King Hereafter Read online

  The boy said, ‘I have news.’ Behind him, the ship was emptying. Perhaps sixty men, well dressed and armed, gazing about them, jumped ashore or came down the gangplank and ranged themselves behind their master. Some of the faces were familiar: men who had left the islands in the last years to take service with Thore Hund, or King Canute and the chief of his housecarls. Two or three stayed aboard, with their weapons, and Thorkel realised, from a sudden thudding, that they had also brought horses. The boy said, raising his voice, ‘I have news. Can you hear me?’

  His voice rolled and boomed, even in that open space, as if it came from the cauldrons of the underworld, and along the beach, men replied with the voices of gulls. The boy stood, taller than any man there, and said, ‘The war in Norway is ended. The men of Trøndelagen have won. King Olaf is dead. His half-brother Harald and Rognvald the son of Earl Brusi have fled back to Novgorod. King Canute is ruler of Norway, and I am defender of all Orkney and ruler of all but the isles of the north. Praise King Canute!’

  The cheer that rose might be held to praise King Canute. Certainly the crewmen from the longship, joining in, might have had that impression. Thorkel said, ‘King Canute defeated King Olaf?’

  ‘The men of Nídarós defeated King Olaf,’ the boy said. ‘The news reached us at Vik as we were preparing to sail to do battle.’

  Thorkel Amundason said, ‘So King Canute took no part in the battle?’ The boy and the men behind him bore no marks, not even a groove from an arrow.

  The boy said, ‘King Canute fought and won this battle without moving from Winchester. This battle was decided not with iron, but gold.’ He raised his voice. ‘Is there a welcome, then, for your Earl and his men, returned with news of victory?’

  There was. Amid the roaring, amid the preparations to sweep the Earl and his men to the great hall at Sandwick, Thorkel Amundason stood back and said almost nothing, and on the march to the west, over the turf and cracked skins of the stone slabs, he let his father and kinsmen move to the Earl’s side while he walked with his friends. Then, during the feasting that followed, he poured ale and wine into a stomach unfilled since morning until he had to leave the benches and empty himself under the moon, where the scythed hay rustled with voles in the in-fields, and a sheep moved cropping, and the salt tang and the hush of the sea drew him away from the heat and the noise, above the beach and along the high ground from where, looking over the ocean, he could discern the slivers of light from Kolbein’s steading on Copinsay and, ahead, the glimmering fire on Deerness, a joy-beacon, dying now on the wind, to celebrate the death and defeat of a king.

  If King Olaf had fallen, then Finn Arnason and all his brothers, it must be expected, would have died with him. So for Thorkel Amundason there was no kinship on either side of the sea that was not subject to the whim of a child: a child aged twenty-one years, being rocked in a cradle of gold by King Canute, his new foster-father.

  The child’s voice, just behind him and rumbling low as the breakers, said, ‘I used to climb on Copinsay when I was small. It looks quiet in the moonlight.’

  ‘It would make a good defence post,’ Thorkel said. He did not turn. He had made sure, he thought, that no man’s eye was on him as he left.

  Thorfinn said, ‘There is a boat down there. Do you suppose we could go over?’

  The boat was his father’s. ‘It would only hold five or six,’ Thorkel said. ‘But call them out and see.’

  He heard his foster-son move, and saw him against the sea, strolling to an outcrop of rock. He hitched himself onto it. Even so, his height was abnormal. The boy said, ‘You have lost none of your cousins. Finn has gone back to Novgorod, where the child is.’

  Thorkel said, ‘I was wondering.’ Enlightenment began to come. ‘And Kalv?’ he found himself asking.

  The boy said, ‘You know their habit. They always divided the family.’

  ‘So Kalv fought against King Olaf,’ Thorkel said.

  ‘So Kalv killed King Olaf,’ the boy said.

  The fire on Deerness rose and fell, dusky red in the night, like the fire King Olaf had lit at Egge before he burned the god Thor and killed Ølve and gave his widow to Kalv. The boy had taken the dragon from his prow before landing today. The great monsters with their tongues of smoke and eyes of mountain-fire must not gaze on the land, lest the earth spirits be afraid and blight the bere in the field and the lamb in the womb. Thorkel Amundason said, ‘There is a woman waiting for you at Duncansby. An old woman called Fridgerd.’

  ‘Her foster-son is Arnór Thordarson the song-maker,’ the boy said. ‘He is in the hall there. She is waiting for him.’

  Thorkel said, ‘They call her a wise-woman.’

  ‘… And I took the dragon from the prow,’ the boy said. ‘Call it superstition. Call it a requirement to look both ways, like Kalv. He wanted so very much to be viceroy of Norway. Canute will still appoint his own son, and Kalv will take his money and grumble. But there is no heir to King Olaf but the bastard son Magnús in Russia, and Magnús is six. You and I, surely, could manage that boat?’

  Thorkel Amundason was empty as a dog-bladder and, ten minutes before, had walked chill and shaking in an unfriendly world. Thorkel said, ‘Why not?’ and ran down to the beach with his foster-son and pushed him brawling into the surf and was pushed in turn before they got the thing launched and across the channel of smooth, swelling sea.

  Copinsay was a steep, turfy island girded with bird-ledges. They ran the boat up the shore, but avoided the farm. Kolbein had been one of the glittering retinue who had disembarked from the longships today. There would only be old women and babies in his house at this moment. So instead they climbed up past the barns and out to the right, to the south-eastern rim of the island, where the cliffs were. Round the rock-foot, the sea creamed in the dark, and the seals beaded the waves, rolling like puppies. The boy sang to them, long, bawdy songs, and the seals sang back, and Thorkel tripped on an old eider nest and had his hand scythed in a hole by a sea-parrot and laughed so much that his stomach went into spasms and had to be treated from a leather flask Thorfinn produced. They emptied the flask, and then went climbing.

  The fowling-cliffs ran for a mile and were made of red flagstones, split vertically into geos and notches and chimneys, and layered across like a shield-maker’s stackyard. From their green tops to the sea-shattered rocks at their base was a fall of two hundred feet. Thorkel, too, had spent summer days there with his friends, filling the egg-basket at the end of a rope, or lying at dusk while Kari silenced the guard-bird and all the slumbering cormorants were seized and throttled and thrown into the boats far below. He had never come unroped this way at night before, full of drink, behind a skipping black shadow that declaimed Odin-verses in Norse and sang love-songs in Gaelic and drinking-songs in Norman-French and Saxon and Wendish and raised the kittiwakes and the auks and the gulls and the fulmars in a screaming white cloud round their heads.

  He enjoyed it. He said, clinging inwards to the sheaves of dark rock, ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘Are you?’ said the boy; and swung himself up to the clifftop. Thorkel slid down and sat where he was. When he opened his eyes, the boy was beside him again, with a stick in his hands. His fingers, spread under one end, supported and displayed a fine circle of black. When Thorkel touched it, he recognised the thin horsehair noose of the fowler. He remembered the horses on board and realised it had shared a pouch with the flask. A man of forethought, his young foster-son.

  Then the boy wriggled along the thin ledge and began to work his way north, and Thorkel, in a bland, confused way, followed him as best he could, but couldn’t remember the history of the stalking, the moments of trapping, or even the climb back to the top with a fat black-and-white auk in the breast of his shirt.

  It was the boy who singed and spitted the birds and roasted them on a little fire he made in the lee of the cliff. Thorkel ate his down to the bones, and half Thorfinn’s as well. The taste of fish-flavoured chicken brought back his childhood, and he talked a l
ot, and the boy listened. It was not until they had picked their way down to the shore, past the farmstead, now quite dark, that Thorkel’s head began to clear and he realised how tired he was, and a number of other things as well. The boy said, ‘Sit in the stern. I’ll row,’ and for a moment it appeared vital to refuse the service: to assert his leadership: to reverse the irreversible.

  But he was too tired. He sat back and watched the smooth pull of the long, disjointed arms and Thorfinn’s tangled black hair blowing in the sea-wind from the east. The moon had gone, and in its place was the grey northern half-dark of summer. Thorkel said, ‘You’re not a hostage any more, are you? Does Canute expect you to go back?’

  ‘Hardly,’ the boy said. He added, his voice patient, ‘King Olaf is dead, and I have back two-thirds of Orkney.’

  Thorkel found his eyes were wet. He could not think why. But he was hardly surprised when some time later, after no one had spoken at all, the boy said, looking past him at the sea, and the south sky above Alba, ‘I wonder what Gillacomghain is planning to do now?’

  Thorkel closed his eyes and shut out the future.

  The next day, when he rose and went out to the yard, the first news they shouted to him, above the noise of the geese, was that the dragon-ship had gone.

  It was from a fishing-boat, late in the afternoon, that he heard that she had sailed north, calling at a few of the islands before beaching at Westray with her dragon-head still on the prow. Earl Brusi had been at Westray that week, looking to his farms, and it was said that the half-brothers had had a short interview, in public, at which not very much had been drunk, and the dragon-ship’s crew had stayed aboard the ship except for Arnór the song-maker.

  They said that Brusi understood that King Olaf was dead, and that, being now a vassal of King Canute’s, he could safely leave the defence of all the Orkneys, and hence the ship-levies and raising of war-bands, to Earl Thorfinn. As before, the produce of the northernmost isles would be his own, apart from any tribute exacted by Norway. But Thorfinn, who knew the regent Svein, King Canute’s young son and his mother, had confidence that no unreasonable demands would be made, if indeed any were put forward at all.

  From Thorfinn when he returned to Sandwick, with the dragon-head doffed, his foster-father heard almost nothing of this event, the boy being occupied with plans for taking up his residence across seas at Duncansby in Caithness, taking with him his dragon-ship, which, it appeared, had been a gift from King Canute. Two-thirds of the men had elected to stay with him. The rest were returning home to Norway and Denmark, well rewarded.

  The Earl wished to know, quickly, the prospects for the harvest on both Orkney and Caithness and its southern parts, and about the state of the flocks and the hay crop. He thought he should be told about the families in all the settlements, and what sons there were of fourteen and over. He had forgotten the names of Thorkel’s council men and would think it impolite not to know their ages and history. Who were the craftsmen these days? Where were the best ships being built? Were the markets still in the same place, and at the same time of year? What weapons did Thorkel have stored? What axes and spears, what swords and arrows and bows? How many men would have fighting-coats: jackets of plated leather; tunics of metal rings? When Thore Hund killed King Olaf, said Thorfinn, Thore Hund wore a reindeer coat sewn and charmed by the Lapps, so that the King’s sword-edge only raised dust from it.

  ‘I thought,’ said Thorkel stiffly, ‘that my cousin Kalv Arnason was the King-killer.’

  ‘He took him in the neck,’ said his foster-son, ‘at the same time as Thore Hund’s spear took the King through the belly. They could not say, it seems, which wound the King died of. If you are to be steward of Orkney for me, you will need a better hall, away from your father’s. We shall require timber.’

  ‘That is in short supply,’ said Thorkel briefly. It was a long time since he had had to make an accounting.

  ‘Then we shall have to get more. Outside Norway, the best,’ said Thorfinn, ‘I suppose, still comes from Moray?’

  For ships, for shelter, for defences, they would need wood. He had always felled it in the south and the west, where it could be brought up to the mouth of the Ness. But the best and straightest trees, yes, were in Moray, and the rolling spates of the Spey would bring them riding out on their rafts to the sea. He said, ‘You will challenge Gillacomghain now? In the autumn?’

  ‘I shall cut my trees now, in the autumn,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And build my stockades and my ships through the winter. And be ready in the spring, when Malcolm and Canute and Gillacomghain have all decided what to do, and Gillacomghain challenges me in return.’

  Thorkel did not go, either, on that timber raid, but he heard about it from the crewmen who brought him two shiploads from Duncansby: the smell of the resin came to him over the water as he stood on the jetty and watched them. They had felled the trees at night, in the first of the autumn rain that was to sweep across Europe and rot the barley and oats in the fields, so that the full barns of Caithness, of his provident storing, would pay for their own defence, and something over.

  The Moraymen were farmers who raised flocks and grain-patches and fished, and had built no warships since the days of the great northern mormaers, the forebears of Gillacomghain and his uncle Findlaech, who had roved the seas of the north and ruled from Thurso south to the mountains of Mar.

  Thorfinn and his woodsmen had loaded the timber and got it out as the rains fell and the land dissolved into quagmire behind them. Then, before Gillacomghain could be warned, far less get keel into water to follow them, the laden ships had set off for the north.

  They offloaded at Cromarty and Tarbatness, at Helmsdale and Wick and Duncansby. There was oak, beech, and spruce; but, best of all, the long, straight lengths of pine needed for mast and for keel. They would cut more from their own woods, and they would buy more from Norway. But Gillacomghain had supplied his cousin by adoption with the nucleus of his new fleet.

  The winter passed like no other Thorkel had known. This time, it was Thorfinn, not himself, who made the rounds of the district leaders on the horse he had brought from the south, with the long stirrups chequered with silver and copper, and a cloak lined with marten fur. His earl’s band went with him, because he had mouths to feed and his dues were waiting, in meal and in butter, in malt and fish and in meat, to be eaten or brought back for storing. All the talk was of defence: how to preserve their homesteads, their flocks and barns from the passing raider and their young men and girls from the slavemen; how to fight off the dispossessed looking for good land to settle on.

  He sent to Ireland before the winter closed in, and brought back threescore half-grown youths and girls of mixed Norse-Irish blood to work in the fields, in the farmhouse, on the shore, so that, no matter what the men of the house might be needed for, the work of producing food, of weaving and building and tending, would go on. He did all that his father Earl Sigurd had done for his people—or for himself, if you looked at it that way. For, no matter how much a man might wish to spend his days at his leisure, lying in his fleeces in winter with all the girls he wanted and an ale-flask at his elbow; or in summer sailing through the blue waters, hearing the sweet song of the axe; fighting one’s friends and one’s enemies and drinking and telling over long tales with them both, these would be nothing without hard work and vigilance: nothing but a cold hearth and an empty quern, a spear through your throat, and your girl in another man’s blankets.

  Of women in his foster-son’s life Thorkel had heard no less or no more than of any other youth of his age. But of marriage alliances he had heard nothing. Tackled, Thorfinn was practical. It seemed to be his chief characteristic.

  ‘In England, to tell you the truth, being unattached was my greatest profession.’

  ‘And now?’ Thorkel said.

  ‘And now, of course, the land demands sons. What do you think? Between them, Crinan and Malcolm and Duncan have closed Northumbria and Cumbria against me. A Saxon marriage would be no
nsense. About a Norman or a Breton one I am less certain. I have no intention of stretching my interests to the east, so I see no purpose in marrying in Norway, saving your presence. The Sudreyar, the western islands, might produce someone, except where my stepfather Crinan has interests. Perhaps best of all, there is Ireland. There are Irish blood and Irish tongues through all Caithness, and older stock still in Orkney. And how conveniently near it would be to south-west Alba, were we to find a reason for taking to the sea.’

  ‘Who in Ireland?’ Thorkel said. They were speaking beside the new hall Thorfinn was building by the haven at Wall, in Orkney, and he was cold and wet from a day in the saddle, and hoarse with answering questions. His name, he noticed, had changed nowadays. He was not Thorkel Amundason to anyone, but Thorkel Fóstri, Foster-father.

  ‘I don’t know—yet,’ said his foster-son. ‘I think I shall ask Eachmarcach again.’

  And the next thing that Thorkel heard, he was off, in a spell of quiet seas in December, and did not come back until just before the January feast. All Thorkel could glean was that he had been to Tiree and to Ireland and had stayed some time in each place. So far as he could learn, the matter of marriage, if explored at all, had reached no point of conclusion.

  In the spring, skirmishing began on frontiers between Moray and Caithness, and the district leaders, stocked with weapons and good earth and stockade defences and well primed on how to support one another, beat off the inroads with little difficulty and no loss beyond a weak cow or two and some hacked limbs. It was perhaps Gillacomghain testing his strength. It was in any case just what the border men on both sides had always done after the rigours of the winter, until the spring plenty or the spring voyages brought laden tables again.

  Kalv Arnason visited Orkney. Thorkel heard a boat had come over from Duncansby and found the crew in Skeggi’s house: he heard Kalv’s voice raised in some tale of disaster before he lifted the latch. When he went in, Kalv stopped speaking. He looked cocky as ever, but there was a nervousness about him that had not been there before. He was soon picking up the thread of his story: how he had called at Duncansby to tell Earl Thorfinn what the new rulers of Norway wanted from him in tribute, and how Earl Thorfinn had told him that he was surprised to hear young Svein had expectations from him, and that he would be quite pleased to listen to him if he came here himself.