The Greenlanders (16 page)

The folk at Gunnars Stead were much diverted at this time by the visits of Skuli Gudmundsson, whose duties on the king’s farm at Thjodhilds Stead were rather light. Skuli had much to say, about the court in Norway where he had lived for many years, and about Kollbein the ombudsman, and he had a way of telling these stories that made their subjects seem foolish. Margret sometimes teased him, wondering in what sly ways he spoke of Gunnars Stead when he was at Thjodhilds Stead, but Skuli knit his brows and feigned ignorance of this.

He also told them what sorts of things folk were wearing at Queen Margarethe’s court, for, he said, the court always dressed in a rich and colorful way even when they had no meat for the table and no wood for the fire. Queen Margarethe herself, Skuli said, was low and dark, not at all pretty, though all of the courtiers said she was, but she had an attentive way about her that showed she knew where to step. King Hakon was more handsome, like his father Magnus, and in Skuli’s view, this caused folk to pay attention to him when they might better be watching the queen, and indeed, this very thing had overtaken Kollbein the ombudsman, who had been a tax collector in the Trondelag and had made a rich man of himself. He had purchased two estates for next to nothing, though they were much improved with good byres, rich chapels, and water systems in excellent repair. It was the queen who noted the richness of these estates and compared them to the relative leanness of the tax collections for these years. Although Kollbein had in fact purchased these estates for much less than it appeared, and probably had not cheated the treasury, he had spent so much time flattering the king and so little flattering the queen, that the queen had turned a displeased ear to his protestations when he made them, and sent him off to Greenland as his punishment, placing some Danes upon his farms as “stewards.”

“We should pity him for these hardships,” said Margret, “but folk only laugh at him.”

“He knows not what to do with Thjodhilds Stead and Foss,” said Skuli, “though they are goodly pieces of land. He chatters on and on only about bearskins and walrus tusks. And he has slaughtered nearly all the sheep that the Greenlanders gave him. It doesn’t seem to the sailors that the Greenlanders will be so generous again. We all look forward to empty bellies.”

Now Olaf spoke up, and said, “This Kollbein is the king’s tax collector, is he not? He must know that there are farms in other districts, and that generosity has little to do with it, come to that.”

Formerly, Skuli had spoken of his dead wife, and especially of his four sons, but now he did not do this as much, because, perhaps, of the recent death of the baby Asgeir Gunnarsson. He acted very kindly toward Birgitta Lavransdottir, and carved her a small round box with a lid out of the base of a large reindeer antler. Around it marched the figures of a polar bear and a seal and a man with a bow and arrow. For Margret, he carved six sharp needles out of bird bones, and they were very cleverly done, so that the eye of a needle was hardly wider than the body, although big enough to carry seal-gut thread. Although these gifts were remarkable to the Gunnars Stead folk, Skuli hardly paused in his talk while he made them. In return, Margret and Birgitta sewed Skuli a pair of purplish stockings from the thickest and warmest Gunnars Stead wadmal, woven by Gunnar himself, and Skuli was considered by the folk at Gunnars Stead to be an old and good friend.

Pall Hallvardsson, too, continued to visit, and Skuli’s stories sometimes aroused him to remember ones he hadn’t told before, about his childhood among Belgian priests, and the things he had learned there about singing and illuminating manuscripts. From time to time, though, he and Skuli discussed the Great Death and the sinfulness of cities, where unprotected folk passing through the ways at night were as likely as not to be beaten and stripped of their possessions, if not killed, and where such abundance of food as the Greenlanders knew except in the severest winters was never known to anyone but the highest folk.

“As for abundance,” said Margret, from her great loom, “anyone who has come to the Greenlanders after the time of Ivar Bardarson, and since men stopped hunting in the Northsetur, has never known abundance. It took a whole summer’s day to carry all of the Greenlanders’ goods out of the bishop’s storehouses when Thorleif departed for Norway, and this was not only wealth, but also meat and sourmilk and blubber and eggs and other good things to eat. Thorleif himself said to my father Asgeir that the ship sat so low in the water that the sailors would have to eat their way to Bergen.”

“That was a fat trip, indeed,” said Skuli, with a laugh, “not like our crossing with Kollbein Sigurdsson, for all that he is the king’s representative. It seems to me that the queen must have purposely stinted him on money for provisions so that the sailors would grumble the whole journey.” And so the talk went on many evenings, while Margret and Birgitta wove and spun, and Skuli carved this and that, and Gunnar repaired such furnishings as needed his attention.

Once, in very early winter, when Margret was in the hills above Vatna Hverfi laying partridge snares, a man came upon her suddenly, and gave her a fright. He was wearing a shirt and hood of very thick sheepskin that fell forward over his face, so that she didn’t know him, and when he stepped out from a willow cleft, where he had been doing something, she jumped back and gave a cry. As she stepped back, her foot rolled with a loose stone, so that she would have fallen, except that the man caught her elbow and held her up.

There was a man at this time living above Vatna Hverfi district, who had committed the crime of killing his cousin over a horse fight, and had been outlawed for three years by the Thing, although in Greenland outlaws were allowed to live at the fringes of the settlement, sometimes among the skraelings and sometimes not, since there was no going abroad as there had been in the old days. This man was named Thorir the Black-browed, and so, when Margret regained her balance, she said, “Thank you, Thorir Sigmundsson,” and backed away from him, for it was not known how he had been enduring his time of outlawry. Nonetheless, although she was afraid, she took three fat ptarmigan from her pouch and laid them side by side on a flat rock at her feet, saying, “You would do me a great favor by accepting these poor birds, Thorir Sigmundsson.” Then she backed away, slowly, not taking her eyes off the outlaw and feeling her way with her feet. The man neither looked at her, nor picked up the birds, and after a while she was out of his sight and she ran the rest of the way to Gunnars Stead.

The next evening, when she came into the farmhouse from the dairy, the three birds, all neatly plucked, were lying on the bench beside the fire. Margret went at once to the door and surveyed the homefield for signs of the outlawed man, for there were many reasons why such visits were not a little to be feared, and the fact that they were contrary to the law was not the least of these. Vigdis, the wife of Erlend, for one, would be glad of something new to bring against the Gunnars Stead folk. Aside from this, an outlawed man living above Isafjord had gained entrance to an isolated farmstead and stolen a great deal of food from both the kitchen and the storehouse, although the tale that he had killed a member of the family had turned out to be false. But there were no signs of anyone except Olaf and Skuli, who were standing near the cowbyre. Margret took the birds outside around the house and buried them in the midden with a spade.

After that, Birgitta came from her bedcloset, and the two women prepared the evening meal of reindeer meat seethed in broth, sourmilk, and dulse mixed with butter and spread on dried meat. Soon Olaf came in and sat before his trencher, and looked at it once, and said, “What more is there to eat, then? I am looking for a good roast ptarmigan.”

Birgitta laughed. “You may look for it as hard as you please, but you are not likely to find it until we have all eaten our fill of reindeer meat.”

Olaf looked around again. The roasting spit was standing upright, unused, near the fire. The only birds in the room were the wheatears and larks in Margret’s willow cages. “Well,” demanded Olaf, “where are these birds Skuli Gudmundsson has brought us, plucked and bled? I laid them on the bench myself.”

Now Margret looked at Skuli, who laughed heartily in his beard. “Indeed,” he said, “I have heard that from time to time a ghost may come between a gift and its recipient, and so it is considered the better course to place it in the hands of the one you are giving it to.”

Olaf growled, “Anything is possible, but truly I have been looking forward to roast fowl all afternoon.”

Later that evening, Margret went to Skuli, and said that it ill behooved him, especially as one of the ombudsman’s men, to consort with outlawed men and in reply, Skuli went outside and carried in a large sheepskin shirt with attached hood, and declared to Margret that she should admire the thing, poor as it was, for one of the young women at Thjodhilds Stead had sewed it for him, and he expected to be very warm in the winter. At this, Margret reddened and turned away, and what had befallen the three birds on the bench remained a mystery that the Gunnars Stead folk talked about for a day or so afterward.

In this fall, Gunnar and Hrafn counted a hundred and sixty-two sheep and goats, thirty-four cows, and four horses, including Mikla, that now belonged to Gunnars Stead. Also in this fall, Hrafn brought home a new wife from another farmstead in Vatna Hverfi, named Katla. In age, Katla fell somewhere between Birgitta and Margret, but much of the time she spoke nonsense, and so the Gunnars Stead folk considered her silly. She was good-natured, however, and worked well if someone stood near her and helped her keep her mind on her tasks. Now Hrafn came to Gunnar and asked if one of the outbuildings could be put in good order for himself and his new wife. The boys, who were now eleven and nine, would continue to sleep off the cowbyre, as Hrafn had done when married to Maria. Maria had been born at Gunnars Stead in Asgeir Gunnarsson’s time, and had preferred to sleep in the farmstead where she always had slept, but this was not suitable for a stranger, Hrafn explained. Now Olaf and Gunnar went around to all the buildings with Hrafn, trying to choose a large enough one that would take only a little fixing up, for Gunnar did not care to hire anyone to help with this work, although neither he nor Olaf was especially clever at building.

Soon a building was chosen, of about ten ells long and eight ells wide, that had once been used as a storehouse in the time of Gunnar Asgeirsson, the father of Asgeir. The masonry in this building was still in good repair, and turves could be easily cut nearby. In addition, the east wall of this house was built into the side of a hill, so that the only real difficulty would be replacing two rotten beams under the roof. When Olaf stuck his finger into them, the wood crumbled away into powder. Now Gunnar had to bethink himself where he might get two stout beams, and what he would have to pay for them. The next time that Pall Hallvardsson and Skuli were visiting, Gunnar leaned back in his seat after the evening meal and declared, casually, that he was thinking of building, if he could find the wood to build with. Pall Hallvardsson said that he had heard that others were thinking of building, too, not only Kollbein the ombudsman, who was always thinking of something, but a farmer of Eriks Fjord, who wanted to put up a new storehouse, and a farmer near Gardar, who wanted to add two rooms to his house. He didn’t know about the men of Vatna Hverfi or the southern districts, but it was common knowledge that wood was in short supply, and that old houses would have to be taken down before new ones could be put up. Gunnar made no reply to this, and afterwards, they spoke of other things.

Now, whenever Gunnar met another farmer or went to church, he mentioned casually that he was thinking of building, if he could get the wood to build, and one by one he began to hear of who else wanted wood and who had wood to trade, and there were more of the former than there were of the latter. After this, Gunnar and Olaf went around to the Gunnars Stead buildings again and tried to decide what could be torn down, so that they could use their own wood, but the buildings not in use were so old that their beams were much like the two beams in Hrafn’s house, so that some bargain had to be made with someone, and many Gunnar asked in the district declared that it would have to be made with Erlend, for indeed, Erlend still had six great beams of wood from Markland that had never been used, and this was more than any other farmer had, but Gunnar said that he would not go to Erlend.

Now Lavrans and his servants came from Hvalsey district to visit with Birgitta, and Lavrans declared that a farmer in his district had one beam of wood in excellent condition that he would trade for four good heifers bred to the Gunnars Stead bull, and Gunnar asked if Lavrans had seen the wood, and Lavrans said that he had, and that the man was not lying about its soundness, although it was only about eight ells long. Gunnar agreed to the deal, if the man, who was a prosperous farmer with many servants, would send the beam to Vatna Hverfi and take the heifers back himself, and Lavrans guaranteed for this.

Now Gunnar heard that Erik Thorleifsson had found wood to build his storehouse from a farmer in Isafjord, and that he had traded for eight beams, enough for the storehouse and more, and Gunnar said angrily that this seemed rather greedy to him, but Pall Hallvardsson said that the tale was that he had paid six cows apiece for the beams, and that they were old and not especially sound. After this, there was news from Thord Magnusson of Siglufjord that a beam could be had in Alptafjord, but Gunnar declared that he knew of no way he could get it in one of his own small boats, and the farmer who owned the wood had no boat. Now there was no news for a while, and Hrafn came to Gunnar and said that Katla was complaining day and night of sleeping beside the cowbyre, and Hrafn asked that Gunnar go to Erlend and get the wood from him, but Gunnar did not agree to do this. Instead, he and Olaf and Skuli repaired what they could of the new building, hoping other news would come.

It was getting well toward Yule, and the ground began to be frozen with hoarfrost every day, although there had as yet been no snow. The cows were still grazing in the homefield, and had not as yet been walled into the byre. On one of these days, Gunnar looked out to see Vigdis approaching, and he turned to Olaf and said, “A strange ship is sailing in the Gunnars Stead waters.”