Meadowland Read Online Free Page A

Eyvind had insisted on us taking shelter for the night, or we’d all have been soaked to the skin.
    For a while we just sat there, feeling sorry for ourselves. Then Kari told Harald to go outside and take first watch; and Harald, rather to my surprise, refused. Come to think of it, those were the first words I heard him speak - in Norse, needless to say, not Greek; I’d been expecting a deep, bear-like rumble from a man of his size and disposition, but it turned out that he had a high, quiet, squeaky little voice, and he stuttered. He could be firm when he wanted to, though. No way was he going out in that, he told them, not with his weak chest (I’d just watched him dragging a money box through the door-hole all by himself); and if that meant the bandits stole the horses, he couldn’t care less, but in his considered opinion any bandit with enough brains to know how to breathe would be passing the night in a nice dry cave, so if we wanted to get drenched that was fine, but he was staying right where he was, and anybody who had problems with that could discuss the matter with his axe.
    He finished his speech - no other word for it; he gabbled his way through it like an amateur actor in front of a restless audience - and immediately went back to being still and silent. Thinking back, he reminded me of one of those strange mechanical toys they used to make in Alexandria, a thousand years or so back. You know the ones I mean: you boil up a big pot of water, the steam goes up a narrow pipe and pushes against a little gadget like a waterwheel with wings, and that drives a whole lot of cogs and gears’, and a little bronze statue of a flute-player spins round and round and makes a whistling noise. Then, when the steam runs out, it stops dead in its tracks. Constantine the Great or someone like that brought a whole lot of them back from Egypt, and when I was a kid they had them set up in the Forum of Arcadius, and they used to set them going sometimes on saints’ days.
    Anyway: I was expecting Kari and Eyvind to kick up a fuss about that, but instead they just nodded, as if to say fair enough, and after a brief silence Eyvind said he’d better take the first watch, then, and stomped out.
    I don’t remember exactly how the subject came up. The idea had been that we’d all get some sleep, but for some reason - the noise of the rain on the roof, is my guess - none of us could get off, and there’s something inherently silly about three grown men lying on the ground, wide awake, not talking. Eventually, Kari sat up, yawned and fished about in an old goatskin bag that he carried with him everywhere he went.
    ‘Chestnuts,’ he explained, when he noticed me watching him. ‘Back home, when we can get them, we like to roast them in front of the fire.’
    That reminded me of something. ‘Food,’ I said. ‘Have we got any?’
    Kari sighed. ‘Wondered when anybody’d mention that.
    And the answer is no, apart from these chestnuts and the burnt end of yesterday’s loaf. Thought we’d be in Sparta by now, see. Not to worry, though. Soon as it’s light, we’ll send out young Harald to kill something - he’s good at that. And meanwhile,’ he added cheerfully, ‘there’s these chestnuts. It’s all right, I’ve got plenty to go round.’
    Actually, they weren’t bad, considered in the light of there being nothing else, and once I’d got some food inside me I cheered up a bit. Kari and Harald were munching steadily away, and I thought it’d be nice to start up a bit of a conversation. That’s me all over, I’m afraid.
    ‘You were saying earlier,’ I said, ‘about some place you’d been where vines and wheat grew wild. Where was that?’
    I think Harald may have made a slight groaning noise, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. ‘Ah,’ Kari said with his mouth full, ‘now there’s a story. Wineland we used to call it; it’s a big island way out in the north-western sea. Furthest island out there is,