Meadowland (3 page)

Actually, unloading the money hadn’t even occurred to me; I can be slow sometimes. But I wasn’t going to admit that. ‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘But a cart, even a mended cart, isn’t going to be much use to us with no horses; and I don’t know how things are where you come from, but around here, you don’t leave valuable horses unguarded all night next to the public road. Not if you want to see them again.’

‘Actually,’ Kari replied, ‘we don’t have horse-thieves in Iceland, the country’s just too small, and everybody knows everybody else. But I take your point. I was going to say, we’ll have to post a watch anyway, so whoever’s on guard can keep an eye on the horses too. Will that be all right by you?’

‘Fine,’ I said, trying to make it sound like I was giving in for the sake of a quiet life, rather than because he was right. ‘You’re the guards, I suppose you know your job.’ An unpleasant thought occurred to me. ‘Post a guard, you said.’

Kari laughed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘Eyvind and me and the boy wonder there’ll do it, you can stay in here in the warm and get some sleep.’ He looked at me for a moment, then added: ‘No offence, but you’d make a lousy guard; and, like you said, we need the horses.’

Another of those double-sided insult-compliments, I suppose. Anyhow, that suited me, and as it turned out, I was let off helping lug the money boxes in through the door, too. All I had to carry was my blanket and my pillow - I’m sadly fussy, so I’d brought my own special pillow with me from the City. They’d probably have fetched them for me if I’d sat there long enough looking helpless, but I reckoned I’d lost enough face already for one day

The tomb, and I’m pretty sure that’s what it had been once, was completely empty inside, though at first there was no way of knowing, because it was as dark as a bag in there. But Harald lit a fire; and when we found out the hard way that there wasn’t a chimney or anything like that, he scrambled up on one of the boxes and bashed a hole in the roof with his axe. It was still uncomfortably smoky in there, but not too bad, thanks to the through-draught from the door-hole.

We’d only just settled in when I heard the most appalling roll of thunder, and then the sound of raindrops pecking on the slates, like King Xerxes’ two-million-strong army all drumming their fingers at the same time. It doesn’t often rain in Greece, but when it does, it gives it the full treatment. Water coming in through Harald’s improvised smoke-hole drowned our fire in no time flat, so we had to shift it over a bit and start again. Just as well, in fact, that Eyvind had insisted on us taking shelter for the night, or we’d all have been soaked to the skin.

For a while we just sat there, feeling sorry for ourselves. Then Kari told Harald to go outside and take first watch; and Harald, rather to my surprise, refused. Come to think of it, those were the first words I heard him speak - in Norse, needless to say, not Greek; I’d been expecting a deep, bear-like rumble from a man of his size and disposition, but it turned out that he had a high, quiet, squeaky little voice, and he stuttered. He could be firm when he wanted to, though. No way was he going out in that, he told them, not with his weak chest (I’d just watched him dragging a money box through the door-hole all by himself); and if that meant the bandits stole the horses, he couldn’t care less, but in his considered opinion any bandit with enough brains to know how to breathe would be passing the night in a nice dry cave, so if we wanted to get drenched that was fine, but he was staying right where he was, and anybody who had problems with that could discuss the matter with his axe.

He finished his speech - no other word for it; he gabbled his way through it like an amateur actor in front of a restless audience - and immediately went back to being still and silent. Thinking back, he reminded me of one of those strange mechanical toys they used to make in Alexandria, a thousand years or so back. You know the ones I mean: you boil up a big pot of water, the steam goes up a narrow pipe and pushes against a little gadget like a waterwheel with wings, and that drives a whole lot of cogs and gears’, and a little bronze statue of a flute-player spins round and round and makes a whistling noise. Then, when the steam runs out, it stops dead in its tracks. Constantine the Great or someone like that brought a whole lot of them back from Egypt, and when I was a kid they had them set up in the Forum of Arcadius, and they used to set them going sometimes on saints’ days.

Anyway: I was expecting Kari and Eyvind to kick up a fuss about that, but instead they just nodded, as if to say fair enough, and after a brief silence Eyvind said he’d better take the first watch, then, and stomped out.

I don’t remember exactly how the subject came up. The idea had been that we’d all get some sleep, but for some reason - the noise of the rain on the roof, is my guess - none of us could get off, and there’s something inherently silly about three grown men lying on the ground, wide awake, not talking. Eventually, Kari sat up, yawned and fished about in an old goatskin bag that he carried with him everywhere he went.

‘Chestnuts,’ he explained, when he noticed me watching him. ‘Back home, when we can get them, we like to roast them in front of the fire.’

That reminded me of something. ‘Food,’ I said. ‘Have we got any?’

Kari sighed. ‘Wondered when anybody’d mention that.

And the answer is no, apart from these chestnuts and the burnt end of yesterday’s loaf. Thought we’d be in Sparta by now, see. Not to worry, though. Soon as it’s light, we’ll send out young Harald to kill something - he’s good at that. And meanwhile,’ he added cheerfully, ‘there’s these chestnuts. It’s all right, I’ve got plenty to go round.’

Actually, they weren’t bad, considered in the light of there being nothing else, and once I’d got some food inside me I cheered up a bit. Kari and Harald were munching steadily away, and I thought it’d be nice to start up a bit of a conversation. That’s me all over, I’m afraid.

‘You were saying earlier,’ I said, ‘about some place you’d been where vines and wheat grew wild. Where was that?’

I think Harald may have made a slight groaning noise, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. ‘Ah,’ Kari said with his mouth full, ‘now there’s a story. Wineland we used to call it; it’s a big island way out in the north-western sea. Furthest island out there is, as a matter of fact.’

‘Wineland,’ I repeated. ‘After the grapes, I suppose.’

Kari nodded. ‘That’s right, he said. ‘Of course, that’s not what it was supposed to be called. But Leif Eirikson - that’s Lucky Leif, the son of the man who founded the Greenland colony - either he misheard it when Bjarni mentioned it, or he thought Wineland sounded better. Anyway, the name sort of stuck, and there you go.’

‘Greenland,’ I repeated. ‘Where’s that?’

This time, Harald groaned quite loudly and distinctly Kari looked all wise, like Minerva’s owl on an old statue. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘For a clever man, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know’

I shrugged. ‘I was never any good at geography,’ I replied. Then, when Kari looked at me: ‘The names of places,’ I explained, ‘countries and cities and rivers and mountains, and where they all are in relation to each other.’

‘Right.’ Kari nodded slowly ‘Never knew there was a word for it. Which is a bit arse-about-face, because of course I probably know more about that sort of thing than most people, even you clever Greeks in the City. Still,’ he went on, ‘I’d have expected you to know about Greenland, because it’s quite a big settlement these days, practically its own little country.’

‘Sorry, no,’ I said. ‘So,’ I went on, because I knew I’d walked straight into a story, like a fox putting its foot in a wire, ‘where is it, then?’

Kari swallowed his mouthful of chestnut before answering. ‘North,’ he said. ‘In fact, as far north as you can go, pretty well, before it gets so cold and snowy you can’t get any further.’

‘Must be an all-right sort of place,’ I said, ‘with a name like that.’

Kari laughed. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘It’s a dump. Just a little frilly edge of farmland between the sea and the mountains; sheep and cattle just about survive there, and most years you can scrape together enough hay to see them through the winter, more or less. But the name was just a gag, a trick, to kid people into moving out there. Eirik -that’s Red Eirik, who started the settlement - he was the one who decided to call it that.’ Kari shifted a little to get comfortable, and scooped some charcoal out of the jar onto the fire. ‘But that’s all a very long story, and I don’t suppose you’re interested.’

CHAPTER

TWO

Actually, he wasn’t far wrong. But I had the feeling Actually, that he wanted to tell me about it, and he’d be sure to get his way somehow or other, sooner or later, so

I thought it’d probably be easier all round if I gave in straight away

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘It’s always interesting to learn things you don’t know very much about.’

Kari shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘Actually, it sort of ties up with what you were asking about earlier - Wineland and all that.’

Well, why not? I thought. Maybe it’ll help me get to sleep. ‘Tell me about that too,’ I said.

There was this man (Kari said) by the name of Red Eirik.

Now, no offence intended, but I reckon you Greeks aren’t a patch on us Northerners when it comes to neat, punchy proverbs and sayings. But a few years ago, I heard a Greek talking about someone, and he said trouble followed this man around like crows following the plough; and straight away, it put me in mind of Red Eirik. You see, it’s not the plough’s fault that the crows follow, it doesn’t encourage them or anything; and Eirik never went looking for trouble, because deep down he was a peaceful sort of man who only wanted to live quietly with his neighbours and get on with a bit of work. But it never seemed to come out of the mould that way First Eirik and his father got thrown out of Norway because of some bother there. I don’t know the details, but everybody who knew him said it wasn’t Eirik’s fault, and he was quite upset that he had to kill those people. Anyhow, Eirik settled in Iceland, like so many Norwegians were doing at that time, and for a while he got on quite nicely in Hauksdal, which is good country, and good people live there. But a couple of bad men, real troublemakers, tried to push Eirik around, and after he’d killed them their relatives kicked up a hell of a fuss - that’s next of kin for you, pathetically narrow-minded - so he had to clear out of Hauksdal and move to Breidafjord. By this time he was sick to death of trouble, and he figured it’d be a good idea to stay clear of other people as far as possible - if there weren’t any people about for him to kill, he’d be far less likely to kill anybody, and that’d be just fine. So he built a farm on Oxen Island, which is a pretty remote place. Also, he went out of his way to be sociable and pleasant to the few neighbours he had. He even lent one of them his bench-boards- Sorry, I forgot. Bench-boards are pretty carved panels that you dowel onto the fronts of your benches. You must have benches, even in Constantinople. For sitting on. All right; back home we build our houses long and low, with one big room where everybody sits around in the evenings and in winter when it’s too cold and dark to go out. I’m forgetting, you don’t have cold in these parts, not cold cold, but you’ll just have to use your imagination. Anyhow, there’s one big long room, and usually one or two smaller rooms leading off it, for the head of the family to sleep in, and storerooms and so on. In the main hall there’s usually long benches running the length of the room, and if you’re reasonably well-set and a bit of a show-off, you stick on these carved panels-You get the idea, I’m sure.

Anyway, Red Eirik had a fine set of bench-boards which he’d brought with him from Norway, and, trying to be sociable, he lent them to a neighbour for some special occasion, and the neighbour was a miserable bugger and wouldn’t give them back. This led to words, words led to other stuff, and pretty soon, Eirik had the deceased’s family snapping round his heels yet again and found himself in need of somewhere else to live.

By now, he was more or less at the end of his rope. All the bad stuff in his life, he decided, was because of other people - because, left to himself, he was just a peaceful, harmless farmer who wouldn’t hurt a mouse - and the only course left open for him was to up sticks and go where there weren’t any other people at all.

A tall order, that; but as luck would have it, he remembered a story he’d heard about some man called Gunnbjorn Ulfson who’d been blown off course trying to reach Iceland, a hundred years or so earlier, and ended up on some island nobody had ever been to before. Now Gunnbjorn just wanted to get to Iceland, he wasn’t interested in exploring, so he turned round and sailed back the way he’d come - his luck was in and he made it home. He told people about his adventure, naturally, but even the people who believed him weren’t particularly interested. As time went on, what Gunnbjorn had said about where these islands were and how you got there started to rust away a bit, so to speak, and by the time the story reached Eirik it was all thin and flaky Never mind: if Gunnbjorn was telling the truth, this island of his was completely empty, and that was just the sort of place Eirik was after. He packed up as much stuff as he could fit on board a knoerr - there I go again: that’s our word for the deep, chubby ships we use for going to places and carrying stuff about, as opposed to your slim, thoroughbred warship, which is your quintessential rich man’s toy and not really much good for anything useful. Anyhow, he took along all his farm workers and some neighbours who’d got into trouble for being on his side, pointed his ship in the general direction of where he thought Gunnbjorn’s islands might possibly be, and set off. Everybody reckoned that was the last anyone’d ever see of Red Fink, and the general view was that that’d be no bad thing.

Imagine people’s surprise, then, when the following summer Eirik sails back to Breidafjord (where, strictly speaking, he wasn’t supposed to set foot ever again, on pain of death), and announces that he’s found Gunnbjorn’s island. Furthermore, he says, it’s huge, and it’s the most wonderful country. The sea’s crawling with fish and seals, sky full of gulls, and the pasture’s so good that you ought to be able to keep your cattle out nine months of the year; in fact, Eirik says, it’s so rich and green, the only possible name for the place is Greenland.