Meadowland

by Tom Holt

  But, like I said, Leif made a pretty good job of it. We didn’t hang about, either; and a couple of days later, we had walls about five feet high, supported by an adequate timber frame. All the wood was green, of course, since it was fresh-cut. Now, people back home’ll tell you green wood’s no bad thing for building. It’s still soft and bendy, so as the house settles down, the timber sort of moulds itself to the shape, where seasoned wood’s more likely to crack than flex under the weight. Me, I’m not so sure. There’s such a thing as bending too much, and you run the risk of the frame getting out of true. Then you’re screwed, of course.

  Anyhow, once we’d done the walls, we were all ready to go back and cut more turf and timber for the roof. But Leif said no. Turned out he wasn’t planning on building an actual house; what he had in mind was booths.

  Right, you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about. Fine. Back in Iceland, we have this meeting every year. Everybody comes along from all over the country Mostly it’s a big market and hiring fair and a chance to drink beer with people you don’t see every day of your life; also there’s lawsuits and political stuff and all sorts of other excuses for the well-off farmers to pick fights with each other. Pretty much everything that gets done is done at the meeting, which is why we call it the Everything Meeting. Point is, you’ve got several thousand people spending a week or so at a place that’s deserted the rest of the year. They’ve got to sleep somewhere. So we invented booths.

  Basically, booths are four walls, a door and no roof. They sit there all year quietly growing; and when people crowd in for the meeting, they fetch along tanned hides and faggots of brushwood and all manner of stuff to make temporary roofs out of. When the meeting’s over, they strip it all off again and take it home with them. It’s nowhere near as warm and cosy as a proper house, but it’s better than nothing. Besides, most people are pretty well tanked up by the first night of the meeting, and when you’ve got a skinful you don’t feel the cold so much, or the damp.

  So you can maybe understand why we all felt a bit confused when Leif told us to build booths rather than a proper house. After all, we were stuck there over winter at the very least. It’d have taken a couple of days longer to roof over the structures with turf in the usual way, but the fact is there wasn’t a lot else to do with our time. We still had a fair bit of flour left in the barrels, it wasn’t as though our few cows and goats and sheep took a lot of looking after, the deer in the forest - bloody great big things the size of horses, some of them - were so unused to people you could practically walk up and bash them over the head, and you could tickle the salmon out of the river barehanded. And if that wasn’t good enough, Tyrkir the German came back the second evening with a basket full of funny-looking grassy stuff he’d found growing wild, which he reckoned was every bit as good as wheat. He wasn’t far wrong, either. You could grind it and make flour, or you could just boil it till it went soft, scoop it up in your fingers and shovel it into your face. Didn’t taste of much, but so what, when all you had to do was stroll about picking great handfuls of the stuff?

  And there’s a funny thing. Naturally, we assumed it was some strange, rare grass that only grows up there and nowhere else. But guess what? I’ve seen people selling it in the streets in the City. Rice, I think you call it, and it comes from away over east.

  I’m wandering off, aren’t I? What I was saying was, since we had so little else to do and all winter to do it in, why did Leif have us building booths instead of proper houses? It was like he still couldn’t make up his mind what he was planning to do: was he there just to cut timber, maybe bring in a few bales of furs and the like, and go home as soon as spring came? Or were we going to build a settlement, like his dad had done in Greenland?

  ‘You’ve asked that question before, I think,’ I interrupted. ‘I take it you’re going to answer it.’

  Eyvind looked at me. ‘Impatient, aren’t you?’

  ‘No, not really,’ I said, pulling my cloak up round my chin. Unfortunately, that meant uncovering my ankles, which were also starting to get uncomfortably chilly Still, I was making a point. ‘And everybody tells me you Northerners have a fine tradition of oral storytelling, and presumably this is all part of your narrative technique. But can’t we just take it that I’m impressed, and get to the point?’

  He sighed. ‘Trouble is,’ he said, ‘you’ve had to sit there listening to Kari drivelling on about how horrible the fog was and how scared we all were, and your patience is starting to wear thin. Now if I’d been telling the story from the beginning-‘

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Do go on.

  You’re right, though (Eyvind said). That question was starting to bug all of us, but nobody quite had the balls to walk up to him and ask him straight, what’re we doing here and how long are you planning on staying? I suppose we were hoping that we’d figure out what he had in mind without needing to ask, just by what he told us to do. But the booths thing was pretty much the last straw By the time they were finished and we were able to move in - he kept us hanging about an extra day, mind, because he reckoned one of the corners wasn’t dead square, so we had to pull it apart and do it again - by the time the walls were finished to his nit-picky satisfaction, and we’d taken the sail off the ship and spread it over a frame of poles to serve as a roof: well, things were beginning to get a bit fraught. So what does Leif do? Does he gather us all round and explain? Hell as like. While we’re lashing in the poles and bashing in tethering pegs, he buggers off into the woods with his bow, hunting deer.

  That didn’t sit too well with us. Sure, a bit of fresh meat goes down nicely when you’ve been working; and the best way to hunt deer is with a bow, and we only had one bow with us, and it belonged to Leif, so it was hard to fault the logic. It was the way he went about it that pissed us all off. Even Lazy Hrafn started muttering, and usually he was the sort who never has a word to say against the captain. But he’d been up in the roof cutting mortices for the poles, and he’d got tired, slipped, and cut himself to the bone with his axe, so he wasn’t in a good mood. ‘Bugger this for a day’s work,’ he said, while Kari and Thorvald Salmon tried to get him to hold still while they tied up his hand. ‘We’re building his booths for him and he goes prancing off in the greenwood like a bloody earl.’

  Of course, Kari has to be contrary. If Hrafu had been sticking up for Leif, he’d have sung a different tune. Instead, he pulls a face and says, ‘Don’t talk daft, Hrafn. We need the meat, and he’s the best shot. You couldn’t hit a barn wall if you were locked inside.’

  A couple of the men laughed at that, which just got Hrafn riled up. ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘He brings us out here, never says a word about what he’s got in mind. Now we’ve been here, what, three days, and still we don’t know’

  ‘Well, it’s pretty clear that we’ll be staying the winter,’ said Thorstein Troll-Ears. ‘No choice about that.’

  ‘Fine, said Hrafu. ‘So why’ve we built stay-at-Meeting huts instead of a proper house, with the cold weather on the way?’

  ‘We don’t know what winter’s going to be like here,’ said Kari, all sweet reason. ‘You don’t need to be told that it’s a damn sight milder here than at home. If we were back in Greenland, we’d have had to get the stock indoors by now -we’d have had the first heavy snow Instead, it’s like autumn. Loads of grass left for the animals, hardly need a fire at all during the day Booths’ll do just fine.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said Troll-Ears, who loved being contrary almost as much as Kari. ‘For all you know, winter comes down sudden here. We could wake up tomorrow morning and have three feet of snow Not saying that’s what’s going to happen, but it might; we don’t know any different, and nor does he. But instead of staying here and talking it through with the rest of us, he’s away hunting the deer, like he’s Good King Hrolf or someone.

  ‘Fine,’ I snapped, because I was getting fed up with all the moaning. ‘You don’t have to eat your share of the venison
, I’ll have it.’

  ‘That’s not the point and you know it,’ said Lazy Hrafu. ‘And we can stay here all night arguing with each other, and it won’t do anybody any good. Here’s what I think. I say that when he gets back, we ask him, to his face, what his plans are. Agreed?’

  Well, it’s so much easier when you think it’s not just you, it’s everybody ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ Hrafn said. ‘So, soon as he gets back, you go and ask him.’

  It’s like when you’re on deck in a squall, and the wind’s so loud you don’t hear everybody yelling at you to look out, and the boom comes swinging round and a loose rope smacks you in the teeth. I hadn’t expected that, and by the time I’d thought of what to say it was too late: I’d been elected.

  There was no getting out of it; they’d all have been on at me all the bloody time, and when you’re stuck in a closed place with a bunch of people, the last thing you want is everybody nagging at you. Even so, I decided that the smart thing to do would be to bide my time and wait for an opening so the question looked like it was just sort of bubbling up out of the conversation.

  Got my chance sooner than I’d expected, or hoped. That night Leif came back looking absolutely livid. Turned out he’d tracked a nice big doe, got a perfect easy shot at no more than fifteen yards. He draws the bow and the stupid thing snaps at the handle. It’s a bugger when that happens, because you can bet that when a bow fails at full draw, the top half’s going to smack you in the face and the lower half’ll give you a kick in the nuts you won’t forget in a hurry. Leif didn’t say that’s what had happened to him; but when he came back he had the makings of a top-flight black eye, and he was limping. ‘Bastard,’ he was saying. ‘Bloody useless bastard.’

  First off I assumed he must’ve been talking about me; then I realised it was the busted bow and the scat round the head. ‘That’s a nuisance,’ I said, all sympathetic. ‘Can you fix it?’

  He sat down and looked at it for a while. Now some breaks near the handle can be spliced, glued and wrapped in rawhide. Not this one, it was too square. ‘I’ll have to make a new one,’ he said. ‘Pity. Dad gave me this bow just before we left. Still, there it is, nothing lasts for ever.’

  So next morning we left early, just Leif and me, and we poked about in the woods till we found what he was after: a tall, spindly straight-grown ash no more than eight inches across at the foot. -It’d been brought down at least two years earlier. A big fat old oak had got blown down in a storm; one of its branches had smacked into our tree and levered its roots out of the ground, but had left it still just about standing, leant right over but still well clear of the leaf mould so it wouldn’t be rotten and stuck full of beetles.

  After we’d felled it properly and cut off the branches and the brash, Leif split it open with his axe and we worked our way down it with wedges and froes, splitting it longways down the grain. Bows are a real cow to make. You’ve got to keep to one growth ring on the back - you know, the rings you see when you chop down a tree - or else it’ll crack first time you draw it. It’s not all that hard a job to do, but it does take time. That suited me: I could hang around making myself useful while Leif was rough-hewing out the inside curves, and maybe find a good moment to slip in the question.

  Coincidence, I guess; because asking a tricky question’s just like splitting timber. You tap the nose of your wedge into a little thin shake in the wood, then you tap it some more, gently so as not to knock the wedge out; once you’re in, you can whack the wedge as hard as you like with the maul or the back of the axe, and if you’ve gone about it right, the log splits open and falls in two neat halves. Or you can get it wrong, the wedge jams in the cross-grain, and you end up sawing or burning it out, buggering up your wedge and spoiling the log.

  ‘So,’ I asked him, ‘what exactly are we doing here?’

  He looked up at me. Now there’s an odd thing about Leif Eirikson. You ask most people who’d met him once or twice to describe him, and they’d tell you he was a big, strong, impressive man: big shoulders, broad back, strong arms and piercing eyes. Of course, I was with him for a long time, so I know he didn’t look like that. He was skinny, with a long neck and a big Adam’s apple that stuck out, like he’d tried to swallow a pear without chewing it. He had a big sharp nose like a hatchet, and his eyes were small and a bit squinty. I’ve seen him struggle to move a hay-bale that a fifteen-year-old kid could’ve pitched up into the wagon without straining; he had a weak bladder, too. But most people went away thinking they’d just met a big, fierce warrior, the sort of man whose bench in Valhalla’s been set aside for him practically since he was weaned. I think he came across that way because, deep down, that’s who he believed he was; and if his reflection in a pool or a bowl of water said otherwise, it was the reflection’s word against his, and he knew who he trusted. Came of being Red Eirik’s son, I guess. Eirik was every inch the big, bad man. He could hold up an ox-cart with one hand while you changed the wheel, carry a six-year-old ram up the mountain on his shoulders; and if he told you something, you believed him, even when you knew he was lying. A difficult man to have for a father, especially if you’re long and weedy They were different in a lot of ways, mind. Eirik was a great talker, so long as you didn’t interrupt; Leif was quiet, but everybody shut up as soon as he opened his mouth. And I wouldn’t say Eirik was stupid, far from it; and Leif wasn’t amazingly clever and wise, he got things wrong sometimes, just like the rest of us. But Eirik thought aloud, and nobody contradicted him even when he was way off the mark. People stood still and quiet while Leif was thinking, and waited to hear what he said. If you saw the two of them together, it wouldn’t take you long to say this one’s brawn and this one’s brains. You wouldn’t be entirely right, but close enough. What Leif had going for him was this unshakeable belief that he was as good a man as his father, and in many respects better. It was also his weak spot, because he never actually figured out why

  ‘That’s an odd question,’ Leif said.

  ‘Humour me.

  He straightened his back and let his right hand with the drawknife in it hang by his side. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I first heard about this place from old Herjolf, Bjari’s dad; he was boasting about his son the explorer, trying to make out that Bjarni was smarter and luckier than Dad because he’d found this wonderful country nobody knew about, while Dad had someone else’s journey to guide him, and Greenland’s nothing special anyhow. That got me going, and I thought, sooner or later someone’s. going to go looking for the places Bjarni discovered, so why not me?’

  I frowned. ‘That’s not what I asked,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you didn’t drag out all this way just to score points off Bjarni Herjolfson - or off your father. Why did we come here? Just to fill the ship with stuff they’ll want back home, or are we stopping here for good?’

  He laughed. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is a very good question.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘So what’s the answer?’

  Leif was quiet for rather a long time. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘You lot don’t know because I don’t know’ He sighed, and put the drawknife down. ‘It was different when we were back in the Greenland colony,’ he said. ‘I knew then. But somehow-‘ He was staring past me, like he was talking to someone standing behind me. ‘This sounds crazy, but I’ve forgotten. I know I wanted to come here, that it seemed really important to come here; and it was like someone had told me and I’d believed him, but he hadn’t explained the reason, so I had to figure it out for myself. So I thought about what your mate Kari said, about feeling lush grass under his feet; and I thought about what Bjari and everybody else said, all that timber there for the taking. Seemed to make sense, there was a good reason to come. But what didn’t seem to sink in was that there were two good reasons, and they were pulling in different directions. One said, go there and come back, the other said, go there and stay But the voice in the back of my mind was just saying, go.’

  He shrugged his bony shoulders and still didn’t lo
ok at me. ‘I never said any of this to Dad, he’d have reckoned the trolls had addled my brains. God only knows why I’m telling you. You’ll assume I’m crazy, tell the others, and everything’ll get very tense.’

  ‘It’s that way already’ I told him. ‘Better to get it out in the open.’

  ‘Balls.’ Leif grinned. ‘Last thing people need is to be in a strange place miles from home and then find out their leader’s brain’s sprung a leak.. But-‘ He closed his eyes, then opened them again. ‘I’m not as crazy as I’m making myself sound,’ he said. ‘I’ve been negotiating with that little voice in my head ever since it started nagging at me. It kept saying, go; I kept asking why So I reached a decision. If the little voice wouldn’t tell me why I had to come here, I’d come here and find out for myself. Maybe it’s just for a shipload of building timber, or maybe I’m going to build a settlement here and wind up as King Leif of Meadowland, the richest and most powerful man in the world. Stands to reason, actually How could I possibly know what this place has to offer until I’ve seen it for myself?’

  ‘That’s not crazy,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s downright sensible.’