An invading army would find no resistance. Two watch-vessels at the mouth of the estuary who would fly, if they were wise. Fifty men left as insurance at Forteviot.
Having taken his strongholds, his wife, and his wealth, such an army had only to march thirty miles south to trap him here, with two thousand enemy mercenaries at his back and Siward before him, triumphant.
Siward, who had done his best to delay. Who had fought only when driven to it, and withdrawn as soon as he could. For whom the news of his ships, far from mortifying, must have signalled the approach of the far greater fleet he was awaiting. For he would know, as the nine men watching him knew, that unless Thorfinn defended the Tay, he was lost. With part of his army or with all his army, Thorfinn had to withdraw.
It crossed his mind that an hour earlier, receiving this news, he could have cut off Siward’s escape from the field and forced him to finish the battle. Instead of seventy dead, it might have cost him five hundred, a thousand, to destroy Siward’s army so that it could neither attack him nor follow him.
But then he could have turned north to the Tay in safety. With a tired army. But with an army twice the size of the one awaiting him.
One hour. So small a margin.
He wondered how long he had been silent. A short time only, for no one had spoken. He said, ‘All right. Over nine hundred have landed at Leven-mouth. Any horses?’
‘None,’ Scandlain said.
‘You’re sure?’
‘My man was quite sure.’
‘And how long ago? Two hours? Tuathal, how many garrons could they pick up in Fife?’
Gillocher broke in. ‘None. Fife is empty. We have all the garrons at Dunblane.’ His voice shook a little.
Thorfinn said, ‘Empty? This army will pass through Markinch and Scoonie. How many garrons could Malduin’s friends hide? A hundred?’
‘Not much more,’ said Tuathal. ‘But I see. If some of the nine hundred got horses, they could ride north ahead of the foot and meet the fleet as it came into the Tay, in time to protect the main landings.’
‘If they have horses,’ Thorfinn said, ‘they’ll be at the Ochils by now, and at Tay side with two hours to spare before the fleet gets into the river. They may take Abernethy, or leave it for their foot. They would certainly have time to get to the river Almond and cut off any interference from the garrisons there at Perth and at Scone, even if they can’t overwhelm them. They’ll probably try to do the same at Forteviot. It’s on the way here.
‘A courier, then, to Forteviot, Scandlain. Of the fifty men at arms there, thirty to get inside Scone, ten to Perth, and the rest to stay with the household. No fighting on the way. No sallies once they get there. Just hold these three strongholds until they are rescued. And the scout to return and tell us what he can find. Two—another man to go quickly and quietly round the burning part of the forest with word for the Normans. My lord Osbern to come here immediately. The rest to round up all the horses they can find and bring them back here, unseen if they can. I take it the signals are lit?’
‘Yes. Tayside knows trouble is coming. My lord,’ said Scandlain, ‘I don’t know if any courier can get to Forteviot before mounted men from the Leven.’
‘I do. He can. And you and he will win this day for us,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Quickly …’
He watched Scandlain go. The courier might even do it. The mercenaries had to get hold of their horses somewhere in Fife, and there were always distractions. Bishop Hrolf said, ‘I’ve lost count. How many landing on Tay?’
‘Thirteen longships, including two guide-ships of Siward’s? About eleven hundred fresh men,’ Thorfinn said. ‘They’ll come on the flood past Earn-mouth but not any further: the banks are too conveniently close for assailants, and we trust there will be assailants. They must, clearly, try to take the main citadels, and especially Scone. Then they should turn south past Forteviot and march against us. By that time, the rest of the army landed at Leven should have reached Tayside by foot and joined with them. A total of two hundred foot and a hundred horse in possession of all central Alba by nightfall, and ready to march south and fall on us tomorrow morning.’
Ferteth said, ‘We could thrash Siward by then.’
‘We could at a price,’ Thorfinn said. ‘We began evenly matched. His losses are small. If we fight now, it will be a fight to a standstill and, no matter who wins, the slaughter will be crippling. If we killed every Northumbrian, we should still have fresh troops coming against us, and Scone and Perth would have fallen.’
He drew a long breath, keeping it clear, keeping it steady, keeping it low. ‘We can’t afford to wait and let the northern army join with Siward. We can’t afford to run north. We couldn’t outdistance Siward. We should have to fight all the way, and arrive too late to save anything. We have to split our force and deal with both invasions. Remember, the one in the north is arriving in stages, beginning with a small group of horsemen from Leven who will be unsupported for at least two hours after they have arrived at the Tay. And we have five hundred horses in the lines over the bridge here.’
‘If you detached five hundred men now and sent them north? What could they do?’ said Malpedar.
‘No: I see,’ said Eochaid. ‘They might get rid of the Leven men, for a start, and help the places already being attacked. And once the ships came, they could hinder the disembarkation and delay the eleven hundred in their march, wherever they may be making for. From Earnmouth to the Almond is eight miles. To Forteviot, ten. I should like to go with them, if I may.’
The Prior got up. He had wiped the blood from the reliquary and only a little remained, stuck in the filigree of its thick little roof-disc. Back in Scone were the embroidered vestments, the golden book-shrines and chalices, the great painted gospels which could be replaced one day, precious though they were. Back in Scone were the monks, Eochaid’s family. And the Stone of Inauguration, upon which the Kings of Alba were enthroned. And the long, jewelled box containing the rod, without roses or leaves, that was the wand of his kingship.
Of all of these, Eochaid was the guardian. Thorfinn said, ‘You and Ferteth and Cormac will go, with five hundred Strathearn men. In a moment, I shall tell you how.’
Cormac of Atholl said, ‘Can you beat Siward with five hundred men gone?’
Thorfinn said, ‘I think we can beat him with two thousand gone, provided the Normans remain. We shall have to. You and your horsemen will be facing four times your numbers by the time the foot-army from Leven has joined up with the eleven hundred from the ships. But less than three hours after that, fifteen hundred footsoldiers of ours could be there, provided they start within the next half-hour.’
Cormac said, ‘They’ll arrive having marched thirty miles.’
‘The Leven army will have come just as far. The ship-borne army will have had five hours of marching and fighting. With your help, and that of the Forteviot men, the main citadels may still be standing. And with what we have left here, we can stop Siward’s army from joining the others.’
Tuathal said, ‘We shall only have two-thirds of Siward’s force. Less. But we can certainly hold them up.’
‘Don’t you see?’ said Bishop Jon. ‘They’ll want to be held up. The longer he thinks he’s pinning us all down here, the better chance, surely, Siward thinks he is giving the fleet to take Perth and Scone. Cormac, O hound of feats, you’ll have to steal those horsemen away the equal of an army of angels for silence.’
‘About that,’ said Thorfinn, ‘I shall have something to tell you. Then I shall speak to the men. Then we shall move. There is no time to say what should be said. But this is a matter for concern, not a matter for despair. Siward is fighting from greed, whereas we fight for our homes. We will win.’
He had not mentioned Dunkeld. No one had mentioned Dunkeld. Dunkeld, which would be attacked: nothing surer. But, first, Scone and Perth had to fall. And twelve river-miles and three hours of marching lay between Scone and Dunkeld, Crinan’s monastery, Cormac’s monastery. Where
Groa was.
‘Bottom pudding!’ said Siward of Northumbria. ‘Do all the cooks come from Bamburgh? Take it to Ligulf and bring me some meat. What d’you see?’
Forne of Skirpenbeck took away the bowl, although that was not his business, and came back with a leg of pork, the burnt seaweed still sticking to it. He said, ‘They’ve got the news, on the other side. Bishop Aethelric saw the King addressing the army, and some sort of movement is starting.’
‘Is it, by God!’ Siward said. He got up, taking the meat, and, setting his teeth in it, walked to the edge of the forest. His cheek-hairs moved as he chewed, and his beard glistened with fat.
He swallowed. ‘Aye. They’re trying to cover it, but they’re mustering. They’re withdrawing men to go north. But how many? What would you do if you were Thorfinn?’
‘Retire to Orkney with my red-haired wife and forget about Alba,’ said Ligulf, strolling up. ‘He’s withdrawing a lot. Look at that. Mind you, I’ve seen better-managed secret dispersals.’
Forne said suddenly, ‘Is he withdrawing a lot? Look more closely.’
Everyone peered. The two Maldredssons came up, and the fool Malduin, who had, however, made all this possible. Siward said, ‘I can see the Normans already in line, and a lot of foot behind the banners and awnings.’
‘A lot of foot, with a lot of spaces between,’ Forne said. ‘It looks a good many at first glance, but I doubt if there are five hundred men there ready to leave. Could Thorfinn be tricking us?’
‘Could Thorfinn be a Norseman?’ said Ligulf. ‘If you think half his army has withdrawn, you’re going to attack him, aren’t you? And what a shock you’re going to get when you find his full army there, all but a hundred or two.’
‘Hence the apparent poor cover. He’s right,’ said Forne. ‘The scouts say it looks at first glance as if thousands are leaving. It’s only five hundred. We shouldn’t attack.’
‘Of course we shouldn’t attack,’ said Siward. ‘So long as you give me something better than bottom pudding, I’m willing to sit here till nightfall if need be.’
‘He’ll try to provoke you,’ said Forne.
‘Personally, it seems,’ Ligulf said. ‘He’s coming himself, a bishop on either side, to address you from mid-field. Or no. Before mid-field and out of bowshot, more’s the pity. I can’t quite hear him, but the gutturals sound very insulting. He seems to be speaking Norse.’
He was speaking Norse, and it was more than insulting. Earl Siward’s tunic creaked with the force of his breathing. Thorfinn had not even troubled to wear his helmet. On either side of the black ridge of his brow, the soot-black plaits were looped, Viking-style, under the leather band of the hla, confining his hair in case his head became bared in battle. His father had been killed in the Brian war when his helmet-buckle had been slashed apart.
He was still speaking. Siward jerked his head, and a hail of arrows and javelins sped rustling from the forest on either side of him and thudded, in sufficient reply, into the ground between himself and Kalv’s nephew by marriage, who had won a kingdom and thought he was no one’s vassal yet.
The King waited a moment and then turned back, his bishops following. Earl Siward made a joke that was barely repeatable, even when changed into Anglo-Saxon, and pushed past Bishop Malduin into the forest, laughing and biting into his pork. It would be entertaining to see what the fellow would try to do next. It would teach him. It would teach him to strut about Lothian and Cumbria, treating Siward like some English underling.
He needed a lesson for that. For the death of Osbern his son, he needed another lesson, which he would receive also.
The next hour was, of course, highly unpleasant. Although there was no question of rising to it, the means of provocation were ingenious. Shield-hung hurdles were brought out into the field, and bowmen and slingshot-throwers behind them began to shred the trees with a descending curtain of missiles. He had to put archers and javelin-throwers of his own up all the climbable trees before he had them on the run, and lost a dozen men to no purpose.
The heat and the gnats were the next burden. As the sun rose into clear skies and burned down on the plain of the Forth, you would say the exposed army opposite would have the worst of it, despite their shields and their awnings.
But there in the open air they escaped the shimmering body of heat from the blaze on the other side of the highway. And since the wind changed, the smoke, once so unwelcome, had drifted north-east; and the armed hosts native to the wood had arrived in their thousands to attack the armed host that was not.
The army became restive. The army wanted to get out of the trees. The army wanted to slake its thirst and, rightly, was not prepared to believe their Earl when he quoted the number of ale-casks destroyed in the fire. A group of men who had come with Leofnoth found a broached cask and began to drag it out of the rear of the wood, and Siward had three of them hanged. He noticed that someone had moved the few horses they had managed to round up, and sent two men to find out where they had been taken. A shout from the front of the wood called him back to the edge of the field, where men were watching a group of the enemy busy with spades on the high ground to his left, near the wood where they stationed the Normans. Supervising the diggers was a large man he recognised as the Irish-Scandinavian bishop from Saxony whose name be believed to be Hrolf.
Forne said, ‘They’re diverting the stream to come through the wood.’
‘Then shake your fist at them,’ said Earl Siward, slapping his neck. ‘For, by God, they don’t know it, but they couldn’t do us a better service. I’d send out and help them if it wouldn’t spoil everything.’
It was only a little after that, and before the damming had got very much further, that Ligulf said, ‘Siward?’
The Earl of Northumbria objected to the way Ligulf addressed him. He said, ‘Well?’
‘Send a man up to look at that part of the army,’ Ligulf said, ‘Is it as thick on the ground as it was?’
His best climber was standing by. Earl Siward snapped his fingers, and the man darted off. Siward said, ‘Where? I see. They’ve shifted them.’
‘Where to?’ said Ligulf. ‘Look along the line.’
‘It looks the same to me,’ Siward said. The banners are all there.’
‘They would be,’ said Ligulf. ‘Here’s your man.’
‘Well?’ said Siward. Could Thorfinn be tricking us? Could Thorfinn be a Norseman?
‘My lord Earl,’ said the climber. His chest was heaving. ‘The men on the right wing and the men on the left have lost half the ranks behind them, although they’re spread out and from the front it looks just the same. My lord, fifteen hundred men must have gone.’
‘What?’ said Siward of Northumbria.
‘What a pity,’ said Ligulf his brother-in-law. ‘And we have wasted all this time resisting provocation, which was just what they wanted. But now, my dear Siward, I think the time has come to be provoked.’
‘God blind him!’ Siward said, ‘Is Thorfinn still there?’
‘Yes, my lord. I could see his helmet,’ said the scout.
Fifteen hundred men on their way to the Tay. No, two thousand altogether, including the horsemen who had already left. But fifteen hundred whom he had time to catch, provided he finished this business quickly. Against him, after all, was a force now only two-thirds of his in size, and lacking the Normans.
He said, ‘Prepare the men to give battle. To form up as before, but this time quietly. This time we shall surprise them. This time, they will not dream that we are coming until they hear the trumpet and see us marching upon them. In half an hour we shall be riding north, victors.’
In the event, however, the victorious half-hour expired and Siward of Northumbria was not even aware of it. For the army of Alba, it seemed, was not at all unprepared for the sudden emergence of the enemy from the wood and only waited politely, as before, for the troublesome stream to be crossed, together with a number of novel earthworks of Bishop Hrolf’s devising, before throwing i
tself in neat but different formation against Siward’s lines.
In the van, as before, flashed the white-and-gold helmet of Thorfinn, towards which Siward spent all his great strength in fighting. It was with anger and astonishment, therefore, that he found, confronting that royal figure at last, that the face under the helmet was the minatory one of Bishop Hrolf.
He would have had no hesitation in sending the Bishop back to Saxony by celestial transport, save that at that moment the Normans emerged again from the wood.
He had seen them leave with his own eyes. Ligulf had seen them, too. It was all Ligulf’s fault.
The half-hour went by, but neither army, killing and being killed, was aware of it.
Under the same sun, Thorfinn of Orkney and Alba had crossed the river and was riding north with a handful of men and a fresh horse collected, with all else he required, at Dunblane. He led them round the range of the Ochils and swept through the strath down which the river Allan poured on its way to the Forth far behind him. In due course, he would meet with the Earn, flowing north and east in the opposite direction to add its waters to those of the Tay eight miles east of Scone.
Also behind him were fifteen hundred of his own men on foot, with Bishop Jon leading them.
Ahead, it was easy to see where Eochaid and the five hundred horsemen had already passed, leaving churned earth and dung on either side of the cart-wide stones of the road. All the steadings the King went by were empty, although hearth-fires still burned; and there was no one at the little monastery of Dunning. Eochaid would have taken the monks with him for safety, and those of Muthill as well. Or perhaps they had gone with their people to comfort them.
Then, just short of his hall at Forteviot, the King came across the first group of injured. Not men-at-arms, but a lad of eleven and another not much older, supporting an elderly man. He stopped.
They recognised him, or perhaps the gold band round his helmet. The man sank to his knees, but the boys were too excited to care. A group of thirty horsemen had come against Forteviot from the east an hour before, and had tried to set fire to it with burning arrows, and strike down the defenders with slingshot and spears. They were getting the best of it, too, for there were only serving-people left and a few armed men, since the rest went off north with the courier. But then my lord Prior of Scone had appeared like a miracle, with a great army behind him, and had killed every horseman. You could see them for yourself, past the next bit of wood. And they had been asked if they wanted to stay in the fort, since more soldiers had now been put into it, but they thought, since they couldn’t fight, they would rather go and hide with their people.