Meadowland Tom Holt

by Meadowland (lit)

  That was enough for the leather-boat man; he drops his spear, swings round on his heels and runs for his life. Gudrid lets out a whoop they could probably have heard back in the Eastern Settlement; she's jiggling the sword with one hand and her tit with the other, and the rear end of the enemy column starts backing away; meanwhile the bull's roaring like hell behind them, kicking and prancing about, and between Gudrid and the bull it's all too much for them. They start to break and run. The front end, who can't see what's going on behind them but know that their mates have just turned and run away - they stop pushing forward against our men, and we push back at them. Ohtar sticks his spear into one of them as he's trying to look back over his shoulder - goes in one ear, comes out the other, you never saw the like - and then it's more or less over. They're all running like mad for the wood. Someone up on the roof manages to drop one of them with an arrow; the shot doesn't kill him, it's being trampled on by his mates that does that. I clock one of them with my lump of rock as they go by, but not enough to stop him; our boys catch another two of them who trip over as they run, and pretty well tear them to bits. And that's the end of the battle.

  I can picture Gudrid in my mind, standing there like she's just woken up out of a really strange dream. She drops the sword on the ground, does her bodice up really quick, scampers back in the house and slams the door. Some of our men - the ones at the back, mostly - are jumping up and down and yelling, because we've won. The ones up front are more stunned-like, can't figure out what the hell just happened. Thorfinn - he's at the back, been there all the time -he's shouting orders but nobody's paying him a blind bit of notice. I hop down off the roof, I'm worried sick because I lost sight of Eyvind when our lot started giving ground and falling back, and I reckon he must've been killed. There s a ring of men round Thorbrand's body, but nobody seems to want to do anything, they're standing there gawping like they'd never seen a dead man before. I pull Eyvind out from under him, and that's when he says, 'Oh fuck, don't say you're here too.' And that was our great and glorious war against the leather-boat people; nearly lost by a moron and a bull, but saved by the same bull and by Gudrid's knockers. I tell you, when your officer cadets read up on their great battles of the past when they're learning how to be generals, they ought to study the Battle of Leif's Booths. It'd make war a lot more interesting if they did.

  As victories go, it was pretty sour. It'd been far too close; and two of us had been killed. Made no odds that we'd killed twice that number of the enemy; it wasn't as though we could eat them or cure their hides for shoe-uppers or anything, so it wasn't like when you stand around after a hunt looking at the bag, thinking about how well you've done. About the best that could be said for it was, we were still alive, and we weren't going to have to waste too much time getting rid of bodies. Actually that's a real issue sometimes, after a battle. Sometimes you can just let 'em lie, once you've buried your own; but if you're in your own territory, you've got to tidy up. Last thing you want to do after fighting a battle is spend a day digging ditches.

  But we made the effort; we buried Thorbrand and Bjarni where they fell and heaped up mounds over them, and we dug a trench out back for the leather-boat people. Just pitched them in; one of you grabs an ankle, someone else grabs a wrist, a little swing and a heave, and down they go. Anything else is a waste of energy.

  Eyvind was still pretty banged up, so we took him and a couple of others who'd been hurt into the back room, Thorfinn and Gudrid's bedroom, and laid them on the bed where they'd be nice and comfortable: wounded heroes, see. The rest of us flopped out on the benches. I don't think most of us slept that night - I got the feeling of lying there in the dark surrounded by sixty-odd people all awake and thinking. Weird, that is.

  Next morning, we tried to go to work same as usual, like nothing had happened. Felt all wrong. For one thing, all of us kept glancing up from what we were doing towards the woods, just in case a bunch of enemies had appeared out of it since we last looked. Normal work around the place didn't seem important any more. Milking or scraping down the yard or splitting logs or mending fence rails; there didn't seem any immediate need to get it done, because where was the point? We all knew we'd be leaving, sooner or later.

  All of us realised that, I think, pretty much as soon as the fighting stopped; but it was two or three days before anybody actually said anything, and even then it was just a hint here and there. I remember I was out in the marsh with a man called Sigurd Eyes; we were picking up chunks of bog-iron for the forge. Nasty job, that: you had to stand or plod about, over your ankles in greasy grey mud, bent over all the time, looking down for the right size and shade of black. Each of us had a big fat oak bucket, and we knew better than to go back till both buckets were full.

  We'd been at it quite a while before either of us said anything; then Sigurd came straight out with it, which surprised me; I knew him quite well by then, of course, because all of us knew everybody else inside out, after being cooped up tight there for so long. But I'd always figured him for the type that gets on with it without thinking: gets up in the morning, does his work, eats and goes to sleep with never a thought beyond the job in hand. He was a Greenlander, Eastern Settlement; I'd known him slightly from Brattahlid, though he was from one of the outer farms.

  'How long do you think it'll be?' he said to me.

  'What?' I replied.

  He frowned, like I was being dumb on purpose. 'How long before we pack it in and go home,' he said.

  'You think it'll come to that?' I asked him.

  'Bound to,' he replied, all matter-of-fact. 'We can't stay here, not now

  I guess I knew exactly what was in his mind, but just for my own sake, for devilment, I played dumb; suppose it was easier arguing with him than with myself, inside my own head. 'Because of the battle, you mean?'

  'Of course.' He stooped, and a bit more iron clinked in the bucket. 'We couldn't ever settle. It'd always be at the back of our minds - will it be today when they come back.'

  'I don't know,' I said. 'We beat them once, didn't we?'

  Sigurd laughed. 'More by luck than judgement. You know that. If it hadn't been for Gudrid-'

  'Yes, well,' I said. 'Maybe she spooked them so badly they won't ever set foot round here again. Her and the bull,' I added.

  He shrugged, like it was a non-issue. 'Even if they never come back, we'll spend the rest of our lives waiting for them,' he said. 'It's, I don't know, trust. We can't trust this place any more. Any day it could suddenly turn on us again and attack us. It's like a marriage, living somewhere: got to have trust, or it's nothing but trouble. It'd be like living on the lip of a volcano, like the poor people do back in the old country.'

  'But it's good here,' I said. 'At least, it's starting to get good. It's warmer and the grass is better, and there's timber; and the way things are going, the rate we're building the herd up, it won't be that many years before we can start branching off and setting up our own farms. You tell me, where else do you know of where you can still do that? And it's the only way the likes of you and me are ever going to have our own places.'

  He sighed. 'True,' he said. 'But it won't happen. Nobody's going to wander off two days' walk from here, out in the wilds on his own. All packed in tight together we might just be safe. Singly, out there, no chance. Fact is, we should never've listened to Thorfinn Thordsson. We knew about the locals, because of what happened to Thorvald Eirikson. That ought to have been enough to warn us.

  'All right,' I said, straightening up for a moment. 'But the plan's always been that we're just, you know, the pioneers. Soon as we're up and running here, Thorfinn'll send the ships back and bring in a new batch of settlers, till there's enough of us here that the locals won't dare mess with us. That'd solve that, wouldn't it?'

  'If he could get anybody to come.' Sigurd shook his head. 'Listen, you're talking about bringing out women - and kids, even; otherwise the settlement doesn't stand a chance. You might find a few men daft or desperate enough to come out here, e
ven with the threat hanging over us; women'd have more sense.

  'I don't know,' I said to him. 'I think now we've come so far, put so much work in-' I tailed off, and he didn't say anything, and we finished the job off in silence. The rest of the day I couldn't keep my mind on what I was meant to be doing; I scat my thumb with the hammer, knocking pegs in fence rails, and tore a hole in a hide I was scraping down. It was like an itch or a stone in your shoe: sometimes you could put it out of your mind and then it came back, and everything I did seemed to be soiled with it, like the hems of your clothes when you walk in the mud.

  Eyvind was up and about again after three days' good rest. There was nothing visibly wrong with him, but he was sour and quiet, didn't want to talk. I guess we were all waiting for Thorfinn to say something, but the days went by and he carried on giving out the day's orders each morning, telling each of us what we'd be doing, same as normal. But there was a sort of forced ordinariness about him, if you get my meaning; he was having to try and act natural, which of course is very hard to do if you're trying to do it. Meanwhile summer was getting on; if we were going to leave, we'd have to make the decision before the autumn started, so we could put by the stores for the journey

  Then one day - it was evening, we'd come in from outside, and Gudrid and the women were getting the place tidied up for dinner - it so happened that they'd had the bundles of fur out, the ones we'd had off the leather-boaters in trade. It was Thorfinn's idea: pull 'em down out of the rafters and check them every now and again to see the damp or the moth hadn't been at them. Anyhow, when we came in from work the furs were all laid out on the tables, and the women were about to pack them away again. Gudrid looks over at Thorfinn, and asks him, 'Where should we put these?'

  He looks at her like he doesn't get the point of the question. 'Back up where they live, he says.

  She shrugs. 'All right, she says. 'I just thought, we might as well get them bundled up and pack them in some hay in a barrel.'

  Thorfinn frowns. 'Why?' he says.

  'For the journey home,' Gudrid answers.

  And all of us listening, of course; standing there, waiting for him to answer. You could've cut the silence like cheese. He took a long time, like he was thinking about it; and he didn't look round at us or anything, but he really didn't need to.

  Eventually 'That's a good idea,' he says; and Gudrid nods to the women, who fetch out the old rags and the wool waste, and she asks a couple of the men to go out back and fetch in one of the empty barrels. And that was it; that was the moment we knew the settlement had failed, and we were going home.

  Thorfinn never made what you might call a formal announcement or anything; but in each morning's daily orders, there'd be two or three jobs that were to do with preparing for the journey - like sending men up into the woods to gather beech-bark and moss for caulking the ships, or drying or curing some bits of meat instead of cooking them for the evening meal. Simple as that, and at least there wasn't any fuss. But we had Gudrid to thank, because none of us could ever've raised the question straight out with Thorfinn. He wasn't that kind of man.

  Now the only question was, could we be ready in time before the cold set in, or were we going to be stuck there another winter, waiting for the spring weather? There again, Thorfinn made it difficult for us all by not saying anything straight out about our plans; it was like he'd told us all about it, but none of us'd been paying attention, and we didn't dare admit we'd not been listening. We kept waiting for him to tell us to start overhauling the ships; he had us out drawing pitch off the pine trees and twisting ropes and putting up supplies, ready to start the overhaul, but before long everything, all the materials were up together but still no word from Thorfinn.

  Meanwhile, as we were waiting, we had another death: Ohtar this time. It started off as a septic finger and then it got really bad. His whole hand swelled up, fever set in, and in the end he couldn't talk or hardly move at all. Sad way for him to go; he was the quiet, solid type, the sort you need on a long-haul job. Talking to him was like digging gravel out of a stream; bloody hard work, and just when you think you've got a good spadeful, it slides off the blade back into the water. He was hard going in winter, when there was nothing to do; but if you were doing a job of work together, you could turn your back on him and know that his part was as good as done. Got to admit, I'm the opposite; I'd always rather talk than graft, and I'd be useless on my own, because the thought that unless I do it, it won't get done would put me off even starting.

  When Ohtar'd been on his back for three days and it was pretty clear that he wasn't ever getting up again, some of us took it in turns sitting by him, just to keep him company Not sure he appreciated it, but we did it anyway When it was my turn, and we were alone in the house, everyone else out at work, he beckoned me over and grabbed my wrist. It was plain enough that he was off his head by then, but if he wanted to talk that was what I was there for. Also, I don't think I could've got my hand free without cutting off his fingers.

  'That mate of yours,' he said, in a raspy, painful sort of voice. 'He about anywhere?'

  I shook my head. 'He's off up the woods,' I said. 'Won't be back now till it's dark, I don't suppose.'

  That seemed to bother Ohtar. 'Give him a message from me,' he said.

  'Wait and tell him yourself,' I replied; because he was sounding urgent, like he didn't expect to be still alive come nightfall.

  'Just in case,' he said. 'Tell him I was right after all, about the fetch.'

  Well; crazy stuff, like you'd expect from a man dying of the fever. 'I'll tell him,' I lied.

  'Tell him,' Ohtar went on. 'Tell him that that wasn't all I saw I didn't say anything before, because I was waiting to see if the fetch was a true fetch. If it was, I'd know the rest was true too. You see that, don't you?'

  'Makes sense to me,' I said.

  'Tell him,' Olitar went on, 'that I was out back of the house one night, and the moon was full. I wasn't doing anything, just getting logs, and I ran into a man I'd never seen before. He looked like he was someone I knew, but I couldn't remember him, and he definitely wasn't one of us. I was going to ask him who he was and how he'd got there, but I couldn't get the words out, somehow Anyway he nodded to me like we were old friends passing on the road, and went on; but then he stopped and turned back, like he'd just remembered something he'd been meaning to tell me.

  "'It'd all have been different," he said to me, "if only you'd landed a mile or so further south. But no, you had to know best."

  'I didn't like the sound of that,' Ohtar went on. 'What I mean is, it didn't make sense, but it felt like I understood what he was getting at. So I asked him, "Who are you?"

  'He grinned at me - scary sight, that was - and he said, "Who you are depends on where you are, and I'm here. Come on," he added, "you've been here all this time, you should know me by now" Again, I sort of felt I understood, though I couldn't have explained it to you then, and I can't now

  "'What do you want?" I asked him, and he shrugged his shoulders.

  "'What do you want?" he asked me back, and I didn't know what to say "There you are, then," he went on. "That answers your question for you, surely If you don't know, how can I know? And if you don't know why you're here, how can you know who you are? Of course, you and me'll have plenty of time to get acquainted, but the others are just passing through, so it doesn't matter. But I always liked you; you've always been the job in hand, no matter where; on a ship, forecastle-man, I reckon that means you're everywhere, and you make it into just the one place. I guess if you've got to settle down, there's worse places than this."

  'He was starting to get me down, but then he raised his hand and waved; I blinked, or I got something in my eye, and when I next looked he'd gone. I went after him, but I couldn't see him anywhere. Any rate,' Ohtar went on, 'not till now But here he is again.' He was looking past me, over my shoulder. 'You should've told me you knew him, Kari,' he said, 'though I suppose I should've guessed.' Then he breathed out, long and
slow, and sort of folded up back onto the bed; he was still breathing, but he'd gone all limp and boneless. He hung on for another day but he didn't wake up again; and then we buried him under a mound at the edge of the meadow, close by the woods.

  Ohtar dying like that seemed to help Thorfinn pull himself together; because the day after we buried Ohtar, he told us to make a start on overhauling the ship. That was good news, because we reckoned we still had time to sail home before the cold weather, if we got a move on. But it didn't work out that way Two of the ships were fine, didn't need anything doing to them except caulking and pitching and a bit of ropework. The third, though - Bjarni Herjolfson's old ship, the one Eyvind and me'd always sailed on - was in a terrible state. Don't ask me how it got like that when the other two stayed sound; but the strakes were so rotten that in places you could break off a handful and crumble it up with your fingers, and you could poke a hole through the boards with your thumb. It was so bad that it might almost've been better to tear out the sound bits and build them into a whole new frame, but we didn't want to admit to that, if you see what I mean - it'd have been too depressing. So Thorfinn decided we'd patch it up, cut out the rot and splice in new timbers; he tried to make it sound like it was just a few weeks' work, but he wasn't fooling anybody Luckily, we had more than enough good, seasoned wood for the job, which meant we stood a chance of getting the work done before the next winter set in. That was the most we could hope for; so, like it or not, we were there for another four months, at Leif's Booths.

  I've known some slow winters, but none quite as bad as that one. Gudrid wasn't talking to Thorfinn, not really since the battle; if they needed to talk about something to do with the running of the house, they'd do it in the hall, in front of everybody, and they were so polite to each other, you could tell how brittle things'd got between them. We carried on working on the ship far too long into the cold season; result, five men went down with cold fevers, and it's a wonder none of them died. Worse than that, we were so busy with the ship we didn't have time for curing fish or smoking meat - we'd finally come to terms with it and slaughtered all the livestock, but somehow a lot of the meat didn't get preserved, so it went bad and had to be thrown away Upshot of that was, there wasn't enough food - but by the time we'd noticed, it was far too cold out to go hunting or fishing. So we had to go on strict rations, which didn't improve matters. A couple of men took it badly, panicked the rest of us; they were talking about killing the four old Irish women, since we didn't need them any more and the rest of us could share their rations. Gudrid put a stop to that kind of talk, but sometimes it's worse, shutting people up when they're in that sort of mood, there's the risk they'll just go ahead and do it anyway, in the middle of the night when everybody else is asleep. So the rest of us were on edge about that. Thorfinn said he didn't trust the men who'd been suggesting it, wanted to take their axes and knives off them; they said they'd kill him if he tried it, and he backed down. Gudrid moved the old women into the inner room, with her and Thorfinn, and that solved the problem, but now we were practically at each others' throats all the time, so nobody dared say anything, all day long; we just sat, or lay on the floor, and time passes very slow indeed when you reach that stage. It was like hanging by your fingertips off a ledge, with a bloody great drop if you let go. You've got to hang on, you daren't move, but you know it's only a matter of time before your fingers start to slip. As if that wasn't bad enough, it was a harder winter than usual. We couldn't face being hungry and cold, so we piled the fire up high and tried not to figure out how long the wood was going to last at the rate we were getting through it. I think we were down to three days' supply by the time the thaw started and we were able to get up into the forest to cut some more. It was just as though Meadowland was getting spiteful with us for wanting to leave, though she'd made it pretty clear that she didn't want us around any more. Sounds strange, but I've known people like that, so why should places be any different?