King Hereafter (44 page)

She touched his shoulder. ‘Lie down. It was a fine campaign. You should hear Arnór’s verses.’

Then the doors of his mind stood wide open. He said, ‘You must be tired as well. Why not put the lamp out and lie down and sleep?’

She looked at him and obeyed, without questioning. There was another pallet against the wall: she lay on it dressed as she was, and blew out the lamp.

Then silence fell; and he could begin at the beginning and plan the war, and fight it, from the very first day to the moment when he brought his sword down on his half-brother’s shoulder.

It ended: and he became aware of the force of his own breathing, and of the
complaint in his arm and his side, and the fact that someone was holding him. Groa’s voice said, ‘Please … please … Keep some pity at least for yourself.’

Her weight was beside him; her arms under his shoulders, her hair on the pillow beside him. He put up his hand, and a tear fell on it, then another. He touched her wet cheek. ‘What is it?’ he said ‘What is it?’ A river of tears fell into his palm and he felt her lips part as she gasped, and gasped again. He lifted his other hand and cupped her face and held it. ‘What is it?’ he said for the third time.

Perhaps the firmness of his hold calmed her. He felt her hands withdraw from beneath him, and a moment later she caught his wrists and lowered them from her face. She turned his hands over and he knew from the sound of her voice that she was sitting now, her eyes lowered as if she could see them. She said, ‘Compassion. Nothing you would recognise.’

If she had not been so near, he would not have betrayed himself. But his hands were in hers, and her fingers on the hammering vein in his wrist: nor by any exertion of will would the run of his breath return to anything approaching normal. He said quietly, ‘I would recognise compassion. Is it compassion?’

She let his hands go. Sitting still, she said, ‘No.’

‘Let me light the lamp,’ Thorfinn said. He moved before she could stop him, and found his way, limping, to where her pallet was, and picked up lamp and flint and tinder. Suddenly, his fingers were steady. He lit it.

She sat where he had left her, with her hair on her shoulders like poppy, and her eyes opened wide in her white face. He walked over and set the lamp down, and then sat down gently beside her and lifted her hand in both of his and held it between them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Compassion would be a very great thing, but I think … I am beginning to think … I am beginning to wonder if we may not have something greater. Is that what you wanted to say?’

She did not speak.

He said, ‘What is it? Do you not know that I love you?’

She stood up, her hand wrenching from his, and stared at him.

He stood, too, but slowly. ‘Or am I wrong?’ he said. ‘If I am wrong, tell me. Tell me quickly. You will lose nothing by it.’

He did not know what she could read in his eyes. He only knew that the shadows melted from the face opposite him until it was luminous as the soapstone of the lamp.

She stood before him, her hands loose in her robe, and said, ‘I thought if ever you spoke those words to me, I would know you were lying, or if you were not, there was no way that I would ever be sure of it. I knew if ever I spoke those words to you, that you would take them for a nice courtesy and might even thank me. I cannot tell what has come to us, but I look at you and I believe you. If I tell you the same, will you believe me? I love you. I have always loved you … even through the six minutes … even through the four minutes … whatever distance there was between us.’

He looked at her. She said, ‘Can you not accept, even yet, that something good may befall you?’

The lamplight burned on her hair. She said, her face uplifted, her hands on his breast, ‘Could you bring your mind to it, I am prepared to be embraced. If it hurts to bend down, there’s a box I could stand on.’

He could not only bend: he could lift her. There were, it seemed, a great many other things he could do that an hour before would have been beyond his strength if he had even thought of them. But he took infinite care in the design of them, moving from harbour to harbour in the voyage of the night with a care one would keep for a child; for a virgin; for something unbroken of rarest fragility, which remained still where it had always lain waiting, in the girl who had borne a child to an old man at fourteen; in the girl who had known nothing since except rape at the hands of her husband.

Through the night, he taught her joy, with patience; and received it.

In the morning, men rode into the settlement, shouting, and banged on all the doors, and thumped on the Earl’s door, finding it shut, until Groa, gowned like a monk, jerked it open.

Thorkel Fóstri stood on the threshold. He said, his eyes on her and then sliding past her, ‘Thorfinn! Is he here?’

‘He is asleep,’ she said, and came out, shutting the door behind her. ‘He is better, but he ought to sleep. What is it?’ She paused. ‘Is it the children?’

‘The children? No,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. He looked at her hair, and her bare feet, and then back at her eyes. He said, ‘You will have to wake him. We have just heard from Moray. Duncan is dead.’

‘Dead? In Moray?’ she said.

‘I don’t know how. They had a rough voyage. I suppose the wound wouldn’t close. They tried to save him by putting him ashore at the mouth of the Lossie. They found some monks near Elgin who would look after him. But he died.’

‘Yes. The Earl will have to be wakened,’ said Groa.

‘Not only for that,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘There is more to the story. Duncan died, and there were the rags of his army about him, with none of the gold he had promised them, or the booty. Thorfinn paid the ships to carry them safely to Berwick, but the shipmasters saw the chance to unload all of them instead at the Lossie and sail quickly for home with their money.

‘The Irish, those that weren’t killed, made their own way home west through the hills, as you probably know. The men from Angus and Atholl and Fife and from Duncan’s lands further south were soured by the war before ever they landed in Moray, and now found themselves leaderless, without ships, without transport, and the whole province to pass through before they could all reach their homes.

‘Would you expect them to mourn Duncan and file off homeward with their hands folded, chanting? They are putting your Moraymen to the sword, and stripping the land of all they can eat, or drive before them, or turn into money. Tell Thorfinn he will have to leave his bed and march south and fight, unless he wants his kingdom gone before he can claim it.’

‘His kingdom?’ said Groa. Behind her, she heard a door open sharply.

‘His kingdom,’ said Thorkel Fóstri grimly. ‘With Duncan dead, what other grandson of Malcolm’s is living?

‘Thorfinn is not only Earl of Orkney and Caithness. He is King of Alba. He has only to take it.’

e is King of Alba. He has only to take it
, his foster-father had said. And if Duncan had died at his brother’s hand by the smith’s houses, it would have been true. There, with the beaten army of Duncan under his heel, Thorfinn could have called his friends together and made his decision.

Then, a little thought would have told him what the last years should already have made plain. Ruling as Earl Sigurd his father had done, he could not even expect to hold what he had. If he wished to add Duncan’s land against the advancing shield-wall of the lesser kindred in England, he would not only face a life-time of battle, long or short. He would have to change.

What his choice would have been there at Tarbatness could never be known. The opportunity to make it was lost, and with it the treasure of one night. The news from Moray reached him, and by noon he and the best of his men were at sea, on the two ships he kept within signal-range, while the rest of his fleet was summoned to carry the remainder.

He came back to the hut for his sword just before he left St Cormac’s, and Groa lifted it for him. There was nothing to say. To mention his wound, to express dismay or anguish, would have been childish. On his order, Moray had stayed silent and watched Duncan’s army march north. No ruler worth his salt, far less Findlaech’s stepson, would stand aside now and watch Duncan’s army ravage it on its way south.

He said, ‘Stay with Duftah. I shall leave you a guard. When it is safe, I shall send for you.’

She could not speak, but she smiled.

He hesitated, then, raising one hand, lifted the hair from her neck and let it fall. Then, with his hand on her shoulder, he kissed her lightly and left.

After that, the news came quickly enough of what he was doing.

That he should meet slaughter with slaughter was to be expected. Landing in the wake of Duncan’s men, he had tracked them from hall to barn and from house to church and from field to fold throughout Moray, mutilating where they had mutilated and burning where they had burned.

Then, as they ran stumbling before him, with their red swords and their
heavy pack-trains and their stolen cattle, he crossed, as they had done, out of Moray and south to their own lands of Angus and Fife, where their own barns and malt-houses and halls and houses and churches were to be found. And these he burned, too, and killed their people as they had killed his people of Moray. And again. And again.

Sulien the priest was in the scriptorium at Clonard when the news came, painting God talking to Noah under a rainbow.

Because he had been grinding gold, the flies were all over him, drawn by the scent of the honey: they crawled over the three Persons of the Trinity with the Enemy crouching at Christ’s feet, and flicked up and down the figures of David harping, with Ethan, Iduthin, Asaph, and Eman in gaiters beside him.

Then the Abbot, in person, stood at Sulien’s elbow and said, ‘It would not cross your mind, I know, to leave us before the Psalter is finished, and it already paid for by the Bishop of Crediton, but I brought the messenger to you myself, just in case.’

Afterwards, when he was packing and the Abbot was threatening him, as he took it, with excommunication for forsaking Bishop Lyfing’s commission for the benefit of a horse-eating berserker, Sulien stood silent and then said, ‘This is a baptised prince, as you are, who sustained me in his lands for five years. He has a right to my friendship.’

‘He lets his friends burn Llanbadarn, and then expects you to run when he snaps his fingers?’

‘He does not know I am coming,’ said Sulien briefly.

In Chester, Alfgar took the best news, as always, to his mother.

‘Have you heard? Thorfinn has murdered his brother and taken the kingdom. They say there’s hardly a man of Duncan’s left living.’

He was twenty-eight years old, and marriage had done nothing for him except perhaps modify the quality of his laugh. Godiva sat and looked at him.

Her son grinned. ‘All right. Duncan attacked him and lost, and Thorfinn chased his army all the way down to Fife. Orm and Siward and the rest will be puking all over Northumbria, wondering what he’s going to do next. They thought Duncan would get himself killed at Durham and we’d all walk in before Thorfinn noticed.’

‘He may go back north,’ Godiva said. ‘Could he rule a kingdom?’

‘You wouldn’t say so,’ Alfgar said. ‘On the other hand, this is how Canute started, by chopping off the assorted limbs of the populace; and he ended by walking barefoot to Durham and ruling half northern Europe. Thorfinn admired Canute.’

Godiva looked at him without seeing him. ‘Yes. The Lady Emma, too, might find it quite convenient to have Thorfinn to deal with, instead of your wife and her sisters. What is your Aelflaed saying?’

‘That three children is enough,’ Alfgar said. ‘When she draws breath to say anything else, it’s to complain that Siward and her sister are much richer than
we are. Which is probably true, since his father went off to the Holy Land and didn’t come back. I wonder who has the Lapp fur-trade now.’

‘Haarek of Tjotta’s son Finn,’ Godiva said. ‘The Lady Groa’s first cousin. As you would know, if you paid more attention to what goes on down at the wharves. He made no mistake, that young man Thorfinn, when he married an Arnason’s daughter. One day, Magnús of Norway might well claim England as well as Denmark.’

‘My sweet lady mother, you are getting old,’ said Alfgar, and came and sat at her feet. ‘It was an Arnason who killed Magnús’s father, don’t you remember? The golden child in Norway is Rognvald, Thorfinn’s little nephew. If Magnús becomes King of Norway and Denmark and England, then Thorfinn had better look out.’

The Lady of Mercia looked down at the merry face of her son. ‘What you are saying,’ she said, ‘is that it is not by chance that Thorfinn has overrun all the lands of Duncan his brother, and that he may well make himself King of Alba?’