King Hereafter (93 page)

In Norway, Harald the King spent part of his time with his Norwegian wife Groa’s cousin and part with his Russian wife, the sister of the Queens of France and of Hungary. The rest of his energy he deployed in wars against Denmark that left no time or money or men he could trust to enforce his claim to the lordship of Orkney.

In Ireland, Eachmarcach, King of Dublin, was feeling his age, and sent Thorfinn the tribute owing for the lands he had conquered, without troubling to visit in person, which had a lot to commend it. The islands and Galloway, left to Thorfinn to order, were quiet under his mormaers.

In England, every man’s eye was turned to Wessex, where the Earl Godwin and his family were improving their stranglehold on the kingdom against the
growing ill-will of Leofric of Mercia, of Siward of Northumbria, and of King Edward himself. Leofric’s noisy son Alfgar, now pushing forty and father of four children ranging in age from fourteen years to six months, dashed into Forteviot and out again, having cast in Thorfinn’s direction his congratulations, a gift from his mother, and the latest rumours from everywhere.

Thorfinn learned that Bishop Ealdred was back and renewing diplomatic relations with his kingly master and all three competing Earls, as befitted a man whose diocese included Worcester and Bristol.

Bishop Hermann, it seemed, had also returned, laden with parchment, and had picked up the threads of the various businesses now rolling briskly between Herefordshire, Dorset, and Devon, Normandy and the Breton coast, Flanders and points further south in the Rhineland.

With a smugness he had noticed elsewhere, Alfgar made pointed mention, Bishop Ulf had made his way from Rome via Besançon, and was now re-ensconced in his splendid diocese of Dorchester. It had, according to opinion, been a near thing, as the synod at Vercelli had been tempted to break his staff for incompetence, until introduced to a greater temptation. (‘By whom?’ said Thorfinn. ‘Ask my father,’ said Alfgar.)

Personally, Alfgar said, he didn’t enjoy having Godwin’s son Harold so close to his borders, however competent he might be in fighting the Welsh, but at least it occupied the attention of Thorfinn’s old friend Siward of Northumbria and kept his heavy hand out of other people’s affairs. Perhaps Thorfinn had heard that Siward had got another son from his wife at last, although by this time her figure had spread so much giving light to daughters or mishaps that neither she nor anyone else could tell whether she was carrying or not.

No doubt Thorfinn’s Bishop Malduin, who had been absent sick in York for nearly a year, had been a comfort to them all.

And of course Thorfinn’s nephew Malcolm was still in the south with Edward’s court, although hardly raising his voice over a whisper in view of all the intrigue with the Godwinsons. Alfgar himself would, however, rely on Bishop Ealdred to keep matters from getting too ugly. It didn’t do to forget that Ealdred had the blood of Aethelred, however emulsified, in his veins, and that the Godwin family knew it. And so what was the news from Germany?

‘You mean Hungary?’ said Thorfinn.

‘I mean Germany,’ said Alfgar. ‘That’s what I came for. Go on. I’ve paid for it. The two grandsons of the late King of England are in exile, and the wife of one of them is related to both the Pope and the Emperor. If anyone would find out what was happening, you would. You and Ealdred.’

‘And Bishop Ulf,’ Thorfinn said.

‘Oh,’ said Alfgar thoughtfully. ‘And so?’

‘And so one son of Edmund Ironside is dead, and the other suffers from indifferent health and has sired two girls of whom the oldest is five. I should not, I think,’ Thorfinn said, ‘allow that information to filter through to the Godwinsons or Earl Siward. The King, of course, will know.’

‘How does it feel,’ said Alfgar, ‘to be God?’

He had been asked that, or something similar, once before. He refrained, as once before, from replying. The last man to miss silence was Alfgar.

It remained noisy, not to say clamorous; but every week, it seemed, some new achievement was made and there blew through the kingdom the gaiety that comes with success.

The mormaers of the regions received back to their hearths, not always with pleasure, the heirs or kinsmen who had represented them in Rome, and endured, not always willingly, long days and long nights of assertive monologues, followed now and then by outright disputes.

Thorfinn went nowhere near them. When, in due course, it became apparent that his mormaers wished to confer, he called a council at Scone to which he invited them all, from Thorkel Fóstri in Orkney to Thor of Allerdale in the south.

When they came, as they did, he set them round a table and listened. Then he spoke to them.

Most of them, now, were acquainted with Saxon. But he spoke in Gaelic, with which every man was familiar, for uniformity was the theme of the meeting.

Uniformity of justice, with the same rules enforced by the King’s authority through the King’s agents everywhere from Fife to the Hebrides.

Uniformity of worship, so that men might be baptised and buried and shriven on the same terms in the same way, and be taught the same practices, and have ready to hand a source of aid for the poor and the sick and the traveller; a source of education for new entrants to the church; a source of learning to be drawn upon in matters of record or dispute.

Uniformity in the way land and rights and property were held and changed hands, so that the rule in Gowrie and the rule in Orkney should for the first time be the same, and both the rights and the duties of a landowner be known; for if the church were to serve, it must be paid its due in rents or labour or offerings, and the king and his law-bands likewise.

Uniformity of aims and ideals, so that no region should plan independently of its neighbour, but each should look towards the rest, as brother to brother, and to the King as to a father. So, as in Alba of old, men had brought their token of earth to the Moot Hill of Scone to signify unity, so each region would bring its own excellence and bind it into the country that was neither Alba nor Orkney, but men had begun to call Scotia.

When Thorfinn spoke in that fashion, he was answered with thoughts as well as words, and with deep speech that achieved many things before it ran shallow.

Halfway through, Thorkel Fóstri took his eyes from the High Chair and said to Tuathal, ‘It sounds well. But if all law is to be uniform, how do we decide which laws are best?’

‘It has been decided already,’ Tuathal said. ‘On the road back from Rome.’

In September, a merchant ship rowed into the mouth of the Tay flying the banner of the Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen.

Word had reached Abernethy, where the King was. Before the visitor rounded the bend of the river, Thorfinn was on the jetty below his castle of Perth with Prior Eochaid and his courtmen about him, and the booths at the wharves were being prepared to receive seamen.

Then the broad, well-kept vessel berthed, to a sequence of quiet Saxon orders, and the gangplank came down, with two oarsmen to hold it steady.

Of the two men who disembarked, one was clearly the master of the vessel and, very likely, a trading-officer of the Archbishop’s household.

The other was neither tall enough nor grand enough to be the Archbishop. His thickset form was smothered in a coarse, hooded cloak, and of his face nothing could be seen but a heavy, clean-shaven chin with a glint of gold chain beneath it.

Then he lifted one hand, and the ring on it flashed as he pushed back his hood, revealing a big, lively face with a nose on it like an elk’s, and above it the ellipse of a pink, marbled tonsure, precise as if drawn with a compass.

A face one had last seen at Goslar, plunging about the Emperor’s fishpond in its small-clothes.

‘Father Sigurd! No, I see …’ said Thorfinn.

‘Bishop Jon,’ said the same Irish-Norse priest from Dublin who had poured the wine at his namesake’s little party at Goslar. ‘Newly consecrated by the noble Archbishop himself, who thought a stutter in Gaelic would hardly be noticed, were I to embark on a dictation of
The Intoxication of the Men of Ulster
in honest cross-vigil outside my cave. So, I am, for want of a better, your Bishop for Orkney.’

‘Now, there is a coincidence,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I have a cave handy here, with your name on it. But the question is, can you endure it?’

‘I am a great man for co-operation,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘The three hundred swords of the family of Kinvard, the three hundred shields of the family of Kynnwyd, and the three hundred spears of the Coelings: whatever enterprise they undertook together, they never failed in it. They were all my cousins, and that is on my Irish side only.’

‘And the Norse side?’ said Thorfinn, leading the way to the hall.

‘Ah, well,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘Likely enough, it would be the Norse side they were fighting.’

Later, when he had recovered from the experience of meeting Groa and the shipmaster had been taken off, leaving the King and the Irish priest Eochaid, whom he already knew, the new Bishop for Orkney asked sober questions and listened carefully to sober answers.

Thorfinn was plain. ‘You have been consecrated Bishop for Orkney because Archbishop Adalbert is responsible for the northern isles, and since Norway cut herself off from Bremen, Orkney and the north have been without spiritual aid.

‘Orkney, of course, needs attention. But so does all the rest of this country. For many years, there has been only one bishop in Alba, and that bishop has been consecrated at York, and devoted to Northumbrian interests. For the
last year, our Bishop Malduin has been sick in York. Perhaps it is a genuine sickness. Perhaps, now he is older, he will feel less impelled to fight for exclusive rights over his territory, or would not at this moment receive support from York if he did. The fact is that for the last year no priests have been ordained, no new churches have been built, and those few that exist have been neglected, despite all that good men like Mael-Isu and the rest have been able to do.

‘What I am asking of you, therefore, is that you should be a Bishop for Scotia: for the north and for Alba as well, travelling as you can to every cure in the country. If you agree, I shall take you riding with me as soon as you are rested: I have to talk to my mormaers before winter. Then, also before winter, I shall call a council and you will be introduced.’

‘This is what I understood,’ Bishop Jon said. ‘Although not quite perhaps what the Archbishop understood. And if your Bishop Malduin recovers, or receives encouragement from his superiors to return?’

‘As I have said, he is older now,’ Thorfinn said. ‘There are regions where he has never troubled to travel and probably never will. It should be possible to keep out of his way. Indeed, I was hoping you would have a companion before long. It is too much for one man.’

‘There is a priest called Hrolf,’ Bishop Jon said. ‘We’ve worked together. Archbishop Herimann thought he could reasonably be consecrated for the Sudreyar. No doubt Man and the rest of the islands could benefit from an occasional visit.’

Father Eochaid smiled. Thorfinn said, ‘The name of Archbishop Herimann, though great in Cologne, is unknown in this country. We should prefer to keep it so.’

‘Ah,’ said Bishop Jon, and gave a great sigh of pleasure. ‘The particular deviousness of the Dublin man: that is what I missed the most, back there in Cologne. That is not to say that there is no intrigue in the Empire: far from it. But it is of very modest dimensions, much to do with simple forswearing and an access of assassination now and then. I knew,’ said Bishop Jon, ‘that, did I get to fathom you, I would find a place where a plumb-bob would fall in a twist.’

He studied Thorfinn, his jaw meeting his lips. ‘You’ll need a rest, come the winter.’

The dark face was unsurprised, ‘I’m taking one,’ Thorfinn said. ‘In Orkney. The mormaers here will have seen enough of me. I have an heir with a sixteenth birthday to celebrate. And the lendermen will require to see their new Bishop.’

‘You want me to come?’ said Bishop Jon.

‘Of course,’ said Thorfinn. ‘We have a cathedral to build.’

The winter came: a sparkling winter of pleasure; and Thorfinn was God without noise: in merriment but also in silence.

Instead of sailing, he rode north with his wife and Bishop Jon and their servants, gathering familiar faces as he went—Ghilander and Kineth,
Gillocher and Morgund—to attend the baptismal feast of Lulach’s first son at Forres.

He knew from an earlier visit that the Shaveling of the Snow did not share its father’s brilliant hair, but was dun-coloured, like Finnghuala the white-shouldered, its mother. But Lulach regarded his son and his wife with the same untroubled affection he gave to all the world, and from the warmth of men’s looks in his hall, and the teasing of their wives, it was easy to see that he had found his place and was well able to fill it.

From there, the King took the north road again, sharing the company of Malpedar and Mael-Isu for a while, and then met in due time by Hlodver and by Odalric, each with his party of welcome at the boundary-stone of his region.

The change from autumn to winter came on the journey, when, to start with, the hillsides were clothed to the top with coloured tree-plumes, coarse-stitched with the black of the firs. Then, one morning they awoke to a powder of snow, white and grey and grey-white on the hill-shoulders, and later, high in the passes, looked up to mountains cloaked with grey conifers, stiff as winter fox fur on a robe.

There were no icy peaks, blue and white, like the spires by the Temple of Mercury, nor did the rivers boil at their sides, jade-green from the snow-caps of summer. As they reached the northernmost point of the mainland, the land became one of low, gentle contours, fostering the snow-thatched longhouses and cabins of small communities. Houses with the mud paths beaten round them to the spring and the close-house, the peat-stack, the barn and the byre and where, fitted into the wall, did you open a door, was a broody goose or a piglet, or a breathing heap of new pups, rump on paw, their slit-eyes fastened in slumber.

Because the cavalcade carried the raven banner, not the white one, it was recognised all the way, and people ran out to greet them, to ask questions, to make a complaint to Odalric and the King, who would listen and promise to make answer. If a woman brought new-laid eggs, Thorfinn would take and carry them himself, as he would knock on a door himself, on the rare occasions they sought water or news that was not to be had for the asking.