Meadowland

by Tom Holt

  That knocked me about a bit, believe me. I’d always been close to my family, especially my father. Like I told you, I’d only left home to go with Bjari so as to get away from Kari; I’d have been perfectly happy staying on the farm if it hadn’t been for him. Now maybe you’re beginning to see why I reckon everything bad that’s ever happened to me is Kari’s fault- ‘You say that,’ I interrupted. ‘But think about it, will you?’

  ‘Think about it?’ Eyvind repeated. ‘I’ve done little else these forty years.

  ‘All right,’ I said, wishing I’d never started on the subject. ‘But the way I see it, if you hadn’t gone away with Bjarni, you’d have been at home when Herjolf decided to go away with Red Eirik. So isn’t it likely that you’d have been on that ship with the rest of your family? You’d have drowned too.’

  There are times when I wish it had been my tongue my parents had cut out when I was a baby, rather than the other thing. True, you can get up to a lot of mischief with either of them, but perhaps I’d have been less trouble to the world if I’d never been able to talk.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Eyvind said eventually ‘And yes, I suppose you’ve got a point there. Whether it makes it any better that I owe my life to that bastard isn’t something I can give you an opinion on straight away Ask me again in another forty years, when I’ve had time to think it through.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Not your fault,’ he said. ‘Anyhow-‘

  Anyhow (Eyvind went on), that was what was waiting for me in Greenland, and as you can imagine, it knocked me out of true for a while. We Northerners put on a great big show about life and death, like we really aren’t bothered one way or another. We’d have you believe that we don’t care whether we die today or tomorrow or in fifty years’ time, and that we take the deaths of others in the same easy way We pretend - to you, to ourselves - that a life is like a coat or a shirt; doesn’t matter whether it’s long or short so long as it’s good quality; and quality, of course, means honour, the way other people see you. So, it’s better if you die young and respected than old and pitiful, and the longer you live the harder it is to keep your life from getting frayed and tatty, so really you’re better off getting killed in the spear-storm, Odin’s tempest of axes (that’s poetry-language for fighting) rather than ending up weak and blind and having to be helped outside each time you need a shit, and everybody saying behind your back what a bloody nuisance you are since you lost all your teeth. Now like I said just now, I turned my back on the True Faith some time ago and went skulking back to Odin like a stray dog, so what I’m talking about here is Valhalla; that’s the place where you go when you die in battle, and just before you get your leg chopped off or your brains crushed, the Choosers come to you - they’re these beautiful women that you can only see when it’s your turn, and they tell you that Odin has chosen you, and they scoop you up out of your body and carry you up to Odin’s wonderful house, where the dead heroes slaughter each other all day and come back to life and drink and feast all night, and so on for ever and ever. But if you die in your bed or drown in the sea or starve in a bad season or a branch drops off a tree on your head, they don’t come for you. Then it’s not so good, for you or anybody else. They stick you in a hole in the ground and there you stay; unless you’re stroppy and a troublemaker, in which case you’re liable to get up and start wandering about at night, dancing on rooftops and smashing things up and killing the living. In which case, they’ll bury you under a big mound of earth, to stop you getting out; and if that doesn’t do the trick and you still get out and make a pain of yourself, they dig you up at noon and burn you and piss on the ashes till they’re cold; and that’s the end of you for good and all. Even now, when we’re all supposed to be good Christians, and our Heavenly Father takes us when we die, they still worry about what happens when someone dies and the farm’s snowed in, say, so they can’t get the body to consecrated ground. In which case, they bury you in a temporary grave and stick a big wooden stake through your guts to keep you down till the thaw comes and you can be moved.

  Valhalla’s just a name that we give to memory, of course. If you live a good-quality life, people remember you after you’ve gone, which is a way of saying you live for ever. If you weren’t anybody, you’re quickly forgotten and that’s that. Personally I can’t make up my mind about any of this stuff. It’s probably because I know that our Heavenly Father’s lot are winning and Odin and Thor are losing, and you’ve got to be truly noble or really stupid to stay loyal to the losing side when you know it can only end one way But I’m pretty sure of this. If there’s a life everlasting, I don’t want it. This one’s been quite enough for me. It’s like the big beer-horn in a rich man’s house: you’ve got to drink it all down in one go or people laugh at you. I’m having my work cut out getting through this life. Last thing I want is some bugger filling the horn up again and handing it back to me.

  No; the way I see it, life is like a lathe or a potter’s wheel. You know that our lives go in circles: day and night, the seasons, the years. I think of myself as a piece of work on a spinning stock or a wheel, and as I turn through each set of cycles the craftsman presses on me with his chisel or his thumb, and that shapes my life. But sometimes he presses too hard and a big chunk of wood splits off, or the clay gets squashed out of shape, and for a while I’m flying round out of true, maybe so hard that I fly out from between the centres or off the wheel, and that’s the end, I’m just scrap for ever. That’s more or less how I felt when I fetched up in Greenland and they told me everybody was dead. Didn’t matter to me, see, whether they’d lived well and gone to Valhalla or whether they were in Heaven or lying on the seabed slowly rotting. One way or another they were clear of the headstock and the wheel and the slip of the chisel, and I couldn’t really find it in my heart to feel sorry for them on that score. It was me I felt sorry for, because I was still here, only now I was on my own, with nobody for company except bloody Kari Sighvatson. And what the hell had I ever done to deserve that?

  ‘Is that really what happens in your country?’ I asked. ‘When a bad man dies, I mean. Do they come back and do all those things you said, dancing on roofs and everything?’

  Eyvind shrugged. ‘Everybody thinks so,’ he replied. ‘I don’t, but everybody else does, so it’s just common sense that they’re right and I’m wrong. Mind you,’ he added, ‘there was this time when I was a kid and we were lying there asleep in the big hall, and suddenly there was this horrible thumping noise coming from directly overhead: stomp, stomp, stomp, like trolls doing ring dances in heavy boots. Everybody lay there dead still, pretending they were still asleep; but you could tell by the sound of them, they all stopped snoring and held their breath. But I didn’t believe in that stuff, even then; so I jump up before my dad could catch hold of me and head for the door. Now Dad wasn’t afraid of anything, but he wasn’t going out after me; because if a dead man catches hold of you and snaps your head off, you’ll end up restless too, or so they reckon. So he just groaned and let me go - don’t suppose he thought he’d ever see me alive again. Anyway, I take the bar off the door and heave it open - had to shove like crazy, because I was only little - and out I went. It was a bright moonlit night, and I strolled round to where the eaves stuck out.

  ‘In case you don’t know, we build our houses out of turf, with short fat walls and big wide roofs, so the eaves are only a foot or so off the ground. It saves on timber, doing it that way, and the best part of it is that after a year or so all the turf’s grown in together, so in effect you’ve got a house that’s alive and growing. You Greeks are clever all right and your houses look bloody impressive and grand, but they’re all made of stone and brick, they’re dead.

  ‘So there I was, snot-nosed kid looking up at the roof, trying to see the dead men trampling up and down. But it wasn’t dead men after all. It was just three fat ewes and the old ram, they’d scrambled up onto the roof to get at the wild leeks growing in the ridges. So I stood
there grinning for a bit, and then I went up and drove the sheep off, and went back inside. I was all set to tell them my amazing discovery, that it’s not dead men who make all that racket at night, it’s just sheep. But as I came in, I could feel them all sitting up in the dark and staring at me, wondering if the dead men had got me and I’d turned into a troll who’d murder them all where they lay Silly of me, but I was so pissed off by that, because they didn’t trust me, thought I’d suddenly become a monster, that I just went back to my place and lay down without saying a word. And nobody ever mentioned it again; but from that day on, I knew people thought I was, well, odd somehow They’d look at me when my back was turned, or stop talking when I came along. Probably, you know, that’s why I decided to go with Bjari, to get away from all that once and for all.’

  I couldn’t help it; Greek cleverness, which is never your friend. ‘So in a sense,’ I said, ‘the dead men did get you and turn you into one of them.’

  He looked at me. ‘Because everybody believed it, that must be what happened?’

  I nodded down. ‘And maybe one of the things they did was scrape the memory of your mind and make you believe that all you saw was sheep. But that’s not what I was thinking of. What I meant was, they brought about the end of your old life, even though they were never actually there.’ I smiled. ‘We Greeks believe that there are things that are real that we can see and hear and touch, and other things that are just as real that we can’t. Maybe the dead men were real but you couldn’t see them.’

  ‘Ah,’ Eyvind said, with a slight click of the tongue. ‘Plato.’ You could’ve sharpened my head and bashed me into the ground for a gatepost. ‘You know about Plato?’ I said.

  ‘I know a lot of stuff,’ he replied, with a grin. ‘Been out here fifteen years, you hear all kinds of old nonsense. Wasn’t it Plato said that once upon a time men and women were joined together, and then God came along and cut them apart, and that’s how Love started?’ He sighed. ‘And you Greeks are meant to be smarter than us.’

  ‘Forget about Plato,’ I said. ‘In fact, forget about all that stuff about dead men and so on. What happened after you’d heard about your family?’

  Well (Eyvind said), the simple answer is, not much. Bjarni said he was through with sea-trading; he settled down in Greenland on his dad’s place, Herjolfsness, and a day or so later he’d turned into a farmer; like one of those people in stories who can shapeshift, turn themselves into bears or wolves or eagles. There weren’t any ships leaving Greenland any time soon, so we had no choice in the matter. We settled down too and worked on the farm. Talk about shapeshifters: Kari and me were gradually turning into our fathers - which is what most people do, I guess, sooner or later.

  Now they say time goes by really fast when you’re having fun and drags along slow when you’re miserable, but that’s not how it’s always been for me. I’ve generally found time slips away quickest when I’m really bored. To start off, when you’re only a bit bored, like you’ve got three days of turf-cutting or mucking-out to look forward to, time creaks along like a snail on a wall. But once you’ve gone past that and you just get used to it, time sort of freezes on you. One day’s exactly like another, and you lose count, and next time you wake up and snap out of it, it’s ten years later.

  Things happened. Like, I got married. Thorgerd, her name was, and I suppose I was lucky to get her, since we were short on women to start off with at the Greenland colony But she was still available, on account of a really filthy temper among other things, and I wasn’t bothered one way or another. Can’t say it made much difference, to her life or mine. I was outside all day, she worked in the dairy, or spinning. At night we all slept in the big hall, and come the cold season we were all cooped up inside till spring anyhow I can’t really say I noticed being married very much. There was sex, of course, except that the having-an-audience thing really puts me off, and she took it personally, because women are funny about stuff like that, so really that was all something and nothing. She took to sneaking off at quiet moments with Hallvard the shepherd. People said, why don’t you divorce her? And I said, same reason she doesn’t divorce me; why bother? Actually, there was another girl I got quite keen on, but after a bit she dumped me and went off with somebody else. Guess who.

  The point is, my life was turning fast and smooth; like when you look at a pot on the wheel, and it’s going round and round so quick that it looks like it’s actually standing still. It all seemed like no time at all had passed, but the fact is that when I first came to Greenland I was seventeen, and I was thirty-two when Bjarni sent Kari and me with a load of logs over to Brattahlid, and we met Leif Eirikson.

  (At this point, Eyvind suddenly stood up, as though he needed to go outside or something. He sat down again, closed his eyes, and sat quiet for a bit before going on with his story.)

  It would still have been all right (he said) if it hadn’t been for the rock. Wasn’t a big rock, a bit smaller than a man’s head, but it was big enough to knock the wheel off our cart, because bloody Kari wasn’t looking where he was going. Well, the Brattahlid smith fixed the axle easily enough, but while he was at it a blizzard came up, and we were stuck there for four days till it was clear to go home. Never had any luck with cartwheels, me.

  Even a place like Brattahlid, which was Red Eirik’s farm and the biggest in the Eastern Settlement, they didn’t get many strangers; so we were sat down in the middle of the table for dinner, and we did more talking than eating. Mostly just the usual stuff, like how much hay we’d made that autumn and were our hens still laying; but once we’d got all that out of the way, this tall, thin man, about my age or a bit younger, started looking at us and frowning. I asked the woman sitting next to me, nice and quiet, who the skinny man was.

  ‘That’s Leif,’ she replied. ‘Eirik’s eldest boy’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘He’s not much like his dad, then.’

  She shrugged. ‘He is and he isn’t,’ she said. ‘He’s quiet and Eirik’s noisy, and the old man’d make two of him with enough left over for a shirt; but they’re both stubborn as anchors when they want to be.’

  I thanked her and turned away before anybody saw me whispering; and Leif was still glowering at Kari and me, which made me feel a bit itchy and uncomfortable. Kari didn’t seem bothered; the man next to him was telling him dirty stories, so he was all right. I told myself Leif must just be a bit cautious around strangers, like the way the cows all look at you when you open the gate; or maybe he’d just eaten his food too quick and his guts were playing him up.

  But the next day, when the men went out to shovel the snow so they could get to the cattle stalls, Leif stayed in and stood in the doorway looking at us again. Well, I’d had enough of that, I’d rather dig snow than get stared at, even when it’s not my snow I went to leave the hall, but as I went past he shifted a bit to block me.

  ‘You’re one of Bjarni’s men, right?’ he said.

  Well, he knew that already, so I just nodded.

  ‘And your mate there.’

  ‘Kari,’ I said. ‘I’m Eyvind.’

  He didn’t nod or anything, just gave me a like-it-matters stare. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know,’ he said, ‘if Bjarni’d be interested in selling his ship.’

  Well, it’s always nice when someone asks you a question you know the answer to. Also, it made sense of the staring, which was kind of a relief. So I said cheerfully, ‘Funny you should mention that, because just last spring - no, sorry, the spring before that - we hauled it out of the shed for its yearly pitching and tidying up, and Bjarni was saying he might as well get shot of the bloody thing, he didn’t plan on using it again.’

  Leif nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘But Herjolf, that’s Bjari’s dad, he said we might as well keep it as get rid of it, just in case we ever wanted something from the old country or Norway, timber or anything like that. Bjarni said he wasn’t bothered, so-‘

  ‘He’s still got the ship, though,’ Leif interrupted
.

  ‘Oh yes, still there. And we tar and caulk it every year, so it’s pretty much up together. Ropes might need seeing to, but that’s about all.’

  I was babbling and I didn’t know why But Leif was one of those people: when you’re talking to him and he’s not saying anything, you can’t help chattering away just to fill up the enormous silences.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you thinking of buying it off him?’

  He didn’t answer that, he only nodded (just enough of a nod to be polite) and went out. But when the thaw came and we were ready to go home, he came out while we were harnessing up and asked if he could come with us. ‘Sure,’ Kari said (and I can’t really blame him for that; we couldn’t very well have said, ‘No, piss off’) and he hopped in the back without a word and sat there quiet as a rock all the way back to Herjolfsness. Talk about a miserable ride. Kari didn’t seem to notice, mind; he chatted away to me, and I didn’t answer, and he chattered over his shoulder at Leif, and Leif may have grunted once or twice; but it’d take a knife across his throat to shut Kari up, not that that’d be a bad thing at all.

  It was a long drive home, I’m telling you. When finally we got there, Leif hopped off the cart without saying a word and strode off on his long thin shanks to the house. We took our time about putting the cart away and seeing to the horses, just in case Leif managed to offend someone with his unfortunate manner and we got blamed for bringing him.

  Leif hung round Herjolfsness a day or two, but we didn’t see a lot of him. Nights he drank up on the top table, with Bjarni and the old man; during the day he was mostly down at the boat shed, crawling about on his back poking at the strakes to see if they’d sprung, and trying to slide a knife blade in the joints. But he must’ve been satisfied in the end, because one night he stood up just as the dishes were being cleared away and banged the table with his fist for quiet.