Meadowland Tom Holt

by Meadowland (lit)

  While they were all kids, of course, there was Thorvald in the middle to keep the peace; and Thorvald was the quiet, easygoing one, had to be or else there'd have been bloodshed. But when Thorvald didn't come back from Meadowland and there was just Leif and Thorstein left, things started to get a bit fraught. Of course, it didn't help that Leif had got the farm and Thorstein had got the girl. Far worse, they had their sister Freydis unmarried and still at home, and she had the knack of making things just that little bit worse that makes all the difference.

  It all caught fire one night at dinner. Leif had been out all day with us, turning the hay We'd cut it during a dry spell in a wet summer, and before we could get it stacked and covered, the rain started again, so it was lying out in the wet, spoiling. Couldn't be helped, but Leif seemed to think it was somehow his fault, for not reading the weather better. Thorstein hadn't said a word, but he didn't really need to; Leif just assumed that Thorstein was looking down his nose at him, thinking he wouldn't have screwed up like that if he'd been the farmer at Brattahlid instead of Leif. Probably Thorstein was thinking that way; but he'd stayed home all clay while Leif was out in the meadows. Actually, he'd been working hard, shoring up the wall of the long barn where it'd been weakened by the damp; if he hadn't noticed there was something wrong and spent all day fixing it, we'd have had the barn collapse and then we'd have been really screwed. But Thorstein didn't think to tell Leif what he'd done, he expected Leif to notice it himself and thank him. Leif, meanwhile, reckoned Thorstein had stayed home because he was lazy, and because he'd washed his hands of the haymaking because Leif had cut too early

  So you had Leif and Thorstein sitting up on the top table not saying a word all evening; and Freydis yapping away in a loud voice about how bad it'd be if the hay spoiled, because nobody else had any to spare, and what a pity it'd be if they had to slaughter all the young stock for want of fodder. Then Gudrid tried to make things nice between the brothers, but that didn't go right at all: she started telling Leif how hard Thorstein had been working on the barn wall, and Leif took that as a personal criticism, because he hadn't noticed it as well as cutting the hay too early, and Thorstein got angry with Gudrid for telling Leif about the wall, and Leif got angry with Thorstein for shouting at Gudrid; and before long, the rest of us were sitting there looking down at our feet and hoping it wasn't going to come to fighting, because whose side were we meant to be on? It was like that a lot of the time at Brattahlid, mind you, but not usually as out in the open.

  Then Thorstein started up a completely new line of attack, and it caught Leif by surprise. It was a bloody shame, Thorstein said, that Leif should've left their poor brother's body to rot in Meadowland, in unconsecrated ground, putting his eternal soul at risk, when anyone with a shred of decent feeling would've gone out there and brought him home. Particularly, Thorstein went on, since Leif knew the place so well, even had houses over there to stay in. Somehow he made it sound like Leif refusing to give Thorvald the houses - you remember, he only lent him Leif's Booths, he wouldn't give him them - had been the real reason why everything had gone wrong at the end and Thorvald had died. Of course, that was complete bullshit; but Thorstein hadn't said it out straight, he'd only implied it, so Leif couldn't very well defend himself, all he could do was let the accusation lie. Anyway, the long and short of it was that Thorstein worked himself up into a real state, while Leif just sat there getting icier and icier, and the end of it was Thorstein declaring that if nobody else was prepared to bring Thorvald home, he'd have to do it. Leif looked at him hard and silent for quite a long time, and then said, fine, you do that; and then he got up and went to bed.

  Well, in most places I've been, you'd have expected that next morning the brothers'd have made it up, blamed it all on the booze, and that would've been that. No chance. First thing, when Leif came out of the back room into the hail, Thorstein was waiting for him. All polite and formal, he asked him if he could borrow the ship and some of the men for his trip to Meadowland. Leif never batted an eye; help yourself, he said, when were you planning on leaving? Thorstein said, as soon as possible, and I don't think they spoke to each other again until the ship was ready to launch.

  Now I'm only too glad to admit that I'm not the brightest man who ever lived; but as soon as I heard that, I made a pretty sensible decision. Nothing on Earth, I decided, was going to get me on that ship again; not money or duty or threats, nothing. They could tie me up in a sack while I was asleep and carry me on board, but I'd jump over the side before we were clear of Eiriksfjord. You don't need me to tell you why, not if you've been listening to a word I've said. As far as I was concerned, my seafaring career was over, and as for Meadowland, I never wanted to see it ever again. Even when Eyvind suddenly made up his mind he was going (and you could've knocked me down with a cobweb when I heard), I never wavered, not one little bit. And if Thorstein tried to pressure me into going, I'd climb up on the roof, jump off and bust my leg. You never came across such a determined man in all your life.

  So, two days before the ship's due to sail, Thorstein comes up to me in the barn, where I'm carrying hay down to the sheds. 'You haven't come to see me yet about joining my crew,' he says.

  'That's right,' I tell him. 'Look, no offence, but I'm not going. Nothing personal, but I've had enough of that ship, and Meadowland too. I wish you all the best, of course, but my mind's made up.'

  Thorstein rubbed his eye, like he'd got a bit of dust in it.

  'That's a pity,' he said. 'You know the ship and the run inside out. You'd be an asset.'

  'Very kind of you,' I said firmly, 'but I've made up my mind.'

  'I see.' He looked away, but stayed where he was. 'I tell you what,' he said. 'If you come with us this time, I'll give you a farm of your own.

  You know how it is when you get that sinking, oh-shit feeling in your stomach, when you know something really bad's about to happen; like, the tree you're cutting down starts creaking before you expected it to, and there's no time to look round, your only chance is to run for it and hope you can sprint the length of the tree before it comes down and flattens you.

  'When you say a farm of my own,' I said quietly, 'what exactly do you-?'

  'I mean,' Thorstein said, 'I'll give you a house, over in the Western Settlement, and three hundred acres of good grazing; I'll throw in six cows, a dozen sheep and a bull-calf, and enough flour and hay to see you over winter. In case you're wondering, it's part of my share of what I inherited from Thorvald. I couldn't think of a better use to put it to than helping fetch him home.'

  My head was starting to hurt. 'Is there any water with it?' I asked him

  He nodded. 'River runs all the way down the southern boundary,' he said. 'And if I remember right, there's a well in the yard and another in your north top field. Water won't be a problem at all.'

  I gave him a long, hard look. 'Don't get me wrong,' I said, 'but that's a hell of a price to pay just so I'll tag along. I mean, it's not like there's anything I can actually do, apart from coiling and uncoiling rope.

  'I'll be the judge of that,' he said. 'And remember, we re only going there to pick up my brother's body, nothing more. With a bit of luck, we could be there and back in one season, before the ice starts to form; so no having to spend another winter at Leif's Booths. It won't be a big party, I'm taking twenty instead of thirty-five, so it won't be all hellish cramped on the ship.'

  I looked at him again. 'My own farm,' I said.

  'That's right,' he said, grinning at me. 'You could call it Karisvatn, after the lake.'

  'There's a lake?'

  'Didn't I mention the lake?' Bastard knew he'd got me then. 'Oh yes, whopping great big lake, and in the season it's completely covered with ducks and geese. All you'd need to do is sit in your porch and throw a stone, and there's dinner.'

  I suppose some bugger must've told him, about me wanting my very own lake. And the Western Settlement wasn't so bad, a bit chilly in winter maybe but good land, not so crowded as the eastern re
gion.

  'Thanks,' I said, 'but no. I made my decision, and I'm sticking to it.'

  He sighed. 'That's a great shame,' he said. 'Eyvind'll be disappointed, too. See, I'm giving him the land on the other side of the lake, so you'd have been neighbours.'

  You can only stand so much. The one thing that'd been bothering me was the thought of leaving my oldest and best mate behind at Brattahlid when I moved out west. But if Eyvind was going to be right next to me, the other side of my lake-

  'All right,' I said.

  Well, it's different, isn't it, doing things for other people rather than yourself. As I lay in bed that night, listening to everybody else snoring, I found myself thinking, I don't really need the whole lake; maybe Eyvind and I can sort of share it between us; he can have the side nearest his place, and I'll have the other half - assuming, of course, that the ducks and the geese don't all hang around on his side.

  Thorstein smiled, thanked me and pushed off, leaving me with the hay and my own long thoughts. I was still thinking those thoughts when it came time to get our few personal bits and pieces on board, then cast off and go. They were still just as long, but now at least I didn't have the option of doing as they told me.

  Leif had come down to see Thorstein off, like I told you, they didn't exchange a word all the time Thorstein had been doing up the ship. Now he stood on the beach looking all solemn, and he'd brought along a going-away present for his brother, all parcelled up in a bundle of old wool offcuts. 'I'd like you to have this,' he said. 'It used to belong to Dad.'

  Thorstein frowned and pulled off the bits of rags. It was a sword; not just any sword, either, but the one that hung off the wall right next to where Leif sat in the hall. You've got to admire how he went about it; because a sword's a real aristocratic gift, like kings give to their favourite earls. Also, Leif had absolutely no use for it, so his wonderful gesture hadn't actually cost him anything. But the real idea behind it was to play on Thorstein's nerves just a little bit. Give a man a sword, you're telling him he's probably going to get mixed up in fighting sooner or later; and the one thing that'd been preying on Thorstein's mind about the trip was the fear of running into the leather-boat people while he was over there. Like I said, Leif had a flair for that sort of thing.

  'Now hang on,' I interrupted. 'I think you're being a bit too cynical about this sword business. Now I don't know very much about your people or the North, but it seems to me that giving your brother your father's sword has got to be a pretty significant gesture of reconciliation. I mean, don't you people make a great fuss about the family sword? You hand them down from generation to generation, or you bury them with your great heroes. This is a big deal, right?'

  Kari smirked at me. 'You're right, of course,' he said. 'And completely wrong at the same time, again of course. Yes, there are old swords that've been in families for a very long time, particularly the big, rich families in Norway and Denmark and Sweden, kings and earls and so on. But that's not being sentimental; back in the good old days, they made them the hard way, by twisting and folding and welding. Then, about five generations ago, traders started fetching home cheap German swords by the barrelful, made from solid steel rather than the old way Nobody could be bothered making folded swords any more, when you could buy one almost as good for a third of the price, so the Northern smiths got out of the sword business. But the German swords aren't really up to the same standard, or at least that's what the rich farmers reckon, and they're the only ones who can afford to own the things. And as for what you said about Leif- well, yes, the sword he gave Thorstein had belonged to Red Eirik, but I don't imagine he ever pulled it out of its scabbard. He was a regular killer, Eirik, but he did his killing with a hand-axe, same as everybody else, and he did it from behind or when the bloke was tying his bootlace or looking the other way, because he may've been a vicious bugger but he wasn't an idiot. No, Eirik got hold of that sword because a Danish trader stayed the winter at Brattahlid, but he buggered off in the middle of the night without paying for his board and lodging; but in the dark, he left one of his bundles of stock behind - twelve ells of foreign coloured cloth, a walrus-ivory chess set and that sword. Naturally, Eirik kept the stuff as part settlement of the trader's bill. He only hung the sword on the wall because he reckoned it gave the place a touch of class.'

  Anyhow (Kari went on) we set sail from Eiriksfjord on a bright, warm summer morning. The biggest surprise, as far as I was concerned, was that Thorstein insisted on dragging his wife along - you remember, Gudrid, the woman from the shipwreck that Leif was so keen on. My guess is, he didn't want to leave her behind at Brattahlid, and I think he may have had a point there. She didn't seem particularly happy to be on the trip, but she soon proved she was perfectly at home on a ship. In fact, she coped rather better than most of us, as it turned out.

  We had a really smooth, fast run of it, right up to the point where we caught sight of Leif's Booths in the distance. Then the weather changed, just a little bit.

  First we got caught in a right bastard of a gale. Ironically, it was the same wind we'd ridden on each of our return journeys from Meadowland, and I've told you already how fast it carried us along. This time, though, made the other times look like a gentle sneeze. How we didn't capsize I don't know. There wasn't anything we could do except ride it out and hope we stayed afloat and in one piece. It carried us two days and one night; on the second evening it stopped dead, and then the fog came down. It was bad. You could shut your eyes and not notice any difference in the light.

  Don't ask me how long we sat in that bloody fog, with no wind and not a clue about where we were. It was a long wait until the fog lifted; and when it did, it was still too hazy to get a fix by the sun, let alone by the stars at night. Long and short of it was, we were lost. All we knew was, we were somewhere in the sea between Meadowland and Greenland, which was a fat lot of use. So Thorstein took his best guess, just before the fog closed in again. A bit of a wind came up after we'd been there three or four days. Thorstein reckoned it was north-west, so we followed it as best we could. Seemed, as they say, like a good idea at the time. When next the fog lifted, we were still none the wiser about where we were. Thorstein said, let's press on, we must be nearly there by now He was wrong, of course. We'd been plodding along for nine days or so when eventually the sun came out enough for Thorstein to hazard a guess about where we'd pitched up. The bad news was, we appeared to have been sailing round in a big circle.

  Things were starting to get a bit tense, mostly because the food had run out. Now really there's no excuse for starving to death in the middle of the sea, not so long as you've got a few fish-hooks, and spare rope you can unwind to make lines. But it's a bugger having to eat your fish raw because there's no charcoal. Water wasn't an issue, because it rained most nights, enough to fill half a dozen buckets.

  By now, we'd all had about as much as we could take. Tempers were starting to fray, and nobody had anything good to say about Thorstein's navigating. Actually, that was unfair, because nobody could've done much in that fog. Even with a bearing-dial you need to be able to see the sun. Also, we wouldn't have got lost to begin with if we hadn't been hit by that freak wind that blew us away from Leif's Booths. But the crew weren't in a mood to be reasonable. Quite a few of them were all for chucking Thorstein over the side; in fact, we'd probably have done it, except nobody else seemed to fancy the job of finding our way home. So instead we contented ourselves by giving Thorstein a hard time. He tried to bluster us down but that didn't get him very far, probably because we could tell he was scared. If you want to control a ship by making threats, you've got to make the men believe you'll carry them out. Once Thorstein realised he was a hair's breadth away from being knocked on the head and pitched into the sea, he went very quiet and sat huddled up next to the sternpost, which didn't help anything.

  Believe it or not, it was Gudrid who made us snap out of it. Someone'd got on her nerves with their constant whining and complaining, and out of the blue she w
ent for him; jumped up from where she'd been sitting, grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be one of the buckets we'd put out to catch rainwater, and gave the poor bastard such a scat round the head you could hear it right down the other end of the ship: a thick, chunky thumping noise, like driving in a fence post with an oak maul. Made me jump, I can tell you; I thought the ship had run aground or something. Anyhow, the whole ship was dead quiet for two or three heartbeats, and then someone laughed, and everybody else joined in, laughing and cheering. For some reason, that made Gudrid lose it completely; she started yelling and shrieking at us, called us all a load of stupid kids. 'It's all your fault she shouted. 'You've been on this route before, you're supposed to know the way.' Actually, that was overstating it, because out of the twenty of us only five, me and Eyvind included, had been on any of the previous Meadowland trips. But there's nothing like being yelled at by a woman to stop you in your tracks. I mean, if a man kicks up a fuss and starts calling you names, you can bash his face in and that somehow proves that you were right and he was wrong. Can't do that with women. You try and argue with them, and that's a bit like trying to swat bees with your hand; mostly they just dance out of the way, and if you do manage to connect, they just sting you anyway. Or you shut your face and try and keep a dignified silence, and of course that doesn't work either. So, she told us our fortunes loud and clear, and we just sat still and quiet, feeling embarrassed, so that when she stopped we were all so relieved we couldn't be bothered snarling at each other any more. I mean, there was a very long silence, and then we started talking to each other nice and friendly, as though nothing had happened.

  Finally the fog lifted for good, and we picked up a slow but steady wind, which we held for three days. The fourth morning, Thorstein woke us up, yelling and bawling: land, at last.

  Turned out we were back to Greenland, off the northern edge of the Western Settlement.