King Hereafter (122 page)

Then his enemies were riding towards him. Men he recognised from half a lifetime ago: from the field by the Forth just that morning, when he had toyed with Siward, setting alight the forest about him; leaving his army, taunting, to cover his retreat.

He recognised, too, the sturdy horses Osbern of Eu and his friends had ridden north from Ewias castle to Kirkby, where Thor of Allerdale had visited him and been made welcome.

Like that of his mount, the horses’ heads were lowered with tiredness. As with his men, Siward’s were bloody and blackened. He glimpsed Siward himself in their midst, the helmet deep on his brows and his face leaded black upon red with sunset and weariness.

Between Siward’s army and the Cumbrian detachment sent to trap them, there was a gap that did not lead to Strathmore. He did not need to call his men, even had he been able. They streamed to him from all over the moors: towards him and the gap.

Wherever Groa might be, he could not reach her. He could not break through to Scone, or to Perth, or to Dunkeld. He could not take the road through Strathmore to the coast and to freedom. All he could do was cling to his horse and guide it to the gap before it, too, was closed. The gap that led to the nearest hill-fortress, and the only refuge he could reach before his enemies did. The path that led to the hill called Dunsinane.

He sent no acknowledgements this time to Lulach. He sent no appeals to the Deity of the Pope or the Deity of his axe. He dismissed from his mind all that was irrelevant, including pain, and led the way up the long, rough approach to the hill to the great ditch and the tall, newly rebuilt walls of the ring-fort, whose gates were already opening.

He had had no idea there would be so many people inside. They laid the timber bridge over the ditch for him, since it was not a jump he cared to make. Tuathal was already within, flinging arrow-bundles into baskets and shouting for archers. By the time the last of the riders was putting horse to the hillside, there were men outside covering their entry, as the foot of the hill
grew a dark girdle of footsoldiers and the arrows and throwing-spears started to flash. The gap had closed.

He waited until they were all in and the gates were shut, and then turned to look round.

Not the massed populace of the district, as once you would have found. With the advance of armies of thousands, these had dispersed further north, taking their children and livestock along with them.

But some country people there were: older men and young boys and even women, with bloody bandaging, some of them, to show the wounds taken when fighting beside him along the Tay, and later.

These and other familiar faces: of men still in leather and mail moving quickly towards him. Wounded men standing in the doorway of the fort’s timber shelters, calling to him. Familiar faces of men—Gillocher, Morgund, Malpedar—whom he had last seen, not by the side of the Tay or the Earn, but early when the day was young and fresh and promising, between the rock-fortress and the forest on the river Forth. The men who had escaped Siward and had escaped, also, Thor of Allerdale’s ambush at Ruthven Water. Some of the fifteen hundred of whose massacre he had heard nearly five hours before.

He did not dismount as they crowded round him, for he could see them better that way, for one thing. He said, ‘Now let’s show them what we can do. Listen to Prior Tuathal and do what he says. You must be quick.’

Then Tuathal’s voice broke in immediately, speaking fast, and men dispersed, running. All the way here, Tuathal had planned it, calling to him, in case Allerdale’s men rushed the hill as soon as they entered. It was clear, from the flags, that half the surrounding army at least was Allerdale’s, or Thor commanding Siward’s own advance troops. It didn’t matter.

He listened to Tuathal shouting and thought that perhaps there wouldn’t be an initial attack at all, until Siward came up. Then he realised that he was still surrounded, and mostly by women who had been speaking to him, although he had not answered. His horse began to move, drawn by the cheekband towards the nearest building, and he saw pallets through the open door, and a man coming out, apparently to greet him.

His face was familiar, too. Bishop Jon said, ‘D’you know me, now?
A Diá
, there was an enemy of Patrick was peeled like an onion come every seventh year, and you have the very look of him. I have a legless fellow somewhere called Cormac would like a word in your ear in a moment. Meanwhile … Can ye walk at all?’

‘I can even talk,’ said Thorfinn. ‘If you’ll get me down off this animal.’

‘Ah,’ said Bishop Jon. The perfect tonsure of the previous night was clouded, Thorfinn observed, with fine bristles. The Bishop said, ‘Should we take that thing out of your hand first?’

He had forgotten the axe. Bishop Jon unwound the reins and took the haft out of his hand. It had stuck fast with blood and had to be tugged from his palm, which reminded him of something, he couldn’t think what. Then he was down, with the ground under his feet, after a fashion, and his ears
assuming the office, it seemed, of his eyes. Bishop Jon said, ‘Have you had a morsel since morning, I wonder? It’s food you need, and a good cup of something, the moment we’ve got you cleaned up. Or else—’

‘Or else what?’ said Groa.

His eyes settled, like muddy water, and allowed his brain through.

It was Groa. He had never seen so much dirt on her face, or such pallid skin under it. Her unplaited hair, crimson-lit, dangled like hawsers. She made a movement to touch him, and checked it.

‘Or else his wife will send him back where he came from. A man who doesn’t know when he is beaten: that I admire,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘A man who doesn’t know when he is killed is another matter entirely, and will need a new page in my psalter. Have I time to shave, or are you going to kiss her?’

Her tears came during the kiss, and made an island of it. He said, ‘No, beloved? We have a long way to go,’ and watched the control of years coming back.

He knew no one like her. There had never been anyone like her.

‘Sulien,’ said Thorfinn to himself. ‘Sulien, hear me. Sulien, soul-friend. I hate thy God.’

ORD
G
OD
A
LMIGHTY
,’ said Siward of Northumbria. ‘Lord God Almighty, what are they doing? They’ve let him get to the hill. They had the man twice. They had him trapped twice, and he bested them. Perhaps he didn’t even have to go to the fort. Maybe he found all Strathmore free to escape through.’

Ligulf said, ‘That he did not. Thor of Allerdale is between him and Strathmore, with the news of Dolphin’s death in his ears. If Thorfinn rose straight in the air, the crows would come down and tear him at Thor’s bidding.… We’re through into Scone, and they’ll have Perth in an hour. My God, did you see the stuff they took at Dunkeld?’

‘Never mind about Dunkeld. What about Scone?’ Siward said. ‘I thought I told you to stay in Scone until the treasure was safeguarded?’

‘Forne and the princeling are looking after it,’ Ligulf said. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t lose a pearl from the altar-cloth. That was a transformation, wasn’t it? The boy has discovered blood-sports. You should send him to join Allerdale.’

‘Which boy?’ said Siward. His bones ached under the mail, and now, due to incompetence, a nightfall of struggle lay before them instead of a clean success with the Orkney King wiped from the accounting for ever. ‘Which boy?’ He was over fifty, and the earth was cluttered with boys.

‘Well, not Maelmuire,’ Ligulf said, ‘who has hardly stopped vomiting since he left Dunkeld. I was talking of his brother Malcolm. You may be going to find Malcolm a handful.’

Siward of Northumbria paid no attention. He disliked Ligulf. He disliked all his brothers-in-law and their kin, with the possible exception of Forne.

Dunsinane. They knew all about that hill-fort from the Angus Mormaer, but hadn’t been able to overrun it in time. He could see the steep face of it now, as he rode between low hills towards it, and steel glittering red, damn them, on the top.

Like eyebrow over eye, this range they called the Sidlaws lay north of the Tay, beginning behind him at Scone; and Dunsinane rose in the west of it. Not the tallest of mountains: the one they named the Black Hill overtopped it
beyond, with only a knife-split between them; and beyond that, there was a higher one still.

But high enough, at six hundred feet above ground, to warrant the attention, centuries ago, of the old races who built the great circular forts with their concentric ditches and walls. This one, so they said, was over two hundred feet wide. Big enough to take a whole tribe and its beasts in time of danger, and subsequently built into something even safer than that. And on the knob at its summit, another fortification had been made, matching a similar one on the Black Hill.

A good place to defend. A good place for a signal-fire. A good place for a watch-station, with its northern slopes overlooking the rolling moors of Strathmore, patterned with plough-strips and homesteads and grazings, and dwindling to the line of high hills on the skyline. To the north-west ran the seam of the Tay, with Dunkeld and the mountains beyond it. And to the south, where he was riding, they could see him, as he could see them, together with all the hill approaches, save where on the west the bulk of the Black Hill blocked their vision. And behind him, the low, swelling folds that ran green to the Tay, and the Tay itself, in glimpses, and the hill-ridges lying beyond.

A commanding viewpoint in daylight. But now the sun was going. And soon Thorfinn and what he had saved of his men—one hundred? two?—would be alone on his hill in the dark.

Siward said, ‘How badly wounded is he, do they say?’

‘Thorfinn? Macbeth? Well, he can ride,’ Ligulf said. ‘But he was pouring blood, so it’s said. I doubt if there’s any fighting left in him. But he could still command their defences. They’ve got a long, gradual slope on the north side over there. He’ll throw a line across there, I imagine, and draw the rest up inside the walls. Some of the cottagers who held up the shipmen seem to have taken refuge there already, and a handful of wounded and others who couldn’t keep up with the fighting. He’ll have more than two hundred to defend it with. And maybe some cattle. And, by all accounts, a good spring of water as well. They could hold out for a while, unless he dies of wound-sickness or a blood-burst.’

Above, the sky hung, changing colour like fine China silk, with homing birds on its surface like powder. Here, emptied by space of all texture, men’s voices spoke and called and were thrown back from hill to hill, as every channel glinted with spears and with acorn helmets of dulled steel or leather and shields like shells on a necklace. Behind, when he twisted round, he saw that the black smoke obscuring the sun had been joined by another burst, this time of pure flame, rising over the river. He said, ‘It looks as if Perth has gone. I was saying. We have enough men to do whatever we feel like. But we could lose a lot up that slope before we get to the walls and then over them.’

Siward grunted. He said, ‘I wouldn’t mind.’ He felt, with satisfaction, Ligulf’s annoyance.

Ligulf would like him to embark on a long siege. It would suit Ligulf … it would suit a lot of people to have Siward of Northumbria held up in Alba with most of his forces. He wished again, bitterly, that the fools who served
him had managed to get rid of this half-bred seaman in daylight.

Ligulf said, ‘Will they obey and storm the hill anyway? It’s certain death.’

‘The mercenaries will,’ Siward said. ‘So will the rest. I haven’t shared out the booty as yet.’

‘Then an appeal to surrender?’ Ligulf said. ‘Send someone to parley. He must know he’s beaten, one way or another, unless he means to spend all his life there. What about Malduin?’

‘That fool?’ said Siward. Malduin of Alba was the only Bishop he had left. Aethelric, Bishop of the Holy Confessor Cuthbert and his Ever-Victorious Flag, had left after the second battle of Forth, and Cynsige had fallen sick and departed soon after. Siward said, ‘Faced with Malduin, Thorfinn is more likely to hold out till the loosing of Satan. Unless …’

He stopped, because he could hear hooves pounding behind, above the jingling thud of marching men. The scout from Scone. He drew in his horse and waited.

It was Gospatrick, Malcolm’s cousin. ‘My lord Siward, Perth has fallen.’

One should hope so. But he said something approving. The boy’s face was green. The boy said, ‘My lord Siward, there is bad news as well. Your nephew … the young lord Siward was killed in the fighting.’

The Earl said something or other and, after a moment, put his horse in motion again. Osbern gone. And now his sister’s son. And every other brat dead that that fool of a woman had ever thrown, except for a baby.

He was going to be the last. After he went, there was going to be none of Thore Hund’s blood in Northumbria except the pink-faced issue of his God-blighted brothers-in-law.