‘Oh,’ said Thorfinn. ‘You mean I should have offered Dunedin also to Earl Siward? And the rest of the churches to the north?’
‘No!’ said Bishop Malduin. ‘That is not at all what—’
‘But why not?’ said Ligulf of Bamburgh. ‘The land and the churches both belong to Bernicia. And how can the rights of churches be divorced from those of the lands they occupy? How can a farmer in the south of Lothian pay his land-dues to one overlord and his church-dues to another? The wealthy will train priests of their own, as they do now, and your churches will be empty and useless. I say the churches belong with the land, and all should be under Durham and York.’
‘Poor Bishop Malduin,’ said Thorfinn gently.
‘Who consecrated Bishop Malduin?’ said Ligulf. ‘When he dies, where will you get your next bishop? The Pope is a prisoner. Adalbert of Bremen claims to be spiritual overlord of the Orkneys and Norway: do you want to set a precedent there?’
‘It is a difficulty,’ Thorfinn said. ‘You must feel it yourselves, with one of your archbishops excommunicated, and the other newly appointed and barely back from his own consecration. He did manage to reach the Pope before the Normans did?’
Siward cleared his throat loudly enough to make Ligulf glance at him and then sit back. But his voice when he spoke was quite gentle. ‘Archbishop Cynsige has the pallium and the power to consecrate bishops,’ he said. ‘He turns a father’s eye, naturally, on Bishop Malduin’s work. But you do not require his services at present, and I see no point in discussing them. As I understand it, you offer me a fraction of Lothian, and war if I do not accept?’
‘I offer you a division of Lothian that ought to suit us both,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Have you any other suggestion to make?’
‘The limits of the Forth lands?’ said Siward.
‘We have drawings. You will be shown them,’ said Thorfinn.
‘And the churches Ligulf spoke of? All the churches in Lothian were St Cuthbert’s at one time.’
‘I do not offer you all the churches,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I offer only those which belong to his shrine by reason of direct dedication or association with the saint. And these are, for that reason, the richest. The rest will remain, under Bishop Malduin, to be pastors to their flock.’
The Earl Siward of Northumbria lifted his arms from the table and folded them. ‘I do not think,’ he said, ‘that my brother-in-law Ligulf is satisfied. Or my son or my nephew, who are not used to dealing with ultimatums.’
Thorfinn said, ‘I am not dealing with your brother-in-law, or your son, or your nephew. Your Bishop seems satisfied.’
‘And so is one of his brothers-in-law,’ said Forne. ‘My son is rather young to speak with authority, but I believe that if his grandfather his namesake were here, he would agree, too. The proposal has come from Scotia, but might equally have come from this side. We are both apprehensive of strong forces and we are both under necessity of taking precautions. We have nothing in common with which to make an alliance except some frontier ground. Let us each take what we need, if we can agree upon it, and save our fighting-resources for when real danger threatens.’
‘Your wife’s father,’ said Thorfinn, ‘always had a high opinion of your good sense even if it didn’t save him, in the end, from the rest of your family. My lord my cousin, have we the basis for an agreement? In which case we might move into the shade and partake of some wine?’
‘We have,’ said Siward. He rose. He said, ‘There was a time, my lord my cousin, when you preferred axes to ink. I liked you better.’
The boy Crinan and Lulach strolled from the table together.
‘Don’t you have a sister called Edith?’ said Lulach. ‘Earl Alfgar has a daughter called Edith. Three Kings, two Ediths, and the House of the Grey Sandal-hose. How proud your grandfather Crinan would have been. Does the sun give you a headache?’
‘I know you’re glad to see me back,’ said Thorfinn. ‘But I can’t breathe. What is it? I wasn’t in any danger.’
His wife released him. ‘Of course not. That’s why you meet Siward on the border instead of in the more usual way, such as in one another’s houses. You heard them outside. They thought you were lucky to get back as well.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Thorfinn. ‘But, really, assassination wasn’t going to solve anything. Assassination only works—I don’t really have to explain?—when the victim’s people were sick of him anyway and ready to let in the new man without overmuch fuss. Or are you trying to tell me that the mormaers think Siward would laugh at their jokes?’
‘They weren’t all that sick of Duncan,’ said Groa critically. ‘But they let you walk in and take his place before they even knew that you never laugh at anything, even if it’s funny.’
‘Yes. Well, I had the whole of north Scotland from the Orkneys to Moray, and Siward has only those bits of Northumbria that Ligulf and the rest haven’t written their crosses on. I knew I wasn’t in any danger. He had to bargain,’ said Thorfinn.
‘I’m surprised Ligulf and the rest let him,’ said Groa.
‘Are you? Then amuse yourself in the long autumn evenings,’ said Thorfinn, ‘working out what bargain he made with them before he came north. If the pact even stands till the autumn.’
‘How long do you give it?’ she said. She wished she hadn’t started the conversation. She was glad she had, because she forgot sometimes how extraordinary he was.
‘Not long. Long enough to let me do what I need to do in Lothian. What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘I like not being able to breathe.’
FOUR
ait till we start campaigning,’ Osbern of Eu had said to Thorfinn, ‘and then you’ll know what it’s like to live again.’
A lamentable remark, if you took it seriously, and fit for the Thorfinn of twenty years earlier. At the time, he had shrugged without answering.
But when the portents continued to gather that autumn, and ruling the kingdom grew further and further from the planned exercise it had been and more like taking a fleet out in freakish, untoward weather, there was a change in Thorfinn as well: the extra swiftness, the finer edge, the sharper zest created by danger.
It struck sparks, flint against steel, from the bright fighting trim of his mercenaries. The Normans, that summer, began to mesh into the fabric of the new, alert life of the country. The west-coast defences given a structure and a system of manning, they moved inland to the key sites at crossroads or ford or defile where, usually, there had long been a hill-fort or an earthwork of some kind. Sometimes they supervised the repair of what they found. Sometimes they made a new fort, throwing up a ditched mound with a palisade on the crown enclosing a timber citadel, with a defensible yard at its feet. It could be done in less than a week by men working with vigour, and mostly they did, for their own new lands looked to the forts for protection and warning. Ewias had performed that service for Osbern, and he did not forget it.
Then, having settled their men and their stewards and their womenfolk, if they had any, they moved eastwards to do the same for themselves and for others along the course of the Forth, and to drift, with an inquisitive eye, through the hills and croplands that lay southwards in Northumbrian hands.
Their seniors attended Thorfinn, moving in rotation, so that he always had Osbern or Ansfred his son or Baldric or Hugh de Riveire or Flodwig or Salomon of the Val de Saire or some combination of these in his company, as was the rule with his mormaers and their leading men. From wherever they lodged, the couriers raced in and out, carrying orders and relaying messages.
The wounds left by the gale were sore to mend. It was well into the summer before the clang of the forge or the thud of mallet and axe meant anything other than repaired houses and fencing and barns: new scythes and spades instead of weapons; new bridges and malt-vats, new sledges and jetties, new creels and baskets and thatching instead of new ships. Then the land had to be cleared of its debris for the sowing and pasture, and the forests cleared of their tangle, and the journeys made, of n
ecessity, to bring in new seed and new livestock.
By late summer, the nousts and the sheds had been mended in Orkney, and there were keels in them, waiting for the harvest to finish. The ships that had survived were divided, some to continue with the trade that was their life-blood; the rest thinly spread through the Sudreyar, including Man, where Bishop Hrolf cultivated his souls and his fortifications with equal exuberance and had received from his smith on Holmepatrick, in his scant leisure from illegal coining, a custom-made tunic of chain-mail with the cross of Christ on every ring of it.
Thorfinn sent to Svein of Denmark, who seemed no nearer to ending his war with Harald of Norway, and obtained an undertaking that, if the terms were right, Svein would get him ships somewhere, although not before spring. After a brief, acid interval, the terms became right and the bargain was struck.
Bishop Jon, after a punishing excursion in Thorfinn’s company to Buchan, rode south to Brechin to bathe his feet and get rid of the dust in his throat and found Prior Tuathal from Fife already there, with the Abbot and Malpedar the Mormaer.
Tuathal, it seemed, had come north from the Forth estuary, where a new church to St Serf was being raised beside the traditional shrine of St Kentigern.
‘Indeed,’ said Bishop Jon, ‘ ’tis to be hoped that the two saintly souls got on well together in life (if so be that they ever met at all, which I take leave to doubt) now that the lord King has made a packet of them, so to speak, for posterity. He had a good eye for a defensible site, had St Kentigern.’
He lifted one dripping foot from its basin and his servant, kneeling, dried it. The foot, like Bishop Jon, was large, well formed, and perfectly manicured. He added, ‘I also hear that Earl Siward has lost no time in equipping all his churches of St Cuthbert with four stout walls, a ditch, and a garrison. Will you hand me my sandals? Only God, the cherubim, and the angels were ever meant by the Lord to be seen with bare feet. Were you and I walking on clouds, we’d be upsides with them.’
‘In some respects,’ said Prior Tuathal, his pigskin face agreeably blank. ‘A week after the pact, Stow and Melrose filled up with soldiers. It allowed us to do the same, if we wished, with our churches.’
‘The fountain of rightful possession. Well, of course,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘And our good friend Bishop Malduin has been helping?’ He nodded, and his body-servant got up and retired.
‘In every way possible,’ Prior Tuathal said. ‘Except, of course, in any direction to do with fortifications or the requirements of war.’
‘The devotion that’s in it!’ said Bishop Jon abstractedly. ‘Like Paul the hermit, alone like a bird on his rock, naked except for his hairs. Although I did hear he had a lad or two with him. Malduin, that is to say.’
‘Two young Fife men. That’s right. Fothaid’s father was blinded and Cathail’s killed in the year King Duncan died. They’ve both been brought up in Ireland and the Bishop has taken them into his household.’
‘And their fathers’ lands?’ Bishop Jon enquired.
‘The King apportioned them between the monastery at Kinrimund and the priory at St Serf’s until the heirs grew from childhood. What happens next will be his decision.’
‘Well, does he want a home for the priest, I would take him with pleasure,’ said Bishop Jon, ‘and no doubt you could find room for the other if called on. D’you still send those terrible cryptograms?’
‘How else would I know what was going on in Cologne?’ said the Prior blandly.
‘I hardly like to suggest,’ said the Bishop. ‘But when my hat is on, you’d hardly notice the notch the Emperor clipped in my ear. Have you heard the news of the Athelings yet? King Edward’s nephew that was exiled to Hungary?’
Prior Tuathal’s clever eyes opened. ‘He’s dead?’
‘He’s frail, but a good stone’s throw from death,’ the Bishop said. ‘His third child, they say, will arrive at any moment, God protect them. And with the Holy Father a prisoner and the Emperor in uncertain health, the situation of that little family must be arousing a host of eloquent prayers this minute. And the heir with only two little girls so far, and no great prospect of life.’
‘You’ve told the King?’ Tuathal said. ‘What did he say?’
‘You could write it without fraying your pen. Pray for a girl, was all he said, to my recollection. He had just heard about Baldric and his party leaving, and was speaking entirely in the vocative. I left before I found myself dispatched to Teviotdale,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘There is a dangerous rising afoot against Duke William in Normandy, and half my lord Osbern’s relatives have gone to the aid of the Duke, the flesh-seeking spears in their hands. My lord Osbern himself is still here.’
‘Until when?’ said Tuathal.
‘Until, no doubt, he sees who is winning. I wish him and his friends no evil,’ said Bishop Jon, shaking down his book-satchel and peering into it, ‘but it’s a difficult thing to make plans for your country with them sitting there, their heads switching from this shoulder to the other, and so sleek you would think it was a cow that licked them all. Do you have a prayer for a caementarius on you? I have to bless this tower before it falls down or the masons perish of liver-rot.’
‘I’m never without one,’ said Tuathal. ‘If I suggest to the King that he spends Christmas at Scone and attends special Masses of Supplication for the continued well-being of his country, would you support me?’
‘He has already proposed it,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘He has, you must agree, a remarkably clear idea of policy, if the topography of God’s Kingdom at times eludes him a trifle. Here is a blessing for bells. It will do admirably. Is there a bell?’
‘I’ll go and look,’ said Tuathal.
* * *
The Masses were held at Christmas, and at Scone instead of the newly finished cathedral at Birsay, for the King did not go to Orkney that winter. They were held in the open, before a portable altar, and three bishops were present, in gold and crimson and purple and white, as well as all the churchmen who could contrive to be there, and several thousand people from Fife and Angus and Lennox and Strathearn and even further away. Afterwards, Thorfinn gave a great feast.
Osbern of Eu and his companions attended, in splendid humour because of the good news the King had brought them from Cumbria.
The King had ridden everywhere that autumn, but he had spent longest with Thor and Dunegal and Leofwine in Cumbria, where he had gleaned the first tidings of Duke William’s victory against his rebel kinsmen.
Everyone knew that Duke William still had his hands full with Anjou and Aquitaine, but a victory was a victory, and the Normans drank deeply that Christmas, but not so deeply, as Osbern cheerfully assured his employer, that they would not be able to defend Scotia against anyone who tried to interfere with it.
‘And if Duke William calls?’ had said Thorfinn calmly.
It was the real danger, and it turned Eochaid cold to hear Thorfinn speak of it openly, as if it amused him. At least the Normans enjoyed the way he dealt with them. Perhaps they knew, as Thorfinn did, that the Pope was learning Greek, there in his imprisonment in Benevento, so that he could the better engage the help of the Eastern Emperor to throw the Normans out of their new lands in Italy. If he ever got out. If the Byzantine Empire would ever bring itself to unite with the Empire of the West.
But Eochaid kept his counsel, as Tuathal did, about everything except what Thorfinn had to know.
Like Tuathal, Eochaid had been in the saddle all autumn, mostly at the King’s side, until he had had to return to his own Scone to prepare for this Christmas.
He had made another visit as well, about which he had not told the King. While in Cumbria, he had obtained leave from Earl Leofric to ride south through Mercia and spend two days in the quiet of Oswestry with Thorfinn’s periglour Sulien, who had travelled from Llanbadarn to meet him.
A young man of twenty-one, Sulien had talked music and manuscripts in Moray with Eochaid. Now, more than twenty years later, the Breton presbyter had lost none of
his grace or his repose. He listened, saying nothing, to all the Prior had to tell him, and, at the end, strolled in silence beside him, his hands lightly clasped at his back.
They had left the church and the low huts behind, and the sun was warm, and the soft air off the hills. Sulien said, ‘You are concerned about Lothian. You are right. But don’t mistrust the King’s judgement. Whatever he did or did not do, Earl Siward was going to make trouble in Lothian. With his kinsmen and the Godwin family hounding him, and Mercia threatening to overwhelm him, he had to extend north, or else clear his rivals out of Northumbria. And no one was going to help him do that. What Thorfinn did was earn a breathing-space, and the right to lodge some sort of defence in the area. Earl Siward can be a nuisance. But, alone, he can’t be a threat to the nation.’
‘I wanted to hear you say that. And the Normans?’
Sulien smiled, walking still. ‘Do you want my expert opinion? I don’t see much of my homeland, but my brother is married into the kindred of Osbern of Eu, and I saw Osbern at Ewias. He’s a good fighting-machine, and honest. I should have invited him, as Thorfinn did, but only time will tell if he was right. It identifies him with the Norman cause and the Norman heir, which becomes a threat if Duke William is successful. On the other hand, if Duke William is successful, Thorfinn has a sponsor as strong as King Canute or the Lady Emma ever was and, one supposes, guaranteed security for Orkney with no Norwegian overlord. How are matters with his wife’s family?’
‘We hear from Denmark from time to time,’ Eochaid said. ‘Finn Arnason holds Halland for King Svein, but his sight is worse, and he is never at court, although he can still fight on shipboard and the young men respect him. His kinsmen in Norway don’t seem to have suffered. His niece Thora has given Harald an heir, and still shares his bed with the Russian. His nephew John has married Earl Siward’s daughter, but there is no sign of an alliance between Earl Siward and Norway. It was what Thorfinn feared.’