King Hereafter Read online

  ‘Which, being a child,’ Kalv said starkly, ‘he is hardly likely to do, or his mother King Canute’s lesser wife either. Don’t you have any say these days in your foster-son’s doings? You know, if he doesn’t, that four of us fought on King Olaf’s side. If Canute or his son don’t get what they want out of Orkney, we are the ones who will suffer.’

  ‘Surely not,’ Thorkel said. He sat down on the bench, and after a bit Kalv sat as well. Someone gave him an ale-cup. ‘Whatever the rest did for King Olaf, you were the one who dispatched him. I hear you looked after Finn and the rest after the battle. How is Finn?’

  ‘In good health. Back at Ørland,’ Kalv said. ‘My brothers couldn’t wait to escape from the tainted purlieus of Egge, once they were all better. You heard Finn tried to kill me after Olaf went down? Flung a knife at me and called me a nithing and an oath-breaker.’

  ‘Finn believes in the White Christ,’ said Thorkel. ‘And I hear some very strange tales about that.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Kalv. ‘It has become a matter of treason to talk about the black afternoon and the failed crops as if they happened in every country and not just in Nídarós. There will be miracles at the grave very soon, mark my words. And it your idiot foster-son holds back his taxes, I shall be hanged for a devotee of the All-Father. So will he, I shouldn’t wonder. Who’s the old woman?’

  Thorkel had been surprised, too, by the number of Icelanders in Thorfinn’s household. ‘You had better speak respectfully of Arnór’s foster-mother,’ he said. ‘Second sight is a gift common to every indigent elder in Iceland.’

  ‘I am told that when this one talks, Thorfinn listens,’ Kalv said. ‘You had better put it into her head that he will have to manage his affairs with more tact or we shall all have black afternoons, whatever the sun may be doing. Has it escaped his attention, do you think, that Gillacomghain is married to an Arnmødling as well?’

  Skeggi, who was not an Arnmødling, said, ‘Well, she’d better look out. A godly deputation has just come from Gillacomghain to Thorfinn. He is to send to Alba the tribute for his grandfather’s Caithness or he will receive a call from Gillacomghain, the official collector.’

  ‘What?’ said Kalv.

  Thorkel lifted his pensive gaze from Skeggi and, turning to Kalv, made the best of it. ‘Gillacomghain wants to take over Caithness, and has got backing from the south to try and do it this way, by claiming tribute. Thorfinn won’t pay, and Gillacomghain will take the excuse to invade and get rid of him. Don’t repine. Your niece Ingibjorg may find herself queen of the north.’

  ‘Margaret,’ said Kalv. ‘Everybody’s wife is getting called Margaret these days. And I suppose Thorfinn will let himself be pushed out, just like that? What if he fights back and takes Moray?’

  Thorkel looked shocked. ‘Is it likely?’ he said.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Kalv. ‘But you don’t want him over here in Orkney, do you? Tell him to pay up. Everyone has to. Everyone is a vassal to somebody.’

  ‘You tell him,’ Thorkel said.

  NINE

  HE INVASION CAME in the summer: an army of men from the south led by the lord Gillacomghain, and those men of Moray whose homes lay under his rule, and others who had owned land or had kinsfolk in the north, in those parts once ruled by the forebears of Findlaech his late uncle. There were also among them, it was said, men who did not live in Moray at all, but who came from further south and west. But if Duncan or his father sent them, they kept quiet about it.

  Findlaech had been respected as well as feared. There were enough disaffected Moraymen in the south to make sure that good warning reached Caithness of what Gillacomghain was about, and enough divided loyalties in Gillacomghain’s army to make sure that devastation wouldn’t follow behind it. The beacons flared up through the north in plenty of time for Thorkel to set sail with his levies from Orkney.

  Perhaps Gillacomghain saw their sails turn into the mouth of the Oykel. Without doubt his scouts, casting ahead as they crossed the Ness and worked their way north, brought back word of the landings, and then news of the army already mustered and waiting in Caithness. The army that proved exactly how Thorfinn had been spending his time in the Western Isles and in Ireland.

  Even Thorkel, when he saw the tents and the numbers of men armed and waiting, felt ashamed that war had now come to this: mercenaries brought in with a Saxon king’s money, instead of war fought in the old, heroic way, leader against leader and king against king. The loser died where he stood, as was right: he stood to gain most, and therefore lost all. And the men who had fought well on both sides went back to their farms and found another to protect them. As had happened to King Olaf and the Trøndelagers.

  For a while there was nothing between the two armies but wading-birds in the marshland, and the scouts. Then Gillacomghain’s army turned and went back.

  Thorkel went to his foster-son’s tent and said, ‘Next time. Next time, where will the money come from? Canute’s past bribes won’t last for ever.’

  Arnór the song-maker said, ‘There won’t be a next time,’ showing that he knew as much as any skald ever did, for all the silver rings on his arms. He was not dressed, Thorkel noticed, for fighting.

  ‘There will be a next time, and we shall have enough money,’ said Thorfinn. ‘You haven’t heard that Gillacomghain had a nephew with him today? He hoped to plant him in Caithness. The boy’s father, I’m told, is in business with Crinan.’

  ‘So the church of Dunkeld is about to establish an outpost in Caithness?’ Thorkel said.

  ‘The church of Dunkeld in the shape of its abbot,’ Thorfinn said, ‘is of an adventurous turn of mind that likes to set up its tables and open its books anywhere where there may be a profit to be made. I am merely making a point. If there is any profit to be made out of Caithness, or indeed out of Orkney, I am going to make it.’

  He did, too, employing the ships that carried the mercenaries home to bring back wine from Dublin which he sold to Haarek of Tjotta in exchange for a shipload of skins, with some bear furs and walrus ivories. Some of the walrus skins he had spiral-cut for ships’ ropes and kept, because it made the best gear in the cold. The rest he sold in Tiree, and the profit came back in its own weight of money and hacksilver.

  Thorkel Fóstri kept quiet and did, mostly, what he was told. In August, the news came that the late King Olaf was now a saint and his tomb at Nídarós the undisputed fount of miraculous healing. Kalv did not make a return visit, either that autumn or the following spring. Thore Hund, on the contrary, showed a lively interest in sharing the Lapp trade with Haarek and Thorfinn, and was to be seen often at Duncansby, which was more than could be said for his stocky son Siward, now well established in northern England at York.

  In after years, Thorkel was to think of this interval after Thorfinn’s homecoming as of the winter months of planning that went towards a long voyage a-viking. In all that time, he never saw his foster-son fight, or do anything other than work like a farm-manager or a usurer among his tenants or his associates on land or on sea. The boy was twenty-one years old when it began, and twenty-three when it ended and the vessel was launched, in bloodshed as the old gods demanded.

  In that year, mocked and baffled, Gillacomghain applied for aid to the south, for the swordsmen and spearmen he would need to defeat this ungainly cuckoo, this cousin by marriage who sat in the north and defied his elders. Soon, if no one checked him, this half-Norse seaman might take it into his head to menace them all: himself, old King Malcolm in the south, and the prince Duncan, who ought to be looking towards his own future but who seemed only concerned, like his grandfather, with wealthy saints and their pickings.

  The aid arrived in the form of the eminent merchant and moneyer Crinan, father of Duncan of Cumbria. My lord Crinan, making one of his regular visits to his lucrative abbey of Dunkeld, turned north out of the rivermouth afterwards and, from the monks’ house at Brechin, summoned Gillacomghain south to confer with him. Gillacomghain came, with an armed escort large
r than might have been accounted polite, and Brechin sheltered them both while they talked, below the pencil-tower of the Irishmen and its irritating bell-signals, rattling down spaced on the wind.

  Worse even than that was the high, continuous voice of Gillacomghain’s son outside the window. Luloecen was the only child he had managed to beget on Finn Arnason’s daughter, and the boy was too valuable to leave where some friend of Findlaech could lay hold of him. The Arnason girl he could leave anywhere. If she got a child from some bedding, it couldn’t be his, and he would be quite entitled to hand her back to her family, once he saw what way the wind was blowing in Norway. Gillacomghain didn’t see how you could overlook the fact that her uncle had killed the only Norwegian anyone had ever thought worth canonising. Canute might not like that.

  This man Crinan, who looked like a saint himself with his long, soft brown beard and large eyes, thought that King Canute would not hold that against Gillacomghain. He said it was well known that the men of North Norway were always ready to throw out a king, whether it was Olaf or Canute, and that a young man who found himself in as strong a position as Earl Thorfinn, with Caithness and most of Orkney under him, might well be considered a natural ally.

  If Earl Thorfinn were to hold Moray as well, then King Canute would feel things had gone too far. He was sure, said Crinan, that King Malcolm his late wife’s father felt the same. Not, of course, that attack would be easy. It was a matter of distance. The domains of King Malcolm and, of course, those of King Canute lay a very long way from Caithness. His own abbey of Dunkeld, he had no need to point out, had no men to support it other than a steward and those who worked the fields for the monks. Had Gillacomghain a plan?

  Gillacomghain said that he believed it was for King Malcolm and the lord Crinan to promulgate a plan, given that they agreed that the Earl of Caithness should henceforth be his sister’s son Maddan rather than King Malcolm’s grandson Thorfinn of Orkney. As everyone knew, he had no resources to match those of Thorfinn. His brother Malcolm had left him nothing. And his wife’s father Finn Arnason had offered only a hornful of silver for dowry, and that had been spent on the last expedition.

  The lord Crinan, who had the gift of unlimited patience, and time to exert it in, heard him out to the end and then said, ‘What you need is a fleet. My son Maldred has an uncle who will supply one for you.’

  Gillacomghain did not care that the uncle in question was Carl the son of Thorbrand of York. All he needed to hear was that the fellow was rich, and had a trading-fleet, and could put twenty ships into the water at Berwick which could land an army anywhere on the coast of Caithness.

  ‘How big an army?’ said Gillacomghain, walking up and down with his sword banging in his excitement. ‘It depends how big an army. Last time, this child potentate mobilised the whole of Ireland—the whole of Ireland, I tell you. That’s the kind of money he has.’

  Crinan’s long robes stood on their furred hems on the beaten earth under his heels. ‘Large enough, I believe,’ he said. ‘Large enough to send him running for Orkney. Unless he is young enough to want to stand and fight.’

  Gillacomghain stood still. ‘You don’t suppose I’m going to take the north coast and hold it while he sits like a madadh allaidh, like a wild dog in his earldom, grinning at me over the water? He has to be killed, and Caithness conquered. I would say Orkney as well, save that I know Canute will have that for Norway.’

  ‘Then if you want to trap him,’ said Crinan, ‘you will have to block his back door as well. Land an army in the south of Caithness, and another in the north, and seal off the havens with Carl’s shipping. Thorfinn has only five vessels, they tell me, at Duncansby.’

  ‘His watch will see the fleet coming,’ said Gillacomghain. ‘If he has fears of facing it, he will make off for the north and Orkney before we could get there.’

  ‘His watch will see half the fleet coming,’ said Crinan. ‘And he will either elect to stay and fight such a small force wherever it may land, or make for the north and try to escape, as you say. He won’t see the other ships till they arrive, because we shall send them straight north from Buchan Ness, so far out to sea that he can have no warning until it is too late. Then they will draw in to round Duncansby Head, destroy his vessels, and hold his own coast against him. Carl will do that. You and Maddan will land with the first ships and, if you are offered no battle, march north until he is contained between Carl’s army and yours. I am no campaigner,’ said the Abbot Crinan, crossing his robe over his waist and rising to his full height, ‘but that seems to me to offer some prospect of success.… Your son seems to disagree.’

  The howls of resistance outside made conversation all but impossible. Nevertheless, Gillacomghain laughed. ‘Whatever he is refusing,’ he said, ‘it is not the kingdom of the north, and the long life and glory this day’s work will bring to us all. Your plan, my lord, is all I could hope for. Set a time for it: that is all I can ask.’

  Outside, he found the child had quietened: a young monk had set him apart from his nurse and was sitting cross-legged beside him, his hand at the boy’s waist. The monk looked at Gillacomghain and the man from York and smiled and said to the child, ‘Look: who is that?’

  ‘Macdowall,’ said the child. He spoke very clearly, for three.

  ‘No. Look again,’ said the monk. ‘Who is the small man?’

  ‘Kali Hundison,’ said the child.

  The monk laughed. ‘No. It is your father. The nurse says it is your father,’ he said. ‘What is your name, my strange boy?’

  The eyes, a clear, empty blue, took hold of his. ‘Luloecen,’ said the child. ‘Luloecen it was. Who are you?’

  For a moment, he could hardly remember, looking into those immense, clear blue eyes, who he was or why he had called at this monastery. Then he said, ‘My name is Sulien,’ and rose to his feet, still looking.

  ‘I know,’ said the child, and tugged his nurse’s skirts to be lifted, and went off after his father without a backward glance.

  * * *

  The Abbot of Llanbadarn said, ‘I know, my lady. It is a very strange message. Shipwrecked on his way to Ireland. On the east coast of Alba.’

  ‘Only Sulien,’ said Alfgar, ‘could be shipwrecked on the east coast while travelling from the west coast further west. What about that Irish monastery he was going to study at?’

  ‘He says that Earl Thorfinn has arranged for him to study at St Drostan’s instead,’ said his mother Godiva. ‘I suspect the sound of St Drostan’s. If there is more than one elderly hermit at this St Drostan’s, I shall be surprised. Alfgar, did it seem to you that Sulien and Thorfinn were much attracted to one another when they met? You remember that dreadful race on the oars?’

  ‘I wish they would hold it again,’ Alfgar said. ‘And next time I should leave my lord Duncan of Alba to drown. No, I remember no meeting of souls, but it’s possible. Sulien likes nearly everybody, and Thorfinn is one to recognise worth when he sees it. He got on well with you. And everyone knows how he got on with the Lady Emma.’

  ‘I don’t know whether that’s an indication of character or cunning or merely endurance,’ Godiva said. ‘But it certainly does show that he knows what is good for him. All the same, I don’t want Sulien harmed, or I should never have … That is, Earl Thorfinn seems to have asked him to stay. The message is certainly odd: even devious.’

  ‘Everything is devious about Thorfinn,’ said Alfgar. ‘Including the fact that he has offered the Icelanders, for a money advance, large tracts of standing timber in Moray that don’t even belong to him. You know he has laid the Western Isles under him.’

  ‘It’s a good phrase,’ said Godiva. ‘Does it mean something?’

  ‘It means,’ said Alfgar, ‘that he has reminded them that he expects to collect tribute from them in the same way that his late uncle did, and that when they forget, he sends a boat over to burn a few steadings until they remember. He’s got a cousin to manage it for him, they say.’

  ‘Moray,’ sai
d Godiva thoughtfully. She realised that the Abbot had dropped out of the conversation. ‘Really,’ said the Lady of Mercia, ‘I can barely follow the import system of Lichfield, never mind the Western Isles, but I expect the church is quite expert in all this. How very good of you, my lord Abbot, to come to Chester yourself. And no doubt you will be writing to Sulien and giving him your news. Perhaps,’ said the Lady of Mercia, ‘if I can find a clerk who is not too busy, which isn’t likely, you would take a message to Sulien from me as well? We must not lose sight of that charming young man.’

  ‘Which one?’ said Alfgar; and laughed when his mother landed a kick on his ankle.

  As with any battle, the waiting beforehand was the worst of it.

  In spite of the heat outside and the blinding flash of the sea, none of the five boat-companies could bear to stay inside the high, dark hall in Thurso where Thorfinn sat with those of his household who had not been sent away.

  All the old people of Thurso had gone by now, and all the women and children. Through the low passes and the broad farmlands that led north from Moray, all that was valuable had been hidden and all who could not fight had gone to safety while Gillacomghain’s army came marching up from the south. And now those who were left were still waiting: for the message from the west that would tell them that Carl Thorbrandsson’s ships were sailing north towards Duncansby to block Thorfinn’s back door.

  Sulien said, for the third time, ‘Five ships are not enough. He will have eleven.’

  ‘Five ships of our kind will be enough,’ said the Earl Thorfinn. ‘Any more, and he would suspect something.’