Meadowland Tom Holt

by Meadowland (lit)

  'You see,' he went on, pouring me a cup of rather good wine; we'd gone back to his private lodgings, splendidly furnished in the very latest fashion. 'The political situation back in Norway has changed; for the better, as far as I'm concerned. My nephew Magnus has been throwing his weight about rather, putting people's backs up. Things are going quite well for me; I'm negotiating a marriage alliance with Jaroslav of Novgorod, which ought to give me the leverage I need to persuade King Svein Ulfsson of Denmark to come in with me; one way or another, it won't be long before I get Norway back, and maybe a nice fat slice of Sweden and Denmark too.'

  'How splendid; I said, remembering how he'd allowed the two old rogues to bully him and order him about. 'Soon I'll be able to tell all my friends I knew you before you were famous.'

  Irony had about as much effect on him as spitting peas at an elephant. 'By all means; he said. 'And if ever you're in the North, you'll have to come and stay with me, as long as you like. But it's not Norway I wanted your advice about, or even Sweden and Denmark. It's what I'm going to tackle afterwards that's been bothering me.'

  I frowned. 'After Norway and Denmark and Sweden, you mean.

  'That's right,' he said, nodding briskly 'The thing is, with the Northerners you've got to keep them busy It's like herding sheep: so long as they're moving, they keep together and one half-decent dog can keep them in order. Once they're grazing quietly in a meadow, however, they split up and wander off, and it's a devil of a job making them do what you want. So, once I've dealt with young Magnus and done my deal with Svein, I'll need something else to occupy my mind; and I've pretty well narrowed it down to a choice of two projects. But that's where I've got a bit bogged down, if you follow me. Can't make up my mind which; and that's where you come in.

  'Heavens I said. 'Well, I'm happy to advise, of course, but I don't know what value my opinions on strategy and international politics are likely to be. All I know about is adding up columns of numbers.'

  He smiled indulgently 'Ah,' he said, 'that's not quite accurate. You'll see, as I explain.'

  'That's all right, then; I said. 'Please, go on.'

  He stretched his legs out a bit - I'm sure he was cramped, Greek chairs are made for normal-sized people - and sat quiet for a moment, marshalling his thoughts. 'The first choice; he said, 'and, I have to say the obvious and logical one, has got to be England.'

  'England,' I interrupted him. 'That's the sort of triangular island up and across from France? Sorry, but it's years since I last had any reason to read Ptolemy'

  'That's England; he confirmed. 'And Scotland's on top of it, and Ireland's next to it, due west. First, I've got a fairly decent claim to it - it's a bit complicated, because the English succession's all tangled up with Denmark and Norway and there's no clearly obvious line, which actually makes it easier for me to step in, if you see what I'm driving at. More to the point, it's a big, fat country, splendid grazing, the people are a bit simple but hard-working and docile, and we sort of speak the same language, more or less. They've had it pretty soft for a long time now, and they're a bit too keen on the quiet life for their own good, to be honest with you. Their idea of repelling an invader is to pay him money till he goes away I reckon that by the time I've sorted out Magnus and Svein, I'll have an army that'll be able to roll the English over as easily as picking apples. Then Ireland'll be the next logical step, then Scotland, Orkney, the Hebrides; after that, possibly the Faroes and on to Iceland, depending on how things turn out. But that's getting a bit far ahead - don't weigh your wool while the sheep are still wearing it, as my grandfather always used to say'

  'Quite,' I said. 'Very sensible.'

  'Anyway' Harald went on, 'England would be a pretty shrewd move for a whole lot of reasons, and it'd make me a player in the big game. I'd be leaning on the Latin Empire from both the north and the west, and if there's one thing I've learned since I've been' here, it's that the Latin Empire is definitely where the future lies. France, Germany, Italy, they're all in a real mess. No direction, you see, nothing to unite them, not since Charles the Great's time. But if someone strong and dynamic were to burst in on the scene, knock their heads together, sort them out and get them organised - well, there's all the manpower there you could possibly want, hundreds of thousands of potential soldiers; and you know better than I do, it's shortage of manpower that's slowly bleeding this place to death. A concerted push from the west, and the Greek empire'd come tumbling down like a derelict barn - no offence; he added quickly

  'None taken,' I assured him gravely

  'Which is exactly what Christendom needs,' Harald went on, as though I hadn't said anything. 'Unite the Latin and Greek empires; drive the Turks out of Asia Minor and North Africa and Spain; get the Church put back together again -I mean, I ask you, what a disaster that's been, the two halves of Christendom at each other's throats for centuries and all over the technicalities of how you calculate the date of Easter, it's pathetic; and once we've done that, well, the sky's the limit, really'

  'Absolutely right,' I said. 'It's such a good idea, in fact, I'm surprised that nobody else ever thought of it.'

  Harald shrugged. 'It's all about vision; he said. 'Anyhow, that's one of my choices; and you can tell, I've thought it all through pretty thoroughly It's the other one that I wanted to ask you about. You see, you were there when those two old farts, Kari and Eyjolf-'

  'Eyvind,' I corrected him

  '-When they were telling that story, all about the big island over the sea, out west; in fact, you heard the whole thing, I only got bits of it. Anyhow, what I was thinking is, how about it?'

  I looked at him. 'How about what?'

  'That island of theirs,' Harald said. 'Meadowland, or Wineland, or whatever it was called. Yes, I know they moaned about it and said what a rotten place it was, but, well, you talked to them long enough, you know as well as I do that they were a pair of losers, so what's their opinion worth? Peel away all their whining and stuff, get back to the facts; you've got a great big island, to all intents and purposes uninhabited, absolutely stuffed with valuable timber, magnificent grazing, good climate - it's crying out for someone to take advantage of it.'

  'Yes; I said slowly 'but look what happened to everybody who tried to settle there; Lucky Leif and Thorfinn Bits, and that dreadful woman who murdered her business partners-'

  He raised an eyebrow. 'Murdered?' he said. 'I think I must've missed that bit. Doesn't matter; the fact is, those examples don't matter worth a damn. Look at them critically, what've you got? A few half-baked attempts by a family of idiots, with no real resources, no planning, no real structure to speak of; honestly, it's a miracle they lasted as long as they did. You can't dismiss a project simply because it's been tried by idiots and failed. Just think of what I'd be able to bring to it. Well, first, money; resources. I can fit out a whole fleet of ships - purpose-built for carrying livestock out and timber back, on the Greek pattern. Then there's manpower, which is generally the key to any venture. The North is seething with spare people, men with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Leave them where they are, they make trouble; send them somewhere to start a colony, you gain a useful new possession and you get rid of a load of layabouts and hungry mouths: two birds with one stone. Then there's organisation, administration. Damn it, we don't even have words for them in our language; but since I've been here, of course, I've learned all about that sort of thing - supply lines, matériel support, communications, all the most up-to-date modern techniques. But the most important thing that I'd bring to the business would be clarity of purpose. I know what I want out of the project; and it strikes me that's one thing the Eiriksons never had. It's like they thought that just going there was enough; they hadn't properly thought through what they were going to do when they got there. With me, it'd be quite different, of course. Planned, phased settlement, self-financing, with the profits from lumber and furs and so forth. Carefully regulated interdependence - no chance of the colonists deciding to kick me out and go it alone, when
they depend on me for their malt and their flour, and of course I'm the one who'll be setting the prices and the rates of exchange. If all goes well, it wouldn't be long before I'm making as much out of selling stuff to the colony as I'm getting from what they send me. Wealth, you see, that's the key to everything. I mean, you must appreciate that better than anybody What's keeping the City and the Greek empire going these days? Not manpower; the Turks and Arabs and Slays outnumber you a hundred to one on each front. Superior military force? Hardly; you hire barbarians to fight barbarians. And you can do that because you still have this amazing knack of generating wealth; and if I'm going to make my proper mark on the world, that's how I've got to start thinking. Oh, it's not the Northern way If you want to conquer your neighbours, you ask yourself, who are my bravest warriors, not where's the money going to come from to pay for all this? But that's small-minded thinking, limited, and it won't get you anywhere. And another thing, about this idea of Meadowland. Everywhere you go in the North, and the South too, sooner or later you're going to run up against the power of the Church. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a God-fearing man, and in its place the Church is a damn good thing; but they own all the land and the property, plus they can send you to Hell for ever and ever if you annoy them, which means you've got to tread very carefully so as not to piss them off. But if I start up what'll basically be a whole new country -a whole new world, even - if the Church wants to do business there, it'll have to play by my rules and do what I say You can see how that alone makes it a more attractive proposition than England, say where half your people are going to have their first loyalty to the Pope and their bishops, not to you. Really, when you think about it, you've got to admit that it's an amazing opportunity for the right man. Mind, I don't know how big the island is, nobody knows that - one of the first things I'd need to do would be a proper survey, send ships right round the coast, draw a map, so I'd know what I'm dealing with. But it's not unrealistic to suppose that it's quite big - bigger than Iceland, almost certainly maybe as big as Ireland, even; and every acre of forest we cut for timber is an acre ready to be ploughed and seeded for pasture. I have an idea that sheep'd do really well there; imagine what you could so if you had a near-monopoly of the wool trade. And then there's the natives; there's a source of cheap labour for you. Do what the ancient Romans did, use the natives as your workforce, and when you've got all the work out of them you can, you reward them by making them citizens, thereby increasing your manpower reserves and your recruiting pool for your armies. You just can't do that in the North any more, apart from a trickle of Irish, they're too well organised and defended. But imagine the benefits. Instead of the old style of government, where I allot land to my earls, and they have their tenants, and both the profits and the loyalties get dissipated all down the line, I can keep the best land for myself as royal estates, worked by native labour under my bailiffs; I keep control directly in my hands, and I get the wealth I need for my aspirations in Europe.'

  By this time he wasn't looking at me; he was gazing over my shoulder, at a bright vision only he could see. 'I don't know he said, 'I really don't. It's a damn shame I've only got a miserable little country like Norway to start off from. If I was King of France, say, or Emperor of the Greeks, I could do both at the same time, England and Meadowland. As it is, I've got to choose; I'm only human, after all, I simply haven't got time to do one and then the other. And I'd hate to turn my back on either of them, but I've got to; it's really frustrating. So; he went on, remembering I was there, 'what do you reckon? You're a shrewd man, and by now you know as much about Meadowland as anybody If you were in my shoes, right now, which one would you go for? I'd be really interested to hear what you think.'

  What I think; so I thought. When I'd finished thinking, I steepled my hands and did my best to look intelligent; I've practised it over the years, at committee meetings and assessment panels, and if I try I can be quite convincing.

  'If you want my honest opinion,' I said, 'I'd go for England. Now I want you to bear in mind that I know next to nothing about the place; and what little I do know is, what, five hundred years out of date, because we Greeks have had bugger-all to do with it since we pulled the garrisons out, back before the Western Empire fell. But I'm basing my advice on what I know about Meadowland; which isn't a lot, since I haven't been there, and all I do know is what Kari and Eyvind told me.

  'That said, though,' I went on, 'I think Meadowland would be a bad idea. Again, I'm very shaky on my geography; but after I heard the story, I had a look in the old maps, and read my Ptolemy and my Strabo; and of course none of the places in the story are even mentioned, unless what Ptolemy called Thule is actually Iceland. And that in itself is significant, I believe. Frankly it's a very long way to go, from Norway to these places. If you wanted to guarantee a practical and efficient line of communication between your base and this Meadowland, you'd need to have a firm grip on all the stepping stones along the way As a soldier, you know how important that is. If you're relying on the goodwill of independent states for your lines of supply and your transport routes, you're asking to be held to ransom at some point. So, in order to make sure of your communications, you'd have to conquer first Iceland and then Greenland. Now, you know about these places, I don't; you know about the political set-up, the degree of resistance you'd be likely to meet, the level of sympathy you might expect from disaffected chieftains, that sort of thing. But my point is, even if it's a straightforward job it'll take time - years, probably before you've got enough control to move on to Meadowland itself. And correct me if I'm wrong, but Iceland and Greenland sound to me like poor places, with no valuable resources to speak of, so all the years you're subduing them, there's no income coming in to finance the project, you'd have to fund it out of your other revenues, which puts a strain on your domestic economy Once you've done that, you can start colonising, yes; but it'll be years and years before the revenues coming in exceed the costs, maybe not even in your lifetime. To be blunt about it: unless you discover large deposits of gold and silver in Meadowland, that you can just dig out of the dirt and cart away to your ships, forget it. Meanwhile, what have you got? Timber. Fine, it's valuable, but it's bulky, you can't ship enough of it quickly enough and cheaply enough to subsidise all your ambitions.' I paused, for effect. 'It depends on how you see things; I said. 'I mean, if you're prepared to plough all your available resources into the project for years to come, your son or your grandson could stand to inherit - what did you call it just now, a whole new world. Fine; you'll be remembered as a visionary, a great man in context, like Philip the Macedonian. But you'd only ever be Philip, you'd never be Alexander. It all depends, like I said, on what you want; and if you'll pardon me for saying so, from what you told me I think you want to be the Northern Alexander: you want the world and you want it quick, while you've still got time to enjoy it. Meadowland's too far away, and too much of the distance between you and it is covered in water. To my mind, it's as simple as that.'

  Harald was quiet for a long time, thinking; then he nodded decisively 'You're right, of course,' he said. 'It's too far away, and that's all there is to it. England it is, then. Thanks. You helped me clarify my thinking, I'm obliged to you.

  I grinned. 'My pleasure; I said. 'And when you're King of the whole North and you need a chief clerk, write me a letter and I'll come up and run your exchequer for you.'

  'I might just do that,' he said. And the grisly part of it was, I think he probably meant it.

  Three years later, to my amazement and, let's face it, horror, that buffoon Harald Sigurdson was crowned King of Norway I read about it - a small footnote in the regular diplomatic gazette - but nobody I asked knew anything about the goings-on of the far-northern savages: heretics and pagans, uncouth, unlettered, kin to the unspeakable Normans who have caused so much trouble in Sicily and other places in recent years. So I thought no more about him, or any of the Northerners, for close on twenty years; until, a month or so back, there was another footnote in the
gazette about a change of regime in England. According to our sources, who are generally reliable, the English king is dead, killed in battle, and the country is now in the hands of William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy This came as a surprise to our diplomats, who never thought the Normans had the resources for such an enterprise; but, according to the report, they managed it because the English were weakened after fighting off another invasion, only a few days earlier, led by Harald Sigurdson, King of Norway, generally known as Harald the Tyrant. The English victory was a close-run thing, our man in Paris reported; but once King Harald was killed, fighting bravely in the front rank, the Norwegians gave up and ran away leaving the English free to march the whole length of their island to fight the Normans and be slaughtered.

  Well, then. It's not every day that an elderly accountant like me changes the course of history. The power of Norway is broken and the relentless spread of the Norman menace continues unchecked, all because I persuaded Harald Sigurdson not to go to Meadowland. The joke of it is, the reasons I gave him were improvised rubbish, made up on the spur of the moment and dressed up in long words so he wouldn't see how thin and scraggy they were; because I didn't want to give him the real reason why he shouldn't go anywhere near Meadowland, because he was an idiot and he'd have ignored me.

  I didn't want Harald Sigurdson to go to Meadowland because it's obviously an unlucky place. Simple as that. No good will ever come of it, nobody who goes there will ever have any joy of it. Don't ask me to explain why; if you've got this far, you'll understand without me having to construe it for you. What was it Kari said? The old story, about the island that turned out to be a hungry whale, gobbling up unwary sailors who landed their ships on its back. That's about right, I believe. But it goes deeper than that, I think. There are places that do things to people; and I believe Meadowland is one of them. If you go there, it will change you. It seems to me that it's a place that takes your strengths and turns them into weaknesses, as it did with the strong willed, venturesome Eiriksons. What-ifs are easy in this wonderful Greek language of ours, where you can turn thoughts into things with a flick of syntax. I wonder: what if Red Eirik had gone there, instead of his son? Would Meadowland have turned his weaknesses into strengths?