King Hereafter (105 page)

‘Leave it to me,’ said Groa. ‘We’ll be all right. Go and do what you can. And be careful.’

Then as he turned away, she went to the door already opening for her.

‘I don’t see,’ said Paul, ‘why Erlend had to go to the houses. He’s strong. And he’s sensible.’

It was the first time he had spoken to his father since the crisis began, although he had never lost him to sight, not for a moment. It was the first time that he had seen his father do anything but ride about and talk to people and sail boats and race and jump and swim and lay wagers at horse-fights on feast days and drink. He was good at sports, and he could handle a boat better than any of the other men’s fathers. But he never seemed to go to war, as other men’s fathers did. He never even settled a quarrel by fighting. He seemed to like the easy life down there in Alba, or feasting with Popes and with Emperors further south.

People spoke of the great times when he fought sea-battles all over the Sudreyar and further south, in England and Ireland and Wales, but he, Paul, had not been there and didn’t remember them. He didn’t remember much of the fighting in Orkney, even, when the man they called Rognvald, who must have been his cousin, was killed.

Men spoke of that as if it was a heroic thing, but it was Thorkel Fóstri, he
found, who had done the actual killing, and his father wouldn’t speak about it at all.

He was proud of his father, who was an earl and a king, but he wished his father stayed in Orkney all summer, as Otkel did, who had taken his son fighting once, when pirates tried to take over Foula. Because Earl Thorfinn wasn’t there to give permission, Otkel had not taken Paul with him, although Paul had begged. He had been fourteen years old. His father had been given
Grágás
at fourteen, and had gone with Thorkel Fóstri raiding the tribute-lands.

Since then, his father had told both Thorkel and Otkel to take his son Paul with them whenever there was prospect of fighting, but there had never been anything worth speaking of, except an Icelandic trader who hadn’t paid his toll and had to be stopped in the Firth, or, once, a small flotilla of ships from Ireland that had fled when they saw them. He was well trained. He had had mock fights enough, and some of them pretty dirty. But he had not been able to show anyone, yet, that he was anything but what his father now was: a rich man who did what he liked because he was King and everyone was polite to him.

It surprised him, therefore, that his father should be here, in the thick of the night and the storm, helping with the heavy, difficult work as well as directing it.

With his height and arm-span, of course, his father had an advantage. When the horses, being bridled to lead them to safety, panicked and lashed out in the dark, threatening to do worse harm to the buildings than the wind would, it was his father who forced his way between them and dragged out the pair who were causing most trouble. When the roof of the cooking-stores threatened to blow off, it was his father who held a mat over it, wooden shingles spurting and whirling about him, until the thing could be bound down and weighted.

They lost the spices. ‘Innocent of pepper as Paulinus’s cook,’ said his father cheerfully. ‘Most of it up my nose. Erlend? He’s too light on his feet. The wind would bowl him over. He’ll be a good man to help the women.’

Which was satisfactory. Erlend, six years younger, needed someone to speak up for him, sometimes.

His father’s face was bleeding a little, and there was more roofing coming down somewhere. A spray of trotter-bone pegs hit the ground and bounced into the darkness, followed by the crack and snap of thin flags flipping and breaking. A handful of what he thought was heather thatch caught him in the face, but it wasn’t: a corn-stack had been pushed over and some of the netting had burst. He ran to help and found that, instead of repairing it, men were thrusting what they could into carts, still under its netting.

The carts rocked as they worked. As soon as they were taken from shelter, they began to slide on locked wheels over the yard, and then to tilt. The door came off a shed full of tools, and spades, even, were turning over and over; while a flock of rods kept for wattling thrust through the air, cruel as arrows.

One of them put a man’s eye out. It was the first of the really bad injuries,
and Paul saw it. He was looking at the man, screaming without being heard, blood coming from between his fingers, when Paul himself was attacked by something thin and cold and slippery that whipped round his neck and stayed there, tugging, as if it wanted to pull his head off.

He put up his hands and found it was a long strand of seaweed. Lokki-lines, they called them, the older people. Seaweed torn from the beach, all that distance away. There had been shore-foam on the beach yesterday. The old people had a name for that as well. The Draug’s vomit, they called it. They said it meant death.

‘Got a new collar?’ his father yelled. ‘Look. There are some sacks over there that wouldn’t go into the barn. They’re well pinned down, but it would be a pity to lose them. Can you get some of them into the hall? And the stuff from that shed. The torf-skeri and shovels.’

He disappeared and Paul, leaning on the wind, began work on the bags. They were full of wool. It was hard to hold them and pull the hall-door open, and every time he did it, the row of shields on the wall clapped about, booming like gongs, and the wind-path swept through the rushes grew broader. They had the malt-sacks in there already, he saw, and heaps of oars, nearly as high as the tapestry. The fire had roared itself out and the ash in the centre flushed up grey with each entry and lay over everything.

Each time he went out, there was more seaweed flying about, and great handfuls of sand, slapping into your face or your clothes. One of the sacks was ripped from his arms as he struggled yet again with the hall-door, and the soft tufts of plucked wool, black and brown and light brown and milky, flowered into the air like a dandelion clock and were blown away just as quickly.

His father’s voice roared, ‘Leave that! It’s time to go.’

Paul looked round. There were still a lot of men about, and a few lanterns, so that you could see dimly. A knot of men came from the shore at a staggering run, carrying another who was crying. He could see men coming away now, too, from where the ships had been put: the first job, and the heaviest he had shared with his father. The noise from the shore was much greater: a familiar hiss and booming he had heard often before with a big tide on the make, but muffled now because of the deafening sound of the wind. He shouted, ‘When are
you
going?’

‘When the yard is clear,’ his father yelled back. ‘See you up on the hillside.’

‘I’ll wait,’ shouted Paul.

He saw his father’s palm come up in acceptance, and then his father disappeared again, blundering forcefully into the wind, checking the groups of men coming inwards towards him. Paul could hear, intermittently, the resonance of his voice through the noise in the throat of the wind, and the roar from the shore that was becoming louder and louder.

How close was the sea? As a good leader should, his father was making sure that no one was left in its path; that no man, taking a last wistful thought to a neglected fishing-boat or a skiff or a hoard of nets he had forgotten, should dash back and drown for his folly.

But a tide could come quickly, and no one was there now on the rocks to watch it advancing.

It came to Paul that he could watch it advancing from the roof of the hall. He knew the footholds. He had often helped with the thatching.

He hurtled round the end of the building, into the cross-draughts and eddies of its sheltered side, and started to climb.

He thought he knew the force of the wind. He had not observed that, from the gale it had been, it had risen through level after level of violence to a power that no man living on Orkney had ever experienced or was to experience again.

He reached the top of the wall and, lying flat on the thatch, pulled himself quickly upwards until his body lay slanting just under the spine and, by raising himself a fraction, he could look over the roof-tree and down to where the beach lay.

The gale, pouring over the roof, caught him before he had even started to make his next movement. It lifted him for a moment before it threw him down, so that for a second he saw what he wanted: that the sea had already overrun the beach and the rocks and the shingle and was advancing like a black wall rimmed with white over the slipways and grasslands of Orphir. He saw men scurrying over the yard, their faces white in the lantern-light, leaning back into the wind with their knees and legs taking the strain as the storm behind tried to bowl them over.

None of them saw him. The wind grabbed him under the arms and flipped him outwards and back as it had the torn raven banner already. It was the folds of the banner, lying thick and cold in the shelter below, that saved his life, but not his skull from the blow that deprived him of consciousness.

Paul Thorfinnsson woke to find himself lying, his hair whipping his face, in the arms of someone who was running. For seventeen, he was big and heavily built, but the man who carried him was so tall and held his weight so easily that there was no doubt who he was. Only for a moment did he pause and face the buffeting wind with an effort, and Paul recognised in that moment his own struggle with bales of wool before the same door. Then the door of the Earl’s hall slowly yielded, and his father carried him in and laid him on the same bales.

He moved as he was placed there. His father’s voice said sharply, ‘You’re awake? Where are you hurt?’

He did not know himself. He moved and felt dizzy. ‘My arm. My shoulder. I could walk.’

‘It’s too late.’

It was. There was a rapping noise at the shutters, as if someone had thrown a handful of pebbles against them. He said, ‘The others?’

‘Up the hill. I told them not to wait. Or to come back.’

‘They will,’ said Paul. They loved his father. He knew that now, and was proud of it.

‘I told them I’d be safe in the hall. Whether I found you or not. Paul.’

‘Yes?’ he said. The wool was soft under his shoulder. Out of all Europe, out of the whole kingdom of Alba and Cumbria, out of all Moray and Caithness and the myriad islands of Orkney, his father was here, only here, and alone with himself.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Thorfinn. ‘At least, listen. If the shutters burst, the bales will float for a while, and there will be oars and benches moving about to take hold of. Do you hear me?’

It hurt to fill his lungs, but he said loudly, ‘Yes!’ The shutters rattled and clattered under another onslaught of stones, and yet another. The yard must be full of water, the first probing lines running ahead of the oncoming battalions and bringing their debris. First pebbles, then big, rounded stones from the storm-beach, bounding and pounding against the timber walls and the planks of the shutters.

He sensed that his father had moved away and guessed what he must be doing: fortifying the boards with the heaviest things he could drag: the sack of provisions, the bench-boards, the high chair itself.

The hall became a sounding-board. Within its shaking beams, there was nothing to be heard and nothing to be felt but the scream and roar of the wind, and the clattering percussion of objects striking the walls and the shutters, and the thunder of water outside, becoming louder and louder under a chattering ground-base of discarded boulders.

Then the main wall of water struck the building, and the shutters burst inwards like reeds, and the salt water rushed white and green into the hall at Orphir, thrusting obstructions aside, while a slap of water, heavy as lead, fell on the thatch and through it, to pour foaming down on the deepening sea on the hall-floor.

The bales under Paul moved, but he was kept from slipping by his father’s hand, firm on his good arm. Behind the King’s back he could see the white-flecked water still flooding in; then it dwindled. He wondered what would have happened if the thatch had opened over their heads. His father said, ‘All right. Pressure inside and out. The walls will stand.’

He could hear him better because the noise was less between waves. His father made no attempt to mend the wrecked shutters. His father had been shielding him from the stones coming through. The bales knocked together again, but the fall from the roof-breach had dwindled, and so had the rush from the windows. The wind, seizing on the hole in the roof, tugged and groaned, and spewed wet straw down over his hair and into the water. His father said, ‘Now, that is a problem. Or we’ll have the roof off.’

He spoke as if playing a board-game. Paul said, ‘The sea? My lord?’

His father adjusted the bales, splashing about, and took a grip of his arm again. A faint radiance, investing what remained of the roof, indicated that, whatever happened, dawn still intended to come. His father said, ‘Either the sea comes to stay, or it attacks and runs off. We seem to have been at the end of its reach on this occasion. I think we’ll find that it is drawing back.’

Now, for the first time, he felt the real fiery ache of his arm and his shoulder;
but he would not be less nonchalant than his father. ‘There’s another high tide this evening,’ he said.

‘Indeed there is,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Well, you can stay for that one if you like. I’m going to be busy.’

In the cold dawn, with the wind pushing them so that they could hardly face each other, the King and his wife met on the slope above the battered hall.

The sea had receded, and the yard and the grasslands were a wilderness of sand and mud and wriggling fish, of stones and pebbles and seaweed, of driftwood and shellfish. Half the buildings between the hall and the shore had disappeared.

Thorfinn’s face was hollow, as hers was. Only Erlend, drunk on the night and the excitement, jumped up and down, swinging on his mother’s arm.

Thorfinn said, ‘Paul’s arm is broken, but he is all right. They’ve taken him off to a dry house. How did you manage?’

‘The roof came off!’ Erlend said. ‘The roof came off a woman’s house, and we all helped to save what we could. The milk-vat ran away. And I saw a hen get killed. It got blown against a thatch-stone and got killed. And her loom fell about and got broken.’