King Hereafter

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘Tell me: who is your foster-son Earl going to get for the wedding Mass? Grimkell can’t do it, and I don’t suppose Thorfinn wants to ask King Canute or his grandfather’s bishop to oblige. I hear,’ said Kalv, ‘that there is a handsome young chaplain from Wales, or was I mistaken? And, of course, Gillacomghain had a priest.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Thorkel said, ‘Gillacomghain’s priest got burned with Gillacomghain in Thurso, and Sulien, who is not as handsome as all that, is only in deacon’s orders. He’ll get a prior from somewhere. I’ve told him to have it on the tribute-hill at Forres, where he can feast all the district leaders, at least from the north half of Moray. Then he’ll need to take the girl south and display her.’

  ‘I’ll arrange the feast, if you like,’ Kalv said. ‘Ølve used to hold good ones, before he was killed.’

  It seemed to Thorkel as good a way as any to get his mind off Queen Alfiva, so he left him with the ship’s clerk, making lists. It occurred to him that for the first time for many years he had not been told that this was a bargain he must have cause to regret.

  He saw the irony of it. For this year, for the first time, Kalv would have been right.

  After that, nothing was as Thorkel Fóstri expected.

  As the wind, relenting at last, let his ship sweep under sail towards the white stretches of sand that marked the mouth of the river Findhorn, he saw lying inland not only the blustered smoke of the wood-and-wattle settlement he remembered, but the gleam of new timber ringing the fortified hill of Forres beyond it, and within that, a long thatched roof he did not recognise, above which blew a flock of bright and unfamiliar banners. At the mouth of the river, there was a new building among the fishermen’s huts, from which a couple of men put off in a skiff and, boarding, steered the helmsman round the skeined sandy course of the river. Below the hill, the old jetty at the crossing was already manned, and at its far end they could see a scattered party of men moving downhill from the stockade towards them.

  Earl Thorfinn was among them. On the planks of the jetty, heaving in a familiar way beneath his feet, Thorkel said, ‘You haven’t met for a long time. Kalv, this is my lord Thorfinn of Orkney.’

  He hardly needed to say it. The men round his foster-son were well dressed, but no one else wore a tunic of Cathay silk from the markets east of the Middle Sea, with three arm-bands of gold with dragons’ heads beading their ridges, and a fur-lined scabbard netted with gold-work and embracing a sword-pommel of Saxon workmanship. Above it was the stormy, remembered face with the bright-coloured skin and blown sable hair. Thorfinn said, ‘Welcome to White Ireland. You’re smaller than I remembered.’

  Kalv, who was not notable for his height, smiled and said, ‘When we last met, you were crying and running about because your stepfather had died. I’m glad we meet in happier days.’

  ‘Since Thorkel here killed Gillacomghain? Ah, he burned like a Trøndelagen man’s conscience, I’m told,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And now I am to have you for uncle. You have a fine niece. Ever good to old men, ever good to young men, as Thorkel Fiflski said.’

  Thorkel gazed at his foster-son. Beside him, he could feel Kalv pause and change mental feet, like a horse in mid-canter. Kalv said, ‘I shall not be ashamed to own you. I expected to find you in pigtails, and your wife chewing limpets for ground-bait.’

  ‘Until tomorrow,’ Thorfinn said, ‘you would be wrong to call her anything but a concubine, and barren at that. But after the morning-ale she will be living in wedlock again. Bring your shipmaster ashore and join in the merrymaking. There is a berth for your ship at Invereren, if you will send it back, and meat and ale on shore for your friends, and somewhere to sleep for the night. You yourself will want to stay with your niece, I make no doubt.’

  The instructions passed to the ship, they had begun to walk up towards the hill. ‘It is easily seen,’ said Kalv, ‘that you had word we were coming, when you have a sufficiency of meat and of guests to have your wedding tomorrow. I have no blessing from Finn to bring you: no doubt you know that also.’

  ‘So long as you bring a heimanfylgja of sorts, even so small that it would fit under a fingernail, and I give you my mundr of the same order, the marriage is legal, they tell me, and assorts with the quality of her first husband better than any other bride-bargain I can think of,’ said Thorfinn. ‘There is her house. I will have you brought to the church-porch tomorrow. Kneel when other folk kneel and stand up when they stand: all I ask of you is that you put a cross next your name in the Gospel-page after, with the rest of us.’

  ‘Who should stop me?’ said Kalv. ‘Will the child your stepson be there? I hear my niece and Gillacomghain made a sorcerer’s maggot together.’ He stumbled. ‘What was that?’

  Two eyes of a clear, empty blue looked up into and through his, from a child’s face. ‘He is Luloecen,’ the child said. ‘He will eat you; but not until you are dead.’

  Kalv slipped his hand inside his shirt, to remember too late that he had put on his hammer pendant instead of his cross pendant today.

  That was the fault of this Thorfinn, the half-heathen. He smiled, showing his teeth at the child, and turned to say something cutting to the Earl, but found he had gone off to the stockade gate, whistling. The maggot-child put up its hand, and he took it, carefully, and was led into the house of his niece its mother, the bride.

  The long thatched building he had seen from the ship was indeed new, Thorkel found: a hall made of split oak trunks smoothed inside with an adze and let into an oak sill at the bottom. The sills and lintels were carved, and inside, the walls were covered to waist height by embroidered cloths dyed in scarlet and white. The upper parts, where the shelving allowed, were hung with shields, in shapes and colours Thorkel did not recognise. The hall was also full of strangers, or so it seemed to him at first. Then he began to see many faces from long ago, from Findlaech’s day, when Thorfinn used to come with his stepfather and his mother Bethoc, King Malcolm’s daughter.

  He said to Thorfinn, ‘I forgot you were taught to be an engineer, down there with the Danes and the Saxons. Did you invite your grandfather or your brother Duncan? They seem the only ones missing.’

  ‘Of course,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I sent their invitation off this very morning.’

  Thorkel smiled, and studied his foster-son.

  The sense of untrammelled vigour which had struck Kalv in the face at their first meeting had caused Thorkel to wonder as well in these few minutes’ walk into the stockade. A man’s marriage-eve might account for this change, if the bride were to his taste and much wanted. But not to Thorfinn, with his bride picked and notched like a ewe and then set aside, on this night as on any other, to wait out the months in her widow’s bed until the purified stock might be bred from. Thorkel said, ‘It seems that Orkney is well forgotten for the land of the Irishmen. You don’t speak to me in Norse any more.’

  Thorfinn turned and looked at him, and said, ‘You need to eat, and to drink, and to meet my friends, who might consider becoming your friends also. Has age taken your memory? You used to speak nothing but Gaelic when you were with Findlaech as well.’

  Then Thorkel tasted auk on his tongue, and came to himself, and went to meet his foster-son’s friends. Among them was a young Saxon from Mercia called Alfgar, who had the wildest laugh in the hall and was possessed of a fund of scandal, smoking-new, about public life in the chapels of Winchester as well as in Chester, mixed with a few things Thorkel had never heard of, occurring in Man and in Wales. He knew Eachmarcach of Ireland, said Alfgar, and thought he had the loudest laugh of anyone he had ever met.

  Thorkel took Alfgar with him and introduced him to the kinsfolk from Caithness and Orkney, whom he began to see were there too, drinking hard but not so much as to be impolite to the Moray chieftains and their women, who had put on their best cloaks and pins and had dropped into the half-Norse half-Gaelic tongue usual on such occasions. Skeggi had brought some Icelanders, including a man Thorkel knew called Isleifr, who had hair all over his b
ody like otter pelt. Isleifr was in talk with the young Breton Sulien, but they drew Thorkel into their circle, and soon Isleifr was holding the floor with some tale of joyous catastrophe, while Sulien was taken off by the Saxon boy Alfgar, who seemed to know him of old.

  It came to Thorkel that his foster-son must indeed have found a priest, for he seemed to recognise not one but a dozen faces of churchmen he remembered from monasteries as far south as Kinbathoc. Then Skeggi said, ‘Come and meet the foreigners and help Sulien talk to them.’

  And so he went to the top bench, where Thorfinn also was signalling him over, and where he sat down, as indicated, between an abbot from Devon and a bishop from Brittany. Thorfinn said, ‘I am not your brave sort of man who would enter into a marriage alliance without informing King Canute’s Queen, the Lady Emma. When she is in her dower town of Exeter, there is no one she leans on more than my lord Abbot Ealdred here, who rules Tavistock and all the trading-ships moving from thereabouts over the sea, as far south as the river Loire—or am I exaggerating?’

  ‘You are,’ said the Abbot. He was young for the position, and fresh-faced and solid of build, with an air about him that Thorkel could not quite put a name to, unless it were one of success. If he were a favourite of King Canute’s chief wife, of course, he would be in want of nothing. The Bishop, in an accent which would have been at home either in Brittany or over the border with the Normans, said, ‘And what lies will you tell of me?’

  ‘Bishop Hamon of Aaron’s Rock,’ said Thorfinn, acknowledging quickly. ‘His bishopric of Aleth is the neighbour of the one at Vannes that Sulien comes from.’

  The Bishop smiled, and then, his gaze shifting, smiled more broadly still. He said, ‘My friend Macbeth, I think your bride has just entered the door with her ladies. You must go and greet her.’

  It was true. The roar of talk and laughter, suddenly wavering, had taken fresh life as men moved back, shouting, from the doorway, taking their women-folk smiling with them. And through the free passage walked the bride of tomorrow as well as yesterday, Ingibjorg-Groa, with her women and Kalv her uncle beside her.

  Thorkel Fóstri had not seen her since she was thirteen, except in a dark hut beside her husband’s smouldering pyre, or huddled under a blanket on the long trip from Caithness to Moray. According to Sulien: She’s the handsomest girl I’ve ever seen in my life, Thorfinn had said; which was probably true but, considering Thorfinn’s record with slaves, not impressive.

  Looking at her now, with a sinking heart, Thorkel recognised that she was the handsomest girl he too had ever seen in a much longer life than Thorfinn’s. In fact, in the very poverty of the phrase, he could judge Thorfinn’s panic that night. He had expected to marry a tax-source, not this tall girl with eyebrows as black as his own, and smooth dark-red hair uncovered by linen, and sleeves of pleated white silk under a long crimson tunic, fringed and belted with gold, and valleyed between her two breasts by the gold chains holding her casket-brooch and her purse and her trinkets. She had worn a fur-lined cloak as well, pinned by a brooch that Thorkel recognised from the treasure-chest of Thorfinn’s mother. The women took it off, and she moved smiling between the people pressing about her, with Kalv pushing behind, his face red.

  A surprise for Kalv, then, this wedding-eve emergence, as perhaps it was a surprise for Thorfinn. Not only to possess a beauty, but a beauty freely displayed, stalking into the hall as though she owned it, as indeed in a sense she had once owned everything. In Thorkel’s ear, Sulien of Llanbadarn said, ‘Why so shocked? Because the bride has made an early appearance, or because the Mormaer of Moray is called Macbeth MacFindlaech?’ His Norse was fluent already.

  ‘He is not Macbeth son of Findlaech,’ said Thorkel shortly. ‘He is Macbeth Son of Life, or Macbeth son of his mother. His baptismal name had to please two cultures. They chose it carefully.’

  ‘It is the common fashion,’ said Sulien, ‘to call a man’s heir by the name of son, even though he were only a stepson. I would think a foster-son closer still. Better, says the tomb saying, a good foster-son than a bad son. Why is Kalv your cousin also angry?’

  ‘Because we are not all sitting round a dung fire chewing suet,’ Thorkel said. He knew Thorfinn was behind him, but he didn’t know how close until he spoke in Gaelic in his ear.

  ‘Fair, clever women are listening to thee, with sharp grey knives in their hands and gold on their breasts,’ the Earl said. ‘If you will turn round, I shall present you to your cousin’s daughter. It’s three or four years since you met, isn’t it?’

  Nearly four years since a grotesque, pregnant child had passed by, on her way to join her elderly husband. And from that child had grown this red-haired girl with the light eyes and the black brows saying to Thorfinn, ‘Kalv my uncle is angry, naturally, because the Arnmødling family are not supposed to be supporting this wedding and you have seen fit to invite two emissaries of King Canute.’

  ‘Amazing though it may seem,’ said Thorfinn, ‘King Canute and the Lady Emma are two different people. Why wear red?’

  ‘Because I was uncertain whether Thor or the White Christ had your devotion these days,’ the girl said. ‘I see that in the matter of hangings you have nodded to each side.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Thorfinn. ‘The essence of the matter is simple. When you hear me addressed as Macbeth you wear white, and the rest of the time dress in animal pelt. If both names occur in the same sentence, you should wear whatever best suits you for running in.’

  With irritation, Thorkel found his head swinging from speaker to speaker, forlorn as a bear on an iceberg. He said, ‘Don’t believe him. Orkney, as you know very well, was brought back to Christ thirty years ago.’

  ‘Oh, there are a few priests living in corners where there is food to be had,’ said Thorfinn carelessly. ‘But should a devotee of Thor or of Odin or the Golden Calf, for that matter, turn up, I am sure there would be an accommodation. The Abbot tells me that a church to St Olaf is being erected in Exeter. You must visit it, Kalv, on your next trading-trip.’

  Thorkel found that Sulien, grinning, had laid a hand on his arm. ‘Withdraw,’ said Sulien, ‘from the assize-field. And bring Kalv as well. If there is a weapon handy, either Thorfinn or his lady will use it.’

  It was good advice. With some trouble, Thorkel detached his cousin and took him away to a group of Duncansby men. Kalv said, ‘What I should like to have seen was the first meeting between that hell-child of hers and his stepfather.’

  ‘Why does that child disturb you?’ said Sulien. ‘Thorfinn and he have a perfect understanding. Thorfinn treats him as if he were five million years old.’

  It was a good answer, and a correct one, Thorkel knew. What Sulien had not described was the moment of that first meeting, when the tall young man had looked down at the white-haired child of three, and the child had looked up, its eyes reflecting the sky, and said, ‘Since one day I shall carry you, will you carry me now?’

  He turned, and had his drinking-horn filled, and then went to lend a hand with the feasting-boards.

  The wedding service took place the following morning, under an awning outside the south door of the small, plastered church that had always been there, with the priest’s hut, and to which Thorfinn had merely added a coat of white lime. The Prior of St Drostan’s of Deer, bringing with him the altar-silver and vestments which Deer already owed to the generosity of Findlaech’s family, spoke the necessary words, but made no address to the people, and the chanting of the five or six monks he had brought with him hardly rose above the squeals of the seagulls and the barking of dogs and the crying of children from Invereren. What was taking place, patently, was the legalising of a marriage alliance created for the proper disposal of property. No one objected.

  Early the following morning, when the fires had died down in the roasting-pits and everyone else at last was asleep or drunk, the bride said to her husband, ‘I was always taught that a sober man was a coward. Are you a coward?’

  ‘I always considered
myself one,’ the Earl said. ‘Until I found out what I was marrying. Perhaps, since we are not expected to sleep together, we should mark the occasion in some other way. What about this? If you will agree to refrain from an attempt on my life, I shall give you the lands of Coulter to hold for your son as your morgen-gifu. More, I shall promise to respect your health likewise.’ In the dark, his black brows were raised, but he was not smiling.

  The lands of Coulter, on both sides of the Dee, were the southernmost limits of his mormaership. They were also the wardlands that protected the north-driving pass of Strathbogie: the route an army from Forres might take if it wished to march south without trusting the coast and its shipping. The route an army from the south of the same mind might use if it wished to invade Mar and Moray.

  Sinna and the rest of her women had already moved ahead into the house. Light still came from the hall and the other buildings on top of the hill, but fitfully, and there was almost no shouting. Here, where the ox-spits had been, the air was heavy with the smells of hot beef and grease and the fumes of ale and mead and wine and other emanations of celebrating humanity. Then the salt dawn wind stirred as they stood there, and a haze of white sand lifted and struck them, like the cakes and the flowers that should have been thrown at their bridal, and had been at Gillacomghain’s. Groa said, ‘You tempt me. The lord Crinan would marry a rich widow of any sort who held the key to Strathbogie.’

  ‘Then you see how much I should rely on your promise,’ he said.

  In her light eyes, the dying fire glimmered. She did not answer. After a moment, he spoke again, in a different voice. ‘Very well. I know that without me you have no protector, and that Canute would not allow Crinan to increase his power at present. I don’t think, either, that you see a place for yourself back in Norway. If you took Gillacomghain to your bed, you will take me, next summer. I don’t, therefore, need to rely on your promise. Nor do you need to doubt mine.’