B0046ZREEU EBOK (30 page)

But I shouldn’t be thinking of sexual passion in the presence of a holy book. Look now, Agnar, this page is all black writing, but even here there’s a man’s face, look, and his body twined around the red bit. What do you mean, the letter? Explain. Oh, but wait, there are more faces. In between the pattern, see, the more you look the more you see them. They’re the faces of men, aren’t they, Agnar? Who are they? What are they doing? Explain it to me.

In the writing? It’s all in the black letters? Can you see it? Very well, read me a bit. What are you doing? Why are you turning the pages so fast? Stop that writing and answer me!

How do you mean, suitable? Isn’t it all the word of God? How can any part not be suitable?

Suitable for me. I like that. Like a present, and you choose it. Very well, I’m listening.

Of course, I hadn’t thought of that. How clever you are, my dear. Can you really turn it into Icelandic as you go along? Are you sure that isn’t blasphemous?

That’s true. Well, maybe I’m turning into you and you’re turning into me. And I’m the one who’s always said we can’t be overheard here. Come on boy, put that pen down. Don’t keep on writing when I’ve nothing to say. I thought you were going to read to me.

Oh my dear one, I don’t know what to say to you. How did you understand that it was so? Out of the whirlwind, yes, out of the north, in terrible majesty. Oh yes, it was like that. Agnar, I never knew it was written in that book that the world was not made for us. Read it to me again, how the stars sang in the morning, and we were not there.

He’s right, Agnar, he’s right. The springs of the sea are beyond us, and the gates of death are not opened to us. What did your cardinal think that I could possibly tell you? I know nothing, Agnar, nothing. I declare to you freely I don’t know it all, nor even the smallest part of it. Read to me again about the rain and the ice, the wilderness outside the world that was neither born nor begotten, nor even thought of by the minds of men.

This world that we have made for ourselves is very small, Agnar. Sometimes we seem to be prisoners in it, and when we die perhaps the doors will open again and set us free. Maybe that’s the only thing I’ve learned. However much you learn, however far you explore, you have no way of seeing beyond where you are. And yet the book is very beautiful to look at, and to touch. Even the leathery smell of it is good. How can we make beautiful things, Agnar, when we know so little? No one ever explained it to me so clearly before, but I think now that your God in the book is greater than the fates because he does much more than spin out the threads of human lives. But that kind of greatness makes me afraid. What are we, in the face of it? The boundaries of the world become so large, and so very cold. Will anyone be waiting for us when we die? Will the meaning of our suffering be hidden from us  hidden fromus even then?

? If there is any mercy, which is what the book is meant to be about, I thought, surely then we’ll be allowed to understand? What do you think, Agnar?

Well of course, you have to say that, don’t you? But a promise like that doesn’t seem to me to come from the same place as what you’ve just been reading. It’s too small, too specific. And yet everything in there is the word of God, isn’t it? I know you’re a theologian, Agnar, but it’s quite enough for me to understand that I can’t understand, which is what I knew already.

Now, I would like to look at the other pictures, please, and then
we’ll get on with the work. You realise we’ve nearly finished, don’t you? It’s going to be hard to part, my dear. I’ve grown very fond of you. I suppose I should be glad there’re only a few pages left to go, and our job is nearly done, but I’m going to miss you very much. That’s odd really, when I think how I’ve resented sitting here through all the summer days when I might have been getting on with my own pilgrimage, which is after all what I came here for. But at this moment, you, writing away there, seem even more important to me than my children. I love them most, of course, but now they’re far away, in another part of my life. Just now it’s you and me that matter, and the words on the page. I find myself wishing – though I know it couldn’t be sustained – that life could always be that simple.

It’s kind of you to say that but, I hope one day you’ll find a more fulfilling kind of happiness. I think you may. Now, enough of all this talk. Let me tell you how we built our ship.

We brought the new keel home in Karlsefni’s ship, laid over our own keel, and the other wood stacked and lashed down around it. It made the voyage very uncomfortable, as it was so difficult to move about with all that timber. They discussed towing some of it, but we’d come a long way south, and it would have been like having an unwieldy sea anchor all the way home, and the ship would have been very difficult to steer even in the best conditions. As well as the keel, we had the stemand stern posts, an unwieldy divided trunk which Gunnar wanted for the keelson, a pine trunk for the mast, and split oaks for the planking. Tucked in around that, we had barrels of wine, the furs the skraelings brought, and our cattle and possessions. We were lower in the water than on any other voyage I ever made, with the sea barely six inches below the gunwale amidships. We knew we might have to jettison some of the cargo if the weather turned on us, but as it was we had a straightforward voyage north again, and reached Leif’s houses soon after Lammas, with everything intact.

The first job was to enlarge the boathouse at the top of the beach. As we’d be working through the winter, the whole job, after the first
month or so, had to be done under cover. Once the keel and the stem and stern were hewn into their final shape, and fastened together, I, ignorant as I was, began for the first time to believe in the whole project. We had an outline, and my imagination could supply the rest. But of course it takes more than imagination to build a ship.

All the half trunks we’d brought home had to be split in half again, and then again, as many times as necessary to get the planks thin enough. Meanwhile Gunnar was hewing out the keelson from the forked trunk he’d chosen. There were ropes to be made too, which had to be done out of sealhide, as we had no hemp. We did have quite a lot of spare rigging with us; both some of our own and some left by Leif’s expedition. The most crucial thing was that Karlsefni’s ship had carried a spare sail. If we hadn’t had that, the whole project would have been impossible, because we had no more wool. In fact shortage of wool turned out to be our biggest problem. We’d killed all the sheep in that first terrible winter, and although, because there were women on the expedition, we’d brought two looms to Leif’s houses, they’d hardly been used since we arrived. It was a kind fate, in a way, that prevented the skraelings taking away the cloth we’d bartered, because we had to unpick a lot of it to get thread enough for caulking. Then the loose wool had to be soaked in grease made from fat and birchbark. Working with the wool would have been a wretched task, only the women did it together, and I was glad to be among them again. They were kind to Snorri too, and he was happy playing indoors in winter when we were all there. There was one horrible moment when he swallowed a spindle whorl, but Helga held him upside down by his ankles and banged him on the back, and the stone fell out of his mouth. She saved his life by doing that. It’s strange to think a spindle whorl brought him closer to death than a skraeling warband.

The real frustration was the smithy. Have you any idea how many iron nails you need to hammer out for a ship, Agnar? They’d been working bog iron at Leif’s houses while we were away, but whether it was the furnace, or the fuel, or the Vinland bog iron, that wasn’t right, I don’t know. Helga’s husband was a good smith, and he made good nails, but we never had enough iron. No man was going to give up his
sword to make nails, but we had to use the ponies’ bits, and shield bosses, and even an axe head, just to get the metal we needed for the ship.

I’m no shipbuilder, Agnar, but I can tell you that there’s never been a winter, and a spring too, when I worked so hard. There was a period when it just seemed to be chaos. As I say, you have an outline, you imagine a ship, and it seems quite possible. But then you try to bring all the pieces together, and there’s a long time when there seems to be far too much of everything, and you can’t believe it will ever all come together. It’s like working with too many threads in your hand at once, and your mind can’t make any order out of them. You just have to look at one bit at a time, and stop imagining the whole, or you’d be too discouraged to go on. You’d just be seeing all the time how much there is to be done. The whole is too much to remember, and so you do a little of one thread, and then it reminds you of something else, and after that you can’t make sense of the first bit without the next, only you can’t do the next until you’ve finished the first: so you get the rope for a block, for example, but you don’t know the thickness you need because the block isn’t made, and you can’t carve the block until you’re sure of the thickness of the rope. It all gets so complicated you can’t think of anything else, and you dream about it at night, and you think you’ll manage as long as nothing else happens, and as soon as you think that there’s another disaster, another tree trunk that won’t split along the grain, another length of rope that isn’t long enough; and it wasn’t even my job, Agnar, except that we were all caught up in it. Sometimes there were arguments, even blows, but only about the ship. No one had time that winter for quarrelling about anything else.

When I think about those people now, Agnar, I feel a bond with them I share with no one else. I didn’t like all of them, I have difficulty remembering their faces, and I wouldn’t even try to remember all their names. A few were thralls, most were freemen, and two – Karlsefni and Snorri – later became chieftains in their own country. At Leif’s houses I naturally spent time with the other four women, but in a way I’d shared more with the men who’d been on the voyage south. Nineteen mortals from this world have
been into the depths of Vinland, eighteen of us came back. Nearly all of those men must be dead now. I don’t know what happened to most of them. Some stayed in Greenland, fewer went home to Iceland, and our own crew sailed with us from Greenland to Norway, and all but two came back with us to Iceland, and half a dozen settled in the valley of Glaumbaer. I suppose they all told their story to someone. Some of them have been back to Vinland, bringing desperately needed timber home to Greenland. Oh yes, those voyages still go on. I don’t know how far south they go these days. They never make winter camps, I’m told, because of the skraelings. They quickly fell the timber they need and go. The only voyage we heard about in detail was the dreadful expedition made by Freydis. She made Vinland into a place of hel, a land of murder and betrayal. I wouldn’t want to face the ghosts she left behind her.

And yet, Agnar, even now, when I think about those people, I miss them. When I was there it never seemed like home, but we made something there worth having. Literally, you could say – after all, we managed to build a ship.

Anyway, by the time the pack ice melted, we had the rudder in place, and the mast stepped, and the planking laid inside the ship. We launched her on a fine spring day, and when she slid into the sea she lay neatly, low in the water, looking surprisingly small after all the effort that had gone into her. I stood with my son and watched them hoist the sail, and slowly slip out to sea. We walked along the shore, following them, until we stood on the sandy spit that guarded our bay from the north, and watched the new craft gradually grow smaller, and then disappear behind the offshore islands. It was only when I watched her out at sea, riding the waves as if that’s what she’d been born to do, that I really believed in her. As soon as she was in the sea she was something more than the thing we’d made. She was a ship, and a ship can go anywhere; it can take men wherever they choose, out of one world, if they like, and into another. Somehow I hadn’t thought of us, right until that moment, as real shipbuilders. We had the expertise: Gunnar had that, and of course all men know enough about ships to be of use. We had the persistence: after all, our lives depended on doing the job properly. But as well as those two things
you need something else – luck. And the fates were kind to us. Don’t get me wrong, Agnar, you can’t rely on them if you don’t work for yourself as well. But all the work you do will come to nothing if they don’t smile on you. They may never favour you, all your life long, but if you’re one of the lucky ones, sometimes you’ll seize a chance, and find them with you all the way.

Our ship stood her sea trials well. Karlsefni and Gunnar came home smiling, and the rest of the crew were drunk on success even before the cask of wine was broached. It was Pentecost, and we had the best feast we ever sat down to in Vinland. Then we made our last preparations, and on Ascension Day we barred the doors of Leif’s houses, took our cattle on to the already loaded ships, and sailed home with the richest cargo anyone ever brought out of the wilderness that lies beyond the world.

There’s one other thing I should tell you about Vinland. We were home at Glaum, at about this time of year, or perhaps a little later. It was very stormy, and as we sat at the hearth we could hear the west wind howling round the house. I can’t remember now exactly who was there: we often had visitors in the autumn; between harvest and winter is a good time for people to get away from home. It was beginning to get dark, and the boys had just come in. That year was the last summer they were both at home, and they were always riding off together. Sometimes they’d be back the same night, sometimes they’d disappear for weeks. I used to worry about Thorbjorn getting into fights, and if he did pick a quarrel, and get killed, Snorri would be bound to avenge him. I was never at ease when they were away. I used to try not to watch for the horses coming back, but I did. I couldn’t help it. Once they really leave, you can’t go on worrying; you’d only destroy yourself. In fact Snorri sailed for Norway the following spring, and I only had news of him once in three years, and that was six months after he’d last seen the man who brought it. I prayed for him every day, but I didn’t feel anxious, as I did when he was a young man roaming about with his friends in Iceland. By the time Snorri came home from Norway, Thorbjorn had already gone.