King Hereafter (91 page)

‘
Vera Bruta Brittanica
,’ Thorfinn said. ‘What chance has the Sovereign Pontiff against it?’

‘You learn guile,’ Juhel said. ‘We are surrounded by Main and Anjou and Normandy. You by England and Norway and Denmark. We are all treading a dangerous path. The protection of St Peter can be costly.’

‘Sometimes,’ Thorfinn said. ‘St Peter doesn’t seem over-anxious to protect his vassal King Andrew of Hungary against German invasions. It must worry Hungary. I gather the Archbishop of Colocza himself is on his way to converse with the Pope.’

‘Ah,’ said Archbishop Juhel, and buried his face in his ale.

‘To beg the Pope’s interest in halting the Hungarian wars,’ continued Thorfinn. ‘What else?’

‘What else, indeed?’ said Archbishop Juhel. ‘But I should wager that, by fair means or foul, Ealdred and Hermann somehow get to that meeting.’

‘Or Bishop Ulf of Dorchester,’ Thorfinn said, ‘racing so slowly to beg the Pontiff to confirm him in his enormous see.’

‘And the Pope will do it,’ Juhel said. ‘Bishop Ulf may even be allowed to shift his seat into Lincoln, which is what he really wants. After all, the un-Saxon Leofric was allowed to take over Exeter. And Hermann isn’t content, of course, with Berkshire and Wiltshire, any more than Ealdred is happy with only Worcester. What’s more, they’ll get what they want. The Pope will give every encouragement. He thinks these changes are progress; that the bishops, Roman-fashion, are coming in from the country. The bishops in fact are stepping aside from the earls and preparing to make themselves into princes.

‘That is the other danger of bishops. Archbishops are worse.… Tell me,’ said Archbishop Juhel, ‘what was the fee for your shriving? Did you promise to erect a bishop’s seat in a city? The opinion on the Aventine was that you had, in return for St Peter’s somewhat distant protection and a bone of St Andrew.… Why should I lower my voice? I thought the Fool for Christ had already crossed to your shores?’

Thorfinn removed his hand. ‘There is a place called Hexham,’ he said, ‘that I should prefer to have a monopoly of St Andrew until the spiritual boundaries between myself and Northumbria are a little more clearly defined. I’ve promised nothing I shan’t carry out. I shall build churches. I shall accept bishops. But there will be no Roman system, yet. Not until we have towns.’

‘Hasn’t Sulien told you?’ Juhel said. ‘Towns corrupt. For towns, you must have rules.’

‘The early church was pure and free, with few rules,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But the desert offers no protection to the young and the old and the sick.… You have heard it all before.’

‘I know it better than you do,’ said Juhel of Dol. ‘The heathen overran Europe, and the Celtic church stayed through the centuries the loving guardians of faith and of learning. But now the lands and the peoples they served are beginning to change.… When Emma invited you to Canute’s court, she planned to use you and your people as mercenaries, the way King Salomon used the Norse, and your grandfather used your father’s men and the Irish.’

‘I know that, of course,’ Thorfinn said. ‘A mercenary is what I was.’ His voice was neutral.

The Archbishop glanced at him, and went on. ‘We talked of the dangers of vassaldom. The Lady-Dowager is still using you. Everything that happens in England today has to do with this childless King and his possible heirs. You know that. The Lady Emma is still using you, to counterbalance the power of Norway, as well as of Mercia and Northumbria in the north.’

‘
Emma
is using
me?
’ Thorfinn said.

They looked at one another.

‘Is that all you wanted to know?’ Thorfinn said. ‘That when Emma dies, my policies will be the same? Then you had better learn that they may not remain the same, but they will remain mine. They have always been mine.’

‘Good,’ said the Archbishop of Dol. ‘A man I can’t move to anger is a man I’d rather not deal with. What and who you are is important. To me, and to many people. You know that. You have just put it to the proof. You were represented to me, when I first heard of you, as a half-pagan jarl with a collection of Christian lands from which he took tribute.’

‘And now?’ said Thorfinn. ‘The plaything of princes? I am willing to be flattered, but I do not intend to lend you any more money.’

‘Now, Macbeth of Alba,’ said Archbishop Juhel. ‘Now you are a king with a kingdom. Perhaps a great king, about to make a great kingdom. What is it like up there on your pinnacle?’

He was not expected to answer. He had no intention of telling the truth. He did not dislike his pinnacle; except that it was land-locked, and noisy.

USPENDED LIKE BUTTERFLY
wings in the haze, under banners of white marked with gold, the dragon-ships of the pilgrim King of Alba moved into the mouth of the Tay, and on either side of the river the first bonfires shimmered into the air.

They were expected. By merchant-ship, by mule-train, by courier; there were ways, however leisurely, of passing news between Alba and Rome. A king requires to be assured of the safety of his kingdom: a kingdom requires to know the exact whereabouts of its king. An envoy of Archbishop Herimann’s, riding relay-horses, had borne the message that summoned Thorfinn’s ships to meet their lord at Cologne. And before the King himself reached the city, the news was on the high seas and on its way home.

Behind it, the cavalcade of the King swept northwards almost as swiftly, escorted by song and clamour and laughter; by contests solemn and ludicrous; by endless talk and at length by argument: argument with Thorfinn himself that went on day and night in the way to which his hird were long accustomed.

But three-quarters of these men were not of his hird, and until this journey he had been a stranger to them. Also, they were landsmen who recognised but could not share the sudden liberation of the spirit that the sea bestowed on her exiles.

From the Rhine to the Tay, Odalric, Otkel, and Hlodver sailed the ship with their souls, and occasionally, out of goodwill, joined Thorfinn and the rest in the well, where the talk was still good and the laughter burst out when it was calm, and still, in the skirl of the wind, the brassy bugles of triumph were ringing. Then land rose out of the sea: the cliffs and meadows and beaches of Alba; and they stood in silence, holding the rigging, for whereas men of the north could recall the summer hosting and the long months of raiding and fighting with perhaps a winter abroad at the end of it, laid up with a broken ship, or a wound, or a girl, men of the land seldom left their wives, or their parents, or their children for long.

To them, the tranquil investment of the broad estuary was a thing that caught at the throat, personal as a bereavement. The sand-flats on either side
moved slowly closer, and the turf and the trees and the low hills behind became greener, and the scattered cabins and their fields more distinct. The smell of wood-smoke came over the water, and of cow-dung, and bracken, and honey; and instead of rafts of small birds and seaweed, there were swans floating through amber reed-beds, and nets on the beach, and small jetties.

Somewhere over a ridge, a lamb issued grating complaints and dogs had started to bark, the sound knitting from shore to shore with the voices of people. First one or two, and then a great many, running, and moving in groups, and calling, their hands hooding their greetings.

Their faces were rosy, and some of them wore coloured clothes. A rowing-boat put out from one bank, and then two or three from another. They came round three sides of the dragon-ships and settled there, more and more of them, like fish at the trawl, rowers calling and smiling to rowers.

Ahead, the river wound glittering over its meadowlands. On their right hand and on their left, and ahead in the mountains of Atholl, joy-fires flamed, gold against the blue sky, like a garland.

‘My lord King,’ said Eochaid. ‘Your people are making you welcome.’

There were flags flying from the citadel of Perth, and from the Hill of Tribute and Eochaid’s monastery opposite. The flickering colours were the first things to catch the eye as the dragon-ships with their flotilla rounded the deep bend of the Tay above Earnmouth. Then you could see the shadows of them dancing on the thatched and slatted roofs of the new hall and its huddle of buildings about it, and coloured cloths, red and yellow and green, hung over the shining palisade of timber that crowned its green mound.

Below that, the land to the water’s edge, where Almond joined Tay, was packed with folk, tight as a mussel-bed. The river beyond was hedged with small boats, and at the long wharf an awning had been raised, bright with streamers, to protect from sun or from rain the King’s lady with her sons, and his mormaers standing about her.

An impartial eye, had there been one, would have noticed that on board the King’s ship, men stood, their faces shining, in a packed knot about him, while on shore Ghilander and his company waited apart from Thorkel Fòstri and Starkad and theirs; that Mael-Isu and Thor of Allerdale claimed each a different stance on the quayside, and that the King’s stepson Lulach was surrounded by his people of Moray, as Maelmuire, the King’s young nephew, held a separate place with the Prior of Dunkeld and his family.

In the centre waited the Queen, jewelled and still as an icon in her straight robe, with a fillet binding her brow over the pale gauze that lay close round her face and her shoulders. On either side of her stood the King’s sons. Paul, to whom the year between fourteen and fifteen had given his father’s nose and something of his height, together with a diffident fairness that came from another quarter. And Erlend, short and flushed, whose straw-coloured hair parted, whatever he did, on each side of his nine-year-old ears.

Then the ships began to swing in to the shore, and the shouting, that for the last mile had never stopped, but had become part of the sky, like a migration of geese or of bees, heightened and became suddenly intimate.

It was Morgund, stiff Morgund of Moray who had viewed his Queen’s marriage with nothing but disapproval, who raised his hand and shouted first, smiling at Lulach and then at his Queen. And Lulach, his face satin-brown beneath the glowing white hair, smiled his open, affectionate smile and then transferred it, deepening, to his father.

To those who knew Thorfinn, the response was there, in his eyes. To the people, under the white banner given by God’s own apostle, stood a man half a head taller than the tallest, in a blowing, brilliant cloak, on a golden galley lined by glittering shields, above which laughed the faces of his oarsmen and his friends.

The oars lifted; the beam of the galley touched wood; the ropes fore and after were thrown ashore and the gangplank laid through the opened gunwale, the crowd running round it.

It dropped at the feet of Thorkel Fóstri, and he started forward. Behind him, the Breton priest Sulien raised a swift hand to restrain him, hesitated, and then dropped it, at the Queen’s smile.

First of all the King’s subjects to greet him, Thorkel Fóstri boarded
Grágás
as if in battle again, and took in his grip the twelve-year-old boy with burned hair who had defied him at Nídarós. For the rights of a king’s wife and king’s sons are not as the rights of a father.

On shore: ‘I shall begin with the youngest,’ said the King, standing under the awning. ‘Erlend, what do you wish for most?’

‘A helmet?’ said Erlend.

‘I have brought you one,’ said the King. ‘Paul: how is my Orkney?’

‘In good order, my lord,’ his son said. His voice, rumbling through the thin frame, came from his feet. The King said, ‘Then you have done well. I am pleased with you. Maelmuire?’

Cormac of Atholl, one arm round his wife, was ruffling the boy’s hair with the other. He gave the youngster a little push, smiling, and Duncan’s son went to his uncle.

‘You are keeping Dunkeld, as your grandfather did. Is it safe?’ asked the King.

Although he, too, was fifteen, Maelmuire’s voice still betrayed him now and then. It did so now and he blushed, but recovered as the King paid no attention, and spoke for the well-being of Dunkeld, the warmth still round his shoulders where the lord Cormac’s arm had gripped him.

‘Then I am pleased with you, too,’ the King said. ‘And now, the lord Lulach?’

‘I am here,’ said Groa’s son, smiling beside him. ‘My lord King, I have to tell you that Moray is in good heart, and so are we all. And that as from last week you have a grandson.’

For the first time, the King paused. Then he said, ‘In Rome, men showed me a church dedicated to St Mary of the Snow after a miracle.’

‘Mael Snechta is the name of my son,’ Lulach said. ‘Bishop Malduin is not here, and so has not been able to object.’ His eyes were dancing.

‘Then,’ said Thorfinn, ‘I have brought you a blessing, which is perhaps
more than you deserve, considering the nature of your labours, but which I shall certainly give to Finnghuala. It is news fit for trumpets, and you shall have them.… My lady?’

It seemed that until then the King had hardly looked at his wife where she stood, behind her three sons and her nephew. Now they faced one another.