Cold Earth, page 6
‘Yeah. Only this has more consequences and spreads faster than people thinking they’re God.’
We came to the tents and put the basket down.
‘I don’t know,’ said Catriona. ‘I bet more people have died of Jesus thinking he was God than died of the plague.’
I laughed. Jim came out of his tent, looked at us, and set off for the barn. I grinned at Catriona but she was red-faced and biting her lip.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Oh God, I’d never have said that if I’d known he could hear. I feel awful. He must be so offended.’
‘Oh, come on. Apart from anything else, it’s true. He was just lecturing us on the need for news, which he seemed to confuse with truth, in a democracy. If he likes democracy he has to cope with other people’s views. And you’re right, religion is deadlier than pestilence. You didn’t say Christianity was wrong.’
‘I implied it. Shall I go after him and apologise? I don’t know what to do.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ I assured her. ‘But do if it makes you feel better.’
‘I think I will,’ she said. ‘Oh dear. And I’ll be working with him today.’
She scuttled off like Alice’s White Rabbit.
Ruth came out of her tent, fully made up. I was beginning to feel as if I was on a stage set.
‘Did you hear what Cat said about the epidemic?’ I asked.
She looked at my top, which still had the coffee stain on it.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know anyone in DC?’
‘Not any more.’
What, she did but they died?
‘So you’re not worried?’
‘No.’ Her gaze flicked across my face. ‘I don’t worry much.’
With which sibylline utterance, she went up the hill.
Yianni asked Ruth and Catriona to keep going in the barn and asked me to help Jim work on the midden outside the farmhouse.
‘OK. Now you really might find something interesting here, Nina. So go carefully, and call me if there’s anything at all odd. Any changes in the soil, in fact, anything that’s not obviously a potsherd or a bone fragment. I’ll be down at the church. Ask Jim if you’re not sure.’
‘What do you mean, bone fragment? And what would a change in the soil mean?’
‘Organic remains,’ he said. ‘Come on, Nina, we’re talking animal bones here. It’s a midden, people don’t put dead bodies on middens.’
‘What about their enemies? Yianni, I told you before we came that I can’t cope with dead bodies. I mean it. They give me nightmares.’
I could see him thinking that a dig is a stupid place for someone who fears the dead, but I did warn him and he did say I wouldn’t have to deal with any human remains.
‘Not enemies, either. They were living in the house, remember.’
He’s right, of course. The Norse have far too strong a sense of the agency of the dead to go round burying people in the back garden. I squatted down and started to dig.
I tried to ask Jim about his thesis. No one here is meant to be writing up, so it’s usually a safe conversational gambit. (How is Daniel doing, I wonder? Last time I saw him, he was, he said, really and finally on track to submit at the end of July, only two footnotes needed checking and a page number glitch sorting out. I told him to leave them and get it in – my MA thesis had two page 47s and nobody noticed, even the internal examiner has better things to do than read the page numbers – but I’d bet a freshly picked salad he’s still working on it. Or buggering about on the internet not working on it. He really is proof that you can be too rich, you know.) Anyway, Jim didn’t want to talk about it. We worked on for a while, but his sniffing and the movement of his hands distracted me. I didn’t know him well enough to share a silence.
‘Have you always wanted to come to the Arctic?’
He paused a moment. ‘Yeah. Since I was a little kid.’
So at least there was going to be conversation, even if about his childhood. I was expecting right-wing folksiness, all simple hometown values and the importance of self-sufficiency, with a twist of self-deprecating humour if I was lucky. Something blue and smooth began to appear through the soil and I had a moment’s excitement before recognising a mussel shell.
‘Was it Hans Andersen got you going? For me, it was the illustrations in The Snow Queen.’
‘Close. My mom was always worried we’d think more about Santa Claus than Jesus at Christmas, so we had more books about camels crossing the desert than Santa in the snow, but there was one I got for my birthday where the reindeer were flying in front of the northern lights. I was completely fascinated. Well, I still am. I saw them in Tromso last winter and it was amazing.’
So you see, it would be worth going to that conference in Finland.
‘I’d love to see them. Were they all you hoped?’
‘Yeah. They were. It’s odd, when they say it’s dark all day you expect it to look like night, but it doesn’t, quite. It’s like the nights here – even when it’s light at midnight it doesn’t look like daytime.’
He prised a potsherd, a big, curved one, out of the ground and dusted it off. The shadow of a bird flickered over us.
‘I thought that was just tiredness,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the northern lights.’
‘I can’t. I think it’s one of those things you can’t describe. You know how writers always compare it to searchlights and curtains of light, but that only makes sense once you’ve seen it. It’s just bigger than either of those, somehow. I can’t do any better, not to a literary girl like you.’
He met my eyes a moment. Come, come, Mr Darcy, I thought. You, my love, having nothing to fear from a large Republican from the Midwest.
‘I keep half-hoping we’ll see them here,’ I said, ‘but we won’t, will we? It’s too early.’
‘It is. I think sometimes they might be visible in October but there’s not a hope in August. Anyway, it’s barely dark at night.’
‘I know. But it is different. You can tell autumn’s coming.’
He glanced out to sea the way we all do at the mention of anything changing.
‘Well, it is. But we’ll be gone before it gets here. The Arctic’s always changing, that’s why I like it so much. Even in winter it’s not quite static. You can kind of feel the planet moving all the time. It’s like having an extra-terrestrial view.’
‘You mean a divine view,’ I said. ‘So you’re happy here? You’re enjoying it?’
He looked at me as if I’d questioned the hardness of the stones or the wetness of the sea.
‘Sure I’m happy. I like it here. But I’m usually happy, I’m happy at home too. I don’t think I have anything to be unhappy about.’
Can you imagine that? Honestly? I’d like to attribute this fluorescently good mental health to stupidity, but all the evidence is against it. He’s got a full scholarship from Harvard. He might be faking it to succeed, since I shouldn’t think you get American grants and scholarships by being neurotic and miserable, which is practically a necessary criterion of success in Oxford, but if so, I think he’s kidding himself as well. I was tempted to offer him a list of things to be unhappy about, starting, perhaps, with war in the Middle East and featuring climate change, pandemics, human rights violations, the fallibility of love and the certainty of death, before moving on to the lack of slow-proved bread and good olive oil in rural Greenland.
Down at the church, Yianni was setting up another grid and I put my trowel down and rolled my shoulders while I watched.
‘Tired?’ asked Jim.
‘My shoulders get stiff.’
I let him hold the moral high ground while the frozen bits of my back thawed a little. It’s the usual place above the shoulder blades and I wish you were here, among many other more urgent reasons, to knead those knots. I thought without a keyboard it would get better, but a trowel seems just as bad. So much for manual labour.
I went back to work. After a while it seemed that my end of the midden had nothing but mussel shells. Even that restaurant in Southwold puts them back on the beach so I can’t see why the Greenlanders kept a heap outside the house, and unless they were very efficient eaters of mussels it must have smelt bad. Not to mention the flies. They had flies, did you know that? Brought like the plague from Norway and, like the plague, died out when there weren’t any people left to live on. The mussels look exactly the same as modern mussels and I couldn’t see that it mattered very much if they got broken.
‘Careful!’ said Jim. ‘They’re still finds, you know.’
‘Sorry. I’m just bored. They’re all the same and I don’t think they’ve changed in five centuries. Tell me, what made you decide to do archaeology?’
His hands kept moving through the earth at his feet.
‘Oh, that’s easy. Because you might find something new. I mean, something you hadn’t thought of. A real surprise from the past. I liked History but it’s just stories. No one really knows what happened and what they say is based on what seems probable now. Archaeology just seems more honest. It’s there or it’s not.’
‘But you interpret what is there. You can read material culture. Well, you have to read material culture. These mussel shells don’t mean anything on their own, they’re just mussel shells. We read the land and say they’re by the house, which means somebody put them there, and we eat mussels so we’re assuming the Greenlanders ate mussels, rather than say sacrificing them or bringing a pile of shells up here for some other reason. And they’re at ground level so we assume the Greenlanders put them there and it’s not that someone came along later and dug a pit and filled it with shells. Archaeology is reading, just earth rather than text. And you could argue that there’s less slippage reading words than land.’
‘I know.’ He shifted but went on digging, pulling out bits of white bone that even I could see came from something smaller than a person. ‘All that theory stuff hit archaeology while I was an undergrad. But it does have a scientific grounding, you know. There is a legitimate claim to objectivity. History only tells you what the people who wrote it want you to know.’
‘OK. So what, objectively, happened to the Greenlanders? Why do you think they left? You think it was plague, you said, even though the burial patterns are all wrong and none of the lab work has found the virus.’
He held two bits of bone together like parts of a broken cup, and then shook his head and added them to his pile.
‘I don’t think there was a mass epidemic. I don’t think there’s going to be a real epidemic now, either, come to that. I think it would be very odd if the plague killed half of Scandinavia and more than half of Iceland but no one in Greenland was even infected. There must have been ships, we know they had external contact right through the plague era, so some farms must have had it. It’s perfectly possible that the population was too sparse for an epidemic. No, I think it was climate change. I think the combination of the mini Ice Age and over-farming poor land meant they just couldn’t feed themselves and their stock.’
‘So they all starved?’ The mussel shells seemed endless and I kept scratching my fingers on the sharp edges.
‘That I don’t know. You’d expect a different burial pattern. Babies and children tend to go first in a famine.’
‘So they went to Vinland?’
‘Doesn’t seem like it. Unless most of them sank on the way.’
‘Back to Iceland?’
‘No ships. No wood or iron for building ships. And you’d expect documentary evidence. They wrote down everything else in Iceland.’
‘Maybe that codex got lost.’
‘And none of the others mention it? Maybe. But if you want to know what I really think, I think we still don’t know. And I’d like to find out.’
The wind was picking up and my hair kept getting into my eyes and mouth. I pushed at it with my wrist, not wanting soil and organic remains on my face. I was still working through mussel shells, and I remembered that new restaurant, the one I went to with Eva. Fifty different ways of serving mussels, each one a better argument for sticking to the white wine, garlic and parsley approach than the last. I don’t think they have mussels in Hawaii, but if they do I am quite sure they don’t cook them with pineapple. Not twice, anyway.
‘What do you think the Greenlanders ate with their mussels? They’d have steamed them, I suppose.’
He looked up. ‘I don’t know, Nina, I don’t think anyone’s done much work on medieval Greenlandic cuisine.’
‘Well, I’d have thought it mattered,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how you can postulate that people starved unless you know what they were expecting to eat. Mussels with angelica? I’m going to try cooking with some angelica tomorrow. It won’t make those noodles any worse. Some seaweed is edible but I don’t know how to recognise it.’
‘Stick with what we brought, huh, Nina? Believe me, no one wants food poisoning out here.’
I wondered if there was a Greenlandic version of Food for Free, but I suppose Food You Pay For is probably more of a rarity round here. Perhaps if we did up one of these barns we could run a company offering foraging holidays. What do you think? And a little cookery school. We could get Dan to run it when he abandons the thesis. Yianni could come and give lectures on local archaeology. He says he used to do that in Crete, when someone started taking middle-aged, middle-class package holiday people to his grandparents’ village.
Jim had made four separate piles of bone fragments, some of them so small I knew I wouldn’t have bothered to pick them up even if I’d recognised them. I wondered, with sudden alarm, how many of the white specks you see in any soil are dead things’ bones.
Jim grunted in surprise and put his trowel down.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What is it?’
He began to brush at the soil with his fingers, and I remembered Yianni’s undertaking that there would be no bodies in the midden. I stood back, ready to look away, and could still see something pale coming through the ground.
‘What? What have you got?’
He went on dusting the soil, and then reached for a stubby brush he keeps with his trowel.
‘Some kind of polished stone,’ he said. ‘Get Yianni, will you?’
Polished stone sounded safe enough. I set off across the turf, calves stiff from squatting so long in the cold. I found Yianni photographing the ruined chapel with a camera about the size of a small chocolate bar, which seemed a less arduous way of passing the time than anything the rest of us were being encouraged to do.
‘Nice camera. Is that from your grant?’
He went on positioning it, in the peculiar tai chi practised by people stalking a pleasing object with a digital camera.
‘Necessary equipment. It’ll belong to the department afterwards.’
‘Mm. And I bet it will live at your house.’
He put it down. ‘Did you come here to demonstrate arts and humanities’ envy of social science research funding or was there something more immediate?’
‘Jim’s found something he wants you to see. Polished stone, he says.’
Yianni put the camera in the pocket of his worn grey cagoule and started up the hill at a fast stride like that of someone pretending not to run away. He’d finished the string and stake grid across the inside of the chapel, but it didn’t feel any less desolate for the addition. The walls were still high and the doorway stood as defenceless as an open mouth. It faces East, of course, towards the Second Coming no doubt, but also away from the sea and more immediate arrivals. There’s a fine view of blowing grass and black rock and sky, and meanwhile anyone could creep up. Someone did. There are scorch marks, and I guess there’ll be a body in the church that never had a burial. The kind the Norse really didn’t like to have around. I shuddered, suddenly sure I was being watched, and followed Yianni up the hill. I didn’t look back until I could hear his and Jim’s voices, clear and ordinary in the cold wind.
They were standing now, studying something cupped in Jim’s hand.
‘Look,’ said Yianni. ‘I think it’s marble.’
I peered at the little object, held like a fragile bird on Jim’s slab-like palm, and couldn’t breathe.
‘Could it be Inuit?’ said Jim. ‘The Norse didn’t go for figurines, did they? And where would they have got marble?’
I tried to inhale but my chest seemed tight shut.
‘Oh, there is marble. But not green. And nowhere near here. And I’m pretty sure there are no Norse marble artefacts. I don’t think anyone’s found any imported craftwork that didn’t have an obvious ecclesiastical connection.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Maybe –’
It was no good. The mountains blurred into low-definition pixels. In and out and in and in and –
‘Nina, you OK?’
‘Yes.’ I still couldn’t breathe. ‘No.’
‘She can’t breathe.’
Jim looked alarmed. ‘She asthmatic?’
‘No,’ said Yianni. ‘She’s panicking. Nina, have you got a paper bag?’
I shook my head. In and out and in and in and out and in and in. My hands tingled.
‘She used to carry one,’ said Yianni. ‘She was getting a lot of these a while ago. It looks bad but it’s OK. She won’t pass out.’
You and your arms around me and your chest against my face. You waiting for me. The mountains came back into focus. The singed smell of your shirt clean from Iron Maids while I’m still in my dressing gown, planning a bath for when you’ve gone to work. My shoulders dropped and there was room for air in my lungs.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m OK now.’ I took a few more breaths. ‘Don’t know what triggered that, sometimes it’s just tiredness. Show me what you’ve found?’
Yianni gazed at me suspiciously. After one glance, Jim turned back to the polished stone.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it a beauty? A little figure. Maybe a doll?’
Ritual or ludic object, I thought, meaning it has no apparent purpose or function. In the days before women did archaeology, Yianni told me in the British Museum, Ancient Egyptian mascara wands and eyelash curlers got categorised like that. (Though the first time I saw an eyelash curler in Hayley Robertson’s schoolbag I thought it was some kind of tea-strainer.) The pale green stone was still dusted with soil from the long burial.
