'He'd just got to the bit where they found you hiding in the charcoal barrel,' I said.
Kari looked blank. 'What charcoal barrel?'
Don't ask me why he told you that (Kari said). The truth is, Thorfinn kept on and on at me to join up, because he needed one of the old hands from the earlier trip, but nobody wanted anything to do with it. I told him to get lost, but he was one of those aggravating little men who won't take no for an answer. Then he told me he'd kidded Eyvind into going, so I gave in. I knew Eyvind'd expect me to go along if he was going. We've been around each other so long, he'd be lost without me.
Now I think about it, I can see where he's got that charcoal-barrel thing from. See, I wanted it to be a surprise for him, me joining up after I'd sworn blind I wasn't going to. So I snuck aboard the ship before everybody else and hid behind a big cask in the hold - behind it, mind you, not in it, there's a difference - and once we were under way I hopped out and said, 'Look, it's me!' or something of the sort, I don't remember what. Anyhow, he pulled a long face like he wasn't glad to see me, but that's just Eyvind mucking around. He always acts miserable when he's happy
Thinking about it, that was probably the easiest trip we had; at least, I can't remember very much about it, so it can't have been too bad. More luck than judgement, mind you, because Thorfinn was a pretty bloody awful navigator - God only knows how he'd managed to flit backwards and forwards from the East all those years without coming to harm. Hardly knew which way up to hold a bearing-dial. Luckily for us, we weren't on his ship. We were on Bjari Herjolfson's old tub, yet again, and we had Thorfinn's forecastle-man, Ohtar, as our skipper. He wasn't the sharpest arrow in the sheaf, but he got us there, and that's about all that needs to be said.
You want to know why I didn't like Thorfinn Scraps? I'll tell you. He was weak. Weak and ignorant, and they don't go together very well. Now Thorvald Eirikson was easygoing, but that's not the same as weak. Thorvald didn't stomp up and down the deck yelling all the time, but you wouldn't have answered him back, or not twice. Thorfinn Scraps was the sort of man who wouldn't make up his mind till he'd asked two or three people, and then he'd do something that was a bit of each idea but also a bit of his own, in other words a right mess, and it'd usually go wrong, as you'd expect. Scraps of ideas, you see, all bunged together like a poor man's stew He deserved his name, all right. Maybe you can get away with that sort of thing when you're plodding the same old trade-routes year after year with the same crew, and so everybody knows what they've got to do without having to be told. Now Thorfinn's crew were a good bunch, far better than he deserved. Search me why they put up with him. He owned the boat, I guess.
Anyhow, we made the Meadowland coast about a day's sail north of Leif's Booths, and turned south. It was funny seeing the place again. A lot of the men were on edge, looking out for the leather boats. Can't blame them for that, but it made me- nervous. The way I saw it, we'd spent a hell of a lot of time at Leif's Booths, on and off, without ever seeing another living soul; it was only when we went poking about north that we ran into the leather-boat people, so really there wasn't anything to be afraid of. But when you're not worried about something, and everybody else around you's pissing down their legs, it tends to make you really jumpy Great start.
Well, we reached the Booths next day and there they still were, which was good. Stood to reason, if the leather-boat people had really got it in for us they'd have wrecked the place, pulled the houses down and burned the timbers. Instead, apart from the grass getting long on the roofs, you'd never know we'd been away
We landed, and the first thing that clown Thorfinn does is go charging off up the beach, leaving the rest of us to pull the ships up, take out the tackle, all that. We've just about finished when Thorfinn comes back, looking dead worried.
'Are you sure this is the right place?' he says.
Eyvind says yes, he's pretty sure. Thorfinn scowls, like he doesn't really believe him. 'So where's all the fields of self-sown wheat?' he says. 'It should be just starting to green up at this time of year. I've got two dozen brand new scythe blades and ten flails in the hold.' Typical of the man.
He'd bungled the supplies, too; he'd fetched along every kind of useless tool you could think of, but bugger-all for us to eat, short of slaughtering the cattle we'd brought as breeding stock. But there's definitely such a thing as fool's luck, because the very next morning we woke up, and there on the beach was a beautiful stranded whale.
Rorqual, we call them; I don't know what the Greek word would be, assuming you get them down here in the warm waters. Anyhow, it was the biggest specimen I've ever seen. Seventy feet if it was an inch, and blubber two fingers thick-
'Excuse me,' I said. 'Do you mean to say you people actually eat those things?'
Kari stared at me as though I'd just spat in his wine. 'Of course we do,' he said. 'There's not much better eating than a fat whale steak; and it keeps practically for ever, if you can bring yourself to leave any
'Amazing,' I said.
'You bet,' he replied. 'Fantastic stroke of luck, when you get one just dumped on your doorstep, so to speak. Back home, though, it can be a problem; because as soon as word gets about that there's a whale, everybody from miles around comes running with their axes and buckets to get a slice, no matter whose land it's washed up on. And then you can bet there'll be a fight or two; regular pitched battles, sometimes. Then you get all the bad feeling, which leads to feuds, which leads to lawsuits and killings and God knows what else.'
'Over whale meat,' I said.
He nodded. 'Give folks something worth fighting over, what d'you expect?'
But this time (Kari went on) there was none of that; because there was just us, no neighbours wanting a share. Talk about luck. But to hear everybody talk, you'd think Thorfinn'd planned it all, maybe sent a message ahead to have it ready and waiting for him when he arrived, like a Greek gentleman's picnic. Truth is, if it hadn't been for the whale, we'd have been back in the old routine, spending all day fishing or grubbing around for the wild corn, and no time to spare for building sheds or putting up fences for all that livestock we'd brought with us.
But anyway; I wasn't complaining, because instead of mouldy porridge I was stuffing my face with prime whale, and who cares where it came from or how it got there? So that was all right; but precious little else was.
I'll tell you a funny thing, though. After we'd finished up the whale, and we were rolling up the last of the blubber in the skin, guess what we found underneath, squashed into the sand: Thorvald Eirikson's canopy stuts. You remember I told you, Thorvald had slung them overboard when we'd made landfall and they'd sunk like stones. Well, there they were, a bit rotten and wormy, but I knew they were his because he'd had THORVALD cut into them in masons letters up one side. I was going to tell Thorfinn about it -he'd been moaning on the way over because he'd forgotten to bring any canopy struts of his own - but it slipped my mind, what with one thing and another, and by the time I remembered some fool had split them up and used them for guy-rope pegs.
Soon as the fencing was done, Thorfinn orders us to turn the stock out. Me, I could see straight off, the grass was very green and lush, and the animals'd been on hay and barley all the way from Greenland. Now any boy'll tell you, don't let a young calf stuff itself full of fat new grass or first thing you know, it'll scour and die. But Thorfinn was lucky yet again, he got away with it. The calves turned a bit funny for a while, kicking and bucking and prancing about - it'd have been a right laugh if we hadn't been expecting them to keel over and die at any moment - but they calmed down eventually and then they were fine, except they'd gone a bit wild and we had a hell of a job handling them sometimes.
But while they were still doing all that frisking about, Thorfinn was watching them with a huge grin on his face, saying it was obvious they liked it here and were going to be happy Bloody merchant, see, hadn't got a clue about livestock. I wanted to tell him, they're skipping around like that because they've got really bad
guts-ache; but I didn't say anything. He wouldn't have listened.
First job on the list, once we'd unloaded the ship and got everything into store and under cover, was building sheds for the animals. No problem about that, with all the timber you could ever possibly want just a few hundred yards up the slope. So we got axes - Thorfinn had brought three dozen, twelve per ship; brand spanking new, with iron heads and twisted-steel edges, must've cost him a fortune - and we spent three days just felling and trimming, splitting the logs down into rails, and dragging them down the hill. It's hard work cutting lumber, but after being cooped up on the ships, even though we'd had a reasonable crossing, we didn't mind; it was good to be able to stretch our backs and loosen up. Evenings, we sat in the long liouse, with a bloody good fire of birch logs, beer we'd fetched from home and all the whale you could eat. Instead of arranging the seating the usual way, with a high table for the bosses and a long table for the rest, Thorfinn just had one table - planks on trestles, really - and he and Gudrid sat in the middle with the rest of us sitting wherever we liked, ever so informal and relaxed. That was his style, and a lot of the men thought it was a good thing. Not me. Far as I was concerned, it was weakness - he knew he didn't have the strength of mind to be respected, so he wanted to be liked, to be our friend. That's fine, but you don't take orders from your friends. A leader's a man who says, Do this, because I say so, or else; so you do it, even if you think it's stupid or downright dangerous, and that's your side of the bargain kept. If the leader gets his side wrong, then it's between him and Odin, or our Heavenly Father or whoever it is who decides who wins the victory and who gets slaughtered. If you're in charge and you're basically saying, It's not my decision, I'm just going by what everybody else wants, then it stands to reason, our Heavenly Father won't know what to think, because let's say half the men in the group deserve the victory and the other half don't. Screws everything up, and puts the blame on the little people who should only be asked to carry out their side. No good ever comes of it, either up North or down here.
Anyway We got the pens built, and after that we raised sheds and byres and a barn. The women were busy with the first brew of beer. Thorfinn had a couple of the men who were good with tools make him a plough, because he reckoned both wheat and barley would grow there, no problem at all. We were getting a decent yield of milk from the cows, the fowls were laying, the ice was slow coming so we carried on taking the boats out fishing much longer than we'd expected. In other words, we all just got on with ordinary everyday things, the sort of stuff you don't think twice about, like when you want to walk you don't issue separate orders to each joint and each toe for each stage of the operation, you just get on with it. That was fine, it was a good time, and autumn melted away into winter before we realised how the time was getting on. But that was all right, too. What with cheese and dried fish and the remains of the whale, not to mention the beer, which came out pretty good, we'd got enough in hand to see us through pretty well: fuel wasn't an issue; the house was warm and weathertight and big enough that we could go to sleep without someone's toes in our ears. It wasn't a whole lot different from being in Greenland, except in some respects it was better. Everyone was getting along just fine; no feuds, no personality clashes or fallings-out or any of that stuff. Really, you couldn't complain. Best of all, of course, we hadn't seen or heard anything of the leather-boat people, which'd been the one thing nobody ever mentioned and everybody kept thinking about.
Really though, you had to laugh. That clown Thorfinn'd fetched along a whole load of mail shirts. I heard the story about them from one of his men; they'd come in the first place out of a big burial mound somewhere on the Danish-Swedish border, there'd been some horrible battle and at the end of it they'd slung all the dead in a ditch and covered them in earth and stones. Some time later, a bunch of the local lads went out there with mattocks and shovels, broke the mound open and salvaged all the gear. These mail shirts - well, some of them were in a bit of a state, else their owners wouldn't have wanted burying; but the Danish lads got some wire and patched them up, and soaked off the rust in salt and vinegar, so they looked pretty good. Then they sold them cheap, as salvage, to some trader or other. He sails to Norway tries to offload these mail shirts, but the buyers take one look at them and they can see they've been in the ground a bit too long, because the rings've got a bit thin where the Danish lads soaked off all the rust. Then Thorfinn comes along, and the trader figures him out for what he is, an idiot. So, one night at the earl's house, where all the foreigner traders are sitting round drinking with the earl's men, he challenges our Thorfinn to a game of chess. Thorfinn doesn't mind that, he fancies himself as a chess player; they play the game, the trader loses on purpose. Right, he says to Thorfinn, for the next game let's make it interesting: your two hundred ells of Icelandic striped cloth against my three dozen mail shirts.
Well, if the shirts'd been any good, that'd have been a bloody stupid bet; as it was, it was rather more than they were worth, and a sight more than he'd given the Danes. Anybody with half a brain would've seen there was something wrong, but Thorfinn rubs his podgy little hands together and says, Right, let's do that. The trader plays, and once again he loses on purpose.
Of course, everybody's really impressed; here's a man who backs himself at these apparently crazy odds, then loses, then gets up from the table and yawns like he really doesn't care, thanks the other man for an interesting game and says he'll have his men bring the shirts over to Thorfinn's ship in the morning. Just the sort of showing-off that goes down a treat with your landed gentry out East, where they all like to play the big, brave viking; and this earl's no exception. He calls the trader over; the way you handled losing that game, he says, was really classy; most men'd be in tears gambling away a fortune like that, but you just shrugged it off like it doesn't matter. I'd like to give you a present, the earl says, worthy of your honour and breeding. So what does the earl do but pull this huge gold bracelet off his arm and hand it to the trader, plus a fine brooch with jewels in it, and a big load of flour, and a sword, and God only knows what else. So the trader goes away with all this lovely loot, the earl's made himself look good in the eyes of all his chums for his princely munificence, while our Thorfinn wets himself with joy because he's got three dozen mail shirts for nothing.
Anyhow; Thorfinn's got these things, and for the first week or so he puts one on every morning, just in case the leather-boat people attack, and he waddles round the place in it, joining in all the work to show what a good man he is, felling trees and hauling lumber and all the rest of it. But even a rusted-out mail shirt is heavy, especially round the shoulders and neck, and you've got to wear a thick wool shirt under it, else it chafes your skin raw, so it gets pretty warm in there; so he's sweating like a pig and staggering around the place, and because he's short the stupid thing comes right down below his knees anyway Naturally people start sniggering, but that means he daren't just take the shirt off, else he'll lose face; so he's stuck in it. What with the damp and the sea air and the sweat, the shirt's getting all red with rust and stinky so every night he's got to dump it in a barrel of sand and roll it up and down the barn to polish it up- Well, eventually he's had enough, and one morning he comes out to go to work with the rest of us, and the mail shirt's not there; everybody stops and stares, and a few of the men grin and maybe start whispering, but of course Thorfinn's suddenly blind and deaf, and that was the end of that. But you can see what I mean when I said Thorfinn was a fool, with fool's luck. He always had this knack of getting things wrong - not so wrong that the ship sank or everybody died, but just wrong enough to spoil his good fortune and take the shine off everything.
Even so, that was a good winter: far and away the best winter I'd spent in Meadowland, though that's not saying a lot. When spring came and we were able to go out and about again, there was something, I don't know, different about everything. Let's see; it'd be completely wrong to say we were starting to think of Leif's Booths as home, it wasn't l
ike that at all. Home - well, I guess you could say that none of us were the home sort. Thorfinn, for example. Presumably he was from some place originally in Norway; but I never heard him talk about it, and from what his men said, he'd been moving around for years and years, trading and so forth - didn't even spend winter in the same place twice if he could help it. His crew'd stuck with him because they were that way too, they had nowhere to go back to, so as far as they were concerned home was people rather than places. As for Eyvind and me; we'd been raised in Iceland, couldn't wait to leave Drepstokk to go with Bjarni Herjolfson; we'd ended up at Brattahlid because we'd joined up with Leif Eirikson, and then he decided his wandering days were over, so we were stranded, like that poor sod of a whale. So what did we all do, our funny collection of drifters? We sailed off the edge of the world to Meadowland, with our ships full of useful and practical things, to make new lives for ourselves in the wide-open country. Dreams, dreams - to my mind, Meadowland wasn't my shining future beckoning to me across the sunset, it was more like a bit of bramble caught in my trouser leg, puffing at me and digging in tighter the more I tried to pull away So no, we weren't starting to see Meadowland as where we belonged. It was more like we'd been washed up there after a horrible storm, and now it was daybreak and the wind and rain'd died off, and sure we were stuck there but at least it was turning out fine.
Spring's when Meadowland's at its best; it's actually not so bad then, particularly if you like flowers and stuff, though they don't do a lot for me personally It helps, of course, if there's plenty to do. Work's a bugger, but it does take your mind off other things. Lambing came on, and turned out pretty well. The spring pasture suited our Greenland cows; poor bloody animals, they were used to grass like short green wire, so the lush, fat stuff was a real treat for them, and pretty soon we had as much milk as we could drink and loads left over for butter and cheese. It's a sad reflection on people, but how they feel depends an awful lot on what they're getting to eat. Dried fish and a few leeks pulled out of the roof-turf will keep you alive when the snow's deep, but it makes you miserable. Cheese and eggs and a spit-roast duck now and again, and you don't mind waking up in the morning so much. It's as simple as that, really
Meadowland Tom Holt Page 23
