He turned on his heel and walked back to the ship, and for a moment she thought she was going to get the fish as well, but he jerked a thumb over his shoulder and the fifteen men began rolling the kegs down to the quayside. Then the gangplank came up and the hawsers aboard, and the knörr moved off as soon as the first oars dug into the water, narrowly missing a longship skimming upriver, aiming for the same berth.
The Irish freedwoman Sinna, gazing at the near-collision in horror, flung her arms to the skies at the explosion of outrage and blasphemy that rose from both ships.
Her kerchief was still in her hand. Dutifully, the row of spearmen and archers on the Mormaer’s mound released their weapons.
Sitting placidly under her awning, Groa saw, with surprise, that it was raining.
Then she saw that the rain was made of steel, and that it was falling steadily, with no very beneficial effect, on a dragon-ship bearing the black-raven banner of Orkney.
‘Three killed and eighteen wounded,’ Earl Thorfinn said.
The white-faced archers had been sent to their flogging and the screaming Sinna dismissed to her hut; the injured had been tended and the dead buried, and the Earl and his lady were now alone, in the hall-room of her house … of his house … on the hill. ‘They were mostly from the other ship,’ Groa said.
Under the crumpled mess of the elegant robe, her body shook like the skin of an idle horse bothered by flies. She had been shaking ever since she ran down to the riverside and her husband had stepped on shore like a man arrived to claim a very particular tax of his own, made up of lopped heads.
She had forgotten what he was like. He had flung his sword at her, pommel first, and she had just caught it, slashing her fingers. ‘Try again,’ he had said. ‘Maybe you have better aim than they have.’
His face had been red and white, and his chest beating with anger.
She had explained. She had explained again, when she had been sent to do so, at the side of the ship. She would have done nothing for the trader under the circumstances, but Earl Thorfinn didn’t want to hear about the circumstances. The trader’s men were looked after equally with his own, and then sent off with as much gold as they might have had if she had given them a shipload of timber for nothing.
And now he and she were alone, and up and down his right arm was a stained envelope made from the lower half of Sinna’s shift, held together by a cross-binding of tablet-made silk and gold ribbon of three months’ making.
She ought to offer to see to it. She had no intention of going anywhere near him. She was married to him.
She sat down, letting him tower over her if he wanted to, and nursed her stinging fingers under their cloth. After a moment, he sat down, too, on the stool behind him, and leaned against the wall. ‘Where is your steward?’ he said.
‘At Speymouth,’ she said. ‘He’ll come here when I go south. Eochaid is here to look after the shipping, and he usually has two or three others to call on. One of them is inland supervising the felling, and the other chose to join you in Galloway. I used to do this when Gillacomghain was alive.’
‘No doubt,’ said Earl Thorfinn. ‘I didn’t hear whether or not he had the use of his right arm when we burned him.’
‘I’ve explained,’ she said. ‘For the last time, I’m sorry. I’ll make sure that it never happens again.’
‘No. I’ll make sure that it never happens again,’ he said. ‘You don’t intend us to eat or drink today?’
‘There’s plenty,’ she said. ‘The girls are frightened to come in.’
‘Then go out to them,’ he said. ‘And get your hand looked after. And bring back as much wine as you need to make you compliant and I need to make me simple-minded but eager. We have five minutes’ work to do.’
She stood up. She did not even know him well enough to tell if he was playing with her. Her throat had closed and her heart was tolling like a dead-bell. He said, ‘Unless it is the wrong time?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Well,’ he said impatiently. And as she still stood, he said, ‘Groa. I am here and you are here because I must have sons. Do you want me to stay any longer than I have to?’
Her knees gave way and she sat down again. Staring at him, she found she was rocking herself backwards and forwards in her anxiety. She stopped it. She said, ‘Could we reconsider and make a fresh start tomorrow? After all, you’ve waited two years.’
He waited, courteously enough, until she had finished speaking, and then, rising, he opened the door and went out. She could hear him calling the slaves, and very soon he was back, with a spouted jug of wine in one hand and two cups in the crook of his arm. ‘Now,’ he said.
‘I’ll have both beakers,’ she said.
Afterwards she reckoned that she had drunk at least two-thirds of the wine. She had a very vague memory of being helped into the bedchamber, and of the door closing. She needed hardly any undressing, and she let him steer her to the mattress and fold back her clothes. She lay with her eyes closed and at the end said, ‘Four minutes. That was four minutes this time.’
There was a little silence and then he said, ‘I’m beginning to find my way about.’
When she opened her eyes later, and the room had steadied, she found she was alone.
His blood was everywhere: her robe was covered with it, and the linen sheet they had sent her from Austråt. She did not feel any particular emotion, but lay quite quietly, with tears pouring into her ears.
‘He’s very practical,’ Thorkel had once said. ‘It seems to be his chief characteristic’
She had time to remember it during the days that her husband spent on his back, with the herbalist monk from St Drostan’s of Urquhart looking after him. He had known very well that his wound wouldn’t let him take her next day, or for some time to come, for that matter.
In the event, his perseverance received its reward, although in no personal sense had he made any conquest, that night, of his partner. News of his progress, or lack of it, filtered through to the Lady from those attending her husband: that the wound was light, but that he was fevered with blood-loss; that the healing had become interrupted and a new ointment sent for; that he was better but weak. She felt no inclination to go and visit him, ailing or well, and receive more abuse for her share in his injuries. Sinna, she noticed, kept well clear of the sick-house as well. No one seemed to find her absence unwifely or surprising: she supposed they all thought she was frightened of him. In which they were perfectly right.
The Lady of Moray accordingly waited, pursuing her daily rounds warily, until, in the way of nature, it came to her that the means of absolution seemed to be at hand. In the privacy of her room, she wiped off the tears of wry laughter that sprang not entirely from hysteria and, putting on her best robe, went and rapped on the door of the sick-house.
Inside, she dismissed the slave sitting there and, surveying the low-lying bed and its inmate, addressed her husband.
‘I have news for you. Unless deceived by the shocks to my womanly senses, I might be carrying.’
The yellow light from the lamp showed him unshaven. Above the black jowls, the nose and cheekbones had sharpened, casting black, jagged shadows. He looked grotesque.
Not a muscle moved round his mouth or his eyes. He lay and studied her. She said, ‘You lost a lot of blood. Most of it over me.’
On either side of his mouth, two lines deepened a fraction. He said, I’ll wager you had a headache next morning. However. There is a month, isn’t there, to prove you right or wrong?’
His voice had not changed. Now she knew how he was taking it, she could meet him on the same ground. She said, ‘Sadly, I realised that you might not believe me. It doesn’t matter. Bound to my lord from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, I shall be ready if needed; preferably with a different sort of wine. When can I expect Caw Revived?’
Undisturbed, the violent brown eyes studied her. ‘I want to visit this steward of yours,’ said Earl Thorfinn. ‘And I have some
things to see to in southern Moray and Mar for a week or two. Move to Monymusk, and I shall come there once a week.’
‘Lulach is at Monymusk,’ Groa said. Once a week? She could not read his face. ‘And what about the wine?’
‘I shall try, but next time you may have to suffer in ale,’ said the Earl. ‘As for Lulach, if he is to have a half-brother or -sister, he had better know who has fathered him or her.’
‘Or them,’ she said. ‘If I have two at a birth, will you feel safe from Rognvald? Or will you never feel safe?’
‘Not while you are about,’ the Earl said.
He returned to Caithness in August, by which time it was public knowledge, confirmed by the women who knew, that his wife would bear him a child in the following March.
‘Did you tell Lulach?’ Sulien said.
‘Lulach says it will be a son called Paul,’ Thorfinn said.
Skeggi, who was frightened of children, let out a snort. ‘I can see an Earl of Orkney having a son called Paul,’ he said. ‘Where in the name of Odin did he get that idea?’
‘I rather think the whole thing is between the White Christ and Frey,’ Thorfinn said peacefully. ‘At the moment, I am not quite sure which is winning.’
FOURTEEN
N THE twenty-fifth day of November in that year of 1034, there died at Glamis in the thirtieth year of his reign Malcolm son of Kenneth, King of Alba and glory of the whole west of Europe.
So reported the monkish scribes of the Irish, whose blood ran in his veins. To those of his own land who paid him tribute at his burial, he was a clever, tough, and unscrupulous man who had fought and killed to gain the throne and fought and killed to keep the throne, as had every ruler before him.
From the time when he seized the succession at the age of fifty, he had maintained his overlordship over the shifting races of Picts and Britons and Scots, the colonies of Norse and the colonies of Danes and of Irish long settled in the plains and rivers that ran from the Derwent in Cumbria to the border of Caithness in the furthermost north. Where fighting would serve, he had fought, to throw from his shores the Norwegians and the Danes, the armies of England when they harried his coast or marched inland in conquest or retribution, or tried to take for themselves the headlands and harbours they needed.
And where war would not serve, he used strategy. He swore fealty to Canute for Cumbria and for those fragments of Lothian he kept hold of; he gave his daughter and Caithness to Orkney; he let Durham keep her churches in the debatable south and did not harry the settlements in the long valleys between England and Alba which had owed allegiance once to Strathclyde or to England, so long as they paid him his dues.
An old man without sons, and with a son-in-law he secretly feared, Malcolm of Alba had turned in his later years, sensibly, from the northern mountains whose control was eluding him, and had bent all his energies on building for Duncan his grandson an empire of infinitely more wealth and promise: the sway over that neck of land—from Durham to Kendal, from Carlisle to Berwick—that lay between England and Alba. And furthermore, if he could get it, that other land next to Earl Leofric’s frontiers: the lands deeper down into England that might, if he were fortunate, include the powerful city of York.
For that reason, he had established this network of dynastic marriages, which meant that his blood, however remotely, would run in every part of the country he coveted. It was now for Duncan his grandson to bring these conquests to pass. And it would be for the young sons of those marriages, growing up in all their ambition and vigour, to take and hold them, and to take and hold also the crumbling frontiers of the north which had fallen about the ears of that fool Gillacomghain and might make other barriers tremble. In his last days in Glamis, he had told Duncan over and over, ‘Bring your armies here. Mass your troops here. Protect Angus.’
‘I don’t think,’ Duncan had said, ‘that you need trouble yourself over Thorfinn. He is spending all his strength running about keeping Galloway quiet for me. And when his nephew Rognvald comes back from Russia, they’re bound to fight over Orkney. I shall be surprised if he survives a twelvemonth.’
‘There is to be an heir, I am told,’ his grandfather said.
And Duncan had smiled and said, ‘You know I have two sons with the royal Saxon line in their heritage who can take care of any brat from that kennel, when they are older.’
And so King Malcolm died, frowning, they said.
Because it was winter, there was every excuse for his grandson of Orkney not to attend the funeral obsequies, which were rarely of great ceremony, there being a tendency among the kings of Alba to die suddenly in out-of-the-way places and frequently after a truncated reign.
The tradition was that burial should take place on lona, the island from which nearly five hundred years since, St Columba had taken the God of the Celts to the Irish and Picts of the mainland.
A monastery to which kings came for burial, or even on pilgrimage, was likely to be very rich. Unerringly, the Vikings had found and sacked it, waited for the altar-silver again to accumulate, and sacked it again until, mournfully, the monks had packed their belongings and crossed the sea back to their saint’s native Ireland, where the monastery of Kells opened its arms to become the new home for the church of Columba.
The men on lona now were anchorites. The church was there, crumbling, and the wattle huts in which they slept and prayed; and perhaps a few sheep, but nothing else. A man going on pilgrimage had to take his own stocky and servants to build him a cabin and furnish it. A man wishing to be buried there, such as a king, would require to import the abbot of the Columban mission from Ireland, with all his retinue, his plate, and his vestments, as well as his own bishop and monks from the mainland. And, whatever the season, would require to cross the sea twice, with a coffin.
‘No doubt, one fine day, they’ll row over a box with his liver and lights in it,’ said Skeggi Havardson, who was not impressed by the White Christ in any form since the late Olaf had found himself canonised. ‘You can’t go, anyway. What about the proclamation of the new King? You shouldn’t go to that, either.’
They were at Sandwick in Orkney at the time, preparing to hold Yule in the big hall that Thorkel Fóstri had inherited, now that his father had died. Outside, a rare occurrence, there was a powdering of snow on the field-strips, which the wind was lifting and throwing about like white grass-seed. Indoors, Arnór had just recited a new poem with something wrong with the last verse, and six men were helping him with it.
Thorfinn said, ‘Why not? It’s always held at the Moot Hill, and that’s just south of Dunkeld. If he could get an army from Dunkeld to Tullich last year, you could get near enough to cut his throat if he kills me.’
‘Two years ago,’ Thorkel said. ‘My guess is that, wherever it’s held, they’ll plan it for Easter.’
‘You mean March,’ said Thorfinn amiably.
‘I mean March,’ Thorkel assented. He could hear the sharpness of his voice.
‘Well. Leaving aside the problems of March for the moment, let us consider,’ Thorfinn said. ‘There can’t be anyone living now who remembers the last time they proclaimed a king. In fact, did Malcolm not just pick up a set of properly annotated gospel books and run?’
‘I know what happens at a king-making,’ offered one of the younger Salmundarsons. ‘I’ve a cousin in Derry that told me once. They slaughter a mare—’
Three people groaned.
‘—and bring her to the new King, and the new King makes … does … pretends that it’s a mistress.’
Everyone groaned.
‘And then they boil the mare, and he has a bath in the broth and then eats it. I told them,’ said the Salmundarson boy, rather red in the face, ‘that we stopped eating horseflesh thirty years ago when Olaf Tryggvasson said it was heathenish.’
‘A good-luck custom. Why not?’ said Thorfinn to the boy, through the ensuing uproar.
That’s what my cousin said,’ said the boy quickly.
‘All the same,�
�� Thorfinn said gravely, ‘I don’t think I see Duncan embracing it. You’ll probably find he merely marries a slab of rock: much less exciting. They’ll still blame him if the crops go wrong.’ He was shaving a piece of calfskin, and there were whiskers all over his knees.
The boy said, ‘Why don’t you go and be made king? You’re a grandson of King Malcolm as well.’
There were some things now that no one said to Thorfinn: even Thorkel; even Sulien. No one spoke.
Thorfinn blew a drift of cowhair into the longfire, laid down the skin, and took up a whetstone. ‘And what a very good idea nephew Rognvald would think that was,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps you think Brusi’s son ought to have Orkney and Caithness to look after while I move down roughly in the direction of Winchester? I don’t quite see how I could do it all otherwise.’
The boy, suddenly aware of the silence, looked at him, but said nothing more. Thorkel Fóstri, pitying him, said, ‘Duncan is his grandfather’s intended heir. Whatever the rights or the wrongs of it, you could only challenge him by going to war. And you might think, as Thorfinn says, that we have territory enough to look after.’
Sulien’s voice spoke from the end of the hall, where he was grinding something in a bowl. ‘None the less, he is within the royal derbfine, isn’t he? Of the royal kindred within four generations from which the fittest man may be elected? Or is that Irish, like the horse-boilings?’
‘No. Kings have been elected that way over here, or from alternate sides of the kindred. The Picts had a different way again, by descent through their women. For the past fifty years, the throne has been open to whoever among the kindred was strong enough to take and keep it. The last eight kings of Alba were all murdered. Half the battles Malcolm fought were to pick up enough booty to keep his electorate happy.’
Thorfinn, unexpectedly, had answered. He finished sharpening his knife and looked up, the blade glittering in his hand. ‘I’m not up for election. You’ll have to learn to like winters on Orkney.’
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