Authors: Margaret Elphinstone
B0046ZREEU EBOK (32 page)
At last Gudleif broached the subject that had been in his mind since the Icelander had first spoken to him. ‘And what of yourself, sir?’ he asked. ‘I won’t ask about this long exile of yours, if you don’t want to tell me how it happened. But you’ll come back to Iceland with us now, won’t you?’
There was a pause before the Icelander shook his head, but Gudleif was sure that he had already made up his mind. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t go back. The time is long past for that. I don’t want to end up as a living ghost in my own country. No, Gudleif, I’m a dead man now, and it’s better if I stay that way. But there is something I’d like you to do.’
Of course Gudleif said he’d do anything that he could. The Icelander turned back the skins that covered the bedplace in the tent, and brought out a good Norwegian-made sword. Then with some difficulty he twisted off the gold ring that he wore on the third finger of his right hand. ‘Take these,’ he said, ‘And give the sword to Kjartan of Frodriver, and the ring to his mother Thurid.’
‘And what shall I tell them about the man who sent them the gifts?’
‘Tell them he loves Thurid of Frodriver better than her brother Snorri the Priest at Helgafell. And tell them you swore that no one would ever try to come to look for me. They wouldn’t find me if they got here. This is a large country, with few harbours, and it’s a mistake to think that meetings are possible beyond the mortal world.’
That was really all that Gudleif had to tell. He and his crew set sail the next day, and even though it was so late in the year, they managed to sail east until they reached the coast of Ireland. They wintered in Dublin, then went home the following summer. Gudleif travelled to Frodriver and handed over the gifts as soon as he could. He told Thurid and Kjartan he wanted to talk to Karlsefni, not in order to break his oath, but to ask questions about Karlsefni’s voyage in order to satisfy some questions in his own mind.
I was touched, Agnar, that even in the midst of such strange events, Thurid sent messages to me. She told Gudleif to say that she’d not forgotten the child that Halldis used to bring to Frodriver, and she could tell even when I was quite little that I was going to be beautiful. She said she was an old woman now, but she’d be glad to see me again if it were possible. We knew Kjartan, of course, because we met him occasionally at the Thing, but I remembered, as I had not done since the day it happened, the first time I ever saw one man kill another, and how a little boy had run with shining eyes to dip his axe in the dead man’s blood. But most of all I was thinking of Bjorn of Breidavik, who used to come to visit us at Arnarstapi. I could see him in my mind most vividly of all. A strong, fierce man in a Norwegian cloak, who used to sit drinking at our hearth, but who could still be bothered to talk to someone else’s little girl, and carve toys out of wood for her, when her own father didn’t care whether she existed or not.
I was thinking of all this, while the murmur of conversation broke out again around me. Men talk of Vinland during the winter at every hearth in Iceland, but who bothers to go there now? Only Greenlanders desperate for timber. It was just a dream, I suppose, that it should ever amount to anything else, but men like to have their dreams.
Snorri had been very quiet all evening. It was Thorbjorn who kept asking questions, in that truculent way he had, as if he wasn’t prepared to believe anybody’s answers. In the end Gudleif turned to my elder son, and said to him, ‘And what about you, Snorri? Do you have any ambitions to go travelling?’
Snorri was never a great talker. He told Gudleif briefly that he was going to Norway in the spring with his father’s ship.
‘Oh yes, Karlsefni keeps up his interests there, I know. So you’re off on your father’s business, as a good son should be?’
‘Yes.’ My son might be inarticulate, but he had a dogged regard for the truth, and would make sure he told the whole of it, unoriginal though it might be. ‘But it’s on my own account as well,’ Snorri explained to Gudleif. ‘I’ve heard enough stories. I want to see the world myself.’
Well, he did see the world, Agnar, for what it’s worth. And so have I, and so have you. I’m old and I’m tired, and sometimes I think that the more we see, the less we know. Yes, I’m tired, and it’s late: the shadows have crept almost the whole way across the wall there. Another day, Agnar. It will all keep for another day.
I, Agnar Asleifsson, finished the task today which was set me by His Holiness Cardinal Hildebrand. This morning I wrote an official report of the work I have done over the past six months: three months of interviews with the woman from Iceland, and three months making a Latin transcription of those interviews, and writing out a fair copy for the Cardinal. What will he do with it? Read it, presumably, since he commissioned the work in the first place. I have a feeling, however, that the moment of need has passed. That controversy over Adelbert’s treatise, what has come of it now? Adelbert is dead, conveniently enough, of Roman fever. There is a notorious ague in this city that comes in off the marshes and strikes men down, particularly those who are not accustomed to it. It is a city of sudden death, and the noxious air seems to have become much more virulent since Pope Leo came back to Rome in ’49.
The divisions of June are forgotten in the new alliances of December. This is the spiritual heart of the world. This is the place where the boundary between the temporal and eternal is closed; this is the city of St Peter, and here our salvation is always before us, the word made flesh. I have believed this always; I was told of it in a far-off, outlandish country, and since then I have been slowly drawn towards Rome, the centre of my world, on a pilgrimage that has taken my whole life.
I miss her more than I can say. In the autumn she was still frail after her long illness, and that was why I wrote to the sisters at Viterbo. I thought the hot springs might benefit her; she had often told me how
healing such springs could be in her own country. The message came just as we were finishing for the day. It was the 23rd September; I know that because it’s the last date in the manuscript. I could see how the prospect delighted her. She craved clean cold air, she said, and mountains. Rome was soft and wet and feverish, and it made her tired. ‘Agnar,’ she said to me, ‘you thought of this. You’re like a son to me. There’s nothing I’d like better. I can go at once, can’t I? In the hills, you say? Hot mud springs, and clear air, and perhaps snow when the winter comes? I can go tomorrow, can’t I? I’ve finished the story, really. Of course, I would have gone on as long as you liked, but I’ve told you everything of significance that I have to say. How will I go? Can you escort us?’
At first I thought that was impossible, but at her request I did ask permission, and was granted leave to see her as far as the lake Bracciano. I would have hired a litter for her, but she insisted on riding. ‘I’ve ridden since I was two,’ she said. ‘What kind of fine southern lady do you think I am? I want to see where we’re going.’
The change in her was remarkable. I hadn’t the heart to say we’d stopped the narrative right in the middle of a scene, and when I thought about it later, I thought perhaps we hadn’t. After all, what else did I expect her to tell me? Did I want some kind of answer? I’d forgotten even what the question was, until I turned back to the letter I’d had from Hildebrand. I’d read that letter before I met Gudrid, but from the moment that she began to speak I’d never referred to it, and barely even thought of it again. Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven. Did Hildebrand expect her to come up with something definitive? Of course not. Did I realise it was just a ploy, ammunition to be used by one faction against another? Hildebrand intended to discredit Adelbert, but Adelbert is dead, and already almost forgotten. I was frustrated that our work came to so sudden an end. I had somehow thought she had more to tell me.
But I couldn’t be angry with her, as we rode out of Rome through a sickly drizzle, that faded away when we got away from the river, and turned into sun when we were barely past the Vatican hill. She rode easily, as if she’d been born to it, and you only knew how stiff her
body was when she had to be lifted up to mount and dismount. All the time we were on the road she looked about her with eyes that had suddenly become bright again, and quite mischievous. She wore no veil, and naturally that attracted attention from passers-by. Men thought she’d be young, you see, from the way she rode alone, and that made them turn their heads, and when they saw she was old, they shrugged and sometimes spat, but usually they went on without a word. Sometimes they shouted after her, and I blushed, but if she knew what kind of things they were saying she gave no sign of it. They meant nothing to her, but she was interested in everything else: in the vineyards, the orchards, the grazing cattle, the hills ahead, and the sea away to the west. She asked me the kind of questions a farmer would ask, about growing seasons, and breeds and crops, but I couldn’t answer her at all. I left my father’s farm when I was ten years old, and I’d talked very little with peasants in any of the countries that I’d been in since. But we travelled together in great harmony. When the day grew hot we stopped at a tavern to eat, then sat over our wine until the shadows began to lengthen, and then we rode on again through the white dust, until our clothes were coated with it, and we could feel dust in our hair, and gritty dust between our teeth, and dust sore around our eyes. Then the sun sank in glorious clouds of red out to the west where the sea was, and we talked about Hati the wolf who chases the sun across the sky every day, and about the Bifrost, the rainbow that links our world to the gods’, and many other tales that I remembered from my earliest days, from before the time when Rome was even the shadow of a name to me.
We parted on the shores of Bracciano. She didn’t weep when we said goodbye. I watched the little party of men and horses until they were just a dark patch moving along the white road. It was I that shed tears then, which I certainly hadn’t expected to do. Then, reluctantly, I turned my horse south again, and set my face to Rome.
‘If I don’t see you before, we’ll meet in Iceland.’ Why did she say that? Does she know? Was it a figure of speech, or simply a blind wish? She looked so fragile, surrounded by her escort. Will she see Iceland again? Will I? Suddenly my world is full of questions, in a way that it hasn’t
been since I read the forbidden works of the Infidel, out of the locked cabinet in the library at Reims. But the questions I ask now are different from that. Now, I seem to see myself at the centre of them. Is that a sin? I don’t know where I stand any more, and I miss her. That was three months ago. I have made the transcript into something suitable for the Cardinal, who I suspect no longer wants it. No doubt it will be catalogued and filed in the library at the Lateran, and perhaps it will sit on a shelf there and gather dust until the end of time. I am left with my original manuscript. It is shamefully untidy, but she talked so much, and I had to write so fast. I still have a pain in my right arm from it, from the wrist to the elbow. For some weeks after she left I kept my arm in a sling, except, of course, when I was working. The Infirmarian says now I must rest it properly, if I wish to have full use of it again, and I am forbidden to write until the end of Lent. So that puts paid to my translation of Gregory for the time being. I ought to feel more frustrated than I do. As it is, I feel almost glad that I shall have some time to think.
Last night I had a dream. I was in a place I did not recognise. I think I was searching for something. There was a compulsion, anyway. I am not sure that I can describe it.
The beach is white sand, and the land lies colourless under a white moon. The darkness under the trees huddles thick as cloth. The sea shines like melted silver. The forest makes no sound, as if there were nothing in it, no life there at all. The little boat leaves deep cuts in the surface of the sea, V-shaped like a flight of geese in an autumn sky. The man sees them stretching behind, and knows that his mark is made so far, and can never be melted away. The boat touches the sand without a sound, and he steps ashore. The sand feels cool under his feet. At the top of the beach wild wheat scratches his legs, and the vines tangle themselves around his ankles. There is no path. There has never been a path. Trees stand in his way. He tries to push through but the forest is closed against him. He takes the knife from his belt and cuts into the tree before him. If once his mark is made, his hold is certain. The bark of the tree is soft as moss, and resinous. He forces the knife in. His arm aches with the effort. The knife touches hard wood, and he pushes it in with all his might, and carves the necessary
letters. The pain in his arm is like fire. The letters are vanishing into the bark as the tree absorbs them. There is no sound. He tries to write, but the letters disappear under his hand, and he cannot see to hold the quill. The moon is round and white as a drop of melted wax, but there is no light in the forest, and no way in.
I woke up feeling that I had trespassed, or even violated something. I have lived with her story for a long time now, and I begin to fear that it is taking over my own. I thought about burning the original script. Certainly I’m not proud of the penmanship, and I don’t particularly want anyone to see it. I like things to be neat, and I pride myself on my fair copying. This was not exactly a copy, of course, but then a casual reader might not realise that.
I won’t burn it. Life is long, and I don’t know what I shall want to refer to again by the time I reach the end of it. I shall put it in a safe place. I keep thinking of her certainty that we would meet in Iceland. I would like to think it were true. If you write down a person’s story, there is a way in which it becomes yours. That’s a dangerous statement; I seem to be talking of a kind of possession, but it isn’t that, or if it is, I possess her as much as she me. She lived it, but I wrote it down. Doesn’t that make it in some sense mine?
Her two sons are alive and in Iceland. I am not her child. Next spring she’ll go back to her family and forget me. She is a woman, after all, and so her own people must be more to her than a chance-met stranger. But that’s wrong. I know more of her than anyone else, more of her now than her own sons do. One thing I should have learned by now is that she doesn’t forget. Anything that’s part of being alive she’ll remember, and she won’t care if it’s the correct thing to do or not. She sees things her own way, and I think she has taught me something about how to do that too. I have grown to love her. It seems dangerous to admit that, almost a heresy. But isn’t it a greater heresy even to imagine that an attachment to a mortal woman could come close to being heretical? Rome feels very foreign to me today. Did Peter feel that too, when he came here? Was this the end of the world to him, or its centre? Both, I suppose, just as it is for me. Perhaps when he knew he must die here he
began to think about the place where he was born. The land he came from is beyond Chistendom now, the country of the Infidel. But for him it was home. There are times now when I begin to think I should like to go home myself.