B0046ZREEU EBOK (19 page)

Meanwhile the ghosts outnumbered us in that house, and at night there was always noise. They murmured together under the rafters, and scratched under the bed platforms. When the storms came the moaning in the rafters swelled to drown the sound of the wind outside. In the morning things were moved about. The baskets that hung on the wall would be turned upside down, and their contents scattered over the floor. The buckets of water would be upset, so that broken ice lay in shards across the floor, and the yoke was flung down on top of them. Chests would be standing open, their contents ransacked as if the woman of the house had come back and was desperately searching for something she had left behind. The ashes by the hearth would be scuffled as if many feet had come tramping through.

I could not sleep in the bed where Thorstein had died. I tried it the first night, with the covers pulled tight over my head, but every time my grip relaxed the bearskin on top would be twitched away, and I would lie exposed to the dark. When Thorstein the Black woke in the morning he found me curled on the bench by the hearth. The second night I didn’t try to go to bed, but sat by the fire, feeding it scraps of dried seaweed. There wasn’t enough fuel to keep a good fire going all night, but it comforted me to let a little flame burst through. The next day I slept heavily, while a snowstorm raged outside, and when I woke we were snowed in under seven feet of snow, and quite cut off from the rest of the settlement.

That was the day Thorstein and I buried the bodies deeply under the snow where they could lie until the spring came. I cooked him a meal that night. Neither of us had eaten properly for several days, and I think our souls were shaken loose in our own bodies, with all that had happened. To eat hot meat again was like a small coming alive. That night I wrapped myself in my cloak and lay down on the hard
bench by the fire. Presently Thorstein spoke to me from his own bed: ‘Gudrid, are you not going to your bed?’

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Thorstein is not gone.’

‘Maybe he wants to say something to you. Maybe you should listen, and then he could lie quiet.’

I shuddered. ‘No.’

‘Well, you can’t sit up all night, night after night. Come here instead, and lie down.’

I sat up. ‘What, with my husband’s ghost watching over me?’

‘I don’t mean that. I won’t touch you. But if you don’t sleep you’ll die too, and if I have to spend the winter with only the dead for company, I shall go mad. You’d be doing us all a favour, Gudrid, if you’d come here and lie down.’

To tell you the truth, I was glad to be persuaded. If there had been no ghosts, I wouldn’t have made even a token defence of decency, but in that place the dead watched everything, and I was afraid that they would judge. In the end I did creep in under the covers with him, and I was glad of his human warmth.

Why do you want to know that? What difference does it make? We did what was necessary to stay alive, no more. It was dark, the snow lay over us, and the dead surrounded us, and for five long months we survived. Thorstein the Black has been my friend ever since. We know each other as no one else possibly can – he knows me in a way that neither of my husbands ever did. He’s my good friend, and we came out of that living grave together, intact in mind and body. I’ll never tell what he had to do to lay his wife’s ghost when she rose from the dead and confronted him, and he’ll never betray me either, if we live for a hundred years. All that winter we were outside the boundaries of this world of yours, and the rules you make just don’t apply. Good and bad, light and dark – in this country these things may seem to be as inevitable as living itself, but in the Western
Settlement in winter it was not like that. Some days were dark as night, when the blizzards blew over us, and some nights, with the moon on the snow, were filled with uncanny light. We fed the cattle in the byre, and ourselves, and we slept, and we talked a little, and we played hnefatafl. Thorstein the Black had carved pieces out of caribou antler, and made the board from a barrel top. Through the short days we sat over our game, throwing the dice, moving the pieces, scarcely speaking. At first he always got my king – I’d never been much of a games player – but I grew more expert with practice, and in the end we were evenly matched. He told me he and Grimhild always used to play hnefatafl every day in winter. To save light in the evening we sat in the dark and told each other the stories of our lives up until that time. Thorstein the Black is an honest man. He tells the truth whether men like it or not, and he wrests his living doggedly, year by year, from the land, and he accepts from his fate the best and the worst that it offers him. He never resents the luck he was born to, as some men do. He’s suspicious of new ideas – he’s not a Christian, even yet – and he’ll end true to the faith he was born in, and accept the meagre promise that it offers when he dies.

It bothered him that he could offer no thralls to wait on me, and he kept saying that when the snow lifted he would fetch some of the land workers. I kept on telling him that the lack of servants was the last thing on my mind, and I wanted no one near me who had to be bribed to come close to a woman who brought evil fortune with her. It was no hardship to me to cook for us both; I was just grateful that owing to his good provision and Grimhild’s forethought the house was well-filled with dried fish and meat. Of course I never said so, but in a way it was a relief to my over-burdened spirit to clean the place up, which I could never have done if Grimhild had lived. You look as if my callous attitude shocked you, and yet you’d not be shocked at all if I were a man and told you I’d wiped out a whole settlement in blood feud. My husband was dead, I was trapped in a house where the dead outnumbered the living by a score or more: you shouldn’t grudge it to me that it satisfied me a little to wash layers of grease from soapstone pots in hot water, for the first time since they were carved. At intervals Thorstein the Black would stand over me, frowning, and
say ‘You’re my guest, you shouldn’t have to do such things for me.’ In the end I snapped, ‘And what would you do if I didn’t?’, which started him off about the thralls again, and I wished I hadn’t opened my mouth.

And yet at other times he was as sensitive as a woman. I wasn’t the easiest of companions, I’m sure. Well, I know I’m not, I’ve never been submissive or quiet as most men like their wives to be. My husband Thorstein and I used to quarrel violently sometimes, because I’d set my will up against his, and I’d go on arguing with him until he had no words left, and then he’d hit me and I’d scream at him so all the household could hear the names I called him. Karlsefni and I didn’t quarrel, because Karlsefni was an even-tempered man, and over the years I grew less aggressive, I think, for having nothing to oppose. The few times I did make Karlsefni angry, I was frightened. He never shouted or hit me, but his silent rage was worse. I rarely saw it, and almost never was it directed at me.

Thorstein the Black was not my husband, but we had to live alone together all that winter. He had suffered as much as I had, and he said again and again that I was a comfort to him, but what I remember is the hard time I gave him. I used to wake in the night sobbing, and crying out for Thorstein who was dead. In my dreams I killed Thorstein myself, night after night, and it was always the horror of what I had done that woke me. I wish I could have felt pure grief, and mourned him as he deserved, but this was not mourning, it was nightmare. Thorstein the Black took an axe and laid the walking ghost of his own wife, but he only did so because she threatened Thorstein and me. Perhaps if we had not been there she would never have walked. I remember how I lay in the arms of Thorstein the Black and cried out ‘I didn’t kill him! I never meant to kill him!’, and he held me and said over and over again, ‘No, Gudrid, you killed no one. You hurt no one. You aren’t to blame.’

One night when he was trying to comfort me he said, ‘If Thorstein’s ghost were to speak to you, it would only have good words to say. You’ll take his body back to Brattahlid in spring, and thanks to you he’ll be able to rest in peace. He would want fate to treat you kindly, and indeed I think your own fate will be gentler after this.’

‘Why do you think that?’ I asked, turning to face him, for the fact was I longed for someone to say that life would not always be quite so hard.

‘I’m sure of it, Gudrid. You’ll marry again. I expect you’ll get out of Greenland; it’s not the place for a woman like you. Maybe you’ll marry an Icelander. But you will marry, I’m sure, and you’ll have a long life together, and your children will be worthy of you, and you’ll found a dynasty that will last through generations.’

I gave a laugh that was half a sob. ‘You’re not a seer, Thorstein. You can’t know that.’

‘No, I’m just an ignorant farmer. But sometimes a little gift is given even to men like me. A farseeing lady like you may mock me’ – I pinched him then – ‘but I know what I know.’

It’s true, Agnar, he did. If he hadn’t, I don’t think he would have dared defy an unknown fate, even to comfort me. I think he knew. Here in Rome you’d think Thorstein the Black a savage. You’d see him as dirty, with matted hair and a skin wrinkled and weathered to dark brown like leather, dressed in stained sealskin trousers and boots with the fur left on them, and a thick bearskin jacket that had once been white, and two knives stuck through his belt without a sheath for either of them. You’d watch how he tore his food apart with his fingers instead of using a knife, and you’d recoil because he chewed raw blubber all the time, and smelt of it. You’d think him uncouth, without much to say for himself even in his own language, and you’d look down on him for not having a word of any other. No, just to imagine him in Rome is like trying to bring the two ends of the earth together inside my mind. I can’t do it; I can’t see where I am now and still see him as I knew him, it’s not possible.

He kept his word to me in everything, and I’m glad to think I could do something for him. In the spring we left as soon as the ship was ready and the sea was open, and we had an easy passage back to Eiriksfjord. When we got back to Brattahlid Eirik took me into his family as if I were his own. In fact, in his terms, I was his own. Not all widows are treated like that, but Eirik’s clan learned generosity from their chieftain, and when the time came Eirik arranged my marriage as if I’d been his own daughter – but that comes later. The point is
that when I explained what Thorstein the Black had done for us, Eirik was ready to do anything that I asked for him. That’s how it was that Thorstein got his farm, and was treated from then on as if he were the chieftain’s own kinsman.

I was afraid when we got back to Brattahlid, because of the bad news we had to give, but when we landed it seemed that our story wasn’t unexpected. It was raining when the people came down to help us beach the ship. Without any waste of words the bodies were carried ashore. In the damp air the smell of death hung over us, and flies gathered quickly where we stood. I can’t remember how I broke the news, but I shall remember until I die the faces of Eirik and Thjodhild when they heard it. Neither of them made any complaint. Eirik Raudi stood very still, and stared out to sea. Thjodhild seemed to shrink into herself, and I remember noting the outline of her skull over finely wrinkled skin, but perhaps I had become too used to seeing death in everything. Then I felt a touch on my shoulder, and when I looked up I saw Leif. He looked serious, but not grief-stricken; I know he felt the loss of both his brothers, but he never showed his feelings to anyone, I am sure. He said to me, ‘It’s been hard on you, Gudrid,’ which no one else had done, and then he glanced at his parents. ‘Gudrid,’ he went on, ‘Will you come with me a moment? I’ve something to tell you.’

Wondering, I walked with him along the sandy path at the beach top, among thistles and silverweed.

‘It’s been a hard homecoming for you.’

‘Hard for you, too,’ I said.

‘Gudrid, your father …’

As soon as he spoke I knew what he was going to say, and I realised too that I ought to have known before. If I hadn’t been so self-absorbed, so buried in my own strange fate, I had the power in me to know that Thorbjorn had also met his fate that winter.

‘How did it happen?’ I asked quickly, and Leif glanced at me sideways through the rain.

‘You knew then?’

‘I ought to have known,’ I said ambiguously.

‘He went to stay with Thorkel at Hvalsoy for the seal hunt. We had
a fine spell just after Yule. He took a hole in the pack ice, not a mile from the open sea. When he didn’t come home at dusk they searched, and his thrall found him where he had slipped into the water and drowned. The body was still afloat. As you’re Christians he was brought back here, and Eirik let my mother and I have him buried in the churchyard here at Brattahlid.’

I was silent. I should have wept but no tears came. Perhaps I had none left. A man has to stand for hours at one of those holes in the ice, with his spear ready, until the seal bursts to the surface. He has a second to strike, and if he fails the seal breathes and is gone. All those hours alone on the ice he must stay alert and watch that round dark hole of water. Karlsefni used to say it was like watching the doors of hell, because you could see uncanny beings move and vanish, seals shifting shape and becoming nightmare creatures from the unknown bottom of the ocean. He said the round hole would seem to grow, and to be a tunnel, or a mirror; it would be like staring into the iris of your own eye. A man might go in, he said, not because he slipped on the ice but because his own will drew him down, so he couldn’t help himself. Karlsefni never knew my father, but I talked to him about Thorbjorn’s death as I talked to him about everything over the years.

I’m not sure I ever knew my father either. Thorbjorn used to complain he never knew his, my grandfather Vifil who had been a slave. I felt I had failed my father by my ignorance of his death, and for a long time I strained to imagine how it happened. I’ve seen the round holes in the ice, and I’ve seen the seals butchered and brought home. I’ve never seen the kill: women don’t. The tense hours of waiting are outside my experience. But I’m not sure the manner of Thorbjorn’s death was even relevant. His whole mind was strange to me, and always had been. I never saw anything from his point of view, and for a long time I felt that perhaps I ought to have done, though I can’t see how that would have saved him.