by Tim Severin
At this point in Tyrkir's tale, several members of his audience exchanged sceptical glances. Everyone knew Tyrkir's other quirk: besides his quaint accent and bizarre appearance, he had a habit of mental wandering. From time to time he would slip off into some imaginary world where he heard voices and met strangers. On such occasions Tyrkir's face took on a glazed look and he would ramble off into long conversations with himself, invariably in German. It was a harmless habit, and everyone who knew him would look at one another and raise their eyebrows as if to say, 'There goes Tyrkir again, wool-gathering in his wits. What do you expect of a German winkled out of the woodlands?'
But that evening in Brattahlid Tyrkir insisted that he had been wakened from his drowsiness following the Skraeling deaths by a great bellowing voice. It had a strange reverberating rhythm. At times it seemed to come from far off, then from very close. It was impossible to tell from which direction. It appeared to fall from the sky or to come from all directions at once.
Even if Thorvald did not hear the mysterious voice, he must have realised that he and his men had been very foolish. He sent a man to a rocky vantage point where he could look across the fjord, and the sentry called down that a whole flotilla of skin boats was paddling towards them. Obviously the Skraelings were coming to seek their revenge. The shore party scrambled down the rocky slope, catching at the bushes to keep their balance and grabbing at trees as they bolted for their ship. The moment they were aboard, they unmoored and began to row, heading out of the bay and hoping for a wind to get them clear. Even the most lubberly among them knew that there was no way the knorr would out-row the pursuing skin boats.
There must have been at least thirty boats and each one contained three Skraelings. As soon as they were within range, two of the men stowed their paddles, took up light bows and began shooting arrows at the Norsemen. The third man paddled, keeping pace with the knorr and manoeuvring to give his companions the best angle for their shots. Thorvald and a couple of the sailors leapt up on their oar benches waving their swords and axes, challenging the Skraelings to come closer and fight hand to hand. But the natives kept their distance. To them the Norsemen must have seemed like giants. The Skraeling archers kept up a steady barrage. Slowly the knorr wallowed towards the mouth of the sound, where they could hoist sail. The natives kept abreast of them. Arrows hissed overhead, occasionally hitting with a thunk into the woodwork of the boat. The Skraeling archers stayed seated in their skin boats while they worked their bows, so they were lower to the water than their opponents on the higher-sided knorr, and at a disadvantage. Most of the arrows angled upwards and flew overhead harmlessly. A few rapped into the sail and stuck there like hedgehog quills.
After half an hour the natives broke off the attack. They were running out of arrows and they could see that the Norsemen were in full flight. The skin boats turned back one by one and the knorr was left to sail out to sea.
'It was only then,' Tyrkir told my father, 'that we realised that your brother Thorvald was wounded. A Skraeling arrow had found the gap between the topmost plank and his shield and hit him in the left armpit. It was scarcely more than a dart, but buried so deep that only an inch or two of the shaft was showing. Thorvald reached to pull out the arrow. But the arrow was designed for hunting seal and had triple barbs. He had to twist and tug violently to pull it and when it finally came free, there was a strong jet of dark red blood, and flesh stuck to the barbs. Thorvald gave one of his booming laughs - "That's my heart's fat there," he joked. "I said I would like to spend the rest of my days in this place, and I think that's what is going to happen. I doubt I will survive this wound. If I die I want to be buried here, up on that headland where every passing sailor will know my grave."
'I wish we could have done exacdy what Thorvald wanted,' Tyrkir concluded in his thick accent. 'There was not much time. We buried Thorvald on the headland as best we could. We feared that the Skraelings would come back, so we could do little more than scrape out a shallow grave and pile a heap of stones over the corpse. Then we set course for Leif’s huts to spend the winter — keeping a sharp lookout for Skraelings as soon as the weather improved.'
My uncle Thorstein spoke up. He was looking distressed. 'Leif,' he said, 'we can't leave Thorvald's body there. There's every chance that the Skraelings will find his body, dig it up and defile it. He deserves better. It's only a three-week sail to the spot, and I would like to take a crew of volunteers, sail to Thorvald's cairn, and recover the body so that we can have a proper burial here in Greenland. Your ship, which has just returned, isn't up to the job. She needs to be pulled ashore and recaulked, but my father-in-law Thorbjorn still has the knorr which brought him and his people from Iceland, and she could be ready to sail in two days' time. I'm sure that Thorbjorn will agree to loan her to me for the mission.'
Of course, both my father and old Thorbjorn, who was in the hall listening to the returnees, had to agree. This was a matter of family honour, and if there is one thing which the Norse are fanatical about it is the question of their honour. To a true Norseman his honour is something he places before all else. He will defend it or seek to enhance it by whatever means available, and that includes raiding for booty, exacting revenge for an insult, and lying or cheating to gain the advantage.
DESPITE THEIR ORIGINAL plans, it was a full month before my uncle Thorstein set sail for Vinland. It seemed a pity to go all that distance and not bring back a cargo of timber and fish, so his expedition expanded into more than just a trip to recover Thorvald's body. There was equipment to gather, men to be summoned from the pastures, where they had gone with the cattle, stores to be loaded. Then someone suggested that it might be a good idea to leave a small group to overwinter at Leif s cabins, and this scheme delayed matters still further. When old Thorbjorn's knorr did finally set sail she looked more like an emigrant vessel than an expedition ship. There were six cows and several sheep standing in the hold, bales of hay to feed them, piles of farming gear, and on board were several women, including Gudrid, who had asked to accompany her husband. I, meanwhile, would stay behind with her father.
And by the time the preparations were all made it was too late. Thorstein Eriksson had a fine sense of family honour, but he lacked a sense of urgency and that essential gift of all good sea captains — weather luck. Intending for Vinland, he and his crew set out from Brattahlid but encountered such strong headwinds that they spent most of the summer beating uselessly about the ocean. At one stage they were in sight of Iceland and on another occasion glimpsed
birds which they judged came from the Irish coast. At the end of the sailing season, without ever having set foot in Vinland, they limped back to Greenland. Simple-minded folk claim that a ship or boat has a mind and a spirit of its own. They believe that a vessel can 'see' its way back home like a domestic cat or dog that has been lost, or a horse to its stable, and that it can retrace the same routes that it has previously sailed. This is nonsense, the dreaming of landlubbers. Vessels which make several repeat journeys usually do so because they are in the hands of the same experienced crew members or there is some characteristic of the particular vessel — shallow draught, ability to sail to windward, or whatever — which makes it best suited to the task in hand. Seamanship and weather luck make for a successful second or third voyage along a particular track, not a boat's own acquired knowledge. Thorstein's failure to fetch back his brother's bones goes to prove this very well.
They eventually made their Greenland landfall not at Brattahlid but at Lyusfjord some three days' sail to the north-west. Here a small group of Norse had already established a few coastal farms, and Thorstein struck up a friendship with a namesake, who invited him to stay and help him work the land, which was plentiful. Perhaps my uncle was ashamed to return to Brattahlid with so little accomplished and without Thorvald's body, so he accepted the offer. That autumn a small coaster came down from Lyusfjord with a message. My uncle was asking for his share of the family's cattle herd and other stores to be sent to
Lyusfjord, and - in a note added by Gudrid — there was an invitation to send me along as well. It seemed that I was still high in Gudrid's affections and her substitute child.
My uncle's new-found partner was remarkably swarthy for a Norseman, hence his nickname Thorstein the Black. This giving of a nickname which identified him from all the other Thorsteins, including my uncle, is a sensible Norse custom. Most Norse derive their names, simply enough, from the parents. Thus, I am Thorgils Leifsson, being the son of Leif Eriksson, who is the son of Erik. But with so many Leifs, Eriks, Grimms, Odds and others to choose from, it is helpful to have the extra defining adjective. The easiest way is to say where he or she comes from - not in my own case, though - or refer to some particular characteristic of the individual. Thus my grandfather Erik the Red's hair was a striking strawberry red when he was young and, as we have seen, Leif the Lucky was extraordinarily fortunate in his early career, always seeming to be in the right place at the right time. During my time in Iceland I was to meet Thorkel the Bald, Gizur the White and Halfdan the Black, and heard tales of Thorgrimma Witchface, who was married to Thorodd Twistfoot, and how Olaf was called the Peacock because he was always so vain about to his clothing, and Gunnlaug Serpent Tongue had a subtle and venomous way with words.
To return to Thorstein the Black: he had done remarkably well in the five or six years that he had been farming at Lyusfjord. He had cleared a large area of scrubland, built a sizeable longhouse and several barns, fenced in his home pasture, and employed half a dozen labourers. Part of his success was due to his wife, an energetic, practical woman by the name of Grimhild. She ran the household very competently, and this left Thorstein the Black free to get on with overseeing the farming and the local fishery. Their farmhouse was easily large enough to accommodate my uncle Thorstein and Gudrid, so rather than waste time and effort building their own home my uncle and aunt moved in with them. By the time I arrived, I found the two families sharing the same building amicably.
So I now come to an event which makes me believe that the mysterious hauntings which accompanied my own mother's death were not as implausible as they might seem. That winter the plague came back to the Greenland settlements for the second time in less than five years. It was the same recurring illness which was the curse of our existence. Where it came from, we could not tell. We knew only that it flared up suddenly, caused great suffering and then died away just as rapidly. Perhaps it is significant that both times these plagues visited us in autumn and early winter when we were all living cooped up, close together in the longhouses, with little light, no fresh air and a tremendous fug. The first person to contract the illness in Lyusfjord this time around was the overseer on the farm, a man named Gardi. Frankly, no one was too sorry. Gardi was a brute, untrustworthy and with a vicious streak. He could be civil enough when he was sober, but turned nasty when he was drunk, and was even worse the following morning when he had a hangover. In fact, when he first fell sick, everyone thought that he was suffering from yet another drinking binge until he began to show all the signs of the fever - a pasty skin, sunken eyes, difficulty in breathing, a dry tongue, and a rash of purple-red spots beginning to blotch his body. When, after a short illness, he died there was very little mourning. Instead the settlers around Lyusfjord began to wonder who would be afflicted next. The illness always picked its victims randomly. It might attack a man but leave his wife unscathed, or it would carry off two children from a brood of five, and the other three siblings never even had a sniffle. My uncle Thorstein contracted the sickness, but Gudrid escaped. Thorstein the Black was spared, yet his wife, Grimhild, succumbed. The progress of the sickness was as erratic as its selection was unpredictable. Sometimes the patient lingered for weeks. Others died within twenty-four hours of showing the first pustules.
Grimhild was one of the rapid victims. One day she was complaining of headaches and dizziness, the next she could hardly walk. She was so unsteady on her feet that by evening she could barely get to the outside privy a few steps away from the main farmhouse. Gudrid offered to accompany Grimhild in case she needed help and, as I was nearby, beckoned to me to assist. I took my place beside Grimhild so she could put her arm over my shoulder. Gudrid was on the other side with her arm around Grimhild's waist. The three of us then made our way slowly out of the door, and we were not halfway across the farmyard when Grimhild came to an abrupt halt. She was deathly pale and swaying on her feet so that Gudrid and I had to hold her from falling. It was bitterly cold and Gudrid wanted to get Grimhild across to the privy as fast as possible, then bring her back into the warmth. But
Grimhild stood rigid. Her arm was tense and trembling along my shoulders, and the hair rose on the back of my neck.
'Come on,' urged Gudrid, 'we can't stand out here in this cold. It will only make your fever worse.'
But Grimhild would not move. 'I can see Gardi,' she whispered in horror. 'He's over there by the door and he has a whip in his hand.' Gudrid tried to coax Grimhild to take a step forward. But Grimhild was petrified. 'Gardi is standing there, not five paces away,' she muttered with panic in her voice. 'He's using the whip to flog several of the farmhands, and near him I can see your husband. I can see myself in the group as well. How can I be there and yet here, and what about Thorstein? We all look so grey and strange,' She was about to faint.
'Here, let me take you back inside, out of the cold,' said Gudrid, half-lifting the delirious woman so that the three of us could turn in our tracks and stumble back into the main hall. We helped Grimhild into the bed closet, which had been turned into a makeshift sanatorium. My uncle Thorstein was already lying there. Fever-struck for the past week he had been shivering and slipping into occasional bouts of delirium.
Grimhild died the same night, and by dawn the farm carpenter was already planing the boards for her coffin. Our burial customs were very brusque. Under normal circumstances a wealthy farmer or his wife, particularly if they followed the Old Ways, might merit a funeral feast and be interred under a small burial mound on some prominent spot like a hillside or favourite beach. But in times of plague no one bothered with such niceties. People believed that the sooner the corpses were got out of the house and put underground, the quicker their wandering spirits would vacate the premises. Even the Christians received short shrift. They were buried in a hastily dug grave, a stake was driven into the ground above the corpse's heart, and when a priest next visited the settlement a few prayers were said, the stake was wrenched out and a bowl of holy water was emptied down the hole. Occasionally a small gravestone was erected, but not often.
That same morning Grimhild's husband went about the day-to-day chores of the farm as if nothing had happened. It was his way of coping with the shock of his wife's sudden death. He told four farmhands to go to the landing place where we kept our small boats and be ready to do a day's fishing. Trying to make myself useful and not wanting to stay in the same house as Grimhild's corpse, I accompanied the men as they headed to the beach to begin preparing the nets and fishing lines. We had loaded up the fishing gear into the two small skiffs, and were just about to push off for the fishing grounds when a runner came stumbling down from the farmhouse. In a lather of sweat and fear, he told Thorstein the Black to come quickly, something very odd was happening in the sick room. Thorstein dropped the sculls he was about to put into the boat and ran, clumping back up the narrow track to the farm. The rest of us stood there and stared at one another.
'What's happening in the farm?' someone asked the messenger, who was not at all in a hurry to get back to the longhouse.
'Grimhild's corpse started to move,' he replied. 'She sat up in bed, slid her feet to the floor and was trying to stand. I didn't see it myself, but one of the women came running out of the bed closet screaming.'
'Better stay away for a while,' said one of the farmhands. 'Let Grimhild's husband sort it out, if the story's true. I've heard about corpses coming alive, and no good ever comes of it. Come on, let's shove off the boats and go fishing. We
'll find out what's happened soon enough.'
But it was difficult to concentrate on the fishing that day. Everyone in the two boats kept glancing back at the farmhouse, which could be seen in the distance. They were very subdued. I had gone along in one of the boats, helping bail out the bilges with a wooden scoop when I wasn't baiting hooks - my fingers were small and deft — but every time I caught sight of one of the men looking back at the farmhouse, I shivered with apprehension.
By mid-afternoon we were back on the beach, and had cleaned and split the few cod and saithe that we had caught, and hung
them up in the drying house. I walked very slowly back to the house, staying at the rear of the group as we tramped up the path. When we came to the front door, no one would go in. The farmhands held back, fidgeted and looked at me meaningfully. I was just a boy, but they thought of me as a member of their employer's family, and therefore I was the one who should enter the house first. I pushed open the heavy wooden door and found the long hall strangely deserted. At the far end three or four of the workers' wives were huddled together on benches, looking very troubled. One of them was sobbing quietly. I tiptoed to the door of the bed closet and peered in. Thorstein the Black was sitting on the earth floor, his knees drawn up to his chest and his head bowed. He was staring at the ground. On the bed in front of him lay the corpse of his wife. A hatchet was buried in her chest, the haft stuck up in the air. To my left, Gudrid was seated on the side of the bed where her husband lay. Thorstein Eriksson was propped up on a pillow, but looked very odd. I ran to Gudrid and threw my arms around her waist. She was deathly calm. 'What's happened?' I croaked.
'Grimhild was on her feet. Her fetch must have come back and entered her body,' Gudrid replied. 'She was stumbling slowly round the room. Knocking into the walls like a blind person. She was bumping and fumbling. That was when I sent for her husband. I feared she would do harm. When her husband came into the room, he thought that Gudrid was possessed. That she had been turned into a ghoul. He picked up the hatchet and sank it into her. To put an end to her. She has not moved since.'