King Hereafter (70 page)

‘Groa. Groa. Groa? Don’t cry. It’s all right. Groa. Groa …’

The beautiful voice was Thorfinn’s. The crying child was herself. The head and limbs brushed and tinselled with pain; the hips and stomach and groin through which pain was rolling, solid as tide-water: rolling, collecting, exploding, and ebbing bodefully back, to begin the whole flood once again: those were hers, too.

She knew what was happening, and what had happened, and cut off her cries with a gasp and opened her eyes.

Darkness. Darkness, of course. In October, in Orkney, the nights were long.

Darkness, and cold open air, and the noise of sea and strained timbers, and the shuddering hardness of wood underneath her, helped a little by something yielding and harsh, and something softer but damp. Heather and rugs, spread in the well of a boat. A small boat moving fast with the pull of two oars. A boat rowed by Thorfinn, who was only a voice, and at whose feet she was lying. He said, ‘Can you bear it? Can you try to bear it, thou bravest of brave? We mustn’t be heard.’

She could hear him apportion his breath: to the words; to the oars. The boat kicked and slid, and the oars dug and stuttered and then resumed their straight sweep.

Orphir. He was rowing from Orphir. It was a strong tide round Graemsay. Who would hide them on Graemsay that Rognvald would not discover?

The boat veered again, and she heard him catch his breath.

He knew where he was going, and he didn’t need questions. The weight of pain in her body moved, ground to its peak, and began to recede, and the freezing air licked at the sweat on her wrists and her forehead. She said, ‘I can bear it. When is dawn?’

He said, ‘We shall be safe long before dawn. I love you. Have I said so?’

‘Not today,’ she said, and when she began crying again, did not know it.

The family who lived in the turf hut on the rocks above Ham in Caithness were freed slaves: Bathrik, the son of an Irishman, made his living mainly by gathering kelp, and his wife had the Norse name of Gyrid.

It was one of their two unmarried daughters who heard the geese snort and hiss just before dawn the next morning, and, lighting the lantern, saw that all three of the birds had come out of the barn and were standing, sunk on their pink clumsy feet, with their thick, scaly necks lifted seawards. Then she saw, as the first faint greyness of day touched the water, that there was a boat there, far down on the mud, half in and half out of the tide-edge, and something moving, it seemed, at one end of it.

She ran and shook her father and brother, and found their boots, and an axe. Then, after the menfolk had gone, she and her mother and sister stood at
the shutter and peered through the darkness till they heard by the sound of ordinary voices and the bob of the lantern returning that there was nothing out of the way about it all.

And in that they were wrong, for when the party returned, it was her brother who carried the lantern, and her father who bore a seal-woman in his arms: a beautiful thing, fast asleep, with long red hair and a strange-blemished face and long, fine clothes, all wet with the sea.

Then her father Bathrik stooped and brought the seal-woman into the light, and it was to be seen that she was not sleeping at all, but very sick, and that the marks on her face seemed to be burns, and that her robe was not only wet with the sea, but dyed and sodden with blood.

Gyrid started forward, and between them they laid her on the bed-straw while Bathrik straightened, panting with news much more than with labour. ‘It is the Lady of Orkney. The Earl is there. She is ill. It is woman’s business. Gyrid, you must find out what to do, and set to curing her. They want no one to know they are here. No one. No one at the hall even, or the fisher-houses. The Lady is to stay here until she is able to be better hid. The Earl will lie in the shed, with the peat and the fish. Straw. Klakkr, put straw in the shed. Malmuru, give a poke to the fire and hang the pot on. Gyrid—’

Gyrid, kneeling, paid no attention. ‘The poor young one,’ she said. ‘ ’Tis a baby she’s lost. Malmuru, come quickly.’

‘And if she dies?’ said Bathrik’s son. ‘Who will get the blame? Or is she the Earl’s wife at all, skulking at night on the seashore? She will be some man’s whore in trouble.’

‘You fool,’ said Bathrik. ‘Do you think I don’t know Thorfinn when I see him? You saw him yourself. Ten feet tall, and black, and nobody’s fool. If he wants to hide, it’s for a good purpose.’

‘I saw nothing,’ said his son. ‘You took the lantern. Where is he, then? We don’t know where he is, far less where he’s come from.’

‘He was behind me,’ Bathrik said. He picked up the lantern.

‘I am still behind you,’ Thorfinn said from the doorway. ‘How is my wife?’ He did not come into the light.

Gyrid made a token movement, but did not halt what she was doing. ‘We’ll have to stop the bleeding, my lord. But she’s warmer already. Never fear. We’ll care for her.’

‘Whatever happens,’ the Earl said, ‘you won’t suffer. There is my purse. Smash the boat. There may be blood … and footmarks to cover. We are not here. We have never been here. Can you do this?’

It was the son who spoke up. ‘I dare say we can, my lord Earl. But if you came from Thurso Bay or Canisbay in the dark, your unfriends can come twice as fast in the daylight. There may not be time for all these fine contrivings.’

‘There will be time,’ Thorfinn said.

Then Klakkr’s sister caught the lantern and held it up higher, so that it lit the Earl’s head and shoulders, his body, his arms, and his hands.

The girl’s throat closed on itself. Then, like a stuck door punched
suddenly open, her air-passage cleared and filled, whining. Even Gyrid looked round.

The Earl’s lips moved and the salt glittered everywhere on the tattered black skin.

‘If,’ said Thorfinn, ‘you will show me the shed?’

Gyrid rose.

‘Not to touch me,’ said Thorfinn, ‘would be best.’

And waited patiently as they came to him slowly and anxiously, as might birds of the wild, save for the look on their faces.

The storms began after that, with sleet and continuous rain, so that the short daylight hours were almost as dark as the night, and if Gyrid did not bring her spare eggs round the settlement, it was no wonder; and everyone knew that Bathrik and his son were no good to anyone once the meat was salted and the ale-cask had been broached.

Besides, by then the news had come about the burning of Earl Thorfinn in Orphir.

The first man who told it was scoffed at, for no ship would cross from Norway in winter, and Rognvald had been sent off only that summer, truly whipped, as half Caithness was aware, who had fought with Thorfinn in that battle. Thorfinn the Mighty. His tents had been pitched there, and he had ridden round here, and he had said this or that to your cousin’s boy, joking, while he held off two kicking Trøndelagers with his left hand and drove his sword through a third with his right.

Thorfinn, the first Earl of Orkney to become King of all Alba also, could not be dead. A murdering death, without battle. And by his own kith and kin: a man whose life he had spared over and over.

And the red-headed Lady. Now, that was a pity.

But if Thorfinn was dead, who was Earl of Caithness? And what of the friends of Thorfinn still living, who had lands in Caithness and Orkney?

The toisechs murmured together in the big settlements and made their own discreet enquiries, while the little townships, like Ham, closed their shutters and kept themselves to themselves and said nothing, waiting. You had to look to yourself. If a woman wept, she was thrashed for it.

They did not have to wait long. Before November was out, Earl Rognvald crossed from Orkney to Thurso and sent a party of horsemen round the country, telling them who their new Earl was to be, which was himself. He took the chance also to look here and there for the friends of Thorfinn who might have slipped out of Orkney and found a friendly house to plot sedition in.

Rognvald’s horsemen were very thorough. They came to Ham almost at once, and took the tribute set aside for the dead Earl, and asked for news of the dead Earl’s two sons, whom someone seemed to be hiding, and of his friends, but not as if they expected an answer. Then they set to searching themselves.

And since one did not argue with bare swords and spearpoints, the people
of Ham let them look where they wished, including the open stone huts where the food dried, and the byres and the sheep-pens and the grain-lofts, where there were any, and even the vats and the cauldrons they used for the milk and the malt and the cheeses. They thrust their spears through the peat-stacks and the thatch, and tossed the hay, and the heather-piles for the rope-making.

There was nothing they didn’t look into: even the well-bucket at Bathrik’s, so the story went. The toisech, watching his wife’s chests being tumbled, asked later how they had found things at Bathrik’s, and Earl Rognvald’s man had said the boy had been cheeky as usual, and the three women tiresome, and Bathrik the worse for drink, and wanting to know how often they were to change earls anyway, and what if a new King of Alba came next, hunting Earl Rognvald.

To which, evidently, Earl Rognvald’s man had replied that there was no problem in that, since the next King of Alba had already been chosen by his uncle Earl Siward, who now ruled in his name in the Lowlands. And that there was nothing the King would like better than to have Earl Rognvald take Caithness and the north off his hands.

It was the first anyone had heard of a new King of Alba and caused a good deal of talk, until the next gale came and they had to see to their roofs again. And Earl Rognvald’s men, having found nothing, went away and did not come back. Only up at the toisech’s house, men looked at one another and began, quietly, to sharpen their weapons. For it seemed to them that, whatever claim Rognvald might have on Orkney now his uncle was dead, he had none on Caithness. And that there might be enough of Thorfinn’s fighting-men left, somewhere or another, to put forward this viewpoint, given encouragement and a little time. Especially if Thorfinn’s two sons could be found.

Somewhere about November, it began to seem as if Thorfinn might live.

It was not a matter on which he had an opinion, having left the conscious world in the doorway of Bathrik’s hovel in Ham and never yet having shown any desire to return to it. Indeed, when at last he moved, fractionally, of his own volition, and caught his breath and then, slowly, opened his eyes, Gyrid screamed, and his lashes dropped again, a long way, into dark caverns.

When they lifted again, Groa was there. Out of the new, marbled skin, pink and brown, the brown eyes were the same, within their singed charcoal lashes. Her tears fell on the blankets, although she was smiling. After a long time, he said, ‘Don’t grieve. We shall have others.’

It was all he said before he left her again, and she had not been able to speak at all.

The next time he awoke, Malmuru was at his side, and he was afraid and bewildered.

She said, ‘Your wife is sleeping. She sat by you all night. There is your friend.’

He looked at Malmuru, and not at his friend. He remembered who he was, and then what had happened. If he could not lift his hand, it was because he
had been ill, not because he was bound. He had expected to see Groa because he had seen Groa once before when he had wakened. Groa was safe.

When, once before, he had seen Groa, there had been someone, a man, on his other side. The same man, perhaps. The freed slave at Ham who had taken them in.

A friend?

Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘Look at me. Child: child, look at me.’

Then Thorfinn turned his head.

Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘Don’t blame Bathrik or his wife. They were afraid. They thought you would both die. They heard I was somewhere in Caithness and managed to get word to me. No one else knows I’m here.… Dear son, your boys are safe, and your wife. You have only to get well.’

To Groa, an hour later, Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘I think he heard me. He is sleeping again. Now you must go.’

Groa said, ‘You are in danger, too.’

And Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘Which of us do you think he would rather see killed? Rognvald’s men might think of returning. And next time they may remember the earth-houses.’

Thorkel Fóstri was right. Thorfinn could not yet travel to Moray, where the boys were hidden, as she could, weak though she was. Nor would he want to. Rognvald, some day, would have to be dealt with.

She said, ‘He does not even know that his throne has gone.’ There was no way now of recovering Canute’s golden helmet, lying blotched and misshapen in the ruins of Orphir. Or the circlet of gold that had burned its way through his brow and his hair before he had dragged it off and thrown it into the furnace. It marked his skin still: the permanent fillet of kingship.

The willpower that could drive him to stand in that furnace of Orphir waiting; waiting for the moment when the roof should cave in and the loft-floor would give him the footing he needed to break out unseen: that was not the temper of the refugee or the exile. Or the willpower that had brought him to cross the Pentland Firth alone at night while she lay at his feet, and the black skin and grey flesh and white ooze of his hands wrapped the looms of his oars and froze there.

‘He has lost neither his earldom nor Alba,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘Trust us. We shall do nothing until he is well. But then you shall hear of us.’

She kissed her lord as he still lay unwitting, and left while she had the courage.

After that, it was Thorkel Fóstri who ruled the régime that brought his foster-son back to full consciousness and then, methodically, to recover his strength. It was Thorkel Fóstri, also, who answered his first low, savage questions.

‘They are fools to have told you. It’s true. As soon as news of your death got about, Siward invaded in the name of Duncan’s second son Donald.… It’s nothing, Thorfinn. A thirteen-year-old boy who hasn’t yet left Ireland? Siward will hold the eastern part of the Lowlands, which was his in practice already, and perhaps the north shore of the Forth, but he can’t afford to keep
an army in Alba, not with all the power-struggle now going on with Godwin and Mercia in England. When you are well, in the spring, and they hear you have Orkney again, they will melt like the snow.’