‘No,’ Thorfinn said.
The ensuing hour took five hours to pass.
At the end of it, Groa, peering from the toisech’s house amid the chatter of women and children, saw the neat wooden door of the meeting-house open and those conferring begin to come out. There were, reassuringly, five of them. She saw other heads turning sharply: those of Sulien and Alfgar, who had been doing nothing in particular with a group of men at the foot of the cross, and those of the Icelanders and the Caithness men engaged in their perpetual dicing.
The five men set off for the hall. Excusing herself, Groa left the women and followed.
There was a crowd in front of the door, including the prince Duncan and his friends, apparently on the point of departure. Duncan looked the same, except that he had a blue patch under each eye and his nose was pale. Thorkel had bags under his eyes as well. Earl Thorfinn and the man Forne were unaltered. She took part in a long, false-hearty muddle of leave-taking and, when the Cumbrian party was finally mounted, watched it ride off to the west, no doubt to join the four hundred armed men who had never been mentioned. ‘Why the army?’ she asked of Earl Thorfinn.
‘It saved the prince asking for hostages,’ said the Earl. ‘And he reckoned he was safe anyway, when we were too drunk to respond, or too fearful. Would you like him for a husband? You would never end as a widow.’
‘There are several ways of never becoming a widow,’ the girl said. ‘Two of them at least seem to be available to me without having to move to another marriage. Are you serious? Was he thinking of offering for me?’
‘What do you think the attack on Thurso was all about?’ the Earl said. ‘If I had died and Gillacomghain had died, there was Moray sitting about in a hut waiting for Duncan or Maddan to marry it. He still wouldn’t mind having you for his secondary wife, Danish fashion, if anything happened to me. If it does, you should accept the offer. It can be a profitable business. Look at Alfiva running Norway.’
‘Look at Norway about to rise against her,’ said Thorkel. ‘I told you to keep your tongue off Siward. If his father and Kalv rebel and throw out Alfiva, you’ll find the Earls ruling Norway again, with the Arnasons in the lead. Isn’t that what we all want?’
‘And you think the Earls could stand against Canute?’ Thorfinn said.
‘Maybe they can’t. But what makes you think you can stand against Canute?’ said Thorkel. ‘You sat in there just now and promised the use of your fleet and your Caithness men to keep Malcolm’s east coast safe against Canute’s son Svein if war breaks out in Norway. Are you mad? Canute is your lord for all Orkney. Two of his churchmen have just been up at your wedding. He’ll send the Danish fleet up, and you’ll lose everything.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said the Earl. He cleared a space on a hall bench and sat on it. ‘Canute’s having trouble in Normandy. He’ll have his hands full if there’s a rebellion in Norway. In any case, by offering to guard the coast, I’ve saved Duncan’s face. I said I could pay him no tribute for at least a year, and he accepted it. I’ve also said I’ll join him with longships to help clear the Norse out of Galloway.’
‘Why?’ said Alfgar.
‘Because King Malcolm … or someone … wants sole possession of the western coast north of Cumbria,’ said the Earl. ‘Galloway and Govan and the old Glasgow churchlands, and Kintyre and all the islands next to Ireland that give a good base for striking, or trading, or whatever you may want.’
‘I know that. Everyone in Mercia knows that. I meant, why join him?’ Alfgar said.
‘Brotherly feeling,’ said Earl Thorfinn rebukingly.
Tullich had been their last visit. The following day, they all left in their various ways: Alfgar to the south and the rest by road and by ship to the northern reaches of Moray, to Caithness, to Orkney.
Groa was returning to Inverness, where Luloecen was. Her husband, it appeared, was taking a different, faster route north to Duncansby, and most of his band were going with him.
He came to say goodbye, and said it, in one word, cheerfully.
‘Nothing else?’ Groa said. Her red hair blew in the wind, and she held it down, gazing at him.
He thought. ‘Until next summer,’ he said.
THIRTEEN
N IN THE SUMMER of 1033, the harvests failed again all over Europe because of the rain, and travellers to Rome were killed and eaten, so report said. In Norway, a man calling himself the son of Olaf Tryggvasson tried to make himself king, but was defeated by the fleet of Canute’s son Svein. The Trøndelagers, having other plans, helped neither side.
An Irishman whose land on the west coast of Alba had become a base for the Norse-Irish kindred of Dublin was attacked and killed by Earl Thorfinn of Orkney, who went on to drive out the Irishman’s uncle from another stronghold in the south-west. The army of the prince of Cumbria played some part in the achievement.
A punitive expedition against the east coast of Alba was led from Norway by Svein’s standard-bearer, on the advice of Svein’s father, to discourage help for his rebels in Norway. The men of Fife, with the aid of the Orkney fleet, fought and defeated the foray. A force led by the prince Duncan arrived in time to play some part in the battle.
The Earl of Orkney allowed time to pass and then let it be known that, due to the drying climate of Caithness, there was a surplus of grain for barter, as he had promised. He became, by hearsay, mildly popular.
The unrest in the north of Norway continued to grow, not without some encouragement. At length, King Canute’s lesser wife and her son Svein lost their nerve and, giving up Trøndelagen altogether, fled to the south, and from there out of the country.
Thus simply, thus foolishly, thus suddenly ended King Canute’s Danish rule over Norway.
The Earl of Orkney returned to Caithness and paid attention to all the news that reached him from Nídarós. Then, with the onset of storms and security, he crossed the Pentlandsfjord and prepared to work through the winter restoring to order his neglected dominion in Orkney. To his wife in Moray he sent his regrets that he had not been able to see her that year.
‘You did what?’ said Thorkel Fóstri at Hfn, when he heard. ‘Haven’t you been to see her at all? Or the boy? You’re going to lose Moray.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Thorfinn replied. ‘She has a good, well-organised council of her men and mine, and the means to raise plenty of strength to protect her if Duncan or anyone else troubles her. And the whole of my resources to call on.’
‘If she had the whole of your resources to call on, I shouldn’t be worrying,’ said Thorkel tartly. ‘What if she goes to Duncan instead of the other way about?’
‘He would send her back. He needs me. And she wouldn’t stand for being anyone’s second wife anyway. I rather suspect,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that she doesn’t particularly care for being anyone’s first wife either. Lording it alone in Moray is probably what she likes doing most, next to wishing she could be an abbess.’
‘Lording it in Moray while you get yourself nearly killed fighting Duncan’s battles for him,’ said Thorkel. ‘And who is supposed to hold the north of Scotland then?’
‘There is another heir,’ Thorfinn said.
Once, thought his foster-father, he could pin him down. Once, he could control him. Once, he could stop him. ‘Who?’ he said. ‘Your four-year-old stepson? Caithness doesn’t belong to Luloecen. Orkney doesn’t belong to him. There is no way by which you could get Orkney to accept Gillacomghain’s son, and so risk having the whole of the north in vassaldom to the King of Alba.’
‘They risked it when they accepted me,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And as the King of Alba’s grandson, I represented a greater threat than Luloecen would.’
‘You were a grown man,’ said Thorkel. ‘Or old enough anyway to show what you meant to do. You fought for Orkney like a cur with a rat in its teeth, and you soon showed what your oath of vassaldom was worth.’ He broke off, advisedly, and cleared his throat. ‘You weren’t seriously suggesting that Luloecen could follow you he
re?’
‘No, I wasn’t,’ Thorfinn said. ‘You’ve forgotten that there is another heir to Orkney of Sigurd’s blood. Far away, like the Saxons’ mysterious Athelings, but still alive.’
‘Rognvald!’ Thorkel had raised his voice. ‘Rognvald, Brusi’s son? The yellow-haired snivelling child we last saw in Nídarós?’
‘The yellow-haired snivelling child you last saw at Nídarós,’ Thorfinn agreed.
Warned, Thorkel looked at him. After a moment, he said, in a quieter voice, ‘Rognvald has been in Russia for nearly four years—nearly six if you count the first time as well. Olaf is dead: Kalv killed him. You will never see Rognvald again.’ And then, as Thorfinn did not at once agree, he said, ‘Will we?’
‘I am afraid we might,’ Thorfinn said, ‘I have just had word from Norway. There has been a meeting of the bonder. They have decided not to rule Trøndelagen themselves, in place of Canute or his son. They have decided—Kalv has decided—your cousin Kalv has decided to go to Russia in the spring and bring back King Olaf’s young bastard Magnús to be the next King of Norway. And if Magnús comes,’ Thorfinn said, and, throwing down the knife he was toying with, rose from the table,’—if Magnús comes, then Rognvald will come with him, to claim his father’s inheritance, which is half of Orkney.’
They looked at one another. ‘So?’ said Thorkel slowly.
‘So I am sending my regrets to my wife that I have been unable to visit her in the past year,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And I have said that I shall most certainly give myself the pleasure of a long stay in Moray in spring-time.’ He spoke mildly. ‘Would you like a daughter, Thorkel, if I have one? You would only have to wait thirteen years or so for her, and at least she would be a good linguist.’
‘My God,’ said Thorkel feelingly. ‘With your tongue and her red hair … You should be prevented from breeding with each other. There must be a canonical rule about it somewhere. What will your sons be like?’
‘Duncan, perhaps,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Soft and sly and stupid. We share the same mother, after all. You should have no trouble fostering that kind, if you have to.… I wonder how prolific Rognvald has been, or intends to be. It is tempting to hope that he has caught the Eastern sin.’
‘Tempting from what point of view?’ said Thorkel sourly, and left him sitting looking surprised.
They spent Yule in Orkney, where Thorfinn was fortifying the near-island at Birsay in the north-west and rebuilding some of the lodges he used when he moved through his property. He seemed to take pleasure in Orkney in the winter-time, perhaps because of the winds that dragged through land and sea like a scraping-board and flung the green waves and the white against the storm-beach at Skaill until the heathland was salt a mile inland and the night sky was cuffed with pale breakers.
Then, with the ships safely trussed in their nousts, the halls of his friends and his kinsmen opened their doors to him and to his household as was their duty as well as their pleasure, and the long roasting-fire would fling its light and its heat into their faces as the hot pebbles hissed and belched in the ale-bucket and the cauldrons swung on their chains in the noise and the laughter.
During the day, there were dangerous sports. They were all scarred from that summer’s fighting. But they always collected their worst scars in the winter.
Word came from Moray that the Lady had received Earl Thorfinn’s intimation that he would travel south to see her in the summer, and thanked him for it. The courier, one of the older Salmundarson boys, said that the Lady seemed to be well, and that, apart from a blood-feud and three districts laid low with a pest, Moray appeared to be quiet at the moment.
‘And the boy?’ Thorfinn didn’t ask it, so Sulien did.
‘I was coming to that,’ said Starkad Salmundarson, who, no more than any member of his family, brooked interference. ‘He’s healthy. His hair’s still white as a patriarch’s, but he isn’t a pink-eye. He wanted Earl Thorfinn to know that he didn’t mind his name being changed to Lulach, but he has sent something so that Earl Thorfinn would always keep his proper name in mind.’
The something was a bare stick. They all looked at it.
‘It had leaves on,’ Starkad offered. ‘They came off in my saddle-bag. I don’t know what it means, either.’
Thorfinn turned it over. There were no runes on it anywhere: it was just an ordinary stick. ‘Sulien?’ he said. ‘A message-token from an unknown land. Put it in your book-bag and tell me if it takes root. What else, Starkad?’
‘Nothing from Moray,’ said Starkad. ‘But I heard something as I came over the Cabrach. They say the King your grandfather is low.’
‘Lower than usual?’ Thorfinn said. His grandfather must be over eighty, and had never ailed in his life. This was the moment brother Duncan had been both dreading and longing for, one supposed. He probably had his day-by-day instructions for the next five years by rote. The most weighty question facing himself, as another grandson, was whether it would be more dangerous to stay away from the funeral than to go to it.
Starkad said, ‘He can’t ride very much, and he’s staying a lot with that old mistress he likes in Glamis. But he could hang on for a year yet, they tell me.’
‘Starkad,’ Thorfinn said, ‘when we want to hear news upside down, we will stand on our heads as you tell it. Killer-Bardi is here: go and find him and get drunk somewhere.’
King Malcolm lived. The spring came, and with it the news that Kalv Arnason and Einar Tambarskelve were now on their way to Gardarike to offer the crown of Norway to the late King Olaf’s bastard, aged ten. They had taken with them a large body of oath-taking Trønder and were expected to pick up Rognvald son of Brusi on their way back, at the end of the year.
Thorfinn, who could swear in five languages better than anyone Thorkel had ever heard, did so, and then said, ‘They might even get the boy to come back at that. Einar Tambarskelve must be one of the only three men in Trøndelagen who didn’t lay a finger on Olaf, and that ought to count. Thorkel, I want to see what is happening in Galloway, and then I’ll leave you in Caithness and get down to Moray. Do you want to see what is happening in Galloway?’
‘There’s a rumour Suibhne’s come back,’ Thorkel said carefully.
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Thorfinn. ‘We go down there; and kill him; and perhaps look and see what is happening on Colonsay. Then I go to Moray.’
The Galloway campaign reached a satisfactory conclusion in June. On learning then that his wife had been for two weeks in Inverness, the Earl of Orkney sailed north with no particular haste, and rounding Duncansby Head, made for the wide arms of the Moray Firth, where the river Ness entered the eastern ocean. He did not happen to send word that he was coming.
Being troubled neither by news nor premonitions, Finn Arnason’s daughter, in an embroidered robe with a train, was sitting under an awning on the wharfside with Sinna her woman and three of her housecarls, overseeing the noisy resolution of a misunderstanding, not to say an open piece of deception, to do with toll-payments.
Her hair and her neck, as befitted a married woman of nineteen, were wrapped in white linen, and she had brought her tablet-loom with her, unwinding its glittering ribbon over her skirts as the ivory placques clicked and clacked under her fingers. She said for the third time in Norse, ‘We do not want fish. Put the kegs back on board. You can have no more timber until you pay in silver or wool, as we agreed. And you can have no more of anything until you settle for the dues on your last cargo.’
‘I paid them,’ the trader said, also for the third time. He was smiling.
‘He didn’t,’ said Eochaid.
She had asked the prior of the monastery of Deer to find her a Norse-speaking clerk who understood business, and he had found this black-haired man Eochaid, a trained priest from Armagh, to help her steward.
He had proved quick-witted as well as skilful with numbers, and she hoped she could keep him all year, but it wasn’t likely. To have a permanent trading-station you needed a town, with men who woul
d do nothing but defend the town and its warehouses and keep order among the ships’ crews. You needed goods to barter, regularly brought in, or a settlement of workshops on the spot, with a surplus of food in the countryside big enough to feed the fighting-men and the craftsmen and the traders; and good roads to carry it all.
In Moray and Caithness, there were things to sell: hides and salmon and eels, squirrel and marten pelts and timber—and, God knew, there were things that they needed. But in all Alba there were no towns: there were only family settlements on the rivers and up the sides of the hills, on the drier land; and since the sea-raiding began and even before, the churches had dwindled to a handful of monasteries supporting a dozen or less in their huts, and a network of cells and chapels in which a monk might find shelter, or a travelling priest to baptise and shrive, bury and pray for his district, while losing even what learning once he had.
And so the fairs were lost, too: the saints’ days on which the countrymen of a Saxon shire would at least know when to gather and bring their goods to market. Since she married Gillacomghain she had done her best to get to know the saints of Moray, but it seemed to her that an undue number of them had gone to their account without proper advice as to the date of the equinoctial gales.
The trader said to Eochaid, ‘It’s my word against yours. I’ll fight you for it.’ He was still grinning, and so were the fifteen men standing behind him. They all had either knives or axes stuck in their belts.
She could hear the housecarls breathing behind her, but they all stood still, as they had been told. She said, ‘Didn’t you see Sinna take out her kerchief a few minutes ago? You must think we are all children. Look up at the stockade.’
The Mormaer’s hill was directly behind her, with her own house and all the service-buildings behind the log walls. On top of the log walls, by now, should be a line of throwing-spears and a row of elbows, cocked above arrow-heads. The ivory clacked under her fingers, and when she looked up, the trader had stopped smiling. ‘Wool,’ said Groa kindly. ‘Or silver.’
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