It was Ragnar’s gift to his bride, blowing up the stone. She wanted somewhere to sow vegetables, a herb garden, but the stone took up most of the space in the cramped patch behind the house. It towered out of the earth, a solid piece of rock, like a crooked molar greasy with moss.

Everyone knew the stone had been there since the first settlers took up residence in the island’s rocky caves and 124died out, and that it was still there when the houses of Vágur began to creep up the mountain slope from the banks of the fjord. The hulder lived beneath it. In a certain kind of weather, misty but tinged with sun, you could make out a glowing greenish corona around the stone. Then it was time to be wary: that was the hulder’s do-not-disturb.

The area around the stone had always been left fallow, tall-grassed and protected, a hole in the village that the wind whistled through, until Ragnar moved in with cement and corrugated iron and rational materialism.

And so the house was wedged in where it stood, but the stone was unbudgeable. Ragnar dug, but the molar’s roots were too deep. Speedy Arni, the youngest of the brothers, got on well with everyone and thus also with the British occupying forces. He borrowed a vehicle, they tied a rope around the greasy moss, and then they tried to pull the stone out of the earth. In vain. Ragnar swore. Beate poured her chilly fingers over his temples and massaged softly.

*

Ragnar is plotting to move the stone.

He is seen gazing down at the green-brown coating of moss.

No good will come of this, they think. People are saying so. But Ragnar is a man of progress, of the new age, and 125Beate will not be cheated of her rows of potatoes and weather-beaten perennials.

He resorts to dynamite.

The day comes when the stone is to be blown up.

Ragnar worms a finger underneath his woolly hat and scratches the curls at his neck. The charges have been set. The fuse is lying neatly in the moss.

Five men stand around the stone.

Three are from the village; the fourth, apart from Ragnar, is Speedy Arni, the afterthought, the footballing hero.

The men’s serious faces mask a small, hysterical giggle. It hurries from body to body. Sleeves are adjusted, soil kicked. Long, expert gazes scan the fjord, the glittering verdigris water.

Now, with everything ready, there’s suddenly a lot to talk about. It’s a shame Kalle can’t be here. Speedy Arni says so, with regret in his lively brown eyes.

Kalle, the cohort’s most headstrong brother, cherishes a deep affection for explosions. That and much else they have in common, he and Arni. Those two are the brothers’ Samson and Hercules, primarily by their own account, yet Arni is still a brown-eyed boy with good calves and fluff on his cheeks.