‘We have had this conversation before,’ the Earl said. ‘I’m tired of it.’
‘Canute wasn’t in any doubt what to do about it,’ Sulien said. ‘His daughter is marrying the Emperor’s only son this summer.’
‘Canute had to think about his Danish frontiers, among other things,’ Earl Thorfinn said. ‘I don’t have the Saxons and the Wends and the Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen sitting on the borders of Moray: I only have Duncan. If you can’t find enough monasteries to keep your writing-hand occupied, then you’d better finish your journey to Bangor.’
Sulien rose and went out.
Groa followed him. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
Sulien turned round. He was still breathing hard, but as she watched, he calmed himself and eventually produced a wry smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is between Thorfinn and me.’
She crossed her arms over her buffeting robe. ‘He is fond of you,’ she said. ‘Of course you know that. And he is not stupid.’
‘He is cleverer than any ruler this land has probably had, and yet he treats the place and its people as his father did,’ Sulien said. ‘The days of the Viking are over: the days when you spent the summer coursing the sea-ways and living off the produce of other men’s hands. Pay me and I’ll protect you: defy me and I’ll kill you. Thorfinn studies Canute, who was born of two cultures as he was: who became King at twenty, and died Emperor of north Europe at forty. He doesn’t see what else Canute was doing.… Thorfinn has a taste for intrigue, as an ox enjoys salt; that is all.’
‘So you are giving up?’ Groa said.
‘I love him,’ said Sulien.
And this time it was she who turned away.
That summer, Thorfinn did not move from Orkney, and Moray and Mar, Caithness and the Western Isles were ruled by stewards.
It had never happened before, and to meet the burden of supporting himself and his household, food was brought in from over the firth almost daily. Groa, with her women and the child Sigurd, crossed in one of the boats and spent some weeks moving from hall to hall throughout Caithness and Ross, making use of the summer tributes and talking, as she went, to as many of her husband’s officers as she could find.
Sulien spent much of his time also in the south, at Deer or Monymusk, and had Lulach with him at intervals. There was no more word of his leaving, and Groa knew, without being told, that the matter which had occasioned the quarrel had never been discussed again. She listened to the news from the south with renewed interest.
The Saxon sons of the Lady Emma each ventured, she heard, to wrest England from King Harold Harefoot. The first attempt, by the son named Edward, was a dismal failure and he went home again. The second, by the son named Alfred, resulted in his capture, mutilation, and eventual death at the instigation, it was said, of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, once Emma’s close ally. Emma’s views no one reported.
Sigurd was fifteen months old and had not seen his father for two months. Groa found out where her husband was and, loading all her possessions into a longship, sailed from Thurso to Orkney.
The hall at Orphir was not full of beautiful Irish slaves, and Earl Thorfinn, when he came in, had not changed. At twelve, he had been an ugly boy; and at twenty-seven, he was an ugly man. She put the child down and let him walk, staggering, towards his father.
‘To some god we should give praise,’ said Earl Thorfinn. ‘After all, he looks like you rather than me. I thought I asked you to stay in Caithness?’
She picked the child up and turned to the door. ‘Sinna? Take him down to the beach and tell the shipmaster not to unload. We’re going back as soon as the tide suits him.’
‘And tell him those are my instructions as well,’ said her husband.
Never for a moment had she expected that. Nor, of course, had Sinna. The older woman hesitated, and then took the child and went out. Earl Thorfinn said, ‘You have six hours. Are you hungry? We eat only, I’m afraid, when we have time.’
‘Time from what?’ she said. It occurred to her that there were remarkably few people about. Of course, his hird was spread thinly, with the men he could trust overseas, looking after his affairs in the mainland. But she had been surprised to see, through an open door, how empty the barns were.
‘From drinking and whoring and worshipping big wooden statues,’ Earl Thorfinn said. ‘How have you spent your summer?’
Sulien was not here. Whatever was wrong, she had to find it out for herself. ‘Do you have time to listen?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we get drunk instead? Have you ever been drunk?’ He moved towards the high chair, and someone, at a signal, scurried up with a board.
Groa said nothing, and he turned and faced her. The servant stood, waiting for orders. Earl Thorfinn said, ‘Ale for me, and water for my wife. Or whatever she asks.’
‘Water will do,’ Groa said, and sat in the other tall chair beside him. She said, ‘You excel Gillacomghain.’
‘No doubt,’ he said. The ale came, in a cheap pottery cup; and her water, when it arrived, was in a vessel no better. She drew breath to comment, but he interrupted her. ‘What made you decide to come at this remarkable moment? Only to see who I was sleeping with?’
She knew her colour was high, and could do nothing about it. ‘Well, you didn’t come to see who I was sleeping with,’ she said.
‘I didn’t need to. I got reports daily,’ he said. He had forgotten to drink from his cup. And although he was answering her, he was not, she saw, really thinking either of her or of what she was saying. In the distance, someone was shouting.
‘I came,’ she said, ‘because we had not met for two months, and if we are man and wife in any sense at all, it seemed to me that it was wrong to live entirely apart. Or if you don’t agree, I ought to know it.’
She ended, raising her voice against the bellow outside, and so did not hear what it said, but her husband, it was evident, heard both and understood both. He rose from the high chair, ignoring her, and then, finding the cup in his hand, he lifted his arm and hurled the thing at the board. It shattered in front of his wife, and the ale spattered her robe and slid down to pool in her lap. She raised her eyebrows.
And whether because of that or not, suddenly he came to himself.
With his stretched hand, he dammed and then swept back the flood on the table as people hurried with cloths. She took one to press over her robe and then stood up.
‘The fault was mine. The fault was all mine. I am sorry,’ her husband said. ‘You will have to get your baggage ashore. But I expect you would want to unload and to change in any case, to prepare for our visitor.’
‘Visitor?’ Groa said.
‘You arrived just after the first of the signal-lights. Evidently your sailing master didn’t see it, or he would have turned back. His orders were clear.’
‘Why?’ said Groa. ‘Who is coming? What is coming?’
‘Three fully armed warships belonging to King Magnús of Norway,’ Earl Thorfinn said. ‘Manned and led by Rognvald son of Brusi, come to claim his father’s share of the islands of Orkney.
‘And to get them, most likely. I could fight Rognvald. I can’t fight all Norway.’
SEVENTEEN
FTER ROGNVALD, as after the little elf-wind that blisters, the islands of Orkney were never to be quite the same again.
No savage prows swept up to the strand below the great hall at Orphir: no grim hordes leaped ashore and began overrunning the land. Instead, watched by the entire population of Orkney, the three Norwegian ships sailed quietly north to the island of Westray, where stood the hall at Hfn, once the chief homestead of Brusi, Thorfinn’s older half-brother and father to Rognvald.
Long before the three ships arrived, the steading at Hfn had been emptied and all those who wished had been taken off Westray. Peacefully, the foreign Earl’s son took possession and, peacefully, he sent his first message south to his dearest uncle Thorfinn son of Sigurd.
In it, together with his warmest regards, he
conveyed his apologies that necessity after an arduous voyage had caused him to quarter himself without invitation in his old childhood house-hall in Westray. It was, of course, a fact that the northern Isles, together with the east mainland and the island of Shapinsay—that was to say ninety-three ouncelands in all—had belonged to his father Earl Brusi and therefore were his, Rognvald’s, by inheritance. He had, however, encountered some delay in occupying them and would have thought it impolite to arrive without warning, and thus upset any arrangements his uncle might have made, if in any way he could have prevented it.
As it was, he hoped his uncle would have no objection to himself and his friends making their way as soon as might be to all the property which was his, and he hoped to give himself the pleasure of calling on his uncle in Orphir, or wherever he might choose to be, in the very near future. Not wishing to impose on his uncle’s hospitality, he would bring with him only two or three men to serve him on the journey. God’s blessings, he was sure, would continue, as ever, to profit his uncle and all his family, whom he was hoping to meet.
With the message, he sent a Byzantine helmet made of gilded steel with an eagle and five plumes of crimson ostrich feathers on top.
‘He has a sense of humour,’ said Groa. ‘And some courage, you will admit.’
‘He can afford both,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. ‘The last time I saw him, he was weeping on the cobbles at Nídarós because his father was going away. Where shall we receive him?’
‘Here,’ said Earl Thorfinn. ‘And since we are not having a war immediately, it would appear, we may as well restore all the furnishings, even if we have to take them all away afterwards.’
‘Shall I be there?’ Groa asked. She knew the answers to all the other questions. To fly back to Caithness now with the child would be unseemly. To invoke an army against Rognvald and throw him out of the northern islands was tempting but debarred by circumstances. To meet effrontery with effrontery was all that was left to do. She was sure her husband could manage it.
‘You’re his aunt,’ said Earl Thorfinn shortly. ‘Of course you will be there. You can discuss his jewellery with him. If this is a sample, he’s probably wearing pendicles over his ears, if not earrings actually in them.’
Having already learned to tread very warily indeed, she did not answer.
Whatever else he might have brought from his long stay in Russia and points further east, the foster-brother of the King of Norway was dressed not in knobbed robes and cataseistae but in a plain linen tunic and narrow hose, whose bindings were, however, gartered in worked gold, which also adorned his belt, his purse, his knife-sheath, his reliquary brooch, his rings, his bracelets, his necklet, and the band which confined the pure silken fall of his pale yellow hair. The face within was that of an archangel worked by a master in ivory.
It was smiling, its blue eyes celestial. ‘My dearest uncle and master,’ said Rognvald gently, ‘I kneel before you. For fifteen years have I awaited this day.’
‘It even seemed for a year or two that you might not be coming,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I hope you will stand up: the dogs are a little excited. You know my wife, Finn Arnason’s daughter. Indeed, I think we nearly shared her.’
The last sentence, if he heard it, provoked no answering riposte from Rognvald. Instead he smiled and, for the second time, sank with grace to his knees. ‘Despite the dogs,’ he said, ‘I act as my impulses tell me. You were a child and I was little more when last we met. But from Kalv I had a picture of what you had become.’ He rose and stood looking down at her, smiling still. ‘His pigments were mud.’
‘I am afraid, so are your knees,’ Groa said. ‘I am longing to hear about Kiev and Ladoga. We received your helmet.’
He laughed, and it was clear and musical, like his voice. ‘It was, of course, for your dwarf,’ he said. ‘I suppose you keep several? I know you have bards. I got someone to sing one of the latest poems:
‘From far Tuscar skerries
To Dublin the people
To a generous lord
Were subject. And truly
I tell men of Thorfinn.…
‘That is something the rest of us envy you. There are no bards singing the praises of Rognvald.’
‘I shall ask Arnór if he has a friend,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Here are some men you may know. And some wine.’
It was half an hour before he had finished greeting everyone, and another hour before the chatter at the board died away. He had kissed Thorkel Fóstri on both cheeks and given a gold ring, quietly, to the girl who brought his wine. At length—
‘We have begun to know each other, dear Thorfinn,’ he said. ‘And that is good. But still there are matters between us that must be settled before we may be comfortable and love one another as uncle and nephew should. Should we speak of this alone?’
‘There is no need. You have asked for the share of these islands that used to belong to the Earl Brusi your father. Indeed, you are settled there. You have a claim to them. I shall not dispute it,’ Thorfinn said.
‘How should you dispute it?’ said Rognvald, smiling. ‘You are my dear uncle and kinsman whom I trust, and I would not weary you by mentioning the matter, except to thank you for your stewardship over the years. I said as much to King Magnús when I told him I was yearning to hold my odal lands in Orkney again, and when he gave me my title of Earl and the three warships that perhaps you saw. I said that I had known you when you were young and knew your mind, and that you would return, willingly and freely, the heritage that was my father’s, and also the second third of the isles, that King Olaf kept in fief, and which King Magnús has now seen fit to give me.…
‘This is a hall my father loved,’ Rognvald said, ‘and I see you kept it as he had it, except for what the years may have done, here and there. But you have your other lodging, I know, in west mainland, for when you tire of your rich lands in Alba. You will not grudge your own kindred the means by which to make a living. I told King Magnús as much.’
His face, mobile and lovely, looked up wistfully into Thorfinn’s black, impassive visage.
Thorfinn said, ‘The wind gets noisier every year. Would you mind repeating what you have just said? You wish me to give you two-thirds of Orkney?’
An expression of sorrow flickered across Rognvald’s face and was gone. ‘King Magnús wishes it,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you don’t remember paying homage to Norway in King Olaf’s day, but Thorkel here will remind you. The northern third is mine, through my father. And the southern isles fell to King Olaf after the killing of my uncle Earl Einar, and he kept these in fief. My father had them in his lifetime, and King Magnús has given them to me his son now. Making one hundred and eighty-eight ouncelands in all. You still have west mainland and Rousay and Egilsay. You might even, for a consideration, look after Orphir for me. I would not have you deprived.’
‘Thank you,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Do you know, of us all, my lady wife here turns out to understand you best. She said you had courage. And a sense of humour.’
Rognvald’s smile became deeper. He had a dimple. ‘As does everyone in this hall, I trust your wisdom,’ he said. The men who follow you and me expect us to recognise what is fair, otherwise what are their prospects under us? Young as he is, even King Magnús strives hard to hold by this rule, now that he has attained his majority, with none to act for him.’
Finding that her eyes were stretched to their uttermost, Groa dropped her lids and unclasped her fingers. The meaning of all that was unmistakable.
Kalv is no longer regent. Don’t expect him to be able to save you for your wife’s sake. Even if you lose your head and attack me, your men probably won’t follow. You are not as young as you were, and no beauty.
She considered her husband. That at least was true. And he was twenty-seven.
Earl Thorfinn said, ‘Well, Rognvald, you put your case excellently. I think I see exactly what you mean. I shall send you my answer with as little delay as may be. Now, I expect you wish to get on your way while it
is daylight.’
Being summer, it would be daylight for another five hours.
Rognvald said, ‘Is there something you cannot understand?’
‘No,’ Thorfinn said. ‘No, I can’t say there is. But we in Orkney like to give proper thought to anything new. You will be told as soon as we have a reply for you.’
He got up, and so, raggedly, did his company. After an interval, Rognvald stood as well, followed by his three men. He said, ‘I had expected to finish this business today. In fact, I can hardly halt my plans to move into this hall by next week.’
‘Why halt them?’ said Thorfinn. ‘If we are still here, we are still here, and I am sure there will be room of a kind for everybody, although it might be uncomfortable for some. If you find there is no need to come south yet, of course, so much the better for both of us.… Here are your horses already. I cannot remember,’ Thorfinn said, ‘when I have seen such a fine pair of spurs. I hope you will remember not to use them too freely in Orkney. It is not Kiev, as you notice. There is small room for manoeuvering and a great number of big, harmful boulders.… An uncle’s blessing upon you.’
Everyone could see the gravity in the delicate face as Rognvald listened to that. Then the white-toothed smile returned, and, without haste, Thorfinn’s nephew made his farewells, gathered his men, and rode off.
‘What …?’ said Thorkel Fóstri.
‘I have saved my face,’ said Thorfinn. ‘And one-third of Orkney. If you think you could have done better, you are welcome to try. Otherwise you wait a week and then send a message complying. I shan’t be here. I shall be in Caithness for the rest of the summer.’
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