Meadowland by Tom Holt

help a few poor buggers lost in the fog? But if what they were saying when we left Iceland summer before last is true, and Christ has driven out Thor and killed him and Christ’s father’s now God, then I’d really be better off staying quiet here where He can’t see me, because they reckon He takes a dim view of sinners, and by all accounts I’m one. So, praying didn’t seem like a clever thing to do, so I didn’t.
    Just when I was sure I was going off my head, I fell asleep. When I woke up, everything was different, thank God. It was broad daylight, we were running before a sharp north wind, and my first thought was, well, I was all wrong about prayer after all, obviously it worked a charm for whoever it was doing it. So I sang out, ‘Who was that praying just now?’
    Nobody answered; I said it again.
    ‘I was praying, if it’s any of your business,’ said Thorgils Ulfsson, the forecastle man. ‘But that was two days ago.’
    ‘Must’ve been you I heard, then. Anyway, who were you praying to?’
    ‘Christ,’ he replied. ‘Want to make something of it?’
    I didn’t say anything, because people can be funny about religion and stuff. But from that day to this, I’ve been a really strong Christian, because of getting out of that fog; and if Thor was to come in here right now and offer me a drink with his own hands, I wouldn’t even talk to him. I’d like to say it was the turning point of my life and it’s been the making of me, but I’ll be straight with you, I can’t say it’s made a whole lot of difference. Loads of other times I’ve prayed and bugger all’s happened, or things have gone the opposite way to how I asked, so clearly what counts is who’s doing the praying, and He can’t be bothered listening to a sinner like me. Also, though I didn’t find this out till much later when it happened to come up in conversation, Thorgils had said a prayer to Thor before he called on our Heavenly Father, so maybe that was what I’d heard after all; or maybe it was Thor who answered, but he took a while getting round to it. Anyhow, that’s enough about that.
    We ran with this new wind a whole day and night; and when it got light again, Bjari jumped up and started yelling, ‘Land, land,’ and we were all craning our necks and trying to see round each other, and pretty soon there were quite a few of us joining in the shouting. I was one of the last to see it, because there was a stack of malt barrels blocking my view, but eventually I caught sight of a grey blur, dead ahead, smack in the middle between the sky and the sea.
    ‘Greenland,’ somebody said. But Bjarni was frowning. He had far and away the best eyesight, and he’d gone quiet.
    ‘Don’t think so,’ he said.
    We weren’t happy about that, I can tell you. Someone said, ‘Well, if it’s not Greenland, where the fuck is it? There’s nothing else out this far, and for sure we didn’t turn round on ourselves.’
    ‘That’s not Greenland,’ Bjarni repeated. ‘I was told, look for the Blueshirt glacier; soon as you see it, you know you’re there. There’s no glacier on whatever that is - it’s as flat as a board.’
    ‘Maybe it’s a different bit of Greenland,’ someone else said.
    ‘Then it’s no good to me, is it?’ Bjarni snapped back at him. ‘I want to find my dad, not go exploring.’
    It took us a while, but at last we persuaded him to take the ship in closer so we could see if there was a glacier. But there wasn’t. There were hills, but they were low and rounded off and covered in woods that came right down to the beach. Now we looked at all those trees, and I don’t suppose I was the only one who thought what a good price a full load of long, straight timber’d fetch in Iceland, where they cut down all the trees back in grandad’s time to build their houses, if we could only get it back so far. If we dumped Bjarni’s cargo from Norway and filled up the hold with lumber, we could double our takings, and since