Tim Severin - Odinn's Child

At that crucial stage, just when Leif was hoping to be rid of the newcomers and the Icelanders were getting restless, Freydis, the born schemer, saw her chance. She travelled from her home in Gardar to call on Helgi and Finnbogi.

'I'm putting together an expedition to sail to Vinland and reoccupy Leif s cabins,' she said to them. 'Why don't you join forces with me? There is plenty of good land there, which I can allocate to you as soon as we are established.'

'What about the Skraeling menace?' Finnbogi asked. 'We heard that Thorfinn Karlsefni reckoned that no Norseman could ever hold Vinland in the face of Skraeling hostility.'

Freydis brushed the question aside. 'Karlsefni was a coward,' she said. 'All his talk of the danger from the Skraelings and how numerous they were was just an excuse to cover up the fact that he and his settlers had been incompetent. If you join with me, our group will be too numerous for the Skraelings to attack.'

She proposed that Helgi and Finnbogi supply thirty settlers. She would match this number and their combined force would discourage the Skraelings. She already had her own list of volunteers from Brattahlid and Gardar. They were mostly her cronies, one or two malcontents and several failed farmers who had nothing to lose by throwing in their lot with Freydis. Personally I disliked Freydis as much as ever and trusted her even less, but my name was also on her list. Against my better judgement and, in a fit of discontent and longing for Vinland, I had volunteered to join my aunt's crew. Like my father Leif, I had never thought Freydis would succeed in mustering a full expedition, and when she succeeded, I feared I would seem cowardly if I had backed out at the last moment. My immaturity also had something to do with the decision to go with Freydis. At the age of twelve I was being both fickle and obstinate. Joining her expedition seemed to me the only way of escaping from my troubles now that Gudrid and Thorfinn had left for Iceland and I felt depressed at the prospect of living out my life in the confines of Brattahlid. Once again the wanderlust that Odinn had implanted in me was stirring.

So for the third time LeiPs venerable knorr sailed for Vinland, the very same vessel which ten years earlier had rescued me as an infant from the reef. My destiny seemed intimately connected with that vessel, though by now she was distinctly shabby and worn. Her mast had snapped in a heavy gale and been fished with heavy splints. Her hull was out of true, with a distinct droop where she had been overloaded so often that she sagged amidships. Many of her planks were rotten or had been damaged, and due to the shortage of good timber locally, they had been replaced with short lengths which made a clumsy patchwork. Even when recaulked and rerigged, she was barely fit for sea, and as we sailed west, I found myself not just cleaning cattle dung, but joining every able-bodied man in the crew to bail out the bilges every four hours to keep our vessel afloat. Our consort, the big new Icelandic ship, did nothing to help us. From the start there was no cohesion in our expedition whatsoever. The larger knorr would draw close as we lay there wallowing on the swell, tipping water over the side from buckets, and her ruffianly crew would jeer at us.

Tyrkir did not come with us. He had finally been given his formal freedom from slavery. A stickler for tradition, Tyrkir held a little ceremony to mark his manumission. He obtained a supply of grain and some malt and brewed a great cauldron of beer, then he invited every one of the Erikssons and their children to Thorvall the Hunter's old empty cabin, where Tyrkir had now installed himself. When everyone was gathered, he formally presented my father Leif with the first drinking horn of the new beer and a small loaf of bread and salt, which he had obtained by burning seaweed. Then he handed beer, bread and salt to all the other senior members of the family, one by one, and they pronounced him to be a free man and his own master and offered their congratulations. Considering that Tyrkir was still far from his German birthplace, from where he had been kidnapped as a youth, it was remarkable how emotional and happy he was. When the ceremony was over, he hung up the drinking horn by a leather thong on a peg just beside the entrance to his cabin, a proud reminder that he was now a free man.

No such camaraderie marked the arrival of our two knorrs at Leif’s cabins. The Icelanders and the Greenlanders might as well have belonged to two different expeditions. Ashore the two groups bickered constantly. It all began with an argument about who was to occupy the longhouse which Karlsefni had built. Helgi and Finnbogi wanted to claim it, but Freydis retorted that all the buildings, including the cowsheds, belonged to her family and she would exercise her right to occupy all of them. She pointed out that she had never offered the Icelanders free accommodation, only a chance to settle the land. If they wanted shelter, they should build it for themselves. Helgi and Finnbogi's people were so enraged that they almost started a fight on the spot. But they paused after they counted up the men that Freydis had mustered. It seemed that Freydis had cheated. Instead of manning her ship with thirty men as agreed, she had smuggled aboard five extra settlers to Vinland, some of the most turbulent characters from Brattahlid, and her faction had the advantage of numbers. So the

Icelanders had to build two longhouses to accommodate themselves and their wives and children, and of course the Greenlanders did not help them. One group laboured at the building, while the other went fishing and hunting and tended their cattle. This time it was the Greenlanders who did the jeering at the sweating Icelanders.

What had begun with mere selfishness degenerated into unconcealed malice. Freydis's people not only refused to assist the Icelanders with their house-building but would not lend them tools for the work. They even demanded to be paid for any share of the fish and game they caught, insisting that the Icelanders pledge future profits from the colony. Very soon the two groups were not on speaking terms, and the Greenlanders were deliberately angering the Icelanders by ogling their women and passing lewd remarks. Freydis's husband Thorvard was too weak and hesitant to stop this reckless behaviour, and Freydis herself seemed positively to approve of it.

I stayed well out of this quarrel. I wanted no part of the growing animosity and I began to appreciate how Thorvall felt when there was bad blood between the Christians and the Old Believers. Obdurate bloody-mindedness is characteristic of the Norse. If someone receives a slight, or even imagines that he or she has done so, then they never forget. If they do not obtain immediate satisfaction, they nurse the grudge until it overshadows their daily lives. They plan revenge, seek allies for their cause and eventually take their retribution.

To avoid the poisonous atmosphere of the settlement, I began making long excursions deep into the forest. I claimed that I was going hunting, but I seldom brought back anything more than the wild fruit and roots that I had collected. Nevertheless, I would stay away from the settlement for two or three days at a time and my absence was barely noticed. Everyone was too engrossed in their own selfish concerns. On one of these trips, heading in a direction that I had never tested before, I heard a sound which puzzled me. It was a gentle, steady, rhythmic beat. I was following a deer path through dense underbrush and walked in the direction of the noise, feeling curious rather than fearful. Soon I smelled wood-smoke and, coming into a small clearing, saw that smoke was rising from what appeared to be a large pile of branches heaped up against a tall tree on the far side of the clearing. Looking closer, I realised that the pile of branches was in fact a simple lean-to shelter and the sound was coming from inside it. I had stumbled upon Skraelings.