Meadowland Tom Holt

by Meadowland (lit)

  Eyvind glared at him. 'Why?'

  'Because you're getting it all wrong; Kari said. 'First, we weren't on the roof, that was the day before. You've forgotten. When it all happened, we were in the yard, scraping down. And it wasn't the two of them, it was just Starkad.'

  Eyvind was silent for a moment or so. Then he frowned. 'You're right,' he said. 'Which is bloody odd, because I have nightmares about that, but in my dream we're up on the roof, and it's both of them, not just Starkad. But yes, what you said is how it actually happened.'

  'Right; Kari said. 'So-'

  So we were in the yard (said Kari) and we'd done about two-thirds, and stopped for a rest. Starkad comes running in; he sees us, collapses against a wall and says, 'Thank God for that. I thought I wasn't going to find anyone.

  'What's up, Starkad?' I asked. 'You look like you've been running.'

  He nodded. 'From the long meadow; he said. 'It's Bersi. He was tethering the bull, and it lashed out and kicked him in the head. He needs fetching back here, so someone can take a look at him.'

  Naturally we hurried after him, fast as we could go. It's a fair step from the yard at Herjolfsness to the long meadow; it's up a steep slope, down into a combe and up the other side. Starkad was plunging ahead, like a dog that's been kept in for two days in bad weather; he'd stop and look back at us, then race on. Bersi was lying at the foot of a big stone outcrop. He was flat on his face and not moving.

  'Kari,' Eyvind called to me, 'you're nearest. Go and see if he's still breathing.'

  I took a few steps toward him, and then there was this bloody awful noise, like all the trolls under the mountains were drunk and having a party. I swung round to see what was up, and there behind me, in a half-circle blocking all my lines of retreat, were a dozen men.

  I knew straight away who they were: they were the berserkers' men, and they were meant to be several hours away out to sea, not hiding behind piles of rock and jumping out on people going by. I had a bad feeling about what they were up to.

  I yelled at Eyvind to run for it, but he was way too slow off the mark; they grabbed hold of him and chucked him down in the dirt, and one of them pulled out a knife and pricked him with it, just under his chin. You didn't need to be brilliantly clever to figure out what that meant: hold still, or we kill your mate here. So I stayed where I was, and Bersi got up off the ground and tied my hands behind my back with a bit of old rope.

  'Welcome to the party,' he said. 'Glad you could join us after all.'

  Well, there wasn't a lot I could do, was there? Should've seen it coming, I suppose. Should've figured that Bersi and Starkad wouldn't have been allowed to leave the berserkers' crew just like that; not by their mates, not by Freydis. Should've thought to ask what Bersi was doing tethering the bull up on the slopes, rather than bringing it back to the farm. But I only thought about that later, lying awake in the middle of the night and beating myself up for lack of anybody else to take it out on. At the time, I was mostly thinking, no, you bastards, you can't do this; which was a waste of time, of course, because they just had. I suppose the real mistake I made was believing we'd got rid of Freydis just by saying no. She wasn't that sort of woman.

  They had a little two-wheel cart hidden among the rocks. They dragged us onto it, and a couple of the berserkers' men came along to keep us company, knives drawn. I thought we'd be going to Gardar, but instead we went straight down to the coast; to a little fjord that didn't even merit a name of its own, where a ship was riding at anchor. I knew that ship. I knew it very well.

  They didn't untie the ropes till we were on board and the ship was too far out for us to risk jumping overboard and swimming ashore; till then, we lay on top of the cargo in the hold, along with the other useful stuff. I was thinking, they may have got me but I'm buggered if I'm going to do any work; I'll just lie here all the way to Meadowland.

  That didn't last long. When they untied us, Freydis came stomping down off the foredeck to look at us. She stood there for a bit, hands on hips, frowning; she was wearing a man's coat several sizes too big for her, and big heavy shoes with nailed soles.

  'Now then,' she said. 'We've got off to a bad start, but I don't want that to be a problem. I've. been to a lot of trouble to get you here, because I know you can be useful; but if you turn out to be more trouble than you're worth, I'll have you slung over the side. Understood?'

  I'll say this for Freydis: you never had any trouble understanding her - or believing her, either. 'Understood Eyvind said, and I nodded.

  'Fine; she said. 'In that case, here's the deal. Same as for the rest of the men: everything we make out of this project, I take half off the top, and everything else is equal shares for everybody. That includes you, provided you pull your weight. Got that?'

  We both nodded this time; and I have to admit, I caught myself thinking, well, that's not so bad. Now we're here and we've got no choice, we might as well be paid. 'What do you want us to do?' I asked.

  'Your part starts when we get there; Freydis answered. 'Till then, just stand your watches and make yourselves useful. You know the drill, you've both done this before.'

  'Who's navigating?' Eyvind asked. It was a valid question, but he had a nerve asking.

  'Me; Freydis said. 'And no, I've never done it before, but I know what to do. If Leif could do it, stands to reason it can't be difficult.'

  Neither of us said anything, because there wasn't any point. Nothing we could do about it; neither of us knew about navigation, that's the captain's job. I knew you used a bearing-dial if you had one, and you got your bearings from the stars, if you had to go out of sight of land. Any kid knows that, and presumably Freydis knew it too. She'd have made it her business to find out how many days we had to follow the north-west Greenland coast before heading due west, how long to hold that course. If we got blown off -well, if that happens, usually it's anyone's guess, you keep going and hope that sooner or later you reach land, and that it's somewhere you recognise. It's a horribly dangerous way to carry on, and it always strikes me as a small miracle that anybody ever gets anywhere without being drowned; but people do it, I've done it more times than I can remember, and I'm still alive, aren't I?

  Three days out, still following the coast, and the fog came down. Wind died away to nothing, sails flopped, we sat there on the decks, couldn't see more than a yard or so in any direction. I knew that when that happens, you just sit still and wait. Freydis, though: first time at sea, she was bloody terrified. She went up and down the ship, asking everybody what to do. We all told her, there's nothing you can do, just sit it out, but that just rattled her even more. 'There must be something; she kept on saying. 'They should have oars on this bloody ship, like they've got on warships.' Well, she wasn't inspiring confidence; but mostly we ignored her. She wasn't so free with her threats, which made a nice change. That wouldn't last, though, once we were moving again.

  Three days we sat there. It gets so boring you can't stand it any more. It's like when you've rubbed your heel raw in a new pair of boots, and every step's torture, but you've got to keep walking. Each stride forward makes the sore worse, but the alternative is to sit down in the wilderness and starve. Eyvind and I scratched the lines of a Tables board on the deck with a brooch pin, and made pieces out of bread-crust. Wasn't long before some of the others wanted to join in, and we couldn't very well say no to them; but neither of us are anything special at the game, so pretty soon we were out of the game and watching - and there's few things in life as boring as watching someone else play Tables. I did my bit; I tried to cheer up Miseryguts here by chatting about old times, but that just made him gloomier.

  Mid-morning on the fourth day, the wind started to blow Fuck me, did it blow; it scooped us up and practically threw us away from the shore. There were those waves that rear up way over the top of the mast and hang there for a second, like you wouldn't believe water could. When they come down you say to yourself; well, it wasn't the best life, but it was better than nothing. Then, just when
you think it's all over, the wave coming down sort of slides under the ship; you're up in the air, hull right out of the water, and it's anybody's bet whether you'll flop back down and get a soaking, or whether the ship's frame will finally spring its joints and fall to bits around you. The cargo tries to bust its way free of the ropes; something gets loose and someone yells your name; you don't want to move, it's the last thing you want to do, but you do it anyway, because you can't disobey orders on a ship just because you're scared stiff or nothing'd ever get done. You try and stand up, and then the deck slams into your heels; you're flying, then you land on the palms of your hands and your kneecaps, and you yelp because it bloody hurts, but a moment or so later the same thing happens again. You slide across the deck and your shoulder slams into a barrel or the mast or something just as hard. You can't feel anything from your shoulder to your wrist, and you're grabbing like crazy with your other hand for something to hold on to; and still you're dead set on doing the job you were told to do, and somehow or other you do it. By then, of course, someone else is yelling to you, do this or do that. You've long since forgotten the wet, the cold, the pain; in fact, it's good you've got this scary, impossible job to do, because it keeps you from noticing stuff that'd make you give up completely otherwise. Mostly you focus on the job, because that helps you shut out the rest of the slit, the danger and the state the ship's in and the wave hovering overhead like a giant hawk. Time doesn't seem to pass the usual way; you know it's been longer than a heartbeat and less than a day, but in between you can't judge, you're lost, like a ship in fog.

  Then it stops; wind dies down, waves behave themselves, people stop moving about and flop down on their knees or their backs where they are. Some of them drop off to sleep just as they are. If you're me, you can't do that; you've got to drag yourself up on deck and take the best look you can at the damage that's been done. A spar's been torn down, and a whole load of your precious rope is mashed up into felt, there's leaks sprung in half a dozen places, timbers ripped off the side. You look at all of that and in a cold, closed part of your mind you're calmly saying, well, we can splice that, we can weave those ripped-up ends into a rope, we can lash that down so it won't come apart any further; that'll take a whole day, that'll only take a watch and a half, there's nothing at all we can do about that till we make landfall. The rest of you just blanks out; there may be another squall on its way, but you can't be bothered. Like the fat man said when the bull'd chased him halfway round the pen: the bugger'll just have to gore me, then.

  When the wind dropped, of course, we hadn't got a clue where the hell we were. We'd lost two out of three water- casks, and the sail was just rags, beyond patching. We had a spare sail, of course, so that was all right; but the spare sail's what you use to catch rain when you're short of water. Starkad the berserkers' man was hanging off the rail, trying to look at the sternpost; there were dowels snapped and nails pulled out, and some poor fool was going to have to hang out over the stern by his feet to make that lot good. Wasn't going to be me, I was absolutely sure about that; but then Starkad called out, 'Here, Bare-arse, you get over here and give me a hand'; Bare-arse is Eyvind, of course, and I took one look at him, head sagged against the rail, dead to the world, and I hopped up and said, 'That's fine, I'll do it.' And I did- 'I don't remember that; Eyvind said.

  'Don't suppose you do,' Kari replied. 'You were shattered. I think your eyes were open, but you weren't hearing anything. That's why I went in your place.'

  Eyvind frowned, as though he was a devout monk who'd just heard irrefutable proof that God doesn't exist. 'You never mentioned anything about it before; he said.

  'Subject never came up; Kari replied, perfectly reasonably 'And it was just one of those things. I'm sure you've done stuff like that for me before now, when it really mattered; when I've been asleep or I've had a bash on the head, whatever.

  Anyhow (Kari went on), we sat there two full days trying to fix up the ship as best we could, though it was a losing battle, we knew It was an old ship; wasn't exactly new when Bjarni first had it, and since then it'd been back and forward across that same bit of sea, taken one beating after another. Comes a time when a ship just gives up; everything starts to go at once. Planks pull off nails, tear out great chunks of rotten wood so you can't just draw the nails and knock 'em back in. Cracks get to the point where there's no strength left, and nothing firm enough to anchor a bit of twine to. Basically, there was nothing holding the ship together beyond cussedness and force of habit; and we were lost in the middle of a very big sea, with a woman who'd never governed a ship before as our captain.

  The thing is, you don't just give up, even when it's bloody obvious you've come to the end of the rope. You think, this is completely ridiculous, might as well not waste your energy; but someone calls out to you, do this, do that, and you do it, and you don't think, you stop thinking. You look at a piece of wood and you know it's going to break sooner or later; but somehow or other sooner and later never come. The wood hangs on, like the man dangling off a cliff by his fingernails. Call it strength of will, call it bloody-mindedness. Time drips by, and you're not dead yet. Doesn't make any sense, but you ask anybody who's been to sea, they'll tell you that's how it is.

  When the wind came back, it was mild and gentle, which is another way of saying too slow It was good because anything stronger would've been enough to shred the ship; but it was bad because we were running out of water fast, and though it pissed down with rain for two full watches we had nothing except pots and cups to catch the water in. Rain tipped down and flooded the bottom of the ship, but we couldn't drink that because it got mixed up with the salt water coming in through the leaks; so there we were, bailing out water fast as we could with our three remaining buckets, while our throats were dry as rawhide. Did you know you can get half a drink of water just by wringing out your clothes over a cup? That's assuming you're sodden wet enough, but pretty soon we were, so that was all right.

  The wind died away again just as the water ran out and it came on to rain again. Freydis had us take down the sail and spread it out to catch enough to fill our one remaining cask. That gave us a few more days, but that didn't do us much good while we were still both lost and becalmed. The thing is, when you're sitting like that in the middle of an endless sea, you know that really there's no reason the wind should blow today rather than tomorrow or the next day; makes no difference to the wind, one way or the other. But it makes a difference to you; if it blows today and in the right direction, most likely we'll make it. If it blows tomorrow, then it's about fifty-fifty. If it's the next day, our chances are one in six or one in seven.

  It blew on the third day By that time, we'd all gone dead quiet. No one called your name, because there wasn't anything to do. When the wind started to come up we didn't even notice it to begin with; we were actually moving when I realised what was happening. Even then, all I thought was, it's too late, a whole day too late; the wind'll blow, the ship'll make it to Meadowland and be run aground, but we won't be there to do anything about it because we'll all be dead.

  But this time it was a good, running wind. It was smooth enough not to shake us apart, but it carried us along much faster than we'd have guessed, all the way to land.

  Not, of course, the land we were trying to get to. It was first light, I remember, and Eyvind happened to be looking that way I was facing back, out over the ship, and I saw men sitting up and staring back over my shoulder. Then one of them called out, 'Well, is this it or isn't it?', so I looked round, and I recognised it. Forestland.

  'Fuck that; Freydis said when we told her; she'd been lying on the cargo wrapped up in three blankets. 'Fuck where we are - is there any water?'

  So Bersi and one of the Gardar men launched the boat, and they were gone a very long time. After a bit, Freydis and a couple of her people started arguing - if the boat didn't come back, should we try and bring the ship itself close in to land so we could swim ashore, or should we cut our losses and try somewhere fur
ther down the coast? At some point someone yelled for me - my local knowledge, presumably -but I pretended that I hadn't heard. If the boat didn't come back, we were through. Taking the ship in would wreck it, and we'd all drown; if we kept going till we reached somewhere we could beach it, thirst would get us. The boat or nothing; and right then, I didn't care.

  'Like a berserker I interrupted.

  Kari looked at me. 'What?'

  'Like a berserker,' I repeated. 'Those people you just told me about. You said they don't care if they survive or not, and that's what gives them their strength. Same with you.'

  Eyvind laughed. 'Not really' he said. 'A berserker's always got something he wants, usually something of yours, or just fame and glory. We didn't want anything. We just didn't give a damn.'

  I thought about that for a moment. 'I disagree,' I said. 'I think this berserker business answers a question that's been puzzling me all through this story-'

  'Don't you want to hear what happened?' Kari interrupted.

  'What? Oh, I guessed. The boat came back with water, or else you wouldn't be here talking to me.

  Kari scowled. Eyvind laughed. 'So,' he said. 'What's the question?'

  'Simple I said. 'Why'd you do it? Not you two personally; I added. 'You two never really had any choice in the matter; you got caught up in the action, like bits of thorn in a sheep's coat. No, I was thinking about the Eiriksons, why they kept going back there; and why Leif would never give away the houses, only lend them.'

  'Fine,' Kari said after an awkward moment. 'You've thought about it. You Greeks are supposed to be good at thinking. What did you come up with?'

  I smiled. 'It's the berserker thing; I said. 'You do these crazy things because you don't care. I mean, listen to yourselves. You come from a country that's piss-poor; over here, your earls would be peasants. You've got nothing. You live in houses with grass roofs, and everybody's got to go outside in the cold and the wet and work. Also, by the .sound of it, there's far too many of you to fit in those funny little countries of yours. I don't know much about them, but the impression I get is that they're mountains with little fringes of grass round the edges. Iceland won't even grow corn, you said. So, because there's too many of you to stay home, you wander off adventuring. You go all over the place. You get in a ship and sail away not even knowing if there's a country out where you're headed, or just open sea and ice. You'd have to be absolutely crazy to do that; either that or you don't care. Berserkers.'