Vinland the Good

by Henry Treece

  This troubled Gudrid and made her weep, but, as the weather improved, something happened which drove all thoughts of Freydis out of her mind. Early one morning when the settlers were outside the stockade, tethering their beasts for grazing, they heard a strange sound like corn being threshed with flails. It came closer and closer, and then, round a head-land in the lake, nine skin boats rode slowly, very low in the water, and full of small men. Their faces were broad and dark-skinned, their hair was coarse and black, their cheekbones were

  so high that their eyes looked evil. Those who were not paddling these boats shook rattle-sticks with a round movement of the hands.

  The settlers ran in to tell Karlsefni, who said, ‘Do nothing to offend them. I do not know who they may be, but they sound to be much like those who shot the arrow into Thorvald.’

  Freydis shouted out, ‘Then show yourself to be a man. Kill them in revenge! They are only Skraeling’s. Go on, take their heads.’

  Karlsefni said quietly, ‘My name is not Thorvald.’

  Then he got his white shield, which signified peace, and went out of the stockade down to the waterside and waved to the men in the boats. They did not wave back, so he called out to them and smiled. But they just sat there, gazing at him like images.

  Then one of them made a sharp barking sound and the rattles started again. The boats turned round in one movement and then made their way slowly up the lake and round the headland.

  When they had gone the settlers came out and stared after them. Karlsefni said, ‘Well, now we know that we are not the only folk who sail on this lake. I thought that this place was too good to be true. What are we to do?’

  Some of the folk said that they should tar the longships and

  set out for Greenland again while they could; but a few of the

  young men said that they were in favour of waiting a while to

  see what happened. Freydis spoke again and said, ‘If you turn tail and run before a few black-faced savages, then you can go home alone, Karlsefni. Here I am, and here I stay. If you

  cannot rule this settlement, then I can. Make up your mind.’

  Karlsefni turned away from her and said to the people, ‘We will stay for a while, and if they come again and are too many for us, then we will go aboard and make for Greenland. In the meantime, we will chop down other trees and make a stockade that will keep out more than wolves.’

  Now everyone worked with a will, as though they had not much time to spare, or words either. A heavy silence hung over the settlement and few seemed anxious to break it.

  Thorhall and Bjarni did not help to build the stockade. They went into the forge and put a good edge on their axes and swords. That was their work.

  Bjarni said to Thorhall, ‘How will it turn out, friend?’ Thorhall said, ‘The way it always does. The one who gets his knock in first wins. There is no more to life than that. There is no mystery about it. Life is really a very simple affair, if men would only let it be so.’

  Then he began to sing as he honed his sword blade. The words of his song were very ancient; not even Bjarni knew them.

  21. Second Time

  Most of the settlers made their own plans. Some dug deep pits in their houses, where the women and children could shelter if the place was fired. But many women said they would rather fight beside the men, and practised with axe and spear. They were not allowed swords, because no woman is skilful enough to manage that pretty weapon.

  The youngest Vikings laid in a good store of arrows and went about swaggering with their belts stuffed full of knives and swords, as though they looked forward to a second visit from the Skraeling’s.

  Karlsefni sent for Freydis and said to her, ‘Now, Eirik’s-daughter, let us get one thing clear in our heads; if these Skraeling’s come again, I do not want to see you anywhere, giving advice to the young fire-brands in this village.’

  Freydis said stubbornly, ‘Someone must advise them, otherwise they will waste their arrows.’

  Karlsefni said coldly, ‘I am the master here and I shall tell all the folk what to do. If you step but one pace out of position, I swear I will make you, and your husband, pay for what happened to the two brothers and the women. You shall hang from the highest tree in the forest.’

  Freydis drew in her nostrils and said, her eyes glinting like ice, ‘I don’t mind hanging - if you can hang me, merchant. But do you mind hanging - if I can hang you?’

  Karlsefni went from her house, hearing her mad laughter following him. He told Gudrid what had been said. She bowed her head and answered, ‘My husband, let us sail away home. Let us take our little son and be thankful. This is an awful place. When folk come here they turn to brutish beasts. I want to go back to Norway, where I was born. I shall die of grief if we do not go back. I cannot bring up a family in these wild places, no matter where. I dream every night of the terrors in Greenland and Iceland, but here worst of all. Let us go back, Karlsefni.’

  He looked at her patiently and said, ‘Dearest love, what can I do, with all the folk depending on me? I cannot leave them, not even for you and for my little son. If I did, when I sat in my warm hall in Bergen, I should think of these poor souls stranded among savages for the rest of my days. No morsel of food or drink would pass down my throat, for I should be a murderer. I could not call myself a Christian after that.’

  Gudrid got up from her stool and paced about a while. Then she went to him and said, ‘Husband, forgive me, I am not a very good wife for a Viking to have. I am too afraid of what might happen to our little one. You know my story as well as anyone; how I stood in the sea on that reef, with all the dying men beside me, shouting to be taken off to dry land. I lost my husband Thorir, while we were both young ones. Then poor Thorstein Eiriksson tended me when I had the plague, and died for me, for his dream of me. So many folk died there, in Greenland, because of me. When I married you, I hoped we might go back to Norway and live in cities among merry folk; but we came here instead; and here we have our first child. Karlsefni, I have seen too much of death. I wish to see no more. Please take me home.’

  Then Karlsefni rose and put his arms round her. And he said, ‘My love, I have been selfish, the way men are. I thought only of glory on the sea and profit on the land. Yes, we will go back to Norway. We will go to where there are streets and churches and folk dressed in clean linen. My dream is over. Forgive me for imposing it on you. I can see clearly at last and I thank you, Gudrid.’

  He bent and kissed her cheek, then strode out.

  Thorhall met him at the door and said briefly, ‘They have come back. The lake is black with them. You must be deaf if you cannot hear their rattle-sticks. I can hardly hear myself speaking to you.’

  Karlsefni said, ‘Why do you carry an axe in your hand?’ Thorhall said, ‘You thwarted me once, over the whale meat, master; but this time old Thor shall have his dues, or you will go headless to the Heaven you talk about. Come on, my lord, we will go to meet these savages, and I shall be close behind you. Never forget that. I do not mind dying - but now I strongly suspect that you do. Move, my lord, move!’

  When Karlsefni saw the massed canoes, his heart sank. It seemed that a man could walk dry-shod across the lake on them. He turned to Thorhall and said, ‘We cannot fight this swarm. There would be twenty to one, even if we gave our women weapons to wield.’

  Thorhall smiled and said, ‘Let us leave one good story for the world to hear then. Let the two of us - a Thor-man and a Christman - rip off our shirts and make the old baresark run at them. We could rattle the heads of a few monkeys before they got to us, Karlsefni.’

  Karlsefni put out his hand and took a friendly grasp of Thor-hall’s beard. He shook at it, grinning, then said, ‘You are all the better for knowing, heathen. Now, will you go back and keep a watch on Freydis? See that she does not break loose and make death for us all? And I will go down to the boats and meet these folk.’

  Thorhall said, ‘You keep Freydis in order, and I will calm these savages. Why give m
e the hard work to do?’

  But when he had had his joke he went, and Karlsefni took the white shield and strode towards the waiting canoes. The settlers watched him from the top of the stockade. For a long while he seemed to be pacing down to that crowded black lake,

  and no one spoke a word. Then he reached the water’s edge, still smiling and pointing to his shield.

  The silence was so heavy and so long that one of the Greenland women started to scream. Immediately, all the eyes of the dark folk in the canoes lifted to see where the noise came from. The woman’s husband clapped his hand over her mouth and carried her away into her house.

  Then slowly the first of the canoes half-turned and rode in to shore. The man who came out of it first was short and squat and very thickly built. On his legs and feet he wore white deerskin boots that reached up to the thigh. His body was clothed in a glistening black bear-skin. Its hood lay about his neck. His coarse black hair shone with fat. His copper-coloured skin was daubed with bars of blue and white clay. He walked towards Karlsefni for a time, then stopped a pace away from him and gazed into his eyes. The Icelander stood his ground and kept nodding and smiling down at the Skraeling. Then suddenly the savage reached forward swiftly, took the white shield and flung it behind him, over the lake. It was caught by warriors in the further canoes and examined. Karlsefni stood quite still while the man touched his face and hair then suddenly took hold of his red cloth tunic and began to pull at it.

  At this, Karlsefni slowly withdrew and, slipping off the tunic, offered it to the Skraeling. The man took it, glared at him for an instant, then signed with his hand to the others in his canoe. They came forward with a pile of sable skins and laid them at Karlsefni’s feet. For his tunic they had given him enough fur to buy a longship. He felt sure that they were joking with him, meaning to kill him in a moment.

  But now they were laughing by their leader’s canoe, and sawing at the red tunic with their stone knives. Karlsefni watched it fall into six strips, then wound about the head of six of the Skraeling’s.

  Thorhall at the stockade saw this too and said, ‘Why, the poor fools only want red stuff to wrap round their silly heads, Get out all the red cloth we have. It is a new colour to them, so they want it.’

  The settlers did this, and laid out the cloth by the stockade, standing beside it to collect their sables and other furs.

  Then the canoes came in, line by line to the bank, and the Skraeling’s stepped from one to the other and so to land. They passed by Karlsefni in droves, but did not touch him or his heap of furs. They were too busy with the heavy bundles they carried on their backs.

  22. Gudrid and the Black Bull

  By the time Karlsefni had got back to the stockade a brisk trade was going on. At first the settlers were giving at least decent value for the furs they took, but soon the red cloth began to run short, and now many of the sharper Greenlanders were cutting their cloth into small strips and trading it for the same amount of furs. Yet the Skraeling’s still took what they were offered and did not question the small amount they got.

  In the rush to barter the cloth, the settlers had left the stockade gates open and now Karlsefni, seeing danger, called out, ‘Do not let them in, lads! Stand in a body before the entrance. Do not let them in! We should never get them out again.’

  But already the chief and four of his friends were inside, and looking at the piled weapons of the settlers. One of the youths bent and took up a sword, turning it over with great curiosity. And at that point great Thorhall in his black bearskin stepped forth and took the sword gently from the youth’s hand, offering him instead a clay bowl of cow’s milk.

  The Skraeling took it and tasted it, then gave it to the chief. After he had drunk the bowl dry, he turned to Thorhall and held it out again. Thorhall said, ‘Nay, master, I’m no kitchen thrall to go running for a monkey’s pleasure.’

  But Karlsefni called out, ‘Give them some more, you fool. Lead them away from the weapon heap.’

  And Thorhall did this. Soon the settlers were trading a bowl of milk for a bundle of sables. And still the Skraeling’s seemed quite happy about the trading.

  Bjarni said to Thorhall, ‘There must be a catch in it somewhere. We have robbed them right and left, and still they are grinning and chattering like apes. I have just bartered three cups of milk for the value of a year’s farming in Breidafjord. This does not make sense. A hard bargain is a hard bargain - but when it gets to this pitch, I begin to wonder who is mad, the Skraeling’s or myself.’

  Thorhall still smiled, but whispered between tight jaws, ‘Be ready for anything, keep your sword where you can reach it in a hurry. Give them some more milk; if that is what they want, why should we break our hearts? They are the losers, not us.’ Now while all this jostling and shouting was going on, Gudrid sat behind her house nursing little Snorri and wishing it could all be over so that they could take ship for Norway once again, when suddenly she was aware of a thick scent of musk and a shadow falling across the child. She looked up in alarm and saw beside her a Skraeling woman, dressed in furs and hides and wearing a head-dress of blue clay beads. Her skin was a reddish-brown like the others, but her eyes were large and grey and her hair shone like the chestnut-fruit, in its long plaits. Gudrid smiled up at her uncertainly and the young woman nodded and smiled back. Then Gudrid plucked up courage and said, ‘My name is Gudrid. Tell me, what is your name?’

  The Skraeling looked down at her and said slowly, ‘My name is Gudrid too.’

  At that moment a Skraeling youth ran forward to the weapon heap and snatched up an axe. One of the Greenlanders got before him and felled him with a blow on the neck. For a time there was a deal of shouting and scuffling and Gudrid started to run inside the house in alarm. But the quarrel died down and she turned again to ask the woman how she could possibly bear such a name. But when she looked outside, the woman had gone and Gudrid dared not go to find her in case she ran into one of the Skraeling warriors.

  Bjarni came up to her then, roaring with laughter and throwing a bundle of otter-pelts towards her. ‘These are for the little chieftain,’ he said. ‘They will buy him a pony back home. I got them for a broken old cloak-pin that wasn’t worth a sniff. Oh, I shall like living here after all. Inside three years I shall be rich enough to go back to Iceland and buy all the farms for myself. How do you like the sound of “King Bjarni”?’

  Gudrid laughed and said, ‘Well, it would be different. There has never been one before that I have heard of.’

  Now, in the middle of all this jesting, a most unlucky thing happened. Some of the Skraeling’s had made their way past the settlement to the woods behind it, where the Greenlanders had put their sheep and cattle for safety. Suddenly Karlsefni black bull, a touchy beast at the best of times, sniffed the musky scent of the Skraeling’s and broke his thong halter in fright. He was known to be a stupid brute who attacked anything that made him afraid. And now he came through the undergrowth with one Skraeling’s hanging from his horns and another being trampled underfoot.

  Their chieftain saw this and shouted to one of his henchmen. This man raised his short bow and let loose an arrow. But, in his haste, the aim was wrong and the shaft only glanced off the bull’s forehead. Then there was trouble to be sure. The beast ran in upon the chieftain and his party, toppling them left and right, then goring at them as they rolled on the ground, and at last kneeling on the leader until he was dead.

  Karlsefni rushed up and beat the bull off with a stick, but the damage was done. As though a cloth had been swept from a feast-board, the Skraeling’s had run down to their canoes again. They sat in them like ghosts for a while, in deathly silence, then all at once their rattles started up once more, they swung round, and with swift strokes of the paddles they went back up the lake and round the headland.

  Thorhall came up to Karlsefni and said heavily, ‘Well, friend, what can’t be cured must be endured.’

  Karlsefni nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but the next time they come
it will not be with furs to trade. It was a mistake to bring that bull of mine. Yet I thought I was doing right at the time.’

  Thorhall said, ‘It’s the same with us all, whoever we pray to, friend. Let us go back inside the stockade and make ready for war. We have tried the other way and it did not work. Now only the sword is left.’

  23. Third Time

  No one slept that night. Instead, they piled wood against the inside of the stockade and covered their houses with damp turf so that they could not be fired with tar arrows. The women brought in all the water they could, in buckets from the lake, and the men rounded up the cattle and penned them behind the huts. Only Karlsefni’s bull was left outside, for it was thought that he of all creatures would be best able to keep the Skraeling’s at bay if they came in the darkness.

  But they waited until dawn; and when they did come, not even Karlsefni’s bull could have kept them back for long, for they poured down the lake like a black torrent, shaking their rattle-sticks a different way this time so as to give the impression of myriads of crickets all shrieking out at once. It was a noise that set the teeth on edge and made even the bravest man want to run away as fast as his legs would carry him.

  Gudrid heard it and said, ‘Will you lend me your dagger, husband?’

  Karlsefni said, ‘What, do you wish to go out with the men and face these savages?’

  She shook her head and said, her eyes closed, ‘No, husband. But if they break in now I have a good idea what will happen to us all. I shall see to Snorri and myself. Will you promise to look after your side of the business? I could not bear to think of them mishandling you.’

  Karlsefni gave her the dagger and said, ‘I promise, though I hope it may not come to that. Like you, I have a strong wish to set eyes on Bergen again.’