The Snow on the Cross (13 page)

Eirik and his men reached the ground
where I was lying and kept running past me, chasing down those who ran before
them.  Eirik did not give me a second glance as he passed.  This was not a
rescue attempt.  Eirik could have cared less about me.  This was revenge for
his butchered fellow hunters, and he had been tracking us for days.  I was a
by-product.  If I was killed in the melee, then I would simply be a casualty of
war.  If I survived the careless attack, then at least I could be dragged back
to Eirik’s church so Thordhild would be happy.  I felt no comfort in the
thought as the men roared past me.  I sat up to watch them run up and over the
hills.  One by one, they ran down my former captors, and one by one, their
heads were mounted on the spears Eirik and his men carried.

I wanted them not to butcher those
men, but even as I shouted, my voice was not heard amid the fray.   I saw
Eirik, triumphant, standing on a hill with his spear raised, letting out a cry
of victory.  He had one of his fallen enemies at his feet and, as I watched, he
pierced the body and hoisted him up, impaling him on the spear as the body slid
down, pulled by its own weight.

His men cheered.  I felt nothing but
bitter loathing as I began to dread the long walk back to Brattahild.  I began
to wonder if I hadn’t been better off with my abductors, for then at least I
could have returned to
France
after my ransom.  It was another
sign, and God was sending me back to play out my fate on Brattahild.  I watched
the vessels of God’s work, the ones who were taking me back to my destiny,
descend from the hills, bloody and grinning, heads swinging from their
spears.   I got wearily to my feet, turned without waiting for them, and
started walking west.  I knew they would follow.  It was the only way back to
Eirik’s farm.   When they caught up to me, I looked at Eirik.  His face was
flushed, and seemed unquestionably happy at his vengeance.  I began to wonder
about my vengeance.  The ones for my brothers slaughtered at
Tours
, Abbeville, and
Lindisfarne
.  Who would avenge them?  I was a man of God, not a fighter.  I had no
strength for revenge, and even if I did, the most holy word of God forbids me
to take action.  That is a job for others rather than me. 

If I could redeem this man, and make
him change his ways, it would take a miracle, and unfortunately, at that point
in
Greenland
, I knew there were none to be found,
especially by me.

The Vikings celebrated as they walked, and I thought again
about Eirik’s character.  The kind of man who would carve out a living in this
desolate place, the kind of man who would lead his men on raid after raid of
innocent monasteries, was exactly the kind of man who would track his prey
across the plains of ice for three days for a five minute slaughter and then a
three day walk home.  This was Eirik the Red, and again I felt no comfort that
at that point, I would be spending the next two years living in his company.

                                                                           ***

The walk back to Brattahild was
misery.  The Vikings might as well have strapped a cross on my back for the
entire journey, except there would be no one to offer to carry it like there
had been for Christ.  The burden was mine alone, and it was only through sheer
will that I forced myself to take step after step.  Eirik did not believe in
wasting time, and he kept his men on a vigorous pace.  Unfortunately, I began
to fall further and further behind as we traveled, and again, no one seemed to
care that I was struggling as I walked.  I thought about what Bjarni had told
me the first night of our hunt about Eirik watching me.  I didn’t believe
Bjarni then, and I surely do not believe that now.  I was a tool to Eirik, like
his axe or his spear.  My only hope as I walked back to Brattahild with the
others was the thought of seeing Malyn again.  I had missed the poor girl while
I had been out.  More importantly, I believe, I missed someone who I could
speak to.  I was not alone on the ice, but I might as well have been for the
language barrier was a wall that divided me from all the others.  Even after a
month of hearing that strange language, I understood no more than I did when I
first set foot on
Greenland
.  Bjarni was forever dead, and Malyn
remained my last hope for a translator.  I was determined to sit the girl down
when I returned to Brattahild and make her teach me some of Eirik’s language. 
It was the only way to make any kind of progress there.

The trip was a hazy blur of trudging
up and down hills, and I kept my mind on the thoughts of God’s holy work to
give me strength.  However, more often than God’s work, I found my mind
lingering on images of
Le
Mans
and my beloved
cathedral that seemed so distant now.  I had a sad feeling about
Le Mans
, as if I knew even then I would not
see it again.  My assumptions would turn out to be correct, but at the time,
the thoughts of
Le Mans
and my home and my returning there
was my only comfort.  I was craving a good, ripe strawberry, and I could see my
plants in my mind, tiny yellow flowers just beginning to emerge on the vines,
giving promise to what would come next.  Instead, I saw only the forsaken
grounds around me, empty and white and hopeless.

By the time we arrived back at
Brattahild, I feared I was near death.  My mind was blazing with delirium, and
my stomach was twisting savagely.  My last mouthful of food, a raw lump of deer
meat, had come up as quickly as I had swallowed it, and I ended up spitting it
out all over the ice.  Some of the Vikings chuckled, but Eirik gave them a
stern glance, and they fell silent.  Apparently, Eirik was growing concerned
about my health, as if he knew I was being pushed to the end of my endurance. 
I had not taken a morsel of food since, and that was two days before.  My weak
constitution was not used to eating meat, for we rarely had beef or venison at
the cathedral in
Le Mans
.  Our diet consisted mostly of
grains and vegetables (and my beloved strawberries.)  As such, my health was
conditioned to a lighter fare, and this heavy meat the Vikings kept forcing
upon me did little for me other than make me sick.  I longed for some of the
bread and perhaps even a small piece of fish Malyn would have given me.

If I had gone insane out on the ice,
it is unlikely the Vikings would have noticed.  The continuous glistening of
the snow and the perpetual sunlight was enough to make any normal man mad, so
perhaps I was right about my initial assessment of Eirik: he had been driven
insane by this green land which wasn’t even green.  When we crested the last
hill and I saw the stretch of pasture that marked the edge of Eirik’s farm, I
practically wept.  Even my humble stone church, drafty and chilled, seemed a
palace to me.

I would have crawled over the rocks
to reach my church, but as it turned out, God had blessed me with a reserve of
strength, and I began running down the hill and toward home.  All I could think
about was my fire and sleep.  Blissful, warm, sleep.

I saw Malyn standing by the fence as
she watched our approach.  The look on her face as she saw me told me the trip
out in the wilds of the north had not been good for me.  A ragged old man
bounding down out of the hills, raving with fever, hallucinating for lack of
food, driven insane by a relentless sun that refused to set.  This is what she
saw, and the shocked look she gave me was a better reflection than any mirror. 
I put my trust that she would bring me what I needed to restore myself.  The
Vikings were coming in from behind me, and I knew Malyn had spend the last few
days preparing for Eirik’s return with enough food to feed six hundred men for
the entire winter.  I am exaggerating, but the food was there, piled high along
the tables for easy consumption.  I couldn’t look at it without gagging, so I
turned away as the others came up to Brattahild behind me.  Let them go first. 
Let them satisfy their hunger.  I will rest by the fire and pray.

I slipped out of Eirik’s home and
made my way to my church.  I opened the door to find Malyn had been here
before.  She had lit a fire that was burning brightly in my fireplace.  Blessed
girl, I thought as I settled on the bench that served as my bed.  The heat
gratified my bones, warming them nicely.  I forgot about my food, and I didn’t
even notice when Malyn came after I had fallen asleep and left a giant plate
sitting by the fire for me when I awoke.  My sleep that day was heavy and dark
and dreamless, and I felt nothing but the warmth as I slumbered.

                                                                           ***

When I awoke, it was as God Himself
had come down and healed me.  The food Malyn had brought was a banquet, and the
mead was the quenching of the fires of my mind.  Restored with food and rest, I
felt almost human again, and the delirium, which had started to worry me quite
a bit, subsided.

When Malyn came to me in the
midday
, she was glad to see me sitting up and meditating.  I had
washed my hands and face with the deep bowl of water she left and, thus
refreshed, I felt adequate to receive a visitor.

She came in and asked me about the
hunt.  She had heard Eirik’s version of the events on the ice, now she seemed
to want the truth.  I asked Malyn about the reindeer heart, and if it was truly
a custom among the Vikings to eat it. 

“I have never heard of such a
custom,” Malyn told me.  “But I am not a Viking.”

There could have been some truth
there.  She had herself only been here two years.  How could she have known
everything about these men? 

“I was saddened to hear of your
capture,” Malyn added quickly.  “But I am glad you are all right now.”

“Indeed.”

I sat her down and carefully
explained to her that I wanted her to teach me some of Eirik’s language.  It
was imperative, I told her, to communicate with him.

“His language is not that hard to
understand,” Malyn said, as if an educated man like myself should have been
able to pick it up if she had.  “It has a lot in common with our language. 
Some of the sounds are very similar.”

She took a stick from the fireplace
and began to sketch letters in the ash.  These were the Vikings’ alphabet, she
explained.  And this was how they sounded, she told me.

Every day Malyn would come to me and
teach me the sounds.  I was a fast learner, and soon I felt I had enough of the
sounds down to compose at least simple sentences. 

“Where is my food?” I asked Malyn in
the Viking tongue.  She clapped her hands and looked very excited.

“Perfect!  Now do another.”

“Bring me some mead.”

“Good!”

Malyn had found my pages of parchment
I had written on before we left for our hunt, and she borrowed my quill.  She
began to scratch words in the margins, where there was a little space left.

“Read this,” she commanded.

I looked at her marks.  The girl’s
script was barely legible, but I could make out the individual letters.  I felt
like a child again learning my Latin phrases over painstakingly long hours.  I
have a sharp mind, and what Malyn had taught me served me well.  The sounds
came back, and I slowly began sounding out the words she had written for me.

I sounded them correctly, but I did
not know what they meant.  Malyn had no translation in my language for me to
compare it to.  I finally gave up.  I needed a book to translate the passages,
and I needed more ink to write down my notes.  Frustrated at my lack of
comprehension, I shoved the parchment away from me.  My head was hurting, and
Malyn, although she was as patient as she could be with me, looked angry.

“You cannot expect to master Eirik’s
language in a few days,” she snapped.  “It has taken me two years, and even
now, I do not understand it all.”

She left my church and went back to
Eirik’s house.  I watched her go with an increasing rage building within me.  I
felt near tears, a feeling I had not had since I was a child as the escalating
feeling of discouragement swept over me.  Malyn was right, always had been
right, and she was just trying to help.  I would apologize to her on her next
visit, I decided.

I settled on my pew and watched my
cheerless fire spit in its fireplace.  There was nothing to do now but wait. 
Even time had stopped for me since the sun never sank.  Each day was an
uninterrupted cloud of light, always shining, always shining.  A man truly
could lose his grip on his senses if exposed to constant sunlight for an
infinite amount of time.  I realize the irony of it all now, locked here where
I am, scratching these words.  The balance of it all.  I grew sick of the
sunlight that never went away, and then upon my return from
Greenland
, I would not see sunlight again for
over twelve years.  A cruel joke played on me as the doors slammed shut and my
light was vanquished forever.  It still is.  I sat there in
Greenland
much like I am sitting now, locked
within a prison of sorts, nothing to do but think and think and think . . .

I have decided people do not care for
me much on a personal basis.

I discovered it there in
Greenland
with the total apathy of the Vikings
greeting me from all sides.  Even Malyn, the poor girl who would later beg me
to kill her, had begun to find me quite disagreeable.  It was not my fault
entirely.  After all, did I want to make this journey to help these men?  They
did not want my help.  They did not want to be converted, no matter what Robert
or King Olaf of
Norway
said.  They were quite happy here
and quite happy with their gods and their lives, and I was not going to be able
to change that.  Not that I tried too hard.  My main concern was my return to
France
, but that would not come until after
Eirik’s death, which would not be for another two years.  I decided I would sit
here in my church and not leave.  If I starved, then I would starve.  If Malyn
brought me food, then I would accept it and welcome her company, but I decided
I would not see Eirik again, not go to his house, and not interact with any of
his men.  It was a long way from converting them, but at the time I knew Robert
wouldn’t care.  He would have been too busy dealing with his political
alliances to worry about what I was doing here.  I took wood and tried to cover
the windows to block out that infernal sunlight, but I had no nails or hammer
to fasten them.  I stacked them the best I could over the openings, but in the
end they always fell when the slightest gust of wind puffed through the church
or something on the outside jarred against the wall.