by Tim Severin
After half an hour the natives broke off the attack. They were running out of arrows and they could see that the Norsemen were in full flight. The skin boats turned back one by one and the knorr was left to sail out to sea.
‘It was only then,’ Tyrkir told my father, ‘that we realised that your brother Thorvald was wounded. A Skraeling arrow had found the gap between the topmost plank and his shield and hit him in the left armpit. It was scarcely more than a dart, but buried so deep that only an inch or two of the shaft was showing. Thorvald reached to pull out the arrow. But the arrow was designed for hunting seal and had triple barbs. He had to twist and tug violently to pull it and when it finally came free, there was a strong jet of dark red blood, and flesh stuck to the barbs. Thorvald gave one of his booming laughs – “That’s my heart’s fat there,” he joked. “I said I would like to spend the rest of my days in this place, and I think that’s what is going to happen. I doubt I will survive this wound. If I die I want to be buried here, up on that headland where every passing sailor will know my grave.”
‘I wish we could have done exactly what Thorvald wanted,’ Tyrkir concluded in his thick accent. ‘There was not much time. We buried Thorvald on the headland as best we could. We feared that the Skraelings would come back, so we could do little more than scrape out a shallow grave and pile a heap of stones over the corpse. Then we set course for Leif’s huts to spend the winter – keeping a sharp lookout for Skraelings as soon as the weather improved.’
My uncle Thorstein spoke up. He was looking distressed. ‘Leif,’ he said, ‘we can’t leave Thorvald’s body there. There’s every chance that the Skraelings will find his body, dig it up and defile it. He deserves better. It’s only a three-week sail to the spot, and I would like to take a crew of volunteers, sail to Thorvald’s cairn, and recover the body so that we can have a proper burial here in Greenland. Your ship, which has just returned, isn’t up to the job. She needs to be pulled ashore and recaulked, but my father-in-law Thorbjorn still has the knorr which brought him and his people from Iceland, and she could be ready to sail in two days’ time. I’m sure that Thorbjorn will agree to loan her to me for the mission.’
Of course, both my father and old Thorbjorn, who was in the hall listening to the returnees, had to agree. This was a matter of family honour, and if there is one thing which the Norse are fanatical about it is the question of their honour. To a true Norseman his honour is something he places before all else. He will defend it or seek to enhance it by whatever means available, and that includes raiding for booty, exacting revenge for an insult, and lying or cheating to gain the advantage.
FIVE
DESPITE THEIR ORIGINAL plans, it was a full month before my uncle Thorstein set sail for Vinland. It seemed a pity to go all that distance and not bring back a cargo of timber and fish, so his expedition expanded into more than just a trip to recover Thorvald’s body. There was equipment to gather, men to be summoned from the pastures, where they had gone with the cattle, stores to be loaded. Then someone suggested that it might be a good idea to leave a small group to overwinter at Leif’s cabins, and this scheme delayed matters still further. When old Thorbjorn’s knorr did finally set sail she looked more like an emigrant vessel than an expedition ship. There were six cows and several sheep standing in the hold, bales of hay to feed them, piles of farming gear, and on board were several women, including Gudrid, who had asked to accompany her husband. I, meanwhile, would stay behind with her father.
And by the time the preparations were all made it was too late. Thorstein Eriksson had a fine sense of family honour, but he lacked a sense of urgency and that essential gift of all good sea captains – weather luck. Intending for Vinland, he and his crew set out from Brattahlid but encountered such strong headwinds that they spent most of the summer beating uselessly about the ocean. At one stage they were in sight of Iceland and on another occasion glimpsed birds which they judged came from the Irish coast. At the end of the sailing season, without ever having set foot in Vinland, they limped back to Greenland. Simple-minded folk claim that a ship or boat has a mind and a spirit of its own. They believe that a vessel can ‘see’ its way back home like a domestic cat or dog that has been lost, or a horse to its stable, and that it can retrace the same routes that it has previously sailed. This is nonsense, the dreaming of landlubbers. Vessels which make several repeat journeys usually do so because they are in the hands of the same experienced crew members or there is some characteristic of the particular vessel – shallow draught, ability to sail to windward, or whatever – which makes it best suited to the task in hand. Seamanship and weather luck make for a successful second or third voyage along a particular track, not a boat’s own acquired knowledge. Thorstein’s failure to fetch back his brother’s bones goes to prove this very well.
They eventually made their Greenland landfall not at Brattahlid but at Lyusfjord some three days’ sail to the north-west. Here a small group of Norse had already established a few coastal farms, and Thorstein struck up a friendship with a namesake, who invited him to stay and help him work the land, which was plentiful. Perhaps my uncle was ashamed to return to Brattahlid with so little accomplished and without Thorvald’s body, so he accepted the offer. That autumn a small coaster came down from Lyusfjord with a message. My uncle was asking for his share of the family’s cattle herd and other stores to be sent to Lyusfjord, and – in a note added by Gudrid – there was an invitation to send me along as well. It seemed that I was still high in Gudrid’s affections and her substitute child.
My uncle’s new-found partner was remarkably swarthy for a Norseman, hence his nickname Thorstein the Black. This giving of a nickname which identified him from all the other Thorsteins, including my uncle, is a sensible Norse custom. Most Norse derive their names, simply enough, from the parents. Thus, I am Thorgils Leifsson, being the son of Leif Eriksson, who is the son of Erik. But with so many Leifs, Eriks, Grimms, Odds and others to choose from, it is helpful to have the extra defining adjective. The easiest way is to say where he or she comes from – not in my own case, though – or refer to some particular characteristic of the individual. Thus my grandfather Erik the Red’s hair was a striking strawberry red when he was young and, as we have seen, Leif the Lucky was extraordinarily fortunate in his early career, always seeming to be in the right place at the right time. During my time in Iceland I was to meet Thorkel the Bald, Gizur the White and Halfdan the Black, and heard tales of Thorgrimma Witchface, who was married to Thorodd Twistfoot, and how Olaf was called the Peacock because he was always so vain about to his clothing, and Gunnlaug Serpent Tongue had a subtle and venomous way with words.
To return to Thorstein the Black: he had done remarkably well in the five or six years that he had been farming at Lyusfjord. He had cleared a large area of scrubland, built a sizeable longhouse and several barns, fenced in his home pasture, and employed half a dozen labourers. Part of his success was due to his wife, an energetic, practical woman by the name of Grimhild. She ran the household very competently, and this left Thorstein the Black free to get on with overseeing the farming and the local fishery. Their farmhouse was easily large enough to accommodate my uncle Thorstein and Gudrid, so rather than waste time and effort building their own home my uncle and aunt moved in with them. By the time I arrived, I found the two families sharing the same building amicably.
So I now come to an event which makes me believe that the mysterious hauntings which accompanied my own mother’s death were not as implausible as they might seem. That winter the plague came back to the Greenland settlements for the second time in less than five years. It was the same recurring illness which was the curse of our existence. Where it came from, we could not tell. We knew only that it flared up suddenly, caused great suffering and then died away just as rapidly. Perhaps it is significant that both times these plagues visited us in autumn and early winter when we were all living cooped up, close together in the longhouses, with little light, no fresh air and a tremendous
fug. The first person to contract the illness in Lyusfjord this time around was the overseer on the farm, a man named Gardi. Frankly, no one was too sorry. Gardi was a brute, untrustworthy and with a vicious streak. He could be civil enough when he was sober, but turned nasty when he was drunk, and was even worse the following morning when he had a hangover. In fact, when he first fell sick, everyone thought that he was suffering from yet another drinking binge until he began to show all the signs of the fever – a pasty skin, sunken eyes, difficulty in breathing, a dry tongue, and a rash of purple-red spots beginning to blotch his body. When, after a short illness, he died there was very little mourning. Instead the settlers around Lyusfjord began to wonder who would be afflicted next. The illness always picked its victims randomly. It might attack a man but leave his wife unscathed, or it would carry off two children from a brood of five, and the other three siblings never even had a sniffle. My uncle Thorstein contracted the sickness, but Gudrid escaped. Thorstein the Black was spared, yet his wife, Grimhild, succumbed. The progress of the sickness was as erratic as its selection was unpredictable. Sometimes the patient lingered for weeks. Others died within twenty-four hours of showing the first pustules.
Grimhild was one of the rapid victims. One day she was complaining of headaches and dizziness, the next she could hardly walk. She was so unsteady on her feet that by evening she could barely get to the outside privy a few steps away from the main farmhouse. Gudrid offered to accompany Grimhild in case she needed help and, as I was nearby, beckoned to me to assist. I took my place beside Grimhild so she could put her arm over my shoulder. Gudrid was on the other side with her arm around Grimhild’s waist. The three of us then made our way slowly out of the door, and we were not halfway across the farmyard when Grimhild came to an abrupt halt. She was deathly pale and swaying on her feet so that Gudrid and I had to hold her from falling. It was bitterly cold and Gudrid wanted to get Grimhild across to the privy as fast as possible, then bring her back into the warmth. But Grimhild stood rigid. Her arm was tense and trembling along my shoulders, and the hair rose on the back of my neck.
‘Come on,’ urged Gudrid, ‘we can’t stand out here in this cold. It will only make your fever worse.’
But Grimhild would not move. ‘I can see Gardi,’ she whispered in horror. ‘He’s over there by the door and he has a whip in his hand.’ Gudrid tried to coax Grimhild to take a step forward. But Grimhild was petrified. ‘Gardi is standing there, not five paces away,’ she muttered with panic in her voice. ‘He’s using the whip to flog several of the farmhands, and near him I can see your husband. I can see myself in the group as well. How can I be there and yet here, and what about Thorstein? We all look so grey and strange,’ She was about to faint.
‘Here, let me take you back inside, out of the cold,’ said Gudrid, half-lifting the delirious woman so that the three of us could turn in our tracks and stumble back into the main hall. We helped Grimhild into the bed closet, which had been turned into a makeshift sanatorium. My uncle Thorstein was already lying there. Fever-struck for the past week he had been shivering and slipping into occasional bouts of delirium.
Grimhild died the same night, and by dawn the farm carpenter was already planing the boards for her coffin. Our burial customs were very brusque. Under normal circumstances a wealthy farmer or his wife, particularly if they followed the Old Ways, might merit a funeral feast and be interred under a small burial mound on some prominent spot like a hillside or favourite beach. But in times of plague no one bothered with such niceties. People believed that the sooner the corpses were got out of the house and put underground, the quicker their wandering spirits would vacate the premises. Even the Christians received short shrift. They were buried in a hastily dug grave, a stake was driven into the ground above the corpse’s heart, and when a priest next visited the settlement a few prayers were said, the stake was wrenched out and a bowl of holy water was emptied down the hole. Occasionally a small gravestone was erected, but not often.
That same morning Grimhild’s husband went about the day-to-day chores of the farm as if nothing had happened. It was his way of coping with the shock of his wife’s sudden death. He told four farmhands to go to the landing place where we kept our small boats and be ready to do a day’s fishing. Trying to make myself useful and not wanting to stay in the same house as Grimhild’s corpse, I accompanied the men as they headed to the beach to begin preparing the nets and fishing lines. We had loaded up the fishing gear into the two small skiffs, and were just about to push off for the fishing grounds when a runner came stumbling down from the farmhouse. In a lather of sweat and fear, he told Thorstein the Black to come quickly, something very odd was happening in the sick room. Thorstein dropped the sculls he was about to put into the boat and ran, clumping back up the narrow track to the farm. The rest of us stood there and stared at one another.
‘What’s happening in the farm?’ someone asked the messenger, who was not at all in a hurry to get back to the longhouse.
‘Grimhild’s corpse started to move,’ he replied. ‘She sat up in bed, slid her feet to the floor and was trying to stand. I didn’t see it myself, but one of the women came running out of the bed closet screaming.’
‘Better stay away for a while,’ said one of the farmhands. ‘Let Grimhild’s husband sort it out, if the story’s true. I’ve heard about corpses coming alive, and no good ever comes of it. Come on, let’s shove off the boats and go fishing. We’ll find out what’s happened soon enough.’
But it was difficult to concentrate on the fishing that day. Everyone in the two boats kept glancing back at the farmhouse, which could be seen in the distance. They were very subdued. I had gone along in one of the boats, helping bail out the bilges with a wooden scoop when I wasn’t baiting hooks – my fingers were small and deft – but every time I caught sight of one of the men looking back at the farmhouse, I shivered with apprehension.
By mid-afternoon we were back on the beach, and had cleaned and split the few cod and saithe that we had caught, and hung them up in the drying house. I walked very slowly back to the house, staying at the rear of the group as we tramped up the path. When we came to the front door, no one would go in. The farmhands held back, fidgeted and looked at me meaningfully. I was just a boy, but they thought of me as a member of their employer’s family, and therefore I was the one who should enter the house first. I pushed open the heavy wooden door and found the long hall strangely deserted. At the far end three or four of the workers’ wives were huddled together on benches, looking very troubled. One of them was sobbing quietly. I tiptoed to the door of the bed closet and peered in. Thorstein the Black was sitting on the earth floor, his knees drawn up to his chest and his head bowed. He was staring at the ground. On the bed in front of him lay the corpse of his wife. A hatchet was buried in her chest, the haft stuck up in the air. To my left, Gudrid was seated on the side of the bed where her husband lay. Thorstein Eriksson was propped up on a pillow, but looked very odd. I ran to Gudrid and threw my arms around her waist. She was deathly calm.
‘What’s happened?’ I croaked.
‘Grimhild was on her feet. Her fetch must have come back and entered her body,’ Gudrid replied. ‘She was stumbling slowly round the room. Knocking into the walls like a blind person. She was bumping and fumbling. That was when I sent for her husband. I feared she would do harm. When her husband came into the room, he thought that Gudrid was possessed. That she had been turned into a ghoul. He picked up the hatchet and sank it into her. To put an end to her. She has not moved since.’
Gudrid pulled me closer. ‘Your uncle Thorstein is dead as well,’ she said quietly. ‘He stopped breathing during the afternoon and I thought he had passed away. But then he did come back to us briefly. He called me over to him and told me that he knew he was about to die, and that he did not want to be buried here, but back in Brattahlid. I promised him that would be done. Then he told me not to forget the volva’s prophecy about my own future. He said he was not the man who
had been promised to me. It was the last thing he said. Then he fell back and did not stir again.’
I was half-kneeling beside Gudrid with my head on her lap. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told Gudrid, trying to console her. ‘Everything will be all right now. You will not die from the plague. Nor will Thorstein the Black. Only old Amundi is going to die, and Sverting, who was with me in the boat this afternoon. That’s all the people who were with Gardi last night in the yard.’
She put her hand under my chin, and gently turned my face so she could look into my eyes. ‘How do you know?’ she said softly.
‘Because I saw them too, just as Grimhild did, all of them were there with Gardi and his whip. Last night, in the yard,’ I answered.
‘I see,’ said Gudrid, and let her hand fall as she looked away.
I was too confused and frightened to make any sense of what was happening. I had never intended to tell anyone that I too had seen the group of fetches in the darkness of the farmyard. It was something which I did not understand. If I could see them, what did it mean about me and my responses to the spirit world? I had heard the rumours about my real mother Thorgunna and the ominous circumstances of her death. Would I see her fetch next? It was a terrifying prospect. But had I glanced up and seen Gudrid’s expression when I made my confession, I would have been reassured. I would have realised that Gudrid too had seen the not-yet-dead, and that she had the gift of seidr, far more than me.
SIX
SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS are remarkably quick to adapt. Naturally enough, the farm workers at Lyusfjord refused to spend the winter cooped up in a building where such supernatural events had occurred, so our household moved back to Brattahlid, and within days I was back into the normal routines of childhood, playing with the other children. There were more of them than there had been at Lyusfjord so our games were more complicated and rowdy. I was smaller in stature than most of my contemporaries, but I made up for my lack of brawn with clever invention and quickness of thought. I also found I had a talent for mimicry and an imagination more vivid than most of my friends. So in our group I was the one who tended to invent new games or embellish the existing games with variants. When spring came and the days lengthened, we children moved out of doors to play the more boisterous games that the adults had forbidden indoors during the winter months. Most of our games involved a lot of play-acting with loud shouts, makeshift wooden shields and blunt wood swords. It was only natural that one we invented was based on my uncle Thorvald’s voyage. Of course Thorvald’s heroic death was a central feature of the make-believe. The oldest, strongest boy – his name was Hrafn as I remember – would play the leading role, staggering around the yard, clutching his armpit dramatically and pretending to pull out an arrow. ‘The Skraelings have shot me,’ he would yell. ‘I’m dying. I will never see home again, but die a warrior’s death in a far land.’ Then he would spin round, throw out his arms and drop in fake death on the dirt and the rest of us would pretend to pile up a cairn of stones around his body. My own contribution came when we all boarded an imaginary boat and rowed and sailed along the unknown coast. I invented a great whirlpool which nearly sucked us down and a slimy sea monster whose tentacles tried to drag us overboard. My friends pretended to scan the beaches and called out what they saw – ravening wolves, huge bears, dragon-snakes and so forth. One day I created for them a monster-man who, I said, was grimacing at us from the beach. He was a troll with just one foot and that as big as a large dish. He was bounding along the strand, taking great leaps to keep pace with us and – to demonstrate – I left my companions to one side, and hopped along, both feet together until I was out of breath and gave up the pretence.
