It bothered him that he could offer no thralls to wait on me, and he kept saying that when the snow lifted he would fetch some of the land workers. I kept on telling him that the lack of servants was the last thing on my mind, and I wanted no one near me who had to be bribed to come close to a woman who brought evil fortune with her. It was no hardship to me to cook for us both; I was just grateful that owing to his good provision and Grimhild’s forethought the house was well-filled with dried fish and meat. Of course I never said so, but in a way it was a relief to my over-burdened spirit to clean the place up, which I could never have done if Grimhild had lived. You look as if my callous attitude shocked you, and yet you’d not be shocked at all if I were a man and told you I’d wiped out a whole settlement in blood feud. My husband was dead, I was trapped in a house where the dead outnumbered the living by a score or more: you shouldn’t grudge it to me that it satisfied me a little to wash layers of grease from soapstone pots in hot water, for the first time since they were carved. At intervals Thorstein the Black would stand over me, frowning, and say ‘You’re my guest, you shouldn’t have to do such things for me.’ In the end I snapped, ‘And what would you do if I didn’t?’, which started him off about the thralls again, and I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth.
And yet at other times he was as sensitive as a woman. I wasn’t the easiest of companions, I’m sure. Well, I know I’m not, I’ve never been submissive or quiet as most men like their wives to be. My husband Thorstein and I used to quarrel violently sometimes, because I’d set my will up against his, and I’d go on arguing with him until he had no words left, and then he’d hit me and I’d scream at him so all the household could hear the names I called him. Karlsefni and I didn’t quarrel, because Karlsefni was an even-tempered man, and over the years I grew less aggressive, I think, for having nothing to oppose. The few times I did make Karlsefni angry, I was frightened. He never shouted or hit me, but his silent rage was worse. I rarely saw it, and almost never was it directed at me.
Thorstein the Black was not my husband, but we had to live alone together all that winter. He had suffered as much as I had, and he said again and again that I was a comfort to him, but what I remember is the hard time I gave him. I used to wake in the night sobbing, and crying out for Thorstein who was dead. In my dreams I killed Thorstein myself, night after night, and it was always the horror of what I had done that woke me. I wish I could have felt pure grief, and mourned him as he deserved, but this was not mourning, it was nightmare. Thorstein the Black took an axe and laid the walking ghost of his own wife, but he only did so because she threatened Thorstein and me. Perhaps if we had not been there she would never have walked. I remember how I lay in the arms of Thorstein the Black and cried out ‘I didn’t kill him! I never meant to kill him!’, and he held me and said over and over again, ‘No, Gudrid, you killed no one. You hurt no one. You aren’t to blame.’
One night when he was trying to comfort me he said, ‘If Thorstein’s ghost were to speak to you, it would only have good words to say. You’ll take his body back to Brattahlid in spring, and thanks to you he’ll be able to rest in peace. He would want fate to treat you kindly, and indeed I think your own fate will be gentler after this.’
‘Why do you think that?’ I asked, turning to face him, for the fact was I longed for someone to say that life would not always be quite so hard.
‘I’m sure of it, Gudrid. You’ll marry again. I expect you’ll get out of Greenland; it’s not the place for a woman like you. Maybe you’ll marry an Icelander. But you will marry, I’m sure, and you’ll have a long life together, and your children will be worthy of you, and you’ll found a dynasty that will last through generations.’
I gave a laugh that was half a sob. ‘You’re not a seer, Thorstein. You can’t know that.’
‘No, I’m just an ignorant farmer. But sometimes a little gift is given even to men like me. A farseeing lady like you may mock me’ – I pinched him then – ‘but I know what I know.’
It’s true, Agnar, he did. If he hadn’t, I don’t think he would have dared defy an unknown fate, even to comfort me. I think he knew. Here in Rome you’d think Thorstein the Black a savage. You’d see him as dirty, with matted hair and a skin wrinkled and weathered to dark brown like leather, dressed in stained sealskin trousers and boots with the fur left on them, and a thick bearskin jacket that had once been white, and two knives stuck through his belt without a sheath for either of them. You’d watch how he tore his food apart with his fingers instead of using a knife, and you’d recoil because he chewed raw blubber all the time, and smelt of it. You’d think him uncouth, without much to say for himself even in his own language, and you’d look down on him for not having a word of any other. No, just to imagine him in Rome is like trying to bring the two ends of the earth together inside my mind. I can’t do it; I can’t see where I am now and still see him as I knew him, it’s not possible.
He kept his word to me in everything, and I’m glad to think I could do something for him. In the spring we left as soon as the ship was ready and the sea was open, and we had an easy passage back to Eiriksfjord. When we got back to Brattahlid Eirik took me into his family as if I were his own. In fact, in his terms, I was his own. Not all widows are treated like that, but Eirik’s clan learned generosity from their chieftain, and when the time came Eirik arranged my marriage as if I’d been his own daughter – but that comes later. The point is that when I explained what Thorstein the Black had done for us, Eirik was ready to do anything that I asked for him. That’s how it was that Thorstein got his farm, and was treated from then on as if he were the chieftain’s own kinsman.
I was afraid when we got back to Brattahlid, because of the bad news we had to give, but when we landed it seemed that our story wasn’t unexpected. It was raining when the people came down to help us beach the ship. Without any waste of words the bodies were carried ashore. In the damp air the smell of death hung over us, and flies gathered quickly where we stood. I can’t remember how I broke the news, but I shall remember until I die the faces of Eirik and Thjodhild when they heard it. Neither of them made any complaint. Eirik Raudi stood very still, and stared out to sea. Thjodhild seemed to shrink into herself, and I remember noting the outline of her skull over finely wrinkled skin, but perhaps I had become too used to seeing death in everything. Then I felt a touch on my shoulder, and when I looked up I saw Leif. He looked serious, but not grief-stricken; I know he felt the loss of both his brothers, but he never showed his feelings to anyone, I am sure. He said to me, ‘It’s been hard on you, Gudrid,’ which no one else had done, and then he glanced at his parents. ‘Gudrid,’ he went on, ‘Will you come with me a moment? I’ve something to tell you.’
Wondering, I walked with him along the sandy path at the beach top, among thistles and silverweed.
‘It’s been a hard homecoming for you.’
‘Hard for you, too,’ I said.
‘Gudrid, your father …’
As soon as he spoke I knew what he was going to say, and I realised too that I ought to have known before. If I hadn’t been so self-absorbed, so buried in my own strange fate, I had the power in me to know that Thorbjorn had also met his fate that winter.
‘How did it happen?’ I asked quickly, and Leif glanced at me sideways through the rain.
‘You knew then?’
‘I ought to have known,’ I said ambiguously.
‘He went to stay with Thorkel at Hvalsoy for the seal hunt. We had a fine spell just after Yule. He took a hole in the pack ice, not a mile from the open sea. When he didn’t come home at dusk they searched, and his thrall found him where he had slipped into the water and drowned. The body was still afloat. As you’re Christians he was brought back here, and Eirik let my mother and I have him buried in the churchyard here at Brattahlid.’
I was silent. I should have wept but no tears came. Perhaps I had none left. A man has to stand for hours at one of those holes in the ice, with his spear ready, until the
seal bursts to the surface. He has a second to strike, and if he fails the seal breathes and is gone. All those hours alone on the ice he must stay alert and watch that round dark hole of water. Karlsefni used to say it was like watching the doors of hell, because you could see uncanny beings move and vanish, seals shifting shape and becoming nightmare creatures from the unknown bottom of the ocean. He said the round hole would seem to grow, and to be a tunnel, or a mirror; it would be like staring into the iris of your own eye. A man might go in, he said, not because he slipped on the ice but because his own will drew him down, so he couldn’t help himself. Karlsefni never knew my father, but I talked to him about Thorbjorn’s death as I talked to him about everything over the years.
I’m not sure I ever knew my father either. Thorbjorn used to complain he never knew his, my grandfather Vifil who had been a slave. I felt I had failed my father by my ignorance of his death, and for a long time I strained to imagine how it happened. I’ve seen the round holes in the ice, and I’ve seen the seals butchered and brought home. I’ve never seen the kill: women don’t. The tense hours of waiting are outside my experience. But I’m not sure the manner of Thorbjorn’s death was even relevant. His whole mind was strange to me, and always had been. I never saw anything from his point of view, and for a long time I felt that perhaps I ought to have done, though I can’t see how that would have saved him.
When Leif told me I said nothing at all. In private he could be surprisingly kind, and he did nothing to press me, but walked with me in silence up to the church where it lay tucked away behind a little hill. When I went and looked at the fresh mound where they had buried my father as soon as the ground was warm enough, I neither wept nor keened, but stood frozen, as if the ice had entered my blood and made me a dead thing in a living body. I felt nothing of my father but a great emptiness inside me, and I saw him neither in heaven nor walking the boundaries of this earth, and I have never had any glimpse of him since.
Of course I inherited everything my father had, as well as Thorstein’s farm at Sandnes, and now I was also part of Eirik’s family at Brattahlid, so I was able to be generous in giving gifts for the first time in my life. I’ve enjoyed my wealth most of all for that reason; I inherit my father’s pride in giving lavishly. Thorstein the Black had told me that he had no wish to return to the Western Settlement. He had buried Grimhild there, but he said, ‘She’ll rest more peacefully if I’m not there to bother her.’ I think the trouble he’d had with her ghost had shaken him more than I knew, and I was so wrapped up in my own troubles, young as I was then, that I didn’t think enough about what it all meant to him. But I got him his farm. I asked Eirik if Thorstein the Black could work my land at Stokkanes, as I was now to live at Brattahlid, and Eirik agreed at once, and Thorstein the Black has lived there ever since. When I left Greenland, I made the place over to him outright. I’ve not heard of his death, so it’s possible he lives there still.
Thorstein Eiriksson was buried next to my father by the church, and his men further away by the wall. So many more lie there now, so many men and women that I knew. Who do I tell this story for, when not one of them can ever hear it? Who else would care? It’s a bad thing to outlive your friends, Eiriksson. You can’t imagine it now, can you? No one can, until it happens. Who is there in this world now who knows me? My sons? What’s the past to them? A few stories that I told them when they were small, that they half remember. And half of that half they’ll make into another story, and tell their children, and maybe a fraction of that will go into yet another story, and be told to their children’s children. Many generations, Thorstein the Black said to me. No woman could wish for more, and yet what are these people to me, whom I shall never know? When I was young and had children, I thought the most important thing in life was the future, their future. But now it seems that the most important part of my life is buried in the Green Land, and the future belongs to somebody else. When I die I hope to rest in peace. I think the worst thing would be to stay here as a ghost that nobody remembered.
I’m being a miserable old woman, Agnar. Stop writing, and tell me about something else. Remind me I’m a Christian, if you like, or give me a penance. You can’t? Never mind. Tell me more about wine then, about these different vineyards you mentioned, and what makes a good vintage. How did you learn about these things? Do you go round tasting them all? Tell me all about it.
THIRTEEN
July 28th
Some people believe you can read the threads of fate in the palm of a hand. I don’t disbelieve them, but I’m not sure that it’s necessary. When I look back on my own life I see very clearly that the threads of my fate haven’t been spun together firmly, but have woven their ways separately. Sometimes one, sometimes another, has come out on top at different times. When I came back to Brattahlid as Eirik’s daughter-in-law, it seemed there was nothing in life but death. Life didn’t seem to offer anything more for me, but the truth was the thread of an unlucky fate had spun itself out. Why I had borne this burden from the beginning of my life I don’t know; the fates are beyond reason. But I had borne it, and now it was done. I come now to a new phase of my life, and now I look back and it seems as clear as the spring following the winter. I’m not saying everything now was easy, but the dark had cleared.
It still seems odd to me that the sun goes on shining day after day. It’s like living in a hot spring, but it’s the contrast I miss; you know what it’s like lying in hot water with the snowflakes whirling round your head. There’s piquancy in that. I do like the light and dark here – walking in from the white heat into a dim room that smells of earth. I hope heaven, if it pleases God we get there, isn’t all brilliance; eternity under those conditions would be exhausting. Perhaps the old way is better, just to survive in shadows and memories; at least one day there’s an end to that. I’m a great-grandmother by now, I think. Snorri’s daughter was pregnant when I left. I’d like to live long enough for the child to have known me – something to tell his (or her) great-grandchild perhaps? I bought a mass for its soul, living or dead. Perhaps by the end of the year we’ll have a letter from Iceland.
Has it occurred to you, Agnar, what a cold place this Christian heaven is? For mortals, I mean. Sometimes I wonder if to be immortal is to be free not from time but from cold. Spirits feel no warmth or cold; some souls are content to lie in their graves while the ground freezes, and others wander over the icefields where no living man would survive one night. Sometimes at sea I’ve looked out on endless water and the cold sky, and I’ve thought that were I not earthbound, were I not cold and afraid, this would in fact be heaven. It fits, you see: heaven lies to the north of earth, outside the boundaries of the world of men. To the living it’s ghastly in its frozen loneliness, but to the dead, untroubled by winter and night, it’s the place of everlasting light, the sun that never sets. But cold, Agnar, and so large you could wander up and down forever, and never see the tracks of another soul, not even those you loved. When I see it like that I think I would rather die.
* * * * *
I’m sure what you say is orthodox, Agnar. It may even be true. But that’s not the point.
I knew Karlsefni so well, body and mind, for thirty years, that now he hardly seems separate from myself. We didn’t get on very well when we were first married. He was so self contained, I felt I could make no impression on him. He never set himself up. I don’t think he thought at all about the effect he had on others. He was shockingly single-minded, at least, it shocked me. He looked after his own, and I was part of his own. He didn’t care much about anyone who wasn’t.
So what did he seem like before I knew him? It’s hard to go back to that, but I’ll try. Walk around the cloister a couple of times, Agnar, and let me think.
Eirik Raudi sits in his hall at Brattahlid. His face is wrinkled now like the surface of a glacier, his body hunched into itself. Only his eyes are dark and alert. On the long hearth in front of him the fire that he first lit here twenty years ago still smoulders. The ha
ll is full of men, but Eirik Raudi looks only into the fire, and tells nobody his thoughts.
Tonight there are guests at Brattahlid. An Icelandic ship has arrived direct from Norway, loaded with goods from Europe and beyond: grain, salt, wine, iron, linen and spices, luxuries hardly seen before in Greenland. The ship took the bold route due west from Bergen, sighting land once two weeks ago, when the last island in Faroe showed to the north, half sunk below the horizon. Leif took the same route five years ago, and now Leif is talking excitedly to the captain of the new ship, whose name is Thorfinn, nicknamed Karlsefni by the king of Norway himself.
Karlsefni answers Leif quietly but with complete assurance. He is a smaller man than Leif, strong and compact. His curly hair is cut short, and his beard is newly trimmed. His eyes are the grey of fresh water under cloud, and his skin is the same colour as his salt-stained deerskin tunic. After making one of the longest voyages in the world, he looks as neat, after half a day ashore, as a man on his way to mass on Sunday morning. He accepts sour buttermilk to drink as if it were the finest wine at the court of Norway, and while he eats he goes on answering Leif’s questions steadily. He seems to know exactly what he is about. He has come to the Green Land to make as much profit as possible.
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