King Hereafter (10 page)

Then the even roar resumed, which would seem to tell that no fall had happened. But Eachmarcach, his attention caught by the shouts, turned his head for one fatal second as the oars, picking up, resumed their full power and he moved from the ninth to the tenth, to the eleventh.

Sulien saw the ginger head falter, half obscured by the swell of the beam, and then jerk. Two arms shot into sight. Eachmarcach yelled. Then, with an expert twist, he aligned his thickset, muscular body and dived, entering the river exactly between the shafts of two oars and gliding outwards, a pale, fishy shape underwater, until, grinning, spouting, and swearing, he raised his head far behind, beyond the digging line of the blades.

A skiff from one bank pulled off and set out for him. Sulien waved and turned, just as a roar louder than all the rest told him that, one way or another, Skeggi’s trip, too, had come to an end. Then he saw a whinbush of grey-yellow hair and a scarlet face rolling inboard beyond the last of the oars and knew that the feat had been achieved, by one of them at least. And that it was possible.

He and Alfgar were next. Alfgar, smiling, was pale. He said, ‘Did you notice the shaking just now? After the oars crashed?’

They’ll know better next time,’ Sulien said.

‘No. It wasn’t only the shift of the boat,’ Alfgar said. ‘It’s the tide coming in. I thought I’d better warn you.’

He had forgotten the Dee was a tidal estuary. He had forgotten to think what must happen when the incoming sea at the top of its flood met the
down-moving flow of the river. He said, ‘I expect it will be all right. This will be over in seconds.’ For, of course, it would. But of equal certainty, it would take only one or two such cross-currents to unbalance them. He said, ‘Anyway, it’s good weather for a swim. See you in the water?’

‘Perhaps,’ Alfgar said.

They threw a coin, he found, to decide which side they should run on. It was one of Canute’s, with
Lux, Lex, Pax, Rex
on the die. He did not look to see if the name of Duncan’s father was on it as well.

‘Take care,’ said the Earl Thorfinn’s cavernous voice. He was sitting, hugging his bound knees, on the half-deck beside him. ‘If in doubt, put your hand on the rail and let them pull you in. It isn’t worth getting wet over.’

He looked as a murderer and an oath-breaker ought to look. His expression, on the other hand, had somewhere in it a light or a shadow not evinced since his talk with Godiva. Sulien said, with austerity, ‘It won’t be the first time that the north has dragged Wales into her shiftless enterprises.’ He waited to see, gratifyingly, the Earl’s black eyebrows twitch and then went to the side he had been given, which was the same one from which Eachmarcach had fallen. The horn blew.

Not to look at the water, streaming like long wool beneath him. Not to look at the faces: the brimming boatful of faces, half turned his way, half to Alfgar. Not to look at the crowds on the shore. But to look only ahead, at the smooth white pine of the oars wheeling, wheeling in their small circles, and to keep, somehow, a sixth sense for the oarsmen, who were afraid, too, and on whom all his foothold depended.

Sulien said, just loud enough to be heard, ‘I am coming—
now!
’ And felt the wood, lightly warm, beneath one foot and then the other. ‘And—
now!
’ he said again, and passed through three feet of air, looking only at the rise of the next oar.

He did not hear the Danish King address Bishop Joseph of Llandaff. ‘The boy is graceful. Find him a monastery by the sea.’

‘He is at Llanbadarn, my lord.’

He did not see Canute turn to Earl Leofric and say, smiling, ‘The young men do well.’ Only Sulien, watching the Earl of Mercia bow, his eyes on his son, would have known what Leofric was thinking.
Too tense
. It was Alfgar’s one mistake, to try too hard; to want too much. Not a bad fault in a ruler, but it should not rule his performance. Leofric had told him and told him until Godiva had stopped him telling him because, she said, it was making him worse. And seeing the muscles knot in the calf of Alfgar’s right leg, his father had known, before it happened, how it was going to end.

None of that Sulien saw, for he was coming up to the seventh oarsman, the one who had faltered after Eachmarcach. The round shaft, coming out of its hole, rotated automatically, as if worked by a wheel, with no sign of trouble. Sulien said, in the same quiet voice, ‘And—
now!
’ and stepped on it lightly: one foot, both feet; and he was on the eighth, preparing to step on the ninth. His mind, in retrospect, seized the breath of a second to congratulate himself. His ears, dead to the particular voices, could not excise a shout, a roar of
cheerful shock and of warning which was unmistakable in its meaning. Alfgar had fallen.

Sulien’s foot slid on the beam, and all the resources of his body thundered in to his aid. A moment later and he could have steadied himself on the wood, but there was no time for that: already the timber was dropping under his weight. He was unbalanced when he launched himself at the next oar, and he hit it unevenly, the second foot as hard as the first, and then had to get off again. His balance this time was better: almost righted, although when his right foot took the wood, his knee started to tremble. There were five more oars ahead, and Alfgar had fallen.

His foot on the eleventh oar, Sulien thought of Alfgar and his mother Godiva. His second foot on the eleventh oar, he remembered what the Earl Thorfinn had said.

But the Mercians were too proud to save themselves. So was he, probably, to imagine he would finish. He wasn’t going to, now he had allowed himself to think.

He missed his footing. Only his left foot reached the oar, at the wrong angle, so that he had to look down to see what room there was for his right, and so saw the violent water racing below him, and, ahead, the arrows that meant tidal currents flooding in at a pace faster than that of the slow-propelled vessel.

The water took his eyes with it, and the last of his balance. He fell, his shoulder striking the swinging oar just behind him, and the water drew him in with a great, splashing rush.

Then, one-handed and choking, he was up on the surface, and two heavy bodies flounced in beside him and had him under the arms, and a little distance off there was a boat with Alfgar in it, his face running with water and grinning.

So that everything was all right. Except for the last race, the race that was supposed to decide whether Skeggi, who had completed the run, was the winner, or whether he would have to run against one or both of the King’s grandsons, if one or both of the King’s grandsons should manage to finish. The last race, which in fact had nothing to do with that sort of competition at all, but had to do with the ruling of Orkney and the ruling of Alba.

Sulien said, when they got him into the skiff, ‘I know we can’t keep up with them, but what about rowing on, in case we can find out who wins?’ But Alfgar, he found, had already arranged all that, and had even taken an oar himself, to make it faster. So that, although they had dropped far behind, Sulien could see by the black head that the Earl Thorfinn had drawn his side, the side that had had all the mishaps, and was lifting himself over the rail while his half-brother Duncan the prince did the same on the other side.

Had he been on board, Sulien would have found that the Earl of Orkney did not speak reassuringly, as he had done, to warn the oarsmen. That he didn’t pause on the rail to remind himself to listen to nothing and look at nothing but the fifteen white oars soaring in front of him. That in fact the only thing he did was to look ahead at the running dark race of the incoming tide and, on the
first breath of the horn, to lay one prehensile foot, at a grotesque angle, on the round, sticky surface of the first oar and then, without pause, to skip forward and set the other foot high on the next shaft.

His stern waggled. ‘The bastard,’ said Eachmarcach with satisfaction. ‘I knew he’d do that.’

Behind in the skiff, Alfgar watched the dancing figure and said, ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘They say Tryggvasson did it with one foot on each oar,’ Sulien said.

‘Well, that’s hardly Tryggvasson,’ said Alfgar rudely. ‘That’s—’

‘I think,’ said Sulien, ‘that because he isn’t well made, perhaps he practises very hard. This must be the work of a summer. Or more.’

‘He’s nearly there,’ said Alfgar, his voice disbelieving. He caught a crab with his oar and looked back: a ridge of water bucked under their keel and plunged jostling ahead to where the longship had drawn away. ‘And just in time. That’s the flood-tide on its way. Where’s the other boy?’

Boy? Duncan was twenty. The age Canute had been when he became King of Denmark and England. Sulien said, ‘I can’t see. They’re all up at the other end, cheering on Orkney.’

Later, he realised that it was because they were all up at the stern cheering the Earl Thorfinn to his victory that none but the oarsmen saw the change in the run of the water; the change for which normally they would have altered stroke but could not, at this moment, under pain of death. And later, too, was given by others a picture of Duncan, sweat on his jaw, his shoulders firm, the tunic stuck to his thighs, copying with steady persistence the two-footed step, the concentration, the technique of Eachmarcach and Skeggi, hearing neither the roar of acclaim up ahead or the change in the sound of the water. As the Earl Thorfinn leaped from the last oar and, victorious, rolled aboard into Skeggi’s hands and the welter of welcoming buffets and laughter, the stern of the longship rose and smacked, and then, pair by pair, the oars kicked and bounded.

Before Duncan’s eyes, the line of looms broke in disorder. Then the shaft below him gave way and he was jumping, with nowhere to jump to. He must have tasted salt before he hit the water. An oarsman cried out, and wood clashed against wood as men dragged at the oars to keep clear of him.

They succeeded. The blow that felled him came not from the blades but the hard, oaken strakes of the vessel as the surge flung him drubbing against them. Those who were there saw him sink, and did not see him surface again.

From the skiff, they saw the longship shudder, and heard the thin ring of a command above the confusion of shouting, upon which the oars rose and changed pattern. The royal ship slowed on her course and then, held by back-paddling, returned and swung in mid-river. On her port side, visible now, there were two swimming heads in the river, and as Sulien watched, another man jumped over the side. All the swimmers were strangers. Sulien said, ‘Duncan has fallen.’

‘I fancy,’ said Alfgar drily, ‘that even Olaf Tryggvasson would have fallen.’
He did not stop rowing. And as they came close to the longship, Sulien craned to see.

Overloaded on the port side, the royal ship was low on that beam and rocked sharply, idling and waiting. Distantly, in her prow Sulien could see the heads of the two Kings standing on the half-deck: Canute speaking, and Malcolm held no doubt by pride, as well as by stiffness and age, from thrusting through to the side to watch the search for Duncan his grandson.

His other grandson was not there. The Earl Thorfinn of Orkney was, Sulien suddenly noticed, quite close at hand, by the high sternpost of the vessel. Undisturbed, it seemed, by the shouting and splashing from the other side of the boat, he was gazing peacefully into the water, his black hair over his brow. In front of Sulien, Alfgar lifted his oar, and motioned the boatman and Eachmarcach to do likewise. He said, ‘They don’t seem to have got him. He said he could swim, didn’t he?’

The Earl Thorfinn continued to contemplate the river reposefully from the rail and gave no indication that he had noticed them. Sulien said, ‘The prince could have been injured.’ Beneath where Thorfinn was looking, you could just see something pale in the water. Sulien said suddenly, ‘Row over there.’

‘Where?’

‘There, Where …’ He broke off and pointed instead. ‘There. There’s something in the water.’

From the prow, Alfgar could see better than he could. He looked and then, seizing his oar, dug it in and looked again as the skiff bucked along nearer. ‘It is!’ he said. ‘Go on!’ And as the other two started to row, Alfgar twisted round, rising, and, cupping his mouth, roared to the longship and the two Kings and the knots of men, who, hearing, rushed to the rail. ‘The prince Duncan is here! We’ve got him!’

Above on the stern, the Earl Thorfinn, sitting down, began at leisure to unwind the bands round his trousers.

The service of peace and thanksgiving in the church of St John the Baptist was kept short because it began late and because, naturally, the King of Alba was concerned about the health of his grandson Duncan, now being helped back to the Mercian palace. The other three submerged competitors all attended the service, in blankets. The final race, between the Earl Thorfinn and his cousin Skeggi, had been cancelled.

Sulien, his shoulder throbbing, kept away from the Earl of Orkney. Since they disembarked at the church, he had addressed Earl Thorfinn only once, and quietly, when no one was particularly near. ‘You saw Duncan was there.’

‘Yes,’ the Earl said. He had been moved, his neck arched, to give all his attention to the upper frame of the church. He added, ‘I knew you would save him. Or somebody.’ Sulien waited, and then walked away.

He must have said much the same to his grandfather when the quarrel broke out at the altar-table as the service ended and they all gathered there to hear the treaty read and attested.

Beneath the voices of Bishop Lyfing and the interpreter came the murmur,
subdued at first, of an exchange between Malcolm of Alba and his grandson of Orkney. Then the King’s voice said something sharply and the Earl Thorfinn answered with insolence.

King Malcolm turned and, interrupting the Bishop, took the skin from his two hands and crumpled it. He said, ‘I shall acknowledge no pact that offers more power to Orkney.’

The Bishop, his eyes narrowed, looked at his King. Canute said, ‘I remind you. On this treaty depends your lordship of Cumbria. Is your dislike of one grandson so great?’

The rich cloak rose and fell over the old man’s broad chest. ‘He offends me,’ he said.