King Hereafter (140 page)

Sulien got up. He walked to the steps of the choir and, turning, stood in the
light, so that Thorfinn could see clearly the steady, judicial gaze. Sulien said, ‘Is that where the real canker lies? I thought that immortal fame was the only desire of a Viking. The future they leave to their women.’

No enemy he had ever faced …

Thorfinn said, ‘I am not a Viking.’

‘Are you not,
Thorfinn Hinn Rikr?’
Sulien said. ‘With your black goose-mother the sea, and the ghosts at your elbow? Or is Thorkel Fóstri right when he laments the
heljarskinn
strain in the blood-line? What glorious name would you leave to posterity had you ruled Alba Viking-fashion, with an axe, as Harald rules Norway? There is the path to the unity that has escaped you. You would die monarch of a united Scotia, with no need to care what legacy of hate you left behind you. And the fate of your wife would be unaltered.’

Thorfinn turned on his heel. He found himself facing the altar; and after a moment he moved slowly over and touched it, smoothing the edge with one finger. He said, ‘You are warning me that my reign will be forgotten.’

‘I am telling you,’ said Sulien, ‘that, whatever Lulach may say, men will look back and see a king who strove to build for his people; and although the gales may still blow and the flood come and cover it all, the foundations will stand.’

‘A picture of ringing success,’ Thorfinn said.

‘Look at me,’ Sulien said.

Thorfinn turned.

Sulien said, ‘What I am telling you is that the name each man leaves is a small thing compared with the mark he puts on the world. You may succeed, in the end, in creating the good land you have worked for. Had circumstances been kinder, you would have been sure of it: had Pope Leo lived and been less beset with the struggle against the Normans in Italy, with the Saracens, with the enmity of the Eastern Empire. Had the Holy Roman Emperor lived, and been relieved of the wars on his frontiers. Had the Lady Emma been younger, or her barons less wayward …’

‘Had Canute lived,’ Thorfinn said. ‘If I may share in the game. Canute might have made himself master of Alba and perhaps even of Ireland, but I have seen worse overlords. Of course, my task might have been easier, but, sooner or later, everyone dies. You sound as if you believe the gales and the floods one day will stop.’

‘One day,’ Sulien said, ‘I think the Throne of St Peter will be as firm as it seemed, for a moment, it might be; I think the Empire will find a design by which to rule that does not break down between one prince and the next. I think the storms will subside and as nation settles by nation, there will be a place for quiet rule, and for building. Till then, it will be the fate of most leaders to die in their prime, and the fate of most women to carry forward their essence; their habit of mind; their spirit; their disciplines.… Be grateful for that, whatever Lulach has told you. You have sons. But, through Groa, what there is of your kingship will pass on as in a lamp, where the flame is what matters, not the vessel. And the flame nothing can touch.’

‘Yes,’ Thorfinn said. After a moment, he heard reeds rustle where Sulien
had been standing, and realised that his own eyes were pressed shut. He opened them.

Sulien was standing beside him. He said, ‘Your mother married three times. You are not Groa’s first husband. She accepts it.’

‘As I remember, it was a fairly dim lamp I received from Gillacomghain,’ Thorfinn said. He drew breath, but could not find quite the voice he wanted. ‘Of course, you are right. Everyone has lists of suitors. Thorkel made one for me; I made one for Lulach. Groa’s father got a priest to draw another when she was young.… I wonder what names would it contain now? Godfrey of Man? Diarmaid of Dublin? Thor of Allerdale? The sons of Maldred and Crinan? Malcolm? Tostig? Duke William, even, if his wife were to die … I suppose Groa has thought of them, too. I have never discussed it with her. That is, she knows that she must carry the kingdom, if she is left, to the man who is able to win it from me.… It does not seem a subject to dwell on. I have done enough damage with my hybrid heritage without hurting the friends I have left.’

‘As I am doing?’ Sulien said.

‘You are my conscience,’ Thorfinn said. ‘When you cease to hurt me, I shall be either perfect or dead. I wish I could repay you better. I wish I could lay my whole heart on your altar-table. It is a bedevilment of my birth. In death, I shall be split, no doubt, also: my heart in the Celtic isle of Iona and my body in Birsay.’

His arms still at his sides, Sulien smiled, the warm, radiant smile that had never changed since his boyhood. He said, ‘You were ordained by God when you took your kingdom at Scone.
Mab maeth
, you are blessed. If you don’t want to be twice blessed, I shan’t force you.’

Thorfinn said, ‘What did you call me?’

‘Fosterling. It is one of your names,’ Sulien said. ‘You have so many: Macbethad … Son of Life. Why not use the Christian ones? There is even a prayer with your name in it. A quaint one, for simple, frightened people who are not like you at all. You would never hear it in Rome.’

To repay Sulien, since the proper price was not in his means, he let him recite it, and was not sorry.

Then they walked to the hall.

t
WAS THE
end of the carefree time, of course, even before Sulien took ship for Wales, for although Thorfinn’s plans were already as well made as they could be, and the messenger-ships plying between Orkney and the rest of his kingdom told him how matters were in the south, a warning was a warning, and had better be heeded, whatever weight Thorkel Fóstri put on it.

The truth was that Thorfinn was not sorry to turn from pastimes to what he could exercise his mind on instead. At the end of the winters in Orkney, he could remember feeling the same. There had been enough drinking, enough sport, enough love-making, even, in the damp, tangled bed of infinite leisure.

With Groa supple in his arms as the sixteen-year-old she had been when he took her, he could lose sight, sometimes, of what else she was, and he knew it was the same for her. His father, he supposed, had kept half a dozen women content. Leading the kind of life they all must, most men still found it hard to do as the priests said, and held, rightly, that to put upon one woman the whole burden of service was inconsiderate.

As indeed it was, if you regarded the act of love as an involuntary exercise, automatic as breathing, and subject to no more restraint.

And, having said all that, he still demanded more of Groa than he should, no matter how well he succeeded the rest of the time. And even then the boundary he imposed was of his making and not hers, for he did not remember a time since the first foolish years when she had not received him freely, with gaiety, sweeping aside his resolutions along with his doubts. ‘It is how you sail. Every voyage is new. I will not be left on the shore.’

Now he lay awake in the dawn light after one such voyage and thought how she looked at Dunsinane, and at Monymusk, and knew that it was time to go south.

Something to do with the decision must have shown on his face. Or perhaps it was only the particular bustle on shore that made Sulien smile when he left, and say, ‘Where would you be without challenge? Eochaid had a phrase for it. He said you were riding your dolphin. And you still are, I see.’

‘I suppose,’ Thorfinn said, ‘It is going where I want to go.’

*   *   *

To Thorkel Fóstri one did not say such things, especially since Thorfinn had become King again, and brought back business to the hall, and broken the news about the army he had summoned from Normandy. To be left out of anything was something that angered his foster-father more than most men, and it was hard to get him to believe that even Groa had known nothing of it, so vital to all Thorfinn’s plans was complete secrecy.

It was to placate Thorkel, in a sense, that after Sulien had gone he allowed himself at last to be prodded into one of the boyhood excursions that so far he had not chosen to give time to. He rejected out of hand a sail to lift kestrels in Westray because of the distance, nor did he think it a good idea to take his lame-footed foster-father on a fowling-expedition to Copinsay, although he understood the nostalgia behind the suggestion.

When finally, in anger, Thorkel had said that if he had as little time as that to spare, perhaps he would merely consider sailing from Skaill round the headland at Deerness and back again, he had agreed without making more of it. And even when he saw that it was not a crowded fishing-boat full of his sons and nephews that Thorkel had on the shore, but a new little yole of three thwarts with a neat mast stepped amidships, he was not suspicious.
Your three lovers
, Sulien had said of himself, and of Groa, and of this man who had taken the place of the father he had lost when he was five.

Since the occasion was in his gift, he did what he could with it, and made his foster-father laugh, which was not always easy, and allowed him to put the little boat through its paces in a sharp southerly wind that bowled her along until she was on the verge of going sea-loose, planing over the water.

His face under-lit white with the foam, Thorkel stopped her, turning into the wind as he whipped free the rope. A moment later, the sail rattled down. ‘Take the oar, will you?’ said Thorkel Fóstri.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Thorfinn. The wind, catching the mast, was swinging them with the current round and up to the Gloup, a sea-tunnel half exposed to the sky, and dirty with rocks at its entrance.

Working with sail and spar, the other man did not even look up. He said, ‘Well, don’t you think it’s worth going in there? It’ll be full of birds. Now’s the time to see what there is. Look, if you don’t take that oar, we’ll be on the rocks.’

‘I thought I was coming for a sail,’ Thorfinn said. He took one oar and, sculling and fending, got the boat lined up for the chasm-entrance. He said, ‘What’s your beam?’

‘Between five and six feet. We’ll have two feet at least on either side,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. ‘You might as well take both oars, to begin with. We’ll have to scull later.’

He did take both oars then, and three or four strokes were enough. Then they were past the other aprons of grey rock and under the arch of the sea-cave, its fissures hanging with nest-straw. A cormorant fell like a book and disappeared with a wipe of black, stinking satin. Beyond, the sunlight from a long-fallen roof showed how the river of sea flowed surging and slapping between the continuing walls of the chasm: on the left, sheer,
towering rock, and on the right, a broken wall nearly as steep, but bearing rock-plants and lichen spilling down to its ledges from the sandy pastures over its rim.

Beyond the opening, the sea-inlet ran on into darkness, for here the roof had not fallen, and, lying down in your boat, sculling as best you could, you could follow its course until, in the end, a shelf of pebbles showed you, if you had a flare, where the way was finally blocked. Once, they said, the sea-tunnel had run through some fault in the rock all the way underneath Deerness.

‘Are you dreaming?’ said Thorkel Fóstri. ‘Bring it over here, boy.’

The sunlit space was, of course, where the bird-ledges were. Thorkel Fóstri had laid down his oar and was gazing upwards. High up, the fulmars and guillemots were still, grey-breasted and white, their heads moving uneasily. The cormorants had left. You could hear the naked young squawking above the hiss and trickle of water, and see their pink beaks, like the insect-eaters, opening and shutting. A rush of tide came into the channel, and the boat lifted and raced, while the water slapped the walls and fell back with the echoing gurgle that had earned the place its name. Thorkel Fóstri, thrown on all fours, turned and shouted at him.

He was pointing, it seemed, to a ledge he wished to get to, and was enquiring if Thorfinn would be handier at climbing than he was at holding the boat still.

Thorfinn said, ‘You’re not climbing anywhere. Let’s get out.’

Whatever joyous expedition this had been intended to be, he was ruining it, and he didn’t care. Another surge of sea came in while Thorkel was issuing orders, and the boat did bump, this time, on the side Thorkel Fóstri had been waving at.

Before he could stop him, his foster-father had stepped on to a ledge in the wall.