She sat where he had left her, with her hair on her shoulders like poppy, and her eyes opened wide in her white face. He walked over and set the lamp down, and then sat down gently beside her and lifted her hand in both of his and held it between them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Compassion would be a very great thing, but I think … I am beginning to think … I am beginning to wonder if we may not have something greater. Is that what you wanted to say?’
She did not speak.
He said, ‘What is it? Do you not know that I love you?’
She stood up, her hand wrenching from his, and stared at him.
He stood, too, but slowly. ‘Or am I wrong?’ he said. ‘If I am wrong, tell me. Tell me quickly. You will lose nothing by it.’
He did not know what she could read in his eyes. He only knew that the shadows melted from the face opposite him until it was luminous as the soapstone of the lamp.
She stood before him, her hands loose in her robe, and said, ‘I thought if ever you spoke those words to me, I would know you were lying, or if you were not, there was no way that I would ever be sure of it. I knew if ever I spoke those words to you, that you would take them for a nice courtesy and might even thank me. I cannot tell what has come to us, but I look at you and I believe you. If I tell you the same, will you believe me? I love you. I have always loved you … even through the six minutes … even through the four minutes … whatever distance there was between us.’
He looked at her. She said, ‘Can you not accept, even yet, that something good may befall you?’
The lamplight burned on her hair. She said, her face uplifted, her hands on his breast, ‘Could you bring your mind to it, I am prepared to be embraced. If it hurts to bend down, there’s a box I could stand on.’
He could not only bend: he could lift her. There were, it seemed, a great many other things he could do that an hour before would have been beyond his strength if he had even thought of them. But he took infinite care in the design of them, moving from harbour to harbour in the voyage of the night with a care one would keep for a child; for a virgin; for something unbroken of rarest fragility, which remained still where it had always lain waiting, in the girl who had borne a child to an old man at fourteen; in the girl who had known nothing since except rape at the hands of her husband.
Through the night, he taught her joy, with patience; and received it.
In the morning, men rode into the settlement, shouting, and banged on all the doors, and thumped on the Earl’s door, finding it shut, until Groa, gowned like a monk, jerked it open.
Thorkel Fóstri stood on the threshold. He said, his eyes on her and then sliding past her, ‘Thorfinn! Is he here?’
‘He is asleep,’ she said, and came out, shutting the door behind her. ‘He is better, but he ought to sleep. What is it?’ She paused. ‘Is it the children?’
‘The children? No,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. He looked at her hair, and her bare feet, and then back at her eyes. He said, ‘You will have to wake him. We have just heard from Moray. Duncan is dead.’
‘Dead? In Moray?’ she said.
‘I don’t know how. They had a rough voyage. I suppose the wound wouldn’t close. They tried to save him by putting him ashore at the mouth of the Lossie. They found some monks near Elgin who would look after him. But he died.’
‘Yes. The Earl will have to be wakened,’ said Groa.
‘Not only for that,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘There is more to the story. Duncan died, and there were the rags of his army about him, with none of the gold he had promised them, or the booty. Thorfinn paid the ships to carry them safely to Berwick, but the shipmasters saw the chance to unload all of them instead at the Lossie and sail quickly for home with their money.
‘The Irish, those that weren’t killed, made their own way home west through the hills, as you probably know. The men from Angus and Atholl and Fife and from Duncan’s lands further south were soured by the war before ever they landed in Moray, and now found themselves leaderless, without ships, without transport, and the whole province to pass through before they could all reach their homes.
‘Would you expect them to mourn Duncan and file off homeward with their hands folded, chanting? They are putting your Moraymen to the sword, and stripping the land of all they can eat, or drive before them, or turn into money. Tell Thorfinn he will have to leave his bed and march south and fight, unless he wants his kingdom gone before he can claim it.’
‘His kingdom?’ said Groa. Behind her, she heard a door open sharply.
‘His kingdom,’ said Thorkel Fóstri grimly. ‘With Duncan dead, what other grandson of Malcolm’s is living?
‘Thorfinn is not only Earl of Orkney and Caithness. He is King of Alba. He has only to take it.’
Part Two
OF DIRE COMBUSTION AND CONFUS’D EVENTS
He is already nam’d, and gone to Scone
To be invested.
— Who was that Thane, lives yet;
But under heavy judgment bears that life
Which he deserves to lose. Whether he was combin’d
with those of Norway, or did line the rebel
With hidden help and vantage … I know not.
ONE
e is King of Alba. He has only to take it, his foster-father had said. And if Duncan had died at his brother’s hand by the smith’s houses, it would have been true. There, with the beaten army of Duncan under his heel, Thorfinn could have called his friends together and made his decision.
Then, a little thought would have told him what the last years should already have made plain. Ruling as Earl Sigurd his father had done, he could not even expect to hold what he had. If he wished to add Duncan’s land against the advancing shield-wall of the lesser kindred in England, he would not only face a life-time of battle, long or short. He would have to change.
What his choice would have been there at Tarbatness could never be known. The opportunity to make it was lost, and with it the treasure of one night. The news from Moray reached him, and by noon he and the best of his men were at sea, on the two ships he kept within signal-range, while the rest of his fleet was summoned to carry the remainder.
He came back to the hut for his sword just before he left St Cormac’s, and Groa lifted it for him. There was nothing to say. To mention his wound, to express dismay or anguish, would have been childish. On his order, Moray had stayed silent and watched Duncan’s army march north. No ruler worth his salt, far less Findlaech’s stepson, would stand aside now and watch Duncan’s army ravage it on its way south.
He said, ‘Stay with Duftah. I shall leave you a guard. When it is safe, I shall send for you.’
She could not speak, but she smiled.
He hesitated, then, raising one hand, lifted the hair from her neck and let it fall. Then, with his hand on her shoulder, he kissed her lightly and left.
After that, the news came quickly enough of what he was doing.
That he should meet slaughter with slaughter was to be expected. Landing in the wake of Duncan’s men, he had tracked them from hall to barn and from house to church and from field to fold throughout Moray, mutilating where they had mutilated and burning where they had burned.
Then, as they ran stumbling before him, with their red swords and their heavy pack-trains and their stolen cattle, he crossed, as they had done, out of Moray and south to their own lands of Angus and Fife, where their own barns and malt-houses and halls and houses and churches were to be found. And these he burned, too, and killed their people as they had killed his people of Moray. And again. And again.
Sulien the priest was in the scriptorium at Clonard when the news came, painting God talking to Noah under a rainbow.
Because he had been grinding gold, the flies were all over him, drawn by the scent of the honey: they crawled over the three Persons of the Trinity with the Enemy crouching at Christ’s feet, and flicked up and down the figures of David harping, with Ethan, Iduthin, Asaph, and Eman in gaiters beside him.
Then the Abbo
t, in person, stood at Sulien’s elbow and said, ‘It would not cross your mind, I know, to leave us before the Psalter is finished, and it already paid for by the Bishop of Crediton, but I brought the messenger to you myself, just in case.’
Afterwards, when he was packing and the Abbot was threatening him, as he took it, with excommunication for forsaking Bishop Lyfing’s commission for the benefit of a horse-eating berserker, Sulien stood silent and then said, ‘This is a baptised prince, as you are, who sustained me in his lands for five years. He has a right to my friendship.’
‘He lets his friends burn Llanbadarn, and then expects you to run when he snaps his fingers?’
‘He does not know I am coming,’ said Sulien briefly.
In Chester, Alfgar took the best news, as always, to his mother.
‘Have you heard? Thorfinn has murdered his brother and taken the kingdom. They say there’s hardly a man of Duncan’s left living.’
He was twenty-eight years old, and marriage had done nothing for him except perhaps modify the quality of his laugh. Godiva sat and looked at him.
Her son grinned. ‘All right. Duncan attacked him and lost, and Thorfinn chased his army all the way down to Fife. Orm and Siward and the rest will be puking all over Northumbria, wondering what he’s going to do next. They thought Duncan would get himself killed at Durham and we’d all walk in before Thorfinn noticed.’
‘He may go back north,’ Godiva said. ‘Could he rule a kingdom?’
‘You wouldn’t say so,’ Alfgar said. ‘On the other hand, this is how Canute started, by chopping off the assorted limbs of the populace; and he ended by walking barefoot to Durham and ruling half northern Europe. Thorfinn admired Canute.’
Godiva looked at him without seeing him. ‘Yes. The Lady Emma, too, might find it quite convenient to have Thorfinn to deal with, instead of your wife and her sisters. What is your Aelflaed saying?’
‘That three children is enough,’ Alfgar said. ‘When she draws breath to say anything else, it’s to complain that Siward and her sister are much richer than we are. Which is probably true, since his father went off to the Holy Land and didn’t come back. I wonder who has the Lapp fur-trade now.’
‘Haarek of Tjotta’s son Finn,’ Godiva said. ‘The Lady Groa’s first cousin. As you would know, if you paid more attention to what goes on down at the wharves. He made no mistake, that young man Thorfinn, when he married an Arnason’s daughter. One day, Magnús of Norway might well claim England as well as Denmark.’
‘My sweet lady mother, you are getting old,’ said Alfgar, and came and sat at her feet. ‘It was an Arnason who killed Magnús’s father, don’t you remember? The golden child in Norway is Rognvald, Thorfinn’s little nephew. If Magnús becomes King of Norway and Denmark and England, then Thorfinn had better look out.’
The Lady of Mercia looked down at the merry face of her son. ‘What you are saying,’ she said, ‘is that it is not by chance that Thorfinn has overrun all the lands of Duncan his brother, and that he may well make himself King of Alba?’
‘What I am saying,’ said Alfgar, ‘is that Duncan’s sons were at Dunkeld, and that ‘Thorfinn has driven out every man of Duncan’s in the neighbourhood and put a ring of steel round Dunkeld that would defy a good thought to get past it. Does that look like the work of an innocent savage?’
‘No. But it looks, at last, like the work of a king,’ Godiva said. ‘Except that it would upset your father, I would suggest that you go to Fife and see if you can talk to Thorfinn and find out what he is going to do.’
‘Would you believe it,’ Alfgar said, ‘but that is just what my wife’s sister was saying?’ He laid his handsome head in his mother’s lap and twisted round to look up at her, grinning. ‘What would you give to go in my place?’
Godiva thought. ‘Your wife, and your wife’s sister, I believe,’ she said.
Wearing all his arm-rings, and with his golden hair combed, Rognvald went to Tarbatness and called on his uncle’s wife.
He found Groa gone, and only the monk there, and her two sons, and forty armed men under the command of Killer-Bardi, who would not let him land.
Rognvald called him up to the skiff, and gave him a twisted gold finger-ring, and patted the bulwark of the other man’s ring-mail shirt, pensively. ‘Would I ever blame a man for following orders? Tell the prince that the Earl his nephew congratulates him on his good fortune in the south. Should he be held there by affairs, he can rest assured that the Earl his nephew will take good care of the north in his absence.’
The words did not please Killer-Bardi, nor the fact that the young Earl, when he uttered them, was clearly sober.
The Earl Thorfinn of Orkney, they said, had taken over the guest-quarters of the monastery of Kinrimund, on the east coast of Fife, next to the hall of the Bishop of Alba, who was absent.
So the lord Crinan, father of the dead King Duncan, was told when he found himself barred by armed men from access to his own monastery of Dunkeld, on the river Tay, where his three young grandsons had lived since their mother died.
With a hardihood characteristic of all his long career since the day when he married King Malcolm’s only daughter, Crinan of Dunkeld took his excited son-in-law Forne by the arm, turned him round, and proceeded with his sober retinue of some thirty riders to follow the course of the river Tay south to the borders of Fife, and then across to the coast where Thorfinn and his army had halted.
The path Earl Thorfinn had taken was not hard to follow. Smoke still lingered among the burned houses, and the scavenging birds were about, jostling in glistening crowds on the ground, rising screaming with anger at each interruption. They passed cairn after cairn of freshly piled stones, some already scattered by wolves.
Apart from Forne, the men he had with him were his own, and seasoned. They rode straight-backed and silent: they had seen this before. When Vikings were defied, or cheated out of their protection money, they behaved in just this way: in Ireland; off the Welsh coast; in Man. They left behind them blood and legends. Already the bardic verses were being sung, celebrating the death of his son and the Earl’s victory:
A keen sword at Tarbatness
Reddened the wolf’s fare.
The young Prince wielded it…
Thin swords sang there …
There fought with Scotland’s King
Our valiant lord …
They were yelling that at the camp outside Dunkeld when he left, and it had upset Forne.
It might be that Forne was right. On the face of it, the appearance of thirty unarmed men with an abbot could offer no threat to the victor of Tarbatness in the midst of his hosting. But the victor of Tarbatness, pitchforked out of Orkney into this particular arena, might well have lost his head. Or at best, he had Viking stock to impress: was of Viking stock himself. The signs, as they began to ride, were not good.
On the other hand, instructions of some kind had been left at Dunkeld. No one tried to stop them departing, although they were offered no boats. And although there were Thorfinn’s men at the first ferry-crossing on the Earn, they were not stopped there either, although they were asked their business. The leader, Crinan judged, was a Caithness fellow; but there were at least two Gaelic-speakers among the small group of men, perhaps trained in Moray. After a short consultation, one of these joined Crinan’s party to act as guide and to save him annoyance, it was suggested.
It seemed likely that he, Crinan, knew the way to Kinrimund better than they might do, but he made no objection, and when they reached the first of two armed camps they passed on the way, he was clearly expected. Indeed, the well-dressed man in charge asked politely if he might have the services of my lord Abbot’s priest for two of his wounded, and Crinan let the man go readily, and told him to take his time, while he sipped ale with the leader and engaged in conversation which told him very little.
The beasts he saw penned by the camp were only enough, he judged, to feed the company for a couple of weeks, and there was no sign of oth
er plunder. When they left, he watched as they moved out of the woods and across the planked bogs and the beaten earth of the heath-paths, and saw more than once the tracks of cattle disappearing up into the high ground between the Firth and the Leven.
The hill-forts were occupied, and Thorfinn had not yet marched to clear them out. Or perhaps, since they would be full of leaderless cottagers and their families, he did not think it worth while. So the cairns belonged to the chiefs and their followers who had gone to his son Duncan’s hosting and had survived Tarbatness to fall to the same enemy here. It had been one of his fears that a hundred of Duncan’s men might at some point jump out of a spinney, slaughter his unwanted guides, and demand to be led on some hopeless crusade. It was, in part, the reason why he had made every man lay down his arms before they got to Dunkeld. Weapons were no defence under these circumstances, nor were hordes of panicking men.
Only careful negotiation was going to get them out of this, if anything could. Provided that somewhere at the end of the journey there was a young man able to negotiate.
On the sandy banks of the Eden, looking across to the smoke of Kinrimund, Forne said, ‘Well, you were right. He didn’t have us killed at Dunkeld, so we have been allowed to pass through and see him. I forget what you said about getting out afterwards.’
Crinan did not reply. His son-in-law said, ‘I thought you said this place was small.’
‘It’s a Pictish monastery,’ the Abbot said. ‘Or was once. The place was called Cenrigmonaid. On a headland between two good beaches. What you see is the smoke from his men’s cooking-fires. Are you hungry?’
They had made camp themselves the previous night, for fifty miles in a day was more than he now cared to travel. He had slept well. He knew that Forne was afraid and disconcerted. Forne was an able man, unlike his own late son, and it would do him no harm to be shaken up. Without waiting for his answer, Crinan led the way down to the ford and splashed over. On the far side, as they approached, a mounted escort moved up, awaiting them.
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