B0046ZREEU EBOK (4 page)

Once Bjorn and Arnbjorn were back we heard much more about the feuds on the north shore – or perhaps it was just that as I got older I became more aware of these things. You weren’t born then, but you must have heard stories. The way I see it now, we were still trying to find a way to live in our new country. We had no king, and so we had to carve out justice for ourselves in a land without laws or precedents. We couldn’t just go on as our ancestors did in Norway; everything was different. The phrase that comes back to
me, from all the talk I heard at the hearth when I was little, repeated again and again, is, ‘Of course, it’s his responsibility’. It was a man’s responsibility to get justice for his kin when they were alive, and to avenge their deaths when they were killed. That’s how I learned about the grown-up world: it was governed by fate, and you had to do your duty, although you knew you had to die for it. My father came from Vifilsdalur, and both he and his father were friends of Styr Thorgrimson of Hraun, and like him they supported Eirik Raudi. That put us against Snorri the Priest and the people from Thorsnes to start off with, and then my father’s alliance with his neighbour Bjorn, when he came home from Norway, increased the tension. Yet we all met as neighbours. I can remember Snorri the Priest talking to my father at the fair at Frodriver as if they were the best of friends. But the undercurrent was always there. I think now that Halldis was right when she said only the new God could save us from the fates that trapped us.

When I came home with Karlsefni Iceland had changed, although I was only gone a few years. But those were the years when our land became Christian, and also the time when the Quarter Courts began to work properly. I’m not saying the feuds were over, but the strength was beginning to go out of them. A good thing, naturally, and yet – they don’t breed men now of the kind I knew when I was young. Looking back, they seem much larger than this life that we live now. In the stories, of course, they grow more formidable still. I’ve had a hand in that myself. I’m known in Glaum for my storytelling, and I’ve made sure my children and grandchildren are well educated in the story of our past. Stories have a life of their own. They grow, as children grow, and perhaps we forget the small thing they once were. But we nurture them just because we respected what was there in the beginning. I’m glad of the world I come from now, although I daresay to you it seems a savage, pagan time.

I could tell you so much about the families living at Snaefelsnes when I was a girl. Those were dangerous years, and the men’s talk I heard then was all of fighting and killing. Hardly anyone, after Eirik left, talked of new worlds and wealth, but only of secret plans for revenge. Only the women’s talk was the same as always, everywhere –
the farm and the household, summer and winter, a pattern of life that is woven year by year and never changes.

I lived ten years at Arnarstapi. It was a quiet place to grow up, even though those were wild times. Travellers would bring news of feuds and killings, but the real things to me were the farm, and what Halldis taught me. I learned from her everything a good farmer’s wife should know. She taught me to treat the land so that it would yield well year after year. I think I was naturally practical, but it was Halldis who made me skilled. Sometimes I’ve thought of her, when I’ve used some trick she showed me:when we set up our camp at Hop, for example, or when we were making the wine out of the strange berries. But of course that wasn’t all I learned from her. I say men called her witch. All that means, I think, is that there are some who know how to stretch the boundaries of this world a little farther than most people think is possible. I knew even then that witchcraft can be turned to good or evil, like any other power. I was only six when Halldis warned me that I must use what powers I had for good. An evil witch at Holt on the other side of the mountains had been stoned to death, and Halldis used her example to impress her message on me. She succeeded; I was terrified afterwards that I might do wrong. Halldis herself taught me only good: how to see and use the things that lie at the edges of the world we know.

When I tell you about my childhood, I find I don’t remember events, just how things were. It wasn’t a story then, it simply was. When I think of specific happenings, they’re usually things Halldis taught me. Witchcraft, would you say now? I don’t know, but for me, they were the important moments. They marked change, whereas in everything else that we did there was no change.

Halldis, as well as Orm, took me about with her. She made me feel like a real person when she introduced me to her friends. In my father’s house I had always seemed to be just a shadow in the background – a shadow of the wrong sex. Halldis made me feel glad to be myself.

After the hay harvest one year she took me to a farm at Frodriver. It was a day’s journey over the hills, and the first time I had been behind Stapafel. We climbed up past the caves where the giants live, right to the glacier itself. Close to, the glacier isn’t the smooth white cone you see from out at sea. It’s streaked with spines of lava and the snow is dusty with ash. There was cloud over the mountain, where the ice disappeared into a clammy mist that caught us in its breath as we passed. Our ponies trudged through patches of snow, and picked their way among boulders through streams of meltwater. The glacier took a long time to pass. Then we climbed down by a river with many waterfalls, and across the sea to the north I could see land. ‘That’s Hvamm across Breidafjord,’ Halldis told me. ‘That’s where your grandfather landed with Aud the Deepminded, when Iceland was settled.’ I stared at the blue land across the sea: the past, about which I knew all the stories, and yet could never reach.

We looked down on Frodriver as dusk fell, where it lay in a corrie facing the sea to the north. The farm stands on a plain that was saltmarsh when the settlers came. Thorodd drained it, and now it’s good land, but I felt shut in there after Arnastapi. The cliffs lower over the plain, and the waterfalls drown the sound of the sea. I remember
jumping over drainage ditches lined with kingcups and cotton grass. The farm was where Halldis’ friend Thurid lived, who was married to Thorodd and sister of Snorri the Priest. The feuds of my childhood had a lot to do with her.

Thurid was obviously glad to see Halldis. I hung back against my pony’s shoulder as they greeted one another. Then Halldis took my hand and brought me forward to the threshold, right in the middle of a group of strangers.

‘This is my foster daughter,’ she told Thurid proudly. ‘This is Gudrid.’

Thurid was so grandly dressed I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was slight and fair, very pretty I suppose, but I saw with a child’s eyes, and it seemed to me her face was closed, and she had a tight mouth which I didn’t like. She wore a blue linen dress with embroidery round the throat and hem, and a darker blue tunic. Her brooches had animal heads on them, and between them she wore a string of coloured beads. Reds and blues were woven in a pattern I had never seen before, in the scarf over her hair. Beside her my stepmother looked big and austere, a bit too much like a man, in her plain dress and simple bronze brooches. A part of me admired Thurid; I thought for a moment that when I grew up I would like to be like that. Then I felt disloyal and despised myself.

Thurid had a baby, Kjartan, the one whose red curl she had sent so that Halldis could work her spell. We gave him his medicine at once, the first evening we arrived. He didn’t look like a child who would have convulsions, but of course I had no experience. He wasn’t fat like some babies are, and he crawled about in the rushes by the hearth, moving faster than you’d think possible, and trying to get his hands into everything. I liked him, and I wished he were my little brother. I had never played with a younger child before.

I remember now: I said I’d tell you how it was that our neighbour Bjorn didn’t marry. Thurid was already married to Thorbjorn the Stout of Frodriver when Bjorn first set eyes on her. It was hardly the ideal marriage for a woman like Thurid; by all accounts Thorbjorn was a loud, violent man, who used to beat up his own thralls for no other reason than to vent his own rage. He’d been married before and
was much older than Thurid. But he was killed in a feud over some stolen horses, and Thurid got the farm out of it, so in the end I suppose it was worth the trouble she went through. Bjorn was already visiting her when her husband was still alive. I think now, from scraps I overheard then and only understand now, that my foster parents hoped, when the news came that Thorbjorn the Stout was dead, that Bjorn would marry Thurid and bring her back to Breidavik. Whether he planned to do that or not, her brother, Snorri the Priest, was too quick for him. That wily man was too quick for most people. When I think about it now, although he took care of his wayward sister, I don’t think he ever understood her, or would you say, loved her? I think Thurid was only loved by one man in her life. And Snorri the Priest had every cause to hate Thurid’s father; they were only half brother and sister, you see, through their mother.

But you don’t want to hear all about that. When Halldis took me to Frodriver, Thurid had been married off, this time to Thorodd, who had grown rich trading with Norway and the islands, and she was living in Frodriver again with her husband. But – I only heard all this years later, from my son Snorri’s godfather’s sister, whom I used to meet at the Thing once a year, when we were living at Glaum – Bjorn started visiting Thurid again, as soon as she was back in her old home at Frodriver. If one husband hadn’t mattered to him, I suppose, why bother about another? Thorodd knew what was going on, and he was as angry as you’d expect a man to be. But he didn’t meet Bjorn in fair fight. Bjorn wasn’t our Breidavik champion for nothing. No, Thorodd ambushed him just before dawn, he and his friends the Thorissons and a couple of thralls, five of them altogether. Bjorn had been with Thurid and was riding home up Digramull from Frodriver. Bjorn killed the Thorissons, and Thorodd – that proud seagoing trader – fled with his slaves. Bjorn came home so covered in blood they thought he’d had his death blow, but he recovered from his wounds soon enough, and it was after that he was sent into exile. He went first to Norway, and then he travelled far into the east beyond that, fighting in the king’s wars. Nine months after the night of the ambush a son was born to Thurid at Frodriver: Kjartan Thoroddsson.

One of the best things that happened for me, when I was a little girl, was Bjorn coming home to Breidavik. I told you about the games, didn’t I? I loved that man, Agnar, if a little girl can be said to love a man who’s not her father. He had time for me, and yet he had an air about him of a man who’d seen much more of the world than we had – a whiff of something far-off and exotic, of strange places very different from our little peninsula. Only he went nowhere any more, after he got home, just over the mountain to Frodriver, and children were not told anything about that. But I think a part of me knew, all the same. I can’t remember anyone telling me who Kjartan really was. I think that’s because whoever actually said it was only confirming something that deep down I’d always known. Anyway, I was telling you about my first meeting with him, when Halldis took me on that visit to Frodriver.

Kjartan had a box full of coloured pebbles, shells and driftwood. That evening I played with him by the hearth. I built him towers and he knocked them down, squealing with laughter each time my castles crashed into the ashes. It was easy to listen to the women’s talk at the same time. Halldis knew I had sharp ears, but Thurid seemed to assume I was as absorbed as the baby. I was half insulted by that; I wanted her to notice me. But soon I forgot about it and was intent on what they were saying. It frightened me, and being among them all in a warm safe place, there was a perverse pleasure to be got from being afraid.

‘No one dare go out after sunset anywhere in the valley,’ Thurid was saying. ‘If ever a man refused to lie quiet in his grave, it was he. And listen – I had this from Thorgeir the packman – you know he comes every summer now along the coast of Breidafjord – it was he who brought me these beads. Do you like them?’

Halldis glanced at the beads. ‘What did Thorgeir say about the hauntings?’

‘It began with the oxen they used to haul the body up the valley to the grave. They took him as far from the farms as they could, but as they went the corpse grew heavier and heavier, and at last the beasts could pull no more, and they had to bury him where they were, in the middle of the lava field. They raised a great cairn over
him to hold him down. But it did no good, and nor did the spells that were used to bind him to the earth. That same night the oxen were possessed, and harried over the precipices where their broken bodies were discovered the next morning. Thorgeir talked to the shepherd, who said it’s as much as a man’s life is worth to be out on the hill. But the shepherd is Arnkel’s thrall and has no choice about it. “But Thorgeir,’’ he said, “I’m a marked man now, you see if I’m not.’’’