The Greenlanders (70 page)

“Devilish tricks, folk say.”

“That’s what I think when I cannot mimic them.”

“You got beautiful foxskins for Helga. Her hood catches all eyes.”

“I have others that I would like to give you, my mother. They are the purest white, with only a shading of blue.”

“Nay, white foxes are too bright for old women. Folk would speak ill of me.”

“Let me show them to you. I have them with me.”

“Kollgrim, it is painful to desire what one cannot have. Promise me some suitable sealskins or even some dark foxes next summer.”

Kollgrim squeezed her hand. Birgitta went on, “Now it seems to me that folk are wandering from room to room, and they must wonder why we continue to sit here, gossiping between ourselves and avoiding our neighbors.”

“Must they? It seems to me that folk care little about what one does, one way or another.”

“And yet everyone has always had an opinion of you, Kollgrim, and I am not rebuking you when I advise you to think of this. It pleases me to hear praise of you.”

“After years of blame?” Kollgrim laughed. “Perhaps I wish only that folk did not care one way or another. There are my father and Johanna, and they are looking for you.” Kollgrim gestured across the room, and Gunnar approached.

It was one fault of Hestur Stead that the builders had not had much notion of the flow of air through the rooms, so that after many folk and much food and many seal oil lamps, the steading became close and smoky, and folk began going outside into the snow for fresh air. The sky was clear and starry, and the crusty snow cast the starlight back into the air, so that much could be seen, although the moon was but a slim crescent. Folk spoke to each other about how pleasant it would be to take their skates out on the fjord, or to find sealskins to slide upon down the crusty, slippery hills above the steading, and a leader in this merriment was Sigrid Bjornsdottir. Thorkel, who saw that his feast was going well, fell in with these plans at once, and went to his storerooms and found eight or ten sealskins and some old skates for folk who had not brought their own. Soon there were races and other games, and much laughter and shouting, so that those left inside were moved to put on their cloaks and come out and sit on the hillside in the starlight, talking and watching those who joined in the games. The air was still and not especially cold.

Now Johanna came to Helga and begged to borrow her skates, for she had been inside all day helping with the feast and, she said, her bones ached for some activity, and so Helga gave them to her sister, but with a twinge of regret, for she saw that Jon Andres Erlendsson and Kollgrim and all of the younger folk were out on the ice, and only the older folk were sitting about. Even so, she sat down between Gunnar and Birgitta and put her arms through theirs. Helga listened as Gunnar and his neighbors spoke of this and that, and it must have been that she dozed, for when she awakened, she saw that folk had gone to their beds, and she was alone, leaning against the turf of the steading, wrapped in a warm robe made of reindeer furs that she did not recognize.

The moon had declined, and now cast the shadow of the steading in front of her, causing the ice of the fjord to gleam with pale brightness. Where the skaters had swept it clean, the light caught in the cuts that they had made with their skates. Helga stretched her legs before her and began to massage the stiffness out of them, when two figures stepped around the corner of the steading. The moonshine revealed them to be Kollgrim and Sigrid Bjornsdottir.

“My brother!” said Helga. “Please—” But the two did not hear her or turn in her direction, although she could hear them well enough. “Nay, Kollgrim Gunnarsson,” exclaimed Sigrid, laughing, “if there are to be but six, then I will have none at all, for my heart is set upon a hood like your sister’s, and I can see that such a hood would take ten or more.” She paused and then went on, “You can see how I have kept my promise. I would not give a cheese in trade, or some dried meat. I have brought along my own scissors, which were made in England and given to my foster grandmother in the time of Thorleif’s ship, and they have damascening all along the blades here. You can see it in the light.”

Now she held up what was in her hand, and Kollgrim laughed. “Indeed, what would I do with your scissors?”

“I care not. You may give them to your sister or melt them down, for the handles are pure silver. But I will have the furs you promised me.”

“And what will you cut your thread with, if you have no scissors?”

“I will bite it, as the skraeling women do. Besides this, do you think that the household of the lawspeaker is so poor that it has but a single pair of scissors?” Her voice seemed to Helga to flow out into the moonlight in cascading ripples. Kollgrim backed away, laughing, and Sigrid pursued him. Helga saw at once that the lawspeaker’s daughter was intent upon him, although he himself did not see this. He stumbled in the snow and threw up his hands, laughing. “Take them all, then,” he said. “I have twelve or thirteen in my pack. I would not have you think that I intended to shortchange you, rather to give more in this bargain than I thought I would receive. Truly, folk say of you that you are a persistent child!”

“Do they say I am a child then?”

“Indeed, I know not what they say, for I am not in everyone’s confidence, but if they do not say this, then they should, for I have not met another like you for relentlessness.”

“Then we have made a bargain, and we must act on it now, while it is fresh.” She pressed the scissors into his hand. “Now they are yours. I would not touch them again.” Her hand fell upon his sleeve, and grasped it tightly, and after that the two went off. A little while later, Helga stood up and shook out her dress, and Gunnar came around the corner of the steading. “You have awakened, then,” he said. “Your mother has just been spreading some furs in Johanna’s bedcloset for you. I thought I would have to carry you there, as I used to when you were a child. Johanna is already asleep.” And he told her what feats of skating and storytelling she had missed, but she told him nothing of Kollgrim and Sigrid Bjornsdottir. During the next day, she could think of little except the desire in Sigrid Bjornsdottir’s gaze, and the power of her grip when she laid her hand on Kollgrim’s sleeve, and these thoughts shamed her when Jon Andres Erlendsson was about, and so she avoided him for as long as the feast lasted, which was until the morning of the third day.

At Gunnars Stead it was apparent to Helga that Kollgrim cared little for the scissors, for he left them about thoughtlessly, and finally threw them into one of the chests as if they were in his way. This seemed to Helga a shame upon Sigrid Bjornsdottir, although only Helga knew of it. After the feast, Kollgrim went hunting a great deal, for hares and ptarmigan to put upon the table. He was out almost every day and many nights as well. He began going sometimes to the bedcloset of Elisabet Thorolfsdottir, and the servingmaid had the effect upon him of making him very gay.

One day in Lent, a servingman from Ketils Stead carried some cheeses over to Gunnars Stead and gave them to Helga, saying that Helga’s and Kollgrim’s late coming would have robbed them of the summer’s milk. The fellow was ill at ease, and not very well schooled in the proper phrases. Helga thanked him and he went off. Now Helga sat down in the steading by herself and gazed upon the cheeses. They were misshapen and Birgitta would have thought them very badly made. Helga looked at them for a long time, as if they were an omen whose meaning she could divine.

When Bjorn Bollason and his family returned to Solar Fell, Sigrid went at once to Margret Asgeirsdottir, who had stayed home from the feast, and showed her the foxskins, and she said, “These were gotten for me by Kollgrim Gunnarsson, your nephew, who seems to me a fine fellow, with a great steading and the reputation for many skills. His father is a man who is said to read and write as a priest does, his sister is married to the foster son of the greatest man who ever came to Greenland, and his other sister is a handsome and well-dressed woman with no reputation for peevishness. It seems to me that such a man would be proper for me, more proper than any lad from Herjolfsnes could be.”

The next day, when the two were at their sewing, and Sigrid brought these things up again, Margret said, “Is it not better that you should speak to Bjorn Bollason of this matter? He has more of worth to say to you about it than I do, and also more to say to those you think upon, for indeed, I cannot help you there.”

“My father cares little to hear of how this Kollgrim’s eyes twinkle, or how he laughs aloud when I laugh, or how tall he is, or how quick he is at untying the knots of his pack. My father would wish me to say that Kollgrim Gunnarsson goes about as other men do, only with more weight.” She laughed merrily. “But indeed, he is not as other men, and they would rather be apart from him and he from them.”

“It seems to me, my Sigrid, that your days will be happiest if you find yourself some prosperous, sanguine, and energetic fellow with wide fields and plenty of livestock, as well as many friends who think well of him.”

“What Greenlanders are there these days who could be so described? None that my father has found, other than himself. Even my brothers seem to stand gaping in the presence of Bjorn Bollason, and there is more to them than most other folk. This Kollgrim stands apart from the rest of the Greenlanders, as you yourself do. You are an old woman, but you stand as straight and move as quickly as a girl. Gunnar Asgeirsson looks to be his own wife’s son, and his own son’s brother.”

“But things in the world do not look as they are. Nor does the unreliable husband look anything like the handsome suitor, though they be the same man.” Now Sigrid Bjornsdottir laid her sewing in her lap and looked at Margret with her lips tightly closed, and Margret saw that the girl’s purpose was fixed. She said, “We Gunnars Stead folk are an unlucky lineage.”

Sigrid tossed her curls and laughed. “And we Solar Fell folk are as lucky as can be.” And that was all they spoke of the matter for the time. Sigrid made herself a very long hood that came down around her shoulders and dangled in the back almost to the hem of her dress, and this hood was neatly sewn, so that the bluish color in the foxskins formed a pattern of chevrons over Sigrid’s shoulders and about her face, and was flattering to her.

Now the spring came on, and the ice broke up in the fjords, and the time for the seal hunt came around, and at the seal hunt, Larus the Prophet, as folk called him, sneeringly, declared in the hearing of many men that a dream had come to him in which St. Nikolaus himself declared that Bjorn Bollason the lawspeaker was to be made king of Greenland, for the king of Norway, St. Nikolaus said, had been consumed in a great fire, with all his offspring. He was to be crowned with a crown carved of walrus ivory and anointed by the new bishop, the episcopal representative of the pope of Jerusalem, who would shortly appear on the long-awaited ship. Men considered Larus the Prophet a peculiar fellow indeed, for he would not leave off these speeches, although he was threatened and then beaten for them, but he only took a breath and started in anew, and he always had something more to say. The seal hunt was not so successful as it had been in recent years, and men were angered and disturbed by this, and blamed it upon the ravings of Larus.

After the seal hunt, these things were reported to Bjorn Bollason, and he went to Gardar and spoke at length with Sira Eindridi Andresson, his friend, but afterwards he had little to say about the matter, perhaps because he had come off so ill in the earlier encounter with Larus. At any rate, nothing prevented Larus from speaking, now, and he spread his tales about the Brattahlid district all during the summer. The ship, he predicted, would arrive in one summer, and it would carry both men and women, numbering thirty together.

Also in this summer, Eyvind Eyvindsson fell and broke his leg in the hills above the church at Dyrnes, and was out among the hills for three days, and died of exposure to the weather. When news of this was brought to Margret from Anna Eyvindsdottir, she was much cast down, for Eyvind was in the habit of visiting her at Solar Fell when he could. His shoulders and hands had been much twisted with the joint ill, but he was still a wild man, disdaining his pain and his disabilities, and full of a great deal of talk. It seemed to Margret that he had been much overlooked by everyone, including, perhaps, herself. And now the Thing came on, and the folk at Solar Fell prepared to make a great display there.

In this year, Gunnar carried with him to the Thing fields at Brattahlid a new booth, for his white reindeer skins had fallen into rags, although he had looked after them carefully. His new set of reindeer skins was pieced together with wadmal, and the booth was not so nice as Gunnar had hoped it to be. Indeed, however, when he looked about, he saw that with the Greenlanders’ booths it was as it was with their clothing—most folk could not furnish themselves as they once had, but made do with a bit of trim here and a bit of color there. Now as Gunnar was arranging his provisions inside the booth, Thorkel Gellison came to him with one of his sons. When Gunnar turned to greet his cousin, he saw that Thorkel’s face was gray, and he was much aged, even since the Yuletide feast. Gunnar said, “You do not have good news for me, I can see that.”

“Nay,” said Thorkel, “but it is no worse than news I have brought you before this, since that has been as bad as can be.”

“Ofeig has come among the Vatna Hverfi folk, then. If he has done ill to Helga, you must tell me straight out.”

“Nay. He is closer to Hestur Stead. He has forced a man to take him in and feed him. Do you recall Arnkel Thorgrimsson and his wife, Alfdis? Little good will come of his visit there.”

“I have seen these folk.”

“They have nothing to defend themselves against such a fellow as Ofeig. He has his way with the wife, for one thing. And the neighbors are small folk, who can do nothing.”

“Have you this news from Arnkel himself?”

“Nay, from his cousin, who sent his servingman there a while ago. His news was that they were putting a good face on things, out of fear. This cousin is himself afraid to go near the steading.”