The Great Weaver From Kashmir Read Free Page B

magnificent thoughts as I did this spring.”
    â€œDon’t you think then that you ought to lie down and get some sleep before morning, Steinn?” she asked.
    â€œMe?” he asked warily. “Do you think that I’m the kind of creature who could sleep here tonight? No, tonight I’m planning to stay awake, to gaze at the mountains and talk. And if no one wants to listen, then I’ll talk to the mountains.
    â€œDiljá,” he added quickly, imploringly, “I have to speak to you tonight after everyone goes to bed! Stay awake!”
    But she still lacked any coquettish promptitude in her responses.
    â€œStay up, me?” she replied hesitatingly. “I don’t know about that. The idea never really crossed my mind. But what is this, boy, you’re going to miss the coffee!”
    Then she added, in a lower voice: “At least Grandma mustn’t know about it if I do stay up.”

6.
    The clock in the house strikes one, just one tiny stroke.
    It is noiseless and still; he starts up at the dulcet metal sound and looks around the loft where his bed had been prepared. Had he drifted off? Was he the kind of creature who would let himself fall asleep? Hadn’t he been dreaming of a girl with golden arms and red lips? Damn. Or had he dreamt that the night before? Or was it a memory of an even older dream? Damn.
    The day would soon dawn behind Ármannsfell – it was much brighter now than it had been at midnight. Everyone was surely asleep, guests and residents; nothing stirred except for a window hasp that dangled from the frame of an open window somewhere on the back side of the house, and the flag rope that smacked at the gable at long intervals. They hadn’t set a time for their meeting, but he snuck downstairs in complete certainty that she was waiting for him, and found the veranda door open. Only those doors through which someone is expected to come stand open like this at night, he thought, and he stepped out onto the veranda. He peered about; the maid had stacked the chairs before she went to sleep, to speed up her morning cleaning duties. He peeked through the windowpanes: the parlor window to the right of the door, the dining room window to the left, but no one was there.
    A high-pitched screech sounded from the lava to the west: someone was whistling through bentgrass. He turned on his heels and saw her. She was sitting out by the road, just on the other side of the bridge over the cleft closest to the house, on the rim of a notch inthe lava rocks, with her feet down in the grass-grown crack. Her face was turned away from the Ylfingabúð, as if she had neither looked in that direction nor seen Steinn. She held her hands to her mouth, engrossed in signaling. Had he not been slightly nearsighted, he would have seen her immediately from the open veranda door. He walked straight over to her.
    She had buttoned her coat up around her neck, but sat in a rather careless posture, as adolescent girls do. The hem of her coat reached to just above her knees, her strong calves stuck obtusely out, and she was not in the least bit conscientious about revealing her extraordinarily stout knee joints. This unhindered, imprudent pose was a reliable witness to a maidenhood too cloudless and untouched to know anything about protecting itself from danger. And yet there was a hot gleam in her steel gray, unswerving eyes.
    He swelled with joy and jumped into the air:
    â€œTonight I’m as happy as an American boxer,” he said. “Or as Douglas Fairbanks, who leaps over fences from happiness and grins like a horse.”
    But she had waited for him for an entire hour out in the night breeze, and when she heard how happy he was she was annoyed. She did not look up even though he was standing right in front of her; she looked at her open palm, which was green and wet from squeezing the grass between her hands.
    Why couldn’t she look up and smile? Hadn’t it been