by Tom Holt
‘That’s fine, then,’ said Bits.
But there was still something bothering me, though really it was none of my business. ‘Just one question,’ I said. ‘If it hadn’t been for Gudrid, would you be reckoning on staying there for keeps?’
He took a moment before he answered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That was the idea all along.’
Usually, I know when I’m being lied to; this time, I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure, to tell you the truth. I never heard Bits tell a lie, before or since, so I’ve got no way of knowing what he looked or sounded like when he was lying. Or it could’ve been true, at that. Not that it matters all that much, I suppose.
‘Well, obviously it matters,’ I interrupted. ‘It goes to the root of his motivation, surely And that’s important, if anything is.’
Eyvind shook his head. ‘Don’t see why,’ he said. ‘Good people do bad things for good reasons; bad people do good things for bad reasons. A hundred years from now, nobody’ll know or care why any of us did what we did. All that matters is actions, and what comes of them.’
I frowned at him. ‘Do you really believe that?’ I asked.
He scratched his head. ‘Not sure,’ he replied. ‘I guess it depends on the action, doesn’t it?’
Anyhow (Eyvind continued) that stopped the rot, as far as people quitting the project went. But none of the men who’d already cried off changed their minds; nor any of the women, either. We were stuck at fifty-nine men and five women. Bits said it’d be enough; no bad thing, in a way, because less people meant less supplies needed for the journey, so there’d be space left over for more of the stuff we’d be likely to need once we actually got there. Bits was a great one for seeing the bright side; if you chopped off his leg, he’d say ‘But think how much I’ll save on shoes.’
We brought forward leaving-day by a week, because it was getting painful to be at Brattahlid. Bits wanted an early start, so those of us who were going made a point of getting up while it was still dark and creeping out so as not to wake anyone else. We’d finished the loading the previous evening, right down to our personal kit, so all we had to do was stagger down to the boat shed and draw the ships down into the water. With Bits in charge, the operation was completely successful, which meant there wasn’t anybody to see us off as we ran the ships out into the sea and clambered aboard. You couldn’t have asked for a better departure: the sea was calm and flat, the wind was moderate but in just the right direction, and it wasn’t raining. I guess you could say that a big crowd waving us goodbye’d only have slowed us up, maybe even made us risk missing the tide. And anyway, why would I be worried? Since I didn’t have any family there, there’d have been nobody to wish me goodbye. Except Kari, of course; and the whole point in going was to get away from him. Even so.
Even so.
But he wasn’t there, because I looked, even while we were drawing down the ships. Good riddance, I thought. Finally, after all those years, I was rid of him. Probably I only looked just to make sure he didn’t come sneaking up at the last moment. I’m sure that was the reason.
And then we were under way, and there was plenty else to think about. Needless to say, I was on board our old ship, the one that’d originally belonged to Bjarni Herjolfson. Bits wasn’t on board, of course, he was on his own ship. He’d put his forecastle-man in charge of ours, a man called Ohtar Kolbeinson; an Easterner, but a good man in his way We were carrying a lot of cargo: mostly livestock, also some tools, clothes, bundles of cloth, and our own rations for the journey
Once the sails were set and we were riding a nice fresh south-westerly wind, I found myself a place to sit, and sat on it. I’d learned to do that early during my previous jaunts. If you leave it too long, all the best places get taken, and you end up huddled in the middle of the deck, when where you want to be is at the side, snuggled under the rail for choice. That way you get some shelter from waves in hard weather; the spray breaks against the rail and sloshes down on the poor buggers sitting in the middle. Once you’re a day into the journey, you’ll be bloody lucky to change your sitting-place, unless you find someone who’s willing to swap with you. Your sitting-place is your only bit of personal space, you see; so it’s simple human nature to want to keep it to yourself and to get all stroppy if someone else tries to muscle in on it. Blood’s been spilt for less on a long voyage.
Anyway There was a big, tall barrel at the aft end of the cargo stash; I made a beeline for it and spread my stuff around, like I was building walls and marking out boundaries with hurdles. I reckoned the barrel’d shelter me in front, same as the rail sheltered me on my left side. Really pleased with myself, I was; and I was grinning like an idiot and congratulating myself on getting possibly the best berth on the ship when the lid of the barrel started to move.
I was so taken aback, all I could do was crouch there and watch. Gradually the lid lifted up, and I was on the point of yelling to the others when I saw a pair of beady little eyes twinkling at me from under, the barrel lid. Familiar? Oh yes. I’d have known those eyes anywhere.
‘Eyvind,’ he hissed. ‘That you?’
It was Kari, of course. Stupid bugger’d stowed away till it was too late to turn back.
I couldn’t manage to get any words out, I was so - well, if you’ve been paying any sort of attention, you can guess how I was feeling without me having to tell you.
‘Don’t just sit there, Eyvind, you stupid bastard,’ he hissed at me. ‘Help me get out of here, before I suffocate.’
I couldn’t have moved if I’d tried, and I didn’t. It was like there was this ridiculous idea in my head of making him stay in the stupid barrel all the way to Meadowland; or maybe he’d die in there and I could fish him out with a boat-hook and throw his shrivelled corpse into the sea for the sharks and the whales to bust their teeth on.
By now, most everybody at our end of the ship had noticed that there was a strange head poking up out of a barrel. There was pointing and yelling, and Captain Ohtar came scrambling across the hold, walking on the backs of the cows, to see what the hell was going on.
‘Stowaway,’ was all I could say, and I pointed. Ohtar looked where I’d shown him, and did this great big comical double take.
‘Kari?’ he called out. ‘What the hell are you doing in that barrel?’
He knew Kari from Brattahlid, of course; in fact, they’d spent quite a bit of time together over the winter, playing chess. Kari cheats, but Olitar didn’t seem to have noticed.
A couple of men grabbed Kari under the shoulders and out he came like a snail from its shell; all filthy dirty, of course, because the barrel he’d been lurking in also contained charcoal. They dumped him down on the deck, right up close to me for some reason, and Olitar came and stood over him.
‘Just a moment,’ Ohtar said. ‘Bits told me quite clearly; he said you weren’t coming with us.
Kari grinned at him, stupid great oaf. ‘Change of plan,’ he said.
‘Does Bits know?’ Ohtar asked.
“Course not,’ I broke in. ‘Bits doesn’t want him, so he’s crept on board and hidden.’
Ohtar looked puzzled half to death. ‘Why’d you want to do a thing like that?’ he said.
Huge grin from Kari. ‘To be with my old mate Eyvind, mostly’ he said; and everybody stopped staring at him and started staring at me instead. ‘Also, you need me on this jaunt. Remember, I was the first ever to set foot on Meadowland. Probably if we took it to law or whatever, it’d turn out that the whole island belongs to me by right of being there first. So you see, it’s not up to Bits to say if I can come or not.’
‘I don’t know,’ Olitar said slowly But he’d figured it out the same as the rest of us by then. We couldn’t go back, so either we’d have to take Kari with us or bash him on the head and chuck him in the sea. I know which choice I’d have gone for, but nobody asked me.
CHAPTER
TEN
‘What’s he been telling you?’ said Kari. ‘Whatever it was, don’t believe a word
of it.’
I smiled at him. ‘He was telling me how you both came to join the third - is it third, or fourth? Anyway, the expedition led by the man with the funny name.
Kari sighed, all the way up from the soles of his ancient boots. They were rather too large for him but had been, at one time, extremely magnificent; and I had my suspicions about them. At the very least, I guessed, their previous owner hadn’t parted with them willingly ‘You mean Thorfinn Thordsson,’ he said.
‘I think so,’ I replied. ‘Eyvind just called him Bits.’
Kari let out a rather forced laugh. ‘Wonderful language, Greek,’ he said. ‘Me, I’d translate it a bit different: Scraps is more like it. Like, a pile of offcuts left over from other jobs, and your workman’s looking to make a bit on the side putting them all together and passing them off as the genuine article. That’d be more like it.’
I scratched my chin. ‘So you didn’t like him much?’
‘You could say that,’ Kari said.
I glanced over my shoulder. Eyvind had gone off to the stream for his daily wash. The Northerners are obsessive about washing, and I believe that’s why so many of them look older than they actually are. As I see it, the human skin is just soft, thin leather; if you’re continually getting it wet, sooner or later it’ll start shrinking and shrivelling. If they used oil and a scraper, like we do, their skins would stay supple and they wouldn’t end up looking like dried figs by the time they turn thirty. But there you are.
‘He’d just got to the bit where they found you hiding in the charcoal barrel,’ I said.
Kari looked blank. ‘What charcoal barrel?’
Don’t ask me why he told you that (Kari said). The truth is, Thorfinn kept on and on at me to join up, because he needed one of the old hands from the earlier trip, but nobody wanted anything to do with it. I told him to get lost, but he was one of those aggravating little men who won’t take no for an answer. Then he told me he’d kidded Eyvind into going, so I gave in. I knew Eyvind’d expect me to go along if he was going. We’ve been around each other so long, he’d be lost without me.
Now I think about it, I can see where he’s got that charcoal-barrel thing from. See, I wanted it to be a surprise for him, me joining up after I’d sworn blind I wasn’t going to. So I snuck aboard the ship before everybody else and hid behind a big cask in the hold - behind it, mind you, not in it, there’s a difference - and once we were under way I hopped out and said, ‘Look, it’s me!’ or something of the sort, I don’t remember what. Anyhow, he pulled a long face like he wasn’t glad to see me, but that’s just Eyvind mucking around. He always acts miserable when he’s happy
Thinking about it, that was probably the easiest trip we had; at least, I can’t remember very much about it, so it can’t have been too bad. More luck than judgement, mind you, because Thorfinn was a pretty bloody awful navigator - God only knows how he’d managed to flit backwards and forwards from the East all those years without coming to harm. Hardly knew which way up to hold a bearing-dial. Luckily for us, we weren’t on his ship. We were on Bjari Herjolfson’s old tub, yet again, and we had Thorfinn’s forecastle-man, Ohtar, as our skipper. He wasn’t the sharpest arrow in the sheaf, but he got us there, and that’s about all that needs to be said.
You want to know why I didn’t like Thorfinn Scraps? I’ll tell you. He was weak. Weak and ignorant, and they don’t go together very well. Now Thorvald Eirikson was easygoing, but that’s not the same as weak. Thorvald didn’t stomp up and down the deck yelling all the time, but you wouldn’t have answered him back, or not twice. Thorfinn Scraps was the sort of man who wouldn’t make up his mind till he’d asked two or three people, and then he’d do something that was a bit of each idea but also a bit of his own, in other words a right mess, and it’d usually go wrong, as you’d expect. Scraps of ideas, you see, all bunged together like a poor man’s stew He deserved his name, all right. Maybe you can get away with that sort of thing when you’re plodding the same old trade-routes year after year with the same crew, and so everybody knows what they’ve got to do without having to be told. Now Thorfinn’s crew were a good bunch, far better than he deserved. Search me why they put up with him. He owned the boat, I guess.
Anyhow, we made the Meadowland coast about a day’s sail north of Leif’s Booths, and turned south. It was funny seeing the place again. A lot of the men were on edge, looking out for the leather boats. Can’t blame them for that, but it made me-nervous. The way I saw it, we’d spent a hell of a lot of time at Leif’s Booths, on and off, without ever seeing another living soul; it was only when we went poking about north that we ran into the leather-boat people, so really there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. But when you’re not worried about something, and everybody else around you’s pissing down their legs, it tends to make you really jumpy Great start.
Well, we reached the Booths next day and there they still were, which was good. Stood to reason, if the leather-boat people had really got it in for us they’d have wrecked the place, pulled the houses down and burned the timbers. Instead, apart from the grass getting long on the roofs, you’d never know we’d been away
We landed, and the first thing that clown Thorfinn does is go charging off up the beach, leaving the rest of us to pull the ships up, take out the tackle, all that. We’ve just about finished when Thorfinn comes back, looking dead worried.
‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ he says.
Eyvind says yes, he’s pretty sure. Thorfinn scowls, like he doesn’t really believe him. ‘So where’s all the fields of self-sown wheat?’ he says. ‘It should be just starting to green up at this time of year. I’ve got two dozen brand new scythe blades and ten flails in the hold.’ Typical of the man.
He’d bungled the supplies, too; he’d fetched along every kind of useless tool you could think of, but bugger-all for us to eat, short of slaughtering the cattle we’d brought as breeding stock. But there’s definitely such a thing as fool’s luck, because the very next morning we woke up, and there on the beach was a beautiful stranded whale.
Rorqual, we call them; I don’t know what the Greek word would be, assuming you get them down here in the warm waters. Anyhow, it was the biggest specimen I’ve ever seen. Seventy feet if it was an inch, and blubber two fingers thick-
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Do you mean to say you people actually eat those things?’
Kari stared at me as though I’d just spat in his wine. ‘Of course we do,’ he said. ‘There’s not much better eating than a fat whale steak; and it keeps practically for ever, if you can bring yourself to leave any
‘Amazing,’ I said.
‘You bet,’ he replied. ‘Fantastic stroke of luck, when you get one just dumped on your doorstep, so to speak. Back home, though, it can be a problem; because as soon as word gets about that there’s a whale, everybody from miles around comes running with their axes and buckets to get a slice, no matter whose land it’s washed up on. And then you can bet there’ll be a fight or two; regular pitched battles, sometimes. Then you get all the bad feeling, which leads to feuds, which leads to lawsuits and killings and God knows what else.’
‘Over whale meat,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Give folks something worth fighting over, what d’you expect?’
But this time (Kari went on) there was none of that; because there was just us, no neighbours wanting a share. Talk about luck. But to hear everybody talk, you’d think Thorfinn’d planned it all, maybe sent a message ahead to have it ready and waiting for him when he arrived, like a Greek gentleman’s picnic. Truth is, if it hadn’t been for the whale, we’d have been back in the old routine, spending all day fishing or grubbing around for the wild corn, and no time to spare for building sheds or putting up fences for all that livestock we’d brought with us.
But anyway; I wasn’t complaining, because instead of mouldy porridge I was stuffing my face with prime whale, and who cares where it came from or how it got there? So that was all right; but precious li
ttle else was.
I’ll tell you a funny thing, though. After we’d finished up the whale, and we were rolling up the last of the blubber in the skin, guess what we found underneath, squashed into the sand: Thorvald Eirikson’s canopy stuts. You remember I told you, Thorvald had slung them overboard when we’d made landfall and they’d sunk like stones. Well, there they were, a bit rotten and wormy, but I knew they were his because he’d had THORVALD cut into them in masons letters up one side. I was going to tell Thorfinn about it -he’d been moaning on the way over because he’d forgotten to bring any canopy struts of his own - but it slipped my mind, what with one thing and another, and by the time I remembered some fool had split them up and used them for guy-rope pegs.
Soon as the fencing was done, Thorfinn orders us to turn the stock out. Me, I could see straight off, the grass was very green and lush, and the animals’d been on hay and barley all the way from Greenland. Now any boy’ll tell you, don’t let a young calf stuff itself full of fat new grass or first thing you know, it’ll scour and die. But Thorfinn was lucky yet again, he got away with it. The calves turned a bit funny for a while, kicking and bucking and prancing about - it’d have been a right laugh if we hadn’t been expecting them to keel over and die at any moment - but they calmed down eventually and then they were fine, except they’d gone a bit wild and we had a hell of a job handling them sometimes.
But while they were still doing all that frisking about, Thorfinn was watching them with a huge grin on his face, saying it was obvious they liked it here and were going to be happy Bloody merchant, see, hadn’t got a clue about livestock. I wanted to tell him, they’re skipping around like that because they’ve got really bad guts-ache; but I didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t have listened.
First job on the list, once we’d unloaded the ship and got everything into store and under cover, was building sheds for the animals. No problem about that, with all the timber you could ever possibly want just a few hundred yards up the slope. So we got axes - Thorfinn had brought three dozen, twelve per ship; brand spanking new, with iron heads and twisted-steel edges, must’ve cost him a fortune - and we spent three days just felling and trimming, splitting the logs down into rails, and dragging them down the hill. It’s hard work cutting lumber, but after being cooped up on the ships, even though we’d had a reasonable crossing, we didn’t mind; it was good to be able to stretch our backs and loosen up. Evenings, we sat in the long liouse, with a bloody good fire of birch logs, beer we’d fetched from home and all the whale you could eat. Instead of arranging the seating the usual way, with a high table for the bosses and a long table for the rest, Thorfinn just had one table - planks on trestles, really - and he and Gudrid sat in the middle with the rest of us sitting wherever we liked, ever so informal and relaxed. That was his style, and a lot of the men thought it was a good thing. Not me. Far as I was concerned, it was weakness - he knew he didn’t have the strength of mind to be respected, so he wanted to be liked, to be our friend. That’s fine, but you don’t take orders from your friends. A leader’s a man who says, Do this, because I say so, or else; so you do it, even if you think it’s stupid or downright dangerous, and that’s your side of the bargain kept. If the leader gets his side wrong, then it’s between him and Odin, or our Heavenly Father or whoever it is who decides who wins the victory and who gets slaughtered. If you’re in charge and you’re basically saying, It’s not my decision, I’m just going by what everybody else wants, then it stands to reason, our Heavenly Father won’t know what to think, because let’s say half the men in the group deserve the victory and the other half don’t. Screws everything up, and puts the blame on the little people who should only be asked to carry out their side. No good ever comes of it, either up North or down here.