B0046ZREEU EBOK

by Elphinstone, Margaret

  When I talk to you about Eirik he seems so close. He was so alive that death can’t destroy his image. I see him now, standing behind you in the corner there. You stoop over your desk, but he stands upright, and he watches us both keenly. He lived by his judgement of men. I never knew him wrong about that. Even his partiality for his sons – I can’t call it love, Eirik did not love – never made him misjudge them. He admired Leif most, I think, and trusted him least. Leif was very like his mother, to look at, anyway.

  I didn’t meet Leif until a year after we arrived, and yet I was always aware of his presence, his place at Brattahlid and his effect on the family, right from the day I landed. In a way his influence was more potent in his absence.

  Eirik’s family were overwhelming. They seemed to have been living in public so long that they just ignored the fact. Like emperors. There were often guests at Brattahlid. New settlers were still arriving, and sometimes they’d stay the first winter with Eirik. In summer, traders and hunters would come and go. Men would come down from the Western Settlement, and leave their goods for Iceland at Brattahlid, for they trusted Eirik to act as their agent. Besides all that, there was the community at Eiriksfjord. Eirik had given land to his friends and dependants, and Brattahlid itself was worked by Eirik’s thralls and freedmen who lived round about. The hall was the centre of all this activity, and there Eirik’s family would carry on with their lives, always shouting and bickering, encouraged if anything by the presence of an audience. When my father and I were with them, that first year, I used to watch them enact their quarrels, almost, it seemed, for our benefit. Sometimes Thjodhild or Freydis would glance our way to see how we were taking it. Eirik would magnificently ignore us, and his sons tried to do the same, but their performance was less convincing.

  Eirik’s two younger sons, Thorvald and Thorstein, were at home. Leif had left for Norway three days before we arrived. We must have passed his ship, and probably he put into Herjolfsnes just a day or so after we left. Sometimes I think how it might have happened. Perhaps our ship was lying to in a fjord one night, when Leif’s trading ship slipped past us in the dawn light. Or perhaps Leif, who was the most daring sailor of them all, had taken a course to the seaward side of all the sheltering islands, while we hugged the coast and took advantage of the sheltered channels. It was still early in the year, remember, with a great risk of ice out at sea. I remember that the wind was south-westerly. It was a fate that made us miss one another. Eirik thought so too, I’m certain. He would have married me to Leif, if things had been different. But there it was; Leif was on his way to Norway, and, three days after his departure, a girl who must have seemed to Eirik both beautiful and eligible turned up on his threshold at Brattahlid.

  Halldis had been right. Lack of dowry mattered much less in Greenland. Wealth was children, who would grow up to inherit vast lands, and who could hunt and farm and trade for their parents when they were old. But there was a shortage of coin to buy that wealth – by that I mean women. Too many of the settlers were related and of course there were more men to start with anyway. After twelve years a new generation of young men needed wives. That was one reason why Leif went to Norway. Thorstein was fairly sure his brother would come home with a wife, and so he would have done, no doubt, if he hadn’t made a complete mess of the business.

  So there was Eirik treating me with special favour, making my father the most honoured of his guests, and there were Thorstein and Thorvald, prowling round the place like a couple of bears on an ice floe, with their eyes always on me. I’m no saint, Agnar, and I hadn’t had much of a youth so far. I revelled in it, and without really knowing it, I think I teased them unmercifully, though I hardly said a word.

  The women were more complicated. Freydis was younger than me, and couldn’t spend half an hour with her stepmother without quarrelling. I was appalled by her rudeness. Halldis would have beaten me if I’d spoken to her like that. Thjodhild just ignored it. Freydis didn’t like me; I think she was jealous, though she can hardly have wanted the attentions of her brothers. Or could she? I wouldn’t put anything past Freydis. Certainly she resented my presence in her father’s house, in her mother’s room, in her own bed. There was something else going on, I could tell, and fairly soon Thjodhild told me what it was.

  Thjodhild, the wife of Eirik, stands at the door of the sheiling hut where the sheep are milked in summer. It is evening, close to milking time, and she has told Gudrid and Freydis to meet her here. The ewes in milk are beginning to make their way over the rocky slopes, with an occasional clink of hoof on rock. The evening is calm, and the sun touches the pastures with gold before it drops behind the mountains. Sunlight cannot be treasured up, except as a fading memory, but there are other treasures that endure. These are the best pastures in the Green Land, on the low isthmus between two fjords. Once Eirik promised Thjodhild a land where the cattle would flow with milk, where the hunting would bring a living fit for kings, where men could take what pastures they chose and be free. She had allowed him to lead her here, with their children and their cattle and all that they had. It had been a hard journey, out of the old world and into the new. Sometimes the land is everything that he had promised; sometimes it is so cruel that she wants to drop dead from weariness. But now Thjodhild has heard a different kind of promise, brought to Brattahlid by Herjolf’s Celtic thrall, who tells her of one who will bring the dead back to life, and give the weary everlasting rest.

  The thrall has gone now with Leif, who will take him back to Herjolfsnes on his way to Norway. His departure was a hard loss, for all winter while she stood at her loom in the women’s room, Thjodhild had Herjolf’s thrall to talk to her. She listened to his stories again and again, until now she has them by heart. She can say them for herself now, but not out loud. Her family will not listen, only the thralls flock eagerly to hear this new story, which offers them a freedom they have never dared to dream of. Thjodhild is Eirik’s wife, and she cannot be led by her own slaves. Even if she cared so little for decorum in this world, she is too loyal to Eirik to shame him in that way.

  Already the new promise threatens him. He grumbles, and says, ‘Aren’t I enough for you? Has Thor ever let you down? Could our voyage to the Green Land possibly have been easier? Don’t you see that a good luck has always been ours, and that you’re tempting it to desert us? Are you mad, woman? What else can you possibly want?’

  None of her children believe what she now knows. Only Leif is sympathetic. He laughs at her, and puts his arm round her as his father never does, and says, ‘As you wish, mother. You’re a canny woman. You have your own way of doing things.’

  He suspects her of something more devious than a vision, which is unfair. It is Leif who is devious, but he should be the one to understand. Of all her children, it is Leif who has the most visions of his own. Visions of wealth, maybe, but always wealth daringly come by. Leif is looking for something too.

  Thjodhild takes in the sun on the green slopes as if she must remember it for ever. The precious light. She gazes downhill and sees a girl rapidly making her way up through the pastures, as if the steep hill were no toil to her at all. Thjodhild recognises Gudrid, and quietly walks down to meet her.

  EIGHT

  July 17th

  When I first met Thjodhild she reminded me a little of Halldis, and it took me a while to learn how different from her she really was. I was still shaken by my meeting with Thorbjorg. A witch like that should never have been in the Green Land, it seemed to me; her familiars were unclean things to bring into a new world. Thjodhild, Eirik’s wife, on the other hand, seemed to be a woman of the daylight, but then it was spring when I met her. She was tall, like Halldis, and her hair had stayed white-fair like a child’s. I was sometimes conscious of my Irish blood when I stayed at Brattahlid, because I was growing darker, compared with them anyway, though here in Italy they’d have called me fair. Now it makes no difference; old women are the same the world over.

  Things flourished for Thjodhild. She ha
d a way with animals, and I never saw so much milk, or such big, round cheeses, as those at Brattahlid. Her hens laid eggs right into the dark months, and more than half her sheep had twin lambs. The fleeces we took from them that autumn were as thick and greasy as any in Iceland. Most people think that the Green Land is a poor country, but I never saw a farm as well provided as Eirik’s until I went to Norway. Thjodhild was one of those people for whom the desert flowers. In summer she used to gather plants, and found more than anyone would dream could grow in such a land. And of course she had borne three outstanding sons, who were strong men now, even by the standards of our country.

  I think she would have liked a daughter. Her work obsessed her. I can remember seeing her out late at night, in the long twilight, still raking and turning the hay on the slopes across the stream from the hall. She was up before any of us, before the house thralls even. She would sit all night with a cow about to calf, if the birth was likely to be a hard one. Eirik used to say, ‘Don’t we have enough slaves? Come to bed, woman! You let these people eat their heads off at my hearth, and then you do their work for them!’ But he respected her greatly, and rightly so. It was Eirik who said first that the land was lush and plentiful, but it was Thjodhild who made it so for him. Erik used words to make things into what he wanted them to be, but Thjodhild despised words. She listened to men as if they were children, encouraging, but not too bothered, I always thought, about what they actually meant. In a way I was wrong about that; later I realised that she did listen. If the men she loved spoke about their dreams, she worked like one of the fates to make them happen.

  What I liked about Thjodhild was what she made. She made a wilderness into a green paradise, those first years at Brattahlid. Her house was always clean and warm. Whether she were feeding a shipload of settlers worn out by a hard voyage, or pulling out a child’s bad tooth, as I saw her do the very day I arrived, she gave the matter the same wholehearted energy, and everything was done right.

  To begin with I was afraid that I couldn’t work hard enough for her. She only understood weakness in men who were wounded, or women who were pregnant, or in the very old, for whom she had a vast respect. Anyone else could never do enough. I needn’t have worried. I think she saw in me all that Freydis was not. No wonder Freydis hated me. I couldn’t understand that either, at first. Being so alone in my childhood, I always had a dream about a friend. I don’t mean a man, I mean another girl. At Arnarstapi I used to imagine I had such a friend. Sometimes I used to look at my face reflected in the water butt, and imagine that was her. When I was alone I used to talk to her aloud. The only real girl of my own age and rank I ever lived with was Freydis, and she saw me as her supplanter, and did all she could to torment me. It’s clearer to me now why she felt like that. She was Eirik’s daughter, you see, but her mother was a thrall, and Thjodhild took her home and fostered her as if she were her own. That’s typical of Thjodhild. I suppose I might have done the same for one of Karlsefni’s bastards; I don’t know. If he had any no one told me about it. But Freydis was angry with everyone. Her brothers were men, and legitimate, and so she hated them. In fact she hated men because they were men, and she hated any other woman who had been luckier than her. And yet who could be more privileged than Eirik Raudi’s daughter at Brattahlid? She had hair the colour of buttercups, and she used to look at men sidelong, and drop her eyes. She wasn’t really pretty, but she had more power over them than I ever did.

  I had a talk with Thjodhild one evening, when she met me going up to the sheiling at milking time. I’d never talked alone with her before. She never stopped working to chat, unless there were something to say that mattered, and she came to the point at once.

  ‘Gudrid, you’re a Christian, aren’t you? Are you baptised?’

  I told her about Halldis, and Thangbrand the missionary, and the baptism at Arnarstapi.

  ‘So you are of the faith. What does it mean to you?’

  The question embarrassed me. I looked at the ground, and watched a clump of gentians in Thjodhild’s shadow, slowly curling up their petals as if it were night. ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered, but I was thinking about Thurid’s story of the demon sitting astride the roof beam, banging against the turfs with his heels, so that the whole house shook. Thjodhild’s question reminded me that I was afraid of ghosts.

  ‘That won’t do. You’re a sensible girl, and you’ve had some hard experiences. Did you keep your faith on the voyage here?’

  I saw in my mind’s eye two men raising Halldis’ body, where it lay shrouded in her wet cloak, and heaving it over the gunwale while the swell rose up to swallow it. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t think about anything.’

  ‘But if you are a Christian, you don’t have to think. Your God is what you know.’

  ‘I know one thing then,’ I told her. ‘I know that Thangbrand said that when God cast Lucifer out of heaven, he fell into the sea, and he lies there still. He is Jormungand, and he lies beneath the waters that surround this world. The sea is his kingdom, and Christ doesn’t rule there. He wasn’t on that ship with us.’

  Thjodhild grabbed me by the shoulders and made me face her. ‘But you’re wrong, Gudrid, you’re wrong! Herjolf’s thrall told me another story. He told that when the disciples were in terror of their lives in the storm, Christ said to them, “Why are you scared? Don’t you have any faith?’’ And he said to the wind and the waves, “Peace; be still!’’ and the storm died away at once.’

  ‘Well,’ I muttered, ‘He wasn’t on our ship. I don’t believe he ever sailed on our seas.’

  ‘But he was on your ship! Thangbrand brought him to you. He should have been in your heart!’

  I wrenched myself away from her. ‘No!’ Suddenly I was crying, and that made me angry. ‘No! No! No! I didn’t make those things happen! It’s not my fault! It’s not! It’s not!’

  I would have run away, but although she was big she was always very quick, and she stopped me. ‘Gudrid, wait. I’m not blaming you for what happened. I’m saying that the power of Christ is given into our hands. Into yours and mine. We are women, what can we do? This is a hard land, but if we have faith, we can move the very mountains. He told me so!’

  All at once this wholesome woman sickened me. If were a man, I thought, I would have my own power, and I would fight to keep it with all the strength in my body. I’d kill my enemies and wrest a living out of the icefields. I wouldn’t get involved with ghosts or spirits, white or black. I wouldn’t be weak enough to need to bother. I wanted to hit Thjodhild. Her faith made me sick. ‘No,’ I said. ‘My will isn’t as strong as that. It’s not my fault.’

  ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ she said gently. ‘We’re all weak, God knows. But let me tell you something else. My son Leif has promised to speak to the king in Norway. King Olaf wants to make the whole world Christian. Leif will ask him to send us a priest. We can build our church then, our own church, here in the Green Land. If God has his house here, he can watch over us. He will be our shepherd, and he will guard the weak and the strong.’

  Even though I was angry, that thought comforted me, and in spite of what she’d said, once again I warmed towards her. I was lonely, Agnar. I missed my foster mother. I was frightened of being in this world without anyone to guide me. I was afraid of my own strength. Mountains do move, sometimes, and ice falls, and the sea sends up great waves that wash away the land where we lead our fragile lives. I’ve lain at night in a wooden ship, and heard the ice cracking all round us, and felt the wave it makes when it crashes down into the sea. Shall I tell you the worst thing about being on a ship in a storm? What my real fear is? It’s the urge to throw myself over. I see the swell come up to the gunwale, or the waves crash against the bow and drench us; I see great troughs open up under our bows; I see huge seas like moving mountains hurling down on to us; and what I want to do is to give in. I don’t want to resist, Agnar, I want to go in. I want to throw myself headlong into the chaos that surrounds our little world.

&nb
sp; ‘I would like a church,’ I admitted to Thjodhild, although I was sullen still. ‘A church built on a rock, like the house that stood when the storms came.’

  She linked her arm in mine, and led me up to the sheiling, where the ewes were gathering. ‘It’ll be all right, Gudrid, we shall have our church.’

  Thjodhild had arranged that all the Christians in Brattahlid should pray together on Sundays. If the weather was good we did this conspicuously at the milking ring, right in the middle of the settlement. Only when it was impossible to be outside did we retreat to the new women’s room, which had been built on to the end of the hall that summer. These public meetings put my father in a very awkward position. The very mention of a new god made Eirik flame. ‘Take away your milk-and-water gods, your god’s for infants!’ he used to shout. ‘What kind of man do you want, if you fancy a god who hasn’t the guts to lift a hand to save himself? Don’t tell me stories about flocks of sheep! I want men like wolves! What kind of country do you think this is?’

  So Thorbjorn kept his mouth shut, and didn’t attend Thjodhild’s meetings of thralls and women, where we shared out dried fish and buttermilk, because in the Green Land there is neither bread nor wine. I went, though, but it made me angry. In the end I felt so resentful and confused that I climbed up out of the settlement one day, and made a different kind of spell.

  It wasn’t just a spiritual confusion, it was my body protesting too. I was young. Like the sap in springtime, when you’re young, humours rise in your body, and if you’re a young girl, you want a man. It’s the same itch the cattle feel; every living creature feels it, and I remember it quite well. At night I’d dream I was making love to a man, and I’d wake up heated and damp, and knowing exactly what I desired. I was angry with Thjodhild for always talking about her Christ, and never noticing that her two sons watched me like hunting wolves. I remember sitting at her Christian love feast, while I imagined the body of Thorstein Eiriksson pressed against my own, and when she passed me the sacrament I wanted to spit it out at her feet. There was a struggling spirit inhabiting me that wanted to be freed, and this woman, who seemed now to want me round her all the time, was weighing me down with stones of faith.