B0046ZREEU EBOK (14 page)

It was the same with Thorir. Leif’s rescue was astonishing, and whether he did it out of generosity, or because a wrecked merchant ship meant great wealth to any scavenger, I leave you to decide. He sailed in close to a lee shore, but he had all the advantage of knowing where the reefs were. He kept men at the oars to keep his own ship afloat, and cast a line across, and hauled men and cargo across in his boat and Thorir’s. Not many men would have taken such a risk, and few but Leif would have got away with it. But Leif’s luck brought
Thorir no good, and Brattahlid even less. Those men carried sickness with them. Leif’s grand gesture killed fifty people that same winter. Thorir was among the first to sicken and die. He had a rash first, and then he couldn’t pass water and swelled up like a puffball. Thjodhild said he grew so hot that butter would have melted on his skin. He didn’t die for days, and at the end he grew delirious and fearful, and saw the nine fates themselves hanging over him in his bed, leering and chuckling.

Most of Thorir’s crew died, and the sickness spread though the settlement. Thorstein came across on a sledge, and shouted to us. He wouldn’t come in, so I talked to him from the threshold. He warned us to stay away that winter, and we did. That was why we saw no more of Eirik’s family until spring came.

So it was not until the snows were melting, and the pack ice grinding and shifting in the fjord, that I heard about the fourth thing. Once again, it was Thorstein who came across. My father scolded him for making the journey when the ice was dangerous, but welcomed him in when Thorstein said that the sickness had gone with the winter dark. It hadn’t, of course. It was a persistent disease, and has been endemic in Greenland ever since. It was a gift from Leif that changed my own life completely, as you shall hear.

I had hoped that Leif might come himself. He hadn’t taken much notice of me, it’s true, but when we’d met he’d had his mind on so many other things. He had looked at me once or twice, appreciatively, I’d thought. But Thorstein’s news put paid to any daydreaming I’d indulged in through the long winter loneliness.

‘Leif had a huge quarrel with my father, just a short time after you were at Brattahlid. That’s nothing new; my family always quarrels, but we get over it quickly. If anything happens outside, we support each other to the death.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘Eirik talked to Leif about you,’ said Thorstein. ‘You know he’d ordered him to take note of you when you came to the feast?’

My father sat up on his bench. ‘So Eirik had spoken to him?’

‘I don’t know what he said,’ said Thorstein sullenly. ‘When Leif comes home, my father seems to forget that Thorvald and I exist. But
whatever plan Eirik had, it came to nothing. I thought you’d better know. My brother Leif made a landing in the Hebrides on his way back from Norway, and seduced a chieftain’s daughter there. I don’t know what he promised her, but he left her pregnant. She insists she is betrothed to him, and she threatened that her brothers would equip a ship, and bring her here to Greenland, with her child.’

‘What of it?’ said my father impatiently. ‘Every man who ever sailed from home could tell the same story. What does an Irish chieftain matter to us? He could surely take her as a slave, and it wouldn’t affect anything?’

‘You don’t understand my brother Leif.’

‘I saw him. I can’t believe any man could threaten him.’

‘You’re right about that. No man could. But this woman, Thorgunna, is a witch, and she cast a fate upon him, that if he wrongs her, the child will be her revenge. The child will come here for certain, she said, even if she did not, and if another woman had taken his mother’s place, she, Thorgunna, would know it at once. And she swore that whatever happened to her, no woman Leif married before the boy came, would live through her labour, nor bear a live child.’

Horrified, I crossed myself. ‘How could she do that?’ I whispered. ‘What kind of power has she?’

‘Leif seems very sure of her power,’ said Thorstein. ‘We talked about it. No man could ever make my brother afraid – he’s not afraid now – you mustn’t think that. But he spoke to me more seriously than he’s ever done before, and said that while this thing hung over him, it would be better for him not to marry. He said he wouldn’t take a wife until this boy came, and then he could see how things were. But if Thorgunna hopes to trap him, she’s gone the wrong way about it. I know Leif. She’s threatened his good luck, and he’ll never forgive her now. I doubt if he’ll ever see her again either.’

‘That’s a terrible fate for a young man,’ said my father. ‘And he’s of an age to need a wife.’

‘He won’t lack a woman, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ said Thorstein, with a crack of laughter. ‘Not Leif. But he’s angry. He wants an heir. So does my father. It doesn’t help Leif much, but once
Eirik had stopped storming at Leif, it occurred to him that he had two other sons.’

I was thinking about the woman who had made such a curse, and how she must have gone about it. It must have been a more powerful magic than anything I knew of, just to cover such a great distance, for a start, to say nothing of making such a powerful spell. And of course Halldis had never taught me evil, so I didn’t know much about how to do harm. Young as I was, I thought Thorgunna must be a wicked woman. I never met her; I scarcely heard her name spoken again, for it brought no good luck to speak of her at Brattahlid, but now, all these years later, I feel a strange kinship with that woman who must have had so much power, and yet got nothing that she wanted. She must have been desperate, Agnar, don’t you think? I suppose she loved him. Why else would she have done all she could to get him to take her to Greenland? No chieftain’s daughter in her right mind would want to go out of her own world into a strange man’s country, among men who despised her own people and thought of them as slaves. Anyway, her curse came to nothing in the end. She died, I believe, only a few years later, and of course Leif did marry, and Thorkel, who is chieftain at Brattahlid today, was born just nine months after. So Leif’s luck held. Leif was a most attractive man, Agnar. I forgot to tell you that, I think. But my good luck was that I was never his woman. He became my brother, and no other man could have treated a sister better. Leif had every notion of what was due to his family. I would choose any time to be his kin rather than his wife, now that I look back on it. As a girl, I saw a handsome man who’d proved himself, beside two youths who’d done nothing. I would have had Leif, if I could, and I realise now that I would have been wrong.

‘How does she know,’ I asked Thorstein, ‘that the child is going to be a boy? If they are indeed betrothed, he should be your father’s heir.’

‘They’re not betrothed,’ said Thorstein shortly, ‘And the boy, and she told Leif that it is certainly a boy, will never be our heir.’

‘May she not curse you all for that?’

‘She has nothing of mine,’ said Thorstein. ‘How can she touch me?’

That was probably true, I thought. She probably had enough of Leif to reach him even in Greenland. A lock of hair, perhaps, a shirt, a ring, who knows? But as for Thorvald and Thorstein, she might not even know that they existed. Her spells could never reach so far. And yet, now I wonder. I thought then that the world was very large. But now here I am in the very centre of it, and when I wake up in the morning sometimes I feel I have only to stretch out my hand to reach across both space and time. It would not surprise me to find Karlsefni lying beside me, and to hear the icy winds of Vinland roaring inland across the winter ice. I have all that within me, every moment, and sometimes it seems nearer to me than what you call the here and now.

‘I’ll be honest with you,’ said Thorstein, and cleared his throat. He didn’t look at my father or at me, but plunged on with what he had to say. ‘I know what you hoped for, Thorbjorn. I know what you negotiated with my father. I know that Eirik wants Gudrid for a daughter-in-law. While you all thought of Leif, I waited. But Leif won’t marry for years now. No woman would risk a curse like that, and no man would wish her to do it.’

‘Every woman takes that risk,’ said my father unexpectedly, ‘And every man who marries expects her to do it.’

Thorstein wasn’t listening. ‘I would never ask it. I haven’t proved myself as Leif has done, but I’m one of Eirik’s sons, and I’ve done nothing to disgrace him, and I’ll do much more to enhance his prestige, I promise you. I’m one of the heirs to this Green Land, and unlike my brother I know Gudrid, and I want her for my wife.’

Well, of course it wasn’t quite as easy as that. My father took a long time to make up his mind. He suspected that the tale of Thorgunna’s curse might be a ruse to manipulate him. But when the ice melted, and we could sail across the fjord again, Thorbjorn had long talks with Eirik, with Thjodhild, with Thorstein, and even with Leif. He never entirely made up his mind that Leif’s fears of witchcraft were genuine, but he did make sure that Leif was unattainable as a son-in-law, for whatever reason. Meanwhile, Thorstein haunted our house, until it was time to go north for the hunting. He came back in the autumn, looking thin and tough, with a boatload of bearskins, caribou hides, marten and fox furs, narwhal tusks and walrus ivory,
and meat to match it, all of which he brought straight to Stokkanes and laid at my father’s feet. My father feasted him well, and listened to his tales of distant places, and the traces of an uncanny people, who had left their stone cairns along the deserted shores of the uninhabited north. I listened too, and watched Thorstein closely as he talked to my father. I thought he’d grown older during the summer. He spoke little of his family, and the dangerous magic of empty lands still hung about him, like an echo of something new and desirable. I noted all this, and thought of what I would say to my father afterwards, whether Thorbjorn were to ask my opinion or not.