King Hereafter Read online

  ‘I fancy,’ said Alfgar drily, ‘that even Olaf Tryggvasson would have fallen.’ He did not stop rowing. And as they came close to the longship, Sulien craned to see.

  Overloaded on the port side, the royal ship was low on that beam and rocked sharply, idling and waiting. Distantly, in her prow Sulien could see the heads of the two Kings standing on the half-deck: Canute speaking, and Malcolm held no doubt by pride, as well as by stiffness and age, from thrusting through to the side to watch the search for Duncan his grandson.

  His other grandson was not there. The Earl Thorfinn of Orkney was, Sulien suddenly noticed, quite close at hand, by the high sternpost of the vessel. Undisturbed, it seemed, by the shouting and splashing from the other side of the boat, he was gazing peacefully into the water, his black hair over his brow. In front of Sulien, Alfgar lifted his oar, and motioned the boatman and Eachmarcach to do likewise. He said, ‘They don’t seem to have got him. He said he could swim, didn’t he?’

  The Earl Thorfinn continued to contemplate the river reposefully from the rail and gave no indication that he had noticed them. Sulien said, ‘The prince could have been injured.’ Beneath where Thorfinn was looking, you could just see something pale in the water. Sulien said suddenly, ‘Row over there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There, Where …’ He broke off and pointed instead. ‘There. There’s something in the water.’

  From the prow, Alfgar could see better than he could. He looked and then, seizing his oar, dug it in and looked again as the skiff bucked along nearer. ‘It is!’ he said. ‘Go on!’ And as the other two started to row, Alfgar twisted round, rising, and, cupping his mouth, roared to the longship and the two Kings and the knots of men, who, hearing, rushed to the rail. ‘The prince Duncan is here! We’ve got him!’

  Above on the stern, the Earl Thorfinn, sitting down, began at leisure to unwind the bands round his trousers.

  The service of peace and thanksgiving in the church of St John the Baptist was kept short because it began late and because, naturally, the King of Alba was concerned about the health of his grandson Duncan, now being helped back to the Mercian palace. The other three submerged competitors all attended the service, in blankets. The final race, between the Earl Thorfinn and his cousin Skeggi, had been cancelled.

  Sulien, his shoulder throbbing, kept away from the Earl of Orkney. Since they disembarked at the church, he had addressed Earl Thorfinn only once, and quietly, when no one was particularly near. ‘You saw Duncan was there.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Earl said. He had been moved, his neck arched, to give all his attention to the upper frame of the church. He added, ‘I knew you would save him. Or somebody.’ Sulien waited, and then walked away.

  He must have said much the same to his grandfather when the quarrel broke out at the altar-table as the service ended and they all gathered there to hear the treaty read and attested.

  Beneath the voices of Bishop Lyfing and the interpreter came the murmur, subdued at first, of an exchange between Malcolm of Alba and his grandson of Orkney. Then the King’s voice said something sharply and the Earl Thorfinn answered with insolence.

  King Malcolm turned and, interrupting the Bishop, took the skin from his two hands and crumpled it. He said, ‘I shall acknowledge no pact that offers more power to Orkney.’

  The Bishop, his eyes narrowed, looked at his King. Canute said, ‘I remind you. On this treaty depends your lordship of Cumbria. Is your dislike of one grandson so great?’

  The rich cloak rose and fell over the old man’s broad chest. ‘He offends me,’ he said.

  The Earl Thorfinn had not spoken. Canute looked at him. ‘He wants discipline, I agree, and his training leaves much to be desired. I, too, have been disturbed by what I have seen of him today. Perhaps there is a remedy that would suit both of us. My lord Thorfinn?’

  Large though Canute was, the youth looked down on him, his hands loose at his sides, his tunic stained with salt and sweat from the run. The King of the Danes and the Saxons studied him, and then spoke.

  ‘Earl Thorfinn. You swore to be the true vassal of King Olaf of Norway, and now you have made a like oath to me, King Olaf’s enemy. The bond of the King your grandfather I have accepted: his territories abut on mine, and I can be just or generous, as occasion demands. For your conduct, I have no such surety. It seemed to me therefore, as this day progressed, that more should be demanded of you, and that you should lodge a hostage with me, in the person of Skeggi Havardson, your cousin.

  ‘I have changed my mind. The hostage I require is yourself.’

  Silence answered him. Beside the altar, King Malcolm’s face did not change. Only somewhere in the eyes there was a gleam, perhaps of triumph, perhaps of disappointment, perhaps of perplexity. Thorfinn of Orkney went red.

  King Canute said, ‘If this were done, my lord King of Alba, would you feel free to ratify this agreement?’

  ‘I should,’ King Malcolm said. He cleared his throat.

  ‘And you, my lord Earl of Orkney. If your cousin goes back with these terms, can your foster-father and your council hold to them until your return?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the youth. His hands still dangled in the folds of his trousers. ‘Depending on when I return.’

  ‘Did you think I would keep you for life? I have not so much time, or so much patience,’ King Canute said. ‘When I am King of Norway, you, my lord Thorfinn, may make your way back to your homeland.’

  The youth bowed. Beside Sulien, the cousin Skeggi was watching open-mouthed while the Dubliner nudged him, grinning. At the altar, the voice of the interpreter had resumed and men were pushing their robes from their right arms while the clerk smoothed the parchment and dipped the quill, ready to hand it. An amendment, squeakily, was being written.

  King Canute watched, his expression benign. On Earl Thorfinn’s face there lingered the last of that sudden raw flush, and on either side of his aquiline nose his eyes glittered. It was not the face of a foolish youth condemned to a course of correction.

  ‘Saint Paternus!’ Sulien said.

  ‘What?’ said Alfgar.

  ‘Nothing,’ Sulien said. But inside, he went on repeating it. Saint Paternus. Saint Paternus defend me. Of course the Earl Thorfinn isn’t dismayed. This is what the Earl Thorfinn has been working for.

  It was while marking his cross that Canute of England remembered something his Norman wife had once said when she and her precious brother had asked him, for the sake of the duchy, not to fall out with Alba. Something about ‘this youth with a barbarous name’.

  It was true: it was barbarous. The boy’s name ought to be changed. His had, from Canute to Lambert, when that fool at St Omer had baptised him. Salomon of Hungary had turned into King Stephen, by the body of God; and his own sister Estrith had been forced to take the name Margaret. While his wife Emma, of course, was supposed to be Alfgifu, but used her new name as little as he did.

  Nevertheless … Thorfinn was a heathenish name, and Emma would object. The King said, laying the quill down, ‘I think, my lord King of Alba, that it might be seemly, since he comes to a Christian court, to baptise your grandson of Orkney. Will you, of your generosity, allow me to arrange it?’

  Malcolm said, ‘He is baptised.’

  Canute said, ‘Thorfinn? Thorfinn, surely, is a name recognised chiefly by pagans.’

  The Earl of Orkney’s voice was obliging. ‘It is among pagans that I most often find myself. I have been baptised, my lord King: before the death of my stepfather Findlaech.

  ‘Macbeth is what churchmen call me.’

  SEVEN

  HE NEWS THAT Thorfinn had defected from Norway to England was brought north to Thorkel his foster-father by Eachmarcach, whom he did not like, and Skeggi Havardson, who appeared to think it funny.

  Then the winter closed in, which preserved him at least from the attacks, verbal and otherwise, of Earl Brusi and the Orkneymen loyal to Olaf, and from the longships which put ashore from Norway as his cousin Kalv once h
ad done but, instead of putting up tents and calling for water, now found out his barns and his boathouses and tried to set fire to them.

  Thorkel soon put a stop to that: he had men enough, as well as money. He had never seen as much money at one time as Thorfinn sent north from King Canute. Blood-money, which Skeggi, hilarious, helped him bury, and which he used himself, grimly, to mollify those in Caithness and Orkney who relished no more than he did being appointed to serve yet another king, and a Danish one at that. He called in the malt and meal for Yuletide early that year, and got his barns stored in Helmsdale and Duncansby and Freswick and Cromarty, and salt brought in good time for the cattle-slaughtering. He had timber, too, felled and well guarded, ready for when the longships would be drawn up to the nousts and the repairing could be done on the good days, and keels laid for new ships. It would be a bad winter. He could sense it.

  Then the snow came, and persisted long after Yuletide, till at Lent, when one looked for the first softening in the wind, it snowed for three days and three nights without halting and the whole of Caithness became a board of ice-white set in seas of ice-grey. Shut in on either side of the longfires with his cousins and courtmen, with the Salmundarsons and the Havardsons and the Amundasons, they talked about the war until he had to forbid it, and then they went back to quarrelling about their women. When at last the wind veered and brought with it the Icelanders, always first into the sea, always first with the bad news, Thorkel hardly knew whether to be glad or to be sorry.

  The merchants and the bards were allowed everywhere and brought tales from everywhere. The bards recited their news, some of it, and for a week of good cheer and brave songs and new bawdy stories were worth their fine lodging and the silver they expected at the end of it. It was from them that he got his first pictures of Thorfinn as chief of King Canute’s housecarls, with a gold and silver inlaid axe and a house of two storeys in Winchester to sleep in. The King’s chief wife, the Lady Emma, had made him her special care, said the bards, adding a phrase or two that Thorkel ignored. And he had gone merchanting with the Lady’s ships, to Rouen and to Nantes and the Couesnon, and had been at the repairing of her fort at Exeter and the King’s fort at Dover before the days grew too short. There was word of a woman or two they wanted him to marry, but so far they were all middle-aged widows, and he had said no.

  It was well known, of course, said the bards, that the King of the Danes was preparing an army to invade and take Norway in the good weather, although he’d be lucky if he got as many as fifty shiploads of English to follow him. But of course, said the bards, young Thorfinn no doubt would be there in the foremost ship, with the Lady Emma behind him in some way or another, and about to make his name and fortune all over again.

  Thorkel became sick of the bards.

  Thore Hund sailed by very fast one day, going south, and did not stop. Afterwards, the tale came to Thorkel’s ears: how King Olaf’s tax-collectors had made Thore pour wine from the kegs on his ships to prove he had no money hidden, never noticing that the casks were double-skinned and the inside of them filled with a fortune in furs.

  King Canute, they said, would appreciate the coming of Thore. And his son, the surly Siward, had escaped to England in the same ship, together with a few others everybody knew about: King Canute hadn’t been mean with his money last autumn. And wasn’t that a fine new suit of ring-mail, said the bards, that Thorkel himself had got since they saw him last? It was an ill wind, said the bards.

  Thorkel threw the bards out, and his immortality with them.

  Then full spring arrived, and Canute with his armada crossed the seas and, without a blow struck, made himself master of Norway. Thorfinn, they said, had not been with him, but guarding the havens facing Normandy at his back. He did not come home.

  After a summer of vain counter-moves, King Olaf with his wife and son and the three loyal Arnasons left for Sweden and Russia, taking with them Rognvald, now seventeen, son of Earl Brusi of Orkney, and leaving behind them Erling Skialgsson, Haarek of Tjotta, Einar Tambarskelve, and Thorkel Amundason’s cousin Kalv, who had changed sides even quicker than Thorfinn and was by way, rumour said, of being King Canute’s new viceroy of Norway.

  Money arrived from Thorfinn, with a gold arm-band weighing sixteen ounces. A third of the coins were silver pennies from Cologne, and among the rest there were three from Baghdad. There was no message, but of course Thorkel could not read anyway. He took the ingot-mould out to the furnace and melted down the arm-band himself. He was pouring the gold when the uproar began in the yard with the pigs squealing, and the geese hissing and flapping, and half the folk from the huts and the farmstead running to help a messenger with some axe-work on him and only enough breath to tell the news from the south.

  The Earl Malcolm of Moray was dying: the elder of the two brothers who had burned their uncle in Alba all those years before. And Earl Malcolm’s middle-aged brother Gillacomghain had gathered a war-band and, moving north, was sitting in Caithness, where he had laid claim to the ancient tax-rights of the Mormaers of Moray and Caithness.

  Skeggi and his brother, up from Freswick, were among those who lowered the man from his horse, yelling for someone to go for the wise-woman while their faces were like new suns for happiness. Everyone had known that this was likely to happen, with Thorfinn away, as soon as the older brother started to fail. It promised a good war, with a lot of fine raiding, and they were well prepared.

  It had to be said, of course, that Gillacomghain was well prepared as well, having been stockpiling Canute’s pensions for even longer than Thorkel. And that Gillacomghain in this particular claim might have a backing that Thorfinn’s birth wouldn’t win him: the support, in men and weapons, of Thorfinn’s grandfather.

  For if Canute remembered his promise at Chester, the conquest of Norway would make Thorfinn a force to be measured: the owner of two-thirds of Orkney as well as the whole of Caithness.

  It was a promise in which Thorkel placed little faith. But to Gillacomghain, as to Malcolm of Alba, the threat of it would be enough. In their place, there was little he’d stop at to check Canute’s grip of the north through Thorfinn.

  While Skeggi swept the heavens with cries about beacon-fires and horses, message-tokens and ships, Thorkel’s mind was addressing his foster-son. And where are you today, Thorfinn, in your house with two storeys, and your rich middle-aged widows who give you arm-bands to pass on to your door-keeper?

  In the event, it took a week of fighting to clear Gillacomghain and his men out of the Black Isle and back to the south side of the Moray Firth. In the course of it, Thorkel saw more than once the coarse yellow hair and stocky figure of Findlaech’s nephew as he ran with his men, but among the men were few that he could recognise from Findlaech’s day.

  It was possible, then, that not too many of the farmers and fishermen of Moray had enjoyed the switch of masters when their old Mormaer, Thorfinn’s stepfather, was burned. It explained why the present attack had been driven off with such speed, although his own precautions accounted for some of their luck.

  A mixed blessing. Next time, Gillacomghain knew, he must look outside of Moray for the army he would bring over the firth. Perhaps to King Malcolm, who had been sparing of his support this time, it would seem. Or to the Irish mercenaries of the west, who would fight for the kind of silver Gillacomghain now had.

  Thorkel commissioned a shipmaster going to York to bring him back three dozen Swedish axes, and sent Steingrim Salmundarson west on the tax-boat with an order to buy Frankish swords in Dublin—three of them, with their hilts on. He had some leather coats sewn, and rode round the coast on his garron to see how the new ships were shaping.

  The ship from York came back with news of two marriage contracts. Prince Duncan of Alba had chosen a wife: a daughter of Ealdred of Bernicia, the land where Alba and England met on the east coast. With that marriage would come the inheritance of Ealdred’s father, who once had ruled all Northumbria. And the even greater interests of Ealdred’s mother, t
he only child of Durham’s first Bishop-magnate.

  It meant that, from the west coast to the east, the north of England could expect to see a good deal of the rulers of Alba. And it made one wonder if Duncan’s marriage had taken place with or without Canute’s blessing.

  The second contract tied another knot between the same families. By this, Maldred, Duncan’s half-brother, became wed to the same Ealdred’s semi-royal stepsister. The stepsister was related both to Canute’s chief wife and to his personal viceroy in Denmark. Which disposed of all doubt. Canute knew, all right. Despite the hazards, Canute was prepared to see Alba strengthen its stake in his northlands.

  Thorkel Amundason forced the first axe-blade off its stake and weighed it in his hands, gazing after the shipmaster as he strode with his fellows back down to the jetty, and if Thorfinn had been there, might have been tempted to give him first trial of the edge of it. What is he doing? What is the young imbecile doing now?

  Then Earl Hakon, the viceroy of Norway, sailed in and, barely observing the welcome-ale, mentioned that, being now lord of Norway, his uncle King Canute was pleased to fulfil the oath he had taken to make the Earl Thorfinn ruler of two-thirds of Orkney. The Earl Brusi had been informed, and had received land in Møre in compensation. Earl Hakon was glad to bear news so welcome and, time being short, would be equally glad to receive the taxes now owed to King Canute: namely, those for two-thirds of Orkney and Caithness.

  Along the board, the Earl’s men talked on, but Thorkel could hear how all his own had fallen silent. He said courteously, ‘Being unaware of the great good fortune you mention, we have prepared for you the tribute for one-third of Orkney, as was usually paid to King Olaf, and as no doubt the Earl Brusi has already prepared for his double portion. As to the rest, the Earl Thorfinn owes nothing for the lands of Caithness.’

  Hakon Ericsson, last of the great Norwegian Earls of Lade, was no great dissimulator, but at thirty-three knew the tricks of the conference table quite as well as did Thorkel. ‘This I was prepared to believe,’ said King Canute’s nephew with an air entirely reasonable, ‘until I learned that King Malcolm’s tax-servants also have been recently menaced with weapons. If you owe no tax and no service to Alba, then Earl Thorfinn’s agreement with Norway is valid and the tax is now owed to King Canute.’