(
of the long hall, where the water gathered and bubbled. The overflow ran through another narrow channel of stone and went out under die opposite wall. - "Here not even haughty Queen Sigrid can bum us out," Eirik liked to say. - Brattahlid was worshipfully attended by its hay-bams and cow-byres, which were diickly turfed around the walls, and dieir doorways curved as diey went outward so that no snov^ winds could harm the shivering catde. Twice a day in vmiter Freydis had to go into the byres and squeeze between die dumbly suflfering animals to dole out hay from die bam. In bad winters she had to feed them on fish and birch leaves. They became so weak and thin that in the spring they had to be carried out of die byres. Then diey stood looking around them stupidly. Mer a long time they began to nuzzle the green shoots of the plant whose wood was called by the Skraelings qajaasat* The sun shone upon their bony shoulders, and the wind blew, and the mountains stood behind great green tundra-bluffs spangled with ice, and the shore of the river below was still lined with it. It was very summery in the §ord, which was guarded by snow-peaks. - Freydis milked her cows, and dreamed of riches as she stood working among the butter-tubs. In the summers she took the sheep to pasture, and drove them home again across the wide and shallow streams.
Sometimes it was very windy, and the grey sea was covered with straight black wave-lines that made the §ord into a plain of rocky slabs. The dwarf poplars shook their heads violently against the wind, but because they were so low Freydis could look out across the land and retain an impression of stiUness. The rocks did not move; the narrow white spill of Troll Falls did not change, but fell steadily in its silent stream (which from a distance seemed frozen), dovm a green cliff-top, down a white cliff-face veined with black, then down a steep green slope into the §ord. Birds still sang; the snow on the cliffs did not move; the clouds presented no new bellies, and only the wind itself expressed the storm that was coming. Even the sun still shone. But no matter how hungry they were, the poor thin cows would raise their heads and moan in low snuffling bellows at the weather, for they were afraid. Always they were afraid that it was winter again. When Freydis saw them failing to eat, she flew into a passion and lashed them with rope. But suddenly she would cease, and fall to comforting the creatures, because she could tell to a nicety (so she believed) when she was being watched from Brattahlid, by the prickling of her head. In fact, everyone in her family was
* "Little kayak." The leaves of this shrub are shaped like kayaks. Native Greenlanders say that a tea brewed from them will give strength to a hunter.
well aware of the cruelties that this little milkmaid inflicted, but Eirik chose to say nothing, and the others, who came increasingly to dread her rages, also held their peace.
Demons and Stones
When Freydis was a little girl her father took her on his knee and told her the stories of the old times, and once he told her how good King Swegde had gone looking for ODIN all through the world with twelve men, and he came to Turkland, but ODIN was not there, and he wandered through the Great Swithiod* and into Vanaheim,f where he got a wife named Vana, and he brought her home to Sweden and they had a son named Vanlande and everybody said that King Swegde should stay home and be a happy King for the rest of his life, but King Swegde had sworn a vow to find ODIN, so after a time he returned to the Great Swithiod and went eastward, and Odin was not there, and King Swegde got drunk and despairing and it was evening and the sun fell behind the forest, and then he saw a stone as big as a rich man's house, and there was a door in the stone, beneath which a dwarf was sitting. King Swegde was very drunk. He ran toward the stone shouting. The dwarf leaped up and stood in the doorway, through which King Swegde saw a glimmer, and the dwarf called, "Swegde! Swegde! Come in, and I will bring you to Odin!", and Swegde ran into the stone, which closed behind him so that there was no door anymore; there had never been; and King Swegde never came home. His son Vanlande succeeded him, but Vanlande was destroyed by a Finnish witch. - Freydis believed this story, because Greenland was inhabited by those artful and treacherous dwarves, the Skraelings, who were known to be sorcerers, although the appellation of "dwarf" rings now with an irony that Freydis could not have appreciated because in M. Vahl's work of 1928 a researcher who dug up the frozen bodies of fourteenth-century Norse women gives us "the picture of a race, greatly deteriorated and degenerated through intermarriage and undernourishment, a community of almost dwarf-like people crushed down by all the bodily infirmities resulting fi-om lack of proper nourishment ..." - nonetheless, it was true that when a Skrseling wanted to become an angdgkoq, or shaman, he went into solitude and sat in silence beside a large stone, and when the time was right he took a small stone in his hand and rubbed it against the
* Russia.
t The Don River region.
II
boulder until his ecstasy came. Then he was given his assistant spirit; then when the people blew out the lamps in the snow-houses he could summon spirits, crying, "Goi! Goi! Goi!"; he could even call upon the dreaded AMORTORTAK, the giant black-armed monster, who yelled, "A-mo/ A-mor and could murder with a touch (his victims, as I have said, turned black and died). Freydis, who was wise and intelligent, remembered this and resolved to call upon Him. She was very ill satisfied at having been bom a bastard.
Amortortak 1987
"This is the medicine man's fiiend." The Inuk showed me a white carving, with wide eyes and big teeth, a carving that could leap. "And this one. All these. They hear the medicine man. He has an enemy and he sings; they come alive, kill his enemy."
"Are there medicine men in Greenland now?" I asked.
"No. The last one is dead."
"WiU there be again?"
"Now we all believe in the GOD," he said contemptuously, "so it can never be again."
Her Soidscape The Bay ofFundy 1987
The grass, brown as if pickled, is all smoothed down by the tide's enormous hand. A flat plain of it goes on and on. Half of the time it is covered by the sea, and the water is as the weather is, and one cannot see Freydis's underlying nature, but as the tide is out now we may walk farther and farther inside Freydis, our feet sinking deep into the welcome of that rubbery grass, on top of which, here and there, rest patch-flakes of mud; and there is mud in the little channels that are filled with the vinegar-colored sea. In those channels the water is very still, reflecting the overhanging grasses, except where loose algae-clots, seemingly dissolved, smear themselves across the picture. The channels drain into larger brovm lagoons. The sea is so calm that it is hard to see any waves. Rich green grass grows on the mudbanks; grey gulls fly over the grass. In the mud are thin pointed slate-bits. - At the edge of the brown grass lie fiirry lumps of mud, which at first impression seem to be the scattered limbs of some dead animal. Then there is a little mud-cliflf, waist-high, which affords a view of a sodden grey mudflat pricked by green stubble, stained by green algae and red clay, littered with rocks and oozing fi-om furry puddles. A rock cast down into it sinks almost completely, with a wet squishy sound. The mud has the consistency of diarrhea. - Along the sides of the lagoons are places where the grass has been rubbed raw, exposing sand beneath; here can be seen tiny white shells. - It is possible to leap the wet mottled banks of some narrow channel and stand upon the mud hoping to see the fled ocean, but then the grass will give way with a ripping sound and the mud will give way and you slide helplessly, long brown hairs of grass sticking to your shoes, into the filthy stream, up which a long green string of half-dissolved algae swims, giving you your first hint that the tide is coming in. Presently things wdll be hidden again. - A good way inland, you can stand on a firm meadow of grass and dandelions and think that you have put that muddy vileness behind you, but then you will find inexplicable piles of rock-flakes, each flake as thin as a gingersnap, and you know that you are still not and never will be away fi-om it.
Wearing the Dream-Shirt
I shall make his blue cloak red.
AasmuND GRANKELSSON, just before spearing Asbiom Selsbane (1
024)
We all dream one dream. But Freydis dreamed seven. On die first night she dreamed of her silver hoard; on the second, of ice-bears; on the third, of black faces in the mountains; on the fourth, of rows of shining axes; on the fifth, of the death of her father. Then she dreamed the sixth dream. As a bleached w^hite tree-bone, startling in its beautiful gruesomeness, may hang suspended against a wall of dark trees, so this sixth dream stood out in her thoughts. She saw her father holding a dream-shirt in his hands, shaking his head and hesitating as lately he so often did, having grown old. - It was a shirt with ribbed darkness inside, the ribs sprung and whorled into almost floral patterns, like some initial letter of the Codex Frisianus's Heimskringla. Carved black channels rushed between the white whorled bones. But it was immense; a mountain could wear it on its chest. Eirik wanted to put it on, but he knew that it would be too big for him. Shrunken and white-bearded, he stood holding the shirt and blinking. Suddenly he seemed to see Freydis. He beckoned her over to him and put the dream-shirt in her hands, and she saw that by no means was it too big for her ...
In a happier family she might have called everyone to her to hear her dream. But when Freydis awoke, she told only her father.
"So it's you who will inherit my Blue-Shirt," said Eirik.
"But is Blue-Shirt a shirt that you put on, father, or is it inside you? - For you wear no blue today." Freydis asked questions such as these because she was a very practical woman.
"Blue-Shirt is a shirt you put on, as you would any shirt." After saying this, Eirik would say no more. But for a moment he put his arm around his daughter's shoulders.
Tfk Wfiir(pool-Dream
What fiend is that who guards the threshold, and prowls round the perilous flames?
DaY-SprING, on a visit to the Frost Giants
On the next night she dreamed the seventh dream. It seemed to Freydis in her dream that she had approached the table of some great King, who sat among his house-carles. She noted well which ones he smiled upon, and which he turned to with displeasure, chastising some, dismissing others; and when she felt sure that she had identified die men to whom the King
most often turned his sunny face, she smiled at them and cultivated their friendship, until she could ask them to bring her before the King, so that she could go into his service. At length the King arose and swept open the casements, through which she saw a great white mountain on a sea-coast, surrounded by lakes of water that were of a dead nature although they boiled fiiriously all the time. Branches falling into these bodies of water became stone. In the sea were many whirlpools, and in them she saw the whirling faces of the King's courtiers, smiling or frowning as the King had smiled or frowned upon them. They whirled and whirled until the sea had stripped their flesh from them, and they became skulls. The mountain rose high above the revolutions of those lost souls. After a time the sun came out beside it, and turned it blue.
"That mountain is Blauserk," Eirik said when she told him her dream. "That was the great blue glacier I first saw so many years ago when I sailed west from Snaefellsness."
"But why have I dreamed that dream?" cried Freydis.
"Because you must go there," her father said. "Go alone, and tell no one."
The Evil Traveler
Freydis set out in her finest clothes. She combed her hair; she put on her bronze brooches (which are now green in her grave). She was wearing a mande dyed with black and scarlet. It was high summer when Freydis set out upon her way. - The wind sounded like women laughing together riding down a waterfall.
Down the §ord she sailed, with two thralls who were to wait for her. The sun went round and round in the sky, but the clouds were arrows pointing behind one black snow-cliflf. The other cliflfs were black and white and green. Sometimes there were lines on their faces like rivers. At night the sea was blue; the mountains were blue and gold. - She wondered when she would return. "What will I become by then?" she thought. "What have I become?" (Perhaps the only time when the meaning of life becomes an issue is when you are waiting for something to happen.) - Shordy after midnight the sun went behind a ridge, and thereafter, as Freydis continued on her way, the snow and the sky seemed paler, though no less luminous. The green §ords, where her father's setders had built, became olive-brown as she passed them, and then they receded like memories. The ridges merged with the mountains
behind them, so that it seemed diat the peaks were but ridge-caps. - At last she came to the open sea, and dien her craft sped down past Herjolfsness, where Bjami Herjolfsson had returned from diat accidental Vinland voyage, where Gudrid and her fadier had first wintered in Greenland; and then Herjolfsness was gone and a mist came and went, and Freydis had rounded Cape Farewell. Leif's luck-wind was working neither for nor against her, so it was with Leif - She followed the coasdine nordi and east. Here for the first time she began to encounter ice. At last she could go no further. Mount Blauserk loomed high above her widi chill shining from its horrible blue shoulders. So her fadier had seen it, when he first fled Iceland and sailed due west from Snaefellsness. So the Skraelings would see it a diousand years later, although by then the ice had bleached a little. - "Wait for me here as long as necessary," she commanded her scared thralls. She fastened the skobrodar-spikcs to the soles of her shoes. Then she slung her traveling-bag over her shoulder, grasped her staff, and stepped onto the ice.
The Edge of the Frozen Sea
At low tide the ice was muddy and made a constant trickling sound. Rocks and ice-boulders rested in the middle of it. Every few moments came the smash of ice breaking. Sometimes there was a littie rusding noise, but it was only sand spilling from crumbling sandhills. The wind made a steady sound above the walls of the valley, each of which was a series of slabs seamed by ice-rivers. As ice fell down the cliffs, the noise of its smashing echoed like cannon-shot. It was a daunting place, but just as a stream may travel slowly down its way-course, deflected by stones but unhindered, so Freydis held to her direction - although whereas a stream is remorselessly patient, she herself would not wait a thousand years, and it was that failing which enslaved her to Blue-Shirt.
The water in the leads was blue and green. Sometimes the edge sheared off the floe that Freydis was walking on, or the floe tilted and began to sink, or her foot broke through a rotten spot in the ice. Every step was a gamble; if she fell, she would die. The leads made long rivers which she must sometimes jump across. Although the middle of the fjord was frozen smooth, getting there involved clambering over rough drifts of shore-ice which were often unstable, so diat she fell into jagged ice-troughs in which the sea-water had pooled. It was an immense labor to drag herself across this waste, although she was a strong woman. At ebb-ride the channels became dripping canyons,
The Ice-Shirt
with stones and darkness at the bottom of them. After she had achieved the smoother ice, the heartbreaking flatness and endlessness of the ice impressed upon her the tedium of her way ahead, and later, after many days upon the floes, the long ridges of stone which she must traverse one after the other made her want to cry. It was too early for the purple flowers, and even had it not been she would not have cared.
!
*1=^ZEN FIORD 'N 9LA3-L/NMD
TfieVestibuk
The western wall of Blue-Shirt's valley was formed of slabs, each slab being a tall narrow pentagon, so that the ridge-top was a series of sharp black points. In the evening the sun came just over the wall, and the little rivers gleamed unbearably, as did every speck of mica in the granite boulders. The sun was hot on her cheek.
Skuiis ondLonedness
She saw a grey rabbit skull frozen half in the ice. There was snow in its eyes, and there was ice on its teeth. It was waiting for the midsummer thaw so that it could be ground into the mud and buried. Here as in Slab-Land the boulders waited out the good weather, half-sunk in the mud like crocodiles. Some had faces. The littie streams waited to become terrifying columns of water that fell from mountains to roll boulders as if they were marbles. The
ice waited to fall in lethal slides (not diat it meant to do harm, for after it fell and killed reindeer it was still waiting for somediing). Considering ftill well the fact diat red hair lightens upon a putrefying human head, but blonde hair darkens, I conclude that Freydis must have walked a tightrope of decay; so now as she went higher and higher along die knife-ridge of deadi (diough she came proudly dressed, because she did not want Blue-Shirt to believe diat her hand could be had for the asking), she maintained a fixity of purpose to steady her; oh, yes, she was one of the Ice-Dreamers. - In the moss was a perfect lemming skull. A flower grew dirough its eye. - Freydis's skuU, not yet fi*eed, grinned inside its bloody flesh.
TheDcadLand
As she walked across the sand, the wind blew in increasingly fierce gusts. The vaUey was very sunny and empty. Sometimes there were litde rivers to jump over or wade through, rushing through the sand, their beds black or cobbled with colored pebbles; near these streams she often sank in wet sand up to her ankles. Hour after hour she walked. There was no place to rest fi-om the wind, for here the valley was a bowl, its sides dull with sand-fans from slides. At length she saw a solitary boulder far to the east, and made for it thankfully. Sitting down in the sand, she rested her back against it and ate. The wind knocked down her walking-stick and swept over her face. Shivering, she fastened her hood. Despite the wind, sounds remained as inhumanly perfect as crystals. Sometimes she could not tell whether what she heard was the sound of a distant ice-fall or of her own thongs striking the boulder she leaned against.
Farther north, the valley was packed hard with tiny stones, a flat, ringing pavement broken up by blue streams. As Freydis looked down, she saw a spider crawling along in the flatness, with a great leaf on its back. The insect stopped for a moment and studied her as she studied it; then it continued on its way. Two black geese quacked and quacked at her. When she came near to kill them, they took flight, showing their feather-skirts in a rush of black and white.
The Ice-Shirt Page 19