Meadowland Tom Holt

by Meadowland (lit)

  For the best part of a month after the killings, Freydis had us clearing ground, digging turf, cutting and driving in fence posts and rails, like she planned on building more barns and sheds. One day I was round the back of the shed that Bits had used as a stable, and I found the Icelanders' cart and their horses, tucking into a big mangerful of hay A couple of days after that, Freydis told one of the Gardar men to take the cart up to the woods to pick up kindling and stuff, and he seemed like he knew what she was on about, so I guess she'd told a few people it was there.

  The cold was coming on, and we'd had the first light dusting of snow, when Freydis called us all together when we came back in for dinner. Time was going on, she said, and if we wanted to get back home to Greenland before winter set in we'd better see to the ship. She'd been to have a look at it, she said, and it was in a hell of a state. There were timbers rotted through, the rigging was shot and the sail was in shreds. Luckily, we could sort it all out by stripping what we needed off the hulk of the other one, Bjarni Herjolfson's old ship; soon as we'd finished the overhaul, we'd be on our way home again.

  Nothing like a bit of an incentive to get you moving. We had the Icelanders' ship fixed, caulked and ready to go inside often days. Freydis came to inspect it and said it'd do; then she told us to drag Bjari's old ship well aground and set it on fire; we didn't need a second ship, she said, there weren't enough of us to man two of them, and she didn't want anybody coming along and stealing it.

  So we did as we were told; we dragged what was left of the old knoerr well inland, piled well-dried brushwood and brash up in the hold and set it alight. Made me feel strange, doing that. It'd never been a wonderful ship; it was old and creaky when Bjarni first bought it, and it had been a long way since then. Just puffing it apart for materials, though, and then burning it: that struck me as a vicious thing to do, as well as wasteful. Kari figured it was because Freydis was worried that she'd got the numbers of the Icelanders wrong, and that some of them had been away from the house and were still alive out there someplace; she didn't want to leave the ship behind in case they sailed back to Greenland after we'd left and told people back home what she'd done. That's the best explanation I can think of, but I don't think it's true. I think Freydis just liked destroying things, if she couldn't have them. When the fire was going well, it put me in mind of stories I'd heard when I was a kid, about how in the olden days, when an earl or a king died, they'd put him on his ship, set light to it and launch it into the fjord, so the dead man could sail to Valhalla or wherever he was going. I don't think Helgi and Finnbogi were on that ship, but there was a funeral feel to it, at the time.

  Once the Icelanders' ship was ready and we'd piled on as much timber as was safe to sail with, and a bit more, Freydis told us she was planning on leaving Meadowland in two days' time. Strange; I'd been waiting for her to say that, looking forward to finally getting away from the place, going. home, never coming back. When I heard her say the words, though, I can't honestly say I felt anything much. Relief, I suppose; but it was the feeling you get when you're doing a difficult job, making a real bitch of it, and it's getting too dark to see, so you've got to leave it unfinished till the next day No pleasure, it wasn't like a terrible pain had finally stopped; certainly no joy We were finally going home: so what? It was too late for being happy now. It was like we'd just lost a big, important battle, and the war with it. No point going home under those circumstances, when you've already lost everything.

  We set sail early on a bright, clear morning, with the frost still crisp on the grass. Don't know when I've set out on a long journey worse prepared: only three casks of water, precious little food, no spare sail and the ship riding so low we were close to getting swamped, even though the wind was gentle and even. Usually when you leave a place, you keep turning back and looking at it till at last it slips away out of sight; me, I kept my stare well out to sea until I was absolutely sure it'd gone, like a small child afraid of spiders in the roof.

  Anyhow, that was the last I saw of Meadowland, and Leif's Booths. We had an absolutely fucking awful ride home: gales and big waves, fog thick as butter, you name it. In spite of that, though, we held our course, and eventually, with hardly any water left and nothing to eat except the cold pickings off a couple of gulls, we came through a fat slab of fog and saw Herjolfsness; Greenland, home.

  'And that; Eyvind said, 'is really the end of the story. Funny,' he added, yawning a little, 'I've told it a fair few times over the years, but never quite like that. Usually, I put in a bit more courage and nobility and stuff. It's what people want to hear, specially if you want them to buy you drinks.'

  He started to get up. I reached out and caught hold of his sleeve. He looked at me.

  'But what happened next?' I asked him. 'Once you got home. What became of your wife? And how did you end up here?'

  Eyvind grinned at me. 'Oh, that's another story; he said. 'But it's just about me, and a few other people. I thought you wanted to learn about Meadowland.' He shook me off gently and walked away without looking back.

  I turned to Kari, who hadn't moved. 'So what happened?' I asked.

  Kari shrugged. 'Not a lot, really,' he said. 'We arrived back at Herjolfsness but nobody seemed particularly glad to see us. They wanted the timber, of course; good straight timber was always in short supply and you can't build houses without it. But they don't have much money and what they do have, in the way of trade goods and so on, isn't really worth having. Freydis kept to the agreement, more or less; she took a big slice off the top, but the rest was shared out equally between all of us, and it was worth picking up. Not enough to buy a farm with, though.'

  'So you stayed there?'

  He nodded. 'For a bit,' he said. 'But Bjarni hadn't expected to see us again - Freydis had told him she'd be staying there with her people while Finnbogi shuttled backwards and forwards with loads of timber. So, naturally, he'd taken on men to replace us, and even on a big farm like Herjolfsness you can't afford to hire men if there's no work for them to do. He was nice about it, but he made it pretty clear: we could stay there a while till we sorted ourselves out and the timber was sold; after that, come spring, we'd be moving on. While we'd been away Eyvind's wife had moved on, gone to keep house for an old farmer in the Western Settlement whose wife had died. Eyvind thought about going out there and fetching her back, but I told him, forget it. She was probably happy there, settled. He had no land, soon as spring came round he'd have no work, no place to live. I told him, best thing we could do was move on, and eventually he had to admit he saw the sense in it. Just before winter a ship from out East stopped at Herjolfsness; they'd been blown off course and needed somewhere they could spend the winter. I had a word with the captain, asked him if he could use two more men. I told him where we'd been, what we'd done - except for the stuff about Freydis, naturally - and he said he was going East soon as spring came -Dublin, then Scotland; then Orkney or some such place. Didn't matter where, so long as it was away See, I realised that I'd gone past the point of going home. There comes a time where you can't, any more, because it's not there. Like, suppose Herjolf, Bjarni's dad, hadn't ever moved to Greenland. Bjarni would've carried on as a merchant, coming home to spend winter with the old man; but eventually Herjolf would've died, and that would have been the end of Bjarni's routine, things would've changed so he couldn't ever go back again, not home, if you see what I mean. He could go back to a place, but not to the man who made that place what it was. Same with me; I couldn't go back to Herjolfsness any more, even though the place was still there, the land and the house and the barns and stuff. Even if Bjarni'd said we could have our old jobs back, our old bits of bench to sleep on, I don't think we could've gone back. We wouldn't have fitted; like a knife that's got bent and won't fit in its sheath any longer. And, well; when you've got no home to go to, any place is as good as any other. Any place, except one.

  Kari paused to scratch his head and shift a little. 'I told Eyvind he went on, 'about getting a b
erth for us both on the Easterners' ship, but he said no, he'd be heading up to Brattahlid, see if there was any work going there. I told him, you don't want to do that, go and live there with Freydis's brother; haven't you had enough of Red Eirik's offspring to last you for good and all? He said no, but he'd had enough of being on ships; anywhere else he went from now on would be somewhere he could walk to, else he wasn't going. I could see his point, but I felt it was sad, that we'd been through so much together, been friends all our lives, and have to split up now and go our separate ways. But I didn't want to go to Brattahlid; my second-least-favourite place in the world, or third if you count Gardar. So I said, this is it, then, here's where we say goodbye. And he said, well, yes, it looks that way; and both of us were feeling too awkward to say anything more by that stage, so we left it there

  'But all through winter, I kept thinking about it, and by Yule I'd made up my mind, I couldn't go East like I'd planned, I'd have to go to Brattahlid, if that's where Eyvind was dead set on going. I told him so, and he seemed sort of pleased, though I couldn't quite make out what he was thinking. Anyhow, that's how we left it. But then I found I couldn't sleep nights; I'd drop off, and then I'd have this same dream, over and over again, and it was always Freydis and the killing, except it wasn't in Meadowland, it was Brattahlid, and it wasn't the Icelanders she was killing, it was her brothers, Leif and Thorvald and Thorstein - and Thorfinn Scraps and Gudrid, too. It was almost like she'd turned into the place, she'd turned into Meadowland, Leif's Booths, and she was killing them all over again; anyhow, it spooked me out, and I knew I couldn't go to Brattahlid or even stay in Greenland any more. So I decided I'd have to go East in the ship after all. But I couldn't face telling Eyvind, not after I'd made a big thing about staying just so we'd still be together. I felt really bad about it, but I didn't have the courage.

  'So spring came, and the thaw; and the Easterners caulked their ship and got it ready loaded their cargo and all. They were leaving very early in the morning, to catch the wind, and I snuck out of the house while it was still dark and went with them. We all went nice and quiet down to the beach so as not to wake the household, and we were on board and cast off before the sun was up. When it was light enough to see, I looked about me; and fuck me, who did I see sitting in the stern but Eyvind?

  'I nearly fell overboard. All that fretting and feeling guilty, and there he was. Of course, I yelled out his name and rushed over to him, trod on a rope and nearly smashed my head in on the rail. "What're you doing here?" I said. "I thought you were going to Brattahlid." He looked at me, with this really strange look on his face, and said, "Apparently not", or something like that. Later, he told me he'd been watching me, not being able to sleep and so forth, and he'd figured out what I was planning on doing, and so he'd changed his mind and decided to come along after all; and he didn't tell me so it'd be a surprise.' Kari stopped and frowned. 'You know,' he said, 'Eyvind and me, we've spent all our lives together, never been apart more than a few days ever, but still there's times when I can't quite figure him out. He can be a funny bugger; but there, every time we think we're going our separate ways we seem to end up back with each other. I said that to him once, and he said yes, a bit like us two always ending up back at Leif's Booths. He meant it as a joke, I know, but it's always struck me as an odd thing to say

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Next day the smith came back with a new axle, fixed the cart, overcharged us and went away We put the gold back in the cart and carried on with our journey, like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The abandoned tomb vanished behind a roll of hills, the road opened up in front of us, and we left behind the place where I'd heard the story. But not the story itself.

  Stories are a bit like those burrs that catch in the hem of your cloak. When you move on, you take them with you, without realising, and that's how the burr-plant propagates itself, riding unseen on the coat-tails of travellers. The story had come a long way all the way from one edge of the world to the other, snagged on the sleeves of two old men who passed it on to another, to me. Here it is, and you can have it.

  It was Eyvind who filled in the rest of the story. Kari was with us, so he didn't explain how he came to be on the Easterners' ship, when he'd told his friend he was going to Brattahlid. Instead, he told me how they'd drifted, with their share of the timber money in their purses, from Dublin to York, York to Winchester, Winchester to Paris and then a pilgrimage to Rome; which didn't seem to have done any good, since they hadn't noticed any miracles happening, or anyway not any good ones; so they decided Rome couldn't have been enough of a pilgrimage for their case history and circumstances, and they'd better go the whole hog and head off for Jerusalem. They got there, somehow or other: no money left, no food, Kari at death's door with the fever, dragging step by step along the road, but they got there at last, to the Holy Land, to the City of God. They arrived one night and lay down to sleep in the first doorway they could find. And next morning: nothing. No miracle.

  Nor the next day, nor the day after that. They went to the Holy Sepulchre, but that didn't help. They went to Calvary, or at least they thought that was where it was, nobody spoke Norse and they were just beginning to pick up Greek and Arabic; they went to Bethlehem, and still nothing. At Bethlehem they finally sat down and came to the conclusion that whatever their problem was, the solution to it wasn't a place. By that time, of course, they were screwed; so they walked back to Jerusalem, hoping to run into some charitable fellow-pilgrim going home somewhere North-West who might take pity on them, and there they heard about the City, and how the Emperor's personal guard was made up of Northerners like themselves.

  It was, as Eyvind said, a small and pretty crappy kind of miracle; but by then they were happy to settle for what they could get. They had to hang about waiting for three months before they found a ship that'd let them work their passage to Constantinople, and by the time they arrived they were in such a sorry state that the captain of the Varangians didn't want them and told them to go away Finally, though, their luck changed. They were sitting outside the barracks gate feeling miserable when someone walking by stopped and said their names; they looked up and saw a very splendid-looking man in Guard uniform, gleaming scale armour and a big shiny sword, who said his name was Thorbjorn Asmundson, and he'd been one of Thorfinn Bits's crew, and had stayed with them at Brattahlid. He hadn't wanted to go to Meadowland, this Thorbjorn said, and he'd struck out East, ended up here and worked his way up to sergeant.

  Thorbjorn got them into the Guard by vouching for them to the captain, and that (Eyvind said) really was the end of the story. Oh, they'd had some fun since then; they'd been to Sicily with Georgios Maniakes, they'd fought the Saracens and the Turks and the Bulgars and all sorts of other interesting people, and when they weren't fighting they'd lounged around the City having a fine old time, and ever since they joined the Guard (Eyvind said) they'd never had to do what he considered a full day's work. But that wasn't the story, Eyvind said; because really, it was only about the two of them, and who'd be interested?

  And that, more or less, was all I got out of them; and when we arrived at Thessalonica, we found a letter from home waiting for us: because we were so far behind schedule, the plan had changed. I was to carry on west with the money and an escort from the Thessalonica garrison, but (for some complicated administrative reason which now escapes me) the Guard contingent was to head back home straight away

  I meant to say goodbye, I really did. I meant to thank them both, in a suitably graceful manner, making it clear that we were now genuine friends, rather than a Greek government officer and two of his hireling guards. I meant to let them know where they could find me once we were all back in the City again, so that we could drink together in a more civilised setting than an ancient looted tomb, and they could tell me other fine stories from the North, experiences and adventures and what Homer calls the glories of Man. But an accountant's idea of the crack of dawn isn't quite the same as a soldier'
s. I got up early so as to be sure of catching them before they set off, and found that I'd missed them by an hour. When I got back, I went to the Varangians' barracks and asked after them; the captain asked his clerk, who first told me they were dead, then that they'd been pensioned off five years ago, finally that they were still in Greece somewhere, and he didn't know when they'd be back. He promised faithfully, by St Constantine and the True Cross, that as soon as they returned he'd let me know And so, of course, I never saw them again.

  Many years later, I heard some news of them, from another, later Guard captain I met at a finance meeting. If the two men he was thinking of were the same as my two, he said, they'd been pensioned off as unfit for service, on account of old age, and had bought a small ship with the intention of sailing to India; because, he said, they'd never been there. I have my doubts, though. He said that the two explorers were Kari and Eyvind, but the descriptions he gave me were nothing like them at all.

  I hoped to get further and better news a few years later, when I met yet another captain of the Guard at some function or other, and he turned out to be none other than our silent, much-enduring comrade, Harald Sigurdson. Actually I didn't recognise him; fortunately though, he knew me, and asked (very diffidently) if I was the Greek clerk who'd taken the payroll to Sicily back in the old emperor's time. When I looked at him more closely I knew who he was. If anything, though, he was even taller and broader, with a leonine mane of hair flowing round his shoulders and a beard you could have stuffed a mattress with. His voice was still high and squeaky, though; but now he spoke flawless Greek with a cultured City accent.

  The first thing I did was ask after Kari and Eyvind. But he didn't know any more than I did; he was pretty sure they'd either died or gone away, since he hadn't seen them hanging around the place for quite some time. But, he went on, it was odd that I should have mentioned them, because he'd been thinking about them - and me - rather a lot lately