Authors: Margaret Elphinstone
We called our camp Hop, because there was a tidal pool where we could moor our ship. The river there had more fish in it than I’ve ever seen anywhere, so we weren’t hungry. As well as trout we caught halibut near the mouth of the lagoon. It was very hot. We built huts for ourselves, and the cattle were set free to graze on the dunes, although we rounded them up at night, because we could hear wolves in the forest. The bull broke his tether shortly after the winter, and disappeared. It was a blow, but not a disaster; we had two calves, and we thought we could keep the cows in milk another year without him serving them again. As soon as we were settled in our camp we started cutting timber. The man in charge of the work was called Gunnar. He’d worked in a shipbuilder’s yard in Norway before joining Karlsefni, and Karlsefni had offered him a large reward to join his crew, so he would have an expert man to make repairs in Greenland if they were needed. When Karlsefni married me, and decided to sail on to Vinland, Gunnar’s role became even more important, for the ships
were our lifeline back to the world. Karlsefni, and Leif before him, had been prepared to build boats at Leif’s houses, though neither had thought of building a trading ship there. So Karlsefni had a man to act as stemsmith, and he had the tools.
As soon as we’d moved into our new camp, Gunnar took men into the forest, searching for suitable trees. There was plenty of fallen wood, so with luck they thought they might find some recently fallen trunks that had already seasoned. We weren’t sure what all the trees were. Gunnar said many of them were unlike those in Norway, but he cut branches off different ones, and he and Karlsefni examined the wood. The most important thing was that he did find plenty of oak, which was what we needed. They hewed the keel out of one large trunk, and the stem and stern out of another, and then they had to split more trunks into lengths for the planking. They chose a pine trunk for the mast, thin enough to be used whole. The new ship had to be quite a lot smaller than Karlsefni’s, so that we could ship the wood and take it back to Leif’s houses. After much discussion Gunnar cut the keel to seven metres.
We were able to work outside nearly all winter, and by spring we had a good load of timber piled in lengths to season. We made more barrels too, because there were plenty of grapes in that part of Vinland, and those of us who were not needed to work with the timber were making as much wine as we could. In fact I took over the wine-making, with as many men as could be spared at any particular time to help me. We used to fill the barrels with grapes and crush them with big pestles, and then seal them up with tar and leave them. The important thing is not to let the air get in. But you make wine in your monastery; I don’t need to tell you that.
In the summer it was really hot, almost as hot as it is here. The land felt very foreign. Around Leif’s houses it was different from Greenland, but still the kind of place that we were used to. The heart of Vinland was another world. I said to Karlsefni, when we were alone at night, that I was sure we were no longer in the world of men, and he admitted he had been thinking the same, except that nowhere had we crossed an ocean so large that he could think it was the waters that surround the world. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘Even if this place isn’t part of
the world we’ve known about, it doesn’t have to be full of gods or giants or dead men either. It’s only land, like the land we left. Maybe the world is just bigger than we knew. You said yourself that Africa is south of us. I think we’re in the lands that circle the world. We’ve not sailed beyond that.’
‘It’s not heaven or hel,’ I agreed, ‘But Thorfinn, it’s alien. Separate. Alfheim, perhaps. Not part of anything to do with us. Whatever lives in the forest, animals or spirits, we can’t even get in without hacking it down as we go. I wonder if we were ever meant to be here.’
He said I was making troubles where there were none, and he knew land when he saw it, and good timber when he found it, and there was no point asking questions if we couldn’t answer them. He turned over then, and was soon asleep. Early the next morning the skraelings came, and that put an end to our innocence in Vinland.
I was out on the dunes with Karlsefni and Snorri, looking at the great oak trunk we’d hauled out of the forest. I’d left my Snorri sleeping in his basket. He was over a year old now, and very active. He could walk, but he could crawl even faster, and I seemed to spend all my waking hours keeping him out of danger. But he still slept in the afternoon. On this particular day some of the men were down on the beach, and the rest were still up at the huts. It was still early, and the grass was soaked with dew. The sea was calm, the waves lapping gently on the outer shore.
It was the noise that made me look up. A strange rattling noise that I can’t describe, like grouse would sound if there were a whole flock of them, or like stones shaken in a sieve – no, not like either. Too loud, too alien. I jumped round, and looked out to sea.
There were boats. Not like ours. Smaller. Thinner. Later I saw they were made of skins stretched over wooden frames. There were men in them. That’s how I knew they were boats, not animals. The men faced us, not rowing, but they had oars they used backwards, without rowlocks. Only they were not men, but black. One of them stood up in each boat, swinging something over his head like a flail. That was the noise. There were nine boats. I thought of my child, and clutched Karlsefni’s arm in both hands.
‘What’s this?’ said Karlsefni sharply. ‘What does it mean?’
I shook my head, dry-mouthed. He turned to Snorri, putting me away from him. The men below us had stopped work, and stood frozen, staring at the strange boats. ‘Skraelings,’ said Snorri. ‘The wretched folk. Skraelings. Remember Thorvald Eiriksson?’ Then Karlsefni shouted an order, and they ran back to the huts for the weapons no one had used since the voyage began. Karlsefni was going after them when Snorri stopped him. ‘Wait!’
‘No,’ said Karlsefni. ‘Those are men.’
‘I know. But the noise – they may mean to say they come in peace. We’re a long way from the place where Thorvald died.’
Karlsefni hesitated. The boats were just offshore. We could see the men clearly. There were six or seven in each boat. We were outnumbered about two to one. Their hair was long and black. Close up their skin was dark brown. The flails rattled like running footsteps breaking ice. Each man held an oar upright, facing the wrong way. I saw no weapons, but I couldn’t see any women either.
‘Gudrid, go back. Wait in the hut.’
I didn’t argue, but retreated ten paces, and stopped. Karlsefni wasn’t looking at me, and I had no intention of obeying him; it would be far worse not to see. Our men were coming back to the shore, swords and shields in their hands. Only Karlsefni and Snorri were still unarmed. The first skin boat beached in the breaking waves, and the others drew in beside it.
‘Wait!’ Our men obediently stood back, their drawn swords in their hands, and their round shields on their arms. Karlsefni touched Snorri on the shoulder, and the two of them went down the dunes, holding their empty hands palms outwards to show they carried nothing.
The brown men stepped through the waves and stood upright on the shore. One man stayed behind with each boat, keeping them afloat. The empty boats bobbed in the breaking waves; they seemed to weigh nothing at all. I watched, ready to run back and hide my son at the first sign of a fight. The newcomers were shorter than our men, and dark as devils. They were half naked, dressed in skins, and their skin was brown as if it were burnt. They had no swords, but some of them had sharpened sticks like short spears. I remembered all the
stories I’d ever heard of demons, shapeshifters and half men, creatures out of the fires of hel who creep into the fringes of the world and lurk there, waiting to seize upon mortal men and capture their souls. I crossed myself, and watched my husband walk down the beach to within two yards of the foremost man. For a moment Karlsefni, whose body I knew as well as if it were my own, looked quite foreign to me. I saw him for the first time as tall, and fair, although in comparison to most of our people he was neither, and I saw how he was clothed almost all over in undyed woven wool, wearing leather boots and a knife in a leather sheath at his belt. It flashed across my mind that although his face was tanned and lined, under his clothes his skin was as white and smooth as his son’s, and for a moment he appeared to me innocent and vulnerable, facing the embodiment of all our fear.
The skraelings stood still and looked at the two men facing them. They stared round, and saw our company waiting further back, with their naked swords in their right hands and the sheltering dunes behind them. Then one skraeling copied Karlsefni’s gesture and spread his hands wide, palms outwards. He stepped forward within two swords’ length of Karlsefni and Snorri. I couldn’t hear, but I could see that he was speaking. I saw Karlsefni shake his head. The skraeling spoke again, and Karlsefni said something in reply. The brown man gestured with his hands and spoke louder, and that time I heard him. He had a voice like a man, though there was no sense in it. I heard Karlsefni answer: ‘I don’t understand. Can you speak Icelandic? I don’t understand.’
They seemed to give up at the same time. Karlsefni shrugged, and at the same time the other man spread his hands in a similar gesture of hopelessness, and I think everyone was startled by the way they echoed each other, because on both sides I heard men laugh. And then the skraelings seemed to relax, because they came forward, right up to where our men were standing. They didn’t try to speak or touch them, but they stared, and muttered, and pointed things out to each other. They couldn’t take their eyes off the drawn swords. Our men watched them like wary dogs, and kept their weapons ready. I realised I had my hands twisted together, and my whole body was tense,
willing the men to keep control of themselves. It only needed one wrong move, I knew, for the taut thread to snap, and I didn’t trust the spinners of it. The fates hunger for battle, and the possession of the dead, but these men were mine, and I prayed to a more merciful God that I should not have to lose them yet. The odd thing was, Agnar, that it was our own men that I was afraid of. It didn’t occur to me that the skraelings would change their mood, or suddenly attack. I knew nothing of their nature, but I knew my own people very well, and I knew they couldn’t be trusted to keep the peace.
Perhaps the skraelings sensed the same thing, because suddenly one of them spoke, and in a moment they had all retreated to the boats. They were afloat again before we quite realised what was happening. The strange oars were shipped, and the whole fleet rowed quickly away until they reached the headland beyond our lagoon, and disappeared from sight.
It may not sound to you like an alarming incident. No blood was shed; no one was hurt; but that first encounter changed everything, and I don’t think any one of us slept so well again after it as we’d done before. Of course we all discussed the strange people interminably, and I think we all knew we hadn’t seen the last of them. Snorri wanted us to leave as soon as possible, and abandon all thoughts of a winter camp. If we’d listened to him, his son would have lived, but then no one knows what might have been, and for all we know, an untimely death may save even greater suffering. Only fate sees everything; there is one face of providence that I trust, and one that seems to be arbitrary and capricious. But perhaps when we cease to be mortal, we shall see what the gods see now, and we’ll find that the two faces are really one.
Inevitably the skraelings came back. Since the first encounter, we’d kept a watch, and so we saw them as soon as they came into view round the headland. There were so many boats that the sea looked as if it were strewn with sticks of charcoal, and when the skraelings swung their flails the noise was terrifying. Such an alarming approach must, we assumed, mean an attack. Our men ran to arm themselves, then waited at the top of the dunes. We seemed very few compared to the massed boats before us, but it was close to high tide, which meant
if it came to a fight we’d be able to rush them from above as they came ashore.
My boy was awake, and I stood at the door of the hut, holding him in my arms. I thought he’d catch my fear, but he seemed quite unaware of it, as he wriggled to get free so he could be off and see what was happening on the beach. I’ve never felt so vulnerable, knowing he trusted me completely, and yet I couldn’t do a thing to protect either of us if our little warband were to be killed. Even if I could escape into the forest, I could never get away from Vinland, so I’d be better dead than free. I couldn’t begin to think about being captured. In all the stories I’d heard of foreigners being taken, they’d kill the baby first and rape the woman, and then maybe kill her too and maybe not. That’s what our own people did abroad; I didn’t know if the half human creatures I saw in front of me would be the same. I had my knife on its cord around my neck. I knew what I ought to do if I could, if the day went against us. I didn’t dare to imagine it clearly. I just felt icy inside and not able to think. My hands were cold and sweating, and I hardly seemed to have the strength to keep hold of my boy. I just concentrated on trying to quiet him and not letting him fall. When your worst fears seem to be coming true it’s more like a dream than reality. I suppose it’s a way of keeping sane to half believe you might wake up and find you’re not really in that world at all.
But the skraelings hadn’t come to fight. They came ashore just as they’d done before, carrying no weapons. The leaders stood at the foot of the dunes, and spoke to us in their outlandish tongue, making wild gestures, and beckoning our men down. Others were unloading the boats behind them. It was so different to the nightmare: the cold knot inside me unfroze, and only then did I feel my heart thumping and my whole body trembling. I took a deep breath and crept forward to see better. Snorri was quiet now that he could see, watching the scene below him with round-eyed wonder. The skraelings were spreading stuff out on the beach, and pointing emphatically. Furs. They had furs, Agnar. It was so unlike what I expected I found instead of shivering I was trying not to laugh, and I had to swallow hard to stop myself from giggling like an idiot. It was like when Thorstein came home from the hunt and laid all his spoils at my father’s feet.
There were deerskins, sealskins, huge brown bearskins, foxskins, wolfskins and some strange pelts I didn’t recognise which we were told later in Norway were some kind of cat, but at the time I’d never heard of such an animal. The furs looked so rich and strange and incongruous, piled on the beach in that empty land beyond the end of the world, and I found I wasn’t thinking of Thorstein so much as Thorgeir the packman and his son Einar, who had once dazzled my eyes and my judgement with beautifully made objects from far countries. Everything fell into place then, like waking from a horrible dream. Karlsefni, who was after all a merchant, understood at the same moment, for he suddenly sheathed his sword, dropped his shield in the sand, and spread his hands wide in the gesture he’d used to reassure the wild men before. Then he jumped down the dunes, sliding in the loose sand, and stood alone, face to face with the skraeling leader.