B0046ZREEU EBOK (10 page)

Agnar, would you say that you were happy?

I’m glad you don’t think it’s wrong to talk to me sometimes. It seems that for both of us happiness is about the past, and about a place. I wasn’t always happy at Brattahlid, far from it, just as you’ve been unhappy sometimes at Reims. But the innocent times exist, just as much as the other. You’ll find that when you’re old. Sometimes the early days are so near, I wouldn’t be surprised to open my eyes in the morning and find myself there, a girl on a summer morning at Brattahlid. She still exists, you know. I don’t just mean in mind and memory.

And now I’m thinking too of a boy at the Cathedral school in Reims, who discovered through new learning that the boundaries of the world were greater than he thought. I’ve never heard any stories from these authors that you mention, but you speak of them as Karlsefni spoke of Bjarni Herjolfsson, or Bjorn the champion of Breidavik. You’re an Icelander, and of course you respond to sailing directions. It’s in your blood. These men you speak of – this Cicero,
Seneca, and the other one – these are the men who gave you directions for your voyage into an unknown world. Yes, and I understand how you got hurt too, in fact I should say it was inevitable. We’re only human, and we need an authority to tell us where the boundaries are. Oh, I understand you had to disobey. How could you not? Another headland, another island, another fjord: promises, always promises of riches yet to come, and if you go a little further the dream may become real. The gifts of this life are boundless, but it’s still dangerous to go too far.

Don’t ever regret what you have done. I don’t believe in advice. No one takes it, and usually they hate you for giving it, but if you were my son I’d tell you what I think. You’d have punished yourself more if you’d turned your back on the way that was opened to you. You’d never have forgiven yourself. I know nothing of your Clunyites; I’ve always hated feuds, but men must have them. Very well, so these men say that you were wrong to study pagan gods. Your master whom you loved defied his archbishop, and went so far beyond the pale that he turned to the infidel, and actually went to the country of the Saracens to find out about ancient writings and the stars. Karlsefni would have done the same. I know that means nothing to you. Karlsefni isn’t in your Church; he has no authority for you. But he knew the call you know, to go on, and on, beyond the limits we’ve made for ourselves. He knew the importance of the stars, although he never heard the word you use, astronomy. You call it an art. To me, it’s the heart of the mystery, the thing that gives meaning to all sailing directions, which we in our ignorance do our best to follow. You wince; you think I blaspheme, and maybe I do. We were punished, as you’ll hear, not outwardly, of course; there was no Pope or Cardinal for us. But I think you and I are haunted by the same thing. We’ve both gone too far. We’ve seen too many ghosts. Isn’t your trouble now, Agnar, not that you have been reprimanded by your Church for pursuing pagan knowledge, but that you know that the world they tell you to stick to is not the
whole truth? You’ve brought something back from the wilds with you, that eats away at your faith. Isn’t that it?

I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have spoken. How did I get on to that? Oh yes, happiness. I was telling you about our first year at Brattahlid.

I was happy, although surrounded by tensions. The relief was that they weren’t mine. Feeling detached, as I did, I began to enjoy the drama. It may seem wicked to you, but I enjoyed the sexual tension too. I’d never been fought over before. It was foolish to think I’d get away unscathed, but I wasn’t part of Eirik’s family yet, and I thought I was still free.

Eirik welcomed my father as if they had been foster brothers. I hadn’t realised they were that close; in fact they weren’t. Eirik Raudi seems when you first meet him to be a bluff, simple sort of man, but in fact he’s as devious as a salmon. He rules – ruled – his Green Land with a wiliness which would do credit to your Lateran. When I say ruled, I mean it. A few of the settlers were also chieftains in their new territories, but there was nothing like the Thing Quarters that we have in Iceland. When we first went to Greenland, disputes in both settlements were referred to Eirik at Brattahlid. One chief can’t be the whole of the law, and Eirik had the sense never to claim to be anything but a chieftain among his peers.

In fact the very first summer I stayed at Brattahlid they had the first meeting of the Greenland Thing. It was carefully arranged that the meeting should not be at Eirik’s house, and so the first booths were built about a mile to the south, so as to seem like no man’s territory. Who came? Einar of Gardar, of course, with his son Thorkel, who later married Freydis, God help him. She had her eye on him even then, because Gardar is one of the richest farms in Greenland, now that they’ve drained that marshy plain. Who else? Thorkel of Hvalsey, Ketil, Hrafn, Thorbjorn from Siglufjord, Hafgrim from Vatnaherfdi, and, to my father’s embarrassment, Snorri Thorbrandsson and his brother Thorleif, old enemies from the Snaefelsnes feuds. They’d
arrived the year before and wintered at Dyrnes. Eirik said nothing about old grievances, and my father had to agree to do the same. Eirik was more interested in colonising his new land now than in pursuing old quarrels. No one came from the Western Settlement, but as it was, I was amazed to see how many neighbours we had, scattered among the apparently empty fjords. But Eirik Raudi always came first among them, not only because he was the first settler, but by sheer force of personality.

I had a child’s memory of him, as a great, red man towering over everything in our hall. I was a woman now, but that first impression was never quite superseded. Eirik’s family were unruly, to say the least of it, and the other settlers were proud and independent men, but Eirik never failed to dominate them until the day he died. You have to understand that if you’re to understand our lives in the Green Land.

In a way it was funny to see how Eirik’s status had changed. Although my father had always admired him, most people at home had regarded Eirik as a notorious outlaw. In Snaefelsnes we were glad to see the back of him, for he caused nothing but trouble. After he’d left I mainly heard evil spoken of him. His partisans, you see, apart from Thorbjorn, had gone with him. It was typical of my father to be the only one who was twelve years late. As I say, Eirik welcomed him like the lost sheep returned to the fold.

Eirik in Greenland was the same man as the troublemaker of the Westfjords, but in another role. Here, he didn’t defy the law, he embodied it. Lawman and outlaw – they’re only two sides of the same coin. Each recognises exactly the same boundaries. No one should be surprised, and yet they always have been, that Eirik the lawless should end up ruling the most peaceful country in all the Norse lands.

He had two allies, and I don’t mean his sons. The first one I recognised at once, although I didn’t take in the implications. In Greenland we had hardly any fermented drink. Does that help you understand why the promise of wine from Vinland meant so much? I’m sure that’s why our gatherings passed off so peacefully, but I don’t suppose men would agree with me. So there was Eirik, presiding over a country where there were, as far as I could see, no feuds happening at all. His other ally, of course, was the land. If there were a quarrel, a
band of raiders couldn’t just gallop over to the next valley. They’d have to make a difficult sea voyage. Besides, they were busy. They had to hunt in the summer, if the community were to stay alive. It was the ghost of winter, really, that kept the peace. Even on the lightest days of summer, one could never forget that grim spirit that stalked among our meadow flowers. Whatever we ate when things were plentiful, we had to save more than as much again for the long months to come. At home the cattle are in the byre eight months, but although it rains more in summer, there’s more time to make hay, and the winters are never quite so hard. In Greenland every mouthful more than bare necessity is like a gift straight from God. So Eirik had the land on his side, and that was worth more than the army of King Charles the Great himself.

He was a kind of emperor. Here in Rome, I try to see him as a little chieftain of a far-off land, so poor that Eirik was filled with shame when he couldn’t feast his guests in the traditional way. I look at the great church of St John at the Lateran, and in my mind I see a hall whose turf roof might reach to the foot of those arched windows. I look at the corn fields and vineyards that surround this city, and I see a hillside scattered with cattle, an island of green balanced between wastes of sea and ice. In winter the whole settlement at Brattahlid is invisible under the snow. Emperors must fight, and hold their own. In Europe they fight one another, while the poor folk struggle to go on living. In the Green Land, a great man must be more than an emperor. He must be like a peasant, and fight the land itself. I think they will tell stories about Eirik Raudi, when Pope Leo and even your Cardinal Hildebrand have been entirely forgotten.

Don’t look round so nervously. You know no one could understand us even if they were listening. You’ve said a thing or two yourself that might interest the Holy Father. No one will ever know, Agnar, unless you’re fool enough to write these bits down.

When I talk to you about Eirik he seems so close. He was so alive that death can’t destroy his image. I see him now, standing behind you in the corner there. You stoop over your desk, but he stands upright, and he watches us both keenly. He lived by his judgement of men. I never knew him wrong about that. Even his partiality for his
sons – I can’t call it love, Eirik did not love – never made him misjudge them. He admired Leif most, I think, and trusted him least. Leif was very like his mother, to look at, anyway.

I didn’t meet Leif until a year after we arrived, and yet I was always aware of his presence, his place at Brattahlid and his effect on the family, right from the day I landed. In a way his influence was more potent in his absence.

Eirik’s family were overwhelming. They seemed to have been living in public so long that they just ignored the fact. Like emperors. There were often guests at Brattahlid. New settlers were still arriving, and sometimes they’d stay the first winter with Eirik. In summer, traders and hunters would come and go. Men would come down from the Western Settlement, and leave their goods for Iceland at Brattahlid, for they trusted Eirik to act as their agent. Besides all that, there was the community at Eiriksfjord. Eirik had given land to his friends and dependants, and Brattahlid itself was worked by Eirik’s thralls and freedmen who lived round about. The hall was the centre of all this activity, and there Eirik’s family would carry on with their lives, always shouting and bickering, encouraged if anything by the presence of an audience. When my father and I were with them, that first year, I used to watch them enact their quarrels, almost, it seemed, for our benefit. Sometimes Thjodhild or Freydis would glance our way to see how we were taking it. Eirik would magnificently ignore us, and his sons tried to do the same, but their performance was less convincing.

Eirik’s two younger sons, Thorvald and Thorstein, were at home. Leif had left for Norway three days before we arrived. We must have passed his ship, and probably he put into Herjolfsnes just a day or so after we left. Sometimes I think how it might have happened. Perhaps our ship was lying to in a fjord one night, when Leif’s trading ship slipped past us in the dawn light. Or perhaps Leif, who was the most daring sailor of them all, had taken a course to the seaward side of all the sheltering islands, while we hugged the coast and took advantage of the sheltered channels. It was still early in the year, remember, with a great risk of ice out at sea. I remember that the wind was south-westerly. It was a fate that made us miss one another. Eirik
thought so too, I’m certain. He would have married me to Leif, if things had been different. But there it was; Leif was on his way to Norway, and, three days after his departure, a girl who must have seemed to Eirik both beautiful and eligible turned up on his threshold at Brattahlid.

Halldis had been right. Lack of dowry mattered much less in Greenland. Wealth was children, who would grow up to inherit vast lands, and who could hunt and farm and trade for their parents when they were old. But there was a shortage of coin to buy that wealth – by that I mean women. Too many of the settlers were related and of course there were more men to start with anyway. After twelve years a new generation of young men needed wives. That was one reason why Leif went to Norway. Thorstein was fairly sure his brother would come home with a wife, and so he would have done, no doubt, if he hadn’t made a complete mess of the business.

So there was Eirik treating me with special favour, making my father the most honoured of his guests, and there were Thorstein and Thorvald, prowling round the place like a couple of bears on an ice floe, with their eyes always on me. I’m no saint, Agnar, and I hadn’t had much of a youth so far. I revelled in it, and without really knowing it, I think I teased them unmercifully, though I hardly said a word.

The women were more complicated. Freydis was younger than me, and couldn’t spend half an hour with her stepmother without quarrelling. I was appalled by her rudeness. Halldis would have beaten me if I’d spoken to her like that. Thjodhild just ignored it. Freydis didn’t like me; I think she was jealous, though she can hardly have wanted the attentions of her brothers. Or could she? I wouldn’t put anything past Freydis. Certainly she resented my presence in her father’s house, in her mother’s room, in her own bed. There was something else going on, I could tell, and fairly soon Thjodhild told me what it was.