Meadowland

by Tom Holt

  ‘Well?’ Leif said, and I didn’t answer. My eyes were all red and bleary with salt, for one thing. But Eyvind was peering about, and after a bit he said, ‘That’s the third island Bjarni found. The one with the flat stone beach and the glaciers.’ He paused a moment, then added, ‘The useless one.’

  I have a feeling that Eyvind promised his mum when he was young that he wouldn’t tell lies, and somehow he stuck like it. Yes, Bjarni had said it was useless, but that really wasn’t the time to mention it. Straight off the blokes started to mutter, like it was Eyvind’s fault, and probably mine too for being his best mate. Leif sagged just a little bit, round the shoulders; then he seemed to snap out of it, and barked out orders like a small -dog yapping. We raised sails and crept in as close to the shore as we dared. Then Leif had them launch the rowboat, and told Eyvind and me to get in it. Wasn’t thrilled about that. I figure the smaller the boat, the more there is to be scared of. Wouldn’t want to be in that thing if the rain and the big wind came back. I sort of wished I hadn’t been so cocky when I was on Bjarni’s crew; if I hadn’t swum ashore when Bjarni’d told me not to, Leif wouldn’t have been so determined to have me with him, and I’d have been back in Greenland mucking out cows instead of clambering into a little boat on the very edge of the world.

  Still, it had to be done. I muttered a prayer to our Heavenly Father and asked him please not to blow up a big wind and take the ship away while I was on the island; and then we were rowing like hell towards the shore. Me, Eyvind, a German called Tyrkir and Leif Eirikson.

  It was a miserable rotten place, right enough. The closer we got, the less I liked the look of it. Imagine a flat plain, black and grey shingle with hardly a smudge of green, pitted with big, sharp rocks. Far away where the ground met the sky, a line of triangular white mountains like the teeth of a saw

  ‘Wonderful,’ Leif said - it was the first thing anybody’d said since we left the ship. ‘Just one great big useless slab of nothing.’

  ‘That’s what Bjarni said,’ I reminded him. ‘This is where we came last of all. It’s good, it means we know where we are. All we got to do is follow the coastline down and we’ll reach the good bit.’

  Leif made a short grunting noise, like a pig.

  Don’t know why we bothered, but we beached the boat, got out and walked about a bit. Just so we could say we’d done it, I suppose. Nobody said anything (and that was unusual, because generally the trick was getting Tyrkir the German to shut up: he couldn’t speak Norse worth slit, but not for want of practice) and after a bit Leif picked up a couple of small rocks and walked back to the boat. I was glad to leave that place. It gave me the creeps. There’s places every bit as bad, in Greenland and Iceland too, that seem to go on for ever and ever. But at least you know that if you keep going far enough you’ll eventually see some green grass and a roof or two in the distance. There it was so flat you could see for miles, and it was all the same.

  ‘Right,’ Leif said, as the German pushed the boat off and scrambled in, and we picked up our oars. ‘Next time, I suppose we’d better build a cairn or something as a seamark, so we’ll know where we are when we come this way’

  Eyvind and I made vague what-a-good-idea noises to keep him happy, and we headed back to the ship. I tell you, it was like coming home after a long and horrible journey Never thought Bjarni’s old knoerr could feel so cosy and safe. Getting back on board was like sunrise.

  ‘So that’s Slabland,’ Leif announced. ‘Anyway, we’ve done better than Bjarni Herjolfson; at least we had the balls to land.’ He turned his head and scowled at the distant mountains, like they were a dog that wouldn’t come when he whistled. ‘Screw it. Let’s go south.’

  So we did. Actually, we didn’t have much choice in the matter. We picked up a strong southbound current, combined with a stiff wind that tried to crowd us up against the shore. We didn’t fancy getting dragged along the beaches like a knife being ground on a wheel, so we held out into the open sea rather more than we’d have normally done. We could still see the land as a grey smudge, but that was about it. I was trying to remember how long it’d taken us the last time to get from the third island to the second, but we’d had a gale up our arses then, if you remember, and now we were chugging along rather more sedately, so I wasn’t going to be much help. Eyvind, on the other hand, was pretty sure of himself. At the rate we were going, he said, we needed to hold this course eight days and seven nights, and that ought to bring us out just where we’d been becalmed, and where I’d swum ashore.

  Well, either he’d been back there since and hadn’t told me, or he was very observant and a bloody good navigator, or he was making it up so as to be important; but Leif took him at his word and we kept going. Made me wish I hadn’t been so honest. Eight days at sea, when we could’ve gone ashore and at least stretched our legs, even if the scenery turned out to be as miserable as Slabland. Thanks to all that rain we were all right for water, even with one of the casks trashed, and food wasn’t a worry, though about half the hens went off lay for the moult, so Leif told us to eat them instead. We were able to get a fire going some of the time, too. But it was four days before our clothes began to dry out; if we’d gone ashore, we could’ve had a proper fire and been warm and comfortable, at least for a bit. Couldn’t suggest anything like that to Leif, though. He seemed to go a bit funny once he’d set foot on shore that first time; he was impatient, always in a hurry, like a man getting the chores done before setting off for the fair. I don’t suppose he was any less cold and damp and miserable than the rest of us, but he took it a different way It was like all the discomfort was an itch, and only getting to my landing site would scratch it. Strange attitude: we were going past all that coastline without even getting close enough to take a look. For all we knew, the land that we were hurrying past might’ve been just what he was looking for, but he couldn’t be bothered to stop and find out. He’d set his heart on the place I’d described, and he wasn’t interested in anywhere else, even if it was better.

  They were eight long days and seven even longer nights. Middle of the eighth afternoon, though, Leif stood up by the prow, highest point on the ship, and peered at the grey smudge for a very long time. Then he called Eyvind and me over.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  Well the fuck what, I thought, but Eyvind said, ‘It’ll be here or hereabouts,’ so Leif had us bring the ship in tight to shore. Closer in we got, the more I could see; and I couldn’t help thinking it wasn’t much of an improvement on the Slab place. True, there were trees. You never saw the like. I mean, they think they’ve got forests in Norway, but I never saw anything over there to compare with what we saw as we skimmed along, and anybody thinking of felling a load to take back to Greenland would’ve gone mad with delight. One thing I could see, though, was that it wasn’t much like Bjarni’s second place. You had a long, very pale beach, the sand almost white, and the trees crowding down onto it like a whole bunch of families come to see you off on a journey But no grass, except for a few sad tufts here and there. It’d been the broad strip of grassland that’d lodged in my mind, and for sure it wasn’t there. Either we hadn’t reached that place yet, or we’d gone straight past it. Either way I was pretty sure that Leif wasn’t going to be happy, and I was glad I’d kept quiet and told the truth after all.

  Even when it was quite clear that we’d come to the wrong place, Leif told us to keep going and make landfall. We put the boat out and the same party of four - me, Eyvind, Leif and the gabby German - rowed across and had a look.

  Wasn’t any better close up. The beach sloped gently up to the forest edge and then it was just trees. Eyvind went all quiet, I hung back out of the way, but Tyrkir the German went bounding off like a dog into the forest, leaving the three of us behind.

  ‘Well,’ Leif said after a while. ‘This isn’t it, is it?’

  ‘Cracking good place for lumber,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not what I asked,’ Leif replied.

  ‘Bet you anythin
g you like those woods are bloody crawling with deer,’ I said. ‘And it doesn’t look like anybody lives here, so they won’t be used to people - you could probably walk right up to them. And bears, too. Never tried it myself, but they reckon bear’s as good as the best beef.’

  Leif looked down his nose at me, and I gave up. ‘This isn’t where I came ashore,’ I said.

  ‘Thought not,’ said Leif. ‘Where’s that bloody Tyrkir got to?’

  ‘While we’re here, though,’ I said, ‘we could beach the ship, see to those sprung boards, maybe build a fire, dry out a bit. Really, we could do with making a new rudder, with all this timber. Silly to take risks with something like that.’

  He didn’t answer, and I decided to shut my face before I got on his nerves. So we walked up and down the beach for a bit, and I wondered if we were the first men who’d ever come there, and if so what were my chances of getting a loan of a ship back in Greenland and coming back here for a cargo of lumber, since nobody else seemed to want the place - waste not, want not, as my old mum used to say But then I thought of all the trouble we’d had, and how I’ve never really liked sailing much anyway, and if I were to kid someone into lending me a ship, I’d have to go halves on the profits with him, so fuck that. It was very quiet there. I don’t mind a bit of quiet, but too much of it makes me nervous.

  Then Tyrkir came loping back out of the trees. He hadn’t brought anything back with him and he didn’t say where he’d been or what he’d been looking for, so for all I know he’d just been searching for somewhere he could have a slit without thirty-four men watching. Soon as he’d joined us we went back to the boat, and that was that.

  It was’ pretty quiet on the ship, too, when we got back on board. There wasn’t the babble of questions you’d have expected - well, what’s it like, then? Are we going ashore or what? Is this where you were looking for? What about fresh water and all that? Instead, they all waited for Leif to say something, but he wasn’t in any hurry.

  ‘Suppose we’d better call it something,’ he said at last. ‘Forestland all right with you lot?’

  Nobody answered him, so presumably it was. Then we raised anchor and left.

  By now I guess everybody was thinking the same thing: had we not reached the place I’d come ashore at yet, or had we gone past it? Not something you wanted to dwell on, particularly since we still didn’t really know what we were supposed to be doing out here. Well, probably not felling lumber, for obvious reasons. Wouldn’t have taken us more than a few days to fell enough to fill our ship, and then we could have gone home. (Except we’d have trouble breaking out of that current enough to strike out east; nobody was forgetting that we didn’t actually know the way home from here, bar turning round and going back the way we’d come, which wasn’t possible because of the current and the winds.) All in all, it was hardly surprising that nobody spoke much as we left Forestland behind us, because there wasn’t anything cheerful to be said, and we were wound up enough without making it worse by arguing.

  The next two days were pretty grim. We didn’t have much control over where we were going, or how fast. The wind made all the decisions for us. It wanted us to go south, fortunately, so we hung on and tried not to dwell on all the things that could’ve gone wrong so far. There comes a point where either you go with it and hope everything’ll end up fitting into place, like a tenon in a mortice, or else you jump over the side and spare yourself the pain. Nobody jumped over the side, so I guess we all found our own ways of coping. By now, though, as a crew we were pretty much all pulled apart, like the boards of an old abandoned ship laid up on a beach. We’d long since run out of things to say to one another, and we’d reached the stage where talking to someone wasn’t much less of an assault than smacking him in the face. We did our work because we knew we had to, because otherwise the ship was going to drift or sink. Nobody was interested in Bjari’s second island any more; except possibly Leif, and he might as well have been on a different ship. We’d given up hope of anything good happening; by the same token, we were far less worried than maybe we should have been about not knowing where we were, stuff like that. Mostly we weren’t living in the here and now. We were thinking about home, about things that had happened years ago, things we could’ve said or done but didn’t, things we did or said and wished we hadn’t. We all thought about the past, because it seemed like the present was just turning endlessly and slipping, like a cartwheel in the mud. As for the future, I think a lot of us had more or less made up our minds that there wasn’t going to be one. Maybe you’re wondering what’d got into us all, why we’d suddenly turned so miserable in two days. Not sure. After all, we knew we weren’t all that far from dry land, and the weather wasn’t kicking our teeth in. I think we’d just been on the ship rather too long, without a reliable end to look forward to. Let’s say it was the difference between climbing down a ladder and jumping with your eyes shut.

  Morning of the third day out of Forestland, I was asleep with my back to the rails. I woke up, and the first thing that hit me was that I’d got drenched with water during the night. Maybe rain, or a big wave; made no odds. I just felt tired, a bit angry that I’d gone to sleep almost dry and now I was soaked to the skin again. Sun was coming up; half a glowing orange egg-yolk in the seaward sky. Cold; but it wouldn’t have been too bad if only I hadn’t been sopping wet. Another day on the ship.

  Well, I like to start the day with a piss if I possibly can; so I stood up, staggered to the rail and started to pull my trousers down. And then I saw it.

  You always assume that other people will do the important stuff, like keep an eye out. But sometimes they’re assuming the same thing, and it doesn’t get done. At that moment, nobody was keeping a lookout. They were waking up, cussing and muttering, stretching and whining about cricked necks and ricked backs. So it was me, with my trousers down round my knees, who saw it first.

  I thought: can’t be, or someone would’ve mentioned it. So I looked again, and there it still was. I had this crazy flash in my mind of us sailing right on past it because I’d felt all shy about yelling and disturbing people. So I yelled. ‘Land,’ I shouted.

  Leif was squatting right up front, coat and cloaks snuggled round him. You’d have bet he was fast asleep, but as soon as I opened my mouth he jumped up like he’d got a bit of string nailed to the top of his head and someone had just given it a sharp tug.

  ‘Land,’ I repeated. ‘Over there, for crying out loud. Look.’ I pointed. People were blinking, rubbing their eyes - it took a quarter of a heartbeat or something like that before they could start looking. But Leif was staring at it, the woods with hills behind, the flat white beach. He turned his head and looked at me - I’m not making this up - looked at me the way a cow does just before you cut its throat.

  ‘Is this it?’ he asked me.

  ‘Think so,’ I replied.

  I’d said something wrong, because he went off at me like pouring water into a crucible of melted lead. ‘You think so,’ he said. ‘Fuck you, is that it or isn’t it?’

  Suddenly everybody was waiting for me to say something. ‘I think so,’ I repeated, and he flared up again, like the famous hot-water spout at Geisir back home. ‘I can’t bloody well see from here, can I?’ I yelled. ‘Soon as we’re close enough, I’ll tell you if we’re there or not.’

  While I was saying this, I was thinking. I was asking myself, You clown, it doesn’t matter, nobody’s seen the place where you went ashore except you, and that was in the dark; so if you lie, nobody’ll ever know and you’ll get all these angry people off your back. And supposing this isn’t the place: are you going to tell them that, and have them throw you overboard out of frustration? And the really weird, crazy thing was, my answer to that was, Well, yes. I couldn’t have told a lie about it if I’d tried. If it hadn’t been Bjari’s second island, and the place where I’d landed, I’d have told them so, because - I have absolutely no idea why - it mattered.

  Just as well, really, that I didn’t hav
e to.

  It was Eyvind who spoke up before I did, bless him. He said, ‘Yes, this is it, we’re here,’ in a quite calm voice, almost cold, bored. ‘And a bit further on, there’s a sort of rounded point that leads into the straits.’

  What straits? I was asking myself, but the good bit was, I’d stopped being the centre of attention. Now why they were all so quick to take Eyvind’s word for it when he’d been completely wrong the last time, I couldn’t begin to tell you. My guess is, because he was telling them what they wanted to hear. Makes you popular for a while, but bad policy in the long run.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Leif was saying, and Eyvind was nodding and wagging his beard, all wet and caked with salt into little rats’ tails. ‘Quite sure,’ he was saying. ‘Couldn’t mistake it for anywhere else. There’s the wooded hills, see, and the beach, and the rounded point in the distance. You can’t see the grassy plain from here, of course, but we never noticed it the first time.’

  People started looking back at me over their shoulders, since of course it was only me who reckoned there was a grassy plain on Bjarni’s second island. It was the first island that’d had the nice flat green meadows; but for some reason Leif had never seemed particularly interested in that.

  Stands to reason I couldn’t have held my breath all the time we were drawing in to land; it took the best part of half a day, I’d have choked. It must just’ve felt like it. While we were getting there, I was thinking to myself that maybe there was something about this place that brought out the worst in all these strong-minded leader types. Like, Bjarni Herjolfson had been dead set against us setting foot on any of the three islands, even though we’d had good reason to go ashore. And here was Leif Eirikson dead set on doing the opposite and landing - what’s more, landing at the place where I’d landed, and nowhere else, like I was someone clever or important, or I knew some wonderful secret.