King Hereafter (133 page)

No, said his entrails. His mind ran about, trying to find a reason for him. He said finally, knowing where it would lead, ‘What makes you think a bishop sacrosanct?’

‘Their hope of heaven?’ Tuathal said. ‘They wouldn’t give that up for Malcolm.’

The King said, ‘They nearly killed Bishop Jon.’

‘He was leading an army,’ said Tuathal. His voice sounded jaunty. ‘That’s different.’

Thorfinn said, ‘A king also is sacrosanct. And I am not leading an army at present.’

The horses’ pace did not break. The thud of the canter went on, and nothing disturbed it. Then Tuathal said, ‘When was this?’

‘The most recent time? In Atholl,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Ten days ago, maybe. A nice spear, but thrown very badly.’

‘Did you get him?’ Between thuds, it came like a snap.

Thorfinn said, ‘Hardly. Do you expect me to stop my train and announce to the crowds what had happened? Few saw it, and those few thought it an accident. If I knew it was personal to me, then I should have no objection to your going to Fife. But it was more likely his view of us all.’

Tuathal said, ‘Do you think none of us knows? It is personal to you, because Malcolm is making it so. The disaffected of Fife won’t waste time and risk holy wrath by cutting my throat. They’ll try to persuade me, like Malduin, to leave you. And that will give you a breathing-space.’

Change, or adapt. He said, ‘Yes. You’re right.’ There was almost nothing he couldn’t do, now, at the cost of some small extra weariness. It was a pity that the exception had been noticed. But that would mend. And as his body grew back to his habit, it would be folly to let his thinking soften. He said none the less, ‘It will be autumn soon.’

Autumn, the season of home-coming and mellow regrets, that the summer’s strand-raids were over, and the sea-fights with the tax-boats, and the evenings that were the crown of the day: kicking the sand in the fire as you wrestled, happy with ale, while the songs and the sea crashed about you, and the salt-smart and blood of the day’s wounds were no more troubling than star-dust. Sad autumn and sadder winter, when the fighting was over till next year.

‘Yes,’ said Tuathal. ‘Thanks be to God. It’ll be autumn soon, and we shall have peace for a space.’

Tuathal was away in November when the messenger came from Godiva of Mercia to where Thorfinn was staying at Essie.

In fact, Thorfinn was out riding, and it was the Lady to whom the messenger was taken, and who heard him out and herself took him to the guest-cabin where he could refresh himself.

So Thorfinn found, coming back from his ride through the hill-pass between Spey and Don, with a smell of snow in the air from the Cabrach.

Latterly, he had spent a week or two here in the mountains, dividing his time between Mortlach and his little hall at Noth, beside Essie. Soon they would have to move to lower ground, either north to the Moray coast or south to the softer regions of Mar. Further south, he could not ride like this, with two attendants and no weapons to speak of. In Moray, where Lulach’s family had always ruled, and Groa ever since her first marriage, every man and woman was loyal.

The day had been a good one. There was a deer laid across the back of one of the garrons, and he had found someone to speak to in all the farmsteads he had passed, but neither had been the main reason for the excursion, which was to have freedom to breathe and to think.

It had seemed to him, that day, that his design for the country might work. It had been different when Duncan died and he himself had arrived south in Alba a conqueror, and had to plant his armed camps amid the smoking ravages of what Duncan’s men had done, and then his own. But even then he had had enough sense to dismiss his men of the north when he could; to take only Moray men with him to Scone. To promise the men of Alba, when he asked them which ruler they wanted, that their leaders would be chosen, as always, from the men of Alba and not from the men of the north.

He did not propose to ask them again which ruler they wanted. Once appointed, his kingship rested with him for life, or until he were crazed or blinded. Nor would he confront anarchy by armed camps of alien warriors, and destroy in a moment all he had been working for, to join together what he had inherited. They thought he had saved his men of the north at the cost of the army of Alba. But he had fought beside them: they had seen him. And if they remembered at all, they must have known that they would like the men of the north down here among them as little as the men of Northumbria.

But people shaken by war and by loss did not always, of course, act reasonably, and there was unruliness, with no standing army left to control it. On the other hand, people grew used to their condition. This winter would be better than last for stores and for shelter. And there was no longer the edge of apprehension and danger that clouded men’s thoughts and made them violent.

Malcolm’s agents were still working, with stealth, on his people’s minds, but the opposite was now also true. Tuathal’s presence in Fife, brave man that he was, would do more good than anything else one could think of. He could not grow men in a season, but the fleet was building again, and he had silver to
help it build quicker. It seemed possible that, in time, dissent might smoulder and die, and the battle-reluctance induced by fatigue transform itself slowly into a genuine peace.

Gradually, he knew, the exiles he sheltered in Moray would find their way south again to the lands they had left. Gradually, there was no doubt that the colonists from the south would consolidate what they had and drift further north before they were finished. At some point, a good deal in the future, he and Tostig would have to meet and reach an agreement of some sort to do with tributes and taxes. It was what he had thought to do with Siward, before Siward’s son Osbern was killed.

At the moment, no man in his senses would try to act the overlord in wasted country, where the means for survival were only just possible. It meant the survivors had no protection and no proper law, apart from whatever patchwork he could obtain for them. Malcolm, he supposed, was in the same position. The snatching of land in the Lothians would not all have gone smoothly.

It might work out. Norway and Denmark, locked in their own strife, were unlikely to trouble him. A ship or two, Thorkel Fóstri reported, had found its way to Thurso or Orphir, sometimes with a genuine cargo to trade, but more often looking for gossip and a good sizing-up of his assets. The masters had not all been well mannered, and after one scuffle aboard, a reproachful message had come south from Odalric, asking for the return of one or two of their own ships when Thorfinn might find it convenient.

He had sent two, but he did not want to spare more till the spring. It was the way of Harald of Norway, to keep reminding his neighbours to be afraid of him. One such Norwegian ship—perhaps the same one—had threaded its way into the Lossie one day when Groa was there, and tried the same thing. She had recognised the master. Groa’s tongue and what she knew of the master’s grandfather and mother had been enough. She had made them unload their goods, at half-price.

But of course all that begged the question of Malcolm, who was still there with, one supposed, some self-pride and would expect a future of sorts that did not shame him.

So long as armies were not marching and Malcolm had no army of any real size to take anywhere, such matters could always be managed by talking, as time went on. He would have to see Malcolm himself and discuss it with Tostig. And, meanwhile, so act that no one in power saw any benefit at all in offering Malcolm the strength to do anything.

Enclosed in sparkling cold, with the russet and white of the hills all about him, and the frost bursting dry from his horse-hooves, he found it easier to plan without impatience. The course that was natural to him was not this one. In Orkney, he would have acted quite differently. In Orkney, they were different people.

Then he got to the stockade, which had already opened for him, and men came forward quickly for his horse, and he became aware of an extra liveliness: a larger number of people in the yard than was usual, and faces
glancing at him, and away. A horse he did not know was being led off, he noticed, with the sweat sluicing the mud from its coat. He reached the hall almost before the man who opened the door for him.

Inside were his household: the few men and women he had brought with him, standing together, bright in the light of the fire, leaning on the pillars, talking to each other and to Groa.

Beside Groa, on the board where they had been taking their morning ale, lay a scarf he recognised. Embroidered on the edge were the rosettas of Mercia.

Thorfinn said, ‘Alfgar?’

They all turned. Not Alfgar. Or not his death, for the looks on their faces did not speak of death, but of worry.

Groa said, ‘Nothing has happened to Alfgar. Except that he has turned raving mad.’

‘What has he done?’ He walked up and lifted the ale-pitcher. He cared about Alfgar. He cared more, at the moment, about what would affect the nation he was trying to beguile back to its allegiance.

Groa said, ‘He has invaded England. With his personal army and eighteen shiploads of hired troops from Ireland.’

But the scarf had been Godiva’s, not Alfgar’s. Thorfinn poured the ale and said, ‘And?’

‘And joined Gruffydd, who has just made himself supreme King of Wales. They laid Archenfield flat, on the Hereford side of the Welsh border, and when Earl Ralph the king’s nephew rushed up to oppose them, together with all the Normans still holding castles, Alfgar and his Irish and Welsh levies offered battle. Except that it wasn’t, apparently, much of a battle. The English had been given horses to fight on for the first time, and used them, with some sense, to run away on.

‘Alfgar marched unopposed into Hereford, burned the town to the ground, and plundered the cathedral of its relics and treasures, murdering seven of its canons. After that, he went on to kill or carry off everyone else still left alive in the town and in Earl Ralph’s own castle.’

She paused, as he well knew, not because she was breathless but to let him think, and also to assess how he was taking the news. He drank, and said, ‘Where was the King?’

‘At Gloucester, as usual. Earl Harold’s levies were arriving there while Alfgar was still in Hereford. Thev say Tostig’s force had been summoned already.’

Which was why they had enjoyed such tranquillity on the Northumbrian border. What a pity. He said, ‘And Harold’s army stopped Alfgar?’

‘They didn’t get the chance,’ Groa said. ‘Alfgar and Gruffydd withdrew into the hills and waited, and now there’s talk of a peace-pact. Alfgar’s army killed five hundred in Hereford and outside, but he’s untouched and has 4 almost no losses.

‘All this news is from Alfgar’s mother, the Lady of Mercia. She says that she thinks Earl Harold has realised that Alfgar is stronger and has more friends
than he thought, and that he is going to have to propitiate him. She says that the peace won’t last, and that it is only fair that all Alfgar’s friends should be warned. She says that you may remember that in the matter of allies Alfgar, if unrestrained, can be ruthless. She says that if the Irish army hadn’t been enough, he was thinking of an alliance with Norway.’

And there, on the whole, he was glad that she stopped. For this news, of course, was vital to him. And without Godiva, he never would have known, cut off as he was. Until suddenly, whatever Alfgar’s personal plans, he himself was either embroiled in them or surrounded.

He said, ‘You’ve met the Lady. Do you think the Earl of Mercia knows about this?’

‘I expect so,’ said Groa. She hesitated, and then said, ‘I think she warns you from friendship. But also she needs to know whether you would join Norway and Alfgar if he were to ask you.’

It was his reading. Without a word, Alfgar’s father Leofric had stood aside, holding Mercia for the King while his son tried this step and that and finally got himself outlawed. When you ruled a great province, there was nothing to be gained by associating yourself with another’s disgrace, even if he were your only son. Alfgar had sons in his turn. Whatever happened, there must remain Mercia, untouched, and still in the King’s favour. You saw it even in wars: a son on one side and his father or brother on the other. So a line could continue.

He said, ‘It’s November, and too late for an answer. We shall talk at the Christmas meeting, and I shall go to Chester when the seas open. There are some things that are better said face to face.’

Bishop Jon said sharply, ‘Sail! Yourself! With Diarmaid’s ships and Allerdale’s on the sea?’

Without warning, Thorfinn lost his temper. ‘What am I?’ he said. ‘A prisoner in my own kingdom?’

Bishop Jon’s face was unmoved. ‘A man who cannot be replaced,’ he said. ‘Traitor that I am, I will say it. If you go, it will only be because we allow it.’

It was not a matter for smiling, either with Bishop Jon or himself.

Then, suddenly, it was. He saw Groa relax a moment before he said, ‘Why are we worrying? Alfgar is invincible. They will have him canonised like Olaf by spring.’

It was the last twist of the pattern that year, and nothing else was to matter so much.

O FAR AS
Tuathal of Alba was concerned, the winter, despite his expressed hopes, was no more peaceful than the rest of the year had been.