Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
‘A welcome accretion, I am sure, for the people of Caithness. And even more welcome news, I am certain, for King Magnús of Norway, when he hears. But, as you say, it need not concern the King your cousin. He will be in Alba this summer, collecting his rents.’
Ligulf pulled up a stool and sat down. A sallow man with a narrow face, his long black moustaches moved, like crow’s wings, with his smile. He said, ‘My good brother found the Christmas crown-wearing somewhat trying. The Lady Emma has not yet forgiven the loss of her resources, and she has some local support. Carl Thorbrandsson is wealthy enough to do as he pleases, and so is the family of my lord Crinan, for all they are kinsmen by marriage. We are waiting, indeed, with a little anxiety to hear what my lord Crinan in particular will do.’
The Bishop of Alba noticed, to his annoyance, that one of the gloves on his lap was unaccountably teased out in one corner. He smoothed it flat again and, folding his hands once more, said, ‘Gossip, I fear, does not come within my province. If you wish accredited news, I can only tell you what I have heard. The King’s foster-father has been restored to his old command in Orkney, which means, I take it, that the King himself is thus free to travel south. On the second matter, I understand that couriers have already been sent to Cumbria to invite my lord Crinan to return to his abbacy at Dunkeld, with his family if he so wishes.’
‘What!’ said Earl Siward. His flat cheekbones above the springing beard had turned red under last summer’s burning. ‘Where did you hear that?’
‘Between prayers,’ said Bishop Malduin calmly. Then, as the Earl continued to stare at him, ‘My clerk brought the news from Dunkeld. The church in Alba is a poor thing, but I pursue what duties I can. It is as well to see that the young child your nephew is cared for. He is, of course, King Duncan’s youngest son, but still the throne might one day be his.’
Ligulf said, ‘My lord Crinan … To return to Dunkeld with his family?’ He looked at his brother-in-law. ‘Forne. And Orm and Maldred, no doubt. You said he was clever. I believe you,’
‘You refer to my cousin Thorfinn?’ said the Bishop. ‘He is an opportunist, yes. From your point of view, of course, it is a pity that Magnús of Norway should at present be so preoccupied with his war against Denmark. It would take very little to push Thorfinn’s foster-father out of Orkney now, and there would be an excellent excuse for invading Caithness while the rebels are there enjoying Thorfinn’s hospitality. Without fighting-men from the north or from Ireland, Thorfinn could not possibly retain hold of Alba.’
The crow’s wings parted on Ligulf’s face again. ‘What are you saying? That King Magnús of Norway should be invited to rule the Orkneys and Alba? I rather think the King of England might object.’
With a bang, Earl Siward of Northumbria struck both arms of his chair. ‘But the Lady Emma might not,’ he said. ‘With the King of England a simple-minded eunuch and Svein of Denmark beaten into a corner by Norway, what is there left?’
‘The Saxon Athelings?’ said Ligulf. ‘The Russians are selling off daughters: the Emperor Henry himself refused one the other day. The babies that Canute sent to Hungary can’t possibly be there still, with revolution after revolution taking place. If they’re not in Germany, they must be in Russia.’
‘Forget the Athelings,’ said Siward. ‘While Emma lives, you’ll never hear of them; or if you do, her assassins will be there first. And you can dismiss the Normans’ young bastard as well. He has a council about him that would throw Emma out of power the moment he took over England. But with Magnús …’
The Bishop of Alba cleared his throat languidly, in the fashion that arrested unwanted chatter on the occasion of his more ghostly dialogues. ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘speculation is interesting; but the facts remain that the King is still in possession of Caithness and Alba and part of Orkney, and Abbot Crinan and his friends are in possession of Dunkeld, and, moreover, Norway is, as you pointed out, fully occupied at present with her claims upon Denmark and, presumably, England.
‘So far as I can see, there is little you can do about any of these matters. If it interests you, the object of establishing my lord Crinan back in Dunkeld is less one of strategy than one of trade. Dunkeld is, like York here and London, at the head of a tidal estuary, and under Crinan enjoyed a considerable trade of a certain kind with the merchants of Norway and Denmark and also elsewhere in the Baltic. I am told that the King plans to turn the Abbot’s undoubted skills to the benefit of himself and his new kingdom. He will certainly have to find them riches soon; and with Earl Rognvald on his tail and a new kingdom to rule, he will not pick them up so readily on the high seas. In this new policy, there may lie no threat to Northumbria at all.’
Ligulf of Bamburgh slapped his palms on his thighs and sat, elbows akimbo, smiling at the Bishop of Alba. ‘How shrewd,’ he said. ‘And how penetrating. Indeed, you have thrown light, as your calling requires of you, on
many places of gloom and obscurity, and have made them all plain. Siward, am I not right?’
‘Eh?’ said Earl Siward. He continued to stare, brows knitted, into the fire-basket.
‘I said,’ said Ligulf of Bamburgh, ‘that perhaps the Bishop would welcome a dish of mutton and a cup of our wine before he has to go?’
‘Oh,’ said Siward. ‘Yes. Send for them, will you? Perhaps Osbern would join us. How old is the boy?’
He was looking at the Bishop. ‘My stepson?’ said Malduin. ‘No. You mean—’
‘King Duncan’s son. The boy at Dunkeld. How old is the boy at …?’
‘Ah, yes. He is eight, I believe, Earl Siward. A little family sadly sundered. The oldest, Malcolm, is still with King Edward?’
Siward did not reply. His brother-in-law, already risen, said, ‘He is being fostered in the south, yes, my lord Bishop.’
‘And the second son? Donald? Is he still in Ireland?’
But this time even Ligulf did not hear him, and the Bishop was forced to get up, collecting his gloves, and walk to the other room.
He left very soon after that, picking his way past the Earl’s handsome new church as he rode thoughtfully back to his lodging.
Walking on either side of him, his men-at-arms were splashed up to the edge of their cloaks, but it didn’t matter: he had already called on the Archbishop, taking him the little magnifying-glass that Crinan had got for him eight years ago.
Aelfric had been gracious, for him, in his grand residence beside St Peter’s, with the bullsheads of the Sixth Legion built into the walls. He had received the magnifying-glass with a quip about old age, in Latin, that Bishop Malduin had been tempted to cap in Greek, except that it was unwise with a Saxon who had not had the advantages of a training in Ireland. The Archbishop had been wearing silk, and his house was full of servants, and Malduin had been given wine in a cup made of glass, and afterwards had been permitted to keep the glass as a gift. It was in his saddle-bag now.
His wife of course would be delighted, and so was he: no one in Alba had such a cup. It was perhaps churlish to feel that something of a less domestic nature, a psalter perhaps, would have been more flattering from one high bishop to another.
He was still in the good quarter of the town and passing the well-kept house that had belonged to Crinan and now, one supposed, to his son Maldred, unless all the college of coiners kept the property in their own hands. When Crinan was there, there had been no need for the Bishop to go to the Jews outside the walls, or to send his man down to the workshops on the Fosse or to the wharves, as he had done today, to find out what was for sale and bring it to his lodging, together with some merchant he didn’t know. In the summer, he used to enjoy going down to the jetties himself to watch the knörrs coming in from the Baltic or further afield, with cargoes that might run from honestone to elephant tusks and silks from Cathay or Italy.
Now, in winter, there would be nothing much at the riverside but barges of brushwood and clay, too late, as usual, for the flood embankment, or a boat in through the rivers from Lincoln, full of those grey bowls and pitchers that his half-brother’s wife used to treat as if they came from Charlemagne’s table.
You could smile, for, living in the Western Isles, she had never seen a town except perhaps a glimpse of Dublin, and certainly never one with eight thousand people in it. They said only London was bigger than York. He had been in London once or twice. He liked cities. Except that it riled him to be summoned, he was pleased to be here and not sitting hunched over his brazier, listening to the drone of illiterate farmers’ sons trying to train for the priesthood. Although in Fife the hunting was good.
He reached his lodging. The merchant with the amber had not yet arrived, but someone else was waiting for the Bishop as he shook his cloak off and walked in. A man he vaguely recognised from the past. A tallish man with broad shoulders and coarse, straight hair exactly between red and yellow, who wore on his shoulder a Pictish buckle, the twin of one he had seen his cousin Thorfinn sometimes use. A kinsman, in fact, of Thorfinn, whose line had kept a toe-hold in the region when all the Norse kings of York had finally fled, and had returned from Dublin, quietly, in later years to settle and spread: first in Westmorland, and then back in the York region itself. The man whose eager helpfulness, on the occasion of King Duncan’s campaign against Durham, had largely contributed to the failure of that campaign.
The Bishop of Alba said, ‘Thor, is it not? Of Allerdale?’
‘There, now,’ said his uninvited guest, in Gaelic. ‘I wore the brooch in the hopes that you would remember the twin of it. And there is not the least need for worry: I kept my hood over my face all the way here, so the Earl will have no cause to imagine that you and Thorfinn and I have a plot in it. Are you well?’
It was more than time to recover the initiative. ‘I am well, I thank you,’ the Bishop said. ‘But pressed for time, I am afraid. Perhaps it is something you could leave with my clerk?’
When he smiled, the man’s colouring became positively vulgar. ‘Cumbria?’ he said. ‘I’ll leave it with your clerk if you wish, but I should have thought, my lord Bishop, that you would have wanted the least taste of it yourself, to begin with.’
‘Sit down,’ said Bishop Malduin shortly, and did so himself, with his gloves on.
Later, he was in two minds as to whether he had done the right thing or not. It was hard enough, as he complained from time to time to his Maker, to have Cousin Thorfinn and the Earl Siward both to serve without meddling with the balance of power between them. Naturally, with the lord Crinan and his family reinstalled in Dunkeld, Thorfinn’s intentions for Cumbria became of instant importance both to Siward and to men like Thor here, who owned land throughout northern England. He was worried himself, come to that.
Whoever controlled Dunkeld was not unlikely to meddle with the interests
of Fife and even of Lothian, at present mainly Siward’s concern. And Crinan was not only a powerful dealer; he was abbot of a Columban church rooted in Ireland and subject to influences York and Durham knew nothing of, not least of which were the vagaries of Irish tribal politics.
He did not know, therefore, if he had been wise to listen to this fourth-generation exiled Orcadian with the three languages and the air of undeviating jollity. All that was required of him was inaction, that must be said. He was under no obligation to his cousin Thorfinn. The land he had been given in Fife had mostly belonged to the men who had gone north with Duncan and paid for it with their lives. Nobody lived on it now but slaves and cottagers and widows: someone had to look after it. And the rest, such as it was, he had been told he could reclaim for himself from the marshes.
He didn’t owe anything to Thorfinn, and the Columban church had nothing to offer him, even if his interests had not been tied firmly to the lowlands of Scotland. There, in the Anglian churches, the churches dedicated to St Cuthbert, lay the promise of rich shrines and the rewards of friendly alliance with the powers of Northumbria and the King further south. Whatever measure of control England let fall under the Kings of Alba, she could never afford to allow it to become absolute, so that the small line of ecclesiastical strong-points fell asunder, and the neck of land between the Forth and the Clyde became a thoroughfare for the Norse of the east to reach the Norse of the west: a thoroughfare and a base from which they might overwhelm all England.
No. He did not relish being ordered about by the fur-trader’s offspring and his minion the new Bishop at Durham, nor yet by the sword-happy war-lord who sat in the Archbishop’s throne at York; but there were compensations. It did not do to cross one’s fate. Particularly when there was nothing to do but do nothing.
It could be said that the man Thor and he had reached a reasonable understanding. He had been quite surprised when, on parting, the fellow had lifted his cloak and taken from under it a small marquetry box, which he laid on the table and opened.
It was full of amber. Not Whitby stuff either, washed up on the beaches and then worked in some local shed. This was Baltic amber, carved where they understood such things. He picked up a pendant, and the thing shone like honey over a flame.
‘It appeals to you, so?’ said the man Thor. ‘Then you will give me the pleasure, surely, of presenting it to you and the lovely girl you have waiting there at home for you, I have no doubt. All I ask is that your two lips stay shut. If it got about that Thor mac Thorfinn was selling his amber for nothing, it would be the ruin of me.’
He might look and sound like a goat-herd, but it did not do to forget that he was a merchant-coiner as well, with licence to strike in London as well as here with his brother in York. Hence the land he owned. Hence the army he could bring, fully paid for, when his interest was engaged, or attacked.
In retrospect, the Bishop saw, he had done the right thing. He had nothing
with which to reproach himself. He had a glass cup and an amber pendant and a conscience as unblemished as either.
Since news has a way of travelling wherever there are waterways, the tale of Bishop Malduin’s summons to York moved north in due course and entered the river Tay and, passing the King’s hall at Perth, arrived with the last of the salt water at the sprawling monastery of Dunkeld, where, on the rising ground looking to Birnam, the lord Abbot Crinan had now made, at last, his permanent home.