by Tom Holt
A lot of people were starting to sound like that, so I wasn’t too worried. Let ‘em finish, and usually they get better. ‘Right,’ I said.
‘A ship’s a place,’ he went on. ‘It’s a wooden platform with sides, you can sit on it or stand or sleep, you can live all your life in that small space. But it can take you anywhere - here, or Norway or right down the bottom end of the world, to the Big City or Saracen country, or the hot place where the blue men live. You can go there, as far from where you were born and meant to be as it’s possible to go, but always you take that wooden cage with you.’ He laughed, don’t ask me why ‘Like the Eiriksons,’ he went on. ‘Leif, Thorvald, Thorstein - they all came here to get out of Eiriksfjord, but instead they brought Eiriksfjord out here, along with the stores and the supplies and the tools and the other necessities from home. And see what happened? Killed two of them, screwed up Leif so he can’t ever give it away - his life’s a shambles, because he wanted Gudrid so much, he thought this place had given her to him but instead it keeps taking her away It’s dragged her out here, and Thorfinn Bits along with her; it’s trashed him, and look what it’s done to you and me. Look what it’s done to me,’ he said, and he sounded like he was getting a bit overwrought; he got like that when he was a kid and he knew he wasn’t going to get his own way; but he was always a strong-willed man who never got what he wanted. ‘I could go anywhere, I could go to Constantinople, and I’d still be stuck on the ship that took me there. With you,’ he added, and I really don’t know what he meant by that.
I wasn’t quite sure what to say but I had to say something. ‘When we get home,’ I said, ‘I say we quit seafaring for good. Get away from Brattahlid; maybe head over to the Western Settlement. Sure, it’s a bit bloody sparse over there, and the winters are no fun, but that means they need good hired men, we’d be treated right. Maybe even, if we knuckled down and got on with it, maybe one day we could get a place of our own. No, seriously’ I went on, when he pulled a face. ‘Let’s face it, you and me, on our own we’ll never raise the money not for land and stock and gear. Together, though-Well, anyway’ I said, ‘it’s a thought, it’s something to aim for. Better than being here.’
Eyvind looked at me for a bit, and I couldn’t see what he was thinking, which is unusual. ‘Whatever you say Kari,’ he said. ‘Whatever you say Only-‘
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Only,’ he went on, and it was like he wasn’t actually talking to me, ‘I think that’d be pretty much like being on a ship, specially in winter. And I keep coming back to one thing, though it sounds pretty stupid if I say it.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘I keep thinking of when we first came here,’ he said, ‘with Bjarni Herjolfson; and he said, that night when we were at anchor, he said for none of us to go ashore; but you did. He told us not to, but you didn’t listen. You left the ship - and here we still are, all these years later.’ He shrugged. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Forget I said it. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘All right,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about, anyhow But think about what I said, the Western Settlement and maybe trying to get a place of our own.’ I made an all-around-me gesture with my arms. ‘This lot here, this was always too far away out of our league, not to mention the leather-boat people being here already But I think the Western Settlement might be just the place. The right place, for you and me.’
‘You know, perhaps you’re right, he said, but he didn’t seem very happy about it. ‘Or we could save our money and buy a ship. There, that’d do just as well, wouldn’t it?’
I wasn’t so sure about that. ‘Not the same, though, is it?’ I said. But he changed the subject.
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I’ve been getting those dreams again.’
‘Oh,’ I said, because that wasn’t too clever. I knew what he was talking about; but dreams are always weird, and they don’t mean spit, no matter what people tell you.
In Eyvind’s dream, he’s married, got his own farm, got two grown sons working with him; and then one morning he wakes up, and there’s his wife in the bed next to him, stone dead; and when he looks closer, she’s actually been dead for years and years. All the skin’s shrunk back to the bone, her hair’s grown out, her nails are long and crooked and her skin’s like parchment. He jumps up and runs into the hall, yelling; and there’s his sons and the hired men, lying on the benches, and they’ve all been dead for years too. He runs outside, and the grass is all long and choked with weeds, everything’s overgrown and falling to bits, the roof-turf has grown down and joined in with the grass on the ground; it’s like they all went to bed one night and didn’t wake up, everybody died in their sleep twenty years ago, except him. So he runs down to the fjord, and there’s the ship, Bjarni Herjolfson’s, drawn down onto the beach and ready to sail; and everybody on board’s dead too, Bjari and Red Eirik and the Eiriksons, just like up at the house. And the crazy thing about it is, he told me once, he knows that he’s the only man still left alive in the whole of Greenland; and when he dies, the settlement’ll end and the grass will grow back over it all, and pretty soon people will have forgotten it was ever there.
Well (Kari went on), not long after that we finally got away I’d been expecting that we’d have a really shitty run back to Greenland, to match the luck we’d had while we were at Leif’s Booths, but actually it wasn’t too bad. The winds were lively but didn’t smack us around too much; we went a bit off course and ended up crossing from Slabland to north Greenland, then down the coast to the Western Settlement. It’d changed a lot since I was last there - you’ll remember, they’d had the bad plague that killed Thorstein Eirikson -and we passed a lot of empty farms, or places where they’d had to let a lot of the pasture go. I said to Eyvind, if we just helped ourselves to one of those abandoned places, nobody’d give a damn; but I guess he’d thought it over and decided that he was against the idea, because he didn’t show any enthusiasm.
We put in at Lysufjord for water, then followed the coast down. Thorfinn said he was making for Brattahlid and a squall pushed him further on; me, I don’t think he ever intended landing there, because he wanted to keep Gudrid away from Leif, now that she’d gone all cold towards him. So we ended up at the southern end of the Eastern Settlement, back at Herjolfsness, where we’d first arrived, round about the third week of summer. Herjolf was long dead by then, of course, and Bjarni was the farmer.
We stayed there a week, all of us together; but then Thorfinn said he was going back north to Eiriksfjord, because he wanted to spend winter at Brattahlid. Truth was, Gudrid made him; Brattahlid was the nearest thing she’d ever had to a proper home, and she wanted to go back.
But Eyvind and me, we stayed. We’d had enough of Brattahlid, and seeing Bjarni again, and a few of Herjolf’s people who were still alive and who’d come over from Iceland with him, we thought we might as well stay there, if Bjari’d have us. I’m not saying he was keen, but he felt obliged. After all, he’d been the one who’d brought us out there to start with.
So there we were, almost home again; and it wasn’t much, in fact it’d got a bit run-down since Herjolf’s day and it wasn’t a patch on the old place back at Snaefells in Iceland, but it was the best we were likely to get, after being out of things so long. Eyvind and me both agreed, compared to Meadowland it’d do us just fine, and we made a solemn vow by the Holy Cross and Thor’s hammer and all that stuff that we weren’t ever going anywhere again, alive or dead. We had the rest of summer and the whole of autumn to settle back in; and winter at Herjolfsness was like being in heaven, after that bloody terrible four months at Leif’s Booths. The work was lighter, too, or else we’d hardened up a lot; Bjarni was pleased with us and the newcomers there, the ones who’d joined the household since we left, were a good bunch, decent people. When spring came, I decided there really wasn’t any need to go off up to the Western Settlement, like I’d planned. We were a damn sight better off as hired men at Herjolfsnes
s than we’d ever be as our own masters up there. Pity, I thought, that we hadn’t known that earlier, before we left in the first place. And whenever I felt like I was getting itchy or pissed off with being the hired man, I just looked out west over the sea, to where Meadowland was, and said to myself, yes, but at least I don’t ever have to go back.
‘So that was the end of it,’ I said. ‘You and Meadowland, I mean.
Kari looked at me and smiled, all sad. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We went back, one more time.’
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Of all the stupid, inconvenient moments to be rescued-Harald was shouting, waving his arms at us; and when I looked in his direction, I could see a cart, with our escort in front and behind. They’d found a blacksmith, and finally they’d come back to fix our busted axle.
Kari looked, and laughed. ‘Doesn’t time fly’ he said. ‘See, if only I’d had me to talk to, all through those long winters and boat trips, think how much less miserable my life would’ve been.’
I sighed. I was nominally in charge of the expedition; so it was up to me to go and brief the blacksmith (though I knew absolutely nothing about mending axles), arrange payment, useful sort of clerkly things, my job. I thought to myself: Lucky Leif Eirikson would’ve known about technical ironworking stuff, so would Thorvald or Thorfinn Bits. And they’d been bad leaders.
The blacksmith was a Greek, of course, so he wanted to talk. As we covered the few yards from his cart to ours, he told me that it was really inconvenient being called away at a time like this, he had a stack of work on, lamp-stands and reaper-blades and pot-hooks to make, if it hadn’t been the Imperial service he’d have stayed at home and screw the bonus payment. (What bonus payment? I wondered.) Also, he didn’t have his proper portable anvil, he’d lent it to his brother-in-law who had a whole lot of chains to overhaul, so he was going to have to do the best he could with an old helmet-stake stuck in a log-end, so I wasn’t to expect bloody miracles, even assuming he could get a welding heat with just two sets of small bellows and two flat stones for a forge, though that’d depend on the men working the bellows, who’d have to be a couple of my men, since he was on his own, well, there was the boy of course, but he needed the boy as his striker and he couldn’t do the two jobs at once, and with the best will in the world it wouldn’t be his fault if the weld didn’t take if it was my two men slacking on the bellows that was to blame.
‘Fine,’ I said, when at last he paused for breath. ‘Understood. Just do the best you can.
He stared at me as if I was mad, or being deliberately awkward, or both. ‘If you could’ve got the cart back to my shop,’ he said, ‘there wouldn’t be a problem, I got a four-hide double-action bellows there, you can pump the bugger with just your little finger and it’ll breathe fire like a dragon.’
I pointed out that if the cart had been in a fit state to get to his workshop I wouldn’t have needed him at all. He didn’t deign to reply to that, and I thanked Heaven for small mercies.
Harald Sigurdson unloaded the gear from the blacksmith’s cart and set it up; he did a splendid job, I think - except that at the last moment he contrived to drop a big, heavy metal thing (the blacksmith told me the technical name, but I wasn’t listening) on his foot, doing himself an enormous amount of damage in the process.
Back in the City they’ll tell you that the Varangians are a stoical lot. Varangian prisoners captured by the enemy will endure days, even weeks of torture and never say a word. Maybe; but only because the Saracens and the Bulgars never thought to drop heavy blacksmithing tools on their feet. Try that, and your problem will be to get them to shut up. Clearly his injuries ruled Harald out for bellows-working duty; and the escorts made it plain that they were far too tired after their long trek to undertake the work; so that only left Kari and Eyvind. To their credit, they agreed and set to work quite cheerfully; even I could see that they were blowing up a good, hot blaze in the improvised forge, and the blacksmith stopped moaning about the fire and turned his attention to something else.
Which left me sitting on a rock, watching a procedure that meant nothing to me at all, waiting, when I really needed to know what on Earth could’ve induced Kari to go back to Meadowland one more time. After I’d been on the rock three hours or so I considered going over and asking him to tell me as he worked the bellows; but then the smith started bashing something with his hammer, sparks flew in all directions from the white-hot axle, and I stayed where I was.
Blacksmiths are strange people to watch when they’re working. Most of the time they stand perfectly still, staring mournfully into the fire like an old man remembering his youth, while the bellows creak and wheeze. Just when you’re sure that they’ve fallen asleep on their feet, like horses do, they suddenly lunge forward, grab their hammer, sweep all the other tools off the anvil with a majestic surge of the forearm, and set about their chunk of dazzling iron with the savagery of a Turk slaughtering civilians. Just when you think you’re seeing some actual work getting done at last, they stick their bit of metal back into the fire, and go back to silent standing. For the first half-hour it’s a fascinating sight. After that, you tend to lose interest.
After what seemed like a very long time, the blacksmith said something to Kari and Eyvind, and they stopped working the bellows; then he upended a pot of charcoal over the fire and came over to talk to me. It wasn’t going well, he said; the axle was horrible, a piece of shit, whoever made it ought to be ashamed; it was impure, filthy stuffed full of sand and clinker and rubbish that meant it wouldn’t weld, get it up to a heat and it just burned away like tallow There was nothing for it, he concluded, with a shake of the head so tragic that Aristotle would’ve written a book about it, but to go back to his workshop and forge a brand new one, from good, clean, honest, Greek iron. It would take time, it would screw up his whole schedule for years to come and it most definitely wouldn’t be cheap, but there was absolutely nothing else that could be done.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well, thanks. How long-?’
He cut me off with a sharp sigh. Obviously that was one of those questions you simply don’t ask. ‘I’ll be quick as I can,’ he said. ‘Probably best thing’d be if I called in my sister’s boy and my cousin, assuming they can be spared; and I’ll need a load more charcoal, the clean stuff, that’s if they’ve even got any Anyhow, I’ll do what I can. After all, it’s for the government.’
He rolled sadly away, and for reasons I couldn’t quite follow, the escort went with him; so, after a day of almost exaggerated bustle and action, I was back where I’d been before: me, Kari, Eyvind and Harald, waiting.
‘So tell me,’ I asked Eyvind - Kari was on watch - ‘whatever was it that induced Kari to go back to Meadowland?’
Eyvind scowled past my shoulder. ‘You want to ask him that,’ he said.
‘Well, I can’t,’ I said irritably ‘He isn’t here. So I’m asking you.
He sighed. ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said.
When we got back (Eyvind said), Gudrid and Bits and the rest of the party went back to Brattahlid; but Kari and I stayed on at Herjolfsness. That is, I thought I’d be clever and stay on there, after Kari’d said he was going with Bits and the others; but as soon as Kari heard, he told Bits he’d changed his mind, and then he went to Bjarni Herjolfson and asked if he could stay too. I actually pleaded with him not to stay; I reminded him about his plans for moving out to the Western Settlement, where he could take over one of the abandoned farms and be his own master. I’d never be able to forgive myself, I told him, if he let the opportunity slip past him just for my sake.
Didn’t bloody work; so Kari stayed, and we dug in at Herjolfsness and got on with our lives. It was funny, being back with that crowd. Most of them were people we’d known from Iceland; but when we’d left with Bjarni to go trading they’d been kids, and suddenly they’d come over middle-aged or old. And then I stopped and thought about it, did the figuring on my fingers; and you could’ve stolen my legs and
replaced them with rake-handles when I worked out that it had been twenty-five years - twenty-five years -since we left Drepstokk and sailed away with Bjarni.
I couldn’t believe it. All that time, a lifetime, wasted; I hadn’t actually noticed it before, but now I realised I’d grown old too, rather more than the kids at Herjolfsness who were now grown men and the men who were now too old to work. Twenty-five years - that meant I was forty-two, which makes you an old man in the North. The best years of my life had melted away in a dream, a recurring nightmare of fog at sea and long winters at Leif’s Booths - and where had it got me? Nowhere: I was right back where I’d started, only rather worse. I was in Greenland rather than the Old Country, and I was forty-two years old.
But at least, I promised myself, at least I’d finally woken up; and it’d been bad and I had nothing to show for it apart from my share of the fur money - did Kari tell you that on the way home the ship carrying the furs got swamped by a real lumpy bastard of a wave, and half the furs got spoiled? -but at least I was still alive, still in one piece, on my feet, able to do a day’s work and earn my keep. It was time, I reckoned, to close the door on all that and make the best of what I had left. There wouldn’t be a farm for me now, I’d be a hired hand until I got too old, and then I’d be a nuisance sitting by the fire, a grace-and-favour man, pleased to be given some stupid little chore that the kids couldn’t be made to do. I’d get stiff and deaf and blind, and I’d die when the house was empty, when the men were all out at work, and soon after that they’d forget I was ever there. Like it mattered to me; at least I wasn’t in Meadowland any more, and I’d never have to go back there again.