Three women of Eirik’s household sit with the men at the high table. Thjodhild has grown larger, her presence sterner. She says little, but she watches the newcomer, she watches her son Leif, and from time to time she glances at her husband’s impassive face. Freydis, Eirik’s daughter, came to Brattahlid this morning, as soon as the news came to Gardar that a merchant ship had been sighted on its way to Brattahlid. Her husband Thorkel is not with her; he is irrelevant to Freydis’ mercantile ambitions. The third woman is Eirik’s daughter-in-law Gudrid, widowed for almost a year. She fulfils her role as daughter of the household with more grace than Freydis ever did, but she and Freydis seem to be as friendly now as sisters should be. Freydis has a man and is mistress of an estate, and Gudrid has lost the advantages of both.
At the lower table the crew of the strange ship tear at fresh seal meat and salmon with teeth and knives, and down their fermented milk as if their stomachs had no limits.
Thorfinn Karlsefni has been a trader for a long time, and his face gives no clue to his thoughts. His manner is open and friendly, but he has said nothing at all yet about the price of his cargo, or his reasons for coming so far off the main trade routes. He seems absorbed in his conversation with Leif, but occasionally his eyes flicker away and glance down the room. They rest for a moment on Gudrid, and a little later they come back to her again, and twice again.
He arrived at Brattahlid at the end of the summer, and naturally he was invited to spend the winter with us. Leif liked Karlsefni at once – they knew each other by hearsay – and treated him with the utmost friendliness. Eirik was getting old by now, and quite irascible, but he soon took to Karlsefni. They spoke the same language; they were both shrewd, and they both knew how to use the rules to get exactly what they wanted. It was like watching a game of chess to see them together. Eirik made the first move. He was silent and withdrawn for about a week, until in the end Karlsefni asked him straight out if his presence at Brattahlid offended his host.
‘No,’ said Eirik. ‘Far from it. It’s not that. But I’m ashamed that I can’t offer you better hospitality. We live in a poor way here; dried fish and seal meat and buttermilk are what get us through the winter. But you’ve been used to wintering in Norway, and I know I can’t offer you the fare you’re used to at the Yule feast. It hurts my pride to treat you so shabbily.’
‘If that’s all, there’s no difficulty,’ said Karlsefni at once. ‘I’ve a cargo here with wine from the Rhineland, spices from Russia, and this year’s grain from the Baltic harvest. What’s mine is yours, for as long as I’m your guest here. I’d like to make you a gift of all the food we’ll need for the winter feasts.’
Eirik clasped his hand at once. ‘You’re a man after my own heart,’ he told Karlsefni. ‘I’ll accept your offer, and now we can treat you in the way I’d like to do.’
So at the price of half his cargo, Karlsefni set up his winter trading post at Brattahlid, and made a good profit from all the settlers round Eiriksfjord, getting white bear furs and sealskins and narwhal and walrus ivory from that year’s hunt. I’m sure everything went exactly as he’d calculated, and all the time he was building up good will for future years. There’s more than one ship coming regularly from Norway to Greenland now, in fact one of them belongs to my son, part of his legacy from his father, but Karlsefni was the first. No one else had the imagination to go straight from Norway to the new settlement until he did. Certainly the direct link with Norway changed people’s lives in the Green Land. It served us far better than trade through Iceland, for Iceland’s needs and goods were much the same as ours, which meant that we paid twice for everything. We couldn’t send a ship of our own, you see. We were chronically short of wood, and therefore boats, and those we had were used for the northern hunt, without which we’d starve. We needed all our men for the farms and the hunting, so Karlsefni was on to a good thing, and he knew it.
He never meant to go further than Brattahlid, but two things happened that winter to suggest other possibilities. The first was that it wasn’t long before Leif was talking to him about Vinland. Leif had been frustrated in his plans for Vinland for years, for the same reason as we didn’t trade directly with Norway ourselves: lack of resources. Karlsefni arrived with the biggest ship that had yet been seen in Greenland, and a full crew, all in good health. Karlsefni husbanded his men, like all his capital, with particular care.
The first snow had fallen before we found out what had put Greenland into Karlsefni’s mind. He mentioned that he’d called at Dyrnes on his way to Brattahlid, to visit Snorri Thorbrandsson.
‘You know him well?’ asked Leif.
‘I’ve known him for years. I saw him and Thorleif set out for here, just before I left for Norway.’
‘And you talked about visiting him in Greenland?’
‘We saw it as a possibility.’
Soon after that we had a fall of good crisp snow, and Leif and Karlsefni went south to Dyrnes. I stood at the milking ring with Thjodhild and watched them ski away, two dark figures like moving holes cut out of the whiteness of the frozen fjord. They were gone two weeks, and when they came back the talk was all of Vinland. I didn’t know, of course, exactly what Snorri and Leif had told Karlsefni, and Karlsefni himself was quiet as usual, and gave away nothing of his state of mind, at least, not about that.
I mentioned two things. The other matter that led Karlsefni on was, in fact, myself.
As Eirik’s daughter, I was a good proposition. I owned Stokkanes, conveniently close to Brattahlid, which Thorstein the Black managed for me, and a big estate at Sandnes. I brought with me kinship with the most powerful chieftain in Greenland. Nothing could do more to enhance Karlsefni’s prospects in the West. But I flatter myself – no, I know – it wasn’t just that. Karlsefni had no plans to marry when he came. He used to look at me, not hungrily, as Thorvald and Thorstein once did, but speculatively, and never for more than a moment. The day after he got back from Dyrnes he started to talk to me. I was startled. I wasn’t working in the women’s room, as it happened, because I was cutting some of the new linen cloth into a tunic for myself, and, as the men were all out, I was using one of the big tables in the hall to spread the cloth right out. When Karlsefni came in, I began to gather up my things and leave him the room, but he stopped me.
‘No, don’t move,’ he said. ‘You’ll spoil the cut if you fold it up now.’
I couldn’t help smiling. ‘You know all about making clothes?’
‘Of course.’ He sat down on the bench next to me, and watched as I made a nick in the cloth with my knife, and tore the length carefully.
‘I’m glad you brought linen,’ I said after a pause. ‘I’ve never worn any before.’
‘It won’t do much to keep you warm here.’
‘It’s not meant to. I can wear as much wool as I like underneath it.’
‘It would hang better if you didn’t have to.’
I said nothing. His last comment seemed faintly immodest, but the men I was used to were much more direct.
‘I hear you’ve lived in the Western Settlement,’ he said presently.
‘I spent one winter there, and that was the worst of my life. I didn’t see much.’
‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry. But you’ve an estate there, so you’ll go back one day?’
‘I’ve never seen Sandnes,’ I told him. ‘Thorstein went there every year. Leif went this summer, and brought back what we needed.’
Karlsefni nodded. ‘I might go north myself in the spring. I thought you could tell me something about it.’
I stared at him. ‘What can I possibly tell you that Leif can’t?’
He grinned at me. ‘A lot. Leif has no opinions about linen, for example.’
‘And you do?’
‘I’m a merchant. I study my goods.’
I didn’t know what to make of him. He never talked to me like that when anyone else was there, but after that occasion he seemed to contrive to get me alone, a difficult thing to do in a c
rowded farmstead in winter. But he had a way of finding out where I was. As soon as he realised I fed the hens first thing in the morning he’d turn up in the byre just as I was bringing the bucket of fish skins from the hearth. We’d have another of those odd conversations, just a few sentences, then he’d smile, raise his hand to me in farewell, and walk off. On the second day of Advent he stopped me as I was about to go into the house. ‘Can I talk to you?’
‘Why not?’
We went a little way along the path past Thjodhild’s church towards the pasture. The snow was firm and easy to walk on, and it was one of those clear days when everything seemed very near: Burfjell across the fjord looked scarcely a stone’s throw away, and I could hear the ravens on the crags by Stokkanes.
‘I want to make an offer to Eirik,’ said Karlsefni abruptly. ‘I think he’ll accept. I want to know if you will.’
‘Me?’ I’d have liked him to be more humble, and so I made it difficult for him.
‘Yes. If he agreed that I should marry you, would you consent?’
‘I’m a widow. I have the right to make my own contracts.’
‘I know. But I don’t want to offend Eirik.’
‘Yes, I can see why that’s important to you. But if you want to succeed in this, you’d do as well not to offend me either.’
‘I don’t want to offend you.’ He gripped my arm when I would have turned away. ‘Gudrid, this isn’t for the reason you think. I had no plans to marry here until I saw you.’
‘It must have seemed very convenient when you did.’
‘No,’ said Karlsefni seriously. ‘If I’d thought it was convenient to have a wife I’d have got one long ago. I don’t need to marry to get what I want – not in business, I mean. But I want to marry you.’
‘Why?’
Karlsefni shrugged. ‘I want to sleep with you. Is that what you want me to say? It’s true. Don’t you think I’d make a good husband?’
The truth was that I did, but I wouldn’t give him an answer because he’d made me angry, and I wouldn’t let him touch me either. In the days before Yule he gave me presents: an amber necklace, a silver bracelet, ivory needles. When I went across to Stokkanes to see Thorstein the Black he asked to come with me, and while we were alone in the sledge I’d have come close to giving him what he said he’d wanted, only it was too cold, even under the fur rug. I’d missed all that since Thorstein died. I didn’t want to make things easy for Karlsefni, but from then on I knew I’d give in, and so no doubt did he.
It was Eirik who put a stop to all this by accepting Karlsefni’s proposal on my behalf, and demanding a straight answer from me. One didn’t play games with Eirik, and so the betrothal was made. I married Karlsefni on the last day of Yule. This time Eirik made no fuss about a Christian ceremony, as he’d done when I married Thorstein. He couldn’t, because Karlsefni had been baptised at the Thing, the year that Christianity was declared law in Iceland. The feast that night was the best ever seen in Greenland, nearly all provided by Karlsefni, of course. For me the two most important guests were Thorstein the Black, because he truly wished me well, and Snorri Thorbrandsson, because he had been my father’s enemy and was now my husband’s closest friend. He was Snorri’s godfather too, but that comes later.
Eirik and Leif were bound to support my marriage to Karlsefni, even if they hadn’t liked him. It wasn’t just the lack of bread and wine to feed his guests that irked Eirik, but the more basic need for timber. In fact we never brought home any wood from Vinland suitable for shipbuilding, but the forests were there, and when Eirik and Leif looked at Karlsefni, what they saw was the fabulous wealth of Vinland, their own and still unreachable. Leif had never been back to his trading post in the west. His brothers were dead and his father was old, and he was tied to Greenland. The only other person who had the sailing directions for Vinland was Bjarni Herjolfsson, whom Leif saw as a rival, not a friend. Bjarni went to Norway about the time I married Thorstein, and when he did finally come home, he showed no interest in the empty lands he had once sighted.
So I was the keystone of an alliance that seemed to be ideal for everybody, yet Karlsefni spoke the truth when he told me he didn’t need a wife to get what he wanted. I realised in the end that I’d genuinely taken him by surprise. He hadn’t thought of himself as a man at all likely to fall in love. I found him much more experienced with women than Thorstein had been, and a good lover because he had a curiosity that Thorstein had quite lacked, which made him endlessly interested in what it was like to be somebody else. Freydis said, when I unwillingly answered some of her questions, that I was a lucky woman, but Karlsefni disconcerted me. After Thorstein I thought him coldhearted, although it turned out I was wrong. We seemed outwardly to get on well, but I somehow felt I couldn’t reach him, not until the ghosts at Sandnes. But that comes later. Meanwhile, I felt at a disadvantage and I told him so.
‘But you’ve been married before,’ he pointed out, ‘which is more than I have.’
‘But you’ve obviously not been alone all your life.’
It was dark and I couldn’t see his face. We were whispering, because although we had an inner chamber, the dividing walls didn’t reach the roof, and we could only be private if we were quiet.
‘What do you want me to tell you?’ he asked. ‘As it happens, I have always been alone.’
‘Not in bed.’
Another pause. ‘No, not when I’ve had the chance. What did you expect?’
‘Do you have a woman at home?’
‘No. I’m hardly ever there.’ He sighed, obviously not wanting this conversation. ‘If it comforts you, there’s no woman anywhere. I’m never in one place for long. When I’ve wanted sex I’ve taken it, and sometimes I’ve paid and sometimes not. When I didn’t, it was usually another man’s wife, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to talk about it.’
It was his last admission that shocked me, and he guessed it from my silence, and laughed under his breath. ‘Seducing unmarried girls is against the law, my love, and can get a man into all kinds of trouble.’
‘I see.’
He was serious suddenly. ‘You don’t. It’s the past. I wasn’t married then. How could I think of you when I’d never heard of you?’
He was right, Agnar, and I was wrong even to bring up the subject. It was none of my business. It wasn’t really the women he’d known that bothered me; it was the lack of knowing between the two of us. I did know about that, you see, because I’d had Thorstein. In his way Karlsefni was as inaccessible as the ice desert that covers the heart of the Green Land. I didn’t realise that I seemed just as cold to him. He made me desire him, certainly, and he desired me, but I wanted something else, so even the pleasure he gave me made me resentful of him. Can you understand that?
* * * * *
No, you’re wrong; he was being honest, and that was more than most men would be. He had integrity; it’s you who judge by the wrong things. It wasn’t for nothing that the king gave him the nickname Karlsefni, and a gold ring with it, which Karlsefni always wore on the third finger of his right hand. He was outstanding. Everyone called him Karlsefni because they recognised what the king saw in him.
When I look back now it’s my own ignorance I see. In fact – I’ve never really thought this out before – what Karlsefni did for me was to lead me back into the world, off the mountaintops and down among the houses. Three years later, when Karlsefni took me to Norway, I loved it. I came alive at the king’s court. I had women my age as friends, and I learned to gossip. I went to feasts and games and markets, I spent money for the first time in my life, and I bought things with it that weren’t necessary for our survival. I ate so much that winter that by spring I could pinch the fat around my waist and it was as wide as my wrist. I’d never been plump before. I liked it, and he liked it too, and I bought new wool and linen, and paid other women to make more clothes for me, even though I already had two of everything. It was a long way from Vinland, but I must tell you about Vinland first.
Anyway, he wanted me to go with him to Vinland, and I said I would, although I’d vowed never to face those western seas again while I lived. Once I’d agreed, I made myself part of it. I wasn’t going to have men making plans all round me as if I wasn’t there, not if I was to share the fate in store for us. Things started to happen very quickly when Snorri came up from Dyrnes at Candlemas over the ice through Isafjord. I remember one day it was snowing, and they were all sitting in by the hearth, and I left my loom and came and stood by the door listening. They were arguing about whose men to take and whose to leave, as space on the ship was going to be very limited. Karlsefni had reckoned on Snorri bringing his own ship, but it turned out that he’d promised it to his brother Thorleif that year. I waited for the right moment, and spoke out clearly: ‘I have a ship lying up at Stokkanes.’
They all swung round in amazement at the interruption. Only Karlsefni didn’t move. He was sitting where he could see me anyway, and he just watched me, giving away nothing. Legally, the ship that had been my father’s and then Thorstein’s was Karlsefni’s now, but I thought of it as mine, belonging to my past, not his. It was Leif, not Karlsefni, who answered me. ‘So you do,’ he said. ‘What are you offering, Gudrid?’
‘A ship,’ I said, ‘Upon terms.’
Snorri swore under his breath. Karlsefni looked thoughtful, and Leif said, ‘Fair enough. Sit down and tell us.’
I sat by the hearth among them all, as I had not been able to do since I was a little girl. I was aware of my heart beating, but I seemed entirely sure of myself, Karlsefni said. ‘That ship was my father’s,’ I said. ‘We brought it from Iceland. It was Thorstein’s, and we set out on this journey once before. It was mine, and I brought Thorstein’s body home in it to Brattahlid. It’s been laid up all summer, and Thorstein the Black has repaired and refitted it for me. It’s a fine ship, and it’s as good as new.’
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