The Greenlanders (31 page)

Lavrans’ house was a steading of fourteen rooms, if the two partly open sheep byres and the three storage rooms were counted. All of these rooms were connected, and could be reached without going out of doors. In addition to this, all of the servants slept in bedclosets in the house, so that there were twelve people sleeping in the house, and such close quarters were unusual for the Vatna Hverfi folk, even Birgitta, who was now accustomed to a more spacious life. Added to this were the perennial crying of the sheep after they were brought in for the winter and the smells of the stored provisions, the privy, which was also within the walls, and of the sheep themselves. Lavrans’ steading had no bath house, and folk from all over the district were accustomed to using the bath house at the church.

One day when a storm was raging outside, Olaf came in from his work, and he was in a black temper, and he said, “These farmers of Hvalsey Fjord are beggarly folk, for though they have good land and plenty of beasts, they go out in all weathers, and care not if they are sleeping outside or in. Just now I saw Orm Guttormsson out upon the fjord in his larger boat, and it seemed to me that he would kill himself.”

“I am very fond of Orm,” said Birgitta, “and it is a great pleasure to me to have him as a neighbor again.” And she put her hand over Lavrans’ hand, where it was resting on the planks of the table.

“Even so,” said Olaf, “in these Hvalsey Fjord steadings the folk are always stumbling over each other and there is hardly the elbow room to lift your spoon.”

“It seems to me,” said Birgitta, “that you are always overflowing with complaints,” and her eyes flashed at him, so that Lavrans saw that they would soon fall to bickering, and he settled himself on his stool and told a tale.

There was a man, said Lavrans, whose name was Thorbjorn, and he lived with his folk in the oldest house in the district, a house that had been built by a relative of his many years before, when folk first came to Hvalsey Fjord. This was a long house, such as they build in Norway and Iceland, and it had many sturdy buildings around it, and Thorbjorn’s ancestor had retrieved many beams from the shores of Markland, for men in those days were great seafarers, and thought little of going to Markland for a load or two of wood. These beams were hewn into staves and porches and attached to the buildings, and carved with fantastic designs, and folk admired them a great deal, and came from other districts to look over these carvings. The carver, in fact, was a Norwegian called Bjarni the Easterner, and he went back to his home district after coming to Greenland, and made a name for himself there as a carver. The result was that in every respect, this Hvalsey Fjord steading came to look exactly like those of the great lords of Norway, with an outer court and an inner court and separate buildings for every activity, except that the buildings were built of Greenland stone, and only faced on the outside with staves. This ancestor would have no turf.

Now it happened that the folk at this steading strove to live in every way as they live in Norway, with hangings on the walls and lots of chairs and the livestock scattered all over the countryside, and they lived so for two generations, in much greater magnificence than anyone else in Hvalsey Fjord. Each generation was full of seafarers, and these men brought a wealth of goods with them at the end of every journey. They fought in many wars, especially those between the kings and the nobles of Norway, and they received rich rewards, and their women rocked the children back and forth in cradles mounted with gold and silver and swaddled them in brightly colored silk. They went often enough to Markland that they had much to trade in the way of marten furs and black bear skins and, of course, great beams of wood were always piled in the outer courtyard of the farmstead, so much wood that these folk thought nothing of burning it on their winter fires to drive away the cold.

Soon enough other houses were being built in Hvalsey Fjord, for the other districts were getting full, especially Vatna Hverfi district. These new farmers, however, were not so wealthy as Thorbjorn’s lineage, and they built more humbly, with stone surrounded by turf and all the buildings linked together, for sheep on the north and cows on the south are like the low glow of a whale oil lamp—you only notice when they are gone that the house is darker than dark and colder than cold.

It happened that these folk who were Thorbjorn’s kin became steeped in pride, for they were thought considerable men even in Norway, and were the first Greenlanders to be so honored. One of these kings (here Lavrans shook his head, for he could not remember the name of this king) made one of these men a lord at the Norwegian court. Earl Skeggi he was to be called, but it happened that this king was killed in battle, and Skeggi remained Skeggi the Greenlander. In this year, when Skeggi almost became an earl, Thorbjorn was some fifteen winters old, and of all his kin he was the most proud, although he was a sickly fellow and left the warrior’s life to his uncles and brothers. Thorbjorn stayed in Greenland and oversaw the farmstead, and he was considered clever at it.

One autumn, two ships containing all of the brothers and uncles set out from Norway, hoping to come to Greenland by the beginning of winter, and the short tale of this is that both ships were lost, one at Cap Farvel and one only the Lord Himself knows where, because it vanished. Thus it was that of all the men in his family, which numbered eight strong fellows and Thorbjorn, only Thorbjorn was left.

The family were greatly grieved of course, but Thorbjorn saw that the many cattle were taken care of and the women kept up the household economy, and so they considered themselves happy enough, and the farm was so rich, with such an abundance of goods, that it seemed to everyone that life on this steading could go on as it had forever. But of course, it went on as it had for only two winters, and at the end of the second winter, servingmen began pulling down the carved staves and throwing them upon the fire, for folk hate to be cold when they are hungry, and almost all of the cows and sheep had been slaughtered except those Thorbjorn wanted to use for breeding. These were folk who had never been hungry before, and they thought that if they had food, they had best eat it all and have a full stomach, as if a full stomach would last longer before it longed to be full again, and so, although they were plump and pink of cheek, Thorbjorn’s folk were always complaining of hunger pains and begging him to slaughter a sheep or a cow, for something was bound to happen that would replace the cow or sheep. Thorbjorn himself was sure of this, also, and still looked for the vanished ship that had carried his brothers and uncles to their doom. He spoke often of what would be on this ship, and how his folk would be saved when it came. But in that summer after the second winter it still did not come, and in the autumn, all of the servants had to be sent away, and Thorbjorn himself undertook to care for the beasts.

At the beginning of this third winter all of the carved staves of all of the outbuildings had been used up, and so Thorbjorn began pulling down the staves around the main house, and these lasted for a few weeks, although the fires got smaller and smaller. After that, he pulled down the decorations inside the steading and burned them, and these lasted about a week. Then he threw on the carved chairs, with their arms in the shape of lions’ heads and hounds’ heads and their feet in the shape of claws. At one chair per day, these chairs lasted twenty days. At Yule, Thorbjorn began breaking up the bedclosets and throwing that wood on the fire, and there were so many of these that Thorbjorn was sure they would last until spring and the return of the second ship. The gold-embossed cradles went on the fire, and benches and barrels—Thorbjorn’s folk drove him on as if under a spell of frenzy, for they were never warm, and talked always of how warm they had been a few years before. The wallhangings went on the fire, the trenchers, and, at last, all of the bedclosets, and still it wasn’t spring, and there was no warmth in the air, and the fresh breezes of Hvalsey Fjord blew into every crevice and chink, and the folk were nearly mad with the cold.

It happened that Thorbjorn still had two cows and one bull, and he went out one day to the byre to feed them. It was about twenty steps to the byre from the farmstead, and as Thorbjorn was making his way, a great storm blew up, suddenly, as storms do in Hvalsey Fjord, and in the midst of this storm, Thorbjorn saw that there was a man standing beside the byre, wrapped in a beautiful cloak of marten fur from Markland. The man came up to him, and spoke to him, and his words could be readily made out, even in the din of the storm, and the man said, “Thorbjorn, you need a little steading cloaked in turf. I have one, may I give it to you?” And Thorbjorn said, “Nay, a big hall is a fine thing to look at.”

And so the man said, “Thorbjorn, I have some sheep trotters in my pouch here. You might seethe them up and eat them.” And Thorbjorn said, “Hungry though I am, I have never cared for sheepsfoot. That is poor man’s fare.”

And the man said, “Here in my pouch I also have this bit of a lamp. You might put some seal oil in it, and have both light and warmth.”

“Nay,” said Thorbjorn, “the smell of seal oil turns my nose.”

Now the man laughed and said, “Thorbjorn, thy neighbors have been eager to help you in your trouble.” And Thorbjorn said, “They are lowly men, these neighbors, and none of them has been made into an earl by the Norwegian king. It is for us to help them, not for them to help us.” And so this man, who was the Devil himself, opened his great black cloak and said, “My Thorbjorn, the light of your pride has been like a beacon in the darkness to me, and I have come to take you for my own. You can go with me now. Your folk, I assure you, will follow shortly, one by one.” And that was the last of Thorbjorn.

Now all the assembled folk who were listening to Lavrans’ tale laughed at this, and Lavrans himself laughed, and Birgitta said, “Indeed, my father, there was never such a lordly family in Hvalsey Fjord as this one.” Lavrans grinned and raised little Helga onto his lap. But Olaf was not made more contented by this tale, and he sulked about all winter.

On moonlit winter nights, Gunnar got into the habit of skiing or skating across the fjord and spending the evening in conversation with Sira Pall Hallvardsson. And it happened that one of these nights, he asked the priest what he remembered of the ways of Europeans, for now that he was no longer at Gunnars Stead, Gunnar declared, he had a new longing to go on ship as his father had done, when he traveled to Norway and the Orkney Isles and Iceland, and returned with Helga Ingvadottir, Gunnar’s mother.

Sira Pall Hallvardsson now laughed heartily, and when Gunnar asked him why he was laughing, he said that in his many winters in Greenland, he had never been led to recall his youth or his education, for no Greenlander had asked him about it before this.

“It is true,” said Gunnar, “that we Greenlanders are like most men in this, we think that what is important is what is taking place in Greenland. And the men of Hvalsey Fjord are the same. To them, the disputes of Vatna Hverfi are small things, hardly worthy of remark, even though Vatna Hverfi is a larger district with greater farms and richer men.”

Sira Pall Hallvardsson said, “And the men of Vatna Hverfi consider that Eriks Fjord has lost much of its importance in late years.” Now Gunnar and the priest both laughed. Gunnar said, “When we went to the south, to Kollbein Sigurdsson’s swimming contest at the hot springs, the farmers of the south were a little perplexed by us and our concerns, and thought of Kollbein as a peculiar and insignificant man, although he was the ombudsman of the king. It seems to me that folk have smaller minds than they once did, in the days of my grandfather Gunnar Asgeirsson. My father, too, was a great one for having news of distant places.”

Now Pall Hallvardsson grew sober, and nodded, and said that all things were worse than they had been, that the decline of men from a state of grace was proven by Church authorities. Gunnar said, “My wife and her father say that even the weather is worse, and every year worse, although Finn declares that of seals and birds and other game there are such numbers as he has never seen before. I know this, that in earlier days, a man who wished to take ship and sail away for wealth and adventure had but to wait a year or so, and now he may see the birth of many children before he sees a single ship.”

Some time after this, Sira Pall Hallvardsson began to speak of his school, for he could remember nothing before this school, although it was said that his mother had been the daughter of a Flemish cloth dyer and his father an Icelander who was part owner of a small ship, and who had visited Greenland as a young man, before Bishop Arni died. But these people, Pall Hallvardsson’s mother and father, along with her parents and brother, all died during the Great Death, as did many of the folk of Tournai, where they dwelt. But Pall Hallvardsson had been taken to the Augustinians of Drongen, and this entire monastery had been spared by a miracle of prayer and fasting, so that no monk or servingman or schoolchild had died during the whole of the first visitation of the Great Death.

“Flanders,” Pall Hallvardsson declared, “is such a place as can hardly be imagined by Greenlanders, or even by folk such as myself, whose eye has become familiar with the wastes of the western ocean. In Flanders, a man did not wait for folk to visit him, or look out his door for them, squinting into the breeze and making of every shadow the longed-for guest, but was instead so beset with folk that he might rather wish to be left alone to hold his thoughts in peace. And all of these folk were seized with aims and desires many times every day, for the very commerce that they had among themselves put them in a frenzy of conflicting notions. All men rushed about as fast as possible, and in addition spoke quickly. Well, these things are outlandish for me to think upon now, but when I was a boy they seemed ordinary. I spent enough time bemoaning the tedium of Drongen. How I longed to be taken along when the cellarer of the monastery went to do business in Ghent, which was not far away.”

Gunnar said, “Was this Ghent another and larger monastery, then?”