The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  One rainy night Freydis was in bed wdth her husband, and when he laid his hand upon her she became as stiff as a corpse. As ever, she refused to open her legs to him, or even to let him touch her. Thorvard asked her what was wrong, but she was silent. - "What is it?" he said. "What is it?" But she would say nothing. She lay beside him, so stiff and wrathful that he was sure that her glaring eyes shone in the dark. He did not attempt to look into her face. - "Freydis, what is it?" he asked her again, almost

  out of patience. "Why are you such a bad wife?" - "I'm an excellent wife," said Freydis calmly, "but you're a bad husband." And she said that the two brothers had abused her that day. "But I know you will do nothing about it." - "It was you who invited them," rejoined Thorvard, for he could think of nothing else to say. Her story seemed very unlikely to him, and he had no desire to fight the brothers. - "Naturally, you will do nothing," his wife repeated bitterly, and she rolled on her side and refused to speak further. Knowing what she was capable of, Thorvard lay beside her with a pounding heart. For a long time he was unable to sleep.

  Frost-Month passed, and so did Ram's Month. The men lay quarreling with each other or roamed the woods sullenly; they cursed the ill luck that had brought them to Vinland and vowed that when they returned home they would tell everyone not to go there. They talked about raiding Gudrid's country; they wanted to rape Gudrid and slaughter her animals, but they were too weak in numbers. If it had been necessary to her purpose, Freydis would have lain with them one after another, but they were afraid of her; they eyed her BLACK HANDS with patient terror, like cornered stags. Whenever she set them a task, they obeyed her. When she spoke to them, they answered her in low voices. It had always been this way vdth Freydis's thralls. It no longer pleased her; she expected it. - The men knew that she lusted to punish someone. They knew that soon she would decide who deserved death; she would say, "He is the one!", or, "They are the ones!"; then the men would rise up and do her bidding; for what else was there to do? Soon they would leave Vinland, and they would never sail back, never; they would never be Freydis's men again (and she knew this but did not care because Thorvard's gold could buy others, could buy them again if she willed it); and the men told over again their stale deeds of murder and rape; being womanless, they continued to talk of rape more than murder, but always they circled round Freydis in their speech like nervous birds; they spoke of the women that the Icelanders had, while Freydis went into the woods by herself every night, and her belly swelled and swelled and she had now been more than ten months pregnant but no one dared to speak of it. - The month of Winter's Wane advanced, and no one gathered cargo for the ship any longer. Soon the waves of the Greenland Sea would calm themselves to bitterness: then it would be time to sail home. There had never been any reason for them to come here.

  One moming Freydis got up and dressed before the others had awoken and she went out into the winter dew. Freydis's dress, it is told, was this: she wore the pale blue gown that her husband had given her, and on her hand

  was a silver ring. But her feet were bare. The path to the brothers' house was overgrown now by reddish thorn-bushes traversed with spiderwebs, there being so few visitors along that way, and bushes seemed to grow two sorts of crops: - the first being ripe red berries, the second, the bees that browsed upon their juices; so that the thorn-bushes were bright with red and yellow. As she went, Freydis shook the bushes with both arms, so that the thorns tore her gown and the bees stung her. The cryings of the gulls rang in her ears.

  Finnbogi was lying in the bed farthest from the doorway. He had not slept; he had heard her coming. - "What will you have here, Freydis?" he said.

  "I want you to get up and come out with me," she said. "I want to talk to you."

  Her voice came flatter than usual to his ears, almost (he supposed) as if she did not want to hear her own words. It would have been very surprising to Freydis had she known his thoughts; she did not doubt herself in the least. She had already decided what she had to do.

  "Is everything well with you and your people?" he said.

  "Yes, yes," she said impatiently.

  He swallowed. It was so unpleasant to him to behold her that he found it hard not to show emotion. But again Freydis did not seem to notice. He looked at her eyes, and the pupils seemed to be tiny black points in the greenish irises; again he felt that she neither saw nor heard him, so that it was strange in the extreme when she said sharply, "Are you coming out or aren't you?"

  The house-carles were awake now. They watched her silently. Helgi still slept.

  "I will come, Freydis, if that is what you wish," he said.

  He smiled entirely too much, she thought. It was not as Gudrid smiled, however; it was the smile of Skofte, or her other thralls who had surrendered.

  They went to a felled tree that lay under the house-eaves, and sat on it together. A very mild breeze was blowing. Finnbogi looked around him, and thought again, as he always did, what a lovely country Vinland was, like some treasure of greenness and goodness in the middle of the sea; and wild grapes were growing on the vine by him and he picked one and ate it although it was a little past its season, and Freydis sat so still beside him that he continually forgot that she was there; and a scarlet maple leaf sailed through the air as lightly as a Lappish boat and was stuck in Freydis's hair, and then Freydis said to him, "How do you like it here?"

  He looked at her squarely. "I like this land, but not our quarrel. I do not see why it came about."

  Freydis smiled. - Oh, how she smiled! Gudrid would have been proud of her. "You are quite right," she said. "But I am afraid that no matter how much we uproot that unseemly blood-tree it will grow again. So let me go away from here, and there will be no quarrel anymore."

  "I never expected that from you," he said. "It would be your way to command us to go, but not to go yourself Are you really finished here?"

  "I want to go back to Greenland," she said. "I miss the snow, and the mountains, and I want to see my own people again."

  "Well, and what do you want from me?"

  "I want your ship, because it is larger than mine, and I have a great deal of cargo. As you are set on staying, you can do with the smaller ship."

  Finnbogi was well aware that if he refused to trade with her, she would set her men against his and most likely kill them all. He smiled wearily. "It will be as you wash," he said.

  "I see that there is not much stuff in you," she said. "You yield to me without any struggle. Finnbogi, wouldn't you rather match yourself against me than give me a victory without any pleasure?"

  "I know not what to say. We are all in your power, Freydis; it is for you to command."

  "And your brother, what will he say?"

  "He too will do as you wish," he said, clenching his fists.

  "Shall we wake him up and hear it from him?" Freydis said, licking her lips.

  "I tell you, you will have your way, Freydis!" he said. "Why can't you be satisfied with that? It almost seems that you would rather have your way by force! Do you care so little about what is proper or lucky?"

  A kind of dullness had fallen over him, and he did not think or care what he said.

  "But you do agree to exchange ships?" she said.

  He nodded. "I promise," he said.

  "Now, Finnbogi, we are agreeing very well together," said she, "but I have a lust to play the Changing-Game against you. Do you know what that is?"

  "I do not like the sound of it," he said. "I will forfeit my stake to you, and declare you the winner as you desire, for you know that we are all Christians here."

  "You must never open your mouth to me in such a way," she said, in such a honeyed purring voice that he shrank back from her. "I find it surprising that you do not recall how narrowly you escaped from Leif's houses. Nor do I think that you truly want to forfeit, for the stake is higher than you

  believe - so I swear by my BLACK HANDS! - Yes, look at them! - I am a Changer, Finnbogi. My King is King Blue-Shirt. Have you ever heard
tell of Him? Do you know what Power He has given me? The olden Kings could only bum everything, or caper like trained bears. But I can lay waste this entire land with ice. What do you say to that?"

  "I say that you are a troll," he said hotly. "You are determined to play with me whether I tell you yea or nay; you will not take what I give freely. Tell me, is Gudrid a witch like you, and am I but a shirt you will wear out in your play against her?"

  "No, she is no witch," Freydis replied. "She has never changed herself, and thinks that things are but one way. And so she has lost, even though they call her the Lunde-Sun! And so have you all! For my every word has been a word of Changing; now we shall see what you and I become."

  "I do not pretend to understand you, Freydis," he said. "But I wish you joy of our ship, as I am sure that my brother does."

  She took his hand. "Sooner than you can believe, I will give you fitting thanks," she said.

  As when the sun breaks through the clouds the blue sky becomes a bay among fog-mountains, so Freydis smiled a smile of incomplete radiance. Then they parted, and Finnbogi returned to his bed, while Freydis walked back through the woods barefoot. Once again she forced the bees to sting her. She climbed up into her berth, and the touch of her clammy feet woke her husband.

  Thorvard yawned. "Where have you been to now? Why are you so cold and wet?"

  She could hear the men stirring and waking; she heard the clank of a shield on the floor.

  "Tell me what happened," said Thorvard.

  Freydis answered indignantly, "I went to see those brothers to discuss their ship, for I want a larger one, and they took it so ill that they struck and abused me. See, look how my dress is torn! Look how bruised and swollen I am! But it's clear to me that you, you lazy wretch, won't avenge my humiliation, which is your own. I realize now how far away I am fi-om Greenland. I wish I had never come here with you. I tell you now, Thorvard, that if you don't avenge the insult I will divorce you."

  She had a snowy face. Pink flowers of anger bloomed in her cheeks. Throwing his belongings violently about, she railed at her husband until no one even pretended to sleep any longer. She called him her thrall. -Thorvard knew that there was nothing to do but to follow her will. When

  a mountain is sheer and has shoulder-wings you cannot cry to it, seeing its form Hke yours, its terrible blank face. He roused his men, and they went to the house of the two brothers with ready axes. What they did there was easy, because the inmates were asleep, and Freydis's five extra men were good at the work. Now Helgi and Finnbogi and their men were all dead, but the women were left, and nobody would kill them. Then Freydis said, "Give me an axe."

  The Coming of the Frost*

  Now their purpose in Vinland was accomplished. They buried the bodies, and slept, and walked to and fro, and bit by bit the rime-heaviness and ice-weight fell upon them. (There was no thunder-clap; there was no shield-clang.) The earth was stone-grey, the trees bare and grey, the air grey and clammy and cutting-cold in the throat like thorns. The sun came up red, and the forests were already defeated, luridly shining orange and brown like grim monster-woods although of course there were no monsters except the Skraelings who wailed at the bad light and tore their shirts and called and called upon KXUSKAP and upon COOLPUJOT Spring-Maker and especially upon Grandfather SUN, believing that they must have done some evil; but the SUN was a woman again, not their Grandfather anymore, and She fled back to Greenland, rushing round and round again above the snow-fells where She had once lived with Her brother Amortortak and been happy; now She must circle high above Her incest-grave without a hope, just as a ghost must hover and rush at the extremity of its fog-tether, unfree until the last bone, the last rotten rag of its life-shirt has decayed, which takes centuries or longer in cold climates -oh, those mummy-husks glow warm and bright for the naked, like the empty red sun-shell dispensing lurid light to the People in Wineland who denied their chilly future; as for COOLPUJOT, He lay boneless and helpless while KlusKAP sailed north and south along the fog-strait between Vinland and Markland, searching for His wicked brother, whom He suspected of having returned from Deathland a second time to wreak this evil, but KLUSKAP could find no signs of Him; and KLUSKAP, having lost the battle, could not go down to where He sat in His Man-Shirt or Woman-Shirt, the buttons

  * "... there shall come that winter which is called the Awful Winter: in that time the snow shall drive from all quarters; frosts shall be great then, and winds sharp; there shall be no virtue in the sun" - Younger Edda.

  of which were viper-eyes shining like red suns, so at last Kluskap paddled His great stone canoe back to Cape Split and returned to Grandmother and Marten, shaking His head. - Marten had thrown many logs on the fire. It was warm and smoky in the wigwam, and filled with the good smell of boiled meat. KLUSKAP yawned; He lay down and wrapped His robe round Himself like a blanket, and Marten squatted in silence looking into the fire, and old Grandmother rocked herself and shook her head and shivered, and tears ran down her cheeks. Outside the wigwam, the high trees spread themselves like bone-fans. Although some leaves remained on them, they grew discolored, going from red to reddish-grey, Hke Freydis's memories of Gudrid. - How cold everything was! - Along that long low peninsula of grass, snow-patches rose from beneath the tundra like seeping lakes. Ice filmed across the dying eyes of tide-pools and crept up rocky beach-shelves. The streams were poisoned with frost, like the Hell-creek Slith, and the quick venom they bore changed them to ice. By degrees the water now froze in the large rivers. Between the bare tree-trunks could be seen a dull white shining, and the hills were silhouetted black in the sun. In the air was a white light. - The grape-vines died; the SUN wept cloudy tears; the Unipeds died. (But KLUSKAP, though dream-stained and sorrow-stained, lived, it is said, for another six hundred years. As Vinland grew more chill, so did the People's stories, and He gained the power to blast His enemies with a cold so intense that it put out their campfires and then they fell down frozen and dead.) The wind laughed down from the Greenland snow-fells. - Now there came great famines, as there had been in Greenland and Norway and Iceland, and many of the People had no food to eat but ravens and rats and foxes. The old and the sick they led to the chff-edge . .. The icebergs came closer; for nine months of the year now the People saw those ominous blue towers of ice at their front door. They learned to wear shirts of thicker skins; they must thatch their wigwams with many more spruce boughs; they must smoke the meat they killed and save what they could of it for the bad days when they would pray to KLUSKAP not for lovers or for holiness-Power, but for food and warmth. Every autumn they had bad dreams; they waited for the frost-months with grim anxiety; when the snow-nights did come the People lay awake waiting for something to happen. - The wind-scream was terrifying. Every winter night they wondered whether the wind would tear their wigwams down. They could hear it coming down from the mountains, piping, whisding, gathering strength from ridge to ridge long before it reached them. When that sound came to their ears, the People braced themselves and called upon Grandfather SUN (Who was not there); the children began to cry. The wind whisded very slowly and terribly.

  Then the screaming commenced - how fierce and harsh it was can never be told - and their wigwams began to shake. But Hfe went on in Vinland as it did in Greenland. - The People dressed their babies in swan-skin and soft warm fox-fur. {''Ehhhr cried Christian's Daddy in the kitchen triumphantly. He had just gotten a royal flush. Christian loved his Daddy because when Christian was a little boy his Daddy had left him on an island near Thule for a few days while he went fishing and the ice crept up to the island, and groaned and chuckled in the black sea and came closer and closer and there was nothing that litde Christian could do and it crushed his Daddy's boat.

  - "Never mind," his Daddy said. "It was only a boat. We'll start afresh.")

  - In the large cities of Vinland, of course, many changes have occurred: -hoarfrost has become whorefrost. Just as New York City becomes a forest of wide golden letters from the air at night, each le
tter made up of lights, so that from one's window-seat one will certainly see a K, an A, an ^, and ever so many L's all underlined and fenced in by night-lines which one must suppose to be freeways; just as the steady texture of the night provides a spurious cleanliness, the lights themselves a spurious elegance; just as the plane continues eastward or westward, and presently the letters are gone and there is nothing but blackness; just as the city-alphabets of meaning, then, give way to emptiness, so the Great Book of Trees in which the Greenlanders had hoped to write, and had indeed written a little, rustied its leaf-pages shut and froze into a Mountain of bluish ice. The King of Vinland wore His blue-black crown of bone.

  Sfeojte Leaves Freyctts

  When Skofte learned that Freydis had murdered five women in cold blood, then at last he gave up his hopes of using her to find the Tree of Gold and decided to leave her service, for he feared to find out what else she might be capable of He now went to Bjami Grimolfsson and asked to be taken on his ship when he sailed for Iceland (for no one pretended any longer that it was safe to stay in Vinland). - "I have heard bad reports of you," said Bjami. "Men tell me that you steal, that you are lazy, and you have no loyalty in you." - "I assure you that I will work," Skofte cried, sinking to his knees. "You know what Freydis has done. Please save my life and let me come with you." - Bjami thought for a moment. "Will you work without complaint?" he asked. - "I promise," said Skofte, "never to ask you for anything."

  The Frost in Greenland 1987

  'In the winter is it very dark?" I asked a Greenlandic woman. "Yes," she laughed. "How dark?" "Like the BLACK HANDS sneaking down on my eyes!"

  TficEnd

  ca. 1010-ca. 1430

  The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world, and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer direcdy a great part of our ails.

  A

  Thoreau, Walden (1854)

  nd so the Greenlanders, having learned their own limits, returned to their own country, where there remained tracts of farmland between the East Bygd and the West Bygd, and hot-springs ran into ^ords where sea-fowl congregated, so that people could catch as many as they liked. Thanks to these springs, the Friars of Saint Thomas would heat their luxurious chambers two centuries later. - Not even then had the terrifying events fully begun; it was not until ca. 1430 that we fmd the bleak statement in Claudius Clavus that the Skraelings "come in a steady stream to Greenland with a strong army, without any doubt from the other side of the North pole." From this time we can probably date the Skraeling legend of Ungertok, last of the white demons, for the Skraelings burned the others alive in their church. Ungertok leaped through the window and ran into the fells with his little son under his arm. The SkraeUngs ran after. Ungertok rushed up and down the green hills; he staggered in the deep green moss, and always the Skraelings came closer and closer. He could not carry his son anymore; he threw him into a lake to save his own life, but the Skraelings were almost upon him. Weeping and gasping, Ungertok ran on. At last they ran him down and killed him: - yes, they stained his blue shirt! - In Bere^ord there was a great whirlpool that trapped whales for the settlers' pleasure. On the west shore of Ollum-Lengri Fjord were treasuries of birds' eggs; on the east shore were grassy green plains where cattle could graze. There were many other ^ords so long that no one had been to the end of them, and no doubt they too contained their fishes and seals. East of Blue-Shirt was the isle of Karsoe, an excellent hunting-ground for white bears. There was a good deal of snow, naturally, but in those days