Meadowland (39 page)
Out of the blue, Freydis comes storming out of the house. She was a short woman, with a little round face and a pointed-up nose, and to look at her you’d have thought she rolled across the ground rather than walking; but she goes right up to Hrapp, snatches the goad out of his hand and gives him a scat round the back of the head with it that sends him staggering; then she hops up over the rail into the pen, marches up to the black stallion and lays into it with that goad so hard that it’s a wonder it didn’t snap.
First off, the horse rears up and tries to smash her head in with its front legs; then it has a go at sideswiping her onto the rails and crushing her ribs. But she’s quick on her feet, is Freydis: she sidesteps and darts in and out, all the time whacking at the horse on its shins and ribs, or stabbing it in the neck and belly So the horse turns round so as to get a kick at her with its back legs, which is what she’s been after. Soon as she’s got a clear shot, she punches the goad into the horse’s arse, and off it goes like a shooting star, prancing and lashing out, hurting like buggery and scared out of its wits. The Einarsfjord horse sees it coming, reckons it’s come back for some more fun, and leaps out at it; gets its teeth round the black horse’s ear and shreds it. Doesn’t realise its mistake till it’s on the ground, front leg busted, ribs stove in, the Gardar horse dancing round trying to stomp on its head; and that’s the end of the fight. Freydis stands there with her arms folded while Hrapp and the men get their horse under control; Hrapp gets a broken collarbone in the process, and one of the farmhands gets kicked in the head, dies two days later.
Of course, the Einarsfjorders aren’t happy at all. They all reckon the fight was over when the Gardar horse bolted the first time, and there was no call for Freydis to go setting it on a second time. They’re yelling all sorts and shaking their fists, but Freydis looks past them like they aren’t there and she can’t hear anything; and eventually they cut their horse’s throat and go home. Freydis has the dead horse flayed and the hide tanned and made into winter boots for the shepherds. For weeks afterwards, they say she was going around with a big smile on her face, nice as pie to everybody they’d never known her be so pleasant. She made her peace with Hrapp straight away, said there were faults on both sides and he was still the best stockman in Greenland so why not just forget all about it; and when his body was found out on the fells, beginning of autumn, not a single bone unbroken, everybody reckoned it must’ve been the Einarsfjorders being sore losers.
Anyhow, that’s Freydis, and you can see why life at Gardar tended to be a bit exciting at times. One thing you had to say for her, she wasn’t afraid of anything on land or sea; and she was always close to her family particularly her father and her brother Thorstein. She even managed to be civil to Gudrid while Thorstein was alive, but after he died and Gudrid married Thorfinn Bits, it was as much as Freydis could do to say a couple of words to her without spitting. For some reason Freydis was always down on her brother Leif, at least to his face, though by all accounts you didn’t dare say a word against him when she was around if you valued your skin. But every time she went to Brattahlid she’d find some excuse for giving him a hard time. If it was autumn and the cows were still out, she’d bollock him for overgrazing; if he’d brought them in, she’d call him a fool for wasting good hay while there was still grass above snow If he bought stock, he’d always paid over the odds; if he sold an animal, he’d practically given it away That sort of thing, all the time, relentless, like water dripping; and Leif never cussed her back or anything like that. He’d just sit still and listen, and I’ve seen him myself gradually freezing up till he was so tense that if he’d toppled out of his chair onto the floor he’d have shattered in pieces. And once she’d gone home again, if anybody said anything against her, even hinted, he’d fly into a rage, knock a man’s teeth down his throat; I don’t think anything ever got him so worked up as someone bad-mouthing his sister.
Well, not long after Bits came back to Greenland, Freydis made up her mind it’d been far too long since she’d been to visit her brother, so she and Thorvard Space and a few of her men set off for Brattahlid. Just so happened that, a day or so before they arrived, a ship put in from Norway It belonged to a couple of brothers called Helgi and Finnbogi; they were Icelanders originally from the Eastfjords. Helgi was the elder brother, about forty-seven or forty-eight years old, and Finnbogi was maybe four years younger: traders, quiet men. They’d hit it off with Leif straight away and of course Leif’d told them all about how he’d discovered Meadowland; and then Gudrid and Bits had joined in and said how it was a nice enough place, but you wouldn’t want to live there; but if you had a good ship and wanted to turn a profit, there was all that timber just waiting to be felled, not to mention furs and all that. They were just trying to impress their guests, they didn’t mean anything by it. But when Freydis showed up - she hadn’t thought to send ahead to say she was coming, that wasn’t her style - everybody was still talking about Meadowland, of course.
A friend of mine from Leif’s expedition, man by the name of Third Horse head, was sitting close by the top of the table, the first night Freydis was there. She had Leif on one side and Bits on the other; the two Icelanders were sitting opposite. That was Freydis all over: had to be in the centre, so everyone was in reach.
Third told me Leif had put him up on the top table that night so he could tell Helgi and Finnbogi some details of his expedition that’d slipped his memory, something about the currents in the bay; he reckoned they went one way Bits insisted they went the other, and Leif wanted Third to back up his version. Well, Third did as he was told, and Bits thought about it for a moment and explained how they were both right - the currents changed with the phases of the moon, or some such slit. Leif got grumpy and sulked because he hadn’t been completely right. The brothers asked Third a few questions, sensible and to the point. Gudrid broke in with some detail that all of them had missed, which supported what Bits had said. All very pleasant and civilised, if you turned a blind eye to Leif being snotty.
Freydis had always had the gift of being able to drink like a man. When she’d had just about enough, her face glowed red and her voice got louder, and she tended to lean across the table and talk right into your face. ‘Sounds to me,’ she said to Helgi and Finnbogi, ‘like you’re thinking of going out there yourself’
The Icelanders looked at each other; it was like they had the knack of being able to talk to each other without saying a word. ‘The thought had crossed my mind,’ Helgi said. ‘But it sounds risky to me.
Freydis laughed. She had a nice voice. ‘The savages, you mean? They aren’t anything to worry about.’
Awkward silence. Leif still sulking; Gudrid looking down at her empty plate and frowning, Bits stroking his beard, my friend Third trying to pretend he wasn’t there. ‘Really,’ Freydis went on. ‘No problem. I mean, if Gudrid could make them all run away just by waggling her tits at them…
Bits started to say something, but thought better of it; Gudrid caught her breath and scowled at Freydis. Probably Third told me, Freydis didn’t even notice. ‘No disrespect to Gudrid and Thorfinn,’ she went on, and everybody must’ve noticed the order she said their names in, ‘but they didn’t handle them right, that’s all. Got to be firm. Give ‘em a good smack on the nose, they won’t bother you. Besides,’ she went on, ‘you probably won’t see hide nor hair of them. I think they wander around, like the Lapps do, following the deer herds.’
The Icelanders were quiet for a moment. Then Finnbogi said: ‘Actually it wasn’t the locals we were concerned about. It’s just - well, it’s a long way away and a lot of open sea to cross, and it sounds to us like the weather’s very unreliable. We’re traders, we like to stick to well-tried routes. We need to know exactly where we’re going to be and when. I mean, it’s no good showing up in Norway with a cargo of stuff when you’ve missed the fairs and the King’s court has moved on up-country.’
Freydis waved all of that away with her solid little hand. ‘If you fill your ships with timber,’ she said, ‘you’ll find a buyer any time, here or back in the Old Country. No question about that.’
‘It’s not that simple, though, is it?’ Bits interrupted. He was quite red in the face now, though he was talking rather softly ‘You can’t just turn up, load up and go on. It takes time to fell enough timber to fill a ship.’
“Course it does,’ Freydis said, all sweet and patient, like Bits was a backward child. ‘Which is why you need to be a bit organised. You have a permanent settlement. Soon as the ships are loaded they sail home; and while they’re away you fell and trim out the next load, so it’s ready and waiting for when the ships come back. You could get it down so nice, you could fit in four, even five round trips in a summer. Keep that up for five years or so, you’d be nicely set up. You see,’ she went on, ‘where all the others screwed up, my brothers and Thorfinn here, no offence, they never really figured out what they wanted to do, or else they had a whole load of cock-eyed ideas. You-‘ (She was looking at Leif.) ‘You couldn’t make up your mind whether you were founding a new settlement or you were just there to cut lumber; result, you fiddled around for a season or two, gave it up and came home. Thorvald was the same. Thorstein was so hopeless he couldn’t even find the place.’ Leif fiddled with his cup, turning it round with his fingertips; Gudrid, Third told me, just looked sick. ‘And you-‘ (Bits this time.) ‘You wanted to go and play at farming, but look at you, you’re a trader, same as these two; you’ll never make a farmer in a hundred years. You couldn’t build a settlement because you couldn’t believe in yourself being a farmer; you were in the wrong place, you couldn’t be yourself. What I say is, there’s this bloody wonderful opportunity out there, it just needs someone with a bit of sense to work out how to make the most of it.’
Thorvard Space - he was there too, of course, but down the table a bit - suddenly pipes up and says, ‘That’s right, that’s absolutely right. Marvellous opportunity going to waste, all it wants is a good leader.’
‘I agree,’ said Helgi unexpectedly ‘We were thinking that ourselves. But as you said just now: Thorfinn here’s a trader, and that’s what we are. If things didn’t work out for him, who’s to say they’ll work out for us? I mean, I don’t know anything about how you go about founding a permanent settlement.’
Then Gudrid turned her head and treated Freydis to a bit of a stare. ‘It seems to me,’ she said quietly ‘that the three of you should go into partnership - I’m sorry, the four of you, I was forgetting Thorvard. It sounds like you’ve got it all planned out in your head, Freydis. I suppose that’s only to be expected from Red Eirik’s daughter.’
Leif opened his face to say something, but Freydis got in first. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘that’s not a bad idea at all. To tell you the truth, I’m getting sick and tired of Gardar. No room to expand, that’s the problem. There’s only the little strip of grazing, no bigger than a rug, between the sea and the fells.
I think I could get to like the idea of a smart little venture like this one.
Helgi and Finnbogi went all quiet again, thinking about it. ‘We’ve only got the one ship, of course,’ Helgi said. ‘Don’t suppose we could get enough lumber on one ship to make it worthwhile - not if we’re going to have a permanent base as well as the ship’s crew
‘Oh, that’s no problem,’ Freydis said quickly ‘Leif’ll lend me his ship, won’t you? I mean, he’s not going anywhere, he’s a farmer now, and that ship’s been there and back so often that it knows the way’
Finnbogi frowned. ‘I thought you sold the ship to Thorfinn?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, he did. And when he came home, he bought it back off him, God only knows why I mean, what on earth is he going to want it for? Waste of good money But there it is, so it might as well be used.’
Leif kept his mouth grimly shut; so Gudrid said: ‘And there’s the houses too, of course. If you use them, it’ll save you all the time and effort of building. Isn’t that right, Leif?’
Third told me that Leif went very still for a moment or so, like he didn’t trust himself to move. Then, very slowly he said, ‘You’re welcome to borrow them.’
Freydis laughed. ‘You always say that,’ she said. ‘But face it, you aren’t ever going to use them again, they’re no good to you. Or are you going to charge me rent, your own sister?’
‘I said,’ Leif repeated, ‘you can borrow them. That’s as far as I’ll go. Same with the ship.’
Freydis shrugged. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t make any odds, in practice. Anyhow, I think we’re nearly there. We’ve got ships, we’ve got a base ready-made, we know the way, and getting a crew won’t be a problem around here, it never is.
Finnbogi shook his head. ‘Our crew won’t all want to go, I can guarantee that. Some of them have been with us a long time, they’ll say they’re getting too old to go dashing off having adventures.’
‘Well.’ Freydis shrugged. ‘You’ll be able to find some people here in Greenland. Or what about the Old Country? Bet you there’s any number of men - hired hands and the like - who’d jump at the chance of a bit of land, house of their own. Iceland’s getting very small these days. And you’re headed back that way aren’t you? And there’s loads of time for you to recruit and be back here well before the end of the season:
Third looked at the Icelanders, expecting that they’d be all reserved and doubtful. But not a bit of it, they were beginning to warm to the idea. ‘It’s true, Helgi said, ‘there’s plenty of manpower in the Eastfjords. We wouldn’t have to pay them anything, just give them their shares in the proceeds, along with the rest. And if there’s houses there already built, all we’d have to find up front would be the cost of stores and gear:
‘And a settlement,’ Freydis interrupted, ‘once it gets going, they’ll need their flour and their malt, same as anybody else, and livestock too, of course. Which means the ships won’t be coming back empty, and we get to turn a profit both ends:
Third said it was like when you light a lamp in a dark room; suddenly he understood what Freydis had in mind. She’d be in charge of the permanent settlement. It wouldn’t be a partnership, not really; once she was there, she’d turn into her father, the way Leif and all her brothers had wanted to do, and failed. (And that was why Leif was squirming in his seat and swelling up like a bullfrog; he’d tried to become Red Eirik and failed, and now he was there in Brattahlid, running the farm Red Eirik had built, his father’s hand-me-down, when what he’d always wanted was to start completely fresh, like the old man had done.) That was why Freydis was putting into the brothers’ minds the idea that they could make more money if the settlement and the ships were run separately, and the settlers had to buy their flour and malt and stuff from the brothers. The surprising thing, Third told me, was that as far as he could tell he was the only one there who’d tumbled to what she was up to.