King Hereafter (25 page)

An old man without sons, and with a son-in-law he secretly feared, Malcolm of Alba had turned in his later years, sensibly, from the northern mountains whose control was eluding him, and had bent all his energies on building for Duncan his grandson an empire of infinitely more wealth and promise: the sway over that neck of land—from Durham to Kendal, from Carlisle to Berwick—that lay between England and Alba. And furthermore, if he could get it, that other land next to Earl Leofric’s frontiers: the lands deeper down into England that might, if he were fortunate, include the powerful city of York.

For that reason, he had established this network of dynastic marriages, which meant that his blood, however remotely, would run in every part of the country he coveted. It was now for Duncan his grandson to bring these conquests to pass. And it would be for the young sons of those marriages, growing up in all their ambition and vigour, to take and hold them, and to take and hold also the crumbling frontiers of the north which had fallen about the ears of that fool Gillacomghain and might make other barriers tremble. In his last days in Glamis, he had told Duncan over and over, ‘Bring your armies here. Mass your troops here. Protect Angus.’

‘I don’t think,’ Duncan had said, ‘that you need trouble yourself over Thorfinn. He is spending all his strength running about keeping Galloway quiet for me. And when his nephew Rognvald comes back from Russia, they’re bound to fight over Orkney. I shall be surprised if he survives a twelvemonth.’

‘There is to be an heir, I am told,’ his grandfather said.

And Duncan had smiled and said, ‘You know I have two sons with the royal Saxon line in their heritage who can take care of any brat from that kennel, when they are older.’

And so King Malcolm died, frowning, they said.

Because it was winter, there was every excuse for his grandson of Orkney not to attend the funeral obsequies, which were rarely of great ceremony, there being a tendency among the kings of Alba to die suddenly in out-of-the-way places and frequently after a truncated reign.

The tradition was that burial should take place on lona, the island from which nearly five hundred years since, St Columba had taken the God of the Celts to the Irish and Picts of the mainland.

A monastery to which kings came for burial, or even on pilgrimage, was likely to be very rich. Unerringly, the Vikings had found and sacked it, waited for the altar-silver again to accumulate, and sacked it again until, mournfully, the monks had packed their belongings and crossed the sea back to their saint’s native Ireland, where the monastery of Kells opened its arms to become the new home for the church of Columba.

The men on lona now were anchorites. The church was there, crumbling, and the wattle huts in which they slept and prayed; and perhaps a few sheep, but nothing else. A man going on pilgrimage had to take his own stocky and servants to build him a cabin and furnish it. A man wishing to be buried there, such as a king, would require to import the abbot of the Columban mission from Ireland, with all his retinue, his plate, and his vestments, as well as his own bishop and monks from the mainland. And, whatever the season, would require to cross the sea twice, with a coffin.

‘No doubt, one fine day, they’ll row over a box with his liver and lights in it,’ said Skeggi Havardson, who was not impressed by the White Christ in any form since the late Olaf had found himself canonised. ‘You can’t go, anyway. What about the proclamation of the new King? You shouldn’t go to that, either.’

They were at Sandwick in Orkney at the time, preparing to hold Yule in the
big hall that Thorkel Fóstri had inherited, now that his father had died. Outside, a rare occurrence, there was a powdering of snow on the field-strips, which the wind was lifting and throwing about like white grass-seed. Indoors, Arnór had just recited a new poem with something wrong with the last verse, and six men were helping him with it.

Thorfinn said, ‘Why not? It’s always held at the Moot Hill, and that’s just south of Dunkeld. If he could get an army from Dunkeld to Tullich last year, you could get near enough to cut his throat if he kills me.’

‘Two years ago,’ Thorkel said. ‘My guess is that, wherever it’s held, they’ll plan it for Easter.’

‘You mean March,’ said Thorfinn amiably.

‘I mean March,’ Thorkel assented. He could hear the sharpness of his voice.

‘Well. Leaving aside the problems of March for the moment, let us consider,’ Thorfinn said. ‘There can’t be anyone living now who remembers the last time they proclaimed a king. In fact, did Malcolm not just pick up a set of properly annotated gospel books and run?’

‘I know what happens at a king-making,’ offered one of the younger Salmundarsons. ‘I’ve a cousin in Derry that told me once. They slaughter a mare—’

Three people groaned.

‘—and bring her to the new King, and the new King makes … does … pretends that it’s a mistress.’

Everyone groaned.

‘And then they boil the mare, and he has a bath in the broth and then eats it. I told them,’ said the Salmundarson boy, rather red in the face, ‘that we stopped eating horseflesh thirty years ago when Olaf Tryggvasson said it was heathenish.’

‘A good-luck custom. Why not?’ said Thorfinn to the boy, through the ensuing uproar.

That’s what my cousin said,’ said the boy quickly.

‘All the same,’ Thorfinn said gravely, ‘I don’t think I see Duncan embracing it. You’ll probably find he merely marries a slab of rock: much less exciting. They’ll still blame him if the crops go wrong.’ He was shaving a piece of calfskin, and there were whiskers all over his knees.

The boy said, ‘Why don’t you go and be made king? You’re a grandson of King Malcolm as well.’

There were some things now that no one said to Thorfinn: even Thorkel; even Sulien. No one spoke.

Thorfinn blew a drift of cowhair into the longfire, laid down the skin, and took up a whetstone. ‘And what a very good idea nephew Rognvald would think that was,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps you think Brusi’s son ought to have Orkney and Caithness to look after while I move down roughly in the direction of Winchester? I don’t quite see how I could do it all otherwise.’

The boy, suddenly aware of the silence, looked at him, but said nothing more. Thorkel Fóstri, pitying him, said, ‘Duncan is his grandfather’s intended heir. Whatever the rights or the wrongs of it, you could only challenge him by
going to war. And you might think, as Thorfinn says, that we have territory enough to look after.’

Sulien’s voice spoke from the end of the hall, where he was grinding something in a bowl. ‘None the less, he is within the royal derbfine, isn’t he? Of the royal kindred within four generations from which the fittest man may be elected? Or is that Irish, like the horse-boilings?’

‘No. Kings have been elected that way over here, or from alternate sides of the kindred. The Picts had a different way again, by descent through their women. For the past fifty years, the throne has been open to whoever among the kindred was strong enough to take and keep it. The last eight kings of Alba were all murdered. Half the battles Malcolm fought were to pick up enough booty to keep his electorate happy.’

Thorfinn, unexpectedly, had answered. He finished sharpening his knife and looked up, the blade glittering in his hand. ‘I’m not up for election. You’ll have to learn to like winters on Orkney.’

‘All the same,’ Skeggi said. ‘I wonder if all the men who supported King Malcolm will find quite so much to admire in King Duncan? A war might not even be necessary.’

Thorfinn stood up. A further shower of cowhair fell into the fire and, sizzling, stank for a second time. He held up the pared skin. ‘Do you see that? It will shortly be vellum.’ He pointed to where Sulien was crouched. ‘Do you see that? It will shortly be ink. By applying the one to the other, we are about to conquer ignorance and make war on stupidity. When you make a mistake, it doesn’t bleed. When you have a success, it lasts not just till next week but for ever. Go and open the ale-cask.’

Thorkel Fóstri went, and the hall settled down to normal talk again. On the way back, he stopped beside Sulien. ‘What was all that about?’

Sulien looked up. His hands were black. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘But, at a guess, he has given us all the sensible arguments his head has already supplied. What the child in him or the god in him are saying is a different matter.’

Sinna, who always knew, said this baby was going to be early, and she was right.

Of all her lodgings in the province, Thorfinn’s wife picked Lumphanan in the south to live in for the weeks before the child was due.

It was not a choice her housecarls thought much of, or her steward. It was too far south; it was less than secure; why not pick one of the islands now: what about Spynie? they said.

But she could see nothing wrong with Lumphanan, set in wooded hills between Monymusk and the Dee river, where the bridal progress had ended three years before. Surrounded by pools and by marshland, the rising ground by the small church was safe, and held within its stockade all she required in the way of buildings to serve herself and her household. And chief among her women was Sinna, who might not be very sensible when it came to flagging armed men, but who had been slave to Groa’s mother and had delivered her in
her time of both Groa herself and her sister Sigrid, now wed to a great earl in Norway, grandson to old Hakon himself.

She did not miss Sigrid, or her mother, a great deal. She missed Finn. Her father had always been courtly to her, even when she was small, and had tried to teach her the lessons about courage and loyalty that he would have taught to his sons.

Which was all very well for a man. But a woman, although she must have courage, had to make up her own mind about the meaning of loyalty. Emma, from Normandy, had married a Saxon king and then, after he was dead, had crossed the sea again to marry his conquerer. As she had done.

And Emma, who had had three children by her Saxon husband, had left the sons to be reared in Normandy, and the daughter to be married there, and now favoured above all the son Canute her second husband had given her. Which she, Groa, would never do. Never, and never.

In the last weeks, it was a trouble to move, but she felt better walking about the well-kept timber buildings on the higher ground, and down and over the causeway to the houses of the people who lived here all the year round with their flocks and their cattle, hunting and fowling and growing their patches of crops. Here they wove on their tall looms, and made their ewe-milk cheeses and malt, and brewed their ale, and collected their honey, and came out when the travelling packhorses came to the meeting of ways and set up their booths, so that they could buy new blades for their knives, and bowls from Shetland, and a pair of brooches or a chain for a dowry-gift.

And from the same houses, when the beacons were lit or the split arrow came down the pass, glinting in an upheld fist, would come the sons who would take their swords and their shields and go to fight for her husband.

They paid their dues to the toisech, the head of the chief tribe, and he stood to the district in place of its peace-maker and governor. And through the toisech they paid their dues to the Mormaer, who guarded the province and spoke for them to the King.

Except that the Mormaer of Moray was the Earl of Orkney, who had married the dragon-head on his ship.

She was watching the last of the old peats being brought up the slope from the covered stacks to the shed by the hall door, dry and crumbling in their strapped creels, when a mellow, meaty sensation drew her attention to the mound of belly under which were her feet.

The sensation thickened into a pang and then expired, like the retiring mud of a geyser. She said to Sinna, ‘Why do I make wagers? You are always right. You may have the blue cloak.’

And after that it was quick, for although it was five years since Lulach was born, she was still barely twenty. Shamefully, she got excited again towards the end, when the pains rose, and blared like a bull-horn, with barely time for a breath in between.

Then there was one abrupt crisis of violence, and a paddling sensation, and a pause, and then Sinna held up a dark-coloured starfish with fair hair on its head and on its shoulders and halfway down its back.

Of its gender there was no possible doubt. ‘Welcome thy coming,’ said Sinna. ‘Welcome, my heartlet. Thy mother has a prince in the very likeness of the Earl your father.’

And turned round, dismayed, as the girl, squealing, buried her head in her pillow.

On closer examination, however, she appeared to be laughing.

Towards midnight, she woke from the birth-sleep, lying on clean linen with a fresh robe about her. Beyond the door, a cat seemed to be mewing. Beside her was sitting Sinna, her hands folded and circles under her eyes. There was a satisfied look on her face.

At the foot of the bed stood Thorfinn of Orkney.

She was dreaming. The lamp flickered, and his shadow ran jagged over the beams, about to bring down death like his father’s black raven. She dug her elbows into the mattress and felt her quiet body give a spurt of anger. The smug expression on Sinna’s face altered and she said, ‘Why, you’re not to be alarmed. The Earl has come to see his son. Is that not—’

‘Be quiet,’ said the Earl.

He was plainly dressed but clean, with the single gold arm-ring she had seen above his elbow that night at Tullich. He showed no signs of dust. Groa said, ‘Have you been waiting long?’ Whether she had been sleeping for hours or for minutes, she had little idea.

‘It seems like months,’ he said. ‘In fact, about two days altogether.’

‘Not here,’ she said.

‘Up in the hill-fort,’ said Earl Thorfinn. ‘It didn’t seem the best moment to introduce thirty good fighting-men into the establishment. They are here now, however, and will supplement your own housecarls after I’ve gone. Since you will choose to give birth to the King’s nephew on the King’s doorstep.’

She assimilated all that. Everything he said was an insult. What made her angriest of all was the fact that he knew the baby had come, and that it was a boy, and now she would never know what he thought about it. She said, ‘I suppose you’ve seen him, too? It’s more than I have.’