‘You spoke of the hird,’ Sulien said.
‘It would need another name. For the first winter, I should have to stay in the south and have none of my own men about me. Thorkel Fóstri, of course, will keep Caithness, and Moray has managed fairly well so far with the leaders I gave it, under Groa. Lulach should go there now and begin to learn his trade, whatever happens. No. The difficult part would be drawing together the courtmen of Alba when it has never been the custom for men to leave their families and their farms except for battle. It may be impossible. I might not be able to feed and maintain a household such as that. They may not have slave-labour or rents enough to let them leave the land and engage in affairs. I might be able to do no more than move between Glamis and Forteviot and Perth and Kinrimund and the rest, as old Malcolm did, using my own family as my officers.’
‘That way,’ had said Sulien, ‘you would be less of a burden where you happened to stay. That way, few people who mattered would know what you were doing until you had done it.’
‘That is the way Malcolm ruled,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And Duncan. And they could not hold what they had.’
‘Because they ruled alone, without the protection of the hird?’ Sulien said. It was unfair. But he had to find out.
‘You are changing your ground,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But I suppose I have to answer, if I am to pass whatever test you are setting me. In a country as far-flung as this, they could not know the minds of their district leaders, or carry them in their own policies, unless they talked together and saw each other more often than the winter weather and the bad roads allow. In Orkney, it is easy: we are all within reach of each other in winter-time, and all at home. Even in Caithness, people come for the feasts and stay many months, and then there is the companionship on the sea.
‘The bonds welded there make it easy to know whom to trust, and men do not often move from faction to faction, but stay with their kinsmen and those whom they know. Before the men of Alba could face a common enemy, they must know each other, and how long will that take, unless they are helped? The men of Lothian don’t even speak the same tongue as the men of Fife over the estuary, and the men of Cumbria and Strathclyde are different from both.’
‘And beyond Moray, different again,’ Sulien said, and waited, but when Thorfinn continued, it was on another tack. And soon the discussion had ended.
The name of Rognvald had never been spoken at any time on that occasion. Then the time came when the enthronement was over and the chiefs of Alba, what was left of them, had ridden thoughtfully away, and Sulien found, going to the pavilion of Rognvald, Earl of Orkney, that there was nothing there but flattened grass and dead embers.
As with Groa, the scene in the hall the previous day had filled the Breton with horror. Unlike Groa, he could at least do something about it. As soon as the tables were drawn and the leave-taking over and the hall freed of all the concourse that had filled it, Sulien had hurried out to find Rognvald and had found instead the newly made King standing in front of him. ‘If you are seeking the brilliant Rognvald, I am told that he is in his pavilion. If you wish to come, I am about to go and see him.’
And so Sulien witnessed the scene, the essence of which Thorfinn was to describe in three words, with perfect accuracy, later that night to his wife.
And indeed there was nothing more to say of it, unless you told of the smell, which was that of a flesher’s stall, or the sight of the straight-nosed, delicate profile sunk in the pillow, its skin bruised and stained under the disordered gold hair. And below that, the shoulders and back, pink and red, with the margins still crossed like reed-shadows with fine scarlet lines.
There were cloths on a board, and a bowl of red water, and a phial of ointment, and a man in a black gown who drew back, and a group of men in the kind of tunic Thorfinn himself wore at sea who did not draw back, although one of their number said softly, ‘My lord Rognvald. King Macbeth has come to speak with you.’
And Rognvald had opened one swollen eye and looked up, a little, at the dark face of his uncle towering over him.
For a long time, they gazed at each other, until the corner of one red lip curled and a golden eyebrow lifted in raillery. ‘Tell King Macbeth,’ said Rognvald, ‘that, naturally, I forgive him.’
That was all. And next day, he had gone.
At last the thirty-ninth Abbot of Kells and Raphoe departed, with his great train, weighed down with gifts. Sulien did not ask him how he would make his way back to Ireland, nor what part he would play or had played in Duncan’s funeral obsequies, in Elgin or Iona. Thorfinn had said nothing of Duncan, although Lulach, walking with him one day, had suddenly said, ‘If Donwald and his wife killed the King, why do they blame my stepfather?’
Sulien stopped. ‘There was a Donwald,’ he said. ‘But he and his wife killed Malcolm Duff. Another king. Not King Duncan.’
‘Duncan, King of Cumbria,’ Lulach said. ‘I could have told you that when I was Simeon. There never was a King Duncan in Alba.’
‘Now you are back,’ Sulien said, ‘I want your stepfather to have peace. He has much to his hand.’
‘If he wanted peace, he would have chosen it,’ Lulach said. ‘What is peace? When a wicked man dies, those who are left behind enjoy peace. St Moluag never killed a living thing, and when he died, the birds wept.’
Sulien left for Ireland just before Yule, and the King did not try to restrain him. ‘Go back, then, to your skin hoops and whelk shells,’ he said. ‘And leave me to my board games.’
‘Am I so transparent?’ Sulien said. ‘You should take heart that I am leaving you.’
‘You are satisfied that this is not merely a board game?’
‘I know what it is better than you do. It is the black gosling seeking the black goose,’ Sulien said. ‘And there will be no peace for you or for any of us until you find her.’
With the profusion of youth and the purse of a man who has just raised £34,000 in taxes, Hardecanute, King of England and Denmark, proclaimed that his hird in future would be fed four times daily from his tables instead of once, as was usual. Thus rendering himself secure for the moment, he left them behind him and, taking only a small retinue of a dozen, rode to Winchester to visit his mother Emma, the Flower of Normandy.
At fifty-nine, the Lady Emma was no longer quite the ravishing heiress who had married King Aethelred of England, or even the beautiful woman who fifteen years later had married the late King Canute of Denmark, who with his father had by that time conquered England. Nor had her three years of exile in Flanders brought back those years of imposing beauty. Handsome, however, she remained, with her big frame and strong, regular features. Handsome and intelligent. Intelligent and powerful. Powerful and perfectly ruthless.
Hardecanute entered the room and she said, ‘I hear you have been buying the smiles of your hird with the grain-barns and byres of your subjects. How old are you?’
He kept smiling. ‘Twenty-two, lady mother.’
‘If you want to eat four times a day, stuff yourself in a chamber. Do it for your men and they will take you for a fool. What’s this news about Northumbria?’
‘But you have to tell me how you are. Your leg. How is your leg? Is it better?’.
‘It is the same as it usually is. You may sit down, if that is what you are after. Now. What about Eadulf?’
Hardecanute sat, with relief. ‘There have been several quite reliable reports. He has been negotiating alliances in the hope of adding Cumbria to his own lands.’
‘Negotiating? Who with? Your father’s mint-master? Crinan?’
‘No. With the new King you were so pleased about. Thorfinn. Macbeth. What did he send you? He sent me a dagger. Look. German-made.’
‘He sent me a reliquary. Never mind that. Earl Eadulf went to Alba to see the new King Thorfinn-Macbeth? When?’
‘Not himself. He sent the Bishop of Alba. Macbeth sent him back with a refusal, and then invited the Bishop to come back for the crowning. He’s still there, they say.??
?
‘Not the crowning. They don’t have a crowning,’ the Lady said. To correct was automatic. ‘The Bishop would go for the ritual anyway. It doesn’t mean that the new King has given up Cumbria.’
‘Whether he has given it up or not,’ Hardecanute said, ‘it looks as if Eadulf is preparing to take it. We could raise enough men in the north to stop it. The Mercians would help.’
‘Four meals a day! You would think men and spears sat about in tithe-barns as well,’ the Lady said. ‘There is no need to be wasteful. Send to Earl Siward at York. You know Earl Siward?’
‘The Norwegian? His father held Huntingdon,’ Hardecanute said boldly.
He had been lucky and got it right. His mother said, ‘He is connected by marriage with the Arnason tribe. His father helped to kill King Olaf: the family will never go back to Norway now. But, principally, the man Siward has married one of the five nieces of Eadulf and so has quite a legitimate claim on Northumbria himself. If Earl Eadulf were to resign the vital breath in the near future.’
As always, Hardecanute felt hollow in the presence of his mother. He thought of something to say. ‘You wouldn’t mind an alliance between Siward and this new Macbeth?’
‘An alliance? They are Vikings. They will face each other, snarling and snapping, one would confidently hope, for many years. And meanwhile the prospect of Earl Eadulf in possession of the whole of northern England is not one that I could entertain, on your behalf or my own. Is this all sufficiently clear, my son? Do you understand me?’ said the Lady.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I see now that your idea is an excellent one. I shall put it into effect as soon as orders can be issued.’ His chest heaved, and he coughed.
‘You have coughed before,’ his mother said. ‘It is a sign of weakness. Control it. I shall have a posset made up and sent to you.’
‘Yes, mother,’ he said.
The winter passed, and people thought it good riddance; it had been an unlucky twelvemonth for weather, with poor grapes abroad and the prospect of sour wine at home; and wheat had gone up to fifty-five pence a sester, for those who were so great that they had to buy it.
With the first spring wind from Norway, Kalv Arnason sailed to Freswick and called, as he had been wont to do years before, on his good cousin Thorkel, foster-father of the new King of Alba.
He came in a single ship, for it was not a trading-voyage. With resignation, Thorkel listened to the women cackling overhead, crowding the loft window, and then the shouts of his men as they ran round from the strip-fields over the beach. It was Kalv’s banner, there was no doubt about that; and he had put out the red-and-black shields for coming into the beach, so that they could get the pork, if they had any, over the roasting-fire and hang their axes back up on the wall.
At forty-six, one did not go running down to the jetty for a man who was five years younger, even though the years had put no more on his belly than on Kalv’s, as Thorkel observed with faint regret. The trim, agile figure of his cousin was the same, and the neat auburn hair and the sympathetic blue eyes with the merest trace of sauciness still remaining, after all that had happened, in the corners.
‘Well!’ said Kalv from the doorway. ‘Do you work hard enough at a patch, it will produce a good crop in the end, as they say. And how does it suit you to have your finger on the golden skid-sledi of one of the kings of the Western world? What has your foster-son Thorfinn taken out of his treasure-chest and given you, since you put him on his throne? I seem to see nothing here but the old bowls and hangings. Are you saving the silk and the gold for a visit from the Emperor’s longship?’
‘I don’t know how it is,’ Thorkel said, ‘but I can always tell when things are going badly with you. Come in and sit down and have some cheap wine in an old wooden cup. Then you will feel better.’
When the story came, in due course, it was much as he expected. Now fully sixteen, King Magnús of Norway no longer had need of a regent, and had taken to going about with men of his own choice. Kalv was being neglected. He was no longer even quite so confident of the amnesty Magnús had proclaimed on his return from Russia those four years since.
‘What are you saying?’ Thorkel Fóstri said patiently. ‘You have just been complaining that Einar Tambarskelve stands higher in Magnús’s favour than you do, and he gave as many promises to King Canute as anyone.’
‘It’s true he didn’t support King Olaf at the Holy River battle,’ Kalv said, leaning his chin on his hand and frowning. ‘But he didn’t swing the blade that killed King Olaf either.’
‘This is nonsense,’ said Thorkel. The girl who had just come in with the platters was the prettiest slave he happened to have, and not really thickening yet. He signed to her to serve Kalv and make a fuss of him. He said, ‘What’s wrong with your brother Finn? Why can’t he help you? He stayed with King Olaf through thick and thin: the King must owe him something.’
‘You might think so,’ said Kalv. ‘Although Finn is not getting any younger, and there are some days when he is not sure whether it is a cow on the beach or two stout men lifting a cooking-pot. The mistake poor Finn made was to marry his daughter to your foster-son.’
Thorkel leaned back. ‘What’s wrong? Thorfinn paid his scatt for Orkney, and so does Macbeth. With Rognvald there, King Magnús surely has no fears for the islands.’
‘Ah, Rognvald,’ Kalv said. ‘Well, you know how Rognvald is dear to King Magnús. I won’t say they shared a bed on the way home from Russia, but no doubt it would have come to that. Is that girl bearing to you? I don’t know how it is with you, but two days at sea is a long time.’
‘When you’ve finished talking, you can have her,’ said Thorkel. ‘About Rognvald. Go on.’
The girl walked out, and Kalv wiped a hand on his side and stretched for his cup. ‘Everyone has heard what happened, of course, at the enthronement. I’ve just come from Orkney. King Magnús wanted to know how things were.’
‘And how were they?’ said Thorkel. He had heard: he was well in control of his third of Orkney. But he wanted to know what tale Kalv would take home.
‘Oh, I was lucky to see Rognvald at all,’ Kalv replied. ‘He was just going aboard for the spring sailing—to the western isles, he said. He was quite himself, too: laughing and joking. He said he had grown tired waiting for his uncle to get off his throne and come sailing at the usual time, and if he forgot sometimes which were his rents and which were King Macbeth’s, the King could not blame him.’
He paused, shooting a glance at Thorkel from the pellucid blue eyes. ‘He has got a new dog, called Sam after the one Olaf the Peacock gave to Gunnor, and has taught it this trick. He says Thorfinn to its face, and the dog replies by snarling and barking. Arnór Jarlaskáld has made some new verses about it.’ He broke off, a little abruptly.
Thorkel knew what Arnór wanted of Rognvald. He said, ‘And you think King Magnús will punish you for that?’
‘For that and what my nephew Siward has done,’ Kalv said. ‘Thore Hund’s son. I brought him here once. You remember.’
The hulking youth who had stretched out with his heels on his father’s furs, and had followed his father to lucrative exile at the time his father, with Kalv, had killed King Olaf.
‘What has Siward done?’ Thorkel asked. He did not relish the kind of news Kalv always brought.
‘Nothing to benefit you or me,’ Kalv replied. ‘He has killed his wife’s uncle. Eadulf, the Earl of Northumbria. Killed him, and taken Northumbria in his place, with Hardecanute’s full blessing. Now he has York under his hand, and his wife’s sister’s husband in Durham and Bamburgh, and, now Eadmund of Durham is going, the gift of the bishopric to dispose of, to the highest bidder, or the most convenient one. He has brought his other woman back and, for all I know, is preparing to install a third one. At first, King Magnús hardly knew what to think; and then Einar Tambarskelve told him. Now he knows it was a plot.’
‘A plot?’ said Thorkel Fóstri.
‘Between my nephew Siward a
nd my niece Ingibjorg-Groa,’ said Kalv. ‘To take over the country from the Orkneys down to the Humber, pushing out Rognvald. A joint rule between Siward and Thorfinn his cousin by marriage.’
‘Macbeth,’ said Thorkel automatically. He said, ‘It isn’t true, but I suppose it is no good just saying so. But consider, at least. If there had been the slightest risk of that happening, Hardecanute would never have allowed Siward to take over Northumbria.’
‘Could he have stopped him?’ said Kalv.
‘Yes, he could. In the same way as Thorfinn … as Macbeth will stop Siward if he so much as trails the thong of his boot on land that wasn’t Eadulf’s before.’
He swung his legs over the bench and clapped Kalv on the shoulder. ‘It won’t happen, and when he sees there’s no danger, King Magnús will forget he ever worried about it. Meanwhile, what else do you want? You have a good wife, and a rich farm, and a girl over there, waiting for you. Or had you forgotten about her?’
He had. He stared out of the open door at the swept yard, and the river glittering in the sunshine, and the houses of Thorkel’s kinsfolk and his serfs, and the farms that stood here and there over the bay, and at his own ship tied to its post on the sand, with the sea-edge like white tortoise-shell running layering in.
It was a good bay, although open to the weather, as his fjord at home was not. On the other hand, there was always Canisbay and the long sands to the east, or Thurso, if the wind blew another way. He said, ‘And where will Thorfinn … Where will Macbeth look for a chief lenderman in Caithness and Orkney when you have stormed into the arms of the Aesir?’
‘To his family,’ said Thorkel agreeably. ‘A stepson and a son, with another on the way. Indeed, unless the girl you saw has caught your particular fancy, I see I ought to set her aside and pick you another. I have done my share towards supplying the hird of the future, but you are right: I should not risk marring her business. Who knows what need there will be for good men in Caithness and Orkney in times to come?’