Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

At this point in Tyrkir's tale, several members of his audience exchanged sceptical glances. Everyone knew Tyrkir's other quirk: besides his quaint accent and bizarre appearance, he had a habit of mental wandering. From time to time he would slip off into some imaginary world where he heard voices and met strangers. On such occasions Tyrkir's face took on a glazed look and he would ramble off into long conversations with himself, invariably in German. It was a harmless habit, and everyone who knew him would look at one another and raise their eyebrows as if to say, 'There goes Tyrkir again, wool-gathering in his wits. What do you expect of a German winkled out of the woodlands?'

But that evening in Brattahlid Tyrkir insisted that he had been wakened from his drowsiness following the Skraeling deaths by a great bellowing voice. It had a strange reverberating rhythm. At times it seemed to come from far off, then from very close. It was impossible to tell from which direction. It appeared to fall from the sky or to come from all directions at once.

Even if Thorvald did not hear the mysterious voice, he must have realised that he and his men had been very foolish. He sent a man to a rocky vantage point where he could look across the fjord, and the sentry called down that a whole flotilla of skin boats was paddling towards them. Obviously the Skraelings were coming to seek their revenge. The shore party scrambled down the rocky slope, catching at the bushes to keep their balance and grabbing at trees as they bolted for their ship. The moment they were aboard, they unmoored and began to row, heading out of the bay and hoping for a wind to get them clear. Even the most lubberly among them knew that there was no way the knorr would out-row the pursuing skin boats.

There must have been at least thirty boats and each one contained three Skraelings. As soon as they were within range, two of the men stowed their paddles, took up light bows and began shooting arrows at the Norsemen. The third man paddled, keeping pace with the knorr and manoeuvring to give his companions the best angle for their shots. Thorvald and a couple of the sailors leapt up on their oar benches waving their swords and axes, challenging the Skraelings to come closer and fight hand to hand. But the natives kept their distance. To them the Norsemen must have seemed like giants. The Skraeling archers kept up a steady barrage. Slowly the knorr wallowed towards the mouth of the sound, where they could hoist sail. The natives kept abreast of them. Arrows hissed overhead, occasionally hitting with a thunk into the woodwork of the boat. The Skraeling archers stayed seated in their skin boats while they worked their bows, so they were lower to the water than their opponents on the higher-sided knorr, and at a disadvantage. Most of the arrows angled upwards and flew overhead harmlessly. A few rapped into the sail and stuck there like hedgehog quills.

After half an hour the natives broke off the attack. They were running out of arrows and they could see that the Norsemen were in full flight. The skin boats turned back one by one and the knorr was left to sail out to sea.

'It was only then,' Tyrkir told my father, 'that we realised that your brother Thorvald was wounded. A Skraeling arrow had found the gap between the topmost plank and his shield and hit him in the left armpit. It was scarcely more than a dart, but buried so deep that only an inch or two of the shaft was showing. Thorvald reached to pull out the arrow. But the arrow was designed for hunting seal and had triple barbs. He had to twist and tug violently to pull it and when it finally came free, there was a strong jet of dark red blood, and flesh stuck to the barbs. Thorvald gave one of his booming laughs - "That's my heart's fat there," he joked. "I said I would like to spend the rest of my days in this place, and I think that's what is going to happen. I doubt I will survive this wound. If I die I want to be buried here, up on that headland where every passing sailor will know my grave."

'I wish we could have done exacdy what Thorvald wanted,' Tyrkir concluded in his thick accent. 'There was not much time. We buried Thorvald on the headland as best we could. We feared that the Skraelings would come back, so we could do little more than scrape out a shallow grave and pile a heap of stones over the corpse. Then we set course for Leif’s huts to spend the winter — keeping a sharp lookout for Skraelings as soon as the weather improved.'

My uncle Thorstein spoke up. He was looking distressed. 'Leif,' he said, 'we can't leave Thorvald's body there. There's every chance that the Skraelings will find his body, dig it up and defile it. He deserves better. It's only a three-week sail to the spot, and I would like to take a crew of volunteers, sail to Thorvald's cairn, and recover the body so that we can have a proper burial here in Greenland. Your ship, which has just returned, isn't up to the job. She needs to be pulled ashore and recaulked, but my father-in-law Thorbjorn still has the knorr which brought him and his people from Iceland, and she could be ready to sail in two days' time. I'm sure that Thorbjorn will agree to loan her to me for the mission.'

Of course, both my father and old Thorbjorn, who was in the hall listening to the returnees, had to agree. This was a matter of family honour, and if there is one thing which the Norse are fanatical about it is the question of their honour. To a true Norseman his honour is something he places before all else. He will defend it or seek to enhance it by whatever means available, and that includes raiding for booty, exacting revenge for an insult, and lying or cheating to gain the advantage.

DESPITE THEIR ORIGINAL plans, it was a full month before my uncle Thorstein set sail for Vinland. It seemed a pity to go all that distance and not bring back a cargo of timber and fish, so his expedition expanded into more than just a trip to recover Thorvald's body. There was equipment to gather, men to be summoned from the pastures, where they had gone with the cattle, stores to be loaded. Then someone suggested that it might be a good idea to leave a small group to overwinter at Leif s cabins, and this scheme delayed matters still further. When old Thorbjorn's knorr did finally set sail she looked more like an emigrant vessel than an expedition ship. There were six cows and several sheep standing in the hold, bales of hay to feed them, piles of farming gear, and on board were several women, including Gudrid, who had asked to accompany her husband. I, meanwhile, would stay behind with her father.

And by the time the preparations were all made it was too late. Thorstein Eriksson had a fine sense of family honour, but he lacked a sense of urgency and that essential gift of all good sea captains — weather luck. Intending for Vinland, he and his crew set out from Brattahlid but encountered such strong headwinds that they spent most of the summer beating uselessly about the ocean. At one stage they were in sight of Iceland and on another occasion glimpsed

birds which they judged came from the Irish coast. At the end of the sailing season, without ever having set foot in Vinland, they limped back to Greenland. Simple-minded folk claim that a ship or boat has a mind and a spirit of its own. They believe that a vessel can 'see' its way back home like a domestic cat or dog that has been lost, or a horse to its stable, and that it can retrace the same routes that it has previously sailed. This is nonsense, the dreaming of landlubbers. Vessels which make several repeat journeys usually do so because they are in the hands of the same experienced crew members or there is some characteristic of the particular vessel — shallow draught, ability to sail to windward, or whatever — which makes it best suited to the task in hand. Seamanship and weather luck make for a successful second or third voyage along a particular track, not a boat's own acquired knowledge. Thorstein's failure to fetch back his brother's bones goes to prove this very well.