King Hereafter (65 page)

‘They never hit anything,’ said Alfgar. ‘You’d hear that the Bishop of Durham got a sharp reprimand for meddling with other people’s churches, but Siward had him reinstalled almost before he had crossed the river. You want to watch,’ Alfgar said, ‘and not get defeated by Norway. If the English think that King Magnús is going to get a foothold through you in the north, they’ll back Siward to do anything he likes, including marching straight into Alba. You know he’s trying to get one of the boys back from Ireland?’

‘No,’ said Thorfinn. Then he said, ‘One of Duncan’s sons … Of course. Donald must be twelve; perhaps thirteen. Where is the boy?’

‘That’s what’s puzzling Siward. It’s a pity,’ said Alfgar, ‘that you didn’t persuade King Edward to take over both boys. And now the third one’s in Ireland, isn’t he? What does that look mean?’

‘It means that I have that matter, at least, in hand,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I hear you have a daughter as beautiful as your mother.’

‘I’ve got a new boy as well,’ Alfgar said. ‘With the same wet-nurse Edith had. It was worth all the labour to get her in the household again. I don’t believe in quick weaning. Was it you who said that both my sons had noses like Lapps’?’

‘Yes,’ said Thorfinn. ‘But then, so have you. Ask about it some time.’

Alfgar’s laugh rolled over the wall-hangings. He shook his head at Groa. ‘He will sit there making jokes instead of looking to the storm-beach he calls a kingdom. Tell him, can’t you, that the rest of us will begin to find life very difficult unless he makes some effort to take the thing seriously? The days for playing at Vikings are over.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Thorfinn. ‘They have only begun.’

Later, he said, ‘What is this? Groa, what is it? It was only Alfgar.’

And through the tears that, amazingly, had broken down all her self-control
she said, ‘It isn’t that. Or not only that. I heard the news that came this afternoon.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, yes. Magnús is raising a levy in Norway. It seems that he has offered Rognvald both a fleet and an army to chastise me with in the spring. But we knew that was likely.’

‘And Kalv?’ Groa said. ‘Magnús has offered him back all his lands and his status in Norway, provided he supports Rognvald against you. That was in the message as well, wasn’t it?’

‘What do you do to my messengers that make them tell you all their secrets?’ said Thorfinn. ‘My love, my love; O glory of women; smile at me. It is a time for making jokes, and laughing at them.’

‘Time to take Lulach from Moray so that he may see, as he may never see again, how a kingdom should be ruled,’ Groa said. ‘Time to try to teach Sigurd the same lesson, although he is only eleven. But Erlend, at five, has to be left with his nurses. You were Rye when your father died. What do you recall of him? Anything?’

‘Then we should talk,’ Thorfinn said. It was a gift he had, that he would not fight against the inevitable, but listen to it, although not necessarily to surrender. And, recognising it yet again, it stole the words from her.

So he said them instead. ‘If you are left, you will hold Moray. For Lulach, it would be best to look for a marriage with the lands about Moray, to knit his interest to whatever king may take Alba. It does not sound desirable, or even profitable; but Bishop Malduin has a young daughter, as well as a family claim to the mormaerdom of Angus, and Lulach might do well to bind himself there. For you, you will also have to think of a husband.’

The sound she made, had she been a human being, would have been a denial. He took it as such.

‘What we have is ours, and dies with us. You have sons. Even if they are offered Orkney, it will be many years before they are old enough to hold power, or to lead. A man must do it, and a man you can influence. You sheared your hair to the roots, but you married Gillacomghain. You saw him burned by my men in front of your eyes, yet you married me. What we have should make the chain stronger, not weaker,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Crinan tried to tell me that soul-friendship between a man and a woman must be a mistake. I will not believe it.’

She said, ‘You are telling me to take to husband the man who will kill you.’

‘You say that,’ he said, ‘as if it cost me nothing. O Befind, whose fair body is the colour of snow: smile at me.’

And from his courage she took courage, and smiled.

s
HE HAD
done twenty-five years before, a beautiful child on the jetties at Nídarós, Rognvald of Orkney took his hurts to the man he thought would best help him. And, though he had his own troubles, the King of Norway kissed him and promised him a well-equipped army, although not the largest, and a well-found fleet of warships, although not the greatest, with which to chastise the swaggering bully who thought to defy the King of Norway’s own partition of Orkney. Enough, with luck, to wrest Orkney whole from Thorfinn. Enough, perhaps, to land on Caithness and annex it to the Norwegian crown.

Or at least so Rognvald, returning the embrace with tears on his cheeks, allowed him to go on believing. And indeed, with the ships and the men he would gather in Shetland and Orkney to add to these, such a feat might well be within his grasp.

He sailed late in the spring on a light easterly wind, and by the time he reached H
fn and found it empty, the armies of Thorfinn, lying patiently waiting in Caithness, knew the quality of the enemy’s fleet and its number; and stirred and quickened, like seed well fed and watchfully tended to which the hour of springing has come.

For three weeks, Thorfinn had husbanded them while the real grain had grown unregarded round empty houses and the flocks and the herds had all gone, barring what was required to feed the men who lay under awnings round Thurso bay: the three thousand men who would sail under his banner; the two thousand who fed them and served them, who acted as guides and as runners, and who would augment, at need, the forces already deployed in small numbers at all those points where a landing might be made.

In small numbers because, from the beginning, Thorfinn’s battle-plan had depended oh a conviction that nothing could shake.

To Thorkel Fóstri, expostulating, Thorfinn said, ‘Whatever he has told King Magnús, Rognvald wants only to kill me. That he can only be sure of doing at sea. It is a sea-battle he wants, and a sea-battle we shall give him. At the end of it, winner or loser, he might fall on the shore of Caithness, but I promise you that he will be in no state to attack it.’

It had pleased the Caithness men, and the Orkney men had made no demur. Long since, anything of value had been removed from the Orkneys, including food. Rognvald’s newly arrived army would require a day, perhaps two, to rest after their journey, but after that their attack wouldn’t be long delayed. They could support an army only with what they brought with them.

Copsige, a man of enterprise, watching from Cornholm, had carried the news of Rognvald’s ships. ‘Only thirty of them, my lord Earl, but great ships: as great as
Grágás
, all of them, and filled with men. As many men as your sixty will hold. My lord, the armies are even.’

Thirty ships against sixty: that was the second strand in the battle-plan. Thirty tall-sided ships who would seek, therefore, to use their advantage by grappling and who, once lashed to the enemy, would require steady water under the keel. Which led to the third strand: the sea.

Between the scattered islands of Orkney and the long, rocky coast of Caithness lay the most dangerous passage of waters ever known about England or Alba, whose tidal current could run twice as fast as a longship, and whose waves could rise two hundred feet up the towering cliff-faces and overwhelm islands.

Once, fighting Carl Thorbrandsson, the Orkney fleet had been able to put to good use the tricks of current and tide. Now, as one Earl of Orkney set sail against another, the sea was the ally of neither and the potential enemy of both.

Thorfinn said, ‘He’s in Westray. He can’t come down the east coast to attack: that way he’ll enter the eastern neck of the firth and either be swept into the tidal race through the passage or be swept out of it with my fleet pursuing him. So he will come down the west side of Orkney, with open sea on his right and the Caithness coast ahead, across the western neck of the firth. Are we agreed?’

There was no dispute. Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘He will know you are here. In Thurso Bay.’

Below them, side by side on two miles of white sand, lay the longships, gold-tipped, embracing the foam like a necklet. As their spies had reported, so would Rognvald’s. As he sailed south from Westray to Hrossey to Hoy, his prows would point straight towards Thurso, and each fleet, whatever it did, would be in fullest view of the other.

‘So we sail out to meet him,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Which he will expect. If we’re lucky, we get warning from the beacon on Hoy. If we’re undeservedly lucky, the wind will change and allow us to meet him under sail high up on the west coast and out of the firth. If neither of these things happens, we shan’t see much of him till he’s off Rora Head, and we might have to row part or all of the way to meet him, which puts us all in the thick of the tide-race.

‘If we engage there and the tide is making, we all get swept eastwards and into deep trouble. If it’s on the ebb, Rognvald may well find himself pushed westwards before we meet up with him, and we should then bear down on him with the tide, plus the wind, which would be most enjoyable from our point of view but not from Rognvald’s.

‘Therefore, if the wind doesn’t change, Rognvald is likely to time his arrival off south-west Hoy at slack water. Or just before. That means a lot of lurching but no real punishing current for an hour anyway, and even then only a mild one, with the wind to cancel it.’

‘If the wind stays easterly,’ Thorkel Fóstri said.

‘If, of course,’ the King said. ‘Who’s the expert on winds? Otkel?’

Everyone looked at Otkel, Thorkel’s nephew, who had once taken a longship round Duncansby, gale-force wind against tide, and lived to tell of it. Otkel said, ‘Variable. But it looks set for twenty-four hours at the moment. You can take it that the Earl will aim for slack water, no matter what the wind, and a quick kill before the flood starts.’

One of the Salmundarsons said, ‘No matter what the wind? He won’t row down against a southerly, surely, even if he has to keep his men starving till it changes.’

‘No,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. ‘But winds have been known to alter. And although he knows the currents as well as we do, his ships are full of Norwegians.’

‘As ours are full of Irishmen,’ the King said tranquilly. ‘But Earl Rognvald will spread his hird through the fleet, as I shall spread mine. Don’t underestimate their seamanship. Everything I have said, Rognvald will have said also. It is the wind, in the end, that will have the last say. The wind, and those with the quickest wits to deal with it. So. The next slack water is when? Five in the morning?’

‘It would mean sailing all through the night from Westray,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘He won’t ask them to do that so soon after crossing from Norway. But tomorrow afternoon. That is possible. Before the wind changes.’

‘I think you are right,’ the King said. ‘Tonight, we sleep. Tomorrow, we shall keep them all active but not too busy. By mid-afternoon or before, we should know if the fleet is coming. Meanwhile—Otkel?—I am to be told of any change in the quality of the wind. And if it changes, this is what we must do.…’

Later, looking back on it, it seemed to Thorkel Fóstri that nothing had been left undone that could be done beforehand: nothing had been left unsaid that should have been said before that battle came that was to decide the fate of Orkney, and that was to decide the fate, for all time to come, of the far greater country called Alba. Only, they were men. And wind, they said, was the breath of the gods.

It was the beacon on Hoy, after all, that gave them their first warning, followed very soon after by the smoke from Easter Head and from Hoi born as the flash of gold, far to the north, told of the Norwegian fleet rounding the west point of Hoy with Rognvald’s banner flying above it. It was three hours after midday, with a steady easterly breeze, and a fitful sun white behind cloud-haze.