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but left out of the copies due to lack of space or else because they were out of fashion or contravened the new Church law … I also copied the diagrams of anatomy in books of healing which showed mankind as we are: our form, the places where the flesh hugs the bone or swells out, all according to how the Creator’s hand moulded our substance like clay … Since the old women in country kitchens would no longer allow me to fumble their bodies, I collected in one volume everything I could find about healing the principal maladies afflicting the female anatomy … There in alphabetical order you could find every kind of blockage, disorder of the blood, fever and chill, or swelling of their vitals or upper body … Between these I copied out old prayers to the Virgin Mary and appeals to those saints who had proved most efficacious in curing the Icelandic belly, together with exorcisms and similar invocations of white magic to aid in the battle against the wiles of demons and other horrid sprites … The bulk of this material was copied from the leechbook of the good Bishop Jón Halldórsson, and patients regarded it as an honour to hear that reverend man’s wise counsel vying with the boiling of the kettle, the sucking of the chimney, the crackling of the lamps and the crunching of the gravel floor. They used to exclaim that it was as if the Lord Bishop himself had descended to the sooty kitchen to heal them … In other words, I held to my course when it came to the healing of female disorders and the collection of ravens’ heads … But the leechbook would later land me in such desperate straits that I will never again be able to return to society but am fated instead to sit here talking nonsense to birds … Having burnt one man, they were eager to burn more … ‘Schoolmaster of Necromancy’ they called me when I helped some lads copy the leechbook and pronounce the names of the holy women who are addressed in the invocations … Those hypocritical jackals would have burnt me too if the ladies I cured with the help of the late bishop had opened their mouths … But no, they kept mum out of gratitude for my care … Yet although my body hair was not singed on their bonfire, I felt the heat of the animosity they bear towards me, the vindictive nature that drives a man to destroy his neighbour in a fire as if he were a banned book … For what is the difference? Every book is imbued with the human spirit … They knew that, the sooty guardians of the kitchen hearths, when they claimed to hear the bishop’s voice in the descriptions of their maladies and fell on their knees, only to jump up with reproaches when they heard that I had compiled the text myself … It was all in fun … And yet … I would not dream of comparing myself to Bishop Jón, any more than it would cross your mind, sandpiper, to liken the puff of air from your short wings to the whoosh from an eagle’s flight … To watch a book burn … My eyes are smarting … In the conflagration I hear the breath of the man who composed the text, and the breath of the man who formed the words, one after the other, and the breath of the man who reads it … I hear this trinity breathing as one and the same being, steadily in and out, until the fire consumes the breath from their lungs, disbanding the fellowship of those whom the book nurtured, like the soil that brings forth different plants … And many were the intertwined souls that burnt at Helgafell when the old monastery library was cast on the bonfire, along with the few holy relics and statues that had not already been destroyed … Alas, I was there! … What could my puny strength achieve when set against the giant pyre that raged like three volcanic craters, so great was the heat from that diabolical act? … And who should have been the Royal Incendiary of the first pyre, the Master Incendiary of the second pyre, the Grim Incendiary of the third? He whose duty it was to take the lead in the spiritual