Meadowland (52 page)

Harald was quiet for a long time, thinking; then he nodded decisively ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said. ‘It’s too far away, and that’s all there is to it. England it is, then. Thanks. You helped me clarify my thinking, I’m obliged to you.

I grinned. ‘My pleasure; I said. ‘And when you’re King of the whole North and you need a chief clerk, write me a letter and I’ll come up and run your exchequer for you.’

‘I might just do that,’ he said. And the grisly part of it was, I think he probably meant it.

Three years later, to my amazement and, let’s face it, horror, that buffoon Harald Sigurdson was crowned King of Norway I read about it - a small footnote in the regular diplomatic gazette - but nobody I asked knew anything about the goings-on of the far-northern savages: heretics and pagans, uncouth, unlettered, kin to the unspeakable Normans who have caused so much trouble in Sicily and other places in recent years. So I thought no more about him, or any of the Northerners, for close on twenty years; until, a month or so back, there was another footnote in the gazette about a change of regime in England. According to our sources, who are generally reliable, the English king is dead, killed in battle, and the country is now in the hands of William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy This came as a surprise to our diplomats, who never thought the Normans had the resources for such an enterprise; but, according to the report, they managed it because the English were weakened after fighting off another invasion, only a few days earlier, led by Harald Sigurdson, King of Norway, generally known as Harald the Tyrant. The English victory was a close-run thing, our man in Paris reported; but once King Harald was killed, fighting bravely in the front rank, the Norwegians gave up and ran away leaving the English free to march the whole length of their island to fight the Normans and be slaughtered.

Well, then. It’s not every day that an elderly accountant like me changes the course of history. The power of Norway is broken and the relentless spread of the Norman menace continues unchecked, all because I persuaded Harald Sigurdson not to go to Meadowland. The joke of it is, the reasons I gave him were improvised rubbish, made up on the spur of the moment and dressed up in long words so he wouldn’t see how thin and scraggy they were; because I didn’t want to give him the real reason why he shouldn’t go anywhere near Meadowland, because he was an idiot and he’d have ignored me.

I didn’t want Harald Sigurdson to go to Meadowland because it’s obviously an unlucky place. Simple as that. No good will ever come of it, nobody who goes there will ever have any joy of it. Don’t ask me to explain why; if you’ve got this far, you’ll understand without me having to construe it for you. What was it Kari said? The old story, about the island that turned out to be a hungry whale, gobbling up unwary sailors who landed their ships on its back. That’s about right, I believe. But it goes deeper than that, I think. There are places that do things to people; and I believe Meadowland is one of them. If you go there, it will change you. It seems to me that it’s a place that takes your strengths and turns them into weaknesses, as it did with the strong willed, venturesome Eiriksons. What-ifs are easy in this wonderful Greek language of ours, where you can turn thoughts into things with a flick of syntax. I wonder: what if Red Eirik had gone there, instead of his son? Would Meadowland have turned his weaknesses into strengths?

Maybe; I think he could have founded a settlement there, just as he did in Greenland. But Greenland and Red Eirik moulded the Eiriksons and made them specially vulnerable to the dangers of Meadowland. When Harald Sigurdson asked my advice, I tried to ask myself, which is he, Eirik or Leif? And I looked at him, and thought of all the men and women he was planning on sending to that place, and I knew it was my duty to God and my brothers and sisters in Christ to talk him out of it - not because I thought he’d fail, but because I was afraid that he’d succeed.

So much, then, for the island of Meadowland, which lies further north and west than any other land we know about. I, John Stethatus the clerk, have written these words in the year of Our Lord 1066, with the express intention of advising my lord Constantine the Tenth, Emperor of the Romans, that he and his successors should never, under any circumstances whatsoever, send any expedition or invest any resources or commit any body of men to this remote and dangerous place, which might rightly be termed, in more senses than one, the end of the world. If anything is certain, this side of Judgement Day it’s that the Roman Empire will last until the end of all things, representing as through a glass, darkly, the Kingdom of God in this world. It will only come to its end on that day when, with the blessed apostle, we see a new Heaven and a new Earth, and all considerations of wordly rule and empire cease to have any meaning. Until that new world comes, we who live on the old Earth, under the old Heaven, all have our place, where we were ordained to be. Leaving our place, as Adam left the garden God made for him, we leave behind who we are, and inevitably become someone, something else; turning our backs on what God has ordained for us, we walk into abomination. This

Meadowland, and all other such places, if any waiting still to be discovered, are not the new Heaven and the new Earth promised to us by the apostle; we must be patient in our place, and wait for them to come to us.

Which is fine, I suppose, as far as it goes: a proper logical conclusion drawn from the facts as they were presented to me. Perhaps I’m biased; after all, I hate travelling by sea, so anywhere I can’t go by land must be a bad thing, and to be avoided. And it’s easy to block off the places where you don’t want to go anyway by stationing at the gate an angel with a fiery sword; God doesn’t want me to go there, so I don’t have to.

But a man who sits in the same chair all day looking out of the same window, can’t help being titillated by stories of far-off lands, curious and unknown places where the sun burns the soil to sand, or the sea freezes over. And a man who spends his life huddled on the deck of a bobbing ship dancing on the crests of mountain-high waves can’t help wishing that he was on dry land, sitting in a chair, looking sleepily into the fire. Kari said about his people, so poor in material things compared to us, that who they were was all they had; and that seems to have been true enough. What made the difference, in Meadowland, was that who we are depends so much on where we are, because context governs everything. What I wrote just now, about God ordaining a place to each of us, may not be so far from the truth after all, and that’s the disturbing thing. Take a man who has practically nothing, and put him in an empty place - a good place, unspoiled, fruitful even without the plough, almost a Garden of Eden - and you’ve stripped away everything that stands between us and God’s original creation, the very essence of Mankind. Shouldn’t you see in him a proper return to grace, as he comes back to the garden he was driven out of? Logically, I believe you should; and then I think about Freydis, and about my friends Kari and Eyvind with their axes in their hands outside the house on the shores of the lake, and somehow I’m not so certain any more.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The written sources make no mention of any further attempts at settlement in Vinland after Freydis’s return. By 1121, when Bishop Eirik of Greenland tried to find it again, the route had been forgotten. Greenlanders occasionally ventured across to Forestland (Markland) to cut timber; but the Greenland colony itself eventually failed. Scandinavians were still living there in 1410, when a Norwegian ship landed there after losing its way en route to Iceland, but the Englishmen who rediscovered Greenland around 1500 found it uninhabited. Nobody knows for sure what happened to the colony It could simply have been climate change, overgrazing, and a decline in the demand for its exports as the Norwegian economy weakened. In 1448, however, rumours of a pirate attack on the Eastern Settlement reached Norway, and Eskimo tradition recorded in the eighteenth century seems to confirm that that was how the colony met its end.

In 1071, six years after Harald Sigurdson died at Stamford Bridge, the Byzantine Empire suffered possibly the greatest catastrophe in its 1,100-year history when its armies were massacred by the Turks at Manzikert. Deprived of most of its territory and manpower, it dwindled away until the city of Constantinople was finally sacked by Sultan Mehmet II in 1453, thirty-nine years before Columbus reached the New World.