King Hereafter Read online

  Thorkel Amundason could feel the shock and the rage again now. He had said, ‘My foster-son. There are matters to think of.’ And to the messenger: ‘Does my lord King expect the Earl Thorfinn to stay long?’

  ‘I think not. A day or two only,’ the envoy had said.

  ‘A journey such as that for a day or two only?’ Thorkel had exclaimed. He had shown, he thought, no satisfaction. Now he would hear the reason.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Thorfinn had interrupted. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll go.’

  ‘The King your grandfather will welcome the news,’ had said the envoy, damn him. Cumbria, where he came from, was full of Irish and Saxons and Norse, and his Norse was quite fluent. The envoy had added, ‘Perhaps my lord Earl will come south with me?’

  By then it was time, clearly, to take the matter in hand. Thorkel Amundason had said, ‘Excuse me. I fear we go a little too fast. Tell me, sir. What does my lord King want with his grandson?’

  But the chance of a straight answer was past. ‘My lord, a family gathering, I would suppose?’ had said the envoy. ‘The King did not confide in me. But is it not natural, after all these years, for the King’s two grandsons to meet in one place?’

  And that was all he would say. He had left the next day. The only victory Thorkel achieved was to persuade the fool his foster-son to wait a few days before travelling.

  He had tried, of course, to stop him going at all. He had tried until the last moment when, surrounded by boxes and barrels and sacks and the members of his sparse household, Thorfinn was about to wade out to his vessel. He had been in mid-tirade when the boy turned on him. ‘Don’t you know why he wants me in Cumbria?’

  ‘To stick a knife in your back,’ had said Thorkel Amundason shortly. Beneath it all, that was his fear.

  ‘No. He needs me,’ Thorfinn had said.

  ‘Needs you?’

  ‘It’s the talk of the islands. King Canute has summoned my grandfather to do homage for Cumbria.’

  ‘Then I suppose he will,’ Thorkel had said. ‘Cumbria is important to him.’

  ‘Yes. But he might not be allowed to keep Cumbria,’ Thorfinn had said, ‘unless he can convince Canute his overlord that he can stop me from helping King Olaf.’

  Around them, the routine of loading had gone on. Thorkel had said, after a while, ‘But you are a vassal of Olaf’s.’

  ‘Not for Caithness,’ Thorfinn had said.

  His stare was unwinking. Thorkel had stared back. Malcolm and Gilla-comghain had done homage to Canute for Moray. It didn’t give Canute rights over Moray. It did give him leave to use the harbours and provisions of Moray in pursuit of his war against Olaf. Thorkel said, ‘You think your grandfather will want you to pay homage for Caithness to Canute?’

  ‘To allow Canute rights in Caithness,’ Thorfinn amended. ‘And perhaps even in my third of Orkney.’

  ‘And will you?’ Thorkel had said. It had sounded jocular, such was his alarm and despair.

  ‘What do you suppose?’ was all Thorfinn had answered. And, turning, had boarded the ship and sailed south.

  That was last week, and Thorkel had heard nothing since. Of what had happened last week he had said nothing at all to Kalv Arnason. Now he was listening to Kalv, and half-agreeing to a Norwegian marriage, and wholly agreeing when Kalv said once more, as he did on departing, ‘Tell the boy, wherever he is. Stick to Olaf and Norway. It’s the best chance we’ve all got of survival.’

  FOUR

  ake me think like a man, the twelve-year-old Thorfinn had said to Thorkel his foster-father, and for a while, it was true, had taken Thorkel for tutor.

  Make me act like a man, he had said also; and for that, his tutors were many and various, and the foremost of them all was the sea.

  He had others, mostly men older than himself, whom Thorkel knew about and put up with. Most of them were on board with Thorfinn now as he sailed south to answer his grandfather’s summons. First for fighting was Skeggi Havardson his father’s nephew, twenty years Thorfinn’s elder and his standard-bearer. First in mischief was a man older still: Eachmarcach, the nephew of King Sitric Silkbeard of Dublin.

  On his way south to Cumbria, Thorfinn had diverged to take on board Eachmarcach, who spent his time sailing the western seas, looking for trouble. Learning where they were going, Eachmarcach laughed until he had to be slapped on the back., A broad, freckled man with a tightly curled ginger thatch, the heir of Dublin had little reverence for King Malcolm of Alba, Thorfinn’s grandfather. And he could imagine (he said) King Malcolm’s face when he saw himself, Eachmarcach, in Thorfinn’s company.

  Thorfinn, who could imagine it too, grinned but said nothing of moment, being doubled up in the midst of a wrestling-match. He had been a nuisance of a boy, and was growing up to be a nuisance of a man, it was obvious. The ragbag of crewmen who sailed with him found him amusing.

  Arrived in no great haste at his rendezvous, Thorfinn left his ship and its crew on the coast and rode inland on the horses provided, taking with him Skeggi and Eachmarcach and such housecarls as an earl’s train demanded.

  That journey, too, was remarkable less for its speed than its eccentricity. When they reached the place of King Malcolm’s Cumbrian camp, it was to find it all but deserted, apart from a waiting guard and a few hostages. King Malcolm’s army had moved south to the Mercian border. King Malcolm himself, with his household and Duncan his grandson, was in Mercia, England, summoned there on short order by Canute to pay homage for his province of Cumbria. The Earl Thorfinn, ran the order, was to join him in Chester immediately.

  ‘Will you go? I burned Chester once,’ Eachmarcach said. ‘At least, I burned some of the wharves up the river.’

  ‘More fool you,’ Thorfinn said. Mercia, south of the Cumbrian frontier, was one of the great English earldoms and its busy port Chester was one of Dublin’s best markets.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ said Eachmarcach. ‘We’d captured some very strong ale. I wanted to marry the Lady of Mercia. You know. Leofric’s wife. But the old Earl called out the guard. You’ve seen the Lady of Mercia?’

  ‘Heard of her. That’s her son over there,’ Thorfinn said.

  Eachmarcach looked at the hostages. Two were elderly. One was a raw-faced youth of fifteen with an unpleated shock of fair hair, playing some sort of game in the dust. None of the captives was shackled, and the guard stood about, watching. The youth talked and laughed all the time. He had a laugh like the flapping of crows’ wings. For the son of a famous beauty, he was, as usually happens, nothing out of the way. Eachmarcach said, ‘That’s how to live to be eighty. Don’t trust yourself into English hands without first asking for English hostages. Alfgar. That’s what the boy’s called. Alfgar, the sole heir to Mercia.’

  The youth looked round, as if he caught the sound of his name. Eachmarcach grinned, since his nature was to be friendly. Thorfinn did not smile at all. Thorfinn said, ‘He isn’t very well guarded.’

  In the town of Chester everything had come to a standstill ever since the King of England’s army had marched up and camped itself a few days before on the opposite side of the river. From their homes of log and planking and wattle, and quite a few of cut stone, the citizens of Chester had watched King Canute of England and his household officers climb the mound to their Earl’s timber palace and feast themselves at Earl Leofric’s table while those talks went on which would end, you could be sure, in bringing no profit to Mercia.

  And so, of course, it turned out. The first thing anyone knew, young Alfgar was on his way north to be held a hostage in Cumbria, and next the old King of the north had appeared at the gates, with ten unarmed men as he had promised, and had been led down to the riverside, where floated the canopied ship, with King Canute on board, upon which the two Kings were to hold their encounter.

  Canute, of course, had his ten unarmed men also with him, but the oarsmen were Mercians and Earl Leofric was in attendance, as if he were the host and not obeying King Canute because there was no alterna
tive. It was by no wish of Leofric’s, you could be sure, that young Alfgar was now in Cumbria. A wild youth, some might say, and that corncrake of a laugh was a terror. But he was the Mercian heir; the only son of Earl Leofric and the Lady of Mercia.

  The Lady might look placid enough, pacing down to the Dee with King Malcolm and waiting there on the bank with her women while the old King was helped into a boat and ferried into midstream for his meeting. Between the guards lining the river, you could see her chat to the King’s grandson Duncan as if one youth were the same as another. But when the prince Duncan had followed his grandfather, it was to another boy that she turned, her son’s best friend, the lad who was training in Wales for the priesthood. The gentle lad Sulien.

  Striding up from the bank, the Lady was too smart to look anxious. But the boy Sulien did. You could see it as he hurried beside her. Learning to be a priest, he was, and Alfgar’s very best friend. It showed you. There wasn’t much wrong with young Alfgar.

  ‘Slow down,’ said the boy Sulien. ‘My lady. Slow down. You would think the river Dee was on fire behind you.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Godiva, Lady of Mercia. ‘It would seem no more than an appropriate judgement, when you consider the pack of designing men meeting there. Apart from Leofric, you understand. Not that Leofric doesn’t design. But when he does, it’s always for Mercia.’

  As people did when with Sulien, she spoke as if to an equal, and not to a youth just a year older than her only son Alfgar. At the same time she slackened both her pace and her grip of her skirts, and the sunlit webs of her hair-veil hovered and sank to rest at her cheek and her shoulder as if to a dovecote. She was a very beautiful woman. Sulien said, ‘Alfgar is security for the old King of Alba’s life. Nothing will happen to him.’

  Walking up to the fine, painted hall Earl Leofric had built for his Lady, with their attendants straggling behind them, Sulien of Llanbadarn had no sense of impending change, any more than had touched Thorkel Amundason in Norway six years before. His only concern at the time was for the Lady Godiva, whose house had been a second home to him from earliest childhood, long before her husband inherited one of the three big English earldoms.

  Godiva had Breton blood, but Sulien was pure-bred from the duchy of Brittany, that part of the old Frankish continent that shouldered out into the Atlantic, divided only by the Narrow Seas from the south shore of England.

  It was fashionable nowadays to speak of Brittany as a primitive place, full of unlettered savages. Its only fault that Sulien could see was that, in common with Wales and Alba and Ireland, it had fought too hard for its freedom. In resisting Roman conquest, it had forgone Roman civilization. Pushed to the western fringes of their land by invader after invader, pride as well as circumstance had seen to it that they spoke today the Celtic tongue of their forefathers and kept their customs.

  Now, between Wales and Brittany and the north-west of England there existed a kinship, strengthened by cross-migration, by trade, by a common language, by a common church, that made it no more than natural that a branch of his own family should for two generations have been settled here in the north, between Cumbria and the land on the east. Or that when, among all his brothers and sisters, it had been a matter of choosing which should inherit the rule of their land and which the power of the church, he, already at home on both sides of the Narrow Seas, should be sent for his training to a Welsh monastery.

  There had been three to choose from, all five hundred years old, but there had never been any doubt which his father would select. St David’s might be the most famous, but Llanbadarn owed its name to St David’s friend St Paternus, by tradition the first bishop of his father’s own province of Vannes.

  In the little time he had been there, Sulien had taken to the monastery on the river Rheidoe, although it was no longer the great teaching-house it had once been. That didn’t matter. He knew what it was to be beaten to the book by the child-master in Brittany. He had learned church practice in the service of his own kinsman the Bishop of Vannes. He had learned good manners here, in the household of the Lady of Mercia. Free of childish matters, there stretched before him now the cursus ordinum, the long training, possibly somewhere in Ireland, that would return him to Llanbadarn as a man proceeding to Holy Orders.

  It was an end he wished to attain, although the path that led to it was not entirely as he would have chosen. There were some games he was going to miss.

  Meanwhile, he was only sixteen, and released for two days from the tyranny of the Office as temporary clericellus to one of the bishops down on the boat there. He talked to the Lady, seeking to cheer her as they came near her threshold, and hardly noticed until she stopped that her way was blocked by one of her own officers, newly emerged from the hall, who bowed, addressing her.

  ‘Lady: another party has arrived to join the Kings on the ship. Led by the King of Alba’s second grandson.’

  The King of Alba was not at that moment a favourite of the Lady of Mercia. ‘Who?’ she said.

  The house-steward glanced over his shoulder. ‘If I have it right, the Earl of Orkney and Caithness, my lady. The prince Duncan, who is already on board, is the Earl’s half-brother.’

  ‘By his mother’s first marriage. I remember,’ said the Lady. She was watching the doorway, looking thoughtful. She added, ‘I gather neither boy saw anything much of the mother. Her third marriage, to the man who was burned, ended in making her something of a recluse. I don’t even know—’

  She broke off as there was a movement in the doorway of the hall and a youth stepped out into the sunlight. Sulien said, ‘What is his name? Do you know enough Norse to understand him?’ They were speaking in Breton, one tongue the young Earl of Orkney would assuredly not possess.

  ‘Norse and Saxon are not so unlike. His name is Thorfinn,’ said the Lady of Mercia, and fell silent, watching the young man approach. Sulien followed her eyes.

  If some men had a gift for seemly relations with space, and the ability to move gracefully through it, this was not one of them. The Earl of Orkney, little older than Sulien himself, was thin and tall as a ladder, and moved as if by external agency. His wind-burnished face was a structure of sinews and hollows in which eyes and brows were fierce accents above the shining, honed scythe of his nose. His hair, thick and tangled with salt, was of that black verging on brown that distinguishes the ruddy-skinned Pict from the swarthy blue-black of the Iberian.

  Whatever looks could do for a man, he had missed, Sulien thought. He had neither the power to charm on first sight nor to horrify. He looked tiresome. He stopped and addressed his hostess.

  ‘The Lady of Mercia?’ The voice was an octave lower than Sulien had expected. Also, he had used Domina, which was clever. Of course, he could not be sure what language to speak.

  Beside him, the Lady of Mercia inclined her head and assented. ‘Godiva.’ Her feelings towards any member of the King of Alba’s family were not of the kind to encourage communication. As if he had been told, the Earl of Orkney studied her face and then turned and looked at Sulien. Since Godiva said nothing, Sulien resolved the matter by introducing himself. He chose Irish Gaelic, a Celtic language near enough to his own to allow him some fluency, which the other surely would have heard spoken at home in Caithness and in the house of his mother’s third husband.

  ‘I am Sulien of Vannes, studying at the monastery of Llanbadarn. The Lady has Breton and Saxon, and can understand Irish Gaelic. You are the Earl Thorfinn of Orkney, and you wish a boat to take you out to the meeting-place?’

  Lashless brown eyes considered him. ‘Not really,’ said the Earl Thorfinn of Orkney. ‘I’ve sent my cousin down to the water’s edge to blow on his horn, and I imagine my grandfather will have a boat over quite quickly. I only—’

  It was not in Godiva’s nature, as her friends were aware, to be discourteous for long. Choosing the kind of slow Saxon a Norse-speaker might understand, she said, ‘It would be quicker still if I arranged for you to take one of mine. Let me send a ma
n with you.’

  The Earl looked at her. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But Skeggi will manage. I’m not in a hurry.’

  Mild understanding appeared on the Lady’s face and, blending evidently with her conscience, produced—wrongly, Sulien thought—an invitation. She said, ‘Perhaps then, if you come back indoors, I can offer you a refreshment. If you have time. Your grandfather was asking most anxiously for you.’

  Disappointingly, she appeared to be right, and Sulien to be wrong. The Earl of Orkney showed no reluctance to turn and make his way back to the hall for a refreshment. He entered after the Lady and sat on a stool next to Sulien’s, as she indicated. He said, ‘It doesn’t matter about the refreshments. I wanted to speak to you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Godiva. Outside, Sulien could hear voices. Either cousin Skeggi had come back from the waterside or the rest of the Earl’s party was arriving. It occurred to Sulien, and also possibly to the Lady, that not all of them might spurn her ale-barrels. She said, ‘Of course we must have a talk. But should you stay now? We really don’t want to upset your grandfather.’

  Standing straight-boned and still, with a print of worry between her fair brows, she had never looked to better advantage. The Earl of Orkney returned her gaze tranquilly. ‘Since we don’t know one another,’ he said, ‘I can’t tell whether you’d prefer truth to compliments. I’m in no hurry, because I don’t like my grandfather. You may not want to upset him, but I do.’

  The Lady drew a deep breath, but Sulien forestalled her. He said, ‘At home, that’s your affair. But you’re in Chester now, and the Lady can’t afford to provoke trouble. You may not know, but King Malcolm took hostages.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said the Earl of Orkney, with an edge of impatience. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’ He turned to Godiva. ‘I came to say I’ve brought your son with me.’

  She opened her mouth so suddenly that the linen creaked over her ears. ‘Alfgar?’ said Godiva.

  ‘Yes. We found him in my grandfather’s camp. He said he wanted to leave.’