Meadowland

by Tom Holt

TWO

  Actually, he wasn’t far wrong. But I had the feeling Actually, that he wanted to tell me about it, and he’d be sure to get his way somehow or other, sooner or later, so

  I thought it’d probably be easier all round if I gave in straight away

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘It’s always interesting to learn things you don’t know very much about.’

  Kari shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘Actually, it sort of ties up with what you were asking about earlier - Wineland and all that.’

  Well, why not? I thought. Maybe it’ll help me get to sleep. ‘Tell me about that too,’ I said.

  There was this man (Kari said) by the name of Red Eirik.

  Now, no offence intended, but I reckon you Greeks aren’t a patch on us Northerners when it comes to neat, punchy proverbs and sayings. But a few years ago, I heard a Greek talking about someone, and he said trouble followed this man around like crows following the plough; and straight away, it put me in mind of Red Eirik. You see, it’s not the plough’s fault that the crows follow, it doesn’t encourage them or anything; and Eirik never went looking for trouble, because deep down he was a peaceful sort of man who only wanted to live quietly with his neighbours and get on with a bit of work. But it never seemed to come out of the mould that way First Eirik and his father got thrown out of Norway because of some bother there. I don’t know the details, but everybody who knew him said it wasn’t Eirik’s fault, and he was quite upset that he had to kill those people. Anyhow, Eirik settled in Iceland, like so many Norwegians were doing at that time, and for a while he got on quite nicely in Hauksdal, which is good country, and good people live there. But a couple of bad men, real troublemakers, tried to push Eirik around, and after he’d killed them their relatives kicked up a hell of a fuss - that’s next of kin for you, pathetically narrow-minded - so he had to clear out of Hauksdal and move to Breidafjord. By this time he was sick to death of trouble, and he figured it’d be a good idea to stay clear of other people as far as possible - if there weren’t any people about for him to kill, he’d be far less likely to kill anybody, and that’d be just fine. So he built a farm on Oxen Island, which is a pretty remote place. Also, he went out of his way to be sociable and pleasant to the few neighbours he had. He even lent one of them his bench-boards- Sorry, I forgot. Bench-boards are pretty carved panels that you dowel onto the fronts of your benches. You must have benches, even in Constantinople. For sitting on. All right; back home we build our houses long and low, with one big room where everybody sits around in the evenings and in winter when it’s too cold and dark to go out. I’m forgetting, you don’t have cold in these parts, not cold cold, but you’ll just have to use your imagination. Anyhow, there’s one big long room, and usually one or two smaller rooms leading off it, for the head of the family to sleep in, and storerooms and so on. In the main hall there’s usually long benches running the length of the room, and if you’re reasonably well-set and a bit of a show-off, you stick on these carved panels-You get the idea, I’m sure.

  Anyway, Red Eirik had a fine set of bench-boards which he’d brought with him from Norway, and, trying to be sociable, he lent them to a neighbour for some special occasion, and the neighbour was a miserable bugger and wouldn’t give them back. This led to words, words led to other stuff, and pretty soon, Eirik had the deceased’s family snapping round his heels yet again and found himself in need of somewhere else to live.

  By now, he was more or less at the end of his rope. All the bad stuff in his life, he decided, was because of other people - because, left to himself, he was just a peaceful, harmless farmer who wouldn’t hurt a mouse - and the only course left open for him was to up sticks and go where there weren’t any other people at all.

  A tall order, that; but as luck would have it, he remembered a story he’d heard about some man called Gunnbjorn Ulfson who’d been blown off course trying to reach Iceland, a hundred years or so earlier, and ended up on some island nobody had ever been to before. Now Gunnbjorn just wanted to get to Iceland, he wasn’t interested in exploring, so he turned round and sailed back the way he’d come - his luck was in and he made it home. He told people about his adventure, naturally, but even the people who believed him weren’t particularly interested. As time went on, what Gunnbjorn had said about where these islands were and how you got there started to rust away a bit, so to speak, and by the time the story reached Eirik it was all thin and flaky Never mind: if Gunnbjorn was telling the truth, this island of his was completely empty, and that was just the sort of place Eirik was after. He packed up as much stuff as he could fit on board a knoerr - there I go again: that’s our word for the deep, chubby ships we use for going to places and carrying stuff about, as opposed to your slim, thoroughbred warship, which is your quintessential rich man’s toy and not really much good for anything useful. Anyhow, he took along all his farm workers and some neighbours who’d got into trouble for being on his side, pointed his ship in the general direction of where he thought Gunnbjorn’s islands might possibly be, and set off. Everybody reckoned that was the last anyone’d ever see of Red Fink, and the general view was that that’d be no bad thing.

  Imagine people’s surprise, then, when the following summer Eirik sails back to Breidafjord (where, strictly speaking, he wasn’t supposed to set foot ever again, on pain of death), and announces that he’s found Gunnbjorn’s island. Furthermore, he says, it’s huge, and it’s the most wonderful country. The sea’s crawling with fish and seals, sky full of gulls, and the pasture’s so good that you ought to be able to keep your cattle out nine months of the year; in fact, Eirik says, it’s so rich and green, the only possible name for the place is Greenland.

  Of course, you’ve never been to Iceland, so you probably don’t appreciate how something like that would’ve sounded. Basically, Iceland is a few blades of grass between the volcanoes. I’m overstating it, of course, but a lot of it’s pretty rough, nothing but black shingle and rock, when it’s not buried deep in snow Part of the story, obviously, was that Eirik wanted to rub his enemies’ noses in it. They’d made him pack up and run for his life, and he’d gone and found this amazing paradise of green grass where a man’d hardly have to work at all if he didn’t want to. The other thing was, Eirik was recruiting. Sure, he didn’t want to live in a crowded place again, where you can’t stand on top of your own mountain without seeing at least one or two roofs in the distance; but he was realistic enough to know that if he wanted to make a go of settling in Greenland, he needed manpower. The difference would be, he figured, that if he founded a settlement and he was the boss and everybody accepted that and did as they were told, there wouldn’t be any reason for upsets and failings-out and all the rubbish he’d had to put up with all his life.

  Give him his due, Eirik was a persuasive man. Someone told me once that when he sailed back to Greenland the next summer, twenty-five ships went with him. Call that forty men to a ship, that’s close on a thousand people, and it’s news to me that there ever were more than a couple of thousand living out there on the middle-west coast, so they must’ve come from all over Iceland to join him. Not all of them made it, of course. Some of them came to harm - they ran into an earthquake under the sea, would you believe, which did for two or three ships and scared the shit out of the rest of them, and after that some of them thought better of it and turned back. But there were still close on six hundred people with him when he made landfall right down at the pointy end of Greenland.

  The strange thing about it is, Eirik was right. Not about the green grass and the fish and the gulls, of course; he was lying through his teeth about that. But it was true that once he’d settled in and the colony or settlement or whatever you want to call it had found its feet and sorted itself out, that was pretty well the end of Eirik’s troubles, at least as far as falling out with people was concerned. Eirik built himself a house and started farming, and pretty soon he had three big barns just to keep the hay in, so you can see he was doing all right. Better still, everybody
who went with him seemed to have left their more boisterous habits behind in Iceland, because people managed to get on fairly well without quarrelling or killing each other, and I get the impression it was a good place to live, if you like quiet. Eirik’s wife had converted to the Faith - this was fifteen years or so before Iceland went over, so you can see she was ahead of her time and quite daring, even - and he didn’t seem to mind in the least; he even built her a little church so she could go and pray and say the holy Mass without disturbing anybody Shows you how thoughtful and considerate he could be, once he’d shaken off those bad-luck crows.

  Now, one of the people who went out with Fink was a miserable old bastard called Herjolf Bardason- ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s an interesting story. Goes to show, too, how people can change their ways, if they set their mind to it.’ I yawned, rather pointedly ‘Well, it’s been a long day and I’m bushed, so I think I’ll get my head down for a bit.’

  Kari looked at me. ‘I thought you wanted to hear the story.’

  ‘I did,’ I replied, ‘and you very kindly told it to me. I enjoyed it. Now-‘

  ‘That’s only the beginning,’ Kari said. ‘Actually, it’s more like the bit before the beginning, because the story really starts with Herjolf Bardason, the man I was just going to tell you about.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Or rather, his son,’ Kari added. ‘Bjarni Herjolfson. I knew him very well, of course. You’ll enjoy hearing about him, he was an interesting man.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said, trying to sound like I meant it. ‘Maybe tomorrow-‘

  Herjolf Bardason (Kari continued) was a wilful sort of a man, always had to get his own way People like that can cause a lot of trouble, though sometimes more good than harm comes of it and then we call them determined and resolute and stuff like that, and everybody thinks well of them. Anyhow, Herjolf could be as resolute as a billy goat when he wanted to; and as soon as he heard Red Eirik sounding off about how great Greenland was, he made up his mind right away, he was going to go out there and start a new life.

  Bloody stupid idea, because Herjolf was fifty-five if he was a day, and that’s an old man where I come from. Not like he had any need to up sticks and start over, either. He was better than well off, good farm, plenty of stock; his son Bjarni was a grown man, he’d never settled to farming so his dad bought him a ship and he’d taken to the merchant life, done very well for himself, so Herjolf never wanted for flour or timber or any of the stuff Icelanders have to bring in from overseas. Absolutely no call to throw it all over and go plunging off into the unknown. But he’d made up his mind to go, and he went.

  Now, then- (Here Kari took a deep breath, like a man about to dive into deep water.)

  Now, then: this is where Eyvind and me come into the story. Eyvind and me, we were born and raised at Drepstokk, which was where old Herjolf farmed. Our families were nothing much; they came over on the first ships to Iceland, but they were hired men, and that’s what they stayed. My dad was Herjolf’s stockman, and Eyvind’s dad helped with the horses, watched the charcoal, did pretty well anything he was told. Him and me, we were born three days apart - I’m the eldest, never let him forget it these sixty years - and I don’t suppose we’ve been out of each other’s company more than a few days all that time. Well, we both knew Herjolf’s son Bjarni since we were kids. He was a good man, Bjari, though he had more than a bit of his old man’s stubborn streak. They were alike in more ways than they were different, so it was bound to happen that they were always falling out, bickering over how things should be done round the farm. Herjolf’s ways were tried and tested and he was set in them tighter than a gatepost, Bjarni was always thinking up clever new ideas to do the job better in half the time. Both of them were right, of course, so neither’d ever give way So, soon as Bjarni was old enough, he decided to get away from the farm and take up trading. Wheat and barley don’t grow in Iceland, there’s precious little timber for building or firing, no iron for tools, no flax for linen, no tar, no honey; so we trade for what we need with what we’ve got.

  So, that first year, Bjari filled up the hold of his ship with a load of stuff his dad gave him - wool, broadcloth, sheepskins, tanned and raw hides, tallow, sulphur, six dozen cartwheel cheeses and even a cage of falcons (guess who had the job of snaring the bloody things; and they can give you a nasty nip when they’re angry, too) - and started asking round the neighbourhood to see who fancied coming with him.

  Important thing you need to remember about Iceland, and it’s something I fancy you might have trouble getting hold of. No cities; no towns, no villages. Everybody lives on a farm, whether he’s the farmer himself (and that makes him a big man), or one of his brothers or sons or nephews, or just one of the hired men; we all live in the same house, and sleep in the long hall on the benches - except for the farmer and his wife, they have a room to themselves, but all the rest of us just crowd in together like puppies in the straw Stands to reason, you can’t live that way unless you learn pretty quick how to fit in. If you don’t, it’s best for all concerned if you clear out as soon as you can. Fact was, Eyvind and me didn’t fit. All the time we were growing up, it’s like there was a little voice in the back of our .heads saying, you boys were never born to be hired hands, doing the same work every day, every year for the rest of your lives, just so you can have food to eat and two yards of a bench to sleep on. That didn’t sit well with living so snug and cosy with sixty-odd other people, and all of them figuring that there wasn’t any other way things could possibly be, and anyone who thought different must be touched in the head. So, when Bjarni asked us if we wanted to go off with him trading in Norway, we didn’t think about it longer than a heartbeat. We grabbed our coats and shoes and axes and we were halfway out to the boatshed before he called us back and said he wasn’t leaving till the spring.

  Now, my old mother always said I was born stupid and went steadily downhill from there, and I’m not saying she was altogether wrong. We wanted to leave Drepstokk because we couldn’t stick being cooped up close with the same people day after day And what did we do? We joined a ship’s crew She knew a thing or two about people, my mother.

  You see, on the farm it was tight, but at least you spent the day outside, in the open. On a ship, twenty men and a full cargo in a fifty-foot boat, you can’t stand up or walk two steps without treading on somebody If you sneeze the whole crew gets wet; and for five days, seven days, ten, there’s absolutely no place to go. You can’t just step outside when it all gets too much; and either it’s a heavy sea and everybody’s working like crazy, elbows in each other’s faces, or it’s flat and calm and there’s absolutely fucking nothing to do, just sit still and quiet, because after a bit on a ship everybody’s said everything they’ve got to say, three or four times over, so if you want to keep from getting your head stove in, you keep your face shut and don’t say a word.

  Well, that’s the seafaring life for you, and I’ve got to say I never took to it much. But short of jumping off in the middle of the Norway Sea and swimming home there wasn’t a lot I could do once we’d started; and once we got there, of course, I forgot all about how shitty the journey was. Once we reached Norway, there were all kinds of amazing things. There were towns, a hundred houses all next to each other, and people making things and selling things I’d never even heard of, and there were strangers. Living on the farm, you knew everybody, you’d see a face you’d never seen before maybe once every five years. I saw more strangers in Norway in an hour than I’d ever set eyes on in my whole life.

  So Eyvind and me, we stuck at the trading, in spite of having to be on ships; and Bjarni was a good merchant, he sold fast and bought slow, pretty soon we’d got into a pattern and that was how our lives were going to be. We left Iceland in spring, soon as it was fit to sail; we’d trade up and down the Norwegian coast till winter closed in, then we’d stay over the dark season with one of Bjarni’s friends, spend next spring and summer buying, go back to Iceland to trade for new s
tock over winter till spring came round again.

  Like I said, Bjarni was just like his dad except for the differences. Old Herjolf was a man of habit, and so was Bjarni. Didn’t take long for Bjari to get set in this way of doing things, and all the time we were in Norway he was looking forward to getting home to the farm and spending winter with the old man. He’d even got him a present, a set of fancy carved struts for the tapestry canopy behind his chair -apparently, the old boy had always fancied some, reckoned they’d add a touch of class, and Bjarni was able to pick up a set cheap in Norway It was just about ideal, he reckoned: one winter in two away one at home, which meant that he and his dad got as much of each other’s company as they could take without fighting, no more and no less.

  And then Herjolf took it into his head to go to Greenland with Red Eirik.

  We were in Norway, of course, when he made that decision; so the first Bjarni knew of it was when he walked up from the ship, leaving us to unload, and pushed in through the door of the house and found himself faced with a hall full of strangers.

  First off, he couldn’t say a word, just stood there like a maiden oak in a meadow The man who’d bought Herjolf’s place was a southerner - he’d had to clear out of his own district because of some trouble or other - and he didn’t know Bjarni from a bunch of goose feathers. You can imagine how he felt when a big stranger in fancy foreign clothes bursts into his house and stands there with his face open, staring. Soon as he’d got over the first shock of it, he jumped up, snatched his axe off the wall behind him, and hollers out, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  Well, that’s just plain bad manners, asking a man his name straight out like that, but I guess he reckoned Bjarni wasn’t the sort good manners are due to. Anyhow, Bjarni stares at him a bit more, then laughs down just one side of his face, and says, ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘I’m asking you,’ the farmer repeats. ‘And what the hell are you doing in my house?’