An Old Captivity (33 page)

In the stern, old Tyrker turned to Leif. “Lord,” he said quietly, “is it your wish that there should be no fighting in this ship?”

The Norsemen looked down at him in surprise. “Surely, my foster father.”

The old German said: “I think the men have laughed enough.”

Leif ripped out a sharp order and the laughter stopped; in silence the Norsemen stood watching the two runners as they struggled with the stone. They got it up to the bows of the ship and dropped it down on to the sand. Then they picked it up between them and staggered forward; sometimes carrying it and sometimes rolling it, they took it ashore with them.

Tyrker said: “Their ways are not our ways, and they don’t understand.”

Leif said: “They are poor, simple people, but I like them very well.”

In the ship the work went on again; on shore Hekja pointed to a little rising knoll. “I want to take it up there, Haki.”

With much trouble they got the stone up to the top of the little hill overlooking the lagoon. They arranged it with the utmost care on the exact summit; the letters showed up beautifully, and they were very pleased with it. They chocked it up with other little stones to make sure that it could never roll about.

The girl sighed happily. “It will be quite safe there, Haki. Whoever comes up here will see our names together.”

The runner nodded. “That is very good.”

They went back and worked till nightfall at the preparation of the camp. In the evening Leif called them to him.

“We are staying here for several days,” he said. “To-morrow morning, with the first light, I want you to set off and run to the west, to find out what sort of a country this is. You can be away for three days. To-morrow you will run inland, and part of the next day, and on the third day you will come back by a different way, so that you give me an account of as much of the country as can be seen in the time. You understand what I want?”

Haki said: “Lord, I understand very well. On the evening of the third day you shall have our story.”

“Good. Will you take food with you?”

The runner shook his head. “Only a little tinder to make fire with, and a flint and steel. We will eat before we go.”

Leif gave him a long knife in a sheath. He strapped this round his waist; Hekja took flints and tinder in a little pouch. Then they ate a very large meal and lay down and slept at once before the fire. They were up before dawn, eating again; in the first light they trotted off together from the camp.

They travelled westwards. The first part of their journey was through a fairly thick forest of fir-trees: after a few miles the country grew more open with stretches of grassy meadow and a few beech-trees. They skirted a lovely circular lake with fir-trees all around and white, sandy beaches, and went on in a north-westerly direction. Presently they came to rising ground and went up to the top of it; from a height of about three hundred feet they were able to see the lie of the land.

They saw that they were on a cape. There was sea both to the north and to the south of them. Behind them, to the eastwards, the land stretched out into the ocean past their camp to Wonderstrands. Ahead of them there was a neck of land perhaps three miles across from north to south which joined the cape to what appeared to be the mainland; this stretched as far as they could see to north and south, and rose up to low hills on the horizon to the west.

They had been running for three hours, and had covered twelve or fifteen miles from the camp. They started off again and ran on to the west, passing on to the mainland from the cape.

After that, the character of the country began to change. The ground rose slowly, and the soil grew richer; the sea was now behind them and a considerable mass of land in front; how large they could not tell. The trees got larger. They knew pine-trees, and beeches, and silver birches, but the cedars and the chestnut-trees were new to them, and strange. Presently Hekja dropped upon one knee.

“Look, Haki—cranberries.” They ate a few of them; they were larger and better than the ones they knew.

They went on westwards into what seemed to them to be a fairyland. Woods of tall trees alternated with meadows beside rippling streams; they saw several herds of small wild deer which fled away before them. They saw a great number of wild birds, bitterns, and geese, and mallard, and teal, and a great many more that were strange to them. One sort that flew with great long legs stretched out behind amused the runners very much.

As they went on, the fruits grew plentiful. They knew strawberries and raspberries and gooseberries by sight; they found all these growing wild, but larger and more luscious than any they had known before. They found a number of wild fruits that they had never seen before and they refrained from most of these, fearing poison.

But one new fruit intrigued them very much. It was a climbing plant and grew up trees, and carried large, soft purple berries massed together in a bunch. The soft, purple skin covered a juicy, pale green flesh with little seeds in it. They saw the birds eating these berries and coming to no harm: they tasted them gingerly and found them sweet and delicious. Soon they were eating them freely.

Presently they found a grassy seed-plant very like the wheat they knew.

As the afternoon progressed they went slower and slower; there was so much new to be seen. In the end they quite frankly stopped travelling altogether and wandered about in the warm sun in the meadows and the woods, marvelling at all the new things in this wonderful country. They had only covered a mere forty miles or so, but Leif would never know.

Hekja said: “This is the best country I have ever seen, Haki. Better than Greenland or Norway, better even than our own country.”

Haki said: “There is no limit to the cows that a farmer could keep here. There is grass for all the cows and sheep in the world.”

Hekja sighed happily. “It is very good here, Haki. The land is beautiful, and it is very good to be alone together, and away from the Norsemen.”

Haki nodded. “Leif is kind and just,” he said, “but we have our ways and they have theirs, and the two are different.”

They may have been, but in many respects the ways of the Scots were not inferior. They found no difficulty at all in living in this fertile country. They could throw a stone with quite extraordinary accuracy and force, born of long
practice at the quarters of the cattle that they herded. They gathered a few pebbles from a brook and wandered about until they saw a little deer; they stalked it carefully up-wind till they were close enough, and threw their stones together. At twenty-five yards range both hit it on the head. It staggered and fell down; they rushed up and despatched it with a knife. Very pleased with themselves, they carried it in turn till they reached a woody glade beside a stream; here they made a fire in a spot where bushes kept the draught from their backs.

As night fell, they cooked the meat on wooden skewers over a fire, and ate it with a quantity of the big purple berries. Presently, happy and amorous, they made a bed of twigs and leaves and grass beneath the bushes by the fire, and lay down and slept together.

They spent the next day wandering through that wonderful country, marvelling at everything they saw. They saw a scarlet tanager with brilliant red plumage; they both exclaimed at it, and tried various ways of catching it without success. They followed it for a long time; for them it was the high spot of the happiest day of their lives. They thought that they had never seen a bird so beautiful.

Presently Hekja had a wonderful idea. She said: “Haki, don’t let’s go back to the ship. We can stay here, in this good land.”

The runner stared at her; new ideas came slowly to them both. “Not go back?”

She said earnestly: “We can stay here and be our own masters. They will never catch us again. We can go on into the country, away from the sea. They will not go far from their ship.”

He thought over her proposal. With anything abstract they had some difficulty, partly because their vocabulary was very small. But presently he said:

“Leif wants the story of this land. He is a good man, and we will go back.”

She sank down on the grass, and looked at him appealingly.
“Haki, I don’t want to go back to Greenland with the Norsemen. They laugh at me, and this is a better land than any we have seen.”

He squatted down beside her, searching for the words that would express what he felt. “Leif has been kind to us,” he said with difficulty. “We have good news for him about this land. We must go back.”

She said a little piteously: “I don’t want to go back on the bitter sea with the Norsemen.”

He took her hand with awkward tenderness. “We must go back to Leif,” he said again. She could not move him from that.

They spent the remainder of the day wandering southwards through the land. They spent the night together by their fireside in a grove of cedar trees; far off on the horizon they could see the sea.

Next day they ran eastwards till they came to the coast at what was evidently the west shore of a large strait, or bay; they could see land on either side. They followed the coast northwards, swimming across two fair-sized tidal rivers, and found at the head of the bay the neck of land that they had passed across two days before. They crossed it back on to the sandy, wooded cape and ran on steadily all day; at about seven o’clock in the evening they ran into camp.

Leif was waiting for them there, with Tyrker. They brought back with them a bunch of the great purple berries they had found so good, and a sheaf of the wild corn.

“Lord,” said Haki, “this is a good country, better than Norway or my own land, better than Greenland. All the cattle in the world can pasture here, and there is food for everyone. It is the best land in the world.”

They took the berries and the corn from him, and examined them. Haki said: “These fruits we found and they are good to eat. There are many other marvels.”

Tyrker smiled. “Lord, I know these fruits. They grow in Germany where I was born. They are called grapes. You make wine out of them.”

Leif took them with interest, and tasted one. “So these
are grapes. I have heard of them, but never seen them before. I have drunk wine, and it is good.”

Tyrker said: “Lord, if we get some more I will make wine, after the manner of my people.”

The Norseman said: “So. We will call this good land Wineland, Wineland the Good.” He turned to the runners: “You have done very well,” he said. “You shall be free people when we get back home, living on your own farm, with cattle of your own.”

They flushed with pleasure. Then they went over to the fire and ate a heavy meal; they had had nothing since the previous night, and they had covered forty-five or fifty miles. Presently, when they could eat no more, Hekja said:

“Haki, let us go and see if our stone is still all right.”

In the evening light they climbed up to the summit of the knoll. The stone was just as they had left it, safe and firmly planted in the turf. They fingered the lettering and admired it for a little while; it was their own wonder, theirs alone. Presently they sat down on the short turf in the setting sun, and stared out across the quiet meadows to the east.

Hekja said happily: “Our names are now together, Haki, for as long as the stone shall endure. Leif said so.”

He leaned towards her on one elbow, and took her hand in his. “This is a good country,” he said earnestly, “better than Greenland. I will ask Leif to let us stay here when the ship goes back, and you shall have your children here.”

   There was a momentary silence.

Alix forced a laugh. “Wake up, Mr. Ross,” she said, a little tremulously. “You’re still asleep.”

He turned away and stared at the tent wall, bitterly disappointed.

T
OWARDS dawn the pilot fell into a doze and slept a little; in his turn, Lockwood lay awake till morning. He had an orderly mind that criticised all evidence, that made a stern distinction between fact and fiction. What Ross had told him was a dream, no more, a figment of a tired, drugged imagination—fiction. It was no more than that. As he rolled round in his sleeping-bag, he thought irritably that there was nothing in it to keep him awake.

For fiction, it was disturbingly concerned with fact. It could not be denied that there had been a man called Leif, the son of Erik, nor that he had discovered a new country on the mainland of America and called it Wineland the Good. The story occurred with variations in three separate sagas. The rational explanation was, of course, that Ross had read the sagas at some time; these memories had been fished up from the depths of his subconscious mind and joined to more recent memories to form a dream. Lockwood was not well versed in the vagaries of the subconscious mind, but he knew that such a combination formed the basis of a great many dreams. It was all quite easily explainable when you came to think of it.

Quite easily, if you discounted Ajago. He rolled around again, trying to put out of his mind the things the Eskimo had said. No reasonable man would give much weight to those, in any case.

He did not sleep at all.

At dawn he saw that the pilot was asleep. The don lay patiently in bed till eight o’clock to give the pilot sleep; then he got up and called Alix. Presently she appeared and began to get breakfast; with the slight noises that she made the pilot woke.

She crossed over to him. “You’ve been asleep, Mr. Ross. Feel better for it?”

He yawned. His mind was quiet and at rest for the first
time for many days. He said: “I feel fine. I suppose I’d better get up.”

She sat down on the end of his bed. “You’d much better stay where you are this morning. I’ll give you your breakfast in bed. The doctor said you were to have bread and milk again.”

He was disinclined to move; the nervous urge that had driven him since they left England had gone altogether. He smiled. “All right. I’ll probably go off to sleep again when I’ve had that.”

He ate his bread and milk while the other two breakfasted at the table. As soon as possible Alix and her father left the hut, hoping that in their absence Ross would go to sleep again. They walked down to inspect the seaplane on the beach.