King Hereafter (49 page)

She turned round, the wine in her hands, and then stopped. He still sat, elbows on knees, as she had left him, but now his two fists were raised to his brow, flesh rammed against flesh in immobile violence, his eyes shut, his lips open and rigid.

She set the cups down, and did not know what to do.

Without moving, he spoke. ‘I am so thankful. It is news above any other I would have wished. It is only that I am tired.’

Then she said, ‘Thorfinn!’ quickly, and moved to him; but had hardly got to his side before he loosed his fingers and thumbs and plunged them down to the mattress like spear-points.

‘No! Macbeth. Macbeth.
Macbeth!’
The name reached her like sling-shot.

Groa said, ‘They are the same man. I should know. I married both.’

The candles flickered; and the aromatic twigs mewed in the brazier and dispatched a milk-blue twist of smoke to spiral between them. His eyes opened, and she thought,
What have I said that is as important as that?

He rose; and when he spoke, it was after a long interval. ‘Then … Whom you love, I should cherish,’ he said. He came and stood before her, his face grave but no longer leaden. He touched her cheek, and then put his arms closely around her, drawing her head to his shoulder and brushing her hair with his lips.

‘Be thou alone my heart’s special love: let there be none else save the High King of Heaven.… It shall be Erlend. He was fathered by Thorfinn upon Groa and will be born to Macbeth and to Groa, who alone can make one man whole. Can you make me sleep without wine?’

‘I can try,’ she said.

MAN OF JUST
over thirty might be held to be at the height of his powers, but not necessarily of his wisdom. To acquire a kingdom of dissident peoples with no towns, no money, and a number of different languages, with few and indifferent roads, and with frontiers so vague that their demarcation virtually did not exist, would have been a daunting task for a man of that country trained for its kinghood.

That it was left to a man from the north was not a measure of the country’s despair, because the country had no voice to speak with. It was evidence only that, of the assorted families who carried most weight in all the separate corners of the kingdom, many had now lost their leaders; some were so placed that one overlord was as good or as bad as another; and some, weary of generations of coastal fighting, were prepared to place themselves in the enemy’s hand, provided he had a fleet and fighting-men to defend them.

Long before this, Sulien had thought of these things, because it was his nature to look ahead, and he had accepted what Thorfinn would not accept: that only Duncan’s life stood between him and the throne. When he left Ireland to go to Thorfinn at Kinrimund, it was in the face of black despair, for he knew his own limits and thought, whatever he found, to face a country destined for ruin and a man who would be his enemy henceforward.

It had not been like that, for, whatever disorder circumstances had brought about in Thorfinn’s life, it was not one of the intellect.

He would not make the decision whether or not to take the kingdom: not until the last moment. But what he had done, with meticulous clarity, was to think through what that decision, either way, would entail.

When Sulien found him, Thorfinn already knew what the greatest difficulties were, and what might be done to solve them. In the brief time they had together after the fever broke, Sulien sat and asked questions, and Thorfinn answered them.

From the bottom of his soul, Sulien believed in the Most High; and he saw this as God’s will, that a man, whatever his blood, brought up to be a warrior-merchant of the north, should stop to turn every gift to preparing
himself for such a burden, should the charge be vouchshafed him or not.

But it had been allowed him; and before he left, late that autumn, Sulien saw come to pass all the things that Thorfinn had spoken of, lying there in the Bishop’s house, with Alfgar, with Crinan hammering at his doors and requiring to be dealt with.

‘About Alfgar. If there is an enthronement, then it will have to be quick and simple, and even then there will probably be trouble. So, no eminent visitors. We send them a messenger later with the news that a new King has been proclaimed, together with some expensive trifle.’

‘And Crinan?’ Sulien had asked.

‘The boys would have to stay at Dunkeld, and Crinan at Alston. There is no reason why he couldn’t remain officially Abbot, and his rents would be collected on his behalf and used to maintain his grandsons. After Malcolm was old enough, one would have to think again. But he couldn’t be allowed into Dunkeld at first. In any case, Dunkeld would be useful. I would bring some of the ships down to the Tay.’

‘The Bishop of Alba?’

‘Poor Cousin Malduin. He would have to come back for the king-making, and I should have to ask the new Abbot of Kells to come over. You will have heard that neither Crinan’s house nor Duftah’s was successful in the election, but that won’t stop the abbots from making war on one another. Kells and Downpatrick have been burned already. I suppose one of the lessons the Irish church learned from the Vikings was that you can set fire to altars and the Trinity pays no attention.’

‘I think—’ Sulien had begun.

‘That I should spare you such blasphemy. Very well. Bishop Malduin is a liability, but I couldn’t dismiss him without stirring up trouble over Lothian and the St Cuthbert’s churches, which I couldn’t yet afford to do. So he would stay, but in Alba, not Durham, and would be kept on a very short tether.’

‘There are some holy men you can trust,’ had said Sulien. ‘You talked once of the Culdees. There are Irish monks like them all over the Rhineland, all with friends accustomed to trade.’

‘I thought of it,’ Thorfinn said. ‘A carrying-trade might be possible. There is no surplus that I can see to support anything else.’

‘Then what about these?’ Sulien had said. The coins of Sitric, Eachmarcach’s uncle, were not quite the Byzantine replicas that Sitric had aimed at, and you would guess from the spread hands on either side of the alarmed silver face that the pendicles of the Ottoman crown had unexpectedly puzzled the die-maker. But it was coinage, the mark of a civilised country.

Thorfinn had picked one up and flipped it. ‘It must make Crinan weep for his profession. But at least it’s their own. We use other folks’ silver up north; you know that. You need money when you hire mercenaries or when you pay off attackers.

‘Duncan got Irish troops to come over for silver, and for what they could get out of it: he possibly promised them tracts of Moray and Angus, once they had got rid of me and a few of the toisechs. But I couldn’t call in the Irish,
except the Irish of Dublin, and I wouldn’t call in anyone else. So, to begin with, everything I did would have to be paid for by my own trading in the north, in the ships that the people of the north build and furnish for me. The rest of the country would have to keep me in food-rents, together with as much of a hird as they will let me have, and enough stored to sustain men on campaign and exchange for their fighting-equipment. Under no circumstances,’ Thorfinn had said, ‘would it appear that we are likely to indulge in the sins of the rich.’

‘You spoke of the hird,’ Sulien said.

‘It would need another name. For the first winter, I should have to stay in the south and have none of my own men about me. Thorkel Fóstri, of course, will keep Caithness, and Moray has managed fairly well so far with the leaders I gave it, under Groa. Lulach should go there now and begin to learn his trade, whatever happens. No. The difficult part would be drawing together the courtmen of Alba when it has never been the custom for men to leave their families and their farms except for battle. It may be impossible. I might not be able to feed and maintain a household such as that. They may not have slave-labour or rents enough to let them leave the land and engage in affairs. I might be able to do no more than move between Glamis and Forteviot and Perth and Kinrimund and the rest, as old Malcolm did, using my own family as my officers.’

‘That way,’ had said Sulien, ‘you would be less of a burden where you happened to stay. That way, few people who mattered would know what you were doing until you had done it.’

‘That is the way Malcolm ruled,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And Duncan. And they could not hold what they had.’

‘Because they ruled alone, without the protection of the hird?’ Sulien said. It was unfair. But he had to find out.

‘You are changing your ground,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But I suppose I have to answer, if I am to pass whatever test you are setting me. In a country as far-flung as this, they could not know the minds of their district leaders, or carry them in their own policies, unless they talked together and saw each other more often than the winter weather and the bad roads allow. In Orkney, it is easy: we are all within reach of each other in winter-time, and all at home. Even in Caithness, people come for the feasts and stay many months, and then there is the companionship on the sea.

‘The bonds welded there make it easy to know whom to trust, and men do not often move from faction to faction, but stay with their kinsmen and those whom they know. Before the men of Alba could face a common enemy, they must know each other, and how long will that take, unless they are helped? The men of Lothian don’t even speak the same tongue as the men of Fife over the estuary, and the men of Cumbria and Strathclyde are different from both.’

‘And beyond Moray, different again,’ Sulien said, and waited, but when Thorfinn continued, it was on another tack. And soon the discussion had ended.

The name of Rognvald had never been spoken at any time on that occasion. Then the time came when the enthronement was over and the chiefs of Alba, what was left of them, had ridden thoughtfully away, and Sulien found, going to the pavilion of Rognvald, Earl of Orkney, that there was nothing there but flattened grass and dead embers.

As with Groa, the scene in the hall the previous day had filled the Breton with horror. Unlike Groa, he could at least do something about it. As soon as the tables were drawn and the leave-taking over and the hall freed of all the concourse that had filled it, Sulien had hurried out to find Rognvald and had found instead the newly made King standing in front of him. ‘If you are seeking the brilliant Rognvald, I am told that he is in his pavilion. If you wish to come, I am about to go and see him.’

And so Sulien witnessed the scene, the essence of which Thorfinn was to describe in three words, with perfect accuracy, later that night to his wife.

And indeed there was nothing more to say of it, unless you told of the smell, which was that of a flesher’s stall, or the sight of the straight-nosed, delicate profile sunk in the pillow, its skin bruised and stained under the disordered gold hair. And below that, the shoulders and back, pink and red, with the margins still crossed like reed-shadows with fine scarlet lines.

There were cloths on a board, and a bowl of red water, and a phial of ointment, and a man in a black gown who drew back, and a group of men in the kind of tunic Thorfinn himself wore at sea who did not draw back, although one of their number said softly, ‘My lord Rognvald. King Macbeth has come to speak with you.’

And Rognvald had opened one swollen eye and looked up, a little, at the dark face of his uncle towering over him.

For a long time, they gazed at each other, until the corner of one red lip curled and a golden eyebrow lifted in raillery. ‘Tell King Macbeth,’ said Rognvald, ‘that, naturally, I forgive him.’

That was all. And next day, he had gone.

At last the thirty-ninth Abbot of Kells and Raphoe departed, with his great train, weighed down with gifts. Sulien did not ask him how he would make his way back to Ireland, nor what part he would play or had played in Duncan’s funeral obsequies, in Elgin or Iona. Thorfinn had said nothing of Duncan, although Lulach, walking with him one day, had suddenly said, ‘If Donwald and his wife killed the King, why do they blame my stepfather?’

Sulien stopped. ‘There was a Donwald,’ he said. ‘But he and his wife killed Malcolm Duff. Another king. Not King Duncan.’

‘Duncan, King of Cumbria,’ Lulach said. ‘I could have told you that when I was Simeon. There never was a King Duncan in Alba.’

‘Now you are back,’ Sulien said, ‘I want your stepfather to have peace. He has much to his hand.’

‘If he wanted peace, he would have chosen it,’ Lulach said. ‘What is peace? When a wicked man dies, those who are left behind enjoy peace. St Moluag never killed a living thing, and when he died, the birds wept.’

Sulien left for Ireland just before Yule, and the King did not try to restrain him. ‘Go back, then, to your skin hoops and whelk shells,’ he said. ‘And leave me to my board games.’

‘Am I so transparent?’ Sulien said. ‘You should take heart that I am leaving you.’

‘You are satisfied that this is not merely a board game?’

‘I know what it is better than you do. It is the black gosling seeking the black goose,’ Sulien said. ‘And there will be no peace for you or for any of us until you find her.’