King Hereafter (36 page)

‘
You fool!
’ said Sulien. ‘You fool! You mounted a double attack with Eadulf against King Duncan in Cumbria? That was why you left so quickly? Don’t you see what you have done?’

‘Obtained two bases on the Hougan peninsula and the river Waver,’ said Thorfinn. ‘I didn’t need to collaborate with Eadulf. He signalled his intentions with trumpet calls all over Bamburgh.’

‘He’s stupid, isn’t he?’ Sulien said. ‘It amazes me sometimes that he has lived as long as he has. How long do you think his good fortune is going to last?’

‘You mean which of the five husbands is going to kill him?’ Thorfinn said. ‘I am really too drunk to tell you. But somehow I don’t think it will be Duncan.’

Sulien flushed. Slowly, he placed his two elbows on the board in front of him and pressed his hands into his eyes. He said, ‘If I thought you knew where you were going, I could forgive you. Sometimes you make it appear that you do, but I think you are playing with us.… If you go where you are going by default, by drifting, by following other men’s fancies, you will freeze in hell, and deserve it.’

Thorfinn leaned back in the high chair. The mark of the helmet was still red round the sun-browned dome of his brow, and his unshaven chin was dark under the untrimmed black of a half-grown moustache. With relaxation, his lids had grown thick. ‘You won’t be content until you have preached,’ he said. ‘So why not preach?’

Sulien dropped his hands sharply. ‘
Sêit mo srôin
. Blow my nose, says the leper. Is there no voice in your own head to listen to? There is a chance to spite Duncan and you take it, regardless of Orkney and Caithness, left behind you exposed to whatever may come. There is a peace pact between Norway and Denmark—have you heard it?—so that Magnús is free for the first time since he came back from Russia to look around his dependencies and correct anything of which he doesn’t entirely approve. If a fleet had come, what could we have done?’

‘Mentioned Rognvald’s name, and asked them to number off and come in as invited,’ Thorfinn said. ‘You forget that we possess the golden talisman, the King’s foster-brother. Also that I have had the good sense to wed an Arnmødling.’

It was a slip, although he realised it as soon as he had made it. ‘Certainly,’ Sulien said, ‘you married Finn Arnason’s daughter. It can hardly be long
before her father or one of her uncles crosses the sea, I suppose, to ask if you think she is dead or rate her as a slave-girl, that you pay no more attention to her than to some painted wood on your ship’s prow. Yes, look at Lulach. I brought him to hear what concerns him.’

‘Have you finished?’ Thorfinn said.

‘I haven’t even finished with Norway,’ Sulien said. ‘Do you never look at the west coast of Norway and see reflected in it the cause of half your own troubles: the sea inlets and mountains that cut off region from region, as they do also in Wales? No one can rule such a country until they find some common belief: a structure along whose veins the blood of nationhood can be made to run.… Olaf placed his hopes in the church, and Canute followed him, using English bishops and English abbots to fashion it.

‘But now Harold Harefoot is King of England, Magnús must have his bishops consecrated elsewhere. Rome is far away. But the Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen is always ready to dispatch his evangelists: to convert the heathen and open his lap to the heathen’s tribute of bear fur and walrus tusks. Whether or not Magnús has designs on Orkney or Shetland or Iceland,’ Sulien said, ‘you may depend on it that Hamburg and Bremen will look to him to call in the black sheep to the fold, and then your vassaldom will really start. For if people learn to pay their dues and cleanse their souls in Orkney, will they not expect to do the same when they stay or visit their kinsmen in Caithness? And if there is one metropolitan and one church in Caithness and Orkney, what is Moray to do? Either Norway will take over your empire, body and soul, or your empire will break in pieces while you are sailing and drinking and encouraging rough men to move from one windy cliff to another.’

‘I forget what your solution is,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Although, to be sure, I have heard it often enough. We join up the monk at Eynhallow with the group at Papay Minni; and the three men at Applecross with the other good and solitary souls at Lismore and Tullich and Dornoch and Kindrochit and Insh and Glendochart and all over the rest of my provinces, and make them all bishop-princes, answerable only to myself and the Lateran? They wouldn’t enjoy it.’

‘You surprise me,’ Sulien said. ‘I didn’t know you had made an inventory of your soul-doctors. When do we look for the results?’

‘You have seen them,’ said Thorfinn placidly. ‘Until recently, my conduct would have shocked you. You haven’t an answer?’

‘At least I look for one,’ Sulien said. ‘You talk of a dozen small houses, scattered over all your country. Perhaps you have visited them: I doubt it. But I can tell you that I have, because that is why I came here, to study and to learn. I have seen monasteries, yes: monasteries which struggle and fade, and are given another injection of monks or of money from a mother-house somewhere in Ireland, and who struggle on once again, with poor teachers or none; with the remains of a library, or a single book-satchel hung on a hook, with one dog-eared gospel inside it, and the prayers for the sick and the dying.

‘Families who need to hunt, to fish, to tend the fields and the flocks, to go
a-viking to please their overlord can’t spare sons to enter the priesthood. How many priests do you think that you have, when the whole country can be served by an ambling bishop consecrated in Durham or York, with a comfortable living somewhere else?’

Thorfinn stretched out his legs and gazed at him. ‘Would we fare very much better if we had seven bishops as Brittany has, and each of them the tool of some duke or other? In any case, I thought all our ills were to be cured by the Servants of God. Or have they stopped arriving?’

‘You have seen them,’ said Sulien. With an effort, he dropped and steadied his voice. ‘Every group of Culdees lives like the next: a quiet life of prayer and isolation led by a group of old men under a prior. They are a well for spiritual refreshment. They are not the stuff with which to bind a people together and protect it from its enemies.’

‘Without the Culdees,’ Lulach said, ‘where would a king die?’

Thorfinn looked at his stepson and did not answer.

Sulien said, ‘Yes. You are right. Where does a king go when he wishes to lay down his sceptre, and the kindred are waiting to seize it? There is nowhere but a house of God. Of course, if you have the health for it, and the gold, you can go to Rome, as Eachmarcach’s uncle did, and live out your life in a hostel.’

‘There was a King of Alba went to Rome,’ Lulach said. ‘One cold winter, the ink froze at Fulda. There was a king of Alba who murdered his uncle and married his uncle’s widow.’

As before, Thorfinn did not speak.

Sulien said gently, ‘I didn’t know that. Was it the same king?’

‘I thought it was,’ Lulach said. ‘There was a king who got a child on the miller’s daughter of Forteviot.’

‘The same king?’ Sulien said. His face, watching the boy’s, was full of pity.

‘His name was Henry,’ Lulach said. ‘How would I know what kind of miller it was? Stepfather, if everyone becomes a Culdee when he grows old, won’t they all become earls and kings?’

‘What a very good question,’ Thorfinn said. He looked at Sulien. ‘Well. Go on. If you don’t want to make too much of the Culdees, what other spiritual means do we have to bind our indifferent peoples together? A brotherhood of the little saints? We have quite an assortment. Finnian and Machar and Torannan, Moluag and Triduana, Madan and Fergus and Ethernais, all with their cells and their chapels in strategic strong-points.

‘There are dangers, of course. One could hardly make much of St Cuthbert without disturbing Duncan’s monopoly, and he would be uneasy, I am sure, if we encroached on St Ninian and St Kentigern. What about our more promising alliances? Would Brittany’s St Serf and St Gobrien lock hands with ours over the seas? Would Cornwall allow our St Drostan to nod to their Drostan son of King Cunomor, and Juhel de Fougères remind us of his sister’s husband Triscandus? Would your St Brieuc and theirs remember his holy places in Alba? What about the other soul-friends of my new friends the Welsh? St Cewydd and St Tudwal and the others you are longing to tell me
about? Come,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I have read your lecture for you. Don’t leave me to end it as well. You must have some new thoughts to offer.’

The boy said, ‘I am going,’ and went.

‘He has sense,’ Sulien said. He was white. He said, ‘You know it all. You know it better than I do, when you trouble to give it a thought. I can’t forgive you for that.’

‘So you have come to tell me you are leaving,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Or so I would gather, since I appear to have been given my penance.’

‘Yes, I am leaving,’ Sulien said. ‘I have to study in Ireland. You knew that.’ He paused. Thorfinn had not moved, but leaned back with his legs stretched, looking at him.

‘Am I supposed to beg you to stay?’ Thorfinn said.

Sulien’s face coloured again, and then paled. He said, ‘It is my fault. I spoke so that you heard a priest, not a friend. I have done nothing for you.’

‘Then at least we are not in one another’s debt,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Lulach will miss you.’

‘Thorfinn,’ Sulien said. ‘Thorfinn.… you know what he is.’

‘Yes,’ said Thorfinn.

Sulien could hear the harshness in his own voice. He said, ‘He has the name of a ghost. Luloecen the Fool. Luloecen of the Threefold Prophecy.’

Thorfinn stamped his feet and stood up. ‘I know. I have told you,’ he said.

They stood facing one another. And then Sulien knew.

‘He has told you what is to come?’

‘Long ago,’ Thorfinn replied. ‘Long ago, while you were exploring rocks and picking off hermits.
A dhùdan fhéin an ceann gach fòid
: its own dust at the end of every peat. We all have troubles.’

The silence lay heavy between them. ‘Send for your wife,’ Sulien said at last. ‘Send for your wife, even though she offends you. If I ask you, will you do that?’

‘The proverb,’ Thorfinn said, ‘says nothing about adding a second peat, far less a creelful. Tell me when you wish to leave and I shall load a ship for you. It is the least I can do.’

Sulien left; and did not know that Thorfinn did not at once go about the business of settling in, but stood in the empty hall, his eyes on the door he had left by.

When he spoke, it was to himself, and still in Gaelic.

‘There is a girl in the house who surpasses the women of Ireland, with red flowing hair.… She is beautiful, and skilled in many crafts. The heart of every man breaks with longing and love for her.…’

He broke off. ‘And so,’ he said, ‘you do not offer her dust, do you, Lulach?’

O THE SURPRISE
of all and the disappointment of many, Sulien of Llanbadarn left, and unbridled licence failed to break out. Only Thorkel Fóstri refused to recognise the phenomenon, observing tartly that if it had, no one would have noticed the difference. Starkad and Arnór and the rest, who knew better, grinned at him as they always did, and went back to where Thorfinn was planning the next summer’s sailing.

Despite Sulien’s warnings, Dubhdaleithe son of Maelmuire was allowed to follow the desire of his heart and, leaving his abbey of Deer, to settle with a group of disciples on a piece of ground by St Cormac’s chapel on the shores of the Dornoch Firth, an inlet of the sea north of Moray. His brother Aedh was given temporary charge of Deer and of Buchan, and word sent to the Lady of Moray to that effect.

The Lady of Moray, in the absence of interference from the Mormaer of Moray, continued to move about her province, calling on her bailiffs and advisors, with whom she was now on excellent terms. In the course of four months, two family groups found themselves elevated to direct service under the Mormaer, and two further districts received the doubtful blessing of a steward from the north, for whom a new lodging had to be built. In time, Groa visited these as well, and on the whole approved her husband’s choice. In return, the new stewards failed signally to tell her what her husband’s private instructions to them had been.

Before the end of the year, despite all Thorfinn’s planning, Eachmarcach got himself thrown out of Dublin by his cousin Ivar son of Harald and arrived at Canisbay half a stone lighter and with no more than two battered longships and their complement. He stayed for a month, during which Thorfinn and he shouted at each other every night for eight days, and Eachmarcach began to eat again. At the end of a month, Guthorm Gunnhildarson called, apparently by chance, and he and Eachmarcach went off to Eachmarcach’s nephew on the Isle of Man until the summer sailing could begin.

In the spring, Sulien wrote a stiff note from Moville, Ireland, in which he mentioned he had met a young monk called Maelbrighde, whom he did not
like. He hoped, he said, that Thorfinn and Lulach were enjoying one another’s company.

The message came with a trading-ship bringing three dozen Frankish mail shirts, on Thorfinn’s order. The shipmaster, who had also called at Tiree, said there was interesting news of a battle in Wales in which the King of Gwynedd had died and the throne been taken by Thorfinn’s recent ally Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. In the course of the fighting, a brother of Earl Leofric of Mercia had got himself killed, and after the battle King Gruffydd’s victorious army had lost their heads and destroyed Llanbadarn.