B0046ZREEU EBOK (12 page)

Anyway, we’d better stop talking and go on with the work. We didn’t do as much as we should have yesterday either, but I’m glad you told me more about those ruins on the Palatine hill. Have there been empires since the beginning of the world? It’s not surprising; after all, gods and giants have always fought one another over who should rule the world of men. So there were gods in Rome too, before there were emperors? I never knew that before. What were their names?

I don’t know what you mean, when you say I must believe one thing and not another. You tell me a story about these Roman gods, and then you say I mustn’t believe you. You shouldn’t worry so much about whether things are, or aren’t. What you should care about is whether they’re bad or good. It doesn’t matter what you believe, it’s where you put your trust.

No, I hadn’t thought of Thorstein particularly before that day. I thought about Leif, whom I’d never seen. I suspected that Eirik had spoken to my father about making a match between me and Leif when Leif came home. Eirik treated me with special favour. He liked me to fill his cup for him. I used to take round a jug of buttermilk and pour it for the men as if it were wine. Eirik once said it tasted like
wine, when I was the cup-bearer, and his two younger sons grinned across the table at one another.

That day on the mountain I talked seriously to Thorstein Eiriksson for the first time. He didn’t say he’d followed me up there, and I didn’t say what I’d been doing. He talked about his own concerns, but that’s not unusual in a young man.

‘It was Bjarni who found the new land,’ he told me. ‘That’s a fate, in itself. He had never even thought of it before! He never even wanted to come so far as the Green Land. He just came back from Norway to Iceland with his cargo as usual, at the end of the summer, and found his father gone. He was given the message from Herjolf to follow him to the new country, and like a dutiful son he went. He’s just a lump of a man, not a thought in his head. Would you believe he actually sighted a new country, actually saw the forests and the white beaches, sailed along the coasts, and never even bothered to land! All he could think about was getting home to his daddy!’

‘But Thorstein, it was the end of the season, and he had a full cargo already. He needed to find Herjolfsnes before the weather changed.’

‘But he had a new world at his feet! If he’d claimed it then, he could be the richest and most powerful of us all!’

‘You wouldn’t like it if he were.’

‘No, but I’d think him more of a man.’

‘I like Bjarni.’

‘“Like!”’ sneered Thorstein. ‘That’s about it.’

‘And I respect him. We had a bad winter – you must know that, it can’t have been much better here. We were hungry. People were ill. He was a good leader then, and that’s a more difficult thing. It’s all very well to find new lands, but hunger and sickness and winter and death will come with you, wherever you go. Would you deal with that better than Bjarni, do you think?’

I wasn’t trying to taunt him, but he grabbed me by the arm, and made me face him. ‘I’m a better man than Bjarni Herjolfsson, Gudrid, and I’ll make you know it!’

I twisted out of his grip indignantly. ‘Don’t you touch me! I’m only saying that you judge him wrong.’ And I couldn’t resist adding, ‘His crew don’t agree with you, you know. They say he’s a great sailor, a
great navigator. They thought they were lost to direction entirely, but Bjarni worked it out. The winds were against him too, but he found his way back. It’s much harder to find one farm than a whole continent, you know.’

Thorstein flushed like a girl. He had a fair skin and blushed easily, to the end of his life. ‘It’s easy to mock,’ he said. ‘You know I don’t have a ship. It’s not fair to throw that in my face.’

‘I never did!’

‘You do. You laugh at me because I’ve done nothing yet. How can I? Leif bought Bjarni’s ship, and now he’s gone to Norway in it. But I’ll do more, I promise you. We’ve talked of it for years, my brothers and I. We haven’t had our chance yet, but this place is ours, at the edge of an untouched world. We’ll claim that land, I tell you, and the whole world will know it!’

‘I’m not laughing at you.’

‘We have the sailing directions. Bjarni gave them to my brother. If they’d been ours, we’d have guarded them with our lives, not given them away to anyone for the asking. If we’d had a ship we’d have fitted it out the very next season. Leif wanted to take my father’s ship at once. But my father keeps it for the northern hunting, because he says everything we have depends on that, and the first thing is to make sure of our family’s position in the Green Land. But the Green Land is nothing to what’s out there in the west!’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because Bjarni described to Leif what he had found.’ Thorstein seized me by the shoulders, as his mother had done two weeks earlier, and looked me in the eyes. ‘Gudrid, there’s a land lying there for the taking. There are beaches for ships all along the shores. The forests have more timber than men could ever fell. There must be herds of deer roaming inland, and flocks of birds nest on all the islands offshore. There’re seals and whales and cod, more fish in the sea than all the nets in the world could ever snare. Compared with the life we might have there, in this land of my father’s we’re only half alive.’

‘And no men have ever reached this land before?’

‘There was no sign of any human soul.’

‘It sounds more like heaven than earth.’

‘I don’t care what you call it, it’s ours. I’m going there myself, Gudrid. I dream of a ship, you know, night after night. When Leif comes back from Norway, there’ll be two ships in my family. One for Leif, one for Thorvald, but one day there’ll be one for me. I may be the youngest, but the youngest in the end is usually the luckiest of the three. You’ll see, Gudrid. Would you go with a man to a new land? Would you marry a man who had a whole new world to call his own?’

‘I might,’ I said, not meeting his eyes, ‘If it should ever happen.’

He seemed to consider for a moment before he spoke again, but he couldn’t help giving himself away, his need was so great. ‘Your father still has a ship,’ he blurted out.

There is a moral there, Agnar, for all young women who think that their personal beauty is irresistible.

Poor Thorstein, he was belated all his life. Leif snatched away every dream of glory before Thorstein could even come at it. I talked to Thorstein often after that day. You know how it is, once you know someone, you wonder how your first conception of them could have been so false. I had thought at first that Thorvald and Thorstein were more or less interchangeable, two young wolves, but it wasn’t so at all. Thorvald died a hero’s death, but Thorstein did just as bravely. That’s a woman’s judgement, I know. Thorvald’s death was a grand gesture, Thorstein’s demanded that uncomplaining acceptance of a fate that takes away not only life but reputation too. Poor Thorstein! He was never tested against equal odds. But he won one thing which his brothers never got. You know what that was?

You’re not being very astute today, Agnar. Very well, I’ll go on now to the following summer. For we spent another winter at Brattahlid, at Eirik’s pressing invitation. My father said that we should claim land of our own without more delay, but Eirik put him off, and then said at last that his plan was to give us the land by the river on the opposite side of the fjord from Brattahlid, part of the vast holding he’d originally claimed for himself. The gift was a sign of great favour. Not only was Eirik not one to part easily with land, but also it showed
that he wanted my father and his household nearby. I’m sure that Eirik’s calculation was that the land would end up in the family anyway, for Thorbjorn had no child but me, and Eirik had settled it that I should be his daughter-in-law, one way or another. I knew what Thorstein wanted, and so I’m sure did his father, but no one spoke. We were all tacitly waiting for Leif.

It was still winter when Thorbjorn and I went to have our first look at our new holding. Thorstein drove us across Eiriksfjord on the big sledge. On the other side we left the track made by previous hoofprints and drove into an untouched white plain. Thorstein said this was a river bed, and flooded every spring, but now it was smooth and blank as the vellum you haven’t written on yet, and our sledge made a single track across the pristine snow. Steep white slopes enclosed us, and it was hard to see where a steading could be built. On our way home the sky clouded over, and just as we reached Brattahlid the first flurry of a blizzard flew into our faces. It seemed a bleak prospect to exchange the snug hearth at Brattahlid for those blank slopes, but I told myself that twelve years earlier Brattahlid had been just as empty.

Leif never came home that winter. Eirik went around muttering against the son who would dare to seize the chance of a winter at the court in Norway, when his duty to his father was to return home with all the speed he could, and a full cargo. Thjodhild said nothing, but she used to pray at our meetings for all those at sea, and men in danger, although she never mentioned her own son specifically. I don’t suppose, in spite of all her new faith, she wanted to tempt a fate. When you’re at the edge of things, grim shadows are likely to get between you and the cross on which you try to fix your heart. Sometimes I think the shadow of the fates can reach even here, to the very tomb of St Peter.

That winter was far better than the last. It had been a good season, and even without the ship from Norway we had plenty, as the hunting parties in the north had been successful, and it had been a good year for hay, and the cattle were fat and healthy. It was a happy time. In the spring Thorbjorn and I prepared to leave. Eirik gave us cattle, as ours had not survived our voyage to Greenland, and a couple
of extra thralls. I was a little afraid of how much we were growing in Eirik Raudi’s debt. It was not that I was unwilling to do what he wanted, and marry into his family, it was just the weight of obligation, knowing that there was no other possibility open to me now. My father seemed entirely carefree. You know how improvident he could be and if I’d said I was anxious, he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about.

By the time we moved to our new land in May it had put on quite a different face. The hillside didn’t seem half so steep without snow, and now we could see it was covered with trees: willow, birch, alder and even rowan. Often they were waist high and in the most sheltered places they grew way above our heads. At first it was difficult pushing our way through, and even when we’d hacked out paths I found the growth restricting; I was used to open land where I could walk anywhere. But the wood showed us what turned out to be true, that we had a sheltered, fertile spot for our home, and also that for the first time in our lives we’d never be short of firewood. We could use wood for fencing and building too, and before long everyone was calling the place Stokkanes, and that’s been its name ever since.

Thorstein was right about the flood plain. All the flat land turned out to be a huge river bed of white boulders, and a river of grey melt water surged over it, so we had to carry our belongings in by pony overland. Later in the year the river was fordable, meandering like a ribbon through its great bed. We could see the glacier now the snow had gone, white against the hills, with two snow-capped peaks behind it. It funnelled the east wind down to us all year, but that made Stokkanes warmer than other places, as the wind off a glacier isn’t as cold as the wind off the sea.

We made camp close to the river mouth, and explored the valley from there, shoving our way through the untrodden forest. We decided to build our steading halfway between the river mouth and the glacier, in a wooded hollow facing south. The trees were tallest there, and when we’d cleared and drained the land we had a sheltered cup of land for our home pastures. Waterfalls poured over the precipices behind us, and between them and the river there was always the sound of fresh water. We never heard the sea, although we
could see across the fjord to Brattahlid from the door of our house. Where I was used to waves lapping at the shore, we often had only an expanse of grey silt covered with ripple marks as if there ought to be water.

As soon as we’d chosen our site we diverted part of the stream to run under the house, marked out where the walls of the first building should be, brought in stones off our pastures until we had a good foundation, and before long we had the turf walls going up on top of that. We had to borrow driftwood for the roof from Eirik’s store at Brattahlid, as we’d had no chance to collect any from open shores. I’ll always remember the day we moved into the house, when I was directing the men – it always seems to have been my fate to have few women about me – where I wanted everything: the store barrels, the loom, the rack of tools, the baskets hanging on the walls, the soapstone pots by the hearth, the furs and blankets on the bed platforms. In two hours I had my house the way I wanted it, and as far as I know everything is still there in its place, just as I arranged it that first day. I didn’t miss Halldis when I was busy. She was there, you see, her spirit worked inside me, part of me now, and it has always remained so.

Hay was difficult the first two years, because of the trees, and we were feeding the animals seaweed and bits of trees, but after a season or two the cattle had trampled the trees down and manured the ground for grass. In the end our best grass came from the silt plains across the river, though sometimes we lost it to floods. Our sheep grazing was steeper than at Brattahlid, and we lost some animals on the precipices close to the glacier, and we had trouble from foxes too, and set lots of stone traps, which worked – I was able to make my father a fox fur cloak after the first winter, with a white hareskin hood.

I was happy at Stokkanes. As the seasons passed it kept revealing new treasures to us. In July we discovered that we were living on one of the best salmon rivers in the Green Land, and all season we had nets at the river mouth, our only competitors the sea eagles who used to come down from Burfjell to fish there too. Towards the end of the first summer I discovered, myself, a little hot spring close to the glacier. And when the autumn came the land was in its glory, all red
and gold. We had more berries than I’d ever seen, so we had fruit soup every night, besides preserving two barrels of fruit in whey for winter. Our traps and nets were never empty, and even the sun seemed to be caught in our valley long after the first gales had blown winter into the fjord. It was worth it to me to have to keep our boats a mile or two away, and as time went on our side of the fjord became less isolated. Before long there were new steadings right up to the head of the fjord, and I could walk that far easily. It was a hopeful time, when everything was new, and quarrels seemed to be left behind in Iceland. But these are women’s things I’m talking about, not the kind of thing you want to know. I was telling you about that first winter.