Meadowland Read Online Free

insisted; a bloody good scrap, and either victory or Valhalla, what more could anybody ask? I have no idea what Valhalla means, but from the way they said it, I don’t suppose it’s something I’d like, and I couldn’t be bothered to ask them to explain.
    So the rest of the train creaked off and left us. I was all for sitting in the shade of the cart and sulking like mad till we were rescued or died of thirst, but Eyvind decided to come over all brisk and useful. He pottered around for a bit until he found a spring of water, and then he pottered around a bit more, came back and told us he’d found a handy abandoned building where we could sleep and get shade from the sun.
    Turned out, of course, it was a tomb. Wonderful. At least, that’s what I think it must have been, though you never saw the like. Imagine the dome of Saint Sophia, but made of slates, carefully fitted together without fixings or mortar; and the only entrance is a little hole you have to crawl through on your hands and knees- ‘This is useless,’ I pointed out. ‘It’ll mean we’ve got to leave the cart outside.’
    Kari made a so-what gesture with his shoulders and hands. ‘We can get the money boxes in through the hole, no bother; and the cart’s not going anywhere, is it? That’s the whole point.’
    Actually, unloading the money hadn’t even occurred to me; I can be slow sometimes. But I wasn’t going to admit that. ‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘But a cart, even a mended cart, isn’t going to be much use to us with no horses; and I don’t know how things are where you come from, but around here, you don’t leave valuable horses unguarded all night next to the public road. Not if you want to see them again.’
    ‘Actually,’ Kari replied, ‘we don’t have horse-thieves in Iceland, the country’s just too small, and everybody knows everybody else. But I take your point. I was going to say, we’ll have to post a watch anyway, so whoever’s on guard can keep an eye on the horses too. Will that be all right by you?’
    ‘Fine,’ I said, trying to make it sound like I was giving in for the sake of a quiet life, rather than because he was right. ‘You’re the guards, I suppose you know your job.’ An unpleasant thought occurred to me. ‘Post a guard, you said.’
    Kari laughed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘Eyvind and me and the boy wonder there’ll do it, you can stay in here in the warm and get some sleep.’ He looked at me for a moment, then added: ‘No offence, but you’d make a lousy guard; and, like you said, we need the horses.’
    Another of those double-sided insult-compliments, I suppose. Anyhow, that suited me, and as it turned out, I was let off helping lug the money boxes in through the door, too. All I had to carry was my blanket and my pillow - I’m sadly fussy, so I’d brought my own special pillow with me from the City. They’d probably have fetched them for me if I’d sat there long enough looking helpless, but I reckoned I’d lost enough face already for one day
    The tomb, and I’m pretty sure that’s what it had been once, was completely empty inside, though at first there was no way of knowing, because it was as dark as a bag in there. But Harald lit a fire; and when we found out the hard way that there wasn’t a chimney or anything like that, he scrambled up on one of the boxes and bashed a hole in the roof with his axe. It was still uncomfortably smoky in there, but not too bad, thanks to the through-draught from the door-hole.
    We’d only just settled in when I heard the most appalling roll of thunder, and then the sound of raindrops pecking on the slates, like King Xerxes’ two-million-strong army all drumming their fingers at the same time. It doesn’t often rain in Greece, but when it does, it gives it the full treatment. Water coming in through Harald’s improvised smoke-hole drowned our fire in no time flat, so we had to shift it over a bit and start again. Just as well, in fact, that