Meadowland

by Tom Holt

  ‘You’re alive, then,’ he said.

  “Course I’m bloody alive,’ I said, swearing because it hurt like buggery to talk. ‘What happened?’

  He sighed. ‘Actually, could’ve been a lot worse. The keel’s all smashed in, but most of the rest of the damage we can probably patch up, eventually And nobody got killed,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘In fact, you’re probably the worst hurt.’

  That didn’t sound good, so I called him a bastard and asked what was wrong with me. ‘Two busted ribs, he told me. ‘But your arm’s probably all right, apart from a bit of bruising.’

  ‘My head hurts,’ I told him.

  ‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it?’ Eyvind replied, and walked away, even though I yelled at him to come back. As it happened, I went to sleep for a while after that, and it was dark when I woke up again There was a fire going nearby, and it was just spitting with rain. Someone said, ‘Kari’s awake’, and next thing Thorvald himself had come to see me. Which was nice of him, I guess.

  ‘We ran aground,’ he said, after he’d asked me how I was and I’d lied to him. ‘We’ll get her afloat again, no worries on that score, but it’s going to be a long job. A bloody long job,’ he added, in a tone of voice I didn’t like one bit. ‘Doesn’t help that half our stuff’s at the bottom of the sea,’ he went on. ‘We lost the cross-cut saw and the carpenter’s chest, and we’ve got just the one long axe between us.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ I said. ‘Eyvind said the keel’s not too clever.’

  ‘It’s a mess,’ Thorvald said sadly ‘We’re going to have to make a new one from scratch - we can’t even salvage the nails.’

  That was when I really wanted to cry. If we had to build and fit a new keel, we’d need more than just timber; we’d need the right tools, and most of all (because you can do a lot with a hand-axe if you’ve really got to) we’d need nails. If we hadn’t got any we’d have to make some; and to make nails, of course, you need a forge and an anvil and bellows and all that, not to mention raw iron.

  ‘We’re going back to Leif’s Booths, then,’ I said, all quiet.

  Thorvald nodded; I could see the silhouette of his beard wagging up and down against the firelight. ‘Might as well,’ he said. ‘We used up the last of the charcoal before we came on, so we’ll need to burn a stack before we can get the forge going. With only one long axe between us, that means everybody pitching in with hand-axes. It’s a real bugger when you’ve got to make every damn thing for yourself.’

  I nodded and pretended that I was feeling sleepy again, because I didn’t feel like talking any more. Of course, I hadn’t had time to figure it all out in my mind, how long each job’d take before we could move on to the next stage, but I didn’t need to know the details. You see, it wasn’t just a matter of doing the work. Three-quarters of our time’d be spent just gathering food and fuel. The plain fact was, we were going to be stuck in bloody Meadowland all summer, probably all winter too. It was like the place had got its teeth stuck into us and wasn’t going to let us go.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  ‘What?’ I muttered.

  ‘You fell asleep.’

  I opened my eyes to the sight of Eyvind’s long, bony, beard-fringed face hovering over me. ‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘I was just resting my eyes.

  I could see light soaking through the shadows at the mouth of the tomb. Furthermore, I had a crick in my neck, pins and needles in my left arm and a sharp pain in the small of my back. It was just possible that Eyvind was right.

  ‘Understandable,’ he went on. ‘In fact, it’s amazing you lasted as long as you did, with that old fool sitting there, spouting his drivel at you. I always said he missed his calling in life. Should’ve been a surgeon’s assistant. Get Kari to talk to a man for an hour, you can cut off both his feet and he’d never notice a thing.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was paying close attention. He’d just got to the part where Thorvald Eirikson ran the ship aground.’

  Eyvind grunted. Behind him, I could see the taciturn Harald mixing porridge in an iron pot over the fire. For choice, I like to start the day with freshly baked wheat-bread dipped in wine with cheese grated over the top; porridge, on the other hand, has the great virtue of being better than nothing. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘the part where I saved that bastard from drowning.’

  I frowned. ‘I don’t think he mentioned that,’ I said.

  Eyvind’s face clouded over like the prelude to a thunderstorm. ‘You’re joking.’

  Yet another thing I probably shouldn’t have mentioned. ‘Well,’ I added, ‘he did say he passed out when he hit his head on something during the storm, and the next thing he knew was being on dry land, so presumably he wasn’t actually aware who saved him, through being unconscious at the time-‘

  ‘Balls,’ said Eyvind succinctly “Course he knew I told him.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘In that case, maybe I misheard him or something. I was nearly asleep, wasn’t I?’

  ‘You said you were resting your eyes, not your ears.’

  ‘Well, anyhow,’ I said, as firmly as I could, ‘I know now, don’t I? Though that rather raises the question: if you’ve always hated his guts as much as you claim to, why didn’t you just let him drown?’

  Eyvind sighed. ‘Because that’s not how it works, on a ship,’ he said. ‘Look, it’s not anything noble or heroic or any shit like that. It’s more that, if you couldn’t absolutely rely on knowing that anybody on that ship’d do as much for you, even your worst enemy in the whole world, people simply wouldn’t be able to go to sea, there’d be nothing on Earth that’d induce them to set foot on the deck of a ship. All right, he added, as I pulled a not-convinced face, ‘let’s take an example you can understand. Your orthodox Christians, right, hate the heretics. They hate them so much that they round them up and kill them like sheep in winter. But if the Greeks were attacked by the heathen Saracens, they’d forget their differences for the time being and fight together. Right?’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘no, they wouldn’t. But I think I see what you mean. The sea is your common enemy, and you’d rather risk your life to save someone you can’t stand than give the sea the satisfaction of getting him.’

  Eyvind nodded. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, I don’t know about you, but I can’t see the point of staying inside when it’s warm and sunny out. Let’s go and sit outside, and I’ll tell you what happened next.’

  Took us the best part of a week to walk back to Leif’s Booths (Eyvind said), carrying all the gear we hadn’t lost in the storm. Can’t say we were overjoyed to see the place again, even though it was looking very cheerful and fine with all its spring flowers and stuff. But it didn’t take us very long to get over being pissed off at being there again, and after that we just slotted back into the routine: catching fish, cutting wood, burning charcoal. Well, it was just ordinary life, except we were doing it a slightly harder way than if we’d been back at Brattahlid or Herjolfsness. Meanwhile, Thorvald was in the forge, with Fat Osvif working the bellows for him, banging out nails day after day Not that Thorvald was the handiest man with a hammer I ever did see, but that’s how we do things. We believe that who you are decides what you can do. Like, in the City there’s men who do nothing but weave rugs or make silver jugs, and they do that because they’re good at it. You can get away with doing things that way round in a city, where there’s thousands of people all living together. On the farms, though, back home, there’s three or four dozen of you at most, so we can’t afford to have experts, men who only do one thing all year round. Even a big place like Brattahlid, there’s only, what, five days’ worth of blacksmith work needed in a year; maybe fourteen days of carpentering, about the same amount of time tanning or building. So we say, the more responsible a job is, the more important the man who does it has got to be. Really, it’s a case of the farmer saying, I need this done right, I’d better do it myself.

  So, since making the nails was an importa
nt job, obviously Thorvald had to do it; and he did all right, because bashing out a few nails is hardly skilled work. But it took time, best part of a month, what with gathering lumps of ore in the bog, making the charcoal, drawing the iron out of the ore, beating it into a bloom, cutting it, all that. Then, when he’d done that, we needed tools for making the new keel: chisels, augers, a square. So Thorvald had to start all over, making more iron and then turning it into steel by getting it white hot, dipping it in the charcoal dust and forging it all up together. That was just the start of it, mind. Next, he had to draw down iron rods the same thickness as the steel ones, twist them together and weld them, draw the welded bars down and fold them, then another weld and another fold, and so on till he’d got something that’d hold an edge. I’ll say this much for him: it was a lot of work for one man to do on his own, with just Fat Osvif to do the bellows and the striking, but he didn’t waste much time standing about and looking out of the doorway.

  Once he’d finished the ironwork, back we went to the place where we’d left the ship, and we got to work on making the new keel. Took us two whole days of wandering about in the forest just to find a tree with the right bend in it - and we had to use maple, because we couldn’t find any elm; then another two days’ chipping away with hand-axes to shape it, because we had to be pretty bloody precise or it wouldn’t fit. Of course, nothing like that ever does fit, no matter how careful you are, so we made it a bit big and counted on having to work it down a little.

  Next was the tricky bit. You see, you can’t just tear the keel off a ship and knock in a new one, because the keel’s what holds the front end of the ship together. If you cracked on and took it out, all the frames and strakes and boards’d spring out of place and you’d never ever get them all back in again. So what we had to do was, we had to haul the ship up onto the flat and build a cradle of timbers for it to sit in; then we had to cut a whole lot of poles and jam them in hard against the sides of the ship to hold everything in place once we’d taken out the keel. That was a bastard of a job, because of course the front end of a ship’s all curves, it’s not like propping something easy and flat, like a wall; and we couldn’t afford to get it wrong, or there we’d be with no bloody ship.

  We managed it, though, somehow; and after that came a really nasty job. Because the keel had taken such a scat running aground, the keel-bolts were all bent and bowed out of shape and we couldn’t just drift them out, they had to be cut through with a chisel, each one. No fun, that: working on your back reaching up, and hardly able to swing your axe -no hammers, of course, so we had to use the polls of our hand-axes, which meant having the sharp edge buzzing back and forward an inch from your nose all day long.

  Once we’d done that, though, it got easier. We got the new keel scarfed into the stem-post good and tight, and the new bolts were a good fit, and we didn’t have to shave the keel down nearly as much as we’d expected. It just took a long time, a bloody long time. We tried to work faster, we even tried working at night, with big fires to light the job, but that didn’t come to anything and we nearly screwed the whole job up, trying to do fine work when we couldn’t see. Anyhow, the point came where we knew we weren’t going to get finished before winter. At least, we might just have done it and got launched before the ice started to form; but if we didn’t make it, we’d be in deep trouble, because if we carried on working on the ship we couldn’t lay in food and fuel for the winter, which would mean that as soon as it got cold we’d all be dead. So we had to take the decision: we’d be spending another winter in Meadowland.

  We split into two groups. Thorvald and nine others stayed working on the ship, the other twenty took the long walk back to Leif’s Booths to get ready for the winter. Now I’m a pretty reasonable carpenter, though I do say so myself, and Kari’s lucky if he can cut a mortice in a fence-post and still have ten fingers. So that was good. Kari went back to the Booths, I stayed on with Thorvald.

  You know, this sounds really sad, but that was possibly the happiest time of my life. Yes, I was working all day in the cold and the wet, lying on my back on frozen mud, sleeping in the open under one threadbare blanket, eating last spring’s wind-dried cod, with everybody in a right mood because Thorvald had gone all quiet with guilt and worry; and yes, we stayed on a week too long because Thorvald insisted on getting the scarf-joint finished, which meant we got caught in a blizzard on the way back to the Booths, got lost, and came within an inch of freezing to death. But that didn’t bother me as much as it might’ve done, because it was six weeks without that bastard Kari. Wonderful feeling, like you’ve had toothache all your life and suddenly it goes away.

  Trouble with that is, though, it just makes it ten times worse when it starts up again.

  I remember when we staggered out of that blizzard into the Booths, when we saw the shape of the roofs against the skyline. Part of me was thinking, thank God, I’m not going to freeze and die after all; the rest was wishing we could all stay out there just a little bit longer, to put off the moment when I had to see that stupid face grinning at me again. Now if you’d ever been so cold your fingers and toes stop hurting, you’d understand.

  That was a very long winter. Didn’t just seem that way: the snow kept on falling, the thaw was late, we were rationing the food and the firewood, and every extra day we had to spend in the Booths was like torture. It’d have been bad enough if it’d been like the previous winter, where we’d all sat quiet. But it was worse than that. About halfway through, some of the men started picking quarrels, quarrels turned to fights, a man called Thorbjorn Elbow nearly got killed. Any other time, Thorvald would’ve stopped it before it got that far; but Thorvald seemed like he’d practically given up being in charge. All he wanted to do was huddle in a dark place up against the wall and worry himself sick about what the frost and the wet were doing to his ship, stuck up on a lot of poles with its belly open and its guts only held in with a few sticks. So when the yelling and the bad temper started, he just pretended he couldn’t hear it; and that made it all worse, of course. Really, it’s a miracle we didn’t all chop each other to pieces, like the heroes in Valhalla, except there wouldn’t have been any Choosers of the Slain to sort out the bits and put us all back together again.

  But spring came, eventually, and still we hadn’t killed each other, so that was all right. The snow was still on the ground as we trudged back to where we’d left the ship, and all the way we were wondering if the bloody thing’d still be there, or whether the winds had blown it down or the thaw-waters had washed it out to sea. Last time I’d seen it - seemed like another life - it’d been stranded up in the air, which is a bloody funny place for a ship to be, and all those poles and props holding it together had made it look like a crane-fly caught in a cobweb. What I was expecting to see was a mess of smashed-up boards and timbers, scattered all over the place, like the mad woman’s shit.

  Instead, there she was, bless her heart, more or less how we’d left her. She did all right by me, that ship. Remember, it was Bjarni Herjolfson’s boat to start with, and she wasn’t new when he got her. This was the third time she’d been in those parts, and she’d had to put up with heavy winds, pounding waves, a fair old bashing from rocks and floating ice. Now she’d just had her backbone ripped out and a new one stuck in, a rushed job instead of slow and careful, not to mention spending winter with damn great holes in her, with the melted snow trickling in and out. If she’d been a horse, you’d have knocked her on the head out of simple kindness, but we were relying on her to get us home again. That’s a lot to ask, really I reckon if ships were human instead of made out of wood and nails, we’d all drown.

  Of course there were a few bits and pieces that needed tidying up, where some of the props had slipped, or timbers had warped. Bear in mind, our new keel was all green wood, so really we had no idea how much or which way it was going to move as it seasoned. We’d just done our best to get the frames up snug to it so that they’d go some way towards holding it in shape, and hoped for
the best. As it turned out, it wasn’t too bad at all - a few shakes and wobbles here and there, but nothing we couldn’t live with. We finished off the work in no time flat, proofed and caulked the hull as best we could, broke up the scaffolding and launched the ship into the sea. It was a nasty moment when our home-made keel went under water, but she just sort of gave a little wiggle, sat up and floated on as though nothing had happened. I think, any other time, we’d have screamed and yelled and cheered and carried on like anything, but we stood there and looked at her and didn’t say a word. There’s times when you celebrate, and other times when you’re just grateful.

  One thing: it perked Thorvald up no end, once we’d got the ship launched and given her a couple of days of trials up and down the coast and back. He wasn’t right back to his old self, mind. Mostly, if you wanted to know what you were supposed to be doing next, you’d have to ask him, else he’d just stay put and not say anything. It’s like after you’ve been ill with a fever, and then it breaks: you know the worst of it’s passed but you’re weak as a baby for days. Thorvald was back with us again from wherever it was he’d been in his mind all winter, but he’d lost all his strength. Really it was just as well we were going home, because he wasn’t any use at all.

  Just as we were getting ready to leave, Thorvald called us all up onto the beach, where the wreck of the old keel was lying where we’d left it. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know it’s been tough and we’re all in a hurry to get under way, but there’s something I’d like you to do for me. I want to set up what’s left of the old keel here on the headland, as a seamark.’

  Well, we didn’t argue; but I don’t reckon I was the only one who thought: right, and who’re we putting this mark up for? I couldn’t imagine for a moment that Thorvald was planning on coming back there ever again; same for all of us, should go without saying. Maybe he meant it more as a symbolic thing, like a thank-you to God or whatever. Anyhow, we did as he said; and then we pushed on east till we came to a place where the mouths of two fjords joined. There was a little tongue sticking out between them, all covered in dense forest. We didn’t need to stop for anything, but Thorvald told us to put in and take on some extra firewood. I think it was just an excuse on his part, so he could get off the ship and walk about for a bit. Why he wanted to do that, I have no idea; but he could be like that sometimes, right down one moment and right up the next. Anyway, we went ashore and stood about, not really having any idea what we were supposed to be doing; Thorvald walked up and down a bit, looking around him like a man at a farm sale, and then he stopped and grinned.