Meadowland (37 page)

Well, we got through. Nobody starved, or froze, nobody killed anybody else; we hung on, and then the snow turned to rain, and we were through into spring. You’d have thought that once we were out of the house, outside in the fresh air, with food to eat and the prospect of going home to look forward to, things’d have lightened up and the tension would’ve melted away It wasn’t like that - I think we’d all come too far over that winter. You never saw men work so hard as we did, fixing up the ship; but that almost made things worse, if possible. We’d got past the unskilled stage of the job, and most of what had to be done was up to the carpenters to do. They were going slow, because the last thing they wanted was to fuck something up and have to start all over. The rest of us thought they were crazy, or doing it on purpose; there were a couple of fights and a lot of shouting and temper, and that slowed things down even more. I think all that saved us was that we were too tired - what’s that clever Greek word - too demoralised to smash each others’ faces in. It’d have needed too much effort, and we didn’t care quite enough to do anything that energetic.

Middle of spring, we were finally all done. We dragged the ship down to the sea and floated her; she was letting a bit of water in, but we pretended we hadn’t noticed. Loading the cargo cheered us up a little bit, because we were absolutely determined to hold Thorfinn to his promise about share and share alike. He hadn’t meant it to apply to trade, of course, only to what we got from farming at the settlement; but we weren’t having any arguments about it. We had the furs we’d traded with the leather-boat people, and two good loads of timber. If you took a few steps back and thought about it clearheaded, a share of just over one-sixtieth of that lot would still amount to a decent wage for the time we’d spent. Not enough to buy a farm in Iceland, maybe, but better than nothing. There were a few cracks about who we could dump over the side on the way home, so as to bump up our shares, but that was just kidding around; a month or so earlier, you’d have been worried if your name had come up.

I remember, the night before we were due to sail, I went outside to take a leak. After I’d run dry, I noticed Eyvind standing in the open and looking up at the stars. Now, we’d got on better than most over the winter; I guess we’d been friends so long we couldn’t fall out if we tried really hard, there wasn’t that much difference left between us, after we’d been through everything together. But for a couple of days before that evening we hadn’t had a chance to have a chat together; and I wasn’t cold or in a hurry to get back indoors, so I went over and said: ‘What’re you looking at?’

He looked round; he hadn’t noticed I was there. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just thinking how glad I’ll be never to see this bloody place again.

I couldn’t argue with that. ‘Dumb, isn’t it, that we’ve spent so much time here, when we both hate it so much,’ I said. ‘Beats me how we kept letting ourselves get dragged back here.’

For some reason he looked at me all crooked, like I was trying to be funny ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is definitely the last time I’ll stand here. I’ve given this place a good slice of my life and I’ve got bugger-all to show for it. If we get blown out and drown on the way home, at least I won’t be buried here.’ He laughed. ‘It’s like feeding a dog begging at table: you do it once and it’ll never leave you alone. Well, it had Thorvald, and then we had to give it Ohtar and Thorbrand and Bjarni Grimolfson. I’m glad it won’t get me as well.’

Eyvind gets like that sometimes. I’m used to it. You are too, probably after listening to him. If you take no notice, he gets a grip and goes back to normal. ‘Fine night,’ I said. ‘Any luck, we’ll get clear of the coast and the current before the wind gets up.

‘Hope you’re right,’ he said. ‘You know, there’s times when I have this horrible feeling that I’ve put my foot in a snare, and the more I try and pull away from the things that hurt me most, the tighter they grab me. This place,’ he said, looking away ‘Some people. But it seems to me that that’s only to be expected - I mean, ever since we left the Old Country, I’ve lived a good share of my life on ships; and what’s a ship but a way of going from place to place, yet always taking the same place with you?’

A lot of people were starting to sound like that, so I wasn’t too worried. Let ‘em finish, and usually they get better. ‘Right,’ I said.

‘A ship’s a place,’ he went on. ‘It’s a wooden platform with sides, you can sit on it or stand or sleep, you can live all your life in that small space. But it can take you anywhere - here, or Norway or right down the bottom end of the world, to the Big City or Saracen country, or the hot place where the blue men live. You can go there, as far from where you were born and meant to be as it’s possible to go, but always you take that wooden cage with you.’ He laughed, don’t ask me why ‘Like the Eiriksons,’ he went on. ‘Leif, Thorvald, Thorstein - they all came here to get out of Eiriksfjord, but instead they brought Eiriksfjord out here, along with the stores and the supplies and the tools and the other necessities from home. And see what happened? Killed two of them, screwed up Leif so he can’t ever give it away - his life’s a shambles, because he wanted Gudrid so much, he thought this place had given her to him but instead it keeps taking her away It’s dragged her out here, and Thorfinn Bits along with her; it’s trashed him, and look what it’s done to you and me. Look what it’s done to me,’ he said, and he sounded like he was getting a bit overwrought; he got like that when he was a kid and he knew he wasn’t going to get his own way; but he was always a strong-willed man who never got what he wanted. ‘I could go anywhere, I could go to Constantinople, and I’d still be stuck on the ship that took me there. With you,’ he added, and I really don’t know what he meant by that.

I wasn’t quite sure what to say but I had to say something. ‘When we get home,’ I said, ‘I say we quit seafaring for good. Get away from Brattahlid; maybe head over to the Western Settlement. Sure, it’s a bit bloody sparse over there, and the winters are no fun, but that means they need good hired men, we’d be treated right. Maybe even, if we knuckled down and got on with it, maybe one day we could get a place of our own. No, seriously’ I went on, when he pulled a face. ‘Let’s face it, you and me, on our own we’ll never raise the money not for land and stock and gear. Together, though-Well, anyway’ I said, ‘it’s a thought, it’s something to aim for. Better than being here.’

Eyvind looked at me for a bit, and I couldn’t see what he was thinking, which is unusual. ‘Whatever you say Kari,’ he said. ‘Whatever you say Only-‘

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Only,’ he went on, and it was like he wasn’t actually talking to me, ‘I think that’d be pretty much like being on a ship, specially in winter. And I keep coming back to one thing, though it sounds pretty stupid if I say it.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘I keep thinking of when we first came here,’ he said, ‘with Bjarni Herjolfson; and he said, that night when we were at anchor, he said for none of us to go ashore; but you did. He told us not to, but you didn’t listen. You left the ship - and here we still are, all these years later.’ He shrugged. ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘Forget I said it. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘All right,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about, anyhow But think about what I said, the Western Settlement and maybe trying to get a place of our own.’ I made an all-around-me gesture with my arms. ‘This lot here, this was always too far away out of our league, not to mention the leather-boat people being here already But I think the Western Settlement might be just the place. The right place, for you and me.’

‘You know, perhaps you’re right, he said, but he didn’t seem very happy about it. ‘Or we could save our money and buy a ship. There, that’d do just as well, wouldn’t it?’

I wasn’t so sure about that. ‘Not the same, though, is it?’ I said. But he changed the subject.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I’ve been getting those dreams again.’

‘Oh,’ I said, because that wasn’t too clever. I knew what he was talking about; but dreams are always weird, and they don’t mean spit, no matter what people tell you.

In Eyvind’s dream, he’s married, got his own farm, got two grown sons working with him; and then one morning he wakes up, and there’s his wife in the bed next to him, stone dead; and when he looks closer, she’s actually been dead for years and years. All the skin’s shrunk back to the bone, her hair’s grown out, her nails are long and crooked and her skin’s like parchment. He jumps up and runs into the hall, yelling; and there’s his sons and the hired men, lying on the benches, and they’ve all been dead for years too. He runs outside, and the grass is all long and choked with weeds, everything’s overgrown and falling to bits, the roof-turf has grown down and joined in with the grass on the ground; it’s like they all went to bed one night and didn’t wake up, everybody died in their sleep twenty years ago, except him. So he runs down to the fjord, and there’s the ship, Bjarni Herjolfson’s, drawn down onto the beach and ready to sail; and everybody on board’s dead too, Bjari and Red Eirik and the Eiriksons, just like up at the house. And the crazy thing about it is, he told me once, he knows that he’s the only man still left alive in the whole of Greenland; and when he dies, the settlement’ll end and the grass will grow back over it all, and pretty soon people will have forgotten it was ever there.

Well (Kari went on), not long after that we finally got away I’d been expecting that we’d have a really shitty run back to Greenland, to match the luck we’d had while we were at Leif’s Booths, but actually it wasn’t too bad. The winds were lively but didn’t smack us around too much; we went a bit off course and ended up crossing from Slabland to north Greenland, then down the coast to the Western Settlement. It’d changed a lot since I was last there - you’ll remember, they’d had the bad plague that killed Thorstein Eirikson -and we passed a lot of empty farms, or places where they’d had to let a lot of the pasture go. I said to Eyvind, if we just helped ourselves to one of those abandoned places, nobody’d give a damn; but I guess he’d thought it over and decided that he was against the idea, because he didn’t show any enthusiasm.

We put in at Lysufjord for water, then followed the coast down. Thorfinn said he was making for Brattahlid and a squall pushed him further on; me, I don’t think he ever intended landing there, because he wanted to keep Gudrid away from Leif, now that she’d gone all cold towards him. So we ended up at the southern end of the Eastern Settlement, back at Herjolfsness, where we’d first arrived, round about the third week of summer. Herjolf was long dead by then, of course, and Bjarni was the farmer.

We stayed there a week, all of us together; but then Thorfinn said he was going back north to Eiriksfjord, because he wanted to spend winter at Brattahlid. Truth was, Gudrid made him; Brattahlid was the nearest thing she’d ever had to a proper home, and she wanted to go back.

But Eyvind and me, we stayed. We’d had enough of Brattahlid, and seeing Bjarni again, and a few of Herjolf’s people who were still alive and who’d come over from Iceland with him, we thought we might as well stay there, if Bjari’d have us. I’m not saying he was keen, but he felt obliged. After all, he’d been the one who’d brought us out there to start with.

So there we were, almost home again; and it wasn’t much, in fact it’d got a bit run-down since Herjolf’s day and it wasn’t a patch on the old place back at Snaefells in Iceland, but it was the best we were likely to get, after being out of things so long. Eyvind and me both agreed, compared to Meadowland it’d do us just fine, and we made a solemn vow by the Holy Cross and Thor’s hammer and all that stuff that we weren’t ever going anywhere again, alive or dead. We had the rest of summer and the whole of autumn to settle back in; and winter at Herjolfsness was like being in heaven, after that bloody terrible four months at Leif’s Booths. The work was lighter, too, or else we’d hardened up a lot; Bjarni was pleased with us and the newcomers there, the ones who’d joined the household since we left, were a good bunch, decent people. When spring came, I decided there really wasn’t any need to go off up to the Western Settlement, like I’d planned. We were a damn sight better off as hired men at Herjolfsness than we’d ever be as our own masters up there. Pity, I thought, that we hadn’t known that earlier, before we left in the first place. And whenever I felt like I was getting itchy or pissed off with being the hired man, I just looked out west over the sea, to where Meadowland was, and said to myself, yes, but at least I don’t ever have to go back.

‘So that was the end of it,’ I said. ‘You and Meadowland, I mean.

Kari looked at me and smiled, all sad. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We went back, one more time.’

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Of all the stupid, inconvenient moments to be rescued-Harald was shouting, waving his arms at us; and when I looked in his direction, I could see a cart, with our escort in front and behind. They’d found a blacksmith, and finally they’d come back to fix our busted axle.

Kari looked, and laughed. ‘Doesn’t time fly’ he said. ‘See, if only I’d had me to talk to, all through those long winters and boat trips, think how much less miserable my life would’ve been.’

I sighed. I was nominally in charge of the expedition; so it was up to me to go and brief the blacksmith (though I knew absolutely nothing about mending axles), arrange payment, useful sort of clerkly things, my job. I thought to myself: Lucky Leif Eirikson would’ve known about technical ironworking stuff, so would Thorvald or Thorfinn Bits. And they’d been bad leaders.

The blacksmith was a Greek, of course, so he wanted to talk. As we covered the few yards from his cart to ours, he told me that it was really inconvenient being called away at a time like this, he had a stack of work on, lamp-stands and reaper-blades and pot-hooks to make, if it hadn’t been the Imperial service he’d have stayed at home and screw the bonus payment. (What bonus payment? I wondered.) Also, he didn’t have his proper portable anvil, he’d lent it to his brother-in-law who had a whole lot of chains to overhaul, so he was going to have to do the best he could with an old helmet-stake stuck in a log-end, so I wasn’t to expect bloody miracles, even assuming he could get a welding heat with just two sets of small bellows and two flat stones for a forge, though that’d depend on the men working the bellows, who’d have to be a couple of my men, since he was on his own, well, there was the boy of course, but he needed the boy as his striker and he couldn’t do the two jobs at once, and with the best will in the world it wouldn’t be his fault if the weld didn’t take if it was my two men slacking on the bellows that was to blame.