Meadowland (23 page)

Helgi Thormodson turned one of them over with his boot. ‘Leather boats,’ he said. ‘I think they could be Irish.’

‘That’s right, said Sigurd Squint. ‘They use leather boats in Ireland, for fishing and hauling peat.’

Thorvald shook his head. ‘You’re trying to tell me they came all the way from Ireland in those?’

‘Not necessarily, someone else said. ‘Maybe these are just, you know, lighters. Like, we’ve got a small boat of our own, for coming ashore when you can’t beach the ship-‘

‘Thank you,’ Thorvald snapped, ‘I know what a boat’s for:

‘That’d mean there’s three Irish ships,’ Sigurd said.

‘Or a big ship with three boats,’ someone else suggested.

Helgi was kneeling down beside the dead man, turning his head back and forth by the chin. ‘Doesn’t look Irish to me,’ he said. ‘And no, I haven’t been to Ireland, since you ask. But I never heard the Irish don’t have hair on their chins.’

‘Maybe they’re monks,’ someone said. ‘Monks shave their beards off, someone told me once. And there’s loads of monks in Ireland. They live on remote islands, for the peace and quiet.’

Someone said he’d heard that, too. ‘I heard tell there were Irish monks living in Iceland when the first settlers came,’ he added. ‘They go places where nobody lives, so they can pray without being disturbed. Then, when anybody shows up, they move on.

Thorvald thought about that. ‘Might account for why we haven’t run into them before,’ he said. ‘But if they’ve been living here any time, you’d have thought we’d have seen something.’

Helgi reminded him about the rick-cover we’d found last summer. ‘That could’ve been them,’ he said. ‘Mind you, it’s hard to tell from a few sticks and bits of bark.’

‘If we’d caught that other bugger, we could’ve asked him,’ Big Thorbjorn said. Nobody pointed out that we could have asked all nine if we hadn’t been in such a hurry to split heads.

‘Anyhow,’ Thorvald said, ‘we’re going home, so who gives a damn? Whoever they are, I don’t suppose they know the way to Brattahlid.’

Nobody had anything to add to that; so we made a fire and burned the leather boats, then got back in the ship and cast off. We were all ready to get started for home, but the wind had dropped away completely, and all we could do was sit and wait.

We’d been there a while, when Helgi, who was down in the stern by the post, called out, ‘You know those Irish boats?’

‘Well?’ Thorvald said.

‘There’s a whole lot of them,’ said Helgi, ‘coming down the fjord.’

That wasn’t so good, we thought. Helgi counted them; there were thirty at least, he said, and they were cutting along at a great lick, headed straight at us. As they closed in, Helgi added that he could see a lot of the men in them were waving bows and arrows at us.

‘We’re screwed,’ someone moaned and, to be fair, he had a point there. My guess is that they saw the smoke from the fire when we burned the boats, or else the one who’d got away had raised the alarm. If we were dead in the water and they had bows and arrows with them, they could simply buzz round us and sting us to death, if that was what they had in mind - and something told me they weren’t rushing up at us just to see if we wanted to buy any local pottery or baskets.

‘Right,’ Thorvald said, suddenly, like he’d just woken up. ‘We’ll need to run out the spare sail along the gunwales. If we rig it pretty slack, their arrows’ll just get snagged up in it.’ And that’s true, too: a good tip, if you’re ever in that situation. Kari and me jumped up and fetched out the sail, while some of the others set up posts to hang it from. We didn’t have any proper shields, of course, or any armour or stuff like that, since the last thing we thought we’d be doing was any fighting. As for weapons, Thorvald was the only man with a bow, and it was a pissy little short-range deer-hunter’s job; the rest of us had our hand-axes and knives. Like the man had said, we were screwed, really

They started shooting at us from about seventy yards, and sure enough, the sail stopped most of the arrows; they got tangled up and fell on the deck, or into the sea. I got the impression they weren’t aiming at any of us in particular, just loosing away at the ship generally Even so, one arrow came a bit too close for my taste. It cut through the sail and buzzed past the end of my nose, so close I could smell the bloody thing. Then it stuck into the deck-boards and the tip of the head snapped off. There wasn’t anything sensible I could do, so I picked it up and had a look at it. Very thin in the shaft it was, like some sort of very tough reed. The fletchings were long and tied on with backstrap sinew, and the reason it’d bust off in the deck was that the head was made of grey flint.

I was crouching there with that stupid arrow in my hand when someone started to yell, and I looked up to see that the sail was beginning to fill. That was a welcome sight; the wind just sort of picked up out of nowhere, just at the right time, and almost immediately we were whisking along at a good pace, leaving the leather boats behind. A few more arrows sailed over and flopped down, but there was hardly any force behind them. Pretty close, I said to myself, but we’d got away with it, so that was all right.

‘Did anybody else get hit?’ Thorvald called out.

We all sang out that no, we were fine; then it struck me what he’d said: did anybody else get hit. I stood up, and I wasn’t the only one.

Thorvald was leaning against the rail, with his left hand pressed into his right armpit. There was blood running out between his fingers, and it wasn’t looking very good. I was thinking, that ought to be seen to, before he loses any more blood. Then he wobbled a bit, like a drunk, and sat down hard on his arse.

The arrow, he told us, was a ricochet; it’d hit the gunwale and flown up, and of course, as soon as Thorvald had seen arrows incoming, instinctively he’d raised his right arm to shield his face. It’d gone in pretty deep, and when he’d tried to pull it out the shaft had busted off in his hand. He was as surprised as any of us when we showed him the flint arrowheads; you wouldn’t have thought a bit of old flaked stone’d cut so well, he said. He was genuinely relieved, I think, that nobody else’d been hurt. The impression I got was that he didn’t reckon he mattered very much by that stage; no great loss, he said, with a grin, which was his way of telling us he didn’t want us to go back and take it out on the leather-boat people. We were glad to hear him say that, because none of us fancied the idea much, I don’t think.

Anyhow, Thorvald died pretty soon after that. We put in at the next headland we came to and buried him there. Then we realised, none of us could remember if he was a Christian or followed the old ways; fair enough, I guess, because it’s not the sort of thing you talk about much, since people can be touchy about that stuff. In the end, we decided that our Heavenly Father tended to be a bit fussy about doing things properly, while Thor couldn’t give a toss how you get rid of a dead body; so we made up a pair of crosses out of cordwood and stuck them at Thorvald’s head and feet, and someone said a bit of the Mass, and then we left him.

Well (Eyvind went on, after a while), that’s about all there is to tell about Thorvald’s trip to Meadowland. All of us except Thorvald got home all right; we picked up the wind a few days later and it blew us back to Greenland, about three days up the west coast from Eiriksfjord. We hadn’t been looking forward to telling the Eiriksons how we’d come home without their brother; but Leif took it pretty well, said it couldn’t be helped and anyhow, it wasn’t our fault. Thorstein Eirikson didn’t say anything, just stumped off and sat on his own. Freydis, the sister, got in a bit of a state, but she was like that. Anyhow, nobody seemed inclined to get stroppy with us, so that was all right.

Thinking about it - I’ve done a lot of that over the years, thought about some of the things that happened on that trip, and what keeps coming back to me is that it all started to go bad on us once we’d already decided to go home again: first the keel getting smashed, which meant we were stranded there another winter; then the whole thing with the leather-boat people, and Thorvald getting killed right at the very last moment, if you see what I mean.

Sometimes I think that maybe Meadowland didn’t want us to go, like it’d grown fond of us or something stupid like that. When we got there, that first time we landed, with Leif, we found everything we needed to live laid out for us ready and waiting: food you could just go out and help yourself to, wood and turf for building and fuel, right down to the iron ore in the bog. It even tried to give us booze when it found we couldn’t get along without it. Then, when we made up our minds to leave, it got nasty with us - or how else do you explain that we’d been there three times, stayed for several years in Thorvald’s case, and it was only when we were sailing away that we ran into the locals for the first time? Oh, they weren’t Irish after all, the leather-boat people; Sigurd Squint had got that completely wrong. We found that out right enough the next time we went there.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

‘Can I ask you a question?’ I said.

Kari looked up from his bowl of porridge. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Anything you like.’

I took a moment to choose my words. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘why Harald Sigurdion cooks our food.’

Kari laughed. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘why do we make him do the cooking, when he hates doing it and he’s so useless at it?’

I nodded. ‘I’m just curious,’ I added.

‘Good for him,’ Kari said. ‘You see, he’s had a hard life, young Harald. When he was just a kid, his brother, King Olaf the Saint, went to war with the Danes and the Swedes and got himself killed. Harald got away, just about; he made his way to Russia - he’s an off-relation of King Jaroslav, I think on his mother’s side. But they didn’t really want him hanging around there, so he came South and joined the Guards, because we’ll take anybody so long as they’re big and vicious. Of course, being a prince of the blood and half-brother to a genuine martyred saint, he reckons cooking porridge is beneath his dignity; so, naturally, we make him do it. Character-forming, see.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That sort of makes sense, I suppose.

‘He’s absolute crap at it, mind,’ Kari said with a sigh. ‘Which shows that he’s not as thick as he looks. It’s a basic rule in the Guards. If there’s something you really don’t want to do, volunteer to do it and do it very, very badly; you won’t be asked again, and sooner or later you’ll find something you are good at, and everyone’s happy But that approach doesn’t work with old hands like Eyvind and me. The worse he cooks, the more we make him do it. It’s tough being a mentor, but he’ll thank us when he comes into his own and gets his throne back.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why will he thank you for humiliating him?’

Kari clicked his tongue. ‘It’s an honour thing,’ he said. ‘You’re probably too civilised and effete to understand. Basically, though, it’s the same idea as when a boy starts off helping his dad and his uncles with the coppicing, and they send him back to the house to fetch the left-handed billhook.’

‘I see,’ I said, frowning slightly ‘This teaches him obedience and stamina, presumably’

Kari looked at me. ‘There’s no such thing as a left-handed billhook,’ he explained. ‘The point is, your elders make a fool out of you when you’re young, so you can make a fool out of the next generation when you’ve grown old and wise. It’s all part of becoming a man, or something:

I grinned at him. ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ I said.

Kari nodded slightly to acknowledge a point scored. ‘Well, quite,’ he said. ‘But presumably you’ve got some similar kind of initiation thing in the clerking trade, haven’t you?’

‘No, actually,’ I lied. ‘When a young man starts work in the chancellery or the records office, the older clerks go out of their way to teach him the best practice, and help him out with anything he may have difficulties with. That way, he fits in straight away and there’s no disruption to the work of the office.’

Kari shrugged. ‘It’s like I always say,’ he replied. ‘You Greeks are bloody clever, but you haven’t got a clue.’

I was getting just a little tired of these Northerners’ attitude towards my people and my City. ‘For a start,’ I said, you can stop calling us Greeks, when we’re the great and indivisible Roman Empire, and we’ve been in business for just on a thousand years - longer, if you don’t make a distinction between the Empire and the Republic, which was founded seventeen hundred and eighty years ago- ‘You can’t be Romans,’ Kari interrupted. ‘Rome’s in Italy

And it’s hundreds of years since Rome was part of the empire. And you don’t talk Latin, you talk Greek, and none of you are Italians. In fact, most of you aren’t even Greeks any more, you’re bits and pieces of all sorts of things, all bundled up together and cross-bred, foreigners in your own City. Which is silly, if you ask me.’

I tried to look all dignified and aloof, but I’ve never had the knack. ‘Being Roman is more a state of mind than a simple accident of birth,’ I said. ‘It’s something you aspire to. We tend to judge a man by where he’s arrived at, not where he came from.’

‘Whatever,’ Kari said, with a grin. ‘My lot, we reckon a man’s no better and no worse than what his neighbours think of him. It’s a pretty hit-and-miss way of putting a value on someone, but it’s the same with all your various systems of weights and measures: doesn’t matter what the standard is so long as everybody’s agreed on using it.’

I had an uncomfortable feeling that I was losing an argument here, though I wasn’t quite sure what the argument was about, or which side I was on. ‘At any rate,’ I said, ‘we’re a nation, not just a bunch of unruly individuals. We work together, under the direction of the Emperor and our superiors, which is how we manage to get things done. You people-‘ I shrugged dismissively ‘Look, even this story you two’ve been telling me proves my point exactly You people can’t do anything, you can’t take an opportunity when it presents itself.’

‘Right,’ Kari said, nodding. ‘Like we couldn’t settle Iceland, or Greenland.’

I laughed. ‘My point exactly When we Romans came to Britain, we settled it and held it for four hundred years; we built roads and towns and bridges, we brought the natives into the Empire, taught them to speak Latin, made them into Romans, like us. And then-‘