Free From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon Page A

it had behaved. We were given a warm welcome and in return entertained the locals with our ballads and riddles, and my tales of people from my home district far away. It was on this investigative journey that we composed the ‘Bird Verses’ which every Tom, Dick and Harry now knows. We were of one mind during those sunny days and nights on the coast of Snjáfjöll. Láfi had begun the poem, the first three stanzas were his, but had run out of birds and inspiration by the time I turned up. As we walked from farm to farm we took to chanting the poem together. He recited the first verses, which he had knocked together with some skill, and I slid into the metre – slipped into it like a tongue into the eye socket of a well-boiled sheep’s head. We composed like fury, casting one bird after another into the air before slotting it into place in our list. The light summer days and nights merged into one and, free from any timetable, we took no rest when the muse was upon us but allowed it to seize us and lift us to that higher plane of the poet’s art that is sometimes called poetic ecstasy and resembles nothing so much as delirious happiness, for those under its influence tend to move with quick jerks of the limbs, rocked by gales of laughter and prone to madcap fits, such as rushing off, yelling words into the blue, one to the west, another to the east, the third up in the air, the fourth behind one, the fifth in front and the sixth at the ground, before plumping down on top of it, as if to crush any devil that might pop up its head at the unexpected message, and sit tight, rocking to and fro, babbling gibberish as one juggled the six words together until they formed a clever, well-crafted line. And so on until we nodded off with a half-made line of verse on our lips and slept where we fell, often till well past midday. Unfortunately, though, it was not always so, and most of the verses came into being like any other discussion between learned men. I even slipped in several alien bird species that Láfi had never heard of, like the noble pelican which builds a nest for its young in its beak and gives birth to them from the blood of its breast, or that Babel bird the parrot that speaks every tongue on Earth. When he cast doubt on the existence of such freaks, I answered his objections by saying:
    ‘Who’s to say that they haven’t been blown here by the wind some time, cast ashore by gales or in the baggage of one of those foreign ships’ captains who are forever turning up in Iceland with all kinds of odd cargo? Really, do you think anyone who ran into us in our madness would find it any stranger to hear of a sky-blue bird with red wings prating in Latin than to learn that men such as ourselves thrive in this land?’
    ‘Well …’, Láfi replied, ‘surely there’s no such thing as the ostrich; one minute a flightless giant, the next a kind of bush?’
    In the end the final verse came together just as we reached the part of the coast where the ghost was wreaking the greatest havoc. I doubt my tongue would have been as agile as it proved when our paths crossed, the living Jónas the Learned and the dead Phantom Jónsson, had I not oiled it with the Bird Verses during the previous week.
     

     
    Where was it that we first encountered the boy? Ah yes, we were asleep in a grassy dell beneath a black crag, known as the Hafsteinn or Sea Rock, and I would sooner have expected a mysterious visitor from its bowels than the one who emerged from his cold grave to harass us. We were lying comatose after one of our poetic fits when I was roused by a movement in the scree above us to the east, as if little stones had been dislodged by a foot and rolled down the gravel bank with a dry rattle. Assuming it was a fox on the prowl, I closed my eyes and lay without moving, waiting for the animal to complete its journey across the scree. But when there were no further noises, I thought it wiser to take a look at this traveller. Holding my