King Hereafter (79 page)

The man raised his hand, and the heifer backed, paused, lifted its naked, glistening tail, and, rumbling, emptied its bowels on the boards.

‘As a protest, I admire it,’ said Thorfinn. ‘But I feel it was a tactical error.’

‘My fool is hesitating,’ said King Svein. ‘In battle, does a man hold back when offered an advantage? Lefsi, have your men clear the dung from the floor. If Arnketil wishes to keep his feet clean, we shall not hinder him.’

He waited. His verse-maker, a man from Sweden, stood beside him. ‘Now!’ said King Svein to the bard, and the man opened his mouth; and the gentlemanly Arnketil laid hold of the tail of the heifer.

Through the uproar: ‘Do your men practise on ice?’ said Thorfinn. The heifer galloped past the dais with Arnketil skimming behind it, his legs opening and shutting. The heifer slowed down, and Arnketil shot to one side, described a tight circle, and returned in a crouch with his knees bent.

He revolved.

The heifer, unused to having its tail wrung, kicked out sharply and, turning, charged in the opposite direction, where weeping men braced their shields to receive him. With a squeal of greased skins, Arnketil followed it. His feet danced of their own volition, flipping from heel to toe and once or twice crossing one another so that his chin swept through the air and his locked hands slid down the tail until, with a snap of the knees that all but struck fire, he surged up the beast’s rump and took a fresh grip of its lathered appendage.

By the time the bard had reached the third verse, the heifer had impaled half a dozen shields and three men, and had learned how to bat Arnketil from end to end of the shield-bearers with a pleasing effect like a drum-roll. Very soon after that, it positioned itself for a clear run, cleared the length of the hall with
its hooves hardly touching the ground, and stopped dead.

With the tail tight in his hands and his feet together, Arnketil whistled under the beast’s belly and, feet first, up the screaming ranks of spectators, where he hung for a moment, suspended on shoulders and elbows. The tail was still in one hand.

On the floor, the heifer stood, looking confused. The bard, halfway through the fourth verse, paused and looked at King Svein, who was crying into his sleeve. King Svein said, ‘The decision rests with my lord of Alba. Thorfinn, what do you say? Has he won or lost?’

The black, lowering gaze surveyed the floor.

‘The heifer has certainly lost,’ Thorfinn said. ‘So, by the same token, I would say that your man Arnketil has certainly won. There is a ring of mine I feel he also deserves, if you will allow him the heifer. You spoke of a personage greater than Svein. Does one exist?’

King Svein stood, raised his arms to signify a judgement in Arnketil’s favour, and gave Thorfinn’s ring to his steward to convey, with the heifer, to the hole in the crowd that was Arnketil. He sat down again, ignoring the ensuing upheaval. He grinned at Thorfinn.

‘Even Canute,’ said Svein, ‘acknowledged one man’s power to be greater than his own in the Western world. Henry, Emperor of the Romans, has sent to invite you and your company to his palace at Goslar, in Saxony.’

He waited, wishing he could read the other man’s face. He had been surprised to be accosted thus in public, but, on the whole, the moment was well chosen: in this uproar, they might as well be in private.

He could not think that there would be any doubt of the man’s reply. Everyone knew that the King of England was childless and that he, Svein, was the heir with the most likely claim. Canute had been his uncle. Earl Eric of Northumbria had been his wife’s uncle. His cousin Edith was Queen of England. Other kinsfolk had ruled the Severn mouth and still did. Emma, the Queen Mother of England, was his aunt by marriage and had shown him long ago, by her attentions, that she regarded this man Thorfinn as someone to watch.

She had been right, as usual. With all the north in tribute to him, from Cumbria through the Irish shores to the Orkneys, Thorfinn was a power that Norway now had to reckon with and no doubt would, if freed from its present engagement with himself.

So he and Alba needed one another against the threat of Norway, and the fact of Thorfinn’s long stay was public witness, as it was meant to be, to an alliance.

Further, Thorfinn required to be on good terms with England, for the Godwins’ power was great, as well as Emma’s, and someone in England was fostering two substitute kings, the sons of Thorfinn’s half-brother.

It was only common sense therefore, to make the bonds tighter: to seal the alliance by extending it to the friends and allies of himself and England: to the Metropolitan of the church in the north, to whom Norway no longer adhered; to the King of Germany and Emperor of the Romans, whose first
wife had been Svein’s first cousin and who had chosen the Pope, whom the Metropolitan had to obey.

Traffic with women played a large part in King Svein’s life, but he never engaged in it against his own interests. The besieging of Thorfinn’s red-headed wife would have been necessary even had she not proved, as she had, tempting enough to drive him mad over the winter.

Thorfinn had two churches to rule and had not yet made up his mind, it would appear, whether to risk one by indulging the other. The arrival of the priest Sulien had alarmed Svein. Already resistant to drawing closer to Bremen, Thorfinn might well turn and go home to please his Celts and their hermits.

On the other hand, should Thorfinn choose to travel, he was not short of silver. Why, then, not open doors further afield that he might find more irresistible than those of Bremen?

Thorfinn said, ‘Goslar, in the Harz mountains? They say the hunting is good.’

‘Even in Lent,’ King Svein said, ‘I hear the Emperor keeps an excellent table.’

‘My wife,’ Thorfinn said, ‘would be distressed to part with her parents.’

‘Why not leave her with them?’ said King Svein gaily.

As a good host should, he accompanied Thorfinn to his frontier when, along with eighty men, skeins of baggage-mules, and several wooden-wheeled vehicles, the King of Alba shortly set out for Saxony.

Sulien the priest did not accompany them, although Tuathal the prior and a dozen courtmen at least were still in evidence. The grace-feast offered, as was the custom, to King Svein by his departing guest had been more than lavish, and the exchange of gifts generous to the point of absurdity. All had been done that was seemly. And the farewells between Thorfinn and his wife had been, Svein was content to see, stoical.

To the river Eider, where Jutland joined Germany, was a ride of four days. At Schleswig, Canute’s old Bishop Rudolf would be waiting to assume the task of conductor: from the frontier to Hamburg, the Archbishop’s officers had already received their instructions: to provide mounts, escorts, hospitality, and whatever else the King of Alba might require on his way to the Emperor.

From there, it was a hundred and fifty miles to Goslar, across the flat, pink-earthed plains and through the forests of Saxony, handed from one guest-quarter to another. Ascelin of Hildesheim would take care of the last stretch, and would not be backward in reciting the needs of the new church as well as the cathedral.

King Svein said, riding into Schleswig, ‘I doubt if the Archbishop of Bremen will be in his diocese, but you must admire his accumulation of treasure and forgive his officers if they suggest that you add to it. In Adalbert’s case, I rather suspect that the Lesum gold and the rest will get itself melted down one day
soon in order to buy Bremen a comté. On the other hand, Hildesheim has an expensive pair of bronze doors still to pay for.’

The same thing happens at home,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Some monk is always explaining that he needs a new pair of shoes. Don’t be concerned. I understand a hint when I hear one. And before we meet with the Bishop, there is another matter we should speak of privately. You have a concubine, a young woman called Ragna.’

King Svein refrained from smiling. The cavalcade was slowing down.

‘She is one of those who serve me. Yes. As a rule,’ said King Svein, ‘I do not keep a girl very long.’

There was a pause.

The King of Alba said carefully, ‘You would not object, then, if the girl left your service and passed to another?’

This time King Svein smiled, because he could not prevent himself. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘not in the least, as soon as she is delivered of whatever brat of mine she is carrying. Who finds her so much to his liking? I will make him a gift of her.’

‘I am sorry to tell you,’ said the King of Alba, ‘that the man in question has taken the gift before it was offered and, indeed, has been sharing her favours for so many weeks that it is a question whether the child may be his rather than your own. On his behalf, may I beg your forgiveness?’

Stretching across, King Svein pressed one ringed hand on his royal guest’s arm. ‘How could I refuse? Of course,’ he said. ‘And the girl, too. I bear no grudges. How could I? Anything under my roof that pleases you is yours: I told you that at the start.’

‘And the girl?’ said Thorfinn.

‘Is yours to do with as you please, so soon as the child is delivered. She will not suffer: I promise it, on my honour. I shall give her a new robe and three marks for herself when she joins you.’

‘Then I shall get my cook to send for her in the summer,’ Thorfinn said. ‘He will be overjoyed, even lacking the baby. And the girl, from what he says, seems to find him very much to her taste. Indeed, they both have real cause to thank you.’

‘Your cook?’ said King Svein.

‘Over there. The large man with black hair. I believe,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that, to begin with, the young woman thought she had found her way to my bed and was quite frightened when she learned otherwise. But he has a way, my cook, of persuading a girl that there is nowhere she would rather be than attempting some new feat on his mattress. If the child has black hair, you had better send it to be taught of an acrobat.’

Such was his emotion that, after the leave-taking, King Svein covered the ground back to Vjborg in three days. Instead of seeking his hall, he made straight for the quarters of Finn and Bergljot Arnason.

The building was shuttered and empty, since Earl Finn of Halland, his wife, and the Lady Groa their daughter had long since left it to travel to Aarhus.

King Svein had enough dignity still to quell the impulse to set off straight after them. He sent a hirdman instead, who duly reported. The Arnasons had found a good wind and had left the rivermouth in a hired ship for Halland.

King Svein needed the Arnasons: he could do nothing to harm them.

He needed Thorfinn of Alba: he could not pursue Thorfinn’s wife across oceans.

He had promised, in public, to do no mischief to the girl Ragna, his former concubine.

On the other hand, there was a good sale for blond hair in Tuscany.

King Svein sent them some.

HAT
M
ARCH, THE
Emperor of the Romans took to his bed with his usual ailment and cancelled his proposed attack on the dukedom of Poland, thereby releasing upon the Saxony plains a large quantity of assorted militia, all riding in different directions accompanied by food, drink, and arms for three months and a full-blooded potential for mischief.

That no one thought of baiting a tight-knit cavalcade under the flags of Hamburg and Bremen was a tribute to the absent Archbishop, as much as to the chain-mail and steel of his officers. And by the time the Hildesheim escort took over for the last leg of the journey, the countryside was almost clear and it looked as if the Emperor’s heathen guests from the pimple on the chin of the world were about to be delivered intact to the Emperor’s bedside.

There was a moment in the approach to Goslar that impressed every visitor from a flat country: when the green, level grassland ahead released from its horizon a surf-line of mounded blue hills that mounted the sky until at last one drew rein above the invisible hollow and looked at the mountains fully revealed, green and blue, full of gods and of demons.

The Harz mountains, with the Emperor’s new palace on their lower slopes, the eastern sun on its face, and the towers of the new church and the old, and the spilling of wood and stone buildings that had spored in the hollow to serve the hunting-lodge and frontier fortress and citadel that, with Tilleda and Werla and Pöhlde, had seen kings and Emperors halt and move on for a hundred years since the first Henry.

Except that the third Henry had shown in ten years a tendency not to move on, having consumed his dues of fat pigs and cattle and malt and honey and corn, but to dwell rather longer than was convenient, given that there existed elsewhere in Saxony alone twenty imperial manors also waiting to nourish the Emperor. But it was to Goselager, the place on the Gose, that he looked for long days of sport and of leisure with his Empress-Queen and his priests, and where he had erected this vast double salon, big enough for the entertainment of Popes, and most likely for the choosing of them as well.

And opposite the palace, the shining, three-towered spread of the cathedral
built to house the travel-worn bones of SS Simon the Zealot and Jude Thaddaeus the Apostle, spared from his hoard at Toulouse by the Queen’s brother William of Aquitaine.