Meadowland (38 page)
‘Fine,’ I said, when at last he paused for breath. ‘Understood. Just do the best you can.
He stared at me as if I was mad, or being deliberately awkward, or both. ‘If you could’ve got the cart back to my shop,’ he said, ‘there wouldn’t be a problem, I got a four-hide double-action bellows there, you can pump the bugger with just your little finger and it’ll breathe fire like a dragon.’
I pointed out that if the cart had been in a fit state to get to his workshop I wouldn’t have needed him at all. He didn’t deign to reply to that, and I thanked Heaven for small mercies.
Harald Sigurdson unloaded the gear from the blacksmith’s cart and set it up; he did a splendid job, I think - except that at the last moment he contrived to drop a big, heavy metal thing (the blacksmith told me the technical name, but I wasn’t listening) on his foot, doing himself an enormous amount of damage in the process.
Back in the City they’ll tell you that the Varangians are a stoical lot. Varangian prisoners captured by the enemy will endure days, even weeks of torture and never say a word. Maybe; but only because the Saracens and the Bulgars never thought to drop heavy blacksmithing tools on their feet. Try that, and your problem will be to get them to shut up. Clearly his injuries ruled Harald out for bellows-working duty; and the escorts made it plain that they were far too tired after their long trek to undertake the work; so that only left Kari and Eyvind. To their credit, they agreed and set to work quite cheerfully; even I could see that they were blowing up a good, hot blaze in the improvised forge, and the blacksmith stopped moaning about the fire and turned his attention to something else.
Which left me sitting on a rock, watching a procedure that meant nothing to me at all, waiting, when I really needed to know what on Earth could’ve induced Kari to go back to Meadowland one more time. After I’d been on the rock three hours or so I considered going over and asking him to tell me as he worked the bellows; but then the smith started bashing something with his hammer, sparks flew in all directions from the white-hot axle, and I stayed where I was.
Blacksmiths are strange people to watch when they’re working. Most of the time they stand perfectly still, staring mournfully into the fire like an old man remembering his youth, while the bellows creak and wheeze. Just when you’re sure that they’ve fallen asleep on their feet, like horses do, they suddenly lunge forward, grab their hammer, sweep all the other tools off the anvil with a majestic surge of the forearm, and set about their chunk of dazzling iron with the savagery of a Turk slaughtering civilians. Just when you think you’re seeing some actual work getting done at last, they stick their bit of metal back into the fire, and go back to silent standing. For the first half-hour it’s a fascinating sight. After that, you tend to lose interest.
After what seemed like a very long time, the blacksmith said something to Kari and Eyvind, and they stopped working the bellows; then he upended a pot of charcoal over the fire and came over to talk to me. It wasn’t going well, he said; the axle was horrible, a piece of shit, whoever made it ought to be ashamed; it was impure, filthy stuffed full of sand and clinker and rubbish that meant it wouldn’t weld, get it up to a heat and it just burned away like tallow There was nothing for it, he concluded, with a shake of the head so tragic that Aristotle would’ve written a book about it, but to go back to his workshop and forge a brand new one, from good, clean, honest, Greek iron. It would take time, it would screw up his whole schedule for years to come and it most definitely wouldn’t be cheap, but there was absolutely nothing else that could be done.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well, thanks. How long-?’
He cut me off with a sharp sigh. Obviously that was one of those questions you simply don’t ask. ‘I’ll be quick as I can,’ he said. ‘Probably best thing’d be if I called in my sister’s boy and my cousin, assuming they can be spared; and I’ll need a load more charcoal, the clean stuff, that’s if they’ve even got any Anyhow, I’ll do what I can. After all, it’s for the government.’
He rolled sadly away, and for reasons I couldn’t quite follow, the escort went with him; so, after a day of almost exaggerated bustle and action, I was back where I’d been before: me, Kari, Eyvind and Harald, waiting.
‘So tell me,’ I asked Eyvind - Kari was on watch - ‘whatever was it that induced Kari to go back to Meadowland?’
Eyvind scowled past my shoulder. ‘You want to ask him that,’ he said.
‘Well, I can’t,’ I said irritably ‘He isn’t here. So I’m asking you.
He sighed. ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said.
When we got back (Eyvind said), Gudrid and Bits and the rest of the party went back to Brattahlid; but Kari and I stayed on at Herjolfsness. That is, I thought I’d be clever and stay on there, after Kari’d said he was going with Bits and the others; but as soon as Kari heard, he told Bits he’d changed his mind, and then he went to Bjarni Herjolfson and asked if he could stay too. I actually pleaded with him not to stay; I reminded him about his plans for moving out to the Western Settlement, where he could take over one of the abandoned farms and be his own master. I’d never be able to forgive myself, I told him, if he let the opportunity slip past him just for my sake.
Didn’t bloody work; so Kari stayed, and we dug in at Herjolfsness and got on with our lives. It was funny, being back with that crowd. Most of them were people we’d known from Iceland; but when we’d left with Bjarni to go trading they’d been kids, and suddenly they’d come over middle-aged or old. And then I stopped and thought about it, did the figuring on my fingers; and you could’ve stolen my legs and replaced them with rake-handles when I worked out that it had been twenty-five years - twenty-five years -since we left Drepstokk and sailed away with Bjarni.
I couldn’t believe it. All that time, a lifetime, wasted; I hadn’t actually noticed it before, but now I realised I’d grown old too, rather more than the kids at Herjolfsness who were now grown men and the men who were now too old to work. Twenty-five years - that meant I was forty-two, which makes you an old man in the North. The best years of my life had melted away in a dream, a recurring nightmare of fog at sea and long winters at Leif’s Booths - and where had it got me? Nowhere: I was right back where I’d started, only rather worse. I was in Greenland rather than the Old Country, and I was forty-two years old.
But at least, I promised myself, at least I’d finally woken up; and it’d been bad and I had nothing to show for it apart from my share of the fur money - did Kari tell you that on the way home the ship carrying the furs got swamped by a real lumpy bastard of a wave, and half the furs got spoiled? -but at least I was still alive, still in one piece, on my feet, able to do a day’s work and earn my keep. It was time, I reckoned, to close the door on all that and make the best of what I had left. There wouldn’t be a farm for me now, I’d be a hired hand until I got too old, and then I’d be a nuisance sitting by the fire, a grace-and-favour man, pleased to be given some stupid little chore that the kids couldn’t be made to do. I’d get stiff and deaf and blind, and I’d die when the house was empty, when the men were all out at work, and soon after that they’d forget I was ever there. Like it mattered to me; at least I wasn’t in Meadowland any more, and I’d never have to go back there again.
Once I’d got all that sorted out in my mind, I discovered that actually things weren’t quite so bad. Perspective; there’s a wonderful Greek word. It’s all perspective. Once I’d told myself I wasn’t much more than a walking corpse playing out my last few sad years, I found that life at Herjolfsness wasn’t so bad after all. We cut the hay, turned it, got it stacked and thatched; and Bjarni came up to me when we’d done thatching the last rick and asked if I was planning on staying for good, because if I was, it’d be all right with him. That made me feel better straight away I was doing something right - in Meadowland you just got on with it, and nobody said good or bad, because it didn’t matter, there wasn’t anybody else to do your work so you couldn’t be fired or sent away I told Bjarni that as far as I was concerned I was there for good, and he shrugged and said, Fair enough - and that was that. I’d come home.
And then there was the girl. Well, that’s how I thought of her, because when we left Drepstokk she was eight, little Bergthora, and her mother used to yell at her because she’d be out back of the barns playing with the dogs instead of helping churn the butter. Next time I saw her she was thirty-three, and her second husband had died of the fever the previous winter, and her face was thin and full of lines. She had a son who was fourteen and a daughter who was ten - crazy I thought, how can little Bergthora have kids who are both older than she is? - and they were both getting a bit wild, they needed a father. I’m not quite sure why I married her, but it turned out to be a good move. We didn’t see all that much of each other - you don’t, when you’re hired hands on a big farm, where all the men work outside all day all the women work in the house or the outbuildings, and then everyone eats and sleeps together in the main hall -but sometimes at night, when she was asleep on the bench next to me and I was lying awake - I often had trouble sleeping after Bits’s expedition - I used to pretend that we’d been married for twenty years, I’d been there all that time, and the boy and the girl were my son and daughter, not the offspring of two men I’d never even met; and I’d convince myself that it was true, this fantasy because if it had been true, if I’d never been away, then here was where I’d have ended up, in that place; like when two of you go for a walk, and one of you takes a short cut that goes badly wrong, through the bog, up and down the fell, and then you meet up again on the road that you should’ve taken in the first place. I won’t say I was happy at Herjolfsness; but it was the best time of my life, absolutely no question about that.
‘So you didn’t go back to Meadowland with Kari,’ I interrupted.
‘I’m coming to that,’ Eyvind replied.
Red Eirik had three sons and a daughter; Lucky Leif, Thorvald who was killed by the leather-boat people, Thorstein who died of the fever, and Freydis, who stayed home. Let me tell you a bit about Freydis.
She was, what, a year or so older than me, and she was married to a man called Thorvard, who lived at Gardar, on the far eastern side of the Eastern Settlement. I can save a lot of words by telling you that Thorvard was generally known as Space, because that’s all he was: a space where a man could’ve stood. You could be in the same house with him for a week and never know he was there. Each morning he’d put on his coat and go out, get on with his work on the farm, and you’d forget he existed. As far as everybody was concerned, the farmer at Gardar was Freydis Eiriksdaughter, and anybody with any sense didn’t go there.
There were plenty of stories about Freydis, and some of them were even true. Like when her stockman challenged the Einarsfjord people to a horse-fight- ‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘Horse-fight,’ Eyvind repeated. ‘It’s a bit of fun for the long summer evenings. You get the nastiest, most vicious horse in your herd, the one you gave up trying to break years ago, and your neighbour brings along his; you haul them into a small cattle-pen, and you prod them with goads till they’re good and mad; then you get out of the pen quick. The horse still standing at the end wins.’
‘I see,’ I replied.
‘It’s meant to be just a way of letting off steam,’ Eyvind went on. ‘But people do like to gamble, and once money comes into it, there’s always the temptation to cheat. Pity, because that leads to bad blood, which leads to feuds, killings, law cases and God knows what. Still, it’s a pretty sight, two bloody great horses kicking and biting shit out of each other.’
There was this horse-fight (Eyvind went on); and the Gardar boys reckoned it was in the bag, because they had this really mean, savage bastard of a stallion. Biggest horse you ever saw, so they say, black with a white teardrop on its forehead; nearly killed a shepherd once, and a terror for kicking down the rails and running off. Only reason they didn’t knock the bugger on the head was, they were saving it for fighting. The Einarsfjord men had a chestnut stallion, not so tall at the shoulder but solid, just a mass of muscle. They’d fought it three times already and it’d pulped the opposition, so they were pretty sure of themselves.
The day of the fight came round; all the Einarsfjord people trooped down to Gardar to watch, they brought a picnic supper and a big barrel of beer, and Freydis sent out two more barrels so as not to be outdone. She’d let it be known she wasn’t happy about the whole business; reckoned the stockman hadn’t asked her first (which wasn’t true, but that’s what she told people) and she couldn’t see the good that’d come of her prize stallion getting all busted up in a fight; so she stayed in the house and watched through the doorway If she thought it’d spoil everyone’s fun, her not being there, she was a bit off the mark. They were all having a great time, the visitors as well as the locals - particularly the Gardar people, because they didn’t get much company
After they’d all had a drink or two and a bit of socialising, the Gardar stockman brought out his horse, and the Einarsfjorders brought out theirs, and the fight was on. Now the Gardar stockman, name of Hrapp, was almost as much of a bastard as the horse. He was from the Hebrides, and they’re all a bit rough round the edges out there; but Hrapp got slung off the islands for being a nuisance, which says a lot about him. The long and the short was, he was a bit happy with his goad, planted as many scats on the Einarsfjord man as he did on the horse, and there was nearly a free-for-all before the horse-fight even started. So feelings were running a bit high when the horses eventually got around to doing the business. The thing was, that nasty old black stallion of Hrapp’s took one belt too many off the Einarsfjord horse, and decided it didn’t like rough games after all. It picked up its heels and ran, and the chestnut chased it round the pen a couple of times and then ignored it.
Well, the Einarsfjord lot were pleased about that, you can imagine. They reckoned they’d won a few pennies off the Gardar people, plus they’d taken Freydis down a peg or two. So they were all cheering and chanting and throwing stuff at the black horse, which stood there trembling up the far end of the pen. Hrapp was stomping up and down looking very unhappy while the Einarsfjord man was making a few choice remarks about him in particular and Hebrideans in general.