by Tom Holt
‘But it’s good here,’ I said. ‘At least, it’s starting to get good. It’s warmer and the grass is better, and there’s timber; and the way things are going, the rate we’re building the herd up, it won’t be that many years before we can start branching off and setting up our own farms. You tell me, where else do you know of where you can still do that? And it’s the only way the likes of you and me are ever going to have our own places.’
He sighed. ‘True,’ he said. ‘But it won’t happen. Nobody’s going to wander off two days’ walk from here, out in the wilds on his own. All packed in tight together we might just be safe. Singly, out there, no chance. Fact is, we should never’ve listened to Thorfinn Thordsson. We knew about the locals, because of what happened to Thorvald Eirikson. That ought to have been enough to warn us.
‘All right,’ I said, straightening up for a moment. ‘But the plan’s always been that we’re just, you know, the pioneers. Soon as we’re up and running here, Thorfinn’ll send the ships back and bring in a new batch of settlers, till there’s enough of us here that the locals won’t dare mess with us. That’d solve that, wouldn’t it?’
‘If he could get anybody to come.’ Sigurd shook his head. ‘Listen, you’re talking about bringing out women - and kids, even; otherwise the settlement doesn’t stand a chance. You might find a few men daft or desperate enough to come out here, even with the threat hanging over us; women’d have more sense.
‘I don’t know,’ I said to him. ‘I think now we’ve come so far, put so much work in-‘ I tailed off, and he didn’t say anything, and we finished the job off in silence. The rest of the day I couldn’t keep my mind on what I was meant to be doing; I scat my thumb with the hammer, knocking pegs in fence rails, and tore a hole in a hide I was scraping down. It was like an itch or a stone in your shoe: sometimes you could put it out of your mind and then it came back, and everything I did seemed to be soiled with it, like the hems of your clothes when you walk in the mud.
Eyvind was up and about again after three days’ good rest. There was nothing visibly wrong with him, but he was sour and quiet, didn’t want to talk. I guess we were all waiting for Thorfinn to say something, but the days went by and he carried on giving out the day’s orders each morning, telling each of us what we’d be doing, same as normal. But there was a sort of forced ordinariness about him, if you get my meaning; he was having to try and act natural, which of course is very hard to do if you’re trying to do it. Meanwhile summer was getting on; if we were going to leave, we’d have to make the decision before the autumn started, so we could put by the stores for the journey
Then one day - it was evening, we’d come in from outside, and Gudrid and the women were getting the place tidied up for dinner - it so happened that they’d had the bundles of fur out, the ones we’d had off the leather-boaters in trade. It was Thorfinn’s idea: pull ‘em down out of the rafters and check them every now and again to see the damp or the moth hadn’t been at them. Anyhow, when we came in from work the furs were all laid out on the tables, and the women were about to pack them away again. Gudrid looks over at Thorfinn, and asks him, ‘Where should we put these?’
He looks at her like he doesn’t get the point of the question. ‘Back up where they live, he says.
She shrugs. ‘All right, she says. ‘I just thought, we might as well get them bundled up and pack them in some hay in a barrel.’
Thorfinn frowns. ‘Why?’ he says.
‘For the journey home,’ Gudrid answers.
And all of us listening, of course; standing there, waiting for him to answer. You could’ve cut the silence like cheese. He took a long time, like he was thinking about it; and he didn’t look round at us or anything, but he really didn’t need to.
Eventually ‘That’s a good idea,’ he says; and Gudrid nods to the women, who fetch out the old rags and the wool waste, and she asks a couple of the men to go out back and fetch in one of the empty barrels. And that was it; that was the moment we knew the settlement had failed, and we were going home.
Thorfinn never made what you might call a formal announcement or anything; but in each morning’s daily orders, there’d be two or three jobs that were to do with preparing for the journey - like sending men up into the woods to gather beech-bark and moss for caulking the ships, or drying or curing some bits of meat instead of cooking them for the evening meal. Simple as that, and at least there wasn’t any fuss. But we had Gudrid to thank, because none of us could ever’ve raised the question straight out with Thorfinn. He wasn’t that kind of man.
Now the only question was, could we be ready in time before the cold set in, or were we going to be stuck there another winter, waiting for the spring weather? There again, Thorfinn made it difficult for us all by not saying anything straight out about our plans; it was like he’d told us all about it, but none of us’d been paying attention, and we didn’t dare admit we’d not been listening. We kept waiting for him to tell us to start overhauling the ships; he had us out drawing pitch off the pine trees and twisting ropes and putting up supplies, ready to start the overhaul, but before long everything, all the materials were up together but still no word from Thorfinn.
Meanwhile, as we were waiting, we had another death: Ohtar this time. It started off as a septic finger and then it got really bad. His whole hand swelled up, fever set in, and in the end he couldn’t talk or hardly move at all. Sad way for him to go; he was the quiet, solid type, the sort you need on a long-haul job. Talking to him was like digging gravel out of a stream; bloody hard work, and just when you think you’ve got a good spadeful, it slides off the blade back into the water. He was hard going in winter, when there was nothing to do; but if you were doing a job of work together, you could turn your back on him and know that his part was as good as done. Got to admit, I’m the opposite; I’d always rather talk than graft, and I’d be useless on my own, because the thought that unless I do it, it won’t get done would put me off even starting.
When Ohtar’d been on his back for three days and it was pretty clear that he wasn’t ever getting up again, some of us took it in turns sitting by him, just to keep him company Not sure he appreciated it, but we did it anyway When it was my turn, and we were alone in the house, everyone else out at work, he beckoned me over and grabbed my wrist. It was plain enough that he was off his head by then, but if he wanted to talk that was what I was there for. Also, I don’t think I could’ve got my hand free without cutting off his fingers.
‘That mate of yours,’ he said, in a raspy, painful sort of voice. ‘He about anywhere?’
I shook my head. ‘He’s off up the woods,’ I said. ‘Won’t be back now till it’s dark, I don’t suppose.’
That seemed to bother Ohtar. ‘Give him a message from me,’ he said.
‘Wait and tell him yourself,’ I replied; because he was sounding urgent, like he didn’t expect to be still alive come nightfall.
‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘Tell him I was right after all, about the fetch.’
Well; crazy stuff, like you’d expect from a man dying of the fever. ‘I’ll tell him,’ I lied.
‘Tell him,’ Ohtar went on. ‘Tell him that that wasn’t all I saw I didn’t say anything before, because I was waiting to see if the fetch was a true fetch. If it was, I’d know the rest was true too. You see that, don’t you?’
‘Makes sense to me,’ I said.
‘Tell him,’ Olitar went on, ‘that I was out back of the house one night, and the moon was full. I wasn’t doing anything, just getting logs, and I ran into a man I’d never seen before. He looked like he was someone I knew, but I couldn’t remember him, and he definitely wasn’t one of us. I was going to ask him who he was and how he’d got there, but I couldn’t get the words out, somehow Anyway he nodded to me like we were old friends passing on the road, and went on; but then he stopped and turned back, like he’d just remembered something he’d been meaning to tell me.
“‘It’d all have been different,” he said to me, �
��if only you’d landed a mile or so further south. But no, you had to know best.”
‘I didn’t like the sound of that,’ Ohtar went on. ‘What I mean is, it didn’t make sense, but it felt like I understood what he was getting at. So I asked him, “Who are you?”
‘He grinned at me - scary sight, that was - and he said, “Who you are depends on where you are, and I’m here. Come on,” he added, “you’ve been here all this time, you should know me by now” Again, I sort of felt I understood, though I couldn’t have explained it to you then, and I can’t now
“‘What do you want?” I asked him, and he shrugged his shoulders.
“‘What do you want?” he asked me back, and I didn’t know what to say “There you are, then,” he went on. “That answers your question for you, surely If you don’t know, how can I know? And if you don’t know why you’re here, how can you know who you are? Of course, you and me’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted, but the others are just passing through, so it doesn’t matter. But I always liked you; you’ve always been the job in hand, no matter where; on a ship, forecastle-man, I reckon that means you’re everywhere, and you make it into just the one place. I guess if you’ve got to settle down, there’s worse places than this.”
‘He was starting to get me down, but then he raised his hand and waved; I blinked, or I got something in my eye, and when I next looked he’d gone. I went after him, but I couldn’t see him anywhere. Any rate,’ Ohtar went on, ‘not till now But here he is again.’ He was looking past me, over my shoulder. ‘You should’ve told me you knew him, Kari,’ he said, ‘though I suppose I should’ve guessed.’ Then he breathed out, long and slow, and sort of folded up back onto the bed; he was still breathing, but he’d gone all limp and boneless. He hung on for another day but he didn’t wake up again; and then we buried him under a mound at the edge of the meadow, close by the woods.
Ohtar dying like that seemed to help Thorfinn pull himself together; because the day after we buried Ohtar, he told us to make a start on overhauling the ship. That was good news, because we reckoned we still had time to sail home before the cold weather, if we got a move on. But it didn’t work out that way Two of the ships were fine, didn’t need anything doing to them except caulking and pitching and a bit of ropework. The third, though - Bjarni Herjolfson’s old ship, the one Eyvind and me’d always sailed on - was in a terrible state. Don’t ask me how it got like that when the other two stayed sound; but the strakes were so rotten that in places you could break off a handful and crumble it up with your fingers, and you could poke a hole through the boards with your thumb. It was so bad that it might almost’ve been better to tear out the sound bits and build them into a whole new frame, but we didn’t want to admit to that, if you see what I mean - it’d have been too depressing. So Thorfinn decided we’d patch it up, cut out the rot and splice in new timbers; he tried to make it sound like it was just a few weeks’ work, but he wasn’t fooling anybody Luckily, we had more than enough good, seasoned wood for the job, which meant we stood a chance of getting the work done before the next winter set in. That was the most we could hope for; so, like it or not, we were there for another four months, at Leif’s Booths.
I’ve known some slow winters, but none quite as bad as that one. Gudrid wasn’t talking to Thorfinn, not really since the battle; if they needed to talk about something to do with the running of the house, they’d do it in the hall, in front of everybody, and they were so polite to each other, you could tell how brittle things’d got between them. We carried on working on the ship far too long into the cold season; result, five men went down with cold fevers, and it’s a wonder none of them died. Worse than that, we were so busy with the ship we didn’t have time for curing fish or smoking meat - we’d finally come to terms with it and slaughtered all the livestock, but somehow a lot of the meat didn’t get preserved, so it went bad and had to be thrown away Upshot of that was, there wasn’t enough food - but by the time we’d noticed, it was far too cold out to go hunting or fishing. So we had to go on strict rations, which didn’t improve matters. A couple of men took it badly, panicked the rest of us; they were talking about killing the four old Irish women, since we didn’t need them any more and the rest of us could share their rations. Gudrid put a stop to that kind of talk, but sometimes it’s worse, shutting people up when they’re in that sort of mood, there’s the risk they’ll just go ahead and do it anyway, in the middle of the night when everybody else is asleep. So the rest of us were on edge about that. Thorfinn said he didn’t trust the men who’d been suggesting it, wanted to take their axes and knives off them; they said they’d kill him if he tried it, and he backed down. Gudrid moved the old women into the inner room, with her and Thorfinn, and that solved the problem, but now we were practically at each others’ throats all the time, so nobody dared say anything, all day long; we just sat, or lay on the floor, and time passes very slow indeed when you reach that stage. It was like hanging by your fingertips off a ledge, with a bloody great drop if you let go. You’ve got to hang on, you daren’t move, but you know it’s only a matter of time before your fingers start to slip. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was a harder winter than usual. We couldn’t face being hungry and cold, so we piled the fire up high and tried not to figure out how long the wood was going to last at the rate we were getting through it. I think we were down to three days’ supply by the time the thaw started and we were able to get up into the forest to cut some more. It was just as though Meadowland was getting spiteful with us for wanting to leave, though she’d made it pretty clear that she didn’t want us around any more. Sounds strange, but I’ve known people like that, so why should places be any different?
Well, we got through. Nobody starved, or froze, nobody killed anybody else; we hung on, and then the snow turned to rain, and we were through into spring. You’d have thought that once we were out of the house, outside in the fresh air, with food to eat and the prospect of going home to look forward to, things’d have lightened up and the tension would’ve melted away It wasn’t like that - I think we’d all come too far over that winter. You never saw men work so hard as we did, fixing up the ship; but that almost made things worse, if possible. We’d got past the unskilled stage of the job, and most of what had to be done was up to the carpenters to do. They were going slow, because the last thing they wanted was to fuck something up and have to start all over. The rest of us thought they were crazy, or doing it on purpose; there were a couple of fights and a lot of shouting and temper, and that slowed things down even more. I think all that saved us was that we were too tired - what’s that clever Greek word - too demoralised to smash each others’ faces in. It’d have needed too much effort, and we didn’t care quite enough to do anything that energetic.
Middle of spring, we were finally all done. We dragged the ship down to the sea and floated her; she was letting a bit of water in, but we pretended we hadn’t noticed. Loading the cargo cheered us up a little bit, because we were absolutely determined to hold Thorfinn to his promise about share and share alike. He hadn’t meant it to apply to trade, of course, only to what we got from farming at the settlement; but we weren’t having any arguments about it. We had the furs we’d traded with the leather-boat people, and two good loads of timber. If you took a few steps back and thought about it clearheaded, a share of just over one-sixtieth of that lot would still amount to a decent wage for the time we’d spent. Not enough to buy a farm in Iceland, maybe, but better than nothing. There were a few cracks about who we could dump over the side on the way home, so as to bump up our shares, but that was just kidding around; a month or so earlier, you’d have been worried if your name had come up.
I remember, the night before we were due to sail, I went outside to take a leak. After I’d run dry, I noticed Eyvind standing in the open and looking up at the stars. Now, we’d got on better than most over the winter; I guess we’d been friends so long we couldn’t fall out if we tried really hard, there wasn’t that much differenc
e left between us, after we’d been through everything together. But for a couple of days before that evening we hadn’t had a chance to have a chat together; and I wasn’t cold or in a hurry to get back indoors, so I went over and said: ‘What’re you looking at?’
He looked round; he hadn’t noticed I was there. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just thinking how glad I’ll be never to see this bloody place again.
I couldn’t argue with that. ‘Dumb, isn’t it, that we’ve spent so much time here, when we both hate it so much,’ I said. ‘Beats me how we kept letting ourselves get dragged back here.’
For some reason he looked at me all crooked, like I was trying to be funny ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is definitely the last time I’ll stand here. I’ve given this place a good slice of my life and I’ve got bugger-all to show for it. If we get blown out and drown on the way home, at least I won’t be buried here.’ He laughed. ‘It’s like feeding a dog begging at table: you do it once and it’ll never leave you alone. Well, it had Thorvald, and then we had to give it Ohtar and Thorbrand and Bjarni Grimolfson. I’m glad it won’t get me as well.’
Eyvind gets like that sometimes. I’m used to it. You are too, probably after listening to him. If you take no notice, he gets a grip and goes back to normal. ‘Fine night,’ I said. ‘Any luck, we’ll get clear of the coast and the current before the wind gets up.
‘Hope you’re right,’ he said. ‘You know, there’s times when I have this horrible feeling that I’ve put my foot in a snare, and the more I try and pull away from the things that hurt me most, the tighter they grab me. This place,’ he said, looking away ‘Some people. But it seems to me that that’s only to be expected - I mean, ever since we left the Old Country, I’ve lived a good share of my life on ships; and what’s a ship but a way of going from place to place, yet always taking the same place with you?’
