The Greenlanders (10 page)

And then the servant makes his way into the byre in the darkness, and he sees a man amongst the cows, and he thinks that the man is stealing a cow, and so, in the darkness, with the howling of the storm and the crying of many voices in his ears, the servant sneaks up behind the man in the byre and he bashes him on the head with a great club that has come into his hand, perhaps thanks to Thor, and the intruder falls senseless to the ground. And then the storm subsides, and members of the household come out with torches and lamps looking for their faithful and hardworking servant, and they find him in the byre, and they discover that he has beaten and killed, not an intruder, but the master’s only son, who has seen the hunger of the livestock and begun to feed them. And the bishop declared that this is a true tale, one that took place on a farm in Vik, when the bishop himself was a boy on the neighboring farmstead. And now Asgeir turned to Thorkel Gellison, who was standing beside him and said, “This case will be the death of me, and that is truth.”

“Thus it is,” said the bishop, looking at Asgeir, “that the servant succumbed to two temptations. First of these was the temptation to think that our Lord Jesus Christ was powerless, although his prayer was promptly answered, and he was spared. This was the temptation that led Thorunn into sorcery and casting spells. But the other temptation, the temptation to act ignorantly on behalf of his master, was a more powerful and still more evil temptation, for any man can recant his belief in demons such as Thor, but no man can undo the murder of his master’s only son.

“It may be,” the bishop went on, “that the killing of Thorunn was duly announced, so that Asgeir is not guilty of murder, and therefore not subject to a sentence of outlawry. And it may be that Thorunn was a sorceress, and guilty of casting injurious spells. After fourteen years these things cannot clearly be proven. There is no evidence that the old woman abjured her savior, made a pact with the devil, or engaged in witchcraft as it has recently been defined among the Italians and the Germans and the French by the holy inquisitors of the Church.”

The bishop paused and looked around the Gardar field at Asgeir’s many supporters. “And in this case, too,” he said, “Asgeir Gunnarsson shows a fondness for force, and a desire to sway our decision by a show of strength. We do not care for such threats. Those who threaten do so because they fear that they do not have right on their side.”

“Asgeir himself,” the bishop said, “is a beloved member of our flock, and now, at the end of a long winter, when the shepherd has been absent from the flock for many months, many of the sheep have lost the way, and some have strayed farther into the mountains than others, and are in danger of being forever lost. Asgeir, who treats all subjects lightly and with merriment, is one of these.

“The spring has come, however, and the shepherd in his strength has returned. He goes out among the wastelands to seek his sheep, and his desire is not to punish them, but to bring them into the fold, and to assure their safety, thus,” the bishop declared, “we will be merciful in our sentence.” The muttering among those standing in the field ceased so that even the lapping of the waters of the fjord on the hull of Erlend’s little boat could be heard.

“Asgeir,” said the bishop, “is the possessor of two great fields. Of these, he will be allowed to keep for himself and his heirs the larger homefield, but he must surrender up the second field to the Gardar church, and the hay on this field will be divided as follows: A third part to the see of Gardar, a third part to Undir Hofdi church, and a third part to Sigmund and Oddny and their heirs, the whole to be administered by Erlend Ketilsson, as the nearest neighbor, for a commission of one-fifth of all the hay grown on the field. After nine years, Asgeir may purchase the field back for a price to be set by the bishop at a later date, and if he is unable to do so, any man of the settlement may purchase the field.” Then the bishop said prayers, and went away, and the group on the Gardar field began to take up their weapons and go off, for it was now dark, and people were hungry for their supper.

After this, the spring seal hunt went forward, and Asgeir’s piece of ill luck was the topic of much talk there, and men were perplexed at such a result, namely that they should not be able to act in their own behalf without punishment. Later, in the fall, Asgeir slaughtered many lambs and calves and one of his horses, for he said that he would not have the hay to bring them through the winter. Erlend Ketilsson harvested the hay on the second field with great trouble, for it was distant from his storehouse and from his other field. Nikolaus the Priest of Undir Hofdi church sent over three of his servingmen to help with the harvesting. The crop from the field was excellent, and much of it went to Erlend himself, because the bishop allowed him to take the Gardar third as well as his own fifth part in exchange for some of Vigdis’ tablet weaving and three soapstone basins. This extra hay made a huge pile outside Erlend’s storehouse, and folk said that it would be a long time before his horses ate seaweed again. These were not things Asgeir spoke of, except to say, once, with a laugh as he was putting on his shirt in the morning, “I find I grow thinner and much diminished,” but he had as much flesh upon his bones as always.

Now in this winter, he spent much of his time with Olaf, and at Yule time he made Olaf his foster son, for Olaf’s mother had died. After Yule, there was a great thaw, followed by a hard freeze, so that the sheep went long distances looking for twigs and tufts of grass. Some even wandered out onto the frozen lake and had to be carefully herded back. Once, when doing this, Asgeir went through the ice. Others were nearby, but no one heard him call out. Some people said that he did not call out at all. When Olaf and one of the servingmen found him toward dusk, his corpus was frozen solid, with his arms wrapped around his chest and his eyes and mouth wide open. They had to build a fire in the bathhouse and lay him out there so that he could thaw. And that was the death of Asgeir Gunnarsson of Gunnars Stead. He was buried next to his brother, Hauk, close under the south side of Undir Hofdi church, and many said that the food provided at his funeral was the most delicious and most plentiful of any funeral in years, for Margret Asgeirsdottir had spent her summers with Kristin, the wife of Thord, who was well known to be one of the most skilled and liberal farmer’s wives in all the settlement. Thorkel Gellison spoke all over the district of what Asgeir had said to him at the end of the bishop’s sermon, that the case would be the death of him.

Not long after the death of Asgeir Gunnarsson by drowning and freezing, Bishop Alf declared the souls of the Greenlanders to be in imminent peril of damnation, for, he said, not one man in five made the proper observances of fast days, especially during the forty days of Lent. It was said that Sira Jon had discovered servingmen of the bishop’s own table eating quantities of meat, and with great reveling, when they should have been fasting and meditating upon the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ. The bishop was especially interested in the skraelings, and preached not a few long sermons on demons and devils and heathens, and declared that sinful contact of Christian men with she-devils was as black as darkest night in the eyes of our Lord, and after this the Greenlanders began to look about themselves and see the skraelings with different eyes. A few men, indeed, left off going among the skraeling women, but others did not, although their visits were now not so open nor so frequent.

In these years it had gotten so that the Greenlanders met the skraelings more and more often, especially hunting in the waste districts, and men and demons came to blows from time to time, but most folk said that the skraelings were happiest on the open ocean, in their skin boats. The best sign of their demon nature was that the fiercest storms could do them no harm. Men had seen skraelings in their boats disappear completely under the waves, and reappear again many ells away and be none the worse. Many said that the most frightening thing about the skraelings was their deceptive habit of smiling at everything, and that their very quietness was a sign of what plans they were hatching against the Christian Greenlanders. There was much talk of these things, but the end result was that those who wanted to trade with the skraelings did so, and those who were afraid to did not.

After first declaring that there must be no contact, the bishop changed his mind and said that it was the duty of all Christians to strive to bring the heathen to Christ. Three men brought skraeling women home, had them baptized, and married them, and some men said that these women made good-humored and willing wives, less self-willed than Christian women. These women lived peacefully among the farms of the settlement. So it was that at Gardar the talk was all of the skraelings and their ways, and among themselves the Greenlanders got a deal of amusement from this.

One woman who was not married was Margret Asgeirsdottir of Gunnars Stead. A certain Arnkel, from a farmstead in Siglufjord, had declared his intention to marry her, but then nothing was heard of this, and Arnkel returned to his steading. Folk in Vatna Hverfi district said how handsome Margret was and how large her marriage portion would have been had Asgeir managed to hold on to all of his farm, but now any man taking on Margret could well be taking on a family of dependents who would drain his own wealth. It was true that Gunnar and Margret were rich in fine things, for the men of their lineage had been abroad and the women had been skilled craftswomen, but there were more fine things inside the farmhouse than there were sheep in the fields or cows in the byre. Folk also remembered how proud and determined to have her own way Helga Ingvadottir had been, and sometimes these habits, it was said, did not appear until a woman had her own house and dairy. Arnkel told people in Siglufjord that he had had some conversations with the woman, but in fact she made him uneasy, with her way of waiting to speak a long moment after he had spoken, and keeping her eyes on his face the whole time, so that he was tempted to say more and more, and ended up feeling that he was a simpleton.

Another thing Margret did that was not usual for a woman was to go off into the mountains above Gunnars Stead in all seasons and come home with not only herbs and medicinal plants, but also birds she had snared and eggs she had gathered. Like her uncle Hauk, she was outside more than inside, and always in pursuit of some quarry. Five willow cages hung from the beams in the Gunnars Stead farmhouse, and in them were Margret’s little birds, wheatears and larks, who chattered and clamored all winter in a way that most of the neighbors considered unlucky and unpleasant.

The farm folk at Gunnars Stead were considerably diminished in the spring after Asgeir’s death, so that only Margret, Gunnar, Olaf, and Ingrid were left, along with one shepherd, Hrafn, and two women servants, Hrafn’s wife Maria, and Gudrun, a young girl. There were also two menservants to help Olaf with the farming. Hrafn and Maria had two children, boys, who went with their father into the sheep meadows early in the summer. Ingrid now spent her days and nights in her bedcloset, for she could no longer stand, or even sit up. No torches or lamps were brought to her, because she didn’t know night from day, and she would sometimes call out to Gunnar to bring her some sourmilk and dried sealmeat mashed with butter for her breakfast or her dinner when breakfast or dinner was long past. Gunnar always did so, and Ingrid would tell him fragments of old stories that he remembered from his childhood. At other times Nikolaus the Undir Hofdi priest and his “wife” would sit with her and pray with her, for she hadn’t been to the church in a number of years.

The farmstead belonged to Gunnar, but he did as little work in the fields as ever, and cared as little for the sheep, although he sometimes rode one of the old horses, leaving the two younger ones to Olaf. The amount of yarn he spun in his idle time was more than Gudrun and Maria had time to weave into cloth, and so he learned to dye and weave, and laughed, too, when people laughed at this. Folk in the district said that Gunnars Stead was an upside down household, and considered this unlucky, but indeed, the winters after the coming of the bishop were so cold and stormy, and the summers so short that every household in the settlement did things in ways that had never been done before. Only the folk at Gardar and at a few other farmsteads had enough hay and other provisions to last through these cold springs, and many Greenlanders were so weakened by hunger and the bleeding disease that they succumbed to vomiting and coughing ills as if they were plagues.

It seemed that nothing could induce Gunnar to work. If it was cold, he would lie silently under his polar bear coverlet until it warmed up, rather than look for driftwood. If he was hungry, he would wait until Ingrid called out for food, and then eat whatever she left. Whenever anything was lost, no matter how valuable, he would declare that it would turn up sometime. He wore whatever shirts and stockings no one else seemed to want, although he knew well how to stitch these things himself. He said that Yule would soon come around, or Easter, or the first day of winter, or some other occasion for the giving of gifts, and then he would get a new shirt from someone, and he could easily wait until then. The result was that the servants began to emulate him, and little work got done on the farm. Fences fell down, turves fell from their places, buildings began to crumble. The storehouses emptied and were not filled again, the bath house fell into disuse, the cows and horses were sent out to look for food when the fields were covered with ice. Neither Gunnar nor Olaf went on the spring seal hunt or the autumn seal hunt. All of Olaf’s efforts could not lift the curse of Gunnar’s laziness, although he himself had become a skilled farmer and was like Asgeir had been in his energy. Things went like this for more than a year after the death of Asgeir, and the neighbors declared that soon Gunnar and Margret would have to go out as servants, for they could hardly keep themselves in this way for another summer, much less another winter.

Now the time came around for the Thing, and Gunnar declared that he was nineteen years old and ready to journey to Gardar and find out what it was necessary for men to do. He stitched himself a new shirt and new stockings, and took one of the servingmen with him, and, to tell briefly what happened, he returned home seven days later with the news that he had agreed to take a wife, Birgitta Lavransdottir, of Hvalsey Fjord, who was fourteen years old, and who brought as her marriage portion two sheep and a roll of red silk.