Free Meadowland by Tom Holt

again. When eventually it popped its head up out of the water, we could see glaciers plain as anything. The trouble was, there were too many of them. Bjarni was on the lookout for one big blue one, but this place that we’d come to had loads of them, crowning a huge mountain range, and once again Bjarni told us to keep going. We weren’t too badly upset by that. It was a fair way from the sea to the foot of the mountains, and a more desolate landscape you never saw, not even the lava coast of southern Iceland. No good to anybody, Ejari called it, and for once we all agreed with him.
    We kept the sail full and followed the coastline for a bit. Turned out that the worthless place was an island, not that that had any bearing on anything. Soon we were sick of the sight of that flat waste of rubble, so we set a course away from it, due east into the open sea. Our luck was in: we picked up a nice brisk wind, which pretty soon thickened up into a regular gale. Shorten the sails, Bjarni said, not that we needed telling; we didn’t want the sail in rags and all the ropes busted.
    We hung on for four days, like men breaking a wild pony clinging to the training rein. Nothing we could do except hold on. The wind knew where it wanted to go and the best we could hope for was that it’d take us somewhere, not just drag us out into the middle of open sea and then suddenly die away I’m not sure which was worse, that or the fog. On balance I’d say the fog, but not by much. Cooking was out of the question. Moving about on the ship was just asking to get swept over the side. We were fairly flying along, and I remember Bjarni saying that if we were headed in the right direction, you couldn’t ask for a better wind, since each day we went twice as far, maybe three times, as you’d expect to go under normal conditions. Me, I could’ve put up with taking a bit longer and going a bit more steady Actually, I was in no hurry at all. See, the difference between Bjari and me was that Bjarni really wanted to see his old man and the rest of his family again. Not so in my case. We never got on all that well, my dad and me, and of course he’d gone west with the rest of the Drepstokk household, so I was going home too.
    Not sure what this has got to do with anything, but let me tell you a bit about my old man. Mum died when I was quite small, I don’t hardly remember her. I had a sister but she was ten years older than me; she married out of the house when I was five and moved fifteen miles away, so I only saw her once or twice a year, at County Fair and Government Assembly, assuming I got taken with the rest of the family So it was just Dad and me most of the time, and the two of us got along like a fox in a henhouse, each of us taking turns to be the fox, if you get my meaning. If he saw something one way, I’d see it the opposite. Like, he was head stockman; it was an important job and he did it well, all credit to him. He valued those cattle more than old Herjolf himself did. Nobody ever had to tell him what to do, because he’d thought of it already; and he always went the extra mile, made the extra effort, did that little bit more than the boss would’ve asked of him. Me, I could never see the point. Why wear yourself to the bone for another man’s herd, was how I saw it; half the time, old Herjolf wasn’t aware of the pains the old man was going to, so he got no extra thanks. Different if it’s your own stock, that goes without saying, but grinding yourself thin when nobody’s even looking - I couldn’t see the point. My attitude was, do what’s expected of you and no more. That riled Dad no end. What else were you planning on doing with your time, he’d say; you just sit around in the house or in the barn. He couldn’t understand anybody wanting to be idle when there was work he could be doing. He was the kind of man who can’t sit still and just be, with his hands folded across his belly
    Truth is (and I can see it now I’ve