For the ships were his little surprise. He was sorry, in a way, that he was not sailing himself, but even if Maldred’s performance was usually indifferent, the two leaders with him were good. Even if only two out of the three landings succeeded, that would be enough. And one of them surely would find the monk, and the woman. And, having found them, would move south to Dingwall to close in on Thorfinn’s back.
In the Mormaer’s hall at Dingwall, Arnór Jarlaskáld hung up his harp, shook his arm free of cramp, and said, ‘They’re all going to sleep out there. How can you let them go to sleep, with Duncan’s army just over the river? They don’t want to sing any more: they just want to go to sleep.’
‘So do I,’ said Thorfinn. ‘And I’m going to, over there, with the lamps out, so the rest of you had better do the same. Otkel?’
‘I’ll wake you, my lord Earl, if there’s news,’ Otkel said. In the last year or two, a number of young men had appeared, serving the hird, Arnór noticed. He settled down beside Starkad and said, ‘How many runners does he have? I passed one on his way out again as I came back to the hall.’
Starkad said, ‘They’re in relays across the peninsula. Don’t ask foolish questions. Go to sleep.’
‘I still don’t know how he thinks it’s safe to sleep,’ Arnór said. ‘And if that’s a foolish question, I’d rather ask it and stay alive than the other way about.’
Starkad snored. A voice on his other side said, ‘Arnór: it’s to do with the tides. Now will you be quiet? You will have all tomorrow to think of your verses.’
There were, of course, men of war who knew nothing of tides, but no prince brought up within reach of the Tay or the Solway would fail to know how important they were, or to find the right man to tell him about them.
Maldred, whose ship would make the first landing, sat on a bale of raw fleeces with the master’s lamp and studied again the bit of vellum with the drawing of the peninsula: a hatchet-shape jutting into the sea, with Tarbatness at the peak of the blade and his own landing-place, at Rosskeen in the estuary, under the notch of the axe-beard. On the same shore, fifteen miles to the west, lay Dingwall, with Duncan’s army presumably now settled within reach and poised for battle.
To the north, across the thick of the peninsula, was the Westray shore, on which Muiredach of Ulidia would make his landing, fifteen miles west of St Colman’s, where Archú’s men would be dropped, just inside the point of Tarbatness. The numbers had been carefully worked out; for though the northern settlements were small, this was where, rumour said, Thorfinn’s wife and the monk had their houses. There would be defences there, and in the vale of Ulladule, in the centre, and of course at Rosskeen, where he, Maldred, was landing. Thorfinn was not so simple as to expect his enemy to throw all his force against Dingwall when a crossing might be made here, by determined men with rafts or coracles, from one side of the firth to the other. There might be a hundred men hidden there on the shore, waiting, as they thought, to pick off an offshoot of Duncan’s army as they paddled painfully across the mile of water that separated firth from firth.
A hundred men who would cringe when the first light revealed a cargo-ship looming up, with three hundred armed men leaping ashore to attack them.
Maldred folded the map just as the lamp toppled over and the prow bucked along the first of the ocean rollers coming up from the south-east. He began to fall. His palm hit the flesh of the sheepskins and saluted them, ending up over his head, with a fistful of sheep’s grease and maggots.
He lay on the lurching thwarts, and his mouth watered.
Once, her mother had stayed waking through a night such as this. ‘When men go on a journey of the grave,’ Bergljot had said, ‘it does not behove women to sleep,’
So Groa did not try, but left the little huts she shared with the people from the farm and the smith’s house below, beyond the bogs of the river.
Somewhere a child cried, and somewhere there was a murmuring: others, too, found it hard to find sleep. The monks, she supposed, prayed, but if so, they did it quietly. Outside, by the hollow which had once been an old forge, the moon shone through the trees on a world of darkness and silence, and the only sounds were those of the wild, for the cattle had long since been driven up into the hills beyond the loch, with the dogs. From the edge of the little hill, she looked into the blackness east and south, and felt the wind lift her hair, and wondered what the morning would bring.
Duftah’s voice said, ‘A wise man said, If thou loathest death, why dost thou love sleep? … Do you need me, or not?’
‘I might ask the same,’ Groa said.
‘Ah yes,’ the monk said. ‘It does not do to forget: you are well versed in the ways of the child, and so of the man. I think tonight we need each other.’
The wind blew, and the tree shadows moved in the moonlight. Groa said, ‘The smith is away, fighting for Thorfinn. His wife says his smith-work is famous.’
‘There is an old tradition,’ Duftah said. ‘There was a monastery once in Westray; and bog iron, and oak trees for charcoal, and the smith made cauldrons and ploughshares and rivets and ladles, and sometimes silver bowls and cast crosses. When the Norse settled, they kept the smithy for swords and harness and axes.… It will make crosses again. His sons are there, in the hut.’
She did not answer. After a while, he said, ‘Is it the beauty of the night, or your sons? You would be right to weep for either.’
‘My father is losing his sight,’ Groa said. ‘I have not seen him for thirteen years.’
She knew that he had turned towards her. ‘My poor daughter,’ he said. ‘It is a very little bulwark to hide behind, but I shall join you there if you wish, till you find better refuge.’
‘There is none,’ she said. Surely … surely there were two shades of black to the east where a moment before there had been one? Surely the wind that stirred her robe was sharper, with the sea in it as well as the lost rumours of woodsmoke and peat, of grass and wet mosses and night-breathing plants. Duftah murmured in Gaelic, and she half-listened, expecting a prayer; and found that instead it was something different.
‘I have a shieling in the wood,
None knows it save my God:
An ash-tree on the hither side, a hazel bush beyond,
A huge old tree encompasses it.
‘Two heath-clad doorposts for support,
And a lintel of honeysuckle:
The forest around its narrowness sheds
Its mast upon fat swine.
‘The size of my shieling tiny, not too tiny,
Many are its familiar paths:
From its gable a sweet strain sings
A she-bird in her cloak of the ousel’s hue.
‘Though thou rejoicest in thy own pleasures,
Greater than any wealth;
I am grateful for what is given me
From my good Christ.
‘… When all seems lost, some things remain,’ Duftah said.
Duncan said, ‘When we make the attack, look for the gilded helmet. Thorfinn always wears Canute’s helmet. I suppose it reminds him of the days when he learned to live like a lord. Where’s the priest?’
The priest, in an unpriestly fashion, had been sleeping. Duncan had him wakened and brought to the tent. Confession didn’t take long: in twenty-four hours in the field, there had been little opportunity to collect more than a minor transgression. After the ritual was over, he kept the priest by him, rehearsing the speeches he intended them both to make next morning, and getting his poet to write them down, in case when the time came he could not catch all the words. As morning drew near, Duncan realised, to his satisfaction, that he felt unafraid and quite happy.
With the move into the firth, the motion of the knörr settled down, and the three hundred soldiers she carried began to groan and sit up.
It was still dark, which was as it should be. They were to land, Duncan had decreed, when there was just enough light for a footing, and then to overwhelm whatever party might await them o
n shore, being careful to leave no survivors. One-third of the company would then strike northwards to Ulladule, there to rendezvous with the other two parties, while two-thirds returned to the knörr and sailed up the firth, there to land at a place called Clachan Biorach and attack Thorfinn’s army from the rear.
In all these years of Saxon speech, Maldred had found little occasion to use his Gaelic and indeed had found conversation with Muiredach and Arch? quite troublesome during the long wait at Forres. It was just as well that most of the men fighting under them were of their own race, as it happened. For himself, he found it a relief to talk to the shipmaster, who was Swedish, and whose tongue you heard any day in Northumbria. At least he knew the man understood him.
All the same, there was a confusion of purpose almost as soon as they began to sail up the inlet to Rosskeen—Maldred requiring that the knörr should down sail and row, and the master objecting on the grounds that the current was far too strong for the few oars that the cargo-boat carried. Which was all very well, but, as the diagram clearly showed, the channel up to Rosskeen consisted of shallow water running through swathes of flat sand, and demanded skilful manoeuvring. He got the vellum out again and tilted it towards the lamp and the vague pink light from the east that was beginning to suffuse the sky and the sea. The captain took the map from him, and the lamp, and carried both to the rear of the ship to show it to his steersman: the oarsmen followed him, peering.
In the prow of the ship, the spears and helms and shield-bosses glittered red, and so did the thin wash of waves, far away, running on to the sands of Rosskeen. Whatever knowledgeable eyes there might have been on board, none saw the glaze on the sea exactly halfway between ship and shore, or heard the lazy surfing of water that came not from the shore but from the sandbank immediately ahead of the knörr’s painted snake-mouth.
From the masthead, someone screamed, ‘Aft! Run aft! Quickly!’ and to the best of their ability, three hundred men did. The knörr hit the sandbank and flew up it with the ease of a snow-sledge on runners.
Inside, the three hundred fell down, slicing one another, while the master and crew, including the man at the masthead, silently disappeared overboard. Righting themselves, bloodied and cursing, Maldred and his landing-party found themselves lodged, firmly and inescapably, on a large tract of sand completely surrounded by water beyond which was a beach, glimmering in the brightening light.
Set upon the beach, in a graceful half-moon, was a fence of linked wattle barriers.
And over and between the barriers, as they watched, rose a spray of glittering pink that began to fall arching towards them, bursting into familiar song.
Arrows; followed by spears; followed by catapulted balls of hay and pitch, blazing.
A third of them died in the first fifteen minutes, after which Maldred jumped into the sea, waving a shirt on a spearhead, and the rest swam and waded after.
The sun rose.
At St Colman’s on the north, Muiredach of Ulidia made no mistake about his landing.
The knörr sailed as close as it could, and Muiredach’s men jumped into the sea, dividing into sections as had been arranged, for there was a palisaded fort on the high ground above the sand and the rocks and the scatter of dark, silent huts.
They rushed the huts, one party covering another, but found them empty. The fort, when they reached it, was deserted, and the little church held nothing but the smell of dead incense to tell that someone had been there not so long ago.
It was not what they had expected, but simply meant that the monk and the woman must be in the west, where Archú’s party would find and take them, or Maldred’s men striking up from Rosskeen.
Meanwhile, their own plan of assault was quite clear. One small party, swords drawn, made its way to the east to scour the land between St Colman’s and the point at Tarbatness. The rest, in troops of fifty, turned west through the bogs and the marshes that separated them from their fellows at Westray.
They were competent men, and there was nothing wrong with their planning. They had arrived at first light, and by the time they set out on the twelve miles they intended to cover, the sky was just bright enough to show the mottled green-and-pink mounds; the bright green cushions sporting the straw-coloured treacherous grasses that betrayed the bog, with its brown peaty pools and its cottongrass jerked by the wind.
It seemed at first like God’s Judgement that, when they had skilfully steered clear of the marsh, the firm ground beneath them should start to give way.
They stood, half of that first party of fifty, arid tried to draw one black-slimed leg after another out of the sucking grip of the mire, while their fellows marched on through the short, dry grass and heather and were hardly deterred until they, too, had felt the water close around their ankles. They were near enough to warn the second force, but the third and the fourth had to find out in their own way that someone had been before them, doctoring the line of march that any sensible hillman would follow. Then the arrows came, and the spears; singly and from different quarters, and began methodically to thin them out.
Finally, on three fronts, they came face to face with a line of armed men: fresh, fully equipped, and on ground of their own choosing. They fought well; and most of them died.
The last ship of the three rounded the point at Tarbatness, passed the beach of St Colman’s, and made its way uncertainly west along the north shore of the peninsula towards Westray.
Uncertainly, because the steering-oar had broken and could not be mended, and the sail shackles had given way during the night, leaving the knörr to creep in under the power of her six pairs of oars.
It was not Archú’s fault, therefore, that she arrived at her appointed landing-place when the sun had already risen and when the tide had receded to such an extent that the river Tain ran out to the firth over a stretch of pink sand that seemed to stretch shorewards to infinity. Since the ship could not come any nearer, they disembarked on the flat sand and had marched halfway across it before they saw, against the bright sky, the size and shape of the armed forces drawn up ahead of them.
Unlike their fellows, they fought a straightforward pitched battle, against much greater numbers; and lost.
South of Dingwall, the army woke at dawn and heard Duncan’s speech, and the priest’s, and knelt to be blessed. At the appointed time, which would take them to Dingwall by mid-morning, they set out to march round the hill-shoulder and down to the Moot Hill.
To the east, as they marched, they looked along the sun-touched avenue of the firth for the snake-head of Maldred’s ship, but could not yet see it. Duncan was not unduly disturbed. Maldred’s men might already have landed, and the knörr drawn off, as arranged, to lift them after the battle. Or it might arrive with a timing still nicer, when battle was already engaged, and shock Thorfinn into flight or submission.
They marched round the hill and there, like a storm-beach of steel flagged with banners, was the army of Ross and Caithness awaiting him, with, bright as a sequin in front, the gilded helmet of Canute on the alpine head of Thorfinn his brother.
Round Thorfinn the men waited, and the sun shone through the white silk of the banner, so that the raven lay black on Thorfinn’s helm and shoulders, and flapped its wings as if in omen: as if Odin had sent them Huginn or Muninn, Mind or Memory, and soon the dedicatory spear would be thrown over their enemy’s heads: Odin owns you all. After which, there would be no quarter.
It would not be like that. But here they would have to fight, with none of the advantage of surprise that had been allowed their more fortunate colleagues facing Duncan’s other landings through the peninsula. Thorfinn had made that plain all along, and had repeated it before them all that morning.
‘The King has dispersed part of his forces beforehand through the peninsula; but so have we. He started with a far larger army than ours, and the difference between us is still in his favour. You will have to fight, and fight hard, at Dingwall. It is worth your while. Win this battle, and you will not hav
e to fight it again. Lose, and the whole of the north will be a battlefield as’ Alba and Norway fight over it.’
And that was true, they all knew, and the men of the hird better than any. While Thorfinn held Caithness and Ross and Cromarty, he would defend them against every predator. He had called his brother King, and so he was, of Alba. But here in Ross he was no king of theirs, nor of Thorfinn’s. What Thorfinn might owe him for Moray was his own affair.
Nearly every man there, in one way or another, had fought for Thorfinn, on his raids, on his war-cruises, and most of them would claim to know him. None would claim to understand him, or the source of his energy. He was lucky, and in many things very successful. To stay with such a man made good sense. So, when the trumpets of Duncan’s army glittered and blared, and the pennants jerked, and the clatter of men marching quickly changed to the jingle of men moving into the run, their spears and swords ready and flashing, the men under the raven responded smartly, as they had been trained.
The shield-wall came up. The spears rose, hefted, ready for throwing, and the smooth swords slid singing out of the scabbard. Then above them all Thorfinn’s right arm rose, with the sword-blade barring the sun, written over with copper and silver. Then the long horns raised their thick voices and the air darkened as the birds of the land and the sea rose, alarmed, and circled.
The army were already shouting as they started to move. The shouting gained rhythm, and came to Duncan’s ears in spurts and snatches as they drew breath until the two sides were close enough, above all the noise of both, for their cry to be heard.
They were calling his brother’s pagan name. ‘Thorfinn! Thorfinn!’ The hoarse double syllable ran from hill to hill and up to the peak of Ben Wyvis, until the southern army caught it and opposed it with a cry of their own. Then the spearpoints came ripping down on either side, and ‘Thorfinn!’ and ‘Alba!’ came mixed with their screams and the rapping of metal on wood.
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