by Tom Holt
‘Now hang on,’ I interrupted. ‘I think you’re being a bit too cynical about this sword business. Now I don’t know very much about your people or the North, but it seems to me that giving your brother your father’s sword has got to be a pretty significant gesture of reconciliation. I mean, don’t you people make a great fuss about the family sword? You hand them down from generation to generation, or you bury them with your great heroes. This is a big deal, right?’
Kari smirked at me. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said. ‘And completely wrong at the same time, again of course. Yes, there are old swords that’ve been in families for a very long time, particularly the big, rich families in Norway and Denmark and Sweden, kings and earls and so on. But that’s not being sentimental; back in the good old days, they made them the hard way, by twisting and folding and welding. Then, about five generations ago, traders started fetching home cheap German swords by the barrelful, made from solid steel rather than the old way Nobody could be bothered making folded swords any more, when you could buy one almost as good for a third of the price, so the Northern smiths got out of the sword business. But the German swords aren’t really up to the same standard, or at least that’s what the rich farmers reckon, and they’re the only ones who can afford to own the things. And as for what you said about Leif-well, yes, the sword he gave Thorstein had belonged to Red Eirik, but I don’t imagine he ever pulled it out of its scabbard. He was a regular killer, Eirik, but he did his killing with a hand-axe, same as everybody else, and he did it from behind or when the bloke was tying his bootlace or looking the other way, because he may’ve been a vicious bugger but he wasn’t an idiot. No, Eirik got hold of that sword because a Danish trader stayed the winter at Brattahlid, but he buggered off in the middle of the night without paying for his board and lodging; but in the dark, he left one of his bundles of stock behind - twelve ells of foreign coloured cloth, a walrus-ivory chess set and that sword. Naturally, Eirik kept the stuff as part settlement of the trader’s bill. He only hung the sword on the wall because he reckoned it gave the place a touch of class.’
Anyhow (Kari went on) we set sail from Eiriksfjord on a bright, warm summer morning. The biggest surprise, as far as I was concerned, was that Thorstein insisted on dragging his wife along - you remember, Gudrid, the woman from the shipwreck that Leif was so keen on. My guess is, he didn’t want to leave her behind at Brattahlid, and I think he may have had a point there. She didn’t seem particularly happy to be on the trip, but she soon proved she was perfectly at home on a ship. In fact, she coped rather better than most of us, as it turned out.
We had a really smooth, fast run of it, right up to the point where we caught sight of Leif’s Booths in the distance. Then the weather changed, just a little bit.
First we got caught in a right bastard of a gale. Ironically, it was the same wind we’d ridden on each of our return journeys from Meadowland, and I’ve told you already how fast it carried us along. This time, though, made the other times look like a gentle sneeze. How we didn’t capsize I don’t know. There wasn’t anything we could do except ride it out and hope we stayed afloat and in one piece. It carried us two days and one night; on the second evening it stopped dead, and then the fog came down. It was bad. You could shut your eyes and not notice any difference in the light.
Don’t ask me how long we sat in that bloody fog, with no wind and not a clue about where we were. It was a long wait until the fog lifted; and when it did, it was still too hazy to get a fix by the sun, let alone by the stars at night. Long and short of it was, we were lost. All we knew was, we were somewhere in the sea between Meadowland and Greenland, which was a fat lot of use. So Thorstein took his best guess, just before the fog closed in again. A bit of a wind came up after we’d been there three or four days. Thorstein reckoned it was north-west, so we followed it as best we could. Seemed, as they say, like a good idea at the time. When next the fog lifted, we were still none the wiser about where we were. Thorstein said, let’s press on, we must be nearly there by now He was wrong, of course. We’d been plodding along for nine days or so when eventually the sun came out enough for Thorstein to hazard a guess about where we’d pitched up. The bad news was, we appeared to have been sailing round in a big circle.
Things were starting to get a bit tense, mostly because the food had run out. Now really there’s no excuse for starving to death in the middle of the sea, not so long as you’ve got a few fish-hooks, and spare rope you can unwind to make lines. But it’s a bugger having to eat your fish raw because there’s no charcoal. Water wasn’t an issue, because it rained most nights, enough to fill half a dozen buckets.
By now, we’d all had about as much as we could take. Tempers were starting to fray, and nobody had anything good to say about Thorstein’s navigating. Actually, that was unfair, because nobody could’ve done much in that fog. Even with a bearing-dial you need to be able to see the sun. Also, we wouldn’t have got lost to begin with if we hadn’t been hit by that freak wind that blew us away from Leif’s Booths. But the crew weren’t in a mood to be reasonable. Quite a few of them were all for chucking Thorstein over the side; in fact, we’d probably have done it, except nobody else seemed to fancy the job of finding our way home. So instead we contented ourselves by giving Thorstein a hard time. He tried to bluster us down but that didn’t get him very far, probably because we could tell he was scared. If you want to control a ship by making threats, you’ve got to make the men believe you’ll carry them out. Once Thorstein realised he was a hair’s breadth away from being knocked on the head and pitched into the sea, he went very quiet and sat huddled up next to the sternpost, which didn’t help anything.
Believe it or not, it was Gudrid who made us snap out of it. Someone’d got on her nerves with their constant whining and complaining, and out of the blue she went for him; jumped up from where she’d been sitting, grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be one of the buckets we’d put out to catch rainwater, and gave the poor bastard such a scat round the head you could hear it right down the other end of the ship: a thick, chunky thumping noise, like driving in a fence post with an oak maul. Made me jump, I can tell you; I thought the ship had run aground or something. Anyhow, the whole ship was dead quiet for two or three heartbeats, and then someone laughed, and everybody else joined in, laughing and cheering. For some reason, that made Gudrid lose it completely; she started yelling and shrieking at us, called us all a load of stupid kids. ‘It’s all your fault she shouted. ‘You’ve been on this route before, you’re supposed to know the way.’ Actually, that was overstating it, because out of the twenty of us only five, me and Eyvind included, had been on any of the previous Meadowland trips. But there’s nothing like being yelled at by a woman to stop you in your tracks. I mean, if a man kicks up a fuss and starts calling you names, you can bash his face in and that somehow proves that you were right and he was wrong. Can’t do that with women. You try and argue with them, and that’s a bit like trying to swat bees with your hand; mostly they just dance out of the way, and if you do manage to connect, they just sting you anyway. Or you shut your face and try and keep a dignified silence, and of course that doesn’t work either. So, she told us our fortunes loud and clear, and we just sat still and quiet, feeling embarrassed, so that when she stopped we were all so relieved we couldn’t be bothered snarling at each other any more. I mean, there was a very long silence, and then we started talking to each other nice and friendly, as though nothing had happened.
Finally the fog lifted for good, and we picked up a slow but steady wind, which we held for three days. The fourth morning, Thorstein woke us up, yelling and bawling: land, at last.
Turned out we were back to Greenland, off the northern edge of the Western Settlement.
Well, we had mixed feelings about that. Yes, it was bloody fantastic to draw the ship up on shore and walk away from it; but you couldn’t help feeling a bit stupid, all those weeks getting soaked to the skin and floundering about in the fog,
and we ended up a couple of days’ sail from where we started out from. We were going to get laughed at, we knew, soon as we showed up back in Eiriksfjord with nothing to show for our adventure; so when the farmer at Lysufjord, which was where we were, offered to put us up for a day or two before we went home, we were happy to accept.
Now I can see where a foreigner like you might get confused by Northern names, because there’s so few of them. The farmer at Lysufjord was called Thorstein; but I can tell you won’t be able to tell him apart from Thorstein Eirikson, unless I help you out a little. That first evening, when we’d had a good feed and a few drinks, he told us people called him Black Thorstein, so I’ll do the same.
God only knows why Black Thorstein offered to put us up in the first place, because he was a miserable bugger, not sociable. He was well off, at least by Greenland standards, and he didn’t begrudge us his food and beer; but he wasn’t interested in hearing about our adventures, outside of a very short summary - ‘We were headed somewhere but there was a storm and we got lost’ - and he wasn’t too keen on talking himself, either. In fact, the only one of us he seemed to have any time for was Gudrid, and he was all over her like a hand-me-down shirt. That didn’t go down terribly well with his wife, a big woman by the name of Grimhild. When I say big, by the way, I don’t just mean fat, or even tall. She was bloody massive: arms and legs like a troll, great big hands and feet. She wasn’t all that fat, actually, just large all over. Black Thorstein was a big man, but stood next to Grimhild he looked like her kid brother. Me, I wouldn’t have wanted to get on her wrong side by sniffing round the skirts of another woman, in her house, sitting at her table; but Black Thorstein acted like she wasn’t there. That was Gudrid for you, though. I’ve seen better-looking women, and women who flirt with anything on two legs. She wasn’t like that. She was quiet, mostly, except when she flew off the handle. I think what got you going was the way she had of sitting looking at you and listening, like you were the most fascinating man she’d ever come across. She had big round eyes, sort of a cloudy brown colour; and when you were talking to her, you felt like it was terribly important that she thought well of you. At least, that was how men reacted. She didn’t talk to women much, and other women tended to skirt round her with their ears back, if you see what I mean. Big Grimhild didn’t like her at all, you could see that the moment they set eyes on each other. Understandable, I guess. I mean, Grimhild was just the sort of woman you’d want to marry if you were fixing to move out to the Western Settlement, because she could cut turf and pitch hay all day long, carry a sick calf over her shoulder down from the shieling to the farm, and that counts for a whole lot more than glamour when you’re living right out on the edge of the world. Gudrid - well, she could card and spin and cure bacon, but I never knew her stir out of doors unless she had to, particularly if it was cold.
So it wasn’t a comfortable atmosphere at Lysufjord, and the best I could say for it was that we weren’t going to be stopping there long; at least, that was the idea. Didn’t quite work out that way, unfortunately
The day we’d set for leaving, a hell of a storm came up out of nowhere. Thorstein Eirikson said, it’s just a bit of a squall, we’ll be fine; but it was obvious he just wanted to get his wife away from Black Thorstein. We wouldn’t have gone a mile in that weather. So we stayed another night, and the weather got worse instead of better, and then we looked out one morning and the sea was full of floating ice, and we knew we were stuck there for the winter.
It’s hard to say who was least happy about that, Thorstein Eirikson or Big Grimhild. The only one who didn’t seem to mind was our host. Of course you’re welcome to stay, he said; but he said it to Gudrid, without even looking at anybody else. I could hear Thorstein Eirikson growling down the other end of the table, and Grimhild got up and snatched away the dinner plates so hard that she scattered bones and bits of gristle. Black Thorstein’s farmhands were looking down their noses; our lot were sat there cowering, because we knew there was going to be trouble sooner or later. We outnumbered the locals five to one, so if it came to a straight fight we’d probably be all right, but none of us wanted it to come to that if it could be helped.
Well, it all ended badly, but not the way we thought it would. After we’d been there about a month, Grimhild woke up one morning and announced that she was staying in bed. We all assumed it was a temper tantrum, but one of the farm women came out mid-afternoon and said the mistress was sweating buckets and couldn’t lie still. That was bad news. The last thing you want in a house shut in for the winter is someone going down with something nasty, because if it spreads, chances are you’ll all get it. Sure enough, next morning one of the farmhands was taken bad the same way, and later on that day one of our lot. Thorstein Eirikson was next; he woke up next day and told us he was burning up, so we went out and broke up some ice, and packed it all over him till just his eyes and nose were showing. That stopped it getting any worse, but he lay there moaning and swearing and calling out that he was being murdered. That wasn’t the brightest thing to say under the circumstances, but by then he was off his head most of the time. The farm people got a bit uptight about it, but Black Thorstein didn’t seem to care. He was more worried about Grimhild, credit where it’s due; he spent all his time sitting next to her bed, holding her enormous hand, except when he went out with his axe to bust up more ice. Gudrid seemed to have pulled herself together a bit as well. She stayed close to her husband all day, but she was wasting her time because he didn’t recognise her, even though he kept yelling for her and asking us all if we knew where she was.
Six more of our men went down. Curiously, the last to fall ill was the first to die; he just seemed to shrivel up, like a ball of wool on the fire. There was no chance of burying him while the ground was frozen solid, so we put him outside and covered him with three foot of snow, so he’d keep fresh till the thaw came. Next to go was one of the farm women, then three of our men, and the rest of us figured that it wouldn’t be long till it was our turn. Talk about a miserable time: stuck in the main hall all day, nothing to do except listen to the rantings of the sick and the dying, unless it was your turn to go out in the freezing cold and break up ice. In the end, Eyvind and a man called Thormod Eyes and me decided we’d move out to the cattle sheds and take our chances there. True, it was bloody cold, but no worse than in the house, because they weren’t keeping up much of a fire in there so as not to melt the ice-beds. We poked a hole in the roof and lit up a brazier, fed and watered and mucked out the cows for something to do, and worried ourselves silly imagining that we were starting to show the first symptoms of the fever.
Which was why we weren’t there when Thorstein Eirikson died. He hung on a long time, Black Thorstein told us, longer than any of the others in our crew, though one of the farmhands outlasted him by a day. By an odd coincidence, Grimhild died at almost the same time - we could hear her ranting and cursing towards the end, even out there in the cattleshed. Anyhow, when there was just Black Thorstein and Gudrid left, they came out and told us what’d happened. Both of them seemed well out of it, like they were way past caring. Black Thorstein asked if we’d mind helping him with the burials once the thaw came, since it’d be a big job for a man on his own. We said that’d be fine, no problem. Then he said, did we think he could come with us back to Eiriksfjord, since he didn’t really fancy staying on at Lysufjord, given what’d happened there. Well, we weren’t in any position to speak for Leif Eirikson, but the plain fact was that the three of us on our own couldn’t handle the ship, but with a fourth pair of hands we’d probably make it; so we said, sure, why not? After that, nobody said anything much, until the spring came.
You know, when I think back on my life, I’m struck by how much of it I’ve spent sitting still and quiet and miserable; either frozen or soaked to the skin, in fog, or cooped up over winter in some place I really didn’t want to be. I dare say it’s mostly my own fault, for drifting through my life instead of making up my mind to do something u
seful and sensible with it, like other people seem to. Maybe that’s why I’ve fetched up here, where most of the year it’s so hot you can scarcely breathe, and you don’t seem to get the long summer days and long winter nights, and when you first come here from the North you think it’s all so much better, until you’ve been here a while and you find out it’s just different. But there you go. For a while, I sort of persuaded myself that places matter; that who you are depends a lot on where you are, and if only you can find the right place to be, that’ll solve all your problems and everything’ll be fine. But the plain fact is, places make hardly any difference at all. Any place you go to changes soon as you get there, and most of us are like snails, we carry one place around with us on our backs wherever we go.
Well: when the thaw came, after we’d buried the dead, we fixed up the ship as best we could and sailed back to the Eastern Settlement. It only took us a night and two days, would you believe; all that time we’d been so close, but we might as well have been back in Meadowland for all the good it did us.
I think I can honestly say that Leif was pleased to see us; mostly, I think, because we’d brought back Gudrid, and the ship. Probably on balance he was sad about Thorstein, and losing sixteen of his men like that definitely came as a blow But it’s like my old mother used to say: you can’t blame a man for looking on the bright side. At a stroke, he’d cleared out both his brothers from under his feet, and surely Gudrid would have to marry him now
She didn’t, of course. Nor did she marry Black Thorstein, who’d come to Brattahlid with pretty much the same idea in mind. He at any rate took it quite well. He borrowed a horse, rode back to the Western Settlement and sold up the farm, live and dead stock, the lot; then he came back to Eiriksfjord, bought a place as close to Brattahlid as he could find, and carried on with his life. I heard at some point that he married again, though I don’t know if it’s true, or any details. Any rate, he went back to being a miserable bastard, and kept himself to himself.