King Hereafter (53 page)

He did not think he did. It was too confused and too delicate. Where her questions had tended, they both very well knew: the one that mattered most had been about Rognvald.

There had been no trouble between them: there he had spoken the truth. For the first few days of the voyage, Rognvald had toyed with him like a wild-cat: all gleaming eyes and soft fur and fine-needled pricking, now from teeth, now from claws.

It was a game he had no objection, himself, to taking part in, and he had played it. The trick was to take the barren exchanges and develop them into a different sort of competition and then, with luck, into something each could tolerate and even enjoy.

Rognvald had been at sea every year, as Thorfinn had not, and was in any case a man created by gods for feats of skill and endurance. What Rognvald might lack was ingenuity, although he had cunning. What he certainly had was vanity, and that, played upon, might produce the ends one desired.

So it had been, in many ways, a nightmare voyage, although a satisfactory one. The business with Eachmarcach had been genuine enough, and the
threatened south-west needed attending to. But before that, there was little enough reason for what he and Rognvald had done.

In the days of Thorfinn’s childhood, his father’s sister Svanlaug had lived in the western isles and her husband had kept order there for Earl Sigurd. Then he had died, and his son Malduin had found softer quarters as Bishop of Alba, with no ambition to exchange them for a longhouse on Tiree and a trio of fast cutters that would rarely find themselves out of the water.

Instead of Malduin, the western isles were in the care of his phlegmatic half-brother Ghilander, who got on well enough with the Norse and Irish and Icelandic folk who populated the isles and paid their tribute to Orkney. It was only when Diarmaid or someone like him swept down with a tight fleet of fighting-ships and scoured the shores, herding off cattle and women alike, that the lack of a strong chief could be dangerous.

So it was sensible to go out to the isles, and to take the tax, of course, that was due, but also to clear away the unauthorised settlers and frighten off a few more who had thought of it, as well as show cousin Ghilander that kinship wouldn’t count for too much if the Earls were to tire of his laziness.

To go to Tiree by way of the island of Hirtir was, of course, an unusual thing, Hirtir being as far out to the west as you could get without overtaking Leif Ericsson.

The wager, however, was made on the way to North Rona, which was not an island on the way to anywhere either, although the hermit had been glad to see them, and they found that someone else had taken the seals the previous year and who it was, so that in due course the matter could be dealt with. Then the south-east wind started up, which was excellent for a long, fast passage by sail to the west, but meant that when they got to the main island of Hirtir there was a swell running into the bay enough to lift all their ships to the top of Conochair and drop them thirteen hundred feet down into the sea again.

Since a race to the top of Conochair was the wager they had had in mind, they simply replaced it with one of total madness: Rognvald challenged his uncle to climb to the top of Stac an Armin and leave his ship’s weathervane there, which his uncle agreed to do, provided that Rognvald would then bring it down again.

Stac an Armin was a whitened tower of rock over six hundred feet high, rearing out of the sea by the shores of the next island, Boreray. It could only be approached by ship’s boat, and it could only be landed on by leaping from the gunwale of the boat at the top of a wave and clinging to the jagged sides like a cat on a pine tree. The breeding-ledges were filled with straw heaps and the questing white goose-heads of gannets, and a pair of skuas came screaming down to the attack, beaks raking before the boat had well reached the stack.

They had both made the climb. He remembered the red fingerprints he made on the guano-skin of the rock, planting the vane, and that, looking down on the wrinkled sea, he could not see the boat for the moving white carpet of geese wheeling in the draughts far below him.

That was when the change in Rognvald had begun. The mischief, even the
vicious mischief, was still there, but without the glitter that had made it so hard to handle. Rognvald had been afraid himself, mortally afraid on that climb, and its achievement had altered his mood.

So, too, had the King’s readiness to accept the challenge. After that, it was still a duel, but Rognvald never again suggested anything quite as dangerous, and usually the men came with them, boat vying against boat as ii every day were a feast day and the world was a playground again, made of blue dolphin sea and green islands, in which to run and to climb and to swim, to leap and to fish and to hunt. When the fighting came, it was no more than an extension of it, and a dead Norse-speaking Irishman, speared out of a boat fleeing from the big bay of Erik’s isle, was no more than a deer to be dragged out of the sea for the stripping.

Last night, making their last camp on shore, Rognvald had taken him down to the sea-edge, where the waves moved towards them like rods, black dimly slotted with white. Rognvald’s cobbler had made him gannet-neck shoes, soft as down on the inside, and his hair was as light and soft, and his skin river-fresh. He said, ‘What is the magic, uncle, that charms your life? Perhaps I should pay more heed to the White Christ. What did Hallfred Troublesskáld say?

‘More
heed?’ Thorfinn had answered.

‘Indeed,’ had said Rognvald, ‘I have been thinking serious thoughts about religion lately, and I have in mind going to see my foster-brother in Norway one day soon, to see what can be done for these poor souls in my care in Orkney.’

‘In two-thirds of Orkney,’ Thorfinn had remarked.

Rognvald had smiled and then looked up, his face ghostly in the night-sparkle of the soft, bursting seas. ‘As I was saying. What charm do you bear? I meant to come back with all Orkney. You knew it.’

‘And now?’ It was like being on Stac an Armin again, exploring by touch and by intuition.

‘I had forgotten,’ said Rognvald, ‘what you were like; and you reminded me. Of purpose, of course, and so I should discount it. I cannot do that, for what you are is what I am also. Do you not feel it?’

Red prints on the rock, and the sea, far below. ‘Yes,’ he had answered. And then, ‘There is one kind of love I will not give you,’ he had added.

There had been a long pause. Then, ‘I know that,’ Rognvald had said. ‘But you may receive it, may you not?’

Rognvald’s touch, light as thistledown, fell on one shoulder; and as Rognvald stretched up, his breath came warm and sweet, just before his lips found one cheek and pressed it. Then he was no longer touching, but only one
pace away, the bird-skin noiseless on the sand. ‘If it is given from the heart, and without thought of reward,’ Rognvald had added.

You were of his blood. You were only two years older. You were the King. He had turned to Rognvald and said, ‘Give me trust, and I will return it to you. That is all I ask.’ And Rognvald had smiled, and he had felt, for one terrible moment, that his hands had slipped from the rock, and that the white flocks were parting, and that he was falling and falling into the slow, wrinkled sea.

Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘What is wrong? We have been waiting for you in the hall.’

He was in Thurso and the voyage was over. The King said, ‘I am sorry. You wanted to talk to me.’

‘There is no need now,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. His voice sounded grim, as it often did now. ‘I have heard all that you have been doing, and more.’ He paused. ‘Your wife was afraid. I thought it was because of Earl Rognvald.’

‘No,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. ‘No. I realise that now. And Rognvald?’

‘Is tamed,’ he said. It was an effort to speak, he was so tired.

‘And then?’ Thorkel persisted. It sounded harmless: a minor conversation. Words were useless. What he was saying was,
What are you?

‘And now,’ said the King, ‘I really must get back south. I have sent Bishop Malduin to the new King of England, asking when I may travel to Winchester to offer him homage for Cumbria.’

In the darkness, Thorkel’s eyes glittered, and then he turned away. ‘And not before time,’ he said. ‘The King in Caithness is all very well, but who will look to the farms if the lot of you are playing pirates all summer? Homage for Cumbria?’

‘Think about it,’ Thorfinn said, making it brisk, and turned to the hall. What waited for him there was the innermost part of his life, without which the rest could not go on. She had been afraid, and he must still her fears; and also conceal from her that his fears had been greater yet; and still were.

N THE FIRST
day of Easter, it being judged that no invasion from Norway was imminent, Edward son of Aethelred was officially crowned King of England at Winchester by the Archbishop Eadsige of Canterbury and, before all the people, was duly instructed as to his duties as King and his responsibilities to his new nation.

The ceremony was not a success, and neither was the banquet afterwards, at which the King’s mother found herself seated staring across two tables at the young King of Alba, who had the good sense to stare woodenly back, He was sitting, she saw, next to his wife’s cousin the new Earl of Northumbria, a well-intentioned and calamitous provision by Edward’s well-intentioned and calamitous seneschal, whom she must get rid of forthwith.

Three seats along from her, she could hear the King her own son forgetting Anglo-Saxon names, as he had been forgetting them for a year now. So much for last night’s session with herself and Aelfwin, trying to teach him, yet again, the names of his English courtmen from outside London and Gloucester and Winchester. Sitting there in the church, you could sense the derision as the Archbishop ranted on about Christian succession, and not only because the old man was making a mess of it, either. Anyone who had been with Edward or knew of Edward during all those years at Rouen must be perfectly well aware that in forty years he had never managed to father a child, despite every encouragement; and all the doctors had done for him, it seemed, was convince him that he now knew more about healing than they did.

Her younger son Alfred had been popular, but she had known from the day she left him in Normandy, thirty years since, that Edward was stupid, with the stupid man’s timidity that occasionally—very occasionally—could burst into hysterical action. She had always prayed that Edward would never have to be brought in to fill Canute’s shoes. She could control Edward. But she couldn’t lead armies, and since he couldn’t either, the power was going to lie with those who did.

Godwin, Leofric, and Siward. She could see them from where she was sitting, in their embroidered robes and gold belts, their thick rings glowing with colour in the candlelight.

Leofric of Mercia, whose brat Alfgar was a grown man now, and as sharp and energetic and ambitious as his father, you could be sure, as well as possessing a mother who clearly meddled with some Breton arts she had better leave alone, since her looks had never changed in twenty years. And there was energy there as well, the kind of special edge that these Breton-Caux marriages brought, like the Norse-Irish ones she had come across. Leofric and his son would take some watching.

Then Godwin of Wessex. One could say it like that, as if he were merely another powerful earl, and not one of her oldest and once dearest friends, who had fought side by side with Canute and had—almost certainly—brought about the death of her son Alfred. Godwin she no longer could trust, nor feel near to, although the past lay there and could not be ignored. Nor could those links with the past that might promise trouble in future. Godwin and Canute’s sister had married sister and brother. Godwin’s wife was aunt to Svein, whom her son Hardecanute had put in charge of Denmark, and whom Magnús of Norway had just succeeded—for the moment—in pushing out.

Now England was under a Saxon King, Denmark was no longer the motherland. If Godwin were to be disappointed with the new England, he and his sons did not have far to seek for a different ally.

And, lastly, Siward, sitting next to the boy from Orkney who had once been Canute’s housecarl, and about whom she must do something as soon as the meal finished. Siward, who had taken the hint and promptly slaughtered his wife’s uncle Eadulf, whose empire-building in the north had been too blatant for comfort. She remembered suggesting it to her other son, her dear son, and he at least had seen the implications at once.
You wouldn’t mind an alliance between Siward and this new Macbeth?

He had been her dear son, but he was young, and he didn’t know northmen as she did. She had known that the Orkney boy would never take Siward into partnership, and she had been proved right. And now, her agents said, the fellow Siward had raided deep into Alba and got hold of two of his three nephews, Duncan’s sons.