In the space made for him between Thorfinn and Lulach at table, Sulien said, ‘I missed the wedding Mass. It was a grief to me.’
‘We all know,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that a sense of direction is not your strongest point.’
Sulien said, ‘You gave me plenty of warning. But to finish the work of so many years in a few weeks is not easy. I could not fail my abbot.’
Thorfinn said, ‘You are not returning to Ireland?’
Sulien’s eyes moved to Groa, which was answer enough, for those who knew him. Then he said, ‘I have been asked by the Bishop of St David’s to come back to Wales to teach. I have accepted.’
‘Your dream?’ said Groa. ‘You will be bishop one day. We are happy for you.’
‘Part of my dream,’ Sulien said. ‘The rest has been realised.’
Thorfinn said, ‘I am sorry for the man who has to deal with your pupils. I have a few of them here already complaining about the lack of equipment.’
‘You will have more,’ Sulien said.
And from that moment, to Finnghuala’s simple pleasure, it became an occasion of quite singular gaiety: indeed, the most inventive feast day of them all, so that she was almost sorry when day dawned at last and the young prince her husband lifted her up in his arms to carry her to their chamber.
Almost, but not quite. All the girls she knew had told her that Lulach was not like other men.
But he was.
Long before that, Thorfinn had taken Sulien off, and Groa was moved to nothing but thankfulness when the bed beside her stayed empty until long after she woke.
From what she saw of the King during the leave-taking, as the halls and the booths slowly emptied next day, she judged that he had slept not at all and that it had done him no harm. Sulien, accustomed to vigils, was unchanged.
Only later, when she found Sulien packing, did Groa say, ‘But you have only just come! You must not leave us!’
Thorfinn said, ‘He has to go to Rheims. The Pope is holding a Michaelmas synod, and churchmen are flocking. Twenty bishops at least. And Emma is sending a trio from Somerset.’
‘The new Pope? Pope Leo?’ said Groa. ‘I thought they’d only just managed to get him to Rome.’
‘Bruno le Bon, the Emperor’s second cousin. He’s back in Toul again,’ said Thorfinn, ‘after five months in Rome and Apulia and a good read of Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrha. He’s back, says Sulien here, to reform France and Germany, or to drum up money, or to keep an eye on the Emperor, or because no one came to his Lateran synod, or because he likes Toul and doesn’t like Rome and Apulia. Take your pick.’
‘Don’t listen to him,’ said Sulien. ‘Bishop Bruno was a clever and courageous leader of men. He was also a good man. As Pope Leo, he is still all of those things.’
Groa looked at Thorfinn. She said flatly, ‘You are going to Rheims with him. Or to Wales.’
‘Nonsense,’ said the King. The bar of his brows rose and descended. ‘Why should I do that? Sulien is going to Rheims, and then he is going to bring all his news back to Denmark, where you and I shall be visiting your mother and father.’
No one spoke. Sulien smiled.
‘You mean it,’ said Groa at length.
‘I mean it,’ said Thorfinn.
Slowly, Groa sat down. ‘You can leave the kingdom?’ she said.
‘I can leave it,’ said Thorfinn. ‘I have been working for two years to make it safe for hands other than mine. Norway cannot afford to attack, and England won’t, while Cumbria is mine and Mercia friendly. While the fleet is there, goods and silver will flow and the coast will be defended. Besides, Lulach says that the peace will not break for four years.’
‘Then I am reassured,’ said Groa. Her face was pink.
‘And I shall see you both in Denmark,’ Sulien said. ‘You can guess what it is. I have promised to bring him a copy of Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrha.’
‘To correct,’ said Thorfinn.
THREE
T AALBORG, THE girls were giving trouble again.
For any King of Denmark, it was sensible to move to Aalborg when caught in a long war with Norway. Aalborg sat on the Limfjord, whose waterway stretched from sea to sea across the north of Jutland. Fleets could sit in the Limfjord, and armies could lie, and did, at Aggersborg on the north shore. From Aalborg, ships could sail west to England and Normandy, or east to Halland and Sweden and Russia beyond.
Finn Arnason and his wife had crossed the eastern sound from his earldom of Halland last week, and today every man who could be spared was busy finishing the new hall that had been built to house this man Thorfinn-Macbeth and his suite. An hour ago, the Jammerbugt bailiff had sent to say that the ships from Alba had arrived in Lokken as directed and were being escorted round to the fjord, having landed their party.
There were horses for fifty people waiting at Borglumkloster, and the ride to Aalborg would take three hours, one could reckon, added to whatever time his bailiff managed to promote for a landing-feast and a rest. Meanwhile, the King of Alba, as was well known, had only one wife and she was an Arnmødling, so that it behoved the King of Denmark to get the girls out of the way, or at least to relegate them to the women’s quarters, where they would be in no danger of pushing themselves into the seats at the feast table beside the legal Lady of Alba and her father and mother.
As soon as Kalv Arnason had been killed and Finn his brother had defected from Norway to the Danish court, it had occurred to his new employer that a message of friendship and goodwill to Alba might have interesting and even profitable results.
He had only half-expected a reply to his invitation to spend the winter in Denmark. An acceptance within the month had given him what might be termed alarmed satisfaction.
Satisfaction because, by bringing his court openly to Denmark, the present opponent of Norway, Thorfinn-Macbeth was certainly making a statement if not actually issuing a challenge to Harald of Norway, to whose forebears Orkney had for so long owed allegiance.
And alarm because, evidently, the King of Alba was strong enough to do so with impunity.
Ragna, the girl he liked best when she wasn’t talking, said, ‘The King will think that he has a child to deal with; or that you smell. If you wish to impress him, why don’t you offer him a trader’s peace and take his wife to your couch, while I show him what Svein of Denmark expects of a woman? He will respect you after that, I assure you.’
He cuffed her then, and had the other two in after his morning-ale instead; but the Irish one sulked and the other spent all her time, when she had the breath, hinting that what he needed was another wife.
King Svein of Denmark had had enough of wives. The German mirror in his chamber showed him at his prime, so far as women were concerned: middle-sized and fair; not so bulky as his uncle Canute had been, but with his uncle’s thin, crooked nose with the high ridge and more than his uncle’s fertility: five sons and two daughters to date, and all healthy, unlike Canute’s clutch of weak, stripling kings.
As he was healthy. He was thirty-one years old and, with any luck, now able to get what he wanted—in every direction—without having to marry for it.
One wondered, therefore, if the tales they told about Thorfinn were true. He knew (everyone did) about the red-haired beauty, Groa his wife. Svein had been in Sweden, in tedious exile with his mother, when Groa made both her marriages. She was about his own age, he had heard. And had been married to Thorfinn for seventeen years.
Of course Thorfinn would hold on to her, an Arnmødling. Anyone would. He, Svein, didn’t need an Arnmødling: he had Finn Arnason himself serving under him. But after seventeen years, a woman might well be bored: a man might have found himself other diversions.
King Svein, touching up his hair with his comb, wondered if, after all, that little horse-fly Ragna had been uttering nonsense. There was sometimes more to an alliance, these days, than the bishops wrote down on their parchments.
‘And what,’ had asked Groa two days before, ‘is the
nature of King Svein of Denmark?’
Sailing in Grágás and another, larger ship of whose building she had been unaware, she and Thorfinn and their train had broken their journey to Denmark at the only part of the Norwegian coast at which they could be sure of a welcome: at the fjord by Dale in Hordaland where Orm and Sigrid her sister had lands.
Orm’s cousin Gunnhild of Lade had been the first wife of King Svein of Denmark. ‘Lusty,’ said Sigrid, Groa’s sister.
‘So said Gunnhild?’ Groa enquired.
‘So say I,’ answered Sigrid austerely. ‘You will be lucky to get through your first night unmolested. Whether or not your husband will protect you, I suppose you know best. A barren woman has few defences.’
‘Thorfinn?’ Groa called. ‘Will you protect me from King Svein’s advances?’
‘I never saw any harm,’ Thorfinn called in reply, ‘in a little rape in the autumn. Svein has seven concubines, Guthorm says. He wrote the names down for me.’
‘Is he joking?’ Sigrid said. ‘He does not smile.’
‘Thorfinn never smiles,’ said the Lady of Alba. ‘Perhaps King Svein of Denmark is a merry man, of the kind a woman can warm to.’
For three weeks after the King of Alba’s arrival in Denmark, the Danish court feasted its eyes on the red hair of the Lady of Alba, lit by the October sunshine of the day and the wax lights of the night at the banquet table.
During that time, no business was discussed nor any untoward approach made on either side. At the gates to Aalborg, King Svein had ridden forth to meet his guests and, taking the hand of the Lady, had chastely kissed her, according to custom, on either cheek.
The flawless face had not escaped his observation. Neither had the brown, unwinking gaze of the King of Alba, or the fact that the magnificent horses he and the Lady Groa were riding were certainly not from the stables at Borglumkloster and must therefore have sailed here from Alba.
The only exchange between himself and the Lady had occurred at the doors to the guest-quarters, where she had paused, glanced about, and remarked, ‘Is there not a strong smell of fish?’
To which King Svein had replied quickly. ‘In your own quarters, no. In fact, they have been newly built for that reason. The odour elsewhere will, I am told, disperse before very long.’
And had broken off because the King of Alba, looking down at his wife, had said forbiddingly, ‘And because of the niceness of your senses, must complaint and contumely attach itself to the simplest of functions? Isleifr has passed through, that is all, with his bear. King Svein welcomes everyone, yourself included.’
Smiling a little, King Svein led his guests to their residence.
He had been right. Seventeen years evidently blunted the appetite, even for luxuries: for fire and sweet fruit-flesh; for deep wine and honey. And there was no haste, for in some things he liked to think of himself as an artist, and this Lady would sleep here all winter.
Such was still the pattern when in November the priest Sulien and his servants rode into Aalborg with his baggage and two mule-loads of red Pingsdorf stoneware full of good Rhenish wine.
Groa was absent from the guest-quarters, staying at the hall set aside for her parents. Sulien paid his respects to the King, proffered his gift from the vineyards of Germany, and, on being allotted both a welcome and a guesthouse, found his way at length to the hall of Alba, bearing a spouted pitcher and two matching beakers.
The hall was full of men: well-dressed chieftains from Orkney and Caithness, stalwart landed-men from Moray and Angus and Perth, from the hilly land to the south, and from the Cumbrian beaches and mountains, mixed with young hirdmen of Svein’s, of their own standing and calibre.
The Bishop of Alba was not present, and Sulien saw only two priests: Eochaid, now Prior of Scone, who had been with the household since the killing of Duncan, and Tuathal, the man Thorfinn had made Abbot of the Culdees of Loch Leven. Arnór Jarlaskáld, he noticed, was not of the party.
Then Thorfinn saw him and, waiting for him to approach, said, ‘You don’t look any different. You have come from the Pope’s synods at Rheims and at Mainz? Bishop Walo returned three days ago, travelling cross-country riding his crozier. There has been a lot of whispering.’
‘The Pope and Archbishop Adalbert spent a lot of time talking of Denmark. I have enough wine for two,’ Sulien said.
Then unless you want two other people to have it, you had better come into my chamber,’ Thorfinn said; and about him, men smiled: even men from Angus and Perth.
In the chamber, Sulien said, ‘They appear, poor fools, to tolerate you. I didn’t think it was possible.’
‘You would be surprised,’ Thorfinn said, ‘what money can do. All right. Tell me about Bruno. Or I shall tell you. Military, forty-seven, and not averse to using his head. Warms the Lateran chair for five minutes, and then marches north from Rome into Germany and, with the sword of anathema, helps his cousin the Emperor put down rebellions in Lorraine and Flanders. Tours Alsace; honours, at a price, the churches of kinsfolk; keeps a promise to consecrate the church of St Remigius, Apostle of the Franks; and throws in a synod that demands the presence of all good-living French bishops just when their liege lord King Henry wants them somewhere else fighting for him. Whose bad planning?’
‘The Pope’s, if you like,’ Sulien said. ‘He’s apt to follow an impulse, and he hasn’t got his household together yet and won’t until the Lorraine business is safely over and he can call in some of his relatives from that quarter. The fund-raising was sensible enough. He’s got rich brothers and sisters and cousins he can milk all over Rhineland and Burgundy and the Vosges, and he needs money if he is to begin to do anything. Apart from pilgrims’ offerings, he’s got virtually nothing else. Between them, the Saracens and the Greeks and the Normans have overrun the papal lands in south Italy, and the princes of the Roman Campagna have whipped away what the church used to have there. The mistake, I think, was in holding the synod in France.’
‘The King thought he was poaching?’
‘The King agreed at first, and then someone persuaded him that he would lose face and authority if he let the Pope come in and harangue his bishops. A two-day fever and a discreet cancellation would have saved everyone’s face.’
‘But instead?’
‘But instead the synod was called, with excommunication for any French bishop who chose to march instead to King Henry’s battles. Which, naturally, most of them did, since their livelihood depends on King Henry and not on Pope Bruno-Leo. Thorfinn, why are you so interested in Pope Leo?’
‘Because I enjoy listening to a Breton scion trained in Scotland and Ireland and about to join a major Welsh monastery discoursing on the troubles of the Coarb of St Peter. What else happened at Rheims?’
‘I’ll tell you if you tell me what you’re doing in Denmark. And without Bishop Malduin,’ Sulien said.
‘Do you want your wine back, too?’ Thorfinn said. ‘I shall do what I can.’
It was no longer so simple as once it had been; but it was not difficult. Sulien said, ‘We are very autocratic, of a sudden, for a half-breed pretender on a precarious throne? Go on. I doubt if Groa hears quite everything. You have to talk to someone.’
The sound of singing, muffled, came through the wall, and of talking and laughter.
Inside, the fire-basket glowed and flickered between the two men, and red light sank through the beaker in Sulien’s hand and glared on the King’s jagged profile: the cheek-knob, the scimitar nose, the globe of the brow beneath the Indian-black hair. ‘If I began, I should never stop talking,’ Thorfinn said. His eyes did not lift. ‘So tell me what happened at Rheims.’
Sulien studied him. Then, smiling a little, he lifted his beaker, drained it, and, setting it down, folded his arms and leaned back.
‘Two things you should know about,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps three. Make sure, when you become king of the Western world, that your servants know how to control the enthusiasm of your subjects. The crowds for the consecr
ation of St Rémi were such that the brethren could neither get into the church nor the Pope leave his house, and the relic, which the Pope at first carried on his own shoulders—’
‘Weeping?’ said Thorfinn.
‘Weeping, as you say—caused such a surge of the population that a fair number were trampled to death when it issued, and the bearers finally had to pass the saint’s body into the new church by way of a window.… Do not underrate, in your calculations, the hunger that poor men feel for spiritual comfort. The people stood in the open all night, their torches burning, and sang.’
‘One must worship an oak if one is to live under it,’ Thorfinn said. ‘What do you want with my knife?’
Sulien finished the nimble movement by which he had drawn it out of its sheath, and turned its blade so that the runes, small as they were, sparkled red. ‘To live under two oaks,’ Thorfinn said, ‘doubles the duties, but also imposes a sense of proportion. You said there were three things I ought to know about.’
‘There appear to be more,’ Sulien said. He laid the knife down. ‘The Pope spoke against simony, and altars served by laymen, and incestuous marriages, and the abandonment of legitimate wives for adulterous unions; against monks and clerics abandoning the habit or making war; against thefts, injustices to the poor, sodomy, and various heresies. The churchmen present were then asked to declare on oath that they had never bought or sold holy office. But you don’t want to hear about all that.’
There was a short silence. Thorfinn said, ‘I have never seen you so angry. I thought it was with me.’ He waited, and then said, ‘So, he spoke against all those things, and then he acted in a way you did not like. Tell me. He may still be a good man.’
‘He is a good man,’ Sulien said. ‘He excommunicated, of course, those bishops who obeyed the King of France and failed to attend, including Beauvais and Amiens, strong adherents of Boulogne and Flanders. He denounced Geoffrey of Anjou for imprisoning a bishop of the opposite faction and Theobald of Blois for setting aside his wife, whose family also opposed Anjou. Two counts were excommunicated for incest, both of them sympathetic to Flanders. Geoffey of Coutances, whose kinsman Nigel-Constantine led a revolt against Duke William of Normandy, was allowed to keep his expensive bishopric, but the Archbishop of Rheims, Primate of all Gaul, was accused of simony and told to report to the Easter synod at Rome, having also relinquished a monastery the Pope thought should properly belong to Toul, his own bishopric. Does this mean anything to you?’