King Hereafter (100 page)

It contented them all for the moment, Groa saw. He did not allow them to forget Diarmaid, the potential enemy: half his fleet lay among the Western Isles and their inlets, in case of attack from that quarter. But the news of the exiled Godwin family, she well knew, was what he was waiting for.

At the end of June, it arrived. The outlawed Earl Godwin had sailed from Flanders to the south coast of England and, having roused half the land in his cause, had joined with his son Harold’s nine ships from Ireland. The combined fleets, it was said, were moving to threaten the King’s ships at London.

Thorfinn received the news and did not comment. His Queen, in desperation, launched a trial commentary of her own.

‘Emma, where are you now?’ said the Lady Groa
.

‘Married to God?’ Thorfinn suggested. ‘Emma’s grandson Earl Ralph is about to receive the first dove of war in religious history. Poor Alfgar, in Harold’s East Anglia.’

‘Poor Earl Ralph in Swegen Godwinsson’s Herefordshire. Poor William, by divine grace Duke of Normandy. I thought,’ said Groa, ‘that you thought that Emma planned the offer to Duke William to provoke the Godwins into trying to return.’

‘Emma liked boiling pots,’ said Thorfinn
.

‘So do you,’ said the Lady Groa
.

He had said nothing, she realised, because there was nothing worth saying. Or not until they knew the outcome of the battle, if there had been a battle. And who was now heir to England, or even King of it.

The household of Scotia moved south to Moray in time for the next news, which came from the west side of England, not the east, and was not about the Godwins at all.

With characteristic opportunism, Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, for thirteen years King of North Wales, had made another successful attack on his English neighbours, culminating in a pitched battle outside Leominster in which had died many Saxons as well as Normans from the castle garrison.

‘What castle?’ said Groa
.

‘Hereford?’ said Thorfinn. ‘Earl Ralph would be away fighting the Godwinssons. The Godwinssons hated the Norman castlemen. They’re supposed to prevent the Welsh raids, but all they ever did was sit there and eat up the countryside and watch the Godwinssons. Osbern of Eu has a castle as well. Alfred keeps his money in it.’

‘So Gruffydd was hoping for booty?’ said Groa
.

‘He got it. Bags of silver and clothing, a lot of good-looking slaves, a herd of cattle and some fine breeding-mares, and all the food and wine he could carry. Eachmarcach helped him.’

‘What!’

‘What do you expect? Stuck on Man with a failure behind him and time on his hands. Guthorm Gunnhildarson went with him.’

‘But not Bishop Hrolf?’

‘Well, hardly,’ said Thorfinn. ‘I expect he went to escape Bishop Hrolf.’

They made light of it, since it was over and the news conveyed no hint of tragedy.

It was a week before they learned of the aftermath. Leaving Rhuddlan, Eachmarcach of Dublin and Guthorm his ancient ally had fallen out while dividing the plunder. In the violent clash between factions that followed, Guthorm fought as his uncle King Olaf would have wished him, and carried the day and the booty, leaving Eachmarcach and his exiled Dubliners dead on a profitless field.

The messenger who brought the news to Thorfinn came from Sulien. He was heard in silence, and in the same silence ended. ‘I was to tell you, my lord King, that Bishop Hrolf will stay on the island of Man with King Eachmarcach’s
nephew until you order otherwise. The Archdeacon Sulien wishes me to say that Diarmaid of Leinster is installed in Dublin in strength and will not be lightly dislodged. Also that Godfrey of Man is not a great warrior.’

Thirteen years before, Thorfinn had made an alliance with Wales, and on the heels of it, Gruffydd had ravaged Llanbadarn, the school of Sulien’s youth, and of King Alfred’s great scholar Asser. Now Sulien was attempting again to build in Wales a retreat, a citadel of art and of learning, even while the spears and axes flashed about him. And he still cared what happened to Alba.

Groa said, ‘Sulien has a wife and two children now. How safe is he?’

‘As safe as he wants to be,’ Thorfinn said.

Eachmarcach was dead, and Ireland was lost, as his father had lost it.

The year, the twisting, dangerous year, moved on its way, and still there was no news of a battle for England, or a conquest, or a pact, or a surrender.

Then, in September, word came. The town of London had declared for Earl Godwin of Wessex, and on opposite sides of the Thames there stood in challenge at last King Edward’s fifty ships and his foreign friends and his levies, against the combined fleets of the men of Earl Godwin.

‘What will happen?’ said Groa. They were, for reasons she could not fathom, in one of their seldom-used lodges in Teviotdale, with a clutter of pavilions outside containing Gillecrist of Strathclyde and a number of men from north Cumbria.

‘Did you imagine the King would fight Godwin?’ Thorfinn said. ‘They’d merely lose the best men from both sides, and the foreign heirs would move in for the pickings. My guess is that the King will hold a public gemot, a council, and will receive the exiled Godwin and friends to his bosom. It is Emma’s power that they have been bidding for. Emma’s power, not the throne of King Edward. You should hear tomorrow, or the next day, what happened.’

‘
I
shall?’ said Groa. She looked at her husband. ‘What messages have been passing between you and Chester and Sulien? Thorfinn?’

‘I’ll tell you when I come back,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Wait for me. I’m only going to the Mercian border.’

‘I’m too simple to understand why?’ Groa said. ‘Or you don’t know what you are doing in any case?’

‘I don’t know what Emma was doing,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But she seemed to have everything planned, and I don’t mind playing the pieces for her. What is it?’

‘What would have happened,’ said Groa, ‘if you and Emma had married each other?’

‘I should be a widower, and free to marry you,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And Eustace of Boulogne would be your stepson. He and Lulach would pass through a world of horror together.’

As always, he left her laughing; but it was different when he had gone, six months after Emma’s death, to do Emma’s bidding.

*   *   *

Thorfinn of Scotia, with a king’s escort, pitched camp at Kirkby, the agreed spot on the north Mercian border, and had been there only a matter of hours when, below the birdsong and the chatter and rattle about him, there came the vibrating thud of many hooves and the rumble of wheels and finally, into distant view between trees, the banner of Mercia, followed by other, unknown banners jerking behind it.

The standard-bearer bore Leofric’s badge, but was unfamiliar: presumably a minor official of Leofric’s household performing the office of safe-conduct.

The long column of cavalry and footmen behind looked foreign as well as unfamiliar as they came near the brink of the boundary-stream. That is, the hooded chain-mail tunics were commonplace, but the conical helms with their nose-guards were Norman, as were the circular haircuts and shaven napes of the stirrup-servants running beside them.

Then they began to traverse the stream, the advance testing the bed for the wagons lumbering behind, piled with boxes and gay with the head-veils of women. The sun shone on the water, and on the long harp-shields with their gilded bosses, and on the bright spears and horse-harness; the tips of the bows and the crowded, filigreed quivers; on the worked heads of sword and of axe and of dagger in silver and gold. The spurs, rowelling the horses over the stream, reflected gold into the muddy water, and a footsoldier, with a shout, held up a lance on which a live fish flashed and curled, silver against the blue sky.

So Edward of England, it appeared, had forgiven the Godwinssons. And before the ill-will of the Godwinssons, Emma’s friends and the boyhood friends of her son were in flight.

Thorfinn could hear his men counting. For the moment, numbers mattered less to the King than did the identities of the leaders, of whom there were more than a dozen. Then they came closer, and he began to distinguish the faces.

Some of them, as he expected, were those of war-leaders of reputation and birth from the duchy of Normandy: men such as the triumphant Godwin family were unlikely to suffer in England. Others were more surprising: an exiled vicomte, an excommunicated bishop he remembered, and, with them, an even more powerful abbot, all of whom, one had to suppose, had found themselves trapped in England when Earl Godwin was reinstated.

Among the younger faces was one remarkably like that of Goscelin de Riveire, the junior interpreter-monk whom he had met in Rome with his second cousin Alfred of Lincoln and Dorset. In fact, surveying the party, there was hardly one noble lord to whom the south-west coast of England was not as familiar as the halls of power in the Norman shores opposite them.

The second last man to arrive, with irony behind the formality of his greeting, was Carl Thorbrandsson, landowner in twelve English counties, whose life Thorfinn had spared once on the deck of a longship off Orkney.

The last was the scarred and powerful figure of Osbern of Eu, whom Thorfinn had first met nearly twenty years before at the enthronement of Duncan his brother. Osbern, uncle of Sheriff Alfred and nephew of the late Queen Mother Emma.

It came to Thorfinn that every landed man he could see, with perhaps one exception, was related to the late Lady Emma. But then, the ducal blood ran throughout Normandy.

‘My lord King,’ said Osbern of Eu. ‘I see that you are a man of your word. So am I.’

‘We have enemies, each of us; and in time to come, no doubt we shall have more. Here is my arm and my sword to protect you and yours. I ask in return only that we and our countrymen over the water may think of you, as we have always done, as a friend and an ally.’

‘If it were not so, you would not be here, nor should I,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Be welcome; and come to the camp.’

‘I won’t say no,’ Osbern said, ‘not now I smell what you’re cooking. We haven’t stopped to eat for eight hours. Did you know the Godwin brothers picked up your young nephew Donald in Ireland? Found where Siward had stowed him after his invasion failed, and brought him back, screaming and kicking …

‘My God, what a lot we’ve got to tell you,’ said Osbern. ‘We match well, you and I. Wait till we start campaigning. Then you’ll know what it’s like to live again.’

O, AS THE
Saxons to England, and the de Hautevilles in late years to Italy, the fighting friends of Duke William of Normandy entered the federation of lands known as Scotia; and the Norns were seen to smile.

The King of Scotia, ignoring the smile, set his intellect and his energy to handle the flamboyant newcomers.

First, he delayed their arrival in the north until they had lost their belligerence.

It was not difficult. They were tired from the swift journey from Hereford, and sore with defeat.

Since Earl Godwin had challenged King Edward in London, everything had turned out as predicted. Faced with a large and threatening army, the King had offered a mollified ear when Earl Godwin laid his axe by the throne, knelt, and begged for forgiveness.

He received it, to the cheers of the populace. To rather more violent acclaim, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London and Dorchester were proclaimed outlaw, together with all those Frenchmen, said the council, whose bad laws and advice had led the King into error.

Exception was made for the elderly, the wholly inefficient, and the friends the King wanted to hunt with. These included several horse-marshals and sheriffs, two half-Bretons, the chamberlain, the chancellor, and several people satisfactorily tied into English property, such as Bishop Hermann of Wiltshire, Dudoc of Wells, Leofric of Exeter, and Alfred of Lincoln and Dorset. Ralph the King’s nephew remained because he was brainless, occupying still the Hereford earldom of Godwin’s son Swegen, who had gone to Jerusalem, not before time. Richard, the sheriff who had raised the fortress at Overton, the most exposed quarter of the Welsh border, had been allowed to stay because he was a good administrator and no one else would take the job anyway.

Ewias castle, under Osbern of Eu, had been different. The English of the southern march who grew the castle’s food and suffered from the high spirits of its garrison had made no effort, like their lord Swegen, to disguise their fear and resentment of the foreigners planted in their midst, and the resulting
failure of the castlemen, lacking proper co-operation, to keep out the Welsh had only embittered them further.

Ewias, on its steep escarpment ten miles south of Hereford, was, with its garrison, the one sure target earmarked by the returning Godwin family for destruction. The other Normans who had incurred the Godwin displeasure were equally aware of their danger.