half-open and full of what looked like hair, along with a silver coin. A simple symbol was carved on the lid and on top of it was a strange creature that could have been mistaken for a mutant hedgehog. 'In the age of sorcery, the common people in Iceland lived in appalling conditions. A handful of families owned most of the property while almost everyone else starved. The only way they could see to escape from their poverty was through magic and supernatural powers. In those days this wasn't considered unusual. For example, they thought the devil went around in the company of men, trying to ensnare their souls.' He turned to the hide on the wall. 'Here's an example of a spell to get richthe symbol represents a sea mouse or circular helmet. You needed the skin of a black tomcat, then you drew this symbol or circular helmet on it with the menstrual blood of a virgin.'
Matthew grimaced and looked out of the corner of his eye to see whether Thorgrimur touched the symbol. Noticing this, the curator told the German dryly: 'We used dark red ink.' Then he continued. 'They had to catch a small vermin that according to folklore lived along the shore and was called a sea mouse. It had to be caught in a net made from a virgin's hair.' Thora felt Matthew running his hand down her long, loose hair. Stifling a giggle, she brushed his hand away inconspicuously. 'Then they made a nest for the mouse from a wooden box and the hair and put a stolen coin in it, and then the mouse was supposed to fish a treasure from the sea and into the box. Then you had to put the circular helmet over it to prevent the mouse from escaping and causing a storm at sea.'
He turned to them. 'So it wasn't just hocus-pocus.'
'No,' replied Matthew, and pointed to a wall with a glass case containing what looked like the lower half of a human body. 'What on earth is that?'
'Ah, that's one of our most popular exhibits. Corpse breeches. They were also supposed to make you rich.' Thorgrimur walked over to the showcase. 'Of course this is just a replicaobviously.' Thora and Matthew nodded eagerly. Behind the glass was the skin of the lower half of a male body. To Thora it resembled a pair of gross, pink tights, hairy and with the genitals attached. 'To acquire corpse breeches you made a contract with a living man to take the skin off the lower half of his body when he died. When that person died his body was unearthed and the skin removed from the waist down, in one piece. These were the corpse breeches that the other person would wear. Corpse breeches were supposed to graft to the wearer's body and if he put a coin in the scrotuma coin that he had to steal from a rich widow at Christmas, Easter, or Whitsunhe would never find the scrotum empty, because it would always contain plenty of money.'
'Couldn't they have chosen a different place?' Thora pulled a face. Thorgrimur simply shrugged.
'And what's this?' Matthew asked, as Thorgrimur took them over to a large photograph of a woman in a long, coarse skirt in folk costume style. She was sitting down with her skirt hitched up to expose her bare thigh. On the thigh a wartlike protrusion pointed up in the air.
'You know of course that the majority of sorcerers who were executed in Iceland were malethere were twenty men but only one woman. This is because it was mainly thought to be men who practiced witchcraft in Iceland, unlike in the rest of Europe. This spellknown as a
'He wasn't exactly a pinup,' Thora said, pointing at the exhibit. The tilberi was wrapped in wool and barely visible apart from an open toothless mouth and two tiny white eyes with no pupils.
Judging from Matthew's expression, he agreed. 'Was this one woman who was executed for witchcraft accused of doing that?'
'No, in fact she wasn't. But there was a case in the southwest of Iceland in 1635 when a woman and her mother were suspected of having a tilberi. It was investigated but did not turn out to be true, so they narrowly escaped.'
They went on strolling around the museum, looking at the exhibits. Thora was struck most by a wooden stake standing in the middle of the room surrounded by bushels of straw. As she stood silently contemplating it, Thorgrimur came over and told her that all twenty-one suspected sorcerers had been burned alive. He added that three were known to have tried to break out of the pyre when the stakes to which they were tied burned through. They were thrown back into the flames to die. The first execution took place in 1625, he said, but the proper witch hunts began when three sorcerers were burned at the stake in Trekyllisvik in the northern West Fjords in 1654. Thora mentally calculated how recent this actually was.
When they had seen enough, Thorgrimur took them to the upper floor. On the way they passed a sign stating that photography was prohibitedthe same sign that had appeared in the photo Thora had seen on Harald's computer. Thorgrimur showed them a large family tree showing the kinship among the most prominent witch hunters in the seventeenth century. He pointed out how members of the ruling class had planted their descendants in the offices of the magistrates and judges. After reading the genealogy, Thora understood exactly what he was talking about. Matthew paid little attention. He left them and went over to look at a showcase containing replicas of sorcerers' handbooks and other manuscripts. He was bent over the case when Thora and Thorgrimur came up to him.
'Actually it's incredible that any books of sorcery have been preserved at all,' Thorgrimur said, pointing to one of them.
'Do you mean because they're so old?' Thora asked, leaning forward to take a better look.
'Well, that too, but mainly because it was a capital offense to possess them. Some are handwritten copies of older manuscripts that had presumably suffered damage, so the originals are not all from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.'
Thora stood up straight. 'Is there any index of all these magic symbols?'
'No, unfortunately there isn't. No one has made the effort to record them as far as I know.' With a sweep of his hand he said: 'All these symbols on exhibit here represent only a few pages from the manuscripts and old booksa tiny sample. So you can imagine how many symbols there are.'
Thora nodded. Damn it. It would have been marvelous if Thorgrimur could have shown them a list against which they could check the unknown symbol. She moved to look at more manuscripts. The showcase stood in the middle of the room, enabling visitors to walk around it while viewing the pages on display. Matthew, who had been hunched over to get a closer look at one of the panels, suddenly straightened up.
'What's this symbol?' he asked excitedly, tapping on the glass with his finger.
'Which one?' Thorgrimur asked, and took a look at the document.
'This one.' Matthew pointed it out to him.
Although Thora had to lean across the case to see what Matthew was pointing at, she was quicker than Thorgrimur to realize which symbol had caught his attentionsimply because it was one of the few symbols that she recognized, the one that had been carved on Harald's body. 'Well, I'll be damned,' she muttered.
'This one at the bottom of the page?' Thorgrimur asked as he pointed one out.
'No,' Matthew said. 'This one in the margin. What does it do?'
'Well, I don't know,' Thorgrimur replied. 'I can't say, unfortunately. The text on the page doesn't refer to itit's an example of a symbol that the owner of the book added to the margin himself. That wasn't unusual; symbols like this occur in more works than just those specifically describing magic.'
'What manuscript is it from?' Thora asked, peering at the text accompanying the document.
'It's a manuscript from the seventeenth century, owned by the Royal Archive of Antiquities in Stockholm. It goes by the name of the Icelandic Book of Sorcery. Naturally the author is anonymous. It contains fifty spells of various sortsmost are innocent, aimed at personal advancement or defense.' He stooped to read the same text Thora had been peering at. 'Some of them are darker, thoughfor example, one is a death charm, to kill the target. One of the two love spells is also pretty heavy black magic.' He looked up from the case. 'Funny. Your friend Harald was passionately interested in precisely this section of the exhibition, the old books and manuscripts.'
'Did he inquire about this same symbol?' Matthew asked.
'No, not as far as I recall,' Thorgrimur replied, then added: 'I'm not exactly an expert in this particular field so I couldn't help him muchbut I do remember that I put him in touch with Pall, the director I'm standing in for. He knows all about these sorts of things.'
