Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

later. To the north-east was Helgafell, the holy mountain, although it was little more
than a knoll, less than a hundred metres high. Here Snorri Godi and later Gudrún had lived, two of the leading figures of the sagas. And most of the farms that were so familiar to
Jóhannes were still inhabited, as they had been in the days of Arnkell, Thórólfur Lame Foot and the other characters of the sagas.
    He remembered his father pointing out all these locations to him from this very vantage point.
    ‘Do any of the farmers still fight each other, Daddy?’ Jóhannes had asked.
    ‘No, I don’t think so,’ his father had answered.
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because people don’t do that any more. They would go to jail.’
    ‘But what about honour?’ the ten-year-old Jóhannes had asked. ‘And revenge. In the sagas they always have to take revenge. Why not today?’
    Then his father had said something that had stuck with Jóhannes all his life. It was his father’s sudden expression of seriousness tinged with sadness that emblazoned the words in
Jóhannes’s memory. ‘Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do.’
    What had he meant? Jóhannes had asked himself that question many times over the years. What had he meant?
    Jóhannes drove down past the Berserkjahraun and on through the ancient farmland to the fishing village of Stykkishólmur, on a spit of land a few kilometres north of Helgafell.
    He remembered his aunt Hildur’s house. It was a few metres back from the harbour. It was tiny, and it was about a hundred years old, ancient by Icelandic standards. It had a red corrugated
iron roof and a red-painted picket fence surrounded it. The walls, also of corrugated metal, were painted green. Various elves peeked out behind net curtains.
    Jóhannes had loved visiting his aunt Hildur when he was a kid. There was a particular kind of toffee that she always seemed to possess in large quantities with which she was very
generous. She was already a widow – her husband, a fisherman, had gone the way of many local men to the bottom of the North Atlantic.
    Jóhannes was looking forward to seeing her.
    He rang the doorbell. In a moment a tiny woman with a crooked back and bright blue eyes appeared. She had shrunk considerably since the last time Jóhannes had seen her.
    ‘Jóhannes! Come in, my dear, come in.’
    He bent down to kiss his aunt and followed her into a cosy sitting room, stuffed with knick-knacks of all descriptions, among which were a fair few little Icelandic flags. A grey-haired woman of
about his own age stood to greet him. He recognized Unnur, who was Hildur’s husband’s niece, if he remembered correctly.
    ‘I asked Unnur to be here when you visited,’ Hildur said. ‘I knew she would want to see you. She has a couple of free periods this morning, so she said she could come
along.’
    This surprised Jóhannes. He had a number of cousins scattered around Stykkishólmur and the Snaefells Peninsula, but he wasn’t close to any of them. He remembered being
impressed by Unnur. Like him, she was a teacher. And she had been quite beautiful when she was younger; in fact she was still attractive, with her smooth skin, her fine cheekbones and her air of
composed gracefulness.
    Hildur fussed over coffee. She must be closer to ninety than eighty, Jóhannes thought, but she was still sprightly. He wondered whether she still had the toffee: he was tempted to ask for
some.
    ‘I’ve forgotten what you teach,’ he said to Unnur.
    ‘English and Danish,’ she said. ‘You teach Icelandic, don’t you?’
    ‘I do,’ said Jóhannes. ‘Or indeed I did until yesterday.’
    Unnur’s eyebrows rose. ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘You could say I lost my job.’
    ‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Hildur. ‘How dreadful.’
    ‘What happened?’ asked Unnur. ‘Or shouldn’t I ask?’
    Jóhannes explained his strong views on how Icelandic literature should be taught and how these did not fit in well with the syllabus. He was gratified with Unnur’s response –
she agreed with him forcefully. She was angry that Shakespeare had almost disappeared from the English syllabus at high school – in her day they’d had to study it in the original.
    Jóhannes remembered why he liked her.
    ‘So what brings you up here?’ Unnur asked. ‘Aunt Hildur said you are researching Benedikt’s death?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Jóhannes. He recounted his impulsive trip to Búdir and his conversation with Hermann, the head groom.
    ‘I remember