King Hereafter (46 page)

So what had happened now, you might say, was an accident, unforeseen by anyone. Malcolm’s careful dynastic marriages in the north of England had become not a holding of hands but a barrier erected in front of his dear grandson’s face. And, baulked in the south, Duncan had made this inept attempt against Thorfinn, which had failed. And, more than failing, had brought Thorfinn headlong south to this point, where he sat among the blood and the dust, wondering which path to take.

Or not wondering. Nothing he had said or done so far had committed him to any one course of action. He had Duncan’s sons, but had not killed them. He had injured Duncan himself, but had not dispatched him. Now he asked, ‘Do I need to claim the throne?’ knowing that there was only one answer.

‘No,’ Crinan said. ‘The throne is yours by right, if you want it. No doubt you have a stout army of Orkneymen. Can you hold the whole of this country from Cumbria to Orkney single-handed? No one has done, so far. Malcolm had a Findlaech to hold Moray and a Sigurd to hold Caithness, and these you don’t have, for the lines of both end in yourself. Can you hold Cumbria against Ligulf and Siward? Can you even hold Fife and Angus and Lothian without Malduin the Bishop? York consecrated him, and York wants Cumbria and Lothian as well as the rest of the north. I offered you a joint rule. I did not think I would have to justify it.’

‘I have nothing against joint rule,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Indeed, I have it already. With Rognvald.’

The heat rose, despite himself, in Crinan’s face. ‘Rognvald has no claim to the throne!’ he said sharply.

‘Neither have you,’ Thorfinn said.

They looked at one another. Then Crinan rose, and Forne followed.

‘On the matter of Cumbria,’ Thorfinn said.

Crinan stood still.

‘On the matter of Cumbria, there may well be something we should talk about, later on. I shall send you a messenger.’

‘I shall be at Alston,’ Crinan said. ‘Unless the Mercians have other plans. Perhaps you could ask Leofric, should you have occasion to see him also.’

He caught Forne’s eyes, and they began the process of leave-taking, with brevity. Thorfinn did nothing to delay their departure, and gave them an escort out of his territory, together with a set of fresh horses. No doubt they belonged to the Bishop and were easily come by.

Forne said, ‘Is it play, or is he in earnest?’

Crinan looked at him. ‘I think you have to hope,’ he said, ‘that he is in earnest. A man like that, who does not know, or does not care, what he is doing, would be a threat I could not contemplate.’

Sulien watched them depart under the blue-and-gold flag of Dunkeld, and then, taking his leave of the priest from Deer, whom he knew well and with whom he had been chatting, walked across the cobbles and in through the door of the Bishop’s palace.

Thorfinn was still there, alone in a carved chair with his head propped on one hand, and his fingers masking his face. As the door unlatched and then fastened shut, he opened an eye between finger-tips. Then he said,
‘Sulien!’
and half-lowered the hand, its palm open.

Sulien walked slowly forward. ‘Father Eochaid says you are an obstinate bastard with wound-fever,’ he said. ‘I was passing, on my way from Ireland to Wales. You’ve had visitors.’

‘Alfgar yesterday. Crinan today,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Now you. An infestation.’

‘And Groa tomorrow,’ Sulien said. ‘She sent for me.’

‘An infestation,’ Thorfinn repeated.

‘You have a decision to take. I suggest,’ Sulien said, ‘that you take it when you are fit.’

‘You want to make it for me,’ Thorfinn said.

‘Of course. Doesn’t everybody?’ Sulien said. ‘Can you walk, or do we have to carry you like the Pope?’

‘I didn’t know the Pope was carrying me,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But indeed I may have to ask him to, before all this is finished.’

It was merely a quip, Sulien thought, to cover his condition. Later, with terrified admiration, he saw that it was something quite different.

The next day, the Lady of Moray arrived, and from that moment, you would say, the poison appeared to leave the Earl’s wounds and they healed. Or so Arnór Jarlaskáld would have it, who, faced with superior competition, had ended by ceding first place to the Earl’s wife and his favourite from Brittany. What Thorkel Fóstri thought, no one knew, but the formal politeness he had always used towards the Lady was now, everyone saw, of a different dimension.

The actual meeting between the Earl and his wife no one witnessed, and indeed at any time they were observed together afterwards, they appeared to be having words, so that the transformation, to the uninitiated, seemed all the stranger.

For a week, nothing happened that the watching world could lay a finger on. The holding-camps in Fife and Atholl and Angus remained, and so did the guard at the crossroads and the ferries. Experimentally, one or two of the hill-forts began to empty, as people crept back to their steadings and began, furtively, to resume daily life without being attacked. In two places, independently of each other, a toisech of Duncan’s army emerged from hiding and,
rallying all the men he could find, attacked the nearest encampment and tried to drive Thorfinn’s men out. In both cases, the leader was killed and the men who had risen under him mostly died in the fighting. September waned, and the harvest was fully in, and the time for tribute-paying drew near, with no King to receive it and no King to protect anyone in return.

In Durham, the Earl Eadulf of Northumbria sent for the Bishop of Alba, whose modest hall beside the half-finished church had been held in uneasy tenure ever since the late King Duncan’s attack.

Twelve years as bishop, first to the ageing Malcolm, and then to King Duncan his grandson, had done nothing for the worldly advancement of Malduin Gilla Odhrain, sole Bishop of Alba. The tightrope he walked in the service of his various masters had already been frayed to a thread by Duncan’s ineffable siege of Durham.

Bishop Malduin had been in Durham when Duncan attacked it, and that had saved Bishop Malduin’s skin, for the moment. The best policy, it appeared, was to stay in Durham while Duncan marched north to seek out his half-brother. And now Duncan was dead; and Thorfinn was not only in Fife, but sitting, so the Bishop understood, in Kinrimund, in one of the Bishop’s chief halls, and enjoying the land that supported it.

The Bishop and this marauder Thorfinn were strangers. But men of eminence would not fail to recall that Thorfinn was the Bishop’s first cousin. No one could fail to recall save Thorfinn, who had walked into his hall and was eating his rents without a thought for his cousin’s very special position, or how matters would look to his masters in Durham. A man gave his all to God’s work, and this was the sort of reward he got. There was no justice anywhere, and life was merely a fight for survival in the face of the betrayals you received from your own heathen-worshipping family.

The summons from Earl Eadulf came, and Bishop Malduin presented himself with black rage in his heart, prepared for any sort of iniquity.

With Earl Eadulf was his nephew Ligulf of Bamburgh, and they were both smiling.

‘Well, Bishop,’ said the Earl agreeably. ‘It seems that your family contains a surprising number of quarrelsome people. Here is a man who seems to think he can kill a king and then require bishops to scamper here and there at will. Your cousin Thorfinn has sent to beg the comfort of your spiritual advice in your own hall of Kinrimund. My first impulse, naturally, was to return his messenger’s head to him to rebuke his presumption. But, on second thoughts, it would be un-Christian, as I am sure you would agree, to deny an opportunity for repentance to any man, however blackened his soul. I think you should go.’

Of all he had anticipated, nothing had been as appalling as this. Bishop Malduin said, ‘My lord Earl, I wish nothing to do with this man. He is beyond redemption. I would humbly suggest that there is no place for a bishop in Alba until the new King is proclaimed, on which I should willingly accede to any instructions you may see fit to give me. But in the meantime—’

He broke off, because the Earl and his nephew were both frowning. He
might have known it. They were getting rid of him. They had never supported him. They would involve him in Thorfinn’s disaster, and he would die in Alba.

Earl Eadulf said, ‘Meantime, you will also, if you please, accede to my instructions and go to Earl Thorfinn in Alba. When you get there, you will act very carefully in accordance with some information that my lord Ligulf will now give you. You will stay with your cousin until it is clear what he is going to do. You will then return and report on the matter, if he will let you. If he will not, you will be given the means to send messages.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Is this such a great thing to ask? Do you not forget, my lord Bishop, that, unlike the rest of us, who stumble on our given way in faint hope of redemption, all that you do is under the shining banner of Christ, with at the end God and His angels awaiting you?’

Bishop Malduin bowed. What was awaiting him was a tall, black-browed war-lord who sliced people’s backs and pulled their lungs out from under their shoulderblades. With the home life of God and His angels it had nothing in common.

‘You’re a wild fool,’ said Groa. ‘You should never have sent for him. He’ll find out all he can, and the next thing you know, the Northumbrian army will have taken over Alba in the name of Duncan’s children.’

‘Whiter than the snow of one night was her skin, and her body appearing through her dress
. Why are you so beautiful,’ said Thorfinn, ‘and talk so much?’

‘Because,’ said Groa, pulling clear, ‘the Bishop of Alba and his officers have been waiting for you in the hall for all of ten minutes while you have supposedly been changing from one tunic to another. It’s going to be like being married to Edgar, who had to be found and dragged off a mattress halfway through his coronation.’

‘What coronation?’ said Thorfinn, and rammed the last buckle home, and went out, just failing to close the door sharply. After a moment, his wife shook out her dress and followed.

What lay between them was as dear to him, she knew, as it was to herself. But at this moment its purpose must only be to support him, not to compete with the decision that had to be made.

For the decision would be taken: they all knew that now. He had risen, clear of his fever, and had not issued the orders that would have ended it all; that would have sent his northerners back to the borders of Moray and allowed Eadulf and whoever so pleased to march in and take the unsettled, leaderless land.

She thought that he might have done that, after the slaughter, if Sulien had not come. Not that Sulien, she believed, could ever drive Thorfinn into a course he did not wish to follow. But he could make him pause; and consider.

The results of the consideration had been quickly apparent.

For a week now, the district leaders of Alba had been coming in, sometimes in groups, sometimes singly, in answer to the message Thorfinn had caused to be passed among them.

At first, only the toisechs who had not fought for Duncan had arrived. Then, gradually, had come some of the leaders in the families that Tarbatness had decimated, and sometimes a priest, taking the place of more than one widow and her children.

To them all, Thorfinn had said the same thing. ‘This is your country. I do not want it, but you have no other protector in Alba. South of Alba, there are many men who would gladly govern, in the name of King Duncan’s children, for the ten years it would take for King Duncan’s heir to gather and lead his own army.

‘The choice is yours. If I rule, I rule as king, by right of royal descent, not as tutor to the sons of my half-brother. If you wish to give Alba to the Earls of the south, I shall return to Moray, and to my own Caithness and Orkney.’

And the bolder of the chiefs from Angus and Atholl and Fife and Strathearn replied in the same way. ‘If you were to rule, prince, who would be your mormaers? Men of Orkney?’

To which Thorfinn’s answer, too, was identical. ‘The men of the north belong in the north, and have enough business there without looking further. The mormaers who ruled under King Duncan would remain, if they so wished, to rule under me. The mormaerdoms fallen vacant would be filled by their toisechs and by me, in consultation.’

The first time he heard it, Sulien had stood before Thorfinn as he came away and said, ‘You would accept this burden, if they agree? You would accept it?’

And Thorfinn, no expression in his face or his voice, had said, ‘What Viking did you ever know to refuse an offer of such land and so many riches? Study has made you foolish.’

She had married a very great man; or a Viking. She did not yet know which.

Within a week, Bishop Malduin was back in Durham, muttering replies before the surprised rage of Earl Eadulf.

‘He would not hear of my staying. My lord Earl, I had no alternative. I was unarmed, in the camp of a war-leader. He insisted on sending me home.’

‘And your errand?’ Earl Eadulf said.

‘He is holding Alba at present by force,’ Bishop Malduin said. ‘There are armed camps everywhere, and the people are muttering.’

‘And his intentions?’

‘Those he has not yet announced. But he is asking all Duncan’s men which they would prefer: rule under himself, or rule by you or your friends, my lord Earl.’

‘What!’ said Earl Eadulf. ‘But you told him, I hope, what I asked you to. You told him that I had no claims to press against Alba other than those I already held in King Duncan’s day, provided that I might take Cumbria off his hands.’

‘I told him,’ said the Bishop. ‘And he thanked you for the offer concerning Cumbria, which he would have been delighted to accept …’

‘Would have been?’ Earl Eadulf said.

‘… but for the embargo of King Hardecanute, whose leave he had asked,
and who would by no means countenance the passing of Cumbria into your hands, my lord Eadulf. I regret,’ said Bishop Malduin, ‘that under the circumstances I could not obtain the assurances my lord Earl was anxious for. It was not my fault.’

‘Emma,’
Earl Eadulf said. He looked the Bishop of Alba up and down. ‘Does your cousin know Emma? The Lady? Does he?’