by Tom Holt
Anyway We got the pens built, and after that we raised sheds and byres and a barn. The women were busy with the first brew of beer. Thorfinn had a couple of the men who were good with tools make him a plough, because he reckoned both wheat and barley would grow there, no problem at all. We were getting a decent yield of milk from the cows, the fowls were laying, the ice was slow coming so we carried on taking the boats out fishing much longer than we’d expected. In other words, we all just got on with ordinary everyday things, the sort of stuff you don’t think twice about, like when you want to walk you don’t issue separate orders to each joint and each toe for each stage of the operation, you just get on with it. That was fine, it was a good time, and autumn melted away into winter before we realised how the time was getting on. But that was all right, too. What with cheese and dried fish and the remains of the whale, not to mention the beer, which came out pretty good, we’d got enough in hand to see us through pretty well: fuel wasn’t an issue; the house was warm and weathertight and big enough that we could go to sleep without someone’s toes in our ears. It wasn’t a whole lot different from being in Greenland, except in some respects it was better. Everyone was getting along just fine; no feuds, no personality clashes or fallings-out or any of that stuff. Really, you couldn’t complain. Best of all, of course, we hadn’t seen or heard anything of the leather-boat people, which’d been the one thing nobody ever mentioned and everybody kept thinking about.
Really though, you had to laugh. That clown Thorfinn’d fetched along a whole load of mail shirts. I heard the story about them from one of his men; they’d come in the first place out of a big burial mound somewhere on the Danish-Swedish border, there’d been some horrible battle and at the end of it they’d slung all the dead in a ditch and covered them in earth and stones. Some time later, a bunch of the local lads went out there with mattocks and shovels, broke the mound open and salvaged all the gear. These mail shirts - well, some of them were in a bit of a state, else their owners wouldn’t have wanted burying; but the Danish lads got some wire and patched them up, and soaked off the rust in salt and vinegar, so they looked pretty good. Then they sold them cheap, as salvage, to some trader or other. He sails to Norway tries to offload these mail shirts, but the buyers take one look at them and they can see they’ve been in the ground a bit too long, because the rings’ve got a bit thin where the Danish lads soaked off all the rust. Then Thorfinn comes along, and the trader figures him out for what he is, an idiot. So, one night at the earl’s house, where all the foreigner traders are sitting round drinking with the earl’s men, he challenges our Thorfinn to a game of chess. Thorfinn doesn’t mind that, he fancies himself as a chess player; they play the game, the trader loses on purpose. Right, he says to Thorfinn, for the next game let’s make it interesting: your two hundred ells of Icelandic striped cloth against my three dozen mail shirts.
Well, if the shirts’d been any good, that’d have been a bloody stupid bet; as it was, it was rather more than they were worth, and a sight more than he’d given the Danes. Anybody with half a brain would’ve seen there was something wrong, but Thorfinn rubs his podgy little hands together and says, Right, let’s do that. The trader plays, and once again he loses on purpose.
Of course, everybody’s really impressed; here’s a man who backs himself at these apparently crazy odds, then loses, then gets up from the table and yawns like he really doesn’t care, thanks the other man for an interesting game and says he’ll have his men bring the shirts over to Thorfinn’s ship in the morning. Just the sort of showing-off that goes down a treat with your landed gentry out East, where they all like to play the big, brave viking; and this earl’s no exception. He calls the trader over; the way you handled losing that game, he says, was really classy; most men’d be in tears gambling away a fortune like that, but you just shrugged it off like it doesn’t matter. I’d like to give you a present, the earl says, worthy of your honour and breeding. So what does the earl do but pull this huge gold bracelet off his arm and hand it to the trader, plus a fine brooch with jewels in it, and a big load of flour, and a sword, and God only knows what else. So the trader goes away with all this lovely loot, the earl’s made himself look good in the eyes of all his chums for his princely munificence, while our Thorfinn wets himself with joy because he’s got three dozen mail shirts for nothing.
Anyhow; Thorfinn’s got these things, and for the first week or so he puts one on every morning, just in case the leather-boat people attack, and he waddles round the place in it, joining in all the work to show what a good man he is, felling trees and hauling lumber and all the rest of it. But even a rusted-out mail shirt is heavy, especially round the shoulders and neck, and you’ve got to wear a thick wool shirt under it, else it chafes your skin raw, so it gets pretty warm in there; so he’s sweating like a pig and staggering around the place, and because he’s short the stupid thing comes right down below his knees anyway Naturally people start sniggering, but that means he daren’t just take the shirt off, else he’ll lose face; so he’s stuck in it. What with the damp and the sea air and the sweat, the shirt’s getting all red with rust and stinky so every night he’s got to dump it in a barrel of sand and roll it up and down the barn to polish it up-Well, eventually he’s had enough, and one morning he comes out to go to work with the rest of us, and the mail shirt’s not there; everybody stops and stares, and a few of the men grin and maybe start whispering, but of course Thorfinn’s suddenly blind and deaf, and that was the end of that. But you can see what I mean when I said Thorfinn was a fool, with fool’s luck. He always had this knack of getting things wrong - not so wrong that the ship sank or everybody died, but just wrong enough to spoil his good fortune and take the shine off everything.
Even so, that was a good winter: far and away the best winter I’d spent in Meadowland, though that’s not saying a lot. When spring came and we were able to go out and about again, there was something, I don’t know, different about everything. Let’s see; it’d be completely wrong to say we were starting to think of Leif’s Booths as home, it wasn’t like that at all. Home - well, I guess you could say that none of us were the home sort. Thorfinn, for example. Presumably he was from some place originally in Norway; but I never heard him talk about it, and from what his men said, he’d been moving around for years and years, trading and so forth - didn’t even spend winter in the same place twice if he could help it. His crew’d stuck with him because they were that way too, they had nowhere to go back to, so as far as they were concerned home was people rather than places. As for Eyvind and me; we’d been raised in Iceland, couldn’t wait to leave Drepstokk to go with Bjarni Herjolfson; we’d ended up at Brattahlid because we’d joined up with Leif Eirikson, and then he decided his wandering days were over, so we were stranded, like that poor sod of a whale. So what did we all do, our funny collection of drifters? We sailed off the edge of the world to Meadowland, with our ships full of useful and practical things, to make new lives for ourselves in the wide-open country. Dreams, dreams - to my mind, Meadowland wasn’t my shining future beckoning to me across the sunset, it was more like a bit of bramble caught in my trouser leg, puffing at me and digging in tighter the more I tried to pull away So no, we weren’t starting to see Meadowland as where we belonged. It was more like we’d been washed up there after a horrible storm, and now it was daybreak and the wind and rain’d died off, and sure we were stuck there but at least it was turning out fine.
Spring’s when Meadowland’s at its best; it’s actually not so bad then, particularly if you like flowers and stuff, though they don’t do a lot for me personally It helps, of course, if there’s plenty to do. Work’s a bugger, but it does take your mind off other things. Lambing came on, and turned out pretty well. The spring pasture suited our Greenland cows; poor bloody animals, they were used to grass like short green wire, so the lush, fat stuff was a real treat for them, and pretty soon we had as much milk as we could drink and loads left over for butter and cheese. It’s a sad reflection on
people, but how they feel depends an awful lot on what they’re getting to eat. Dried fish and a few leeks pulled out of the roof-turf will keep you alive when the snow’s deep, but it makes you miserable. Cheese and eggs and a spit-roast duck now and again, and you don’t mind waking up in the morning so much. It’s as simple as that, really
Thorfinn was happy as a lamb because the wheat he’d sown was starting to come through. Gudrid and the other women grumbled now and again, because they were so busy making cheese and churning butter that they were way behind on darning and mending. We had a man working practically full time in the little smithy, bashing out nails by the bucketful, and we all took it in turns to sit by the charcoal heap as it burned through - nice job, that, particularly if you’ve got a big jug of beer handy Thorfinn spoilt things a bit because he was so full of bright ideas, things he wanted done; you couldn’t settle into a pattern, because one day he’d want a dozen men to drop what they were doing to go off into the woods to cut ash coppice for arrow-shafts; next day he’d tell you, Leave that and see if you can find any decent withy-beds for making baskets, and the day after that it’d be clay for pots, or putting up a row of frames for stretching hides on. So we had a dozen clever projects started at any given time, then put aside and not finished because he was off on some other new craze. But it was all right, he’d say there’ll be plenty of time to finish off later; and in the meantime, he wanted six men to cut turf, or dredge gravel.
Spring just sort of melted away, and then it was summer, the busy time of year. That wasn’t too bad, either: long, warm days, the first cut of hay, folding the stock on the home meadows. It still wasn’t home, but we were beginning to feel that the place quite liked us, and that’s important even if it does sound dumb. Thorfinn started talking about when the best time would be for a bit of surveying, because at the rate we were going on maybe this time next year we’d be well enough established to think about splitting up, going out and staking our claims, deciding where we’d build our farms. The key to all that, he said, was the hay If we could get a good enough cut, we could feed the stock over winter without having to slaughter. That way, there’d be the makings of a herd big enough to supply each of us with, say, a house-cow and two heifers, in a year or so. Either that, he went on, or fill two of the ships with timber, send them back to the Eastern Settlement and load up with livestock on the return trip; only there, of course, the problem’d be timing, being sure that the ships could get there and back before the start of the cold weather - and if we had half our manpower sailing the ships, would that leave enough of us for the second cut of hay which was what we’d be relying on to feed the stock?
That’s the way Thorfinn thought about things, like a puppy chasing its tail: full of energy, round and round in circles. The more he thought about things, the more complicated they got, until you started to wonder how in hell you’d ever managed to do difficult stuff like breathing or walking without falling over. Instead of telling him to shut up gabbling and get on with it, though, everybody listened carefully and nodded and said, Yes, that’s true, good point, until everything outside of routine’d pretty much ground to a halt. Well, it was a change of pace after the spring, when we’d started jobs first and thought about them after, but I can’t say it was an improvement.
It was a warm morning in the middle of all this, and either we were thinking long thoughts about haymaking timetables or not thinking of anything at all. I can remember quite clearly all I had on my mind that morning was a pulled muscle in my back and what we were having for dinner. It all began so quietly, I can’t actually tell you what happened to start with. The first thing I noticed was the bull, roaring its head off in the long pen.
Even that didn’t register with me to begin with, because that bull was a noisy bastard at the best of times. Thorfinn’d been letting the stupid creature gorge itself on the new grass since the start of spring, so it had colic pretty much all of the time, and when its guts ached it made sure we all knew about it. Well, when a noise goes on all the time you quickly stop hearing it; only that morning, the sound of its roaring suddenly changed, just a little bit.
I was on charcoal duty that day; I was down by the lumber stacks with a saw, cutting cordwood into short logs to go in the middle of the heap. With the saw snicking away I didn’t notice the change in the bull’s hollering until someone drew my attention to it; he’d stopped work and straightened up, listening.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him.
He made a be-quiet gesture at me. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Hear it?’
‘Hear what?’ I said.
‘The bull,’ he replied; and then, yes, I heard it. ‘What’s got into him?’ he went on.
Just then I looked round, and I could see about a dozen other blokes laying off what they were doing to listen, so I wasn’t imagining things. ‘Let’s go and have a look,’ I said to the other man - can’t recall to save my life who it was, sorry. He nodded, so both of us downed tools and strolled over towards the pen.
About fifty yards away, we stopped dead. There were about half a dozen strangers on the other side of the pen, close in by the rails, standing absolutely still.
Sounds bloody silly of course; but we didn’t immediately figure out who they were, because we all thought of them as the leather-boat people, and these ones didn’t happen to have their boat with them. They didn’t look all that different from us, see; they had buckskins on, and quite a few of our people had made themselves buckskin shirts or trousers, so as to save the wool for best. At that distance, you could see they all had black hair, but we were just too far away to notice that their skins were a bit browner than ours and they didn’t have beards.
But eventually the little bells rang in our heads, and we realised: it was them, the same lot that’d chased Thorvald Eirikson’s men and killed Thorvald himself. That was when we started panicking.
Well, we panicked a bit; but then someone pointed out that there were only six of them, and they weren’t actually attacking. What they were doing, of course, was standing dead still and most likely pissing down their legs in terror. Pity we didn’t know it at the time, of course; but the reason why they were scared stiff was that none of them had ever even seen a cow before, let alone a great big noisy bull.
Sometimes I think about that moment, when I’ve got nothing better to do with my mind. We were scared of them, they were scared of the bull; but a bull’s just a farm animal, and they were just men, so where did the fear come from? Simple: never seen one before. It’s natural, it’s sensible to be scared of things you don’t know about or understand. That’s what we learn when we’re kids, the first time we reach out and grab at the pretty red and yellow fluttery thing and find out the hard way that it’s fire. And then I get to thinking; Meadowland didn’t scare me particularly the first time I saw it, or even the second, or the third. It was only when I got to know it - maybe I’m kidding myself if I say I ever understood it, but I guess that’s my privilege, as an explorer - that it started to throw shadows in my mind. Now, you’re a Greek, you know about a lot of clever stuff shouldn’t that have been the other way around? Or should the leather-boat people have gone prancing up to the bull assuming it’d be friendly, and only got the jitters once it’d gored a few of them?
Anyhow They were standing there, still as trees, and we didn’t know it was because they were frightened. Now a stranger walking towards you and then standing still and staring in your direction’s always an unsettling thing, and really all you can do is stare back until something happens. So that’s what we did.
What struck me wasn’t how different they were from us, but how alike. I’d say they were a bit shorter than us, though maybe I’m thinking more about the other ones we came across later on. They had straight black hair pulled tight into a knot at the back of the neck. Like us, they were wearing coats that came down a hand’s span below the knee; like ours, theirs had the fur on the inside, except round the neck. Under their coats they had buckskin shirts, an
d trousers down to the ankle, with tanned-hide boots on their feet. I couldn’t see any weapons, except that one of them had a bow in his hand and a quiver on his back; but you’d expect that, of course. Four of them had some sort of leather packs or satchels on their backs, and one of the other two was carrying a kind of basket made out of strips of birch bark.