Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
Whatever his cousin of Orkney said to him, Bishop Malduin was not going to make an issue of it. Talking with Thorfinn always unsettled him.
Listening to the Archbishop of York and Earl Siward, he found the nature of the King of Scotia simple to understand, if not easy to like.
Face to face with the man himself, Bishop Malduin was aware, of course, with every word spoken, that here was a smart-witted Viking greedy for riches and power, and to that end equally ready to sue either God or the guts of an animal.
Such a man, my lord Siward said, would take even the Pope as his spiritual overlord, rather than acknowledge a superior closer at hand. Would the Pope see a tithe of the dues being raised in his name? The produce of his churchlands? The returns for the services of his priests? The offerings brought by the faithful?
No, said my lord Siward. And neither would Bishop Malduin. Or if any reached pious coffers at all, they would be those belonging to the two Bishops sent by the Pope’s favour so that they might report and keep the King’s face before the eyes of the Pope and the people.
‘Go and see what he is doing,’ had said the Earl Siward. ‘And I shall pray in my church of St Olaf’s for guidance as to how I may help you.’
Face to face with the man, therefore, it should have been simple. But they
talked of the flight of Earl Godwin, and, without warning, the King changed the subject and it was not simple at all.
‘You are wondering what I am doing,’ said Thorfinn, ‘about the division of our spiritual labours, now I have, as you must know, three bishops in the place of one. I have an idea about that.’
‘Indeed,’ said Bishop Malduin, ‘I have to congratulate you, my son, on your hazardous voyage to the Tombs of the Apostles and an audience, I hear, with the Holy Father himself. I heard that he had offered two churchmen to sustain you during my illness. They speak, I believe, both Irish and Norse? So gifted?’
‘You have been reviving your Norse?’ the King asked.
‘What need?’ said Bishop Malduin. ‘Now that Earl Siward, as doubtless you have heard, is to marry his daughter into your wife’s family … or at least,’ said Bishop Malduin with smoothness, ‘that branch which remained loyal to Norway? Norse bishops have always served Orkney, and will be happy to do so again. Your Irishmen may leave their cold northern cabins and retire with a clear conscience to Goslar.’
‘I have this difficulty,’ said Thorfinn, ‘with my cook. Do you ever hesitate when taking your broth? Does the smell of a sauce ever disturb you? For five years, I have had the same cook, and no one, to my knowledge, has ever died at his hand. An attack of nausea, yes. But death in agony, no. I should not like to lose him.’
He had lost Bishop Malduin. Bishop Malduin thought of the lord Siward’s great, lowering bulk and the lord Ligulf’s friendly smile, printed about by the caret of his silken moustaches, and gritted his teeth.
‘Your cook, my son?’
‘King Svein of Denmark sent my cook his best concubine. My cook likes King Svein of Denmark,’ said the King of Scotia. ‘He doesn’t like King Harald of Norway at all. There is the dilemma.’
Along the tracks of Bishop Malduin’s mind, obliterating the Latin of Psalm, the Latin of prayer, the Latin of ritual, sprang words of coarse country Gaelic: words from his boyhood in the monastery school in Ireland, used by one crude country boy when another was teasing him.
Bishop Malduin said, ‘You are pleased, my cousin, to amuse yourself. It is not a pleasant thing, at my age, to find my cure has been usurped by others. It is not pleasing, either, to those who consecrated me as Bishop for Alba. In the past, the whole country served to supply no more than a modest living. What can I expect now?’
‘Indeed,’ said the King, ‘I should be a poor kinsman had I not already thought of your plight. More than that, as I said to the Holy Father in Rome, have I been concerned with the plight of the poor folk who lie to the south of us, between Fife and Bamburgh, and who have had scant attention from the Bishop of Alba or the Bishop of Durham since the Lothians became a matter of dispute between the Earls of Northumbria and King Malcolm my grandfather. Who, these days, is concerned for the cure of souls in Abercorn and Aberlady, Hailes and Cramond, Coldingham, Melrose and Tyningham? Good provider that he is, Bishop Aethelric does not forget to collect from the
lands of St Cuthbert all the tributes due to the shrine of St Cuthbert at Durham, but, in return, what pastoral care do the people on these lands enjoy?
‘The Pope himself,’ continued Thorfinn gravely, ‘confessed concern. I reassured him. In the Bishop of Alba, I said, we had a man practised in Saxon as well as Gaelic; a man who understood the Angles south of the Forth from long sojourn with Earl Siward of Northumbria; a man to whom Earl Siward and his friend the Bishop of Durham would without doubt be happy to allot the revenues which at present disappear to the south, in return for his services among the poor and the deprived people of Lothian. The Holy Father’s contentment,’ said Thorfinn, ‘was such as to gladden the heart. He sent you his blessing.’
Bishop Malduin sat without movement, encased in the stifling mould of his anger.
The lands of the Bishop of Alba had never been large, and old Malcolm, liberal enough in time of war, had never been slow in time of peace to win back the property he had allotted so freely. Then had come this marauder his cousin Thorfinn, making free with the Fife lands of dead men or the young he had orphaned, and forcing the Bishop to spare from the little he had to enrich the shrines of St Serf and St Drostan.
Dunkeld and Kinrimund had always worked together in Malcolm’s day, and the lands of Crinan ought by rights to have come to him, but had they? He had claim by descent to the lands of Angus, but who collected the revenues there now? That fool Gillocher and his power-mad cousin Kineth of Brechin, who had come back from Rome with his head turned.
Rivals stared at Bishop Malduin everywhere. Lulach the royal stepson, ensconced in Moray with his confessors. Eochaid, the new Prior of Scone, who had taken a faster grip on the place than the absent Coarb of St Columba ever had, and who was always in the King’s household. And now the biggest threat of them all, Tuathal of St Serf’s in the middle of Fife, his own precinct.
You weren’t supposed to run a group of Culdees like a mint-master. You weren’t supposed to run a kingdom like a Cluniac market. Enrich a shrine, yes. From the gold in your coffers and the returns from your lands, you could support the clergy who served the shrine, and the priests who would starve otherwise on the little their flock could afford.
But to teach men to manage their land; to encourage strangers to trade; to take an interest in shipping: how did that benefit the church, how did it improve the spiritual welfare of a country? Trouble, that was what it brought. The kind of trouble the Earls of Northumbria struck with the foreigners and the kindred who had been allowed to grow too powerful.
Thorfinn was trying to build York in Alba. He and his minions would fail. Or else the minions would swell and obliterate him. But meantime, was he himself, twenty-three years a bishop and no longer young, to end milled between magnates and living off herbs in the Lothians? He said, ‘My son, what the Holy Father desires must command attention from us all. But if, despite this, the Earl Siward should refuse to allow the revenues from the
Lothians to be alienated, how then should I live?’
‘Is it possible,’ said the King, ‘that he would refuse? Why, then, you must live as all the Bishops of Alba have done. From your lands of Kinrimund, and upon my expense as an officer in attendance on my household. The other Bishops, being much to the north, cannot do this.’
The man was wicked. Everyone knew how far the King of Scotia’s household had to ride, and how often. Forty miles a day, every day for a week, was not unknown. Even the favoured Eochaid and Tuathal, he had heard, complained sometimes. Bishop Malduin said, ‘My son, you are speaking to a man who is no longer young.’
‘… Or there is retirement,’ said the King. ‘Perhaps you should consider retirement? The Culdees, I am sure, would accept you, and we should find a convent for your wife. I should be disappointed. The deprived people of Lothian will be disappointed. But the decision, my cousin, must lie with you. Tell me when you have made it, and, one way or the other, we shall write to Earl Siward together.’
‘So what happened?’ said Lulach.
‘To Bishop Malduin? He’s gone south to try and persuade Earl Siward to give up the church-tithes from Lothian. You don’t know about that.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Lulach cheerfully. ‘But I don’t mind conjecturing with you. Isn’t this a bad time to issue a challenge to Siward over Lothian, now the Godwin family are out of his way and he has a new alliance with Norway?’
‘It would be if the English succession was settled,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But it isn’t. Eustace is no longer a favourite, and Godwin is banished, but there are still two strong runners left to occupy the attention of both Siward and Norway. I think Siward will agree.’
‘Agree to give up his church dues in Lothian? You’re mad. He’s mad,’ said Groa to Prior Tuathal. They were all, for once, on her own lands in Fife south of Loch Leven, and it was dusk, which meant that Tuathal would stay overnight rather than try to get back to the island once the geese had landed. From Iceland they came, the flocks of thick-beaked Vikings, darkening the sky after the first full moon of September, and from dusk to dawn the shores and isles of Loch Leven were theirs, to disturb at one’s risk. The older monks knew them by sight, as each dropped, year by year, to his familiar roosting-place, and some of them came to the hand, as did the priory birds.
One could live, winter and summer, on a lake such as this, ringed with low, pretty hills; full of life, as were the other small lochs about it. During winters in Orkney, she felt like that. When age blew on one’s cheek instead of winter, life in such a place was not hard to contemplate.
But this debate was not about peace, but about consolidating the southlands of Alba. And her role was not to applaud, but to provoke. ‘He’s mad,’ said Groa again of the King her husband. ‘With the Godwin family exiled, Siward has conquered his greatest rival for power in England. Now all of England outside Wessex is divided between Siward and Mercia.’
‘I suppose you could put it like that,’ Thorfinn said. ‘On the other hand,
since Alfgar has been given the Godwinsson lands of East Anglia …’
‘What!’ said Groa.
‘Didn’t I tell you? Alfgar’s an Earl. His wife will love it. And it means that he and his parents now hold the whole of central England from sea to sea, south of Northumbria on the east coast and of Cumbria on the west, leaving Siward with as much as he can retain of Middle Anglia and the eastern lands north of the Humber. I think,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that we might spend Christmas in Cumbria this year. We never have.’
‘We’ve never dared,’ said Tuathal bluntly.
‘I know nothing of it,’ said Lulach cheerfully.
Christmas in Cumbria was hard work.
Advancing in cold and blustery weather from the princely guest-house on Carlisle’s southern outskirts to the royal hall maintained by Thor, the King’s distant cousin in Allerdale, and proceeding eastwards from there to the palace between Penrith and Appleby where, led by Leofwine, the whole of East Cumbria was assembled to welcome them, Bishop Hrolf felt it his duty to instruct, to learn, and to entertain his fellow-travellers.
His fellow-travellers, who were saving their energy for the extremely cautious festivities which were taking place at each halt, were not responsive. Bishop Hrolf, who liked to spice his learning with a little jollity, rallied them out of their apathy by tying their leg-bands together while they were sleeping, or by emptying some ale-horn and refilling it swiftly from a small bag of sawdust. Bishop Hrolf became the largest cross that the King of Alba’s Christmas cavalcade to Cumbria had to bear.
Bishop Hrolf loved the Romans. His Celtic blood, much diluted, did not prevent him from wishing, from time to time, that the Emperors in their day had crossed to Ireland and there established a Bremen, a Goslar, a Cologne: a city of mighty stone churches over which Bishop Hrolf could preside.
Instead, the Romans had reached, here in Cumbria, the northern limit of their English conquest, marked by the line of their Wall. Four hundred years ago, the walls and fountain of Luguvallium had still stood, when Carlisle was given by the King of Northumbria to St Cuthbert and there was a house of nuns at its gates.
The Roman roads were still there. They were riding on one now: the great highway from Carlisle to York. And the settlements they were visiting were still to be found where the Roman engineers first had made their selection: at the great crossroads and the fords, at the points guarding the few awkward highways from this principality ringed with hills and wedged between Alba and Mercia.
Once, this land had been lived in by Romans and by Britons, speaking the language they now spoke in Wales. It was the tongue St Kentigern of blessed memory would use when he came south to preach and establish his church. It would be known to St Cuthbert of (he reminded himself) not quite such blessed memory when the Celtic church was dismissed from Lindisfarne a hundred years later and he found refuge in Carlisle and the Solway.
Then, of course, had come those other refugees when the Viking raids had started. Refugees from the Viking kingdom of York. Refugees from Ireland: Gaels at first, and then those of mixed Norse and Irish descent.
To preach in Cumbria, as to preach in the island of Man, you required four different tongues. It was one of the reasons, they said, why the Bishops of Alba had had little to do with the area. And why the Bishop of Durham, who would ordain a priest or two in an emergency, had shown no interest, either, in rebuilding the churches and monasteries.
Not, of course, that the Bishop of Durham had any rights here, since, a hundred years before, the King of England had ceded to Malcolm of Cumbria all the land from the Firth of Clyde south to the river Duddon and Stainmore.
Or so ran the theory. In practice, Bishop Hrolf gathered, it was not uncommon for a good, Celtic-trained bishop much involved with the Anglian part of his cure to obtain consecration from the Archbishop of York in addition to the simple ceremony required by his native church, to make his teaching more acceptable. And when the Bishop of Alba was called further north, to his flock or to his king, it was natural that his brother of Durham should see to urgent business, such as the examination and ordaining of young men serving God near his area.