Meadowland (21 page)

Came the day when we cast off, and all of us agreed that whatever happened we weren’t coming back to Leif’s Booths again, not ever; we’d rather drown or get crunched on the rocks. We headed east, then north-east, following the lines scored on old Bjari’s bearing-dial, keeping the coast in sight but making the most of the current.

All went well until we came to a headland. I remembered it vaguely, but last time and the times before we’d kept much further out, so all I’d seen of it was a sort of grey smudge at the bottom of the sky This time, we took a chance and held closer in, because the current was so good. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Stuff always happens in the middle of the night. We’d actually had the sense to drop anchor, because we weren’t happy about being that close in. But a dirty great squall blew up and sprang the anchors, and then we were off. In the pitch dark and the sea throwing us about we couldn’t actually be precise about where we were headed, but it didn’t feel good at all. We hopped about trying to get the sails up and tack out of it - just as well we failed, because that’d probably have made things a whole lot worse - and then there was the most almighty bang, loudest noise I’ve ever heard, and we were all thrown up in the air. I came down badly landed awkwardly on the rim of a bucket, of all things. I felt at least one rib go, and then something heavy gave me a bloody . great scat on the side of the head, and I was excused duty, as we say in the Guards.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I noticed was how much the daylight hurt. Then I realised I wasn’t on the ship any more. I was lying on my back on a rock, looking up at the sky, which was grey and miserable, and I was soaked to the skin. Also my left arm hurt, though not nearly as much as my ribs; and there was Eyvind, with a bit of bloody rag tied round his head, looking down at me all thoughtful.

‘You’re alive, then,’ he said.

“Course I’m bloody alive,’ I said, swearing because it hurt like buggery to talk. ‘What happened?’

He sighed. ‘Actually, could’ve been a lot worse. The keel’s all smashed in, but most of the rest of the damage we can probably patch up, eventually And nobody got killed,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘In fact, you’re probably the worst hurt.’

That didn’t sound good, so I called him a bastard and asked what was wrong with me. ‘Two busted ribs, he told me. ‘But your arm’s probably all right, apart from a bit of bruising.’

‘My head hurts,’ I told him.

‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it?’ Eyvind replied, and walked away, even though I yelled at him to come back. As it happened, I went to sleep for a while after that, and it was dark when I woke up again There was a fire going nearby, and it was just spitting with rain. Someone said, ‘Kari’s awake’, and next thing Thorvald himself had come to see me. Which was nice of him, I guess.

‘We ran aground,’ he said, after he’d asked me how I was and I’d lied to him. ‘We’ll get her afloat again, no worries on that score, but it’s going to be a long job. A bloody long job,’ he added, in a tone of voice I didn’t like one bit. ‘Doesn’t help that half our stuff’s at the bottom of the sea,’ he went on. ‘We lost the cross-cut saw and the carpenter’s chest, and we’ve got just the one long axe between us.’

‘That’s bad,’ I said. ‘Eyvind said the keel’s not too clever.’

‘It’s a mess,’ Thorvald said sadly ‘We’re going to have to make a new one from scratch - we can’t even salvage the nails.’

That was when I really wanted to cry. If we had to build and fit a new keel, we’d need more than just timber; we’d need the right tools, and most of all (because you can do a lot with a hand-axe if you’ve really got to) we’d need nails. If we hadn’t got any we’d have to make some; and to make nails, of course, you need a forge and an anvil and bellows and all that, not to mention raw iron.

‘We’re going back to Leif’s Booths, then,’ I said, all quiet.

Thorvald nodded; I could see the silhouette of his beard wagging up and down against the firelight. ‘Might as well,’ he said. ‘We used up the last of the charcoal before we came on, so we’ll need to burn a stack before we can get the forge going. With only one long axe between us, that means everybody pitching in with hand-axes. It’s a real bugger when you’ve got to make every damn thing for yourself.’

I nodded and pretended that I was feeling sleepy again, because I didn’t feel like talking any more. Of course, I hadn’t had time to figure it all out in my mind, how long each job’d take before we could move on to the next stage, but I didn’t need to know the details. You see, it wasn’t just a matter of doing the work. Three-quarters of our time’d be spent just gathering food and fuel. The plain fact was, we were going to be stuck in bloody Meadowland all summer, probably all winter too. It was like the place had got its teeth stuck into us and wasn’t going to let us go.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

‘What?’ I muttered.

‘You fell asleep.’

I opened my eyes to the sight of Eyvind’s long, bony, beard-fringed face hovering over me. ‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘I was just resting my eyes.

I could see light soaking through the shadows at the mouth of the tomb. Furthermore, I had a crick in my neck, pins and needles in my left arm and a sharp pain in the small of my back. It was just possible that Eyvind was right.

‘Understandable,’ he went on. ‘In fact, it’s amazing you lasted as long as you did, with that old fool sitting there, spouting his drivel at you. I always said he missed his calling in life. Should’ve been a surgeon’s assistant. Get Kari to talk to a man for an hour, you can cut off both his feet and he’d never notice a thing.’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was paying close attention. He’d just got to the part where Thorvald Eirikson ran the ship aground.’

Eyvind grunted. Behind him, I could see the taciturn Harald mixing porridge in an iron pot over the fire. For choice, I like to start the day with freshly baked wheat-bread dipped in wine with cheese grated over the top; porridge, on the other hand, has the great virtue of being better than nothing. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘the part where I saved that bastard from drowning.’

I frowned. ‘I don’t think he mentioned that,’ I said.

Eyvind’s face clouded over like the prelude to a thunderstorm. ‘You’re joking.’

Yet another thing I probably shouldn’t have mentioned. ‘Well,’ I added, ‘he did say he passed out when he hit his head on something during the storm, and the next thing he knew was being on dry land, so presumably he wasn’t actually aware who saved him, through being unconscious at the time-‘

‘Balls,’ said Eyvind succinctly “Course he knew I told him.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘In that case, maybe I misheard him or something. I was nearly asleep, wasn’t I?’

‘You said you were resting your eyes, not your ears.’

‘Well, anyhow,’ I said, as firmly as I could, ‘I know now, don’t I? Though that rather raises the question: if you’ve always hated his guts as much as you claim to, why didn’t you just let him drown?’

Eyvind sighed. ‘Because that’s not how it works, on a ship,’ he said. ‘Look, it’s not anything noble or heroic or any shit like that. It’s more that, if you couldn’t absolutely rely on knowing that anybody on that ship’d do as much for you, even your worst enemy in the whole world, people simply wouldn’t be able to go to sea, there’d be nothing on Earth that’d induce them to set foot on the deck of a ship. All right, he added, as I pulled a not-convinced face, ‘let’s take an example you can understand. Your orthodox Christians, right, hate the heretics. They hate them so much that they round them up and kill them like sheep in winter. But if the Greeks were attacked by the heathen Saracens, they’d forget their differences for the time being and fight together. Right?’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘no, they wouldn’t. But I think I see what you mean. The sea is your common enemy, and you’d rather risk your life to save someone you can’t stand than give the sea the satisfaction of getting him.’

Eyvind nodded. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, I don’t know about you, but I can’t see the point of staying inside when it’s warm and sunny out. Let’s go and sit outside, and I’ll tell you what happened next.’

Took us the best part of a week to walk back to Leif’s Booths (Eyvind said), carrying all the gear we hadn’t lost in the storm. Can’t say we were overjoyed to see the place again, even though it was looking very cheerful and fine with all its spring flowers and stuff. But it didn’t take us very long to get over being pissed off at being there again, and after that we just slotted back into the routine: catching fish, cutting wood, burning charcoal. Well, it was just ordinary life, except we were doing it a slightly harder way than if we’d been back at Brattahlid or Herjolfsness. Meanwhile, Thorvald was in the forge, with Fat Osvif working the bellows for him, banging out nails day after day Not that Thorvald was the handiest man with a hammer I ever did see, but that’s how we do things. We believe that who you are decides what you can do. Like, in the City there’s men who do nothing but weave rugs or make silver jugs, and they do that because they’re good at it. You can get away with doing things that way round in a city, where there’s thousands of people all living together. On the farms, though, back home, there’s three or four dozen of you at most, so we can’t afford to have experts, men who only do one thing all year round. Even a big place like Brattahlid, there’s only, what, five days’ worth of blacksmith work needed in a year; maybe fourteen days of carpentering, about the same amount of time tanning or building. So we say, the more responsible a job is, the more important the man who does it has got to be. Really, it’s a case of the farmer saying, I need this done right, I’d better do it myself.

So, since making the nails was an important job, obviously Thorvald had to do it; and he did all right, because bashing out a few nails is hardly skilled work. But it took time, best part of a month, what with gathering lumps of ore in the bog, making the charcoal, drawing the iron out of the ore, beating it into a bloom, cutting it, all that. Then, when he’d done that, we needed tools for making the new keel: chisels, augers, a square. So Thorvald had to start all over, making more iron and then turning it into steel by getting it white hot, dipping it in the charcoal dust and forging it all up together. That was just the start of it, mind. Next, he had to draw down iron rods the same thickness as the steel ones, twist them together and weld them, draw the welded bars down and fold them, then another weld and another fold, and so on till he’d got something that’d hold an edge. I’ll say this much for him: it was a lot of work for one man to do on his own, with just Fat Osvif to do the bellows and the striking, but he didn’t waste much time standing about and looking out of the doorway.

Once he’d finished the ironwork, back we went to the place where we’d left the ship, and we got to work on making the new keel. Took us two whole days of wandering about in the forest just to find a tree with the right bend in it - and we had to use maple, because we couldn’t find any elm; then another two days’ chipping away with hand-axes to shape it, because we had to be pretty bloody precise or it wouldn’t fit. Of course, nothing like that ever does fit, no matter how careful you are, so we made it a bit big and counted on having to work it down a little.

Next was the tricky bit. You see, you can’t just tear the keel off a ship and knock in a new one, because the keel’s what holds the front end of the ship together. If you cracked on and took it out, all the frames and strakes and boards’d spring out of place and you’d never ever get them all back in again. So what we had to do was, we had to haul the ship up onto the flat and build a cradle of timbers for it to sit in; then we had to cut a whole lot of poles and jam them in hard against the sides of the ship to hold everything in place once we’d taken out the keel. That was a bastard of a job, because of course the front end of a ship’s all curves, it’s not like propping something easy and flat, like a wall; and we couldn’t afford to get it wrong, or there we’d be with no bloody ship.

We managed it, though, somehow; and after that came a really nasty job. Because the keel had taken such a scat running aground, the keel-bolts were all bent and bowed out of shape and we couldn’t just drift them out, they had to be cut through with a chisel, each one. No fun, that: working on your back reaching up, and hardly able to swing your axe -no hammers, of course, so we had to use the polls of our hand-axes, which meant having the sharp edge buzzing back and forward an inch from your nose all day long.

Once we’d done that, though, it got easier. We got the new keel scarfed into the stem-post good and tight, and the new bolts were a good fit, and we didn’t have to shave the keel down nearly as much as we’d expected. It just took a long time, a bloody long time. We tried to work faster, we even tried working at night, with big fires to light the job, but that didn’t come to anything and we nearly screwed the whole job up, trying to do fine work when we couldn’t see. Anyhow, the point came where we knew we weren’t going to get finished before winter. At least, we might just have done it and got launched before the ice started to form; but if we didn’t make it, we’d be in deep trouble, because if we carried on working on the ship we couldn’t lay in food and fuel for the winter, which would mean that as soon as it got cold we’d all be dead. So we had to take the decision: we’d be spending another winter in Meadowland.

We split into two groups. Thorvald and nine others stayed working on the ship, the other twenty took the long walk back to Leif’s Booths to get ready for the winter. Now I’m a pretty reasonable carpenter, though I do say so myself, and Kari’s lucky if he can cut a mortice in a fence-post and still have ten fingers. So that was good. Kari went back to the Booths, I stayed on with Thorvald.

You know, this sounds really sad, but that was possibly the happiest time of my life. Yes, I was working all day in the cold and the wet, lying on my back on frozen mud, sleeping in the open under one threadbare blanket, eating last spring’s wind-dried cod, with everybody in a right mood because Thorvald had gone all quiet with guilt and worry; and yes, we stayed on a week too long because Thorvald insisted on getting the scarf-joint finished, which meant we got caught in a blizzard on the way back to the Booths, got lost, and came within an inch of freezing to death. But that didn’t bother me as much as it might’ve done, because it was six weeks without that bastard Kari. Wonderful feeling, like you’ve had toothache all your life and suddenly it goes away.