VESTRIBYGD

From the stone cover of the ruins, two hunters watched eight men spill onto the ice-littered shore from a landing craft, which they pulled aground with them. A ninth, one with poor balance, stood up in the boat and fell immediately into the shallow water. The foreign wretch crawled ashore as if pinned beneath great weight, then rolled onto his back and thrust his hands skyward. Anda and Minik's own hands tightened on their bows as this sick man began bellowing as if he were a snared animal. Another of their number, towering even among the hairy outlanders, dragged the howling man further from the sea and silenced him with three heavy slaps. The boatmen had arrived from their lands in a tall, boot-shaped craft anchored in the bay, and wore what Anda recognized as the clothing of the intruders who fashioned these once upright ruins so many generations ago. Clothing the builders had buried their dead in, made of the hair of their animals and not skin. Useless in any rain or wind. Anda pitied them their inferior technology, but understood as his ancestors had that these invaders were men too stubborn to accept any knowledge that was not their own.

– W –

Traveling to Iceland had been awful enough, but nothing nearing this leg of Rupert's accursed saga. He'd fallen ill once again as the boat was being flung about in seas taller than her mast. Gerritt, the ship's first mate, took notice of Rupert's rumpled form huddled against the rail on his knees and approached.

“Don't worry for the vessel. This ship is a cog, invented by my forefathers in Frisia. She's far more seaworthy than the boats that brought the Norsemen this far.”

Rupert was visibly disinterested. Undeterred, the hulking Dutchman continued.

“These settlers arrived in gnars, which were superior to their traditional longships for ocean travel. But still well beneath --”

“Not right now. I'm not well,” Rupert gurgled.

Gerritt stood in silence, swaying with the surf. He looked across the ocean and farted thunderously, its wet timbre and lasting effluvium suggesting more than a little follow-through. Rupert vomited onto the deck. From one of many pockets, Gerritt produced a phial of liquid and offered it to the fallen traveler.

“Hogbean. Take it. It will help you.”

“Hog bean?” Rupert inquired as he weakly removed the stopper. An attempt to ascertain the potion's odor detected only the lingering consequence of Gerritt's fish-laden diet. He drank it.

“How long must I wait?”

“Not long. We go ashore in the morning. You should maybe not have ingested all of it, Rupert. Get some sleep.”

– C –

In Leeds, Rupert stood before his constituents without any idea as to why he had been summoned to do so. He did not have to wonder long.

“Barrister Rupert. In the interest of brevity I'll get right to the point,” began a red-faced man sat in the middle of the board. “You are to accompany a Norwegian Priest named Ivar Bardsson to Vestribygd – Greenland's Western Settlement – where he is to relieve their current clergy and find out just why in Hell those people haven't sent tribute of walrus ivory to Norway in thirteen years. You are to mediate any dispute that arises during this transitional process.”

One of Rupert's knees buckled a bit. “But what could I... Greenland, Sir?”

“Just go and represent us accordingly, Rupert. You'll be back within a year, and I'm certain the council and I all share the same enthusiasm regarding the position of considerable significance you'll occupy among men of lawe upon your return.”

“But I've just been married, Sir William.”

“Indeed you have, and what a prize she is,” Sir William leered. “But God's hooks, man, must I put it on parchment for you? You've come under consideration for a spot on the King's Bench, Rupert. Will that serve to motivate you?”

Rupert straightened. “Sir William, I... Of course, Sir, but when --”

“Tomorrow you leave Leeds for Blackpool, where you will board the Leeuwarden along with her twenty-man crew under the command of a Captain Gordeau and set out for Iceland. There, Bardsson will come aboard and you shall sail north.”

Feeling many things at once, Rupert gathered himself before addressing Sir William Scott for the last time that day. “If I may, Sir, why has the council chosen me? I speak the language of the Norsemen but I've no experience coming between them when they aim to kill one another. Why an Englishman at all?”

“Bardsson has personally begged the Archbishop of Canterbury for the involvement of a neutral party as a personal favor, and we have learned that word of our humble council's competent reputation has reached the office of his excellency. I'm sure your lovely wife will be glad of the news. Of your promotion to come, I mean. Well Lad, best you take leave to prepare for this grand adventure. And Rupert – extend Edith my warmest regards.”

– M –

“I am sorry to have struck you,” Gerritt told Rupert.

They were warming themselves inside of a tent, a process that came more readily to the drier of the two.

“But we were fortunate in not drawing the Skraelings' attention. They are a horde of unthinking murderers.”

“Couldn't Ivar just convert them, or something?” Rupert responded, without meeting the first mate's eyes.

“Hoh hoh! And waste the Lord's Word on those devilish mongrels?”

“Well it seems he should have an abundance of the Word to spare, since it appears that there are no Norsemen here to receive it. What have the priest and the captain said of my earlier spectacle?”

Gerritt exhaled solemnly. “Well. They are not pleased. There was discussion questioning your presence on this journey. Bardsson doesn't seem to know why you're here, and Captain Gordeau suggested you be left on this shore. He says his fee wasn't enough to carry dead weight this far and back.”

Rupert's mind bent with such severity that he barely recognized himself as Rupert. Sensing his colleague's torment, the Dutchman placed a hand upon his shoulder.

“Don't worry about it so much. The captain is a good man, and I don't think he means to leave you here.”

Rupert thought of his wife Edith and hoped she was well, even as fury seized him.

“You gave me stinking nightshade!”

“You looked as a man who may have died if I hadn't. We'd have had to throw you overboard.”

“You gave me stinking nightshade and you pummeled me, and now I'm freezing to death on this shitty wasteland!”

Gerritt drew his cloak more snugly about himself. “May the things we run from never find us, Rupert. And here we are. At the edge of the entire world. Those things can never find us here.”

“I've not run from anything, you oaf,” Rupert snarled. “I was beguiled into joining this infernal misadventure by swine in Yorkshire!”

Gerritt farted, but before seige was laid to Rupert's senses a man screamed and dropped to the gravel near the tent. A commotion erupted throughout the camp and another man agonized at the top of his voice. A thick arrow punched through the tent and Gerritt's abdomen, halting its travel halfway through the backrest of his chair. Still holding enough rage to keep from collapsing and weeping, Rupert attempted to snap the arrow as Gerritt groaned.

The arrow held firm.

Rupert emerged from the tent and saw another man felled by arrows that Rupert could now hear traveling in abundance. In the bay, the Leeuwarden was being swallowed by a fire that illuminated several slender boats returning swiftly to the beach after their accomplishment of arson, each piloted by a single Skraeling. Well this is perfectly fanciful, he thought, wondering if any human that had gone before him in this world had ever felt as cold as he did at that moment. He remained withdrawn into that thought for some time before realizing that the violence around him had ceased and he was now surrounded by squat, fearsome looking men clad in the hides of animals.

– T –

Anda's people understood that the foreigners who came to their lands didn't stay. The first ones his people killed nearly as soon as their vessels appeared on the horizon, sparing them more torturous deaths by their own ineptitude. The next, his people allowed to homestead, and they did. For generations, until the skies had dimmed and the winters grew stronger. His grandfather had spoken of the invaders scuttling their own buildings before setting out after the sun as if they believed that mimicking its path would deliver them to more bountiful lands. When the most recent strangers had arrived all of those winters ago, his people made the difficult decision to slay them in order to save the valuable man they held captive. The village had been without an angakkuq for too long, their bond with the unseen world weakening since he left this life before Anda's parents had been conceived. The children of their village had shown no spiritual promise since the last angakkuq, but Anda's people didn't anguish over this. Anda's people understood that in time, one would come to them.