by Tim Severin
Our men were still on the edge of the surf, shouting insults and defiance, when the first Skraeling missiles struck. Once again the range of their dart throwers took our men unawares. Two grunted in surprise and slumped down so suddenly that their comrades turned round in puzzlement.
Unnerved, our men began to fall back. They retreated up the beach in disorder, leaving the corpses at the water’s edge. We watched the Skraeling flotilla paddle right up to the beach unopposed and their warriors step ashore.
The mass of the Skraelings advanced up the beach towards us. There must have been nearly eighty of them and they kept no particular order or discipline, but neither did our men, who were scampering back towards the settlement. What followed was a chaotic and deadly brawl, which I watched from the shelter of a dense willow thicket, where I had been sent by Freydis’s husband Thorvard when the Skraeling boats first appeared. Earlier I had told Thorvard how the Skraelings had been terrified by the bellowing of our bull on my first visit to Vinland. Now Thorvard told me to run and catch one of the bulls we had brought with us and produce the animal as our secret weapon. But by the time I had brought the animal to the willow thicket, ready to drive it into the open, our forces were about to gain an even more spectacular advantage.
Our men were fleeing back along the bank of one of the small rivers leading up from the strand. Later they claimed that a second band of Skraelings had emerged from the forest and was blocking their line of retreat towards the settlement, though this was a fabrication. The real problem was that our men had no leadership or cohesion. Once again the Icelanders and Greenlanders were behaving as though they were complete strangers to one another, and neither group showed any sign of helping the other. In their panic-stricken haste men were tripping over and picking themselves up, then running onward and bumping into one another as they glanced over their shoulders to see if any more of the Skraeling darts were on their way, or if the Skraelings were pressing home the attack. At this point, when it seemed that our forces were beaten, we were saved by a berserk.
The term berserk has now such common currency that it is known to nations far beyond the Norse world. All agree that the word describes someone so brimming with fighting rage that he performs extraordinary deeds on the battlefield with no regard for his own safety. Some say that in his fury the berserker howls like a wolf before he attacks, others that he foams at the mouth and bites the rim of his shield, glares at his foe, snarls and shakes before he strikes. A true berserk scorns any notion of armour or self-protection and wears only a bearskin shirt as a mark of his role. Sometimes he wears no shirt at all and goes half-naked into battle. This I have heard, and much more besides, but I have never heard tell of what appeared that day as our men fought the Skraelings – a female berserk.
Our situation was desperate. Our ill-disciplined men were degenerating into a worse rabble. A few of them had turned to skirmish with individual Skraelings, while others were scrambling along the river bank, fleeing ignominiously. One or two were shouting for help, or standing open-mouthed and apparently shocked by the reality of hand-to-hand fighting. It was shameful.
Just at that moment the gate of the settlement palisade banged open, and out rushed a frightful figure. It was Freydis. She had been watching the rout and was appalled by the cowardice of our men. She was in a fury. She came running full tilt down the slope towards the battle, roaring with anger and cursing our men as cowards and poltroons. She made an awesome sight, with her massive bulk, thick legs like tree trunks pounding the ground, red-faced, sweaty and her hair streaming behind her. She was wearing a woman’s underdress, a long loose shift, but had discarded her overmantle so as to be able to run more swiftly, and now the undershift flapped around her. She thundered down the slope like an avenging heavyweight Valkyrie and, coming on one of the Norsemen who was standing futilely, she gave him a hefty blow with her meaty arm, which sent him flying, and at the same time snatched the short sword from his hand. She was in a blinding rage, more with her own men than with the Skraelings, many of whom had stopped and turned to look in shocked amazement at this huge, blonde woman raging with obscenities. Freydis was incandescent with anger, her eyes rolling. ‘Fight like men, you bastards!’ she bellowed at our shamefaced settlers. ‘Get a grip on yourselves, and go for them!’ To emphasise her rage, to shame our men and work herself into an even greater frenzy, Freydis slipped aside her shift, pulled out one of her massive breasts and gave it a great stinging slap with the flat of her sword. ‘Come on!’ she screamed to her followers. ‘A woman could do better.’ And she flung herself at the nearest Skraeling and slashed at him with the weapon. The wretched man, half her size and strength, put up his spear shaft to ward off the blow, but Freydis’s sword chopped through the timber cleanly and dealt him such a terrific blow on his neck that he crumpled up instantly. Freydis then swung round and began lumbering at full speed at the next Skraeling. Within seconds the invaders broke and ran back towards their canoes. They had never seen anything like this, and neither had our men. Puffing and panting, Freydis churned along the beach, taking wild swipes at the backs of the departing Skraeling, who did not even attempt to turn and throw darts at her. Our attackers were utterly nonplussed, and they left a panting Freydis standing in the shallows, her loose shift soaked at the hem, great patches of sweat staining her armpits, and splashes of Skraeling blood across her chest.
It was the last time we saw the Skraelings. They left seven of their number dead on the beach, and when we examined them I found that they were not like the healer I had met in the branch shelter in the woods. These Skraelings who had attacked us were shorter in stature, broader, and their faces were generally flatter and more round than the man I had met. They also smelled of fish and wore clothes more suited to the sea than the forest – long sealskin jerkins and heavy leggings. We stripped their bodies of any useful items – including some finely worked spearheads of bone, then carried their bodies to the top of a nearby cliff and threw them into the tide. Our own dead – there were three of them – were buried with little ceremony in shallow graves scraped out of the thin soil.
Our victory, if such an inglorious encounter deserves the name, made the resentment within our camp even worse. Icelanders and Greenlanders heaped blame on one another for being cowards, for failing to come to help, for turning and running instead of making a stand and fighting. No one dared look Freydis in the face, and people slunk about the settlement looking thoroughly ashamed. To make matters worse, winter came on us within a few days and so swiftly that we were caught unprepared. One morning the weather was crisp and bright, but by afternoon it began to rain, and the rain soon turned to sleet, and the following morning we woke up to find a heavy covering of snow on the ground. We managed to get the cattle rounded up and put into the sheds, but we knew that if the winter proved to be long and hard we had not gathered sufficient hay to feed the cattle through to springtime. And the cattle would not be the only ones to suffer. The Icelanders had spent so much time on the construction of their new longhouses during the summer months that they had not been able to catch and dry enough fish for a winter reserve or save a surplus of sour milk and cheese. Their winter rations were very meagre, and when they suggested to Thorvard and the Greenlanders that they should share their food supplies, they were brusquely told that there was not enough to go round. They would have to fend for themselves.
That winter did prove to be exceptionally long and bitter, and in the depths of it we were hardly able to stir from our longhouses for the deep snow, ice and bitter cold outside. It was the most miserable episode of our entire Vinland experience. In the longhouse of the Greenlanders, where I lived, life was hard. Our daily intake of food was quickly reduced to tiny portions of gruel with a handful of dried nuts which we had gathered in the autumn, and perhaps a few flakes of dried fish as we huddled around the central fire pit, nursing the embers of our small stock of firewood. All our cattle were dead by midwinter. We were feeding them such short rations that they never g
ave any milk anyhow, and we killed them when the fodder ran out entirely, though by then they were so scrawny that there was hardly any flesh on their bones. I missed my two mentors, Tyrkir and Thorvall. Before, in Vinland, they had been on hand to help pass the long dark hours with their tales of the Old Gods or instructing me in the Elder Lore. Now, with both men gone, I was reduced to empty daydreaming, turning over in my mind the tales they had told and trying to apply them to my own circumstances. It was at this time, in the depths of uncommonly harsh Vinland winter, that I first began to pray to Odinn, making silent prayers partly for my own solace, and partly in the hopes that he would come to help, to make the winter pass away, to reduce the pangs of hunger. I made sacrifices too. From my tiny ration of food, I would set aside a few dried nuts, a shred of meat, and when no one was looking I would hide them in a crevice in the longhouse wall. They were my offerings to Odinn, and if the mice and rats came and ate them, then – as I told myself – they were either Odinn in disguise or at least his ravens, Hugin and Munin, who would report back that I had made my proper obedience.
If our lives were pinched in the longhouse of the Greenlanders, the conditions in the two houses occupied by the Icelanders were far, far worse. Two of their men had received crippling wounds in the Skraeling attack, and while in summertime they might have been able to recover from their injuries with adequate food and warm sunshine, they failed to survive the fetid gloom of their longhouses. They lay wrapped in their lice-ridden clothes and with almost nothing to eat until they died a lingering and famished death. Theirs were not the only Icelandic deaths that winter. One of the longhouses was infected with some sort of coughing sickness which killed three of the settlers, and then a child, driven to desperation by hunger, wandered out into the black winter night and was found a few paces from the entrance next morning, frozen to death. A malignant silence settled over the three longhouses, which became no more than three long humps in the snow. For days on end nothing stirred.
Our longhouse was the most westerly of the three, and only occasionally did someone venture outside and walk through the thick snow to visit our immediate neighbours. For two months no one at all from our longhouse went as far as the second of the Icelandic houses, and when someone did – it was Thorvard, Freydis’s husband – he found the door was banked up with snow as if no one had emerged for days. When he levered open the door and went inside, he found the place was a mortuary. A third of the people were dead of cold and hunger, and the survivors looked no more than bundles of rags, scarcely able to raise themselves from where they lay on the side benches.
There was more bad news when one of our own men came back from the beach, where we had stored the two knorrs for the winter. At the time of the first, unexpected snow we had dragged the two vessels on rollers up above the high-tide line, propped them up on wooden baulks, and heaped banks of shingle around them as a protection from the blizzards. Then we covered them with tents of wadmal. But a winter gale had stripped away the covers from the elderly vessel that Leif had loaned us, and snow had filled her. A false spring day with its sudden thaw had melted the snow to water, which filled the bilge. That same evening a sudden drop in temperature turned the water into ice, which expanded and split the garboard plank, the key plank which ran the length of her keel. When our carpenter tried to mend the long and dangerous crack he found that the bottom of our ship was entirely rotten. Every time he tried to replace a section of plank, the adjacent area of hull crumbled away. The carpenter was a grouchy and bad-tempered man at the best of times, and now he reported to Thorvard that he refused to waste his time trying to make the decayed old vessel seaworthy.
By that stage, I think, Freydis had already made up her mind that the colony was a failure and that we would have to evacuate Leif’s cabins yet again. But she kept the idea to herself and, with typical guile, prepared for the evacuation without alerting anyone else. Her immediate problem was the damage to our knorr. We needed a vessel to carry us away from Vinland and our ancient and rickety knorr was no longer seaworthy. One possible solution was for all the settlers, both Icelanders and Greenlanders, to evacuate the colony by cramming aboard the Icelanders’ large, newer vessel. But given the history of bad blood between the two groups it was very unlikely that the Icelanders would agree to this arrangement. Alternatively the Icelanders might lend us their vessel for the evacuation if we promised to send the ship back to them once we had safely arrived in Greenland. Though why the Icelanders should trust us to do this was an open question. And even if the Icelanders were so generous, Freydis knew that there was a more acute problem to confront: if the Icelanders stayed behind in Vinland and somehow managed to make a success of the venture, then by customary law the possession and ownership of the entire settlement would pass away from the Erikssons and transfer to Helgi and Finnbogi and their heirs. They would no longer be Leif’s cabins, but Helgi and Finnbogi’s cabins, and this was a humiliation which Freydis, the daughter of Erik the Red, could not bear.
Her solution to the dilemma was as artful as it was demonic. It depended on that fatal Norse belief in personal honour.
Very soon after the spring thaw, a real one this time, she walked over to visit the nearest Icelandic longhouse. It was early in the morning, at first light, and I saw her go because I had slipped out of the longhouse to get some badly needed fresh air after a fetid night spent among the snoring Greenlanders. I was loitering near one of the empty store sheds. I always tried to stay well clear of Freydis, so when I saw her I stepped behind the shed until she walked past. I watched her push open the door of the Icelanders’ longhouse and go inside. When she reappeared she was accompanied by Finnbogi, who was wearing a heavy coat to keep out the cold. The two were intending to walk in my direction, and once again I shrank back from view. They halted, less than ten paces away, and I heard Freydis say, ‘I’ve had enough of Vinland. I’ve made up my mind that my people should leave the colony and return home. For that I need to buy your knorr because our vessel is no longer fit for the journey to Greenland. We’ll sail away from here, and if you, Helgi and your people want to stay on, then the settlement is yours.’
Finnbogi must have been taken by surprise, for there was a long pause and then he answered that he had no objection to her proposal but would first have to check it with his brother. I heard the soft crunch of his footsteps receding on the slushy snow as he returned to the Icelanders’ house. I waited to give Freydis time to get back to our own longhouse, and then scuttled there as fast as I could, knowing instinctively that something was very wrong. It was not my second sight which warned me. It was my long experience of Freydis. Speaking to Finnbogi, her voice had carried that hint of treachery and manipulation that had preceded the unpleasant tricks she had inflicted on me back in Brattahlid in my father’s house. That tone of deceit convinced me that Freydis was planning something unpleasant. Quite how foul her plan was soon became apparent.
I got into the longhouse just in time to hear Freydis deliberately provoke her weak-willed husband Thorvard into losing his temper. That was another of Freydis’s techniques I recognised. Thorvard must still have been in bed when Freydis returned to the longhouse and climbed in beside him, for he kept repeating his question. ‘Where have you been? Where have you been? You have got cold, wet feet, and the hem of your shift is damp, so you must have been outside.’ At first Freydis refused to answer. Then finally, when Thorvard was truly irritated with her grudging silence, she said that she had been to see Finnbogi and his brother to ask them for the sale or loan of their knorr.
‘They refused my request outright,’ she said. ‘They laughed in my face, and then insulted me. They said I was becoming more like a man every day, and that you, not I, should have come to discuss the matter with them. Finnbogi even went so far as to hit me, knocking me to the ground.’
Thorvard began to bluster. He had a good mind to go out and give the brothers a good thrashing, he said. Freydis pounced on his bravado. ‘If you were more than half a man,’ s
he retorted scathingly, ‘you would do more than just lie in bed threatening the two ruffians who have humiliated me. A real man would go off and avenge my honour. But you, you little worm, you are such a coward that you will do nothing. I know you and your fainthearted ways, and so too do half the people in Brattahlid. When we get home, I’m going to divorce you on the grounds of cowardice, and there’s no one who would not sympathise with me.’
As usual, my aunt knew how to twist the knife. Cowardice is almost the worst and most shameful ground for summary divorce in Norse society, exceeded only by homosexual acts. Her goading was more than Thorvard could bear. He leapt out of bed, threw on his clothes and grabbed an axe and a sword. Moments later, with Freydis at his heels and calling on the other Greenlanders to follow their leader, Thorvard was slipping and slithering along the muddy path to the Icelanders’ longhouse. He slammed his way into the building, ran across to where Helgi was sitting on his bed, sleepily thinking over Freydis’s proposal to buy the knorr, and with a great swipe he sank his axe into Helgi’s chest, killing him. Within moments a massacre was in progress. More and more of the Greenlanders appeared, brandishing their weapons and hacking and stabbing at the unfortunate Icelanders, who were taken by surprise. There were curses and shouts as the Icelanders rolled off their sleeping benches and scrabbled to find their weapons and defend themselves. But they were at too much of a disadvantage. Most of them were killed while they were sleepy or unarmed.
