The Flatey Enigma Read Free

place to sleep,” Kjartan said when Högni had settled down.
    “The man’s tired,” Grímur answered, “and he likes to have a lie down on sea trips. The working hours in the hunting season are long, and he isn’t used to hard labor. He’s a boarder at my wife Imba’s place and pays for it by working for me in the summer.”
    “Is he a bachelor then?”
    “He’s a widower; his wife died a few years ago. He sleeps in the school building and has two meals a day at our place.”
    The boat sailed smoothly along its journey. Grímur kept a sharp eye on the course he was steering because in many places their sailing path was strewn with rocks and reefs.
    Kjartan felt he needed to keep the conversation going, without quite knowing where to start. He gazed across the bay. Everywhere he looked there seemed to be islands big and small.
    “I’ve never been to Breidafjördur before,” he said. And then, just for the sake of it, he added: “It must be true what they say then, that the islands in this fjord are countless?”
    Grímur smiled and seemed to be willing to participate in the conversation. “They’re certainly not easy to count with any exactitude,” he answered, “and first you’ve got to decide on what you call an island. If we define an island as a piece of land that’s surrounded by sea at high tide and has some vegetation on it, then maybe we can count them. By that criteria, there are about three thousand islands that have been counted in the whole fjord. But then you’ve got the barren skerries that no one’s been able to count with any certainty, so they can be considered to be countless.”
    Kjartan nodded, trying to strike an interested air.
    Grímur pointed at an island that rose high out of the sea: “That’s Hergilsey, which was recently abandoned by the last farmer. It’s named after Hergil Hnapprass. Have you read Gísli’s saga?”
    “Yes, but not recently,” Kjartan answered.
    “Hergil’s son was Ingjaldur, a farmer in Hergilsey. The story goes that he sheltered the outlawed Gísli Súrsson. When Börkur Digri was going to kill Ingjaldur to punish him for hiding the convict, Ingjaldur the old uttered the following words…”
    Grímur took a deep breath, altered his voice, and declaimed: “ My clothes are rags anyway, so little do I care if I won’t be able to wear them down any further .”
    Grímur grinned and then added: “The people of Breidafjördur weren’t bothered by trivialities.”
    Kjartan nodded and attempted a smile.
    Grímur carried on pointing at the islands as they sailed, naming them and recounting their histories. To the west there was the skerry of Oddbjarnarsker, which had important fishing grounds that the poor traveled to in the days of the famine to survive. Then there were the isles of Skeley, Langey, Feigsey, and Sýrey. Each place name had its own story.
    Högni woke up from his nap, moved over to them, and contributed his own anecdotes. As Flatey appeared on the horizon, he said, “One Christmastime, just before the turn of the century, a ship was sailing from the mainland with wood cuttings they were supposed to sell in Flatey as firewood. There were six men on board, but they ran into bad weather and got lost on the way. They finally reached the island of Feigsey, but the boat was wrecked.”
    Högni pointed Feigsey out to Kjartan and then continued: “The men were there for days on end, cold and without any food, but they could see people walking between the houses in Flatey when there was light during the day. Finally, their shouts were heard and they were rescued. They all survived the ordeal, which was quite a feat, because they’d had no food apart from a small ration of butter. A few decades ago a foreign freighter sank in the fjord here. It was carrying a cargo of telephone poles and barrels of thick motor lubricant. A rescue was launched, and some of the goods floated to shore. The men didn’t really like the taste of what they took to be