Odinn's Child

TIM SEVERIN

Odinn's Child

Viking: Odinn's Child

first published 2005 by Macmillan

Viking: Sworn Brother

first published 2005 by Macmillan

Viking: King's Man

first published 2005 by Macmillan

www.panmacmillan.com

MAPS

To my holy and blessed master, Abbot Geraldus, it is with much doubt and self-questioning that I pen this note for your private attention, laying before you certain disturbing details which until now have been hidden, so that I may humbly seek your advice. In choosing this course I am ever mindful how the works of the devil, with their thousand sharp thorns and snares, lie in wait for the feet of the unwary, and that only His mercy will save us from error and the manifold pitfalls of wickedness. Yet, as you read the appended document, you will understand why I have been unable to consult with others of our community lest I sow among them dismay and disillusion. For it seems that a viper has been nurtured in our bosom, and our presumed brother in Christ, the supposed monk called Thangbrand, was an impostor and a fount of true wickedness.

You will recall, my revered master, that you requested of your unworthy servant a full and true inventory of all documents and writings now in our abbey's keeping. As librarian of our community, I began this task in dutiful compliance with your wishes, and during this labour discovered the above-mentioned document where it lay unremarked among the other volumes in our collection of sacred writings. It bears no identifying mark and the script is well formed, the work of a trained penman, so - may I be forgiven if I have committed the sin of presumption - I began to read, imagining to find recorded therein a life of one of those saints such as Wilfred of most blessed memory, whose shining and glorious example was so ably recorded by our most learned predecessor, the monk Eddius Stephanus.

But such is the mystery of His ways that I have found instead a tale which often substitutes hypocrisy for truth, depravity in place of abstinence, pagan doubt for true faith. Much I do not comprehend, part I can comprehend dimly and by prayer and fasting strive to expunge from my mind. Yet other - and this is what troubles me - contains notice of many distant lands where surely the seed of truth will flourish on fertile soil if it is broadcast by the faithful, trusting only in God and his sublime grace.

Of the identity of the author of the work there can be little doubt. He is remembered by several of the older members of our congregation, and by subtle enquiry I have been able to confirm that he came to us already an old man, sorely hurt and in need of succour. His learning and demeanour led all our congregation to suppose he was in holy orders. Yet this was but the skill of the arch-deceiver, for this present work reveals the unswerving error of his ways and the falsity of his heart. Truly it is said that it is difficult for a man who has fallen deeply into temptation to emerge from the wallow of his sin save with the grace of our Lord.

Also I have learned how this false Thangbrand spent long hours alone in the scriptorium in quiet and arduous labour. Writing materials were supplied, for he was a gifted copyist and possessed of many artistic skills despite advancing years and fading eyesight. Indeed, his posture, hunched close over his pages, shielded his work from others' gaze and rendered it difficult to overlook what he was writing. But Satan nerved his fingers, for instead of sacred text he was engaged in preparing this dark and secret record. Naturally I have instructed that henceforward no writing materials be provided to anyone without due justification. But whether what has now been written is a blasphemy I have neither the intellect nor learning to judge. Nor do I know whether this work should be destroyed or whether it should be retained for the strange and curious information it contains. For is it not written that 'A much travelled man knows many things, and a man of great experience will talk sound sense'?

Regrettably, two further volumes I hold in safe keeping, presuming them to be a continuation of this blasphemous and wicked memorial. Neither volume have I investigated, pending your instruction. Holy father, be reassured that no further particle of the reprobate's writing exists. I have searched the library most attentively for any other trace left by this pretended monk, who departed unexpectedly and secretly from our community, and I found nothing. Indeed, until these documents were discovered, it was presumed that this pretended monk had wandered away from us, confused in his senility, and we expected for him to be returned by the charitable or to hear that he had departed this life. But such has not happened, and it is evident from this account that this would not be the first occasion on which he has absconded like a thief in the night from the company of his trusting and devout companions. May his sins be forgiven.

On behalf of our community, beloved master, I pray for your inspired guidance and that the Almighty Lord may keep you

securely in bliss. Amen.

Ethelred

Sacristan and Librarian

Written in the month of October in the Year of our Lord One Thousand and Seventy

ONE

I SMILE SECRETLY at the refectory gossip. There is a monk in Bremen across the North Sea who has been charged with collecting information for the Bishop of Bremen-Hamburg. His name is Adam, and he has been set the task of finding out everything he can about the farthest places and peoples of our world so that he may compile a complete survey of all the lands known, however dimly, to the Christian Church, perhaps with a view to converting them later. He interviews travellers and sailors, interrogates returned pilgrims and foreign diplomats, makes notes and sends out lists of questions, travels for himself and observes. If only he knew . . . right here in this monkish backwater is someone who could tell him as much about strange places and odd events as any of the witnesses whom he is cross-examining so diligently.

Had I not heard about this assiduous German, I would be content to spin out the last years of my life in the numbing calm of this place where I now find myself in my seventieth year. I would continue to copy out sacred texts and embellish the initial letters with those intricate interlacings which my colleagues believe I do for the greater glory of God, though the truth is that I take a secret delight in knowing that these curlicues and intricate patterns derive from the heathen past they condemn as idolatrous. Instead, their refectory tittle-tattle has provoked me to find a corner seat in

our quiet scriptorium and take up my pen to begin this secret history of my life and travels. How would my colleagues react, I wonder, if they discovered that living quietly among them is one of that feared breed of northmen 'barbarians', whose memory still sends shivers down their spines. If they knew that a man from the longships wears the cowl and cassock beside them it would, I think, give a new edge to that plea which recently I found penned in the margin of one of their older annals - 'From the fury of the foreigner O Lord preserve us.'

Writing down my memories will also help pass the time for an old man, who otherwise would watch the play of sunshine and shadow moving across the edge of the page while the other copyists hunch over the desks behind me. And as this secret work is to keep me from boredom, then I will begin briskly — as my mentor the brithem, once drummed into my young head more than half a century ago - and of course at the very beginning.

My birth was a double near-miss. First, I failed by a few months to be born on the millennium, that cataclysmic year foretold by those who anticipated, often with relish, the end of the world as we knew it and the great Armageddon prophesied by the gloomy Church Fathers of the Christians. Second, I only just missed being the first of our far-flung race to be born in that land far distant across the western ocean, scarcely known even now except in mists and swirling wisps of rumour. It was, at that time, dubbed Vinland the Good. As luck would have it, my foster brother had the distinction to be the original and perhaps only fair-skinned child to come into this world on those distant shores. However, I can claim that the three years I spent there are about as long a span of time in that place as anyone from our people can boast, and because I was still so young they have left their mark. I still recall vividly those huge, silent forests, the dark water of bog streams lit by the glint of silver salmon, the odd striding pace of the wide-antlered deer, and those strange native peoples we called the Skraelings, with their slant eyes and striking ugliness, who ultimately drove us away.

My own birthplace was a land on a far smaller scale: Birsay, an insignificant, dune-rippled island in the windswept archipelago off the north coast of Scotland which the monk-geographers call the Orcades. When I first drew breath there, Birsay was home to no more than a couple of hundred inhabitants, living in half a dozen longhouses and sod-walled huts randomly placed around the only large structure - a great long hall shaped like an upturned boat, a design I was to grow very familiar with in later years and in some strange settings. It was the main residence of the earls of Orkney, and the widow of the previous earl, Jarl Haakon, told me of the circumstances of my birth when I visited that same long hall some fifteen years later, seeking to trace my mother, who had disposed of me waif-like when I was barely able to take my first infant steps.

My mother, according to the earl mother, was a massive woman, big-boned, muscular and not a little fearsome. She had green-brown eyes set in narrow sockets under very dark and well-marked eyebrows, and her one glory was a cascade of beautiful brown hair. She was also running to fat. Her family was part Norse and part Irish, and I have no doubt whatever that the Celtic side predominated in her, for she was to leave behind an awesome reputation for possessing strange and uneasy gifts of the sort which trouble, yet fascinate, men and women who come in contact with them. What is more, some of her character passed on to me and has accounted for most of the unusual events of my life.

The earl mother told me that my birth was not an occasion for rejoicing because my mother had disgraced herself. I was illegitimate. Thorgunna, my mother, had suddenly appeared at Birsay in the summer of the previous year, arriving from Dublin aboard a trading ship and bringing with her an impressive quantity of personal luggage, but without parents or a husband or any explanation for her journey. Her obvious wealth and self-confident style meant she was well received by Jarl Haakon and his family, and they gave her a place in their household. The rumour soon arose that my mother was the ill-favoured offspring of one of our opportunist Norse chieftains, who had gone to try his luck in Ireland and married the daughter of a minor Irish king. This speculation, according to the earl mother, was largely based on Thorgunna's aloof manner and the fact that Ireland abounds with kinglets and chieftains with high pretensions and few means, a situation I was to experience for myself in my slave days.

THORGUNNA LIVED WITH the earl's entourage through the autumn and winter and was treated as a member of the family, though with respect for her size and strength of character rather than with any close fondness. And then, in the early spring of the pre-millennium year, it became obvious that she was with child. This was a sensation. No one had ever considered that Thorgunna was still of child-bearing age. Like most women, she said as little as possible about her age and she was far too fearsome a woman for anyone to enquire, however discreetly. By her appearance it had been presumed that she was in her mid-fifties, barren, and had probably always been so. Indeed she was such a broadly built woman that not until the sixth month was her condition noticeable, and that made the sensation all the more spectacular. The immediate reaction after the first stunned disbelief was to confirm what the sharper tongues had been saying all winter: Thorgunna employed sorcery. How else could a woman of her age be able to carry a child inside her, and how else - and this was the crux of the matter - had she been able to seduce the father so utterly?

'There was never the least doubt who your father was,' the earl mother told me. 'Indeed there was a great deal of jealousy and spitefulness from the other women of the household on the subject. He was such a dashing and good-looking man, and so much younger than your mother. People were hard put to explain how he had fallen under her spell. They said she had brewed up a love potion and slipped it into his food, or that she had cast a foreign charm over him, or that she had him under the effect of the evil eye.' Apparently what infuriated the critics even more was that neither Thorgunna nor her lover tried to conceal their affair. They sat together, gazed at one another, and in the evenings ostentatiously went off to their own corner of the long hall and slept beneath the same cloak. 'What puzzled people even more was how your father became so besotted with your mother less than a week after he arrived. He had barely set foot in Birsay when she carried him off. Someone remarked that he looked like a good-looking toy being seized to comfort the giantess.'

Who was this glamorous traveller, my natural father? He was a well-to-do farmer and fisherman whose ship had sailed into Birsay's small anchorage in the autumn while en route from the farthest of the Norse lands, Greenland. Indeed he was the second son of the founder of the small and rather struggling colony in that ice-shrouded place. His father's name was Eirik rauda or 'Erik the Red' (I shall try to insert an translation wherever appropriate as my wanderings have given me a smattering of many languages and a near fluency in several) and his own was Leif, though in later years I would find that more people had heard of him as Leif the Lucky than as Leif Eriksson. He, like most of his family, was a rather wilful, dour man with a marked sense of independence. Tall and strong, he had tremendous stamina, which is a useful attribute for any frontier colonist if combined with a capacity for hard work. His face was rather thin (a feature which I have inherited) with a broad forehead, pale blue eyes and a prominent nose that had been broken at some stage and never set straight. He was, people seemed to find, a man whom it was difficult to argue with, and I would agree with them. Once he had made up his mind, he was almost impossible to be persuaded, and though he was capable of retreating behind a series of gruff, blunt refusals, his usual manner was courteous and reserved. So he was certainly respected and, in many ways, very popular.

Leif had not intended to stop in at Birsay. He was on his way from Greenland to Norway, sailing on the direct run which normally passes south of the Sheep Islands, which our Norsemen call the Faeroes. But an unseasonal bout of fog, followed by a couple of days of easterly headwinds, had pushed his course too far to the south, and he had made a premature landfall in the Orkneys. He did not want to dawdle at Birsay, for he was on an important errand for his father. He had some Greenland products to sell - the usual stuff such as sealskins, walrus hides, walrus-skin ropes, a bit of homespun cloth, several barrels of whale oil and the like - but the main reason for his journey was to represent his father at the Norwegian court before King Olaf Tryggvason, who was then at the height of his mania for converting everyone to the religion whose drab uniform I now wear.

Christianity, I have noted in my seventy years of lifetime, boasts how humility and peace will overcome all obstacles and the word of the Lord is to be spread by example and suffering. Yet I have observed that in practice most of our northern people were converted to this so-called peaceful belief by the threat of the sword and our best-loved weapon, the bearded axe. Of course, there were genuine martyrs for the White Christ faith as our people first called it. A few foolhardy priests had their tonsured heads lopped off by uncouth farmers in the backlands. But that was in an excess of drunken belligerence rather than pagan zeal, and their victims were a handful compared to the martyrs of the Old Ways, who were cajoled, threatened, bullied and executed by King Olaf either because they refused to convert or were too slow to do so. For them the word of the Lord arrived in a welter of blood, so there is little wonder that the prophesied violence of the millennial cataclysm was easy to explain.

But I digress: Erik had sent his son Leif off to Norway to forestall trouble. Even in faraway Greenland the menacing rattle of King Olaf’s religious zeal had been heard. The king had already sent messengers to the Icelanders demanding that they adopt the new faith, even though they were not really Norwegian subjects. The Icelanders were worried that King Olaf would next send a missionary fleet equipped with rather more persuasive weapons than croziers. With Iceland subdued, fledgling Greenland would have been a mere trifle. A couple of boatloads of royal mercenaries would have overrun the tiny colony, dispossessed Erik's family, installed a new king's man, and Greenland would have been swallowed up as a Norwegian fief under the pretext of making it a colony for the White Christ. So Leif s job was to appear suitably eager to hear details of the new religion — a complete hypocrisy on Erik's part in fact, as he was to remain staunch to the Old Ways all his life - and even to ask for a priest to be sent out to Greenland to convert the colonists. I suspect that, if a priest had been found for the job, Leif had secret instructions from his father to abandon the meddling creature on the nearest beach at the first opportunity.

Erik also instructed his son to raise with King Olaf the delicate matter of Erik's outlawry. Erik was a proscribed man in Iceland -a hangover from some earlier troubles when he had been prone to settling disputes with sharp-edged weapons - and he was hoping that the king's protection would mean that certain aggrieved Icelanders would think twice about pursuing their blood feud with him. So, all in all, Leif had a rather delicate task set for him. To help his son, Erik devised what he thought could be a master stroke: a gift to catch the royal eye — a genuine Greenland polar bear to be presented to the royal menagerie.

The poor creature was a youngster which some of Erik's people had found, half-starved, on a melting floe of drift ice the previous spring. The floe must have been separated from the main pack by a back eddy and carried too far out to sea for the polar bear to swim to shore. By the time the animal was rescued it was too weak to put up a struggle and the hunters - they were out looking for seals — bagged it in a net and brought it home with them. Erik saw a use for the castaway and six months later the unhappy beast was again in a net and stowed in the bilges of Leif's embassy boat. By the time Birsay was sighted, the polar bear was so sickly that the crew thought it would die. The creature provided Leif with a first-rate excuse to dally away most of the winter on Birsay, allegedly to give the bear a chance to recuperate on a steady diet of fresh herring. Unfortunately this led to unkind jests that the bear and my mother Thorgunna were alike not only in character and gait, but in appetite as well.

That next April, when a favourable west wind had set in and looked as if it would stay steady for a few days, Leif and his men were eagerly loading up their ship, thanking the earl for his hospitality, and getting ready to head on for Norway when Thorgunna took Leif on one side and suggested that she go aboard with him. It was not an idea that appealed to Leif, for he had failed to mention to Thorgunna that he already had a wife in Greenland who would not look kindly on his foreign import. 'Then perhaps the alternative is going to be even less attractive,' Thorgunna continued. 'I am due to have your baby. And the child is going to be a boy.' Leif was wondering how Thorgunna could be so sure of her baby's sex, when she went on, 'At the first opportunity I will be sending him on to you.' According to Leif, who told me of this conversation when I was in my eleventh year and living with him in Greenland, my mother made the statement about sending me away from her with no more emotion than if she were telling Leif that she had been sewing a new shirt and would deliver it to him when it was ready. But then she softened and added, 'Eventually, if I have the chance, I intend to travel on to Greenland myself and find you.'

Under the circumstances my father behaved really very decently. On the evening before he set sail, he presented his formidable mistress with a fine waterproof Greenlandic sea cloak, a quantity of cash, a thin bracelet of almost pure gold and a belt of Greenland ivory made from the teeth of walrus. It was a very handsome gesture, and another speck in the eye for those hags who were saying that Thorgunna was being left in the lurch and was no better than she deserved. Anyhow, Leif then sailed off on his interrupted journey for Norway, making both a good passage and an excellent impression. King Olaf welcomed him at the Norwegian court, listened politely to what he had to say, and after keeping him hanging around the royal household for almost the whole summer, let him sail back to Greenland on the westerly winds of early autumn. As for the wretched polar bear, it was a temporary sensation. It was admired and petted, and then sent off to the royal kennels, where it was conveniently forgotten. Soon afterwards it picked up distemper from the dogs and died.

I was born into this world at about the same time that the polar bear departed it. Later in my life, a shaman of the forest peoples in Permia, up in the frozen zones, was to tell me that the spirit of the dying bear transferred itself to me by a sort of spiritual migration at the moment of my birth. I was reluctant to believe it, of course, but the shaman affirmed it as fact and as a result treated me with respect bordering on awe because the Permians worship the bear as the most powerful spirit of all. Whatever the truth about the transmigration of souls, I was born with a minimum of fuss and commotion on a summer's day in the year my present colleagues, sitting so piously around me, would describe as the year of our Lord, 999.

SHE CALLED ME Thorgils. It is a common enough Norse name and honours their favourite red-haired God. But then so do at least forty other boy's names from plain Thor through Thorstein to Thorvald, and half that number for girls, including my mother's own, Thorgunna. Perhaps Thorgils was her father's name. I simply have no idea, though later, when I wondered why she did not pick a more Irish-sounding name to honour her mother's people, I realised she was preparing me to grow up in my father's household. To live among the Norsemen with an Irish name would have led people to think that I was slave-born because there are many in Iceland and elsewhere whose Irish names, like Kormak and Njal, indicate that they are descended from Irish captives brought back when men went a-viking.

Thorgunna gave me my Norse name in the formal manner with the sprinkling of water. It might surprise my Christian brethren here in the scriptorium to know that there is nothing new in their splashing drops of water on the infant's head at baptism. The pagan northmen do the same when they name a child and it would be interesting to ask my cleric neighbours whether this deed provides any salvation for the innocent infant soul, even when done by heathen custom.

The year following my birth was the year that the Althing, the

general assembly of Icelanders, chose to adopt Christianity as their religion, a decision which led to much dissension as I shall later have reason to describe. So, having been born on the cusp of the new millennium, I was named as a pagan at a time when the tide of the White Christ was beginning its inexorable rise. Like Cnut, the king in England whom I later served as an apprentice court poet, I soon knew that a rising tide is unstoppable, but I resolved that I would try to keep my head above it.

My mother had no intention of keeping me around her a moment longer than necessary. She proceeded to carry out her plans with a massive certainty, even with a squawling baby in tow. The money that Leif had given her meant that she was able to pay for a wet nurse and, within three months of my birth, she began to look around for an opportunity to leave Birsay and move on to Iceland.

She arrived in the early winter, and the trading ship which brought her dropped anchor off Snaefellsness, the long promontory which projects from Iceland's west coast. Most of the crew were from the Orkneys and Ireland and they had no particular family links among the Icelanders to determine their final port of call, so the crew decided to wait in the anchorage until news of their arrival had spread among the farmers of the region, then shift to the ripest harbour for trading to begin. Iceland has always been a country starved of foreign luxuries. There is not a single town or decent-sized village on the whole vast island, or a proper market. Its people are stock herders who set up their homesteads around the fringes of that rugged land wherever there was pasture for their cattle. In summer they send their herds inland to the high meadows, and in winter bring them back to their byres next to the house and feed them hay. Their own food is mostly gruel, sour milk and curds, with meat or fish or bird flesh when they can get it. It is a basic life. They dress in simple homespun clothes and, though they are excellent craftsmen, they lack the raw materials to work. With no forests on the island, their ships are mostly imported ready built from Norway. Little wonder that the Icelanders tend to join viking expeditions and loot the luxuries they do not have at home. Their viking raids also provide a channel for their chronic pugnacity, which otherwise turns inward and leads to those deadly quarrels and bloody feuds which I was to find it impossible to avoid.

Here I feel that I should try to clear up a misunderstanding among outsiders over what is meant by 'viking'. I have heard it said, for example, that the description is applied to men who come from the viks, the creeks and inlets of the north country, particularly of Norway. But this is incorrect. When the Norse people call someone a vikingr because he goes viking they mean a person who goes to sea to fight or harry, perhaps as a warrior on an expedition, perhaps as an outright brigand. Victims of such raids would readily translate the word as 'pirate', and indeed some Norse do see their vikingr in this light. Most Norsemen, however, regard those who go viking in a more positive light. In their eyes a vikingr is a bold fellow who sets out to make his fortune, takes his chance as a sea raider, and hopes to come home with great wealth and the honour which he has won by his personal bravery and audacity.

The arrival of a trading ship at Snaefellsness — moored in the little anchorage at Rif — was just the sort of news which spread rapidly among these rural farmers. Many of them made plans to row out to the anchored ship, hoping to be the first to look over the cargo in her hold and make an offer to buy or barter for the choicest items. They quickly brought back word that a mysterious and apparently rich woman from Orkney was aboard the ship, though nothing was said about her babe in arms. Naturally, among the farmers' wives along the coast this was a subject of great curiosity. What was her destination? Did she dress in a new fashion? Was she related to anyone in Iceland? What were her intentions? The person who took it upon herself to answer these riddles was almost as formidable as my mother - Thurid Barkadottir, wife of a well-to-do farmer, Thorodd Skattkaupandi, and half-sister to one of the most influential and devious men in Iceland, Snorri Godi, a man so supple that he was managing to be a follower of Thor and the White Christ at the same time and who, more than once, was to shape the course of my life. Indeed it was Snorri who many years later told me of the relationship between Thurid Barkadottir and my mother, how it began with a confrontation, developed into a wary truce and ended in events that became part of local folk memory and scandal.

Thurid's extravagant taste was known to everyone in the area of Frodriver, close by Rif, where she and Thorodd ran their large farm. She was an extremely vain woman who liked to dress as showily as possible. She had a large wardrobe and an eye-catching collection of jewellery, which she did not hesitate to display to her neighbours. Under the pretence of being a good housekeeper, she was the sort of woman who likes to acquire costly furnishings for her house — the best available wall hangings, the handsomest tableware and so forth — and invite as many guests as possible to show them off. In short, she was a self-centred, ostentatious woman who considered herself a cut above her neighbours. Being half-sister to Snorri Godi was another encouragement for her to preen herself. Snorri was one of the leading men of the region, indeed in the whole of Iceland. His family were among the earliest settlers and he exercised the powers of a godi, a local chieftain-by-election, though in Snorri's case the title was hereditary in all but name. His farmlands were large and well favoured, which made him a rich man, and they contained also the site of an important temple to the God Thor. Thurid felt that, with such illustrious and powerful kin, she was not bound by normal conventions. She was notorious for her long-running affair with a neighbouring farmer — Bjorn Breidvikingakappi. Indeed it was confidently rumoured that Bjorn was father to one of Thurid's sons. But Thurid ignored the local gossip, and in this respect, as in several others, there was a marked resemblance between the two women who now met on the deck of the trading ship — Thurid and my mother.

My mother came off best. Thurid clambered aboard from the small rowing boat which had brought her out to the ship. Scrambling up the side of a vessel from a small rowing boat usually places the newcomer at a temporary disadvantage. The newcomer pauses to catch breath, straightens up, finds something to hold on to so as not to topple back overboard or into the ship, and then looks around. Thurid was disconcerted to find my mother sitting impassively on a large chest on the stern deck, regarding her with flat disinterest as she balanced unsteadily on the edge of the vessel. Thorgunna made no effort to come forward to greet her or to help. My mother's lack of response piqued Thurid, and as soon as she had composed herself she came straight to the point and made the mistake of treating my mother as an itinerant pedlar.

'I would like to see your wares,' she announced. 'If you have anything decent to sell, I would consider paying you a good price.'

My mother's calm expression scarcely changed. She rose to her full height, giving Thurid ample time to note the expensive cloth of her well-cut cloak of scarlet and the fine Irish enamelwork on the brooch.

'I'm not in the business of buying and selling,' she replied coolly, 'but you are welcome to see some of my wardrobe if that would be of interest here in Iceland.' Her disdain implied that the Icelandic women were out of touch with current fashion.

My mother then stepped aside and opened the chest on which she had been sitting. She riffled through a high-quality selection of bodices and embroidered skirts, a couple of very fine wool cloaks, some lengths of silk, and several pairs of elegant leather slippers -though it must be admitted that they were not dainty, my mother's feet being exceptionally large. The colours and quality of the garments — my mother particularly liked dark blues and a carmine red made from an expensive dye — put to shame the more drab clothing which Thurid was wearing. Thurid's eyes lit up. She was not so much jealous of my mother's wardrobe as covetous. She would have loved to obtain some of it for herself, and no one else on Iceland, particularly in the locality of Frodriver, was going to get the chance to buy it.

'Do you have anywhere to stay during your visit to our country?' she asked as sweetly as she could manage.

'No,' replied my mother, who was quick to discern Thurid's motives. 'It would be nice to spend a little time ashore, and have a chance to wear something a little more elegant than these sea clothes, though I may be a little over-dressed for provincial life. I assembled my wardrobe with banquets and grand occasions in mind rather than for wearing aboard ship or going on local shore visits.'

Thurid's mind was made up. If my mother would not sell her clothes, then at least she could wear them in Thurid's farmhouse for all visitors to see, and maybe in time this haughty stranger could be manoeuvred into selling some of her finery to her hostess.

'Why don't you come and stay on my farm at Frodriverr" she asked my mother. 'There's plenty of room, and you would be most welcome.'

My mother was, however, too clever to run the risk of beingdrawn into Thurid's debt as her invited guest, and she neatly sidestepped the trap. 'I would be delighted to accept your invitation,' she replied, 'but only on condition that I earn my keep. I would be quite happy to help you out with the farm work in return for decent board and lodging.'

At this point, I gather, I let out a squawl. Unperturbed, my mother glanced across at the bundle of blanket which hid me and continued, 'I'll be sending on my child to live with his father, so the infant will not disturb your household for very long.'

Thorgunna's clothes chest was snapped shut and fastened. A second, even bulkier coffer was hoisted out of stowage and manhandled into the rowboat, and the two women — and me — were carefully rowed to the beach, where Thurid's servants and horses were waiting to carry us back to the farm. I should add here that the horses of Iceland are a special breed, tough little animals, rather shaggy and often cantankerous but capable of carrying substantial loads at an impressive pace and finding their way over the moorlands and through the treacherous bogs which separate the farms. And some of the farms on Iceland can be very large. Their grazing lands extend a day's journey inland, and a successful farmer like Thurid's cuckolded husband Thorodd might employ as many as thirty or forty men and women, both thralls and freemen.

Thus my mother came to Frodriver under her own terms - as a working house guest, which was nothing unusual as everyone on an Icelandic farm is expected to help with the chores. Even Thurid would put off her fine clothes and pick up a hay rake with the rest of the labourers or go to the byres to milk the cattle, though this was more normally the work of thrallwomen and the wives of the poorer farmers, who hired out their labour. However, my mother was not expected to sleep in the main hall, where the majority of the farm workers settle down for the night among the bales of straw which serve as seats by day. My mother requested, and was given, a corner of the inner room, adjacent to the bedchamber where Thurid and her husband slept. When Thorgunna unpacked her large chest next day, Thurid, who had thought my mother wanted her own quiet corner so she could be alone with her baby, understood the real reason. My mother brought out from their wrappings a splendid pair of English-made sheets of linen, delicately embroidered with blue flowers, and matching pillow covers, also a magnificent quilt and a fine coverlet. She then asked Thurid if the farm carpenter could fashion a special bed with a high frame around it. When this was done Thorgunna produced a set of embroidered hangings to surround the bed, and even — wonders of wonders — a canopy to erect over the bed itself. A four-poster bed arrayed like this was something that Thurid had never seen before, and she was overwhelmed. She could not stop herself from asking my mother if perhaps, possibly, she would consider selling these magnificent furnishings. Once again my mother refused, this time even more bluntly, telling her hostess that she did not intend to sleep on straw. It was the last time Thurid ever asked Thorgunna to sell her anything, and Thurid had to be content, when Thorgunna was out working in the fields, with taking her visitors to give them surreptitious glances at these wonderful furnishings.

My mother, as I have indicated, had a predatory attitude towards the opposite sex. It was the story of Birsay all over again, or almost. At Frodriver she rapidly took a fancy to a much younger man, scarcely more than a boy. He was Kjartan, the son of one of the lesser farmers working for Thurid. Fourteen years old, he was physically well developed, particularly between the legs, and the lad was so embarrassed by Thorgunna's frequent advances that he would flee whenever she came close to him. In fact the neighbours spent a great deal of time speculating whether my mother had managed to seduce him, and they had a lot of fun chuckling over their comparisons of Thurid with her lover Bjorn, and Thorgunna in chase of young Kjartan. Perhaps because of their shared enthusiasm for sexual adventures, Thurid and Thorgunna eventually got along quite well. Certainly Thurid had no reason to complain of my mother's contribution to the farm's work. In the nearly two years that Thorgunna stayed at the Skattkaupandi farm, she regularly took her turn at the great loom at one end of the house where the women endlessly wove long strips of wadmal, the narrow woollen cloth which serves the Icelanders as everything from clothing to saddle blankets and the raw material for ships' sails when the strips are sewn side by side.

Thorgunna also pulled her weight — which was considerable — in the outside work, particularly when it came to haymaking. This is the crucial time in the Icelandic farming year, when the grass must be cut and turned and gathered and stacked for winter fodder for the animals, who will shortly be brought back from the outlying pastures where they have been spending the summer. My mother even had the carpenter make her own hay rake. It was longer, heavier and wider than most, and she would not let anyone else touch it.

Then came the day - it was late in heyannir, the haymaking season which occurs at the end of August in the second year of Thorgunna's stay — which the Frodriver people will never forget. The day was ideal for drying - hot with a light breeze. Thorodd mobilised the entire household, except for a few herders who were away looking after the sheep and cattle in the high pasture, to be out in the home meadow turning the hay. They were widely scattered, when just before noon the sky began to cloud over rapidly. It was a sinister sort of cloud — dark and ominous and heavy with rain. This cloud spread rapidly from the north-east and people began to glance up at it nervously, hoping that it would hold off and not spoil the haymaking. The cloud deepened and darkened until it was almost like night, and it was obvious that there would soon be a torrential downpour. Thorodd instructed the haymakers to stack their sections of hay to protect them from the rain, and was puzzled when Thorgunna ignored him. She seemed to be in a trance.

Then the rain started to pelt down and there was little point in staying outside, so Thorodd called in the workers for their midday break, to eat coarse bread and cheese in the main house. But Thorgunna again ignored Thorodd's instructions, nor did she pay any attention to the other workers as they trudged past her and back toward the farm. She kept on working, turning the hay with the wide slow powerful sweeps of her special rake. Thorodd called again, but it was as if Thorgunna was deaf. She kept working even as the rainstorm swept in, and everyone ran for shelter. It was a most unusual rainstorm. It fell on Frodriver, and only on Frodriver. All the other farms escaped the downpour and their hay was saved. But the Skattkaupandi farm was saturated. That in itself is not so strange. Any farmer has seen the same phenomenon when a summer cloudburst releases a torrent of rain which seems to drop vertically and strike just one small area. Then suddenly the rain ceases, the sun comes out and the ground begins to steam with the heat. But what was startling about the rainstorm at Frodriver was that it was not rain which fell from the cloud, but blood.

I know that sounds absurd. Yet it is no more fantastic than the contention that I have heard from apparently wise and learned men that fire and brimstone will pour from the sky in the great apocalypse. Certainly the people of Frodriver and the locality swear that the drops which hurtled from the sky were not rain, but dark red blood. It stained red the cut hay, it left pools of blood in the dips and hollows, and it drenched Thorgunna in blood. When she returned to the farmhouse, still as if in a daze and not saying a word, her clothes were saturated. When the garments were squeezed, blood ran out of them.

Thorodd asked her what was meant by the thunderstorm. Was it an omen? If so, of what? Thorgunna was slow in recovering from her confused state and did not reply. It seemed to Thorodd that she had been absent from her physical body and was not yet fully returned to it, and that something otherworldly was involved. His opinion was confirmed when the entire haymaking team went back into the field. The sun had re-emerged and the cut hay was steaming in the heat. All except one patch. It was the area where Thorgunna had been working. Here the hay still lay sodden, a dark blotch on the hillside, and though Thorgunna went back to work, turning the hay steadily, the workers noticed that the hay never dried out. It clung flat and damp on the ground, gave off a rank smell and the heavy handle of Thorgunna's hay rake stayed wet.

That evening Thorodd repeated his question. 'Was that strange thunderstorm an omen, Thorgunna?' he asked.

'Yes,' my mother replied. 'It was an omen for one of us.' 'Who is that?' asked Thorodd.

'For me,' came Thorgunna's calm reply. 'I expect I will shortly be leaving you.'

She went off to her splendid bed, walking stiffly as though her muscles were aching. In the morning she did not appear at breakfast to join the other workers before they returned to the haymaking, and Thorodd went to see her. He coughed discreetly outside the hanging drapes of the four-poster bed until Thorgunna called on him to enter. Immediately he noted that she was sweating heavily and her pillows were drenched. He began to make a few mumbled enquiries as to how she felt, but Thorgunna in her usual brusque fashion interrupted him.

'Please pay attention,' she said. 'I am not long for this world, and you are the only person around here who has the sense to carry out my last wishes. If you fail to do so, then you and your household will suffer.' Her voice was throaty and she was clearly finding it an effort to speak. 'When I die, as I soon will, you are to arrange for me to be buried at Skalhot, not here on this out-of-the-way farm. One day Skalhot will achieve renown. Just as important, I want you to burn all my bedding; I repeat, all of it.'

Thorodd must have looked puzzled, for Thorgunna went on, 'I know that your wife would love to get her hands on it. She has been hankering after the sheets and pillows, and all the rest of it from the very first day I got here. But I repeat: burn all of it. Thurid can have my scarlet cloak - that too she has been coveting since I first arrived and it ought to keep her happy. As for the rest of my possessions you can sell off my clothes to those who want them, deduct my burial costs from the money, and give the rest of the money to the church, including this gold ring,' and she removed the gold ring which she had been wearing since the day she arrived and handed it to Thorodd.

A few days later she died. One of the house women drew back the curtain and found her sitting up in bed, her jaw hanging slack. It took three strong men to lift her corpse and carry it out to the shed, where she was wrapped in a shroud of unstitched linen, and the same carpenter who had made her special bed nailed together a coffin large enough to contain her body.

Thorodd genuinely tried to carry out Thorgunna's last wishes. He had the bed frame knocked apart, and the pieces and the mattress and all the furnishings carried out to the yard. The carpenter took an axe to the bed frame and its four posts and made kindling, and the bonfire was ready. At that point Thurid intervened. She told her husband that it was a wanton waste to destroy such beautiful items, which could never be replaced. There would never be another chance to acquire such exotic goods. Thorodd reminded her of Thorgunna's express last wishes, but Thurid sulked, then threw her arms around him and wheedled. Eventually the poor man compromised. The eiderdown and pillows and the coverlet would be thrown on the flames; she could keep the rest.

Thurid did not lose a second in seizing the sheets and hangings and the embroidered canopy, and rushed them into the house. When she came back out, Thorodd had already left the yard and was walking away across the fields, so Thurid darted over to the fire and managed to salvage the coverlet before it was scorched, though it was some time before she dared to produce it before her husband.

Up to this point there seems to be an explanation for what happened in the events leading up to my mother's sudden death, including the red rain: she had caught a bad chill when she stayed out in the thunderstorm, then failed to change into dry clothes, and the chill developed into a mortal fever. Her insistence that her bedding was burned may have been because she feared that she had caught some sort of a plague and — if she had the medical knowledge that I was later to find among the priests and brithemain in Ireland — it was normal practice to burn the bedclothes of the deceased to prevent the illness spreading. As for the red rain, I observed when I was in the lands of the Byzantine emperor how on certain days the raindrops had a pinkish tinge and contained so many grains of fine sand that if you turned your face to the sky and opened your mouth the rain drops tasted gritty and did not slake your thirst. Or again, when I was employed at Knut's court in London, a south wind once brought a red rain which left red splotches on the ground like dried blood, as if the sky had spat from bleeding gums. Also I have heard how, in countries where the earth belches fire and smoke, there can be a red rain from the sky — and, Adam of Bremen should note, there are places in Iceland where holes and cracks in the ground vomit fire and smoke and steam, and even exude a bright crimson sludge. Yet the people of Frodriver will swear on any oath, whether Christian or pagan, that genuine blood, not tinted water, fell on them from the sky that day. They also affirm that in some mysterious way Thorgunna and the red rain were linked. My mother came from the Orcades, they point out, and as far as the Icelanders are concerned any woman who comes from there — in particular one as mysterious and taciturn as my mother — is likely to be a volva. And what is a volva? It is a witch.

Perhaps witch is not quite the right word. Neither Saxon English nor Latin nor the Norman's French, the three languages most used here in the scriptorium, convey the precise meaning of the word volva as the pagan Norse use it. Latin comes closest, with the notion of the Sibyl who can look into the future, or a seeress in English. Yet neither of these terms entirely encompasses what a volva is. A volva is a woman who practises seidr, the rite of magic. She knows incantation, divination, mysticism, trance — all of these things and more, and builds up a relationship with the supernatural. There are men who practise seidr, the seidrmanna, but there are not nearly so many men as there are women who have the knowledge and the art, and for the men the word magician would apply. When a volva or seidrman is about to die, there are signs and portents, and the red rain at Frodriver is a surer sign that my mother had seidr powers than any silly stories about love potions she used on my father.

And this is confirmed by what happened next.

Early the following morning my mother's coffin was lashed to the pack saddle on the back of the biggest horse in Thorodd's stables, and a little procession set out for Skalhot, where my mother had asked to be buried. Thorodd stayed behind on the farm as he had to oversee the rest of the haymaking, but he sent four of the farm labourers to manage the pack train. They took the usual route southward over the moorland. The going was quite easy as the moor was dried out at the end of summer and the usually boggy patches could carry the weight of the horses, so they made good progress. The only delays were caused when my mother's coffin kept slipping sideways and threatening to tumble to the ground. A coffin is an awkward load to attach to a pack saddle. If slung on one side like an enormous wooden pannier, you need a counterweight on the opposite side of the horse to keep the load in balance. The men did not have a sufficiently heavy counterweight to balance my mother's coffin, and in the first half-hour the saddle itself kept slipping sideways, forcing the escort to tighten the girth straps until the poor pack horse could scarcely breathe. In desperation the men were on the point of hauling my mother's body out of its wooden box and draping it sideways across the pack saddle in its shroud, as it should have been in the first place. But they were far too fearful. They were already muttering amongst themselves that Thorgunna was a volva who would come to haunt them if they disturbed her. So they kept on as best they could, stopping every so often to tighten the lashings, and at noontime shifted the coffin to one of the spare pack horses as the first animal was on the point of collapse.

As the makeshift cortege climbed onto the higher ground, the weather got worse. It became squally with showers of rain and sleet, and by the time they reached the ford on the Nordur River the water was rising and the ford was deep. They waded across cautiously and late in the afternoon reached a small farm at a place called Nether Ness. At this point the man in charge, a steady farm worker called Hrolf, decided that it would be wise to call a halt for the day. Ahead lay the ford across the Hvit River, and Hrolf did not fancy trying to cross it in the dark, especially if the water was running high. He asked the farmer if they could stay the night. The farmer said they could bed down in the main hall, but it was late and as he had had no warning of their arrival, he would not be able to feed them. It was a churlish reply, but the Frodriver men were glad to get some sort of shelter even if they went to sleep hungry. So they unloaded my mother's coffin, stored it in an outhouse, fed and watered their horses and put them in a paddock near the farm, and brought their saddle bags into the hall.

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.

ON 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.

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.

LEIF'S WIFE, GYDA, 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.

'Where's Thorvaldr" someone in the crowd called out.

'Dead,' grunted one of the seamen. 'Killed by Skraelings.'

'What's a Skraeling?' I whispered to one of my friends, Eyvind. The two of us had wriggled our way through to the front of the crowd and were standing right at the water's edge, the wavelets soaking our shoes. Eyvind was two years older than me and I expected him to know everything.

'I don't know for sure,' he whispered back. 'I think it means someone who is weak and foreign and we don't like.'

Thorvald Eriksson, the second uncle of my tale, I remember only vaguely as a jovial, heavy-set man with large hands and a wheezing laugh, who often smelled of drink. Thorvald and his crew had departed westward eighteen months earlier to pick up where my father Leif had left off. My father had described an iron-bound low vista of slab-like grey rocks, long white-sand beaches extending back into boggy marshes and swamps, enormous still forests of dark pine trees whose scent the sailors could smell from a day's sail out to sea. Now Thorvald wanted to know whether anyone lived there, and if they did whether they had anything of value for trade or taking. If the place was truly deserted, then he would reoccupy the camp Leif had established on the Vinland coast and use it as a base to explore the adjoining territory. He would search for pasture, timber, fishing grounds, animals with fur.

Thorvald had taken with him a strong crew of twenty-five men and had the loan of my father's knorr, the same vessel which had plucked me off the rocks. He was a good navigator and several of his men had sailed with my father and were competent pilots, so his track brought him directly to the spot where Leif had overwintered four years before. There the Brattahlid men reoccupied the turf-and-timber huts that my father had built, and setded in for the winter. The following spring Thorvald sent the ship's small boat farther west along the coast on a voyage of enquiry. They found their journey very wearisome. The coast was a vast web of islands and inlets and shallows where they often lost their way. Yet the farther they went, the more the land improved. The wild grass grew taller, and there were strange trees which bled sweet juice when cut, or produced edible nuts whose buttery taste no one had encountered before. Despite the fertility of the land, they found no people and no trace of human habitation except at the farthest end of their exploration. There, at the back of a beach, they came across a ragged structure made of long, thin wooden poles which seemed to have been fashioned by man. The poles were fastened together with cords made from twisted tree roots and appeared to be a temporary shelter. Our men assumed that whoever had made the structure was living off the land, like our hunters in Greenland when they went north in summer to trap caribou. They found no tools, no relics, nothing else, but it made them nervous. They wondered if their presence had been noted by unseen watchers and feared an ambush.

Meanwhile Thorvald had spent the summer improving Leifs-bodir, 'Leif s cabins' as everyone called them. His men felled timber to carry back to Greenland, and caught and dried fish as food for future expeditions. The quantity of fish was prodigious. The shore in front of the cabins had a very gentle slope, and low tide exposed an expanse of sand shallows runnelled with small gulleys. The men found that if they built fish traps of stakes across the gulleys, the fish — cod mostly - were trapped by the retreating tide and lay flapping helplessly. The fishermen had only to stroll across the sand and pick up the fish by hand.

After a second winter spent snug in the cabins, Thorvald decided to explore in the opposite direction - to the east and north, where the land was more like the Greenland coast, with rocky headlands, long inlets and the occasional landing beach. But the tides ran more powerfully there and this caught Thorvald out. One day the knorr swirled into a tide race and slammed against rocks beneath a headland. The impact was enough to break off the forward ten feet of her false keel and loosen several of the lower strakes. Luckily there was a beach nearby where the crew could land their craft safely, and with so much timber around it was a simple matter to replace the damaged keel with a fine clean length of pine. Thorvald found a use for the broken-keel section. He had the piece carried to the top of the headland and set vertically in a cairn of stones, where it was visible from far out to sea. If strangers came to contest the Greenlanders' discovery, it would be proof that the Erikssons had been there before them.

This was the story of Thorvald's expedition as it emerged from the reports of the returned crew that evening. Everyone in Brattah-lid crammed into the hall of the Eriksson longhouse to hear the details. We were listening with rapt attention. My father was sitting in the place of seniority, midway down the hall on the right-hand side. My uncle Thorstein sat beside him. 'And what about Thorvald? Tell us exactly what happened to him,' my father asked. He put his question directly to Tyrkir, the same man who had been rowing the small boat that rescued Gudrid and myself from the skerries, and who had gone with Thorvald as his guide.

AT THIS POINT I should say something about Tyrkir. As a young man he had been captured on the coast of Germany and put up for sale at the slave market in Kaupang in Norway. There he had been bought by my grandfather, Erik the Red, on one of his eastward trips, and proved to be an exceptionally good purchase. Tyrkir was hard working and tireless and grew to be intensely loyal to my grandfather. He became fluent in our Norse language, the donsk tunga, finding that it is not so far removed from his mother tongue of German. But he never shed his thick accent, speaking from the back of his throat, and whenever he got excited or angry he tended to revert to the language of his own people. Eventually Erik trusted Tyrkir so completely that, while my father Leif was growing up, Tyrkir had the task of watching over him and teaching him all sorts of useful skills, for Tyrkir was one of those people who has gifted hands. He knew how to tie complicated knots for different purposes, how to chop down a tree so that it fell in a certain direction, how to make a fishing spear from a straight branch, and how to scoop out a lump of soapstone so that it made a cooking pot. Above all he possessed a skill so vital and wondrous that it is closely associated with the Gods themselves — he could shape metal in all its forms, whether smelting coarse iron from a raw lump of ore or fusing the steel edge to an axe and then hammering a pattern of silver wire into the flat of the blade.

We boys found the German rather frightening. To us he seemed ancient, though he was probably in his late fifties. He was short and puny, almost troll like, with a shock of black hair and a ferocious scowl emphasised by a bulging, prominent forehead under which his eyes looked distinctly shifty. Yet physically he was very brave, and during Leif s earlier voyage to the unknown land it was Tyrkir who volunteered for the scouting missions. His German tribe had been a forest-dwelling people, and Tyrkir thought nothing of tramping through the woodlands, wading across swamps, living off berries and a handful of dried food. He drank from puddles if he could find no clean running water, slept on the ground and seemed impervious to cold or heat or damp. It was Tyrkir who had first come across the wild grapes that some believe gave Vinland its name. He came back into Leif s camp one day carrying a bunch of the fruit, and so excited that he was rolling his eyes and muttering in German until Leif thought he was drunk or hallucinating, but Tyrkir was merely revelling in his discovery. He had not seen fresh grapes since he had been a lad in Germany and indeed, if he had not recognised the wild fruit, it is doubtful whether my father and his companions would have known what they were. But the moment Tyrkir explained what a fresh grape is, my father realised the significance of the moment. Here was evidence that the new-found country had such a benign climate that grapes — an exotic plant for Norsemen — actually grew wild. So he gave the land the name Vinland, though of course there were cynics when he got home who said that he was as big a liar as his father. To call a wilderness by a name that evoked sunshine and strong drink was as misleading as to call a land of glaciers and rock Greenland. My father was canny enough to have an answer for that accusation too. He would reply that when calling the place Vinland he did not mean the land of grape vines but the land of pastures, for 'vin' in Norse means a meadow.

'TEN DAYS AFTER repairing the broken keel,' Tyrkir said in answer to my father's question about Thorvald, 'we came across the entry to a broad sound guarded by two headlands. It was an inviting-looking place, so we turned in to investigate. We found that the inlet divided around a tongue of land densely covered with mature trees. The place looked perfect for a settlement, and Thorvald made a casual joke to us that it was the ideal place, where he could imagine spending the rest of his life.' Tyrkir paused. 'He should never have said that. It was tempting the Gods.

'We put a scouting party ashore,' he went on, 'and when the scouts returned, they reported that on the far side of the little peninsula was a landing beach, and on it were three black humplike objects. At first they thought that these black blobs were walruses, or perhaps the carcasses of small whales which had drifted ashore. Then someone recognised them as boats made of skin. Many years earlier he had been on a raiding voyage to plunder the Irish, and on the west coast he had seen similar craft, light enough to be carried on land and turned upside down.'

Here I should explain that the idea that these boats belonged to the wild Irish was not so incredible as it might seem. When the Norse first came to Iceland they found a handful of ascetic Irish monks living in caves and small huts laboriously built of stones. These monks had managed to cross from Scotland and Ireland aboard their flimsy skin boats, so perhaps they had also spread even farther. Thorvald, however, doubted that. Tyrkir described how Thorvald sent him with a dozen armed men to creep up on the strange boats from the landward side, while Thorvald himself and most of the others rowed quietly round the coast to approach from the sea. They achieved a complete surprise. There were nine strangers dozing under their upturned boats. They must have been a hunting or fishing party because they were equipped with bows and arrows, hunting knives and light throwing lances. When they heard the creak of oars they sprang to their feet and grabbed their weapons. Some of them made threatening gestures, drawing back their bows and aiming at the incoming Norse. Others tried to launch their light boats into the water and escape. But it was too late. Tyrkir's shore party burst out of the treeline, and in a short scuffle all the strangers were overpowered, except for one. He managed to flee in the smallest of the skin boats. 'I've never seen a boat travel so fast,' said Tyrkir. 'It seemed to skini across the water and there was no possibility that our ship's boat would have caught up. So we let him go.'

The eight Skraelings our men had captured were certainly not Irish. According to Tyrkir, they looked more like ski-running people from the north of Norway. Short, they had broad faces with a dark yellow skin and narrow eyes. Their hair was black and long and straggly, and they spoke a language full of high sharp sounds, which was like the chattering alarm call of a jay. They were dressed entirely in skins: skin trousers, skin jackets with tails, skin boots. Any part of their bodies not covered in these clothes was smeared with grease or soot. They were human in form, but as squat and dark as if they had emerged from underground. They squirmed and fought in the clutch of the Norsemen and tried to bite and scratch them.

Tyrkir's story now took a grim turn. One of the captive Skraelings wriggled out of the grip of the man holding him, produced a bone harpoon head which he had hidden inside the front of his loose jacket, and jabbed the point of the weapon deep into his captor's thigh. The Greenlander roared with pain and rage. He slammed the man's head against a rock, knocking him unconscious, and then in a fury plunged his short sword into the victim's body. His action triggered a massacre. Thorvald's men fell on the

Skraelings, hacking and stabbing as if they were dispatching vermin, and did not stop until the last one of them was dead. Then Thorvald's men disabled the two remaining skin boats by gashing the hulls to shreds with their axes, and climbed through the woodland up to the top of the peninsula while the ship's boat rowed back to the knorr.

'On the highest point of the land we sat down to rest,' Tyrkir recalled. 'Thorvald intended to allow us only a few moments' breathing space, and we threw ourselves on the ground, and for some strange reason all of us fell asleep as if we were bewitched. About two hours later I was roused by a great voice howling, "Get back to the ship! If you are to save your lives, get back to your ship."'

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.

They eventually made their Greenland landfall not at Brattahlid but at Lyusfjord some three days' sail to the north-west. Here a small group of Norse had already established a few coastal farms, and Thorstein struck up a friendship with a namesake, who invited him to stay and help him work the land, which was plentiful. Perhaps my uncle was ashamed to return to Brattahlid with so little accomplished and without Thorvald's body, so he accepted the offer. That autumn a small coaster came down from Lyusfjord with a message. My uncle was asking for his share of the family's cattle herd and other stores to be sent to Lyusfjord, and - in a note added by Gudrid — there was an invitation to send me along as well. It seemed that I was still high in Gudrid's affections and her substitute child.

My uncle's new-found partner was remarkably swarthy for a Norseman, hence his nickname Thorstein the Black. This giving of a nickname which identified him from all the other Thorsteins, including my uncle, is a sensible Norse custom. Most Norse derive their names, simply enough, from the parents. Thus, I am Thorgils Leifsson, being the son of Leif Eriksson, who is the son of Erik. But with so many Leifs, Eriks, Grimms, Odds and others to choose from, it is helpful to have the extra defining adjective. The easiest way is to say where he or she comes from - not in my own case, though - or refer to some particular characteristic of the individual. Thus my grandfather Erik the Red's hair was a striking strawberry red when he was young and, as we have seen, Leif the Lucky was extraordinarily fortunate in his early career, always seeming to be in the right place at the right time. During my time in Iceland I was to meet Thorkel the Bald, Gizur the White and Halfdan the Black, and heard tales of Thorgrimma Witchface, who was married to Thorodd Twistfoot, and how Olaf was called the Peacock because he was always so vain about to his clothing, and Gunnlaug Serpent Tongue had a subtle and venomous way with words.

To return to Thorstein the Black: he had done remarkably well in the five or six years that he had been farming at Lyusfjord. He had cleared a large area of scrubland, built a sizeable longhouse and several barns, fenced in his home pasture, and employed half a dozen labourers. Part of his success was due to his wife, an energetic, practical woman by the name of Grimhild. She ran the household very competently, and this left Thorstein the Black free to get on with overseeing the farming and the local fishery. Their farmhouse was easily large enough to accommodate my uncle Thorstein and Gudrid, so rather than waste time and effort building their own home my uncle and aunt moved in with them. By the time I arrived, I found the two families sharing the same building amicably.

So I now come to an event which makes me believe that the mysterious hauntings which accompanied my own mother's death were not as implausible as they might seem. That winter the plague came back to the Greenland settlements for the second time in less than five years. It was the same recurring illness which was the curse of our existence. Where it came from, we could not tell. We knew only that it flared up suddenly, caused great suffering and then died away just as rapidly. Perhaps it is significant that both times these plagues visited us in autumn and early winter when we were all living cooped up, close together in the longhouses, with little light, no fresh air and a tremendous fug. The first person to contract the illness in Lyusfjord this time around was the overseer on the farm, a man named Gardi. Frankly, no one was too sorry. Gardi was a brute, untrustworthy and with a vicious streak. He could be civil enough when he was sober, but turned nasty when he was drunk, and was even worse the following morning when he had a hangover. In fact, when he first fell sick, everyone thought that he was suffering from yet another drinking binge until he began to show all the signs of the fever - a pasty skin, sunken eyes, difficulty in breathing, a dry tongue, and a rash of purple-red spots beginning to blotch his body. When, after a short illness, he died there was very little mourning. Instead the settlers around Lyusfjord began to wonder who would be afflicted next. The illness always picked its victims randomly. It might attack a man but leave his wife unscathed, or it would carry off two children from a brood of five, and the other three siblings never even had a sniffle. My uncle Thorstein contracted the sickness, but Gudrid escaped. Thorstein the Black was spared, yet his wife, Grimhild, succumbed. The progress of the sickness was as erratic as its selection was unpredictable. Sometimes the patient lingered for weeks. Others died within twenty-four hours of showing the first pustules.

Grimhild was one of the rapid victims. One day she was complaining of headaches and dizziness, the next she could hardly walk. She was so unsteady on her feet that by evening she could barely get to the outside privy a few steps away from the main farmhouse. Gudrid offered to accompany Grimhild in case she needed help and, as I was nearby, beckoned to me to assist. I took my place beside Grimhild so she could put her arm over my shoulder. Gudrid was on the other side with her arm around Grimhild's waist. The three of us then made our way slowly out of the door, and we were not halfway across the farmyard when Grimhild came to an abrupt halt. She was deathly pale and swaying on her feet so that Gudrid and I had to hold her from falling. It was bitterly cold and Gudrid wanted to get Grimhild across to the privy as fast as possible, then bring her back into the warmth. But

Grimhild stood rigid. Her arm was tense and trembling along my shoulders, and the hair rose on the back of my neck.

'Come on,' urged Gudrid, 'we can't stand out here in this cold. It will only make your fever worse.'

But Grimhild would not move. 'I can see Gardi,' she whispered in horror. 'He's over there by the door and he has a whip in his hand.' Gudrid tried to coax Grimhild to take a step forward. But Grimhild was petrified. 'Gardi is standing there, not five paces away,' she muttered with panic in her voice. 'He's using the whip to flog several of the farmhands, and near him I can see your husband. I can see myself in the group as well. How can I be there and yet here, and what about Thorstein? We all look so grey and strange,' She was about to faint.

'Here, let me take you back inside, out of the cold,' said Gudrid, half-lifting the delirious woman so that the three of us could turn in our tracks and stumble back into the main hall. We helped Grimhild into the bed closet, which had been turned into a makeshift sanatorium. My uncle Thorstein was already lying there. Fever-struck for the past week he had been shivering and slipping into occasional bouts of delirium.

Grimhild died the same night, and by dawn the farm carpenter was already planing the boards for her coffin. Our burial customs were very brusque. Under normal circumstances a wealthy farmer or his wife, particularly if they followed the Old Ways, might merit a funeral feast and be interred under a small burial mound on some prominent spot like a hillside or favourite beach. But in times of plague no one bothered with such niceties. People believed that the sooner the corpses were got out of the house and put underground, the quicker their wandering spirits would vacate the premises. Even the Christians received short shrift. They were buried in a hastily dug grave, a stake was driven into the ground above the corpse's heart, and when a priest next visited the settlement a few prayers were said, the stake was wrenched out and a bowl of holy water was emptied down the hole. Occasionally a small gravestone was erected, but not often.

That same morning Grimhild's husband went about the day-to-day chores of the farm as if nothing had happened. It was his way of coping with the shock of his wife's sudden death. He told four farmhands to go to the landing place where we kept our small boats and be ready to do a day's fishing. Trying to make myself useful and not wanting to stay in the same house as Grimhild's corpse, I accompanied the men as they headed to the beach to begin preparing the nets and fishing lines. We had loaded up the fishing gear into the two small skiffs, and were just about to push off for the fishing grounds when a runner came stumbling down from the farmhouse. In a lather of sweat and fear, he told Thorstein the Black to come quickly, something very odd was happening in the sick room. Thorstein dropped the sculls he was about to put into the boat and ran, clumping back up the narrow track to the farm. The rest of us stood there and stared at one another.

'What's happening in the farm?' someone asked the messenger, who was not at all in a hurry to get back to the longhouse.

'Grimhild's corpse started to move,' he replied. 'She sat up in bed, slid her feet to the floor and was trying to stand. I didn't see it myself, but one of the women came running out of the bed closet screaming.'

'Better stay away for a while,' said one of the farmhands. 'Let Grimhild's husband sort it out, if the story's true. I've heard about corpses coming alive, and no good ever comes of it. Come on, let's shove off the boats and go fishing. We'll find out what's happened soon enough.'

But it was difficult to concentrate on the fishing that day. Everyone in the two boats kept glancing back at the farmhouse, which could be seen in the distance. They were very subdued. I had gone along in one of the boats, helping bail out the bilges with a wooden scoop when I wasn't baiting hooks - my fingers were small and deft — but every time I caught sight of one of the men looking back at the farmhouse, I shivered with apprehension.

By mid-afternoon we were back on the beach, and had cleaned and split the few cod and saithe that we had caught, and hung

them up in the drying house. I walked very slowly back to the house, staying at the rear of the group as we tramped up the path. When we came to the front door, no one would go in. The farmhands held back, fidgeted and looked at me meaningfully. I was just a boy, but they thought of me as a member of their employer's family, and therefore I was the one who should enter the house first. I pushed open the heavy wooden door and found the long hall strangely deserted. At the far end three or four of the workers' wives were huddled together on benches, looking very troubled. One of them was sobbing quietly. I tiptoed to the door of the bed closet and peered in. Thorstein the Black was sitting on the earth floor, his knees drawn up to his chest and his head bowed. He was staring at the ground. On the bed in front of him lay the corpse of his wife. A hatchet was buried in her chest, the haft stuck up in the air. To my left, Gudrid was seated on the side of the bed where her husband lay. Thorstein Eriksson was propped up on a pillow, but looked very odd. I ran to Gudrid and threw my arms around her waist. She was deathly calm. 'What's happened?' I croaked.

'Grimhild was on her feet. Her fetch must have come back and entered her body,' Gudrid replied. 'She was stumbling slowly round the room. Knocking into the walls like a blind person. She was bumping and fumbling. That was when I sent for her husband. I feared she would do harm. When her husband came into the room, he thought that Gudrid was possessed. That she had been turned into a ghoul. He picked up the hatchet and sank it into her. To put an end to her. She has not moved since.'

Gudrid pulled me closer. 'Your uncle Thorstein is dead as well,' she said quietly. 'He stopped breathing during the afternoon and I thought he had passed away. But then he did come back to us briefly. He called me over to him and told me that he knew he was about to die, and that he did not want to be buried here, but back in Brattahlid. I promised him that would be done. Then he told me not to forget the volva's prophecy about my own future. He said he was not the man who had been promised to me. It was the last thing he said. Then he fell back and did not stir again.'

I was half-kneeling beside Gudrid with my head on her lap. 'Don't worry,' I told Gudrid, trying to console her. 'Everything will be all right now. You will not die from the plague. Nor will Thorstein the Black. Only old Amundi is going to die, and Sverting, who was with me in the boat this afternoon. That's all the people who were with Gardi last night in the yard.'

She put her hand under my chin, and gently turned my face so she could look into my eyes. 'How do you know?' she said softly.

'Because I saw them too, just as Grimhild did, all of them were there with Gardi and his whip. Last night, in the yard,' I answered.

'I see,' said Gudrid, and let her hand fall as she looked away.

I was too confused and frightened to make any sense of what was happening. I had never intended to tell anyone that I too had seen the group of fetches in the darkness of the farmyard. It was something which I did not understand. If I could see them, what did it mean about me and my responses to the spirit world? I had heard the rumours about my real mother Thorgunna and the ominous circumstances of her death. Would I see her fetch next? It was a terrifying prospect. But had I glanced up and seen Gudrid's expression when I made my confession, I would have been reassured. I would have realised that Gudrid too had seen the not-yet-dead, and that she had the gift of seidr, far more than me.

SIX

SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS are remarkably quick to adapt. Naturally enough, the farm workers at Lyusfjord refused to spend the winter cooped up in a building where such supernatural events had occurred, so our household moved back to Brattahlid, and within days I was back into the normal routines of childhood, playing with the other children. There were more of them than there had been at Lyusfjord so our games were more complicated and rowdy. I was smaller in stature than most of my contemporaries, but I made up for my lack of brawn with clever invention and quickness of thought. I also found I had a talent for mimicry and an imagination more vivid than most of my friends. So in our group I was the one who tended to invent new games or embellish the existing games with variants. When spring came and the days lengthened, we children moved out of doors to play the more boisterous games that the adults had forbidden indoors during the winter months. Most of our games involved a lot of play-acting with loud shouts, makeshift wooden shields and blunt wood swords. It was only natural that one we invented was based on my uncle Thorvald's voyage. Of course Thorvald's heroic death was a central feature of the make-believe. The oldest, strongest boy - his name was Hrafn as I remember — would play the leading role, staggering around the yard, clutching his armpit dramatically and

pretending to pull out an arrow. 'The Skraelings have shot me,' he would yell. 'I'm dying. I will never see home again, but die a warrior's death in a far land.' Then he would spin round, throw out his arms and drop in fake death on the dirt and the rest of us would pretend to pile up a cairn of stones around his body. My own contribution came when we all boarded an imaginary boat and rowed and sailed along the unknown coast. I invented a great whirlpool which nearly sucked us down and a slimy sea monster whose tentacles tried to drag us overboard. My friends pretended to scan the beaches and called out what they saw — ravening wolves, huge bears, dragon-snakes and so forth. One day I created for them a monster-man who, I said, was grimacing at us from the beach. He was a troll with just one foot and that as big as a large dish. He was bounding along the strand, taking great leaps to keep pace with us and — to demonstrate - I left my companions to one side, and hopped along, both feet together until I was out of breath and gave up the pretence.

It was a harmless bit of play-acting, which was to draw attention to me in a way that I could never have anticipated.

The following day I got a really bad scare. I was walking past the open door to the main cattle shed when a thin arm reached out of the darkness, and seized me by the shoulder. I was yanked inside, and in the gloom found myself staring close up at the sinister face of Tyrkir. I was convinced he was about to batter me for some fault, and I went numb with fear as he briskly hefted me to the back of the cow byre and twisted me round to face him. He was still gripping my shoulder and it hurt. 'Who told you about the uniped?' he demanded in his heavy accent. 'Did you speak with any of the crew about it?'

'Turn the boy so I can look at his eyes,' said a voice with a deep rumble, and I saw another man, seated on the hay at the back of the byre. I had not noticed him before, but even without looking at his face I knew who he was, and my fright only increased. He was Thorvall, known as 'the Hunter'.

Of all the men in Brattahlid Thorvall was the one we boys most feared and respected. He was the odd man out in our community of farmers and fishermen. A huge, weatherbeaten man now in his late fifties but still as fit and tough as a twenty-year-old, he was disfigured by a scar which ran from the corner of his left eye back towards his ear. The ear had been partly torn away and healed with a ragged edge so that Thorvall looked like a tattered tomcat that had been in numerous fights. The injury was the result of a hunting accident in which Thorvall had been mauled by a young polar bear. Standing in front of him in the cowshed, I tried to keep my glance away from that terrible scar, while I thought to myself that Thorvall had been lucky not to lose the eye itself. As it was, the lid of his left eye drooped, and I wondered if it affected his vision when he was drawing his hunting bow.

Thorvall was dressed in his usual hunting clothes, heavy leggings bound with thongs, stout shoes and a jerkin with a hood. I had never seen him wear anything else, and to be frank the clothes did smell strongly even over the stench of the cow byre. Thorvall had no one to look after his laundry. He was a bachelor who lived by himself in a small house on the edge of the settlement and he came and went as he pleased. His only personal ornament was a necklace made of the teeth of polar bears he had killed. At that moment, he was looking at me steadily and I felt I was being scanned by some sort of predatory bird.

'Maybe the woman told him. She has the sight and knows a good deal of the ways,' he said.

Tyrkir was still gripping my shoulder in case I made a dash for the open door behind me. "We know about her qualities, but she's only his foster mother. Besides she wasn't there either. I think the boy saw the uniped himself. They say that Leif s Orcades woman had seidr powers. More likely the boy has his abilities from her.' He gave me a slight shake as if to check whether these mysterious 'abilities' would somehow clank together inside me.

'You'll only scare him more if you rattle him around. Let him speak for himself.'

Tyrkir relaxed his grip slightly, but did not release my arm. 'Have you talked with Gudrid about the uniped?' he asked.

I was puzzled.

I

had no idea what a uniped was.

'That creature who hopped along on just one foot.'

I now realised what this interrogation was about, but was completely baffled why Tyrkir and Thorvall would be interested in my childish antics. Surely I had done nothing wrong.

'What else do you see? Do you have any strange dreams?' Tyrkir was asking the question so intently that his German accent was all the more obvious. I did not know how to reply. Of course I had dreams, I thought to myself, but so did everyone else. I had nightmares of being drowned, or pursued by monsters, or that the room was squeezing in on me, all the usual terrors. In fact I was rather ashamed of my nightmares and never spoke about them to anyone. I had no idea where my vision of the so-called uniped had come from. It was not something I had dreamed in the night. The image had simply popped into my head at the time when I was playing with the other children and I had acted it out. I was still too scared to speak.

'Anything else unusual in your head, any odd sights from time to time?' Tyrkir rephrased his question, trying to adopt a more soothing tone.

My mind stayed a blank. I wanted desperately to answer, just to save myself, but I couldn't recall a single dream out of the ordinary. But I was beginning to understand that these two gruff men meant me no harm. With a child's acuteness of observation I was becoming aware that in some mysterious way they needed me. There was an undercurrent of respect, and of something else — of awe — in their attitude to me. Clamped in the rough grip of Tyrkir, and faced by the scarred face of Thorvall, I realised that the two men were expecting me to supply something they could not achieve, and it was something to do with the way I saw things.

'I can't remember any of my dreams,' I stammered. I had the good sense to look straight at Thorvall. A deliberately level gaze is a great help in persuading an interlocutor that one is telling the truth, even if one isn't.

Thorvall grunted. 'Have you talked about the uniped or any other dream like that with your foster mother?'

I again shook my head, still trying to understand why the two men were so interested in Gudrid's role.

'Do you know what this is?' Tyrkir suddenly brought his free hand in front of my face, and showed me what he had been holding in his palm. It was a small metal pendant, squat and T-shaped. The creases and lines on his hand, I noticed, were deeply ingrained with soot and grime.

'Mjollnir—' I ventured.

'Do you know what Thor uses it for?'

'Sort of,' I murmured.

'He uses his hammer to crack the heads of those who disobey him, and to obliterate his enemies. He'll use it on you, if you tell anyone about our little talk.'

'Let the boy go,' said Thorvall, and then, looking at me, he asked in a matter-of-fact tone, 'how would you like to know more about Thor and the other Gods? Would that interest you?'

I felt strangely drawn to his suggestion. I had now controlled my fear and nodded my agreement. 'All right, then,' said Tyrkir, 'Thorvall and I will teach you when we have time. But you don't tell anyone else about it, and we want you also to describe us any other dreams that you have. Now go on your way.'

Looking back on that little episode so long ago when two grown men trapped and questioned a frightened small boy in the cattle byre, I can see what Tyrkir and Thorvall were trying to achieve, and why they behaved in the odd way they did. They feared that knowledge of the Old Ways was fading from Greenland, and had been jolted into action when they detected in me someone who might possess the seidr power. They may even have heard about Christian missionaries rounding up the schoolchildren and the women and preaching at them. By imitation Thorvall and Tyrkir must have been thinking that they should do the same, but in a secret and select fashion, picking a child who seemed to have special powers and was therefore already gifted with seidr ability by the Gods. Then they would teach him what they knew of the old wisdom so that the knowledge and practice of the Old Ways would survive. If that is how they felt, at least a part of my subsequent life would have been their justification, though they would be scornful to see me now, skulking here in a Christian monastery pretending to be one of the faithful.

The uniped, Tyrkir told me in one of my first lessons, was the creature he had seen during the trip with Thorvald Eriksson to Vinland. The uniped had been skulking at the edge of the woods, close to the beach, as their ship sailed by. It looked exactly as I had described it to the other children — a bizarre, hunched body of a man standing on a single thick leg, which ended in a single broad foot. It had hopped along the strand, just as I had done in my childish game, keeping pace with the Norsemen and their boat. But when the visitors turned their vessel and began to make for shore, intending to land and capture the uniped — whether it was beast or man they could not tell - it abruptly swerved away, and had gone leaping off into the undergrowth until it had vanished underground, or so it seemed from a distance.

The sighting of the uniped was curious and inexplicable. Perhaps it was just one of Tyrkir's eccentricities, and he was citing another of his hallucinations. But several of the crew also claimed they had seen the strange creature, though not as clearly as Tyrkir. Nor could they describe it in such detail. None of them had mentioned the incident when they got back to Brattahlid for fear of being considered foolish. So my imitation of the creature — even the exact way it had kept pace with the knorr - had led both Tyrkir and Thorvall to think that somehow my other-spirit had been on that exploring ship off the coast of Vinland, and yet back at home in Brattahlid at the same time, and — as every Old Believer knows - the ability to be in two places at once is a true mark of seidr power. A seidr-gifted person is born with this trick of spirit flying through the air, invisible and at supernatural speed to places far distant and then returning to the mortal body. Judging by what happened to me in Vinland soon afterwards, Thorvall and Tyrkir were right in detecting a spirit link between me and that unknown land in the west. On the other hand, I have to admit that it could have been pure coincidence that I imitated a hopping One Foot in the children's game because no one ever saw a uniped ever again.

But that doesn't mean that unipeds do not exist. Recently I came across one here in the monastery's library. I was preparing a sheet of vellum, scraping off the old ink before washing the page. Vellum is so scarce that we reuse the pages when their writings are too faded or blurred, or the content of the text is out of date or unimportant. This particular page was from Ezekiel, on the demons Gog and Magog, and had become detached from its original book. As I removed the old writing, I noticed a small, simple drawing in the margin. It was rather crudely done, but it caught my attention at once. It was a uniped, just as Tyrkir had described it to me in that cattle shed sixty years ago, except that the creature in the margin was drawn with giant, napping ears as well as a giant foot. And, instead of hopping, it was lying on the ground on its back with the single large foot held up in the air. I could just make out the faint word '. . . ped sheltering . . .' and then the rest of the caption was a blur. What the uniped was sheltering from was not clear. If it was a Vinland uniped then it might have been the snow and rain. But there was nothing in the adjacent text to explain the mystery.

Over the next months Thorvall or Tyrkir frequently picked on me for some chore or other, ostensibly because they wanted me to help them, but in fact they were looking for opportunities to tell me something of their beliefs out of earshot of the others. Neither of my tutors were learned men and Tyrkir in particular was very artless. But they both possessed the enormous advantage that they were not in the least hypocritical in their beliefs. Their genuine conviction made a stronger impression on me than all the sophistry imaginable. And the pagan world of the Old Ways was so easy to imagine, so logical, so attractive, and so apt to our situation on the remote shore of Greenland, backed by its immense and mysterious hinterland of ice and mountains, that it would have been a very dull student who failed to respond.

Tyrkir told me of the Aesir, the race of heroes who migrated out of the east long ago and established their capital at Asgard, with Odinn as their chief. With the twin ravens Hugin and Munin — Thought and Memory — perched on his shoulders, Odinn was — and is, so Tyrkir insisted to me — cunning and ruthless, a true king. Dedicated to the pursuit of advantageous knowledge, even sacrificing the sight of one eye so he could drink a draught of water from the well of wisdom, he still treads the world in a variety of disguises, always seeking more and more information. But his role is doomed, for in his wisdom he knows he is leading the other Aesir in the ultimately hopeless task of defending the world against the powers of darkness, the frost giants and mountain giants and other grim monsters who will finally crush them, to the hideous baying of the monstrous hound, Gorm. In his palace at Valholl Odinn entertains the departed heroes of our human race, proven warriors who are provided with feasting and drinking and the company of splendid women, until they will be summoned forth for the last, fatal battle at Ragnarok. Then they and all the Gods will be overwhelmed.

There is no doubt in my mind that Tyrkir's eerie tales of Odinn and his deeds were the original inspiration for my later devotion to the All-Father, as Tyrkir always called him. To a seven-year-old there was a morbid fascination in how Odinn interviewed the dead or sat beside men hanging on the gallows to learn their final secrets or consorted with the maimed. His skill as a shape-shifter was no less beguiling, and I easily imagined the Father of the Gods as he changed himself into a bird of prey, a worm, a snake, a sacrificial victim, according to whatever stratagem he had in mind. Being still a youngster I had no inkling of his darker side — that he can trick and cheat and deceive, and that his name means 'Frenzy'.

Thorvall's hero, unsurprisingly given his own name, was redhaired Thor, Odinn's son, who rides across die sky in his goat-drawn chariot, his passage marked by rolls of thunder and flashes of lightning, hurling thunderbolts, controlling the sea, and laying about him with Mjollnir, his famous hammer. Thorvall was an ardent member of the Thor cult, and once he got started on one of his favourite Thor-stories, he became very animated. I recall the day he told me how Thor went fishing for the Midgard serpent, using an oxhead for bait, and when the serpent took the hook Thor pulled so hard on the line that his foot broke through the planking of the boat. At that point in his story Thorvall stood up and, as we were in the cattle shed at the time, put his foot against one of the stalls and heaved back to imitate his hero. But the stall was poorly made, and collapsed in a cloud of dust and splinters. I can still hear Thorvall's great bellowing laugh and his triumphant cry of 'Just like that!'

Despite Thorvall's enthusiasm for Thor — and my boyhood respect for the tough hunter — I still preferred Odinn. I savoured the idea of creeping about in disguise, picking up intelligence, observing and manipulating. Like all children, I liked to eavesdrop on the adults and try to learn their secrets, and when I did so and stood hidden behind a door or a pillar, I would close one eye in imitation of my one-eyed hero God. Also, if my foster mother had searched under my mattress she would have found a square of cloth I had hidden there. I was pretending it was Skidbladnir, Odinn's magic ship, which received a favourable wind whenever it was launched and could carry all the Aesir, fully armed, yet when Odinn no longer needed it, he could fold it up and tuck it in his pocket.

Several years later, when I was in my teens, it slowly dawned on me that I myself might be a part of Odinn's grand design. By then it seemed that the path of my life was increasingly directed by the All-Father's whim, and whenever possible I paid him homage, not only by prayer and secret sacrifice, but also by imitation. That is one reason why, as a callow youth, I sought to become a poet, because it was Odinn, disguised as an eagle, who stole the mead of this night, and tomorrow afternoon I believe I will be able to reply to your question.'

There was a general sigh of despondency. Those who lived close enough to be able to walk to their homes through the dark left the building. The others bedded down for the night in Herjolf s hall and waited anxiously for the long, slow spread of dawn, which comes so late at that season that the light begins to fade almost as soon it reaches the earth.

The next afternoon, when the audience had reassembled, a hitch arose. The Sibyl unexpectedly declared that she needed the help of an assistant. She required someone to sing the proper seidr chants as her spirit began to leave her body. The chants would help free her spirit to start on its journey to the otherworld. There was consternation. The Sibyl had never requested an assistant before. Herjolf turned to face the crowd and appealed to everyone in the hall — if anyone could help, please would they step forward. His appeal was met with silence. The Sibyl sat on her high seat, blinking and peering down impatiently. Herjolf repeated his appeal, and to everyone's surprise Gudrid stepped forward quietly. 'Do you know any seidr?' Herjolf asked in astonishment. Gudrid's own father, Thorbjorn, must have been equally startled. He was gaping with surprise. 'Yes,' replied Gudrid quietly. 'When I was a foster child in Iceland to my father's friends Orm and Halldis, it was Halldis who taught me the warlock songs. If Halldis were here today, she would do it better, but I think I can remember all the words.' The Little Sibyl gave a sceptical grunt, and beckoned Gudrid close to her. She leaned over and must have asked the young woman to say a sacred verse to test her because Gudrid sang some refrain in a voice so low that no one could make out more than a few words, most of which seemed to be in some strange sort of language. The Sibyl nodded curtly, then settled back on her cushion.

At that point Gudrid's father, Thorbjorn, normally very easygoing, broke in. 'I'm not having my daughter involved in any witchcraft,' he announced loudly. 'That's a dangerous game. Once started, no one knows where it will end.'

'I'm neither a witch, nor a seeress, but if it will help our situation I am prepared to take part,' Gudrid told him firmly.

Thorbjorn took this rebuff badly, turned on his heel and pushed his way out of the crowd and left the building, muttering that at least he would not have to witness his daughter's disgrace.

'The spirits are still wary and obscure to me,' the Sibyl said after a short silence when the audience had settled down. 'They must be calmed and called to attend us.' She gestured to Gudrid, who exchanged glances with several of the farmers' wives. As their husbands looked either curious or uncomfortable, these women pushed through the crowd, and under Gudrid's instructions formed a small circle. There were perhaps half a dozen women facing inwards, Gudrid standing in the centre. As the crowd hushed, she began to sing the words of the warlock song. She had a high clear voice and sang without any trace of embarrassment. The women around her began to sway quietly to the rhythm of the voice, then their hands reached out and joined, and their circle began slowly to shuffle sideways, the direction of their rotation against the sun. Husbands and sons looked on, half-fearful and half-amazed. This was woman's work, something that few of the menfolk had ever guessed. Gudrid sang on, verse after verse, and the older women, softly at first, then more loudly, began to echo the refrain. To some of the audience the songs seemed at times like a lullaby that they had heard as children, though only Gudrid appeared to know all the verses and when to change the rhythms. She sang without a tremor until finally her voice died away, the women slipped back into the crowd and the volva looked down at Gudrid. 'I congratulate you,' she announced. "Whoever taught you, taught you well, and the spirits have responded. I can feel them now, assembling around us and ready to carry my spirit to the Gods.'

She beckoned Gudrid to stand closer and began to croon softly. Gudrid must have recognised the chant, for she began to respond, catching the refrain, repeating the stanzas, changing a line, adding a line. Back and forth went the chant between the two women, their voices weaving together, and the volva began to rock back and forth in her chair. Then the words made a circle on themselves. There were repetitions and long pauses. People in the crowd began to shuffle their feet, glance at one another, then turn their gaze back to the blue-cloaked figure on its high seat. Not a person left the hall. Finally, after a little more than half an hour, the Sibyl's voice slowed. Gudrid, still standing beside her, seemed to sense that her role was at an end. The volva's head sank forward on her chest, and she appeared to be both awake and asleep. For a long moment nothing happened, and then very slowly the volva raised her head and looked straight down the crowded room. She nodded to Gudrid, and Gudrid quietly walked back to the edge of the crowd of onlookers, turned and faced the Little Sibyl.

Herjolf cleared his throat with a nervous cough. 'Can you tell us the answer to the question we all ask?' he said. The volva's reply was matter of fact. 'Yes, my dream was clear and cloudless. My spirit circled up through the air and I saw ice breaking in the fjord. I saw the first signs of new grass even though the migrating birds had not yet come to feed and prepare their nesting sites. The air was warm around me though the day was still short. Spring will come very early this year and your trials will finish within a few days. The hunger you are suffering will be at an end and no one else will die. You have put your trust in the Gods, and you will be rewarded.'

Unexpectedly the volva turned towards Gudrid and spoke directly to her. 'And for you,' she said, 'I also have a prophecy. My spirit messengers were so charmed by your seidr knowledge and the songs you sang that they have brought me news of your destiny. I can now reward you for the help you have given me. You are fated to make a distinguished marriage here in Greenland, but it will not last for long. Rather, I see how all your links lead you towards Iceland and its peoples. In that land you will give rise to an illustrious family line and, through its people, you will attain an enduring renown.'

TYRKIR CAME TO the end of his story.

'So you see, Thorgils,' he said, 'that's why Thorvall thought, when you imitated the hopping One Foot in your game, that you might have inherited seidr skill, the power of spirit flight, through your foster mother. Gudrid herself could be a skilful volva, if only she did not consort so much with White Christ fanatics.'.

I knew what Tyrkir meant. Ever since Gudrid had come back from Lyusfjord, she had been spending time with Leif’s wife Gyda, a zealous Christian. The two women were often seen visiting the White Rabbit Hutch together. Tyrkir and Thorvall found it worrying that someone so gifted with the skills and knowledge of the Old Ways was drifting towards the newfangled Christian beliefs. Gudrid's interest in Christianity shook their own faith in the Old Gods, and they felt uneasy. They did not realise, as I do now, that the underlying truth is that good pagans make good Christians and vice versa. The choice of religion is less important than the talents of the person who is involved. The same is true of generals and politicians, as I have noticed during my travels. I have seen that it makes no difference whether an outstanding military commander is clad only in skins and painted woad, or in a gilded helmet and a beautifully tailored uniform of Persian silk as worn by the horse-warriors of the kingdom between the two great rivers. The martial genius is identical, and the brilliant, decisive reaction to the moment is the same whatever the dress. Similarly with politicians. I have listened to speeches delivered at a flea-infested tribal council meeting held around a guttering campfire in a bare forest glade which, if prettified with a few well-polished phrases, could have been the same as I heard from a conclave of the highly trained and perfumed advisers to the Basileus. I am talking about Christ's supposed representative on earth when he sits on his gilded throne in a chamber banded with porphyry and pretends that he is the incarnation of a thousand years of learning and refined civilisation.

The saddest aspect of Gudrid's drift towards the White Christ ways, now that I look back on it, is what a waste it proved to be. My foster mother would have made a truly remarkable priestess of the Old Ways if she had preferred to study under the Little Sibyl. For it is a striking feature of the old beliefs - and it would appal the monks around me if they knew - that the majority of its chief experts were women. There are fifteen different words in the Norse language to describe the various female specialisms in seidr, but fewer than half that number of words for male practitioners. Even Odinn the shape-changer has a strong element of the female about him, and you wonder about his enthusiasm for disguising himself as a woman. By contrast the White Christ expects his leading proponents to be male and women are excluded from their inner priesthood. Thus Gudrid diminished her horizons on the day she formally professed the faith of the White Christ. If she had followed the Old Ways she could have been respected and influential and helped those among whom she lived. But as a devout and saintly Christian she was finally obliged to become an anchoress and live on her own. However, that brings me far ahead of my story . . .

Thorvall and Tyrkir tried their best to make me understand that unless the Old Ways continued to be practised, they would soon be submerged by the advancing tide of White Christ beliefs. The speed with which the White Christ faith had taken hold in Iceland alarmed my tutors, and they feared that the same would happen in Greenland. 'I don't know how the White Christ people can claim to be peaceful and gentle,' said Thorvall sourly. 'The first missionary they sent to Iceland was a ruffian named Thang-brand. He swaggered about the countryside browbeating the farmers into taking his faith, and when he was teased about his crazy ideas, he lost his temper and killed two Icelanders in fights. To try to control him, a meeting was arranged between him and a learned volva at which the two of them would debate the merits of their beliefs. The volva made Thangbrand look an utter fool. He felt so humiliated that he took ship for Norway, and the volva proved her worth by asking Thor to send a storm, which nearly sank his ship on his journey home.

'The Icelanders were far too easy-going,' Tyrkir added. "When the missionaries came back to Iceland some years later and began their preaching all over again, the farmers had no more stomach for the endless debates and quarrels between those who decided to take the new faith and those who wanted to stay with the old ways. They got so fed up that their delegates met at the Althing with instructions to ask the Lawspeaker to come up with a solution. He went off, sat down and pulled his cloak over his head, and thought about it for nearly a day. Then he climbed up on the Law Rock and announced that it would be less bother if everyone accepted the new religion as a formality, but that anyone who wanted to keep with the Old Ways could do so.

'We completely failed to see that the White · Christ people would never give up until they had grabbed everyone. We were quite happy to live side by side with other beliefs; we never presumed to think that our ideas were the only correct ones. We made the mistake of thinking that the White Christ was just another God who would be welcomed in among all the other Gods and would coexist with them peaceably. How wrong we were.'

Inevitably, my education in paganism was patchy. Thorvall and Tyrkir often confused folklore with religion, but in the end it did not matter much. I soaked up the welter of information they gave me. Tyrkir, for example, showed me my first runes, cutting the rune staves on small flat laths of wood and making me learn his futhark, the rune alphabet, by heart. He taught me also to read the staves with my eyes shut, running my fingers over the scratches and translating them in my mind. 'It's a skill that can come in handy,' he said, 'when you want to exchange information secretly, or simply when the message is so old and worn that you cannot see it with the naked eye.' I tried hard to repay my tutors by having significant dreams which they could interpret. But I found that such dreams do not come on demand. First you have to study the complex paths of the Old Ways, and then you must know how to enter them, sometimes with the help of drugs or self-mortification. I was still too young for that, and I was reluctant to approach my foster mother to ask about her seidr knowledge because she was growing more Christian by the day, and I was uncertain if she would approve of my growing interest in the Elder Faith.

Besides, that next winter Gudrid was distracted by much more down-to-earth events. Her father, old Thorbjorn, had died not long after our return from Lyusfjord, and Gudrid, as his only surviving child, had inherited everything. Next, Thorstein the Black announced that he would not return to the farm in Lyusfjord. He felt it was an unlucky spot for him and he did not feel like starting there all over again as it would mean finding a new partner to help run the farm. So by January he had found a buyer to purchase the farm as it stood, paying him in instalments, and this meant he could reimburse Gudrid for her deceased husband's share. The result was that Gudrid, who was still without a child of her own, still beautiful, still young, was now a wealthy woman. No one was much surprised when, within a year of being made a widow, my glamorous foster mother was approached by an eligible new suitor and that she agreed to his proposal of marriage. What did surprise everyone was that her husband announced soon afterwards that he was fitting out a ship to travel to Vinland and establish a new and permanent settlement at the same spot where the two Eriksson brothers, Leif and Thorvald, had previously set their hopes.

SEVEN

WHY DID GUDRID'S new husband, Thorfinn Karlsefhi, decide to try his luck in far-off Vinland? Partly, I think, because he felt he owed a debt of honour to my father, Leif. By Norse custom, when a man wishes to marry, he first seeks formal permission from the bride's senior male relation. In Gudrid's case this was Leif and he readily agreed to the match. When Leif suggested the Vinland project to Thorfinn soon afterwards, I believe that Thorfinn, who had an old-fashioned sense of family loyalty, felt that he should take up the project. Leif still believed that Vinland could be a new and prosperous colony for the Greenlanders and, though he was too busy as head of the family at Brattahlid to go there himself, he did everything he could to support the new venture. He offered Thorfinn the loan of the houses he had built there, which were technically still his property, as well as the help of several key members from his own household. Among them were my two secret tutors - Thorvall the Hunter and Tyrkir the Smith - and two slaves Leif had acquired on the same fateful voyage which brought him to my mother's bed in Orkney.

I had always been curious about Haki and Hekja because I saw them as a link to my own enigmatic past. They were husband and wife, or that is what everyone took for granted. On the other hand, they may have had no choice but to live together as a couple since fate had thrown them together. They had been captured in a viking raid somewhere on the Scottish coast and shipped to Norway, where, like Tyrkir, they were put up for sale in the slave market at Kaupang. One of King Olaf Tryggvason's liegemen bought them as a pair. He presumed the two captives were Christians and thought that he could get into the good graces of his king if he made a gift of them to his monarch. King Tryggvason could then gain public credit and reputation by giving the two slaves their freedom. To their owner's dismay, it turned out that Haki and Hekja were not Christians at all, but adherents of some pagan belief so obscure that no one had any idea what their mutterings and incantations meant. Olaf kept them at his court for only a few months, but the two Scots showed no aptitude for household work. They were only happy when they were out on some high moor or open fell that reminded them of their homeland. So when my father Leif visited the court, the Norwegian king got the two seemingly useless slaves off his hands by presenting them to Leif with the remark that he hoped that one day he would find some use for these two 'wild Scots', as he put it, whose only skill seemed to be how swiftly they could run across open country. Leif found the perfect work for Haki and Hekja as soon as he got back to Greenland. The couple made excellent sheep and cattle herders. They would spend each summer on the farthest heath lands, where they made themselves temporary shelters by thatching over natural hollows with branches and dried grass. Here they lived snugly like summer hares in a form, a resemblance enhanced by their extraordinary speed on foot. They could run down a stray sheep with ease, and they were particularly valuable when it came to chasing wayward animals during the autumn drive, when the livestock had to be brought down from the hinterland and put into the winter barns. For the rest of the year they busied themselves with odd jobs round the farm, where I used to watch them surreptitiously, wondering if my mother with her Irish blood had possessed the same mixture of fair skin and dark hair, and I tried without much success to understand the words that passed between the two Scots in their guttural, rippling language.

Karlsefni's expedition was the largest and best-equipped venture for Vinland up to that time. It numbered nearly forty people, including five women. Gudrid insisted on accompanying her new husband and she took along two female servants. There were also two farmers' wives, whose husbands had volunteered to help clear the land during the early days of the settlement in return for a land grant later. These two couples were too young to have had children of their own and Thorbjorn, Karlsefni's five-year-old son by an earlier marriage, was left behind in Brattahlid with foster parents. So the only child on board the knorr was myself, aged nearly eight. I had lobbied my father Leif to let me join the expedition and he readily agreed, to the open satisfaction of his harridan wife, Gyda, who still could not stand the sight of me.

The knorr which was to carry us westward belonged to Thorfinn. She was a well-found ship and had served him for several years in trade. Now he purchased a second smaller boat to serve as a scouting vessel. With characteristic competence Karlsefni also set about compiling a list of what was needed to establish the pioneer farm. After talking with Leif and the other men who had already been to Vinland, he loaded a good stock of farm implements -hoes, axes, saws and spades and the like — blacksmith's tools, a supply of rope and several bags of ship's nails in case we had to make repairs, as well as three dozen rolls of wadmal. This wadmal was an essential. It is cloth made from wool hand-plucked from our sheep and steeped in tubs of urine to remove the worst of the sticky wool grease. The women spin this fibre into yarn, then weave long bolts of the cloth on a simple loom suspended from the ceiling of the main room. The better-quality wadmal is set aside to make the sails of our ships while the coarser grade is turned into garments, blankets, sacks, anything that requires a fabric. Most wadmal is the same dingy brown as when the sheep had worn the wool, but sometimes the cloth is dyed with plant juice or coloured earth to produce more cheerful reds, greens and yellows. A special wadmal soaked in a mixture of sheep's grease and seal oil is nearly waterproof. This was the cloth we used to make our sea-going cloaks for the voyage — the same garment that my father gave my mother as his going-away present.

Downwind, anyone would have thought we were a mobile farm when we set sail. A small bull and three milch cows took up most of the central hold, and the smell of the cattle and wisps of dried hay from their stack of feed drifted out across the water in our lee. For the first few hours there were farmyard sounds as well because the cows kept up a low, distressed mooing before they settled to their strange new routine.

With youthful zeal I had expected instant adventure and excitement the moment we cleared the land, but like the cattle I soon found that life aboard followed the same routine as at home. I had chores to do — give the animals fresh water to drink, keep their hay topped up, clear the cattle dung. Our knorr proceeded at a stately pace, towing the scouting boat behind on a thick cable. The sea was calm, and there was nothing to see except for the escort of seabirds hovering over us and an occasional flock of black and white waterfowl with massive thick beaks, which swam along the surface of the sea beside us, occasionally ducking down and speeding ahead underwater. When I asked Thorvall why these birds did not take to the air and fly, he laughed. 'They do not know how to fly,' he said. 'The Gods gave them wings more like fish flippers. They swim when they want to travel, even from one country to another, from Iceland to Greenland, from Greenland to Vinland. That's how our sailors first guessed that there must be land to the west. When they saw the swimming birds heading out in that direction.'

This was the third of the many, many voyages of my lifetime, and I believe that Odinn had a hand in sending me upon the journey as he deliberately provoked in me the wanderlust which would bind me to him as the Far-Farer. I had been a babe in arms when my mother sailed with me from Birsay to Iceland, and still too young to remember much when I went with Gudrid from

Iceland to Greenland and suffered shipwreck. But now the crossing from Brattahlid to Vinland made a deep and lasting impression on me. There was a sense of travelling towards the new and unknown, and it was a drug. Once tasted, I could never forget it, and I wanted more. It would make me a wanderer all my life, and that is what the All-Father intended.

My first sensation on the westward journey was the slow, rhythmic motion of the fully laden knorr. She swayed up and down over the long, low swells in a seemingly endless repetition of the same movement, rising and falling, and giving a slight lurch as each swell passed beneath her keel. Looking up at the mast top, I saw the pattern repeated constantly in the steady elliptical circles that the weathervane made against the sky. And just behind each movement came the same sequence of sounds — the regular creak of the mast stays taking up the strain each time the vessel rose, the slight thump as the mast moved in its socket, the wash of the bow wave as the prow of the knorr dug into the sea and, when the vessel checked, the soft thud of a loose item rolling across the bilge and striking the hull. I found something hypnotic and comforting about the way that life on board took on its own rhythm, set by the timing and order of our meals. The sequence began at dawn with rismal when the night watch ate a cold breakfast of dried bread and gruel; in mid-morning came dagmal when the entire crew, except for the helmsman and lookout, gathered round the little charcoal fire lit on a stone slab balanced on the keelson and out of the wind and consumed the only hot meal of the day, usually a broth, though sometimes there was fresh fish or boiled seagull if we had been able to catch anything. Finally, as the sun went down, we ate the nattmal, again a cold meal of skyr, sour milk, and gruel.

On the very first night, as soon as it was dusk, Thorvall brought me to a quiet corner of the deck and made me gaze upwards past the dark outline of our sail. It was still early in the season so the night was dark enough for the stars to be visible. 'The vault of the sky,' he said, 'is the inside of Ymir's skull, the ancient frost giant. Four dwarves, Austri, Vestri, Nordri and Sudri, sit in the four corners and they took molten particles and sparks and placed them as stars, both wandering and fixed, to illuminate the earth. That way the Gods made it possible for us to guide our way at night.' He pointed out to me the leidarstjarna, the Pole Star, and how it was always at the same height in the sky on our right hand as we moved through the night. Thorvall was in his element when he was on the sea, and every day at noon he would produce a little wooden disc with small notches on the rim and lines scratched on its surface. He held it up in the sunlight so the shadow from a small pin in the centre of the disc fell across the engraved face, then he grunted directions to the helmsman.

'Trust the Gods,' he told me. 'As long as the wolves chase Sol, she will move across the sky and we can follow beneath her.'

'What if it is too cloudy and we cannot see the sun?' I ventured.

'Be patient,' he growled.

It was not cloud but a dense fog which shrouded the sun two days later. The fog was so thick that we seemed to be gliding through a bowl of thin milk. Drops of water condensed on the walrus-hide ropes of the rigging, the deck planks were dark with moisture, and we could not see farther than fifty paces. We could have been sailing in circles for all we knew, and the helmsman was edgy and nervous until Thorvall produced a flat stone from a pocket in his sea cloak. The stone was thin and opaque. Thorvall held it up to the light and peered through it, turning the stone this way and that, his arm held out straight. Finally he pointed ahead, slightly to the steering-board side of the ship. 'That course,' he ordered and without question the helmsman obeyed him.

Apart from two days spent groping our way through the fog and relying on what Thorvall called his sunstone, we had remarkably good weather and a smooth passage. Thorvall had absolute faith in Thor's power over the weather and the sea conditions, and whenever he caught a fish on the hook and line he always trailed behind the boat, he made a point of throwing a small part of the catch back into the sea as a sacrifice. No one dared to scoff at him openly for doing this, though I did notice some of the crew members, the baptised ones, exchange amused glances and snigger.

Certainly Thorvall's gifts to Thor seemed to be remarkably effective. No one was seasick except for Gudrid, whose servants looked after her as she vomited, and it was on the morning of the ninth day after leaving Brattahlid that Thorvall gave a deep sniff and said firmly, 'Land.' By evening we could smell it too, the unmistakable scent of trees wafting to us from the west. On the morning of the tenth day we saw on the horizon the thin flat smudge that was the edge of Vinland, and twenty-four hours later we were close enough for Tyrkir and Thorvall and the other veterans to establish our exact position. With the help of Thorvall's wooden disc our knorr had made a near-perfect landfall. By general opinion we were only a day's sail from the place where we would find Leif s cabins.