Now, in winter, there would be nothing much at the riverside but barges of brushwood and clay, too late, as usual, for the flood embankment, or a boat in through the rivers from Lincoln, full of those grey bowls and pitchers that his half-brother’s wife used to treat as if they came from Charlemagne’s table.
You could smile, for, living in the Western Isles, she had never seen a town except perhaps a glimpse of Dublin, and certainly never one with eight thousand people in it. They said only London was bigger than York. He had been in London once or twice. He liked cities. Except that it riled him to be summoned, he was pleased to be here and not sitting hunched over his brazier, listening to the drone of illiterate farmers’ sons trying to train for the priesthood. Although in Fife the hunting was good.
He reached his lodging. The merchant with the amber had not yet arrived, but someone else was waiting for the Bishop as he shook his cloak off and walked in. A man he vaguely recognised from the past. A tallish man with broad shoulders and coarse, straight hair exactly between red and yellow, who wore on his shoulder a Pictish buckle, the twin of one he had seen his cousin Thorfinn sometimes use. A kinsman, in fact, of Thorfinn, whose line had kept a toe-hold in the region when all the Norse kings of York had finally fled, and had returned from Dublin, quietly, in later years to settle and spread: first in Westmorland, and then back in the York region itself. The man whose eager helpfulness, on the occasion of King Duncan’s campaign against Durham, had largely contributed to the failure of that campaign.
The Bishop of Alba said, ‘Thor, is it not? Of Allerdale?’
‘There, now,’ said his uninvited guest, in Gaelic. ‘I wore the brooch in the hopes that you would remember the twin of it. And there is not the least need for worry: I kept my hood over my face all the way here, so the Earl will have no cause to imagine that you and Thorfinn and I have a plot in it. Are you well?’
It was more than time to recover the initiative. ‘I am well, I thank you,’ the Bishop said. ‘But pressed for time, I am afraid. Perhaps it is something you could leave with my clerk?’
When he smiled, the man’s colouring became positively vulgar. ‘Cumbria?’ he said. ‘I’ll leave it with your clerk if you wish, but I should have thought, my lord Bishop, that you would have wanted the least taste of it yourself, to begin with.’
‘Sit down,’ said Bishop Malduin shortly, and did so himself, with his gloves on.
Later, he was in two minds as to whether he had done the right thing or not. It was hard enough, as he complained from time to time to his Maker, to have Cousin Thorfinn and the Earl Siward both to serve without meddling with the balance of power between them. Naturally, with the lord Crinan and his family reinstalled in Dunkeld, Thorfinn’s intentions for Cumbria became of instant importance both to Siward and to men like Thor here, who owned land throughout northern England. He was worried himself, come to that.
Whoever controlled Dunkeld was not unlikely to meddle with the interests of Fife and even of Lothian, at present mainly Siward’s concern. And Crinan was not only a powerful dealer; he was abbot of a Columban church rooted in Ireland and subject to influences York and Durham knew nothing of, not least of which were the vagaries of Irish tribal politics.
He did not know, therefore, if he had been wise to listen to this fourth-generation exiled Orcadian with the three languages and the air of undeviating jollity. All that was required of him was inaction, that must be said. He was under no obligation to his cousin Thorfinn. The land he had been given in Fife had mostly belonged to the men who had gone north with Duncan and paid for it with their lives. Nobody lived on it now but slaves and cottagers and widows: someone had to look after it. And the rest, such as it was, he had been told he could reclaim for himself from the marshes.
He didn’t owe anything to Thorfinn, and the Columban church had nothing to offer him, even if his interests had not been tied firmly to the lowlands of Scotland. There, in the Anglian churches, the churches dedicated to St Cuthbert, lay the promise of rich shrines and the rewards of friendly alliance with the powers of Northumbria and the King further south. Whatever measure of control England let fall under the Kings of Alba, she could never afford to allow it to become absolute, so that the small line of ecclesiastical strong-points fell asunder, and the neck of land between the Forth and the Clyde became a thoroughfare for the Norse of the east to reach the Norse of the west: a thoroughfare and a base from which they might overwhelm all England.
No. He did not relish being ordered about by the fur-trader’s offspring and his minion the new Bishop at Durham, nor yet by the sword-happy war-lord who sat in the Archbishop’s throne at York; but there were compensations. It did not do to cross one’s fate. Particularly when there was nothing to do but do nothing.
It could be said that the man Thor and he had reached a reasonable understanding. He had been quite surprised when, on parting, the fellow had lifted his cloak and taken from under it a small marquetry box, which he laid on the table and opened.
It was full of amber. Not Whitby stuff either, washed up on the beaches and then worked in some local shed. This was Baltic amber, carved where they understood such things. He picked up a pendant, and the thing shone like honey over a flame.
‘It appeals to you, so?’ said the man Thor. ‘Then you will give me the pleasure, surely, of presenting it to you and the lovely girl you have waiting there at home for you, I have no doubt. All I ask is that your two lips stay shut. If it got about that Thor mac Thorfinn was selling his amber for nothing, it would be the ruin of me.’
He might look and sound like a goat-herd, but it did not do to forget that he was a merchant-coiner as well, with licence to strike in London as well as here with his brother in York. Hence the land he owned. Hence the army he could bring, fully paid for, when his interest was engaged, or attacked.
In retrospect, the Bishop saw, he had done the right thing. He had nothing with which to reproach himself. He had a glass cup and an amber pendant and a conscience as unblemished as either.
Since news has a way of travelling wherever there are waterways, the tale of Bishop Malduin’s summons to York moved north in due course and entered the river Tay and, passing the King’s hall at Perth, arrived with the last of the salt water at the sprawling monastery of Dunkeld, where, on the rising ground looking to Birnam, the lord Abbot Crinan had now made, at last, his permanent home.
It amused him to be back in the kingdom whose heiress he had married forty years before.
Bethoc. A tough-minded young woman who had attended to the affairs of the marriage-bed as he might one of his tally-boards: had produced their son Duncan and then, when the King and policy both required it, had removed herself north and placed herself, with equal briskness, at the disposal of Earl Sigurd of Orkney.
He, Crinan, had been brought to Alba because he had had to fly, temporarily, from his Saxon masters and because he had something King Malcolm needed.
A head for business and the means to supply silver was part of it. Easy movement between one trading-centre and another was another part. At the height of his power, his ships had carried him anywhere he pleased: to Denmark or Norway, to Friesland and Germany, to Normandy and Brittany and south to Aquitaine. He had bought Moorish silk in Spain, in his day. But most of the work was done, of course, with his small, folding balance and the weights he still carried, native to the inside of his shirt as his heart was.
He went everywhere because merchants in money or in goods went everywhere as churchmen did, under licence to kings who lived only to kill each other. Sometimes, as with churchmen, the safe-conduct failed, and that was the end of it. But in the meantime the King of Norway sent you his gold to have new regalia made, and the portion of gold that was yours for your trouble you lent, at interest, to the King of Denmark to pay for the new ships he needed for his next war on Norway. And of course, because you moved freely from court to court and baron to baron, men gave you secrets to carry.
Two or three years in Alba had b
een enough, and he had given the troubles of King Malcolm little more than a passing thought in all the years that followed, save that he collected his rents from Dunkeld and brought his boats into the Tay and supplied good advice and fighting-men and silver, for a consideration, when it was needed. Latterly, as he withdrew more to his lands in Cumbria, he had been able to watch and to weigh up his royal son, and to find no reason to disagree with the general opinion: that when King Malcolm went, this youth of modest gifts was not likely to stand up to King Canute for long.
You could say, of course, that it would do no one any harm, and himself least of all, to allow Canute the satisfaction of increasing his empire by the dimensions of Alba and Orkney. But sometimes kings died young, and he had little confidence in Canute’s heirs.
Then, at Chester, he had seen Bethoc’s other son Thorfinn.
In a long and successful career, he supposed that there, on the royal ferry, he had experienced his only real moment of regret: that the extraordinary, ramshackle youth sitting on deck winding back his leggings should not be his son, and that the fool on the riverbed, drowning, was not the son of Bethoc and Sigurd.
But Thorfinn was not his son, and self-interest had not prevented him from executing the neat little plan to send Gillacomghain north to oust his uncle’s stepson, together with Carl Thorbrandsson. At the same time, it had been no accident that Carl Thorbrandsson was one of his own brotherhood of coiners and, in particular, ran the Lady Emma’s mint at Exeter.
Behind Emma’s dealings with young Thorfinn lay something a trifle more than expediency. The Lady all her life had looked after her north-born family, to its remotest members. And, in an odd way, you could say Thorfinn was her family. Orkney and Normandy, after all, had been settled by kinsmen. Emma and Sigurd, Thorfinn’s father, were second cousins of the half-blood. And he himself stood between them.
So Thorfinn had survived to inherit Moray; and now he had Alba, with Rognvald hampering him in the north, and the five husbands of those five Northumbrian sisters and their adherents staring hungrily at his borders on the south. A situation that would tax a man strongly based as Malcolm had been in the middle and south of his kingdom, with his own adherents and Ireland to call upon. A situation full of peril for an interloper from the north, as men must see him, with no great families who had known him from childhood and who for his benefit and their own would follow him into war; and no Irish to call upon except the exiled Eachmarcach.
It had been wise of Thorfinn to invite himself, Crinan, to return, and to bring Maldred with him if he wished. It would be even wiser of Thorfinn to make use of him, now he was here. The observer always saw the heart of the game. He had counsel to offer, and it would be worth the price he would exact for it.
The summer passed, and Thorfinn did not come to see him, although every man who arrived in Dunkeld had a different story about his doings in Alba: how long he had stayed in each part, and what meetings he had held, and how he had set people to look to the marsh-passes and bridges, and clear and re-lay the most useful paths, and how he had even gone up to the hill-shielings to count the stock and look at the condition of the hay, and into the turf huts to see what there was in the way of good tools for ploughing and reaping and cutting and even for slicing the peat.
In some parts, he had stopped men from felling their own timber, which had not pleased them very well, and in others he had set them to cut it, even though the pains of dragging the logs had never seemed worth the effort. And when the timber was there, it was put into store for their own use, or the King’s. Instead of butter, this year he wanted wagons, and instead of malt, next year he wanted ships.
And that was a matter of complaint as well, for there was a big difference between the good summer you could have, when you felt like it, down at the shore with the other fisher families knocking up a new boat for the season, and the kind of ships that traders and fighting-men had. Men who knew about these things had to come and live beside you, and eat your food, and expect you down at the sheds most mornings, unless you could show a good reason why.
The King had promised to install no hierarchy from Orkney, and to that extent he had broken his promise. On the other hand, the day-to-day ordering of the districts was, four years after he had taken the kingdom, in the hands of the best-respected families in each district, and as the roads improved and hence the markets, and the movement of surplus food from one part of the country to another, men could come to him in increasing numbers and stay, as his hird in Orkney had done, and both advise and be advised, as well as provide the strength at the centre without which there could be no central justice; or none that could be enforced.
Already, Crinan knew from report that Thorfinn had men with him who were not only servants, free or unfree, but had lands of their own in Angus and Moray; about Perth; in the lands leading southwards to Cumbria; and inside Cumbria itself. A small court, but one which seemed a good deal bigger by now than a self-seeking nucleus, and which, to exist at all, must already have faced up to or conquered the barrier of language. If he had men from Strathclyde and Cumbria in his entourage, then Cumbrian was being spoken as well as Gaelic, and very likely Saxon as well. And if he had Cumbrians with him, Siward must know of it.
That, to the skilled observer who sat at Dunkeld, was one of the perils in what Thorfinn was doing. There were many others. Every week from the north came different jokes about the blood-feud in Orkney: the skirmishing that daily beset Thorkel Fóstri, the King’s steward there; the disasters that overtook any ship of Thorfinn’s that came within his nephew Rognvald’s reach on the sea or laid up, collecting its tributes.
The men of the north, it appeared, had been instructed to deal with it, and they did. It was not easy, for they had their own farmlands to see to, and the rents to collect, and twice Thorfinn had sent them down the west coast to clear the Irish-Norse out of his headlands, and once to support Eachmarcach in an attack.
For a year perhaps, they could do that, if the bere ripened well and the winter was mild and the vital balance was struck, and preserved, between food-raising time and all the other things they had been set to do. For a year, too, their regard for Thorfinn, even in his absence, would carry them through much that was unpleasant, and in particular the unwanted presence in Caithness of the kinsmen from Norway: the colony of Kalv Arnason and his friends that had dropped like a plague on the land and was stretching its resources to the limit.
They had been fed this year. They would have to be fed again next. And the hird, as was its right. And the new court, here in Alba, as well as the King himself and his personal household of chaplain and servants and officers. When, therefore, Crinan, Abbot of Dunkeld, looked from his window high over the Tay one fine morning in September and saw moving slowly towards him the glittering prow of the longship Grágás, he smiled within his grey beard and reached for the fine, furred robe he wore in other people’s writing-offices for business. ‘So, my stepson,’ he said to the window. ‘You have remembered the in-field that has not yet had a spade put to it. I wonder what you want most. My counsel or my money?’
Then, very soon, he and Thorfinn stood face to face in his receiving-hall and Crinan was conscious, in his critical survey, of only one thing: that this was the man he would have wished for his son.
He looked, now, like a king. It was mainly, perhaps, a matter of dress. In Alba, men expected the royal house to appear in the Saxon tunic with its heavy worked hem and wide oversleeves: there was no room here for barbaric gold arm-rings and waistcoats of pelt. Thorfinn’s ankle-boots were not made on any last his stepfather had seen in London or the Rhineland in recent years, and his inlaid belt one would guess was an heirloom from some Irish king’s treasure-house. The ribbon of gold confining his hair was less novel: it simply replaced the hlā which he had always worn. And his dark, solemn face with the steady brown gaze was, it seemed, changeless. He looked as if nothing had disturbed him and nothing could.
Crinan said, ‘You mentioned a meeting four
years ago in Kinrimund.’ He chose Saxon, of intent, and then saw, by the amusement in the other man’s eyes, that he could expect no ascendancy there.
Thorfinn said, in the same language, ‘I am known for keeping my appointments. Do you regret leaving Cumbria?’
‘What!’ said Crinan, sitting. ‘Did you think I would take root in Dunkeld? I am in Cumbria as often as here, and further afield where there is need for it. It is the only way to keep one’s friends, when one is old. I have seen your kinsman Thor twice in the Cotentin; once at Valoignes and once in Bayeux. Do you suppose that your cousin Bishop Malduin is aware of it? You know that he was summoned to York in the winter?’
‘If you had gone to Fougères,’ said Thorfinn, seating himself also, ‘you would have heard my name mentioned at least as often. You may take it, therefore, that I have not come here because I have need of money, and, further, that I take a cousinly interest in all that Bishop Malduin is doing. Indeed, that’s why I’m here.’
‘You think,’ said Crinan, ‘that Earl Siward is going to take over Cumbria? I suppose he might, while you are so heavily engaged in other places.’
‘I am not sure,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I am not sure, indeed, if I have done you a disservice in inviting you back to Dunkeld. It all depends on the daughters of Ealdred. There are only four of them left, but they and their husbands might still prove very troublesome. And I cannot spare men to protect Dunkeld in perpetuity.’