Meadowland (20 page)

After we’d done that, next thing was building a proper boat shed for the ship. Well, you can see the sense in that. If anything happened to the ship, we were completely screwed. But I’ve seen earls’ houses in Norway that were less well built than that bloody shed. Just cutting mortices and slotting the timbers together wasn’t good enough, oh no. We had to go scrabbling about in the bog for iron nuggets, so Thorvald could cook them up in the smithy forge and draw them down into nails, nails by the bucketful, just to build a boat shed. Then, with winter really starting to come on and big fat chunks of ice starting to form in the bay, he had us outside riving great hundred-foot trees up into posts and rails to build a huge stock-pen. Comical it looked, with our four cows, three goats and half a dozen sheep standing in the middle of all that open space. As if that wasn’t enough, he made us cut about a ton of withies and wind them into hurdles, God only knew what for. I never did find out what he had in mind; when we’d finished making them we stacked them neatly round the back of the houses, and there they stayed until the damp got in them and they fell to bits. All in all, we were glad when winter set in and it was too cold to be outside, even though there was only fish to eat and nothing whatsoever to drink, only water.

Spring came, and we all came bounding out of the houses like calves turned out of the stalls. Thorvald had gone very quiet indeed over winter, just sitting there in the corner hardly saying a word, and we all had a nasty feeling he’d spent the time thinking up more bloody silly things for us to do. We weren’t far wrong. What needed doing, he told us all one morning, was a proper survey of the island, so we’d know where we were. We’d launch the ship and sail right round the island, keeping an eye out for the best places for farms. We’d start off heading west, because nobody had been that way before; for all we knew, Leif’s Booths was the crummiest spot in the whole of Meadowland, and just round the corner we’d find meadows where the grass dripped with butter, streams where the salmon crawled along on each others’ backs, and God only knew what else. Maybe, he added when he saw our faces go all sad, we’d even find the place where the vines grew, or a big rap of the wild corn, which (he felt sure) would probably make decent malt if only we could figure out how.

That last bit got our attention, after a winter spent drinking water. It’s surprising how well thirty men cooped up in a small space with no women and no booze can cope; I guess it’s the unspoken fact that if one of them blows his top and starts getting stroppy, chances are that the other twenty-nine will follow suit, and the only possible outcome after that would be a short but bloody fight, with not enough survivors to get the ship home again. But those thirty men will be hard to motivate, unless you can offer them something they actually want. After the long, fraught winter, nobody gave a damn about exploring a strange new country or looking for greener pastures and crisp, cold rivers teeming with salmon. What twenty-nine of us really wanted to do, of course, was go home; it was because we wanted it so badly, I guess, that nobody actually dared say so. That would’ve been the hole in the planks that lets the sea in. Now that the thaw had come we needed to do something other than scrape along catching fish and burning charcoal, and it had to be something that’d break the tension. An epic quest for Tyrkir’s vines was exactly what we needed.

So we loaded the ship with dried and smoked fish, and set off westwards. It was a good season for exploring, a warm, pleasant spring and early summer, with helpful winds, and we cruised along the coast at a nice easy pace. We didn’t find any vines, but we saw great forests sweeping down to white sandy beaches, and it was easy to get lost in daydreams about bringing great cargoes of priceless lumber back to Iceland, without giving much thought to precisely how we’d get them there. All that raw material, just waiting to be cut, logged and planked; just looking at it did something to your brains. I remember spending several days hatching out a cock-eyed scheme of building a great raft of floating logs and towing it home all the way to Brattahlid. Completely impossible, needless to say; but I wasn’t the only one who let his mind wander, so to speak. It was like those kids’ stories about the hero who gets carried off to the land of the giants, where he sees gold rings the size of cartwheels and cups and plates as big as houses; all that wealth, and not a hope in hell of getting it home. If you stopped to think about it clearheaded, it’d have broken your heart.

I remember, we were cruising through a little group of islands, and we had to put in for fresh water. We saw a lake with a river flowing out of it, so we landed; and there it was, the thing that changed everything.

Strange; but it was so ordinary that we nearly missed it. No big deal at all, you see them all the time at home, so you don’t notice them. It was a rick-cover: a bundle of long sticks rigged up on top of a hayrick to support the thatch that keeps out the rain. The only difference was that the thatching was birch-bark rather than reed. When it’s time to cart off the hay, you pull out the sticks, bundle them up and put them aside ready for next year, you don’t think about them any more. Someone had done just that, only by the looks of it they’d forgotten all about it, because the grass and weeds had grown up through the bundle - it was only when you got up close and saw the woven-grass cords they were tied with that you realised what you were looking at.

I can’t remember who noticed it first; but someone called out, ‘Here, look at this.’ Nobody panicked or went wild with excitement, but we stopped what we were doing and gathered round, staring at those weed-covered poles like we knew we were looking at something but we couldn’t figure out what was such a big deal. It dawned on us gradually Someone had tied those poles together, and it hadn’t been us.

‘Here, Eyvind,’ Thorvald said, in a perfectly calm voice. ‘When you came this way with Bjarni Herjolfson - did you stop here?’

Eyvind didn’t say anything, just shook his head. I was trying to figure out how long the sticks had been there by the length of the overgrowth: three years, I thought, maybe four. I was thinking, so we aren’t the first to come here after all. Obviously, someone else had heard about Bjarni’s trip and come exploring, and for some reason they’d built a rick here; or maybe the cover was for cords of wood, which’d make more sense, since why would anybody bring hay out here to an island? It didn’t occur to me, or to any of us, I think, that whoever left those poles there might not have been a Greenlander or an Icelander or just possibly a Norwegian. We stared at it for a while, then shrugged and went back to filling our water-barrels. It was a mystery, and maybe we felt a bit put out that someone had beaten us to it, but it wasn’t like it mattered, after all.

We spent all summer fooling about like that, but we never found any vines. Instead, we found honey, which was even better.

Stands to reason, really Where you’ve got wild flowers and fruit trees and all that, there’s got to be bees. The stupid thing was that it took us so long to think of it. But it was only when a man called Sigurd Squint was cutting brushwood, stuck his hook into a wild bees’ nest and got horribly stung all over that we realised what we’d been overlooking all that time.

‘You’ve lost me,’ I said.

Kari looked at me as though I was simple, and said a word I’d never heard before. It began with M.

‘Say again,’ I said.

He sighed. ‘You Greeks,’ he said. ‘All right. Basically, it’s like beer, only you make it out of honey You ferment it, and-‘

‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘I know what you’re talking about. It’s mentioned in Homer, but nobody makes it any more.

Kari grinned. ‘Yes, they bloody well do,’ he said, ‘though back home it’s sort of like showing off, because there’s so many other things we need the honey for: preserving meat, that sort of thing. You only make (the M-word) if you’re filthy rich and have more honey than you can use. But as far as we were concerned, booze wasn’t a luxury any more, it was an essential; so we gave up exploring and turned all our attention to bee-hunting.

It’s a bastard thing about bees (Kari said): when you aren’t looking for them, the bloody things are everywhere, stinging you. When you want to find them, it’s another matter entirely Each one of us reckoned he knew the sort of places where bees like to nest: hollow trees, for instance, or the forks of old oaks. Turned out we hadn’t got a clue, because back home we’ve been keeping bees for as long as anyone can remember. It was like looking for wild cows. But we couldn’t wait for a swarm to show up, like you do at home; we needed to find them as quickly as possible. So we spent weeks poking about on the edges of the woods, prodding rotten trees with long sticks, climbing up in the branches like a load of kids. A man called Big Thorbjorn hit on the idea of following bees back to their nest; he’d wander around in the open till he saw one, then he’d follow it, stalking it like a rabbit while it buzzed around drinking from flowers, then running after it when it started flying - he never found a single nest, but he kept at it for days on end, till at last he tripped over a great big stone while he was chasing a bee and bashed his knee so hard that he couldn’t walk for a week.

In the end, though, we found a dozen hives - and didn’t we all get stung busting them open. Two of them were empty, no honey at all, but we finished up with enough comb to brew from; and then we waited. Of course, everybody had slightly different ideas about how you brew the stuff, and in particular how long you’ve got to leave it till it’s ready What’s more, it turned out that none of us had ever done any actual brewing; we’d maybe watched our mother or our wife or our aunt do it, but we hadn’t actually paid close attention, because it wasn’t our job. After all the effort and bother we’d gone to in collecting the honey, the last thing we wanted to do was screw it up by tapping it before it’d finished working; but thirty men who haven’t had a drink for best part of a year find it hard to be patient. Thorvald organised a guard rota, to make sure nobody got at it while the rest of us were asleep; we kept watch in pairs, since one man on his own might be tempted. It was all very tense, specially the last few days, and I think we were all worried about what’d happen if we tried it and found it’d gone off or something; there’d have been bloodshed, for certain.

Luckily, it was all right. It was better than all right, actually it went down a treat, hardly touched the sides, and for a couple of days we were all very happy and pleased with ourselves. Then we woke up, and there wasn’t any more left, and our heads hurt.

Things were pretty subdued around Leif’s Booths for a while after that. It wasn’t just because there wasn’t any booze, though of course that didn’t help. The whole point of booze is that it helps make you forget how shitty your life is; on the other hand, when the booze runs out, you find yourself remembering all the shitty things the booze helped you forget, and then you get really depressed. In particular, we all found ourselves asking what the hell we thought we were supposed to be doing there. I mean, it was a fine country, with the most wonderful grazing and all that valuable lumber, but that didn’t alter the fact that we were living off dried fish and there wasn’t anything to drink. Just for the sake of being there, it seemed a high price to pay It didn’t help that autumn was closing in, so even if we’d decided to pack it all in and go back to Greenland, we couldn’t, not till spring. The only answer was to find more honey - or grapes, or wild grain, or any bloody thing we could squash into a pulp and leave to ferment.

It was all a bit ridiculous by that stage. I mean, back home, in winter, the one thing you take for granted is loads of salt beef and bacon washed down with gallons of beer. We were busy all that autumn, but we ended up rationing ourselves to one mug of disgusting mixed-fruit rotgut per man per day to wash down our dried cod and smoked salmon. Over winter, stuck indoors all bundled in together, we mostly went quiet. We’d been together so long that there was nothing left to talk about, and if we tried to talk it just flared up into arguments and bad temper, so mostly we just sat. Now you Greeks know a lot more about Religion than we do, but there’s one important thing you’ve got wrong. You say that if a man’s evil and wicked and he dies and goes to the bad place, what’s waiting for him there is a huge bonfire stoked with sulphur and pitch, for ever and ever, along with a whole load of other wicked people. No disrespect, but that can’t be right. For one thing, you don’t know spit about the cold. Sitting in Leif’s Booths in the middle of winter, even with the thick turf walls and the hearth stoked right up, you were cold right down inside your bones. Give me this pitch-and-sulphur furnace of yours any time. Also, if I’ve got this right, most people are evil and wicked, so most people are going to end up in the bad place, which means there’ll be plenty of different people to talk to; what’s more, since what you call evil and wicked is pretty much what we call interesting, I can’t help but think the company’ll be better there. Sounds to me like the good place hasn’t got much going for it, because if the bad place is hot, it figures the good place has got to be the opposite, cold. Add in being stuck there for ever with a small number of boring people, and it seems to me I’ve been there already and I didn’t like it much.

We got through the winter, but I couldn’t tell you how. Mostly I think we went to sleep with our eyes open. When spring came, there weren’t any arguments. We were going to get the ship up together as soon as it was warm enough to be outside, and then we were going home.

Well, we got the ship overhauled and seaworthy in no time flat; you never saw thirty men work so hard. True, we were very low on stores, apart from water, but we didn’t care; we’d put lines over the side and lures for seagulls, just so long as we could get under way as soon as the ice broke up. Once we could get out and start working on something, the tension broke up faster than the ice in the bay I was chatting and laughing with men I hadn’t said two words to all winter, mostly because we finally had something to talk about. Different if we’d been women, of course, because it’s my experience that what women mostly talk about is nothing at all; but men need to talk about something, or else they just sit there staring at the wall.