It was the sloop Eystoroy, en route to Aberdeen, that first met a British warship and received orders to lower the Danish flag. And the British had asked, of course, if the captain had another flag he could raise instead. So up went the Merkið! The flag of independence. Bloody is the cross, blue is the sea, and white is the foam beating against the homeland coast. Fritz said so. He drew the flag on a 102sheet of paper and waved it around to show her: this is how it is now; now there is a flag.

Marita doesn’t know what flag she’s sailing under, hiding the letter in a hollow in her back, past the soldiers outside the hospital, down the white corridors. Is it that important?

She empties a bedpan and pinches off a withered petal. The carnations in their enamel vases, the roses. Shades of death. She shakes a pillow and pictures the surface of the sea on fire, arms sticking up like charred masts.

The needle hacks into the fabric, clicking against her engagement ring. Her eyes are tired.

After curfew, voices on the radio hum in all the front rooms along the silent road. Two young Germans walk past outside, looking like confirmands in dullish green. There are often soldiers at the hospital. She’s grown used to them.

That’s the funny thing: she’s grown used to them as to everything else. The evenings at the pictures. The throttling of a motorcycle. She slips through the white day, wrings out a cloth and folds it over a brow. Makes a bed. Opens a window and shuts it again. Piles for washing and piles for folding. The sound of the trees.

The light has dragged itself underneath the hedge. She hooks the heavy black curtain in front of the window. Imagines it as a cloak around the room, a grave. 103

The bed creaks quietly beneath her.

‘There’s a story about the king who built the tower,’ Fritz said that afternoon on the brown beach. The water was black and still as gravel. In the handlebar basket she carried over her arm, the last drops of coffee were sloshing around inside a tin flask. Fritz told her the tale.

The Dog King had built the castle; now it lay in rubble along the coast. The halls were gold. The king kept a big court. He himself was big, laughed a lot, and galloped out daily with his retinue of hunters and dogs.

One day he brought a pretty young peasant girl home from the hunt. He dressed her in damask and small pearls, which trembled like skin.

The queen had no choice but to accept it.

But the girl, she noticed her reflection in the king’s strong teeth and liked what she saw. Before long she was seen strutting round the town in the garb of a noble lady.