Odinn's Child (6 page)

By a remarkable coincidence he was on his way back from that trip even as Thorir's knorr shattered on the skerry. He was at the helm, battling a headwind and steering so hard on the wind that one of his crew, drenched by the resulting spray, complained, 'Can't we steer more broad?' Leif was peering ahead for his first glimpse of the Greenland coastline. 'There's a current from the north setting us more southerly than I like,' he replied. 'We'll keep this course for a little longer. We can ease the sheets once we are closer to land.'

Some time later another crew member called out a warning that he could see skerries ahead. 'I know,' Leif replied, relying on that phenomenal eyesight. 'I've been watching them for a while now and there seems to be something on one of the islands.' The rest of his crew, who had been curled up on deck to keep out of the wind, scrambled to their feet and peered forward. They could see the low black humps of the islands, but no one else could make out the tiny dark patch that my father could already discern. It was the roof of our makeshift shelter. My father, as I have said, was a hard man to dissuade, and the crew knew better than to try to make him alter course. So the ship headed onwards towards the skerry, and half an hour later everyone aboard could make out the little band of castaways, standing up and waving scraps of cloth tied to sticks. To them it seemed a miracle, and if the story was not told to me hundreds of times when I was growing up in Brattahlid, I would scarcely believe the coincidence - a shipwreck in the path of a vessel commanded by a man with remarkable eyesight and sailing on a track not used for fourteen years. It was this good fortune which earned Leif his nickname 'Heppni', the 'Lucky', though it was really the sixteen castaways who were the lucky ones.

Expertly Leif brought his vessel into the lee of the skerry, dropped anchor and launched the small rowboat from the deck. The man who jumped into the little boat to help row was to have a significant part in my later life — Tyrkir the German - and I think it was because he was my rescuer that Tyrkir kept such a close eye on me as I grew up. Tyrkir was to become my first, and in some ways most important, tutor in the Old Ways, and it was under Tyrkir's guidance that I made my first steps along the path that would eventually lead me to my devotion to Odinn the All-Father. But I will come to that later.

'Who are you and where are you from?' Leif shouted as he and Tyrkir rowed closer to the bedraggled band of castaways standing on the edge of the rocks. They backed water with the oars, keeping a safe distance. The last thing my father wanted was to take aboard a band of desperate ruffians who, having lost their ship, might seize his own.

'We're from Norway, out of Iceland, and were headed for Brattahlid when we ran on this reef,' Thorir called back. 'My name is Thorir and I'm the captain as well as the owner. I am a peaceful trader.' Tyrkir and Leif relaxed. Thorir's name was known and he was considered to be an honest man.

'Then I invite you to my ship,' called Leif, 'and afterwards to my home, where you will be taken good care of.' He and Tyrkir spun the little rowing boat around and brought her stern first toward the rocks. The first person to scramble aboard was Gudrid and tucked under one arm was the two-year-old boy child she had promised Thorgunna she would deliver to his father. So it happened that Leif the Lucky unwittingly rescued his own illegitimate son.

L
EIF'S WIFE,
G
YDA
, was not at all pleased to learn that the toddler Thorgils, saved from the sea, was the result of a brief affair between her husband and some middle-aged Orcadian woman. She refused to take me under her roof. She already had the example of her father-in-law's bastard child as a warning. My aunt Freydis, then in her late teens, was the illegitimate daughter of Erik and lived with the Erikssons. She was an evil-tempered troublemaker who, as it turned out, was to play a gruesome part in my story, though at the time she seemed to be no more than a quarrelsome and vindictive young woman always quarrelling with her relations. As Gyda did not want another cuckoo in her house, she arranged to have me fostered out, a real fostering this time. And this is how I came to spend my childhood not with my father but with Gudrid, who lived nearby. Gudrid, I suppose, felt responsible for me as she had brought me to Greenland in the first place. Also, I believe, she was a little lonely because soon after her arrival in Greenland she lost her husband, Thorir. He was in Eriksfjord for only a few weeks after his rescue before he went down with a severe fever. The illness must have arrived with his ship because Thorir and most of his crew were the first to begin coughing, spitting blood, and having bouts of dizziness. By the time the illness had run its course, eighteen people had

died, among them Thorir and - finally - that old warhorse, my grandfather Erik the Red.

The gossips said that Gudrid took me in as a substitute for the child her body had failed to give her when she was Thorir's woman. I suspect these critics were jealous and only looking for a flaw to compensate for Gudrid's astonishing good looks — she possessed a loveliness of the type that endures throughout a woman's life. I remember her as having a pale translucent skin, long blonde hair, and grey eyes in a face of perfect, gentle symmetry with a well-defined nose over a delicious-looking mouth and a chin that had just the suggestion of a dimple exactly in the middle of it. At any rate I am sure that the young widow Gudrid would have taken me in even if she had children of her own. She was one of the kindest women imaginable. She was always ready to give help, whether bringing food to a sick neighbour, loaning out kitchen utensils to someone planning a feast and then doing half the cooking herself, or scolding children who were behaving as bullies and comforting their victims. Everyone in Brattahlid had a high opinion of her and I worshipped her. Never having known my real mother, I accepted Gudrid in that vital role as entirely normal, and I suspect that Gudrid made a far better job of it than gruff Thorgunna would have done. Gudrid seemed to have endless patience when it came to dealing with children. I and the other dozen or so youngsters of the same age made Gudrid's house the centre of our universe. When we played in the meadows or scrambled along the beach looking for fish and skipping stones on the cold water of the fjord, we usually finished by saying, 'Race you to Gudrid's!' and would go pelting across the rough ground like hares, bursting in through the side door which led to the kitchen, and arriving in a great clatter. Gudrid would wait till the last of us had arrived, then haul down a great pitcher of sour milk and pour out our drinks as we perched on the tall wooden benches.

Brattahlid was, for a child, an idyllic spot. The settlement lies at the head of a long fjord reaching deep inland. Erik had chosen the site on his first visit and chosen shrewdly. The length of the fjord offers protection from the cold foggy weather outside, and it is the most sheltered and fertile place to set up a farm in the area, if not the whole of Greenland. The anchorage is safe and the beach rises to low, undulating meadowland dotted with clumps of dwarf willow and birch. Here Erik and his followers built their turf-roofed houses on the drier hillocks, fenced in the home paddocks, and generally established replicas of their former farms in Iceland. There are no more than three or four hundred Greenlanders, and so there is plenty of room for all those who are hardy enough to settle there. Life is even simpler than in Iceland. At the onset of winter we brought the cattle in from the meadowland and kept them indoors, feeding them the hay we had prepared in the summer. We ourselves existed on sour milk, dried fish, smoked or salted meat and whatever else we had managed to preserve from the summer months. As a result everything carried a rancid flavour, particularly the lumps of whale and shark meat we buried in earth pits for storage, then dug up, semi-putrid. The long, idle, dark hours were spent with story-telling, sleeping, doing odd repair jobs, playing backgammon and other games. In Greenland we still played the older version of chess - a single king in the centre of the board with his troops arranged against a crowd of opponents who were spread around the edge. Not until I returned as a youth to Iceland did I see the two-king style of chess, and I had to learn the rules all over again.

Every youngster, almost from the time he or she could walk, helped with day-to-day work and it made us feel valued. On land we graduated from running errands and cleaning out the byres to learning how to skin and butcher the beasts and salt down the meat. On water we began by baling out the bilges of the small rowing boats, then we were allowed to bait fishing lines and help haul nets, until finally we were handling the sails and pulling on an oar as the boats were rowed back to the landing place. We had very little schooling, though Erik's widow, Thjodhild, did attempt to teach us our alphabet and some rudimentary writing. We were not enthusiastic pupils. Thjodhild's character was embittered by a long-running disagreement with her husband. What irked her was that Erik had refused to become a Christian and this had set an example to many of his followers. Thjodhild was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic converts to the creed of the White Christ, and she was one of those querulous Christians who was always seeking to impose her beliefs on the rest of the community. But Erik was a dyed-in-the-wool pagan, and the more she nagged at him, the more stubborn he became. He had not left Iceland, he said, to bring with him in his baggage the newfangled religion. He had offered a sacrifice to Thor before he sailed to Greenland and, in return, Thor had looked after the colony very well. Erik told his wife in no uncertain terms that he was not about to abandon the Old Gods and the Old Ways. Eventually matters became so bad between the two of them that Thjodhild announced she would have as little as possible to do with him. They still had to live under the same roof, but she had a Christian chapel built for herself, very prominently, on a hillock near the farm just where Erik was sure to see it every time he left his front door. However, Erik refused to let his wife have much timber for the structure so the chapel remained a tiny building, no more than a couple of arm spans wide in any direction. It was the first Christian church in Greenland, and so small that no more than eight people could fit inside at once. We children called it the White Rabbit Hutch for the White Christ.

Halfway through the fifth summer of my life I learned that my foster mother was to marry again. After the hay gathering, the wedding was to be celebrated between the young widow Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir and another of Erik's sons, Thorstein. I was neither jealous nor resentful. Instead I was delighted. Thorstein was my father's youngest brother and it meant that my adored Gudrid was now to be a genuine relation. I felt that the marriage would bind her even more closely to me, and was only worried that after the wedding I would have to go to live in the main Eriksson household, which would put me in range of my detestable aunt Freydis. She had grown into a strapping young woman, broad shouldered and fleshy, with a freckled skin and a snub nose, so that she attracted men in a rather over-ripe way. She was also full of spite. She was always hatching plots with her girlfriends to get others into trouble and she was usually successful. On the few occasions I spent any time in my father's house I tried to stay clear of Freydis. Sixteen years older than me, she regarded me as a pest, and would think nothing of shoving me roughly into the darkness of the root cellar and locking me in there for hours, going off and not telling anyone. Luckily old Thorbjorn, Gudrid's father, who was still alive though weakly, was so pleased with the match that he agreed to let the newly-weds share his house, which was a short walk from the Eriksson home.

The wedding was a huge success. To satisfy grumpy old Thjodhild there was a brief Christian ceremony at the White Rabbit Hutch, but the main event was the exchange of ceremonial gifts, heavy beer drinking, raucous music and stamping dances which are the mark of the old-style weddings.

My next distinct memory of Greenland is a bright spring morning with the ice floes still drifting silently in our fjord. The glaring white fragments, so luminous on grey-blue water, made my eyes hurt as I stared at a little ship edging slowly towards us. She was a knorr, battered and seaworn, her planks grey with age. Some men were rowing, others handling the ropes as they tried to swing the rectangular sail to catch the cold breath of the faint wind that came from the north, skirting the great glacier behind us that is the heart of Greenland. I still recall how, from time to time, the oarsmen stood up to push with their blades against the floes, using the oars as poles to punt their way through the obstacles, and how slowly the boat seemed to approach. A crowd began to gather on the beach. Each person on the shore was counting the number of the crew and searching their faces to see who was aboard and if they had changed from the images we had been holding in our memories since the day they had gone to explore the mysterious land west across the sea, which Bjarni had first seen, and my father Leif had been the last person to visit. Then the keel grated on the shingle, and one by one her crew leapfrogged the upper strake and splashed ashore, ankle deep in the water. The crowd greeted them in near silence. We had already noticed that a man was missing, and the helmsman was not the skipper they had expected.