Meadowland

by Tom Holt

  It must’ve been around midday when we got close enough to launch the boat, and the sun was bright and high. We dropped anchor off the rounded point Eyvind had mentioned - it was there right enough, though I had no memory of it - and rowed in up the sound a short way till we came to a little bay

  This time there were six of us in the boat: a couple of Greenlanders called Thorvald Salmon and Lazy Hrafn came along, I’m not sure why It was a bit of a struggle rowing in, but we got there, ran the boat up on the sand and hurried up the beach.

  Now I could be slandering you, but my guess is that you’re a City boy- ‘That’s not slander,’ I said. ‘That’s a compliment.’

  He looked at me, smiled wryly and sighed. ‘Thought so, he said. ‘You’re a City boy all right.’

  In which case (Kari went on) you may have trouble understanding why we ran up the beach. In fact, if you’d been there watching, you’d probably have thought we’d been drinking salt water on the journey and had gone off our heads.

  You’d have seen us dashing up the beach till we reached the point where the sand stopped and the grass began. You’d have watched us dropping down on our knees, trawling our hands through the grass, licking our fingers and suddenly bursting out in whoops of joy, hugging each other, jumping up and dancing round in circles. Very sad, you’d have said to yourself, to get so far and then break down, brains eaten away with worm by the looks of it-The point being, you don’t understand about grass. You think it’s just a weed that grows up between paving stones, or a green colour in the background. You don’t know about the difference between sour and sweet grass, or why it’s a matter of life and death which sort you’ve got when, or why a man’d go to all the trouble of ploughing up a meadow just to sow grass seed. All a closed book to you, isn’t it?

  Well, in that case, you’ll just have to take it on trust from me that the grass that grew between the beach and the trees in that place was enough to make us think the whole trip’d been worthwhile. You see, if the grass is right, you can keep your cattle outside in the open right through the autumn and into the winter; and then you can bring them in under cover and feed them hay until the spring. Result: you start off the new year with pretty much the same number as you ended the old year with. But if the grass isn’t right, you can’t leave them out when the weather starts turning cold. First their milk’ll dwindle away till they go dry, and then they’ll starve or get sick. So you bring them in early; but now you’ve got to feed them hay for a third of the year, and there’s never enough. You’ve got no choice but to pick out the best and slaughter all the others, preserve the meat as best you can to see you through the winter in place of milk and butter and cheese, and try and make the numbers up by bringing the calves on next year, which of course means less milk for you. Iceland’s a green country, large parts of it, but the grass is pretty grudging, if you follow me. It’s all right when it’s full and fat in summer, but it wanes with the cold till there’s not enough sweetness in it. You can make reasonable hay out of it some years, but other times it’ll let you down. Then you get shortages, and the fun starts. Good men’ll rob and kill each other for hay, when they’ve got stalls full of cattle starving down into bags full of bones. Greenland was a little better, the good land there anyhow, but the poor land was rubbish. It’s a green country all right, but just ever so slightly the wrong shade of green, which makes all the difference. I guess you could say that water and piss look very much the same, if you don’t know what you’re looking at; but you can drink one, and not the other.

  So what we were doing, when we knelt down in the wet grass there, was scooping up the dew and tasting it; and I’m telling you, the beer the angels serve in golden jugs to our Heavenly Father in Paradise couldn’t be sweeter than the dew on the beautiful green grass of that landfall. The others were slurping it off their fingers and crowing like cocks and grinning; and I was kneeling there completely stunned, thinking, What the hell is going on here? Because this was the place where I’d come ashore that night when I swam over from Bjarni’s ship, absolutely no doubt about that at all. But I’d come there in the dark, I hadn’t even seen the grass, just felt it under my feet, so of course I hadn’t known it was so good, so bloody wonderfully good. So if it wasn’t me who’d known what a marvellous country this was, it must’ve been Leif, who’d been so determined to come here, ignoring all other possibilities. But he couldn’t have known, because I was the only one who’d been here. I couldn’t make it out, and I still can’t to this day

  At last, when we were all wet through and tired with making noises and prancing about, Leif looked at me and said, ‘This is the place. We’re here.’ And he smiled. It was a huge smile that said I was right and he’d been right, and he’d believed and I hadn’t let him down. All that fog and rain and storms and miserable bare rocks and sitting huddled and not talking on the ship just seemed to thaw and melt away It’d all been just unimportant stuff that we could forget about, now that we’d found what we came for.

  ‘All that,’ I said, ‘because of some grass.

  Kari looked at me. ‘Knew you wouldn’t understand,’ he said. ‘Because you’re a City boy, see.’

  I was getting a bit sick of that. ‘And proud of it,’ I said. ‘But I’ve read books about agric-about farming. I’ve read Hesiod, and Virgil’s Georgics, and Theophrastus on plants, and Varro and Cato and Columella, and Apollodorus of Sicyon, and Magnentius on the care and breeding of dairy cattle, and-‘

  The look on Kari’s face would’ve withered a fresh rose.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So reading books isn’t quite the same. But just because I don’t know all about something doesn’t mean I can’t understand how important it is. But it was still just grass. You make it sound like you’d found gold, or pearls.’

  He carried on looking at me for a bit; then he said:

  ‘Another thing about you City boys, you never bloody listen. I mean, you ask a man a question, but you don’t pay him any mind because secretly you think you know the answer already and you don’t: He sighed, like Christ for the sins of the world. ‘Which means I can’t explain, because you won’t listen, so I won’t bother. You’ll just have to take my word for it.’

  Carrying on much longer with this thread would’ve led to bad tempers, so I shrugged. ‘It was nice grass,’ I said. ‘Really, really nice grass. So then what?’

  So then (Kari said) we got back in the boat and rowed to the ship; and everybody looked at us as we climbed back on board, and Leif just said quietly, ‘We’re here.’

  After that, they got the anchor up so fast you wouldn’t believe it. We steered between the headland and the island into that little bay I told you about. It was pretty shallow water and we ran aground, but nobody could face waiting for the tide to come in and float us off. Instead, they jumped over the side, came down with a splash and a squelch and waded ashore like there were wolves after them. They knew good grass when they saw it too, see.

  Suppose I’d better tell you a bit about the place, so you can picture it in your mind’s eye, assuming you’ve still got one after reading all those books.

  If you’d been standing on the beach with us that day you’d have been looking at a small, lazy river, winding in loops like an adder on a sunny day until it came out into a small bay In the background you’d have seen a wall of birch forest, tall and rather spindly because nobody had ever been in there thinning out the trees. Between the beach and the woods you’d have seen a raised shelf of grass meadow I think you’d have liked it, because you strike me as the sort - no offence intended - who gets a kick out of pretty flowers and stuff. There was heather beside the brook, blue iris and yellow cloudberry and the like; more to the point, there were blueberries, crowberries, gooseberries, red and black currants and a small thicket of raspberry canes. Up along the river there was a large boggy patch, which had Tyrkir the German pointing like a dog and sniffing; he seemed more interested in it than the fat green grass, which we couldn’t understand at the time. B
ehind us, the bay was sheltered and free of ice, with only a few rocks sticking up above the water here and there; out in the-distance you could just have seen the closest of the litter of small islands, where the gulls lived. You could’ve been in southern Norway or Denmark even. If you’d have been dressed like us, in a coat down to the knees and thick baggy trousers, you’d have been sweating a little - well, you wouldn’t, because you were brought up in this godforsaken bloody south-eastern oven, but by any reasonable standards it was pleasantly warm. If you’d looked for them you’d have seen deer-slots in the mud by the river, maybe the silver flash of a salmon struggling upstream. And you’d have thought, even a miserable bugger like you, that by some extraordinary stroke of luck you’d fetched up in a place that was as good as anywhere and better than most.

  Tyrkir the German managed to control himself for about as long as it takes to boil a fish kettle, and then he darted off, straight at the bog, like an arrow He squelched about for a bit, up to his knees in black mud; then he dropped down on all fours and crawled around, clawing chunks of something up out of the ground and stuffing it down his sleeves. Mad as a rat in a churn, I thought, till it struck me that we’d all been carrying on just as strangely not so long ago, when we’d been drinking dew off the grass. We stood there watching him for a bit, until he dragged himself up out of the muck and came scampering back to us, grinning like a skull and waving a handful of slimy black lumps under our noses.

  ‘What’ve you got there, Tyrkir?’ Leif asked.

  Tyrkir beamed at him. ‘Iron,’ he said.

  Bugger me if he wasn’t right. Black as charcoal till you rub it between your fingers, and it starts to blush brown through the dirt; but as far as we were concerned, it was better than finding gold nuggets. Bog-iron they call it, and of course Tyrkir would’ve known what to look for, being a German. All they care about there is iron and steel. I’ve been there, Germany, and if you walk through one of their towns you can’t hear yourself think for the chinking of hammers on anvils. No wonder the poor bloody fool was beside himself with joy A bog full of iron ore and a forest just waiting to be burned for charcoal, and it just so happened that there was an anvil and a full set of smith’s gear in the hold of the ship.

  So Tyrkir was happy, standing there pawing at his lumps of grubby black rock. The rest of us were staring at the grass, or the trees, or looking out for deer or birds. Apart from me, of course. I wasn’t really taking it in, except out of the corners of my eyes, if you follow me. All I could think of was, Well, I found this place. Aren’t I the clever one?

  You know, there are moments so perfect that you can hardly bear to move for fear of spoiling them.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Anyway (Kari went on), there we were. Soon as we’d got over our excitement, we made a proper survey of the place. Turned out that the river flowed out of a lake, big and deep and alive with ducks; so we brought the ship up the river - we had to haul it with ropes most of the way - and anchored it in the lake, where it’d be safe from storms or a sudden freeze. It was easier to unload the cargo, too.

  That night, we slung hammocks between the trees on the edge of the wood, but none of us slept worth a damn. Our minds were too busy with what we were going to do tomorrow

  First on the list would be house building, because we’d all had about as much as we could take of the cold and the wet and, although it was surprisingly mild still, we all knew winter’d be along sooner rather than later. Of course- ‘Excuse me,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No offence,’ I said, ‘but hadn’t someone better go and relieve Eyvind on watch? He’s been out there an awfully long time.’

  Kari blinked, like a surprised rabbit. ‘Bugger me, so he has,’ he said. ‘My fault, I got caught up with the story. I’ll go and take over.’

  I frowned. ‘Isn’t it the lad’s turn?’ Just then, I couldn’t remember his name. ‘He hasn’t had a go yet.’

  ‘What, him?’ He grinned. ‘Didn’t we tell you? Harald’s the Prince of Norway, or he would’ve been if they hadn’t slung him out on his ear. Princes in exile don’t sit out in the cold, freezing their bollocks off, not when there’s commoners to do it for them. Also, he’s a pathetic sentry Much more use in here, in case some of the local toe-rags bust their way in after all that money He may not be the brightest lamp on the wall, our Harald, but he’s not bad when it comes to crushing skulls and chopping off legs at the knee.’

  Kari scooped up his blanket and pottered out into the night, leaving me alone with the royal exile. I looked at him, trying not to be too obvious about it. He was sitting on one of the money chests, leaning slightly forward, arms rested on knees, and he was scraping out his fingernails with the pointed horn of his axe. I couldn’t help thinking that Norway had had a lucky escape.

  A clumping noise from the tomb entrance.

  ‘Right.’ Eyvind shook a triple handful of charcoal out of the scuttle onto the fire, then sat down where Kari had been sitting. ‘So where did he get up to?’

  ‘The story, you mean?’ Stupid question. ‘Well, I gather he’d more or less reached the end,’ I went on, disingenuous as they come. ‘You’d all finally got to the place with the really nice grass.

  ‘That’s not the end.’

  Somehow, I’d suspected that’d be the case. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is there more?’

  Eyvind grinned, but without the underlying sense of fun. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘There’s more.’

  ‘How splendid. Perhaps we could start again tomorrow, when they’ve come and fixed the wheel.’

  Kari’s probably told you (said Eyvind) what a rotten time we had, crossing over from Greenland. And then, I suppose, he went on a bit about how wonderful the place he discovered was. Right?

  Thought so. I’ve heard him tell the story scores of times since we’ve been stuck out here in the East. Practically every new recruit in the Guards has had to listen through it. Apparently it’s regarded as some kind of initiation ritual: if they can survive Kari telling them about discovering Meadowland, then pitched battle against the Saracens the length and breadth of Sicily will hold no terrors for them. The truth is-p

  ‘Meadowland?’ I interrupted.

  Eyvind nodded. ‘That’s what Leif decided to call the place. When it came to naming places, I reckon he took after his father.’

  ‘What? Oh, I see. You mean Red Eirik choosing the name for Greenland. But Kari said there were wonderful meadows in the new country. He went on at some length about the grass.

  ‘That,’ said Eyvind, ‘I can believe. And yes, there were meadows. And good grass, no doubt about that. Not an awful lot of it, though: just that strip between the beach and the forest.’

  ‘I see,’ I replied. ‘So really it wasn’t anything special.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Eyvind replied cautiously ‘But it wasn’t a country of endless rolling meadows, that’s all I’m saying. It’d be like calling this place Figland because from time to time you come across a fig tree.’

  I wasn’t quite sure I grasped the point he was trying to make. ‘You were saying,’ I said.

  All right (said Eyvind), it was a good place; or it could have been worse. That doesn’t change the fact that we were effectively stranded there till spring. Which meant, of course, that we had no choice but to dig in and get ready to spend the winter there. Before we started work, though, Leif insisted on a little ceremony He got in the boat and had a couple of men row him up and down while he chucked bits of stick he’d gathered earlier over the side; he’d marked the bits of stick with notches, and the idea was to see where he’d need to have the ship anchored so that he could chuck his canopy struts out and be sure they washed up in the place he wanted to set up camp.

  Now, you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about when I say canopy struts-Oh, right, you know about that. You Greeks know some funny old stuff, don’t you?

  Anyhow: after he’d slung out all the notched sticks, he waited till the tide turn
ed; and sure enough, one of them pitched up right where we’d first come ashore. Fine. He’d taken bearings off the dial while he was throwing out the notched sticks, so he knew exactly where he’d been when he slung each one. Result: he was able to take the ship to precisely that point, chuck out the canopy struts - and, sure enough, they washed up right where he wanted them to, which proved by the age-old traditional method that that was the place where Providence had chosen for him to build his house.

  I’ll say this for the lads, they managed not to laugh while they were watching. Anyway, that was Leif Eirikson for you; when all else fails, trust to the family luck, provided you can cheat.

  First thing that needed doing, of course, was putting up some kind of shelter. Before we could make a start on that, though, we needed to get a few things straight. Mostly, how long were we planning on stopping there? All along, you’ll remember, Leif had been pretty cagey on that score. Finally, we thought, we’re going to get a straight answer.

  No chance. We asked the question, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he had us all cutting turf for the next two days.

  I don’t have to ask if you’ve ever done any turf-cutting. Bloody horrible job. It’s a bit easier if you’ve got the proper tools, which we hadn’t. Instead, we had to chop each turf out with a spade. It’s not exactly challenging work, but it takes a long time and it’s pretty exhausting. The hard bit isn’t chopping the turf out of the ground; it’s getting down on your hands and knees, rolling the turf up like a bit of old mat and lugging it over to where it’s needed. Kari and I got put on that, while Leif swanned about supervising the actual building side of things. Credit where it’s due, they made a nice, neat job. Building houses out of turf isn’t nearly as easy as it looks. If you don’t have decent footings and a good, solid inside framework of timber, you’re wasting your time. It’s not like building in stone - or whatever those things are that you people seem to like so much: bricks. See, the grass carries on growing; and as it grows, it pushes upwards, just as the grass underneath is pushing up into it. True, once it’s established, the roots tie the whole thing together far better than mortar between stones or dowels in wood, assuming you’ve got a sound frame to keep everything in place. If not, your turf wall will quite literally tear itself apart, given time; the walls start bulging outwards, and eventually, the whole lot slowly and quietly collapses. It’s so quiet, in fact, that there’s no warning: no creaking or groaning or splitting noises to give you a chance to get out. First thing you know about it, you’re buried under a couple of tons of living roof.