Freydis was being a great leader again. ‘You six, round the back,’ she said, without making it clear who she meant, so nobody moved. ‘And I want three of you under each skylight, in case they try and shin out over the roof. Bersi, Starkad, when I tell you, bust the door down.’
Stupid woman; you try busting in a house door, with just your boot and a hand-axe. They looked at each other, hesitating; but Thorvard walked straight past them and put his hand to the latch. It was open, and the bar wasn’t up.
So he went in; and I guess the Icelanders didn’t get up as early as we did, because they were all still asleep. I heard drowsy voices asking, who’s that, what’re you playing at? But Thorvard started grabbing them, hauling them up by their shirt-fronts or their hair and bundling them out, like unloading cargo from a ship. As they came out, arms twisted behind their backs, eyes blinking, like you do when you’re still mostly asleep, Starkad and Bersi caught hold of them and slung them down on the grass, and as each one fell one of our men put his boot on the poor bastard’s neck, to keep him still. When Thorvard had hooked out half a dozen or so, Freydis nodded at the Gardar men, and they went in and helped. I was standing well back, but someone caught hold of the collar of my coat and dragged me forward, same with Eyvind, and we were given an Icelander each to look after; and I put my boot on some man’s neck, pressing down hard until I knew it’d be hurting; and I could do it because, like I told you, my feet were numb and I couldn’t feel them. I can remember his face, though, and how I jammed his jaw to the ground with my toe, so he couldn’t turn his head and look at me.
Thorvard went and pulled out Finnbogi, and Helgi came staggering out after him, yelling, ‘Now wait a minute,’ or something like that. I think he tried to grab Thorvard’s arm, and then someone moved behind him. I didn’t see, I was looking at the man under my feet, but I heard that very flat, chunky noise of an axe going into something solid. When I looked up, Helgi was toppling forward, and the hair on the back of his head was a sticky mess.
Finnbogi started to wriggle in Thorvard’s grip; and then Thorvard looked at Freydis, and she just nodded, once.
I want you to believe me when I tell you that I didn’t want to do it; but I knew I had no choice in the matter. There’s a point where a thing’s balanced and it tips just a hair’s breadth too far; or where the man hanging by his fingernails off a ledge just can’t quite hold on any longer. It’s the moment when a man breathes out and this time he doesn’t stop till all the air’s gone out of him, and that’s when you go from two possibilities to only one. I was telling myself, I don’t have to, they can’t make me; but I felt the axe-handle slip up through my belt, I felt the smooth weight in my hand, the weight as I lifted it above my head, to the point where I couldn’t hold it up any longer and it came down. I screwed it up, of course; I meant to hit him nice and smart just behind the ear, good and crisp and clean; but I let the handle roll in my hand, and the edge gouged out a big chunk of scalp and blood and skidded off, and I had to do it again, and again, until I’d got the top horn jammed in smashed bone. I had to press down hard on the handle to lever it out again, like when you’re splitting logs and you miss the line, and the grain clenches on the axe-head and grips it. Then I stood up and straightened my back; I felt sick and very scared; and mostly I felt really, really stupid, because I’d made a fuck-up of doing this one important job, I’d done it so badly and there wasn’t even anybody I could tell I was sorry.
So; we killed them all, thirty-two men, on the wet grass. Apart from Helgi and Finnbogi, none of them struggled or made a fuss; I don’t think they had a clue what was going on, to be honest with you. It was all over, and the only sound was one of the Gardar men, swearing and whining because his axe had glanced off and nicked a fat slice out of his own shin.
Then Freydis looked up - she’d been watching very carefully, to make sure we were doing a proper job - and she said, ‘And the women.’
Thorvard straightened up and said, ‘Freydis, for God’s sake,’ but she acted like she hadn’t heard him. Nobody moved, we all stood quite still and looked at her, and she frowned slightly like she was annoyed. Her eyebrows tightened and she pursed her lips; and then she said, ‘All right, then. Somebody give me an axe.
Still nobody moved; so she clicked her tongue, and she pulled out from her belt the pretty little axe that Finnbogi had given her, the one whose handle she’d busted. Then she went into the house. She wasn’t gone long, and when she came back out there was blood on the cuffs of her sleeves, and a dab on her cheek, where she must’ve pushed her hair back behind her ear.
‘Set fire to it she said; and someone told her, ‘It’s fresh turf, it won’t burn’; and she sighed, like it was so annoying. ‘Just pull it down, then,’ she said. So we lugged the bodies inside, and four of the Gardar men who’d brought long axes went in and cut through the sills and the joists. They got out. in good time; the roof just sagged in the middle, like it was tired, and the whole house folded slowly in on itself and kind of sat, then lay down, as though it was curling up to go to sleep. ‘We should’ve looked inside; Freydis said. ‘We’d have found all the things they stole from us. But it’s too late now, and I can’t be bothered with it any more.’ Then she sighed again, and turned round, and headed back the way we’d come.
Kari stopped talking; he folded forward, with his hands crossed over his chest, and he looked very old. I turned my head away, and Eyvind was watching me. He nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘Right up to the last moment I was going to refuse, I was going to do something to stop it. But I didn’t.’ He shook his head slowly ‘Things like that happened all the time in the Old Country: men cut down in the fields or on the road, whole families burnt to death in their houses -they’d wedge the doors shut from the outside, nail bars over the skylights, and get a fire going under the eaves till the turf caught. But there was always a reason; a bad one, mostly, a blood-feud or a matter of honour, but a reason we could all understand; and they knew when they did it that it’d be their turn soon, nobody ever expected to get away with it, so when they lit the fire it was like they were burning their own houses too. It wasn’t good, sure, but in a way it was fair, and at least we all knew why it had to be done.’ He shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘It all happened just like Kari said. Must be getting on for twenty years ago now, but I can remember it like I’d just come from there, like my coat’s still wet with the dew’
Kari lifted his head. ‘When are those idle buggers finally going to get that wheel fixed?’ he said. ‘No disrespect, but you bloody Greeks-‘
‘So what happened after that?’ I said.
When it was all over (Eyvind said; Kari just shook his head and didn’t say anything), Freydis led the way back to Leif’s Booths, and we all followed, like ducklings. She kept well in front of us, but someone told me that halfway back she started smiling.
It was still early of course, the whole job had been very quick and easy, so it still wasn’t even time for breakfast. We hung about outside the door, until Freydis came out again. I noticed she’d changed her apron, but she was still wearing the dress with the bloodstained cuffs. She started giving out jobs, like it was an ordinary day When she’d finished, though, she cleared her throat loudly and we all stopped and looked at her.
‘One last thing,’ she said. ‘If any one of you ever says a word about what just happened, to anyone, ever, I’ll have him killed. When we get back to Greenland, if anybody asks after Finnbogi and the Icelanders, we just say they stayed on here. Pretty soon everyone’ll have forgotten all about them. That’s all.’
Freydis had her way on that score, but she needn’t have bothered threatening us. I don’t think anybody ever mentioned the killing of the Icelanders; there wasn’t any point, we’d all been there, seen it all, been part of it. The whole business just lay quiet, always in my mind but never brought out into the open. Fact is, we didn’t talk much at all, barring the usual work stuff, like who had the staffhook last and the log basket needs filling. The only chat beyond that was a little bit of growling between the Gardar crew and the berserkers’ men; they tended to stay out of each others’ way, mostly but there were a few flare-ups, always short and brittle, and nobody actually pulled a knife or took out an axe. I could tell the berserkers’ men weren’t happy though. Starkad did tell me he was worried, in case his lot were going to be next - that was the closest anyone ever came to mentioning the forbidden subject - but I thought he was fretting unduly Freydis mostly acted like the berserkers’ men didn’t exist, except first thing in the morning, when she was handing out the day’s work. She got very sharp with Thorvard, I noticed; she’d criticise him in front of the men or behind his back, which she never did before. He shrank back inside himself like a snail. I never saw him say more than two words to her, and he was always the first out of the house and the last back. If you came across him during the day, he’d look straight past you. He was always working, hard enough for two men: felling and trimming lumber, dragging logs and building cords. One day I saw him beside the lake; he stood for a long time looking at the mess where the Icelanders’ house had been, and then he opened his coat and pulled out that sword of his; it was wrapped in old cloth, but it was plain enough what he’d got there. Soon as he’d got it free of his belt, he slung it out into the lake as far as he could get it to go. When I told Kari, he was all for swimming out there and trying to find it, before it got all rusty and clagged up. I managed to talk him out of it.
For the best part of a month after the killings, Freydis had us clearing ground, digging turf, cutting and driving in fence posts and rails, like she planned on building more barns and sheds. One day I was round the back of the shed that Bits had used as a stable, and I found the Icelanders’ cart and their horses, tucking into a big mangerful of hay A couple of days after that, Freydis told one of the Gardar men to take the cart up to the woods to pick up kindling and stuff, and he seemed like he knew what she was on about, so I guess she’d told a few people it was there.
The cold was coming on, and we’d had the first light dusting of snow, when Freydis called us all together when we came back in for dinner. Time was going on, she said, and if we wanted to get back home to Greenland before winter set in we’d better see to the ship. She’d been to have a look at it, she said, and it was in a hell of a state. There were timbers rotted through, the rigging was shot and the sail was in shreds. Luckily, we could sort it all out by stripping what we needed off the hulk of the other one, Bjarni Herjolfson’s old ship; soon as we’d finished the overhaul, we’d be on our way home again.
Nothing like a bit of an incentive to get you moving. We had the Icelanders’ ship fixed, caulked and ready to go inside often days. Freydis came to inspect it and said it’d do; then she told us to drag Bjari’s old ship well aground and set it on fire; we didn’t need a second ship, she said, there weren’t enough of us to man two of them, and she didn’t want anybody coming along and stealing it.
So we did as we were told; we dragged what was left of the old knoerr well inland, piled well-dried brushwood and brash up in the hold and set it alight. Made me feel strange, doing that. It’d never been a wonderful ship; it was old and creaky when Bjarni first bought it, and it had been a long way since then. Just puffing it apart for materials, though, and then burning it: that struck me as a vicious thing to do, as well as wasteful. Kari figured it was because Freydis was worried that she’d got the numbers of the Icelanders wrong, and that some of them had been away from the house and were still alive out there someplace; she didn’t want to leave the ship behind in case they sailed back to Greenland after we’d left and told people back home what she’d done. That’s the best explanation I can think of, but I don’t think it’s true. I think Freydis just liked destroying things, if she couldn’t have them. When the fire was going well, it put me in mind of stories I’d heard when I was a kid, about how in the olden days, when an earl or a king died, they’d put him on his ship, set light to it and launch it into the fjord, so the dead man could sail to Valhalla or wherever he was going. I don’t think Helgi and Finnbogi were on that ship, but there was a funeral feel to it, at the time.
Once the Icelanders’ ship was ready and we’d piled on as much timber as was safe to sail with, and a bit more, Freydis told us she was planning on leaving Meadowland in two days’ time. Strange; I’d been waiting for her to say that, looking forward to finally getting away from the place, going. home, never coming back. When I heard her say the words, though, I can’t honestly say I felt anything much. Relief, I suppose; but it was the feeling you get when you’re doing a difficult job, making a real bitch of it, and it’s getting too dark to see, so you’ve got to leave it unfinished till the next day No pleasure, it wasn’t like a terrible pain had finally stopped; certainly no joy We were finally going home: so what? It was too late for being happy now. It was like we’d just lost a big, important battle, and the war with it. No point going home under those circumstances, when you’ve already lost everything.
We set sail early on a bright, clear morning, with the frost still crisp on the grass. Don’t know when I’ve set out on a long journey worse prepared: only three casks of water, precious little food, no spare sail and the ship riding so low we were close to getting swamped, even though the wind was gentle and even. Usually when you leave a place, you keep turning back and looking at it till at last it slips away out of sight; me, I kept my stare well out to sea until I was absolutely sure it’d gone, like a small child afraid of spiders in the roof.
Anyhow, that was the last I saw of Meadowland, and Leif’s Booths. We had an absolutely fucking awful ride home: gales and big waves, fog thick as butter, you name it. In spite of that, though, we held our course, and eventually, with hardly any water left and nothing to eat except the cold pickings off a couple of gulls, we came through a fat slab of fog and saw Herjolfsness; Greenland, home.