The Greenlanders (49 page)

After the reindeer hunt, Margret’s friend came to her from Isleif with some parcels of reindeer meat and such hides as he could get for her, not beautiful or distinctively marked, but serviceable enough. Margret, who had been looking out for him and had seen his boat out in the water, was waiting at the tiny Steinstraumstead jetty with her sheep and her cheeses and a packet of clothing, and when he came upon the strand, she prevented him from unloading his articles, but asked him to take her across, for she was ready to quit Steinstraumstead for the winter, and, indeed, for good, for the steading needed more care than she had in her to give it. And as they crossed Eriks Fjord, the servingman told her of some other farms abandoned this year—three or four in the valley leading to Isafjord, two more in Isafjord itself, and two on the way to Solar Fell, although it was also true that the skraelings had moved off from Solar Fell, and the farm of Ragnvald had been claimed by Bjorn Bollason the lawspeaker. There was other gossip, too, enough to keep them occupied for the trip, and the servingman rubbed his fingers and rowed more and more slowly, apparently because of his joint ill, but really, Margret suspected, because he had intended to have the day to himself for a good gossip with her, and she had cut his time short. She opened one of her bags, and took out a cheese, and they sat in the middle of Eriks Fjord talking and eating bits of cheese.

He told her about Sira Jon. “The eyes started from his head and his arms swiveled in their sockets, showing to anyone who cares to see it that the fellow is possessed of the devil and there can be no two opinions about it. And indeed, what help is there if the chief priest himself lies open to evil like a trencher on a bench? And so Sira Pall Hallvardsson is in charge, and perhaps, you might go there. Weren’t you a friend of Sira Pall Hallvardsson once?”

“And what do folk say of Sira Pall Hallvardsson?” asked Margret.

The man smiled. “The servingfolk say that he is timid enough for them, and lets them do as they please. It seems to me that everyone expected the new bishop a long time ago, and will be glad enough when he gets here. But folk have been expecting new bishops for most of my life, and only one has ever come.”

Margret sat looking out over the water. Icebergs were beginning to gather in the fjord, blue underneath, white on top.

“Or you might follow Sira Isleif to Bjorn Bollason the lawspeaker, for Bjorn Bollason is greedy for help.”

“So she has sent him off, then?”

“Not just yet. Folk say that any priest in the house is better than none after all, especially through the winter, when folk are dying and need to be ministered to, and it is better not to have to go out, but only to go among the bedclosets in your stocking feet. But Bjorn Bollason is urging her, and promises to send two or three of his folk in exchange, plus other gifts. It seems to me that her only hesitation has to do with the difference between what she considers enough and what Bjorn Bollason considers too much. She looks about her folk and tries to foresee who is going to die this winter!” He laughed. “Her son looks healthy enough, and it is not at all sure that she would send for a priest for Ragnleif!” He laughed again, and Margret smiled. “But indeed, folk who go there on errands say that Bjorn Bollason’s place is a merry one, and the masters do much to ingratiate themselves with the servants, as if the servants might go elsewhere, as indeed they might, that is true enough these days. That would be a good place for you.”

“Nay, Sira Isleif would attend too much to his lost sheep. Neither of these crowded steadings interests me. I have never been to Isafjord.”

“Isafjord is a bitter place, and it would be well if you never went there.”

“It is not so far off from Eriks Fjord, only over the hills a bit.”

“But that bit is enough. The whole place slopes northward, and the fjord is full of ice winter and summer. Folk who were born there, with lots of land, long to get out. It is truly said that a small farm in Vatna Hverfi district is like unto an estate in Isafjord.”

“Even so, I am curious to go there.”

Now the servingman picked up the oars to the boat and looked Margret full in the face. Then he said, “It is true enough that we are old, you and I, for your hair is as white as can be and my fingers are bent and my hips ache all the time now, day and night, winter and summer. But even so, there are many abandoned farmsteads these days, and some in happy locations, and it would please me to wed you and go to one of these places.”

“Do you know that I am married already to Olaf Finnbogason of Hvalsey Fjord? Have you heard that he has died?”

“Folk don’t hear much of the Hvalsey Fjorders, but I have not heard that anyone of that name has died.” After this they rowed in silence to the Brattahlid jetty, and Margret got out of the boat with her things, and packed them onto her back, and then for some days, she herded her sheep, which numbered nine this year, to Isafjord, and there she found herself a place for the winter at a large but somewhat ramshackle steading owned by a man named Eyvind, who had four daughters. As all folk do who are going into service, Margret gave her sheep and her cheeses and her reindeer hides and her meat to Eyvind as a pledge of her service, and he promised to return the value of these goods to her should she have to go elsewhere in the future. And all this time she looked out for Quimiak and Sigurd, for it was said everywhere that of all the districts of Greenland, the skraelings preferred Isafjord district, and spent a great deal of time there, winter and summer.

It was true that the Isafjorders were unlike any folk that Margret had known before. Eyvind and his daughters were small and dark, and the eldest daughter, although only eighteen winters old, was already stooped from the joint ill. Eyvind himself bragged of having had the joint ill very badly in his shoulder, so that his arm had been frozen for a time in the socket, but then spring had come and he had gone out and done the spring work with especial vigor, and his arm had freed itself. When Margret remarked that his shoulder looked peculiar as if the arm had come out of the socket, Eyvind laughed and said that indeed it had, and that had been the purpose of his vigor. And now he raised his arm above his head and lowered it again. “Now, old woman,” he said, “it may be that a man can have pain or he can have death, and surely in Isafjord a man with one arm is facing death. But the priests tell us that we must not choose death, if we have any hope of Heaven, and so I chose that my shoulder should swim freely in my flesh as payment for life, and so it does, and so I live, and when it swims too far, we nudge it back where it came from!” Now Eyvind laughed and his daughters laughed with him, and indeed, they laughed at many things, pinched and small and gray as they were. Food about the place was spare and always had been, although Eyvind had as much land to his steading as Asgeir had had in his best days.

The daughters were named Finna, Anna, Brenna, and Freydis. Their mother and brother had died in the recent stomach ill. After a messenger had come from Brattahlid to all the farmsteads of Isafjord to see how folk were faring, some of those who had been hale fell ill, and these two and three of the servingfolk had died. The four daughters were pleased to speak every day of the qualities of Heaven and to picture for each other the sort of life the souls of their mother and brother were leading. Each day they would sit over their small meals and begin:

“What do you think our mother is eating?” said Finna.

“Milk and honey is what the priest says,” said Anna.

“But surely other things, too,” said Finna.

“Oh, yes,” said Brenna. “Bread and grapes and calves’ meat, I would say.”

“And what,” said Finna, “will she make at her weaving today?”

“The thread will be mostly gold, I think,” said Anna. “But with some silver twisted in.”

“It seems to me that the angels would like a nice two-by-two twill.” Everyone laughed merrily.

“Do you think,” said Brenna, “that the shuttle flies back and forth of its own accord?”

“Perhaps,” said Freydis, “she is finished as soon as she begins, or as soon as she thinks of the pattern.”

“Maybe there is other thread, thread the colors of the rainbow,” said Anna.

Some days they would talk all morning about exactly how warm Heaven might be. It could not be warm enough so that souls went naked, or could it? If souls went naked, then why all the weaving, and if there was no weaving then how did souls occupy themselves? And in addition to this, Hell was said to be hot and cold, so it must be that Heaven was warm and cool, and then they would talk about whether it was as warm as a hillside with the sun shining right upon it, or as cool as a cool sunny day in the summer, with a breeze blowing or without a breeze blowing, with lots of ice in the fjord or without very much ice in the fjord. And so their talk went on and on, as lively as could be, and it seemed to Margret sometimes that she could see the mother Hjordis in the fields of Heaven, or the streets of Heaven. Some folk said that Heaven was a holy city, as Jerusalem was, and so the daughters would imagine what a city was, and what Jerusalem was, and what a heavenly city Jerusalem might be. The folk at Eyvind’s steading chattered all the time, and Margret thought of something that Ingrid had said often when she was a child, of poor folk, that “They have words for meat and little else.”

Eyvind was practiced at getting through the winter, and had a routine of sheep killing through Yule and fasting through Lent that left him with three cows and twelve ewes with their lambs in the spring. In Lent, the whole household did as Margret and Asta had done during their winter at Steinstraumstead, that is, they stayed in bed under the coverlets and furs, half asleep and very hungry, saving what they could for an Easter feast. At the seal hunting time, Eyvind could hardly drag himself out of the steading, but he did so anyway, in the same way that he had made his shoulder work, and he returned with great quantities of meat and fat and everyone got up and ate some, and then more the next day, for, as they did this same thing every year, they knew about the sin of gluttony and the payment such sin exacted. And so it went at Eyvinds Stead in Isafjord, and when Margret spoke from time to time of other ways, the daughters and even Eyvind himself marveled at the peculiarities of folk elsewhere. Though Margret saw a number of skraelings during the winter and the following summer, none of them were Quimiak or any of his wives, nor indeed, the much-loved Sigurd Kolsson. Nonetheless, she decided to stay with Eyvind and his daughters, for she liked them very much, and considered their steading a good place for her.

Now it came time for the Thing, and one morning Eyvind said, “Well, I will go this year, though I haven’t gone in so many summers that I have lost count. But indeed, this year I have three or four daughters to marry out of Isafjord, and it will also be a pleasure to see the new lawspeaker. I have seen them all in my time, Gizur Gizurarson and Bishop Alf and Ivar Bardarson himself, and Osmund Thordarson.” And so the daughters got out their finest items of clothing and put them on and began the walk to Brattahlid, for Eyvind had no horses, as there are no horses in Isafjord. The land can no longer support them, though it is said that there were many horses there at one time. The daughters asked Margret to go with them, and she had no wish to refuse, but only to wrap up in her cloak and stay out of the light of folk’s attention.

When they got to Brattahlid and encountered others traveling toward the Thing, Eyvind found them places in one of the Brattahlid boats that was going to Gardar, and Margret spoke politely to her former associates when they spoke to her, but mostly she occupied herself in soothing the impatience of Brenna and Freydis, who had never been so far from Isafjord before, and in consoling Finna and Anna, who had earlier been pleased with their clothing, but now were less pleased, when they saw the finery of the wealthy folk from Brattahlid. But, said Margret, it was true enough that some of that finery was stitched from wadmal she had dyed and woven herself while living with Marta, Osmund, and Gudrunn, and it would please her to weave such things for the Eyvindsdottirs, too, and so they passed the time of the boat ride to Gardar talking of weaving patterns and colors and such dyeing plants as there were about Eyvind’s steading. Finna and Anna contented themselves, as women do, with the knowledge that even if they received no offers at this Thing, they would be far better dressed at the next one.

When they came to the Eriks Fjord jetty that belonged to the bishopric, everyone drew their boats up onto the strand or tied them to the rocks that jutted out of the water on the north side of the landing place. Now these northerners began to walk over the hill to Gardar, and to meet others who had come before them, and to linger and look back over the water for others who were behind, and there was a great deal of gossip and talk, and folk, especially womenfolk, saw relatives and friends that they hadn’t seen for many summers. It seemed to Margret that everyone had looked about themselves and thought as Eyvind had thought, that after many years of not going to the Thing, this was a good year to do so, if only to get a look at Bjorn Bollason and his family and his style of speaking and his knowledge of the laws. And as they were walking, an old man that Margret did not recognize told a tale of Osmund Thordarson that Margret had never heard before, and this is how it went:

There was a Greenlander named Oskar Ospaksson who had come to Greenland from Iceland as a small boy, for his father was a poor man in Iceland, and in addition to that had received a sentence of lesser outlawry for attacking a wealthy man. Ospak saw that there was little for him in Iceland, so he came to Greenland, thinking to take to hunting in the Northsetur and make himself a wealthy man, and so he had done so, bringing his son Oskar, but leaving behind his wife. And Ospak and Oskar lived in Greenland for some fifteen summers, mostly in the western settlement, which was closer to the Northsetur. And Ospak was not a bad hunter, and Oskar was not either, although he was hardly so good as he thought himself, for no man could be. These men had one great advantage, and that was that they had had the foresight to bring with them many iron weapons—swords and spears and crossbows with iron-tipped arrows—indeed, Ospak had sold off his patrimony for these weapons, and they were the making of him.