King Hereafter (57 page)

Then a spray of cold slush slapped their faces, and Rognvald, halting before them, said, ‘I declare, uncle, you are shaking. Is it fear for yourself, or your wife, or the figure you cut on the ice? A silver cup says you won’t race with me. A golden cup says you won’t win.’

‘A fairly safe wager, under the circumstances,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But if you are in such sore need of a cup, then who am I to refuse you?’ And Groa, silent, watched him bind the bones to his feet and pick up the sticks and step out into the noise and laughter on the lake and did not stop him, for it took courage to stand, a king and a leader, and pit the practice of one or two frozen winters against his enemy and the skill of six years. But on the ice, surrounded by men of both factions, nothing more than humiliation of a humdrum kind could come to him, which no doubt he would pass off. And so long as Rognvald was on the ice, she was safe.

In the event, a score of them took part in the ensuing race to and from the row of boulders, half swallowed in darkness, which was their makeshift boundary mark. The woman of the farmstead, her face flushed and smiling, swung the tallow-dip that gave them their starting signal and the skaters set off, in a whooping, uneven row, their backs brilliant in the firelight.

It was not to be expected that, drunk or sober, at war or at sport, any man of such a group would dream of pinning all his faith on his natural gifts. Shoulders and knees, elbows and hips and the pointed ends of the skating-sticks came into play instantly, until the receding line, bunching as it progressed, looked less like a contest of skaters than the crews of two longships that had just had a head-on collision. They receded, roaring, with one man at least among them traversing the ice on his shoulders, and Groa, laughing, shook back her hood and talked across the fire with the other women where they sat at ease on the shore on the heaped, straw-stuffed hides.

She watched, as long as she could, the ducking, swaying head of Thorfinn, who was demonstrating, it would seem, that the balance required of a youth skipping on oars at nineteeen can serve him just as well in other ways fourteen years later. Then she could distinguish nothing but a dark line on the ice which became a mound which became, in turn, part of the darkness. The shouting continued.

Having reached the boundary, the contestants did not return as quickly as they had gone, but, held in woman-talk, Groa was not unduly concerned. Not far away, one of the passenger-sledges had been turned, and a pony brought down from the horse-lines was being clipped into its harness: someone feeling the cold, no doubt, had decided to make for his warm bed at Orphir.

That there was a connection between the two did not cross her mind until a pair of hands closed on her arms and jerked her upwards. She gasped, kicking
and wrenching, but the man behind her, whoever he was, did not let go, although one of the women shouted and picked up the big ladle and two more were running towards her. But he was too strong for her and too quick. Before he could be stopped, he had thrown her into the sledge and held her there while a dark figure vaulted on to the pony’s back and, seizing the reins, flung the horse and the sledge into motion.

The man holding her down dropped his hands and jumped back. The rider ahead, whose back was all she could see, raised his whip-hand and brought the thong coiling down, so that the garron kicked up its heels and, ears flattening, lengthened its pace. The snow began racing below her. Already it was too late to jump. Already the black bulk of the steading was blocking the flames of the fire, and the cries of the women were thinning, overlaid by the hiss of the runners.

Then the rider ahead, whip and reins in one hand, twisted round, smiling, and looked at her, his teeth dimly white below the black circle of fur he had pulled over the bright, gilded hair. ‘Why not jump?’ Rognvald said. ‘I don’t want you. I only want Thorfinn to follow me.’

The sledge swerved. The horse was running wild. Rognvald paid no attention, twisted round, smiling, with the reins lying loose in his fingers.

Groa said, ‘I am not getting out.’

‘You are hoping for rescue?’ Rognvald said. ‘I have told my men not to come after me. Thorfinn will come, of course: he will follow the tracks. My guess is that he, too, will come alone. He knows that in a duel one does not need companions.’

The sledge lurched, and he half-turned and, looking ahead, took the reins in both hands again. He was still smiling. They crossed a ridge of bared rock, and she gripped the sides of the sledge as it bucketed. He was steering straight, she saw, for another. She took a short breath and called. ‘If he finds me in the snow, he won’t come after you.’

This time, he did not turn, but she could just make out his words, although the wind snatched his voice. ‘He won’t find you, my beautiful aunt. I shall make quite sure of that.’

There was a mound ahead, one of the great burial mounds that shouldered out of the snow-covered turf all about them, only just blacker than the cloud-covered sky overhead. She saw him guide the horse to its slope and flung her weight to the right just as the runner on that side mounted the incline and ran jumping, striking sparks from the half-submerged stone-work. Then it thudded down to the level and the sledge was running evenly again, for the moment.

‘Do you think,’ Rognvald said, ‘that the stream will be frozen? It runs very fast. A skin of ice, perhaps: not much more. It isn’t, of course, a very broad stream. Any horse could leap it. What the sledge will do, there is no telling, is there, until we find out?’

She knew the stream, and she knew what the sledge would do. It would overturn. And in that icy water she would not drown. But unless taken quickly to warmth, she would die.

Which was what he wanted. Not to rule Orkney as stepfather to Sigurd and Erlend. Not even to rule Orkney, two-thirds or all of it. But to stand in the centre of Thorfinn’s world so that he had no world that was not Rognvald his nephew. Then her eye fell on the two thick, plaited cords that joined the sledge to the yoke of the horse, and she remembered the knife at her belt.

She had little time, and the use of hardly more than one hand, or she would have been thrown from the racing, bucketing sledge as she laboured. But, bracing herself as best she could, she began work on the thongs, sawing quickly, first on one side and then the other, for if one were to part prematurely, the sledge would scythe round under the galloping heels and nothing then was likely to save her. She must so work that the last strands would give way together and, evenly balanced, the sledge would merely run gently on, losing momentum.

Then Rognvald would turn as his horse ran free of the weight, and, coming back, would bend over her. And she would still have the knife in her hand.

She had the thong half through when the first cry came from behind, and at that second she stopped what she was doing, because Rognvald turned, scanning the darkness behind her. Then he lowered his gaze. ‘Do you play board games? It was a risk I took, that your husband would bring his friends with him. I believe he has brought one. How unfair. I must point it out to him.’

Then she looked round as well, and saw, far behind, two galloping horses, their torch-flares streaming like hair-stars. Unencumbered, they were gaining ground fast. Then Rognvald laughed, and she turned and made out, dim black on dim grey ahead, the line of the brook he was making for.

This time, she did not heed whether he saw her or not. She grasped the front board of the sledge and slashed the ropes through, one after the other.

The sledge kicked. Like a towed skiff severed at sea, its nose swung wildly, first to one side and then the other, and the harsh saw of the runners alone would have told Rognvald what had happened, without the sudden stumble and peck of his horse. He began to wheel round. Then his eyes lifted to something behind her. He laughed a second time and, leading the reins in an arc, turned his mare back again and pressed her into a trot. For a moment, Groa could see horse and rider black against the grey of the snow. Then there was nothing but the sound of muffled hooves drumming as Rognvald rode off, spurring from trot to full gallop.

The snow turned from grey to pink, and her shadow flickered before her, ahead of the maundering sledge. The runners ran to a halt, and two fur-cloaked horsemen overtook her in a flurry of snow.

One was Thorkel Fóstri. The other was Thorfinn, who was out of the saddle before she could stand, and was holding her, her face deep in the warmth and the softness between glove and shoulder. She began to shake, and he tightened his grip. Then he said, ‘Groa. Will you ride back with Thorkel Fóstri?’

She lifted her head, without looking up at him. ‘Let him go. Please. Thorkel Fóstri?’ She made to twist round, but Thorfinn’s grasp only tightened.

Behind her, she heard the swift jingle as Thorfinn’s foster-father dismounted, and then his quick breathing, and Thorkel’s voice saying, ‘Go back with her. I’ll see to it.’

Then Thorfinn’s hands dropped. He said, ‘That isn’t what she meant. Go away, both of you. Rognvald has to be dealt with.’

‘He’s waiting for you,’ Groa said. ‘He knew you would follow.’

Thorfinn said, ‘My foster-father: you will neither track us, nor will you look for us until first light.’

‘As you say,’ said Thorkel Fóstri.

‘On the hilt of my sword,’ said the King.

Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘He may give you promises. They mean nothing.’

‘That is for me to judge,’ said the King. ‘How much does your promise mean?’

‘That is for you to judge,’ said Thorkel Fóstri harshly, and, dropping his hand on the cross-guard, took the oath asked of him. Then, turning, he faced Groa and, holding pommel and reins, offered her his help to spring into the saddle.

The flare in its socket showed her the fire-haze round Thorfinn’s black hair, and the two tongues of cheekbone and jaw, and the predatory nose, lit bright as the gold of a weathervane. His eyes, deep as cup-markings, brimmed with shadow. He said, ‘Quickly. I shall come,’ and stood waiting until she was in the saddle and Thorkel mounted behind her, the reins in his hand. Then, as they turned to go, he put foot to his own stirrup and was off.

Her hands round Thorkel’s hide coat Groa watched, chin on shoulder, as the flare disappeared into the darkness and the sound of hooves faded, going fast but not so fast that he could not read the trail by the light of his torch. It would not take long for him to catch up with Rognvald, since all Rognvald wished, and all he had worked for, was to be caught.

What happened then was fated to happen, and only a faint heart would put it off from day to day or year to year. Only a faint heart like hers.

HE TRAIL
was indeed easy to follow, for by now it was late, and deep cold had crisped over the snow, so that the hoof marks of Rognvald’s horse were like ink on a piperoll, or like the marks of an Arabesque poem: alluring picture and message at once.

Down through the shallows of a fast, icy stream he was led, and up and over a rise, and then wheeling down to the flat, frozen face of another loch, where his horse found ice and staggered briefly, as he saw from the scars the other horse also had done.

Then the trail looped round again, and for a moment he saw far away and a little below him a circle of flares in the darkness, masked and unmasked by the black moving figures of men, and a single light, travelling swiftly, making towards it.

Thorkel Fóstri had obeyed, then, and taken Groa to safety. At a guess, he would not return. The oath on the sword-hilt might give him pause, but not very much. More than that was the knowledge that he could not return, anyway, in time to alter the outcome. And that someone had to stay at Brodgar to control Rognvald’s men and his own when both sides came to guess what was happening.

Thorfinn knew Rognvald’s hird-leader, a hard-faced man from Westray called Styrkar who had escaped to Russia with Harald Sigurdsson. He was sensible enough, one would hope, to realise that extra bloodshed was useless, and to persuade his men to let well alone and camp by the lake for the night. No one, he supposed, would leave for Orphir now.

The trail turned east. The dash-marks made by the whipping harness had gone: Rognvald had taken time to pull it up, free of the galloping hooves. When she cut it, Groa must have had no hope of rescue. He wondered what she had meant to achieve, and then remembered the knife.

She was an Arnmødling, and pure-blooded Norse. They both owed their upbringing to the Norse way of thought, overlaid and changed in its turn by the time they had spent, both of them, among the Picts and the Gaels of the province of Moray—he for six years with his stepfather Findlaech, and Groa for four with Gillacomghain her husband. She would have made
Gillacomghain a good child-wife: grimly obliterating from her consciousness that part of their personal lives that she found repugnant, and building upon what was left, until she had made a place for herself, organising, guiding, advising the people less capable who looked to them.

As the first Lady of Alba, she had no such sinecure; no well-defined niche; no well-defined people, only a vast land of river and mountain and forest which offered two courses only to its ruler and his lady. They could take its tribute, and use it to make a life for themselves where they chose, free of any care other than guarding it. Or they could look further off than their own lives, or the lives of the races within it, and consider what might be needed to bring such a land into order.