The Ice-Shirt

by William T. Vollmann

  winter was still worse in Iceland. (No one sailed past Blue-Shirt, due to the perilous whirlpools. "From this point eastward," says Ivar Bardsson, "nothing presents itself to the eye but ice and snow, either by land or by water." (Unden Is och Sne bade till Land och Vand.)

  The Death of Bjonti Grimo^sson ca, lOlO

  Eirik's Saga says that Bjami and his men set sail in good order, and they followed the long blue peninsula of Vinland north past Straumi^ord, past Marvel-Strand where Gudrid and Karlsefiii used to look for stranded whales, and where the Skraelings now shot arrows from the tree-shadows and pierced one of Bjami's men in the shoulder; past Keel-Ness where Leif repaired his ship so long ago, and presently they were at the end of Vinland, where the seals barked and the seas were high and cold. The men sent up a great shout of joy when that evil land vanished behind a cloud. Bjami steered into the deep waters of Markland Strait and said that he expected good luck at last. But the ship soon ran afoul of the winds, as had happened to Naddour-Viking, to Thorstein and Leif and Thorgunna and all the rest of us; and he was blown west into the Greenland Sea. The sea-spray froze on the faces of his men, and the black waves threw the ship up and down so that it creaked. - Bjami watched the horizon anxiously. (As for Skofte Carrion-Crow, he was white with fear.) For a long time there was nothing to be seen, but after many days Bjami saw a blue spot on the horizon which presently resolved itself into a tower of ice, and he knew that he was in sight of Blauserk, but he was not destined to reach it because the Greenland Sea was maggot-ridden in that season and the maggots ate holes in his ship. So Bj ami's ship began to sink, and Bjami called everyone on deck to decide who would die and who would live. - "This lifeboat is blubber-tarred, and I have never heard of maggots that could eat through blubber," said Bjami. "However, it will only hold half of us." - The crew ignored Bjami's words at first in their panicked life-lust and crowded into the boat, but then it was seen that they were tme. - "Even half of us may be too many," said Bjami. "The boat will sink under the weight of so many. I propose that we draw lots, rather than filling the boat according to rank." - Since Bjami was the captain, this was considered a very fair and generous offer. So they drew lots, and by chance Bjami was among those who would depart in the boat. He led them into the boat, and the others, the doomed ones, stood on the deck watching them ready themselves, and suddenly Skofte Carrion-Crow came forward from among

  them and said, "Bjami, do you really mean to leave me?" - There was a shout of laughter at the cawing of that selfish and unlucky bird, but Bjami answered as kindly as he could, "Skofte, that is how it has to be. You can see that there is not room for all." - But Skofte cried desperately, "You promised that no harm would come to me, and now you are abandoning me!" Bjami had promised Skofte nothing, for Skofte had come with Freydis, but in his panic Skofte did not know what he said. - "What then do you suggest?" said Bjami. - "I suggest that we change places," said Skofte hurriedly, his eyes full on Bjami's eyes, and men waited to see what would happen, but Bjami shook his head and laughed a little and said, "I see that you are so afraid to die that you will do anything. So be it." - Then he got out of the boat, and Skofte Carrion-Crow mshed into his place. - Bjami and the others who stayed behind were all drowned. But Skofte Carrion-Crow and everyone else in the boat survived. There was much danger and exhausting labor in rowing that little boat across the sea, but it is said that Skofte did more than his part, for he knew better than to trust anyone but himself in the saving of his life. The Hauksbok text reports that they landed in Ireland, and there told this tale.

  The Timersuit in their Twddght Years

  ca. 1010-ca. 1050

  In the month of Winter's Wane, Freydis and Thorvard returned to their farm in Gardar, which had prospered in their absence. Wood was now becoming scarce in Greenland, and their cargo of tree-trunks fetched a good price. Freydis was still pregnant. She threatened to kill anyone who told what she had done, but mmors about the fate of the two brothers became so insistent that Leif finally tortured some of Freydis's men to find out what had happened. - "I do not have the heart," he said, "to treat my sister as she deserves." For he was wise enough to fear her. As Blue-Shirt had predicted, Freydis was shunned after that, and to some extent, therefore, she grieved and repented, but whenever she felt lonely she could always cheer herself by making her husband give her a belt of silver, a serk lined with velvety pell, a strap-cloak with costly borders .. . But all her life she was known for her BLACK HANDS. (Of course BLACK HANDS must be endured by those who have everything.) Later she gave birth to a lump of ice.

  As for Gudrid and Karlsefni, they sailed to Norway, and the following year to Iceland. Of their departure (some days after that of Bjami Grimolfsson,

  whose doom they did not learn for many a year) little is related, from which we know that it was undertaken with gainful success: only failures cry shrilly from the bird-islands of the Flateyjarbok. Gudrid's house-men were greatly pleased to be leaving Vinland, for they had shares in the wealth of wood and grape-vines that made the cargo. (As for the booty that they had taken from the Skraelings, those arrows and skin-shirts they reckoned useless at the last, and left them behind.) - Karlsefiii, too, was satisfied to be going. He said to his wife, "Soon we will be among civilized folk again!" - "Yes," she said. "Then we shall enrich ourselves indeed." - As she led little Snorri by the hand, and took her last steps upon the soil of Vinland, Gudrid was a little troubled that her heart did not ache, as it had done in the days when she was a girl, and the time had come to leave Iceland. On some nights of that first winter, when people would have thought her praying in that cold drafty farm at Herjolfsness, she had been stretching out her arms to Iceland, longing to touch the soil of home even for a moment; now she scarcely cared that she was going there. - What was the meaning of a tree that reached out from its mossy rock with every bud? That it found what it reached for, Gudrid knew from the swelling of those buds into little red birch-fruits, from the unfurling of its leaves; but she could never trust its longed-for One; and so it was with a beloved, with a home, with GOD: - her own embracing arms were there, like Thjodhild's stone church; but these were questionable bridges fading into darkness, no matter how brightly the first terminus might be lit. -The wind ruffled Snorri's blond hair. "Skraelings, Skraelings!" he cried as his mother lifted him onto the ship. But there were no Skraelings; that was only a word that he loved to say, without being certain of its meaning. - Now she herself walked up the ramp, and all the house-thralls saluted her. It was a very fine day, as soft and sweet as honey. Suddenly Gudrid took thought, strangely enough, of poor Thorstein Eiriksson, who had died with his face turned away from her. She remembered his prophecy concerning her. Truly God must have spoken through his cold lips, for much of what he predicted had already come to pass. And yet that scarcely made her different. Whatever successes ripened for her, they did so without her sowing. - Yes, Something must be there. Where else could the purple tundra-flowers come from? -Ah, soon she would see them again, even though her father was dead and buried in another land. Was her uncle Thorgeir still alive? Who had Orm and Halldis's land now? And what of her old suitor, Einar Slaveson - which woman had taken him at last? (Of course he might not even be in Iceland anymore; for he had traveled often, as she remembered, to the courts of the Norwegian Kings.) - The trees of Vinland leaf-whispered around her. Soon

  she would be sailing from this sea of green into the blackish Greenland Sea. Of course, in Stokkaness, where Eirik had given her father land, there had been green trees also (not quite as high as her knee), trees from the edge of the ^orci all the way to the top of the hill. - How pleasant the sea-sun was upon her face! There must be Something in that SUN, even though in the days when Thorstein courted her she had sometimes thought it not as real as a single Arctic tree (Gudrid only wanted what was real!) - so she had thought until those same small trees shook in the wind and a cloud returned to its place in front of the poor SUN; then the hillside became a place of trembling despair, and Gudrid knew that the S
UN was the most real of all. - Yes, Iceland had been her SUN, but not until she came to Greenland and had to set aside her girlish ways. Her husbands had never been; Vinland had never been. Naturally she felt regret for leaving the kingdom that she and Karlsefni had carved out here. They had made a success, the two of them, but by no means so much as they had hoped. Now their palisade would rot and crumble, like the longhouses within; and greedy green trees would burst up through the ceilings (or would the Skraelings simply bum everything?). But even the thought of her home being eaten by flames scarcely smote her. Vinland had been an unsettled country before, and now it would be again. - But then Freydis and those Icelanders were still here; perhaps they would stay (for no one believed the wild tale that Skofte Carrion-Crow had told). Very pleasing it was to Gudrid to know that soon she would put the Greenland Sea between herself and her greatest enemy (and when she thought of that, Gudrid smiled as she was wont to do, for certainly she had gained the mastery!) She herself was the SUN; she could go where she pleased now and warm herself with her own light. She always had been; nothing could change her. - Grey waves parted insidiously around their ship, and Gudrid thought she saw grey trees, but they were only clouds. - By now the veins stood out on Gudrid's hands, but she was still good-looking. - Karlsefni bought a farm in Glaumby. He was considered a man of the foremost reputation. There he stayed for the remainder of his life, telling the story of WiNELAND THE GOOD to all who asked to hear it. His listeners marveled at his luck and courage, and said that they had no wish to journey to such places. After his death, Gudrid and Snorri continued to farm the land until Snorri married; then his mother, remembering the prophecy of Thorstein Eiriksson, made a pilgrimage to Rome and returned to become ordained as a nun. Many prominent people were descended from her. They are all dead now.

  FREYDIS EIRIKSDOTTIR

  FreycHs and Thorvard 1944

  333

  In the north chapel of the cathedral at Gardar, the grave of a bishop was uncovered by the team of Norland and Roussell, the holy skeleton being headless but retaining w^hat W2is more important - its crozier and its gold ring. At some distance beneath this interment was discovered another from an earlier period, comprising two skeletons - a man's and a woman's. ''This interment, by the way, is peculiar," wrote the examination team (1944), "m that we are presented with a woman's grave in a place so exclusive as the chapel of the cathedral in which afterwards a bishop was laid to rest .. . Perhaps this woman's grave, side by side with that of the man, indicates that celibacy was not observed - even officially - in these out-of-the-way parts ..." - Knowing Freydis's love of exclusivity, I think we need have no doubt that Norlund and Roussell uncovered the remains of the murderess herself, lying next to her husband, whose very skeleton looks weak-willed and imbecilic in the photo plate, his head sheepishly cocked, his arms bent upward from their pious heart-fold as if to defend himself from his spouse, who lies with her hands crossed grimly in her lap, her skull deformed by grave pressure.

  Smtf ^fvu., Fwi-rey HiAis>

  Summer in the Ruins 1987

  "What's your favorite thing?" I asked the Greenlanders.

  "The summer," they laughed. "Yes! Then we can kill so many animals!"

  We ate whaleskin sandwiches for dinner. The blubber was black and white. It tasted like peanut butter. Then we had bread and cheese. My friends slathered their cheese with butter, salami and jam. They put lump after lump of sugar in their tea ("for the cold," they said). - "Eat!" cried Bettina, smiling with every part of her round golden face. "Eat!" - When she was finished she vdped her hands in the moss, but for me she poured water into a basin, because I was her guest.

  Henryk stood straight and hadess at the wheel of the boat for hours. His face paled in the frigid wind, but he only smiled. I sprawled at my ease at the bottom of the boat, wearing my parka and gloves and wool hat. When I moved slightly he said, "Are your legs tired?" - "I'm okay," I said. "How about you?" - "Fine," he said very shyly. And every now and then Bettina asked anxiously, "Are you freezing? Are you tired?" The waves in the §ord were bluish-grey. The cliffs were grey and orange.

  The mountains rose more and more sheer and enormous. Waterfalls rushed down to the sea between the snowbanks. Everywhere were flocks of birds, black birds and white birds; and I asked if they were good to eat, and the Greenlanders smiled, "Yes, yes, yes!", Bettina looking even more Inuit when she smiled because her high cheekbones showed then.

  The Greenlanders camped in big canvas tents staked on a grassy meadow above the fjord, the men grinning happily on the grass as they dumped another knifeful of jam on their buttered bread, poured another heaped spoonful of sugar in their coffee. - "You hongry?'' they asked me anxiously. - "Halloo!" cried the girls in delight when they saw Henryk coming up the mudbank, his hands full of whale-meat. What a treat it was to see the laughing girls pop long rectangular slabs of blubber into their mouths, talking and giggling as they chewed, then seizing the fat once again between their white teeth and sawing off pieces with their big knives half an inch from their lips! After awhile they made tea, laughing around the primus flame in the big tent, and after tea it was two in the morning with the sun coming up again, and the men slung their rifles over their backs and set out contentedly to hunt sheep. A half-hour later there came three shots. The next morning a sheep hung neatly butchered on a bush, with the skin scraped clean and drying.

  The next morning it was the same: tea, cereal, bread and butter and cheese

  and jam. Later they cooked hot dogs in butter, eating them between slices of buttered bread, and some people drank up a can of sweetened condensed milk. The primus flame burned blue and green. Its steady hiss was very soothing. -"Eat, Beeir they said. ''Beeir "Boo/-a-lo Beeir they teased me. "Bee-lee Boy!" -When they talked among themselves their words, though unintelligible to me, were very distinct, because every syllable seemed to begin or end with a hard clean consonant. - From the camp, the §ord seemed to be only a muddy river, for to the west a green tundra ridge cut off any view of the main channel. But over that ridge rose four snowy peaks. - Suddenly Henryk rose to his knees and said, "TwrtM.'" There were three snow-white reindeer on the ridge, just beneath the third peak. The little boy sat in the grass and slapped mosquitoes oflf Henryk's back as Henryk looked at the reindeer. - The Greenlanders played games killing the mosquitoes, catching them dramatically in midair, squashing them and throvdng them at each other laughing. Then they put sunglasses on their dog and laughed.

  Later they went walking. While the women started a fire halfway up the ridge, the men walked to the crest to look for caribou. Above the river, the slope was terraced with granite slabs. (Sometimes the rocks were grovm with white lichen-spots like clumps of daisies.) Dwarf birches, their leaves a bright sweet green, grew against a granite shelf carbuncled with quartz. As we ascended, the bushes gave way to moss. It was hot and sunny and windy. Birds sang, as they had done all night, all day. Presently one of the Greenlanders pointed to something. I thought at first that he had seen another caribou. But he was pointing at some rocks a few paces down the slope.

  It had once been a house. The stones were still laid out square on one side of the foundation. But the house had fallen in. It was a jumble of rock-slabs grovm black and soft with lichen in their thousand years.

  "Vikings," one of the Greenlanders said. "Only they built this way."

  The house was only rocks now. It was nothing but part of the landscape.

  "So they had a farm here," I said, pointing dovm at the grassy space where the tents were pitched.

  "Yes. This was probably a storage building."

  "The fjord must have been deeper a thousand years ago," I said. "It's too shallow and muddy for a ship now."

  "Yes," the Greenlander said. "Look. In this hole. Bones. Human."

  We all peered into the rectangular grave at the edge of the ruin. It too was a room of sorts, being lined with flat stone slabs. I saw some long bones from an arm or a leg, and a cracked skull.

  "Maybe he was
one of us," the Greenlander said. "Maybe he was an Eskimo.

  I think so from the shape of the cranium. This was a reindeer route. Many hunters came here. But I don't know."

  "Will you tell the Museum?" I said.

  He shook his head. "It's better here."

  Gently and unhurriedly, the Greenlanders closed the grave with slabs from the ruins. Later, we found another slab near the fire that the women had made. We put Danish butter on that rock and set it over the flames. When the butter began to melt, we laid reindeer steaks and whale steaks on the stone. The meat was very tender, and cooked quickly. We poured coarse salt on another stone, skewered the cooked meat on our knives, and dragged it through the salt. It was one of the best meals I ever had. Later we lay on the grass listening to the radio, and a beautiful girl lay smiling and picking yellow flowers and singing, "At-ya, la-la-la ..."