King Hereafter (69 page)

Rognvald had been a young god, full of magic and mischief, whom they had loved to lead them overseas to high adventure. But the sun had set on the Viking, or was setting. What remained was still high adventure, but of a different kind.

One tried in vain to teach as much to Arnór Jarlaskáld, whose verse on the recent occurrence even the scarffs on the rocks were repeating:

Sitting on Aith Hope, where he had been forcibly placed with the dead and the wounded, Arnór had used his time well. Without a skald, the deeds of a war-lord would die. It was Arnór’s bad luck, and his master’s, that men should wish, now and then, to celebrate something in their lives other than battles. With a lesser poet who peddled his verses like bits of robbed-out foreign mosaic, one might throw the hearth-stool away and close one’s door on him. But, rare of his breed, Arnór gave love with his
kvaedi
and hoped for love in return, even from enemies. And if the love remained, and not the verses, it would be equally a judgement of sorts.

At the great feast that night, at which he had no need to drink because Groa was there and the boys, she said to him, ‘I can feel happiness all around you, like the warmth from a burning wax-light. You will stay in Orkney all winter, till you are sure of your people again?’ And when he nodded, she said,
‘You know you have been drunk on sea-water, not ale. Can you ever be so happy anywhere else?’

Thorfinn said, ‘Was Canute happy? I suppose he was. About King Olaf I don’t know: he was my age when he died. If you are apprehensive, I suggest you watch what happens to your great-uncle Harald in Norway. He’ll persuade Magnús to give him half the throne soon, when he has finished exhibiting how awkward and how powerful he can be. And then we shall see a King of Norway who has spent half his life with the Orientals. They say Jaroslav’s father in Russia had eight hundred concubines. And seventy years ago
his
father went about with his head shaven, save for a lock on one side, and long moustaches, and a ring in one ear. Yet in their turn they all come from the northern islands, as you and I do. Will Harald be happy?’

‘He is not a Celt,’ Groa said.

‘Then he will be happy,’ said Thorfinn. ‘And now that I think of it, so will Rognvald, with any luck.’

The child they wanted was conceived that night in Orphir, and because her health came before everything else, Thorfinn made her stay at the hall, as soon as they knew of it, and rode about Orkney on his own, with the hird and with their older son Sigurd, who was eleven, and to whom he was God. And she did not grudge him it, but stayed with Erlend and with Sinna and her women and discovered that David the priest was good at board-games, and that Thorkel Fóstri, on the days he preferred not to ride, would tell her things about Thorfinn that she did not yet know.

It was to be a hard winter, when wolves ran on the ice between Norway and Denmark, and forests froze round Cologne. By October, the first signs were there already, and men travelled less, but returned to their steadings to see to their barns and to make all snug for the harsh weather to come, before feast-time arrived. The couriers that came back and forth, when they could, from the mainland of Alba, stopped arriving and Thorfinn came home with only those courtmen who belonged to his household and restored Sigurd, who could not stop talking, to his mother, and tossed Erlend in the air and asked after Lulach, who was staying at Deerness with Thorkel Fóstri.

The air of contentment was still there, although tempered, when he held her, with a restraint she knew he did not enjoy. Until this child was safe, they slept in different beds. So he kissed her, complaining, and she said, ‘Ah, the black-headed fighting-men the fifty islands will see, come next July.’ She hesitated, and then said it. ‘I have never seen a son of yours by another.’

His face did not change, but she turned scarlet under the brown, velvety gaze.

‘At twenty-three,’ he said, ‘I cannot recollect having so many. And after that, of course, I was forced into marriage.’

‘So?’ she said sternly. She knew that her colour was high, but she had no fears now.

‘Is there a question?’ he said. ‘There is this Druid. I ask him what the present hour is good for. And he says,
for begetting a King on a Queen
.’

‘I have met him?’ she said.

‘Surely,’ said Thorfinn. ‘He sits on your pillow. And, that being so, what chance do I have, and myself exhausted?’

Those nights, she went to bed early, when the tables were cleared and the rest of the women withdrew to their sleeping-quarters. Lying on her down mattress, she could hear Thorfinn’s voice, low and rich through the timber wall, and the exclamations and rejoinders of his men, as they sat talking and drinking.

Masculine talk. The mild, austere voice of her father remonstrating with his hot-headed brothers, persuading Kalv into moderation, explaining to Thorberg and Kolbiorn. The hoarse, lewd voice of Gillacomghain her husband boasting of his prowess to his brother. The good-humoured roughness Thorfinn used with the hird when he was handling them, stirring their interest in something he wanted. If Thorfinn had ever had personal exchanges with anyone, man or woman, apart from herself, she had never heard them. But he must have had: with his foster-father; with Sulien, she imagined. With other women, she did not believe, despite the question she had made him answer. His nature was otherwise.

She did not know, therefore, as she drifted into sleep, how long into the night Thorfinn talked, or how long he sat with his hands round his horn, saying nothing in particular, with the two men or three who still stayed with him when the rest had crossed to the wall-benches and rolled, stretching, into their skins and drawn the covers over them as the long centre fire glowed and glimmered on the axes and shields, and the painted carving on the pillars and beams. Nor did even Thorfinn know that on such nights men took turns to sit with him in silence while he thought, for toleration and acceptance had grown, a long time since, into something else.

On such a night, it was Sinna, kept awake by a wriggling Erlend, who realised that a great cold had come suddenly, and that the tapers burned still in the hall, where there were no slaves awake to see to the fire. For a while, she stayed where she was, grumbling and muttering. Then, because what disturbed her girl Groa was to her also a matter of moment, she rose and found another blanket to put on the bed and, having tucked up the boy, pulled her old sheepskin cloak over her robe and opened the door of her sleeping-hut.

Orphir lay still on the slopes of its hill, hut after hut black on the grey, save only the long shape of the drinking-hall with its amber rectangles of flickering membrane. She could hear the stream that ran down to the shore, and the breath of the sea washing the shores of the Flow, and sense rather than see the low black islands that lay out there over the water: Cava and Flotta and Huna, with Ronaldsay lying behind. And to the west, unseen, the ramparts of the island of Hoy, outside which such a terrible carnage had been wrought five months before.

Then she saw a longship on the beach which had not been there at dusk. And as she stood, staring, a hand gripped her over the elbow and another palmed her over the face, so that she could neither breathe nor call out, and
the voice of Rognvald, Thorfinn’s nephew, said, ‘Be still, little woman, or I will feed your bowels to my dog.’

Then two men tied her and threw her gagged in a corner, where she had to watch what all the others were doing: the others who came up from the beach with great bundles, which they stacked man-deep round the walls of the drinking-hall before melting into the darkness, steel glinting, to where the sleeping-quarters lay silent.

There had never been a guard posted at Orphir until the struggle between the two Earls began, and the first thing that Thorfinn had done after the battle was to remove him. Magnús of Norway could never give Rognvald another army. That everyone knew.

He had not given Rognvald another army. Rognvald had one ship, with the men needed to sail her. It was all he required, when his only purpose was to kill his father’s half-brother.

Sinna saw it all happen: saw the hall-lights glint gold on the Earl’s silken hair as he passed and repassed, and willed in vain that Thorfinn within would rise, would extinguish the lights, would open a shutter, would send a man into the yard … anything to avert what was going to happen.

But nothing averted it, and she watched as the brand was kindled that Rognvald stretched to the darkness round the hall door, as his men did on each of its long sides and its ends. Watched as, stark-lit by the ring of bright fire, Rognvald threw back his fair head and called.

‘Hallo there, my uncle! Are you cold? Come out! I have kindled a fire for you, and my aunt, and your soul-friends. Come and warm yourselves at it!’

Groa was so deeply asleep that the shouting in the main part of the hall did not fully wake her at first, and it was the smoke, oozing thick through the timbers and catching her throat, that roused her at last.

There was enough light in the chamber to show her where her cloak was, and that Thorfinn’s bed was empty still. Then she saw why the light was orange and red, and what was making it. She was halfway to the door when it opened and Thorfinn’s hands stopped her, gripping her shoulders. Behind him Sigurd stood, pressing hard at his father’s back. When she flung out her arm, he ran to her.

Thorfinn said, ‘Rognvald has set fire to the hall. Take Sigurd and walk out. He is letting go all the thralls and the women and children. Sigurd, take care of your mother.’ He had flung her cloak over her shoulders and, dragging rugs from the bed, pushed them into Sigurd’s arms. ‘Quickly. I’ll follow.’

She didn’t move. ‘Erlend!’

‘He’s safe. All the huts are empty. The women are safe. They’re waiting. Quickly. Groa,
run
.’

The door to the big hall hung open. It was full of Thorfinn’s men, half dressed, steel in their hands. The main door to the yard stood empty, outlined in brilliant orange. Very few slaves slept in the hall. By now, they had gone. Thorfinn said, ‘Groa: I cannot fight till you go.’

She said, ‘He’ll kill the boys,’ on something like a scream, and he shouted back at her, so sharp was his anger. ‘Rognvald will never do that. You will kill
Sigurd yourself if you keep him.’ And, taking their son by the arm, he flung him into the hall, while she ran after. She saw Thorfinn drag the rug over the boy’s head and shoulders. Then, ‘
Run!
’ he said. ‘Run. And hide if you can,’ and pushed the boy through the fire and into the open.

Then Groa felt her husband’s hand on her back and caught his arm with her own. ‘You cannot fight, with me or without me,’ she said. ‘Can you? You burn, or you run through the door and they kill you.’

He said ‘Groa—’ with the lie on his lips, and then the wisdom he had came to his rescue and he was silent.

She said, ‘Give me this gift,’ and in all the uproar there was a splinter of silence between them. Then he said, ‘Shoes. Cloak. Rugs in the water-butt. Wait in the chamber.’ And was gone into the swirling smoke of the hall, where the tapers glared on black, moving billows, and on the edge of an axe; on a man’s arm moving quickly; on a group of blundering shadows that masked the doorway and stood screaming and then fell, so that the flames on the threshold sprang flattening like sheaves and then roared upwards again. She heard, as she thrust her feet into her shoes, as she plunged the rugs into the butt, the thuds and cries as other men hacked their way out of the building and died of the steel Rognvald’s men threw at them.

Rognvald’s men were all round the hall. She could hear them yelling and taunting because Thorfinn lacked the courage to come and meet death with his friends, but would rather let himself die in his dung while his wife stroked his hand and younger men taunted and spat on him. She heard the words they used.

You could not see if there was anyone left now in the hall. The hangings had gone, and the lines of flame caulking the timbers had spilled over, one log to the next, so that the great inside wall of the building stood like a cascade of tumbling fire, with a bush of fire like a stork’s nest on every pillar, and the roof-beams brilliant with light as a sunset.

And the walls of the chamber she was in had caught now, too, and the bed she had lain on.

He had said to wait; and she waited; and he came; but by then she could not see how he looked, for her swollen eyes were closed, and she could not breathe very much any more, and her fists were raw where she had tried to beat the flames from the hem of her cloak and her shoulders.

But then she felt him between her face and the heat, and his arms round her body, lifting her. Something burning touched her bare ankle and forced her lids open. Her cheek rolled on his shoulder. A small dazzle tormented her eyes, and she put out a blundering hand and it stopped as a lock of her own hair, smoking, seared into her palm.

Then there was a series of terrible movements where she cried out to him to loosen his grip because he was gouging the flesh from her bones. There was an explosion of light, greater than anything that had gone before, and of heat like the heat of liquid brass pouring over her body.

And then it was dark and there was nothing.

*   *   *

To help a child in a panic, you must first stop it screaming. To stop it screaming, you call it by name.

A child was trying to scream, and someone was calling its name, over and over, steadily, softly.