by Henry Treece
5. Strange Longship
Life was not easy in the settlements, but up beyond the head of Eiriksfjord men found that the grazing was good. On Brattahlid, Eirik kept over forty cattle and many goats, sheep and pigs that could forage even on the thinner slopes. The summers were short, but while they lasted warm; and after the settlers had got into the way of things, they found the best and most sheltered slopes for their corn-growing, and lifted decent crops from the soil.
Eirik got the men together in his long hall and said, ‘Well, now you have spent a couple of winters here and you can see what life is like in Greenland. So far we have hunted only for our own larders, and have not done badly with meat, milk and wool. With thought, we could easily catch more caribou, whales and seals than we have done, and enough fish to keep us over the hardest winter, well-cured.’
Thorhall the Hunter said, ‘Aye, Eirik, we know that; but we need timber in this woodless land for our houses; we
need iron for our axes; malt for our ale - or wine if we could get it!’
Eirik nodded and said, ‘I was coming to that, friend. If we bend our bows and our backs to it, we could gather furs, fleeces and hides. We could make thong-ropes. We could trap the fine falcons that abound here. We could pile up the ivory of the walrus and of the whale. These could be almost as good as gold in our bargaining. We have ships enough, and good men to sail them, men who know the way to Iceland and, beyond that, to Norway. It is only a matter of picking the right winds and the calm seas. The distance is nothing. Down here we have no ice to contend with. We are lucky men. Soon we could be rich men too. What do you say?’
There was a man called Herjolf Bardarson who said, ‘I would be happy enough to set course on these merchant-voyages as soon as you like, Eirik. I have not seen my son Bjarni for two years. He was away in Norway trading when we sailed here. Sometimes I dream of him and wonder if he is well. They would give me news of him if I went to Iceland.’
Eirik said, ‘Aye, that they would, Herjolf. But I cannot spare you from Greenland. Let the younger men go with the furs and ivory. You stay here to lend me your support in the council. They will fetch Bjarni back with them.’
So it was left at that. The Greenlanders went off in the spring, their ships weighed down in the water with all the things they could gather. The women and children had woven reed-cages for the falcons, and had rubbed the sheepskins with pumice till they were as soft as silk.
Before autumn they came back, laden with all the corn and malt and timber they needed. Ships from Norway itself accompanied them, anxious to build up this good trade. But Bjarni was not with them. Herjolf went down to the wharf at Eiriksfjord to see if his son stepped ashore, and came back to Brattahlid with a sad face.
‘I fear I shall never see my son again,’ he said to Eirik. He looked round the farmstead, where Leif and Thorstein were playing with sulky Freydis, and where Thjodhild was suckling their newest son, little Thorvald. And he said, ‘Eirik, your life has turned out luckily for you with such a brood of children. But I am denied my only son, Bjarni. Every night now, when I sit by the fire with the shutters over the windows, I think that I should sail back to Iceland.’
Eirik said, ‘Leave it a little while, old friend. Sometimes Thor makes us wait for what we want most, and just when we have given up heart he lets us have it. He is testing our endurance. You would not say that you had less endurance than other men, would you?’
Herjolf went away to his wife Thorgerd and sat by his fire at Herjolfsness. He said, ‘I have come to this conclusion, Thorgerd, that we might just as well forget we ever had a son. We shall see him no more.’
Thorgerd took his hand and said, ‘I do not give up hope so easily, husband. When we sailed out here, did we not bring with us a poet from the Hebrides? And did he not make a prayer that went:
I beseech the pure Master of monks To guide our journey And out of the high heavens To hold his strong hand over me?’
Herjolf nodded impatiently. ‘Aye, the Hebridean did that,’ he said. ‘He called his prayer “The Lay of the Breakers”, I recall. What of it?’
Thorgerd said, ‘That man is a Christian, did you not know? The lord he prayed to in his song was not our Thor. We landed safely here, did we not, husband?’
For a while Herjolf gazed at her sternly. Then he said, ‘Very well, put a bar across the door so that no one shall see what we
are up to. For the sake of my son Bjarni I will even get on my knees to the Whitechrist.’
Now three days later Herjolf and Eirik were strolling along the fjord with the sun on their backs, on their way to look at Herjolf’s longship that was drawn up on the shore to be tarred. Leif was walking behind them, listening to all they said but not butting in. They were talking about dull things, like sheep-pastures and fish yields. Leif wondered how men who had fought so much and sailed so far should be contented to talk of sheep and fish. He thought: If Thor lets me grow to be a Viking, I will leave all such things to the women and the thralls. I shall put my dragon-prow to the green sea and forget about farming and fishing. I shall go where men have not been before. I shall find gold, and a kingdom, and shall have no fear of meeting monsters in dark forests. And when all that has been done, I shall come home to Brattahlid and tell the folk about it. Poets shall make songs about me and the King of Norway will get to hear of them in his feast-hall and will send for me to sit beside him and drink from his ale-cup. And all men, even the court baresarks, will bow when I pass and will whisper, ‘Hey, that’s Leif Eiriksson. He’s the one who sailed where no man has ever been before.’
The men were talking and Leif was dreaming in the last sunlight of the Greenland summer, when suddenly the boy saw a brown ship, battered and low in the water, away to the far side of the fjord, its sail full with sea-wind, veering round towards them.
He caught hold of Eirik’s tunic and said, ‘Father, hey father, look at the ship. It is not one of ours.’
But the men were waving their hands and stood deep in the pool of argument. Eirik brushed Leif’s hand away and then went on.
So the boy watched the longship swing round towards them and come bearing down. Many of the shields had gone from the
gunwales, and the striped sail was split in two places. It would not hold against a good wind for many more hours. Leif wondered if there were rovers aboard it, who had come to rob the settlement and to set fire to the houses. So he tried again and called out, ‘Father, shouldn’t you have the sword in your hand this moment?’
Eirik turned round and saw the ship. But before he could speak, Herjolf cried, ‘It is Wolf-snout I know every plank of her like the palm of my hand.’
He began to run into the cold water. Then the longship swayed back from the anchor-stone and a red-bearded young man jumped overboard and waded through the fjord to meet him and to clasp him round the neck.
Eirik said to Leif, ‘Wonders will never cease. That is young Bjarni Herjolfsson, come all the way from Norway. I never thought we should see that youth again. Let us go down and greet him. You are old enough to shake the hand of seafarers now, my boy. The sooner you start the better.’
6. Stranger Story
In the long hall at Brattahlid the folk were gathered. Bjarni sat beside Eirik at the cross-board on the dais, food and ale before him, warm wool on his back, to tell of his voyage.
‘Call me a fool, my lords,’ he said, ‘but now that I am on dry land, I do not care what you call me. I think I have done what no man has done before me, though whose hand held the steerboard, I know not. It certainly was not mine for much of the way.’
His father, seated below him, said dryly, ‘Tell us what happened in plain words, my son. Leave all the magic to the poets who shall tell the tale again at another time. Come, we are waiting.’
Bjarni bowed his head and said, ‘Yes, father. Well, as you know, I was in Norway when I heard that twenty-five ships had set course for this land, so I sailed to Iceland without delay and went up to the old farm on the hillside.
I found it empty and my parents gone. Tears ran down my cheeks; I would not stay even to unload my cargo, but called the men aboard again and set course directly to the west. I had not sailed the Greenland Sea before, but I knew that if I kept Snaefellsness behind me, I should see Blueshirt Glacier before long, then it was only a matter of time, sailing southwards round the coast, before I put in to haven.
‘But when we were three days out, and Iceland had sunk behind us out of sight, the east wind failed and a north wind took its place, blowing us down towards Ireland. Thick fogs came and hung about us for days. We did not know where we lay, so I took down the sail and we bobbed about on the green sea, letting the waves do with us as they wished.
‘Sometimes we saw floating wreckage of other boats, and often at night we heard strange voices calling out to us through the fogs. But we came to no harm. And one morning the east wind came again and blew the fog away. Then the sun shone and I could get some sort of bearing. I hoisted the sail and sped before the wind. The next day we sighted land, but it was so greenly wooded and its hills were so low and gentle, we knew it could not be Greenland.’
Eirik said, ‘So, you had circled round in the fogs and had gone back to Norway, Bjarni? But how, with an east wind?’
The young rover flung back his head and laughed. Then he said, ‘Norway, master! Nay, that belongs to the world we know, the olden world. I have sailed to the other side of the new world.’
Even his father cried out shame on him, like all the others, when he boasted so. But Bjarni held up his hand for silence and said, ‘Look, all you shipmaster’s; when I saw this green land, I put off again to sea with the shore to my left hand, and after two day’s sailing, came to yet another flat and forested land. Here I had the greatest difficulty because the rowers with me wanted to go ashore for water and fire-wood. But I told them we had enough of both, and this time I caught a wind from the
south-west. Now, even you women will understand this, the wind blew from behind and towards the left, so sending us towards the north and the right-hand. We sailed before this wind for three days, and at the end of that stretch we saw a land full of stark mountains and glaciers and slabs of rock. It looked so bare, there was no sense in thinking it would be the Greenland Master Eirik had described, so we just went round its coast for a while. And then we found it to be an island.’
Eirik put his hand to his brow. ‘Where you have been, no man will ever know, lad, ‘ he said, shaking his head and reaching for his cup.
But Bjarni smiled and said, ‘I put out into open sea once more, Eirik. My south-west wind now blew a gale. I had the sail pulled down, so as not to risk blowing it to shreds. Now I will tell you what happened - four days from taking in the sail we saw yet another land, and as the sun came out we sighted a fjord before us. We slackened the sail and went up that fjord and there, on the shore, I saw my father’s longship hauled up and men tarring it as though for a voyage. So, I am here. ‘
Herjolf struck the table before him with a mighty clout. ‘The world is a dish, ‘ he said, ‘just as you guessed, my son. And you have sailed round its lip, coming to Greenland from the south. Why, Bjarni, you are the most famous of men, you have sailed round the world, no less. ‘
Everyone was laughing and shouting at this and the ale was flowing freely. Thjodhild rose from her place by the hearth-fire and took Leif’s hand. ‘My son, ‘ she said, ‘you have heard the voyager tell his tale, and I have noticed that you were listening carefully. That is right and proper for a young boy such as you are; but one day, when you are much older, you will learn that these sailing-men dream dreams in the fogs and the winds; at last they cannot tell left hand from right hand. ‘
Leif said gravely, ‘Bjarni is a most proper sound-brained
man, mother. He knows his left from his right. And he has been round the world. I believe him.’
Thjodhild took hold of one of his cars and pulled it gently. ‘So?’ she said. ‘The man has been round the world. So?’
Leif scampered away from his mother to his warm wall-bed and jumped under the sheepskin covers. ‘So,’ he mocked, ‘when I am old enough to have my own ship, I shall go where Bjarni went too. For, to tell the honest truth, mother, I cannot bear to think that any Viking has been where I have not been.’ Thjodhild turned from him sadly. She said, almost to herself, ‘Is it not bad enough to come out to this distant desert of Greenland, where the summer is so short and the winds are so cold?’
But Leif was not listening. He shouted back at her, ‘And what is more, mother, I shall take old Eirik, my father, with me. He should never be set at this farming all his days. He is a fighting-man and should not be penned in like a worn-out old horse.’
Thjodhild did not answer him. But to herself she whispered, ‘Aye, a fighting-man, and look where that has got us - a stony farm on a bleak fjord for ever, with hardly more weeks of summer than there are fingers on the hand.’
She just waved to her son at the door, and went to the bower where her loom was set up, to weave more warm cloth for their winter jackets. And a new skirt for Freydis, who always wanted to have as much as her brothers did, if not more.
Part Two: The Edge of the World
7. The Christian King
In time Leif grew to be a brisk young man who could use the axe almost as shrewdly as his father, and who had learned all that Thorhall the Hunter could teach him. Often he would stand alone above Eiriksfjord and watch the ships coming in from Iceland with Corn and timber, or sailing out with their white fox and the loping hare, and wished he could feel the boards bucking under his feet and the blown spray harsh on his face. The sound of the sail smacking against the hawsers was music to his ears. And in the spring, when he looked up into the blue sky and saw the birds coming back as free as air, with no one to stop them, he almost wept.
On one such morning he turned and said to his brothers, ‘I can take care of myself now. It is time I was on my way.’ Thorstein, who had also felt this yearning, looked away from him and did not answer. Thorvald, who was younger, said, ‘You must tell our mother first.’
She was sitting outside the farmstead in the sunshine at her
spinning-wheel, wearing a grey gown. And when he had finished, she said, ‘I have been waiting to hear you speak these words for some time, my son. But now you have spoken them the pain is greater than I thought. I had hoped I might be ready for it.’
Leif said stoutly, ‘A man must do as he must, mother. A man owes it to himself to see the world. Bjarni has seen the world.’
Thjodhild nodded. ‘Aye, and much good it has done him,’ she said. ‘His ship lies rotting on the shore. He dare not put out to sea again. His mother tells me he still screams out in the night that the fogs are choking him. He still sees the wrecked ships floating by on the green waves.’
Leif said, ‘I only dream of the gold I should bring back, and the great name of warrior I shall leave behind, wherever I go’
Thjodhild drew him to her and put her arms round him. She said, ‘For your first voyage, I implore you with my hands together, do not go where he went. Do not set the prow to north or to west, my love. There is something waiting for us in this hard land, something lurking in the north and west, dark and frightful, nameless, almost ready to close in on us all.’
Leif said, ‘So far we have met no dangers, mother, apart from the stark winters. You have been dreaming. You spend too much time alone.’
Thjodhild said, ‘If you go, I shall spend even more time alone, my son. I cannot talk to Freydis, she is not a gentle child. She wishes to impose her will on everyone.’
Leif laughed and said, ‘We must get her married off as soon as I get back. When she has a house to run, that will tame her. But I must go.’
Thjodhild said sadly, ‘Something is waiting for us in the north, my son. It will come upon us soon enough - but do not go to meet it. It is a shapeless thing that lives and breathes up
among the snows and the icebound waters. Its breath sweeps down into my drea
ms like poor Bjarni’s sea-fogs. If you must go a-viking, then take the course eastward towards Norway, where decent folk still live.’
Leif bowed in obedience, and less than a month later he went with Thorhall the Hunter in a new ship with a strong wind at his back. But when they had left old Blasark behind them, Thorhall came to him at the steerboard and said, smiling, ‘See all the ships that pass us, going one way or the other? It is like being in the middle of a cattle-market. You can even hear what the rowers arc saying to one another when the wind swings. A Viking should go alone, out of sight of other men. That is the test of manhood.’
Leif said quietly, ‘Which way shall I steer?’
The troll-faced Hunter smiled and said, ‘I have an itch to lay my hands on some good red Irish gold from Wicklow. It would make a better cargo to bring back than Norse Iron. Pull her round to your right.’
Leif did not question Thorhall, and so they altered course and were in empty sea for three days. On the fourth evening they sighted land and ran into a shallow fjord, thinking they had come to Ireland. But they were soon disappointed, for a hundred men came from behind the rocks and surrounded them, hemming them in with sharp iron spears, and calling out that they were sea-wolves and should die on the shore straightway.
Just when things looked very bad, a lady came down to the beach, dressed in red and wearing a blue cloak. She had gold rings round her neck and arms and carried a white staff. Her hair was brown with red glints in it like bronze.
When the spearmen saw her, they drew back. She said in a clear voice, ‘I am Thorgunna, the lady of this island. Who is the captain of this longship?’
Leif said that he was and that they were looking for Ireland