Season of the Witch Read Free Page A

of society are creaking, not least in the media market, that we can take account of some old personal conflict between you and Ásbjörn. We’ve got a battle on our hands, and in this battle, all of us, and I mean
all,
must stand together. Anyone who doesn’t has no place on our team. Ásbjörn was, as you are well aware, not a good news editor, not my cup of tea in that job. So he’s not doing it anymore…”
    “I’m not at all sure that his successor is any better,” I interjected.
    Hannes fumed: “You were offered the job yourself and turned it down.”
    The best decision I’ve ever made
, I thought.
    Hannes went on regardless. “I believe that Ásbjörn’s abilities, his attention to detail, and his organizational skills will provemore useful in this important task, rather than handling paper clip purchasing and taxi receipts here at the head office. You and he, sir, are going north.”
    “And into the outer darkness,” I added.
    But I wasn’t sure I meant it. I wasn’t sure of anything. Except that it might be good to try something you haven’t tried before. And tried again. And again.
    I’m thinking of the biggest loss entailed by my exile: my daughter, Gunnsa. My only consolation is that she’s planning to visit me at Easter. And I can always make the odd flying visit to the south.
    It’s close to six o’clock when we drive up Eyjafjördur, past the Hlídarbær community center, which, once, long ago, before the days of pubs and clubs in Iceland, fulfilled its function, but now seems to be an empty shell.
    I switch the radio on for the evening news.
    When I look out my window,
Many sights to see.
And when I look in my window,
So many different people to be
That it’s strange, so strange…
    The lyrics of the old pop song seep into my consciousness in the silence between me and Jóa, who is dozing next to me. She stirs as the singer belts out the final notes.
    “
Season of the Witch
, from Donovan,” says the DJ, speaking from Akureyri, capital of north Iceland. “The song was played for Skarphédinn and the other kids in the Akureyri High School Drama Group, who will be giving their first performance of
Loftur the Sorcerer
at Hólar on Holy Thursday. And for our last songon this Saturday before Palm Sunday, here’s Donovan again. We’ll be here again next week at the same time. Thank you for listening, and good-bye.”
    “Thanks to you too,” mumbles Jóa.
    And the gentle voice begins, as if chanting a rhyme, first with a quiet guitar accompaniment; then a touch of piano is added:
    The continent of Atlantis was an island
Which lay before the great flood
In the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean.
So great an area of land, that from her western shores
Those beautiful sailors journeyed
To the South and the North Americas with ease,
In their ships with painted sails…
    Nice image
, I think, losing myself in it.
    “People are always claiming to have found traces of Atlantis here and there,” Jóa suddenly remarks. “I remember there was some American who said he’d discovered ruins using sonar soundings on the floor of the Mediterranean, off the coast of Cyprus. And there was a German scholar who revealed Atlantis, using satellite photographs, on the salt plains of southern Spain. And a Swede said that the descriptions were more consistent with Ireland. It’s only a question of time until someone finds Atlantis here in Iceland. We’re always claiming to find what we want to find.”
    “I don’t have a lot of luck with that,” I remark.
    “That’s because you don’t know what you want to find.”
    “Oh, yeah. But what descriptions do you mean? Are there accounts of Atlantis? Wasn’t the whole place supposed to have sunk into the ocean without a trace more than twelve thousand years ago?”
    “Er, it’s a legend, Einar,” Jóa replies, in rather too motherly a tone for my taste. “So far as I remember, in Greek mythology the gods are supposed to have been so enraged by the greed,