The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  spears whose tips shone as brightly as the sun, the long bright swords that glittered like ice-teeth (but of course in those days the People knew of ice only from those regions to the north of Markland; sometimes in the spring they saw lovely icebergs come drifting by in the blue, blue water, sometimes they paddled their canoes out into the strait and moored them to a floe with a spear-cast; then they patted the belly and flanks of that white animal with their hands, laughing at how cold it was); they pracdcally split their cheeks in joy to see the sax-kmves that curved like a dolphin's jaw; but of highest excellence they rated the blue axes, those pretty bone-biters, those gleaming wound-gashers . .. However, the Jenuaq guarded them jealously.

  The Axe

  There was a chief among the People named Carrying the War-Club; he was tall and straight, and bore himself well, so that he enjoyed the respect of all * Carrying the War-Club said: "It is clear to me that Powers live in those axes. You men, watch and wait. If you can steal an axe from the Jenuaq, do so. I myself will go in search of KLUSKAP and bring it to Him. He will tell us how to enjoy the axe-Power for ourselves." - Another chief named Dreaming of Bad Days shook his head and said: "This is cloudy counsel. You know that the tribes across the water call us the Porcupine People, because we are prickly and irascible. Let us live in peace with the Jenuaq. We give them skins; they give us the blood-red cloth; they give us the sweet white syrup." - Then Carrying the War-Club stamped his foot and said, "These are the words of an old man. Look how the Jenuaq cheat us with their cloth! They are not honest men, but demons. And they have established another nest in the north, by the old demon-houses. They have brought their demon-women; they are making demon-children to plague us. Have you not seen the little white demon-babe whose hair is white like sea-foam? Do you want him to have brothers? Do you want his brothers to eat our hearts? We must get the axe-Power of the Jenuaq; we must not wait until their numbers are too great for us. Let others call us the Porcupine People! Let them call us the Panther-People! Ha, ha!" - So saying, he incited them all to pull on the Bear-Shirt. - Dreaming of Bad Days was not happy, and prophesied evil.

  * "It is a historical fact that the Beothuk men were tall and well-formed," wrote Farley Mowat. "The last chieftain of the race, who was murdered by white hunters on Red Indian Lake in 1819, was stretched out on the ice by his killers and measured. They reported that he was more than six feet tall."

  The Ice-Shirt

  But the matter of the red cloth so incensed the People now that they paid no attention to him. So they agreed to steal an axe at their first opportunity, and in the meantime to dissemble their purpose.

  Names and Gifts

  Freydis was often among the People, for she wished to learn more of their god GloOSKAP. At first she bribed them with milk, but presently, noticing that they grew less shy of her, she discontinued these unnecessary payments (though she accepted their skin-presents just the same). - What ugly dark thralls they were! They wore weasel-skins; bear claws and wildcat-teeth clicked around their necks, so that they sounded like skeletons when they moved. They gaped at the sun; they played with stones as if they were children. - When they saw her in the forest (for she did not choose to meet them in plain view of the other Greenlanders), they croaked at her like raven-people; and she could easily imagine them creeping about on battlefields like ravens, pecking and pecking at the slain, stealing armor and gold rings, cawing in good men's blood; - ''KweF' they always said. This

  BIRCH TW16

  (NEW H/V^P^HlRbj 1^«7)

  was their uncouth greeting. - ''Kwer Freydis replied sourly. She hunkered down on her hams among them; scowling, she suffered them to stroke her red-gold hair. - Oh, how she hated them! But she must learn more of their speech. The first thing to do was learn their names; then she could deal with them. - "Freydis," she said, pointing to herself - But all the Skraeling women - ugh! how withered and little they were! - promptly pointed to themselves and called themselves freydises. - "No, no, no, you dolts!" screamed Freydis,

  and they cowered back and whispered. - She touched her heart. "Freydis," she said. She beckoned to a scared Skraeling girl and said, "You! What's your name?" - But the Skraeling girl hid herself behind her blue-black hair. They never would give her their names. But she learned that a Skraeling woman was called an e'pit. Every Greenlandic woman they called puoin, and she was with them many times before she understood that that meant witch. At first her face darkened with rage, but then slowly she began to smile. - "So I'm a wdtch, am I, you Skraelings? A witch among trolls? So be it. We'll see whose sorceries win out in the end." - And the Skraelings laughed and gave her roast moose-nose, because they could not understand her.

  By pointing at the sea and sky she learned at last the word she so longed to hear: MUSKUNAMU'KSUTI - blueness. She never forgot it, because it was the attribute of her LORD. (She was hawk-keen; she was eagle-keen.) Finding her so eager and grasping in the way she whispered this word over and over among the trees, the Skraelings taught her Muskunamu'k (blue), Muskunamu'kwesik (bluish), Muskunik (blue cloth). But the word she prized was MUSKUNAMU'KSUTI. - "Yes," she said to herself; "now I can worship Him here; now I can put on the Blue Shirt in Wineland as my father did in Greenland; now I can invoke Him in the presence of GlooSKAP Himself!"

  Maktawaakwa

  To the People Kluskap* was one Person among many. They admired His Powers, and sometimes sought to visit Him. But equally they admired the Powers of colored stones in streams, of knurled bones: these things they kept in skin-pouches with their rattles and used to guard against sickness, to summon the moose and caribou. But Freydis was a Christian, and must only beheve in one God. The games of Power that the Skraelings played with their pebbles were as slow and useless to her as chess, which she had never had the patience to learn from her father (and Thjodhild never much enjoyed it, either, although she played with Eirik before Leif was grown and later again when Leif and Eirik had a falling out over religion because it was better for her that she do that than leave Eirik to fall into a sullen rage of boredom and horror as he squatted on his heels, pulling at his beard and cursing into the fire, and the vdnd shrieked outside and the days were as dark as the nights and when the wind-gusts desisted for a moment Thjodhild could

  * For Kluskap/Glooskap, see Note on Micmac Orthography, p. 354.

  hear the cows in the byre, lowing thinly, with a quavering shivering sound, so Thjodhild moved the ivory pieces around on the board as patiently as she could, until her husband began to curse her and her Christian ways and then she rose up wearily, silently, to go back to her loom); so Freydis must play by the rules of the black Crow-Fathers, who did not know that in Wineland pale sad Sister SUN was a Grandfather Whose hair was softly streaming light. Who was tranquilly unassailable. Who had created the People in pairs. Who had divided the world into lakes and lands; - nor did Freydis know about COOLPUJOT the Person of Seasons, nor yet about Chief EARTHQUAKE ... but when she heard the old man. Dreaming of Bad Days, call gently upon Glooskap (and his voice was like the sighing and shimmering of leaves), then she became determined that GLOOSKAP would be the Only One to help her speed her designs in Wineland - and because she thought so, so it would be. She could put on whatever shirt she chose. - The People marked out for Freydis a map on the ground. - "Go this way," they said politely. "Here He lives: He is NIKSKAM, our Grandfather; He is KiSU'LKW, our Maker." (They said that about everyone with Power; they were indeed a courteous People.)

  Thus it seemed to Freydis as if she had acquired Blueness in Wineland just as in east Greenland she had struck upon the rock and called the name of AmoRTORTAK. She needed the Skraelings precisely because she despised them: being trolls, they knew what she must know. Just as each country's sky is its own shade of blue (and just as what you see depends on who shows it to you), so one must put on the same shirt over and over in different climates: - that was how it seemed to her; therefore that is how it was. So she collected His Names as she had once hoarded the silver coins of King Eric Bloody-
Axe, and the word MUSKUNAMU'KSUTIenriched her, and she laughed and hugged herself while the Skraelings looked on (they never painted themselves blue); she had gained something else of theirs without paying for it. - As for them, they could see something flickering, something crawling behind her eyes. So when they spoke of her they did not use the word MUSKUNAMU'KSUTI; instead they said Maktdwddkwd (blackness); they said Maktokdkunumdse (to paint something of one's own black).

  GudridandGudrid

  Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door. Blake, "Holy Thursday" {ca. 1790)

  One day in Haymaking-Month they were trading with the Skraelings, and Gudrid was sitting in the doorway of the longhouse giving her little boy suck when she felt a shadow on the back of her neck, and looking up she saw a woman dressed in black, who was very pale, and had eyes too big for human eyes. "What is your name?" the woman said.

  "My name is Gudrid," said Gudrid. "And what's your name?" "My name is Gudrid," said the woman in a very strange voice, so that Gudrid could not tell whether she were mocking her or repeating what she had said wdthout understanding it or whether her name really was Gudrid, which was possible since she did not seem to be a Skraeling. She had chestnut-colored hair, round which she wore a headband. Leif had once had bad dreams about Thorgunna; he woke up crying out every night for seven nights, and Gudrid remembered how he said that Thorgunna's eyes seemed to be getting bigger and bigger the closer she came to him and her face got paler and paler; but for Leif the most horrible thing had been the iron-cold malice in Thorgunna's face, which he might melt away no more than he could any other glacier in Greenland; this other Gudrid, however, seemed to be not so much a person with intentions as a presentiment (for such things still happened in those days, although not so much to Christians). The woman walked closer and closer to Gudrid, gliding as if wdthout volition, and her shadow stretched all the way to the door; and she plucked aimlessly at her tight black kirtle, as if it were hurting her and she could not pull it off; it was tight about her wrists and neck, which were livid, but the rest of her was so pale, so pale; and her eyes were like poHshed beach pebbles. - What shirt had Gudrid Thorbjomsdaughter put on? The Flateyjarbok presents it as a matter surpassing conjecture; and yet I think we ought to suppose that Gudrid's double meant to tell her something that Gudrid (whose soul was as fragrant as asphodels) did not want to understand for the same reason that she did not want to remember her foster-mother Halldis's Warlock-Songs; she was content now to act, agile and naked, within Karlsefiii's husband-shirt. - The other Gudrid stared and stared, until Gudrid thought that she was going to scream because she did not want to be fey. Her own wool shirt now seemed to be shrinking and tightening and hardening on her like drying leather, her collar swallowed more and more of itself,

  like the Midgaard Serpent; it was choking her; and little Snorri was weeping and she sank to a bench with her eyes almost popping out of her head like the other Gudrid's eyes, until in her extremity she remembered the Power - not of Christ but rather of her own smile; so quickly she put on the rosy shirt of smiles as if she were not at all asphyxiated and smiled and smiled, wider and wider; it was Gudrid's most beautiful smile ever. - "Sit down with me," said Gudrid, and the other Gudrid smoothed her black kirtle with both hands and stepped slowly over to her, when suddenly there was a crash, and the woman vanished. A Skraeling had just been killed by Karlsefiii's men for attempting to steal a sword. Shouting and crying, the Skraelings fled, leaving their packs of skins behind.

  "Now I think we will have some trouble," said Karlsefiii, but Freydis laughed when she heard this and said, "After all, we got their skins for nothing this time. Have a drink of milk, Karlsefhi!" - Karlsefhi turned upon her. "I will take no notice of you this time," he said, "but someday my patience may run out." - At this, Freydis abused him until he turned and went into his house. She called after him, "Go and pick crowberries with the Skraelings!"

  As for Gudrid, the instant that her double had vanished she could breathe again, and not a mark on her neck could she find. - "What is it about my life that strangles me?" she wondered. "There is nothing so ill about my babe and my good husband, though certainly I wdll always be resdess; I would enjoy going linen-bound to a wedding again ..." - "Why so pale?" said Karlsefiii, coming in. "Are you unwell?" - "Yes," said Gudrid weeping.

  The Quiet Days

  Now the men of Karlsefiii and Gudrid put on their batde-helms; they raised their axes and polished them; they strode fi-ovming upon the meadows, with their arms folded across their breasts; they talked seldom, and traveled always together. (But Freydis's men despised them for cowards, and continued to roam the forests. Freydis had no worry that they might talk too much about her yeamed-for Tree because they had less and less to do with the others.) As for Karlsefiii, he often spoke with his wife alone, shaking his head, stroking and stroking the buttons on his sleeves. - "Now you have got us all into the raven's beak!" he said to her; "you enticed us all here, and who knows when the Skraelings will attack?", but Gudrid smiled ever so gendy and stroked his

  beard . . . The baby cried; Karlsefiii paced and paced and began to shaft his arrows . .. Again, for no reason that he could see, he found himself thinking upon King Olaf, who had truly been a splendid fellow. Once Karlsefni had made him the gift of some finely made falconer's gloves (for that year he had had a whole cargo of such goods); and in retum the King gave him a gold ring; he had it still. No, for all his manliness. King Olaf never forgot to be courteous, as when he rode the fish-road to Salten Fjord with the Bishop and a tempest blew against him for days and days until at last he called upon the Bishop to pray, which the Bishop did at ship's-bow, v^th tapers and incense; then a sea-way was parted beneath the wave-peaks for them by the hands of God, and the Bishop said his AMEN and King Olaf struck sail and directed his Christianizers to their oar-work; after rovsdng fully a day and a night, with the green-flecked ocean-shoulders rising so high on either side that they obscured the mountains (but the Bishop's path was as smooth as oil), they reached Godo Isle, where there dwelled a most benighted and stubborn pagan named Raud the Strong, as Trygvesson well knew, for he had come to convert him; and the sky was black and the mountains were black and slick with rain as the King's dragon-ship slid into harbor, so that Raud did not see; then the King raised his hand and the men seized that place, killing, beating and imprisoning Raud's house-thralls as they liked, but even now (so fine were his manners) King Olaf spoke to Raud in all good humor, saying, "Let me offer you baptism, Raud. I wdll not take your property fi*om you, but would rather be your friend, if you might only make yourself worthy to be so!" and he looked at Raud so longingly, as if Raud were the King and he himself but the humblest thrall in the land; when Raud refused, however, Olaf changed his face, and had Raud bound, and forced an adder into Raud's mouth with a red-hot iron; so that the snake crept down Raud's throat, and came out below the armpit, giving Raud his death; then King Olaf seized all his silver and gold. Doubtless, then, he thought that he could likewise prevail against Queen Sigrid if need was. And yet she was very cunning and had foreknowledge fi-om her father Skogul Toste, who was a Swede, and therefore, as all Norwegians knew, a warlock. - Sigrid had many great estates in Sweden, so that she was often wooed. Now of the wooers that she burned, perhaps the most remarkable was her foster-brother King Harald Graenske, who one summer went a-Viking to the Baltic, "to gather property," says the saga blandly; and keen-eyed Sigrid sent her men to invite him to a feast, because she knew that he was destined to father King Olaf the Saint; and Sigrid longed for the distinction of being the mother of so holy a King; therefore she lured King Harald to her with all his followers, and feasted him grandly, sitting

  beside him in her high-seat and smiling upon him so that he thought: "This Queen has the greatest understanding!", and later he thought: "What blue eyes she turns upon me!", and later still she had her carles put up a bed whose linen hangings were much finer than Thorgunna's had been - if only Thurid of Frodis-Water, who had so badly coveted t
hose, could have been here in Sweden to see them! - But then it is likely that she would have burnt her fingers. The world-circle was embroidered on it, fi-om Jotunheim to Wineland the Good, so that upon going into his bed King Harald felt as if he were clothing himself in the whole world (for he did not think that that was also what dead men did, when they were covered in earth). For a time he sat there upon the bed yawning and rubbing his beard, for he regretted most keenly his night-parting wdth the Queen, and was loath to lay himself down, but ale enthralled him, so at last he threw back the coverlet. There were few men in the lodging-house that night, says the tale; and Queen Sigrid's breast was heaving in excitement as she thought to fulfill her designs. Now King Harald took oflf his serks and lay naked in that pretty bed, at which Sigrid parted the hangings softly and sat down beside him, and her eyes were glittering in the darkness as she filled a bowl for him to drink with her own hands, and they drank together until they were drunk. - But what did she truly desire in all this? Perhaps she never intended to bear Saint Olaf under her heart at all - for she worshipped FREYJA - perhaps (unlike Freydis Eiriksdottir, who always acted according to a purpose) Sigrid was nothing but a bored and vicious woman-cat playing with mice whom she whirled about by their tails until she tired of them and bit oflf their heads; for in the morning she got up not fi-om King Harald's bed, but fi-om her own, where she had laid herself down at the last; and the sun was bright upon the water as she crowned herself and the entertainment went on as brightly as ever and Queen Sigrid was so lively as to uplift the hearts of all, teasing her foster-brother the King, making sport of other countries behind her hand, even of his dominions (at which he firowned a little), opening her mouth wide in a laugh to say that she valued her estates in Sweden much more highly than his kingdom in Norway! at which he lost all his pleasure in the day, in the year, in himself The following summer he steered again for Sweden, this time beseeching Sigrid to marry him, at which she said, "How now, Harald? For you are already well-married to Queen Aasta Gudbrandsdottir!" - "Aasta is a good woman," said he, "but in beauty and importance she is nothing to you, my Sigrid." - "Oh, I'm beautiful now, am I?" she said. "Am I your little dove? For so you named me that night when I came to your bed." - And here King Harald could say nothing,