King Hereafter (78 page)

Sulien said, ‘Germany could devour you and what is left of your culture.’

‘That, I gather, is King Svein’s suspicion,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Indeed, we have a lot in common, which is why I am here. To observe, and to learn. Do you blame me?’

‘I am afraid for you,’ Sulien said. ‘I am afraid for your country, if you lose your way. Where is all this money coming from? The ships and the horses they tell me about; the clothes your hird wears; Groa’s jewels … Where is Groa?’

‘Money?’ Thorfinn said. The bar of his eyebrows rose and fell again. ‘Booty. Regular bribes from King Harald and Emma. Protection payment from Llanbadarn and practically everywhere. A toll-chain across the Pentland Firth. Money offers no problems, I assure you. As for Groa …’

‘They said she was at the hall of her parents,’ Sulien said. ‘But when I called there, she hadn’t arrived.’

‘She will, later on,’ Thorfinn said. ‘At this present moment, I rather imagine—I told you we had a lot in common—she is in the private quarters of our host, the divorced Svein of Denmark.’

H, AN ABLE
man!’ said King Svein of Denmark. ‘An able man and a fine huntsman. Look at his record today. A man after my own heart. But to pay no attention to the needs of his wife: that I cannot forgive him. I married twice, as you know, but neither lady, if I say it myself, had any cause for dissatisfaction. Gytha—the Lade heiress: your sister married her cousin—Gytha died of poison, a tragedy. And Gunnhild, of course, has been torn from my side because of a so-called Swedish alliance. What has love to do with a Swedish alliance?’

‘There are consolations,’ the Lady of Alba said. She was given to saying things like that. She sat in a man’s chamber with her light eyes and her dark brows and her knotted red hair, pulsing womanhood, and said things like that. Also, she brought her woman Sinna, who was half asleep in a corner.

King Svein of Denmark said, ‘A man will seek, yes, when he is free and has no wife to dishonour. But why, do you think, does your husband the King send you each day to the house of your parents, and debar you from his couch when you come back at night? These things are known and talked about.’

She lifted one hand, and the spike-lantern glowed on the great necklace of gold and cornelians and amber she was touching, and on the rings of her fingers. ‘He gives me these,’ she said. ‘And feeds and shelters me.’

Svein settled back in his chair so that the lamp could catch, too, his square head with its glossy yellow hair that all his women said was irresistible; the short patrician lip and rounded chin, each with its tailored thatch of light gold. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that for some weeks now that privilege has fallen to me. And I, too, have seen bracelets of mine on your arms, although you are not wearing them tonight.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the Lady of Alba, ‘Your concubines are accustomed to displaying their jewels to their parents. My father is Finn Arnason, whom Harald of Norway would welcome, should Denmark displease him.’

‘And if Alba should displease him, I wonder what your father would do?’ King Svein said. ‘I told you that a foreign court offers many temptations to men of mixed blood. Is it so hard to persuade your husband to travel?
Hamburg is a busy town, Bremen a rich one. The Archbishop would welcome him. And you could stay here. With your parents.’

At last, the old woman had fallen asleep. As on every occasion, the Arnason daughter had seated herself not on the settle but in the high-backed chair that would not admit two. Her overskirt was embroidered with rolled metal thread, and the robe under it had a border of pearls like a reliquary. There were pearls beading the twists of her hair, wound among smooth copper roulades, each turning through amber, and crimson, and a lustre the colour of grape-bloom.

He slid from his chair and said, ‘Look. I will ask you again. On my knees. Persuade your husband to go to Bremen. You said you could.’

The pearled hem slid from his fingers just as he raised it, and he moved his hand barely in time, as she stood. She said, ‘I have stayed long enough. I told you. I can persuade him. Eventually.’

The old woman had wakened. Svein stood up, too. He said, his voice carefully low, ‘Who is he with while you are here? And do you think he has done no more than touch the hem of her dress?’

She smiled. ‘It would take a great deal to make me believe that,’ she said.

‘But if you found it were true?’ King Svein said. It always ended like this. His shirt was sticky with sweat.

‘Even if I found it were true,’ the Lady of Alba said. ‘While he is here, I could do nothing.’

He took her out himself, and confided her and the old woman to the care of their servants.

Ragna had not yet returned. When he was told, Svein sent the messenger staggering with a cuff and an order and turned into his chamber to pour himself wine, for his hands were trembling.

When the Irish girl came, he took her on the straw on the threshold of the room before his chamberlain had even left. He didn’t care. They were both men. They had seen it all before.

But the Irish girl never satisfied him as his favourite did even when, as tonight, Ragna came late, and from another man’s bed, and had to drag into being the joyous, sinewy lust that was his everyday portion.

Later, she fell asleep and he shook her awake, angry, and said, ‘You were late.’

She opened her eyes and looked up through the mesh of her hair. ‘I had to wait until the priest went.’

Weeks ago, he had been flattered when she had resisted his order to go and lie with the Alban King and had continued to weep and refuse until he had pulled his knife out. Women in Italy, he had been told, found flaxen hair fashionable. Should he choose to crop her locks short at the scalp, would it not provide a fine wig for a Tuscan woman?

She had obeyed him sulkily then and, after the first night or two of the foreigner, had stopped complaining.

If anyone had cause to complain, it was himself. He had taxed her with losing her looks, but for a girl serving two masters she did what she could. It
was not her fault but the fault of the red-haired Queen that he still had to come hungry to bed, with an edge to the hunger that a fine woman’s presence made all but insupportable.

Meanwhile, he made sure of one thing: no foreign king could lay legal claim to a child begotten on Ragna, for everyone knew where Ragna spent the rest of her time. And, conversely, nothing would suit King Svein more than to sire a child—a son—on the Arnason woman; for everyone knew that she and her husband slept in different quarters. Kings came to grief in battle or died of a sickness, and other kings married their widows. He had done it himself once already.

‘And so?’ he said to Ragna, and shook her awake again, smiling quite fondly.

‘Does he please you, this Thorfinn from storm-ridden Orkney? Is he vigorous? What words do you speak? What services did he demand that surprised you? I want you to tell me.’

‘He uses me hard, as you do,’ said Ragna, and winced. Then she put her arms round his neck. ‘But all the time it’s:
Show me again, do you do thus with King Svein? Does King Svein really do thus and thus? And how often? I cannot believe it! Is he a god?
he will say. And some things I show him. But some things I do not,’ ended Ragna.

‘But why not?’ said Svein. ‘Look. Here is something I have just thought of. It is to show you that I forgive you for sleeping. I will do it, and you will tell him tomorrow.’

The next day, a ship arrived from Orkney, for the weather remained open, and delivered falcons, a gift for King Svein, as well as sundry crates and writings for Thorfinn of Alba.

It was not the first so to make its way from the Pentland Firth or the Tay. The journey, after all, would take less than ten days. Thorfinn from whatever distance was still, it seemed, keeping an eye on his kingdom.

They went hawking later that day, and the Caithness birds exceeded all King Svein had heard of them. The following morning, he arranged a full day’s hunting over the heathlands and patches of forest, and in the afternoon they changed horses and raced along the edge of the sea, sand and spray in their faces and the courtmen cheering them on, until all they could see were the ruddy faces and furs in the light of the flares and the ghostly waves from the Barbarian ocean, rolling over and over.

They moved to Aarhus at the end of December, and to Viborg for Christmas, for the seas had closed; and Harald of Norway had turned his mind from raiding to the building of his new town on the Foldenfjord, where he had established a sanctuary for the corpse of his cousin St Halvard and a hall of Russian splendour, so they said, for his Russian wife Ellisif and her daughters.

King Svein noticed that his guest Thorfinn of Alba paid attention to such items of news and always took the chance to sit next to the envoys, the guests, and the couriers that came to the Danish court from Germany and the south.
He wondered if he had been wrong in deciding, this year, not to cut himself off from the continent by spending Christmas at Roskilde; and bit his nails when word came in from Bremen that the Archbishop was not expected back in his diocese for several weeks.

Returned from the side of the Pope, the Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen attended the Emperor Henry at Christmas in Frisia, after which the Emperor left for his palace at Goslar.

From Goslar, a courier rode without haste to Bremen and then continued to Viborg, where he remained for some space with King Svein.

Returning to his chamber, King Svein called for his concubine Ragna and, pulling down the taut cloth from her shoulder-clasps, observed with an experienced eye how the sharp, tender breasts had become squat.

He smiled, although she had been the best he had ever had and he knew, also from experience, that she would never be as exceptional again.

‘What a pity,’ he said. ‘But now, really, it hardly matters.’

That night, they had some music, and one of his three skalds intoned a long poem in eulogy of the King’s brother Bjorn, who had been murdered that year in England by the King’s half-English nephew Swegen Godwinsson, who had coveted his lands and even possibly his position in the line of succession.

Swegen was now in exile in Flanders. King Svein looked not dissatisfied, sitting in his high chair listening to the poem. He approved of the Emperor’s war against Flanders.

After the poem, there was a discourse by Bishop Walo of Ribe, for, naturally, this was a Christian as well as a civilised court; and the King of Alba’s bard sang to the harp, amid shuffling.

When he finally ended and the tables had been drawn, King Svein decided, since it was a merry as well as a civilised court, to select one of the shufflers to pay for his inattention.

For safety, the women were sent to their quarters. King Svein escorted the Lady Groa himself and petted her hand, which he had not permitted himself to do for a week. Returning to the cleared hall, he settled himself lavishly beside the King of Alba his guest, saying, ‘You must not mind the delay. First they have to bridle the heifer, and then they have to shave bare his tail. He is wild, you understand.’

‘I’m not sure that I do,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But I rely on you to instruct me.’

‘Arnketil understands,’ King Svein remarked. ‘It is not everywhere that a young man transgressing good manners is allowed to redeem himself so, and even to better himself, if he has the ability. You will note the shoes Arnketil is assuming. They have been greased.’

‘So I see,’ Thorfinn said.

‘And, further, when you see the heifer brought in, you will note that its tail has been smeared with grease also.’

‘What next?’ said Thorfinn. ‘The slave-girls?’

Svein was in a mood to humour everyone. He laughed. ‘Another time, perhaps we shall try it. When you and I are on our own. No. My men will
make a ring with their shields. The heifer stands in the centre. My bard begins a poem: it is not one for the ladies’ ears: you will recognise it, no doubt, when you hear it. Arnketil takes the floor in his greased shoes, and seizes the beast by the tail while another man, with a whip, goads the heifer. If Arnketil contrives to hang on to the beast till the end of the poem, the heifer is his.’

‘And if not?’ Thorfinn said.

‘Then he pays a fine for his misbehaviour. It is good sport,’ King Svein said. ‘You have enjoyed your stay? You feel at home in my country? My people please you?’

The young men were lining up in the hall, laughing and pushing one another, with their shields shouldered up in position. Thorfinn said, ‘Is this a host indicating to his guest that he has outstayed his welcome?’

King Svein swept up a hand in a signal and turned, smiling broadly. ‘It is a host,’ he said, ‘who so values his guest that, were he to stay in Denmark ten years, he would never grow tired of his company. Except that, for such a delight, he would have to compete with a personage greater by far. After the play, we shall talk of it. There is the heifer.’

‘So I notice,’ the King of Alba remarked.

The heifer, an active animal hitherto proud of its tail, darted into the hall and stood with its feet splayed, swinging its head at the noise, the lights, the smoke, and, last of all, the man standing before it, a whip in his hand.