King Hereafter Read online

  It was then, after a very hard year and in prospect of another just like it, that Thorkel’s self-control for a moment gave way. ‘Then that is a matter, is it not, that King Canute must raise with Earl Thorfinn himself in England?’ he suggested. ‘Whatever agreement they come to, you can rely on me to fulfil to the letter.’ And to himself: He began it without me. Let him finish it, if he can, Thorkel added.

  He paid for two-thirds of Orkney in the end. He had expected to. Just as Earl Hakon had had no real hope of the Caithness tribute—as yet. The talk ended, of course, with a careful reference to the numbers of Trøndelagers who had deserted King Olaf for Canute, including Thore Hund of Bjarking, now in England with his son Siward. Earl Hakon thought he could find Thore land in Huntingdon. Siward preferred further north. Earl Hakon’s own father had found much satisfaction in ruling Northumbria. Thorkel, of course, would have heard the latest news of Northumbria.

  Thorkel had.

  ‘Dynastic marriages,’ said Earl Hakon, smiling. ‘But the Arnasons aren’t coming out of it all too badly. There is Kalv married to a rich widow. Finn got King Olaf’s niece to wife, which no doubt is why Finn felt constrained to follow Olaf to Russia. And now his two daughters are placed.’

  ‘Sigrid and Ingibjorg?’ said Thorkel. Poor Finn, in Russia. Rognvald had fled to Russia as well. He wondered what Finn had done about Rognvald. He said, ‘I thought the girls were too young. Or is it just a contract?’

  ‘Thirteen and upwards, I should think,’ Earl Hakon said. ‘One of them is married, anyway. To my cousin Orm. The one with the long hair. Sigrid, isn’t it?’

  ‘There was one called Sigrid,’ said Thorkel. They both had had long hair, so far as he could remember. ‘What about the other one?’

  ‘Oh, the other one should be across in the spring,’ Earl Hakon said. ‘You’ll be interested. Of course, they broke her contract to the blond boy who’s gone to Russia. Now she’s signed to marry one of the two lords of Moray. Gillacomghain. The one who submitted to my lord Canute. Maybe,’ said Earl Hakon, smiling, ‘she’ll persuade her husband to let you off with some of your taxes next time he comes collecting over the border? Or maybe you’d find it wiser,’ said Earl Hakon, breaking this time into a laugh, ‘to pay your tributes direct to King Canute instead? We must see what view your young lord Thorfinn thinks it wisest to take.’

  There was no comment that he could possibly make, nor was there anything about it that he wanted to discuss with his council, although he ought to. The daughters and only heirs of Finn his cousin were being contracted to those favoured of Canute, whether by Canute’s desire or because Finn despaired of ever returning from Russia. And, for whatever reason, Gillacomghain and not Thorfinn his foster-son had been offered the alliance.

  That winter, Thorkel visited his home at Sandwick, Orkney, for the first time since Earl Brusi held it. Brusi himself stayed in the north. To be a vassal of King Olaf brought him no good now, with King Olaf in Russia and Rognvald, the bright, golden heir, gone also to that cold country over the mountains.

  He heard later that Finn’s younger daughter had turned thirteen and Gillacomghain had gone to Norway that autumn to claim her. Then the brother, Earl Malcolm mac Maelbrighde, had finally died, and Gillacomghain had had to leave his new wife in Norway and come back to Alba. After that, he kept economically at home in Moray till the weather got better. There were no raids for six months.

  Child marriage, everyone said, was a killer for middle-aged husbands. How many cases did one not know? With cynicism not altogether unmixed with lower emotions, Thorkel awaited the news that Gillacomghain’s little bride had crossed from Norway to join him.

  In the event, he had the news before anyone, for Kalv his cousin brought the girl in the spring, calling on Thorkel in Caithness on his way to deliver her to her husband of six months in Moray. Leaving Kalv with his arm round a slave and his nose in an ale-horn, Thorkel went across to pay his respects to Finn’s child at the women’s house and found the little bride with Bergljot her royal mother.

  The last time he had seen Ingibjorg was in the rain at Nídarós when Thorfinn had shrilled and vowed away the overlordship of Orkney. Then she had been about five, with long ox-blood hair and black brows over a gaze as clear and transparent and colourless as pond-jelly. Now she was thirteen and sat short-lapped, her small slippers dangling, so heavily pregnant that she might have been sitting a garron. He asked her jocularly what she had done with her hair, which was five inches long, and she replied in a polite, bored voice that she had cut it herself.

  You had to excuse Gillacomghain’s hurry, he supposed, when you remembered that there was no one now alive from that stock except Gillacomghain himself and Thorfinn, if you counted Findlaech’s stepson. Had the child married Rognvald as was planned, the result would have been much the same, with a boy’s hot blood to contend with. Daughters of the royal line were well aware of their fate: to cement their father’s alliances, and to breed. Where one contract or one marriage failed, through death or another reason, then according to the need of the moment, the next was made in its place. The child she was carrying could have been Thorfinn’s, had things fallen out differently. As it was, one supposed it would die like the rest of Gillacomghain’s siring. If it was a daughter, Christian or not, he might very likely expose it. Gillacomghain was too old a man now to count on rearing and placing a girl-child.

  The bride’s spawn-like eyes made Thorkel uneasy, and he came out as soon as was courteous.

  Outside, Kalv was waiting. Kalv backed him into a corn-strip where no one could hear, and said, ‘You’ve heard what’s happened? I was to be viceroy of Norway. Canute swore it. And now Earl Hakon his nephew has everything.’

  ‘Maybe you should have stayed with King Olaf,’ said Thorkel drily. It was no business of his if the Arnason family wanted representation on both sides in every battle. ‘Where are you going to now, once you hand over the girl? To King Canute? To complain?’

  ‘Do you think,’ said Kalv, ‘that I have been treated with justice?’

  Thorkel let him go.

  Gillacomghain’s son was born in the summer and survived, as did his young mother. He was baptised Luloecen, which gave nothing away, as it was not a name known on either side of the family. Fatherhood, it seemed, restored Gillacomghain’s energy. That year, the Mormaer of Moray made three punitive raids into Caithness and the Black Isle, in which Thorkel lost thirty men.

  Kalv Arnason’s stay with King Canute was a short one. He next sailed directly north, without calling at Wick or Freswick or Duncansby, and, after an unexpected descent on an acquaintance in Orkney, made his way back to Norway and Egge.

  An order came to Thorkel Amundason from King Canute at Gloucester to pay Earl Hakon the required tax for all the lands held by the Earl Thorfinn under Norway. Caithness was included.

  There was a piece of parchment as well as the spoken message, and Thorkel took it to the monks at Deerness, who read what was in it. It said the same, except that, underneath, Thorfinn had written Do this and added his name. Thorkel had seen the name written before, when Thorfinn had done it once as a joke, but this time it was much better formed, like a clerk’s work. Someone in England must be teaching him.

  Also on board were two kegs of wine which must have come from Thore Hund’s ship, because there was an inner skin full of money. There was nothing to show whether it came from Canute or Thorfinn.

  Earl Hakon continued to rule for Canute in Norway, and the Trøndelagen people were quiet. In the autumn, he crossed the sea to visit his uncle Canute and, sailing back, was diverted by bad weather to Orkney. No one ever knew whether he reached it or not, since his ship was next heard of in pieces, having overturned with the loss of all it carried.

  In Egge, Kalv Arnason waited, throwing a number of feasts.

  The news came that the late Earl Hakon’s uncle Einar Tambarskelve and his son had visited King Canute and had asked, as the Earl’s closest relatives, to be considered as the next rulers o
f Norway. Kalv Arnason stopped throwing feasts, hit his wife, and ordered two longships into the water, even though it was February.

  The news came, before he could sail, that King Canute had refused to make Einar or Henry his son the viceroy of Norway. Kalv embraced the news-bearer. The messenger added that King Canute had announced that the next viceroy of Norway was to be the King’s own son Svein, aged just thirteen. Kalv knocked the news-bearer down.

  A man called Biorn, travelling very fast, left Norway for Russia with the news that Earl Hakon was drowned and Norway leaderless for the moment. The exiled King Olaf gathered an army and set out to recapture his kingdom with the three Arnasons, Rognvald Brusason and Harald, Olaf’s fourteen-year-old half-brother.

  It was the beginning of the year 1030. Norway, Denmark, Alba, England, and those parts of the north under the Earls of Orkney left the sowing of the harvest to the slaves and the women; and those who believed in the old gods made the old sacrifices, while nothing was spoken of or planned that had not to do with war.

  King Canute gathered a fleet and an army and sent them north, but did not go with them. Instead his forces were led by an experienced war-leader from Jomsberg, together with Svein, the young son of the King’s lesser wife, whom he meant to make viceroy of Norway.

  This time also, King Canute took thought, as he often did, without consulting his other wife, Emma. And after taking thought, he dispatched north with the fleet his noble housecarl and hostage, the twenty-one-year-old Thorfinn of Orkney.

  EIGHT

  NDER THE sun-warmed skies of high summer, Thorkel Amundason chose to await his fate on the sacred green prow of Orkney, the monks’ cliff of Deerness by his father’s homestead of Sandwick.

  Long ago, the Irish monks who brought Christ to Caithness had built their huts in the sun, above the terns and the seals, on this God-made tower of layered pink rock, chained to the gulleys and pools of the mainland by rotting spines of pebble and stone.

  Now, the church was still there, and smoke rose through the thatch roofs of some of the round, lichened huts, but it was thirty years since an Irishwoman crossed the sea to bear sons to an Earl of Orkney, and no sensible abbot in Ulaid or Leinster would send monks to the Norsemen of Orkney for the sake of a few Irish slaves.

  So beside him here on the headland, looking across the blue space of sea and of sky beyond which lay Norway and the war which would settle, one way or another, the fate of all Orkney, stood only David Hvita, the monk from Fair Isle, who lived here with his wife and his sons and a cousin or two who acted as helpers and who was paid by Thorkel’s father to read and write for him, and teach his children, and give him advice, and withdraw discreetly when once in six years the Bishop Grimkell from Norway would come with the ships to collect King Olaf’s tax and glance over the souls of his diocese.

  Southwards, behind the low green-and-brown ridges, lay the sea channel that divided Orkney from Alba. There, Caithness was secure, but not only because it was guarded. All Alba lay quiet, as all Orkney lay quiet, awaiting the outcome of this war in the east. And it was to here, to Earl Brusi in his northern islands, that the first news would come, as fast as longship could bring it.

  Because if King Olaf won: if the great combined armies of Sweden and the east, sweeping over the long mountain backbone and flooding down into the plains and fjords of west Norway, were to drive out King Canute’s child ruler and the men of Nídarós who supported him, Earl Brusi would no longer have to cling to the outlands of Orkney, with the cold winds of the north for companions.

  Two-thirds of Orkney would be his again, with King Olaf behind him. All of Orkney, if King Olaf recalled, as indeed he would recall, that Thorfinn, his other young vassal Earl, was not only an oath-breaker but a man cherished by Saxons.

  It was possible—it was even possible, Thorkel Amundason knew, that the young fool was about to meet King Olaf head on in battle. Hanged for a rebel and traitor, what future would this fine Earl leave Thorkel his foster-father, and Thorkel’s parents and family, here in Orkney? What could stop Brusi and King Olaf, together, from leaping those seven miles between Orkney and Alba and overrunning all Caithness?

  At least that, said Thorkel to himself, his face twisting, would give our red-haired friend Gillacomghain something to think about. And Malcolm of Alba as well, squeezed like an old leather book-bag between Canute and Norway. No wonder, thought Thorkel Amundason, that Thorfinn took such trouble to cultivate Eachmarcach. There may come a time when we all need Ireland, one way or another.

  The monk David said, ‘Do you see something?’

  There was something, far out in the haze. Thorkel looked down to clear his eyes, and studied the crab-claws and the shells on the tussocky turf, and the pink and paper-brown heads of the sea thrift, and, far below, the tranquil grey-and-white drift of the fulmars passaging on the airflow released by the spray and the rocks. Then he looked up and saw what the monk had seen: a single square sail, low on the horizon to the east. To the east, and not the north-east, where news from Nídarós might be expected.

  He said, ‘Another merchant.’ He realised that he was hungry. Another merchant. Like birds before a forest fire, the flocks of aliens, the wandering craftsmen, the churchmen, the traders had risen and settled, wild-eyed and apprehensive, all over the east coasts of Orkney and Alba. It was the first time in living memory that Norway had been threatened by land. By sea, yes: when a dispute could be settled by the sword and the axe by men whose business was the sword and the axe. But a battle on land was another thing.

  David said, ‘I take leave to doubt it. The ship is covered in gold.’

  He was right. With the sun behind him, Thorkel steadied his gaze on that far, moving speck and deciphered the pinpoint of brilliance as the sun caught the masthead and the prow. He forgot he was hungry, although it seemed a long time before the longship was near enough to see its great length, and the scarlet woven with gold of the sail, and, last of all, the banner that beat like a black bird of prey in the unclouded blue sky behind her.

  In all the world, there were only two living men entitled to fly the black raven of Sigurd of Orkney, and one of them was here in Orkney as he was, standing no doubt on some headland watching. Thorkel said, ‘It is the Earl Thorfinn,’ and cleared his throat, and turned on the grass to drop down the steep path towards Sandwick, his home.

  The monk David said, ‘My lord, there is no need to leave. I don’t know why, since they cannot possibly see us. But I think the longship has turned for this bay.’

  Leaping down to the beach, with the little settlement emptying behind him, and the cliff-watchers, below, all beginning to run and call in his direction, Thorkel did not stop then to identify the glancing hurt he had felt, watching the longship turn and head for the promontory. And yet some time later, when an enemy used unwittingly a phrase of his mother’s, he was reminded again of that moment.

  Instead of a clean half-moon of blue pebbles, the beach was thick as a bere-field with heads: the cloth-bound heads of married women and the shining cloak-fall of hair of young girls, as well as the cloth and leather caps, the untrimmed hair and beards of the farmers, and the smooth chins and snake-moustaches of those who had travelled and fought and fancied a foreign style would make them sound wittier. The roar of talk, as the longship’s prow, sixty feet high, cut towards them, grew to a storm, pushing back the kindly sound, the surfing lap of the waves.

  The first thing that Thorkel saw was that the longship’s flanks were unscarred, and that the shields ranged on the sides for her harbour-coming were not only unbloodied but new from the maker’s. The second thing was that the prow-dragon, seen from afar, had been taken down for the shore landing. The third thing was that, among the glitter of silver and gold, a tall, bareheaded man was making his way forward among the helmeted throng and, as the ship was run up on the beach, took as his right the first foot on the gangplank and walked downwards slowly, his eyes drifting over the crowd.

  The boy Thorfinn. The boy he had fost
ered, tall and loose-limbed, with the silken band of the hlā round his black hair, and a fine, long-sleeved tunic of wool above loose breeches gathered tight under the knee into soft leather boots. There was gold and enamel, fine as shell-work, on the scabbard of his sword and the sheath-ends of his belts, and the sword-pommel was deep-worked in gold like a king’s. The high brow and the violent brown eyes were the same.

  Then the crowd fell back, quietening, around Thorkel, and the boy saw him, and stopped.

  Thorkel watched himself being studied: saw noted the grey in his hair and the scar on his neck where a Morayman’s arrow had taken him. And, perhaps, the confidence and even the arrogance that two years of undivided power can give. Thorkel Amundason knew that he had ruled the north well, and that he had no need of a master. He also knew that on the deeds of this wealthy and self-willed young foster-son depended the lives of himself and his family. He said, ‘You have news of King Olaf?’

  The brown eyes turned to the right and to the left. ‘An Orkney welcome,’ the boy remarked.

  The low wave of talk rose and fell, and half a dozen voices around and behind Thorkel called, ‘Welcome, lord! Welcome!’ to a rumble of scattered amusement. Orkney was reserving its judgement. Orkney was playing safe.

  Thorkel said, ‘Forgive me. We are glad to see you. But news of the war is of such moment to us all, as it must be to you, that we thought first of the greater issue.’ The boy’s accent had changed again. First, the sinuous Gaelic of his stepfather had infected it, and now in three words you heard the roundness of the colonial Saxon. Thorkel stood on the pebbles and hated him.