King Hereafter

by Dorothy Dunnett

  This time, leaving both the Lady and Lulach in the hall, Thorfinn’s foster-father went down to the shore himself to see the King’s dragon come to her dock.

  This time, there was a difference, of course. She had been away for little more than a month, not for a season. She had been, in the main, collecting her dues from those lands in the west which owed tribute, therefore she and her fellows were little marked, although a sharp eye could see a hack or two that had not been there before.

  But the chief difference lay in her mode of arrival. To commands that hardly carried over the water, her sails dropped. As she rowed her way into the rivermouth, with the same regulated efficiency, the larboard oars lifted as she slid to her berthing. The decks were clear of clutter, and the men, when the plank was down and they began to lift their boxes ashore, shouting and talking, were the leave-taking crewmen of a royal fighting-ship, not a horde lurching home from its viking.

  The King came down the plank quite soon, talking to someone. His helmet under his arm was sea-tarnished and his open hide jacket stained with salt, but otherwise he could have stepped straight to a council-board, you would say. Then he turned to Thorkel Fóstri, and his foster-father saw how his brown skin glowed, and how the clear, far-sighted look had returned, so familiar that he had never realised until this moment that it had been missing. The King said, ‘We have lost no one, not even Rognvald, and have had a successful voyage. The Lady is here?’

  ‘With Lulach. In the hall,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘Before you go in, I have news for you.’

  ‘Well?’ said the King.

  It was not easy to speak. As the ships emptied, those whose steadings were here, over the beach, or along the riverside set off whistling for home; but the rest were already making their way to the hall, where by custom the home-coming feast would be spread, with their hands sluiced and their beards combed and their boxes on their backs, to put where they could see them.

  Thorkel Fóstri said in a low voice, ‘Word came this morning from Dunkeld. A trader sailed up the Tay to do business at Perth, or so he claimed. He landed a force somewhere out of sight. They marched to the monastery, and forced the gates, and took away Duncan’s two older sons, Malcolm and Donald. They have gone, no one knows where.’

  The King listened, his head a little bent. His foster-father said, ‘I left men on guard on that monastery, and on the riverbank, and at the ferry. I shall have them all hanged.’

  ‘No,’ said the King. ‘No. I told them myself that it was likely to happen, and if it did, they were not to make more than a show of force, since the thing was being done secretively and not in proper fashion. I said that when Malcolm was twelve, he could choose whether to stay in Alba or not.’

  ‘He has made no choice,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘Someone has taken him, who means no good to you and perhaps none to the boys either.’

  ‘Now, that is foolish,’ said his foster-son. ‘The boys would be of no use to anyone dead, that is obvious. No. I know where they are.’

  They had reached the door of the hall. ‘How can you know?’ Thorkel said.

  ‘Because I have just come from Crinan,’ said the King. ‘I told you we had a few pirates’ nests to smoke out for our own good and Eachmarcach’s. At least his brother’s son will trouble him no more: Rognvald stormed ashore and came back with his head. Then, while they laid about Kintyre, I took my ship into the Waver and saw Thor and Crinan.’

  ‘So that’s where they are,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘With their grandfather.’ Drawing to one side, he stood under the eaves and thought about it.

  ‘You might have thought so, but Crinan doesn’t want children on his hands, or to trouble with war,’ the King said. ‘He would like his rents from Dunkeld, and I have told him they will be sent to him, but that Dunkeld is still closed to him, as it was before the boys left. The youngest is still there, and has to be paid for.’

  ‘And the other two?’ Thorkel asked.

  ‘Rumour had it, said Crinan, that Forne his son-in-law hoped to get hold of them. If he did, they were to go to one of their aunts. Crinan’s guess was that it would be to Kalv’s nephew, the new Earl Siward of Northumbria.’

  Thorkel thought about Kalv. He said, ‘He will rear them in York, a permanent threat to you. Did you expect that?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ the King said. ‘It was always likely. Nor is Crinan quite innocent, of course, of his share of plotting. Eachmarcach says that Maldred has been canvassing freely in Ireland for someone to take the younger boy, Donald. His guess is that the boy will go to Downpatrick, and not to Siward, thus halving the risk. Siward, after all, can’t be sure yet that the new King Edward will let him keep Northumbria. And Malcolm is still very young: he might sicken and die. I am rather pleased, indeed, that, whatever fate overtakes my poor nephews, it won’t be under my roof.’

  Inside the hall, it was too crowded even for benches, and men were coming out into the sunlight, talking, with a filled ale-horn in one hand and a piece of roast meat in the other. The noise, already deafening, intensified into a roar of welcome as men saw the King was entering. They made a passage for him through the long room, banging on the posts or the wall-shields or their platters and cups with their knives.

  From the doorway, he had seen his wife’s red hair burning beside the high chair, with the boy’s white head next to her. He reached his lady and kissed her hand and then her cheek, leading her to the other tall chair next his own, and ruffling the boy’s hair as he moved. Then someone called for silence and he spoke; and at the end there were cheers and the noise broke out again. Someone brought him wine.

  Groa said, ‘According to Lulach, you have a new name. Walter, son of Fleance. That is, if you killed someone named Makglave. Did you?’

  ‘Now you come to mention it,’ Thorfinn said, ‘I have his head somewhere. As to names, I am at the moment far from impoverished, but if Walter appeals to you, then by all means appeal to me by it.’

  ‘Forne had a grandson called Walter,’ said Lulach. ‘And a son called Alan.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said the King. ‘Who will tell me news of my family, or have you all done nothing but grow two feet taller, as I observe?’

  They told him the news, broken into, as he allowed on such occasions, by the overtures that came from the men standing about them, by way of observation or question or merrymaking of some sort. There was no way of avoiding it, and no way of shortening it. With the discretion he now knew was part of her, Groa introduced only the lightest of topics and, in the course of the long evening, asked only three questions, harmless in themselves, that showed him her mind.

  The first time, she said, ‘Where is Isleifr? He went with you?’

  He had watched her search for the big Icelander who, since Skeggi’s death, had acted as his standard-bearer when Thorkel was absent. He said, ‘Isleifr continues to bear a charmed life, but in Ireland. I have sent him to Sulien. If you can guess why, I shall give you the Lombardian earrings a merchant sold me in Ramsay, if I can get them back from the girl I gave them to. Lulach, you are not allowed to reply.’

  ‘Isleifr in Ireland? I didn’t know of it,’ said Lulach placidly. He was a tranquil child, and stirred to light laughter by the smallest things. All his mother’s guesses, of intent, made him laugh, and when they all failed, he listened, smiling, to his stepfather supplying the answer.

  ‘Isleifr wants to be a priest,’ said the King. ‘As his father was a leader and a holy man in the old faith before he was converted. And since Isleifr has set his heart on it, I thought that Sulien could best find him a place to begin his studies. He will come back, I hope. Meanwhile, we shall look after young Gizur and Dalla until she has her new child, and then send them to join him.’

  ‘To Ireland?’ Groa said, and her eyes scanned his face. ‘But if he wants to serve in Iceland, and I suppose he does, won’t he have to look to Bremen for some of his training?’ She paused. ‘You’ve thought of that.’

  ‘It wasn’t difficult
,’ Thorfinn said. ‘He can study in Saxony later.’

  ‘Of course,’ Groa said. ‘I see it. Softened by Celts, at least he will have a foot in both cultures, and a child brought up in each. Poor Dalla.’

  Then she changed the subject, a little too quickly.

  The second time, when the noise had risen and men’s attention had started to slacken, she said, ‘Did Thorkel tell you the news?’ And when he nodded, she said, ‘We hear that cousin Siward has arranged a new Bishop of Durham much to his liking. Called, I think Aethelric’

  ‘Now, there,’ said Thorfinn, ‘is a victory of faith over sin. The family has come a long way, I must say, since Ølve’s pagan feast at Sparbu. A spiritual tutor for cousin Siward. Six strokes for indenting with the teeth the cup of salvation. I wish him well of the entire affair.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Groa. ‘I’m glad.’

  And the third time: ‘Why can it be,’ Groa said, ‘that no one is quoting Arnór Jarlaskáld? Did his invention fail him, with two masters to serve?’

  ‘I would blame his courage rather than his invention,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Indeed, he left his harp at home, for fear one of us should demand a panegyric and the other would kill him. When he saw there was no trouble between us, he took to the ale-jar out of sheer relief.’

  He looked at her, and his voice faded. He said, ‘It won’t be long now.’

  It was long. It was night before the hall was empty of all but the young men who slept there and Thorkel Fóstri waiting to speak to him. The boy had gone to his sleeping-quarters long since, and Groa to the hall-room they shared, where she would look at him presently and judge whether or not he wanted to talk, or whether or not he required to talk, whether he knew it or not.

  He did not think he did. It was too confused and too delicate. Where her questions had tended, they both very well knew: the one that mattered most had been about Rognvald.

  There had been no trouble between them: there he had spoken the truth. For the first few days of the voyage, Rognvald had toyed with him like a wild-cat: all gleaming eyes and soft fur and fine-needled pricking, now from teeth, now from claws.

  It was a game he had no objection, himself, to taking part in, and he had played it. The trick was to take the barren exchanges and develop them into a different sort of competition and then, with luck, into something each could tolerate and even enjoy.

  Rognvald had been at sea every year, as Thorfinn had not, and was in any case a man created by gods for feats of skill and endurance. What Rognvald might lack was ingenuity, although he had cunning. What he certainly had was vanity, and that, played upon, might produce the ends one desired.

  So it had been, in many ways, a nightmare voyage, although a satisfactory one. The business with Eachmarcach had been genuine enough, and the threatened south-west needed attending to. But before that, there was little enough reason for what he and Rognvald had done.

  In the days of Thorfinn’s childhood, his father’s sister Svanlaug had lived in the western isles and her husband had kept order there for Earl Sigurd. Then he had died, and his son Malduin had found softer quarters as Bishop of Alba, with no ambition to exchange them for a longhouse on Tiree and a trio of fast cutters that would rarely find themselves out of the water.

  Instead of Malduin, the western isles were in the care of his phlegmatic half-brother Ghilander, who got on well enough with the Norse and Irish and Icelandic folk who populated the isles and paid their tribute to Orkney. It was only when Diarmaid or someone like him swept down with a tight fleet of fighting-ships and scoured the shores, herding off cattle and women alike, that the lack of a strong chief could be dangerous.

  So it was sensible to go out to the isles, and to take the tax, of course, that was due, but also to clear away the unauthorised settlers and frighten off a few more who had thought of it, as well as show cousin Ghilander that kinship wouldn’t count for too much if the Earls were to tire of his laziness.

  To go to Tiree by way of the island of Hirtir was, of course, an unusual thing, Hirtir being as far out to the west as you could get without overtaking Leif Ericsson.

  The wager, however, was made on the way to North Rona, which was not an island on the way to anywhere either, although the hermit had been glad to see them, and they found that someone else had taken the seals the previous year and who it was, so that in due course the matter could be dealt with. Then the south-east wind started up, which was excellent for a long, fast passage by sail to the west, but meant that when they got to the main island of Hirtir there was a swell running into the bay enough to lift all their ships to the top of Conochair and drop them thirteen hundred feet down into the sea again.

  Since a race to the top of Conochair was the wager they had had in mind, they simply replaced it with one of total madness: Rognvald challenged his uncle to climb to the top of Stac an Armin and leave his ship’s weathervane there, which his uncle agreed to do, provided that Rognvald would then bring it down again.

  Stac an Armin was a whitened tower of rock over six hundred feet high, rearing out of the sea by the shores of the next island, Boreray. It could only be approached by ship’s boat, and it could only be landed on by leaping from the gunwale of the boat at the top of a wave and clinging to the jagged sides like a cat on a pine tree. The breeding-ledges were filled with straw heaps and the questing white goose-heads of gannets, and a pair of skuas came screaming down to the attack, beaks raking before the boat had well reached the stack.

  They had both made the climb. He remembered the red fingerprints he made on the guano-skin of the rock, planting the vane, and that, looking down on the wrinkled sea, he could not see the boat for the moving white carpet of geese wheeling in the draughts far below him.

  That was when the change in Rognvald had begun. The mischief, even the vicious mischief, was still there, but without the glitter that had made it so hard to handle. Rognvald had been afraid himself, mortally afraid on that climb, and its achievement had altered his mood.

  So, too, had the King’s readiness to accept the challenge. After that, it was still a duel, but Rognvald never again suggested anything quite as dangerous, and usually the men came with them, boat vying against boat as ii every day were a feast day and the world was a playground again, made of blue dolphin sea and green islands, in which to run and to climb and to swim, to leap and to fish and to hunt. When the fighting came, it was no more than an extension of it, and a dead Norse-speaking Irishman, speared out of a boat fleeing from the big bay of Erik’s isle, was no more than a deer to be dragged out of the sea for the stripping.

  Last night, making their last camp on shore, Rognvald had taken him down to the sea-edge, where the waves moved towards them like rods, black dimly slotted with white. Rognvald’s cobbler had made him gannet-neck shoes, soft as down on the inside, and his hair was as light and soft, and his skin river-fresh. He said, ‘What is the magic, uncle, that charms your life? Perhaps I should pay more heed to the White Christ. What did Hallfred Troublesskáld say?

  ‘ ’Tis heavy to cherish hatred

  for Frigg’s divine husband

  Now that Christ has our worship

  For the skald delighted in Odin.’

  ‘More heed?’ Thorfinn had answered.

  ‘Indeed,’ had said Rognvald, ‘I have been thinking serious thoughts about religion lately, and I have in mind going to see my foster-brother in Norway one day soon, to see what can be done for these poor souls in my care in Orkney.’

  ‘In two-thirds of Orkney,’ Thorfinn had remarked.

  Rognvald had smiled and then looked up, his face ghostly in the night-sparkle of the soft, bursting seas. ‘As I was saying. What charm do you bear? I meant to come back with all Orkney. You knew it.’

  ‘And now?’ It was like being on Stac an Armin again, exploring by touch and by intuition.

  ‘I had forgotten,’ said Rognvald, ‘what you were like; and you reminded me. Of purpose, of course, and so I should discount it. I cannot do that, for what you ar
e is what I am also. Do you not feel it?’

  Red prints on the rock, and the sea, far below. ‘Yes,’ he had answered. And then, ‘There is one kind of love I will not give you,’ he had added.

  There had been a long pause. Then, ‘I know that,’ Rognvald had said. ‘But you may receive it, may you not?’

  Rognvald’s touch, light as thistledown, fell on one shoulder; and as Rognvald stretched up, his breath came warm and sweet, just before his lips found one cheek and pressed it. Then he was no longer touching, but only one pace away, the bird-skin noiseless on the sand. ‘If it is given from the heart, and without thought of reward,’ Rognvald had added.

  You were of his blood. You were only two years older. You were the King. He had turned to Rognvald and said, ‘Give me trust, and I will return it to you. That is all I ask.’ And Rognvald had smiled, and he had felt, for one terrible moment, that his hands had slipped from the rock, and that the white flocks were parting, and that he was falling and falling into the slow, wrinkled sea.

  Thorkel Fóstri said, ‘What is wrong? We have been waiting for you in the hall.’

  He was in Thurso and the voyage was over. The King said, ‘I am sorry. You wanted to talk to me.’

  ‘There is no need now,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. His voice sounded grim, as it often did now. ‘I have heard all that you have been doing, and more.’ He paused. ‘Your wife was afraid. I thought it was because of Earl Rognvald.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Thorkel Fóstri. ‘No. I realise that now. And Rognvald?’

  ‘Is tamed,’ he said. It was an effort to speak, he was so tired.

  ‘And then?’ Thorkel persisted. It sounded harmless: a minor conversation. Words were useless. What he was saying was, What are you?

  ‘And now,’ said the King, ‘I really must get back south. I have sent Bishop Malduin to the new King of England, asking when I may travel to Winchester to offer him homage for Cumbria.’