

The stranger studied him. The studying took longer than the questions had. The still eye went over him, from the hair down to the feet and back, and the boy stood inside it and waited.

Who said you were Kempan?

My father.

Only your father?

The boy did not answer. He did not know how to answer. He could hear that a second question sat folded inside the first one, and he could not find what it was. The kitchen had gone quiet around the question. The cloth had stopped in his mother's hands, and the wandering eye had gone to the window and stayed there, and the still eye waited on him with the patience of a man who had asked boys questions before. The stranger smiled with half his mouth, and he said —

Let me see. Take hold of your own ear. The right one. With your right hand. Reach over your head.

The boy looked once at his mother. Her face told him nothing, and the cloth was moving in her hands again, so it was not a thing she was against. He reached over his head. It took him a moment to find which ear the man meant. The arm went up and over, and the fingers came down the far side of his head until they found the ear, and he caught the lobe of his right ear in the fingers of his right hand, over the top of his head. Standing so, with his elbow up beside his head like the handle of a jug, he waited. The stranger looked at the arrangement and said nothing about it.

Good. Now run up the slope outside. Up to the fence. And run back. With your hand where it is.

The boy ran.

He did not ask why. He went out past the table and out the door, over the worn sill and across the packed dirt of the dooryard, and turned up the slope. The slope behind the house was short summer grass rising to the fence at the top of the home field, and it was steeper inside his legs than it had ever looked from the door. He ran up it barefoot with his right hand over the top of his head holding his right ear, and his elbow sticking out to one side. A boy runs with both arms, and one of his was up on his head: the first strides went long, and the ear pulled at the fingers at every one of them, and the pulling shortened the strides of its own accord, and the free arm worked double across his front to keep him square. The breath came loud in him where the ground rose hardest, near the top. He did not fall. He reached the fence, put his free hand on the grey wood of it, warm where the sun had been on it all morning, and turned, and saw below him that the stranger had come out of the kitchen and was standing in the doorway, watching. From up there the house was small and the man in the doorway was small, and the boy's own breathing was the loudest thing on the hill.

He came back down. Downhill was worse. Downhill a boy wants both his arms, and he came down short-stepped, leading with the free shoulder, the elbow swinging out over the slope; his feet ran away from under him twice, and twice he got them back, and he did not go over. He fetched up in front of the doorway with his lungs working. The ear was hot in his fingers.

Again, the stranger said.

He said nothing between the commands, and his face said nothing either. The boy turned and ran it again. The second time, the body knew the slope. The strides came short from the first step, the hand rode the ear instead of pulling against it, the free arm had found its work and did it without being told. His own footprints from the first run were in the grass and he set his feet in them going up. He touched the fence and came down sideways the whole way, which went better, and which he had not decided to do; the legs had decided it.

Once more.

He ran it once more. There was nothing left in the run to find out, so he just ran it, up and back, breathing in his strides' own time. The grass was warm under his feet going up and cool in the shadow of the house coming down. It was a game and it was not a game; he could not have said which, and he did not need it to be either.

He came down the last time and stopped. His face was red. The stranger was standing in the doorway. His mother was behind the stranger, at the kitchen table, holding a dishcloth, watching.

The stranger looked at the boy for a long time.

He looked at him the way a man looks at a horse he has not decided on. The boy stood in the dooryard with the sun on his neck and his hand still on his head, because nobody had told him to let go of the ear, and he let himself be looked at. His breath came down out of loudness and went ordinary, and the looking went on after the breath had finished. He did not look away. Somewhere on the hill above the fence a sheep called once, and nobody looked at it. The wandering eye had stopped wandering. Both eyes were on him now, agreed for once, and what they were weighing he could not have said, and he did not try. Behind the stranger his mother stood with the cloth in her hands. The cloth did not move.

Then he said, gravely, in a voice that had gone slower —

Your name will be Jói Kempan.

He said it the way a man says a thing that has been decided somewhere else. He did not explain what the test had been. He did not say whether the boy had passed it or had failed it. He simply nodded, once, as though a business had been closed, and he turned, and he went back to his bench, and he finished his bread.

His mother said nothing. The cloth began to move in her hands again, and the kitchen went back to being a kitchen — the bench took the stranger's weight with a creak, the bread came apart in the big brown hands, the talk found the road and the hay again where it had left them. The boy stood in the dooryard with his ear in his fingers. He liked the name. He said it over once in his head, where it made no sound. After a while he let go of the ear.

His name was Bjarni Hjaltalín.

The stranger stayed perhaps another hour at the kitchen table. He talked with Kristín about the weather east of the hills, and about a man they both knew who had lost three sheep, and the boy sat down on the doorstep with his back against the frame and listened to the sound of the talk without following the words. The voices went along like the talk of two people with nothing to settle between them, and no trouble in it. The bone of the fish lay straight on the empty plate. Then the stranger got up, and he thanked her, and he took his stick and his bag and he walked down the road to the west, and the family never saw him again.

The boy watched him go.

He watched him the whole way, as he had watched him come: the coat going smaller along the west road, the stick touching the ground at every second step, the knock of it coming back up the field fainter and fainter and then not at all. The stranger did not look back. The coat became a dark mark again, and the mark went over the rise, and the road was empty.

He did not dwell on it.

He was twelve years old.

The farm was called Samkomugerði, which meant, roughly, the place where people gathered. Samkomugerði. In the boy's time there he did not see people gather. He saw cows gather. He did not gather with them.

He was the cowherd.

The farm had nineteen cows. The nineteen cows went out every morning up a long sloping pasture toward the ridge above the fjord and came back every evening along the same road. The pasture climbed into the valley called Djúpidalur, the deep valley, and that name, unlike the name of the farm, was accurate. The boy walked out with them at four in the morning and back with them at nine in the evening. He had two dogs. They did most of the work.

A cow's day is eating. The nineteen ate from the time they reached the grass until the time they were turned for home. They ate walking and they ate standing, swinging their heads side to side along the ground, and the grass came up with the sound wet linen makes when it is torn, and by evening their udders were packed full and swung against their hocks. They were in no hurry. They were never, in the whole of that summer, in any hurry. The boy threw stones ahead of them to move them along. He cut himself a rod and used the rod. He twisted tails. He set his teeth once into the root of a tail and bit. The cow walked on at the speed the cow had chosen. The slowness of those cows was not a thing that could be argued with. It was like the weather. It was like the ridge.

What he did, mostly, was walk.

The walk had an empty middle because the boy was hungry.

It was accepted that children did not need much food — that a hungry child grew straight, that to feed a child the way one fed a working man was to soften him. The boy did not know the theory. He only knew that breakfast was a cup of thin coffee and a piece of hard bread about the size of a man's palm, and that this was intended to carry him to a supper of skyr and potatoes at nine at night.

The bread was given to him at the door, at four, into his hand, the coffee drunk standing on the step while the dogs turned in the yard.

Heim fyrir níu, the wife of the farmer said. Home by nine.

That was the morning's talk. He ate the bread walking, in the gray light, behind the cows, and made it last to the first rise, and at the first rise it was gone, and the day was in front of him. At four in the morning the fjord lay pale and flat below the pasture, and the dew stood cold on the grass and came through his shoes inside the first mile, and the dogs ran their wide circles at either side of the herd without being sent, and the light came up while they climbed.

Up the valley the day was long. The sun stood on the grass, and the grass was good that summer, and the cows took it hour after hour, and seventeen hours is a long time to listen to eating. By midafternoon the supper had begun to arrive in his mind's eye of its own accord — the plate of skyr, the potatoes, the spoon — and the image of it would not stand still; it jumped, and moved when he looked at it, like a thing seen through heat. He put his mind on the dogs. He put it on the count of the cows, one through nineteen and back. The image waited until he was done, and came again.

He drank at the beck where the cows drank, lying on his chest on the bank with his sleeves pushed up. The water was snow water and it ached in the teeth, and a stomach full of water is quiet for about half an hour. He knew the half-hour well. He spaced his drinking down the length of the afternoon the way a man spaces the last of his tobacco.

He tried, one afternoon, eating the grass himself. The cows were all around him doing it, and had been doing it for ten hours, and their bellies swung with it. He pulled a handful where it grew youngest and chewed it. The juice of it was green and thin and bitter, and the chewing did not make the grass smaller, only wetter, and it balled at the back of his tongue, and his throat shut against it. He could not swallow it. He spat it into the dirt and understood that his body was not a cow's body.

Every evening he walked past the kitchen.

The road from the pasture ran along the bottom of the hayfield, past the kitchen door, and on toward the barn. The window, in those summer evenings, was open.

The wife of the farmer, in the hour before the boy came down with the cows, baked pot bread. She set a deep iron pot into the embers of the stove, and into the pot she put the round dough, and she covered it, and she let it cook under its iron lid for several hours. By the time the boy was coming down the road, the bread was done. The smell came out of the open window, across the home yard, across the stubble of the mown hayfield, and along the road, and it met the boy a full quarter-mile before it met the door of the barn.

On the first evening of the baking — the first week of the summer, the cows new to him and the road new to him — the smell had come up the road to meet him and he had walked faster, because he was twelve and the day had been long and he drew the natural conclusion. He came down through the home yard at the heels of the last cow and went in to the table, and on the table was the small plate of skyr, and the board had already been swept. That was the evening he learned whose bread it was. The lesson took no words and was not repeated, because it did not need repeating.

After that he knew where it began. It began at the gate at the bottom of the hayfield — a few steps before the gate on the evenings the air came down off the ridge, a few steps after on the evenings it came up off the fjord — but at the gate, on every clear evening of those weeks, it was there. He had counted the road once, from the gate to the barn door. It was five hundred and forty steps.

The smell was rye, and under the rye the banked fire, and under the fire, faint, the hot iron of the pot. It was sweet at the bottom, the way the dark breads are sweet. It had body. It stood in the road, and walking into it was like walking into water.

At the gate the water came into his mouth. It came without his leave, from below, the way water comes up in a pump when the handle is worked. His jaw ached at the hinges, both sides, a small bright ache. His stomach, which had been quiet since midday — it had stopped asking by the third week — woke, and turned over, and stood up against his backbone like a fist. His legs went on walking. From the road there was nothing to see: a boy, nineteen cows, two dogs, coming down at the end of a day. The rest of it happened between the gate and the barn, every step of the five hundred and forty.

The cows went past the kitchen door at the speed the cows went everywhere. The smell stood thickest in the home yard, where the wall of the house held it. The boy came through the thickest of it thirty steps behind the last cow. The window was at the height of his head. Some evenings there were voices inside it, the daughters', small and at their own business; some evenings he could hear the lid lifted off the pot, iron on iron, and the sound put a finer point on the smell, the way a whetstone puts a point. He did not turn his head. He walked past the door, and the smell came with him along the wall of the barn, and thinned, and at the midden it let go of him altogether, because at the midden the air belonged to the midden.

He walked through the smell. He walked through the smell every evening for six weeks.

He was not allowed to eat the bread. The bread was for the farmer and his wife and the daughters, and by the time the boy came off the evening chores and sat down to his small plate of skyr, the bread had been cut and eaten and the crumbs had been swept from the board.

The wife of the farmer was not unkind. She set the plate down in front of him herself, most evenings, and on some evenings she rested her hand a moment on his shoulder on her way past.

Þú heldur vel á kúnum, she said once. You keep the cows well.

He said the dogs kept them.

She laughed, once, the way grown women laughed at the things boys said, and went back to her end of the table. The board was clean. He ate the skyr.

He had only one sentence for it.

I could smell the pot bread and lost my mind.

He did not, at twelve, have the sentence yet. What he had, on the road, was the walk. He had walked, behind the cows, through the smell, every evening for forty-two evenings, and on none of those evenings had he run forward to the kitchen door, and on none of those evenings had he put out his hand for any piece of the bread.

There was an evening in the fifth week when it was close. Rain had come through in the morning and washed the air, and the smell rode the washed air stronger for it, and in the home yard his steps shortened without being told to. The door stood where the door stood. The latch was at the height of his hand. The bread was under its lid not ten steps off, and a latch is a small thing, and ten steps is nothing. He counted the cows ahead of him instead. There were nineteen. He counted them again. When he had counted them the second time he was past the door and along the barn wall, and at the midden the air took the smell off him, and both his hands were where they had been all summer.

He had, in the course of those forty-two evenings, made a decision about his sense of smell.

It was not made in words, and it was not made at one stroke. It was made the way the road was made — by steps. The smell arrived at the gate; he set it to one side; it came back; he set it aside again. On the first evenings he could keep it off for ten steps, and then the water came into his mouth and the stomach stood up against the backbone and the smell was in the middle of him as if he had done nothing at all, and the next evening he began again at the gate. By the sixth week he could come through the gate, through the home yard, past the open window and the iron sound of the lid, and arrive at the barn with his mouth dry and his stomach lying quiet, and what the smell did between the gate and the barn was no longer a thing done to him. It was a thing he permitted or did not permit.

He did not permit it.

He did not phrase it to himself at twelve. The phrasing came later:

With my method, I only smell the scents I want.

He said it, when he said it, dryly, and without explanation.

The berries came in August.

They came on the hillsides above the farm, blue in low tight mats of crowberry and bilberry. The boy went down on his knees in the moss and picked. He picked slowly at first, as a child picks, one berry at a time, and the first berry, on his tongue, burst.

It burst against the roof of his mouth, and the juice of it went down cold and sweet, and his stomach woke and stood up, and this time there was something to give it. He stopped picking one at a time. He picked with both hands, kneeling, moving up the hillside on his knees, stripping the mats sideways the way the cows stripped the grass, and his hands learned the work inside the first hour — thumb under the cluster, roll, and the berries came away in threes and fours.

He picked for two hours. He picked until his hand was stained blue to the second knuckle and his teeth were stained blue and the front of his shirt was stained blue, and when he stood up at the end of the two hours he was, for the first time in six weeks, not hungry.

He began to laugh.

He laughed the short ragged laugh of a boy who has been given back, without warning, a thing he had stopped expecting. The dogs lifted their heads and looked at him. The dogs did not laugh. The cows did not laugh. The fjord, long and gold and indifferent, did not laugh.

The boy laughed anyway.

He came back down to the farm at dark. He did not tell the farmer's wife what he had eaten. He sat at the kitchen table and he ate his skyr and his potatoes, and he went up to the little room over the stable, and he lay down, and for the first night in six weeks he did not fall asleep with the smell of pot bread still in the back of his mouth.

He fell asleep instead with the taste of the berries.

That night he dreamed of his mother at a washtub. His mother, who had walked him up the road at the beginning of the summer, and had stood in the doorway without waving, and had, through the weeks of his absence, kept her own accounting at her own kitchen table of what her son, at another woman's farm, was or was not being given to eat.

What she thought, during that summer, belongs to her.

He was eleven that winter in Oddeyri.

Oddeyri was the spit of land on the eastern side of the fjord. It held the dock, and the warehouses, and the gabled houses of the Danish trading firms. The firms ran the dock. In the middle of winter the spit had three hours of sun, and the lamps in the warehouse windows burned through the middle of the day. Men moved between the buildings with their heads down and their hands drawn up into their sleeves. The fjord past the dock was black, and the mountains across it were white, and between the black and the white the spit went about its business.

His father's shop was on the spit. The boy did not often go in. He had learned that a son in his father's shop was a son in a small room with his father.

The smithy was at the other end.

The smithy was the loudest place on the spit. You could hear it three warehouses off — the slow bass of the bellows, the high tempered ring of the hammer, the long hiss of iron going into water. The hammer had two voices. There was the heavy blow on the iron, and between the heavy blows a lighter ring on the bare anvil, where the hammer fell while the iron was turned, and in the cold air both voices carried the length of the spit and out over the black water. A boy walking the boardwalk past the open door in the first dark of a winter afternoon could see a square of orange air that did not belong to the winter, and the square of orange air held, in the middle of it, the shape of a man.

The shape of the man was Jósef.

This Jósef was not the father. This Jósef was the blacksmith, and he was the kindest man in the parish, and he was enormous. He was bigger than the father. He was bigger than any man who came down the dock, and the men of Eyjafjörður counted him among their chieftains, and he worked black to the elbows. The boy, later, would describe his hands in one phrase — hands like forces of nature, big and black, that stretched iron.

The boy saw the hands do it. The blacksmith took a bar out of the fire with the end of it the color of the fire, and laid it over the horn of the anvil, and hammered it, turning it between the blows, and the iron moved under the hammer. It did not break, and it did not fold. It lengthened. It went into the fire a short bar and came off the anvil a long one, and nothing had been added to it. The boy had not known that iron could be made to do that. He stood in the doorway and watched the bar grow and revised his understanding of iron.

The boy began to come to the smithy. He stood inside the open door in the edge of the orange light and watched. The heat stood off the forge like a wall, and at the door the wall of it met the winter, and the boy stood where they met, his face hot, the back of his neck cold, and watched. He learned the work the way you learn a thing you are not being taught. The blacksmith never hurried. The iron told him when it was ready, and it told him by its color. White was for joining. Orange was for drawing out. Dull red went back into the fire. The hammer did not come down hard everywhere; it came down hard where the iron was to move and softly where the iron was to stay, and the difference between the two was the whole trade.

After perhaps a week, on an afternoon when the bellows had stopped, the boy walked across the floor and put his small hands on the handle and began to work it.

The handle was a long arm of ash, hung at the side of the forge, polished pale where hands had worked it. It stood higher than his chin. The first stroke hardly moved it. He hung his weight on it and it came down slowly, with the sound of a big animal breathing in, and rose again on its own, breathing out, and in the forge the fire brightened. He pulled again. The stroke wanted to be long, and it wanted to be even. He found that out by giving it short ones and watching the fire flare and fall instead of build. He counted the strokes to keep them even. At fifty his arms burned. At a hundred the burning had stopped mattering, and he stopped counting and kept pulling. He set his feet and leaned, and found that his weight could do the work his arms could not, and the fire built and held. The blacksmith put iron into the fire and took iron out of it and did not look at the door, and the bellows kept breathing, and the boy kept it breathing. Jósef the blacksmith did not tell him to stop. The boy walked out half an hour later without having said a word.

He came back the next morning. He came twice a day, every day, for the better part of a year. He came in the dark before the warehouses opened and in the dark after they closed, and through the winter the two darks were one dark, and the smithy stood in the middle of it, orange. He worked the bellows unbidden. He swept the floor when the floor needed sweeping. He carried water for the slack tub and coal for the fire, and learned to bank the fire at the end of an afternoon so that the morning's fire could be raised out of what the night had kept. Horseshoes went over the anvil that year, and boat hooks, and hinges, and the long irons of sledge runners, and once a broken anchor fluke off one of the firm's ships, and under all of it the boy pumped the fire. In the spring the light came back to the spit and he was still coming twice a day. He could work the bellows with one hand now. He leaned less. The lean had moved inside his arms. In the last minutes of an afternoon when the smithy was empty of any other task, he stood at the door and looked at the wall.

On the wall, among the tools, there was a gun.

It was an old front-loaded shotgun, long, heavy, made out of the stock of a rifle of some older pattern. The blacksmith had made it himself, in some other decade — had taken the old rifle and drilled the barrel out smooth and made a shotgun of it. It hung on two pegs. It was oiled. It was not used. It had been there, on those two pegs, for longer than the boy had been alive. It was — more of a dream of a gun than reality. A gun whose use had been forgotten was not, any longer, a gun. It was the idea of a gun. The idea hung on two pegs.

The boy looked at the gun every afternoon, for a year, without once asking about it. He looked at it the way he had looked at the work — learning it without being taught it. He knew the grain of the stock, and the brass of the butt plate gone brown, and the hammer standing at half-cock, and the ramrod under the barrel in its pipes. He knew where the oiled wood took the forge light and where it did not. He could have found it on the wall in the dark with one reach. He did not touch it.

He asked Jósef the blacksmith many other things. He asked about the iron, and about why the iron of one ship was better than the iron of another. Once, with the bellows breathing under his hands, he asked, carefully, the other question.

Can a pair of hands be learned?

The blacksmith turned the iron in the fire before he answered.

Mine were, he said.

He asked about Höfn, and the tavern at Höfn, and the night in it — Jósef and Skafti and the Danes — that the men of the dock still told in winter. He asked about it more than once, over weeks, in pieces, the way he worked the bellows.

Is it true about Höfn? he asked.

Men tell it longer every winter, the blacksmith said.

They tell it that it was you and Skafti against the house.

Skafti was there, the blacksmith said.

That was a day's worth. The boy let it lie. He came back to it a week on, a piece at a time, and one afternoon, between strokes, he set the whole of it down —

How many do you think they were, Jósef?

The blacksmith looked into the fire.

I had no time to count them, he said.

The boy wrote the answers down in his head with everything else he was not being taught. He did not ask about the gun.

On an afternoon in the late winter, Jósef the blacksmith came over to him.

The bellows were still. The iron was cooling on the anvil. The cooling iron ticked on the anvil. The fire had gone down to its coals and put a lower, redder light into the room, and the doorway behind the boy had gone the blue-black of the end of a short day. The boy was standing at the door with his small hands at his sides, looking, as he did every afternoon, at the gun. He heard the hammer being set down on the anvil — set down, not dropped. He heard the blacksmith come. The blacksmith came across the floor without haste and stopped a half-pace behind him, and folded his enormous arms, and stood, for perhaps a full minute, looking at the wall with the boy.

A full minute is a long time for two people to look at a wall. The iron ticked on the anvil. The coals settled once in the forge. The boy could hear the blacksmith breathing above him, slow, the way the bellows breathed, and he looked at the gun and did not turn around, because turning around was a kind of asking, and he was not going to ask.

Then he said —

Do you want that gun an awful lot?

The boy did not turn. He looked at the wall.

Yes, he said.

The blacksmith uncrossed his arms.

Ten crowns, he said. One crown now. One crown a year, for nine years. You can do that?

The boy had no crown.

He had, in his pocket, a piece of string and a small sharp stone he had been carrying since summer because the stone had a shape he had liked.

Yes, he said.

Jósef the blacksmith took the gun down off the wall. He did it with one hand and without reaching, the way a man takes down his hat. The gun, in the blacksmith's hands, was the size of a small tool. He held it out. The boy took it.

The weight came onto the boy's arms all at once. The gun, in the boy's hands, was as tall as the boy. It was heavier than the boy had expected, which was useful information, because a thing heavier than expected was a thing that would teach you something about your own arms. He found where the balance of it lay, forward of the lock, where the barrel began to be most of the gun, and he settled his grip there as if he had always known.

The first crown, the blacksmith said, by the end of the month.

Yes, the boy said.

The blacksmith took the hammer up off the anvil and turned back to the fire.

Keep your word, he said, and we won't speak of it again.

He walked the gun home through the dark. The cold had come down hard with the dark, and the snow on the boardwalk squeaked under his feet, and the iron of the barrel went cold at once against his neck and stayed cold. He did not walk it past his father's shop. He went the long way, around behind the warehouses, adding ten minutes of Oddeyri to the walk, and came into the kitchen with the gun on his shoulder the way he had seen grown men carry guns, and stood it up against the wall in the corner, and his mother looked at the gun and looked at him and did not ask.

He found the first crown. He did not, later, write down where he found it. He put it into Jósef the blacksmith's hand before the end of the month.

The next morning he went out with the gun. He learned the fjord as a hunter learns a country — not the country of walking, but the country of standing still. Standing still in the cold was work; he learned it the way he had learned the bellows, by doing it past the point where it hurt. The auks. The seals on the skerries. The harbor porpoises rising in the channel. He shot, and missed, and shot, and stopped missing. He shot awake, and at night, asleep, he went on shooting; the shooting did not stop because he had lain down.

There was meat in the pot at home. The pot had not always had meat in it. Then he sold what the pot did not need. He sold the meat to neighbors, to the kitchens of two boarding houses on the spit, and once to the cook of a Danish firm who took the cuts without asking where they had come from. He brought the coins home. He handed them to his mother.

His mother took them. She counted them. Her arthritic fingers moved along the coins the way they had moved, twelve years earlier, along the edges of a shawl in a stable. The shawl was on her shoulders. It was the same shawl. She counted the coins, and she put them in the tin on the shelf above the stove, and she said the sentence she said every time.

These will be put to good use.

She did not say it with warmth. She did not say it with pride. She said it the way a woman of her kind said the sentences of her life — once, flatly.

The father was not in the kitchen.

The second crown did not wait for its year. Neither did the third. He paid off the gun in less than five years. On an afternoon in the summer when he was fifteen, he walked into the smithy and put the final coins into Jósef the blacksmith's enormous black hand, and the blacksmith closed his fist around them and did not say anything. He did not need to. They stood in the orange square of the door for a moment, and then the boy went out.

He had one sentence for the gun — I don't know of any business that could have paid me as well as this gun.

A boy who feeds his family at eleven is no longer, in any way that matters, a boy who is fed by other people.

He did not phrase this to himself at eleven. He phrased it by walking, twice a day, through the door of a smithy, and working a bellows for a man who was not his father, and looking at a gun on a wall for a year without asking, and then asking, and then paying.

He was not quite fifteen the afternoon of the eider.

The fjord was flat. It was April, and the winter was going out of the light but had not gone out of the water, and the channel lay below the rocks without a seam in it, the color of unpolished tin. The tide was low. The smell of the bared kelp stood over the shore. Small water worked at the foot of the rocks, and that was the only sound there was.

He lay down on the rocks above the channel with the gun. The rock gave its old cold up through his coat, into his chest and his thighs. Lying still was work, and he knew the work. He set the gun forward along the rock, charged, the hammer back, and lay behind it, and let the cold come, and did not move against it.

An eider came in range — a female in the dun winter plumage, at perhaps forty meters. It came up the channel feeding, diving and coming up, gaining a length of gray water at every rise. He watched it dive twice, and counted the dives out in his head, and twice the water closed over it and showed nothing, and twice it came up close to where he had judged it would. He tracked it. The bead of the front sight rode the waterline ahead of it. He let a breath go out and did not take the next one. He fired.

The report slapped flat across the channel. The powder smoke stood in the still air in front of his face and came apart slowly, with no wind to take it.

The bird jerked once, sideways, in the water. A thin red ring spread out from it. The bird, in the middle of the ring, did not float up and lie still, as a shot eider did.

The bird dived.

It dived the way a diving duck dives, not the way a shot bird falls — cleanly, head first, with a small tuck of the body that closed the air in behind it, and went under.

The ring went on widening after the bird was gone. It thinned as it went, and the tide pulled it long, and then there was no ring, and the water lay as flat as it had lain before he fired.

He waited the half-minute a hit bird needs to come up for breath. His hands recharged the gun while he waited — powder, wad, shot, wad, the ramrod down and back out of its pipes — and his eyes did not leave the water. A hit bird that comes up gets the second charge; that is what the second charge is for. He laid the gun forward again and held it on the water where the bird had gone down.

The bird did not come up.

He waited the full minute. He counted it out in his head. Nothing rose. The channel lay flat from rock to rock, and the smell of the powder went off the air, and a gull came down the channel and went past without stopping.

The bird did not come up.

He gave it a second minute on his own account, and a third. The cold had come up out of the rock and through him while he lay, and he noticed it now, and let it stand. The water did not move.

He walked along the rocks to a place he could see down into the water, the gun up off the rock and with him, still raised. He looked down. The water was clear and undisturbed, and the light went down through it a long way. He saw, at the bottom of the channel, the shape of the eider.

It was holding on to the seaweed.

The bird had, in the last seconds of its life, dived to the bottom of the channel, and it had found a long ribbon of kelp growing up out of the rock, and it had bitten the kelp, and it had closed its beak on the kelp, and it had held. It was dead. But it was held.

He stood above the channel and looked down at it for a long time. The kelp ribbon swayed its whole length with the small coming of the tide, and the bird swayed with it. The dun of it was darker for the wet, and along its back a thin skin of held air showed silver in the clear water. The body wanted to rise. He could see that the body wanted to rise — it stood up off the bottom at the slant the kelp allowed, lifting a little and easing a little with the water, held at the beak. The beak did not let go. He stood and watched the kelp sway and the bird sway with it, and the light moved on the water between them, and nothing changed, and he went on standing.

He had, in his head, one sentence for this. He did not speak it. He thought it —

This bird didn't like the prospect of ending up on our dinner table and made appropriate provisions for its funeral before it died.

He lowered the gun. His right hand — the same hand that had, five years earlier, closed around the cold wet body of a phosphorescent haddock and come away glowing — hung open against his thigh, the fingers slightly apart, empty.

The water under him was April water, winter water still. It was not too deep, and it was not too cold.

He did not wade in. He shouldered the gun, and he turned, and he walked home along the shore in the long thin light of the April afternoon, without the bird.

His mother was in the kitchen, and the day's pot stood on the stove.

How did the afternoon go? she asked.

It was a quiet afternoon, he said.

She looked at him once, at his hand at his side, and she did not ask again.

The shore, behind him, held the flat water, and the flat water held the bird.

At fourteen, he was sent to school at Möðruvellir.

The school was a grey stone building on a rise above a valley, two hours' ride from the spit. It had one long hall for the classes, a row of narrow beds in a loft above the hall, and a kitchen at the back that smelled of boiled mutton and turnips. Inside, the boys were taught Danish, mathematics, the history of the kings of the north, and a little Latin. Jói sat at the bench on the wall side and took his notes in the neat small hand he had learned from Kristín. He could do the arithmetic in his head before the master had finished writing the problem on the board. The Danish ran through him the way water runs through a sieve. He did not speak up. He did not, in any direction, distinguish himself.

The Danish master noticed him once, in the first week. He stopped at the bench on the wall side and looked down at him for a moment.

"Should you perhaps sit on a cushion?" the master asked. He asked it with great courtesy.

Some of the boys laughed. The boy said nothing. The master went back to the board.

His attention, for the whole of that first term, was not on the room inside the grey stone building.

It was on the yard.

The yard was behind the school — a flat bare piece of ground, walled on two sides by the turf of the hill and on the third by the stone of the building, and nothing grew in it, because the boys had walked it down to stone and dust. The boys had it for the hour between the morning lessons and the midday meal, for the half-hour after the meal, and for the long stretch after supper before the master rang the bell for bed. In the yard the boys wrestled. The wrestling was called glíma. It was the old wrestling — done in belts, with fixed grips, with a footwork that had been settled before the Danish came. It was the one thing the country had carried across every bad century without losing. Whatever else had been taken — the kings, the fleet — the grip on the belt and the step behind the knee had stayed. Boys threw boys. Boys threw boys who were bigger than them. There was a small code about it. It was understood.

There were big boys at Möðruvellir that winter. The biggest were Ingólfur, from Fjósatunga, and Magnús — giants, both of them, and very strong. When the wrestling began after supper, the small boys gave the middle of the yard to the big ones and stood at the walls, and the yard filled with the sound the wrestling made — breathing, mostly, and the dry slap of hands taking belts, and the falls, and the boys at the walls calling the falls.

In the yard at Möðruvellir, there was a boy named Hallgrímur Kristinsson.

Hallgrímur was the same age as Jói and slightly smaller. He had a narrow face. He had narrow hands. He had the body of a pastor's son who sat at a desk. At the end of the school day he sat on a bench with three other boys and made them laugh about the Danish master. He did not think of himself as a wrestler. He thought of himself as a boy who was good in the yard the way another boy was good at long division. He did not look dangerous. He looked like a boy who might be thrown.

He was never thrown.

Jói stood at the wall in the strip of shadow the building cast on the dust in the afternoons, where he could see the whole yard without being looked at, and he watched Hallgrímur Kristinsson throw, one after another, the biggest boys in the school, in a manner that did not seem to involve strength. The biggest boys came at him with their shoulders down and the low grunting eagerness of boys who had been raised on the assumption that weight would settle the question. It did not settle the question. The narrow hand went under the belt, and the big boy's own weight went into the dust wearing the big boy, and the boys at the walls shouted bylta — a fall — and the big boy got up, and took the belt again, and went down again.

Magnús went down. Ingólfur went down. They were not gentle about it afterward, and it made no difference.

"I slipped," Ingólfur said, the first evening Jói watched.

"The ground again," one of the small boys at the wall said.

Ingólfur took the belt again. He went down again.

There was an evening late in the term — the light already off the hill, the dust of the yard freezing into a crust that held the boot prints of the afternoon — when Ingólfur took the belt against Hallgrímur, and the boy at the wall watched one throw the whole way through.

They fitted their hands to each other's belts. Ingólfur's hand covered the belt and a hand's width of the boy besides. Hallgrímur's narrow hand lay along the leather and took it low, at an angle, the fingers going in under where the belt crossed the hip. They stepped, in the circle the wrestling stepped in, around a center nobody had marked, and the boys at the walls went quiet, and the only sound in the yard was the four feet on the frozen crust and the two breathings. Jói watched the feet. Ingólfur's weight was in his heels — the boy could see it from the wall, the way a man on the dock could see where a loaded boat was heavy. Hallgrímur was waiting. He was not standing still; he was stepping, and his hand was riding the belt, and the waiting was inside the stepping, and the boy at the wall could see that too, now, after a term of looking — that the stepping was a question asked over and over until the bigger body answered it.

Ingólfur answered it. He pulled the belt, hard, to drag the smaller body in to him, and he had the strength to lift a boy of that weight clean off the ground, and meant to. The pull found nothing to pull against. Hallgrímur went with it — went a half-step early, at his own speed instead of the pull's — and Ingólfur's weight, which had set itself for a fight that did not come, had to go somewhere, and it went back through his right heel, and his left foot lifted. It lifted a fraction of an inch, for one of the reasons bodies lift a foot in a wrestle — to brace, to turn, to find a better piece of ground. The foot was in the air no longer than a blink. It needed nothing in that time. It needed only the dust to be where the dust had always been.

Hallgrímur's heel was there instead. It had started traveling before the foot lifted — that was the whole of it, that was the thing the strip of shadow had been bought to see — and it lay behind the ankle, tilted the wrong way, in the place the foot was coming down to, so that when the foot came down there was no floor to come down to. The narrow hand turned the belt. Ingólfur went, not forward, not sideways, but in the diagonal a boy goes when his own weight has been aimed into the dust by the smaller boy who has read it before it has moved. The length of him hit the yard. The crust broke under him. The dust came up and hung in the cold.

"Bylta," the boys at the walls said. It hardly needed calling.

It was not strength. It was not, precisely, speed.

It was that Hallgrímur knew where the weight was a tenth of a second before the bigger boy's body had told the bigger boy's brain. He was early. He lived a tenth of a second ahead of the boy he was wrestling, and the tenth of a second was enough. He had learned the right moves, and he practiced more than the others practiced; the boy could see that much from the wall.

At the long table, over the mutton, the big boys explained Hallgrímur to one another.

"He oils the belt," Magnús said.

"He's made low," Ingólfur said. "A low-made man can't be lifted."

"He's quick," a third boy said. "That's all it is."

None of the three was right, and the boy at the end of the table did not have it in words yet either. He ate, and said nothing.

Jói watched this through the first term. He said nothing. In the whole of the term, he and Hallgrímur did not exchange one word. Hallgrímur did not know he was being watched.

His body — the body he had been told for fourteen years was simply a small body — was not, in fact, a small body. It was a body. It was an instrument. It had not yet been taught. The boys in the yard who were bigger than him had not taught their bodies anything either. Their bodies had just happened. The only boy in the yard who had taught his body anything was the smallest one of them, and the smallest one of them was throwing everybody.

Size was not destiny. Method was destiny.

Quickness, knowledge and skill canceled out stature in the sport I liked the most of all.

He walked home for the Christmas fortnight, on foot, over the hill road to Oddeyri and up the spit to Barð, in a short blue afternoon with snow on the tops and no wind, and he thought about nothing else the whole way. He had the picture of Hallgrímur's hand at the belt, and the foot behind the ankle, and the bigger boy going diagonally into the dust, and he had the first unbroken conviction of his adult life that the small frame he had been fitted into was a piece of material. It could be worked.

He came in at Barð at dusk. His mother, at the kitchen, turned and looked at him.

She looked at him for longer than she usually looked at him. Kristín did not say anything.

What she saw, in her son's face, across a kitchen on the third of December 1897, belongs to her.

He went out, that first evening, into the field behind the house.

The field was a flat piece of pasture between the back wall of the house and the turf wall of the sheepfold. There was a wooden post in the middle of it — it had carried the corner of an outbuilding once, and the outbuilding had been pulled down, and the post had stayed. It was snowing lightly. The light was going. He took the old belt his father had discarded two winters before. He put it around the post. He fitted his own belt to it, the way the boys in the yard at Möðruvellir fitted their belts to each other.

He stepped in. He stepped out. He walked around the post. He fitted his hand to the belt at the low angle he had watched Hallgrímur fit his. He put his foot behind where the ankle of a bigger boy would have been. He did the move, against the post, twelve times. By the last of them his boots were sliding on the half-inch of snow he had trampled, and he did the move with the sliding in it. The post did not fall, because it was a post. But his body learned a thing it had not known a month before.

His body knew where his own weight was.

He went out again the next night, and the night after, and on the nights of the whole of the Christmas fortnight, with the belt and the post and the snow. When he walked back to Möðruvellir at Epiphany he did not go into the middle of the yard. He stood, again, at the wall, in the strip of shadow, and watched. But he had, in his own body, a piece of what Hallgrímur had in his.

That was the beginning.

Patience was a thing the boy had, and the men of the country, for the most part, did not.

There was one other thing at Möðruvellir that winter.

The school kept a stud horse — a Faxaflói stallion, six years old, black with a white blaze — for the breeding of the mares of the district. The stallion lived in a paddock behind the kitchen yard. He was, in the judgment of the man who kept him, the most difficult horse in the valley. When the man wanted to catch him to bridle him for a mare, it took three grown men with ropes, and the horse threw one of them more often than not, and twice that winter a man was kicked in the belly and lay in bed a week. The school boys were told to keep out of the paddock. The school boys kept out of the paddock.

Jói went in.

He went in on a Sunday morning, when the master was at chapel and the kitchen yard was empty and the horse was standing in the far corner with his head down. The boy walked across the paddock, very slowly, without looking at the horse. He stopped ten feet from the horse. He breathed. He walked three more steps and did not look. He stopped. The horse lifted his head. The horse looked at him. The horse did not move.

The boy moved his hand, palm open, out toward the horse's shoulder, at the slow steady rate at which a man in Iceland in 1897 raised a hand toward an animal that had the right to be unsure of him. He put the hand, flat, on the black hide of the horse's shoulder. The horse blew out, once, through his nose, and did not move.

He stood there with the hand on the shoulder. The hide twitched once under it, where it lay, and settled. The cold stood in the paddock around the two of them, and from the church across the yard the hymn came thin on the air, and the boy did not move the hand and did not take it away. A minute is a long time for a boy to stand with his hand on a horse that has put men in bed. He stood it. Then he took the hand off and walked out.

He came back the next Sunday, and the Sunday after. By the fifth Sunday he was walking the horse around the paddock on a lead rope that the stallion, who had thrown three grown men in the autumn, was consenting to wear. The man who kept the horse came out of the kitchen yard that morning and saw it. He stopped. He watched for a minute. He did not say anything, and he went back in. He spoke of it afterward, in the valley, and the valley had two or three ways of telling it, and one of them was uncomplimentary to the man who kept the horse. The boy did not pay attention to any of them.

What he noticed, across those five Sundays, was a thing he did not name. He had not, in fourteen years, been called over to a bench by another boy the way Hallgrímur was called over at the end of the school day. He could sit an hour at the long table and say three sentences, and none of the three would land. With the horse, the minute he walked into the paddock, every breath was the right breath. The horse had not decided anything about him in advance. The horse did not carry the hundred small assumptions the boys carried without knowing they were carrying them — about his size, about his father, about his silence.

The horse was open. The boys were not.

It soon became clear that I had an easier time befriending animals than humans.

He was fifteen the spring the Frem came in.

The Frem was a Danish gunboat. She was two-masted, black at the waterline, white at the upper strakes, with a low gun on a pivot at the foredeck and a Danish ensign at the stern. She put in at Oddeyri in the first week of May, when the ice had just gone from the head of the fjord and the first trading ships were coming up the coast, and she dropped her anchor at the outer mooring, and she stayed three weeks. Her captain, a sandy-haired lieutenant in his thirties, came ashore the first afternoon to present himself to the Danish firm-master, and was given schnapps in a glass room on the second floor of the firm's building, and stayed two hours. Her crew came ashore in a long boat, in fours and sixes, across the three weeks, and did what sailors do ashore. They bought wool socks. They drank at the house of a woman at the upper end of the spit who had no license for the drink she sold and no need of one. They walked up the main street of the spit in twos and threes, in their dark blue blouses and their flat round caps with the ribbons trailing down the back of their necks, and they looked at the Icelandic girls with the long slow looking of men who were a thousand miles from home and knew it, and the Icelandic girls looked back, or did not look back, in the slow careful way of the spit.

The boy had come down to the harbor on an errand for his mother — a piece of twine from the firm, for a net — and had stopped at the corner of the customs house to watch. The twine was in his right hand, wound twice around two fingers, the way the man at the firm's counter had handed it to him.

It was a Thursday.

He was standing in the narrow lane between the customs house and the third warehouse, half in sun, half in the shadow of the wall. The sun side of him was warm and the shadow side of him was cold, and the wall at his shoulder held the day's heat the way stone holds it in May, shallow and borrowed. From the corner he could see the long boards of the dock, and the stack of cod crates at the head of it, and the line of fishing boats tied up on the inside. There were about twenty men on the dock, three of them Danish sailors, the rest local men. The water moved against the pilings with the small repeating slap of harbor water. A gull stood on a piling.

He could see, at the seaward end of the dock, among the crates, the argument.

The argument was between one of the Danish sailors and an Icelander named Giant Jón.

Giant Jón was, in the parish, precisely what the name said. He was nearly seven feet tall. He was broader than any door he walked through. He was, by ordinary reckoning, the strongest man in the district, and in some reckonings the strongest man on the fjord. He was not a fighter. He was a man who unloaded boats. He had been unloading boats at the Oddeyri dock for twenty-two years. He had five children and a bad back from the first decade of the work, and he moved, in his late thirties, with a slight favoring of the left hip. He was known as a slow kind man. He had never, in his twenty-two years on the dock, hit anyone.

The Danish sailor was middling height, sun-reddened, half drunk.

The boy could not hear the beginning of the argument. Whatever it had been about — a bumped shoulder, a mistaken word, a trick of the sailor's idleness on a Thursday afternoon — had already been said. What he saw was the sailor stepping up close to Giant Jón and lifting his face to Giant Jón's face, and Giant Jón, without any visible reaction, looking down at him.

The dock went quiet around the two of them. It went quiet from the seaward end inward. The men at the crates stopped with their hands where their hands were. A man at the boats stood with a line in both hands and did not haul it.

Then the sailor slapped him.

The slap came up across the face in a short arc, the slap a short man delivers to a tall man. It was not a hard slap. It was an opening slap — the slap of a man who wanted to see what would happen.

Giant Jón did not move.

Nothing on the dock moved. The boy did not move. He heard the water against the pilings, small and repeating, and counted four of the small slaps of it before anything else happened. He did not decide to count them. The twine had come tight across the inside of his two fingers. He had not decided that either.

The sailor stepped back half a step and looked up into Giant Jón's face to see what had happened in it. Nothing had happened in it.

Slå igen, the sailor said — hit back. He said it loudly. He said it the way a man says a thing he wants a dock to hear, not a man.

Giant Jón looked down at him. He did not hit back.

The sailor slapped him again.

This one was hard. The crack of it went along the dock and came back off the wall of the third warehouse. Two men at the next stack of crates turned their heads. The gull lifted off the piling and settled again. Giant Jón's head jerked a quarter-inch with the force of it and came back to where it had been. Giant Jón did not move.

Nobody moved. The man at the boats stood with the line in his two hands. The men at the crates stood with a crate half lifted between them, and set nothing down, and lifted nothing up. The boy stood at his corner with the sun on one shoulder and the shadow on the other and the twine tight across his fingers, and the water went on, small and repeating. He counted the small slaps of it again, without deciding to. He got to nine before the sailor moved.

The sailor waited the way a man waits who has the whole of a Thursday afternoon and a dock watching him. Then he slapped him a third time.

This time Giant Jón looked at him.

He did not look at him the way one man looks at another man who has just hit him three times. He looked at him the way a man looks at a thing he is genuinely trying to understand. He tilted his big slow head and he said, in a voice that was neither angry nor afraid but only puzzled —

Did you hit me?

It was a question. He asked it the way questions are asked that want answers, turned up a little at the end, left open at the end. It went out over the dock, over the crates and the tied-up boats and the men, and it hung there.

Nobody answered it.

The water answered against the pilings, small and repeating, which was no answer. The gull said nothing. Up at the head of the dock a man looked at his boots, and the looking made no sound. The question stayed in the air above the dock, asked and open. The answer that should have come — six men's worth of answer, standing within twenty feet of it — did not come. The dock's whole answer was the water.

The Danish sailor grinned.

He turned his head toward the long boat, where his two companions stood at the stern, and said, in Danish — Han spørger, om jeg slog ham — he is asking whether I hit him. The two at the long boat laughed. The laugh came up over the boards. It was the only answer Giant Jón's question got.

There were six grown Icelandic men on the dock.

The boy counted them. He counted them without thinking about it, the way a boy who has watched sheep on a hill counts sheep — automatically, without having decided to. There were six. The nearest of them was Jónas the harbor-keeper, standing by the bollard at the head of the dock, who had known Giant Jón for twenty years. The next was the old fisherman Sveinn, who had served four years as Jón's rowing partner when they were both young, before Jón went to the unloading and Sveinn went to the net. The third was a man from up the spit who traded oil. The fourth was a stranger, a bearded man in a black coat, whose trade the boy did not know. The fifth and sixth were two of the day-labour men from the warehouse.

None of them moved.

None of them spoke.

Jónas the harbor-keeper was looking at his boots. The old fisherman Sveinn was looking at a coil of rope near his foot. The oil-trader was looking at the water. The stranger in the black coat was looking, as far as the boy could tell, at the Danish ensign on the stern of the gunboat out at the mooring. The two day-labour men were looking at each other's boots, each at the other's. Six pairs of Icelandic eyes on six pairs of Icelandic boots and one pair of Danish grin.

The boy stood at the corner of the customs house and he felt a thing come up through his chest.

He had felt it once before — in a kitchen at Barð when his father had been standing in the doorway with the hand still lifted above Kristín's shoulder — and he had done, that time, the thing a ten-year-old does, which is to rush with his fists forward and be slapped down. He felt it now.

It came up through his chest and into his throat. It came up faster than he could think about it. The twine cut a white line across his two fingers. By the time it got to his mouth he was already opening his mouth, and his voice — the voice of a fifteen-year-old who had not yet had his voice break cleanly — came out of him in a scream.

He screamed one word.

Kill him.

He screamed it in Icelandic, in the sharp short imperative, Drepið hann — into the air above the dock and into the faces of the six grown men who were standing, impassive, behind Giant Jón. He screamed it because there was nothing else, in that moment, to scream.

The scream went across the dock.

Jónas the harbor-keeper looked up for a quarter-second, and looked back down. The old fisherman Sveinn, whose son was the boy's age, did not look up at all. The oil-trader did not look up. The stranger in the black coat did not look up. The two day-labour men did not look up. The Danish sailor, who understood no Icelandic, understood the word as every man in every language has understood the word at the top of a boy's voice in a moment like that, and his grin widened.

Giant Jón wiped his face, slowly, with the back of his own hand.

He wiped the place on his cheek where the sailor had hit him three times. He did it without looking at the sailor. He did it the way a man wipes a bit of wet off his face when a wave has broken over the bow. Then he turned — slowly, with the slight favor of the left hip — and he walked away. He walked up the dock past the six men, who did not look at him, and he turned at the corner, and he walked up the lane into the spit, and he was gone.

The Danish sailor laughed once, shrugged, and walked back to where his two companions were standing at the stern of the long boat.

There will be rain by evening, Jónas the harbor-keeper said. He said it to nobody in particular. Nobody answered that either.

The dock, within a minute, emptied. It emptied in the quiet way docks empty — men turning to their work or turning to the customs house, without speaking to one another, without making, by word or gesture, the slightest acknowledgment that anything had happened.

The boy stood in his corner.

He stood there for a long time. He stood there with the twine in his hand and the scream still in his throat, and nobody had picked it up, and nobody was going to. The work came back below him. The crates went on from the stack to the boats. The line he had watched not being hauled was hauled. The sounds of the dock came back one at a time, rope and wood and water, the same sounds as before, in the same order as before. He watched the afternoon light move across the boards of the dock, and go up the wall of the third warehouse, and take on the long red of the May evening. The gull left the piling. The water went on against the pilings, small and repeating.

At that moment I realized the true state of the Icelandic people.

He walked home along the shoulder of the hill road. The fjord was to his left. The hill was to his right, rising from the shoulder of the road into smooth pasture and then into the steeper grey rock above. The sun was on the water. The evening was the long slow May evening of the north, in which the light takes three hours to go, and in which a boy walking home has a long time to think about whatever he is thinking about.

He thought about Giant Jón's hand. The big hand, at the end of its slow wiping, had gone back down to Jón's side, and Jón had walked away. The hand was what his country had been trained into. The hand was what his country had learned, over four hundred years, to let hang at its side while its face was being slapped.

He got to Barð in the last of the light.

He did not tell his mother. He did not tell his father.

He sat at the table with his brother Magnús and ate a plate of boiled fish and a piece of rye bread and said nothing, and Kristín, at the end of the table, looked at him once — the long careful look — and looked away. She had heard. He could see, from the small motion in the corner of her mouth when she bent to her bowl, that she had heard. The story of the dock would have traveled, in the way stories traveled on the spit, up the lane and across the harbor and along the hill road to Barð in about two hours, and she would have heard it at a door or across a fence or in the kitchen of a neighbor who had come up for salt, before he came in.

What she thought, watching her son eat a plate of fish at her kitchen table on the evening of the Thursday of the Frem, belongs to her.

She set a bowl of skyr in front of him after the fish.

The Frem came back in the spring of 1899.

She was a year older and he was a year older and the fjord was the fjord. She dropped her anchor at the same outer mooring in the first week of May, when the ice had gone from the head of the fjord and the first trading ships were coming up the coast. Her captain came ashore the first afternoon to present himself to the firm-master. Her crew came ashore in a long boat, in fours and sixes. It was the same crew, with three men replaced. The sailor who had slapped Giant Jón was not among them. He had been promoted, or reassigned, or was ashore sick, or was no longer in the Danish navy at all; the boy did not know, and did not, in that week, think about him. The boy was thinking about the deck of the Frem.

The deck of the Frem was, on a spring afternoon in 1899, the place where the boys of Oddeyri went to find out how the year had gone.

It was a custom. It was not an announced custom — it was not a thing anyone had decided, in the way things get decided in a parish — but it was a custom. The sailors of the gunboat came ashore and drank at the house at the upper end of the spit and walked up the main street in their blouses and caps, and the boys of the spit looked at them and did not look at them, and by the third or fourth day of the visit there was always, somewhere on the water or on the dock or on the Frem herself, a small fight. Sometimes it was two sailors and three boys, in a lane. Sometimes it was eight or ten on a side, on the dock. This year it was on the Frem herself, which the sailors had — in a gesture that was half generous and half insulting — invited the boys aboard for.

It was a Thursday.

There were fifteen or twenty boys aboard that afternoon, and about a dozen sailors. The captain was on the bridge. He had not yet come down. When he came down he would end the fight, because that was what captains of gunboats did with fights of this kind: he would blow the whistle at his waist, and the sailors would fall back to their side of the deck, and the boys would be told off the ship, and the boys would go, and the story of whatever had happened in the half-hour before the whistle would travel up the spit the same evening, and the year's test would have been administered.

On this afternoon the half-hour had not yet run.

The boys had come aboard in three groups. In the first were Pétur and Stefán and Júlíus and a boy named Hafliði, who was the cobbler's second son. In the second were four older boys, seventeen and eighteen years old, from the upper end of the spit. In the third group, which had come up the gangway last, there were seven, and Jói had come up last of the seven. He was, on the deck of the Frem that afternoon, the smallest boy aboard.

He was sixteen.

He was, by the estimate of the Danish captain on the bridge, who looked down the length of his ship at the boys and made a quick inventory of them, closer to twelve. This was a trick of his frame and of the way he stood.

The deck was warm underfoot where the sun had been on it all afternoon and cold in the shadow of the deckhouse. It smelled of tar and wet hemp and scrubbed wood — the scoured cleanness of a navy ship, which was not the smell of any boat on the fjord. The water knocked along the hull, small and steady. Under his boots the boy could feel the size of her: the slow deep shifting of a ship that did not move the way a fishing boat moved, the weight of her going over and coming back long after the water that had moved her was gone. He stood at the back of the six with his weight on the balls of his feet, and the deck lifted and settled, lifted and settled, and he put his weight where the deck was going. Nobody had told him to do that. His feet did it.

The fight got going at the aft end of the deck, where one of the larger Danish sailors was standing with his back against the quarter-deck rail and shouting at the Icelandic boys — in Danish — that they should go home to their mothers.

The sailor was a full head taller than any boy on the deck. He was broad. He was broader in the shoulders than Giant Jón. He had the long heavy face of a man from Jutland and the low patient bullying voice of a man who had done this on a dozen other decks in a dozen other harbors. He stood at the rail with his thumbs hooked into his belt and he repeated the line slowly, so that the Icelandic boys — most of whom understood Danish — would understand it —

Gå hjem til jeres mødre, I småtter.

Go home to your mothers, little ones.

Nobody went home to his mother.

Nobody moved at all. The sailor looked along the line of the boys, without hurry, the way a buyer looks along a line of horses, and said it again, in the same level voice, at the same unhurried pace. The water knocked along the hull. The deck lifted and settled under all of them. Sailors were drifting aft now, in twos and threes, hands in their pockets, arranging themselves along the rail to watch. At the foredeck a sailor had stopped with a match halfway to his pipe. The boys bunched. The boy could hear, around him, the boys of Oddeyri breathing.

Pétur, who was the bravest of the boys in the way a boy of fifteen can be brave — which is to say without any real understanding of what he was brave against — moved forward first. He put up his fists. The Dane laughed. Stefán moved in behind Pétur. The Dane, without taking his thumbs out of his belt, moved his right shoulder a half-inch, in a small amused readiness. It was plain what came next. When Pétur came in, the Dane would hit him once, a short hard right, and Pétur would go down against the rail, and the fight would be over before the rest of them had moved.

Jói, at the back of the group, stepped forward.

He did it without plan.

He did it in the small automatic way in which a body that has been practicing a thing all winter in a field behind a house does, in the moment it is called on, the thing it has been practicing. He did not think: now is the moment. He did not think about Hallgrímur Kristinsson. He did not think about the post in the back pasture, or his brother, or any of the boys he had thrown in the field across the winter. His body, which had spent eight months teaching itself where its own weight was, stepped forward into the opening between Pétur and Stefán and went down low.

He slid in under the arm of the Dane — under the arm, not past it, at the short awkward angle that was the one angle a man with his thumbs in his belt could not close — and he hooked his own heel behind the Dane's heel.

His cheek was against the man's blouse. The wool of it was warm and smelled of tobacco and salt. He had come in with the ankle flat and ready, the way he had come in against the post a thousand times, and the post had never weighed anything, and the post had never breathed. This breathed. The whole side of the man moved against his face with the breathing. For the length of one breath nothing happened. The deck lifted under the two of them and settled. He knew precisely, at that moment, where his own weight was. He knew where the Dane's weight was. The Dane's weight was on the right foot, because the Dane had shifted his shoulder in the direction of Pétur and the hip had followed; he could feel it through the bone of his own ankle, the way a man feels through the haft which way a loaded sledge will tip. The left foot carried nothing. The left foot was the one the boy hooked. Above him — a long way above him — the Dane was beginning to turn his head, to look down, to see what had attached itself to him.

He dropped his own weight backward.

He did it all the way.

He did it harder than Hallgrímur had ever done it in the yard at Möðruvellir, because Hallgrímur had been throwing boys, and this was a man, and a heavier thing needs a harder drop.

The Dane went over.

He went over like a man falling off a chair. He did not go over like a man falling off a ship — the hook held him to the deck. He went over like a man who, standing at a rail with his thumbs in his belt, has been uncoupled, in the space of a heartbeat, from his own ankle. He went down in the clean diagonal the boys at Möðruvellir had gone in. The noise he made when he hit the deck — thumbs still hooked into his belt, hands not coming out in time to catch him — was the noise of a side of beef landing on wood.

Then it was silent on the deck of the Frem, for about a half of a second.

Half a second is not a long time. It was long enough. The water knocked along the hull, once. The deck lifted, and settled. The boy let the man's ankle off his heel and stood up out of the drop, and the silence held while he stood. Fifteen Icelandic boys stood on the deck of a Danish gunboat absorbing what they had seen. They had seen a sixteen-year-old who looked twelve take down, with one unannotated motion, a Jutlander who was a full head taller than any of them and who had been, a heartbeat before, the largest man on the deck. The sailors along the rail stood with their hands in their pockets. The sailor at the foredeck stood with the match still unstruck in his hand.

Then the boys of Oddeyri let out a roar.

It was not a dignified roar. It was the pure undignified delight of small boys who have, for the first time, seen one of their own do the thing none of them had believed could be done. Pétur shouted. Stefán shouted. Júlíus, who was the tallest of them and had done the most shouting of his life already, shouted louder than he had ever shouted. Hafliði the cobbler's son jumped where he stood. The four older boys at the far end of the deck lifted their arms over their heads.

Júlíus shouted it first — across the deck, in Icelandic, at the cluster of sailors at the foredeck: the biggest Dane on the Frem, thrown like a rag by the smallest boy in Oddeyri.

The line found its meter on the second saying. They began, almost at once, to chant. They chanted in Icelandic, loudly, for the benefit of the Danish sailors at the foredeck.

Minnsti drengurinn í Oddeyri!

The smallest boy in Oddeyri!

It went around once and steadied and came around again, louder, with a stamp of boots in it on the second beat — fifteen boys' boots coming down together on the scrubbed planking of a Danish navy deck. They chanted it at the sailors along the rail. They chanted it up at the bridge. They chanted it down at the man on the deck.

On the deck of the Frem the Dane sat up.

He sat up slowly. His Jutlander face was red. He was breathing hard. He looked at the boy who had taken him down — saw the size of him, measured it, did not believe it, looked again, and still did not believe it — and he opened his mouth and shouted, in Danish, at the top of his voice —

Du spærrer Ben dit Svin!

You tripped me with your leg, you pig!

The boy heard it. He did not respond.

The chant responded for him. It came around again. A sandy-haired sailor crossed the deck and squatted to help the Jutlander up, and along the rail one of the others shouted, in Danish, that it was uhæderligt — ungentlemanly — to trip a man with your leg, and the boys of Oddeyri, who understood at least the Danish part of it, laughed, and chanted.

The whistle came.

The captain had decided it was enough. The sailors fell back toward the foredeck, and the boatswain came along the deck and waved the boys off, and the boys went. They went down the gangway in a loud sullen clump, chanting as they went, and they came off the bottom of the gangway onto the boards of the dock, and they kept chanting, up the dock and into the lane and along the upper spit and onto the shoulder of the hill road.

He walked up the hill road with them.

Pétur was beside him. Stefán was behind him. Júlíus was in front, walking backward half the time so that he could look at Jói. Hafliði was at the flank. The four older boys fell off at the top of the lane, with slaps on the shoulder and the slow serious admiring nods that older boys give a younger boy who has done, in front of all of them, a thing they had not known how to do.

The fjord was to his left. The hill was to his right. The chant kept up the whole way — full, then thinning to two voices where the road steepened, then coming back full where it leveled. A wheatear went off the stone wall ahead of them and ran along the top of it. It stopped, and watched them pass.

You are ten years old now, Júlíus said, walking backward.

I'm sixteen, the boy said.

You are ten, Júlíus said. Ten is the better story.

The light was going. It was the long slow northern May evening again — the same evening in its type as the one a year before, when he had walked this same hill road in the other direction, with nothing in him but the scream he had thrown at six backs.

He walked up the hill with his friends in the long red light, and he understood that it had worked. The thing he had seen Hallgrímur Kristinsson do in the yard at Möðruvellir, the thing he had been practicing all winter in the field behind Barð, had worked. It had worked on a Dane. It had worked on the biggest Dane, on the deck of a Danish gunboat, in the harbor of his own town. He was not going to scream at docks anymore.

He had a better instrument, and he had started to use it.

Ahead of him was the house. The house at Barð was the same house. It was the turf ridge against the hill. It was the stable at the lower end. It was the kitchen. His mother was inside it. His father was inside it. The weather was the weather. The year was the year.

He was sixteen. He was the smallest boy in Oddeyri.

That was the first time I kicked a Dane's ass. That continued and in fact intimidating Danes became a sort of sport to us.

The boys walked up the hill road toward Barð, and the fjord was behind them, and the house was ahead of them, and they chanted, and the chant went out across the fjord and did not come back.

The news came up the lane on a Saturday afternoon in the second week of April 1904.

It came in an envelope brought down from Akureyri by a farmer's boy of twelve who had been paid two øre for the errand. The boy did the last hundred yards of the lane at a run, came in at the kitchen door without knocking, put the envelope on the oilcloth in front of Kristín, took the two-øre piece already in his hand as the whole of the answer, and went out, and the kitchen door swung behind him. Kristín left the envelope on the oilcloth beside the salt cellar, and at half past four she put the kettle on.

Jóhannes came in at five.

He had been that afternoon at the post in the back pasture — the post he had gone up to on almost every afternoon since he had come back from Bergen. He had done the heel hook against it, left leg and then right leg, sixty times, and had washed his hands at the outside pump. The envelope was on the oilcloth.

She said — There is a letter.

He sat down. He drew the paper out. It was one sheet, folded once, written in a merchant's blue hand.

The letter was from Grímur Laxdal, the merchant at the firm in Akureyri. He had heard that Ólafur V. Davíðsson of Reykjavík, held to be the finest wrestler in Iceland, was available for the summer. Grímur had laid out one hundred krónur as a wager that no northerner could throw him in the best of three falls. He named the match for the first Sunday of June. The money was posted in escrow at the firm. The southern man would come up by steamer in the first week of May and be housed at a cottage the firm owned on the edge of Oddeyri. I am told that a young man of Barð has been quietly preparing. I should like to find out whether I have been told the truth.

Jóhannes folded the paper along its crease. He did not say anything.

One hundred krónur. He set the sum against the things he knew the price of. A year's wage for a girl in service in Akureyri. A secondhand rowboat. It was not a sum that had ever been on this table.

Kristín looked at him across the oilcloth. She poured the coffee. She set the cup in front of him. She took up her knitting and waited.

He said, after a minute —

A man in the south. The best of three. One hundred krónur.

She said — When.

He said — The first Sunday of June.

She said — Very well.

He went out after the coffee, up the lane to the post, and did the heel hook another thirty times in the last of the light.

The two months began the next morning.

He went out at four. He ran the shore road a mile out and a mile back. He came in as Kristín was putting the kettle on, and he went up to the post. He wrestled the post in the morning. He ran the road in the afternoon. The snow went off the field as April went out, all but a long low drift on the north side of the sheepfold, and the grass at the post was a flat pale brown, and then, by the middle of May, a flat pale green. The work was the same work every day, and every day it was done. He took, twice a week, his cousin Ari, who was eleven, and threw him across the flat pasture in the same diagonal he had seen Hallgrímur's boys go in the yard at Möðruvellir. Ari was the only body at Barð that would stand against him. He got up every time. He took off his cap and came back to the grip.

Ari asked — Will the southern man go down like that?

Jóhannes said — I don't know yet how he goes down.

Ari came back to the grip. Jóhannes threw him an estimated four hundred times across those two months.

His father had begun to watch. He did it from the edge of the barnyard, in the way a man leans at a corner of a building to which he has walked from the shed as if on some other business. He stood with a rope or a bridle-strap in his hand, half-turned. He watched the son at the post, or the son with Ari, or the son coming down the hill in the runner's stride the weeks had built, and then he went back into the shed. He did not call out. He did not comment at the supper table.

On the morning of the twentieth of May Kristín met Jóhannes at the pump with a piece of cut bread in her hand and a dab of the butter on it, saved across three days from her own ration. She handed it to him without speaking. She went inside.

Ólafur came up on the fifth of May.

He came up on the steamer Skálholt with a leather valise in his right hand and a linen jacket over his left arm. Jóhannes had come down to the quay with Grímur Laxdal, who held that the two men should meet before the match and not after. He stood a little back on the boards with his cap in his hand and watched the southern man come down the gangway. He watched the feet first. The feet were quiet. The weight came down the slope of the gangway already collected, not caught at each step, and the free hand did not touch the rail. He was twenty-six. He was tall — an inch and a half, Jóhannes judged, above six feet — and his hair was a brown that in the strong afternoon light was almost black, and his face was the face of a man who had grown up in a house where the light fell evenly.

He was the most handsome man Jóhannes had ever seen.

Ólafur set the valise down on the boards. He walked three paces forward and put his hand out.

Ólafur said — Grímur. And Jóhannes Jósefsson.

Jóhannes took the hand. It was dry and even.

Grímur did the introductions in the louder voice of a merchant closing a small account, and Jóhannes said the five or six words required of him, and the three of them walked up the spit toward the cottage. At the turn by the firm's warehouse he pointed across the head of the fjord toward the pasture above Barð and said the post was up there.

Ólafur said — I will come up in the morning and see it.

He said it without any edge in the voice — a man who had come north to do a piece of work and wanted first to see where it would be done.

He came up the next morning at seven and stood at the post with his hand on it.

Ólafur asked — How many winters?

Jóhannes said — Five.

Ólafur nodded. He took off the linen jacket, laid it on the turf wall, and they went to work.

They trained together at the post in the pasture and on the flat at Oddeyri, and they ran the shore road together. On the first morning Ólafur asked — How far?

Jóhannes said — A mile out. A mile back.

Ólafur said — Every morning?

Jóhannes said — Every morning.

He had not, by the way he ran the first mile, run a road before breakfast in his life. He learned it inside ten days, and by the third week the two of them came back along the shore in the same stride. Jóhannes showed him the heel hook. Ólafur showed him the two-handed grip break the southern wrestlers had taken — he said, with a small laugh — from a pamphlet a Danish gymnastics master had circulated in the schools of Reykjavík three winters before. He taught it at the post on the evening of the eleventh of May, setting the break on twice at half speed, so the hands could be followed.

Ólafur said — Four figures on a page. We learned it off the page.

Jóhannes said — Show me at speed.

The break came at speed, and Jóhannes's grip went. He learned the break in an evening. He learned, under it, without saying so, where it began: an ounce of the southern man's weight going onto the right foot before the hands moved. They took each other down. They got up. They took each other down again. Across three weeks they grew, in the small unspoken way of two men whose bodies had begun to read each other, into a thing closer to a friendship than to a sport.

At the end of the second week, at the post, Ólafur said — You will throw me on the first Sunday.

Jóhannes said — Perhaps.

Ólafur said — You will.

He said it once. They did not speak of the match again.

The first Sunday of June was clear.

The flat at Oddeyri had been cut to a level square of turf forty feet across, with a length of sisal rope rigged at four corner posts at knee height. The Reykjavík steamer had come in on the Saturday with eighteen men from the south. By one o'clock on the Sunday afternoon there were about four hundred men and a dozen women standing at the rope. The sun was high. The fjord on the north side of the flat lay dark blue under the mountain and pale in the middle distance, and a low wind came off the head of the fjord and moved in the rope. The sound of four hundred men talking in the open air was a low even sound, and it went quiet in patches when Jóhannes came onto the spit, and the patches followed him.

Jóhannes came down with his father and his mother. His father walked at his left shoulder in a clean shirt for the first time that Jóhannes could remember. His mother walked at his right shoulder with the shawl on her shoulders. Ólafur was already at the far side of the square in a white shirt and dark trousers and bare feet.

Grímur stood in the middle of the square. He held up his hand for quiet, and got it. He said, loudly, that the match was the best of three — þrjár byltur — and that the winner would be the man who put the other man down three times out of five tries, and that the purse, one hundred krónur, would be paid on the Monday morning. He stepped back.

The two men took the grips.

They took the standard grips of the glíma — right hand to the top of the left hip, left hand to the rear of the right hip, heads set to the right of the other's right shoulder — and they settled, for half a second, into the weights of each other's bodies. The turf was dry and firm and gave half an inch. Jóhannes had stood in this grip with this man five days a week across May. The weight in it was new.

The first fall was the outside hip. He had learned, across the three weeks, that Ólafur liked to lead with a small push at the left shoulder in the first second of the grip, and that the push, well disguised, committed an ounce of his weight onto his right foot. He took the first second of the grip. The push came. Jóhannes stepped inside the right foot, put the heel of his left boot against the ankle of Ólafur's right, and turned at the hip. Ólafur went down in a slow clean diagonal that did not, for the first heartbeat, look like a fall at all. The back hit the turf flat. The crowd gave the low open roar of men who had seen, in the first eight seconds, that the thing they had come down the lane for was going to happen.

Ólafur got up. He nodded, once, to Jóhannes. He took the grip.

The second fall took a minute and a quarter. Ólafur had anticipated the outside hip. He set the grip with his weight carefully even, and he did not push. Jóhannes did not push either. They stood under each other's hands for about twenty seconds without moving. The wind moved in the rope. Behind his right shoulder a man said something low, and was not answered. The hands at his hips lay even, asking nothing, and his own hands lay the same way, and the sweat started at the small of his back in the sun. He counted four breaths. The hands on his hips asked one small question — a finger's weight at the back of the left hip — and he did not answer it. The fjord made the only sound, down on the stones at the edge of the spit. The twenty seconds went one at a time. Then Ólafur set his weight onto his right foot and began the double-hand grip break. Jóhannes felt the motion. He let the break begin. In the one-quarter second between the start of the break and its completion he reversed the grip — took the two wrists in his own, and used not his own strength but the strength Ólafur had put into the break, as the force that pulled Ólafur off his own line. Ólafur went down a second time. It was, to an eye at the rope that knew what it was looking at, a fall executed entirely out of the energy the falling man had supplied. The roar was louder, because the northern men had understood, across the minute and a quarter, what the physics had been.

Ólafur got up. He did not brush the grass off. He stood at his place on the square and looked at Jóhannes across the four feet of turf between them, and there was, in the look, the clean open respect of a man who had met, for the first time in his life in a ring, a body that had read him. He nodded. He took the grip.

The third fall took three seconds. Jóhannes felt, under his right hand at Ólafur's left hip, the small tightening that was Ólafur's preparation for a rotation — a third technique, one they had not trained, held back across three weeks. He did not wait for the rotation. He stepped, before it began, into the line the rotation would have cleared, and he brought Ólafur down on the fourth beat of a count Ólafur had not had time to start.

It was clean. There was no dispute.

The crowd, for about two seconds, made no sound at all, because the third fall had been too fast for the eye, which had expected a struggle and was still waiting for one. Then the roar went over the flat and down to the boards of the quay and up the spit to the buildings of the firm. The reporter the steamer had brought from Reykjavík, who had carried a notebook down to the rope and had not opened it, did not open it now.

Grímur came across the square. He took Jóhannes's right arm above the wrist and he lifted it.

Ólafur came across the square. He put his hand out. Jóhannes took it.

Ólafur said — Þú last mig.

You read me.

Jóhannes said — Þú last mig líka.

You read me too.

They held the grip a second longer than a handshake.

The money came up the lane on the Monday evening.

Jóhannes had gone down to the firm at ten in the morning and had signed, at the counter, for one hundred krónur — ten ten-krónur notes, new — to the account of Jóhannes Jósefsson of Barð. The clerk counted the notes twice. He had put them in the inside pocket of his coat — the same pocket in which the folded paper from the Bergen barracks had sat across seven months and which he had, on the evening of the first Sunday of June, finally taken out and burned in the stove without opening — and he walked the mile and a half home.

He came in at the kitchen door at five.

Kristín was at the table, hands folded on the oilcloth. Jósef was at the door of the side room.

Jóhannes took the ten notes out of the inside pocket. He laid them on the oilcloth in front of his mother, in a small stack, not quite square, the king of Denmark's head turned up on the top note. The stack sat four inches from her folded hands.

Kristín looked at the stack. She did not count it. She lifted, with the fingers of her right hand, the corner of her apron. She held the corner for about three seconds. She put the corner down again.

She said — Þetta verður vel notað.

These will be put to good use.

She did not touch the notes. She left the stack on the oilcloth under the lamp for the remainder of the evening.

Jósef came over to the table. He did not sit down. He looked at the stack on the oilcloth for a long moment. He looked at his son. He did not say anything. He nodded, once, the small nod of the evening in October, and he went back into the side room.

Ólafur stayed at Oddeyri a week more.

He did not wrestle Jóhannes again that spring. They walked the shore road in the evenings — out and back, three miles, in the long dusk that had begun to hold its light until ten. Ólafur talked: of his family in Reykjavík, of a sister who played the piano, of a teacher at the Latínuskóli who had tried for two years to make him read Greek and failed. Jóhannes said less.

On the last evening before the steamer south, at the turn where the road went up toward Barð, Ólafur said — You will come to Reykjavík this autumn.

Jóhannes said — I might.

Ólafur said — You will.

He said it as he had said You will throw me. They did not shake hands. Ólafur went back down the road toward the cottage. Jóhannes went up the lane to the house.

He went up to Reykjavík in the autumn.

He went on the steamer Ingólfur in the first week of October 1904, with the canvas bag on his shoulder and forty krónur in the pouch at his waist. His mother had made him a new canvas coat across the summer. He was twenty-one years old. He was going to the capital for the first time in his life.

The hall was on Hverfisgata.

It was a plain wooden building of one story, lying on the east side of the street about two hundred yards north of the Parliament, which had been, until the autumn of 1904, a warehouse for the cooperage trade. A cooper named Pétur had kept barrels and barrel-hoops and long-handled mallets in it for twenty-two years, and the plank floor held the smell of his trade in its grain — oak, and hoop-iron. Ari Jónsson, a young merchant's son of twenty-two, had put four krónur down for the month's rent in the second week of September after a meeting in Þórhallur Bjarnason's drawing room, at which Þórhallur had said that what the young men of Reykjavík needed, before anything else, was a place to wrestle.

Jóhannes came in at the door on the third evening after his arrival in Reykjavík, with Ólafur at his shoulder. It was raining a fine cold rain, and the door of the hall stood open, and the light of the lamp inside lay out across the mud of the lane.

Inside were seventeen men on two benches and a row of chairs, around a square of sawdust and sand sixteen feet across under a single oil lamp. The low murmur of the room fell off. Ólafur said — This is Jóhannes Jósefsson.

The men stood. They did not cheer. They stood in the even courtesy of young men who had, across the summer, read in the weekly papers of a match on the flat at Oddeyri in June at which a northerner had put Ólafur V. Davíðsson on the turf in three straight falls. Ari Jónsson came forward and put his hand out.

Jóhannes shook it. He said the small words he could find.

He said — I have come down from the north. I was told there was a hall here in which a man could train.

Ari said — There is now.

The men sat down again, and the meeting began.

Ari ran the meeting with a bound notebook and a pencil.

He said — The hall is taken at four krónur the month. October and November are paid.

He said — The club will need a name.

He read four suggestions — Glímufélag Reykjavíkur, Íþróttafélag Austurvöllur, Aflvaki Íslands, and last, as if he had been holding it —

Grettir.

The name sat in the hall for two seconds. Nobody cheered it. The men at the benches — who had each read the saga of Grettir the Strong, the outlaw at Drangey, the best wrestler in the north in the eleventh century — took the name with the particular silence of Icelanders hearing, in the mouth of a chairman, the name of a saga-hero proposed as the name of a thing they were going to do in a warehouse.

Þórhallur Bjarnason said — Grettir.

He said it as a vote. A man named Sigurður said it next. Ólafur Rósinkranz said it next. The tally came up thirteen. The men had voted without raising hands. That was the name.

Ari said — The club will need a statement of purpose. One line. For the papers.

The room went still.

Ólafur V. Davíðsson, at Jóhannes's left elbow, said, in the quiet voice of a man who had been thinking about the statement across three weeks —

Glíman er tvíburasystir íslenskrar tungu.

Wrestling is the twin sister of the Icelandic language.

Nobody in the hall, for a long second, said anything. The young men on the benches heard the sentence, and they understood what the sentence had said.

Ari wrote the name in the notebook. He wrote the sentence beneath it. He closed the book.

The Belt came in the second week of December 1904.

A silversmith on Laugavegur had struck the buckle, for twenty-eight krónur payable in three installments — round, two and a half inches across, in struck silver, with the face of Grettir Ásmundsson in profile at the center and, in a ring around it, the saga-line sá er ber veginn hjálm í hellinum. The buckle had, at the two-o'clock position of the ring, a small imperfection where the casting had not quite taken: a faint pit no wider than the head of a needle, which a hand sliding across the buckle would feel but an eye looking at the buckle at two feet would miss. The leather had been the gift of a tack-maker at the harbor, cut from a strap of oxhide off a broken harness to a length of forty-two inches — cut in the back of his workshop on a Saturday afternoon with his son of twelve holding the end. When the strap came into Ari's room in the first week of December it smelled of harness-oil, and under that of the horse whose back it had sat on for eight years, and under that of wax.

Jóhannes saw the Belt for the first time on the evening of the seventh, at the practice sessions, on the table at the back of the hall. The leather had been rubbed with a light oil and the silver had been polished, and the Belt lay flat on the deal of the table in the low orange light. He walked past it on his way to the bench. He stopped. He put his hand on the leather. He ran his thumb once across the buckle, and the thumb found the pit at the two-o'clock position — a faint deepening, a hair past a scratch — and went on past it. He took his hand off the buckle and went to the bench and took off his coat.

The tournament was the eighth of December.

The hall was full. There were, by Ari's count at the door, a hundred and forty men in the hall at seven o'clock — on the benches, at the chairs, along the walls, three deep at the back — and another forty or fifty in the lane outside, looking in at the door. A second lamp had been hung alongside the first over the square, and the two lamps put a clean even yellow light on the sawdust. The men had come in by coastal steamer and by cart and in one case by a three-day ride from the western fjords. The heat of a hundred and forty men stood in the room with the smell of them — wet wool, lamp oil, the cooper's oak under the floor. There were nineteen matches on the bill, drawn in the form of a ladder at Ari's kitchen table three days before. Jóhannes had drawn the first slot out of a cap.

Jóhannes wrestled nineteen times.

He won the first in three seconds. The man came into the grip with his weight already leaning, and Jóhannes stepped inside the lean and put him down with the outside hip before the lean had finished arriving. The sawdust took the back with a flat dry sound. The hall laughed once, and settled.

He won the sixth in two minutes and eight seconds, against a long-armed boy from Vestmannaeyjar who came nearer to him than any man of the night. At the close of the first minute the boy began a two-handed grip break, of the kind Ólafur had shown him in May, and for the half of a half-second Jóhannes's right hand held nothing. He gave ground along the diagonal, took his second grip low at the hip, and waited the boy out. The boy's arms were longer than his and lighter than his, and at two minutes the boy was holding on rather than wrestling, and Jóhannes finished it.

Between matches he sat at the end of the first bench with his forearms on his knees. The sweat ran and the sawdust stuck where it ran. The cold off the open door came up the hall and stood against his back, and he let it, and his breath came down on its own to the pace of the shore-road mornings. By the tenth match his hands had begun to swell at the knuckles. He opened them and closed them and did not look at them.

He won the tenth against a man from Borgarfjörður who had a reputation at the fairs of the western coast and who, at the end of the fall, got up, nodded to Jóhannes in the manner of Ólafur on the turf at Oddeyri, and said, quietly, that he had been read.

He won the semifinal against a heavy farmer from Skagafjörður in a minute and seventeen seconds. The farmer's grip was the strongest thing he met that night — the grip of a man who had taken wet hay off a field every August of his life — and for the first minute Jóhannes let the strength spend itself against half-turns that moved nothing. Then the right foot set itself for a lift, and under it the sawdust said the throw before the farmer did. He stepped into the line the lift wanted clear, and the farmer's own strength carried the farmer over Jóhannes's hip, and down, and the sawdust jumped.

Ólafur V. Davíðsson came to the corner of the square before the final with a tin cup of water in his hand.

He said — You were caught twice yesterday evening.

Jóhannes said — I was trying the grip.

Ólafur asked — And now?

Jóhannes said — Now I will wrestle what I have.

Ólafur took back the cup and stepped away from the square.

Ari stood at the edge of the sawdust with the notebook shut at his side.

He said, into the hall — The nineteenth match. Jóhannes Jósefsson. Ólafur Rósinkranz. For the Belt.

The hall came down to one low sound.

Ólafur Rósinkranz was a good wrestler of a light build, quick at the feet. He took the grip without ceremony. For the first twenty seconds he went left, light and fast, looking for the line he had caught Jóhannes on twice at the practice — and the line was not offered, because Jóhannes was not trying anything. At the half-minute Rósinkranz committed to the inside step. The weight left his left foot before the step began, and Jóhannes felt it leave. He did not wait. He stepped first, took the hip, and turned, and Rósinkranz went over in the slow clean diagonal of the falls at Oddeyri. His back hit the sawdust flat. It was the nineteenth match, and it had lasted fifty-four seconds.

The nineteenth fall was at eleven at night.

The hall went into the open roar of a crowd of a hundred and forty men who had watched, across an evening, a thing being done in a warehouse. The boots came down on the plank floor and the floor moved under them. A glass pane in the rear window, rattled loose by the stamping, fell out of the frame and broke on the lane behind. Ari Jónsson came to the square. He took up the Belt from the table at the back of the hall. He walked across with the Belt in his two hands, and the roar did not slacken while he walked, and it did not slacken while he found the hole, and the walking and the closing took longer than the final had taken. He put it around Jóhannes's waist.

The leather fitted at the second-to-last hole.

Out of the roar came the chant —

Grettir — Glímukóngur!

Jóhannes felt, at his hip, the cool weight of the buckle. He felt, under the pad of his right thumb — because he had put his thumb, without thinking, on the buckle the moment Ari had closed it — the small pit at the two-o'clock position.

His father was in the hall.

Jósef had come down from Barð on the steamer Skálholt on the morning of the seventh without telling Kristín or anyone what he was doing. He had walked up from the quay with a borrowed cap pulled low. He had sat through the afternoon in a coffee house on Austurstræti over one cup of coffee, at a table from which he could see the door. He had gone to the hall in the evening of the seventh and had watched, at the back of a room of eighty men, the practice sessions Ari had put on for the wrestlers who had come in early, and he had watched Jóhannes lose two of three practice rounds to Ólafur Rósinkranz — caught twice, on the line of a grip he had not trained. He had walked out at nine o'clock and paid eighty aurar for a sleeping-bunk in a pension on Hafnarstræti.

He had gone, the morning of the eighth, into the Post Office on Austurstræti. He had stood at the counter with the form in front of him for a long time before he wrote. He had written a telegram to Kristín at Barð in the short slow careful print of a man who had, across forty-eight years, put a pen to paper not more than thirty times. He had written —

Drengurinn mun verða niðurlægður stop. Ég hef séð æfingarnar stop. Suðurlandsstrákarnir eru skarpari stop. Jósef stop.

The boy will be humiliated. I have seen the practices. The southern boys are sharper. Jósef.

He had paid the telegraph clerk seventy aurar. He had not gone to Jóhannes at the boarding house, because he could not think of a sentence he could say to his son that was either true or kind. He had walked, across the day, out to the lighthouse on Seltjarnarnes and back, nine miles in a cold rain off the sea, with the wind working at the cap and his boots taking water at the seams; at the turn under the lighthouse he stood for a while looking at the water, and then he walked back. He came into the hall on Hverfisgata in the evening of the eighth at half past six, and he stood at the back wall behind the three-deep row of men, in the single place in the hall at which he could see the square and not be seen by the square, and he watched every fall of the nineteen.

He stood four hours. He did not lean on the wall. He had taken the cap off inside the door, and he held it at his side in one hand. Between the shoulders of the two men in front of him he could see the square, and the two lamps over it, and his son's back. At each fall the three-deep row went up on its toes and roared and came down again, and he did not go up, and he did not roar.

Across the first seven matches he said nothing, not even in his head.

At the semifinal, when his son put the heavy farmer from Skagafjörður on the sawdust in a minute and seventeen seconds, his two hands began to shake. He hung them at his sides, very carefully. He did not put them in his pockets.

At the nineteenth fall, when Ari closed the buckle at the second-to-last hole, Jósef turned his face to the back wall of the hall, because he had not wanted the row of men in front of him to see the face he had turned, and he stood with the cap in his two hands and the face to the wall, and he breathed once, and he put the cap back on, and he turned around, and he went out of the hall in the dispersing crowd without his son having seen him.

He got back to Barð on the morning of the eleventh of December.

He came in at the kitchen door in the late morning, in the shirt he had slept in for four nights. Kristín was at the table. The telegram — The boy will be humiliated — was still on the oilcloth at the spot she had set it three days before. She had not moved it. She had not turned it over.

Jósef took off the cap. He hung it on the nail. He came to the table. He sat down opposite her. He did not touch the telegram.

For a time neither of them said anything. The rain of four days was in his shirt, and the warmth of the kitchen had begun to work on it.

He said — Drengurinn er óyfirvinnandi.

The boy is unbeatable.

He said it into the kitchen. He said it in a voice Kristín had not — across twenty-five years of marriage to him — ever heard him use. He said it without looking at her. He said it with his two hands flat on the oilcloth, the telegram between the two hands. He said it once.

She did not say anything. She got up. She walked, past his shoulder, to the stove. She put the kettle on the hook over the fire. She came back to the table. She folded her hands on the oilcloth about four inches from the telegram, in the position she had folded them in front of the stack of ten-krónur notes on the Monday evening after the first Sunday of June.

She said — Já.

Yes.

Jóhannes did not know his father had been in the hall.

He walked, on the night of the eighth of December 1904, from the hall on Hverfisgata in a cold rain down along Hverfisgata to Lækjargata and across to Þingholtsstræti and up to the boarding house. The streets were empty, and the rain came fine and cold off the harbor. The Belt, under the open coat he had not bothered to button, sat at his hip. The silver of the buckle, when his right hand brushed it, was cold through the cotton of his shirt. His thumb, without thought, rested at the small pit at the two-o'clock position.

He came up the stair. He went into the narrow room at the back. He took the Belt off. He laid it across the wooden chair at the foot of the bed.

He turned down the oil lamp.

He slept.

The cable came in the middle of February 1906.

It was signed by Carl Kjær, of a trading house at Copenhagen, and it said that the Danish heavyweight champion Henry Nielsen would be available in May for a friendly match at the Athletic Club of Copenhagen, and that the house of Kjær og Nielsen, having read in the Reykjavík weekly of the Icelander Jóhannes Jósefsson and his nineteen falls at the hall on Hverfisgata, would be pleased to offer the Icelander the match, the Atlantic passage for himself and one trainer, and a purse of three hundred Danish kroner.

Ari read it twice, at the small table at the back of the hall, under the lamp. He laid it on the boards between them and put his hand flat on it.

Ari said — Will you go.

Jóhannes said — Yes.

Ari said — He has thrown every man in Denmark.

Jóhannes said — They were Danish men.

Ari took his hand off the cable.

He had, between the eighth of December 1904 and the fifteenth of February 1906, trained five days a week at the hall. He had wrestled an estimated three hundred matches, and lost four, all four to Ólafur Rósinkranz. He had added nine pounds at the chest. He had learned a length of workable Danish from the commercial men at the coffee house on Austurstræti.

He boarded the steamer Ceres on the twenty-eighth of April.

He had, at his hip under the shirt, the Belt. He had decided in March that it would travel with him to Copenhagen as a separate piece of the going, additional to the match itself — a piece nobody in Copenhagen was told about. The Belt traveled in the canvas bag, wrapped in the shawl.

The Ceres was eight days going over. He walked the afterdeck an hour each morning in the dark before the watch changed, between the davits and the cargo hatch, twenty-six steps and a turn, and the spray came over the rail fine and cold and dried on his face as salt.

The Ceres came up on the coast of Denmark on the morning of the sixth of May. Carl Kjær met him at the office at Christianshavn and looked at him for a moment longer than the handshake took.

Kjær said — You are smaller than the champion.

Jóhannes said — Yes.

Kjær waited for the rest of the answer. The rest of the answer did not come. He wrote the address of a boarding house on Nyhavn on the back of the firm's card.

Kjær said — The match is the ninth of May, at seven in the evening.

He had three days. He did not sightsee. He ran the length of the Nyhavn and back at the early hour, when the quay stones were wet and the masts of the small traders stood out of a low white mist on the harbor, and the only other men out were the fish-sellers setting up their boards. He walked, once, across the stone square at Amalienborg, looked at the statue of the king on horseback, and did not feel anything at the statue. The anger he had carried across the water from the hall at Bergen was not available in the square at Amalienborg. It was available in the hall at Østerbrogade, on the evening of the ninth, and not anywhere else.

He came to the hall at half past six on the evening of the ninth and was shown to a dressing room at the back — a narrow room with a bench, a row of iron hooks, one lamp. He could hear the hall through the wall. It was not a sound of voices. It was one steady sound, like water working under ice, with no single voice in it. He changed. He folded the shirt and laid it on the bench with the collar to the wall. The Belt stayed in the canvas bag, in the shawl, at the end of the bench. He stood a moment in the lamp light with his hands at his sides, and his hands were dry, and he opened them and closed them twice.

The hall at Østerbrogade was full.

Five hundred men stood along the walls and filled the standing pit and the rail of the low gallery. They wore dark suits; they smoked cigars; the smoke made, in the upper ten feet of the hall, a flat blue band under the electric lights. The heat of five hundred men stood in the room with the smell of them — wool, cigars, the resin off the mat. At the rail of the low gallery there was a cluster of about thirty men in wool blouses and flat caps — Icelandic sailors off the coastal steamers. As Jóhannes walked along the edge of the hall to the square, a single voice from the cluster called loudly across the hall —

Jói!

Jóhannes did not look.

The square was canvas over felt, chalked at its borders, and it gave half an inch under his weight. He stood at the near corner with his arms loose and rolled his neck once, and he put the sound of the hall away from him, the way he put away the smell of bread.

Henry Nielsen was already at the far corner — six feet one and a half, long narrow face, moustache trimmed close. He had, in the face, the clean even confidence of a man who had been told, that morning, by a physician he respected, that his reflexes were up. He did not nod. He stood with his weight even on his two feet and rolled his head to the left and to the right, and his neck was a working neck, thick at the base, the neck of a man who had done the bridging drills across ten years. Jóhannes watched the feet. The feet were good. They were not as good as Ólafur's.

A thickset man in shirtsleeves stood at Nielsen's corner and worked the champion's neck with both thumbs, talking low into his ear. One word of it crossed the mat — otte. Eight. Jóhannes did not need the rest of the sentence.

The referee read the rules — best of three falls, three minutes a fall, Greco-Roman upper-body holds, no tripping, no heel. He read them in Danish at a speaking pace, and then he read them a second time, slowly, with his face turned to Jóhannes. Jóhannes had understood them the first time. He let the man finish.

The referee asked — Har De forstået? Had he understood.

Jóhannes said — Ja.

It was all the Danish he intended to give the hall.

They shook hands. Nielsen's hand was large and dry and even; it gave nothing and it took nothing. The bell rang.

Nielsen took the center of the mat at a small walking pace. He set the high clinch at the back of the neck with his left hand, and the forearm came down along the side of Jóhannes's neck with the weight of a loaded oar. He began the small slow preparatory pull of the head at the Greco-Roman setup.

Jóhannes read the opening in the first three seconds.

He had, in Reykjavík, in an early conversation across a pension table, asked a retired Danish trainer named Sørensen what the standard opening was worth. Sørensen had set his coffee cup in the middle of the cloth and pulled it slowly toward himself.

Sørensen had said — The Hamburg school says the left elbow stays at the ribs. In the half-second of the pull it does not. A hair. No more.

He had pushed the cup back.

Sørensen had said — A hair is nothing. But a tired man pulls long, and a long pull is wide. Wait for the wide one.

The elbow showed at the first pull and went back in.

Nielsen broke the clinch, stepped a half-step to his left, and set it again. The pull came again, small and slow and even — a pull that was not trying for the fall yet, only weighing what it held. The elbow stayed at the ribs. Jóhannes gave the clinch his neck and nothing else. He carried his weight low, on the balls of his feet, and turned as Nielsen turned, a quarter-step at a time, and the chalk line of the border came around, and went away, and came around again.

To the hall it was two men walking.

It was not two men walking. The clinch had a weight that did not show from the rail — the pull came down through his neck and into the small of his back and into the backs of his thighs, and the work of standing still under it was the work of holding a loaded sledge on a slope, and it had to be done without showing, because what showed would be read. Nielsen was reading him too. He could feel the reading in the hand at the back of his neck — small changes of weight, a finger's pressure walking from the second knuckle to the first, questions put one at a time. He answered none of them.

The first minute went. The smoke band lay flat in the upper ten feet of the hall and did not move. A man at the rail of the gallery called down, — Er det en vals, Henry? — is it a waltz, Henry? — and the men around him laughed, low. The sailors did not laugh and did not call again.

The second minute went. The heat of the electric lights stood on his shoulders. Sweat went down the channel of his back, and he let it go down. His own breath he kept at the pace of the morning runs. Nielsen's breath had been even and through the nose; at the close of the second minute it came shorter, and the pull, each time it came, came a little longer.

He counted the pulls. The sixth was the same as the fifth. The seventh was longer. From the gallery a single voice called — Nu, Henry. Nu. Now. Now. Nielsen had begun to want the fall, in front of his own city, in his own hall. The eighth was longer again, and at the long end of it the left elbow came out from the ribs, the width of a thumb, for the half of a half-second, and went back in.

Jóhannes let it pass. The ninth would be longer.

The ninth was longer.

He went to the elbow.

He did not go to it in strength. He went to it in the small inside turn the glíma schools of the southern plain taught the boys from the age of eleven. He took his own right forearm across Nielsen's left forearm, at the elbow, in the half-second of the slow pull, and he rotated — no more than the rotation of a man opening the door of a cupboard — and he took, with the rotation, the weight of Nielsen's upper body across his own right hip. Nielsen, whose plan had not anticipated the rotation, was for one heartbeat entirely on his own left foot. Jóhannes dropped. He brought Nielsen down across the canvas on the back of the right shoulder in the slow clean diagonal of the third fall at Oddeyri and the nineteenth fall at Hverfisgata.

Nielsen's shoulders went flat. The referee knelt. He counted one, two, three.

The hall was silent for four seconds. It was the silence of five hundred Danish men who had paid to see the Danish champion put a colonial subject down in eight minutes, and who had watched the colonial subject put the Danish champion down in three minutes and thirty seconds. Then the cluster of Icelandic sailors at the rail, having understood what they had seen, opened into a sound that was not applause.

The sound went on while Jóhannes stood up off the canvas. It was still going on when Nielsen rolled to his knees.

In the whole of the evening Nielsen had not spoken. The hand at the back of the neck had done his asking.

Nielsen got up. He came across the mat. He put his hand out. Jóhannes took it.

Nielsen said — Du læste mig.

You read me.

He said it in the same rhythm Ólafur had used it in, two years before, on the turf at Oddeyri. Jóhannes nodded. He did not reply in Danish. He did not reply in Icelandic. He nodded.

The Reykjavík weekly had, on the morning of the tenth of May, a short note on the front page under the heading Jóhannes Jósefsson fellir danska meistarann á 3½ mínútum — Jóhannes Jósefsson throws the Danish champion in three and a half minutes. A copy came up by the coastal steamer Laura on the morning of the sixteenth of May to Akureyri. A boy from the firm at Oddeyri carried a copy up the lane to Barð, and he put it on the kitchen table in front of Kristín Einardóttir, and he did not wait.

She read it. She did not show it to Jósef, who was in the side room splicing a piece of rope. She read it a second time. She folded the paper once in half. She put the kettle on the hook over the fire at a quarter before five. She folded her hands on the oilcloth in the position she had folded them in on the morning of the eleventh of December 1904.

What she thought, across the half hour before the kettle boiled, belongs to her.

Jóhannes walked back from the hall at midnight. He had accepted, from the cluster of Icelandic sailors at the rail of the gallery, a hand on the shoulder and a short loud sentence in the accent of the eastern fjords —

Gott, strákur, gott.

Then he had refused the company of the sailors. There was a cellar off Nyhavn that stayed open for the Iceland boats, the oldest of them said, and the hand was still on his shoulder while he said it.

Jóhannes said — Thank you. No.

The man said — You won.

Jóhannes said — I'll walk.

The hand came off the shoulder. He walked the two and a half miles from the hall to the boarding house. A thin rain had come on off the harbor; the gaslamps stood in it in rings; the streets emptied as he went. The Belt, which he had taken out of the canvas bag in the dressing room after the match and had put on at his waist under the shirt, sat at his hip, and the buckle was cold against his shirt, and his right thumb found the pit at the two-o'clock position without thinking.

He went up the stair to the narrow room at the back. He unbuckled the Belt and laid it across the chair at the foot of the bed. He slept.

He boarded the Ceres on the twelfth of May for the return, and on the morning of the eighteenth he came up on the deck in the light before dawn and stood at the rail of the bow and watched, across the gray water ahead, the northern shore come up.

Báran was a public hall in Reykjavík.

It stood at the lower edge of the town, near the harbor, with the sea within earshot through any open window. It had a floor of planed pine and a low platform at one end, and a seating gallery ran the length of one wall. It held, on a good night, about three hundred people. Across the year it was used for political meetings, for choir rehearsals, for temperance gatherings, for theatrical productions, for the occasional wedding, and, two or three times a year, for wrestling.

It was agreed, between Jóhannes and Hallgrímur Benediktsson, that the two of them would wrestle three matches. Best of three. A rematch. A clean accounting.

He had one phrase, later, for the way the asking had been done. He had threatened, he said, all kinds of mischief.

It had needed none. Hallgrímur Benediktsson was twenty-two that September, a tall man with narrow shoulders, a long face, and steady hands, raised in the south among people who said less than they felt. He had beaten a northerner in front of a king. He knew the word in the camp. He had not said it himself. He said yes to the rematch the first time it was asked.

They met at Báran on an evening in the first week of September. There were, in the hall that evening, about a hundred and twenty men. The gallery was half full. The lamps along the wall were lit. The floor was dry.

Jóhannes came down to the hall a little after eight with his wrestling clothes in a roll under his arm. The evening was mild for September. The harbor lay still, with the tar smell standing over the water, and lamps were going on one at a time in the houses along the road. Inside, the hall was warm with men. It smelled of wool, of lamp oil, of pipe smoke, and, through the open windows, of the sea. He changed at the back of the platform and folded his jacket on the boards.

Hallgrímur Benediktsson was waiting at the middle of the floor.

They took hold — the right hand in the waistband at the hip, the left at the thigh of the trousers — and stood a moment at the length of their forearms, head beside head, and began the slow circling step that opens every match.

They wrestled three matches.

In the first, Hallgrímur went early to the hip — the same unspectacular grip that had taken Jóhannes to the grass at Þingvellir in under two minutes. Jóhannes felt it come on. At Þingvellir it had come on at a man with locked calves and fifty kilometers of road in his legs. At Báran it arrived at a man whose legs were his own. He turned his hip out of the line of it, let the pull spend itself across his waist, and went under it with the low hip throw — the right knee dropping, the shoulder coming up into the taller man's chest, the whole of Hallgrímur's weight passing over the hinge of his hip — and Hallgrímur Benediktsson went over it and down, and the boards took him flat. The fall took about ninety seconds.

In the second, Hallgrímur kept the hip back and circled. He was taller, longer at the reach, lighter on his feet, and he used all three, and the match went long — the two of them turning at the length of their forearms, the waistbands twisting in their fists, the boards knocking under the small steps. Twice he tried the hip and twice found nothing on the end of it. Then Jóhannes caught the right knee with the inside of his foot and took him down across it.

The third was the longest of the three. Near the end of it Hallgrímur got his hip under Jóhannes's weight and for a moment had him — one of Jóhannes's feet off the boards, the benches coming up — and Jóhannes broke his weight downward through the standing leg, found the floor, and turned the two of them around and down, Hallgrímur beneath.

Jóhannes won all three.

It was not enough.

He asked for more.

Hallgrímur Benediktsson had gotten up the third time and was standing with his hands at his sides, breathing. At the back of the hall, men were reaching for their coats. The agreement had been three. The accounting was clean. The evening was over.

Jóhannes said — Again.

Hallgrímur Benediktsson looked at him. The look took some time.

Hallgrímur said — Again.

The coats sat back down.

They wrestled a fourth. Hallgrímur came to it with his jaw set and his hold changed, higher in the waistband, and for two minutes he wrestled the soundest wrestling of the evening. Jóhannes won. They wrestled a fifth. Jóhannes won.

By the sixth, the sound of the hall had changed. It had been, at the start of the evening, the low murmur of a hall expecting an ordinary evening of sport. It was not that now. The doorman, without being asked, had set the street door open, and the night air off the harbor came in along the floor, and between falls, under the voices, the sea could be heard working at the stones. Men had gone out the open door at the fifth and come back at the sixth with other men.

By the seventh, the grips were wet. The waistband turned in his fists, and he took it lower and harder, and the cloth wore the skin off two knuckles of his right hand. He set the hand back on the cloth.

At the eighth, the floor of Báran was wet with sweat.

They were working inside a rough darkened circle of boards, and the circle widened with each fall. His lungs burned at the top of each breath. His forearms had filled and gone hard with the work. Between the falls there was no talking. There was the one word, and the taking of the grips, and the next fall.

Hallgrímur had the vocabulary of the low hip throw by now. He had begun, fall by fall, to put answers in its way — the hip drawn back, the near leg withdrawn, a half-step across that was new each time. By the eleventh there were three answers, and they came in rotation, and Jóhannes met each one a half-beat earlier than the last. Each answer cost him more than the one before it. None of them was enough, and each of them was better.

At the ninth, the withdrawn leg nearly saved him. Jóhannes came in for the hip and found it gone, and Hallgrímur's weight came down across his shoulders, driving him toward the boards, and for three seconds the two of them were locked there, bent, head to head, neither man's feet moving, the sweat dropping off the two faces onto the wood between them. Then Jóhannes straightened. He straightened the way a jack straightens under a load, slowly, in one line, and the hip was there again, and the ninth fall went like the others.

At the tenth fall, or the eleventh, their heads came together above the grips. A cut opened over Jóhannes's left eye. The blood thinned in the sweat and ran. He wiped it with the heel of one hand, and said the word, and took the grips.

At the twelfth, the gallery was standing.

No one had called for it. The benches had emptied from the back forward, and the men stood along the rail with their pipes gone dead in their hands. A man near the platform had taken out his watch at the tenth and stood now with it unread in his palm. In the windows on the harbor side the night had come all the way down, and past the twelfth fall Jóhannes stopped keeping the count with his head. The hall was keeping it. After each fall the number went along the rail, in one voice and then in several, and the number was the only thing said in that hall that reached him.

The falls had stopped being separate things. They had become one long thing with pauses in it — grip, turn, weight, boards, the standing up, the one word — and inside the long thing his body went on making its reports: the lungs, the knuckles, the cut, the heat of the lamps on his wet back. He heard the number at the rail. The number was thirteen. It did not seem to him that the number could be thirteen; it seemed both smaller and much larger; and at the next pause the number at the rail was fourteen.

At the fifteenth, men who had come in off the street were watching through the open windows.

They had been walking home along the harbor road and had stopped, two and three to a window, with the lamplight on their faces and the dark at their backs. More came. Nobody inside the hall turned to look at them.

If the word from the camp was anywhere in the hall that evening, no one was saying it.

His hands would no longer close all the way. He closed them. His breath had an edge at the top of it. Hallgrímur Benediktsson's breath was louder than his own, and came slower each time the grips were taken.

The sixteenth fall and the seventeenth were not thrown so much as finished. What was left of Hallgrímur's wrestling was the standing up. He stood up at the sixteenth. He stood up at the seventeenth. Each standing took longer than the fall it followed. His grip no longer held; it dragged. Going down, his fists kept the cloth, and his knuckles came down the front of Jóhannes's shoulders, and the skin rose in long burns.

After the seventeenth, Jóhannes stood inside the circle of darkened boards and waited. Hallgrímur Benediktsson got to one knee. He gathered the other leg under himself. He came up by stages, the way a loaded man comes up a ladder, and the hall had gone quiet enough that the lamps could be heard at their burning, and the sea came in at the open door, and the sweat went off Jóhannes's chin onto the boards, one drop and another drop, and he stood with his ruined hands open at his sides and wanted nothing in the world but the next fall. Hallgrímur rose. He set his feet. He put out his hands for the grips. The hands were shaking.

At the eighteenth, Hallgrímur Benediktsson could barely stand.

The eighteenth was not a throw. Jóhannes took the grips and turned, and Hallgrímur went down out of his own weight.

At the nineteenth, Hallgrímur Benediktsson spent whatever he had been saving. The half-step came, and the inside of his right foot caught Jóhannes's knee, and his hip came across the line of Jóhannes's weight, and the throw was real — the best thing either man had done all evening — and it closed on a weight that was no longer there, because Jóhannes had read it at the half-step. They went down together. The boards took the skin above Jóhannes's other eye. Hallgrímur's shoulders met the floor first, and it counted.

The twentieth was ugly. There was no wrestling in it. Jóhannes pulled him down the way a man pulls a load off a cart, and the hall, which had roared at the nineteenth, did not cheer it.

At the twenty-first fall, Jóhannes — wet, gasping, a cut above one eye, a cut above the other, his shoulders streaked with rope burns where Hallgrímur's grip had dragged on his skin — stopped.

He stood.

He looked down at Hallgrímur Benediktsson, who was on the floor, looking up at him. His own breath was the loudest thing in the hall. The blood from the second cut had reached his jaw. His hands hung at his sides, half open.

It was, in his own later accounting, one of the ugliest things he ever did to a man.

I don't think I've ever wrestled in such an ugly manner. Either of us thought about anything other than to bring the opponent down.

He said it the way he said most things about himself. Flat. Dry.

Jóhannes walked over to him. He bent down. He offered a hand. Hallgrímur Benediktsson took the hand and let himself be pulled up. He stood, on the wooden floor of Báran, with one eye already swelling, with his shirt torn at the shoulder, with a line of sweat running from his temple to his jaw, and he looked, across perhaps eighteen inches of air, at the other man. The hall was up and loud around the two of them, and the two of them stood inside the noise as if it were an empty room.

Hallgrímur said — We said three.

Jóhannes said — Yes.

Hallgrímur Benediktsson looked at him a moment longer. The eye was closing while he looked.

Hallgrímur said — Next time we will say one.

Jóhannes did not answer. There was nothing left in him to answer with.

Then the floor filled with men, and the two of them were taken apart by it.

And then something that should not have happened happened.

The two of them became friends.

Not in the moment. Not that evening. But over the next days and weeks, in Reykjavík, quietly, Hallgrímur Benediktsson and Jóhannes Jósefsson became the kind of friends that men who have genuinely tested each other sometimes become.

In the last week of September they met on the harbor road. It was early, with frost in the shadows of the houses and none yet in the sun, and the gulls were working over a boat gutting its catch at the quay. Hallgrímur was walking north along the road and Jóhannes south, and there was a stretch of twenty paces in which each man saw the other coming and the road offered neither of them anything to turn down. They stopped. The cut above Hallgrímur's eye had closed to a line.

Hallgrímur asked — Is the hay in, in the north?

Jóhannes said — It was going in when I left.

Jóhannes asked — Your father's horses?

Hallgrímur said — Fat.

They walked together as far as the coal stacks, talking about the hay and about the horses, and they did not speak of Báran, that day or in the weeks after. At the coal stacks they stopped, and Hallgrímur looked out at the water, and Jóhannes looked at the coal, and then each man went the way he had been going.

He was running, in the cold mornings, along the harbor road, with his breath making white shapes in front of him.

The regimen started on the first of October.

It started the way the regimen had started in August of 1906 — at the eleven-by-nine shed, at the paraffin lamp, at the tin trough of well water at the back wall — except that this time it was not being begun. It was being deepened. He had the book. He no longer needed it. He knew the fifty-two in order, and he did them, on the first of October 1907, at a quarter to four, with one difference.

His father was there.

Jósef had come down from Barð on the packet of the twenty-seventh of September. He had come without a letter. He had come without an announcement. He had come with a canvas bag containing one change of wool and a bottle of sheep tallow for his knees. He sat down in the kitchen of Mrs. Guðmundsdóttir and kept his coat on.

I will be staying in Reykjavík across the winter, he said. If a folding cot can be arranged in the back of the shed, I will sleep in the shed.

Mrs. Guðmundsdóttir said that a cot could be found. He had set the canvas bag at his feet against the leg of the chair, and the bag stayed there until the matter of the cot was settled, and when it was settled he picked the bag up and carried it across the yard and put it in the shed, and that was the whole of the moving in.

He did not say what he had come for.

His son understood.

In the evenings Jósef sat on the cot and worked the tallow into his knees with the flat of his thumb — the left knee and then the right, by the lamp, the trouser leg rolled to the thigh. The knees had spent forty-two years under loads of wet rope and timber. He said nothing about the knees. Jóhannes asked nothing about them. The smell of the tallow sat in the shed under the smell of the paraffin, and it was the smell of Barð, and neither of them said that either.

On an evening in the third week of October, with the tallow open on the cot beside him, his father spoke without looking up from the knee.

What is the woodyard asking for pine now? he asked.

Jóhannes told him.

The yard at Oddeyri asked less.

The loads at Oddeyri came up wet off the boat, Jóhannes said. Half that weight was water.

We lifted it anyway, his father said.

He rolled the trouser leg down over the knee, and that was the evening.

---

Jóhannes rose at a quarter to four.

The room at the top of the rooming house was black at that hour, and he dressed in the black, the wool laid out the night before across the chair in the order it went on. The floor took the warmth out of his feet while he dressed, and that was the first cold of the day, the small one, the one that cost nothing. He pulled on his running wool and his boots. He went out past the shed where his father was already up and moving — Jósef rose at three, and had for fifty-three years — and down Laufásvegur to Hverfisgata, turned east, and ran.

The town was asleep on either side of him. Frost stood on the gravel of the road, and the gravel was hard under the frost, and his boots took it with a flat double knock that came back at him off the dark housefronts — one runner, four streets, no other sound. Past the last lit window the road opened, and the harbor lay on his left, black and flat, with the riding lights of two schooners standing still in it. The cold came off the water and met the heat that was starting in him, and for the first mile the cold won, and for the second mile neither won, and from the third mile the heat won and kept winning. His breath settled into his stride and stayed there, and the two of them carried him east along the shore. Out to the last house at Laugarnes. He turned. He ran back.

It was five miles.

He did it in thirty-eight minutes on his best mornings and in forty-two on his worst. The four minutes between the best mornings and the worst were the wind.

When he came back up through the gate in the dark, with his breath making the white shapes in front of him, his father was at the door of the shed with the wooden bucket in his hand.

The bucket was a thirty-pint stave bucket of pine from the woodyard at Oddeyri where Jósef had lifted timber with his son. He drew the water each morning from the pump in the middle of the yard, while his son was out on the shore road, with the long unhurried stroke of a man who had drawn water all his life, and the knock of the pump handle in the empty yard was the only announcement the regimen got. There was no skim on the first of October. By the twenty-second there was.

On the first morning of the skim, Jósef spoke across the yard as his son came through the gate.

There is ice on it, he said.

Pour it, Jóhannes said.

That was the whole of the talking at the bucket. On the mornings of the skim, Jósef broke the skim with the heel of his hand and lifted the broken plates of it out of the bucket and laid them on the gravel by the door, and the plates of ice were lying there, gray at the edge of the lamplight, when his son came through the gate.

Jóhannes stopped at the shed door. He pulled the running wool over his head. He stripped to the waist.

He stood.

The heat of the run came off his back and shoulders as steam, and the steam went up past the eave of the shed and was gone. The air found the sweat on him and began its work on it. He set his feet shoulder-width on the gravel, and put his hands at his thighs, and looked at the doorpost in front of him, and his heart came down out of the run by degrees, and he could hear it come down, and under it he could hear the harbor — the small slap of water under the quays, a long way off — and then his father's boots on the gravel behind him, two steps, and nothing.

His father picked up the bucket.

Jósef set his feet — the right a little forward of the left, the weight onto the back heel, the torso square — and he lifted the bucket by the rope handle at the top of its arc, and he swung it in a slow long arc that began at his hip and ended at the height of his own shoulder, and he poured the thirty pints over his son's shoulders in a single continuous stream that took, from the first touch at the nape to the last drop off the hem of the running trousers, a count of about seven seconds.

Jóhannes gasped.

He gasped once.

He did not gasp a second time.

The first of the water took him at the nape, and the breath stopped in him as if a hand had been laid on it. The cold went down the spine and came around the ribs from both sides and met at the breastbone. It was not like weather. It was like a grip. His scalp drew tight. His hands opened by themselves at his thighs. The stream kept coming — the second second, the third, the fourth — and the cold stopped being a thing arriving and became a thing standing on him, and he stood under the standing weight of it, and at about the fifth second, under the breastbone, the body lit its own small stubborn heat against it, the way it had on the first morning of October, the way it did every morning, and he held still, and at the seventh second the last of the stream came off the hem of his trousers, and it was done.

He stood in the doorway with the well water going over his shoulders and down his back and off the tops of his boots into the gravel, and he did not move, and he did not speak, and his father, with the empty bucket in his rope-scarred right hand, did not speak either.

The water ran off him and found its way down among the stones. For a while he could hear it ticking into the gravel, and then he could not, and after that the yard was quiet. The steam had stopped. The lamp put its light out through the shed door, across the gravel, across the broken plates of ice, across the dark patch the water had made, and the two of them stood at either end of the dark patch, the son bare to the waist with the cold working on him, the father with the bucket hanging from his hand, and nothing more happened, and the harbor said the small things the harbor said at that hour, and they stood.

Jósef hung the bucket at the hook above the doorway. He walked back across the yard to the shed and went inside.

---

Jóhannes went in after him. He dried. He took up the dumbbells and began the deep-breathing and the press and the pulls, and his father sat on the folding cot at the back wall with his elbows on his knees, and he did not watch the exercises as a trainer watches exercises. He watched them the way a man who had across forty-two years watched the stiffness come into his own back at the end of a day of rope work watched another man doing the work he had never had the framework to do.

He did not correct a form. He did not count a repetition.

Twice in October he got up from the cot, trimmed the wick of the lamp without being asked, and sat back down.

The shed was eleven feet by nine, and the book that had ordered all of it — the small red cloth octavo, London 1897, the fifty-two exercises laid out one to a page — stood on the shelf beside the lamp and was not taken down. The dumbbells were the cast-iron pair at five pounds and the pair at ten. The work was light and slow and exact, one muscle at a time, the way the book had it: the press, the pulls, the curl, the trunk bent left and bent right, the rise onto the toes, the wrists turned against the iron until the forearms burned, and between each exercise the deep slow breathing, each exercise to its count, each count in its order. The heat of the work rose off him and met the cold of the shed and went up. Frost stood on the heads of the nails in the north wall when he began; by the twentieth exercise the frost nearest the lamp had gone to water. The work did not take the big muscles and go home. It went looking for the small ones — the muscles between the ribs, the muscles at the sides of the neck, the ones that hold the shoulder blade to the back — and it found them one at a time, and one at a time, across October, they answered. By the last week of the month the running wool sat differently across his shoulders than it had sat on the first, and his wrists had thickened so that the cuff buttons of his work shirt had been moved over, and his neck had gone up against his collars, and none of this was spoken of in the shed.

At five minutes before six, Jóhannes was at the fifty-second exercise. He walked to the tin trough. The water was at the temperature of the well — thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit at the start of October, thirty-four by the end — and he lowered himself in and sat, with his knees drawn up, and counted aloud, in Icelandic — einn, tveir, þrír; one, two, three — to two hundred and forty.

The count was the instrument. The first sixty were nothing; the body still carried the heat of the work, and spent it. By a hundred and twenty the heat was spent, and the cold had come in past it and taken its grip on the thighs and the small of the back, and the count showed it — the numbers came shorter. By two hundred the thighs were shaking under the water where the shaking could not be seen, and the count could be heard holding itself level, number after number, like a man walking on ice. He took it to the end level, and the last number — tvö hundruð og fjörutíu, two hundred and forty — came out of him the same size as the first. On the cot at the back wall his father sat, every morning, while the count tightened and held, and said nothing.

He stepped out. He went to work at the hall on Hverfisgata at half past seven.

This was the regimen in October.

It did not vary.

It did not vary in rain, and October gave rain. It did not vary in the first snow, which came wet and did not lie. It did not vary on the mornings after the hall had kept him late, or on the Sundays, or on the morning the wind came down off Esja so hard that the stream of the pour bent in the air between the bucket and his shoulders and arrived at a slant. The run went out to the last house at Laugarnes and came back. The water went over him. The count went to two hundred and forty. The skim on the bucket thickened, and the plates of it that Jósef laid by the door went from the thickness of paper to the thickness of glass, and then past glass, and that was the calendar they kept.

---

By the middle of November, the thing had the shape of a thing they had agreed, without saying so, to do together. They did not speak during the pouring. They did not speak before. They did not speak after. At the other hours of the day they spoke as they had always spoken, which was little, and about things — the woodyard, the weather the packet had had coming in — and the little came easier than it had come in any year either of them could have pointed to, and neither of them pointed to it.

On the morning of the twelfth of November — a morning with a thin dry snow on the gravel — Jóhannes stood in the doorway with the wool off his shoulders and the steam going up in the pre-dawn air, and his father lifted the bucket, and his father poured, and his father, when the bucket was empty, set it down at his feet, and he lifted his eyes from the bucket, and he looked at his son.

He held the look.

He held it for about two seconds longer than was customary.

The snow came down thin between them and did not hurry. The water was still moving off Jóhannes's shoulders. He did not look away and stood with the cold standing on him and gave the look back to his father the way he gave the count to the trough — level, and to its full length.

He did not say anything.

He picked the bucket up. He walked across the yard and hung it at the hook, and he went inside the shed, and the morning went on.

The man who had kicked him, seven years before, in the side of the ribs in the kitchen at Barð, in a March that had still been the drinking March, was now — in the yard of a rooming house in Reykjavík at a quarter past five in the morning, in the first cold of November 1907 — pouring thirty pints of well water over his shoulders in the dark, and neither of them had proposed the arrangement, and neither of them had consented to it in words, and they had, without saying so, agreed that this was the shape a father and a son took when the son was being prepared to cross a horizon the father had never seen.

He did not think about the kick.

He thought about the ribs in the cold.

The Ceres lay at the main quay with the tide at a third flood.

She was a Danish passenger and mail steamer of twelve hundred tons, the white-on-red flag at her stern, carrying six Icelanders to the Games: Jóhannes, four other athletes, and a chaperone-official named Halldór from Akureyri. Þórhallur was not going. He had been the man who made the journey possible and not the man who took it.

A crowd had come down to see her sail. It stood along the inner edge of the quay in its dark best wool — families of the crew, families of the passengers, men from the harbor offices, boys who had come for the ship herself — and it left the working stone clear, so that the quay lay in two bands: the still band of the watchers, and the moving band of the work.

The smell at the quay was fish and coal smoke and salt.

He did not smell any of it. He had lost the nose at twelve. He registered it by the way it lay in the air around the heads of the other men at the rail, and he held the weight of it, in the interior memory he had built at Samkomugerði, at the exact weight the nose would have held.

His father was not at the quay.

Jósef had said goodbye on the cot in the shed the previous evening, at a quarter past ten, with the paraffin lamp on the shelf above the trunk and the rope-scarred right hand flat on his own right knee, and he had looked at his son across the narrow space of the shed and said —

You will do what you went there to do.

He had not said anything else. The son had not said anything else. Jósef had reached up and turned the lamp down to a bead, and the son had crossed the yard to the house through the white June night. They had poured the last of the winter's cold water together at five in the morning — the well bucket in the father's right hand, the arc at the count of seven seconds they had by then done through one hundred and forty mornings. There had been no lamp for it; the June morning was full light at five. He had taken his shirt off at the trough and stood, and the water had come over the back of his neck and his shoulders at the count, and he had stood in it to the end of the count, the way he had stood in it through a winter. By a quarter past six the father had been on the harbor road with the small canvas bag at his shoulder, walking to the slip where the mail-boat to Akureyri took on. He would be somewhere off Akranes, in the other direction, by the time the Ceres cleared the harbor mouth.

The son had understood, by the way the father set down the bucket and did not look at him, that the cold water was the whole farewell. The father had across one winter said with the bucket what he was not going to say with his mouth on a quay, and he was done.

His mother was at the quay.

Kristín was at the quay at fifty yards back from the foot of the gangway, standing with her hands folded at the waist in the way she had, across all the years he had known her, stood. She was wearing the shawl.

It was the shawl of her own weaving — the undyed wool with two broken lines of pale blue at the hem, black frogged hooks at the throat, one small worn place at the right shoulder where a quarter of a century earlier she had carried a child pressed against her — that she had wrapped him in at the stable at Barð on the night of the twenty-eighth of July 1883. She had worn it on the quay at Akureyri the morning he left for Samkomugerði. She had worn it every morning in the shed on Laufásvegur through the hundred and forty cold-water mornings. She was wearing it now.

She stood on the open stones between two mooring bollards, back from the crowd and apart from it, in the working band of the quay where nobody else stood, and the work went around her. The wind off the harbor moved the hem of the shawl at her skirts. He could not see the two broken lines of pale blue at that distance. He knew where they were.

The arthritic knuckles had across the eight months of the shed become more swollen at the first joint of the third finger of the left hand, and she had learned to rest that finger inside the palm of the right rather than alongside the fourth. He saw the small adjustment across the fifty yards. He had watched the hands for twenty-four years.

He had watched them drive the heel of the palm into bread dough on the table at Barð, mornings past counting. He had watched them at the loom the shawl had come off of, when the third finger was still straight and threw the shuttle home. This morning they were doing the stillest work he had ever seen them do, and the swollen joint lay pressed inside the right palm the whole length of it, and he knew, because he knew the hands, that the holding of it there was not comfort.

At fifty yards he could not see her eyes. He could see the set of the head, and the head was set toward him. It did not turn when the derrick swung a load in over the rail. It did not turn when two boys ran across the open stone after a dog. It did not go down to the hands, the way a head goes down when a wait has grown long. It stayed where it was aimed, and he kept his own aimed back, and the work of the quay crossed under the two lines of looking and did not cut them.

The quay worked around the two of them through the last of the loading.

The derrick swung the closing slings in over the rail — salted fish in matting, the sealed grey sacks of the Danish mail — and the steam winch took each one with a short breath and let it down into the forward hold. The hatch boards went on board by board, and the tarpaulin over the boards, and the battens over the tarpaulin. Barrows crossed the stone between him and his mother, loaded going out, empty coming back. A man with a handcart of trunks went across at a trot, late. Everything on the quay crossed the fifty yards, and the fifty yards stayed what it was.

The four athletes went up the gangway one behind another with their canvas bags on their shoulders, and the gangway gave under each man and came back. Halldór from Akureyri went up last of them with the leather folder of papers under his arm, and stopped at the head of the gangway, and looked back down the quay, and found Jóhannes standing at the foot of it. He did not call down to him. He went aboard.

The tide came up under the hull through all of it. The Ceres stood a little higher against the stones at the end of the loading than at the beginning of it, and twice a harbor man went to the bollards and took up the slack of her lines, and the lines came out of the water and went taut and shed their drip and held her.

What she was looking at, he knew, was a man standing the way the winter had taught him to stand. He registered the weight of the look on him the way he registered the smell he could not smell — held in the body at its exact weight — and he stood in it the way he had stood in the water at five that morning, to the end of the count, except that this count had no number and ran on.

Jóhannes stood at the foot of the gangway with his weight even on both feet, the way he stood in the sawdust before a match, and his hands hung at his sides with nothing in them. The trunk was in the hold. The envelope was in his inside pocket. There was nothing left anywhere for the hands to do, and they hung, and fifty yards away the folded hands did not move either, and between the two pairs of hands the quay finished its morning's work. The last barrow went back up the stones empty. The working band cleared, and for the space of a minute there was nothing between him and his mother but the wet stone and the fifty yards, and neither of them put anything else into it.

She did not come forward.

He did not go back.

They had agreed, not in words, that she would stand at the fifty yards and he at the foot of the gangway, and the goodbye would be the distance.

He went up the gangway.

It was a plank walk with battens nailed across it at the length of a step and a rope rail on either side, made fast at the gate in the bulwark above and resting on the stones below. He put his right hand on the rope. The rope was damp and hard-laid and ran through the loose of his hand as he climbed. The plank gave under his weight at the middle of the span and came back under him past it. He went up in eleven steps and through the gate in the bulwark onto the iron of the deck.

He turned, at the top, once. He had not meant to turn. He had meant to go up without turning. But at the top of the gangway, at the rail where the gangway met the rail of the deck, the body he had spent the winter making obedient disobeyed him by one small motion, and he turned, and he looked down at her.

She looked up at him.

From the head of the gangway the fifty yards were fifty yards still, with the height of the deck added to them, and the angle was new. He had never in his life looked down at his mother from above. He could see from up there what the quay had left around her all morning: a margin of clear wet stone on every side of her, two yards of it at the least, the work going past her and not brushing her. The shawl made her the one undyed thing in the two dark bands of the quay. Her face came up to him, white above the black frogged hooks, and at that distance and that angle he could see her eyes no better than he had seen them from the stones, and he did not need to.

She did not wave. He did not wave. The wind moved a strand of the grey-brown hair across her forehead, and she did not lift her hand to push it back, because her hands were folded at the waist, and she did not unfold them.

A seaman put a hand at his elbow and moved him clear of the gangway gate. He went three steps aft along the rail and set both hands on it and kept her in his eye.

The gangway was drawn in. Two men walked it inboard, end over end, and laid it along the bulwark, and the gate was closed. The ropes were untied. The bow line came off its bollard and dropped its length into the harbor and was hauled up streaming. The stern line followed it. For the space of half a minute the Ceres lay against the stones held by nothing at all, the smoke thickening at her funnel. The horn gave its single long note, and the note carried up across the harbor and off the low grey face of Mount Esja and came back about four seconds later. The screw turned. The black water between the hull and the stone quay opened — first by a foot, then by three feet, then by six.

She did not step back.

The ship pulled away from her, and the distance opened, and she stayed exactly where she had been standing. She did not move her hands. She did not move her feet. She did not lift her head. The place she was standing at was no longer the place of goodbye. It was the place of the woman who had stayed.

The screw put a low shudder into the rail under his hands, and the stones began to go sideways. At the rail on either side of him the other men of the party were waving. They had their own people somewhere on the quay — a wife, a father, a brother — and their people came a little way along the stones after the ship, waving handkerchiefs, calling things across the widening water that the wind took most of. He did not wave. His hands stayed on the rail. The fifty yards became eighty, and the eighty became two hundred, and one by one the figures on the quay that had been moving stopped moving, and the figure that had been still was still.

He watched her from the rail.

The harbor traffic crossed his line of sight — a rowing boat pulling out to the moorings, a smack coming in on the flood — and each time it crossed he picked her up again on the far side of it: the undyed wool, the folded hands. He watched until she was too far for him to make out as a person, and then he watched the grey shape that had been her for another full minute, and then the shape was a small pale mark against the stones, and then the stones were a grey line, and then Reykjavík was the outline of a town against the low hills, and then he could not see Reykjavík at all.

He did not cry.

He did not know, at twenty-three, how to cry. The training had gone past that door.

He went to the bow. He stood at the rail with the trunk in the hold and the envelope from Þórhallur in his inside pocket and the Belt of Grettir folded in a linen cloth beneath the nineteen pairs of stockings, and he looked at the grey line where the sea met the sky, and the sea began, as the Ceres came through the harbor mouth, to lift in the long slow swell of the Denmark Strait.

The body was his.