Meadowland (17 page)

Which was when Leif changed course and started taking us close into the wind.

‘What’s the bloody fool doing?’ Kari shouted to me, and buggered if I knew We were all muttering, and a man called Thorgrim Otter jumped up on the aft deck and tried to grab the rudder. Leif kicked him back down into the hold, then yelled to us that it was all right, he knew what he was about. We weren’t so sure about that - little voices in his head and all that - and we started asking him what the hell he thought he was playing at.

‘Look for yourselves,’ he said.

Well, none of us had thought to do that, so we looked. At first there wasn’t anything to see, but then Thorvald Salmon, who had good eyes, called out that there was something there but he couldn’t tell what it was.

‘It’s a ship on a reef,’ Leif said. ‘My guess is they’re stuck. Anyhow, we’re going in closer to have a look.’

We couldn’t argue with that, so we shut up and let him get on with it; and sure enough, it was a middling-sized knoerr, which some fool had run aground on a sunken reef. We could see the people aboard, jumping up and down and waving at us. We’d shown up just in time, because the reef had made a real mess of their hull. A few hours later and they’d all have drowned.

Leif could steer a ship, no question. Getting in close to the reef without trashing our own ship wasn’t a simple matter, particularly since we had all that valuable timber on board. But he held in tight to the wind until we were sure that we were going to run aground ourselves, then at exactly the right moment he swung her broadside on, dropped sail and called for the anchor and the boat. Neatest thing you ever saw

‘Hello, he called out, leaning over the rail. ‘Who the hell are you?’

Someone shouted something back, but we were too far away to hear it. But we were close enough to see that there were fifteen people on the deck of the knoerr; fourteen men, and a woman.

‘Screw it,’ Leif said, after a moment’s thought. ‘We’ll take the boat and pick them up, and if they’re raiders you can share my beer ration in Valhalla.’

Guess who pulled boat duty. It hadn’t actually occurred to me before Leif raised the possibility that these people were vikings- ‘Excuse me?’ I said.

‘Vikings,’ Eyvind repeated. ‘Pirates to you. The word actually means, “evil bastards who drop anchor just outside the entrance to a fjord and pounce on cargo ships as they come out”. It can also mean “evil bastards who loot farms and settlements on the coast or a mile or so inland”. Or it can mean a landowner’s son and a bunch of hired hands and neighbours turning an honest penny when there’s nothing much needing doing on the farm, depending on how you look at it, and which ship you’re on

‘I see,’ I said. ‘What’s a fjord?’

Probably the thought hadn’t occurred to me (Eyvind went on) because the castaways were on a knoerr, and vikings prefer to use warships; also, they don’t tend to take women along with them. But there’s no hard and fast rules, so I guess Leif was right to be concerned. I took my axe with me on the boat just in case, and I wasn’t the only one. Kari was in the boat with me, and Tyrkir the mad German, and Leif himself and three others. When we were in hailing range, Leif prodded Tyrkir in the ribs with his elbow; Tyrkir stood up and called out, ‘Who are you?’

A short, frail-looking man leaned out and yelled back that his name was Thorir: he and his crew were from Norway Leif looked at me and Kari, but we just shrugged:

Norway’s a big country and just because we’d been there a few times, we didn’t know everybody who lived there. Leif shrugged too and stood up.

‘My name is Leif Eirikson,’ he said.

The short man looked interested. ‘Are you the son of Red Eirik from Brattahlid?’ he said. Leif nodded, and the short bloke laughed. ‘That’s a good one,’ he said. ‘We were on our way to see you.

That sounded odd, since they were closer to the Western Settlement; if they’d come from Norway, they’d have sailed right past Brattahlid to get there. But maybe they got carried past by a storm or something.

‘Splendid,’ Leif said. ‘In that case, we’ll give you a lift.’

Just as well, I thought, that the rest of our lot hadn’t heard that. Think about it. We were still several days from home; if Leif was thinking about taking these people on board, there wouldn’t be room. Not unless we dumped the cargo…

Thorir must’ve had the same thought, looking at how low our ship was riding in the water; he’d have guessed we had a full load on board. ‘You sure?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ Leif called back. ‘We’ll ferry you across four at a time in the boat. Bring your stuff along, we’ll have plenty of space.’

Fuck, I thought, there goes all that valuable building timber, and my winter’s earnings. But Leif was right, of course, we couldn’t just leave the poor buggers there to drown. I was surprised to see how little fuss the rest of the crew made when we got back to the ship and told them what we were going to do. Still, it was a blow, no doubt about it.

Thorir reckoned so too once we’d fetched him across to the ship and he’d taken a look at our cargo. ‘It must’ve taken you for ever to put together that lot,’ he said. ‘Look, maybe some of us could go in the boat and you could tow us in; and the rest could perch up top of your cargo hold. It’d only be for a few hours. Got to be better than jettisoning all that lumber.’

Credit where it’s due, Leif wasn’t even tempted. He had the wit to realise it wasn’t about room so much as weight. If we took on ten men lying on top of the cargo, we’d be down so low in the water that the first little wave would swamp us. ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ he said. ‘We’ll offload our cargo here, on this reef. Then, when we come back to salvage your ship, we can pick it up and bring it on.’

Thorir agreed to that, not that he really had any say in the matter, and we spent the rest of the day hauling planked wood into the boat and sending it across to the reef, bringing back men from the stranded ship. We made the last three trips in the dark, which was no fun at all, but Leif was positive that if we didn’t Thorir’s ship wouldn’t still be there in the morning. At least I got to stay on board our ship, hauling on a block and tackle, rather than going on the reef to unload. All the same, I couldn’t have felt more miserable if I’d tried. It was fine for Leif to shoot his mouth off about coming back for the cargo. But the reason we were doing this was because the wrecked ship could wash off at any moment, and naturally the same went for our beautiful lovingly planked timber. Heartbreaking was the only word for it.

‘That was a good day’s work,’ I remember Leif saying, after we’d brought the boat back for the last time.

‘For us, anyhow,’ Thorir replied. At least he sounded like he appreciated what this was going to mean to us. But Leif only laughed and said that there was plenty more where that’d come from in Meadowland, where we’d been all winter. Naturally, Thorir replied with, ‘Meadowland? Where’s that?’ So Leif told him, and you could practically see the idea putting out roots in Thorir’s mind. From his point of view, it must’ve been hard to resist. He’d just lost his own cargo, in all likelihood his ship as well. To a merchant, that was a crippling blow, his entire livelihood gone. And now here was his heroic rescuer telling him about an amazing opportunity to make up those losses in the lumber trade. I could’ve strangled Leif with my bare hands.

So why’d he do it? I’ll give you three guesses.

That’s right. The woman I mentioned earlier had come across in the first boatload of survivors from the ship. Her name was Gudrid, and she was Thorir’s wife; and the moment Leif set eyes on her, I knew there was going to be big trouble at some point in the proceedings.

It didn’t help, of course, that she was the first woman any of us had seen since we’d left Greenland the previous autumn. But Gudrid would’ve caused problems under any circumstances. Not on purpose, mind, she wasn’t that sort at all. On the contrary. I guess you could say she was the sort that brings out the best in any man, and on balance that’s the most dangerous kind of all.

Have I got to explain to you - try and explain, anyway -about women? After all, you can’t be expected to know, seeing as how you’re-Well, if you say so. I guess even you must’ve at least met some, from time to time. But - I don’t know how to put this without sounding offensive, so I’ll say sorry in advance and just crack on, right?

The thing is - well, it stands to reason you can’t ever have felt about women the way ordinary men do; the most you can do is try and get some idea from what they tell you, same as you’re trying to picture Meadowland in your mind, based on what Kari and me have said about it. But you’ve never been there. Same, obviously, with how men feel about women. Right?

But of course, it’s in a man’s nature that he’ll never tell you, or anybody, the actual truth about that particular subject. No, he’ll tell you what he wants you to believe, because he reckons that it’s one of the main ways of keeping score, of figuring out who’s better and who’s worse than everyone else. Stupid bloody way to carry on, of course, and I’m not kidding you when I tell you there’ve been times in my life when I’d gladly have traded places with one of your lot, and to hell with all the fun-and-games side of things. Be that as it may: if you believe what men tell you about the way they deal with women, then there’s got to be a bit of your brain missing, as well as the other thing.

So you’re just going to have to take this on trust. Men just can’t help liking certain women, even when they know it’s a really bad idea - like he’s already married, or she is, or she’s a farmer’s daughter and he’s just a field hand, or her dad killed his uncle in a feud, or whatever. And when they feel the tug - like a hook in a fish’s lip, it hurts like fuck but you’ve got to go with it - it’s not a blind bit of use people telling you how bloody stupid you’re being. You already know that, thanks very much. But you still carry on, because the hook draws you. Maybe you know she can’t stand the sight of you, it still makes no odds. The best you can hope for is, you make sure you try your hardest not to let it lead you into doing something stupid or dangerous.

Like I just told you: if you think you understand the subject just from listening to what I’ve been saying, you’re clearly so stupid it’s a toss-up whether we cook you a dinner come suppertime, or just water you. Don’t try and understand. You’ll only get confused.

So yes, Leif was taken with Gudrid. Smitten. A really bad case. And he’d just saved her life, and he was the captain of the ship, and he was just back from a wonderful adventure (it was a wonderful adventure the way he told it, and she hadn’t been there so how would she know otherwise?) and her husband was a waste of good cargo space, it was his fault they’d missed Greenland and ploughed into that reef, he was short and fat and his beard looked like weeds growing up through barley stubble. I wouldn’t say she was anything really special to look at. Her face was a bit flat and so was her chest, and she had big hands, like a man’s; but she had great big eyes for gazing with, and a way of staying perfectly still when someone was talking to her, like she was almost too enthralled to breathe. Bad news.

Thorir, her husband, wasn’t blind, he could see what was going on. But he was on Leif’s ship, and if it hadn’t been for us he’d have drowned, and we’d dumped a fortune in building lumber just to rescue them, so what could he do? What anybody would’ve done in that situation: he pretended he hadn’t noticed, and hoped we’d make landfall sooner rather than later.

Which we did. Nice helpful wind whisked us down the Greenland coast, round the point and straight up Eiriksfjord to Brattahlid. First thing we saw was half a dozen skinny ponies grazing between the rocks, on the narrow shelf of grass at the foot of the white mountain. Goes to show how quickly you get used to things: after winter in Meadowland, it amazed me that anybody could scratch a living in such a miserable place.

The Brattahlid people saw our sail before we beached, and a bunch of them came down to see us come in. Truth is, I was a bit disappointed by the reception. In my mind, we were mighty heroes of navigation who’d come back from the ends of the Earth, and quite likely from the dead. Far as they were concerned, we might just as well have been a Norway trader come to sell them malt and buttons: they were pleased to see us, but that was about all.

Even the pleased-to-see-us wore off a bit when they found out that we’d ditched a holdful of building lumber in favour of fifteen destitute Norwegians who were going to need board and lodging until someone showed up who’d be prepared to take them home. Certainly that side of it wasn’t lost on Red Eirik, who came limping down as we were drawing the ship up to the sheds. His first words to his son, after he’d stopped and given Thorir and his gang a good long glare, were, ‘Who the hell are these?’ Well, I guess he was entitled, since it’d be up to him to put them up, or at the very least pay the neighbours to billet them. For what it’s worth, I think he was genuinely pleased to see Leif home again and safe, but he wasn’t at all impressed when he heard about all that good timber stuck out on the reef.

Kari and I stayed just the one night at Brattahlid; the atmosphere was a bit too fraught for my liking, and Kari was itching to get back to Herjolfsness and tell everybody there how wonderful the place he’d discovered had turned out to be. We took on a couple of Thorir’s men as guests (Eirik insisted), and Leif saw to it that we got the loan of four ponies. We left early in the morning, before the house woke up. After all those months together, it seemed odd to be riding away without Leif or anybody to see us off. You’d have thought we’d come over for the day to return a borrowed plough.

Nothing worth mentioning had changed at Herjolfsness, which was a pity as far as I was concerned. Bjarni Herjolfson was pleased to see us, mostly because he couldn’t wait to hear about the new countries he’d seen but never set foot on. He’d changed his tune, you can guess. Quite likely he was jealous, because Leif Eirikson was going to get all the glory when he’d been the one to find those places, albeit entirely by accident. What the hell: we answered all his questions and told him a few of the better stories, some of which were actually true, in parts.