The Greenlanders (30 page)

Lavrans’ farmstead at Hvalsey Fjord was smaller and poorer than Gunnars Stead had been, but the fact was that all of Birgitta’s best livestock was there, now numbering some fifty or sixty beasts. These, with Lavrans’ own flock, made a sizable holding. And Finn Thormodsson was with them. It was here that the boy she expected was born to Birgitta, and at the last minute before the baptism, she recalled Asgeir Gunnarsson, the child who had died, and the name seemed ill-omened to her. So she told the priest to name him after Lavrans’ father, that was, Kollgrim. And Kollgrim Gunnarsson was a fat and bonny babe, and all went well with him.

THE DEVIL

I
T HAPPENED IN THE AUTUMN OF THIS YEAR
1378
THAT RAGNVALD
Einarsson, who lived with his folk at Solar Fell in Eriks Fjord, grew very suspicious and apprehensive, so that he often saw apparitions among the icebergs in the fjord, and he was never so happy during the whole summer as when the fjord was free of ice, and never so haunted as in the time after the seal hunt, when icebergs, small and large, began to calve and cluster between his farmstead and the two beaches where he had killed one skraeling and allowed the other to escape. Tidings that Ragnvald Einarsson was spirit-ridden were greeted with much interest all around Eriks Fjord and Gardar, for Ragnvald was a prosperous and powerful man.

Now one day toward the end of the summer half year, some days after St. Michael’s mass, folk at Solar Fell were engaged in making preparations for the winter, and were busy slaughtering sheep. On this day, Ragnvald’s spirits seemed to lift, and he no longer stared out into the fjord, but instead admired his fat sheep and handsome children, including especially his young grandson, Olaf Vebjarnarson, who had been born the previous fall. Late in the morning, one of Ragnvald’s servingmen came to him and declared that he had seen a strange boat in the water, such a boat as appeared and then disappeared, neither a skin boat, as skraelings paddle, nor a wooden boat, as Norsemen row. Ragnvald said that this would be a peculiar sight indeed, and laughed heartily at the idea. However, his children and servingfolk grew uneasy, and began casting glances toward the fjord.

Sometime after this, when most of the sheep had been slaughtered, Ragnvald’s folk built a fire and began singeing the hair off the heads of the slaughtered sheep. Ragnvald himself oversaw this operation, in the company of his wife, who was a sturdy, gray-haired woman named Svanhild Erlingsdottir, and had produced five sons and three daughters for Ragnvald. When this job had been done, and the sheeps’ heads carried into the storehouse, the folk went inside for their evening meal, leaving one servingman, Gaut, tending the fire and boiling a large vat of water for washing wadmal cloth. All of a sudden, Gaut ran to the door of the house and shouted that the skraelings were coming, and all of Ragnvald’s folk streamed out of the house, but they saw nothing. Ragnvald himself reassured them, saying, “It is only that the ice is so thick in the fjord.” They went back to their meal, and Gaut back to his work.

While Gaut was engaged in putting driftwood on the fire, a strange iceberg floated to shore, and figures silently slipped out of it and silently ran up the strand, and one of these figures, who were skraelings after all, dealt Gaut a blow on the head with a rock. Blood and gray matter spilled out onto the turf. Then the skraelings grabbed the burning faggots from the fire and carried these and some other brush they had brought with them to Ragnvald’s farmhouse and set the turf afire. And the turf went up very quickly, for it was the end of summer: little rain had come yet, and no snow.

The skraelings were diabolical in this, that they filled the doorway with brush and whale oil-dipped faggots, so that those who attempted to escape by the door were burned to death. Among these was Svanhild. It happened, however, that Ragnvald himself escaped through a back passage with his grandson Olaf in his arms, and he fled at first up the hills toward Isafjord, but the skraelings cut off that route, and so he turned and ran along the fjord toward Brattahlid with the child screaming in his arms. Many skraelings pursued him, both on foot and in skin boats, and he grew despairing, for he saw that they had many arrows in their quivers. Ragnvald was sure of death, both for himself and for his grandson, and much talk had gone around of what the skraelings were known to do with the children of men, such as roast them like sealmeat and drink their blood, and so, fearing such a fate for his beloved grandson, Ragnvald came to the fjord and threw the child into the water, while at the same time repeating the last prayers, as it is spelled out in the laws. The child drowned, but was assured of Heaven, and Ragnvald ran on. As it turned out, the skraelings were unable to catch him, and he came to the farms of Brattahlid district. The number of those killed, including Olaf Vebjarnarson, amounted to fifteen. A large band of skraelings settled at Ragnvald’s steading, and took prisoner two of Ragnvald’s shepherd boys.

Those Greenlanders who were in the habit of trading with the skraelings soon had news of this fight from the demons they traded with, and this was, that a certain warrior by the name of Kissabi was resolved to kill Ragnvald himself, for Ragnvald had killed his brother, cut off the brother’s arm, and shamed Kissabi with it. Other than this, it was discovered that two of the skraelings had been killed in this fight. During this winter, Ragnvald moved to the southern fork of Hrafns Fjord and took over an abandoned farm there. As many of his children and folk as had survived the attack at Solar Fell came to live with him, and this included two daughters and one son and one daughter’s husband and nine servingfolk. One of these daughters was named Gudny, and her husband had been the Solmund who was shot by the arrow of the second skraeling when he was innocently gathering shells. She was now married to a man named Halldor Grimsson, and these two lived with their baby son Grim at Hrafns Fjord with Ragnvald.

Folk in every district spoke about this attack until Yule, through Lent, and past Easter, for it was the greatest event to take place in Greenland for many years, and now folk looked upon the skraelings with renewed fear and contempt. Some men, Erlend Ketilsson among them, gained great respect from this attack, for Erlend had always refused to trade with the skraelings and to learn any of their language, for, he said, those who speak the tongue of the devil will soon be doing the devil’s work. Vigdis, too, spoke of this, and she said that she looked for the great conflict between Goodness and Evil in her own lifetime, when the skraelings would come down from the north in myriads and overrun the farms of men, and they would cease to look like men, as they did now, but be revealed as giants and trolls. At this time there was a prayer that began to be repeated during services, and this prayer went:

Lord, we see Thee in Thy might
,
Higher than the cliffs of white
,
Greater than the ocean gales
,
Thou who mad’st both bear and whale
.
We call to Thee, Father and Son
,
Look down upon these lowly ones
,
Scattered thinly in these hills
,
Beset by demons and devils
.

This prayer was the work of the Greenlander priest Sira Audun, and was highly thought of by every one of the Greenlanders.

Certain men thought differently than Erlend did, those who had grown rich trading with the skraelings, or were married to skraeling women and had their wives’ mothers with them on their farmsteads. These men remarked on how exactly the skraelings’ attack had matched Ragnvald’s attack upon the skraelings after the killing of Solmund; but the killing of Solmund was itself a sore subject, as it had been unprovoked.

Another tale much repeated was the tale of the drowning of Olaf Vebjarnarson, and Ragnvald was greatly praised for his course of action, although much pitied for the extremity of desperation he had found himself in. There began to be talk of how little Olaf might be made a saint for this, and Sira Jon declared that there had to be evidence of miracles. Some declared that a holy glow emanated from the water where Olaf was drowned.

The case was that the Greenlanders could do nothing about the skraelings living at Solar Fell, as they did not have enough weapons to make a proper attack, not enough boats to come by sea nor enough skis to come over the hill from Isafjord, and so it was judged better to leave the skraelings be through the winter. By spring hot blood had cooled, and men thought more carefully of the bloodshed and death that would be involved in such an undertaking. Ragnvald, after all, lived far to the south, at Hrafns Fjord, and was not present to excite the anger of the other farmers.

Ragnvald was much downcast through the winter, and so spirit-ridden that he could neither sleep nor pay attention to his tasks, but woke up screaming every night and often entertained the ghosts of his sons and his wife, who had followed him southward.

The folk at Hvalsey Fjord were much concerned with these events, for there were fewer farms there, and the district was more subject than others to the comings and goings of groups of skraelings. For many years a band of skraelings had been in the habit of hunting whales at the mouth of Einars Fjord, where there are many islands. It was the practice of these demons to hide among a group of small islands in their skin boats, and one sign of their diabolical nature was that they could rest quietly in these boats even in rough seas for long periods of time if they knew that a family of leviathans was approaching. Greenlanders had once or twice gone with them, but it was impossible for men to sit so quietly as these skraelings. At the approach of the great sea beasts, the hunters would fix their harpoons, and then, quick as lightning, the barbed spear would hurtle into the flesh of any whale that surfaced. And then the other boats would descend upon the place like a flock of wheatears, and the demons would kill the beast with their harpoons and tie their boats together and float the beast to others standing on the shore. Some of the Greenlanders were much envious of this sort of hunting, for one whale could feed many folk for many days, but this sort of hunting is not in the nature of men, and whales come to Christians only by the grace of God.

This latter point had sometimes been the object of much debate among the folk of Hvalsey Fjord, for folk disagreed about whether whalemeat traded from the skraelings was wholesome to eat without being blessed, or even after being blessed. Sometimes folk grew sick from it and sometimes they did not. Sira Pall Hallvardsson had learned nothing of this at his school among the Flemish, and folk were greatly surprised at this, that such an important question was unconsidered by learned men. But the fact was that the farmers of Hvalsey Fjord always kept by some whalemeat traded from the skraelings, and this flesh spelled the difference between life and death at the end of the winter.

Much else about living in Hvalsey Fjord was different from the ways of Vatna Hverfi district. Folk used boats much more than they used horses, and in fact there was only one horse in the district, but every farm had two or more boats, and there was much discussion about the best ways of keeping these boats watertight and in good repair. Men vied about their boats just as men in Vatna Hverfi district vied about their horses. Another Hvalsey Fjord habit was to depend upon the fjord for a great number of fish, and there were times when the folk of the district ate nothing but fish day after day, for both morning meat and evening meat. Gunnhild Gunnarsdottir, for one, thought little of this custom, and was often discontented. For their part, natives of Hvalsey Fjord were much surprised at the quantity of ewe’s milk Birgitta gave her children to drink and predicted that children nourished in such a fashion would soon suffer an excess of blood.

Nor were there so many good herbs growing about the farms, for the slopes above the farmsteads were steep and rocky and the strip of ground beside the water narrow. Often the peaks were clad in morning mists and the winds that blew these mists away, if they came off the ocean to the west, were brisk and chill. For this reason, farm buildings had smaller rooms and were themselves smaller, for folk had to go off in their boats to cut turves, and the turves had to be set thickly about the stone walls, for the wind, especially in the late winter, when folk are hungry, could seek out the smallest chinks and bring frost into the house.

The folk of Hvalsey Fjord were ready builders, Gunnar found, and when they were not tinkering with their boats, they were climbing about on their houses and outbuildings, repairing this or rebuilding that. It was for this reason that Hvalsey Fjord had such a great church, the newest and most beautiful in Greenland. The builders had done an unusual thing. They had ground up the shells of mussels and mixed these with water and put this into the spaces between the stones of the walls, so that these walls, on the inside, were very smooth, and did not need to be covered with wallhangings. They had also built an arched window in the east wall of the church, which not even Gardar Cathedral had, and from the feast of St. Eskil forward until the feast of St. Thomas, the morning sun rose in this window and lit the church with a dazzling light. Birgitta was much pleased with this church, and with Sira Pall Hallvardsson, who had lived there for many years now, and as Lavrans Stead was situated just across the water from the church, she spent not a little time there, and soon came to the position of overseeing the disposition of church furnishings and also of Sira Pall Hallvardsson’s household.