King Hereafter (23 page)

‘I know that. Everyone in Mercia knows that. I meant, why join him?’ Alfgar said.

‘Brotherly feeling,’ said Earl Thorfinn rebukingly.

Tullich had been their last visit. The following day, they all left in their various ways: Alfgar to the south and the rest by road and by ship to the northern reaches of Moray, to Caithness, to Orkney.

Groa was returning to Inverness, where Luloecen was. Her husband, it appeared, was taking a different, faster route north to Duncansby, and most of his band were going with him.

He came to say goodbye, and said it, in one word, cheerfully.

‘Nothing else?’ Groa said. Her red hair blew in the wind, and she held it down, gazing at him.

He thought. ‘Until next summer,’ he said.

N IN THE SUMMER
of 1033, the harvests failed again all over Europe because of the rain, and travellers to Rome were killed and eaten, so report said. In Norway, a man calling himself the son of Olaf Tryggvasson tried to make himself king, but was defeated by the fleet of Canute’s son Svein. The Trøndelagers, having other plans, helped neither side.

An Irishman whose land on the west coast of Alba had become a base for the Norse-Irish kindred of Dublin was attacked and killed by Earl Thorfinn of Orkney, who went on to drive out the Irishman’s uncle from another stronghold in the south-west. The army of the prince of Cumbria played some part in the achievement.

A punitive expedition against the east coast of Alba was led from Norway by Svein’s standard-bearer, on the advice of Svein’s father, to discourage help for his rebels in Norway. The men of Fife, with the aid of the Orkney fleet, fought and defeated the foray. A force led by the prince Duncan arrived in time to play some part in the battle.

The Earl of Orkney allowed time to pass and then let it be known that, due to the drying climate of Caithness, there was a surplus of grain for barter, as he had promised. He became, by hearsay, mildly popular.

The unrest in the north of Norway continued to grow, not without some encouragement. At length, King Canute’s lesser wife and her son Svein lost their nerve and, giving up Trøndelagen altogether, fled to the south, and from there out of the country.

Thus simply, thus foolishly, thus suddenly ended King Canute’s Danish rule over Norway.

The Earl of Orkney returned to Caithness and paid attention to all the news that reached him from Nídarós. Then, with the onset of storms and security, he crossed the Pentlandsfjord and prepared to work through the winter restoring to order his neglected dominion in Orkney. To his wife in Moray he sent his regrets that he had not been able to see her that year.

‘You did what?’ said Thorkel Fóstri at H
fn, when he heard. ‘Haven’t you been to see her at all? Or the boy? You’re going to lose Moray.’

‘No, I’m not,’ Thorfinn replied. ‘She has a good, well-organised council of
her men and mine, and the means to raise plenty of strength to protect her if Duncan or anyone else troubles her. And the whole of my resources to call on.’

‘If she had the whole of your resources to call on, I shouldn’t be worrying,’ said Thorkel tartly. ‘What if she goes to Duncan instead of the other way about?’

‘He would send her back. He needs me. And she wouldn’t stand for being anyone’s second wife anyway. I rather suspect,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that she doesn’t particularly care for being anyone’s first wife either. Lording it alone in Moray is probably what she likes doing most, next to wishing she could be an abbess.’

‘Lording it in Moray while you get yourself nearly killed fighting Duncan’s battles for him,’ said Thorkel. ‘And who is supposed to hold the north of Scotland then?’

‘There is another heir,’ Thorfinn said.

Once, thought his foster-father, he could pin him down. Once, he could control him. Once, he could stop him. ‘Who?’ he said. ‘Your four-year-old stepson? Caithness doesn’t belong to Luloecen. Orkney doesn’t belong to him. There is no way by which you could get Orkney to accept Gillacomghain’s son, and so risk having the whole of the north in vassaldom to the King of Alba.’

‘They risked it when they accepted me,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And as the King of Alba’s grandson, I represented a greater threat than Luloecen would.’

‘You were a grown man,’ said Thorkel. ‘Or old enough anyway to show what you meant to do. You fought for Orkney like a cur with a rat in its teeth, and you soon showed what your oath of vassaldom was worth.’ He broke off, advisedly, and cleared his throat. ‘You weren’t seriously suggesting that Luloecen could follow you here?’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ Thorfinn said. ‘You’ve forgotten that there is another heir to Orkney of Sigurd’s blood. Far away, like the Saxons’ mysterious Athelings, but still alive.’

‘
Rognvald!
’ Thorkel had raised his voice. ‘Rognvald, Brusi’s son? The yellow-haired snivelling child we last saw in Nídarós?’

‘The yellow-haired snivelling child you last saw at Nídarós,’ Thorfinn agreed.

Warned, Thorkel looked at him. After a moment, he said, in a quieter voice, ‘Rognvald has been in Russia for nearly four years—nearly six if you count the first time as well. Olaf is dead: Kalv killed him. You will never see Rognvald again.’ And then, as Thorfinn did not at once agree, he said, ‘Will we?’

‘I am afraid we might,’ Thorfinn said, ‘I have just had word from Norway. There has been a meeting of the bonder. They have decided not to rule Trøndelagen themselves, in place of Canute or his son. They have decided—Kalv has decided—your cousin Kalv has decided to go to Russia in the spring and bring back King Olaf’s young bastard Magnús to be the next King of Norway. And if Magnús comes,’ Thorfinn said, and, throwing down the knife
he was toying with, rose from the table,’—if Magnús comes, then Rognvald will come with him, to claim his father’s inheritance, which is half of Orkney.’

They looked at one another. ‘So?’ said Thorkel slowly.

‘So I am sending my regrets to my wife that I have been unable to visit her in the past year,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And I have said that I shall most certainly give myself the pleasure of a long stay in Moray in spring-time.’ He spoke mildly. ‘Would you like a daughter, Thorkel, if I have one? You would only have to wait thirteen years or so for her, and at least she would be a good linguist.’

‘My God,’ said Thorkel feelingly. ‘With your tongue and her red hair … You should be prevented from breeding with each other. There must be a canonical rule about it somewhere. What will your sons be like?’

‘Duncan, perhaps,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Soft and sly and stupid. We share the same mother, after all. You should have no trouble fostering that kind, if you have to.… I wonder how prolific Rognvald has been, or intends to be. It is tempting to hope that he has caught the Eastern sin.’

‘Tempting from what point of view?’ said Thorkel sourly, and left him sitting looking surprised.

They spent Yule in Orkney, where Thorfinn was fortifying the near-island at Birsay in the north-west and rebuilding some of the lodges he used when he moved through his property. He seemed to take pleasure in Orkney in the winter-time, perhaps because of the winds that dragged through land and sea like a scraping-board and flung the green waves and the white against the storm-beach at Skaill until the heathland was salt a mile inland and the night sky was cuffed with pale breakers.

Then, with the ships safely trussed in their nousts, the halls of his friends and his kinsmen opened their doors to him and to his household as was their duty as well as their pleasure, and the long roasting-fire would fling its light and its heat into their faces as the hot pebbles hissed and belched in the ale-bucket and the cauldrons swung on their chains in the noise and the laughter.

During the day, there were dangerous sports. They were all scarred from that summer’s fighting. But they always collected their worst scars in the winter.

Word came from Moray that the Lady had received Earl Thorfinn’s intimation that he would travel south to see her in the summer, and thanked him for it. The courier, one of the older Salmundarson boys, said that the Lady seemed to be well, and that, apart from a blood-feud and three districts laid low with a pest, Moray appeared to be quiet at the moment.

‘And the boy?’ Thorfinn didn’t ask it, so Sulien did.

‘I was coming to that,’ said Starkad Salmundarson, who, no more than any member of his family, brooked interference. ‘He’s healthy. His hair’s still white as a patriarch’s, but he isn’t a pink-eye. He wanted Earl Thorfinn to know that he didn’t mind his name being changed to Lulach, but he has sent something so that Earl Thorfinn would always keep his proper name in mind.’

The something was a bare stick. They all looked at it.

‘It had leaves on,’ Starkad offered. ‘They came off in my saddle-bag. I don’t know what it means, either.’

Thorfinn turned it over. There were no runes on it anywhere: it was just an ordinary stick. ‘Sulien?’ he said. ‘A message-token from an unknown land. Put it in your book-bag and tell me if it takes root. What else, Starkad?’

‘Nothing from Moray,’ said Starkad. ‘But I heard something as I came over the Cabrach. They say the King your grandfather is low.’

‘Lower than usual?’ Thorfinn said. His grandfather must be over eighty, and had never ailed in his life. This was the moment brother Duncan had been both dreading and longing for, one supposed. He probably had his day-by-day instructions for the next five years by rote. The most weighty question facing himself, as another grandson, was whether it would be more dangerous to stay away from the funeral than to go to it.

Starkad said, ‘He can’t ride very much, and he’s staying a lot with that old mistress he likes in Glamis. But he could hang on for a year yet, they tell me.’

‘Starkad,’ Thorfinn said, ‘when we want to hear news upside down, we will stand on our heads as you tell it. Killer-Bardi is here: go and find him and get drunk somewhere.’

King Malcolm lived. The spring came, and with it the news that Kalv Arnason and Einar Tambarskelve were now on their way to Gardarike to offer the crown of Norway to the late King Olaf’s bastard, aged ten. They had taken with them a large body of oath-taking Trønder and were expected to pick up Rognvald son of Brusi on their way back, at the end of the year.

Thorfinn, who could swear in five languages better than anyone Thorkel had ever heard, did so, and then said, ‘They might even get the boy to come back at that. Einar Tambarskelve must be one of the only three men in Trøndelagen who didn’t lay a finger on Olaf, and that ought to count. Thorkel, I want to see what is happening in Galloway, and then I’ll leave you in Caithness and get down to Moray. Do you want to see what is happening in Galloway?’

‘There’s a rumour Suibhne’s come back,’ Thorkel said carefully.

‘That’s what I mean,’ said Thorfinn. ‘We go down there; and kill him; and perhaps look and see what is happening on Colonsay. Then I go to Moray.’

The Galloway campaign reached a satisfactory conclusion in June. On learning then that his wife had been for two weeks in Inverness, the Earl of Orkney sailed north with no particular haste, and rounding Duncansby Head, made for the wide arms of the Moray Firth, where the river Ness entered the eastern ocean. He did not happen to send word that he was coming.

Being troubled neither by news nor premonitions, Finn Arnason’s daughter, in an embroidered robe with a train, was sitting under an awning on the wharfside with Sinna her woman and three of her housecarls, overseeing the noisy resolution of a misunderstanding, not to say an open piece of deception, to do with toll-payments.

Her hair and her neck, as befitted a married woman of nineteen, were
wrapped in white linen, and she had brought her tablet-loom with her, unwinding its glittering ribbon over her skirts as the ivory placques clicked and clacked under her fingers. She said for the third time in Norse, ‘We do not want fish. Put the kegs back on board. You can have no more timber until you pay in silver or wool, as we agreed. And you can have no more of anything until you settle for the dues on your last cargo.’

‘I paid them,’ the trader said, also for the third time. He was smiling.