Odinn's Child (5 page)

The household settled down for the night, and the travellers were making themselves reasonably comfortable among the straw bales, which served as seats running the length of the main hall, when an odd sound was heard. It came from the larder. Going to investigate, one of the farm servants found my mother, stark naked, standing in the larder, preparing a meal. The unfortunate servant was too shocked even to scream. She rushed to the bed closet, where the farmer and his wife were just dropping off to sleep, and blurted out that she had seen a burly nude woman, her skin a deathly white, standing in the larder and reaching to take bread from the shelves, with a full pitcher of milk already beside her on the work table. The farmer's wife went to see, and there indeed was Thorgunna, calmly slicing thin strips off a leg of dried lamb, and arranging the slices on a wooden board. The farmer's wife did not know what to do. She had never met my mother, so did not recognise her, and she was utterly at a loss at this strange apparition. At this stage the corpse-bearers from Frodriver, awakened by the commotion, appeared. They, of course, recognised Thorgunna at once, or so they later claimed. Hrolf whispered to the farmer's wife that the apparition was Thorgunna's fetch or spirit, and it would be dangerous to interfere. He suggested that the farmer's wife should clear off the main dining table so that Thorgunna could set the table. Then the farmer himself invited the men to sit and take their missing evening meal. As soon as they had sat themselves at the farm table, Thorgunna in her usual taciturn way served them, placing down the food without a word and walking ponderously out of the room. She then vanished.

The Frodriver men remained at the table, taking care to make the sign of the cross over the food, and ate their delayed supper while the farmer hurriedly found some holy water and began sprinkling it in every corner of the building. Nothing was too much trouble for the farmer's wife now. She gave the travellers dry clothes and hung up their wet ones to dry, brought out blankets and pillows so they could sleep more comfortably and generally made as much fuss of them as possible.

Was the apparition of Thorgunna an elaborate hoax? Did the supperless Frodriver men arrange for someone to play the part of Thorgunna? It was dark and gloomy in the farm building, and the candles were not lit until after Thorgunna had served the meal and withdrawn, so a substitution and a bit of play-acting might just have succeeded. The nudity was a nice touch as most people are too shy to look closely at someone stark naked. On the other hand, who did the Frodriver men persuade to act the role of Thorgunna? A local farm woman would have been recognised at once, and the band of corpse-bearers were all male. Yet it is suspicious that her apparition was such a bonus for the corpse-bearers on the rest of their journey to Skalholt, where they delivered the coffin to the Christian priest at the brand-new church there, and handed over the money from Thorgunna's bequest. They lost no opportunity to recount the strange events of their evening at Nether Ness, and every farm they passed invited them in for a meal, for beer, for shelter if they needed it.

Do I believe that my mother's fetch appeared at Nether Ness? If I told that same story here in the scriptorium and changed the details, saying that she had reappeared emitting a strange glow and holding a copy of the Bible, my colleagues would accept my version of events without hesitation. So why would not the farmers of Snaefells be just as convinced that she had reappeared? Farmers can be as credulous as priests. There is hardly a soul in that remote farming community who doubts that Thorgunna came back to haunt the stingy farmer at Nether Ness, and while there might be an earthly explanation for the happenings at Nether Ness, until this explanation is supplied I am prepared to accept the supernatural. During my lifetime of travels I was to see many odd sights that defy conventional explanation. Within a few years of my mother's death I too encountered a fetch, and on the eve of a great battle I had strange and vivid forebodings which proved to be accurate. Often I've witnessed events which somehow I know that I have seen before, and sometimes my dreams at night recall events that are in the past, but sometimes they also bring me into the future. The facility for seidr is improved by apprenticeship to a practitioner, but there must be a natural talent in the first place, which is nearly always a question of descent. Volva and seidrmanna come from the same families down through the generations, and this is why I have spent so much time writing of the strange circumstances

of Thorgunna's departure from this life and the hauntings: my mother gave me neither affection nor care, but she did bequeath to me a strange and disturbing gift - a power of second sight, which occasionally overwhelms me and over which I have no control.

O
N HER DEATH
bed Thorgunna made no mention of her son because she already had sent me off to join my real father. I was just two years old. I bear my mother no grudge on this score. Handing on a two-year-old child like a parcel may seem harsh, but there was nothing unusual about this. Among the Norsemen it is common practice for young children to be fostered out by their natural parents, who send them off to neighbouring families to be raised and educated. It binds the two families together, and this can be very useful when it comes to conducting local politics and intrigues among the Icelanders. Almost every family has its foster sons and daughters, foster brothers and sisters, and the attachments built up between them can be just as strong as between natural siblings. Besides, everyone at Frodriver had heard the rumour that my father was Leif Eriksson. So I was not being fostered, but merely sent to him where he lived with his father Erik the Red in Greenland. Indeed it turned out to be the kindest thing that my mother ever did for me because this second sea journey of my infancy placed me in the care of the woman who became more a mother to me than my own. Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir was everything that her reputation claims — she was kind, thoughtful, clever, hard-working, beautiful and generous of spirit.

Gudrid was travelling with her husband, the merchant Thorir, known as the Easterner, just at the time my mother at Frodriver was looking for someone to take her small child off to Greenland as she had long ago promised my father. And perhaps, too, my mother had a premonition of her own death. Thorir was pioneering a regular trading run between Iceland and Greenland, so when his ship called in at Snaefellsness Thorgunna put her request to Gudrid, and it was Gudrid who agreed to take me to my father.

Thorir's merchant ship was not one of the longships which have entered the sinister folklore of sheltered priests. The longships are warships, expensive to build, not particularly seaworthy and unsuitable for trading. At twenty paces' length, a longship offers barely four or five paces in the beam and, being like a shallow dish amidships, has little room for cargo. Worse, from a merchant's point of view, she needs a large crew to handle her under oars and even when she is sailing — which is how any sensible mariner makes progress - a longship must have a lively crew because these vessels have a treacherous habit of suddenly running themselves under or capsizing when under press of sail. Nor was Thorir's vessel one of those dumpy little coasters that farmers use when they creep round the Icelandic shore in fair weather, or to go out to the islands where they graze their sheep and cattle. His ship was a knorr, a well-found, full-bellied ship which is the most advanced of our deep-sea trading designs. She can carry a dozen cattle in pens in the central hold, has a single mast rigged with a broad rectangular sail of wadmal, and can cross from Iceland to Greenland in six dogur — a day's sailing — the standard length by which such voyages are calculated (Adam in Bremen might have difficulty in translating that distance onto a map, if that is what he proposes to do). Her chief cargo on that particular voyage was not cattle, but Norwegian timber. And that cargo of timber was about to save our lives.

Any sensible person who embarks on the voyage from Iceland to Greenland keeps the fate of the second settlement fleet in mind. Seventeen ships set out, nearly all of them knorrs. Less than half the ships managed to reach their destination. The others were either beaten back by adverse winds and limped into Iceland, or were simply lost at sea and no one ever heard of them again. As an experienced mariner, Thorir knew the risks better than most. The open water between Iceland and Greenland can be horrendous in bad weather, when a fierce gale from the south kicks up mountainous seas over the current that runs against it. Even the stoutest vessel can be overwhelmed in these conditions, and although the knorr is the most seaworthy ship that floats, she is just as much a plaything of the elements as any other vessel. Caught in heavy weather, a knorr has a fair chance of survival, but the crew must forget any idea of keeping a course. They spend their time frantically baling out the water that breaks aboard the ship, stopping leaks in the hull if they can, and preventing the cargo from being tossed about and bursting the planks, while the helmsmen struggle to keep the vessel at the safest angle to the advancing waves. If a storm continues for three or four days, the ship is often blown so far off course that no one has any idea of where they are, and it is a matter of guessing the most likely direction of land, then sailing there to try to identify the place.

Thorir had talked with men who had already sailed between Iceland and Greenland, so he knew the safest, shortest route. He had been advised to keep the tall white peak of Snaefellsjokul directly astern for as long as it was visible. If he was fortunate, he would see the high mountains of Greenland ahead before Snaefellsjokul had dipped below the horizon behind him. At worst he had only one or two days of open ocean between the landmarks until he had Greenland's huge white mass of ice in plain view and could steer larboard to skirt the southern tip of that huge and forbidding land. Then he planned to head north along the coast until he would arrive at Brattahlid, the centre of Greenland's most prosperous settlement and home of Erik the Red.

Thorir's knorr was well handled. She crossed the open straits and when she came in sight of Greenland's southern cape, it seemed that the ocean crossing had gone flawlessly. The vessel turned the southern cape and was heading for the fjord at Brattahlid, when as luck would have it she encountered a thick, clammy fog. Now a normal fog is associated with calm seas, perhaps a low swell. When the wind begins to blow, it clears away the fog. But a Greenland fog is different. Off Greenland there can be a dense fog and a full gale at the same time, and the fog stays impenetrable and dangerously confusing while the battering wind drives a vessel off course. This is what put paid to Thorir's ship. Running before the gale in bad visibility, trying to follow the coast, indeed almost within sight of Brattahlid if the weather had been kinder, the heavily laden knorr ran onto a reef with a crunching impact. She slid up on the rocks of a small skerry or chain of islands, the bottom tore out of her, and she was wrecked. Had the cargo been anything other than timber she would have filled and sunk. But the wedged mass of planks and logs turned her into a makeshift life raft. Her crew and passengers, sixteen including myself, were lucky to escape with their lives. As the waves eased, they scrambled up through the surf and spray and onto the skerry, with the shattered remnants of the knorr lurching and grinding on the rocks behind them until the tide dropped and the hulk lay stuck in an untidy heap. The castaways cautiously waded back aboard to retrieve planks and spars and enough wadmal to rig a scrap of tent. They collected some cooking utensils and food, and made a rough camp on a patch of windswept turf. With enough fresh water saved from the ship to last them several days, and a good chance of collecting rainfall later, they knew they would not die of thirst or hunger. But that was the limit of their hopes. They had been wrecked in one of the emptiest parts of the known world (indeed I wonder if Adam of Bremen knows about it at all) and their chances of rescue, as opposed to mere survival, were very bleak.

They were saved by a man's phenomenally keen eyesight.

Even now I can write this with a sense of pride because the man who possessed that remarkable eyesight was my father, Leif. I used to boast about it when I was a child, saying that I had inherited that gift of acute vision from him — as opposed to the second sight, which I possess through my mother and about which

I am far more reticent. But to explain how that remarkable rescue took place, I need to go back briefly to a voyage fourteen years earlier which had gone astray in another of those typical Greenland fog-cum-gales.

On that occasion a navigator named Bjarni Herjolfsson had overshot his destination at Brattahlid, and after several days in poor visibility and strong winds he was in that anxious condition the Norse sailors call hafvilla — he had lost his way at sea. When the fog lifted he saw a broad, rocky coastline ahead of him. It was well wooded but deserted and completely unfamiliar. Bjarni had kept track of his knorr's gyrations in the storm. He made a shrewd guess as to which way Greenland lay, put his ship about and after sailing along the unknown coast for several dogr eventually came back to Brattahlid, bringing news of those alluring woodlands. About the time my mother was thinking of sending me to my. father, Leif had decided to sail to that unknown land and explore. Believing in the sea tradition that a vessel which had already brought her crew safely home would do so again, he purchased Bjarni's ship for the voyage.