King Hereafter (13 page)

Because if King Olaf won: if the great combined armies of Sweden and the east, sweeping over the long mountain backbone and flooding down into the plains and fjords of west Norway, were to drive out King Canute’s child ruler and the men of Nídarós who supported him, Earl Brusi would no longer have to cling to the outlands of Orkney, with the cold winds of the north for companions.

Two-thirds of Orkney would be his again, with King Olaf behind him. All of Orkney, if King Olaf recalled, as indeed he would recall, that Thorfinn, his other young vassal Earl, was not only an oath-breaker but a man cherished by Saxons.

It was possible—it was even possible, Thorkel Amundason knew, that the young fool was about to meet King Olaf head on in battle. Hanged for a rebel and traitor, what future would this fine Earl leave Thorkel his foster-father, and Thorkel’s parents and family, here in Orkney? What could stop Brusi and King Olaf, together, from leaping those seven miles between Orkney and Alba and overrunning all Caithness?

At least that, said Thorkel to himself, his face twisting, would give our red-haired friend Gillacomghain something to think about. And Malcolm of Alba as well, squeezed like an old leather book-bag between Canute and Norway. No wonder, thought Thorkel Amundason, that Thorfinn took such trouble to cultivate Eachmarcach. There may come a time when we all need Ireland, one way or another.

The monk David said, ‘Do you see something?’

There was something, far out in the haze. Thorkel looked down to clear his eyes, and studied the crab-claws and the shells on the tussocky turf, and the pink and paper-brown heads of the sea thrift, and, far below, the tranquil grey-and-white drift of the fulmars passaging on the airflow released by the spray and the rocks. Then he looked up and saw what the monk had seen: a single square sail, low on the horizon to the east. To the east, and not the north-east, where news from Nídarós might be expected.

He said, ‘Another merchant.’ He realised that he was hungry. Another merchant. Like birds before a forest fire, the flocks of aliens, the wandering craftsmen, the churchmen, the traders had risen and settled, wild-eyed and apprehensive, all over the east coasts of Orkney and Alba. It was the first time in living memory that Norway had been threatened by land. By sea, yes: when a dispute could be settled by the sword and the axe by men whose business was the sword and the axe. But a battle on land was another thing.

David said, ‘I take leave to doubt it. The ship is covered in gold.’

He was right. With the sun behind him, Thorkel steadied his gaze on that far, moving speck and deciphered the pinpoint of brilliance as the sun caught the masthead and the prow. He forgot he was hungry, although it seemed a long time before the longship was near enough to see its great length, and the scarlet woven with gold of the sail, and, last of all, the banner that beat like a black bird of prey in the unclouded blue sky behind her.

In all the world, there were only two living men entitled to fly the black raven of Sigurd of Orkney, and one of them was here in Orkney as he was, standing no doubt on some headland watching. Thorkel said, ‘It is the Earl Thorfinn,’ and cleared his throat, and turned on the grass to drop down the steep path towards Sandwick, his home.

The monk David said, ‘My lord, there is no need to leave. I don’t know why, since they cannot possibly see us. But I think the longship has turned for this bay.’

Leaping down to the beach, with the little settlement emptying behind him, and the cliff-watchers, below, all beginning to run and call in his direction, Thorkel did not stop then to identify the glancing hurt he had felt, watching the longship turn and head for the promontory. And yet some time later, when an enemy used unwittingly a phrase of his mother’s, he was reminded again of that moment.

Instead of a clean half-moon of blue pebbles, the beach was thick as a bere-field with heads: the cloth-bound heads of married women and the shining cloak-fall of hair of young girls, as well as the cloth and leather caps, the untrimmed hair and beards of the farmers, and the smooth chins and snake-moustaches of those who had travelled and fought and fancied a foreign style would make them sound wittier. The roar of talk, as the longship’s prow, sixty feet high, cut towards them, grew to a storm, pushing back the kindly sound, the surfing lap of the waves.

The first thing that Thorkel saw was that the longship’s flanks were unscarred, and that the shields ranged on the sides for her harbour-coming were not only unbloodied but new from the maker’s. The second thing was that the prow-dragon, seen from afar, had been taken down for the shore landing. The third thing was that, among the glitter of silver and gold, a tall, bareheaded man was making his way forward among the helmeted throng and, as the ship was run up on the beach, took as his right the first foot on the gangplank and walked downwards slowly, his eyes drifting over the crowd.

The boy Thorfinn. The boy he had fostered, tall and loose-limbed, with the silken band of the
hlā
round his black hair, and a fine, long-sleeved tunic of wool above loose breeches gathered tight under the knee into soft leather boots. There was gold and enamel, fine as shell-work, on the scabbard of his sword and the sheath-ends of his belts, and the sword-pommel was deep-worked in gold like a king’s. The high brow and the violent brown eyes were the same.

Then the crowd fell back, quietening, around Thorkel, and the boy saw him, and stopped.

Thorkel watched himself being studied: saw noted the grey in his hair and the scar on his neck where a Morayman’s arrow had taken him. And, perhaps, the confidence and even the arrogance that two years of undivided power can give. Thorkel Amundason knew that he had ruled the north well, and that he had no need of a master. He also knew that on the deeds of this wealthy and self-willed young foster-son depended the lives of himself and his family. He said, ‘You have news of King Olaf?’

The brown eyes turned to the right and to the left. ‘An Orkney welcome,’ the boy remarked.

The low wave of talk rose and fell, and half a dozen voices around and behind Thorkel called, ‘Welcome, lord! Welcome!’ to a rumble of scattered amusement. Orkney was reserving its judgement. Orkney was playing safe.

Thorkel said, ‘Forgive me. We are glad to see you. But news of the war is of
such moment to us all, as it must be to you, that we thought first of the greater issue.’ The boy’s accent had changed again. First, the sinuous Gaelic of his stepfather had infected it, and now in three words you heard the roundness of the colonial Saxon. Thorkel stood on the pebbles and hated him.

The boy said, ‘I have news.’ Behind him, the ship was emptying. Perhaps sixty men, well dressed and armed, gazing about them, jumped ashore or came down the gangplank and ranged themselves behind their master. Some of the faces were familiar: men who had left the islands in the last years to take service with Thore Hund, or King Canute and the chief of his housecarls. Two or three stayed aboard, with their weapons, and Thorkel realised, from a sudden thudding, that they had also brought horses. The boy said, raising his voice, ‘I have news. Can you hear me?’

His voice rolled and boomed, even in that open space, as if it came from the cauldrons of the underworld, and along the beach, men replied with the voices of gulls. The boy stood, taller than any man there, and said, ‘The war in Norway is ended. The men of Trøndelagen have won. King Olaf is dead. His half-brother Harald and Rognvald the son of Earl Brusi have fled back to Novgorod. King Canute is ruler of Norway, and I am defender of all Orkney and ruler of all but the isles of the north. Praise King Canute!’

The cheer that rose might be held to praise King Canute. Certainly the crewmen from the longship, joining in, might have had that impression. Thorkel said, ‘King Canute defeated King Olaf?’

‘The men of Nídarós defeated King Olaf,’ the boy said. ‘The news reached us at Vik as we were preparing to sail to do battle.’

Thorkel Amundason said, ‘So King Canute took no part in the battle?’ The boy and the men behind him bore no marks, not even a groove from an arrow.

The boy said, ‘King Canute fought and won this battle without moving from Winchester. This battle was decided not with iron, but gold.’ He raised his voice. ‘Is there a welcome, then, for your Earl and his men, returned with news of victory?’

There was. Amid the roaring, amid the preparations to sweep the Earl and his men to the great hall at Sandwick, Thorkel Amundason stood back and said almost nothing, and on the march to the west, over the turf and cracked skins of the stone slabs, he let his father and kinsmen move to the Earl’s side while he walked with his friends. Then, during the feasting that followed, he poured ale and wine into a stomach unfilled since morning until he had to leave the benches and empty himself under the moon, where the scythed hay rustled with voles in the in-fields, and a sheep moved cropping, and the salt tang and the hush of the sea drew him away from the heat and the noise, above the beach and along the high ground from where, looking over the ocean, he could discern the slivers of light from Kolbein’s steading on Copinsay and, ahead, the glimmering fire on Deerness, a joy-beacon, dying now on the wind, to celebrate the death and defeat of a king.

If King Olaf had fallen, then Finn Arnason and all his brothers, it must be expected, would have died with him. So for Thorkel Amundason there was no kinship on either side of the sea that was not subject to the whim of a child: a
child aged twenty-one years, being rocked in a cradle of gold by King Canute, his new foster-father.

The child’s voice, just behind him and rumbling low as the breakers, said, ‘I used to climb on Copinsay when I was small. It looks quiet in the moonlight.’

‘It would make a good defence post,’ Thorkel said. He did not turn. He had made sure, he thought, that no man’s eye was on him as he left.

Thorfinn said, ‘There is a boat down there. Do you suppose we could go over?’

The boat was his father’s. ‘It would only hold five or six,’ Thorkel said. ‘But call them out and see.’

He heard his foster-son move, and saw him against the sea, strolling to an outcrop of rock. He hitched himself onto it. Even so, his height was abnormal. The boy said, ‘You have lost none of your cousins. Finn has gone back to Novgorod, where the child is.’

Thorkel said, ‘I was wondering.’ Enlightenment began to come. ‘And Kalv?’ he found himself asking.

The boy said, ‘You know their habit. They always divided the family.’

‘So Kalv fought against King Olaf,’ Thorkel said.

‘So Kalv killed King Olaf,’ the boy said.

The fire on Deerness rose and fell, dusky red in the night, like the fire King Olaf had lit at Egge before he burned the god Thor and killed Ølve and gave his widow to Kalv. The boy had taken the dragon from his prow before landing today. The great monsters with their tongues of smoke and eyes of mountain-fire must not gaze on the land, lest the earth spirits be afraid and blight the bere in the field and the lamb in the womb. Thorkel Amundason said, ‘There is a woman waiting for you at Duncansby. An old woman called Fridgerd.’

‘Her foster-son is Arnór Thordarson the song-maker,’ the boy said. ‘He is in the hall there. She is waiting for him.’

Thorkel said, ‘They call her a wise-woman.’

‘… And I took the dragon from the prow,’ the boy said. ‘Call it superstition. Call it a requirement to look both ways, like Kalv. He wanted so very much to be viceroy of Norway. Canute will still appoint his own son, and Kalv will take his money and grumble. But there is no heir to King Olaf but the bastard son Magnús in Russia, and Magnús is six. You and I, surely, could manage that boat?’

Thorkel Amundason was empty as a dog-bladder and, ten minutes before, had walked chill and shaking in an unfriendly world. Thorkel said, ‘Why not?’ and ran down to the beach with his foster-son and pushed him brawling into the surf and was pushed in turn before they got the thing launched and across the channel of smooth, swelling sea.

Copinsay was a steep, turfy island girded with bird-ledges. They ran the boat up the shore, but avoided the farm. Kolbein had been one of the glittering retinue who had disembarked from the longships today. There would only be old women and babies in his house at this moment. So instead
they climbed up past the barns and out to the right, to the south-eastern rim of the island, where the cliffs were. Round the rock-foot, the sea creamed in the dark, and the seals beaded the waves, rolling like puppies. The boy sang to them, long, bawdy songs, and the seals sang back, and Thorkel tripped on an old eider nest and had his hand scythed in a hole by a sea-parrot and laughed so much that his stomach went into spasms and had to be treated from a leather flask Thorfinn produced. They emptied the flask, and then went climbing.

The fowling-cliffs ran for a mile and were made of red flagstones, split vertically into geos and notches and chimneys, and layered across like a shield-maker’s stackyard. From their green tops to the sea-shattered rocks at their base was a fall of two hundred feet. Thorkel, too, had spent summer days there with his friends, filling the egg-basket at the end of a rope, or lying at dusk while Kari silenced the guard-bird and all the slumbering cormorants were seized and throttled and thrown into the boats far below. He had never come unroped this way at night before, full of drink, behind a skipping black shadow that declaimed Odin-verses in Norse and sang love-songs in Gaelic and drinking-songs in Norman-French and Saxon and Wendish and raised the kittiwakes and the auks and the gulls and the fulmars in a screaming white cloud round their heads.