Odinn's Child

The land was vast. The coastline extended across our ship's bow, as though the country would go on for ever in each direction. Behind the coast, in the interior, I could see the dark green swell of an immense forest, where the land rose in a succession of low hills as far as the eye could see. The shore itself was one low, grey headland after the another, divided by deep bays and inlets. Occasionally there were beaches of sand, but for the most part the foreshore was a jumble of sea-worn rocks, where the waves rumbled and surged. The colours of the stones were drab except where a crust of seaweed and lichens added touches of green and brown. To anyone from more southerly climates, the shore of Vinland would have looked like a bleak and forbidding place. But we had come from barren Greenland and, before that, from Iceland with its equally harsh landscape. Vinland showed great potential to the farmers among us. They noted the early growth of wild meadow-grass speckling the land behind the beach and the first flush of shoots on the low bushes of willow and alder. The bull and three cows on board also sensed the pasture and became restless to get ashore. We kept a sharp lookout for signs of

Skraelings and Tyrkir probably kept an eye open for his mysterious unipeds. But nothing moved. The land seemed empty.

Neverthless Karlsefni was cautious. He remembered Thorstein's death at the hands of the Skraelings and summoned our two 'wild Scots', Haki and Hekja. He told them that he was going to put them ashore so they could make a wide sweep inland. If they encountered Skraelings, they were to avoid contact, stay hidden, and try to assess the numbers of these strange people. After three days the two scouts were to report back to the beach, where our vessel would be anchored close by. Haki and Hekja each filled a satchel with dried food, but took nothing else. They were both wearing their usual dress, nothing more than a coarse blanket with a slit through which to put the head. There was a hood for when it rained, but otherwise the garment was so basic that it was open at the sides except for a single loop to fasten the cloth between the legs. Underneath they were naked. Both scouts clambered down into our small tender, and Thorvall and a small crew rowed them to the beach. There the Scots slipped into the water and waded to land before walking up the beach and disappearing into the scrub. Apart from a knife, they carried no weapon or tool, not even a steel and flint for making fire. 'If the Skraelings catch them, they'll think we've come from a tribe more wretched than themselves,' someone said as we backed our oars and manoeuvred the knorr to a safe distance, well out of arrow range.

Those three days seemed like an eternity for an eight-year-old boy. Karlsefni flatly refused to let anyone go ashore. We had to sit on the knorr, impatiently watching the run of the tide, trying to catch fish but without much success, and looking for signs of movement on land and seeing nothing until, suddenly, the slim figures of the two runners reappeared. Thorvall and a couple of the men went in the scouting boat to pick them up, and the two Scots returned with encouraging news. They had seen no Skraelings, they said, nor any sign of them.

We arrived at Leif s cabins at noon on the second day of coasting, but did not go ashore until Thorvall and four of the men

had gone ahead, armed and alert, to check the abandoned huts, looking for strangers. But they found no sign that anyone had been there since the unlucky expedition two years earlier. Our scouts waved to us to bring the knorr into the anchorage, and by nightfall the entire expedition was safely ashore and setting up the wadmal tents which would be our homes until we had refurbished the semi-derelict cabins.

Three winters of rain and wind and snow had beaten on the turf and stone walls of Leif s cabins until they were slumped and crumbled. The rafters had fallen in. Weeds and wild grass grew on the floors. The original cabins had been constructed only for short-term occupation, so they had been roofed over with wadmal to keep out the weather. Now that we were here to stay, we needed something much more sturdy and permanent. So we began to mend and enlarge the cabins, build a big new longhouse, clear the land for our cattle, dig latrines. Our knorr, which had appeared to be so amply laden when we started out, now seemed to be a meagre source of supplies. The cattle had taken up most of the available cargo capacity, and Karlsefni had brought tools for the future, not food for the present. So we nearly starved during that first month. Of course there was no question that we would kill and eat the cattle. They were the beginning of our herd, or so we hoped. We had no time to investigate the fishing or check the forest to see if there was any wild game. Instead we laboured from dawn to dusk to cut and carry and stack hundreds of turf blocks for the main walls of our new longhouse. Soon people began to complain of hunger and how they needed proper food, not thin watery porridge, if they were to work so hard. The Christians among us began to pray to their God, seeking his help to alleviate their distress. They set up their cross-shaped symbol at one edge of the settlement, and when Thorvall — rather provocatively, I thought — built a little canopied shelter on the opposite edge of the settlement and made a pile of stones under it as his altar to Thor, there was very nearly a fight. The Christians accused him of being poetry from its guardian Suttung. More important, my growing devotion to Odinn was in harmony with my natural wanderlust. Whenever I have set out on any journey I have done so in the knowledge that the All-Father is the greatest of all far-farers, and that he is watching over me. In that regard, he never played me false, for I have survived when many of my travelling companions fell.

TYRKIR ALSO TAUGHT me the details of the mysterious prophecy which Gudrid had mentioned on that dismal day in Lyusfjord when she sat beside Thorstein's deathbed, and I had let slip that I had seen the fetches of the not-yet-dead. Tyrkir had been delayed late in his workshop, where he made and repaired the metal tools essential to our farming. Gudrid had sent me to take the little German his supper. 'She's a good woman, your foster mother,' Tykir said as he set aside the empty bowl and licked his fingers. 'Far too good to fall under the influence of those crazy White Christ fanatics. No one else can sing the warlock's songs so well.'

'What do you mean, the warlock's songs?' I asked. 'What are they?'

Tyrkir looked at me from under his bulging forehead, a momentary gleam of suspicion in his eyes. 'You mean to say that your foster mother hasn't told you about her and the Little Sibyl?'

'No, I've never even heard of the Little Sibyl. Who was she?'

'The old woman Thorbjorg. She was the Little Sibyl, the volva. She died four years ago, so you really never knew her. But plenty still do, and they all remember the night when Gudrid Thorbjornsdottir revealed herself.'

Tyrkir settled himself on the low stool near his anvil, and pointed for me to make myself comfortable on a pile of sacks that had held charcoal for his simple furnace. It was obvious that his story would be a long one, but he considered it important that I know the details about my foster mother. Anything which concerned my adored Gudrid was important to me, and I listened

so attentively that I still remember every detail of Tyrkir's explanation.

THE LITTLE SIBYL, Tyrkir began, had come to Greenland in the earliest days of the colony to avoid the turbulent White Christ followers who were causing such ructions in Iceland by insisting that everyone should follow their one true God. She was the last of nine sisters, all of whom had possessed the seidr skills, and being the ninth she had more of the gift than all the others. She could foretell the weather, so farmers planned their activities according to her advice. Their wives asked her about the propitious names they should give their babies and the health and prospects of their growing children. Young women quietly enquired about their love lives; and mariners timed their voyages to begin on the auspicious days the Little Sibyl selected. Thorbjorg knew the correct offerings to the Gods, the right prayers, the proper rituals, all according to the Old Ways.

It was in the autumn of the year that my foster mother Gudrid first arrived in Greenland that a black famine had gripped the colony. After a meagre hay harvest the hunters, who had gone inland or along the coast looking for seals and deer, came back with little to show for their efforts. Two of them failed to come back at all. As the cheerless winter months wore on, our people began to die of starvation. The situation became so bad that a leading farmer, a man named Herjolf, decided he should consult the Little Sibyl to ask whether there was any action that the settlers could take to bring the famine to an end. Herjolf arranged a feast to honour the Little Sibyl and, through her, the spirit world she would have to enter if she was to answer their plea for advice. Also, consuming their last reserves of food in such a feast was a signal to the Gods that the people placed their trust in them.

Herjolf supplied the banquet from his final stocks of dried fish and seal blubber, slaughtered the last of his livestock and brought out his stores of cheese and bread. Naturally the entire community was invited to attend the feast, not just for food to fill their aching bellies but to hear what the Sibyl would say. Herjolf’s wife arranged a long table running the full length of their hall. Crosswise at the head of the table and raised slightly above it where it could be seen by everyone, a seat of honour for the Little Sibyl was placed - a carved wooden chair with a cushion stuffed with hens' feathers.

While the guests were assembling, a man was sent to escort Thorbjorg from her home. When she arrived, it was immediately clear that the Little Sibyl had acknowledged the gravity of the emergency. Normally when called upon to practise seidr she arrived dressed in her everyday homespun clothes, and carrying only her seidr staff, a wooden stick about three feet long carved with runes and hung with withered strips of cloth. But when Thorbjorg was led into the great hall that evening she was dressed in clothes no one had ever seen her wear before: a long overmantle of midnight blue reaching almost to the ground and fastened across the chest with cloth straps worked with intricate designs in red and silver thread. The entire surface of the cloak was encrusted with patterns of small stones, not precious stones but pebbles, mottled and marbled and all smooth from lying underwater. They shimmered as if still wet. They were magic 'waterstones' said to contain the spirits of the river. Around her throat the volva wore a necklace of coloured glass beads, mostly red and blue. Her belt was plaited from the dried stalks of mushrooms and fungi, and from it hung a large cloth pouch, in which she kept her collection of dried herbs, charms and the other ingredients for her sorcery. Her feet were encased in heavy shoes made of calfskin, the hair still on them, and laced with heavy thongs with tin buttons on the ends. Her head was hidden within a dark hood of black lambskin lined with the fur from a white cat. On her hands were mittens also of catskin, but with the fur turned to the inside.

Had it not been for her familiar seidr staff the guests would have found it difficult to recognise Thorbjorg. The staff was of pale honey-coloured wood, much worn and slick with handling, and the knob at the end was bound in brass and studded with more of the 'waterstones'. There were, it seemed, more ribbons than usual.

As she arrived, Herjolf, who had been waiting to greet her at the door of the long hall, was surprised to find himself looking at the back of her black hood. Thorbjorg was walking backwards. The entire assembly fell silent as her host escorted Thorbjorg down the length of the hall, still facing the main entrance door. Herjolf named each person who was present as they drew level. The Sibyl responded by peering out from under her black hood and into their faces but saying little, only giving the occasional sniff as if smelling their presence.

When the volva was safely settled on her high seat, the meal was served and everyone ate with gusto, though many kept glancing up at Thorbjorg to see how she was behaving. She did not eat with the everyday utensils, but pulled from her pouch a brass spoon and an ancient knife with a handle of walrus ivory bound with two copper rings. The blade of the knife was very worn and pitted, as if it had been buried in the earth a long time, and the onlookers noted the point was broken. Nor did she eat the same food as everyone else. She asked for, and was given, a bowl of gruel prepared with goat's milk and a dish made of the hearts of all the animals slaughtered for the feast.

When the meal was over and the tables cleared, Herjolf stood up. 'Sibyl, I hope that everything that has been arranged this evening has been to your satisfaction,' he announced in a voice that carried the length of the hall. 'We have all assembled here in the hopes that in your wisdom you will be able to tell us how long the famine will last, and whether there is anything we can do to end our difficulties.'

'I need to spend longer in this house,' she answered. Her voice was thin and wheezing as if she had difficulty in breathing. 'I have yet to absorb its spirit, to learn the portents, to feel its soul. It is too early to give any judgement. I will stay here on this seat, all an arch-pagan. Thorvall warned them that he would knock down any man who interfered with his Thor altar.

Karlsefni had assigned Thorvall to help the house-builders rather than hunt. His great strength was very useful when it came to lifting up the turf sods as the walls grew higher and higher. But everyone could see that Thorvall was itching to explore. Finally, when hunger was really pinching, Karlsefni gave Thorvall permission to go hunting, though most of us wondered how just one man could find and kill enough wild game to feed forty hungry mouths. Thorvall said nothing, but gave one of his unsociable grunts, gathered up his spear and made ready to leave. As he left the camp, he went first to his little altar, took off one of the polar-bear teeth from his necklace and laid it as an offering on the top stone. Then he walked off into the thick brushwood. Within moments he had vanished.

Thorvall was away for three days, and when he did not reappear Karlsefni and the other senior men began to worry. Once again there was talk of the Skraelings and speculation that they had captured or killed our hunter. Finally Karlsefni called for volunteers to join a small search party to look for Thorvall. Karlsefni announced that he himself would lead the searchers. They were to take weapons and be on the lookout for Skraelings as well as Thorvall. There was a certain amount of reluctance to join the search party because Thorvall was not a popular figure, particularly among the Christians. Some said that if the Skraelings had got the surly curmudgeon, then it was good riddance. Naturally Tyrkir was willing to look for his friend, so too were the two Scots, and I managed to attach myself to the little group because I could be spared from the house-building.

After all this, finding Thorvall was very easy. Haki and Hekja ranged ahead, quartering back and forth through the undergrowth like a pair of hounds, and to all our surprise returned on the third day to say that they had found Thorvall on a nearby headland, but he had refused to come back with them. Thinking that Thorvall might be injured, we fought our way through the underbrush and arrived, exhausted and scratched, to find Thorvall lying stretched out on the ground on the flat crest of a small headland overlooking the sea. To the fury of the Christians, and the relief of his friends, Thorvall was in good health. Indeed, he looked remarkably relaxed as he lay on his back, gazing up at the sky and apparently talking to himself, occasionally itching himself rudely. For a moment I thought our hunter had leave of his senses or had got hold of some alcohol and was drunk. One of our group, a Christian named Bjarni, began shouting angrily at Thorvall, demanding what on earth he was playing at. Thorvall rose to his feet, and scowled at his interrogators.

'There's nothing to hunt here,' he told them, 'at least, not enough to feed forty people in a hurry. Just some small animals and birds. Maybe later, when I've more time to explore the land, I'll find the places where I can set traps for the larger animals. So I composed a poem to Thor's honour, and was reciting it for him, and asking him to provide for us.'

'Thor! You heathen!' yelled Bjarni. 'How do you imagine that your blundering oaf of a God can help us. You might as well pray to the sea to give us some food.'

'Maybe he will,' Thorvall replied gruffly.

We all walked back to the camp and Thorvall received black looks from many of the settlers. Several of them turned their backs on him. I heard a number of comments that he was a cantankerous fool, riddled with superstition, too lazy to go hunting properly, and had been idling away his time, while others had been doing all the hard work on the house-building.

Next morning one of the men went out along the strand to gather driftwood for our cooking fires and came stumbling excitedly back into camp.

'Everyone, bring your knives and axes. There's a dead whale lying on the beach,' he shouted. 'It must have been washed up in the night. There's enough meat there to feed us for a couple of weeks!'

Thorvall, who had been sitting near the campfire, raised his shaggy head and let out a great roar of triumph. 'There, you White Christ fanatics, Old Red Beard liked his praise poem and he's sent us food from the sea. Now go and fill your envious bellies.'

We all hurried along the beach and were soon hacking up the whale. It was perhaps twenty-five feet in length, and of a type that none of us had ever seen before, not even Karlsefni, who had seen many different types of whale during his travels as a merchant. But the carcass cut like any other whale's, with a good three-inch-thick layer of blubber which we peeled away in strips to get at the rich, dark red meat. It was a magnificent find. The blubber we would use as fat for cooking or eat salted, while the dark red meat we grilled and ate straight away - it tasted like well-hung beef. Thorvall took his chance to gloat over the Christians, teasing them about how Thor had turned out to be more generous than their Christ. Eventually they became so exasperated that they said that the meat was cursed and that it gave them stomach cramps and we should throw away the profane flesh. But I noticed that they ate a full meal before they made a gesture of throwing some of the offal into the tide.

The stranded whale ended our famine because over the next few weeks the land began to reward us with her bounty. Leif had sited his cabins on the lip of an estuary, where two small rivers merged before emptying into a shallow tidal estuary. Both rivers teemed with fish. One of my earliest tasks was to dig a series of trenches in the sand shallows at low tide. Shoals of halibut and other flat fish regularly came swimming into the lake on the high tide to feed and as the water receded were left stranded in my trenches. For variety I also picked up clams and mussels on the wide curve of the beach, or helped the adults set nets for the magnificent salmon and sea trout which swam up the rivers. By our Greenlandic standards nature was extraordinarily bountiful. The meadows by the river mouths were covered in tall wild grasses and gave good pasture for our cattle, which usurped the deer whose tracks we could clearly see on the river banks. The most travelled of our colonists had never laid eyes on such stands of trees, mostly softwoods, but with some trees completely unknown. One yellow tree, very like our birch, provides timber as tough as our native oak, and another tree with a three-pointed leaf gives a beautiful ingrained wood that Tyrkir gloated over, turning and polishing it so that it glowed with a deep honey colour. As a timber-starved people, we scarcely knew what to do first: whether to cut down small trees to make our houses or to fell the larger ones and set them aside to season so that we could take a precious cargo across to Greenland.

By late summer there was an almost continuous natural harvest along the fringes of the forest. The wild cherries were the first to bear fruit, followed by an abundance of hazelnuts and then an array of wild berries swelling and ripening on the bushes and shrubs, speckling them with red and purple, dark blue, crimson and gold. Many plants we recognised — blueberries, cloudberries, raspberries, loganberries and cranberries. But there were several which were new to us, and sometimes so highly coloured that at first we were suspicious they were poisonous. I was given the job of hiding in the undergrowth and watching to see whether the wild birds fed on them. If they did, then we gathered this fruit as well, drying what we could not eat immediately for our winter provisions.

Only the soil was a little disappointing: it was light and thin and not as rich as we had hoped, lying in a shallow skin over the estuary sand and gravel. But it was no worse than much of the soil in Greenland and Iceland, and our farmers did not complain because they were compensated by the excellence of the hunting. In the long days of summer we trapped deer on the edges of the meadows and snared wild duck, which gathered in vast numbers on the meres and bogs. Scarcely a month after we landed there was a whale drive. A small school of pilot whales ventured into the bay at high water, and we managed to get behind them in the rowing boats and drive them up into the shallows just at the critical moment when the tide turned, so that the animals were unable to retreat and lay awkwardly in the shallows. It was a slaughter. The water was striped with wavering red bands of blood as every able-bodied person waded into the water, knife or axe in hand. We must have dispatched at least twenty of the animals in a gory frenzy, with the beasts thrashing in their last agonies and the foam pink with their blood. After we had tugged the corpses ashore, skinned and cut them into pieces, we had enough meat to last three months.

Tyrkir set up his workshop and a smithy down by the river. Digging in the swamp behind the settlement, he turned up loaf-shaped lumps of a hard encrusted stone which he said he could smelt into soft iron for replacement tools when they were needed. He announced that he required an assistant to help him with the work and made sure that I became his apprentice. In his little smithy he showed me how to build the small kiln of clay and stack it with alternate layers of charcoal and the bog iron, then ignite the mixture and wait until the fierce heat had done its work, before breaking open the kiln and scraping out the lump of raw iron from the embers. As I supplied more charcoal and operated the bellows, and he refined and forged and shaped the metal, he talked earnestly to me about the Old Gods and their ways. Watching Tyrkir heat and hammer the metal, then quench it in water, I was fascinated by the almost magical process whereby our metal tools were produced, and I readily accepted Tyrkir's central theme that there is an indissoluble bond between knowledge of metalwork and magic. Tyrkir would mutter simple charms through the smoke and steam, and grunt invocations to the Gods as he scrupulously observed his craft's taboos. He never allowed two blades to lie one across the other. He sprinkled a pinch of salt on the fire when we began work in the morning, and at the end of the day he always placed his working hammer on the small altar he had built for Thor. And when he finished an item, whether a billhook or a spearhead, he would mutter a small prayer and gather a few leaves, then pound them into a green paste and smear them on the hot metal as an offering. 'The juice gives strength to the metal,' he told me as I held the cooler end of some spearhead or sickle with a cloth around

my hand and plunged it into the quenching tub with its hiss of steam.

In the smoke-grimed little smithy Tyrkir took breaks from pounding at the glowing metal to tell what he knew of the galdra, the charms and spells that make up the bulk of seidr lore. 'There are hundreds,' he told me. 'Each produces a different result suitable for a different occasion. How effective they are depends on the user's experience and skill. I know only a few, perhaps a couple of dozen, and they are mostly related to my work with metal. I never complete a sword for war, a sea knife for a sailor, or a spearhead for a hunter without reciting the correct galdra for the purpose it will serve. But these are craftsmen's galdra. There are more powerful ones, above all at times of combat. There is one to calm the rage in a warrior's heart, another to sing behind a shield as the charge is launched, which will guarantee that all your comrades-inarms emerge from the fray unscathed, while a third gives the enchanter the quickness to catch an arrow flying through the air. A fourth, if spoken over a goblet of water which is then thrown over a warrior, ensures that he survives the forthcoming battle, perhaps wounded, but alive.'

Tyrkir failed to notice that I was not attracted by martial prowess and muscular feats and stories of bloodshed. To tell the truth I was always a little frightened of my dwarfish mentor and the hard-edged bitterness he sometimes showed when he told the more gory tales. He relished telling me how Volund, the master smith and 'prince of elves', had lured the young sons of King Nidud into his forge and, as they peered into his chest of treasure, lopped off their heads. 'You know why he did that, Thorgils?' Tyrkir asked as he fused a strip of harder steel into the soft iron blade of a sickle to give it a sharper edge. 'Volund did that to revenge himself on Nidud. Volund was so skilled at metalwork that the evil Nidud kidnapped him, then lamed him so he could not escape and forced him to work as a royal goldsmith. Volund bided his time until he could lure Nidud's greedy and stupid sons into his workshop. There he killed them and made splendid jewels from their eyeballs, brooches from their teeth and silver-plated bowls from their skulls. To their mother he presented the jewels, to their sister the brooches and to their father the bowls.' Tyrkir gave a grim smile of satisfaction. 'And in the end he seduced the Princess Bodvild and left her with child, before he cunningly fashioned wings of metal and flew away from his captivity.'

Gudrid was pregnant. People now understood why she had been seasick on the outward voyage and why she had insisted on bringing two serving women with her from Brattahlid. Most of the settlers took her pregnancy as a good omen. It meant that our little colony would flourish and grow. I wanted to be happy for Gudrid, like everyone else, but I was confused and unsure. For most of my young life I had seen myself as Gudrid's true son, and now it seemed that I was to have a rival for her affections.

In the late autumn of that first year in Vinland Gudrid gave birth to a healthy, squalling male child. He was given the name Snorri, which means 'unruly' or 'argumentative', and he was the first of our race to be born in that distant Norse outpost. Perhaps he is the only one ever to be born there. I do not know because for many years I have not had any direct news from Vinland. Nor, I suppose, has anyone else. Instead I have only the memory of the great rejoicing and excitement on the day when Snorri arrived in this world and how Thorfinn, the proud father, gave a birthday feast in our fine new longhouse. Perhaps it was the first stirring of jealousy within me, or perhaps it was my sixth sense that produced a sense of foreboding within me. But that evening, as we all gathered in the longhouse and sat along the side benches and listened to Thorfinn call toasts to celebrate the arrival of our first child, I felt a nagging certainty that those golden early days of our colony were numbered.

EIGHT

THE HERALDS OF our failure came just three days later. It was almost noon on a mild sunny day and the colonists were spread out doing their usual daily tasks, some fishing, a few absent in the forest hunting and tree-felling, the majority working in and around the houses or clearing gardens. The women, I remember, were preparing food, for I recall the smell of venison roasting on a spit over an open fire. One of the builders was up on the roof of a house, checking that the turves were binding together properly to make a watertight seal, when he straightened to ease his back and happened to glance out to sea. He stopped in surprise and shouted, pointing out along the coast. His cry alerted all of us in the settlement and we turned to look. Around the end of the farthest low spit of land a cluster of small boats was approaching. At that distance they looked no more than black needles, but it was quite obvious what they were: Skraelings. Everyone stopped whatever they were doing, and a shiver of apprehension passed through the crowd. It must be remembered that we were farmers and fishermen, not seasoned warriors, and the arrival of these strangers in this isolated land sent a chill of fear down our spines. 'Be as friendly as possible. Act normally,' warned Thorfinn. 'Don't make any sudden movements, but don't let them come too close either. We'll just wait to see what they want.'

The little Skraeling flotilla — there were nine of their skin boats — slowly paddled closer. The boatmen seemed to be as surprised and cautious as we were. They slackened their pace and drifted their boats gently through the shallows, keeping about fifty paces offshore as they watched us, staring curiously. Neither side said a word. There was a tense silence. Then one of the Skraelings stood up in his boat - it was a narrow, trough-shaped vessel, not very well made — and began to wave his arm in circles above his head. In his hand was some sort of blade, which made a low humming sound, halfway between a gentle roar and a mutter.

'What do you think that means?' Thorfinn asked his second-in-command, a man called Thorbrand Snorrisson.

It could be a sign of peace,' he replied, 'They don't seem very hostile.'

'Then we had better respond in the same way,' answered Thorfinn. 'Take a white shield and go into the water up to your knees. Hold up the shield so they can see it clearly.'

A white shield is our standard signal of peace, recognised and used even among the wild Irish and distant German tribes. A red shield displayed means war. Anyhow, the Skraelings seemed to understand the gesture; they gently turned their boats towards us and paddled inshore. We all stood motionless as they touched land, and the men climbed out of their boats and advanced hesitantly up the beach.

We could see that they were exactly like the people that my uncle Thorvald's crew had attacked and killed. The men — there were no women in the party — were dark-skinned and a little smaller than us in stature. They had the same almond-shaped eyes and lank, very black hair worn long and loose, right down to their shoulders. Their cheekbones were high and prominent, and this gave their faces a menacing look. I noticed that their eyes were uniformly dark brown, almost black. They must have been a hunting party because there was very little in the boats except for some hunting spears and nondescript bundles wrapped in rawhide. Thorfinn suspected that they were as startled as we were by the encounter. At any rate, there was a very long silence, while both parties looked one another over, and then the leader of the Skraelings called out something in an unintelligible language and the entire group deliberately got back into their boats, shoved off and paddled away, from time to time looking back over their shoulders.

As the Skraeling boats disappeared on their original route up the coast, we returned to our chores. You can imagine the chatter and speculation about when the Skraelings would reappear and what they intended. No one doubted that this was only the preliminary encounter.

The Skraelings took us even more unawares on their next visit by appearing from the landward side of the settlement. It must have been about six months later, and how they got so close to the settlement without being detected was alarming. At one moment we were going about our usual routine, and the next instant a couple of dozen Skraelings were walking down from the edge of the woods towards us. They seemed to have sprung from the ground. It was lucky that they came peacefully for we were taken totally off guard. Indeed, we were all dithering, not knowing whether to run for our weapons, cluster together or go forward to meet the Skraelings with another peaceful gesture, when, as luck would have it, our bull began to bellow. He was with the cows in the nearby meadow, and possibly the scent of the Skraelings — for they did smell rather powerfully - disturbed him. He let out a series of thunderous bellows and this terrified our visitors. Glancing back over their shoulders, they scampered for the safety of our houses as though pursued by a monster. Several of our more timid men had already taken up position inside the houses, the better to defend themselves, and had already shut the doors. The next thing they knew, the terrified Skraelings were beating on the door planks, crying out in their strange language, pleading to be let in. The Norsemen, thinking that an attack was in progress, pushed desperately against the doors from the inside, trying to keep them shut. For us who were outside the situation, once so fraught, was now totally comic. It was clear that the Skraelings meant no harm, and the fainthearts inside the houses were in a panic at the unseen onslaught. Those of us who could see what was happening burst into roars of laughter. Our guffaws reassured the Skraelings, who calmed down and began to look sheepish, and after a few moments the frightened house defenders began to peek out to see what had happened, only to make us scoff even more loudly. This ludicrous situation proved to be the ideal introduction — there's nothing like two sides making public fools of themselves and accepting the fact for a sense of mutual understanding to develop. With sign language and smiles the Skraelings began to open the packs they had been carrying. They contained furs, splendid furs, the pelts of fox and marten and wolf and otter. There were even a couple of glossy black-bear pelts. The quality was like nothing we had seen before, and we knew they would fetch a premium price in any market in Norway or Denmark. There was not one of us who did not begin to wonder what we might trade with the Skraelings in exchange.

The obvious item was metal — for we had noted that the Skraelings possessed only stone-tipped weapons. But Thorfinn was quick off the mark. He ordered sharply that no one was to trade weapons or metal tools to the Skraelings. Better weaponry was the only advantage we possessed against their superior numbers. Everyone was standing around racking their brains about what to do next and the Skraelings were gazing around curiously, when one of the women in a gesture of hospitality fetched a pail of milk and a wooden dipper. She offered a dipper of the milk to the leader of the Skraelings. He stared at the liquid in puzzlement, sniffed it suspiciously and then cautiously tried a sip, while the woman indicated that he should drink it. The Skraeling was delighted with the taste of milk. He must have also believed that it was a rich and rare substance, for he delved in his pack and offered the woman a marten skin. She had the wit to accept it. Another Skraeling stepped forward and gestured he wanted to try drinking milk, and before long the entire group were clustering around, reaching for the ladle and handing over valuable furs and pelts in exchange.

Even as an eight-year-old lad, I had seen the drunks at Brattahlid so desperate as to give their last coins for a draught of wine or strong mead, but this was the only time in my long and varied life that I have ever seen anyone pay so handsomely for mere cow juice. What is more, the Skraelings were totally happy with the bargain. After they had parted with their entire stock of furs, even leaving behind their empty packs, they were content to walk back into the forest, carrying their barter profit in their bellies, while we gleefully stowed away a small fortune in Vinland furs.

But however peacefully the Skraeling visit had turned out, their arrival had a more sinister implication. The following day Thorfinn told us to stop all our other work and start building a palisade around the settlement. We did not need urging. All of us had an uncomfortable feeling that our peaceful and profitable relationship with the Skraelings might not last. Everyone remembered how the Skraelings had killed Thorvald Eriksson with their darts on his earlier expedition to this land, and that a massacre by our men of eight Skraelings from their hunting party had preceded his lone death. If the Skraelings behaved like us, then they might still be looking for more blood vengeance to balance the account. Like one of those sea anemones who retract their tentacles when they sense danger, we shrank back inside a safer perimeter. The outlying houses were abandoned and the entire community shifted to live within the shelter of the palisade, just in case the Skraelings returned with less peaceable intentions. The only structure to remain outside the stockade was Tyrkir's little smithy down by the river, where he needed access to the bog iron and running water.

THE SKRAELINGS DID not return until the beginning of the following winter, when baby Snorri was nearly a year old. By then we felt we were getting the measure of this new land. We had cleared back the surrounding brushwood for additional pasture, fenced two small paddocks for our cattle, which now included three healthy calves, improved and strengthened the walls and roofs of our original hastily built dwellings, and our people were beginning to talk about the prospect of sending our knorr back to Greenland with a cargo of timber and furs, and attracting more settlers to join us. We had lived through the full cycle of the seasons, and though the winter had been cold and dreary, it had been no worse than what we had known in Greenland. Our settlement had begun to put down roots, but — as we soon learned — those roots were shallow.

This time the Skraelings came in much greater strength, and by land as well as by water. One group of about a score of hunters emerged from the forest, while their comrades paddled directly into the bay in glistening, grease-treated skin boats. Their visit seemed to have been planned well ahead of time because both groups were seen to be carrying no weapons, only their packs of furs. This time one of our fishermen had spotted the Skraelings at a distance and come ashore to warn us. Thorfinn, worried by their greater numbers, had already ordered the entire community to enter the stockade and shut the gate. So when the Skraelings approached they found no one to greet them. The fields and the beach were deserted. They came up to the palisade and hesitated. Thorfinn called out, asking what they wanted, but of course they did not understand a word of our language and we had no way of understanding their reply. Then one of the Skraelings, a tall, good-looking man who must have been their chieftain, lobbed his pack over the top of the palisade. It landed on the earth with a soft thump and we found it contained five grey wolf pelts. Clearly this was the result of their summer trapping and the Skraelings had come again to trade. 'Let's see if we can sell them only milk again,' Thorfinn warned us. 'Remember: on no account let them get their hands on our weapons.' The stockade gate was cautiously open and we began to trade.

It was not quite as easy as before. The strange dark-skinned men were still eager to barter furs for milk, but when the milk was all drunk they still had more pelts for sale, and pointed to the red wadmal, which one of the colonists was wearing as garters. In the beginning we offered a hand's span of red cloth cut from the bolt for every pelt. This they accepted and immediately tied the pieces of cloth around their heads, preening in the gaudy decoration. But then the supply of red cloth ran low and it was only possible to offer them a single ribbon of red cloth, barely a finger wide, for each pelt. To our astonishment, the Skraelings were just as happy as before to make the bargain, and kept on dealing until their stock of fur was used up.

When the trading for milk and red cloth had ended, the Skraelings lingered. They strolled among our men, gingerly picking up various implements and testing their weight and wondering at their purpose. Clearly these were people who had never handled a spade or sickle, though I suspect that, hidden in the edge of the forest, they had often watched us farming. They did not mean any harm, I'm sure, and were merely inquisitive. But quick as a flash one of them leaned forward and tugged a scramsaxe from the belt of a man called Hafgrim. Startled, Hafgrim gave a shout of surprise and tried to seize the culprit Skraeling in order to retrieve his long knife. But the Skraeling was too quick for him and twisted away. The entire group of Skraelings scattered like a shoal of frightened minnows and began to run back towards the woods, several of them still with our farm tools in their hands. One Skraeling was so terrified that he ran in the wrong direction, past the smithy, and Tyrkir, who had gone back to work, emerged from the doorway just at the right moment to stick out his foot and trip him up. As casually as if he were in a salmon stream, Tyrkir then reached inside the smithy, produced a heavy fish spear he had been mending and killed him. I shall never forget the sight of my first battle corpse, the half-naked Skraeling, suddenly a pathetic, scrawny, broken figure, sprawled half in and half out of the peat stream, his bright red headband smeared with mud.

Thorfinn immediately called an assembly to discuss what we should do next. Everybody crowded into the open space in front of the longhouse and in the nervous aftermath of that tragic brawl it was not long before people were shouting irritably at one another, arguing about the best tactics to defeat the Skraelings. No one doubted that the Skraelings would return and seek revenge.

I do not know whether the next, and final, visit of the Skraelings was an accident or intentional and if they came to exact retribution for the man killed outside Tyrkir's smithy. For more than a year we mounted guard over the colony. Day and night there was a watcher stationed on the headland to keep a lookout for Skraeling boats, and another lookout scanned the edge of the forest, where it lapped down towards our stockade. Then came the fateful day when the coast watcher came panting up from the beach to announce that a large Skraeling fleet was rounding the headland. He had counted at least thirty of the needle-shaped boats and half a dozen larger canoes, each paddled by a dozen men. No one seemed to have noticed that the new Skraeling threat came from the south, and that the men we had driven off had run away in the opposite direction, to the north.

Thorfinn had planned it all out. As the Skraeling fleet aproached the beach, a handful of our men, led by the same Thorbrand Snorrisson who had stood alongside Thorfinn at the first encounter with the Skraelings, took up position on the foreshore, displayed their red shields and called out a fighting challenge. For a short while the Skraeling fleet hung back, the paddlers either suspicious or puzzled by the belligerent behaviour of the white men. Then, as our champions continued to shout defiance and wave their weapons, the Skraelings decided to accept the challenge. The Skraeling men rose to their feet in the skin boats and began to wave the same thin-bladed implements over their heads that they had employed on their very first visit, the flail-like implements that might have been mistaken for the flat wooden lath known as a weaver's sword. Only this time the sound they produced was entirely different. Instead of a low muttering hum, the noise was a loud and angry buzz, almost the sound of an enraged swarm of bees. Then, as more and more of the whirling flails joined in, the sound swelled in volume until it became a cataract of noise, filling the air until it seemed that the blood was roaring in our ears. Finally, the noise altered again as the sound-makers began to coordinate the movements of their flails, and the sound began to come rushing towards us in wave after wave, rising and falling in volume as it beat upon our senses.

Presumably, this extraordinary resonance was intended to frighten or dismay our small group of men down on the beach and it worked. Numbed by the vibrating din, they stood rooted to the ground. This was their error. While the Skraeling boats were still some distance away from the shoreline, a shower of darts suddenly came skimming through the air from the flotilla and began to patter down around our men in a deadly hail. The Skraelings were using some sort of dart launcher, a flat board a cubit long that made an extension to their throwing arm and gave an astonishing range to their missiles. Three of our men were struck by the darts, two were killed outright, and scarcely a member of our advance party was not injured in some way. As the Skraelings came into close range, they began to fling another strange weapon at us - spears which pulled behind them some sort of round float attached by a short length of line. The weird and startling appearance of these floats hurtling through the air frightened our men as much as the war sound of the flails. As they went skimming through the air over their heads and bounced on the ground, our men feared that the Skraelings were unleashing some sort of magic weapon.

Now the Skraelings were climbing out of their boats and running up the beach, waving lances and stone-edged knives, trying to come to grips with our advance guard. The Norsemen turned and fled, as was Thorfinn's plan, for they were really decoys. When the Skraelings came level with the dead bodies of our two slain, their leader was seen to reach down and pick up the axe from the corpse of Thorbrand Snorrisson. The Skraeling leader must never have seen a metal axe before, because he hefted it and then hacked experimentally at a nearby rock. The axe head broke, and thinking it was useless because it did not cut the rock, the Skraeling leader threw it into the sea with a gesture of disgust. A few moments later he learned what a metal blade can do on human flesh because by then the decoy party of colonists, with the Skraelings in pursuit, had fallen back as far as the edge of the forest, where Thorfinn had hidden the main body of the settlers in his ambush. The bulk of our men came charging out of the brushwood at full tilt, waving their weapons and roaring their war shouts. The Skraelings did not have a chance. They were lightly clad, held no shields, and even their lances could be sheered through with a swingle sweep of a metal sword. The rush of Norsemen bowled over the Skraelings, and before they could flee four Skraelings were killed, two of them victims to the heavy axes of the Norse farmers. The whole encounter was over in an instant. The Skraelings took to their heels in panic and either ran for the edge of the woods or back to their boats, which they pushed off and fled in as fast as they could paddle.

When I helped bury the corpse of Thorbrand Snorrisson I found that the small dart which had killed him looked more like a hunting weapon than a man-killing implement. As for the mysterious spears and their attached floats, they proved to be sealing harpoons with an inflated bladder attached to mark the spot where the seal has dived when it is wounded. I did not voice my opinion to the jubilant settlers — they would have thought me utterly impertinent — but I came to the conclusion that the Skraelings had not come prepared for war and we did not deserve our victory. The Skraelings were a large hunting party and would have passed by us peaceably if we had not challenged them with our red war shields and shouted defiance.

Yet, in the greater scheme of our Norse involvement in Vinland, I don't think it would have made any difference in the end. Even if we had realised that the Skraelings meant us no harm on that occasion, they would probably have come back on a later visit to drive us away from the lands where they lived. And, of course, we took the Skraelings to have the same responses as ourselves — when the Norse feel threatened, their natural reaction is to turn and fight, to protect their territory. They seldom consider the long-term consequences of such action, and they rarely back down. That day on the beach at Vinland our men were too frightened and too desperate to act in any other way than with violence.

It was that feeling of being under threat that lost us Vinland. We stayed for the winter — the season was too advanced to think of moving anywhere - but all through the winter months we worried and fretted that the Skraelings would return. 'This is a rich and fertile land,' was how Thorfinn put it to us on the day we assembled to make a final decision about leaving. 'Of course, we can visit from time to time and cut shiploads of fine timber for ourselves. But we would be foolish to think that we can establish ourselves here in the face of superior numbers of hostile Skraeling. In the end they would overwhelm us.' There was no dissenting voice. We knew we were too isolated and exposed. In the spring we reloaded our knorr with the products of our labour — seasoned timber, dried fruit, a rich store of furs, carved souvenirs of that splendid honey-coloured wood, the dried skins of some of the more colourful birds complete with their feathers — and we set sail for Greenland.

As our travel-worn knorr felt the wind and began to gather speed, I looked back at the gently sloping beach in front of Leif s cabins. On the very last morning of our stay I had stood barefoot in the sand and dug a final channel in the hopes of trapping a flounder, just as I had done when we first came there. Already the incoming tide which had floated the knorr off the landing beach, had washed away every trace of my labour. The only mark of my efforts to harvest the sea were a few piles of empty mussel shells just above the line of seawrack. A hundred paces farther up the beach, over the first swell of the dunes, I could just see the roofs of the turf houses we had abandoned. Already their humped shapes were merging into the distance, and soon they would be lost to view against the forest background. Everyone of us aboard the knorr was looking back, even the helmsman was glancing over his shoulder. We felt regretful but we did not feel defeated, and the one unspoken thought in our minds was that perhaps there were

Norsemen still left alive in that vast land and we were abandoning them to their fate.

I was thinking of one person in particular - my hero and tutor, Thorvall the Hunter. He had disappeared midway through our time at Leif s cabins when the bickering between ardent Christians and Old Believers reached such a pitch that Thorvall announced that he did not intend to stay any longer with the group. He would explore along the coast and find a more congenial spot. Anyone who wanted to accompany him was free to do so. Four of our men chose to go with him and Thorfinn gave them our small scouting boat, possibly because Gudrid encouraged him to do so. More than once she said that she did not want Snorri growing up in the company of men like Thorvall with their heathen ways. I was downcast for several days after Thorvall and his few companions rowed off, heading north along the coast. When we heard nothing more from them, I presumed with everyone else that Thorvall and his companions had been captured and killed by the Skraelings. It was what we Norse would have done to a small group of interlopers.

NINE

BACK IN BRATTAHLID, we received a muted greeting from the Greenlanders. The general opinion was that our expedition had been a wasted effort and it would have been better if we had stayed at home. Faced with this dispiriting reception, Thorfinn announced that he would spend only a few weeks in Greenland, then head onwards with his ship to Iceland. There he proposed to return to his family in Skagafjord, and set up house with Gudrid and their two-year-old son. This time I was not invited to accompany them.

Abandoned - or so I felt — by Gudrid and with only wizened Tyrkir as my mentor, I became morose and difficult. After nearly three years' absence in Vinland, my moodiness deepened when I found I had drifted apart from my circle of boyhood friends in Brattahlid. Eyvind, Hrafn and the others had continued to grow up as a group while I was away. They showed an initial curiosity about my descriptions of life in Vinland, but soon lost interest in what I had seen or done there. The boys had always regarded me as being a little odd, and now they judged that my lonely life in Vinland as the only child of my age, had made me even more solitary. We no longer had much in common.

The result was that I began to nurse a secret nostalgia for Vinland. My experiences in that strange land helped define who I was. So I yearned to return there.

The opportunity to go back to Vinland was a complete surprise when it came, because it was arranged by the last person in the world whom I would have expected: my aunt Freydis. While I had been away in Vinland, she had matured from a scheming nineteen-year-old into a domineering woman, both physically and mentally. She had put on weight and bulk, so now she was big and buxom, full-bosomed and with heavy arms and a meaty face that would have been better suited to a man. She even had a light blonde moustache. Despite her off-putting appearance she had managed to find a husband, a weak-willed blusterer by the name of Thorvard, who ran a small farm at a place called Gardar. Like the majority of the people of the area, he lived in fear of Freydis's temper, with its violent mood swings and bouts of black anger.

Freydis, who never lost the chance to remind people that she was the daughter of the first settler of Greenland, took it into her head that Thorfinn and Gudrid had been incompetent as pioneers in Vinland and that she, Freydis, could do better. She was so vehement on the topic that people listened to her. Leif s cabins, Freydis pointed out, were still the property of her half-brother, and she announced that the Eriksson clan should return to their property and make it flourish, and she was the person to do it. She began by asking my father for permission to reoccupy the huts. Leif prevaricated. He had decided that he would not waste any men or resources in Vinland after his failed investment with Thorfinn. So he put off Freydis with the promise that he would lend her the buildings and even loan her the family knorr, but only if she managed to raise a crew. However, when Freydis put her energies into a project there was nothing and no one who could stand in her way.

To everyone's astonishment Freydis produced not one crew, but three, and a second vessel as well. The way it happened was this: the spring after my return from Vinland with Gudrid and Thorfinn, a foreign ship jointly owned by two brothers from Iceland, Helgi and Finnbogi, put in to Brattahlid. She was the largest knorr that anyone had ever seen, so big that she carried sixty people on board. Helgi and Finnbogi had decided to emigrate to Greenland and had brought along their families, goods, cattle, and all the necessary paraphernalia. Naturally the two brothers went to see Leif to seek his advice on where they should settle. But on meeting the new arrivals, Leif was not at all keen to welcome them, for it was abundantly clear that the Icelanders were a very rough lot. Like Erik the Red before them, they had left Iceland to escape a violent blood feud which had involved several deaths. Three of the men had murder charges hanging over them. Leif could easily imagine the quarrels and violence if the newcomers tried unsuccessfully to settle the marginal lands, and then started to edge towards the better lands closer to the water. So while my father greeted the two brothers with a show of hospitality, he was very anxious that they should not stay too long. He advised them to proceed farther along the coast and find new land to the north — the farther away from Brattahlid the better was his unspoken opinion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking back on that moment, I imagine that most people would have stepped quietly back into the cover of the underbrush and quickly put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Skraeling hut. This would have been logical and sensible. Yet this thought never occurred to me. On the contrary, I knew with absolute certainty that I had to go forward. I knew, also, that no harm would come to me if I did. Later I was to come to understand that this sense of invulnerability mingled with curiosity and trust is a gift that I have naturally. I felt no fear or alarm. Instead a strange numbness ran right down through my legs, almost as if I could not feel my feet, and I felt I had no control over what my limbs were doing. I simply walked forward into the clearing, went across it to the entrance of the shelter, stooped down and pushed my way in.

As I straightened up inside the smoke-filled interior of the little lean-to, I found myself face to face with a small, thin man, who was flicking some sort of rattle steadily from side to side. It was this rattle which had made the rhythmic chinking sound I heard. The man must have been about sixty years old, though it was difficult to tell because he looked so different from any other human I had yet seen. He was no taller than me, and his narrow face was very brown and deeply lined, and framed with long, lank, black hair which hung down to his shoulders. He was dressed entirely in deerskin, from the jacket to the slippers on his feet. Above all he was very, very thin. His hands, his wrists where they emerged from the sleeves of his rough jacket, and his ankles were like sticks. He glanced up as I entered and the expression in his narrow brown eyes did not change as he looked straight into my face. It was almost as if he was expecting me, or he knew who I was. He gave me a single, long glance, then looked down again. He was staring down at the figure of another Skraeling, who was lying on a bed of branches and was obviously very ill. He too was dressed in animal skins and covered with a deerskin wrap. The man seemed barely conscious and was breathing erratically.

How long I stood there I have no recollection. All notion of time was absorbed into the hypnotic beat of the Skraeling rattle and I was completely relaxed. I too looked down at the invalid, and as I gazed at his recumbent body, something strange happened to my senses. It was as if I was looking through a series of thin veils arranged within the man's body and, if I concentrated hard enough, I could shift aside a veil and pass forward and see deeper and deeper inside, past his external form and into the man's interior. As each veil was passed, my vision became more strained until I could progress no further. By then I knew that I was seeing so far inside the sick Skraeling that I could distinguish the interior shape of his spirit. And that shape, his inner soul, was emitting a series of thin flickers, too light and frail to be sustained. At that moment I knew he was mortally ill. He was too sick to be saved and no one could help him. Nothing like this insight had ever happened to me before, and the impact of the premonition broke through my own inner calm. Like someone struggling to come awake from a deep sleep, I glanced around to try to grasp where I was, and I found myself looking into the eyes of the Skraeling with the rattle. Of course I did not know a single word of his language, but I knew why he was there. He was a doctor for his sick comrade, and he too had been peering into the invalid's soul. He had seen what I had seen. I shook my head. The Skraeling looked back at me quietly and I am sure he understood. Without any hurry I pushed my way out of the lean-to, then walked back across the clearing and away into the underbrush. I was confident that no one would follow me, that the Skraeling would not even mention my presence to his fellows, and that he and I shared something as close as any ties of tribe or race.

Nor did I tell Freydis, her husband, Thorvard, or anyone else in the camp about my encounter with the two Skraelings. There was no point in trying to explain it. They would have thought that I was hallucinating or, in view of what happened a month later, they would have seen me as a traitor who had failed to warn them that the Skraelings were closing in.

They came when the leaves on the trees had turned to the vivid reds and russets and yellows which herald the arrival of winter in those lands. Later we guessed that the Skraelings had needed to assemble their menfolk, who had dispersed to hunt and gather food for the winter, before they made their united effort to drive us away. Certainly the fleet of canoes which came paddling towards us that late autumn morning was twice the number of anything we had expected, though many of our more belligerent settlers had been waiting eagerly for the encounter. For weeks they had endlessly discussed their tactics and boasted how they would crush the Skraelings. So when the Skraeling canoes eventually approached the land, our main force rushed down to the beach and showed their red shields in defiance. For their part, the Skraelings stood up in their canoes and — as they had done the first time I ever saw them - they began to whirl their strange humming sticks through the air. Only now I noticed that they did not swing them with the sun as before, but in the opposite direction, and as they they whirled them faster and faster the air was again filled with a dreadful droning sound that seemed to work right inside our heads.

Our men were still on the edge of the surf, shouting insults and defiance, when the first Skraeling missiles struck. Once again the range of their dart throwers took our men unawares. Two grunted in surprise and slumped down so suddenly that their comrades turned round in puzzlement.

Unnerved, our men began to fall back. They retreated up the beach in disorder, leaving the corpses at the water's edge. We watched the Skraeling flotilla paddle right up to the beach unopposed and their warriors step ashore.

The mass of the Skraelings advanced up the beach towards us.

There must have been nearly eighty of them and they kept no particular order or discipline, but neither did our men, who were scampering back towards the settlement. What followed was a chaotic and deadly brawl, which I watched from the shelter of a dense willow thicket, where I had been sent by Freydis's husband Thorvard when the Skraeling boats first appeared. Earlier I had told Thorvard how the Skraelings had been terrified by the bellowing of our bull on my first visit to Vinland. Now Thorvard told me to run and catch one of the bulls we had brought with us and produce the animal as our secret weapon. But by the time I had brought the animal to the willow thicket, ready to drive it into the open, our forces were about to gain an even more spectacular advantage.

Our men were fleeing back along the bank of one of the small rivers leading up from the strand. Later they claimed that a second band of Skraelings had emerged from the forest and was blocking their line of retreat towards the settlement, though this was a fabrication. The real problem was that our men had no leadership or cohesion. Once again the Icelanders and Greenlanders were behaving as though they were complete strangers to one another, and neither group showed any sign of helping the other. In their panic-stricken haste men were tripping over and picking themselves up, then running onward and bumping into one another as they glanced over their shoulders to see if any more of the Skraeling darts were on their way, or if the Skraelings were pressing home the attack. At this point, when it seemed that our forces were beaten, we were saved by a berserk.

The term berserk has now such common currency that it is known to nations far beyond the Norse world. All agree that the word describes someone so brimming with fighting rage that he performs extraordinary deeds on the battlefield with no regard for his own safety. Some say that in his fury the berserker howls like a wolf before he attacks, others that he foams at the mouth and bites the rim of his shield, glares at his foe, snarls and shakes before he strikes. A true berserk scorns any notion of armour or

self-protection and wears only a bearskin shirt as a mark of his role. Sometimes he wears no shirt at all and goes half-naked into battle. This I have heard, and much more besides, but I have never heard tell of what appeared that day as our men fought the Skraelings — a female berserk.

Our situation was desperate. Our ill-disciplined men were degenerating into a worse rabble. A few of them had turned to skirmish with individual Skraelings, while others were scrambling along the river bank, fleeing ignominiously. One or two were shouting for help, or standing open-mouthed and apparently shocked by the reality of hand-to-hand fighting. It was shameful.

Just at that moment the gate of the settlement palisade banged open, and out rushed a frightful figure. It was Freydis. She had been watching the rout and was appalled by the cowardice of our men. She was in a fury. She came running full tilt down the slope towards the battle, roaring with anger and cursing our men as cowards and poltroons. She made an awesome sight, with her massive bulk, thick legs like tree trunks pounding the ground, red-faced, sweaty and her hair streaming behind her. She was wearing a woman's underdress, a long loose shift, but had discarded her overmantle so as to be able to run more swiftly, and now the undershift flapped around her. She thundered down the slope like an avenging heavyweight Valkyrie and, coming on one of the Norsemen who was standing futilely, she gave him a hefty blow with her meaty arm, which sent him flying, and at the same time snatched the short sword from his hand. She was in a blinding rage, more with her own men than with the Skraelings, many of whom had stopped and turned to look in shocked amazement at this huge, blonde woman raging with obscenities. Freydis was incandescent with anger, her eyes rolling. 'Fight like men, you bastards!' she bellowed at our shamefaced settlers. 'Get a grip on yourselves, and go for them!' To emphasise her rage, to shame our men and work herself into an even greater frenzy, Freydis slipped aside her shift, pulled out one of her massive breasts and gave it a great stinging slap with the flat of her sword. 'Come on!' she screamed to her followers. 'A woman could do better.' And she flung herself at the nearest Skraeling and slashed at him with the weapon. The wretched man, half her size and strength, put up his spear shaft to ward off the blow, but Freydis's sword chopped through the timber cleanly and dealt him such a terrific blow on his neck that he crumpled up instantly. Freydis then swung round and began lumbering at full speed at the next Skraeling. Within seconds the invaders broke and ran back towards their canoes. They had never seen anything like this, and neither had our men. Puffing and panting, Freydis churned along the beach, taking wild swipes at the backs of the departing Skraeling, who did not even attempt to turn and throw darts at her. Our attackers were utterly nonplussed, and they left a panting Freydis standing in the shallows, her loose shift soaked at the hem, great patches of sweat staining her armpits, and splashes of Skraeling blood across her chest.

It was the last time we saw the Skraelings. They left seven of their number dead on the beach, and when we examined them I found that they were not like the healer I had met in the branch shelter in the woods. These Skraelings who had attacked us were shorter in stature, broader, and their faces were generally flatter and more round than the man I had met. They also smelled of fish and wore clothes more suited to the sea than the forest — long sealskin jerkins and heavy leggings. We stripped their bodies of any useful items — including some finely worked spearheads of bone, then carried their bodies to the top of a nearby cliff and threw them into the tide. Our own dead — there were three of them — were buried with little ceremony in shallow graves scraped out of the thin soil.

Our victory, if such an inglorious encounter deserves the name, made the resentment within our camp even worse. Icelanders and Greenlanders heaped blame on one another for being cowards, for failing to come to help, for turning and running instead of making a stand and fighting. No one dared look Freydis in the face, and people slunk about the settlement looking thoroughly ashamed. To make matters worse, winter came on us within a few days and so swiftly that we were caught unprepared. One morning the weather was crisp and bright, but by afternoon it began to rain, and the rain soon turned to sleet, and the following morning we woke up to find a heavy covering of snow on the ground. We managed to get the cattle rounded up and put into the sheds, but we knew that if the winter proved to be long and hard we had not gathered sufficient hay to feed the cattle through to springtime. And the cattle would not be the only ones to suffer. The Icelanders had spent so much time on the construction of their new longhouses during the summer months that they had not been able to catch and dry enough fish for a winter reserve or save a surplus of sour milk and cheese. Their winter rations were very meagre, and when they suggested to Thorvard and the Greenlanders that they should share their food supplies, they were brusquely told that there was not enough to go round. They would have to fend for themselves.

That winter did prove to be exceptionally long and bitter, and in the depths of it we were hardly able to stir from our longhouses for the deep snow, ice and bitter cold outside. It was the most miserable episode of our entire Vinland experience. In the long-house of the Greenlanders, where I lived, life was hard. Our daily intake of food was quickly reduced to tiny portions of gruel with a handful of dried nuts which we had gathered in the autumn, and perhaps a few flakes of dried fish as we huddled around the central fire pit, nursing the embers of our small stock of firewood. All our cattle were dead by midwinter. We were feeding them such short rations that they never gave any milk anyhow, and we killed them when the fodder ran out entirely, though by then they were so scrawny that there was hardly any flesh on their bones. I missed my two mentors, Tyrkir and Thorvall. Before, in Vinland, they had been on hand to help pass the long dark hours with their tales of the Old Gods or instructing me in the Elder Lore. Now, with both men gone, I was reduced to empty daydreaming, turning over in my mind the tales they had told and trying to apply them to my own circumstances. It was at this time, in the depths of uncommonly harsh Vinland winter, that I first began to pray to Odinn, making silent prayers partly for my own solace, and partly in the hopes that he would come to help, to make the winter pass away, to reduce the pangs of hunger. I made sacrifices too. From my tiny ration of food, I would set aside a few dried nuts, a shred of meat, and when no one was looking I would hide them in a crevice in the longhouse wall. They were my offerings to Odinn, and if the mice and rats came and ate them, then — as I told myself — they were either Odinn in disguise or at least his ravens, Hugin and Munin, who would report back that I had made my proper obedience.

If our lives were pinched in the longhouse of the Greenlanders, the conditions in the two houses occupied by the Icelanders were far, far worse. Two of their men had received crippling wounds in the Skraeling attack, and while in summertime they might have been able to recover from their injuries with adequate food and warm sunshine, they failed to survive the fetid gloom of their longhouses. They lay wrapped in their lice-ridden clothes and with almost nothing to eat until they died a lingering and famished death. Theirs were not the only Icelandic deaths that winter. One of the longhouses was infected with some sort of coughing sickness which killed three of the settlers, and then a child, driven to desperation by hunger, wandered out into the black winter night and was found a few paces from the entrance next morning, frozen to death. A malignant silence settled over the three longhouses, which became no more than three long humps in the snow. For days on end nothing stirred.

Our longhouse was the most westerly of the three, and only occasionally did someone venture outside and walk through the thick snow to visit our immediate neighbours. For two months no one at all from our longhouse went as far as the second of the Icelandic houses, and when someone did — it was Thorvard, Freydis's husband - he found the door was banked up with snow as if no one had emerged for days. When he levered open the door and went inside, he found the place was a mortuary. A third of the people were dead of cold and hunger, and the survivors looked no more than bundles of rags, scarcely able to raise themselves from where they lay on the side benches.

There was more bad news when one of our own men came back from the beach, where we had stored the two knorrs for the winter. At the time of the first, unexpected snow we had dragged the two vessels on rollers up above the high-tide line, propped them up on wooden baulks, and heaped banks of shingle around them as a protection from the blizzards. Then we covered them with tents of wadmal. But a winter gale had stripped away the covers from the elderly vessel that Leif had loaned us, and snow had filled her. A false spring day with its sudden thaw had melted the snow to water, which filled the bilge. That same evening a sudden drop in temperature turned the water into ice, which expanded and split the garboard plank, the key plank which ran the length of her keel. When our carpenter tried to mend the long and dangerous crack he found that the bottom of our ship was entirely rotten. Every time he tried to replace a section of plank, the adjacent area of hull crumbled away. The carpenter was a grouchy and bad-tempered man at the best of times, and now he reported to Thorvard that he refused to waste his time trying to make the decayed old vessel seaworthy.

By that stage, I think, Freydis had already made up her mind that the colony was a failure and that we would have to evacuate Leif s cabins yet again. But she kept the idea to herself and, with typical guile, prepared for the evacuation without alerting anyone else. Her immediate problem was the damage to our knorr. We needed a vessel to carry us away from Vinland and our ancient and rickety knorr was no longer seaworthy. One possible solution was for all the settlers, both Icelanders and Greenlanders, to evacuate the colony by cramming aboard the Icelanders' large, newer vessel. But given the history of bad blood between the two groups it was very unlikely that the Icelanders would agree to this arrangement. Alternatively the Icelanders might lend us their vessel for the evacuation if we promised to send the ship back to them once we had safely arrived in Greenland. Though why the Icelanders should trust us to do this was an open question. And even if the Icelanders were so generous, Freydis knew that there was a more acute problem to confront: if the Icelanders stayed behind in Vinland and somehow managed to make a success of the venture, then by customary law the possession and ownership of the entire settlement would pass away from the Erikssons and transfer to Helgi and Finnbogi and their heirs. They would no longer be Leif s cabins, but Helgi and Finnbogi's cabins, and this was a humiliation which Freydis, the daughter of Erik the Red, could not bear.

Her solution to the dilemma was as artful as it was demonic. It depended on that fatal Norse belief in personal honour.

Very soon after the spring thaw, a real one this time, she walked over to visit the nearest Icelandic longhouse. It was early in the morning, at first light, and I saw her go because I had slipped out of the longhouse to get some badly needed fresh air after a fetid night spent among the snoring Greenlanders. I was loitering near one of the empty store sheds. I always tried to stay well clear of Freydis, so when I saw her I stepped behind the shed until she walked past. I watched her push open the door of the Icelanders' longhouse and go inside. When she reappeared she was accompanied by Finnbogi, who was wearing a heavy coat to keep out the cold. The two were intending to walk in my direction, and once again I shrank back from view. They halted, less than ten paces away, and I heard Freydis say, 'I've had enough of Vinland. I've made up my mind that my people should leave the colony and return home. For that I need to buy your knorr because our vessel is no longer fit for the journey to Greenland. We'll sail away from here, and if you, Helgi and your people want to stay on, then the settlement is yours.'

Finnbogi must have been taken by surprise, for there was a long pause and then he answered that he had no objection to her proposal but would first have to check it with his brother. I heard the soft crunch of his footsteps receding on the slushy snow as he returned to the Icelanders' house. I waited to give Freydis time to get back to our own longhouse, and then scuttled there as fast as I could, knowing instinctively that something was very wrong. It was not my second sight which warned me. It was my long experience of Freydis. Speaking to Finnbogi, her voice had carried that hint of treachery and manipulation that had preceded the unpleasant tricks she had inflicted on me back in Brattahlid in my father's house. That tone of deceit convinced me that Freydis was planning something unpleasant. Quite how foul her plan was soon became apparent.

I got into the longhouse just in time to hear Freydis deliberately provoke her weak-willed husband Thorvard into losing his temper. That was another of Freydis's techniques I recognised. Thorvard must still have been in bed when Freydis returned to the longhouse and climbed in beside him, for he kept repeating his question. 'Where have you been? Where have you been? You have got cold, wet feet, and the hem of your shift is damp, so you must have been outside.' At first Freydis refused to answer. Then finally, when Thorvard was truly irritated with her grudging silence, she said that she had been to see Finnbogi and his brother to ask them for the sale or loan of their knorr.

'They refused my request outright,' she said. 'They laughed in my face, and then insulted me. They said I was becoming more like a man every day, and that you, not I, should have come to discuss the matter with them. Finnbogi even went so far as to hit me, knocking me to the ground.'

Thorvard began to bluster. He had a good mind to go out and give the brothers a good thrashing, he said. Freydis pounced on his bravado. 'If you were more than half a man,' she retorted scathingly, 'you would do more than just lie in bed threatening the two ruffians who have humiliated me. A real man would go off and avenge my honour. But you, you little worm, you are such a coward that you will do nothing. I know you and your fainthearted ways, and so too do half the people in Brattahlid. When we get home, I'm going to divorce you on the grounds of cowardice, and there's no one who would not sympathise with me.'

As usual, my aunt knew how to twist the knife. Cowardice is almost the worst and most shameful ground for summary divorce in Norse society, exceeded only by homosexual acts. Her goading was more than Thorvard could bear. He leapt out of bed, threw on his clothes and grabbed an axe and a sword. Moments later, with Freydis at his heels and calling on the other Greenlanders to follow their leader, Thorvard was slipping and slithering along the muddy path to the Icelanders' longhouse. He slammed his way into the building, ran across to where Helgi was sitting on his bed, sleepily thinking over Freydis's proposal to buy the knorr, and with a great swipe he sank his axe into Helgi's chest, killing him. Within moments a massacre was in progress. More and more of the Greenlanders appeared, brandishing their weapons and hacking and stabbing at the unfortunate Icelanders, who were taken by surprise. There were curses and shouts as the Icelanders rolled off their sleeping benches and scrabbled to find their weapons and defend themselves. But they were at too much of a disadvantage. Most of them were killed while they were sleepy or unarmed.

Too young to have been called upon to join the attack on the Icelanders, I heard the shrieks and clamour of the massacre and ran to the side entrance of the Icelanders' longhouse, arriving on the scene just in time to see Freydis pick up Helgi's sword from under his bed and make sure that his brother Finnbogi did not have a chance to reveal the truth by running him through so powerfully that the blade emerged a hand's breadth out of his back. She then wrenched the blade clear and joined in the general bloodbath.

Again Norse custom had its malign influence. Once the massacre had started, there was no going back. Every man knew the pitiless truth. The moment that the first mortal blow had been struck, it was better to kill every last Icelander. Any survivor was a potential witness, and his or her evidence about the murders would lead to a cycle of revenge if a report of the atrocity reached their families back in Iceland. Contributing to this stark policy was the killing frenzy which now gripped the Greenlanders. They killed and killed and killed until they were tired. Only when every adult Icelander, male or female, was dead did they stop the slaughter. By then only five Icelanders were left alive, three boys and two girls, and they were huddled in a corner, wide-eyed and speechless with shock as they watched their parents cut down. Murdering the children was beyond the capacity of even the most blood-crazed Greenlander, but not Freydis. She ordered the men to complete the job. They looked back at her, panting with exhaustion, their swords and axes streaked with gore, their clothes spattered with blood, and the red madness slowly fading from their eyes. They looked drained and tired, and did not move. Freydis raised her borrowed sword, and screamed at them. 'Kill the brats! Kill them! Do as I say!'

I was well inside the longhouse. Appalled by the sight of what seemed like so many limp and blood-soaked bundles of clothing lying on the floor, I crept along the side wall and sank down into a corner, wishing that I was somewhere else. I sat with my back to the wall, trying to make myself invisible, with my arms around my knees and my head down. Hearing Freydis's harridan shriek I raised my head and saw her become grim and calm. Her sway over the men became almost diabolic. She seemed to dominate them like some awful creature from the Hel of the Gods, as she ordered the men to bring the children one by one before her. Such was her authority that the men obeyed, and they led the children to stand in front of her. Then, teeth clenched, she beheaded each child.

I vomited pale, acid bile.

FREYDIS NOW ORDERED that everything that would burn was to be collected and heaped around the bases of the heavy timber posts supporting the turf roofs of the longhouses. Wooden benches, scraps of timber, old rags, anything combustible was piled up. Then Freydis herself went down the line of pillars, setting fire to the materials. She was the last person to leave each building and heave the big door shut. By midday we could see that smoke, which had been issuing from the smoke hole, was also seeping out from the sides of the building, where the turf wall joined the roof.

The whole structure of the longhouse began to look like a smouldering charcoal burners' mound as the turf and wattle interior walls eventually caught fire. The heat steadily built up until we could feel it from forty paces away. Around the fire the last of the snow melted and turned to slush, and in the end the long curved roofs simply fell in with a soft thump, a few sparks curled up into the sky, and the remains of the longhouses which the Icelanders had spent three months building became their funeral pyres. Looking at the ruins, it was obvious to us that in a few winters there would be scarcely any trace that they had ever existed.

Freydis summoned us to a meeting in our own longhouse late that evening. We gathered in a glum silence. Many of us were ridden with guilt, a few were trying to boost their spirits by bragging that it was exactly what the Icelanders had deserved. But Freydis was clear-headed and unmoved. 'The only trace of the Icelanders' existence now lies in our heads,' she told us fiercely. 'No one else will know what has happened, if we keep our mouths shut about the events of this day. We, who are responsible, are the only witnesses. Here on the edge of the world there is no one else to observe and report. We control the only knowledge of what has happened.' Freydis promised us that we had been justified in destroying the Icelanders. Again she produced the lie that she had asked Finnbogi for the loan of the knorr and been refused. 'The Icelanders denied us their knorr,' she said. 'If we had not seized the initiative, they would have sailed away, leaving us behind to our deaths. We acted in self-defence by striking first. What we have done was to save our own lives.'

I do not know how many of us believed her, perhaps a few. Those who did not were either too ashamed or too shocked or frightened of what might happen if they disagreed to speak out. So we kept quiet and followed Freydis's orders when she told us to load the knorr with our possessions and a cargo of valuable Vinland timber to take back to Greenland, for even at that late stage Freydis was determined to make a profit from her venture.

We were so keen to get away from that sinister place that we had the boat loaded and ready to sail within a week. Then Freydis ordered that our longhouse, too, should be set on fire. She told us that when we returned to Greenland we were to say that we had decided to abandon the colony, but the Icelanders had elected to stay, that Freydis and Thorvard had purchased the knorr, and when last seen the Icelanders had been thriving and prosperous and alive. Should anyone in later years visit the site, all they would find would be the burnt-out ruins of the longhouses, and of course they would presume that the Skraelings had overwhelmed the settlement and destroyed every last colonist.

TEN

SUCH A MONSTROUS event could never be kept a secret. When we reached Brattahlid, our people were delighted to see us safely back, though disappointed to hear that once again our plans for a permanent settlement in Vinland had been abandoned. Freydis went immediately to her farm at Gardar, taking her followers with her. Some she bribed to keep quiet about the massacre of the Icelanders, others she threatened with death if they should reveal the details. Given her reputation for violence, these threats were very effective. But rumours soon began to leak out, like the smoke which rose from the smouldering longhouse. Some former Vinlanders blurted out the grisly details when they were drunk. A few shouted aloud during their nightmares. Most were clumsy liars, and inconsistencies in their stories were noticed. Finally, the swirl of rumour and doubt became so powerful that Leif himself decided he must get at the truth of what was happening with his property in Vinland. He asked his half-sister to visit him at Brattahlid, and when she refused, he had three of her thralls arrested and tortured to reveal what had really gone on at Leif s cabins. They quickly revealed the horrors of Vinland, and Leif was appalled. He could not bring himself to punish his half-sister directly, for that would violate his ties of kinship. But he pronounced a curse on her and her progeny and shunned her for the rest of his life.

He also refused to have under his roof anyone who had been involved in these despicable events. The result was that I, who had been an innocent bystander to the massacre, was banished from his household.

For me, it was out of the question to live in Gardar with Freydis. We had a mutual dislike and my presence would have reminded her of the blood-stained episode which was to blight the rest of her life. For a few weeks I lived with Tyrkir, now an old man with failing eyesight, in his cabin on the outskirts of Brattahlid, until my father Leif could make plans for me, his bastard child, to be shipped away. He arranged a passage for me aboard the next trading vessel that arrived and made it clear to me that it did not much matter where I went. I said goodbye to Tyrkir, who was probably the only person genuinely sorry to see me leave, and at the age of thirteen began yet another sea journey, this time heading eastward.

Deep down, I suppose I was hoping that I might be able to find Gudrid again and be accepted back into her affections. I had heard nothing from her since she and Thorfinn and young Snorri had left Greenland to return to Thorfinn's people in Iceland. But for me Gudrid was still the person who had shown me the greatest kindness in my childhood, and I had no plan save for a vague notion of presenting myself at her new household to see if she would take me in. So when the ship called in at Iceland I told the captain that I would be going no farther with him. It may have seemed a rash decision to set foot in a country, several of whose people had been victims in Vinland, but news of the massacre had not yet spread and I discovered within days that the extermination of the Vinlanders was not the unique atrocity that I had imagined. Every farmer in Iceland was talking about the climax to a more local feud which, in its gruesome details, provided a freakish echo of the Vinland atrocity.

The feud had been going on for years, driven by the hatred of Hallgerd, the malevolent wife of a farmer named Gunnar Hamundarson, for her neighbour Bergthora, wife of Njal Thorgeirsson.

The feud had started with a quarrel over a dowry and had spread to include dozens of kinsmen and outsiders, leading to a series of killings and revenge murders. The autumn before I arrived a gang of Hallgerd's faction had surrounded the farmhouse in which Njal and his wife lived, blocked up the doors and set it on fire, burning to death nearly everyone inside, including Njal's three sons.

For me the story was a grisly reminder of Vinland, but for the sweating farmer from whom I heard the tale after I came ashore it was the juiciest gossip of the day. I was helping him stack hay in his barn to pay for my night's lodging. 'It'll be the high point of the next Althing, of that you can be sure,' he said as he wiped the back of his hand across his shiny forehead. 'It'll be a confrontation the like of which has not been seen for ages. Njal's people are bringing a lawsuit against the Burners, seeking compensation for his death, and the Burners are sure to bring along as many of their own supporters as they can muster to defend their action. And if that maniac Kari Solmundarson also shows up, the Gods only know what is likely to happen. I wouldn't miss it for all the looted silver in the world.'

Kari Solmundarson was the name which kept cropping up whenever people discussed the possible repercussions of the Burning, as people had taken to calling it. He was Njal's son-in-law and had escaped from the blazing building after the roof fell in by running up a fallen rafter, where it lay aslant against the gable wall, then leaping out through the smoke and flames as his makeshift ladder collapsed behind him. The Burners had surrounded the building and were waiting to kill any fugitives. But they failed to spot Kari in the gathering darkness, and he slipped through the cordon, though his clothes and hair were so charred by the heat that he had to plunge into a small lake to extinguish the embers. Now he had sworn to exact revenge and was criss-crossing Iceland, rallying Njal's friends to the cause and swearing bloody vengeance. Kari was a foe the Burners would have to take seriously according to everything I heard. He was a skilful warrior, a vikingr who had seen plenty of action overseas. Before he came to Iceland and married Njal's daughter, he had lived in Orkney as a member of the household of Earl Sigurd, lord of that country, and had distinguished himself in several sharp battles, including a famous encounter with a gang of pirates when he had rescued two of Njal's sons.

The moment I heard Kari's story, my half-formed idea of trying to track down Gudrid was replaced by a new and more attractive scheme. I added up the years and calculated that when Kari Solmundarson had served the Earl of Orkney, he might well have met my mother, Thorgunna. He was in Orkney at about the time she seduced Leif the Lucky, to the amazement of all at Earl Sigurd's court, and conceived a son. If I could locate Kari and ask him about those days in Birsay, maybe I would have the chance to learn more about my mother and who I was.

The place to find Kari, if the farmer was correct, was at the next Althing.

As this memorial is intended, if only in my fantasy, to redress some of the lapses which the good Adam of Bremen is likely to make in his history and geography of the known world, perhaps I should say something about the Althing, because I doubt if the cleric of Bremen has ever heard of it, and it is a remarkable institution. Certainly I never came across the like of it elsewhere in my travels. The Althing is how the Icelanders rule themselves. Every year the leading farmers in each quarter of the island hold local meetings, where they discuss matters of common interest and settle disputes among themselves. Important topics and any unresolved lawsuits are then brought to the Althing, a general conclave, which always assembles in July after ten weeks of summer have passed. Only the wealthier farmers and the godars or chieftains have any real role in the actual law-making and courts of justice. The common folk merely look on and support their patrons when called upon to do so. But the gathering is such a combination of fairground, congress and gossip shop that every Icelander who can make the journey to Thingvellir does so. Listening to the lawsuits is a spectator sport. Plaintiffs and defendants, or their representatives, appear before sworn juries of their equals and make their appeals to the customs of the country. This is where the Law-speaker has an important role. He acts as umpire and decides whether the customs are fairly quoted and applied. In consequence the arguments often take on the flavour of a verbal duel, and the Icelanders, who enjoy courtroom revelations as much as anyone else, cluster round to listen to the rhetoric, while analysing who is being most skilled in twisting the law to their own ends or outsmarting the opposition. If they are looking for such lawyers' tricks, they are rarely disappointed.

Some might say that the Althing is an ill-advised way to run a country's affairs, and feel that these are best conducted by a single wise ruler, whether king or queen, emperor, lord or regent. If a single ruler cannot be found, then a small council of five or six is more than enough. The notion that Iceland's affairs should be conducted by the mass of its citizens assembling once a year on a grassy pitch does seem very odd. But this is how the Icelanders have arranged matters ever since the country was first settled nearly two hundred years ago, and in truth its way of government does not differ so very much from the councils of kingdoms where the barons and nobles form their rival factions and compete with one another for the final verdict or advantage. The only difference is that Iceland lacks a single overlord, and this leaves the factions to settle the scores directly among themselves when legal arguments are exhausted. This is when the weapons take over from words.

Thingvellir, the site of the annual Althing, is an impressive location. In the south-west of the country and about five days' ride inland from Frodriver, where my mother spent her last days, it is a grassy area at the base of a long broken cliff, which provides sheltered spots for pitching tents and erecting temporary cabins among scattered outcrops of rock. One particular rock, known as the Lawgiver's Rock, makes a natural podium. Standing on top of this, the Lawspeaker opens the proceedings by reciting from memory the traditional laws and customs of the land to the assembled crowd. There is so much law for him to remember that the process can take two or three days, and when I was there the White Christ priests were already suggesting that it would save time just to write down the laws and consult them as necessary. Of course, the priests knew very well this meant that they, the book-learned priests, would eventually control as well as interpret the legal system. But as yet the change from memory to the written page had not been made, and to the irritation of the White Christ faction the Lawspeaker still went to the nearby Oxar River on the first day of the Althing and hurled a metal axe into the water as an offering to the Old Gods.

THE FACTION SUPPORTING the Burners arrived in style. They came as a group, about forty of them, riding those small and sturdy Icelandic horses. They were armed to the teeth because they feared an ambush organised by Kari. Their leader was a local chieftain, Flosi Thordarson. He had planned and organised the incendiary attack, though he did not boast about it as much as several of the other Burners, who arrived at Thingvellir gloating over the death of Njal and bragging that they would finish the job by putting paid to Kari as well, if he dared show his face. By contrast Flosi preferred to work with his head rather than by brawn. He knew that the Burners had a very weak case when it came to defending their actions before the courts set up at the Althing. So he used a classic strategy: he resolved to bribe the best lawyer in Iceland and rely on his legal hair-splitting to get the Burners acquitted.

The lawyer he picked was Eyjolf Bolverksson, generally considered to possess the most wily legal mind in the country. Eyjolf had already set up his booth at Thingvellir when Flosi went looking for him. Flosi, however, had to be careful about being seen negotiating in public with Eyjolf because Icelandic custom dictates that a lawsuit can only be conducted by the party directly concerned or by a deputy with a recognised relationship such as kinship or a debt of honour. Legal advice is not meant to be for profit or hire. Eyjolf had no prior connection with the Burners, and it is very unlikely that he believed in their innocence. But Eyjolf had a reputation for avarice and, like many lawyers, he was perfectly willing to sell his skills if the payment was high enough. So initially he rebuffed Flosi, telling him that he would not act on his behalf. At most he was allowed to act as a friend of the court and give impartial advice. But when Flosi quietly took him off to one side and offered him an arm bracelet of solid gold, Eyjolf accepted the bribe and agreed to act for him, assuring Flosi that no one else knew so intimately the twists and turns of the back alleys of Icelandic custom and that he would find a way which would allow the Burners to escape punishment.

I know all this because, by then, I had been set to spy on Flosi.

Four days before the Burners arrived at the Althing, Kari Solmundarson slipped quietly into Thingvellir. I would not have guessed from his appearance that Kari was the formidable warrior of his reputation. He was only of average height and rather slim, and he scarcely looked as if he could heft a battleaxe to good effect. He had a narrow face with a long nose above a small mouth, and his brown eyes were rather close set. Unusually for a fighting man, he kept his beard very neat and trim and tied back his hair with a browband of dark grey. Only when he was ready to do battle did he remove the browband and his magnificent head of hair become a warrior's mane. But if you looked past the sober style of Kari's dress, his movements gave him away. He was as supple as an athlete, always quick and fluid, and constantly alert like some sort of hunting animal. A bystander pointed Kari out for me just as Kari was about to enter the booth of one of his potential allies. I walked up behind him, out of his line of vision. Yet he sensed my presence, suddenly whirled about to face me, and dropped his hand to the hilt of the short sword in his belt. When he saw only an unarmed boy, he relaxed.

'Are you Kari Solmundarson?' I asked.

'I am,' he replied. 'Who are you, lad? I don't think I have seen you before.'

'I'm Thorgils Leifsson, though perhaps it might be more accurate if my name was Thorgils Thorgunnasson.'

He looked more than a little startled. 'Thorgunna the w—' He stopped himself. 'Thorgunna, who came from Ireland to Earl Sigurd's court?' he asked.

'Yes, I grew up in Greenland and the west, and only arrived here recently. I was hoping you could tell me something about my mother.'

"Well, well, you're Thorgunna's son. I did know your mother, at least by sight, though we exchanged only a few words,' Kari replied, 'but right at this moment I don't have time to spend chatting about those days. I've got much to do here at the Althing, but if you want to tag along with me, perhaps there will be a moment when I will be able to tell you a little of what you want to know.'

For the rest of that day, and the next, I followed Kari as he went from booth to booth, talking to the godars who had known his murdered father-in-law. Sometimes he was successful in enlisting their support for the case against the Burners, but just as often he was told that he would have to look after his own interests as the Burners were too powerful and anyone helping Kari would be victimised. In one booth we found a tall, rather gaunt man, lying on a bed with his right foot wrapped in bandages. The invalid was Thorhall Asgrimmsson, Njal's foster son.

'Thank the Gods that you managed to get here,' said Kari, obviously pleased.

'The travelling was painful, but I managed it by taking it in slow stages,' Thornhall replied. 'The infection is so sore that I can hardly walk.'

He pulled aside the bandages and showed his right ankle. It was swollen to three times its normal size. In the centre of the swelling a great pus-filled boil seemed to pulsate with heat. In the centre of the boil, I could see the focus of the infection: a black spot like an evil fungus ringed with a fringe of angry red.

'The court case against the Burners will probably be called the day after tomorrow. Do you think you will be able to attend?' asked Kari.

'I doubt it, unless the boil bursts by then,' Thorhall replied. 'But even if I can't attend in person, I can follow the case from my bed here and offer advice if you keep me informed of the details of each day's proceedings.'

'I'm really grateful, and can't thank you enough for coming to the Althing,' Kari said.

'It's the least I can do,' Thorhall said. 'It was your father-in-law Njal who taught me nearly everything I know about the law and I want to see justice done to his murderers.' He paused and thought for a moment. 'In fact, my disability could be useful. Very few people know that I am here, cooped up on this bed, and I think that it should stay that way. We might work a surprise on them.' He glanced at me. 'Who's this youngster?'

'He's just come from Greenland, grew up there and in a place called Vinland.'

Thorhall grunted. 'What do you know about the arrangements Flosi and the Burners are making for their defence at the trial?'

'It's said that they are going to try to get Eyjolf Bolverksson to lead their defence.'

'Officially he shouldn't be taking the case,' said Thorhall, 'but knowing how greedy he is for money, I expect he will be bought. If he is lining up against us, then it would be helpful to know.' His glance fell on me. 'Perhaps this lad could make himself useful. I doubt if anyone around here knows who he is, and he wouldn't stand out in a crowd.'

Then, speaking directly to me, he asked, 'Could you do something for us? If you had Flosi and the chief Burners pointed out to you, do you think you could stick close to them and report back to us how they are getting on in their campaign to recruit allies for their court hearing?'

It was the first time that anyone had ever showed such confidence in me and I was flattered. Equally important, Thorhall's suggestion appealed to my sense of identity. Odinn, as I mentioned earlier, is the God of disguises, the listener at the door, the stealer of secrets, and the God whose character and behaviour appeals to me most. Here was I, alone in a new country, being asked to spy in a matter of real importance. To accept the invitation would be a homage to Odinn and, at the same time, it would be a way of earning the confidence of the man who could tell me about my mother.

So it was that, three days later, I was crouching in a cleft of rock, barely daring to breathe. Not ten paces away was Flosi Thordarson, leader of the Burners, together with two of his leading supporters, who I would later learn were Bjarni Brodd-Helgason and Hallbjorn the Strong. With them was the eminent legal expert Eyjolf. He was easy to recognise because he was a dandy who liked to strut around the Althing wearing a flashy scarlet cloak and a gold headband, and carrying a silver-mounted axe. We were all a short distance behind the lip of the Almmana Gorge, out of sight of the meeting place below. Clearly the four men had come to this isolated spot for a private conference, thinking it an ideal place to talk freely, after they had left their retainers to keep a lookout. I had seen the group leave the cluster of booths at the Althing and begin to walk along the path leading to the clifftop, and I had guessed where they were going. Scrambling up ahead of them, I flung myself down on the grass so I was not visible against the skyline. After catching my breath and waiting for the pounding of blood in my ears to cease, I raised my head cautiously and looked to my right. A moment later I was wriggling backwards anxiously and trying to burrow into cover. The four men had chosen to sit down alarmingly close to me and begin their discussion. Fortunately the Thingvellir cliff is made of the rock the Icelanders call hraun. It oozes from the ground as a fiery torrent when the Gods are angry and, when it cools and hardens, develops cracks and slits. Into one of these clefts I slid. I was too far away to hear anything more than the occasional scrap of conversation when one or another raised his voice, but it was clear that some negotiations were going on. The outcome must have been satisfactory because the next thing I saw as I peeked cautiously from my hiding place, was Flosi pull off his own arm a heavy gold bracelet, take Eyjolf s arm and slip the bracelet onto it. I could tell that the bracelet was valuable from the way it gleamed briefly in the watery sun, and Eyjolf lovingly ran his finger over it. Then Eyjolf carefully slid the bracelet farther up his arm, under the sleeve of his coat where it would not be seen.

At this point I had no idea of the significance of the transaction. When the four men got to their feet and walked back along the path to rejoin their waiting retainers, I waited silently, still pressed to the ground, until I guessed that the others must be gone. Then I slipped quietly back to the booth, where Kari was conferring with Thorhall, and reported what I had witnessed. Kari scowled and muttered something about making sure that Eyjolf did not live to enjoy his bribe. Thorhall, lying on his cot, was more phlegmatic. 'Eyjolf s a tricky customer,' he said, 'but he may not be quite the invincible lawyer that he thinks he is.'

The eagerly awaited lawsuit began next morning before a large and expectant audience. One after another, various members of Kari's faction stood at the foot of the Law Rock and took it in turns to pronounce the accusations. The most eloquent speakers had been chosen, and the legal formulae rolled out sonorously. They accused Flosi Thordarson and his allies of causing the death of the Njalssons 'by internal wound, brain wound, or marrow wound' and demanded that the culprits be neither 'fed nor forwarded nor helped nor harboured' but condemned as outlaws. Further, they demanded that all the goods and properties of the accused be confiscated and paid as compensation to the relatives of the dead family and the people living in their area. It was then that I noticed how the crowd assembled round the law court were standing in separate groups. If I had not been a newcomer, I would have identified much sooner how those who supported the Burners were standing well apart from the band of men allied with Kari and the Njalsson faction. Between them, acting as a buffer, stood a large crowd of apparently neutral bystanders, and it was just as well they did so because both Kari's men and the Burners had come fully armed to the Law Rock and were wearing tokens -ribbons and emblems attached to their clothes - which signalled their loyalty and that they were ready for a fight.

For the moment, however, both sides were prepared to let the lawsuit take its course. The first day of the court case was occupied entirely with Kari's people laying accusations of murder or conspiracy to murder against the Burners. The second and third days saw legal arguments over which court had the power to try the cases, and who should be on the juries. Eyjolf proved to be every bit as slippery as his reputation suggested. He tried every wily trick in law to delay or deflect the accusations, and even came up with several variations which were entirely new. He fastened on tiny procedural irregularities which he claimed rendered the prosecution irrelevant. He discredited witnesses on minor technical points and had so many jurors disqualified for the most arcane reasons that Kari's side were driven to summoning up and enrolling nearly a dozen substitute jurors. Eyjolf bent and twisted the law this way and that, and the Lawspeaker, a man named Skapti, was constantly being called on to adjudicate. Invariably he found in favour of the clever Eyjolf.

At the end of each day the crowd, who greeted each new legal subtlety with a murmur of appreciation, judged that the Burners had the upper hand. But then next morning the spectators had to reverse that opinion because they had not reckoned with Kari's hidden adviser, Thorhall, lying in his booth nursing his grotesque boil. I was kept employed constantly running back and forth to Thorhall to report every latest twist in the. legal wrangling. Thorhall, grimacing with discomfort, red-faced and tears of pain running down his cheeks, would listen to what I had to say, though the legal wording was so ornate that half the time I did not know what it was that I was reporting. Then he would wave me away to return to the law court and wait my next errand while he mulled over the fresh scrap of news. That evening he and Kari would have a consultation, and Kari or his representative would appear before the Lawspeaker the following morning and produce Thor-hall's counter-argument, which would save the day and allow the prosecution to proceed. The Lawspeaker several times remarked that he did not know there was anyone who knew the laws so thoroughly. One little wrangle, I remember, turned upon whether the ownership of a milch cow entitled an individual to sit on the jury as a person of property. Apparently it did.

After four labyrinthine days, the case finally ended with a verdict. Despite all his twisting and turning Eyjolf had failed to get the case thrown out and the Burners were found guilty by the forty-two members of the jury. At that moment Eyjolf produced his master stroke: the verdict was invalid, he pointed out, because the jury was too large. It should have had thirty-six members, not forty-two. Kari and his faction had fallen into the trap that Eyjolf had set right at the beginning. His strategy had been to challenge repeatedly the composition of the jury, until he had lured Kari's faction into agreeing to an excess of jurors. On this technicality, the case against the Burners collapsed. Promptly Eyjolf turned the case on its head. He announced that Kari's prosecution had been malicious and that he was indicting Kari and his followers for false accusation and demanded that they, not the Burners, should be pronounced outlaws.

Kari came with me this time as we hurried back to Thorhall's booth to report the disaster. It was just past noon, and we left a crowd of onlookers clustering round Eyjolf and the Burners and excitedly offering their congratulations. Kari pushed past the door flap and summarised the situation in a few words. Thorhall, who had been lying back on his cot, swore loudly, sat up and swung his tender foot onto the ground. I had never seen a man look so angry. Thorhall groped under the cot and pulled out a short stabbing spear. It was, I remember, a particularly fine weapon, razor sharp, its blade inlaid with some fine silver work. Lifting up the spear with both hands, Thorhall brought it plunging down on the enormous boil on his ankle. There was a sickly squelching sound and I could almost hear the pus and blood as it burst out. A fat gob of pus slopped on the earth and there was a splatter of black blood across the earth floor as the putrefaction exploded. Thorhall let out a brief moan of pain as the boil was lanced, but a moment later he was on his feet, spear in hand and with bits of his own flesh still on the blade, striding out of the door, not even with a limp. Indeed, he was walking so fast that I found it difficult to keep up with him. I noticed that Kari, who was matching Thorhall stride for stride, had pulled off his browband, shaken out his hair, and had clapped a helmet on his head.

Thorhall came barging into the back of the crowd loyal to the Burners. The first person he encountered was one of Flosi's kinsmen, a man called Grim the Red. One look at Thorhall's furious expression and the spear in his hand, and Grim raised his shield to protect himself. Barely pausing, Thorhall rammed the spear into the shield with such force that the shield, an old and badly maintained wooden one, split in two. The spear blade carried right through Grim's body so that the point came out of his back between his shoulders. As Grim dropped to the ground, someone from the far side, from Kari's faction, shouted out, 'There's Thorhall! We can't let him be the only one to take revenge on the Burners!' and a furious melee broke out. Both sides drew their weapons and flung themselves at their opponents. So I saw what, in the end, is the deciding factor of Icelandic justice.

I also understood how Kari had got his reputation as a fighter. He came face to face with two of the Burners — Hallbjorn the Strong and Ami Kolsson. Hallbjorn was a big brute of a fellow, heavy-boned and broad-set. He was armed with a sword, which he swung at Kari, a low scything sweep at his legs, hoping to cripple or maim him. But the big man was too ponderous. Kari saw the blow coming. He leaped high in the air, drawing his knees up to his chest, and the sword swept harmlessly under him. Even as Kari landed, he struck with his double-bladed battleaxe at Ami Kolsson, a hit so shrewdly directed that it caught the victim in the vulnerable spot between shoulder and neck, chopping through the collarbone and splitting open his chest. Mortally wounded, Ami fell. Turning towards Hallbjorn, who was getting ready to take a second swing at him, Kari sidestepped and used his axe backhanded. The blade glanced off the lower edge of Hallbjorn's shield and carried downward, severing the big toe from Hallbjorn's left foot. Hallbjorn gave a howl of pain and hopped back a step. One of Kari's friends now rushed in and gave Hallbjorn such a shove with his spear that the big man toppled backwards in a heap. Scrambling back to his feet, Hallbjorn limped back in the crush of people as fast as he could set his injured foot on the ground. With each step he left a small splash of blood.

Next I witnessed something I have seen only four or five times in my life, even though I was to take part in quite a number of battles. Standing a little behind Kari, I saw a spear came hurtling at him, thrown by one of the Burners. Kari, who was not carrying a shield, sidestepped and caught the weapon left-handed in mid-air. At that instant I realised that Kari was ambidextrous. He caught the spear, as I say, left-handed, turned it and flung it back straight into the crowd of Burners and their supporters. He did not take aim, but threw as a reflex. The spear plunged into the crowd, killing a man.

By this stage men from both factions were trading blows with swords and axes and daggers, slamming shields in one another's faces, headbutting, wrestling hand to hand. This was not a military encounter between trained soldiers, disciplined and skilled in the use of arms. It was an ugly brawl between enraged farmers, and no less dangerous for being so.

The Burners and their friends began to fall back in disorder, and as the retreat began, Kari, the experienced fighter, picked his targets. He looked around for the men whom I had identified to him, those who bribed Eyjolf at the meeting at the gorge. One — Hallbjorn the Strong — was already in retreat with his injured foot, the other was Bjarni Brodd-Helgason. Seeing Bjarni in the scrimmage, Kari began to press towards him. There was no room for Kari to use his axe in the thick of the turmoil. Instead, again with his left hand, he snatched up a spear which someone had thrown and which was sticking up from the ground, and slithered the weapon through a gap between two men. His intended victim swung his shield round just in time to deflect the stab, which otherwise would have spitted him. With Kari extended fully forward, Bjarni saw his chance. As a space opened up, he darted his sword at Kari's leg. Once again Kari's remarkable agility saved him. He jerked back his leg, pivoted like a dancer, and in a moment was poised again and making a second spear thrust. As he lunged forward, Bjarni's life was saved by one of his retainers running forward with a shield. Kari's spear penetrated the shield and gashed the man in the thigh, a deep wound which was to make him a cripple for the rest of his life. Kari swayed back, preparing to strike a third time. He had dropped his axe and, holding the spear with both hands, thrust straight at Bjarni. The Burner threw himself sideways, rolling on the ground so the spear passed over him, then got back on his feet and ran for his life.

The fighting was now getting hazardous for the onlookers. The retreating Burners had to pass between the booths of several godars who had been friends with their victim, Njal. These godars and their retainers deliberately blocked the way, jostling and taunting the unfortunate Burners. Their taunts soon turned to blows and it seemed that the entire Althing was about to disintegrate into a general battle. A man named Solvi, who belonged to neither faction, was standing beside his booth as the Burners streamed by. Solvi was cooking a meal and had a great cauldron of water boiling over the cook fire. Unwisely he made a remark about the cowardice of the Burners, just as Hallbjorn the Strong was passing by. Hallbjorn heard the insult, picked up the man bodily and plunged him head first into the cauldron.

Kari and his allies chivvied the Burners through the booths and back towards the bank of the Oxar River. Both sides began to suffer losses. Flosi hurled a spear which killed one of Kari's men; someone else wrenched the same spear from the corpse and threw it back at Flosi, injuring him in the leg, though not badly. Once again it was Kari, the professional fighter, who did the most damage. Of the men who had almost humiliated him at the court, the key figure was Eyjolf the lawyer. Now Kari was out for revenge. As the Burners began to cross the river to safety, splashing their way through the milky-white shallows, Thorgeir Skora-Geir, who had been fighting alongside Kari all the time, saw the lawyer's scarlet cloak.

'There he is, reward him for that bracelet!' Thorgeir shouted, pointing to Eyjolf.

Kari seized a spear from a man standing beside him and threw it. The trajectory was flat and low, and the spear took Eyjolf in the waist and killed him.

With Eyjolf s death, the fighting began to subside. Both sides were exhausted, and Kari's faction were unwilling to cross the river and advance uphill against the Burners. One last spear was thrown — no one saw who flung it — and it struck down one more Burner. Then several of the leading godars arrived, among them Skapti the Lawspeaker, with a large band of their followers. They placed themselves between the two groups of combatants and called a halt to the fighting. Enough blood had been spilled, they said. It was time to make a temporary truce, and try to settle the dispute by negotiation.

To my astonishment, I now learned that conflict and killing in Iceland can be priced. Half a dozen godars assembled before the Law Rock and formed a rough-and-ready jury to calculate who had killed whom, how much the dead man was worth, and who should pay the compensation. It was like watching merchants haggle over the price of meat.

The weary fighters, who had been hacking at one another a moment before, were now content to lean on their shields or sit down on the turf to rest while they listened to the godars make their tally. The killing of this man was balanced by the killing of someone on the other side, the value of that wound was set at so many marks of silver, but that sum was then set against an injury on the opposite side, and so forth. In the end the godars decided that the losses that the Burners had sustained at the Althing brawl made up for the deaths they had inflicted on Kari's faction on previous occasions, and that both sides should make a truce and waive their claims for compensation. The original outstanding matter - the Burning of Njal and his family - was also settled. Compensation was to be paid for Njal's death, also for the death of his wife, and the Burners were to suffer outlawry. Flosi was banished for three years, while four of the more belligerent Burners — Gunnar Lambason, Grani Gunnarsson, Glum Hildisson and Kol Thorsteinsson — were banished for their lifetimes. However, in a spirit of compromise, the sentence of outlawry was not to take effect until the following spring, so that the chief malefactors could spend the winter arranging their affairs before beginning their period of banishment from Iceland.

The one man for whom no compensation was either sought or paid was Eyjolf. His underhand ways, it was commonly agreed, had brought the law into disrepute. One by one, the various farmers shook hands on the agreement, and thus ended what was, by all accounts, the most violent battle ever to take place before Logberg, the Law Rock.

ELEVEN

'OUTLAWRY FOR THREE years - that I can accept, but it's not for a youngster,' Kari explained later that evening. He had remembered me, even after all the violence of the day, and summoned me to the booth where he was staying. There he told me as much as he could remember about my mother Thorgunna in Orkney — including the details which I have given earlier — and now he was trying to make me understand why I had to fend for myself. When the godars announced their decisions at the Law Rock, Kari had been the only person to reject their judgement. He refused to acknowledge that the killings and maimings of the recent skirmish could be equated with the murders committed by the Burners on Njal and his family. 'In front of the most influential godars in the land, I declared that I refused to give up my pursuit of the Burners,' he went on, 'That means that sooner or later they will condemn me to outlawry and force me to leave Iceland. If it is lesser outlawry, then I must stay away for three years. If I come back before the time is complete, then my sentence is increased to full outlawry and I will be banished for life. Anyone declared an outlaw and still found in Iceland can be treated as a criminal. Every man's hand is against him unless he has friends willing to take the risk of protecting him. He can be killed on sight, and the executioner can take his property. It is no life for you.'

I still asked Kari if I could continue to serve him. But he refused. He would have no retinue or following. He would act alone in pursuing his vengeance, and a thirteen-year-old lad would be a hindrance. But he did have a suggestion: I should travel to Orkney, to the earl's household, and find out more details about my mother for myself. 'The person there who might have some more information for you is the earl's mother, if she is still alive. Eithne is her name, and she and Thorgunna got on particularly well. Both came from Ireland and they used to sit for hours at a time, quietly talking in Irish to one another.'

And he promised that if he himself was ever going to Orkney, then he would take me with him. It was my reward for spying on the Burners during the Althing.

Kari's revelation that on Orkney, in the person of the earl's mother, I might find a source of direct information about my mother completely eclipsed my earlier, ill-formed scheme of trying to rejoin Gudrid and Thorfinn. There were another six days before the Althing would be closed and the people dispersed to their homes, and I spent those six days going from booth to booth of the more important landowners, looking for work. I offered myself as a labourer, willing to spend the autumn and winter on a farm doing the same humdrum jobs I had performed in Greenland. In return I would receive my board and lodging and a modest payment when spring came. I realised that the payment would probably be in goods rather than cash, but it should be enough to buy my passage to Orkney. As I was rather weakly looking, I encountered little enthusiasm from the farmers. Winter was not the season when they needed extra hands, and an additional employee in the house had to be fed from the winter stocks of food. My other failing was that no one knew who I was. In Iceland's close-knit society that is a great disadvantage. Most people are aware of a person's origins, where he or she comes from, and what is their reputation. The people I spoke to knew only that I had been raised in Greenland and had spent some time in Vinland, a place few of them had even heard of. They were puzzled that I did not speak with the vocabulary of an ordinary labourer - I had Gudrid to thank for that - and I was certainly not slave-born, though once or twice people commented that my green-brown eyes made me look foreign. I supposed that I had inherited their colour from Thorgunna, but I could not tell them that I was Thorgunna's son. That would have been disastrous. I had made a few discreet enquiries about my mother, without saying why I wanted to know. The reactions had been very negative. My informant usually made some comment about 'foreign witches' and referred to something called 'the hauntings'. Not wanting to seem too curious, I did not pursue my enquiries. So, with the exception of Kari, I told no one about my parentage.

Thus my anonymity, which had been a help when Kari set me to spy on the Burners, was now a handicap, and I became anxious that I would not find a place to spend the autumn and winter. Yet, someone had made a very accurate guess as to who I was, and was keeping an eye on me.

He was Snorri Godi, the same powerful chieftain whose half-sister Thurid Barkadottir had stolen my mother's bed hangings at Frodriver.

Thus when I arrived from Greenland, bearing the name Thorgils, and of the right age to be Thorgunna's son, Snorri Godi guessed my true identity at once. Typically, he kept the knowledge to himself. He was a man who always considered carefully before any action, weighed up the pros and cons, then picked the right moment to act. He waited until I approached him at his booth on the penultimate day of the Althing, looking for work. He gave no indication that he knew who I was, but told me to report to his farm at a place called Tung five or six days' distance to the northwest at the head of a valley called Saelingsdale.

Snorri's bland appearance belied his reputation as a man of power and influence, and it would have been difficult to give him a nickname based on his physical looks. Now in late middle age, he was good-looking in a neutral way, with regular features and a pale complexion. His hair, once yellow, had turned grey by the time I met him, and so had his beard, which once had a reddish tinge. In fact, everything about Snorri was rather grey, including his eyes. But when you looked into them you realised that the greyness was not a matter of indifference, but of camouflage. When Snorri watched you with those quiet, grey eyes and with his expression motionless, it was impossible to know what he was thinking. People said that, whatever he was thinking, it was best to be on his side. His advice was sound and his enemies feared him.

Snorri turned that quiet look on me when I reported to him on the day I arrived at his farmhouse. I found him seated on a bench in the farthest shadowy corner of the main hall. 'You must be Thorgunna's son,' he said quietly, and I felt my guts coil and tighten. I nodded. 'Do you possess any of her powers?' he went on. 'Have you come because she sent you?'

I did not know what he was talking about, so I stood silently.

'Let me tell you,' continued Snorri, 'your mother left us very reluctantly. For months after her death, there were hauntings at Frodriver. Everyone knows about your mother's reappearance stark naked when they were taking her corpse for burial. But there was more. Many deaths followed at Frodriver. A shepherd died there under mysterious circumstances soon afterwards, and his draugar, his undead self, kept coming back to the farm and terrifying everyone living in the house. The draugar even beat up one of the farm workers. He met the worker in the darkness of the stable yard and knocked him about so badly that he took to his bed to convalesce and never recovered. He died a few days later, some said from pure fright. His draugar then joined the shepherd's draugar in tormenting the people. Soon half a dozen of the farm workers, mostly women, got sick and they too died in their beds. Next, Thorodd, the man who had given your mother a roof over her head when she came from Orkney, was drowned with his entire boat crew when they went to collect some supplies. Thorodd's ghost and the ghosts of his six men also kept reappearing at the house. They would walk in and sit down by the fire in their drenched clothes and stay until morning, then vanish. And for a long time afterwards there were mysterious rustlings and scratching at night.'

I remained silent, wondering where Snorri's talking was leading. He paused, eyeing me as if to judge me.

'Have you met my nephew, Kjartan?' he asked. 'I don't think so,' I replied.

'He was the only person who seemed to be able to quell the hauntings,' Snorri went on. 'That is why I'm sure your mother's spirit was responsible because in her life she really desired that young man. I think that even as a ghost she still lusted for him until finally she understood that he had no wish for her. She came back one last time, in the form of a seal, and poked her head up through the floor of the farmhouse at Frodriver. She was looking at him with imploring eyes, and Kjartan had to take a sledgehammer and flatten her head back down into the earth with several strong blows before she finally left him alone.'

I still did not know what to say. Had my mother really been so enamoured of a young teenager, scarcely three years older than I was now? It was unsettling for me to think about it, but I was too naive as yet to know how a woman can become just as hopelessly attracted by a man, as the other way around.

Snorri looked at me shrewdly. 'Are you a follower of the White Christ?' he asked.

'I don't know,' I stammered. 'My grandmother built a church for him in Brattahlid, but it wasn't used very much, at least not until Gudrid, who was looking after me, took an interest in going there. We didn't have a church in Vinland, but then we didn't have a temple to the Old Gods either, we only had the small altar that Thorvall made.'

'Tell me about Thorvall,' Snorri asked, and I found myself describing the cantankerous old hunter - how he had placed his trust in Thor, and vanished mysteriously, and was believed killed by the Skraelings. Snorri made no comment, except to ask an occasional question that encouraged me to talk further. When I told Snorri about Tyrkir and how I had worked alongside him in the smithy and learned something of the Old Ways, Snorri cross-examined me about Tyrkir's background, what the wizened German had told me of the various Gods and of their different legends, and how the world was formed. Occasionally he asked me to repeat myself. It was difficult to guess what Snorri was thinking, but eventually he stood up and told me to follow him. Without another word, he led me out of the house and across to one of the cattle byres. It was little more than a shed and from the outside looked like a typical cattle stable, except that it was round not oblong, and the roof was higher and rather more steeply pitched than usual. Snorri pushed open the wooden door and closed it behind us when we went in, shutting out the light.

When my eyes had adjusted to the dim interior, I saw that there were no cattle stalls. Instead the building was empty. There was only a bare earth floor and rising from it a circle of wooden poles supporting the steep cone of the roof, with a hole at the apex to let in the light. Then I realised that the poles were not necessary to the structure of the building.

'I built this four years ago when I moved here from my father's home,' Snorri was saying. 'It's a bit smaller than the original, but that does not matter. This does.' He had walked to the centre of the circular earth floor, and I now saw there was a low, round stone, very ancient and almost black, directly under the sky hole. The rock seemed to be natural, and was not carved or shaped in any way. There were irregular bumps and protuberances so that it was slightly misshapen. There was a shallow depression on its upper surface, like a basin.

Snorri walked over casually and picked up something which had been left lying in the basin. It was an arm ring, apparently made of iron and without any markings. Snorri handled its smooth surface, for it was much worn, then slipped it on his right arm, pushing it up just above his elbow. He turned to me. 'This is the priest's ring, the ring of Thor. It was my father's, and it is as precious to me as the cross of the White Christ. I continue to use it because

I know that there are times when Thor and the other Gods can help us here in Tung as they did my father and my grandfather before him.'

He was standing in the shaft of light that came in through the smoke hole so I could see his expression. His voice was utterly matter of fact, not in the least mystical or reverential. 'When Kjartan and the others came to ask my advice about the hauntings I went to the temple and put on the arm ring. Thinking about the hauntings and deaths, it came into my mind that the deaths might have something to do with the bed hangings that your mother left. She had said they were to be burned, but Thorodd, egged on by his wife Thurid, failed to do so. They kept some of the bedlinen, and somehow that brought the deaths and sickness. So I ordered that every last scrap of linen, sheets, hangings, drapery, everything, should be taken down and committed to the flames, and when that happened the sickness and death stopped. That is how Thor helped me to understand.'

'And did that stop the hauntings also? Was my mother ever seen again?' I enquired.

'Your mother's fetch was never seen again. The other hauntings ended when the White Christ priests went to the house and held a service to drive out the draugars and ghosts they like to call godless demons,' Snorri told me. 'They knew their job well enough to perform the matter correctly in the old way. The ghosts were summoned to appear and stand trial, just like in a law court, and told to leave the house. One by one the ghosts came, and each promised to return to the land of the dead. If the Christians believe that the White Christ himself appeared as a draugar after his death, then it is not so difficult to believe in ghosts that rise up through the floor as seals.'

Snorri slid the ring of Thor off his arm and replaced it on top of the altar.

'What made Thorvall and Tyrkir take so much trouble to teach you about the Old Ways?' he asked.

'They began after I became a uniped,' I said, and explained how my childish game had led them to believe that I could spirit-fly.

'So it seems that, like your mother, you do have seidr powers. That's how it usually is. The gift passes down through the family,' Snorri commented.

'Yes, but Tyrkir said that my spirit, my inner self, should also be able to leave my body and travel through space to see what is happening in other places. But that has never happened. It is just that at times I see people or places in a way that others do not.'

'When was the last time?' Snorri asked quietly.

I hesitated because it had been very recently. On the way to Tung I had stayed overnight at a large farm called Karstad. The farmer had been away when I called at the door and his wife had answered. I had explained that I was walking to Tung and asked if I could sleep the night in a corner of the main hall. The farmer's wife was old-fashioned; for her a stranger on the road was always to be given shelter, and she had put me with the household servants, who had provided me with a wooden bowl of sour whey and a lump of bread. Shortly before dusk the farmer had come in, and I was puzzled to see when he took off his cloak that the left side of his shirt was heavily soaked with fresh blood. But instead of enquiring what was the matter, his wife ignored the bright red stain and proceeded as if everything was normal. She produced the evening meal and her husband sat at the table, eating and drinking as if nothing was the matter. After the meal he walked over to be nearer the fire, pulled up a bench and began mending some horse harness. As he walked across the room, he came right past me where I was seated, and I could not keep my eyes off his bloodstained shirt. The gore still glistened. 'You see it too?' asked a thin, cracked voice. The questioner was so close that I jumped with fright. Turning, I found that an old woman had seated herself beside me and was looking at me with rheumy eyes. She had the mottled skin of the very elderly. 'I'm his mother,' the old woman said, nodding towards the farmer, 'but he won't listen to me.'

'I'm sorry, I'm a stranger,' I replied. 'What won't he listen to?'

I expected to hear the usual ramblings of an aged mother about her grown-up son, and I was preparing to invent some sort of an excuse — that I needed to visit the latrine — so that I could avoid this crazy old crone, when she went on, 'I've warned him that he will be hurt and hurt badly.'

Suddenly I felt giddy. Did she mean that she also saw how the man was bleeding heavily? And why had she spoken in the future tense? The blood seemed real enough to me.

I glanced across at the farmer. He was still unconcerned, pushing the awl through a broken horse harness. His shirt was sticking to his side it was so wet with blood. 'Why doesn't he take off the shirt so someone can attend the wound and staunch the bleeding?' I said in a low voice.

She laid a withered hand on my wrist and held tight. 'I knew you could see,' she said fiercely. 'I've been watching your face just as I've been watching that stain on his shirt for nearly three years past and still he won't listen to my warning. I told him to kill the creature, but he hasn't done so.'

This did not make sense, and I began to revert to my idea that the old woman was addled. 'Haven't you heard it?' she enquired, still holding me with her claw of a hand, thrusting her head forward until it was only a few inches from my face.

At this point her mutterings had lost me completely, and I was feeling uncomfortable, shifting in my seat. The farmer, sitting by the fire, must have noticed because he called out, 'Mother! Are you still going on about Glaesir. Leave the youngster alone, will you. I told you I don't believe there's any harm in the animal, and if there is I can deal with it.'

The old woman made a sniff of disgust, got slowly to her feet, and moved off down the hall. I was left to myself.

'Ignore her, young fellow,' called the farmer. 'And I wish you a safe journey wherever it is that you are going.'

'Was the farmer's name Thorodd?' asked Snorri, who had been standing silently, listening to my account.

'Yes, I think so,' I answered.

'He farms over at Karstad all right and there's a young bull in his herd called Glaesir. It's an animal you couldn't miss, spotted, very handsome. Frisky too. Some people think the animal is inhabited by the spirit of another Thorodd, a man called Thorodd Twist-foot. I had several quarrels with him. The worst was about the right to cut timber in a small woodland he owned. He got in such a rage that he went home and had a fit. Next morning they found him dead, sitting in his chair. They buried him twice. After the first time, when his ghost began plaguing his old farm, they dug up the corpse and shifted him to a hilltop, where they buried him under a big cairn. Then, when that didn't work and his ghost kept reappearing, they dug him up again. The grave diggers found that the body had not rotted away but just turned black and stank, so they burned the corpse to ashes on a pyre. Some say that the ash blew onto a nearby beach and was licked up by a cow feeding near the shoreline. The cow later gave birth to two calves, a heifer and a young bull calf. That's the one they call Glaesir. The Thorodd you met has a mother with second sight, or so it's said, and ever since that bull calf got on the farm, she's been wanting someone to kill it, saying that it will do terrible damage. Did you see the calf? He's a young prize bull now. Quite remarkable colouring.'

'No, I left the farm at first light next morning,' I replied. 'I wanted to get on my way early, and I didn't see Thorodd's mother again. I expect she was still asleep when I left. And there was nobody about, except for a few farm servants. I don't know anything about Glaesir. I just know that the farmer looked as if he had a serious injury to his side.'

Snorri was trying to assess what I had just told him. 'Maybe you do have second sight,' he said, 'but it's not quite in the usual way. I don't know. You seem to have it only when you are with others who also possess the gift. Like a mirror or something. You are young, so perhaps that will change. Either the sight will grow stronger or you will lose it altogether.'

He shrugged. 'I don't have the sight, though some people think

I do,' he said. 'My common sense tells me what is likely to happen, and the result is that many believe that I can see into the future or into men's minds.'

Whether Snorri believed I had the sight or not, from that moment onward he treated me as something more than a itinerant farm labourer. At the end of the day's work I was seated not among the farmhands down the far end of the hall, but alongside Snorri's large and rather boisterous family, and when he had free time — which was not often because he was such a busy man — he would continue with my education in the lore of the Old Gods. He was more knowledgeable in these matters than either Tyrkir or Thorvall the Hunter had been, and he had a more elegant way of explaining the intricacies of the Old Ways. Also, whenever Snorri went into the Thor temple, he expected me to go with him.

Such visits were surprisingly frequent. Local farmers came to pay their respects to Snorri as the local chieftain and ask his advice, and they spent hour after hour in the evenings, talking politics, negotiating land rights, discussing the weather and fishing prospects, and mulling over whatever news reached us via travellers or traders. But when the talking was over, and especially if the farmers had brought their families, Snorri would beckon to me and we would all walk across the farmyard to the temple shed, and there Snorri would hold a small ceremony to Thor. He would put on the iron arm ring, say prayers over the altar stone and present to Thor the small offerings brought by the farmers. Cheese, chickens, haunches of dried lamb were placed on the altar, or hung from nails driven into the ring of surrounding wooden pillars. These pillars were tied with ribbons brought by the farmers' wives, together with scraps of children's clothing, milk teeth wrapped in packets, embroidered belts and other personal articles. Frequently the women would ask Snorri to look into the future for them, to prophesy what would happen, what marriages their children would make, and so forth. At such moments Snorri would catch my eye and look slightly embarrassed. As he had warned me, his prophesies were largely based on common sense. For example, when a mother asked whom her young son would marry I noticed that Snorri often identified - though not exactly by name - the daughter of a neighbour who, like as not, had visited the temple the previous week and asked exactly the same question about her young daughter. I never found out whether any, or all, of Snorri's matrimonial prophecies came true, but the fact that the parents thenceforward nurtured the probability of a particular match for their offspring must have helped to bring it about.

However, on one particular occasion which I will always remember, Snorri behaved differently. A small group of farmers — there were about eight of them - had come to see him because they were worried about the weather for the hay harvest. That year there had been little sunshine and the hay growth was exceptionally slow. But eventually the long grass in the meadows was ready to be cut and dried, and everyone was waiting for a spell of good dry weather to do the work. But the days continued cloudy and damp, and the farmers were increasingly worried. If they did not get in their hay crop, they would be obliged to slaughter many of their cattle for lack of winter feed. A bad hay crop, or worse, no hay crop at all, would be a major misfortune. So they came to Snorri to ask him to intercede on their behalf because, of course, Thor controls the weather. Snorri led the farmers into the temple building and I went with them. Once inside, Snorri made offerings, rather more lavish than usual, and called on Thor, using the fine rolling phrases and archaic Norse vocabulary which are a mark of respect to the Gods. But then Snorri did something more. He called forward the farmers to stand around the central altar stone. Next he made them form a circle and join hands. Snorri himself was a member of the circle and so was I. Then Snorri called out to the men and they began to dance. It was the simplest of the stamping dances of the Norsemen, an uncomplicated rhythm, with a double step to the left, then a pause, a step back, a pause, and then two steps more to the left, their clasped hands swinging out the rhythm. The men swayed down and then arched back at the end of each double step.

As I joined in, I had a strange feeling of familiarity. Somewhere I had heard that rhythm before. For a moment I could not recall when and where. Then I remembered the sound that I had heard while wandering in the forest of Vinland, the strange rhythmic sound that had led me to the shelter of branches with the sick Skraeling inside, and the older man chanting over his body and shaking his rattle. It was the same cadence that I now heard from the Icelandic farmers. Only the words were different. Snorri began a refrain, repeating over and over the same phrases, and this time he was not speaking archaic Norse. He was using a language that I could not recognise. Again there seemed to be something distantly familiar about it. Several of the farmers must have known the same spell language because they began to chant in time with Snorri. Eventually, after nine circuits of the altar, left-handed against the sun, we stopped our dance, straightened up and Snorri turned to face north-west across the altar. He raised his arms, repeated another phrase in the same strange language, and then the spell session was over.

The next four days, as it happened, were bright and sunny. There was a perfect drying wind and we gathered and stacked the hay. Whether or not this was because we had performed our nature-spell I have no idea, but every farmer in the Westfjords managed to save his hay for the winter, and I am sure that each man's faith in Thor increased. Later, at a discreet moment, I dared to ask Snorri whether he thought the fine weather was the result of our incantations, and he was non-committal. 'I had a feeling in my bones that we were finally due for a dry spell,' he said. 'There was a change in the air, the moon was entering a new phase and the birds began to fly higher. Maybe the dry weather was already on its way and our appeal to Thor only meant that we were not disappointed.'

'What was the language you used when we were dancing in a circle?' I asked him.

He looked at me pensively. 'Under other circumstances you would know it already,' he said. 'It is the language of many spells and incantations, though I only know a few words of it. It is the native language of your mother, the language of the Irish.'