by Tom Holt
He smiled. ‘It is, isn’t it? Only thing is, that’s me talking, not the little voice. The voice just keeps saying, this is where you need to go, this is where you need to be. I’m just trying to explain it away, like a woman with a drunken husband. But you don’t need to tell the others that, do you?’
‘I guess not,’ I replied. ‘So, what’s the verdict? We’re here, you’ve had a look, what do you plan to do?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Leif shook his head. ‘Just imagine that, will you? My father’s son, unsure about something. The old bugger’d have a stroke if he knew’ He leaned forward, picked the drawknife up and tested its edge with his thumb. ‘We’re a load of funny buggers, you know? Right down deep in the heartwood, right down as far as our names. When we say who we are, I mean. Half of my name says, I’m Leif, but the other half tells you I’m Eirik’s son, like that’s just as important as who I am. I can’t even say my name without dragging him into it. Do you see what I’m getting at? Half of me wants to look at this place and make a sensible decision: the grass is good, there’s fish and game, it’s warm, we’ve got a river and woods, there’s even iron ore. But it’s a hell of a long way from home - there’s no way we can make it work here unless we can get at least a hundred people, a hundred and fifty’s more like it, and who’s going to want to come all this way just because I say it’s a good idea? So I’m turning that over in my mind, and immediately I’m thinking, well, Dad managed it; he managed to kid all those people into settling Greenland, and Greenland’s a dump compared to this. If I’m as good a man as he is-You remember,’ he went on, ‘how, just before we were about to set off, the old bastard suddenly announced he was coming along too? I tell you, I was so close to sticking my axe between his eyebrows, I don’t know how I stopped myself. It took me all my strength not to; and I only managed it because I managed to keep my mind clear and realised that killing Dad would cause so much trouble I’d never be clear of it. So instead, he went on, ‘I lent him a horse.’
That didn’t make sense. ‘You lent him-?’
Big smile. ‘I lent him my chestnut mare, for the ride over from Brattahlid. Forgot to mention what a dirty, filthy temper the bloody thing’s got. See, Dad’s not what you’d call a gentle rider. He likes to impose his will. But my chestnut mare won’t stand for that.’
I stared at Leif, I didn’t know what to think.
Sorry, I keep forgetting how ignorant you are. We’re not too superstitious up North, but there’s some things we reckon are just plain unlucky. Like falling off your horse, for instance, when you’re just about to set off on a journey That’s not superstition, that’s a bloody great big heavy hint from Them Up There: stay home. Now I’d already figured out for myself that Leif was a strong-willed sort. But setting up your own father like that-Clever too, of course. I never said he wasn’t clever.
‘So I thought,’ Leif went on, ‘I’ll start off near the end of the sailing season, which means we’ll have no choice but to spend the winter here. Come spring, we ought to have a better idea of whether we’re here to cut timber or here to build a settlement. Till then-‘ He shrugged. ‘I can put off choosing till then. Fact is, I think this is a bloody marvellous place. But I also know-‘ He turned his head and stared at me, like he wanted to see the inside of my head. ‘I know that if I stay here, I won’t live long. But that’s the bitch of it, when you know the answer but you don’t know how you came by it. Now, does any of that make any sense?’
I looked at him. ‘Some of it,’ I said.
‘That’s good, then.’ He seemed to relax, or shrink, I wasn’t sure which. ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘it’s all your mate Kari’s fault, finding this place and all. And since the two of you are closer than staves in a barrel, it’s your fault just as much as it’s his:
‘You know,’ I said quietly ‘I’m not really surprised to hear you say that.’
So (Eyvind went on) I passed the word along, or bits of it, anyway I told the others I’d asked Leif straight out what his plans were, and he’d told me we were here to spy out the country, make up our mind whether it was a good place for a settlement or only fit for logging. They all thought that was pretty reasonable, though they were still a bit snotty that Leif hadn’t told them earlier. In fact, the only person who wasn’t reassured and happy was me. There you go, though; you can fool other people, but you can’t fool yourself And believe me, I’ve tried.
Now we all knew where we stood, we didn’t mind putting our backs into the jobs that needed doing. Plenty of those to go round.
I hadn’t said anything when I’d talked to Leif, because there’s no point falling out with the boss over something that’s done and can’t be helped, but - well, you’re an intelligent man, or you’d never have risen to be chief assistant bean-counter to the King of the Greeks, so I don’t need to dwell on it. Simply, Leif had been bloody irresponsible, stranding us in a country that he knew bugger all about, with only the food we’d brought with us. What if it’d all been stone and shingle, like Slabland? True, he’d brought livestock: two cows (but no bull), four goats, six sheep and a dozen hens, to feed thirty-five men. No chance. Well, it’s obvious now, with hindsight, why he brought them, just to see if they’d survive here, how well they’d do, in case he decided to settle here after all. I’d have had no quarrel with that, if he’d fetched along something for us to eat as well.
But as luck would have it, food wasn’t a problem. Getting enough to eat didn’t even take up more than half our time, which is more than you can say of life in the old country. That said, you can get really tired of salmon and venison, and wild goose now and then as a treat. We stretched out the flour we’d brought with us as long as we could, likewise the malting barley We tried cutting it half and half with flour we ground from the wild corn, but that was a waste of both resources. When the flour ran out we made porridge from the wild stuff - boil a handful with an equal amount of water and any bits of meat or herbs you can find to mask the godawful cloying mushy taste, and when the water’s soaked into the grain, you gobble it down with a spoon. Then we had nuts and berries, which would’ve been fine if we’d been squirrels, and a thin sliver of cheese, just enough to remind us of how much we missed the stuff. There were seals when we arrived, but we ate the ones who were stupid enough to hang around, and the rest buggered off. We rowed out to the islands hoping to find gulls’ eggs, but that was a waste of time. Oh, we all got enough to eat, no question about it; and as winter dragged on we smoked and salted more than enough to see us through the journey home. No shortages; but it was either horrible or boring, and by midwinter we’d have traded a week’s rations for one meal of salt cod or smoked lamb.
Same with everything else. Our clothes had pretty well rotted off our backs after all that huddling in the wet on the way over. No wool, no linen; instead, we tanned the deer hides into buckskin, and that’s a job I wouldn’t wish on an enemy In case you don’t know, it means hours and hours of scraping with a dull knife or a flint, and then you scoop the deer’s brains out of its skull with a stick, beat them up in water to make a thickish goo, and squidge them into the hide with your fingers. Cures the hide a treat, and five hides make you a shirt and a pair of trousers - except they soak up the water when it rains, and turn as stiff as bark when they dry out. At least we weren’t cold, with all that timber, and Tyrkir the mad German was as happy as a lamb with all the charcoal we made for him, so he could smelt the ore out of the bog-iron to make nails for building. At least, he was happy till the malt ran out and there was no more beer. Then he got very sad, and you’d find him sat behind his anvil, all droopy and weeping and not getting any work done. Finally, when the warm spring weather started, he went a bit strange in the head and vanished for two whole weeks. We thought we’d seen the last of him, and we thought that was a pity but something we could learn to live with, given time; but no, he came back, wet and smelly and covered in mud and bits of leaf and stick, dragging a huge sack. He’d been a long way he said, walking south, always sout
h, because he knew he’d find what he was looking for, he could smell it, a very faint scent but no mistaking it-When we asked what he was yammering on about, he yanked open the sack - three flour-sacks ripped up and sewn together again as one - and bugger me if it wasn’t full of grapes.
‘They grow wild,’ he said. ‘Many vines, hanging from the tree, just like in my home. Make the good wine, better than beer.’
Well, that cheered us up, no question. I’d had wine in Norway, as a special treat; can’t say I liked it much, too sour for my taste, but give me a choice between wine and no beer and I don’t have to lie awake all night before I make my mind up. Same with the rest of us; so we asked him, Tyrkir, are there more where these came from, do you think you could find the place again? And Tyrkir nodded madly; of course, he could find it blindfold, just following his nose, he’d lead us there and we’d fill all the empty sacks and barrels and fill the ship and the boat and make a fortune selling grapes in Greenland. So the very next day off we sent him off again with ten men and a whole lot of sacks; and two weeks later they brought the sacks back, and one very sad-looking German, but no grapes.
‘Never mind,’ Leif said, ‘they’ll still be there next year, when we come back, and we’ve got time to look properly and find them again.’ We all nodded, and Tyrkir went on being sad. Meanwhile, we decided against making wine with the grapes he’d brought back the first time, since we’d be leaving soon, once the sea warmed up and thawed the ice. Instead, we loaded them onto the ship. They went bad almost overnight, halfway into the journey, and we had to pitch them overboard because of the smell.
Not that that mattered too much; we had a decent enough cargo without them. I can’t remember offhand how much building-lumber was fetching in Greenland in those days, but it was some ridiculous price. Obviously you couldn’t get very much in the way of planked timber on board a sixty-foot knoerr, but it wouldn’t take all that much to turn a handsome profit, enough to mean that our winter in Meadowland had been well worth the effort and the misery. We slaughtered what was left of the livestock and had a bloody good feed, we left behind everything we didn’t absolutely need for the journey, and we filled the hold with planked wood, till the ship was riding dangerously low in the water. It was all right after all, we decided, in spite of Leif and his indecision and the little voices in his head. We were going home, and when we got there we were going to have a cargo to sell. Credit where it’s due, Leif had said when we set off that it’d be equal shares for all, and he never once tried to go back on that. I’m sure he meant it, too, except-Well, I’ll come to that directly.
Came the day, and we had a good wind to see us on our way By then we were so bright and breezy and full of it that most of us were saying yes, of course we’d be back next year; it hadn’t been so bad really, and next time we’d bring more flour and a lot more malting barley, and another ship just to carry the livestock; we’d do this and we’d do that, and now we knew a bit about the place there really wasn’t any good reason we couldn’t make a go of the business. We were going to build proper houses, and some of us’d stay there all year round, felling and logging and planking up, while the rest of us ferried to and fro to Greenland and Iceland (because the price back in the old country was higher still, and it wasn’t that far from Brattahlid to Snaefellsness, was it?) and pretty soon we’d all be farmers and earls and God knows what, and everything had turned out for the best, just as we’d always known it would. Things couldn’t have been better, in fact. Leif had made up his mind to do the return trip in one straight dash - he didn’t tell us that was what he had in mind, of course, because we’d have tied him to the anchor and thrown him in the sea - and as soon as we set sail, we picked up a brisk north-easterly wind that sent us skimming along like an arrow The sea was beautifully behaved, so it didn’t matter a damn that we were ridiculously over-laden. The ice had already broken up, there was almost no fog. We hardly got wet, even. Before we knew it, there on the skyline were the blue caps of the Greenland glaciers. We were home and safe.
Which was when Leif changed course and started taking us close into the wind.
‘What’s the bloody fool doing?’ Kari shouted to me, and buggered if I knew We were all muttering, and a man called Thorgrim Otter jumped up on the aft deck and tried to grab the rudder. Leif kicked him back down into the hold, then yelled to us that it was all right, he knew what he was about. We weren’t so sure about that - little voices in his head and all that - and we started asking him what the hell he thought he was playing at.
‘Look for yourselves,’ he said.
Well, none of us had thought to do that, so we looked. At first there wasn’t anything to see, but then Thorvald Salmon, who had good eyes, called out that there was something there but he couldn’t tell what it was.
‘It’s a ship on a reef,’ Leif said. ‘My guess is they’re stuck. Anyhow, we’re going in closer to have a look.’
We couldn’t argue with that, so we shut up and let him get on with it; and sure enough, it was a middling-sized knoerr, which some fool had run aground on a sunken reef. We could see the people aboard, jumping up and down and waving at us. We’d shown up just in time, because the reef had made a real mess of their hull. A few hours later and they’d all have drowned.
Leif could steer a ship, no question. Getting in close to the reef without trashing our own ship wasn’t a simple matter, particularly since we had all that valuable timber on board. But he held in tight to the wind until we were sure that we were going to run aground ourselves, then at exactly the right moment he swung her broadside on, dropped sail and called for the anchor and the boat. Neatest thing you ever saw
‘Hello, he called out, leaning over the rail. ‘Who the hell are you?’
Someone shouted something back, but we were too far away to hear it. But we were close enough to see that there were fifteen people on the deck of the knoerr; fourteen men, and a woman.
‘Screw it,’ Leif said, after a moment’s thought. ‘We’ll take the boat and pick them up, and if they’re raiders you can share my beer ration in Valhalla.’
Guess who pulled boat duty. It hadn’t actually occurred to me before Leif raised the possibility that these people were vikings- ‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘Vikings,’ Eyvind repeated. ‘Pirates to you. The word actually means, “evil bastards who drop anchor just outside the entrance to a fjord and pounce on cargo ships as they come out”. It can also mean “evil bastards who loot farms and settlements on the coast or a mile or so inland”. Or it can mean a landowner’s son and a bunch of hired hands and neighbours turning an honest penny when there’s nothing much needing doing on the farm, depending on how you look at it, and which ship you’re on
‘I see,’ I said. ‘What’s a fjord?’
Probably the thought hadn’t occurred to me (Eyvind went on) because the castaways were on a knoerr, and vikings prefer to use warships; also, they don’t tend to take women along with them. But there’s no hard and fast rules, so I guess Leif was right to be concerned. I took my axe with me on the boat just in case, and I wasn’t the only one. Kari was in the boat with me, and Tyrkir the mad German, and Leif himself and three others. When we were in hailing range, Leif prodded Tyrkir in the ribs with his elbow; Tyrkir stood up and called out, ‘Who are you?’
A short, frail-looking man leaned out and yelled back that his name was Thorir: he and his crew were from Norway Leif looked at me and Kari, but we just shrugged:
Norway’s a big country and just because we’d been there a few times, we didn’t know everybody who lived there. Leif shrugged too and stood up.
‘My name is Leif Eirikson,’ he said.
The short man looked interested. ‘Are you the son of Red Eirik from Brattahlid?’ he said. Leif nodded, and the short bloke laughed. ‘That’s a good one,’ he said. ‘We were on our way to see you.
That sounded odd, since they were closer to the Western Settlement; if they’d come from Norway, they’d have sailed right past Bra
ttahlid to get there. But maybe they got carried past by a storm or something.
‘Splendid,’ Leif said. ‘In that case, we’ll give you a lift.’
Just as well, I thought, that the rest of our lot hadn’t heard that. Think about it. We were still several days from home; if Leif was thinking about taking these people on board, there wouldn’t be room. Not unless we dumped the cargo…
Thorir must’ve had the same thought, looking at how low our ship was riding in the water; he’d have guessed we had a full load on board. ‘You sure?’ he said.
‘Of course,’ Leif called back. ‘We’ll ferry you across four at a time in the boat. Bring your stuff along, we’ll have plenty of space.’
Fuck, I thought, there goes all that valuable building timber, and my winter’s earnings. But Leif was right, of course, we couldn’t just leave the poor buggers there to drown. I was surprised to see how little fuss the rest of the crew made when we got back to the ship and told them what we were going to do. Still, it was a blow, no doubt about it.
Thorir reckoned so too once we’d fetched him across to the ship and he’d taken a look at our cargo. ‘It must’ve taken you for ever to put together that lot,’ he said. ‘Look, maybe some of us could go in the boat and you could tow us in; and the rest could perch up top of your cargo hold. It’d only be for a few hours. Got to be better than jettisoning all that lumber.’
Credit where it’s due, Leif wasn’t even tempted. He had the wit to realise it wasn’t about room so much as weight. If we took on ten men lying on top of the cargo, we’d be down so low in the water that the first little wave would swamp us. ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he said. ‘We’ll offload our cargo here, on this reef. Then, when we come back to salvage your ship, we can pick it up and bring it on.’
Thorir agreed to that, not that he really had any say in the matter, and we spent the rest of the day hauling planked wood into the boat and sending it across to the reef, bringing back men from the stranded ship. We made the last three trips in the dark, which was no fun at all, but Leif was positive that if we didn’t Thorir’s ship wouldn’t still be there in the morning. At least I got to stay on board our ship, hauling on a block and tackle, rather than going on the reef to unload. All the same, I couldn’t have felt more miserable if I’d tried. It was fine for Leif to shoot his mouth off about coming back for the cargo. But the reason we were doing this was because the wrecked ship could wash off at any moment, and naturally the same went for our beautiful lovingly planked timber. Heartbreaking was the only word for it.
