‘You think that’ll help?’
‘It would make me feel better.’
‘You’d put this witchcraft idea out of your head, then?’
‘I would.’
‘And if I can arrange a good marriage for you in Eiriksfjord, you’d like that?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘Very well then, but you must leave me to do what’s politic.’
‘But you’ll tell them we’re Christians?’
‘Yes, I’ll do that.’
It was the most satisfactory conversation I’d ever had with my father, and indeed, it did turn out to be a turning point between us. We’d been among strangers all winter, and that maybe had something to do with it.
I think my father was as relieved as I was to leave Herjolfsnes. We weren’t ungrateful. Herjolf had saved our lives when his own community was at risk. Not, of course, that we were destitute. My father gave him good gifts when they parted, but gold isn’t much use when you’re starving. Anyway, Herjolf lived to enjoy his wealth, and he deserved all the good luck that came to him.
The gift that Bjarni gave me I used for the first time before we ever left the bay at Herjolfsnes. It worked, too. Our ship had been repaired, and we had plenty of provisions, and we were sailing within sight of an inhabited – more or less – coast, with men of Herjolf’s to guide us. Bjarni had originally suggested coming with us himself, but Herjolf said, ‘Better not.’ I saw him meet Bjarni’s eyes. Father and son looked at each other for a moment, then Bjarni said, ‘Very well. Better not.’ I was sorry. The voyage seemed simple, but it was still early in the year, with the pack ice only just breaking up in the fjords. We followed a lead between islands while the ice mountains of Greenland shone to the north of us. After a while the land fell away, so we stood out to sea, still heading north-west. There was nothing green about the land, and yet this voyage was far from chaos. The orderly spirit of Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had ignored those unknown lands and made, after all the storms, a perfect landfall at the place his father had described to him, seemed to watch over us. I said my charm, and the white mountains glinted in the sun, and the swell rocked us kindly as we slowly raised new islands, and slowly, slowly, came even with them and passed them by.
Eventually we raised the mountain we’d been looking for, a long way inland, marking the hidden entrance to Eiriksfjord. Landlocked now, we passed the island where Eirik wintered when he was exploring this new country, and saw the remains of his camp above the shore. There was still no sign of the way into Eiriksfjord, but we had our sailing directions, and kept to the east of the mountain, threading our way through the ice, and, at the last moment, it seemed, a new channel of water opened up in front of us. And then we were sailing with the ghost of a breeze between the sides of a fjord, the like of which I’d never seen before. The water between the ice was charcoal grey, with barely a ripple. A great grey mountain rose on our right, and grew closer, and on the far side of it we passed a narrow fjord that ended in a steep glacier. Blue icebergs towered over us, threatening to bar the way, and then suddenly we were in clear water. The eastern side of the fjord was still sheer and forbidding, but to the west lay a low line of grey-green hills, with a sharp range of snow mountains behind them. We drew into the shore, and saw a place where the hill was green and smooth between the rocks. There was a stony beach below, and soon we saw that the shapes on it were not boulders or seals but boats. On the slope above, the regular green knolls resolved themselves into turf-roofed buildings, and smoke rose from the roof of the nearest. Cattle and sheep grazed on a hillside already starred with dandelions, the first spring flowers, and as we stood into the western shore there came a smell of growing grass that brought tears to my eyes, because it smelt of home.
I’m tired now, Agnar. It’s a long time since I let myself remember so much. Have the rest of the day to yourself. Go for a ride in the hills. It’s not natural for a young man to be indoors all day. Go on, off with you. I want to be alone now, but you’ll find me here tomorrow.
SEVEN
July 14th
July at Brattahlid. Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir sits at the door of Eirik Raudi’s house with Eirik’s daughter Freydis. They are scraping sheepskins to soften them, but neither is working very hard. White clouds sail slowly over the fjord, and the sun shines between them. The fjord is ice-blue, and small waves lick at a stray berg that is stranded offshore. Below the mountain called Burfjell on the opposite shore, a line of newly calved icebergs seems to block the way to the sea, but here at Brattahlid it is high summer. The doors of the long byre are thrown open, and the winter dung is piled outside ready for spreading. Hay is ripening in the fields, and around the house hens scrape the trodden soil. The angelica that grows near the door is level with the house roof, and its flowers are entangled with the lines of fish hanging up to dry. On the beach below the house swarms of flies hover over drying seaweed, and two men are patching the hull of an upturned boat.
Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir is happy. Eirik’s house is built in a safe place, sheltered from behind by an outcrop of rock, and its walls are strongly built of turf and stone. His pastures are good; he has twenty-seven cows and nearly fifty sheep, with this year’s lambs. Every day his men come in with boatloads of salmon or cod, and yesterday his sons came home with a cargo of caribou, seal and whalemeat from the northern hunt. There is going to be plenty to eat here, and hunger and bad dreams seem far away.
Gudrid is a beautiful young woman, and she is new here. There are not enough women in this land, and Eirik Raudi has three sons. He needs grandsons, because in this place he intends to found a dynasty, rulers of the Green Land, and of the lands further west where there is untold wealth for men who have the courage to take it. Eirik has had twelve years to make his mark here. The Green Land will be his and his sons’ for ever. But just now he is on the look-out for suitable young women. His son Leif left for Norway three days before Thorbjorn turned up with his daughter. That was fate at work; if Leif had been at home Eirik would have had Leif and Gudrid married before the summer was out. He could always give her to Thorvald or Thorstein, but his instinct is to wait until next spring, for Leif to come back. Eirik’s wife Thjodhild is also waiting for Leif to come back. Although her eldest son laughs at her new faith, he is attached to her, and he will honour his promise to her, to bring a priest back with him from Norway, and the consecrated vessels for a church. Eirik knows nothing of this, but he sees clearly that his younger sons Thorvald and Thorstein admire Gudrid, and there are other men here seeking women. Eirik keeps his eye on Gudrid, and makes her father so very welcome that Thorbjorn is overcome. He had no idea he meant so much to Eirik Raudi, or that Eirik had waited so eagerly all these years for his coming.
As Gudrid sits at Eirik’s door, she considers the meaning of the warm welcome that she and her father have been given. The sound of trotting hooves interrupts her train of thought, and a pony appears from the shore path, and breaks into a canter. The rider is Eirik’s youngest son Thorstein. Stirrupless, he rides easily, holding the reins in one hand. He doesn’t look round, but canters across the top of the beach, and out of sight behind the bank of the stream. Gudrid watches him until he has gone.
Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir is happy, and yet her foster parents died for her sake, and she has not atoned for the death she brought to them. Only one winter has passed since then. The past is terrible, so terrible that she has locked it away in one corner of her mind where for the present it cannot escape. Only sometimes she is aware that there is something she should have done that she has not done, and that by living in this sunlit world as if she were an innocent woman, she is tempting a worse fate. Sometimes she has bad dreams, but when she wakes in the night she sees light at the chimney hole, and the soft breathing of the women of Eirik’s household surrounds her. She has only to put out her hand to touch Freydis, who sleeps beside her. Freydis is a square, solid girl with her father’s build and none of his charm. Apart from a grim insistence on having her
own way, she seems harmless enough. There is no evidence that she has bad dreams.
Sometimes Gudrid’s own good fortune overwhelms her. She is a young girl again now, and that is all. Men are attracted to her. Maybe she will marry one of Eirik’s sons. Maybe she will have children, and work with the other women on this farm in the sheltered fjord under the ice mountains, and life will be ordinary. The peril that she fears seems far away in the household of Eirik Raudi. There are other dangers, certainly, but they belong to the waking world. The family quarrel with their neighbours, and with each other, but there have been no killings in the Green Land. They dream of wealth, and seem to feel no guilt. Theirs, at the moment, is a daylight world, and Gudrid is reassured. She would like to belong to it for ever.
Agnar, would you say that you were happy?
* * * * *
I’m glad you don’t think it’s wrong to talk to me sometimes. It seems that for both of us happiness is about the past, and about a place. I wasn’t always happy at Brattahlid, far from it, just as you’ve been unhappy sometimes at Reims. But the innocent times exist, just as much as the other. You’ll find that when you’re old. Sometimes the early days are so near, I wouldn’t be surprised to open my eyes in the morning and find myself there, a girl on a summer morning at Brattahlid. She still exists, you know. I don’t just mean in mind and memory.
And now I’m thinking too of a boy at the Cathedral school in Reims, who discovered through new learning that the boundaries of the world were greater than he thought. I’ve never heard any stories from these authors that you mention, but you speak of them as Karlsefni spoke of Bjarni Herjolfsson, or Bjorn the champion of Breidavik. You’re an Icelander, and of course you respond to sailing directions. It’s in your blood. These men you speak of – this Cicero, Seneca, and the other one – these are the men who gave you directions for your voyage into an unknown world. Yes, and I understand how you got hurt too, in fact I should say it was inevitable. We’re only human, and we need an authority to tell us where the boundaries are. Oh, I understand you had to disobey. How could you not? Another headland, another island, another fjord: promises, always promises of riches yet to come, and if you go a little further the dream may become real. The gifts of this life are boundless, but it’s still dangerous to go too far.
* * * * *
Don’t ever regret what you have done. I don’t believe in advice. No one takes it, and usually they hate you for giving it, but if you were my son I’d tell you what I think. You’d have punished yourself more if you’d turned your back on the way that was opened to you. You’d never have forgiven yourself. I know nothing of your Clunyites; I’ve always hated feuds, but men must have them. Very well, so these men say that you were wrong to study pagan gods. Your master whom you loved defied his archbishop, and went so far beyond the pale that he turned to the infidel, and actually went to the country of the Saracens to find out about ancient writings and the stars. Karlsefni would have done the same. I know that means nothing to you. Karlsefni isn’t in your Church; he has no authority for you. But he knew the call you know, to go on, and on, beyond the limits we’ve made for ourselves. He knew the importance of the stars, although he never heard the word you use, astronomy. You call it an art. To me, it’s the heart of the mystery, the thing that gives meaning to all sailing directions, which we in our ignorance do our best to follow. You wince; you think I blaspheme, and maybe I do. We were punished, as you’ll hear, not outwardly, of course; there was no Pope or Cardinal for us. But I think you and I are haunted by the same thing. We’ve both gone too far. We’ve seen too many ghosts. Isn’t your trouble now, Agnar, not that you have been reprimanded by your Church for pursuing pagan knowledge, but that you know that the world they tell you to stick to is not the whole truth? You’ve brought something back from the wilds with you, that eats away at your faith. Isn’t that it?
* * * * *
I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have spoken. How did I get on to that? Oh yes, happiness. I was telling you about our first year at Brattahlid.
I was happy, although surrounded by tensions. The relief was that they weren’t mine. Feeling detached, as I did, I began to enjoy the drama. It may seem wicked to you, but I enjoyed the sexual tension too. I’d never been fought over before. It was foolish to think I’d get away unscathed, but I wasn’t part of Eirik’s family yet, and I thought I was still free.
Eirik welcomed my father as if they had been foster brothers. I hadn’t realised they were that close; in fact they weren’t. Eirik Raudi seems when you first meet him to be a bluff, simple sort of man, but in fact he’s as devious as a salmon. He rules – ruled – his Green Land with a wiliness which would do credit to your Lateran. When I say ruled, I mean it. A few of the settlers were also chieftains in their new territories, but there was nothing like the Thing Quarters that we have in Iceland. When we first went to Greenland, disputes in both settlements were referred to Eirik at Brattahlid. One chief can’t be the whole of the law, and Eirik had the sense never to claim to be anything but a chieftain among his peers.
In fact the very first summer I stayed at Brattahlid they had the first meeting of the Greenland Thing. It was carefully arranged that the meeting should not be at Eirik’s house, and so the first booths were built about a mile to the south, so as to seem like no man’s territory. Who came? Einar of Gardar, of course, with his son Thorkel, who later married Freydis, God help him. She had her eye on him even then, because Gardar is one of the richest farms in Greenland, now that they’ve drained that marshy plain. Who else? Thorkel of Hvalsey, Ketil, Hrafn, Thorbjorn from Siglufjord, Hafgrim from Vatnaherfdi, and, to my father’s embarrassment, Snorri Thorbrandsson and his brother Thorleif, old enemies from the Snaefelsnes feuds. They’d arrived the year before and wintered at Dyrnes. Eirik said nothing about old grievances, and my father had to agree to do the same. Eirik was more interested in colonising his new land now than in pursuing old quarrels. No one came from the Western Settlement, but as it was, I was amazed to see how many neighbours we had, scattered among the apparently empty fjords. But Eirik Raudi always came first among them, not only because he was the first settler, but by sheer force of personality.
I had a child’s memory of him, as a great, red man towering over everything in our hall. I was a woman now, but that first impression was never quite superseded. Eirik’s family were unruly, to say the least of it, and the other settlers were proud and independent men, but Eirik never failed to dominate them until the day he died. You have to understand that if you’re to understand our lives in the Green Land.
In a way it was funny to see how Eirik’s status had changed. Although my father had always admired him, most people at home had regarded Eirik as a notorious outlaw. In Snaefelsnes we were glad to see the back of him, for he caused nothing but trouble. After he’d left I mainly heard evil spoken of him. His partisans, you see, apart from Thorbjorn, had gone with him. It was typical of my father to be the only one who was twelve years late. As I say, Eirik welcomed him like the lost sheep returned to the fold.
Eirik in Greenland was the same man as the troublemaker of the Westfjords, but in another role. Here, he didn’t defy the law, he embodied it. Lawman and outlaw – they’re only two sides of the same coin. Each recognises exactly the same boundaries. No one should be surprised, and yet they always have been, that Eirik the lawless should end up ruling the most peaceful country in all the Norse lands.
He had two allies, and I don’t mean his sons. The first one I recognised at once, although I didn’t take in the implications. In Greenland we had hardly any fermented drink. Does that help you understand why the promise of wine from Vinland meant so much? I’m sure that’s why our gatherings passed off so peacefully, but I don’t suppose men would agree with me. So there was Eirik, presiding over a country where there were, as far as I could see, no feuds happening at all. His other ally, of course, was the land. If there were a quarrel, a band of raiders couldn’t just gallop over to the next valley. They�
�d have to make a difficult sea voyage. Besides, they were busy. They had to hunt in the summer, if the community were to stay alive. It was the ghost of winter, really, that kept the peace. Even on the lightest days of summer, one could never forget that grim spirit that stalked among our meadow flowers. Whatever we ate when things were plentiful, we had to save more than as much again for the long months to come. At home the cattle are in the byre eight months, but although it rains more in summer, there’s more time to make hay, and the winters are never quite so hard. In Greenland every mouthful more than bare necessity is like a gift straight from God. So Eirik had the land on his side, and that was worth more than the army of King Charles the Great himself.
He was a kind of emperor. Here in Rome, I try to see him as a little chieftain of a far-off land, so poor that Eirik was filled with shame when he couldn’t feast his guests in the traditional way. I look at the great church of St John at the Lateran, and in my mind I see a hall whose turf roof might reach to the foot of those arched windows. I look at the corn fields and vineyards that surround this city, and I see a hillside scattered with cattle, an island of green balanced between wastes of sea and ice. In winter the whole settlement at Brattahlid is invisible under the snow. Emperors must fight, and hold their own. In Europe they fight one another, while the poor folk struggle to go on living. In the Green Land, a great man must be more than an emperor. He must be like a peasant, and fight the land itself. I think they will tell stories about Eirik Raudi, when Pope Leo and even your Cardinal Hildebrand have been entirely forgotten.
Don’t look round so nervously. You know no one could understand us even if they were listening. You’ve said a thing or two yourself that might interest the Holy Father. No one will ever know, Agnar, unless you’re fool enough to write these bits down.
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