‘How big an army?’ said Groa.
His eyes studied her face. ‘Big,’ he said. ‘But badly led.’
‘And yours? I do not question the leadership,’ said Groa with irony.
‘If things fall out well,’ he said, ‘it will be adequate.’
‘But surely?’ Groa said. ‘I see you can’t call on Moray. But you have all Orkney and Ross and Caithness and the Western Isles, and probably Each-marcach’s men as well. And hardened men, used to this country.’
‘One-third of Orkney,’ Earl Thorfinn said. ‘But, as I say, adequate. I shall come back for you with the baggage-train. What else?’
She stood where she was. ‘One-third of Orkney? Rognvald isn’t helping you?’
‘I haven’t asked him,’ Earl Thorfinn said. ‘I think he is in Wales, plundering wine-ships with Gruffydd. And Eachmarcach is best uncommitted. He can join in when he sees which side is winning. What else?’
‘Nothing else. Bring your baggage-train in three hours,’ Groa said. ‘Sinna and the boys can go to Caithness. I am staying with Duftah.’
That he should agree, after a bitter five minutes of argument, might have surprised anyone but his wife, who knew that he had sent Skeggi to bring her north with orders to let nothing stand in his way. If he had wanted her removed to Caithness, he would have had it done. If he didn’t have it done, it was because it was no longer important.
When Sigurd clung to her, screaming, and Sinna, aghast, tried to step back on shore, Earl Thorfinn used all the force that was necessary to separate them and sent the ship on its way with her sons and her household.
If she died, Lulach would live to outface Duncan one day as the rightful Mormaer of Moray. And if Rognvald had his skull cleaved by an angry Welsh matron, Sigurd lived to become Earl of Orkney and hold his own in the north. Neither she nor Thorfinn was irreplaceable.
The monks were packing as well, ready to move to the safe place the Earl had found for them all in the hills a little way up from the estuary. A safe place, provided the battle went well. And if Duncan’s men overran all the country, as good a place to die in as any.
The former Abbot himself showed no surprise at Groa’s decision, nor at the evident fact that her husband had not reversed it.
‘He is wise,’ Duftah said. ‘He knows that your place is by your husband and his place is by you. Would you have it otherwise?’
Smiling, he continued ramming blankets into a bag, and did not appear to notice that no one answered him.
TWENTY
HE IRISHMEN IN Duncan’s army talked all the time; and there was a penance he didn’t deserve, after six years of suffering in the wake of his grandfather’s mistakes. They talked even at the outset, when the priest was blessing them for the great crusade they were launched on, for St Columba and Christ; or perhaps it was the other way round.
He didn’t even know who the priest was, because Malduin, the Bishop of Alba, had refused to come and do the job after the fiasco at Durham; or at least had become promptly invisible, so that no superior of his at Durham in later weeks could tap him on the shoulder and take away his living in Fife and Northumbria.
Duncan might be High King of Alba, but he could do nothing meantime about that, nor about the Irishmen. It was only the vision of Viking gold in Thorfinn’s strongholds in the north that was keeping them here as it was, after Durham.
He still couldn’t believe what had happened at Durham. He had got his army there fast, a third of it on horseback, and had swept the country before him, from Gilsland along Tyneside to the banks of the Wear.
There must have been hundreds rushing into the fort-town ahead of him, and he let them go. All the more mouths to feed. He didn’t intend to make an assault. Just to sit outside and wait while they starved, secure in the knowledge that neither Ligulf to his north nor Siward to the south would trouble him. And once he had Durham, so the theory went, he would have the whole of Bernicia from Teeside north to the Forth, and the control at last of the churchlands of St Cuthbert and Kinrimund in Fife and Lothian, whether Ligulf liked it or not. And of Westmorland and Cumbria as well.
Riding north with his shadow before him, and behind him the din of the Irishmen, Duncan recalled that it was Maldred who had stopped the three boatloads of ale from proceeding up the river to Durham, and who had failed to stop the contents from reaching the army. Afterwards, you might wonder who sent them. At the time, he was only thankful that there were enough sober to stay watching the high, rocky peninsula made by the loops of the river, so that nothing got in or out.
You wouldn’t think anyone, even Eadulf, would be fool enough to spend the night weakening the whole line of his palisade across the neck of the bluff. Or not, anyway, until the whole thing fell suddenly flat and a line of steel appeared, glittering, and bore down on the sleeping camp, with twenty more lines behind it.
He would never use horses again. Horses take an army quickly where you want it to go. Horses carry it out again even faster. He had been lucky to escape with as much of the host as he had. He hoped their brass spires caught a fire-bolt and melted all over the Congregation of St Cuthbert. He hoped that St Cuthbert would, at a convenient moment, return his attention to eider ducks.
Maldred rode up and said, ‘The Jura men have got wind of the plate in the monastery at Abernethy. They’re telling the others.’
They were riding through Fife at the time. Because they shared the same father, he needn’t like Maldred; and he didn’t. But because of Maldred and his father, they had the support of the Athollmen, and they were going to be able to get rest and supplies at Crinan’s abbey. He said, ‘I told you to break up the files so that the Fife and Angus men hemmed in the outsiders. Go and do it. And tell them Thorfinn took the plate long ago.’
He didn’t know if it was true, and he didn’t care. Somehow he had to get them north without looting. There were, he believed, enough land-owning men with him to protect their own until they got to the limits of Angus. But he had not called out the men of Mar and Moray, even though as King of Alba he was their overlord. That was Thorfinn’s territory, and before him his stepfather Findlaech had held it until his two nephews had killed him.
He didn’t think Moray would stand against him. Maldred disagreed, but then Maldred had no royal blood and was only a half-brother. Bethoc had produced only two sons: Duncan himself and Thorfinn, whom his grandfather should have killed years ago. Malcolm had disposed of everyone else: every second cousin, every half-nephew who might have divided the kingdom had been destroyed with great skill and thoroughness.
The injustice of it all overwhelmed Duncan. He said to Maldred, ‘The Abbot our father had plenty of chances as well. Why should it be left to us to get rid of Thorfinn?’
Maldred, who had just been abused by three men from Forfar, said coldly, ‘It was your grandfather’s idea. He preferred Thorfinn’s stewards, he said, to the King of Norway. And it kept the Irish from getting a bigger stranglehold on Mar and on Buchan. You notice, of course, the great success of that.’
‘I expect,’ said Duncan, ‘that he thought my lord Crinan might do something about it, other than counting his money while Dunkeld was burned.’ In no sense other than the physical one did he regard the Abbot Crinan as his father. It was because of Crinan’s neglect that Dubhdaleithe of Armagh and his brother had elbowed their way into Alba and might well snatch control of the Celtic church at the Fair of Teltown next month. Unless Duftah, as they called him, was got out of the way. Duftah, the monk who had been Abbot of Deer and was now, the most reliable couriers said, in the peninsula of Tarbatness with the Lady of Moray and her son and heir Lulach.
Duncan’s army camped that night in the fields about Perth, and the next night found all the supplies they required waiting for them in Crinan’s abbey of Dunkeld. But then, provisioning on this march had not been a problem. They carried with them enough to make sure that no one would starve, and all the way had been able to buy or barter. Although the bere was not yet in, somehow
fish or cattle or game had been forthcoming—not lavishly, but to a degree that removed at least that care from his shoulders.
Then, when they entered Moray, they found matters better than he had dared hope. Half the houses on their march were empty—for days the beacons had been burning, and he had expected that. But those who had remained on their land watched them pass without interfering, and if they offered to buy, would sell something out of their barns.
The High King had passed that way already, and had been entertained in guest-quarters as was his right in each district. He did not impose on them now, but what he wanted they gave him within reason, and watched silently as the army moved past.
They did not love Duncan. But, it seemed, they loved Groa with circumspection, and Thorfinn their absent Mormaer commanded from them no duty at all.
The Lady of Moray. Groa. His grandfather had been disturbed, Duncan remembered, when Gillacomghain had married her, about the time King Olaf had been thrown out of Norway and Canute had been up in the Tay, taking promises of allegiance from everyone.
His grandfather had sent him to Inverness, and he had seen this red-haired child with the black brows and the light eyes.
That had been another miscalculation of his grandfather’s: the attack on Thorfinn that had ended in total disaster, with Gillacomghain dead, and Thorfinn in Moray and husband to the red-haired heiress.
She was young. She could bear ten children yet. After Gillacomghain and Thorfinn, any man would be welcome, he imagined, far less the King of all Alba.
And this time it would be the throne of all Alba he sat on. Not a boulder at Scone and an abbey at Dunkeld and a parcel of districts in Fife and Perth and Angus and Moray and Lothian.
Duncan was prince of Cumbria as his grandfather had been and, if matters went well, might remain so. To wrest more land from England, as his grandfather had done was, at the moment, beyond him. But if he ruled Alba from Carlisle to Duncansby, and put his own man into Moray as guardian of Lulach … and got rid of Forne … and forced the Bishop of Alba to stay in Kinrimund … he would be a greater king than Malcolm had ever been. With a red-haired wife.
The Irishmen talked; and Duncan, marching up the Vale of Strathbogie, heard them, and was no longer disturbed.
He was within reach of the sea, and his enemy.
* * *
Skeggi said, ‘I don’t like it. He’s too confident. I’ve prayed to Jesus and I’ve prayed to Odin Lord of the Gallows and still the barley jumps on the hearth every time I cast a grain down. I don’t like it, I tell you.’
‘Who’s too confident?’ said Thorkel Fóstri. ‘Thorfinn or Duncan?’
‘Now you mention it,’ Skeggi said, ‘both of them. How can Thorfinn know what Duncan is thinking? All this plotting is worthy of Loki, but if Duncan doesn’t do what Thorfinn says he’s going to do, then Odin or Saint Peter are going to have to throw dice for me.’
‘He said Duncan would let them light all the war-beacons, and he did,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. They were riding east, and very soon would part company, Skeggi to make for the Tarbatness Point and himself to get down to his command at Alness. The parting was something he was looking forward to.
‘That’s what I mean about confidence,’ Skeggi said. ‘Dear Thor and Christ, you have to be confident to bring a host on foot into enemy land this far north and make sure that the enemy knows that you’re coming.’
‘Well, Duncan doesn’t want to come all this way and find he’s only wiped out half of us,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘He can’t hold a country like the Normans do, by putting his own men into forts. He hasn’t got any spare men and we haven’t got any forts. He’s got to kill all the leaders and scare the survivors so much that they’ll pay him tribute and supply him with fighting-men whenever he asks them.’
Skeggi, staring ahead, was thinking of something else. ‘Three thirty-hundreds,’ he said. ‘That’s what they say Duncan has. Three thirty-hundreds, and we’re making a stand against them! Do you think we have a chance?’
Thorkel Fóstri halted. ‘This is where I go south. I don’t know what chance we’ve got. They’ve got more men, but they’ve also got Duncan.’
‘And we’ve got Thorfinn,’ said Skeggi. ‘Of good stock, though I say it myself, but a shade too inclined to run risks. You brought him up. In your opinion, is he the man to conduct a war of this kind?’
He had never thought much of Skeggi, but the question cut too near his heart, in this moment, to be ignored. ‘I don’t know,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘Once I thought that I knew, but I don’t know any longer. All I can tell you is that if we are going to die, it will be in a blaze, and not in some sour, whining cranny.’
‘In a blaze. Like Gillacomghain,’ said Skeggi gloomily; and trotted off, with his men, through the bogland.
‘I thought,’ said the Lady of Moray, ‘that men of religion were supposed to be in the vanguard of battle these days. But I can see the trouble, of course. It must be quite hard to know what language to pray in, and even what god to pray to, when you bless this particular army.’
Standing beside her in the trees, looking down on the glittering stream of the Averon, Duftah of Buchan and the Clann Sinaidh smiled through the rug of his beard and slapped a scarred hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘If it will ease your mind, she’ll be out of her scabbard soon enough, whatever your husband has to say. There is MacBeathad son of Ainmire, the chief poet of Armagh, and his namesake playing Armagh off against Kells like a man stealing a hen from two foxes. And I thinking that, once the Welshman had gone, we should all be comfortable.’
‘We should be comfortable enough,’ Groa said, ‘fifteen long miles from Dingwall as we are. Provided that Duncan is stopped at Dingwall, of course.’
‘Ah,’ said Duftah, and expanded his great diaphragm, inhaling the scent of the fir trees. ‘Now, that I should not entirely count on. I should not count on it at all. I am a humble man, as you know; but, like Modomnoc’s bees, men strive to find me, no matter where I may conceal myself.… Does it seem to you, as it does to my stomach, that a bite and a sup might not come amiss before we settle down to watch these great lords shout at one another?’
The smell of food had already reached her from the charcoal-burners’ houses behind, where his people and hers had found shelter. Without speaking, she turned and led the way through the trees. He followed her, chuckling into his beard.
‘You would say, Let the pig into the house and it will make for the kitchen,’ he said.
‘I would say, Big ships going to the bottom, and pails floating,’ said Groa. ‘Come and bless the food. No doubt it needs it.’
At Forres, as Duncan had expected, the folk from the rath settlement and the river had all taken their beasts and locked themselves behind the palisades of the hall-mound. The thatched houses stood about, with a dog or two nosing inside them, but nothing else had been left, and when a group of Ulstermen broke into the little church, they found it also quite empty.
Duncan hanged one of them as an example, and set a strong guard round the mount so that no one could get out and carry tales, for this time it mattered. And then he walked down to the riverbank and stood, helmet in the crook of his arm, with his moustache ruffled by the afternoon breeze and his firm cheeks russet with pleasure.
The three ships were there. The round-bellied knörrs paid off by Hardecanute had been making a nuisance of themselves round the east coast, picking up bits of cargo here and there when he had found them at Berwick, and paid off the portreeve who was about to take them off to his lord, and sobered one or two of them up enough to explain what he wanted.
They had made a nuisance of themselves here also, he expected, drinking off the last of their pay and haggling over their cargo. But there was nothing to connect three hired ships with the advance of his, Duncan’s, army, and by the time anyone realised it, the thing would be over.
He sent his scouts out, and they came back with the news he had been hoping for. Eskadale, on the next firth, was
undefended. Thorfinn was coming down to stop him from the north, gathering men hurriedly as he came. But, however quickly he marched, he could not get them south, so they reported, in time to save the Cromarty peninsula. So the stance would be made further north, at Dingwall.
‘You were right,’ Maldred said, when he heard; and if there was a thread of astonishment in his voice, it was no more than his half-brother had come to expect. ‘So we put the first plan into effect. I sail, and you march to Dingwall. Unless you’ve changed your mind?’
He had not changed his mind, because Dingwall was where Thorfinn would be. There he had the big hall and the Moot Hill by the mouth of the river Peffer, where the long sea inlet reached into the hills. To gain the Tarbatness peninsula, a marching army would have to pass between the sea and the mountains of Easter Ross, where Dingwall, the assembly-place, lay. Unless Thorfinn wanted to lose Tarbatness as well as Cromarty, he would have to stand there and bar Duncan’s way.
Nor would Duncan have him wait there in vain. At a carefully chosen hour, say halfway between dawn and midday, this half-breed brother would stand among his hammer-struck heathens and see the army of his overlord fill the plain before him with its steel.
Perhaps he would turn tail. Perhaps, as they came nearer, he would be encouraged to think that there were fewer of them than he expected: a number much the same as his own, and far from their homeland. Duncan hoped that he would feel emboldened—even contemptuous. He hoped to be there when Thorfinn’s expression changed—for at some point, face to face with his King and his Maker, Thorfinn’s face, surely, would change. Until it was changed for him, one way or another. Eadulf had made a show with the heads of a few Irishmen. He, Duncan, proposed to take home the head of the Earl of Orkney on the masthead of one of his ships.
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