King Hereafter (9 page)

Earl Thorfinn paused, saying nothing. Then he stepped down and sat by his brother, followed, despite his intentions, by Sulien. Such seats as there were, at either end of the boat, had been taken. Unnoticed, Sulien stood and listened to the prince Duncan, in the Celtic tongue, baiting his brother.

‘Your poor, old-fashioned cloak with its cheap pedlar’s brooch!’ said Duncan cheerfully. ‘How can you forgive me, you lout? You must let me buy you another. Two. And a Thor hammer for feast days. They tell me that’s when you breed on the mares.’

There was no interpreter within earshot. Clearly, he thought himself safe. He waited, smiling up at his brother, preparing for some futile sentiment in the Norse language.

Earl Thorfinn turned his head. ‘It’s better, I suppose, than breeding on midgets,’ he said in resonant Irish-Gaelic. He had good lungs.

Across the deck, King Malcolm’s head made a small movement and checked. Near at hand, Duncan had, it seemed, forgotten to breathe. His eyes moved to where his grandfather was.

‘Go on. Tell him,’ said the Earl of Orkney. His expression was not unamiable. ‘You don’t have to be polite to me any longer. I have, I hope, made it quite clear that I don’t belong to this family, nor do I propose to be adopted into it at moments of conveniences.’

Now Duncan was breathing quickly, and there were spots of colour high on his cheeks. ‘That’s new,’ he said. ‘You kept running to us for help over Orkney.’

The Earl Thorfinn considered. ‘Six years ago, yes. Don’t you wish you had given it? I should hold all of Orkney; you would be my accredited ally, and we could both ask Canute for anything we wanted, and get it.’

‘Or the promise of it. Do you imagine he trusts you?’ Duncan said. ‘The moment he fails to take Norway, you switch back to King Olaf. If you ever left him.’

‘I should be a fool if I didn’t,’ said his brother. ‘And so would Canute, if he didn’t realise it. Get Crinan your father to explain it to you. He didn’t have much to say in there, did he? Don’t you get on with one another?’

‘He remarried when I was two years old,’ said Duncan. ‘You at least ought to know that. He found he could make more money in England.’

‘I’ve seen some of it,’ Thorfinn said gravely. ‘Doesn’t he have a daughter? How would you like to have me in the family twice over?’

He could have been serious. Duncan said, ‘I think my lord Crinan has a match a good deal more important than that arranged for Wulfflaed. Why not a thick Danish wife, or a fine, dung-smelling Wend? King Canute would find you someone suitable. Or maybe your Viking friend has a niece or a daughter in Dublin? What a pity,’ said Duncan, getting reckless, ‘that Sitric’s mother is too old. She married everyone in Ireland in turn, didn’t she? Even your father, if he hadn’t got himself killed trying to win her. I wonder what our late mother thought of that?’

‘What woman minds sharing her husband if he brings her the chance of a kingdom? The Lady Emma came back to marry King Canute on exactly those terms.’ The boat bounced as it crossed someone’s wake, and the glare of the sun on the red Roman walls doubled itself in the long, running furrows that spread to the bank.

Even out of his hearing, it was not wise to speak thus of King Canute. Sulien, glancing about, caught sight of the stalwart figure of Eachmarcach making his way towards the brothers as if he had heard them. They saw him, and knowing him for a Gaelic-speaker, Duncan fell silent.

It was Earl Thorfinn whom the Dubliner wanted. He called to him as he came. ‘Skeggi says you can do Olaf Tryggvasson’s trick.’

That, certainly, King Canute heard: his head turned. The other King sat without moving, impacted among the golden glitter, the silk and jewels of both royal parties. The longship, painted and carved and wreathed with silk streamers, overcame the next wake and then stroked smoothly forward to the pull of the oars. Both riverbanks were filled with people, talking or calling, who clearly did not know they were vassals. The Earl Thorfinn looked up at the Dubliner standing splay-legged before him. ‘Sometimes,’ he said.

‘Prove it,’ said Eachmarcach.

‘Why not? On the way home,’ the Earl of Orkney replied.

‘On your own ship, with your own oarsmen? What sort of feat would that
be?’ Eachmarcach said. ‘I’ll wager my axe against yours that you couldn’t do it on this boat.’

People were beginning to listen. At sea, by themselves, Sulien could guess how the matter would resolve itself. Here, a boy among peers on a day of imperial ceremony, the Earl of Orkney had to find another way to deal with his importunate friend. He said, ‘Everyone knows that you are braver than King Sitric, and I am cleverer than Earl Sigurd, and Skeggi could run Freswick better than Thorkel. You don’t have to prove it.’

‘Look at them,’ Eachmarcach said. He jerked his head towards the crumpled velvets and silks. ‘They’re rotten-soft. I want to show them.’ Under the teazled, rust-coloured hair, his eyes glittered. Someone, somewhere, Sulien deduced, had a flask of wine under his robes and had been a little too hospitable. In the distance, King Canute spoke to his Bishop, and Lyfing, turning, began to thread his way aft.

‘If they’re soft, then you’re drunk,’ Earl Thorfinn said. ‘In any case, here comes King Canute’s veto.’

But Lyfing brought not a veto but a summons to explain to the King. Listening, in the crowd that gathered round Canute and Leofric, Sulien found Duncan, too, at his elbow. Related, the unspecified challenge sounded ridiculous. It was therefore to Sulien’s total surprise that he heard the King turn to Earl Leofric, his nominal host, and say, ‘If you will allow it, it would please me to see such a contest.’

Leofric said, ‘My lord, I do not know what feat they speak of. But if it would give my lord King pleasure …’ Beside him, Alf gar his son was whispering noisily, his fair head jerking back and forth.

‘It would,’ Canute said. ‘It is an exercise for the young. I have seen it done twice. Bid your oarsmen stop rowing.’

The oars lifted, dripping and parallel, and heads scraped round, among all the gold wire, to find out the reason. The Earl Thorfinn said in Norse, ‘I have not agreed.’

‘Yes, you have,’ Eachmarcach said. ‘Skeggi heard you. He is going to do it as well. And your axe is safe. Canute’s offered a gold one, and prize-money. We’re to run in pairs, one to each side. A knock-out contest, the axe to the winner.’

Alf gar of Mercia said, ‘What
is
it? I want to do it.’

The Earl of Orkney looked him over. ‘Can you swim?’

Seized with madness: ‘He can swim very well,’ Sulien said. ‘And so can I.’ He knew what it was, and he knew the feat was beyond him: was beyond all of them, probably. But Canute wanted it done, for a reason. He wanted to know what Canute’s reason was.

Canute said, ‘But that is only five. Good King Malcolm, lend us your grandson as well. Unless my lord Duncan is unable to swim?’

Duncan stepped forward. ‘What have I to do?’ he said. Despite his lack of height, he had good shoulders, and the round face with its fluffed upper lip was firm with resolve.

Earl Thorfinn, from the height of a thwart, bent down and unpinned his
brother’s bright cloak, which he bunched and threw to the gunwale, from where, swiftly, it slid overboard and then sank. ‘Oh, the pity of it. But you won’t be needing that,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I’ll tell you what you have to do. You have to step over the rail and run across the oars of the ship, from the front to the back, while her crew are rowing her.’

‘No one could do that,’ said Alfgar of Mercia. ‘Who is Olaf Tryggvasson anyway?’

‘Was,’ said Thorfinn. He was looking at Canute. ‘His grandfather was one of the twenty assorted sons of Harald Haarfagre of Norway. King Olaf’s called after him.’

Canute and the young man stared at one another. Then the King’s eyes moved to Earl Leofric, who was speaking. Leofric said, ‘These are men of high birth.’

‘Then let them prove themselves,’ Canute said.

There were six of them, brought up to lead and to rule. A boyhood of perpetual training, in games, at hunting, in battle, had given each of them balance and an accurate eye. They had all had to exercise judgement; to exert concentration; to defeat weariness; to push a task to completion in public, against odds. To all of them except perhaps Skeggi, their reputation and standing was the reputation and standing of their line, and at all costs to be upheld and defended. If they failed, they had to be seen to fail with courage and honour, flinching at nothing.

‘Perhaps I may advise,’ said Canute and, rising, looked to the oarsmen, fifteen on each side, who had lowered their blades and were keeping the vessel where she lay, in midstream, pointing up the shallow, fast-running river. Other craft, intrigued, had begun to hover before and behind.

Canute said, ‘Clear the river ahead with the horn. Oarsmen, you will begin rowing on signal, in absolute unison, to the beat your master will give you. You will not falter, no matter what happens. If one life is lost because you do not keep beat, your master will know how to deal with you. The horn will tell you a runner has started. He will begin from behind you. You must listen, and be prepared to resist his weight as he passes, and keep the time of your sweep. If he falls, you continue to row.’

The Bishop from Llandaff said carefully, ‘My lord King … A blow from one of these blades could kill a man, or knock him senseless and drown him.’

Canute turned. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you think we are asking too much. Your clerk is only a youth and my lord Alfgar, an only son, is still younger. You are right. I say that these two, if they wish, may withdraw.’

Alfgar looked at his father, a cry of protest half-escaped on his breath. The Earl of Mercia said stiffly, ‘If the feat will give my lord pleasure, then of course my son will attempt it.’

My lady Godiva
, Sulien thought.
Absolve him. He had no alternative
. Aloud he said, ‘And I too, if you please,’ He would make a fool of himself: that he knew. But he felt no doom-laden fear. He was agile and light and, when he fell, could keep out of trouble.

He knew Alfgar felt differently by the set of his jaw. Living in Godiva’s house, he had early learned how good Alfgar was with the spear and the sword and the bow; how he liked to win at running; how proud he was of his splendid body. To fail would be a bad thing for Alfgar.

The Dubliner he did not know, or the man Skeggi, who was half an Icelander, he had heard. Older by twenty years than the rest, this pair had at least done this before, or attempted it, and had gained in cunning perhaps what they no longer commanded of suppleness.

There remained the two grandsons of Orkney and Alba. There was no doubt which had the build of a winner. Duncan was twenty, which meant he must have had battle experience. He looked self-reliant. And, for all he was short, he was compactly made, with a sturdy back and deep chest and well-turned, springy legs.

Nothing could have contrasted more with the lanky, half-shackled frame of his brother. But for a certain brightness of skin and the heavy, well-defined line of the eyebrows, the common blood of their mother had produced no physical likeness in her offspring. To the casual eye, the Earl of Orkney seemed little more than a miscellany of disengaged angles, occupied now in the poop with baring his shins and his feet and rebinding his short, baggy trousers to lie tight at the knee and the thigh. He had long, bony feet with knuckled toes agile as fingers.

What he was doing was undoubtedly sensible. Sulien pulled off his skin shoes and, untying his girdle, bound his serviceable robe between the legs with the wool, in a figure of eight. Smiling, Alfgar started to do the same with his tunic; but Duncan the prince did no more, it was seen, than unfasten his leggings.

Turning to make for the prow, Sulien wondered why men, looking forward, were grinning. Then he saw that Eachmarcach of Dublin and Skeggi the Icelander, with more common sense than sense perhaps of occasion, had simply set to and stripped themselves naked.

Whether for that reason or another, they made the run first. The signal for rowing was given, and a moment later, as the oars settled into their rhythm, the horn blew for the run. There was a double flash of brown flesh as the Dubliner on the port side and Skeggi on the other each handed himself over the side and paused, fist on rail, foot on gunwale, looking at the long, almond shape of the vessel stretching to the horizon, to infinity before him, the last of the oars drawn from view by the slow, perfect curve of the beam. At the fifteen shining shafts barring the water: rising flashing as one, reaching back, and gripping the river again. And below, streaming ahead, masked by sunlight, the body of unknowable water driving on to the sea.

The oars were seventeen feet long at the beam: longer where the shell swept high at the prow and the stern, and the holes that admitted them, small and snug, with a narrow slot for the blade, were pierced through the third strake down from the edge and the fourth up from the waterline. And since, for the moment of his passing, the weight of a man would have to be borne by each oarsman in turn, it was essential to find footing at the upper end of the shaft,
where the movement would be least; and to pass quickly, before the rower’s grip broke and the oar swung in his hands.

Then, as Sulien watched, Eachmarcach stepped down. His hand left the rail. His toes curled white round the shining wood of the oar just below him. And then, his arms crooked at his sides, he was off, his heels kicked flashing beneath him, his shoulders trimmed against the slope of the oars, settling no longer than a bird might on each. And every time bridging the gap right-footed as Skeggi, his head disappearing on the port side, must be using his left.

Everyone shouted. There was sweat coming through the cloth on the rowers’ backs. They had not asked to play a leading role in this dangerous game, and if there was an accident, they would pay for it. Eachmarcach’s shoulders were covered in ginger-white fur, and below that his skin was patchily red. He had got to the fifth oar, a third of the way gone. On the other side, Sulien could tell from the roar, Skeggi was moving as well.

On Eachmarcach’s side, the seventh oarsman was not prepared for him; or perhaps, his concentration faltering, the Dubliner had lingered a moment longer than he should. The oar jerked and, losing its sweep, floundered and cracked against the neck of the blade just behind him. For a moment, between two and three oars at Eachmarcach’s back were out of action, and, driven lop-sided, the gilded boarshead on the sternpost swung to the right. A cross-wave, kicking, ran under the keel, and a surge of noise on the other side of the vessel told that Skeggi had been shaken by it.