‘Odious is your song, you poisonous troll,’ says the captain, and he tells her to piss off, or ‘I’ll have you cut to pieces!’, and then it’s the chorus again—Well before the break of day, they come across the heath.

The Scottish forces, the hired Scots, continue steering a course towards the Romsdal Fjord, and Captain Sinclair lands at Åndalsnes with his dick swinging. They begin to cut a brutal swathe through Norway, drenching the land in the blood of women, of children, of doddering old men. We sang it. Duh, I thought—war, but then the peasants take up arms. Carpenter’s axes. Rusty guns.

‘No longer hangs the musket on the wall,’ we bawled, stamping till the cutlery tinkled on the yellow paper tablecloth by the wall, on and on, round and round, towards the captain’s anti-climactic death in verse fifteen. It happens by a river, the Laagen, where a band of local peasants have set up an ambush.

The first shot fired strikes the captain’s brow. He stands there on the riverbank, stiff with blood and a lust for death, and for one moment more he’s certain of his victory, his pay. Then the system fails, then the bullet strikes, then the carnival begins. 142

The captain roars like a slaughtered animal and goes down.

The ballad continues for another four verses. Now he’s dead he’s got to be thrashed; the ending can’t be his.

The Scots want to go home, but they’re not going to. They’re stamped upon, the Scots, stamped down—Well before the break of day, they come across the heath.

A steadily pulsing massacre.

The blood flows. The ravens feed on the rusty berries.

Everywhere along the Laagen there are songs and polished beaks clacking, the water is as red as at the killing of a pod of whales, and the peasants whoop hack them down, hack them down! It’s a veritable widow-factory. ‘And not one living soul came home,’ we sang, the penultimate verse, then the chorus, and after that the final verse:

Now on that spot’s a statue where

Our foes their war were waging,

And woe to him who sees it yet

Feels not his passions raging!

Abbe was singing, fervently, about the memorial by the Laagen, which he’d never seen but now saw—singing, stamping, ecstatic.

He had the same look, swollen and wide open, as when he talked about the Klaksvík troubles, and how all the island folk had risen up against the tyrants. As when he 143read from the chapter where Odysseus kills Penelope’s suitors. As he stamped past me in the chain, I could see his elbows pumping up and down. He wasn’t Abbe now, nor the village schoolteacher or the social democrat; now he was that. Home.

Next morning they waved us out of the carport, Omma and Abbe. Two ageing bodies in loose-hanging clothes.