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Meadowland

Page 22

by Tom Holt


  It comes back to that old question, doesn’t it? Are you always the same person wherever you are, or do you change as you move about? For instance: at Brattahlid I was just a pair of hands; there wasn’t anything I could do that couldn’t be done better by someone else. I hadn’t chosen to go and live there, and they hadn’t chosen me; I’d been sort of inherited from Bjari Herjolfson, like old junk found left behind in the barn when someone sells up and moves on. In Meadowland, though, I was practically the founding father -me and that worthless bastard Kari, who I’d somehow got myself chained to as well. In Meadowland, I was the man who knew where the sweet-water streams were, the best places to build fish traps, which direction the wind came from in winter, where the best grazing was, where Thorvald Eirikson was buried. In Meadowland, I could have my own farm; there’d come a time when I could walk out my door and climb the mountain and look down over Eyvindsfell and Eyvindsmark and Eyvindsvatn, all mine as far as the eye could see. Just by a simple bit of ordinary journeyman magic - get on a boat, sit still and quiet for a few days in the wet and the mist, get off the boat and go ashore - I could get rid of who I was born to be and turn myself into somebody else, like the shape-changers in the old stories, the men who can turn themselves into wolves and bears and eagles. As I stood there in the yard, I could hear that other man’s voice muttering in the back of my head - this Thorfinn Bits isn’t like the Eiriksons - he’s a serious man, he knows what he’s about. It’d be quite different going there with him. There’s nothing at all wrong with Meadowland: compared with here or the Old Country it’s bloody paradise; what’s been wrong each time so far is the bunch of losers you’ve been with. Like Kari, for instance; and you’ve had it from the horse’s mouth, this time Kari isn’t going to be there. You know perfectly well, all your life he’s been holding you back, screwing everything up for you; well, now’s your chance to be rid of him. Look, all you need to do is go to this Thorfinn Bits and say you’ve changed your mind; and then you’ll be free and clear, finally you can be who you were meant to be. But, I said to myself, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He wanted to go back there, because Meadowland was the only place he’d ever get to exist. Meanwhile there was this other voice; and all it was saying, over and over again, was: don’t go, don’t go. It wasn’t giving any reasons, that voice. It didn’t have to. It had my full attention.

  Well, Bits went off again the next morning, didn’t come back for three days; and when he did come back, didn’t he ever cause trouble.

  I wasn’t there at the time; I was piling up cordwood in the woodshed, so it’d be handy for the house once the snow came. So I missed the big scene indoors, when Bits marched up to Leif Eirikson and told him that he and Gudrid, Thorstein’s widow, were planning on getting married.

  I always miss the good shows - like the classic horse-fights and wrestling matches that people talk about for years afterwards, or the really spectacular fights and shouting matches. By all accounts, that was one of the best. It’s no use trying to describe it to you, they all told me, you had to have been there.

  Well, I wasn’t; so all I can tell you is the outline. Leif wasn’t happy, not at all. Ever since Gudrid came back after Thorstein’s death, Leif had been convinced it was only a matter of time. It was destiny, he reckoned. He’d rescued Gudrid from death on the rocks, and she belonged to him. Stupid Thorstein had tried to steal her, and look what happened to him. Leif hadn’t pressed the issue since she got back, because he wasn’t an idiot, he wasn’t going to dance over her feelings in nailed boots. Give her time, don’t rush anything, and just like apples grow on trees, when the time was right she’d come round and see it was the right thing. And now this bastard, his winter guest, this short bastard, had nipped in at the last moment and robbed him right under his nose.

  Leif couldn’t say that, of course; so he lashed out in the only direction open to him. Fine, he said, if you’re hell-bent on getting yourself killed, you crack on and do it, and well rid of you. But if you think I’m going to let you take my sister-in-law out there to be shot dead by the leather-boat people, or die of fever, or starve or get eaten by bears or God only knows what, then you must be even more stupid than you look. She’s under my roof, my responsibility, and I say she’s not going.

  It’d probably have been all right if Bits’d flown into a temper; if he’d bashed Leif round the head, even, or pulled a knife, anything like that. Where I come from we’re used to people flaring up, and there’s nothing like a few painful blows or a stab wound to make you ask yourself: is this really such a big deal, like something I’d be prepared to die for, or is it really not that important? But no. The more Leif shouted and raved at him, the calmer Bits became. Leif was yelling; Bits didn’t yell back, in fact his voice got softer and softer, so Leif had to quieten down just to hear what he was saying. And Bits said: I appreciate your concern, but it’s her choice. I’ve thought it through, and I wouldn’t be taking the woman I love with me if I thought there was any serious risk she’d come to harm. On the contrary; I’m taking her there because that’s where I can give her a better life, the sort she deserves. You do see that, don’t you?

  Well; it was as though our Heavenly Father’d stuck His thumb into the cone of a volcano, just when it’d started to bust open. All that heat and fire, and nowhere for it to go. After a while, Leif stopped shouting; it was like he was drunk and having a desperate row with someone who wasn’t actually there. Instead, he just turned on his heel and stomped out, leaving Bits standing there with a sad look on his face, like he was saying, why can’t people just be reasonable about things?

  I knew as soon as I heard about it that we were in for another long, tense winter; and I wasn’t far wrong. Bits carried on like nothing’d happened. He sold the rest of his timber, laid off various deals and loans based on his property back East, and started laying in supplies and buying stuff for the journey; also, he saw to all the arrangements for the wedding. In the end it was a quiet business - at least Leif had the sense and the grace to stay well away for a day or so -and it all went off with the minimum of fuss and aggravation. Bits seemed very happy that day; I’m assuming Gudrid felt the same way, but she wasn’t the sort to show what she was thinking, not if she could help it. Of course, a lot of the Brattahlid and Eiriksfjord people reckoned she was only marrying Bits so she could get away from Leif; and if that really was the reason, I can’t say I blame her for it.

  At the wedding dinner Bits announced that he and his people’d be sailing for Meadowland just as soon as the thaw came. We’d all guessed that for ourselves already, but hearing him announce it was something else.

  He’d be sailing, he said, with three ships: his own, plus Leif’s ship, which he’d bought off him (before the falling-out, presumably) and another knoerr he’d picked up from a man from the Western Settlement who’d just moved down. Ninety men and fifteen women would be going along with him, which meant there’d be plenty of room on the ships for livestock, including a ram, a boar and a bull. Everyone knew what that meant, of course. This time, he was planning on staying out there and doing it all properly; not like the Eiriksons.

  Getting through that winter was like walking uphill in thick mud; every step heavier than the last, and getting more difficult rather than less as time went on. It was so bad indoors that I volunteered to help shift the stores Bits had brought from the long barn down to the boatsheds, just for the chance to be outside, in the freezing cold. It set me thinking: Bits had obviously planned everything down to the last detail, and being a trader he thought mostly in terms of objects. So there was a barrel of boot-nails, and seven big wooden reels of heavy linen thread; a box of the very best whetstones, from Gotland in Sweden; a box of flints, from the east of England; three large jars of beeswax; a wooden pot of blacksmith’s flux; a bag of lumps of yellow sulphur, from the Old Country; five big coils of wire; crates of tools I’d never seen before, let alone knew what they were for; all the things that sooner or later you’ll desperately need but never think a
bout until it’s too late. Bits had thought of them, though; and it struck me that someone with that much about him might just be enough to make the difference between success and failure, even in Meadowland.

  By the time we got around to unloading the last cartload it was just past sundown. Everything had been loaded in a particular order, so that the things likely to be needed first had to go in last, so they’d be on top of the stack, and handy. Practically the last items were five long wooden crates, and four big apple-barrels - except that what was in them wasn’t apples, you could tell that by the weight. Took three of us just to roll the bloody things along the ground; and I got to wondering, as we manhandled them down the plank and into the shed, what sort of item was small enough to go in a barrel but really heavy, and also didn’t rattle or shift about as the barrel rolled. Well, I had my own ideas about that, which set me thinking about the crates that seemed to go with them. Not quite so heavy, those crates, but they weren’t packed with feathers, either.

  ‘Careful with those,’ Bits called up to us as we handed them down off the cart. There’s always some clown who thinks he knows best, though; in this case, a man called Hrapp something-or-other, I can’t remember now Anyway, he thought he could take the whole weight of one of these crates, and it turned out he couldn’t; the crate slipped off the cart sideways, landed on a corner and smashed open. Turned out I’d been absolutely right in my guesses. It was full of weapons. Spears - short-headed Norway pattern and long-headed French type; Danish beard-axes, the sort that’s not much good for cutting or cleaving wood, but works a charm on arms and legs; even a bundle of five swords, packed up in straw and tied into their scabbards.

  We all stood there, looking. Quiet? You could’ve heard a mouse fart.

  Bits came bustling up; he wasn’t pleased. ‘What’s the matter?’ he said, sounding a bit guilty. ‘You lot never seen a spear before?’

  Nobody said anything, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if at least one of us had said yes. Don’t get me wrong; where I come from, we don’t mind a bit of a scrap now and then. But there’s a difference between settling a long-standing argument with a hand-axe or a big knife, and actual weapons. See, we like to think we’re practical people; and if a thing’s not going to get used, we don’t bother with it. So maybe, somewhere about the farm, you may find an old spearhead or a cracked old bow with wormholes in the riser; tucked up in the rafters, maybe, or hung on the wall so long you don’t even notice it any more. But when you see a crate full of weapons, obviously newly made, with the oil still glistening on the wood, you stop and ask yourself what’s going on.

  I’d guessed, of course; I was also prepared to bet, though I don’t suppose I’d have found any takers, that in these heavy barrels were mail shirts - apart from a ship, the most expensive thing a man can own where I come from, because it’ll take a blacksmith all winter just to draw down the wire, coil it and cut it off into rings, and then another winter patiently linking them together, hammering the ends of each ring flat, punching a hole, cutting a rivet, sliding it into the hole and peening it shut, eighty thousand times. For a start, I don’t think any of us had guessed that Bits was quite so incredibly rich. Kings can afford mail shirts by the barrel, and some of the bigger earls out East; and the King of the Greeks, of course, he’s got factories where a thousand men do nothing else all day, all year. I’d never seen one in my life, and I’d never expected to, either.

  Now when I was a kid back in the Old Country, there was this old man who had a small farm at the other end of the fell; and everybody knew who he was because he was dirt poor, only had three cows and half a dozen sheep; but if you went in his house you’d see swords and helmets and shields, all greased up against the damp and wrapped in wool; put together, they’d have been worth enough to buy the whole valley, assuming you could find anyone who wanted to buy them, but the old man’d rather have sold his fingers. Years ago, they told me, he’d been a real blood-red viking, sailing up and down the fjords every season robbing the ships, or going out to Finland or Permia and making a nuisance of himself round all the coast villages. All the time he was away, of course, his farm went downhill; his brother was supposed to look after it, but he caught a fever and died, and when the viking finally learned some sense and came home, there was next to nothing left. So yes, there’s people who have weapons just for the sake of it; but Bits wasn’t anything like that. If he’d spent an earl’s ransom on the things, it was because he figured they’d be needed.

  I guess we were all thinking the same thing, just then: the leather-boat people, who’d killed Thorvald Eirikson. It was a stroke of bad luck for Bits that the crate had smashed open, but it must’ve been at the back of other people’s minds beside mine. The big difference between Meadowland and Greenland - or Iceland, come to that - was that there were people already living in Meadowland, and maybe they wouldn’t want to share.

  Nobody had anything much to say after that. We got the weapons back in the crate, tied down the lid with ropes of twisted hay, and put it with the others, at the back of the barn. Then we went back to the house, where it was quiet as the grave and there were other things to think about.

  But next day three of the men who’d been the first to join up went to Bits and said they’d changed their minds. They didn’t say why and he didn’t ask, because there was no need. That was just the start. Next day, ten out of the fifteen women cried off, and that meant ten less men, too. Before long, the party was down from a hundred and five to sixty-four, with another twenty wavering.

  Bits took it quite well, or that was the impression he gave. It was just as well, I overheard him saying, that they’d changed their minds now rather than later; and there was still time before they were due to leave for recruiting others to fill the empty places. The general view, though, was that he was kidding himself The most striking thing was that four of his own crew, Easterners who’d been with him for years, announced that they’d be staying over when the thaw came. Needless to say, Leif was delighted; told them they could stay as long as they liked, he’d be glad to have them on the farm, or he’d ask around the neighbours to see if anybody was looking to take on more hands, if they didn’t want to stay at Brattablid. He was rubbing it in, of course, trying to encourage more of Bits’s men to leave him, hoping to scupper the whole project and so keep Gudrid within arm’s reach. He could’ve been a bit less obvious about it, maybe, but that wasn’t his way Bits pretended nothing was going on, and that just made Leif angry.

  So; while everybody else was changing their minds about the project, why should I be the only one left out?

  The point is: I’d had those leather-boat people in mind all along. It was a shock, yes, actually seeing the weapons. But unlike the others, who’d heard the story of how Thorvald died but hadn’t really thought it through, I’d already taken it on board; and I’d realised that that wasn’t why I had this bad feeling about Meadowland in general. So for me it was the other way about; the fact that Bits was taking weapons with him made me feel better about the idea, not the opposite. Far as I was concerned, the spears and mail shirts were just like the boot-nails and the wire, or the bull: they told me that Bits was taking it all far more seriously than the Eiriksons had ever done, and that could only be good. Looked at from the other direction, the worse things got around Brattahlid, the more I wanted to get away from there; and if the only ship out of Eiriksfjord was headed for Meadowland, then so be it. It came down to a simple choice, really: who would I prefer to take my chances with, the leather-boat people - or the household at Brattahlid? Put like that, it didn’t need a whole lot of thinking about.

  Well; if you make up your mind to do something, might as well do it in the best possible way I could’ve waited till I had a chance to talk to Bits nice and quiet; but instead I went up to him when he was talking to Leif - rare thing, at that stage - and a bunch of other people, and I pushed my shoulder in between Bits and Leif, and said in a loud voice, ‘I changed my mind. If you still want me along
, I’ll come.

  Bits looked blank for a moment, then grinned all over his face. I couldn’t see Leif, of course, I had my back to him, but I wouldn’t have minded the loan of one of those mail shirts, to keep Leif’s scowl from coming out through my chest. I knew, see, that what Bits wanted, and Leif didn’t, was a big vote of confidence, from someone who mattered. Normally, that wouldn’t have been me; in this case, though, because I’d been with Bjarni Herjolfson and then Leif and Thorvald and Thorstein, and everybody knew I’d refused to go this time, of course it mattered that I’d changed my mind. It was just the sort of thing, my deciding to join up, that could save the whole project from falling apart.

  Ah well. Sometimes I get these good ideas; and then I have to live with them afterwards.

  There wasn’t any going back after that. Leif Eirikson hated me now, which meant I couldn’t stay at Brattahlid; and I had nowhere else to go. You ever wondered what it must be like to be a fish with a hook through your lip? Just ask me - I can tell you.

  Much later that day, just as we were all turning in to go to sleep, I went up to Bits and asked him straight out what was in the barrels. I didn’t say which barrels I was talking about; I didn’t need to.

  ‘I think you know,’ was all he said.

  ‘Mail shirts,’ I said. He nodded. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s all right, then.’

  He looked at me for a bit, then grinned. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you’ve really screwed things up for yourself here; with Leif, I mean. Not that I’m not grateful:

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, trying to sound like I meant it. ‘I mean, it’s not like I’ll be coming back here, is it?’

  Bits nodded slowly. ‘You’ve got the picture,’ he said. ‘And you’re all right with that, then?’

  ‘If I wanted to be here, I wouldn’t be going away,’ I said. It sounded really profound when I said it, too.

 

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