Slayer-Styr said, "Yes, we both know that he's hkely to be outlawed despite my efforts, and that is why I want you to guarantee his protection until he's left the district." - At this Snorri the Priest demurred, but Slayer-Styr promised that if Snorri did this for him then he would come to his aid were he ever to need it, and Snorri was too worldly a man not to know that eventually trouble would come to him as it came to all, so he gave his word, and Slayer-Styr shook his hand and then straightened his big shoulders and left the booth, and while Snorri sat sighing and shaking his head and rubbing his hands Slayer-Styr sought out Eirik, who had been somewhat anxious during this empty time, which must be filled by some pleasant or unpleasant result, and told him the news.
"Little enough the old fox has promised us," said Eirik.
Slayer-Styr bowed his head. "Little enough can we gain," he said. "If Thorgest has his way, there will be nowhere you can go."
"Then I'll go to Nowhere," said Eirik. "The land may be as green there as here."
Eirik was sentenced to the three-years' outlavsry. As soon as the Thing ended and Weapontake began, old Thorgest, well pleased, sent his men to find Eirik and spit him on their spears, as he had loved his dead sons; but by then Eirik was gone, for his supporters had already hidden him among the islands.
The BircC-IsCcmcfe ofBrddajjord
BreidaiQord means "Broad-Firth," and indeed it is so wide that on the south shore the sea-cliffs on the northern side, which are among the highest and sheerest in the world, appear as a low blue line interrupted by clouds. But the fjord is by no means empty. Over its grey waters rise everywhere a carnival of bird-islands, whose tenants cackle and scream and sob, offering men mirrors of meaninglessness for their feelings. So, as Thorgest's men roamed the islands for Eirik in their skiffs, choking with anger and hatred, they met themselves in the shrill troops of bird-soldiers that promenaded on the low black cliff-edges of mossy islands; as they sailed fi-om rock to ochre-smeared rock, harshly jesting and telling each other the lying tales of their unsheathed swords, they heard the soft sobbing chuckles of birds; and sometimes when they rowed suddenly upon some hidden beach, skiff by skiff in their full warlike importance, they passed between guano-streaked cliffs fi-om which jutted thousands of tiny pedestals, cushioned by moss, and on every one of these perches stood a
grey bird, with a snowy breast and a snowy head; and because Thorgest's men were rowing quietly, in order to take Eirik by surprise, the birds did not take fright, but stood on their ledges like statues of themselves, and as Thorgest's men came closer the birds shook their heads and cried like children and spread their wing-feathers like fingers. In a cleft between cliffs, a boulder had fallen and wedged itself halfway above the sea, and upon it, too, a bird stood, ridiculously weeping and shaking its snowy head. - On other islands, which grew grey-green with grassy velvet, puffins hid in their holes. White loons laughed in the grass with upraised beaks. "Odin's chickens" (Phalaropus hyperboreus) cackled back at them. Clouds swooshed in the sky, and birds swooshed in the air. On every island was a flock of birds; and there were so many low rocks and low islands in that wide grey sea! - Some islands were commanded by the skatfur-hirds - black cormorants with long narrow beaks - and the skatfurs paid sublime inattention when Thorgest's men rowed by, for they were busy looking up at the weather wdth their bright eyes, or going fishing in the sea for a moment or two, returning to stand on their white rock as they spread their wings like arms to dry themselves. Beside this white island of black birds was a black island of white birds - the fyll - who did not even trouble to look into the clouds; and in the sea paddled other birds, colored black and red and white . . . Puffins fluttered desperately, like fat white fish that had suddenly discovered that they were birds and had to fly, and could never stop flapping. There were eider-ducks, fulmars, shearwaters, sea-parrots. The islands were crazy and crowded with the bird-clowns, some of whom screamed until Thorgest's men were deafened. They never found Eirik. As the proverb goes, "Three things are uncountable in Iceland: mountains, lakes, and islands."
Dirtvunar^s-Bay
Eyjolf of Svin Island had hidden Eirik in Dimunar's-Bay, which was a cold and narrow refuge set among sloping hills of crumbling lava that ended against a cold black wall of rock that sloped outward like a cave-lip; and above this wall rose two grey-green mounds like teats.* Between these hills, birds crouched screaming. Sometimes when the sea was hard and grey, mountains and clouds seemed to be mutually translucent upon the coast of Iceland.
* In Icelandic, dimunar means two hills set close together.
Eirik sat patient among the bird-cries. He scarcely thought of Thjodhild anymore. To guard against mischance and malice, she had returned to her stepfather's at Haukadale. - "I know I have caused you grief and trouble," Eirik had said to her; "I am sorry." - "So I see," she said. - On his left he saw the long blue vertebrae of Snaefellsness, which was cut lower and flatter today by a cloud-knife, and then a broken line of low black islands. Clouds hid the white dome of Snaefellsjokul, but he supposed that he would be able to find it again if he sailed out far enough so that it would rise above the bad weather like a white tower to guide him straight to his goal. The sea was flat and blue. To the west, a cloudbank met the sea at the water-horizon. Above it, the sky was the usual luminous subarctic blue, which Eirik did not care about in the least. - At midnight the sun was north, and sank down against a ridge-top, each aflfecting the other so that the sun took on a wide egg-shape and the ridge became notched. The sky was orange, and the sea was like a rolling plain of snow.
When Eirik's ship was ready, Thorbjom Vifilsson and his daughter Gudrid helped him cast oflf. For a long time he saw the girl's slight form in the purple shadows. Thorbjom waved him out through the rocks. - "May good luck go with you!" he called. - Eirik could see the twin dry teats of Dimunar Island for a long time. The hills were faded in the sun.
BhiC-Sfiirt ca. 381 - ca. 385
His supporters accompanied him beyond the islands, and he told them that he was going to Greenland. The very existence of the country was debatable in those days. Eirik had heard something about it fi*om Ulf Crow's son.* He sailed due west fi*om Snaefells Glacier and made landfall at the base of another glacier which came to be called Blue-Shirt... What happened then? - That is unknown. The Flateyjarbok records only that he named an Eirik's Island, an Eiriksfjord and an archipelago called Eirik's Holms. - Sometimes during those winters, when the nights were separated only by feeble red wedges of daylight, and he was more alone than if he had been buried, he must have thought he heard loud voices roaring in another language, but had he rushed out into the dark black snowstorms he would have seen nothing. -Nor is it written anywhere how Thjodhild fared at home. As always in the
* Gunnbjom, after whom are named Gunnbjom's Skerries. It is said in the Book of Settlements that Ulf Crow had another son, Grimkel, whose son Thorarin Komi was a wizard and a shape-changer.
history of Blue-Shirt, answers are nowhere and everywhere, crowding upon the islands of fact like a trillion separate whitecaps . . .
In the fourth summer after he had come to the new country, he sailed back to Iceland, where he still had numerous supporters, and called for colonists * His shrewdness was evidently superior to his vanity, for he referred to the place not as Eiriksland, but as Greenland, because, he said, people would be most tempted by a pretty name.f (Most fortunate were those of limited understanding, for whom the Idea of Greenland remained an unknown island; for them was only a humming and rushing as something darkened the grey air overhead; this was AMORTORTAK, the Demon with Black Arms.) No doubt some of the colonists believed that Greenland really would be green, perhaps a hilly misty sort of country, like Scotland, where their sheep could graze (when in fact there were mainly rock-sheep and cloud-sheep), and their daughters could pick berries eight months of the year. If they thought of Blue-Shirt at all, it might have been as one of the dyed garments which they would soon be wearing there in token of wealth. The women and children leaned over
the side, talking excitedly. Mothers put their children's hoods on; the children looked down at the water. The sea was lavender, and the sun wheeled round to the west, casting a shining light. In any case, twenty-five ships set sail from Iceland in the year 985. Only fourteen of them arrived at the icy rocks of the new coast. Of the others, some were blown back to Snaefells, and the rest were drowned before they ever saw the cold, cold glitter of Blue-Shirt.
Greenland at tfxe Millennium
"The Land is wonderfuU mountainous, the Mountaines all the year long full of yce and snow: the Plaines in part bare in the Summer time. There grows neither tree nor herbe in it, except Scurvy-Grasse and Sorrell." So wrote an Englishman six and a half centuries later. - But accounts written before the fatal change in climate said that Greenland's winters were not as severe as Iceland's, and that some of the hills had trees that bore litde apple-like fruits.
* Here it should be mentioned that when Eirik returned he had anodier battle widi Thorgest of Breidabolstead, which he lost, and after diat, says die saga, diey were "reconciled." In diat case, pears are surely partridges.
t I take diis as proof diat die salesman's art is unchanging, for in die Book of Settlements we read diat Thorolf, one of die first Norsemen to set foot upon Iceland, returned to Norway proclaiming diat "butter dropped fi-om every blade of grass in die land which diey had discovered; therefore he was called Thorolf Butter."
The Ice-Shirt
That reluctant mercenary, Nicolo Zeno, who wrote one of the last descriptions of the colony before it was lost, claimed that the monasteries were tolerably well-heated, thanks to the boiling sulphur-springs. (Not being accustomed to the cold, however, he died nonetheless.) The establishment at EiriksQord, near Cape Farewell, they called the Eastern Settlement (Ostrebug), and the one at Godthaab they called the Western Settlement (Vestrebug). They traded ivory, reindeer hides and walrus-skin ropes for com, timber and iron. It was said that Greenland abounded in silver mines, in white bears with red spots on their heads, in white falcons, in whales' teeth, and in walrus' skins. It surpassed all other countries in its quantities of fish. There were many different colors of marble, and on a certain island could be found great deposits of a stone called talguestein, which was ductile enough to be worked into pots and
drinking-vessels, but resisted fire. (In my arrogance I dare to hypothesize that it must have been soapstone.)
There were no Skraelings then to harry anybody, although die herdsmen sometimes found their abandoned settlements. Since the climate was mild in those days, the Skraelings had gone north, preferring the icy skerries which the polar bears preferred. They were wild people, in no way to be trusted. They returned with the southward wend of the polar ice, bestriding the huge turquoise-colored bergs. Their flat brown faces expressed nothing; their black eyes moved in a restiess nomadic alertness that the Greenlanders considered ominous. They smiled only among themselves. At first they lurked among the glacier wastes of the interior, never in the same place from day to day, but it was clear that they coveted the coast. And while they awaited their hour the winters became longer and colder, stalking across more of the calendar every year. The mountains exhaled a freezing vapor. A contemporary sailing treatise seems to have been written in the chilly shadow of Blue-Shirt: "From Snae^eldsnaes in Iceland, from which point the passage to Greenland is the shortest, the course is two days and two nights due west, and there you will find Gunnbjom's Rocks midway between Greenland and Iceland. In old times this was the customary route, but now the ice that has been brought down fi-om the northern recess of the ocean, has adhered so closely to the above-named rocks that no one can hold the ancient course without placing his life in danger."
The Other GreenUvnders ca, 1200 - ca, 1500
In 1271, according to a Danish chronicle, a strong wind fi-om the northwest carried to Iceland a quantity of ice laden with bears and wood. This incited the pickers and gleaners to go to Greenland. Some mariners from Friesland encountered "some miserable-looking huts hollowed out in the ground" -no doubt the traditional sod igloos or anegiuchaks of the Eskimos. Beside these huts were mounds of iron ore intermingled with gold. The mariners took as much as they could carry. "But when they returned to their vessels, they saw coming out of these covered holes deformed men as hideous as devils, wdth horns and slings and large dogs following them." One sailor, characterized as an idler, so that we need not mourn him, was caught by the Skraelings and cut to pieces with knives of unicom-hom.
They were often to be seen after that, hunting seals and walruses in their skin-boats, which were long and narrow, so narrow that each Skraeling seemed
to be a part of his boat, for it was not much wider than a single ski. The boats were dark-colored. Tanned skins had been stretched tight over wooden lips to make them. They were pointed at both ends.
By the end of the century, Icelandic chronicles were reporting fearful signs and monsters in the seas around Greenland. Giant men called halfsstrambs rose out of the waves, with pointed heads, flippers and sad angry eyes. Sometimes the sailors saw tnarguguers - tall beings who were women from head to waist, with loose hair, great breasts slung over their shoulders, and long webbed fingers. Their appearance always presaged a fatal storm. Waves so high as to be called sea-mountains would rise around a ship, three at a time, and overwhelm it.
In their good time, the Skraelings raided and destroyed the Western Setdement. Ivar Bardsson, longtime procurator of Gardar, was, according to a narrative of 1349, among those selected by the Governor to expel them. "When they arrived there," says the manuscript in its resigned way, "they found no man either Christian or heathen, but only some cattle and sheep running wild, of which they took as many as they could carry on board the ships and returned home." The only settlement now remaining was the Ostrebygd. In 1379, according to the Icelandic Annals, "Skraelings attacked the Greenlanders, killing eighteen of them and carrying off two boys into captivity to be their thralls." It is hard not to be irritated by the really rather manic optimism that could have permitted Nicolo Zeno to write {ca. 1400) that monks and nuns held easy sway over the country. He devoted several pages to praising the luxuries of the Friars' chambers, which were heated with volcanic water. "They have also small gardens," he went on,
covered over in the winter time, which being watered with this water, are protected against the effect of the snow and the cold, which in these parts, being situate far under the pole, is severe, and by this means they produce flowers and fruits and herbs of different kinds, just as in other temperate countries in their seasons, so that the rude and savage people of these parts, seeing these supematural effects, take these friars for Gods and bring them many presents such as chickens, meat and other things, holding them as Lords in the greatest reverence and respect.
After Zeno's death the ice continued to tighten around the island, until landfall could only be made during the month of August. Having no access to trade, the Greenlanders were forced to live on dried fish and milk. A papal letter written in 1492 expressed the belief that no ship had sailed there for eighty years. By that time the Greenlanders had all perished.
11
Black l)dn(l$,
on
How ifie Skrddin^s put ihc WhiU-Shirt on
The HennapfiroiCiie
?? - ca. 30j000 BC
God has made everything out of nothing. But man He made out of everything.
E
Paracelsus, ca. 1590
Ider Brother and Younger Brother Hved on the ice without knowing where they had come from. Elder Brother supposed that maybe the ice had given birth to him through a seal-hole, because that was how Younger Brother had been bom; but whether or not that was the case, many questions lay underfoot, like frozen tussock-beds. He had no memory of how he had learned to be himself, striding about so utterly at home upon the black ice; he could recollect many hunts and moons before the time of Younger Brother, but whether his aloneness had ever had a beginning he could not say. Sometimes he had a dream of anot
her Brother, who had turned his face from him and gone southward into the ice-mountains, crying out and tearing at himself with his BLACK HANDS; and there were other nights when he was certain that in the ice-combs far beneath him many other brothers lay curled in frozen sleep, waiting to be bom; but when he thought upon them those fancies seemed to him fantastical, for on that entire world of ice there were to be found but two souls: Self and Other; and between two and many there lies a gap as wide as between one and two. Thus, Elder Brother could never beHeve in a multitude of men corresponding to the seal-multitudes he fed on; nor did it seem to him wise to make any presumptions. The ice had taught him that: each step he took upon that surface must end with the weight of heel and toe placed firmly upon known ice, never presumed ice that might be no more than a film, shattering beneath him so that he fell into the black dead sea beneath, never again to be bom, perhaps ... So he became by degrees ever more practical, and stem and stately in his knowledge. Younger Brother feared more than loved him. But this was a matter that Elder Brother
The Ice-Shirt Page 9
