B0046ZREEU EBOK (11 page)

When I first met Thjodhild she reminded me a little of Halldis, and it took me a while to learn how different from her she really was. I was still shaken by my meeting with Thorbjorg. A witch like that should never have been in the Green Land, it seemed to me; her familiars were unclean things to bring into a new world. Thjodhild, Eirik’s wife, on the other hand, seemed to be a woman of the daylight, but then it was spring when I met her. She was tall, like Halldis, and her hair had stayed white-fair like a child’s. I was sometimes conscious of my Irish blood when I stayed at Brattahlid, because I was growing darker, compared with them anyway, though here in Italy they’d have called me fair. Now it makes no difference; old women are the same the world over.

Things flourished for Thjodhild. She had a way with animals, and I never saw so much milk, or such big, round cheeses, as those at Brattahlid. Her hens laid eggs right into the dark months, and more than half her sheep had twin lambs. The fleeces we took from them that autumn were as thick and greasy as any in Iceland. Most people think that the Green Land is a poor country, but I never saw a farm as well provided as Eirik’s until I went to Norway. Thjodhild was one of those people for whom the desert flowers. In summer she used to gather plants, and found more than anyone would dream could grow in such a land. And of course she had borne three outstanding sons, who were strong men now, even by the standards of our country.

I think she would have liked a daughter. Her work obsessed her. I can remember seeing her out late at night, in the long twilight, still
raking and turning the hay on the slopes across the stream from the hall. She was up before any of us, before the house thralls even. She would sit all night with a cow about to calf, if the birth was likely to be a hard one. Eirik used to say, ‘Don’t we have enough slaves? Come to bed, woman! You let these people eat their heads off at my hearth, and then you do their work for them!’ But he respected her greatly, and rightly so. It was Eirik who said first that the land was lush and plentiful, but it was Thjodhild who made it so for him. Erik used words to make things into what he wanted them to be, but Thjodhild despised words. She listened to men as if they were children, encouraging, but not too bothered, I always thought, about what they actually meant. In a way I was wrong about that; later I realised that she did listen. If the men she loved spoke about their dreams, she worked like one of the fates to make them happen.

What I liked about Thjodhild was what she made. She made a wilderness into a green paradise, those first years at Brattahlid. Her house was always clean and warm. Whether she were feeding a shipload of settlers worn out by a hard voyage, or pulling out a child’s bad tooth, as I saw her do the very day I arrived, she gave the matter the same wholehearted energy, and everything was done right.

To begin with I was afraid that I couldn’t work hard enough for her. She only understood weakness in men who were wounded, or women who were pregnant, or in the very old, for whom she had a vast respect. Anyone else could never do enough. I needn’t have worried. I think she saw in me all that Freydis was not. No wonder Freydis hated me. I couldn’t understand that either, at first. Being so alone in my childhood, I always had a dream about a friend. I don’t mean a man, I mean another girl. At Arnarstapi I used to imagine I had such a friend. Sometimes I used to look at my face reflected in the water butt, and imagine that was her. When I was alone I used to talk to her aloud. The only real girl of my own age and rank I ever lived with was Freydis, and she saw me as her supplanter, and did all she could to torment me. It’s clearer to me now why she felt like that. She was Eirik’s daughter, you see, but her mother was a thrall, and Thjodhild took her home and fostered her as if she were her own. That’s typical of Thjodhild. I suppose I might have done the same for
one of Karlsefni’s bastards; I don’t know. If he had any no one told me about it. But Freydis was angry with everyone. Her brothers were men, and legitimate, and so she hated them. In fact she hated men because they were men, and she hated any other woman who had been luckier than her. And yet who could be more privileged than Eirik Raudi’s daughter at Brattahlid? She had hair the colour of buttercups, and she used to look at men sidelong, and drop her eyes. She wasn’t really pretty, but she had more power over them than I ever did.

I had a talk with Thjodhild one evening, when she met me going up to the sheiling at milking time. I’d never talked alone with her before. She never stopped working to chat, unless there were something to say that mattered, and she came to the point at once.

‘Gudrid, you’re a Christian, aren’t you? Are you baptised?’

I told her about Halldis, and Thangbrand the missionary, and the baptism at Arnarstapi.

‘So you are of the faith. What does it mean to you?’

The question embarrassed me. I looked at the ground, and watched a clump of gentians in Thjodhild’s shadow, slowly curling up their petals as if it were night. ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered, but I was thinking about Thurid’s story of the demon sitting astride the roof beam, banging against the turfs with his heels, so that the whole house shook. Thjodhild’s question reminded me that I was afraid of ghosts.

‘That won’t do. You’re a sensible girl, and you’ve had some hard experiences. Did you keep your faith on the voyage here?’

I saw in my mind’s eye two men raising Halldis’ body, where it lay shrouded in her wet cloak, and heaving it over the gunwale while the swell rose up to swallow it. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t think about anything.’

‘But if you are a Christian, you don’t have to think. Your God is what you know.’

‘I know one thing then,’ I told her. ‘I know that Thangbrand said that when God cast Lucifer out of heaven, he fell into the sea, and he lies there still. He is Jormungand, and he lies beneath the waters that surround this world. The sea is his kingdom, and Christ doesn’t rule there. He wasn’t on that ship with us.’

Thjodhild grabbed me by the shoulders and made me face her. ‘But you’re wrong, Gudrid, you’re wrong! Herjolf’s thrall told me another story. He told that when the disciples were in terror of their lives in the storm, Christ said to them, “Why are you scared? Don’t you have any faith?’’ And he said to the wind and the waves, “Peace; be still!’’ and the storm died away at once.’

‘Well,’ I muttered, ‘He wasn’t on our ship. I don’t believe he ever sailed on our seas.’

‘But he was on your ship! Thangbrand brought him to you. He should have been in your heart!’

I wrenched myself away from her. ‘No!’ Suddenly I was crying, and that made me angry. ‘No! No! No! I didn’t make those things happen! It’s not my fault! It’s not! It’s not!’

I would have run away, but although she was big she was always very quick, and she stopped me. ‘Gudrid, wait. I’m not blaming you for what happened. I’m saying that the power of Christ is given into our hands. Into yours and mine. We are women, what can we do? This is a hard land, but if we have faith, we can move the very mountains. He told me so!’

All at once this wholesome woman sickened me. If were a man, I thought, I would have my own power, and I would fight to keep it with all the strength in my body. I’d kill my enemies and wrest a living out of the icefields. I wouldn’t get involved with ghosts or spirits, white or black. I wouldn’t be weak enough to need to bother. I wanted to hit Thjodhild. Her faith made me sick. ‘No,’ I said. ‘My will isn’t as strong as that. It’s not my fault.’

‘You don’t understand, do you?’ she said gently. ‘We’re all weak, God knows. But let me tell you something else. My son Leif has promised to speak to the king in Norway. King Olaf wants to make the whole world Christian. Leif will ask him to send us a priest. We can build our church then, our own church, here in the Green Land. If God has his house here, he can watch over us. He will be our shepherd, and he will guard the weak and the strong.’

Even though I was angry, that thought comforted me, and in spite of what she’d said, once again I warmed towards her. I was lonely, Agnar. I missed my foster mother. I was frightened of being in this
world without anyone to guide me. I was afraid of my own strength. Mountains do move, sometimes, and ice falls, and the sea sends up great waves that wash away the land where we lead our fragile lives. I’ve lain at night in a wooden ship, and heard the ice cracking all round us, and felt the wave it makes when it crashes down into the sea. Shall I tell you the worst thing about being on a ship in a storm? What my real fear is? It’s the urge to throw myself over. I see the swell come up to the gunwale, or the waves crash against the bow and drench us; I see great troughs open up under our bows; I see huge seas like moving mountains hurling down on to us; and what I want to do is to give in. I don’t want to resist, Agnar, I want to go in. I want to throw myself headlong into the chaos that surrounds our little world.

‘I would like a church,’ I admitted to Thjodhild, although I was sullen still. ‘A church built on a rock, like the house that stood when the storms came.’

She linked her arm in mine, and led me up to the sheiling, where the ewes were gathering. ‘It’ll be all right, Gudrid, we shall have our church.’

Thjodhild had arranged that all the Christians in Brattahlid should pray together on Sundays. If the weather was good we did this conspicuously at the milking ring, right in the middle of the settlement. Only when it was impossible to be outside did we retreat to the new women’s room, which had been built on to the end of the hall that summer. These public meetings put my father in a very awkward position. The very mention of a new god made Eirik flame. ‘Take away your milk-and-water gods, your god’s for infants!’ he used to shout. ‘What kind of man do you want, if you fancy a god who hasn’t the guts to lift a hand to save himself? Don’t tell me stories about flocks of sheep! I want men like wolves! What kind of country do you think this is?’

So Thorbjorn kept his mouth shut, and didn’t attend Thjodhild’s meetings of thralls and women, where we shared out dried fish and buttermilk, because in the Green Land there is neither bread nor wine. I went, though, but it made me angry. In the end I felt so resentful and confused that I climbed up out of the settlement one day, and made a different kind of spell.

It wasn’t just a spiritual confusion, it was my body protesting too. I was young. Like the sap in springtime, when you’re young, humours rise in your body, and if you’re a young girl, you want a man. It’s the same itch the cattle feel; every living creature feels it, and I remember it quite well. At night I’d dream I was making love to a man, and I’d wake up heated and damp, and knowing exactly what I desired. I was angry with Thjodhild for always talking about her Christ, and never noticing that her two sons watched me like hunting wolves. I remember sitting at her Christian love feast, while I imagined the body of Thorstein Eiriksson pressed against my own, and when she passed me the sacrament I wanted to spit it out at her feet. There was a struggling spirit inhabiting me that wanted to be freed, and this woman, who seemed now to want me round her all the time, was weighing me down with stones of faith.

When we were all together harvesting the hay I just couldn’t stand it any more, and I ran away up the hill, and looked down on tiny figures raking the hay into round coles. They were like mice against the giant Burfjell across the fjord. I laid out in front of me salt and ice, and tinder and flint to make a flame. The chant I used was one that Halldis taught me long ago. It was a song for harvest, a charm to bring plenty to last through the dark days ahead. I changed the words, though, because the fruition I wanted was for myself. I wanted a promise given to my body, not my soul. I wanted nothing more to do with the things that are not visible. I wanted the love that is of this world. I didn’t want to meddle with mountains, or powers beyond my control. It was a fate that took Halldis and Orm, and none of my doing. The strong thing to do is to endure. It’s only fear of fate that makes people want to control things for themselves, isn’t it?