B0046ZREEU EBOK
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‘How’s it different?’
‘They’re all different. But this one – did you see under its head? Grey on the left side, white on the right. And its fin was too far back. It isn’t any kind I’ve heard of.’
‘The meat’s the same as any other.’
‘That’s true. It’s the way it came I’m thinking of. What’s a monster, Gudrid? It can be an animal, I suppose, and it can be a ghost, and maybe there are stranger matings in the sea than anyone knows anything about.’
‘Not so strange,’ I remarked. ‘What’s a man, if it comes to that? Don’t we come in the middle too, between the animals and the ghosts? Perhaps a monster is only something we fear because we know too much about what it’s made of.’
‘A dream, you mean?’
‘A winter’s meat isn’t made of dreams.’ I pulled his shoulder and made him turn on his back and look at me. ‘We’re quite far south, and they say there are all sorts of beasts in Africa. And it was his namesake and yours that Thorhall prayed to, your own god who’s protected you all your life. It’s not like you to be confused, Karlsefni.’
‘No.’ He twisted a lock of my hair round his finger, not looking at me. ‘But this country didn’t belong to the old gods, and Christendom ends at Thjodhild’s church. You know I don’t rely on anything but my own judgement, and that’s what I’ve always done. In my opinion Thorhall is a dangerous man.’
‘He found the whale. We needed food.’
‘And how did it come there? No, don’t answer, I don’t want to know. But keep away from him now, Gudrid, please.’
I remembered Thorhall in my dream, and I was frightened. I had no way of shutting him out from there, and that meant he had found his way into the intimate centre of our lives. Karlsefni wasn’t the man to stand for that; he was more jealous even than most men of his married privacy, of mind as well as body. I thought of my fire spell, and I wondered where Thorhall had been at the moment that I made it, and whether I should have been more careful to exclude evil things. I hadn’t bothered with the whole ritual that Halldis made me use at home, because I thought in Vinland we were safe from ghosts. I thought of my unborn baby, and I wanted passionately never to have Thorhall’s eye on me again.
Karlsefni must have been watching my face, because he pulled my head down on to his shoulder, and held me. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he repeated. ‘It’s not your fault. And thank God we’ve got the meat. If it came by evil means it’s nothing to do with you, and we certainly can’t reject it. But keep away from Thorhall. Don’t do anything that could bring him near you. We have enough food now. You don’t need to take any risks now. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Then will you do that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine. Don’t worry, I can manage the rest.’
He did manage that winter very well. Now that the ghost of hunger was banished everyone relaxed, and as the sea froze over, our little settlement settled down to its indoor life. The winter was more severe than Leif had led us to expect, with few clear days, just one blizzard after another. But even at Yule there was quite a lot of daylight, and we had good fires. The smell of woodsmoke always makes me think of Vinland. The first things we made in our new workshops were a couple of sledges, and every fine day we’d bring in wood. We never had to use seaweed or dung for fuel in Vinland, and we could have our fires as big as we liked. My son Snorri was born on the last night of Yule, and he first opened his eyes on firelight, and in the days that followed, while his soul still seemed new and strange in his little body, he used to turn his head and watch the fire with that unfocussed blue gaze that new babies always have. Sometimes he does the same now. He’s chieftain at Glaum in his father’s place, his own sons are as tall as he is, and you’d think there was nothing vague about him anywhere – he seems to see things so very clearly – but sometimes I look across the hearth to him, and I see him withdraw into some other world, staring into the flames, as if the human world around him were only a shadow flickering across the edges of his sight, and I think of where he came from, and the strange places that were home to him, and I wonder what he still remembers.
Having no priest, we baptised him ourselves, and Snorri Thorbrandsson was his godfather. I was relieved when it was done. It would be a terrible thing to be a soul without a name wandering for ever in those deserted lands, and coming into the world is the most dangerous journey of all. It’s a cruel thing to have a God who’s indifferent to it, only offering the protection of his name when the worst is over.
Even after Snorri was safely baptised I hated Thorhall to come near us. He knew it, and somehow he was always with us. Although his place was in the north house, furthest away from ours, he frequently seemed to have a reason to come and sit at our hearth. He was welcomed by the company because he was a poet, and used to entertain us in the evenings with epigrams about us all, and all the things that happened in our new settlement. But he was quarrelsome too, and he never left the business about the whale alone. He was always making poems and jibes against Christianity, and mocking the men who’d turned their backs on Thor. Around Candlemas we had an outbreak of dysentery. Thank God it didn’t get into my milk and the baby was all right, but more than half the men were ill, and Thorhall seized the opportunity to raise doubts about the whalemeat, out of sheer mischief, I suppose, since he’d been the one who found it in the first place. A lot of them refused to touch it after that. Maybe it wasn’t just superstition: it puts you off a food anyway if you start to associate it too much with vomit. But things came to a head when some of Snorri’s men raided the storehouse one night, took the rest of the meat, and flung it into the sea.
That was one of the times I saw Karlsefni in a rage. He forced Snorri’s people to say who’d done it, and when the men were dragged out of the house to face him I think they thought when they saw his face that he’d kill them then and there. Only one dared speak, and he was defiant, insisting that they’d thrown away the devil’s meat to save us all. He was still talking when Karlsefni strode up to him and smashed his fist into the man’s face. The man dropped like a slaughtered ox and writhed in the snow, gasping. Blood poured from his broken nose, but no one dared move. Karlsefni kicked him in the back where he lay, and would have done so again if Snorri hadn’t got between them, grabbing my husband’s arm, shouting: ‘He’s my man! Don’t touch him!’
I thought they’d fight each other, but slowly Karlsefni lowered his free arm, and he and Snorri stood, almost chest to chest, staring into each other’s eyes. Then Karlsefni said breathlessly, but in his ordinary voice, ‘Your man. So what will you do if he’s killed us all?’
‘He was afraid.’
‘He may well be.’
‘They say that meat was devil’s work.’
The man on the ground rolled over, and struggled groggily to his hands and knees. The snow around him was pink with blood. ‘So you cast out devils,’ said Karlsefni to him softly.‘You’vegiven us our Lenten fast with a vengeance. So what about Easter? Any plans for our resurrection?’
The men around looked baffled, as well they might. ‘Don’t I make myself clear?’ went on Karlsefni. ‘Very well, do you understand this? It’s February. We don’t know when spring will come. May, perhaps June. Now that you’ve thrown away most of our food, we have barely enough for a month. So what are you going to do about that?’
Snorri said, ‘It’s no use blaming anyone for what’s done. We’ll just have to hunt for what we can.’
‘Out there?’ Karlsefni swept his arm out and everyone looked out obediently into the white world that surrounded us, and in the sudden silence we could hear the wind moaning across the pack ice.
‘We’ll have to ration ourselves,’ said Snorri doggedly.
‘True. And maybe we’ll have to die.’
‘Thorfinn,’ Snorri was one of the few people who sometimes used Karlsefni’s name. ‘This won’t do. Let the men go in. You and I need to talk.’
‘Talk!’
‘So where’s Thorhall now?’ she said. ‘He wasn’t there this morning, was he? Is it his doing, do you think?’
I shook my head. ‘But why should he? He says Thor gave us the meat. Surely he’ll be furious?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Helga looked away from me into the fire. ‘He says it’s the women here who’ve caused the trouble.’
‘How?’
‘Oh, a lot of them think so. If there are to be women, they say, it should be women for all – slaves. Men shouldn’t bring their wives, they say, and carry on as if they were at home while other men have nothing. It’s the worst of all worlds, Thorhall says, and a lot of the others agree with him. Oh, they’ll hardly say so to your husband – look what he did today – but my man’s a smith, not a chieftain, and they don’t hesitate to get at him. He told Snorri he wouldn’t come without me, you see, and Snorri gave in because he needed his skills.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ I said slowly.
‘No, you don’t know a lot of things. But you’re not an ordinary man’s wife.’
‘But the women here had nothing to do with the meat.’
‘You don’t think so? Some people think you have more powers than you say, Gudrid.’
That scared me. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you think we’ll starve now?’
‘No.’ I shook my head firmly. ‘No, it may be hard, but I’m sure we won’t. It’s not our fate.’
‘You see? How do you know that?’
I couldn’t answer her, but I think I insisted because I had Snorri, and I would defy any power that existed to protect him. There’s no witchcraft about that; it’s just what any mother would do. But more than ever I wanted nothing to do with Thorhall. He was back the evening after the whalemeat went, and though he must have heard what had happened, he never referred to it, and all the want we suffered for the rest of the winter just seemed to make him more cheerful, and more aggressive.
So there was no magic in the luck that brought us a brief spell of fine weather, so that the men were able to drag the boats across the ice, and harpoon two seals in open water. It wasn’t magic that brought a wakeful bear snuffling round our middens, where it could be trapped and killed with a spear. It wasn’t magic that made men risk their lives fishing off the edge of the ice in a freezing sea that grudgingly yielded a few dogfish. It certainly wasn’t magic that made us kill our pitifully skinny sheep, who should have given us the next year’s lambs. Long before Easter the winter closed in again, and we endured it until June. And then the spring came with a rush, and the pent up anger of all the hungry months erupted with it.
SIXTEEN
September 12th
I did appreciate the things you sent, my dear. The wine is so good – smooth and rich, the best I’ve yet tasted. Did it come from your monastery vineyards? It was kind of you, and I enjoyed the grapes too, they were much bigger and juicier than I’d expected. Were they really grapes, I wonder, those fruits we picked in Vinland? If they were, then hundreds of years of cultivation must have changed the ones in Italy out of all recognition. How long have people eaten grapes and drunk wine in this country, Agnar?
* * * * *
Since the flood, you think? And what about before that? Were there grapes in Eden? You can’t answer that, can you? Rome is so old I’m not at home in it. So old and so cultivated; the past weighs it down. When I was ill I thought at first I didn’t want to die here. I watched the sun move across the wall in my cell, showing up the cracks in the plaster, and lighting up clouds of dust that the shadows never show us. Dust from the past, dust of people, maybe, or whatever they once made here that’s fallen and forgotten. I lay in my bed, feeling too weak to raise my hand or turn my head, and I watched the dust. It floated and floated in the heat and never seemed to settle. Why do we stir up the past, Agnar? Why not let it lie? The sun moved across the wall, I lay under my sheet and I felt as dry and light as vellum, after all these months of heat and stickiness. When the sun left, the night swept in like velvet and wrapped me softly round, and I thought then I wouldn’t be afraid to go quietly onwards into the dark. I thought of my love, as if I were young again and close to him, and it seemed that I might stretch out my hand into the sweet night and his hand would be there, waiting for mine. He was there, I could tell, in his body, just as he was a long time ago when we were young. I remembered how his weight pressed down on me, and how he moved inside me, as if it were his body not his soul that was waiting for me now. I thought then that perhaps there had been times, when we were together, when body and soul were truly one, and that it would somehow be in the image of our mortal love that my soul would find his. Age is only the husk that grows around us, Agnar; I am still myself inside this shell, and when I die I think I shall be just as he remembered me.
When I knew he was there it didn’t matter any more that I was a long way from home. I thought about what it must be like for him, and wondered how he found his way into this place which is so unlike anything he ever knew. Did the throng of alien ghosts trouble him? Was he afraid to come so far, when his own resting place is half the world away? I don’t think he was frightened; perhaps the thread that binds me to him is short and straight, and he didn’t have to make the long journey that we make in life to get from there to here. We once meant to find a new country, he and I, and maybe we did, in our own way. I don’t think it was as new as we thought, though. Perhaps there were more before us, and more after, than we could ever have dreamed of.
Anyway, Agnar, I’m tougher than I look, and I didn’t die this time. Don’t look so solemn, my dear. Your gifts pleased me very much. I don’t think I’m fated to die in this place. It’s getting cooler every day, thank God, and even though the air is so old and tired and dry, I can smell the freshness of autumn in it. Are you worried that when my mind should have been on the last things it was the spirit of a mortal man that comforted me?
* * * * *
You’re right, and more sensible than I’d given you credit for. What are sacraments for, if not to do for us what our own minds can’t do? Yes, the priest did come, and committed me to the mercy of a God whom I still can’t apprehend. I think he’ll have mercy on me even for that. I have more hope now that he is merciful enough to give us a heaven inhabited by the people we loved, because that’s the nearest to divine love most of us are going to get.
* * * * *
I know. No marriage nor giving in marriage. Just as well, because after all I had two husbands, and have had more than one mass sung for each of them, so heaven is where they both should be. No, no, I’m not worrying about the logic of it. But I’ve had to make some journeys on my own, and some with a man who loved me, and though I’m quite able to take care of myself, I have to admit, having experienced both, I prefer to travel with someone I love. Yes, even on the last journey of all. Go on, then, cross yourself. I can still shock you, then, even though you should know me quite well by now.
* * * * *
That’s true too, but it’s a long time ago. Grief passes, and one heals so well in the end that one almost feels guilty about it. I can’t remember grief now. The worst pain I can recollect is toothache. Sadness comes and goes, sometimes it’s in your head and sometimes it isn’t, but toothache just stays there with a vengeance, and there’s no melancholy satisfaction in indulging in it either. I lost my first adult tooth when I was pregnant with Snorri – a tooth for every child they say – and then I was lucky for a long time. The year Karlsefni died my back teeth began to rot, and one by one they fell out. It was agony. Losing him was agony too, but I remember the tooth
ache better. It made me want to die. I could think about life without Karlsefni, when it came down to it, but not without my teeth. Losing my teeth felt more like the end of me. But I have some still, as you see, and that’s an achievement at my age, and what’s more they don’t bother me any more, and I don’t cry for the dead any more either.
* * * * *
I know, I know. We have to go on with the story. What else are we here for, after all? But I’m tired today, Agnar. Couldn’t we have a cup of your wine, and sit out in the shade? There are ripe figs on the tree out there, and bunches of little green grapes on the vine that grows over the cloister roof, and the leaves are just beginning to go yellow. We don’t have much time, Agnar, and we can’t afford to waste it all writing things down. Think about where we are now! You want me to talk about Karlsefni. He would think us mad to bury ourselves in shadows. He wouldn’t dream of wasting his days telling you a story about his life. He’d be thinking about the present. He’d have talked to me about you, about Rome, about the significance of this strange new world we’re living in. He seemed a quiet man in public, but he was usually very self-possessed; he didn’t give much away. He was always observant. Even at the very end, when his body let him down at last, he was still wanting to know, still trying to find out. Even when he couldn’t leave his own hearth, he still wanted the news, he still insisted on speaking to every passing stranger.
Maybe you don’t know – you were so young when you left – and of course you’re a Southerner anyway – but Karlsefni made the chieftain of Glaumbaer one of the most important men in Iceland. Snorri has inherited what his father made, and he holds it well. But though Karlsefni was of good family himself, he had to make his own place in the world. He bought Glaum when we got back from Norway. He paid a good price for it, but Vinland had made us rich, and Karlsefni never minded spending money on what he’d set his heart on. He never left Iceland again, which you may think strange for a man who spent the first half of his life travelling nearly all the time. He’d found what he wanted, you see.