Abbot Crinan said, ‘Are you by any chance inviting me to return to Cumbria? I imagine I should receive even shorter shrift there, if one of the daughters or her husband come to regard me as one of your agents. In any case, I challenge your arithmetic. One of the daughters is married to Alfgar of Mercia, and he is unlikely to harm you, unless you have offended him recently.’
‘Which leaves three,’ remarked the King. ‘One married to Earl Siward, whose intentions we are discussing. One married to Ligulf of Bamburgh, who has a double interest since his own family married into Earl Eadulf’s. And one married to Orm.’
‘Whose uncle married my daughter. You are asking, in fact, whether I can trust my son-in-law and his nephew?’ the Abbot said. He was smiling. He did not smile when alone, thinking of this very same problem.
‘I am sure, since they are here with you, that Forne and Maldred your son both have your confidence,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Excluding Alfgar, whom I have not to my knowledge offended, that leaves Ligulf and possibly Orm to help Earl Siward with whatever conquests he may care to attempt. None of them has land in Cumbria at the moment, but, on the other hand, none of them may be quite prepared to find himself face to face with Mercia.’
‘So you think they may march north and busy themselves with Dunkeld?’ Crinan said. ‘I am moved by your concern, but I can’t say that I share it. Would they take so much trouble to retrieve my youngest grandson? He is nine—you possibly saw him on the way in—but in no sense a remarkable child, and he has two older brothers, one of whom at least is well within Earl Siward’s grasp. Or my son Maldred? It is true that he is married to a daughter of a previous Earl of Northumbria, but he has laid no claim to the earldom, and by moving north has made his renunciation quite clear. In addition, his wife is a niece of King Edward of England, and one would credit Siward with enough sense not to offend there. No. I am grateful, as I said, for the warning. I do not see the danger.’
Thorfinn said, ‘I cannot protect you. I cannot, either, have Dunkeld turned into an armed Cumbrian camp, however agreeable I find the individual members of your family. Your entourage may run to two hundred men, but not more.’
‘I understand your difficulty,’ the Abbot said. ‘I sympathise, indeed. We little thought, either of us, four years ago that, far from enjoying joint rule with your nephew in Orkney, he would be bleeding you dry of the ships and the men you now need so badly. Why do you allow it?’
‘What do you do with a badly reared child?’ Thorfinn said. ‘He is jealous of my Norwegian colony. It will pass.’
‘It won’t pass if you continue to support Kalv Arnason,’ the Abbot said. ‘I have wondered if, in retrospect, you did not wish you had sent Kalv instead to his wife’s nephew Siward of Northumbria. With one stroke, you would have pleased your nephew of Orkney and embarrassed the Earl of Northumbria while sparing yourself a great deal of hardship and expense. But perhaps your lady wife Kalv’s niece was insistent.’
‘My lady wife Kalv’s niece felt as you do,’ said the King in the deep, unhurried voice that brought all his answers. ‘But Kalv, I have reason to know, is a true son of Norway who would do almost anything to get back his wife’s farm at Egge. I felt that he and Siward and Magnús would have a pact made in a trice which the Lady Emma might like, but which I should not.’
Canute had thought his way like this into an empire. Crinan had felt no pleasure like this with anyone since the days of Canute. And he had no time at all in which to extend it, for already Thorfinn was showing signs of wishing to leave. Crinan said, ‘I seldom give advice for nothing. But I will tell you again what you know already. Borrow nothing that you cannot be sure of repaying. And take back Orkney. While that canker exists, you can do nothing lasting with Alba or Cumbria.’
He learned nothing more; for the King merely made some non-committal reply and proceeded, as he had guessed, to make the first moves towards leaving. It was, surprisingly, on their way down to the river wharf that he made the only personal remark of his visit. ‘We do not know each other well,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But my mother spoke of you.’
‘You remember her?’ Crinan said. He, too, had met Bethoc once or twice after her next marriage to Sigurd was over. She had never mentioned Thorfinn. But then, she had hardly spoken of her first son, of Duncan. She had been a practical woman, and a strong help-meet to each of her husbands without allowing herself to become deeply engaged, he imagined, with any of them. Certainly, there had been no trace of grand passion in the marriage she had shared with himself. It would have been most inconvenient if there had been.
Thorfinn said, ‘I was nineteen when she died. Latterly, we saw little of each other: she was living in Angus and I was at sea most of the time. I remember her best in Moray when I was young and my stepfather Findlaech was alive.’
‘And what did she say of me?’ Crinan asked.
The glimmer he had learned to be wary of entered his stepson’s solemn gaze. ‘That, were it possible to combine the virtues and vices of all of her husbands, you would have a man capable of ruling the world,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Your business acumen had her bewitched. She was not a woman, of course, who depended on the softer emotions.’
Now, why did you say that? Crinan wondered. They had arrived at the riverside, and, halting, he looked at his stepson’s face and thought he knew. An old hurt lay there, and not a hurt caused by any resentment against mother-neglect. Thorfinn had loved his stepfather, and his mother had not. It was as simple as that.
And in all that lay one danger he had never thought of, and one he could not warn the King against, although, obliquely, he could try.
Crinan said, ‘She was a woman who had learned the only thing a well-born woman must know: that she cannot survive, nor can her husbands in the work they have to do, unless the softer emotions are expunged from her life. As you know, it is also true of men in high places. If you give yourself to anyone or anything, the enemy will move into the unguarded space and cripple you.’
‘As you suggest I should do with Earl Rognvald,’ Thorfinn said. ‘My stepfather, I must leave. You will think over what I have said about Cumbria.’
‘I shall think more of the friendship that brought you here,’ Crinan said, and smiled; and watched the King board, amid the swift, orderly preparations for rowing downriver, and the good-humoured faces of his men.
He had tried to warn him and, through him, Gillacomghain’s widow his wife. But, clearly, it was already too late.
In that, he was right. But, for all his passionless acumen, he failed to observe that the wheel which this year had turned so inexorably for his stepson was turning also for himself, and towards a destiny about which he, too, had received his warning.
He made his own dispositions, as his conversation with Thorfinn and his own intelligence dictated, and after the turn of the year he began, with discretion, to remove what goods he still possessed in Cumbria and transport them, bit by bit, to the monastery of Dunkeld and his storehouses. It was on one such trip, in the spring, that he disembarked with his goods and his men at the riverside where eight months before he had parted with the King his stepson.
The silence at the monastery should have warned him. The absence of his own men-at-arms there and on the pathway up to his hall finally did; but by then it was too late, and the cataract of steel was already pouring down the hillsides towards him.
He saw the banners before he died; and died, characteristically, with a mild imprecation on his lips, not against his murderers but against himself for having been so foolish.
NINE
HE NEWS REACHED the King at Inverness, on the northern most confines of Moray, where he had come not to rest from his labours but to turn to the general benefit the sixteenth birthday of his stepson Lulach.
The man who had the enjoyment of breaking it was Kalv Arnason from Trøndelagen, now resident in Caithness and invited, as was no more than his right, to his great-nephew’s celebration. The messenger he intercepted on the outskirts of Inverness could
hardly have gone any further anyway, and it was worth all the trouble to see Thorfinn’s face when he told him.
He had stood still, on the crowded, garlanded knoll overlooking the river, and said, ‘Crinan is dead, and Maldred his son? Who else? His daughter’s son Forne?’
‘He was south, in Nottingham. And of course they got the boy. Maelmuire. Duncan’s youngest. But they killed every man Crinan had. Nearly two hundred, the man said. Dunkeld is clean. Dunkeld is your own at last. I told you,’ said Kalv, ‘that no man in his senses would have let that double-dealing banker into the finest port in the kingdom. They got all the gold, of course. That was your other mistake. Take his harvest from such as Crinan, and within a year it will be worth reaping again. The Lady Emma, they say, was the same. You ought to have thought of that, too.’
It was worth it, at any rate, up to that point. And then, just as he was finishing what was left in his drinking-horn, Thorfinn had picked it clean from his fingers and said, ‘You must advise me again when your thirst will allow you. Where is the man who brought this news?’ And when Kalv, with some coldness, had told him, had gone striding off without speaking further.
Kalv turned to Groa his niece. And she, in turn, signed to a slave, who dipped another horn in the cask and brought it to him, while Groa said, politely as was only right, ‘I didn’t hear. There has been an attack on Dunkeld? By Earl Siward?’
‘Not by himself. No. The English King wouldn’t put up with it. But by Ligulf and Orm, two of his kinsmen. The boy Maelmuire is their nephew as well, you see. That was the excuse, or one of them. And they say that the Bishop of Durham’s flag was there as well. Malduin’s master. A churchly rebuke to an overworldly abbot, if you stretched a point and forgot that Dunkeld was in another kingdom. They’ll send the boy to Ireland, I expect, where his brother is. And with Maldred gone, Siward is now sure of Northumbrian.’
‘Maldred had sons?’ Groa said.
‘Children. No threat to Siward. He’ll foster them.’ Kalv emptied his horn, shook the drips from it, and looked up, grinning. ‘That’s an abbacy Thorfinn will need to think about filling.’
‘I am sure,’ said Groa, ‘he will take the best advice. Your horn is empty. Let me have it.’
And after that, the day was more the sort of festival it ought to be, with more food than anyone could eat, even though it was May, and sport and music and dancing and all the things men do, from custom and affection, to tease a youth who has become of full age.
Kalv had met fools who were afraid of Groa’s son, or claimed to see something other-worldly about him. For himself, he had always taken him for what he was, a simpleton with no harm in him, and had treated him as he would any other boy, on the few occasions he had had to do with him.
When, as now, Sigrid his wife was there, he kept clear of him. It was hardly his fault she was barren: if Ølve had got two sons on her, he wished he had asked him for the trick, before he killed him. It had been no help in his career, either, that she should blame King Magnús’s father for the death of both her sons, and keep saying so.
Latterly, she had taken to pointing out that the slaves of Egge were the only ones in the whole of Trøndelagen to stay childless until they were old enough to go to market themselves. And when she had caught him bidding for a red-headed man for the goats, she had laughed herself silly.
Groa said, ‘You did very well. Myself, I think I should have done with his horn what the sheep-farmers do.’
‘Kalv?’ said Thorfinn. ‘No. But I miss Thorkel Fóstri. Is that Lulach?’
‘I let him come here to sleep,’ Groa said. ‘Otherwise he would have no peace. You don’t mind?’
Outside the window she had just shuttered, it was dawn, and still the hall and the yard and the sleeping-quarters were full of guests and singing and talking. It had been her suggestion to take some rest now, while they could, and Thorfinn had needed so little persuading that she knew that he had thought of little else all that day but the news from Dunkeld. He sat down now beside Lulach’s slumbering form and moved his hand gently over the thick, silvery hair. ‘No. He enjoyed his day, I believe. He has a kind heart. You can see how Sigurd worships him.’
‘He calls Earl Siward the Dragon-slayer,’ Groa said. ‘Perhaps you heard him. Some Siward, it appears, drove out a dragon that had been ravaging Orkney, and then went to kill another in Northumbria.… You will have to think of a marriage alliance for Lulach one of these days.’
‘Do you want to see him married?’ Thorfinn said. He did not look up.
‘One must think of the future. But it might destroy his power,’ she said. She paused. ‘At least, his strangeness. It is hardly power.’
‘It is power,’ Thorfinn said, and drew the cover over the boy and looked up. ‘Don’t be afraid. It does me no harm. Should you be standing there?’
This spring, she had lost a child, hardly three months on its journey, and his care for her had been like a lining of silk under all that he did. She smiled and said, ‘I look worn and frail. Thank you,’ and came and sat in the circle of his arm.
‘No. But I shall have to go to Dunkeld tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Rognvald, what am I to do with you? This should never have happened if I had had the trained men I should have by now.’
‘You warned Crinan,’ Groa said. ‘They were his kinsmen, not yours.’
He released her and stood, his chin supported in thought, his head bent, as always, because of his height. He spoke, frowning a little, to the floor.
‘How could he have been so blind? Crinan used to know better than any man living what was going on behind closed doors. The Godwin family marry a daughter to King Edward: surely that was a danger signal? We know it doesn’t mean heirs, but it does prevent other alliances. So that throws Siward and Mercia into one another’s arms, or as near as Leofric can bring himself.
‘And meanwhile Emma is busy. The Bishop of Ramsbury died last month and the job has gone to Hermann, the little chaplain from Hainault whom I met in Winchester, while Osbern’s nephew Alfred has settled in as sheriff of Dorset, next door to our friends from Dol. And that means an alignment of the trading and money interests that won’t go ignored, especially as England has just bought off Denmark with some sort of specious promise that if King Edward dies, Svein can expect to cross over and sit on his throne.…
‘All straws in the wind. But they should have warned Crinan. I’m vulnerable to Magnús of Norway, now he is no longer threatened by Denmark; for all England knows, I might have offered my services to Magnús already. He’s made one alliance in Saxony and it’s certainly known that I’ve done business, too, in Arras and Mont St Michel. An attack on Dunkeld offered nothing but profit to Siward’s family: the death of Maldred, the removal of Crinan from the race for power; the acquisition of the last of Duncan’s three sons, not to mention the silver. But even then Siward would hardly have risked it without the profoundest encouragement from other quarters. I should have dismantled the foundry.’
‘Whose foundry?’ said Groa. She sat up. ‘Crinan’s? Crinan had a furnace at Dunkeld? Who was he striking for?’
‘Anyone who would pay him. Norway, I expect,’ Thorfinn said. ‘It was in the stone building they used to keep books in. You could smell the hot metal from the waterside. I sent some men to look about while I was talking to him. It’s common enough, of course, for a monastery to melt down its offerings, but this was something much more. And these things are hard to keep quiet.’
‘And now?’ Groa said.
‘I shall complain to the Archbishop of York, and to Earl Siward, and to King Edward, and much good it will do me. I shall have a long talk with the Bishop at Kinrimund. And from somewhere I shall find a new abbot for Dunkeld, which brings me up against a whole field of thistles whose traversing I had hoped to postpone until my other tenures were a little more secure. I don’t know my sons and I hardly know my wife, these days. Are you sick of me?’ said Thorfinn suddenly.
‘Yes,’ said Groa. ‘That is why I am sittin
g here listening to you, instead of lying in Rognvald’s arms.’
Till she was better, they could do nothing but talk, and she knew it was hard for him, and that he was thinking aloud now for that reason as much as any other. But then she smiled up at him, unthinking, and the candles wavered; and from standing he had laid himself silently at her feet, with his head resting, heavy and warm, against her knees. She touched his hair, as he had touched Lulach’s, and moved her fingers through and through its thick softness.
She said, ‘I had some news from Kalv. He has been receiving messages from my father. The Grand Duke of Kiev has given one of his daughters in marriage to Harald, St Olaf’s half-brother. And there are rumours that, after fifteen years of fighting the Saracens, Harald is about to cross back from Russia and claim a share of the throne from King Magnús his nephew.’
Beneath her fingers, Thorfinn had become very still. Then he gave a sound that might have been a laugh. ‘True prince of the awning of the sun, help the mighty Rognvald,’ he said. ‘That’s from Arnór’s latest poem. He has invented some splendid pieces, I’m told, in honour of King Magnús as well.’
He moved a little, resting his weight against the side of the bed, and she lifted her fingers. He said, ‘ Arnór’s third cousin is Harald’s marshal. I used to get all my information through him. Does Kalv have any idea what this means?’
‘He’s excited, of course,’ said Groa slowly. ‘It might be good news, or it might be bad. Harald fought at Stiklestad too, although he was only fifteen. He saw Kalv kill his half-brother. But he may need men like Kalv to get back his inheritance.’ She paused, and then said, ‘Kalv will do anything to get back to Egge. You know that.’
‘So that,’ Thorfinn said, ‘if I have to settle the matter of Rognvald, I should do it soon, while King Magnús is concerned about the prospect of dividing his kingdom, and before Harald Sigurdsson arrives and I have to contend with the war-hardened leader of the Varangian guard?’
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