B0046ZREEU EBOK (24 page)

‘I don’t like being used.’

‘Used?’

‘Even in my own bed,’ I could hear hysteria in my voice, and I made myself whisper. ‘Inside my own head. Even if I want to shut it out. Can’t I even have my dreams to myself?’

He took me in his arms and comforted me, and I could feel my baby inside me kicking against his hard stomach. I wasn’t frightened so much as angry, and while I did feel safe in Karlsefni’s arms, I knew at the same time that he couldn’t protect me from what he could never see. My dreams were my own problem, wherever they came from. He loved me, and that’s a powerful charm against evil, in its way, but the trouble was he caught my suspicion off me, and I should never have woken him.

The next morning the wind was blowing itself out, and the sun hung like a silver coin in a washed-out sky. The hills were white, and the wind that was left had a wolfish bite. I was just coming back from the midden when I saw Thorhall striding down from the ridge. Reluctantly I went to meet him. He looked wild, his eyes red-rimmed and his fleece jacket stiff with frost. It seemed to me he couldn’t have survived that storm in the shape of a man, and something alien still hung about him, a predatory smell, a whiff of wolf or bear perhaps, or some Vinland creature we knew nothing of. He came right up to me and I met his eyes.

‘So you make spells, not prayers, Gudrid, and I lie out in the wilderness,’ he said to me. ‘It’s a good thing some of us dare to do what’s needed.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Say what you like, or dream what you don’t like,’ he said. ‘Will you believe me if I tell you there’s a whale sixty feet long washed up in the storm, good fresh meat lying just two beaches along from here?’

I clasped my hands together over my swollen stomach. ‘There is? Truly?’

‘You should know,’ he said, and walked on past me without another word.

Karlsefni listened to Thorhall’s news with uncomplicated relief. We all set out at once, the two ponies loaded with ropes and knives and saws, and everyone carrying empty baskets on their backs. We
walked along a grey beach, between the high water mark and the forest, shoved through scrub, and there on the second beach was a massive grey whale, just as Thorhall had described.

There was no smell. I walked round to its eye, which was quite small and human looking in that vast body, and saw it still had the sheen of life on it. When the men began to climb up the body the tail gave a feeble jerk, and when they made the first cut, the creature flailed so hard that one man was flung off into the sand. Karlsefni climbed up behind the great head, drew his sword, and plunged it down the blowhole. Dark blood spurted over him, and dribbled down the body. The creature twitched once and was still. Gradually I saw its eye glaze over. Karlsefni wiped his sword and sheathed it, and slid down off the body beside me. Thorhall strolled over to him.

‘So what d’you say now, you Christians?’ he said. ‘Hasn’t old Redbeard turned out to be a bit more use than your Christ? Aren’t you glad there’s one man in your company who still makes poems in praise of Thor?’

‘You’d better keep quiet about that,’ was all Karlsefni said.

‘Quiet about the truth? Why should I do that?’

‘Because you know as well as I do that if the men think this is devil’s work they’ll not touch it. Winter’s nearly on us, and if we don’t get this meat home and dried, we’re done for. Is that sense enough for you?’

‘And what about you, Karlsefni? Aren’t you afraid of the devil? What kind of creature do you think this whale is?’

Karlsefni glanced at the whale, where the men were already stripping off the blubber, and for a moment I saw doubt in his face, but when he turned back to Thorhall there was no sign of it. ‘I think it’s meat,’ he said, and strode away.

That night we slept hard after our long day’s work. Before we got up in the morning I asked Karlsefni what he’d been thinking when he looked at the whale like that. He was lying curled up with his back to me, and it was a minute before he answered. ‘Nothing,’ he said eventually, ‘only I thought I knew every whale in the sea, but I never saw one like this.’

‘How’s it different?’

‘They’re all different. But this one – did you see under its head? Grey on the left side, white on the right. And its fin was too far back. It isn’t any kind I’ve heard of.’

‘The meat’s the same as any other.’

‘That’s true. It’s the way it came I’m thinking of. What’s a monster, Gudrid? It can be an animal, I suppose, and it can be a ghost, and maybe there are stranger matings in the sea than anyone knows anything about.’

‘Not so strange,’ I remarked. ‘What’s a man, if it comes to that? Don’t we come in the middle too, between the animals and the ghosts? Perhaps a monster is only something we fear because we know too much about what it’s made of.’

‘A dream, you mean?’

‘A winter’s meat isn’t made of dreams.’ I pulled his shoulder and made him turn on his back and look at me. ‘We’re quite far south, and they say there are all sorts of beasts in Africa. And it was his namesake and yours that Thorhall prayed to, your own god who’s protected you all your life. It’s not like you to be confused, Karlsefni.’

‘No.’ He twisted a lock of my hair round his finger, not looking at me. ‘But this country didn’t belong to the old gods, and Christendom ends at Thjodhild’s church. You know I don’t rely on anything but my own judgement, and that’s what I’ve always done. In my opinion Thorhall is a dangerous man.’

‘He found the whale. We needed food.’

‘And how did it come there? No, don’t answer, I don’t want to know. But keep away from him now, Gudrid, please.’

I remembered Thorhall in my dream, and I was frightened. I had no way of shutting him out from there, and that meant he had found his way into the intimate centre of our lives. Karlsefni wasn’t the man to stand for that; he was more jealous even than most men of his married privacy, of mind as well as body. I thought of my fire spell, and I wondered where Thorhall had been at the moment that I made it, and whether I should have been more careful to exclude evil things. I hadn’t bothered with the whole ritual that Halldis made me use at home, because I thought in Vinland we were safe from ghosts. I
thought of my unborn baby, and I wanted passionately never to have Thorhall’s eye on me again.

Karlsefni must have been watching my face, because he pulled my head down on to his shoulder, and held me. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he repeated. ‘It’s not your fault. And thank God we’ve got the meat. If it came by evil means it’s nothing to do with you, and we certainly can’t reject it. But keep away from Thorhall. Don’t do anything that could bring him near you. We have enough food now. You don’t need to take any risks now. Do you?’

‘No.’

‘Then will you do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fine. Don’t worry, I can manage the rest.’

He did manage that winter very well. Now that the ghost of hunger was banished everyone relaxed, and as the sea froze over, our little settlement settled down to its indoor life. The winter was more severe than Leif had led us to expect, with few clear days, just one blizzard after another. But even at Yule there was quite a lot of daylight, and we had good fires. The smell of woodsmoke always makes me think of Vinland. The first things we made in our new workshops were a couple of sledges, and every fine day we’d bring in wood. We never had to use seaweed or dung for fuel in Vinland, and we could have our fires as big as we liked. My son Snorri was born on the last night of Yule, and he first opened his eyes on firelight, and in the days that followed, while his soul still seemed new and strange in his little body, he used to turn his head and watch the fire with that unfocussed blue gaze that new babies always have. Sometimes he does the same now. He’s chieftain at Glaum in his father’s place, his own sons are as tall as he is, and you’d think there was nothing vague about him anywhere – he seems to see things so very clearly – but sometimes I look across the hearth to him, and I see him withdraw into some other world, staring into the flames, as if the human world around him were only a shadow flickering across the edges of his sight, and I think of where he came from, and the strange places that were home to him, and I wonder what he still remembers.

Having no priest, we baptised him ourselves, and Snorri Thorbrandsson was his godfather. I was relieved when it was done. It
would be a terrible thing to be a soul without a name wandering for ever in those deserted lands, and coming into the world is the most dangerous journey of all. It’s a cruel thing to have a God who’s indifferent to it, only offering the protection of his name when the worst is over.

Even after Snorri was safely baptised I hated Thorhall to come near us. He knew it, and somehow he was always with us. Although his place was in the north house, furthest away from ours, he frequently seemed to have a reason to come and sit at our hearth. He was welcomed by the company because he was a poet, and used to entertain us in the evenings with epigrams about us all, and all the things that happened in our new settlement. But he was quarrelsome too, and he never left the business about the whale alone. He was always making poems and jibes against Christianity, and mocking the men who’d turned their backs on Thor. Around Candlemas we had an outbreak of dysentery. Thank God it didn’t get into my milk and the baby was all right, but more than half the men were ill, and Thorhall seized the opportunity to raise doubts about the whalemeat, out of sheer mischief, I suppose, since he’d been the one who found it in the first place. A lot of them refused to touch it after that. Maybe it wasn’t just superstition: it puts you off a food anyway if you start to associate it too much with vomit. But things came to a head when some of Snorri’s men raided the storehouse one night, took the rest of the meat, and flung it into the sea.

That was one of the times I saw Karlsefni in a rage. He forced Snorri’s people to say who’d done it, and when the men were dragged out of the house to face him I think they thought when they saw his face that he’d kill them then and there. Only one dared speak, and he was defiant, insisting that they’d thrown away the devil’s meat to save us all. He was still talking when Karlsefni strode up to him and smashed his fist into the man’s face. The man dropped like a slaughtered ox and writhed in the snow, gasping. Blood poured from his broken nose, but no one dared move. Karlsefni kicked him in the back where he lay, and would have done so again if Snorri hadn’t got between them, grabbing my husband’s arm, shouting: ‘He’s my man! Don’t touch him!’

I thought they’d fight each other, but slowly Karlsefni lowered his free arm, and he and Snorri stood, almost chest to chest, staring into each other’s eyes. Then Karlsefni said breathlessly, but in his ordinary voice, ‘Your man. So what will you do if he’s killed us all?’

‘He was afraid.’

‘He may well be.’

‘They say that meat was devil’s work.’

The man on the ground rolled over, and struggled groggily to his hands and knees. The snow around him was pink with blood. ‘So you cast out devils,’ said Karlsefni to him softly.‘You’vegiven us our Lenten fast with a vengeance. So what about Easter? Any plans for our resurrection?’

The men around looked baffled, as well they might. ‘Don’t I make myself clear?’ went on Karlsefni. ‘Very well, do you understand this? It’s February. We don’t know when spring will come. May, perhaps June. Now that you’ve thrown away most of our food, we have barely enough for a month. So what are you going to do about that?’

Snorri said, ‘It’s no use blaming anyone for what’s done. We’ll just have to hunt for what we can.’

‘Out there?’ Karlsefni swept his arm out and everyone looked out obediently into the white world that surrounded us, and in the sudden silence we could hear the wind moaning across the pack ice.

‘We’ll have to ration ourselves,’ said Snorri doggedly.

‘True. And maybe we’ll have to die.’

‘Thorfinn,’ Snorri was one of the few people who sometimes used Karlsefni’s name. ‘This won’t do. Let the men go in. You and I need to talk.’

‘Talk!’

But Karlsefni did go with him. They went into our house, and nobody followed. I took Snorri and went to Helga’s hearth. I felt shaken, and I had learned to trust in her matter-of-fact strength when Snorri was born. She gave me hot buttermilk, and we talked, lowering our voices so the others couldn’t hear. I’d never said anything to anyone about Karlsefni; that would have been disloyal, but I found myself telling her about Thorhall.

‘So where’s Thorhall now?’ she said. ‘He wasn’t there this morning, was he? Is it his doing, do you think?’

I shook my head. ‘But why should he? He says Thor gave us the meat. Surely he’ll be furious?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Helga looked away from me into the fire. ‘He says it’s the women here who’ve caused the trouble.’

‘How?’

‘Oh, a lot of them think so. If there are to be women, they say, it should be women for all – slaves. Men shouldn’t bring their wives, they say, and carry on as if they were at home while other men have nothing. It’s the worst of all worlds, Thorhall says, and a lot of the others agree with him. Oh, they’ll hardly say so to your husband – look what he did today – but my man’s a smith, not a chieftain, and they don’t hesitate to get at him. He told Snorri he wouldn’t come without me, you see, and Snorri gave in because he needed his skills.’

‘I didn’t know that.’ I said slowly.

‘No, you don’t know a lot of things. But you’re not an ordinary man’s wife.’

‘But the women here had nothing to do with the meat.’

‘You don’t think so? Some people think you have more powers than you say, Gudrid.’

That scared me. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you think we’ll starve now?’

‘No.’ I shook my head firmly. ‘No, it may be hard, but I’m sure we won’t. It’s not our fate.’

‘You see? How do you know that?’

I couldn’t answer her, but I think I insisted because I had Snorri, and I would defy any power that existed to protect him. There’s no witchcraft about that; it’s just what any mother would do. But more than ever I wanted nothing to do with Thorhall. He was back the evening after the whalemeat went, and though he must have heard what had happened, he never referred to it, and all the want we suffered for the rest of the winter just seemed to make him more cheerful, and more aggressive.