Meadowland (27 page)

He looked at me, but I didn’t say anything, so he went on:

‘My idea is to start up a proper settlement there; basically, do what Red Eirik did here. Build a farm, get settled in; then, when we’re properly established and we know where our next meal’s coming from, we share out the land between ourselves and turn it into a real settlement, a community. There’s enough people here in the Eastern Settlement who’re starting to feel a bit cramped, wouldn’t mind moving on; and once we’re up and running, we’ll have people joining us from Iceland, maybe even from the East. Once we ye got eighty families or so, we’ll be big enough to look after ourselves and keep going. I’ve given it a lot of thought since I came here and heard all about it, and I believe we’d have a very good chance of making it work. It’s splendid grazing country by all accounts, plus there’s all that timber, fish, game - even iron ore, which is more than you can say for this place. The key to it, I reckon, is doing the thing properly: enough people, enough livestock, enough provisions to see us through the first winter, including an allowance for stuff lost or spoiled on the trip over. So, what d’you reckon?’

I thought for a while before I answered. ‘For a start,’ I said, ‘you got the name wrong. It’s not Wineland, it’s Meadowland.’

Easy mistake to make, of course, specially for an Easterner, with an accent. See, in our language, it’s almost the same word: vinland. Only, if it means ‘wine’ it’s pronounced yin, but if it’s ‘meadow’ it’s more like veen.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ I went on. ‘So if you’d got an idea in your head of running cargoes of grapes back to Norway and making a fortune, forget it. And if anybody’s been telling you there’s wild vines growing all over the place, that’s bullshit. We came across some, on Leif’s expedition, but we never could find them again, no matter how we tried.’

The way Bits was quiet for a while after I said that, it was plain that he’d been counting on finding grapes under every bush; but he just shrugged and said, ‘Well, no big deal. But there is timber there, isn’t there?’

I nodded. ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Bloody great forests, far as the eye can see.

‘Good.’ You could almost see him booting everything to do with grapes out of his mind, then slamming the door. ‘That’s all right, then. But you haven’t answered my question.’

I allowed myself a bit more time; then I said: ‘I’m really grateful to you for asking, but I’ve got to say no. Plain fact is, I’ve had it with that place. Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t tell you. Now I’m not trying to tell you your scheme s a washout. I think it could succeed, I certainly hope so. But I won’t be joining you, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘That’s a pity.’

Bits looked so sad that I wished there was something I could do. And then it hit me; genius. One stone, two dead birds. ‘Tell you what, though,’ I said. ‘You want to ask Kari. He’s been there on all three trips. He knows the place just as well as me, maybe even better. And I know he’s not settled here, any more than I am. You take my tip and ask him, he’s a good man.’

Bits frowned, like he was being made to do something he’d rather not. ‘I’ll be straight with you,’ he said. ‘I know Kari’s a friend of yours, but he’s not the sort of man I was looking for. He does his work but no more, if you see what I mean. What I’m after isn’t farmhands, it’s men who’ll go off and build their own farms, once we’ve sunk our roots in, if you follow me. That’s why I’d rather have you than him. But if you’ve made your mind up, I won’t try and nag you into anything. The project won’t work unless the people I take with me all want the same thing: they’ve got to believe that they aren’t working for me, they’re working for themselves. But anyhow,’ he added, ‘that’s beside the point. Thank you for listening to me, anyway.

And he straightened up, turned round and walked away, leaving me standing there with squished-up bull’s brains all over my hands, and a feeling like I’d been kicked in the nuts by a large, strong horse.

If it’d been anywhere else-If he’d wanted to sail up the Greenland coast, or north-east to Permia, where the sea-ice is six feet thick at midsummer, or anywhere in the world, I’d have said yes and thank you without a moment’s thought. But no, it had to be bloody Meadowland; because if it’d been anywhere else, I wouldn’t have been asked or wanted. I was bound to that miserable place, as though my feet were planted there. Simple choice: stay at Brattahlid the rest of my life, carting shit and turning hay and dragging myself up the mountain to the shieling in the freezing cold to move on another man’s flocks; or go back to that warm, lush, hospitable place on the edge of the world, which I never wanted to see again as long as I lived.

It comes back to that old question, doesn’t it? Are you always the same person wherever you are, or do you change as you move about? For instance: at Brattahlid I was just a pair of hands; there wasn’t anything I could do that couldn’t be done better by someone else. I hadn’t chosen to go and live there, and they hadn’t chosen me; I’d been sort of inherited from Bjari Herjolfson, like old junk found left behind in the barn when someone sells up and moves on. In Meadowland, though, I was practically the founding father -me and that worthless bastard Kari, who I’d somehow got myself chained to as well. In Meadowland, I was the man who knew where the sweet-water streams were, the best places to build fish traps, which direction the wind came from in winter, where the best grazing was, where Thorvald Eirikson was buried. In Meadowland, I could have my own farm; there’d come a time when I could walk out my door and climb the mountain and look down over Eyvindsfell and Eyvindsmark and Eyvindsvatn, all mine as far as the eye could see. Just by a simple bit of ordinary journeyman magic - get on a boat, sit still and quiet for a few days in the wet and the mist, get off the boat and go ashore - I could get rid of who I was born to be and turn myself into somebody else, like the shape-changers in the old stories, the men who can turn themselves into wolves and bears and eagles. As I stood there in the yard, I could hear that other man’s voice muttering in the back of my head - this Thorfinn Bits isn’t like the Eiriksons - he’s a serious man, he knows what he’s about. It’d be quite different going there with him. There’s nothing at all wrong with Meadowland: compared with here or the Old Country it’s bloody paradise; what’s been wrong each time so far is the bunch of losers you’ve been with. Like Kari, for instance; and you’ve had it from the horse’s mouth, this time Kari isn’t going to be there. You know perfectly well, all your life he’s been holding you back, screwing everything up for you; well, now’s your chance to be rid of him. Look, all you need to do is go to this Thorfinn Bits and say you’ve changed your mind; and then you’ll be free and clear, finally you can be who you were meant to be. But, I said to myself, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He wanted to go back there, because Meadowland was the only place he’d ever get to exist. Meanwhile there was this other voice; and all it was saying, over and over again, was: don’t go, don’t go. It wasn’t giving any reasons, that voice. It didn’t have to. It had my full attention.

Well, Bits went off again the next morning, didn’t come back for three days; and when he did come back, didn’t he ever cause trouble.

I wasn’t there at the time; I was piling up cordwood in the woodshed, so it’d be handy for the house once the snow came. So I missed the big scene indoors, when Bits marched up to Leif Eirikson and told him that he and Gudrid, Thorstein’s widow, were planning on getting married.

I always miss the good shows - like the classic horse-fights and wrestling matches that people talk about for years afterwards, or the really spectacular fights and shouting matches. By all accounts, that was one of the best. It’s no use trying to describe it to you, they all told me, you had to have been there.

Well, I wasn’t; so all I can tell you is the outline. Leif wasn’t happy, not at all. Ever since Gudrid came back after Thorstein’s death, Leif had been convinced it was only a matter of time. It was destiny, he reckoned. He’d rescued Gudrid from death on the rocks, and she belonged to him. Stupid Thorstein had tried to steal her, and look what happened to him. Leif hadn’t pressed the issue since she got back, because he wasn’t an idiot, he wasn’t going to dance over her feelings in nailed boots. Give her time, don’t rush anything, and just like apples grow on trees, when the time was right she’d come round and see it was the right thing. And now this bastard, his winter guest, this short bastard, had nipped in at the last moment and robbed him right under his nose.

Leif couldn’t say that, of course; so he lashed out in the only direction open to him. Fine, he said, if you’re hell-bent on getting yourself killed, you crack on and do it, and well rid of you. But if you think I’m going to let you take my sister-in-law out there to be shot dead by the leather-boat people, or die of fever, or starve or get eaten by bears or God only knows what, then you must be even more stupid than you look. She’s under my roof, my responsibility, and I say she’s not going.

It’d probably have been all right if Bits’d flown into a temper; if he’d bashed Leif round the head, even, or pulled a knife, anything like that. Where I come from we’re used to people flaring up, and there’s nothing like a few painful blows or a stab wound to make you ask yourself: is this really such a big deal, like something I’d be prepared to die for, or is it really not that important? But no. The more Leif shouted and raved at him, the calmer Bits became. Leif was yelling; Bits didn’t yell back, in fact his voice got softer and softer, so Leif had to quieten down just to hear what he was saying. And Bits said: I appreciate your concern, but it’s her choice. I’ve thought it through, and I wouldn’t be taking the woman I love with me if I thought there was any serious risk she’d come to harm. On the contrary; I’m taking her there because that’s where I can give her a better life, the sort she deserves. You do see that, don’t you?

Well; it was as though our Heavenly Father’d stuck His thumb into the cone of a volcano, just when it’d started to bust open. All that heat and fire, and nowhere for it to go. After a while, Leif stopped shouting; it was like he was drunk and having a desperate row with someone who wasn’t actually there. Instead, he just turned on his heel and stomped out, leaving Bits standing there with a sad look on his face, like he was saying, why can’t people just be reasonable about things?

I knew as soon as I heard about it that we were in for another long, tense winter; and I wasn’t far wrong. Bits carried on like nothing’d happened. He sold the rest of his timber, laid off various deals and loans based on his property back East, and started laying in supplies and buying stuff for the journey; also, he saw to all the arrangements for the wedding. In the end it was a quiet business - at least Leif had the sense and the grace to stay well away for a day or so -and it all went off with the minimum of fuss and aggravation. Bits seemed very happy that day; I’m assuming Gudrid felt the same way, but she wasn’t the sort to show what she was thinking, not if she could help it. Of course, a lot of the Brattahlid and Eiriksfjord people reckoned she was only marrying Bits so she could get away from Leif; and if that really was the reason, I can’t say I blame her for it.

At the wedding dinner Bits announced that he and his people’d be sailing for Meadowland just as soon as the thaw came. We’d all guessed that for ourselves already, but hearing him announce it was something else.

He’d be sailing, he said, with three ships: his own, plus Leif’s ship, which he’d bought off him (before the falling-out, presumably) and another knoerr he’d picked up from a man from the Western Settlement who’d just moved down. Ninety men and fifteen women would be going along with him, which meant there’d be plenty of room on the ships for livestock, including a ram, a boar and a bull. Everyone knew what that meant, of course. This time, he was planning on staying out there and doing it all properly; not like the Eiriksons.

Getting through that winter was like walking uphill in thick mud; every step heavier than the last, and getting more difficult rather than less as time went on. It was so bad indoors that I volunteered to help shift the stores Bits had brought from the long barn down to the boatsheds, just for the chance to be outside, in the freezing cold. It set me thinking: Bits had obviously planned everything down to the last detail, and being a trader he thought mostly in terms of objects. So there was a barrel of boot-nails, and seven big wooden reels of heavy linen thread; a box of the very best whetstones, from Gotland in Sweden; a box of flints, from the east of England; three large jars of beeswax; a wooden pot of blacksmith’s flux; a bag of lumps of yellow sulphur, from the Old Country; five big coils of wire; crates of tools I’d never seen before, let alone knew what they were for; all the things that sooner or later you’ll desperately need but never think about until it’s too late. Bits had thought of them, though; and it struck me that someone with that much about him might just be enough to make the difference between success and failure, even in Meadowland.

By the time we got around to unloading the last cartload it was just past sundown. Everything had been loaded in a particular order, so that the things likely to be needed first had to go in last, so they’d be on top of the stack, and handy. Practically the last items were five long wooden crates, and four big apple-barrels - except that what was in them wasn’t apples, you could tell that by the weight. Took three of us just to roll the bloody things along the ground; and I got to wondering, as we manhandled them down the plank and into the shed, what sort of item was small enough to go in a barrel but really heavy, and also didn’t rattle or shift about as the barrel rolled. Well, I had my own ideas about that, which set me thinking about the crates that seemed to go with them. Not quite so heavy, those crates, but they weren’t packed with feathers, either.

‘Careful with those,’ Bits called up to us as we handed them down off the cart. There’s always some clown who thinks he knows best, though; in this case, a man called Hrapp something-or-other, I can’t remember now Anyway, he thought he could take the whole weight of one of these crates, and it turned out he couldn’t; the crate slipped off the cart sideways, landed on a corner and smashed open. Turned out I’d been absolutely right in my guesses. It was full of weapons. Spears - short-headed Norway pattern and long-headed French type; Danish beard-axes, the sort that’s not much good for cutting or cleaving wood, but works a charm on arms and legs; even a bundle of five swords, packed up in straw and tied into their scabbards.