King Hereafter (21 page)

‘Fair, clever women are listening to thee, with sharp grey knives in their hands and gold on their breasts,’ the Earl said. ‘If you will turn round, I shall present you to your cousin’s daughter. It’s three or four years since you met, isn’t it?’

Nearly four years since a grotesque, pregnant child had passed by, on her way to join her elderly husband. And from that child had grown this red-haired girl with the light eyes and the black brows saying to Thorfinn, ‘Kalv my uncle is angry, naturally, because the Arnmødling family are not supposed to be supporting this wedding and you have seen fit to invite two emissaries of King Canute.’

‘Amazing though it may seem,’ said Thorfinn, ‘King Canute and the Lady Emma are two different people. Why wear red?’

‘Because I was uncertain whether Thor or the White Christ had your devotion these days,’ the girl said. ‘I see that in the matter of hangings you have nodded to each side.’

‘Why not?’ said Thorfinn. ‘The essence of the matter is simple. When you hear me addressed as Macbeth you wear white, and the rest of the time dress in animal pelt. If both names occur in the same sentence, you should wear whatever best suits you for running in.’

With irritation, Thorkel found his head swinging from speaker to speaker, forlorn as a bear on an iceberg. He said, ‘Don’t believe him. Orkney, as you know very well, was brought back to Christ thirty years ago.’

‘Oh, there are a few priests living in corners where there is food to be had,’ said Thorfinn carelessly. ‘But should a devotee of Thor or of Odin or the Golden Calf, for that matter, turn up, I am sure there would be an accommodation. The Abbot tells me that a church to St Olaf is being erected in Exeter. You must visit it, Kalv, on your next trading-trip.’

Thorkel found that Sulien, grinning, had laid a hand on his arm. ‘Withdraw,’ said Sulien, ‘from the assize-field. And bring Kalv as well. If there is a weapon handy, either Thorfinn or his lady will use it.’

It was good advice. With some trouble, Thorkel detached his cousin and took him away to a group of Duncansby men. Kalv said, ‘What I should like to have seen was the first meeting between that hell-child of hers and his stepfather.’

‘Why does that child disturb you?’ said Sulien. ‘Thorfinn and he have a perfect understanding. Thorfinn treats him as if he were five million years old.’

It was a good answer, and a correct one, Thorkel knew. What Sulien had not described was the moment of that first meeting, when the tall young man had looked down at the white-haired child of three, and the child had looked up, its eyes reflecting the sky, and said, ‘Since one day I shall carry you, will you carry me now?’

He turned, and had his drinking-horn filled, and then went to lend a hand with the feasting-boards.

The wedding service took place the following morning, under an awning outside the south door of the small, plastered church that had always been there, with the priest’s hut, and to which Thorfinn had merely added a coat of white lime. The Prior of St Drostan’s of Deer, bringing with him the altar-silver and vestments which Deer already owed to the generosity of Findlaech’s family, spoke the necessary words, but made no address to the people, and the chanting of the five or six monks he had brought with him hardly rose above the squeals of the seagulls and the barking of dogs and the crying of children from Invereren. What was taking place, patently, was the legalising of a marriage alliance created for the proper disposal of property. No one objected.

Early the following morning, when the fires had died down in the roasting-pits and everyone else at last was asleep or drunk, the bride said to her husband, ‘I was always taught that a sober man was a coward. Are you a coward?’

‘I always considered myself one,’ the Earl said. ‘Until I found out what I was marrying. Perhaps, since we are not expected to sleep together, we should mark the occasion in some other way. What about this? If you will agree to refrain from an attempt on my life, I shall give you the lands of Coulter to hold for your son as your
morgen-gifu
. More, I shall promise to respect your health likewise.’ In the dark, his black brows were raised, but he was not smiling.

The lands of Coulter, on both sides of the Dee, were the southernmost limits of his mormaership. They were also the wardlands that protected the north-driving pass of Strathbogie: the route an army from Forres might take if it wished to march south without trusting the coast and its shipping. The route an army from the south of the same mind might use if it wished to invade Mar and Moray.

Sinna and the rest of her women had already moved ahead into the house. Light still came from the hall and the other buildings on top of the hill, but fitfully, and there was almost no shouting. Here, where the ox-spits had been,
the air was heavy with the smells of hot beef and grease and the fumes of ale and mead and wine and other emanations of celebrating humanity. Then the salt dawn wind stirred as they stood there, and a haze of white sand lifted and struck them, like the cakes and the flowers that should have been thrown at their bridal, and had been at Gillacomghain’s. Groa said, ‘You tempt me. The lord Crinan would marry a rich widow of any sort who held the key to Strathbogie.’

‘Then you see how much I should rely on your promise,’ he said.

In her light eyes, the dying fire glimmered. She did not answer. After a moment, he spoke again, in a different voice. ‘Very well. I know that without me you have no protector, and that Canute would not allow Crinan to increase his power at present. I don’t think, either, that you see a place for yourself back in Norway. If you took Gillacomghain to your bed, you will take me, next summer. I don’t, therefore, need to rely on your promise. Nor do you need to doubt mine.’

‘I wonder,’ she said. ‘So long as you have Luloecen, you have Moray.’

In the purple darkness, her hair was Byzantine, touched with crimson where the light caught it; and the sand moved down her fine robe like silver. He said carefully, ‘Luloecen is young. He might die. I shall need heirs for Orkney and Caithness. After you have paid your way with some sons, we might have this conversation again, with a priest present.’

She said, ‘Save the price of it. Oaths never saved a man’s life, or a woman’s either. I will come on your progress. But I know these people as well as you do. When you plan your policies, I want to be there; or, one way or another, I will ruin them for you.’

‘Policies?’ Thorfinn said. ‘Whatever policies there are to be made will fall to you and your council in any case: why do you think you have Coulter? I have no policies for Moray. I have told you before. My business is in the north, and so soon as this journey is over, I shall be going back there to look after it.’

‘You were right. You are a coward,’ she said, and did not wait to watch him walk back uphill, any more than he, turning, glanced back at her over his shoulder.

HE TWO SOUTHERN
churchmen set sail the next day; and so did Kalv; and if a winged monster hovered over his head with a corpse in its plumage, there were none with heads clear enough to notice. Or so they said later. Sulien of Llanbadarn stayed, and so did Alfgar, the Mercian heir, who had no pressing business, it seemed, back in Chester.

After that, the ritual procession through the Earl of Orkney’s new lands was over in three weeks, and towards the end the rain that had ruined the harvest began at last to stop, so that the deep mud started to dry beside the riverside settlements and there was blue sky behind the sheet-bronze of the bracken and the hill-shoulders brilliant with heather.

It was a good time to go, when meat was easy to come by because of the autumn killing, and food and hospitality would settle the tribute-score. Only, this time, their lord fed not only his retinue but the people themselves at the gathering-place for each district, and added ale and barleymeal from the wooden carts his oxen dragged behind him.

After a feast such as that, there was no trouble. The new Lady of Moray, after all, was the same as the old, and there was no one there who did not know Findlaech’s stepson, who had in any case been this way before with his men, and had given the former friends of Gillacomghain something to think about. What was more, at the end of the feasting, Findlaech’s stepson Macbeth stood up to his full height (and, God’s Judgement, he was a very tall man) and said that since God had seen fit to send them bad harvests and those in Caithness and Orkney were good, he had given orders that the surplus meal in his barns should not be sent overseas, but should be kept to trade with the Moraymen for whatever the people of Caithness might need.

The first time he sat down after saying that, the Lady Groa, flushed and smiling beside him, addressed him under cover of the consequent noise. ‘I didn’t hear you telling my uncle that the Arnmødling family were to starve this winter?’

‘If they ever make me King of Trøndelagen, I shall do what I can for them,’ said Thorfinn-Macbeth. ‘As it is, I’ve already bought the only thing the Trøndelagen had that I needed.’

Three people she knew came over to speak to her, and she talked and laughed with them. When they had left, ‘If you mean me,’ she said, ‘I don’t recall gold passing the way of my father, more than would buy him a comb-case.’

‘Is it nothing,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that I have undertaken to feed, clothe, and shelter you for the rest of your life, whether the harvest fails in Caithness or not? That is, if other harvests fail, we shall have to think again. Smile.’

‘I am laughing,’ she said. ‘Between you and Gillacomghain, I shall have that to tell that would earn my keep as an old woman at anyone’s fireside.’

Then they moved on: to Deer, to Turriff, to Formartine, to Monymusk, for the chief meeting-place of each district was still the place where the monks had come first, long ago, and where most often there remained a small monastery or a collection of huts round a chapel dedicated to one of the familiar saints. And for their last visits of all, they made their way along the frontier of Mar, where the river Dee rolled down through its broad heath-lands from the hills where lay Coulter, the bride’s dower lands.

There, because of the mire underfoot, they took to the river by barges, and for the first time there was peace to stand alone, and in silence, and watch the cloud-shadows move on the hills, and hear the thin, swooping voice of the curlew and smell the bog-myrtle hot in the sun. Then, round the next bend, they swept into the dancing curtain of gnats, and someone lit a smudge fire in a bucket, round which they crouched coughing and wrapped in their cloaks until they saw the smoke of Tullich in the lee of its hills in the distance and drew in where the boards had been laid at the mouth of the stream.

Five ways met at or near Tullich, including the pass that led north to the Don, and so it was a brisk little hamlet, with room for market-booths at the Dee crossing, and storage barns, and a good, well-built house for the toisech, the head of the family group, whom Groa knew. Gillacomghain had held this land himself, and until Luloecen was of age, his widow would have to appoint her steward for all these places, to see to their protection and their laws, their tributes and the things that made up their livelihood. She had been allowed to keep some of the men from Gillacomghain’s council, whom Thorfinn thought he could trust, and in that she thought he was right.

For the rest, they would have to see. The land was full of young men, as was all of Alba, grown up since Clontarf and Carham took their toll, and the plunderings of sea-raiders, and the seasons when armed refugees would take possession of a ness or a beachhead and stay there, raiding, until they were thrown out. In the manner that the Earls of Orkney had taken Caithness until the King of Alba had been forced to regularise the invasion, by marriage.

The land was full of young men like Thorfinn, ready to plot, to argue, to kill for their rights. But men who knew who they were and what they wanted because they had learned it at the knee of their fathers, and would act as the blood of their race told them to.

Here was a half-breed whose nature was a meeting-place, like this township, of many different roads, with a guide to none of them. If killing
Gillacomghain had been necessary to bring to life Thorfinn’s conception of himself, Gillacomghain was dead.

‘What next?’ the bride of Moray said to herself as the heat and the talking began again, and the smells of roast meat, and the squeak and hoot of the music, and the roaring chant of the songs, drowning the thud of heels on the bare earth as the dancing started under the stars. ‘What next? He has done what Gillacomghain did, and next summer he will father his son, because so did Gillacomghain. Then, when there is nothing to prove, he will go to sea, because the sea gave him pleasure at fourteen. And he will be fourteen still in his soul when they lift him white-haired out of the ship, with the meeting-place nothing but dust again.’

The young Breton, whom she might have liked, said, ‘You have been thinking solemn thoughts. May I ask you a solemn question?’

‘If it has to do with my spiritual welfare, no,’ Groa said.