Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
He enjoyed it. He said, clinging inwards to the sheaves of dark rock, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Are you?’ said the boy; and swung himself up to the clifftop. Thorkel slid down and sat where he was. When he opened his eyes, the boy was beside him again, with a stick in his hands. His fingers, spread under one end, supported and displayed a fine circle of black. When Thorkel touched it, he recognised the thin horsehair noose of the fowler. He remembered the horses on board and realised it had shared a pouch with the flask. A man of forethought, his young foster-son.
Then the boy wriggled along the thin ledge and began to work his way north, and Thorkel, in a bland, confused way, followed him as best he could, but couldn’t remember the history of the stalking, the moments of trapping, or even the climb back to the top with a fat black-and-white auk in the breast of his shirt.
It was the boy who singed and spitted the birds and roasted them on a little fire he made in the lee of the cliff. Thorkel ate his down to the bones, and half Thorfinn’s as well. The taste of fish-flavoured chicken brought back his childhood, and he talked a lot, and the boy listened. It was not until they had picked their way down to the shore, past the farmstead, now quite dark, that Thorkel’s head began to clear and he realised how tired he was, and a number of other things as well. The boy said, ‘Sit in the stern. I’ll row,’ and for a moment it appeared vital to refuse the service: to assert his leadership: to reverse the irreversible.
But he was too tired. He sat back and watched the smooth pull of the long, disjointed arms and Thorfinn’s tangled black hair blowing in the sea-wind from the east. The moon had gone, and in its place was the grey northern
half-dark of summer. Thorkel said, ‘You’re not a hostage any more, are you? Does Canute expect you to go back?’
‘Hardly,’ the boy said. He added, his voice patient, ‘King Olaf is dead, and I have back two-thirds of Orkney.’
Thorkel found his eyes were wet. He could not think why. But he was hardly surprised when some time later, after no one had spoken at all, the boy said, looking past him at the sea, and the south sky above Alba, ‘I wonder what Gillacomghain is planning to do now?’
Thorkel closed his eyes and shut out the future.
The next day, when he rose and went out to the yard, the first news they shouted to him, above the noise of the geese, was that the dragon-ship had gone.
It was from a fishing-boat, late in the afternoon, that he heard that she had sailed north, calling at a few of the islands before beaching at Westray with her dragon-head still on the prow. Earl Brusi had been at Westray that week, looking to his farms, and it was said that the half-brothers had had a short interview, in public, at which not very much had been drunk, and the dragon-ship’s crew had stayed aboard the ship except for Arnór the song-maker.
They said that Brusi understood that King Olaf was dead, and that, being now a vassal of King Canute’s, he could safely leave the defence of all the Orkneys, and hence the ship-levies and raising of war-bands, to Earl Thorfinn. As before, the produce of the northernmost isles would be his own, apart from any tribute exacted by Norway. But Thorfinn, who knew the regent Svein, King Canute’s young son and his mother, had confidence that no unreasonable demands would be made, if indeed any were put forward at all.
From Thorfinn when he returned to Sandwick, with the dragon-head doffed, his foster-father heard almost nothing of this event, the boy being occupied with plans for taking up his residence across seas at Duncansby in Caithness, taking with him his dragon-ship, which, it appeared, had been a gift from King Canute. Two-thirds of the men had elected to stay with him. The rest were returning home to Norway and Denmark, well rewarded.
The Earl wished to know, quickly, the prospects for the harvest on both Orkney and Caithness and its southern parts, and about the state of the flocks and the hay crop. He thought he should be told about the families in all the settlements, and what sons there were of fourteen and over. He had forgotten the names of Thorkel’s council men and would think it impolite not to know their ages and history. Who were the craftsmen these days? Where were the best ships being built? Were the markets still in the same place, and at the same time of year? What weapons did Thorkel have stored? What axes and spears, what swords and arrows and bows? How many men would have fighting-coats: jackets of plated leather; tunics of metal rings? When Thore Hund killed King Olaf, said Thorfinn, Thore Hund wore a reindeer coat sewn and charmed by the Lapps, so that the King’s sword-edge only raised dust from it.
‘I thought,’ said Thorkel stiffly, ‘that my cousin Kalv Arnason was the King-killer.’
‘He took him in the neck,’ said his foster-son, ‘at the same time as Thore Hund’s spear took the King through the belly. They could not say, it seems, which wound the King died of. If you are to be steward of Orkney for me, you will need a better hall, away from your father’s. We shall require timber.’
‘That is in short supply,’ said Thorkel briefly. It was a long time since he had had to make an accounting.
‘Then we shall have to get more. Outside Norway, the best,’ said Thorfinn, ‘I suppose, still comes from Moray?’
For ships, for shelter, for defences, they would need wood. He had always felled it in the south and the west, where it could be brought up to the mouth of the Ness. But the best and straightest trees, yes, were in Moray, and the rolling spates of the Spey would bring them riding out on their rafts to the sea. He said, ‘You will challenge Gillacomghain now? In the autumn?’
‘I shall cut my trees now, in the autumn,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And build my stockades and my ships through the winter. And be ready in the spring, when Malcolm and Canute and Gillacomghain have all decided what to do, and Gillacomghain challenges me in return.’
Thorkel did not go, either, on that timber raid, but he heard about it from the crewmen who brought him two shiploads from Duncansby: the smell of the resin came to him over the water as he stood on the jetty and watched them. They had felled the trees at night, in the first of the autumn rain that was to sweep across Europe and rot the barley and oats in the fields, so that the full barns of Caithness, of his provident storing, would pay for their own defence, and something over.
The Moraymen were farmers who raised flocks and grain-patches and fished, and had built no warships since the days of the great northern mormaers, the forebears of Gillacomghain and his uncle Findlaech, who had roved the seas of the north and ruled from Thurso south to the mountains of Mar.
Thorfinn and his woodsmen had loaded the timber and got it out as the rains fell and the land dissolved into quagmire behind them. Then, before Gillacomghain could be warned, far less get keel into water to follow them, the laden ships had set off for the north.
They offloaded at Cromarty and Tarbatness, at Helmsdale and Wick and Duncansby. There was oak, beech, and spruce; but, best of all, the long, straight lengths of pine needed for mast and for keel. They would cut more from their own woods, and they would buy more from Norway. But Gillacomghain had supplied his cousin by adoption with the nucleus of his new fleet.
The winter passed like no other Thorkel had known. This time, it was Thorfinn, not himself, who made the rounds of the district leaders on the horse he had brought from the south, with the long stirrups chequered with silver and copper, and a cloak lined with marten fur. His earl’s band went with him, because he had mouths to feed and his dues were waiting, in meal
and in butter, in malt and fish and in meat, to be eaten or brought back for storing. All the talk was of defence: how to preserve their homesteads, their flocks and barns from the passing raider and their young men and girls from the slavemen; how to fight off the dispossessed looking for good land to settle on.
He sent to Ireland before the winter closed in, and brought back threescore half-grown youths and girls of mixed Norse-Irish blood to work in the fields, in the farmhouse, on the shore, so that, no matter what the men of the house might be needed for, the work of producing food, of weaving and building and tending, would go on. He did all that his father Earl Sigurd had done for his people—or for himself, if you looked at it that way. For, no matter how much a man might wish to spend his days at his leisure, lying in his fleeces in winter with all the girls he wanted and an ale-flask at his elbow; or in summer sailing through the blue waters, hearing the sweet song of the axe; fighting one’s friends and one’s enemies and drinking and telling over long tales with them both, these would be nothing without hard work and vigilance: nothing but a cold hearth and an empty quern, a spear through your throat, and your girl in another man’s blankets.
Of women in his foster-son’s life Thorkel had heard no less or no more than of any other youth of his age. But of marriage alliances he had heard nothing. Tackled, Thorfinn was practical. It seemed to be his chief characteristic.
‘In England, to tell you the truth, being unattached was my greatest profession.’
‘And now?’ Thorkel said.
‘And now, of course, the land demands sons. What do you think? Between them, Crinan and Malcolm and Duncan have closed Northumbria and Cumbria against me. A Saxon marriage would be nonsense. About a Norman or a Breton one I am less certain. I have no intention of stretching my interests to the east, so I see no purpose in marrying in Norway, saving your presence. The Sudreyar, the western islands, might produce someone, except where my stepfather Crinan has interests. Perhaps best of all, there is Ireland. There are Irish blood and Irish tongues through all Caithness, and older stock still in Orkney. And how conveniently near it would be to south-west Alba, were we to find a reason for taking to the sea.’
‘Who in Ireland?’ Thorkel said. They were speaking beside the new hall Thorfinn was building by the haven at Wall, in Orkney, and he was cold and wet from a day in the saddle, and hoarse with answering questions. His name, he noticed, had changed nowadays. He was not Thorkel Amundason to anyone, but Thorkel Fóstri, Foster-father.
‘I don’t know—yet,’ said his foster-son. ‘I think I shall ask Eachmarcach again.’
And the next thing that Thorkel heard, he was off, in a spell of quiet seas in December, and did not come back until just before the January feast. All Thorkel could glean was that he had been to Tiree and to Ireland and had stayed some time in each place. So far as he could learn, the matter of marriage, if explored at all, had reached no point of conclusion.
In the spring, skirmishing began on frontiers between Moray and Caithness, and the district leaders, stocked with weapons and good earth and stockade defences and well primed on how to support one another, beat off the inroads with little difficulty and no loss beyond a weak cow or two and some hacked limbs. It was perhaps Gillacomghain testing his strength. It was in any case just what the border men on both sides had always done after the rigours of the winter, until the spring plenty or the spring voyages brought laden tables again.
Kalv Arnason visited Orkney. Thorkel heard a boat had come over from Duncansby and found the crew in Skeggi’s house: he heard Kalv’s voice raised in some tale of disaster before he lifted the latch. When he went in, Kalv stopped speaking. He looked cocky as ever, but there was a nervousness about him that had not been there before. He was soon picking up the thread of his story: how he had called at Duncansby to tell Earl Thorfinn what the new rulers of Norway wanted from him in tribute, and how Earl Thorfinn had told him that he was surprised to hear young Svein had expectations from him, and that he would be quite pleased to listen to him if he came here himself.
‘Which, being a child,’ Kalv said starkly, ‘he is hardly likely to do, or his mother King Canute’s lesser wife either. Don’t you have any say these days in your foster-son’s doings? You know, if he doesn’t, that four of us fought on King Olaf’s side. If Canute or his son don’t get what they want out of Orkney, we are the ones who will suffer.’
‘Surely not,’ Thorkel said. He sat down on the bench, and after a bit Kalv sat as well. Someone gave him an ale-cup. ‘Whatever the rest did for King Olaf, you were the one who dispatched him. I hear you looked after Finn and the rest after the battle. How is Finn?’
‘In good health. Back at Ørland,’ Kalv said. ‘My brothers couldn’t wait to escape from the tainted purlieus of Egge, once they were all better. You heard Finn tried to kill me after Olaf went down? Flung a knife at me and called me a nithing and an oath-breaker.’
‘Finn believes in the White Christ,’ said Thorkel. ‘And I hear some very strange tales about that.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Kalv. ‘It has become a matter of treason to talk about the black afternoon and the failed crops as if they happened in every country and not just in Nídarós. There will be miracles at the grave very soon, mark my words. And it your idiot foster-son holds back his taxes, I shall be hanged for a devotee of the All-Father. So will he, I shouldn’t wonder. Who’s the old woman?’
Thorkel had been surprised, too, by the number of Icelanders in Thorfinn’s household. ‘You had better speak respectfully of Arnór’s foster-mother,’ he said. ‘Second sight is a gift common to every indigent elder in Iceland.’
‘I am told that when this one talks, Thorfinn listens,’ Kalv said. ‘You had better put it into her head that he will have to manage his affairs with more tact or we shall all have black afternoons, whatever the sun may be doing. Has it escaped his attention, do you think, that Gillacomghain is married to an Arnmødling as well?’
Skeggi, who was not an Arnmødling, said, ‘Well, she’d better look out. A godly deputation has just come from Gillacomghain to Thorfinn. He is to send to Alba the tribute for his grandfather’s Caithness or he will receive a call from Gillacomghain, the official collector.’
‘What?’ said Kalv.
Thorkel lifted his pensive gaze from Skeggi and, turning to Kalv, made the best of it. ‘Gillacomghain wants to take over Caithness, and has got backing from the south to try and do it this way, by claiming tribute. Thorfinn won’t pay, and Gillacomghain will take the excuse to invade and get rid of him. Don’t repine. Your niece Ingibjorg may find herself queen of the north.’