King Hereafter

  His voice stopped, and no one spoke. Thorfinn studied the grass. The Lady said, ‘Thorkel Fóstri is right. It should be a duel between you.’

  Thorfinn lifted his head. ‘And you would belong to the winner?’

  ‘What choice would I have?’ the Lady said.

  ‘Then we fight,’ said Thorfinn briefly.

  They chose a stretch by the river and staked it, while the smith’s family, with their belongings, came down the hillside and crossed the water and stood watching and silent. Through the trees, men were arriving, in twos and threes, as word filtered through to those few on this side of the peninsula. The man whom Duftah had-killed was dragged out of the way, and the remaining five hung about beside Duncan, who had been given the use of a hut, and food and ale if he wished it.

  He had jibbed at going into the booth, and Thorkel Fóstri had pushed him instead into the next one with the anvil in it, and the tongs and draw-plate and nail-iron and ladle hanging still on the wall. ‘Try this one,’ he said. ‘Four stone walls. We can hardly burn it around you.’

  Outside, Thorfinn sat on a log, with a leather flask in his hand, and Groa watched him. Duftah said, ‘Speak to him.’

  ‘Afterwards,’ Groa said.

  ‘And if there is no afterwards?’ Duftah said.

  ‘Then he will not know what he has missed, will he?’ Groa said, and walked away. Then Thorfinn stood, and laid the flask down, and, sliding his sword from the scabbard, looked at it. Duftah opened the door of the smithy and spoke, and a little later Duncan emerged, walking stiffly.

  For a moment, by the stakes, the half-brothers faced one another. Then the monk said, ‘What you do, you do, each of you, for your peoples. May God indemnify both your souls. My lord King, will you enter on this side.’ He waited. ‘My lord Earl, on that.’ Again he waited, and so did the two men, facing each other.

  ‘To action,’ said Duftah Albanach. And the sword of Thorfinn, like the flail of a reaper, swept down and cut the King through the right shoulder before Duncan had time to move.

  Duncan dropped his sword. His spread fingers, clutching his shoulder, barely checked the spurt of the blood: soon all his arm and side was thick, shining red, and, gasping, his head fell forward and he dropped to his knees. Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘You have won. Take his head.’ The rope swayed as Duftah crossed and hurried over with two of his monks. Thorkel Fóstri vaulted over as well and strode up. ‘Dispatch him! What are you thinking of?’

  ‘That I should have managed it better,’ Thorfinn said. ‘With eight inches’ difference in height, the least I could have done was to cripple him neatly.’ There were four of them now on the grass beside the crouching figure of Duncan, and a woman, untying a bundle, was hurrying over with cloths. Thorkel Fóstri lifted his sword and cried out as Thorfinn struck his arm down with a blow from his fist.

  ‘Kill him, and I will kill you,’ Thorfinn said to his foster-father. ‘The duel is over. Get a litter made, and find a gospel. The King has an oath to take before he sails back to Berwick.’

  Groa turned to the nearest hut and sat down, and put her hands over her ears, and shut her eyes. After a long time, she heard someone come into the hut and found it was the woman who lived there, come to tell her that the monks were going back to St Cormac’s and would take her with them. There was a garron.

  She walked outside and stood looking.

  The settlement had come to clamorous life, with women moving briskly from place to place, and children screaming and playing. All the armed men had gone. Down by the river, the stakes had been uprooted and only by the trampled ground and the blood could you tell that there had been a flight.

  Not a fight. An execution. And not an execution either, for that would have been simple. A deliberate wounding, which perhaps had not taken quite the course the swordsman had intended.

  She knew, from the women, that Duncan had been carried out by his men, under escort, on their way to the ships and the remnants of his army. Thorfinn and the rest of his men had left also, and in some encampment no doubt were engaged in the affairs that followed a battle: the celebrations; the gathering in of the dead and the wounded.

  And now here were the monks, prepared to go back to their church and their houses as if nothing had happened. And as if nothing had happened, she was to go with them.

  They were kind, helping her into the saddle. She said, ‘Should I not go to the camp, where my lord Thorfinn is?’

  Duftah was not there, but the muscular arms and the soft Irish voices reminded her of him. Someone said, ‘The orders came from my lord’s foster-father Thorkel. You were to go to St Cormac’s, my lady.’

  Of course, the women and Sigurd and Lulach were still away: someone would have to send for them, now that the danger was over. She left the settlement, and the stream, and the hills as if they had been no more than a break on her journey and travelled back with the monks to St Cormac’s.

  St Cormac’s was empty. Like hers, the monks’ servants had gone, and they had much to do, to get their baggage-mules unpacked and their hamlet in order. She did not want their help or even their attention: she was too tired to unfasten boxes and too tired to take any of the laborious steps that would bring her food and drink and bedding or even something to wear, now that she need no longer look like a monk.

  She arrived among the last by the chapel, and waited only to learn that the bundles containing her gear had been left outside the empty houses she and her household had used. Then, deaf to well-meaning protests, she set off alone to find herself a cabin.

  There was no danger: the new huts were almost within sight, just over a rise in the ground. She wanted no company. She did not know what she wanted. She stumbled, walking over the beaten earth and the grass, and her bones felt aching and weak. She topped the rise and saw below her the smokeless thatched roofs beneath which her sons had played and slept, and the well, and the peat-stacks, and the boxes and rolls, neatly piled where the monks had bestowed them.

  She did not know how long she stood, her eyes resting on it unfocussed, before she realised that the space by the huts was not deserted. By a still-saddled garron, a man was standing there as if undecided: a man of ungainly height with a black, uncovered head who moved at last and began, slowly, to loosen the girths of his pony.

  She did not need to see his face to know who it was, but none the less she stared, her breath catching. Thorfinn of Orkney and Caithness, victor of today’s brilliant battle, was not with his army in Dingwall but here alone, without escort or harbingers.

  She had learned not to trust impulse. She neither ran to her husband nor called, but walked steadily down to the huts, so that she was halfway there before he looked up and saw her coming. She saw him check, with a suddenness that seemed to suggest something more than astonishment. Then he simply stood, his elbow couched on the saddle, and waited until she stopped in front of him. He said, ‘I thought you were at Balnagowan.’

  ‘The monks brought me here,’ Groa said. She wondered what Thorkel Fóstri was essaying. In the afternoon light, Thorfinn’s face looked different, although there was no particular expression on it she could name, and the black brows above the dark brown eyes were unmoving. He carried neither helmet nor shield, and had exchanged his mail-shirt for narrow trousers and a loose tunic, with only his armlets and the linked gold of his belt to show his standing.

  He said, ‘Are all the huts empty?’

  ‘This one is, and the two others. There hasn’t been time to furnish them yet,’ Groa said. ‘Why? Whom do you want to bring here?’

  He ignored that, and went into the nearest hut, leaving the pony.

  Inside, she knew, there was only a beaten earth floor, and the roof was so low that he would have to bend all the time. He came back to the doorpost and leaned against it. ‘It seems about the right height for children. Do you want to stay here? I shall get the monks to come and unpack what you need.’

  ‘They are busy,’ Groa said. ‘It’s all over there, in the boxes. I
shall get it myself when I need it.’

  He did not move. ‘Oh,’ he said. After a moment, he added, ‘Do you think you could get it now?’

  His voice, fathomless as the sea in a cavern, told her nothing through its inflections. Whatever that request might imply, she did not want to interpret it, or face it, or deal with it.

  Then she remembered that he was accustomed to giving orders, to women as well as to men, and that for him explanations were unnecessary. She found a ring and hitched the garron where it could graze. Then, finding her way to the baggage, she searched for the box with her bedding, and with a mattress roll and an armful of rushes walked quietly back to the house. Sounds from over the hill indicated that the monks had withdrawn to the church, having no doubt made their own dispositions as to supper. The smell of roast sheep rose and lingered somewhere in the still air. It occurred to her to wonder if she would be sent to forage for food. She had not intended to return to the monks’ hamlet till morning. Arrived, she laid her burdens on the threshold and pushed open the door of the rough wooden hut he had entered.

  She could not get the door fully open, because he was lying behind it, his hand outstretched near the post it had been gripping. He did not move as she squeezed through and dropped kneeling, and when she turned his shoulder to look at his face, she found he had lost consciousness. Behind the unshaved stubble his skin stood, pallid and glistening, over all the peaks of his face; and under the shut eyes, the hollows were brown as oiled leather.

  She had never seen Gillacomghain struck down by pure exhaustion, but she could recognise it in another man when she saw it. She pulled the Earl’s shoulder until he rolled over, his shoulders and cheek on the earth, and only then saw the blood he was lying in.

  His eyes opened, and he turned his head and saw her.

  ‘It’s all right. The monks will help,’ Groa said.

  His hand caught her robe, but could not hold it. ‘No. They gossip.’

  His breathing altered. He was angry, possibly with her: certainly with himself and whatever had brought this about. He said, ‘Not the monks. Go away.’

  Not the monks. Not the hird: that was why he was here, so that no one would know he was vulnerable. Someone knew: Thorkel knew—that was why she had been sent here, but without the Earl being consulted. The single desperate stroke at Duncan was now explained. It had been Inverness all over again. He had had to make the first blow do all the work; there might have been no chance of another.

  She said, ‘No monks. All right,’ and waited until his eyes closed again. Then she set about dealing with the matter.

  * * *

  He wakened to darkness, and the slow, stammering hush of the sea, and a little steatite lamp glowing green-grey in a corner. He had been asleep far too long, for his muscles were stiff from the boards of his sea-chest, and he could hear no sound from the men. He said, ‘Rognvald?’

  A hand lifted the steatite lamp and brought it over. Set down, the glow burned through a hanging of deep crimson silk. He could not remember whose bed had such a curtain, and could only deduce that, since he could not be on board his ship, there must have been a landing he had forgotten about.

  Then the curtain brushed his hand, and he lifted his fingers and let the fringe of it trickle between them. It was warm.

  When it fell away, he closed his eyes, feeling the lamplight still on his lids, and seeking still, without haste, to distinguish where he might be.

  Rognvald had not replied. Rognvald always replied, or threw himself upon him, or launched him into some boisterous game. He said aloud, ‘Not Rognvald.’

  No one answered. Certainly not Rognvald, then; and not Arnór, for he would have come rushing over; and not Thorkel, for if it was time to wake, Thorkel would have wakened him, a little roughly, long before now. And if Skeggi or Killer-Bardi or Starkad were here, he would hear them, for, like children, they could never stay silent for long.

  Findlaech his stepfather had been a silent man, unless he was stirred to anger. Silent but thoughtful, and kind. If the day had been too much for you, he would know it, and would let you sleep.

  But he had had this dream a great many times before, and had learned to scotch it at the start, even in sleep. Findlaech was dead. His mother, that busy, practical womam, was dead. Sigurd, the great roaring Colossus at whose knees he had walked, had gone before he could come to know him: Sigurd his father, from whom came the Norse blood in his veins.…

  Duftah. Duftah, who had so much ambition that one day certainly he would be a saint: Duftah would have made his presence known, gently but firmly, by now. Sulien … Ah, Sulien. That had hurt, and hurt still. Sulien would sit quietly like this and let him think, but Sulien held no truck with crimson silk hangings and in any case was no longer here.… He had once come across a verse, just after he met Sulien. He tried it aloud, stopping to think.

  I used to be young. I journeyed alone, then I lost my way. I thought myself rich when I met someone else. Man is man’s delight. That was it.

  His thoughts wandered, until in time he remembered what he had been pursuing. Sulien. Sulien was in Ireland. So where was he himself now?

  A pillow under his head. A sack filled with chaff under his body, stripped to the waist. Round his arm and his side, clean wrappings skilfully bound. And under his arm a fine sheet with embroidery he had seen before. Once. In the course of six … four minutes …

  And then he knew where he was, and who was with him.

  A long time afterwards, he opened his eyes, well prepared for the face he would see in the lamplight, and said, ‘I rise, a corpse already wept, and live. I thought I asked you to go away? It’s my good fortune, I see, that you stayed.’

  Her face was Greek in the lamplight, with its rounded classical jaw, and its brow broad and pure above the dark wings of the eyebrows. Her lashes were wet.

  ‘You wanted Rognvald,’ Groa said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He lay looking at her. Perhaps it was true. Yes, it was true: he remembered dimly speaking his name. What else had he said? She had risen and was bringing him water. She put her arm behind his shoulders, and her hair fell forward again, brushing his skin.

  He drank, and she slid her arm out, letting him sink to the pillow. He said, ‘I thought I was on board ship. I am sorry, there is blood—’ He stopped abruptly.

  ‘—over the sheet again,’ said Groa serenely. If she had been weeping, the reason was not now visible. She said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I won’t take advantage of you.’ She pulled, smiling, a wry face. ‘Man is man’s delight.’

  Why was he so tired? Why could he not deal with this: make her laugh; make her angry; please her; reward her for her care of him; protect himself, as he always did, from the probing, inquisitive mind? He drew a breath and said, ‘What an unfortunate night you have had. What an unfortunate night I have had, if I have to interpret all my ravings. I seem to remember dreaming of Sulien, who is your friend as well.’

  ‘You said, It hurts,’ Groa said. After a pause, she said, ‘It is two nights since you came here, not one.’

  He sat upright; and the protesting pain in his side barely registered. ‘What!’

  ‘So I had to call the monks in,’ Groa said. ‘I’m sorry. But someone had to send word to Thorkel, and see to you from time to time. No one knows that you are hurt: only that you are busy with some crisis in Caithness. You’ve opened the gash again. What was it? An axe?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What about Duncan? The ships?’

  ‘They got away safely. Half your own men have finished their work and gone. A longship called, and was sent north to bring Sinna and the boys back to me. We assumed that was what you want. You will tell us, I suppose, where you want us to go.’

  ‘Skeggi is dead,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I remember now. Thorkel told me.’

  She touched his shoulder. ‘Lie down. It was a fine campaign. You should hear Arnór’s verses.’

  Then the doors of his mind stood wide open. He said, ‘You must be tire
d as well. Why not put the lamp out and lie down and sleep?’

  She looked at him and obeyed, without questioning. There was another pallet against the wall: she lay on it dressed as she was, and blew out the lamp.

  Then silence fell; and he could begin at the beginning and plan the war, and fight it, from the very first day to the moment when he brought his sword down on his half-brother’s shoulder.

  It ended: and he became aware of the force of his own breathing, and of the complaint in his arm and his side, and the fact that someone was holding him. Groa’s voice said, ‘Please … please … Keep some pity at least for yourself.’

  Her weight was beside him; her arms under his shoulders, her hair on the pillow beside him. He put up his hand, and a tear fell on it, then another. He touched her wet cheek. ‘What is it?’ he said ‘What is it?’ A river of tears fell into his palm and he felt her lips part as she gasped, and gasped again. He lifted his other hand and cupped her face and held it. ‘What is it?’ he said for the third time.

  Perhaps the firmness of his hold calmed her. He felt her hands withdraw from beneath him, and a moment later she caught his wrists and lowered them from her face. She turned his hands over and he knew from the sound of her voice that she was sitting now, her eyes lowered as if she could see them. She said, ‘Compassion. Nothing you would recognise.’

  If she had not been so near, he would not have betrayed himself. But his hands were in hers, and her fingers on the hammering vein in his wrist: nor by any exertion of will would the run of his breath return to anything approaching normal. He said quietly, ‘I would recognise compassion. Is it compassion?’

  She let his hands go. Sitting still, she said, ‘No.’

  ‘Let me light the lamp,’ Thorfinn said. He moved before she could stop him, and found his way, limping, to where her pallet was, and picked up lamp and flint and tinder. Suddenly, his fingers were steady. He lit it.