Meadowland Tom Holt

by Meadowland (lit)

  There was a long silence. Then Eyvind said: 'Have you finished?'

  'No,' I answered. 'Because, surprising as it may seem, you aren't the only ones. I can think of another race that acted the way you do, many years ago. They lived in a poxy little country, mountains with a few pockets of dirt at the bottom of the folds, and there were way too many of them to fit. So they got on ships and sailed all over the world; they took amazingly stupid risks, and they fought big, powerful enemies and they won. All these years there hasn't been a word for them, but now I've found one: berserkers. Pity that most Greeks couldn't even pronounce it, because that's what they were.

  Eyvind sighed through his teeth. 'Now have you finished?'

  'Yes.'

  'Good. You're wrong. You've sat there all this time, we thought you were paying attention, but you've completely missed the point. And, I'm sorry to say you don't understand us worth pigshit.'

  I'd offended him; which was odd, because I thought I was paying him an enormous compliment, comparing him and his tribes of barbarians to us, the Greeks, rulers of the world, the greatest and wisest people ever. But either he'd missed the point or he had a different view of the world.

  'All right,' I said. 'What's the real answer?'

  He shook his head. 'Just asking the question shows you don't really understand. Maybe you don't want to, I don't know. Look, do you want to hear about what happened, or don't you?'

  The boat came back (Eyvind said) and they'd found water. It'd taken them a long time because the water was a little spring deep in the woods; they'd had to lug the empty barrel out there, fill it with nothing more than their cupped hands and their hats, and finally fetch the barrel back and get it into the boat without spilling it all. It must've been an exciting story, how they managed all that, but nobody was in the mood to listen. They were thirsty, and they wanted a drink.

  We sailed on; and nothing much happened till we reached Meadowland, and Leif's Booths. It was mid-afternoon when we rounded the point and I saw the place again. Mixed feelings. Yes, I was delighted I was still alive, after I'd quite definitely given up hope, and yes it'd be bloody marvellous to get off the ship and onto dry land. But I had to tell myself to be happy it didn't come of its own accord. That place, again: I kept asking myself, why here, why does everything

  I do wind up with me here, of all the bloody awful places? Just for once, couldn't it be somewhere else?

  I was whining happily to myself in this vein, when I noticed something different, or something odd; something that wasn't as it should have been, anyhow. Took me a moment to figure out what it was, and I realised it wasn't because it was anything out of the ordinary. Quite the opposite, in fact. It looked so very familiar, which was why I overlooked it for a long time.

  There was smoke coming from the chimney-hole of the main house. Somebody was at home.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  When Freydis saw it, of course, she did her block. She jumped up, staggered her way to the rail (there was a bit of a surge blowing up) and stared for a while. Then she started yelling, 'Bring us in, quickly now!'

  By the time we were all the way round the point, so that we could see the whole of the bay we had an answer to the mystery. There was a ship dragged up on the beach, and Freydis recognised it. Nothing to panic about; Helgi and Finnbogi had beaten us to it and got there first.

  Well, you'd have thought Freydis'd have been pleased; they'd arrived before us and laid a fire in, so at the very least we could go ashore, warm and dry ourselves, and quite likely they'd have some dinner cooking; all chores we wouldn't have to deal with ourselves. Good.

  But Freydis was absolutely livid. You know how, when they're really upset about something, some people stop yelling and go dead quiet. I'd never seen Freydis go like that before, and I guessed it was because this was the first time I'd ever seen her get properly angry. For the life of me, I couldn't figure what it could be that'd got to her so badly

  But her face was white, with little red spots in the middle of her cheeks, and she wasn't saying a word.

  Freydis went ashore - couldn't wait for the boat to get in tight. She hopped over the side and waded, with her skirts floating up round her waist. Soon as she was on the beach she tripped on something and when she got up she was grinning, because what she'd fallen over was a canopy strut. Trouble was, it wasn't one of hers, though she'd done the usual business as soon as we were in sight of land. But hers were all carved and fancy, imported, and the one she'd gone arse over tip on was just plain oiled wood with a few twiddly bits top and bottom. That really hacked her off; no need to ask whose struts they were.

  Anyhow, she set off marching up to the main hall, wet skirts flopping round her knees like the flap of a netted fish drowning in air. Starkad and another of the berserkers' men went after her, but they couldn't catch her up except by running. Kari and I followed on at a safe distance, just to be nosy

  She stormed up to the house door and shoved it open, and went right on in. You know, she reminded me a lot of Bjarni Herjolfson, that time he came back from Norway and found his dad had buggered off to Greenland. Anyhow, in she went, and there were some women there, fixing dinner.

  'What the fuck are you doing in my house?' Freydis yelled.

  Naturally they looked at her like she was a frost-troll or something. Most of them didn't even know who she was. I don't remember any of them screaming, but probably that was just shock.

  'Where's Finnbogi?' she snapped. 'I want a word with him. And you can leave that and get packing. I want all this slit out of here now.'

  You could've heard a mouse cough. Then one of the women - I think she must've known Freydis from Brattahlid or somewhere - mumbled, 'They're all up the woods, I think they're marking trees for felling. If you like, I can take you up there.'

  Freydis didn't bother answering. She was chalk-white now, like a dead body She turned on her heel and marched out, saw me, grabbed me by the arm and said, 'In the woods. Where are they likely to be?'

  Actually, I could answer that. There was a ride; Leif had started it, and Thorvald and Bits had carried on with it, quite some way into the forest, for hauling out felled lumber. Chances were that Helgi and Finnbogi would've seen it and gone there, if they were choosing what to fell to start making up a cargo. I tried to tell her where it was, point to it, but either she wasn't taking it in or I wasn't explaining clearly 'Shut up and take me there; she said.

  So I led the way; Freydis followed, and Kari tagged along behind like the pedlar's dog. Freydis walked quick when she was in a mood; I was supposed to be leading her, but I could only just keep up. Days of sitting around on a boat, see; your legs get stiff. Anyhow, we toiled up the hill into the wood, following the ride. Someone had been using it; there were footmarks everywhere, and ruts where logs had been dragged out.

  We came on them quite suddenly; the track curved a bit, and there they were. I saw the brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi, and four or so other men; Finnbogi was cutting a cross in the bark of a tree, marking it for felling. Soon as Freydis saw him, she shot past me, nearly knocked me over, and bounded up to Helgi so fast that she was on him before he looked round. He opened his mouth to say something but never got the chance.

  'What the fuck do you think you're playing at?' she yelled. 'Stealing my houses.'

  It was like Helgi'd walked into a wall in the dark; he never saw it coming till it hit him. 'I'm sorry,' he mumbled, 'I don't know what you're-'

  'My houses; Freydis repeated. 'And now you're up here felling my trees. You thought I'd drowned, you arsehole, and now you're robbing me.'

  Helgi stepped back a bit, because she really did look like she was going to go for him. Then Finnbogi came over and stood between them. 'They aren't your houses; he said. 'Leif only lent them to you. And besides, you weren't here, we were cold and wet and the houses were empty. What were we supposed to do?'

  A moment later, he'd shrunk back as well; Freydis spun round and shoved right up close to him, so he'd e
ither have to push her back or get out of her way 'What you were supposed to do,' Freydis said,. 'was keep the hell out of my houses. And instead, they're stuffed full of your junk.'

  Finnbogi pulled a puzzled face. 'I don't see the problem,' he said. 'I mean, the house is big enough for all of us, and we're partners, aren't we? But since you feel so strongly about it,' he added quickly, 'we'll clear out, you can have them back. Give us a couple of days-'

  'Not a couple of days,' Freydis growled at him. 'Tonight. Come morning, anything I find in there belongs to me. You understand?'

  'Well, yes; Helgi said. 'But what's your problem? And what you said about the trees. I really can't follow that. The whole point is, we fell timber and ship it back home. But now you're saying-'

  Freydis lunged at him. I never saw a man skip so fast; he jumped backwards and dodged behind the tree that his brother had just marked. I think that ended the debate, because the Icelanders sort of faded away among the trees, like elves in a story. A few heartbeats later, we were on our own, just the three of us.

  'Bastards,' Freydis said. 'I never ought to have trusted them. We're going to have to watch them very close, very close indeed.'

  You get moments like that sometimes. It's when you've sort of resigned yourself to things going badly, but deep down inside you still believe it'll all come out right in the end; and then something happens, and that little light in your heart goes out, and you know you were right all along. It's a cold, lonely feeling, and I'm sick to death of it.

  Well, neither of us said anything; there wasn't anything to say, and Freydis didn't really seem to know we were there, she was more talking to herself, preoccupied. Kari and me, we followed her back to the houses at a distance, just in case she started off again. We didn't talk; I was thinking, surely she knows Leif only lent her the houses; but that didn't seem to matter. Some people see the world the way they want it to be, and anything different is someone else's mistake. I felt sorry for the Icelanders, and even sorrier for me.

  When we got back to the houses, we found the Icelanders had got there before us; they were fetching all their stuff outside, and Helgi had got two horses in the shafts of a cart and was leading it round into the yard. I was surprised to see two horses and a cart; they must've taken up a lot of the cargo space on his ship, but I guess he reckoned he'd need them for logging. Maybe because of that they didn't seem to have brought much gear - a few chests and presses of clothes, not much flour and bacon, a load of axes and saws but not much else in the way of tools. It'd be rough on them, having to build a new house for themselves without the right equipment, and if I'd been them I'd have kicked up a fuss. I'm glad they didn't, mind.

  They were obviously in a hurry to get away as fast as they could; but Freydis was in among them, getting under their feet, looking at every damn thing before she'd let them load it up, in case it belonged to the house rather than them. She didn't find anything like that, though she argued the toss about a three-legged stool and a pair of bellows, till Finnbogi dragged up three or four witnesses to swear they'd seen them aboard the ship on the way over. I don't think Freydis believed them; she called them all liars and said the things had been left there by her brother - though how she could've known when she'd never set foot there before she didn't explain, and nobody asked. After they'd gone, though, she pounced on Kari and me and asked us over and over again, wasn't that Leif's stool and the bellows Thorvald had brought from Brattahlid? We said no the first five times, and maybe the last two. She wasn't pleased with us, but she let us go in the end.

  Meanwhile, they were fetching in our stuff. Truth is, I hadn't seen much of it, because it'd all been covered up with hides on the way over - we'd begged her to let us strip the hides off and use them to catch rainwater, but she'd flat-out refused, she wouldn't let us risk the stuff underneath getting spoiled by sea water. We'd all assumed it must be flour and malt and smoked meat. When the hides came off, though, we saw what her precious cargo really was: furniture, and tapestries, and the famous bench-boards that had belonged to Red Eirik, the ones he lent to someone and got into a blood feud over. Bersi the berserkers' man got into a right state about that, because it meant there wasn't much room left for useful stores. 'What the hell do we need all this shit for?' he said. 'You planning to eat this stuff over winter? Because there'll be fuck-all else Freydis acted like she hadn't heard him, so he came up closer and repeated what he'd said, right in her ear. 'And we could've died of thirst; he went on, 'because you wouldn't let us take the hides to catch water, and it was just to keep the salt off all this junk.'

  Like I just said, Freydis was carrying on like he wasn't there; and then quite suddenly, she spun round, grabbed a farrier's hammer off a pile of tools, and cracked Bersi on the side of the head with it. I won't forget the noise it made in a hurry: a thick, chunky sound, like slamming an axe-poll against a stump. His legs seemed to melt under him and he flopped down in a heap, like a wet coat you shrug off when you come in from the rain. Then she put the hammer back where she'd got it from and carried on unpacking cups and plates from a barrel.

  Nobody gave her any trouble after that, not about the furniture or the hides. But we were none of us happy about the situation. Because the journey had taken longer than we'd planned, and we'd lost stuff over the side in the storms, we didn't have more than a month's food in hand. No cows or sheep or other animals on our ship; somehow, when we saw there weren't any, we'd got it into our minds that the Icelanders were bringing them, but they'd brought horses instead and besides, we weren't on speaking terms with them. So: no milk, cheese, butter. Four hens and a cock-bird between thirty-five of us. Another nasty shock, specially for Kari and me who understood the implications: just two small barrels of malt, enough for two weeks' beer at the very outside. But we had very nice tapestries: one old one of warriors arriving in Valhalla, and a very pretty thing with women in blue dresses picking flowers, which Freydis told Starkad was French.

  After we'd been there three days, and nothing much had got done apart from unloading the ship and repairing the palisade - top priority, Freydis said, though I got the impression it wasn't the leather-boat people she wanted to keep out, it was the Icelanders - we had a bit of a meeting. Freydis had gone off on her own, to see what Helgi and Finnbogi were up to. They were building a house on the other side of the lake, and Freydis went at least twice a day to the edge of the wood, where she could look down at them without them seeing her. When she went off on the third morning, Bersi and Starkad came round and called us all into the long barn. We sat on the floor or leaned up against the wall, while those two and another of the berserkers' men, Grimolf, stood up at the far end, looking nervous.

  'Right,' Starkad said, when everybody had settled down, 'we'd better keep this short. Looks to me like we've got a problem.'

  He wasn't getting any arguments about that.

  'Question is,' he went on, 'what're we going to do about it? The way I see it,' he went on, ignoring a few suggestions from the rest of us, 'we've got two choices. We can either carry on like we are, and probably starve to death or get caught out by the locals and killed, or else we can have a change in who calls the shots round here, and sort out something sensible among ourselves.'

  There was a bit of muttering, and I noticed it was mostly coming from the Gardar men. There were about twenty of them, people Freydis had brought with her from her farm. One of them - we'd clean forgotten about him up till then, which gives you an idea of what he was like - was Freydis's husband, Thorvard Space.

  Now don't get me wrong about Thorvard. He was a funny man; in fact, he was two men. When Freydis was around, he was so pale and thin you practically couldn't see him, and if you could he was just this shapeless drip of a man, like a skin without any bones or meat inside. But when she wasn't there, you noticed he was actually a big bloke, tall and broad across the shoulders, great big hands like rake- heads. Anyhow, when Starkad said all that about getting rid of Freydis, up bobs Thorvard Space, and his face is as red as
a sunset.

  'Just this once,' he said, very slow and gentle. 'Just this once, I'll forget I heard you say that, Starkad; and I'll assume you were just talking for yourself, and not the rest of you arsewipe vikings. But if I hear another word against my wife in this place, I'll kill the man who says it, and you've got my word on that.' Then he sat down; and I looked out the corner of my eye at the Gardar bunch, and they were all sitting there grim and stern-looking, giving the berserkers' men the long, cold stare. Just goes to show, you should never speak first and then think after.

  Well, that was the end of the meeting; and Starkad and Bersi and Grimolf had a bit of trouble getting out of the barn, because wherever they tried to go there were Gardar men standing in the way, like they were just waiting to be shoved aside. Very ugly indeed, the whole feel of it; and I can't remember ever feeling more scared. Cold sort of feeling, right to the bone. See, Kari and me didn't really belong to either side, the berserkers' men or the Gardar mob; figures, really, since we'd been dragged along kicking and screaming, so to speak. But it meant we were nobody's friends, so if it did blow up into a right old mess, we'd be fair game for either party

  If I'd ever kidded myself it'd blow over and we'd all settle down, it wasn't for long. Things just got worse. I'm guessing someone told Freydis about what Starkad had said; she got all uptight and quiet, which was worse than when she was roaring around the place yelling. Then there was Starkad, who wasn't going to forgive her for bashing in his mate's head with the hammer, and the rest of his lot, who were furious with Thorvard for calling them vikings. Everywhere you went, you saw men walking quickly across the yard or outside with their axes in their belts, not talking to men from the other faction. At night, in the house, with precious little to eat and nothing to drink, it was bloody awful. Not much better during the day, because there wasn't anything to do. Freydis wouldn't send us out to hunt or gather food, even though we were nearly at the end of the flour and stores; she didn't want the berserkers' men going off somewhere plotting against her, and she wanted her own people close, for protection against Starkad and his lot and also against the Icelanders, who she was convinced were going to sneak across when she wasn't looking and rob her, or worse. She was still going out twice a day to watch them, and often she'd take one or two of her men with her; when they came back they all had that grim look, so I guess it was starting to rub off on them. Once or twice I heard Thorvard whispering with some of the Gardar blokes, something about waiting till they were ready or biding their time till the enemy were off their guard; then, as soon as they saw me, they'd go quiet and stare at me, which I really didn't like at all. Obviously they were planning something, but there was no way of knowing who they were figuring on dealing with, Starkad's people or the Icelanders.