Meadowland

by Tom Holt

  I nodded. ‘You used to be a merchant, then.’

  Kari grinned. ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘More like a karl; no word for it in Greek, you’re all either free men or slaves, and anyhow it’s such a different system, I couldn’t make you understand. Doesn’t matter. Best way to put it is, me and Eyvind used to work for merchants, or with them; we used to help work the ship, and it was the boss who decided where we were headed for. It’s-‘ He rolled his eyes. ‘It’s much simpler than the way you people do things, and much more complicated at the same time. If you see what I’m getting at.’

  ‘Different,’ I said.

  ‘Different, and leave it at that.’ Kari yawned. ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘I’ve been over here I don’t know how long, and that’s probably the longest conversation I’ve had with a Greek. I always figured your lot for different, but maybe you aren’t as different as all that.’

  Was that a compliment? Looking back, I suppose it was, though of course he knew perfectly well when he said it that I’d have to think about it before I could make up my mind; and presumably that’s why he phrased it that way. It’s one of the things Varangians like to do: they say things in such a way that they sound like insults but turn out to be compliments, or the other way round. I think that’s a strange way to behave, since in their culture it’s not only acceptable but expected of you to cut a man’s head off on the spot if he insults you a certain way; other insults, on the other hand, are just the conventional way of being friendly and good-humoured. I don’t think I could live like that. You’d forever be having to think about what you’re saying before you actually say it, and that’d be no good for a Greek. Most of what we say is thinking aloud, and most of the rest is the same but without any thinking at all. If we saw things the way the Varangians do, we’d all be dead inside a week.

  Before we could take matters any further, the other old man, Eyvind, let off the biggest yawn you could ever imagine, and said he was dead beat and needed to sleep. It was, he pointed out, his watch first; but what the hell was the point of carting around a useless great lump like Harald Sigurdson if you couldn’t slide off your duty assignments on him? Harald - the young, silent man - pulled an even sadder face than the one he’d been wearing and pulled his cloak a bit tighter round his shoulders; the other two lay down on their backs without another word, shut their eyes and were both fast asleep a heartbeat later. That’s another thing Varangians can do, by the way. Some of them, anyhow.

  I suppose friendship is a bit like a disease. Once you’ve caught it, you’re stuck with it, and it spreads. You can’t just back out of it once it’s begun. Either you stay with it or you bring it to an end, turn it into something else - hatred, contempt - like turning grape must into wine. What I mean is, once I’d taken the step and started talking to the Varangians, I couldn’t very well stop, not unless I was prepared to offend them and turn them into enemies. Not that I minded terribly much. It made a pleasant change to have someone to talk to on the long drag through Illyria and down through Greece. I just have this thing about irrevocable steps, that’s all. If I can, I stay clear of them, even if I’m pretty sure they’d be no bother, or even to my advantage. It’s just the way I am. Sometimes I get the feeling that I’ve lived my whole life like a man on a beach who’s taken off all his clothes but can’t actually bring himself to get into the water; so he just stands there naked, can’t go back into town with no clothes on, can’t go forward into the sea. Not that that’s anybody’s business but my own.

  We talked a lot, the Varangians and I. It was a curious system. Before I opened my mouth that night, they were always nattering away among themselves, and I didn’t exist. Then I changed all that; and from then on, they - well, the two old men - they never talked to each other, they always said everything to me, even if they were having a discussion about something. It was like finance committee meetings where, if you want to say something, you’ve got to address your remarks to the chairman, even when you want to tell the man sitting next to you that he’s being a bloody fool. On the other hand, Kari and Eyvind never seemed even the slightest bit interested in anything about my life, or what I did, my family or my home or anything. They wanted to tell me things, things that both of them already knew but usually didn’t agree about. It was like I’d suddenly become the official arbitrator for everything. I suppose you could see that as a compliment, but it wasn’t really. It puzzled me, until I gathered from things they said that they’d known each other all their lives - born within a week of each other on the same farm, went to sea together, sailed on all the same journeys, left the North and came to the City together - so it sort of stands to reason that they’d long since either reached agreement on everything or else come to a rock-solid impasse, so there simply wasn’t any point going over the issues again. Introduce me into the equation, and you’ve got a whole new set of rules. No wonder they never seemed to shut up, all the way from Heraclea to bloody Corinth.

  Which reminds me: it was not far from Corinth that we ran into a spot of trouble. I shouldn’t say this, being a loyal servant of the Empire, but once you’re south of Thebes, the roads are terrible. Bone dry all the year round, of course, and so much traffic up and down; no wonder the tracks are rutted axle-deep in places, which can be pretty terrifying on those mountain passes, where the highway’s just this little scratch on the side of the cliff-face, and most of what there is looks like it’s all set to crumble away right under your wheels. All things considered, it’s a miracle, and a tribute to good solid Galatian craftsmanship, that our cart axles lasted as long as they did - all that heavy gold coinage bumping up and down, plus four grown men, over ruts and potholes and rocks as big as your head.

  The wheel eventually came off on the stretch between Corinth and Sparta. Don’t suppose you know it; very dry, very stony, grey and brown dirt with a sort of steel-green blur in the distance as you look out over the olive groves. Now our family’s supposed to be from Greece proper, way back - Athens, in case you’re interested, and I’m supposed to be a remote descendant of Eupolis the comic poet, who was around at the time of the Great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta; but that’s fifteen hundred years ago, so I don’t suppose it’s true - but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a rotten country and you can have it. It’s got this all-used-up feeling about it everywhere you go; you can’t travel a few miles without seeing bits of ruined building sticking up out of the dirt, like stones in a ploughed field. I find it rather depressing, as if nobody could be bothered to tidy the place up.

  But about the wheel. The consensus of opinion was, the axle sheared when we bounced off a rut into the trough, and all the weight of the cart landed on it. Anyhow, even I could see we didn’t have a hope in hell of mending the wretched thing ourselves; and the drivers of the other carts in the train were no help at all. The most they’d agree to do for us was find a blacksmith in Sparta and send him out to fix it. I pointed out that there we were, best part of two days from Sparta, further from Corinth, with several million gold tremisses and just the four of us to keep them safe for the Emperor until help came. My idea was to shift the money over onto the other carts, but that didn’t go down at all well. The extra weight, they insisted, would bugger up their axles as well, and then all four carts would be stranded out in the wilderness. I suppose they had a point, of sorts, but their attitude didn’t impress me very much. Nor was I materially reassured when they pointed out that I had three soldiers of the Varangian guard at my command to keep the money safe.

  Kari and Eyvind, on the other hand, didn’t seem bothered at all, even when I told them that the mountains of the Peloponnese were notorious for bandits, free-company men, Saracen pirates and Catalan privateers. Good, they said; let ‘em come, and if Harald Sigurdson wouldn’t mind leaving a few for us, we can have a bit of sport. I pointed out that neither of them were exactly in the first flush, but they pretended they hadn’t heard me, so presumably it was insulting to bring the matter up. It didn’t matter to them either way, the
y insisted; a bloody good scrap, and either victory or Valhalla, what more could anybody ask? I have no idea what Valhalla means, but from the way they said it, I don’t suppose it’s something I’d like, and I couldn’t be bothered to ask them to explain.

  So the rest of the train creaked off and left us. I was all for sitting in the shade of the cart and sulking like mad till we were rescued or died of thirst, but Eyvind decided to come over all brisk and useful. He pottered around for a bit until he found a spring of water, and then he pottered around a bit more, came back and told us he’d found a handy abandoned building where we could sleep and get shade from the sun.

  Turned out, of course, it was a tomb. Wonderful. At least, that’s what I think it must have been, though you never saw the like. Imagine the dome of Saint Sophia, but made of slates, carefully fitted together without fixings or mortar; and the only entrance is a little hole you have to crawl through on your hands and knees- ‘This is useless,’ I pointed out. ‘It’ll mean we’ve got to leave the cart outside.’

  Kari made a so-what gesture with his shoulders and hands. ‘We can get the money boxes in through the hole, no bother; and the cart’s not going anywhere, is it? That’s the whole point.’

  Actually, unloading the money hadn’t even occurred to me; I can be slow sometimes. But I wasn’t going to admit that. ‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘But a cart, even a mended cart, isn’t going to be much use to us with no horses; and I don’t know how things are where you come from, but around here, you don’t leave valuable horses unguarded all night next to the public road. Not if you want to see them again.’

  ‘Actually,’ Kari replied, ‘we don’t have horse-thieves in Iceland, the country’s just too small, and everybody knows everybody else. But I take your point. I was going to say, we’ll have to post a watch anyway, so whoever’s on guard can keep an eye on the horses too. Will that be all right by you?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, trying to make it sound like I was giving in for the sake of a quiet life, rather than because he was right. ‘You’re the guards, I suppose you know your job.’ An unpleasant thought occurred to me. ‘Post a guard, you said.’

  Kari laughed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘Eyvind and me and the boy wonder there’ll do it, you can stay in here in the warm and get some sleep.’ He looked at me for a moment, then added: ‘No offence, but you’d make a lousy guard; and, like you said, we need the horses.’

  Another of those double-sided insult-compliments, I suppose. Anyhow, that suited me, and as it turned out, I was let off helping lug the money boxes in through the door, too. All I had to carry was my blanket and my pillow - I’m sadly fussy, so I’d brought my own special pillow with me from the City. They’d probably have fetched them for me if I’d sat there long enough looking helpless, but I reckoned I’d lost enough face already for one day

  The tomb, and I’m pretty sure that’s what it had been once, was completely empty inside, though at first there was no way of knowing, because it was as dark as a bag in there. But Harald lit a fire; and when we found out the hard way that there wasn’t a chimney or anything like that, he scrambled up on one of the boxes and bashed a hole in the roof with his axe. It was still uncomfortably smoky in there, but not too bad, thanks to the through-draught from the door-hole.

  We’d only just settled in when I heard the most appalling roll of thunder, and then the sound of raindrops pecking on the slates, like King Xerxes’ two-million-strong army all drumming their fingers at the same time. It doesn’t often rain in Greece, but when it does, it gives it the full treatment. Water coming in through Harald’s improvised smoke-hole drowned our fire in no time flat, so we had to shift it over a bit and start again. Just as well, in fact, that Eyvind had insisted on us taking shelter for the night, or we’d all have been soaked to the skin.

  For a while we just sat there, feeling sorry for ourselves. Then Kari told Harald to go outside and take first watch; and Harald, rather to my surprise, refused. Come to think of it, those were the first words I heard him speak - in Norse, needless to say, not Greek; I’d been expecting a deep, bear-like rumble from a man of his size and disposition, but it turned out that he had a high, quiet, squeaky little voice, and he stuttered. He could be firm when he wanted to, though. No way was he going out in that, he told them, not with his weak chest (I’d just watched him dragging a money box through the door-hole all by himself); and if that meant the bandits stole the horses, he couldn’t care less, but in his considered opinion any bandit with enough brains to know how to breathe would be passing the night in a nice dry cave, so if we wanted to get drenched that was fine, but he was staying right where he was, and anybody who had problems with that could discuss the matter with his axe.

  He finished his speech - no other word for it; he gabbled his way through it like an amateur actor in front of a restless audience - and immediately went back to being still and silent. Thinking back, he reminded me of one of those strange mechanical toys they used to make in Alexandria, a thousand years or so back. You know the ones I mean: you boil up a big pot of water, the steam goes up a narrow pipe and pushes against a little gadget like a waterwheel with wings, and that drives a whole lot of cogs and gears’, and a little bronze statue of a flute-player spins round and round and makes a whistling noise. Then, when the steam runs out, it stops dead in its tracks. Constantine the Great or someone like that brought a whole lot of them back from Egypt, and when I was a kid they had them set up in the Forum of Arcadius, and they used to set them going sometimes on saints’ days.

  Anyway: I was expecting Kari and Eyvind to kick up a fuss about that, but instead they just nodded, as if to say fair enough, and after a brief silence Eyvind said he’d better take the first watch, then, and stomped out.

  I don’t remember exactly how the subject came up. The idea had been that we’d all get some sleep, but for some reason - the noise of the rain on the roof, is my guess - none of us could get off, and there’s something inherently silly about three grown men lying on the ground, wide awake, not talking. Eventually, Kari sat up, yawned and fished about in an old goatskin bag that he carried with him everywhere he went.

  ‘Chestnuts,’ he explained, when he noticed me watching him. ‘Back home, when we can get them, we like to roast them in front of the fire.’

  That reminded me of something. ‘Food,’ I said. ‘Have we got any?’

  Kari sighed. ‘Wondered when anybody’d mention that.

  And the answer is no, apart from these chestnuts and the burnt end of yesterday’s loaf. Thought we’d be in Sparta by now, see. Not to worry, though. Soon as it’s light, we’ll send out young Harald to kill something - he’s good at that. And meanwhile,’ he added cheerfully, ‘there’s these chestnuts. It’s all right, I’ve got plenty to go round.’

  Actually, they weren’t bad, considered in the light of there being nothing else, and once I’d got some food inside me I cheered up a bit. Kari and Harald were munching steadily away, and I thought it’d be nice to start up a bit of a conversation. That’s me all over, I’m afraid.

  ‘You were saying earlier,’ I said, ‘about some place you’d been where vines and wheat grew wild. Where was that?’

  I think Harald may have made a slight groaning noise, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. ‘Ah,’ Kari said with his mouth full, ‘now there’s a story. Wineland we used to call it; it’s a big island way out in the north-western sea. Furthest island out there is, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Wineland,’ I repeated. ‘After the grapes, I suppose.’

  Kari nodded. ‘That’s right, he said. ‘Of course, that’s not what it was supposed to be called. But Leif Eirikson - that’s Lucky Leif, the son of the man who founded the Greenland colony - either he misheard it when Bjarni mentioned it, or he thought Wineland sounded better. Anyway, the name sort of stuck, and there you go.’

  ‘Greenland,’ I repeated. ‘Where’s that?’

  This time, Harald groaned quite loudly and distinctly Kari looked a
ll wise, like Minerva’s owl on an old statue. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘For a clever man, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know’

  I shrugged. ‘I was never any good at geography,’ I replied. Then, when Kari looked at me: ‘The names of places,’ I explained, ‘countries and cities and rivers and mountains, and where they all are in relation to each other.’

  ‘Right.’ Kari nodded slowly ‘Never knew there was a word for it. Which is a bit arse-about-face, because of course I probably know more about that sort of thing than most people, even you clever Greeks in the City. Still,’ he went on, ‘I’d have expected you to know about Greenland, because it’s quite a big settlement these days, practically its own little country.’

  ‘Sorry, no,’ I said. ‘So,’ I went on, because I knew I’d walked straight into a story, like a fox putting its foot in a wire, ‘where is it, then?’

  Kari swallowed his mouthful of chestnut before answering. ‘North,’ he said. ‘In fact, as far north as you can go, pretty well, before it gets so cold and snowy you can’t get any further.’

  ‘Must be an all-right sort of place,’ I said, ‘with a name like that.’

  Kari laughed. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘It’s a dump. Just a little frilly edge of farmland between the sea and the mountains; sheep and cattle just about survive there, and most years you can scrape together enough hay to see them through the winter, more or less. But the name was just a gag, a trick, to kid people into moving out there. Eirik -that’s Red Eirik, who started the settlement - he was the one who decided to call it that.’ Kari shifted a little to get comfortable, and scooped some charcoal out of the jar onto the fire. ‘But that’s all a very long story, and I don’t suppose you’re interested.’

  CHAPTER