Meadowland Tom Holt

by Meadowland (lit)

  Came the day when the food ran out. When Freydis heard there was nothing left, she got into a right old state, though I can't see how it could've come as a surprise to her. First she had two of her men drag Bersi in from the yard; they held him up against the wall, and she accused him of stealing the flour for the vikings (which was what she called the berserkers' men, to their faces as well as behind their backs). First Bersi just said no, he'd done no such thing; but it was plain she didn't believe him, or didn't want to believe him, and he was getting very scared, you could see that.

  'It wasn't me,' he repeated; and then I guess he had a flash of inspiration, because he added: 'It must've been them. Finnbogi's lot, the Icelanders. They must've snuck in here while our backs were turned and stolen that flour.'

  I happened to be looking at Freydis when he said that, and I swear that her face sort of lit up, like a lamp glowing bright when you blow on the wick. She didn't say anything, but you could see that, as far as she was concerned, that had to be the right explanation.

  Well, Bersi could see from the look on her face that he was part-way off the hook, but not free and clear; you could almost hear the grindstones in his mind slowly turning. 'Stands to reason,' he said, in a very wobbly sort of voice. 'They filled their ship up with that cart and the logging gear, and those horses. Probably fed all their grain to the horses, so no wonder they've run out.'

  I guess Bersi realised that wasn't a clever thing to say at roughly the same time the rest of us did. Freydis gave him a look that would've flayed the skin off most people, and then said: 'It's my fault, I'm too trusting. Leif should've told me they were no good, but I expect he wanted me to fail. Probably suit him if I never came back. I know for a fact that he had more than his fair share of Father's things when he died, but it was no use trying to say anything.' She scowled; she had a way of scowling like she was rinsing all the anger off her face, and then she'd smile. 'Well, we'll see about that, when the time's right. Meanwhile,' she went on, all brisk and businesslike, 'we need food, before winter sets in. No point doing their work for them. Right, I want foraging parties, first thing in the morning. You-' For a horrible moment I thought she meant me, but she was looking over my shoulder at a Gardar man called Styr Otter. 'Fishing. Take the ship's boat, I want cod for drying and salmon for the smokehouse. Bersi, you can make yourself useful for a change; take two of your men and pan for salt, we'll need plenty. I want you' - now she was looking at Thorvard Space - 'to lead a hunting party in the woods, there's deer everywhere, you can see their slots all over the place. And you two' - this time it really was our turn - 'Leif was always talking about the wild corn that grows here. You'll know where to find it. I want enough for flour for the winter, and brewing.'

  No point telling her you couldn't brew with the stuff, we'd tried, God knows. Kari nodded brightly, I think he'd have agreed to anything just to get out of her way 'And while you're at it,' she added, 'you can bring in, say fifteen bushels of grapes. Take four men, we need to move quickly'

  There was a lot more of that sort of thing before she was done; and in each case it was, Take five men and Choose half a dozen men to go with you; Kari told me later that he'd added it all up, and she'd given orders for at least a hundred men, even allowing for double shifts. But we were all right; since we knew there weren't any vines, we wouldn't need four men to help us find them.

  Gathering wild corn was just fine by us, because it got us well away from the house for most of the day It was hard work, mind; stooping down all the time, lugging heavy sacks, two hours' walk at least in the morning before you even started picking, and all as far back again at night. I've worked as hard in my time, but never harder; and nothing nice to look forward to, like you've got at home, a good meal and a drink, friendly company in the hall and a good feeling about your life. I guess I kept myself going by telling myself, this can't go on, sooner or later it'll get sorted out and we'll all be going home, back to Herjolfsness where I belong. Funny actually that it took all that time away, all those journeys to the very edge of the world, to make me understand that the place I ought to be was pretty much the place I started out from.

  We were out one time, mid-morning, and we'd been working since first light. It was getting harder and harder to find any stuff worth picking, but we'd been lucky and come across a patch big enough to fill our sacks. We carried on till noon, then we sat under the trees for a breather while the sun was high. You'd laugh if I said it was hot; a Greek'd freeze to death. But picking that wild corn was enough to work you up into a muck sweat even on a cold day which was part of the pain of it; you'd be frozen going out, sweating while you were there, chilled to the bone going home. But anyway.

  We were sitting under the trees, not talking or anything; I may even have closed my eyes for a moment or so. But then I felt someone's shadow on my face. Now, obviously my first thought was the leather-boat people; so I sat up before I even opened my eyes, and tried to tug my axe out of my belt, only it was stuck. But then I heard a voice saying, 'Steady on; and I knew it wasn't them, so I looked up.

  I didn't recognise any of them, but it wasn't genius to figure out that they were Icelanders, Helgi and Finnbogi's lot. There were six of them, standing looking at us. They didn't seem tense or anything like that. I noticed they had long axes, and one of them had a long cross-cut saw over his shoulder.

  Of course, I wasn't sure whether we were on speaking terms or not; but they seemed fairly relaxed about us, which was just as well. One of them sat down next to me, and the others followed suit. 'Mind if we join you?' the first one said; I nodded, and Kari said, 'Help yourself.'

  'Sorry,' the stranger said, 'I don't know either of you; but my name's Einar, this here's Skeggi, and this is Svein' - and so on, I can't remember the rest of their names. I said who we were, and Einar nodded. 'You're the two who came here with Lucky Leif,' he said.

  'That's right,' Kari replied. 'And Thorvald, and Thorfinn Bits. Actually we were with Bjarni Herjolfson, the very first time.'

  Einar seemed impressed. 'You must like this place a lot,' he said.

  Well, it'd have taken far too long to explain. 'It's all right; I said. 'But a lot depends on the company, if you follow me.'

  Einar looked at me, all thoughtful. 'It's all right back at our place,' he said.

  'I don't doubt it,' I replied. 'How's the house coming along, by the way?'

  'The house? Oh, we finished it a while back. We're all settled in now It's a bit rough and ready, but it keeps the rain off and the cold out.'

  'That's good; Kari said. 'So, where are you boys from? In the Old Country, I mean.

  'Eastfjords,' Einar replied, and before long we were chatting away nice and pleasant, about people we knew, distant relations we shared, because in Iceland everybody's somebody's cousin. They say in Norway that you can shut up a load of Icelanders in a house in October, and let them out again in spring when the snow thaws and they'll still be having the same conversation, about whose great-aunt married whose third cousin back in Laxriverdale, and whether their second child was a boy or a girl. I know it's one of the big jokes with foreigners against us Icelanders, that we're all inbred as buggery, but I think it's a good thing we all know who we are; and hearing that kind of talk out there, in bloody Meadowland - I'll admit it, I was pretty close to tears.

  The fact is, you see, home isn't a straightforward thing. Partly it's a place, but partly it's people. I mean, you can be with the same bunch, like a ship's crew, for years and years, going all over the place, trading or whatever, but that's never home; not when you wake up every morning and there's a hill or a mountain on the skyline you don't know the name of. So you pack in the seafaring and go back to the farm, but everybody you ever knew is dead or moved away and that's not home either. Or you can be in a place like Meadowland so often and so long you know it by heart, you can walk around with your eyes shut and not bark your shins, and you know the people you're with, because you've been through winter with them; and it still isn't home, beca
use you know perfectly well the place doesn't want you there, any more than you want to be there. Home's such a bloody delicate thing, one slight change or one thing missing and it's screwed up for ever; and a man's better off blind or missing a hand or a leg than being away from his home. Greeks I've talked to since I've been here, they think we Icelanders are soft because the most a court of law can do to you back home is make you an outlaw, so you've got to leave your house and move away to another part of the country, or overseas. Soft; I don't think so. I think it's the cruellest thing you can do. I mean, everybody dies sooner or later, but having to live in the wrong place, in a place that's not meant for you to be in - that's cruel. And I never even did anything wrong.

  Anyhow, we talked away with the Icelanders for a long time, till they realised it was getting late and they were supposed to be meeting up with another party to do a job. See you around, they said, and they went on, while we just sat there.

  A bit later, we got up and carried on gathering the wild corn; and Kari said, 'This is stupid. I mean, look at us, men our age, and all we've got to eat is wild stuff off the ground. Pigs live better than this.'

  My mind had been working along much the same lines, I'll admit. So I said to him, 'Are you thinking the same as me?'

  'Could be,' he said.

  'I was thinking,' I said. 'We could go over to the Icelanders' house, see if they've got bench-space for two more. I mean, they're felling lumber, which means they're planning on going home come the spring.'

  'Earlier, maybe; Kari said.

  'Possibly even that,' I said. 'And what's more, they'll be heading back to the Old Country.' I thought about it for a moment or so, then I added, 'Don't know about you, but I'm sick of Greenland.'

  Kari nodded. 'Whole place smells of Red Eirik he said. 'Like here. Everywhere you go, you can smell him.'

  Well, I wouldn't have put it quite like that, but I could see what he was getting at. We didn't say much more about it all the rest of that day, but next day and the day after we kept coming back to it; and pretty soon we reached the hard place, which was how Freydis'd take it if two of her crew went over and joined up with Finnbogi's people.

  There wasn't any need to talk about Freydis much, we both knew what we'd seen. The only way either of us could see it working was if we timed it just right and went over to the Icelanders just when they were getting ready to sail. Of course, we'd tell them to forget about any claim we had on shares in the timber proceeds, we just wanted to get away from there and back to Iceland. The question was, would they give us a ride out of the kindness of their hearts, and my guess was that they probably would. After all, I didn't imagine they'd be coming back again, deal or no deal, and if helping us pissed off Freydis, that'd more likely make them want to help us rather than the other way about.

  'But we want to be sure,' Kari said, one time when we were going over it yet again. 'No point showing up on the off chance the day before they sail. They'd be more likely to tell us to get lost, and if Freydis found out that we'd tried to go with them, she wouldn't be happy No, we need to have a talk with them first, see how they take it. For one thing, how are we going to know when they're going to leave, unless they tell us first?'

  Seemed to me that what Kari was suggesting was a bit risky. All it would take would be for one of the Gardar lot to see us talking with the Icelanders, and we'd be in trouble. On the other hand, I could see he had a point. Anyhow, we couldn't agree, so we let it slide, and the year was slipping away I never knew a place like Meadowland for time just melting away like beer in a leaky barrel. You'd think time'd crawl along, like it usually does when you're suffering, but it wasn't quite like that. The days could seem very long sometimes, but they soon went by, without you really noticing. You know, I've thought about this stuff for a good many years now, and I think where you are makes all the difference. Who you are is all about where you are, and it bends other things too, like how quickly time passes, and what's right and wrong. Strikes me there's nothing more important than place; everything else falls in with it.

  Anyway, we'd been on gathering wild corn for maybe a month, and we'd got pretty well all there was. Suddenly one morning, Freydis calls us all together. There's now enough food for the winter, she says, so there's going to be a change of plan. We're all off food-gathering and on felling timber.

  'We've got to be quick about it, too,' she said, 'before the Icelanders get all the good stuff. They've got a head start on us, but we can get ahead if we work hard.'

  I took that as meaning that the deal they'd struck back in Greenland, that we'd be the permanent outpost and they'd do all the hauling and shipping of the lumber, was now dead and buried. Fair enough; like I said just now, I didn't see Finnbogi and his people coming back here again once they'd taken their cargo home. But this business of making it into a race struck me as plain stupid. After all, the forest was so vast we'd never even bothered trying to explore it: the little bit that Finnbogi's lot could fit onto one medium-sized knoerr was neither here nor there. Also, it increased the chances of our lot running into theirs; if the Gardar people met up with the Icelanders, there would probably be a whole lot of trouble, and there was no need for anything like that.

  But never mind. Next day we were all up bright and early, off to the woods with axes and hooks and saws and rope. Freydis drove us at it like a plough-team. There was none of the careful surveying and marking we'd seen the Icelanders doing; no, if it was tall and had leaves on, she had us cut it down and trim the brash, and then leave it where it lay In a couple of days we'd felled more than enough timber to make up a cargo for our ship, and we were all expecting to be put on to hauling what we'd cut. Not a bit of it. Next day we cut another big load, trimmed it, left it where it'd fallen. Even the Gardar men thought it was all a bit odd. For one thing, we weren't just felling oaks, like the Icelanders were; a lot of what we'd felled was birch, which isn't a lot of use for a lot of things, and rots into pulp if you leave it in the cord too long. In fact, what Freydis put me in mind of was when a fox gets into the hen-coop and runs round and round after the hens, picking off any that're a different colour or breed and then killing the rest too. Fox'll only take one or two birds to eat, the rest he kills just because they're there. Same with Freydis. She was acting like she was planning on cutting down every last tree in Meadowland, not because she wanted to sell the trees as timber but because she wanted them all dead and out of the way - well, yes, that's right, so that the Icelanders couldn't have them.

  Still, it was something to do, and it's easier to forget about the big picture when you're busy I can't say as felling timber is my favourite job; too dangerous, for one thing. A hundred-foot tree is a treacherous bastard when you've cut three parts of the way through and it's starting to creak. You can stand there and look at it, figure out which way it's going to fall. You can rope it up to the trees next to it, or you can have your mates pull on the rope so it'll drop neatly where you want it to go. But one time in five it'll have the last word, twisting or splitting, getting hung up in the neighbouring branches so it's dangling there ready to go at any moment; and when you finally get round to those last few strokes of the axe, watch out for the butt-end of the log. It dearly loves to kick back as the tree goes down. One of our men, Geir Something-or-other, got careless that way, and the kickback smashed three of his ribs.

  Mostly, I'm glad to say Kari and me were on trimming duty, cutting off the branches, clearing and burning the brash. It's hard work, but you're less likely to get squashed flat, unless someone drops a tree in the wrong place and you're under it. Mostly it was hand-axe work, which jars your elbows and strains your hands and wrists. At least we were doing something useful, because the branchwood wasn't fit to ship and was only good for burning. So we made cords and faggots, more than enough to keep us going through yet another Meadowland winter.

  By the time the wind started to turn cold, we'd been logging practically non-stop for over a month, and we'd had enough. We wanted a rest, possibly even
a bit of fun before we had to barricade ourselves indoors till the thaw Someone suggested getting up a few sports and games; races and wrestling and the ball-game, or even a swimming match if anybody felt brave enough to get in the freezing-cold water. The idea went down well. Slogging away cutting timber, the Gardar men and the berserkers' men had put most of their differences behind them. There were a few hard cases, obviously; one or two men who held grudges because of accidents or near-misses at the logging, and a couple of long-running feuds between men who just didn't like each other very much. But that sort of thing's normal, and if you can't cope with it you'd best find a remote bit of land nobody else wants and stay there.