The quarrel broke out very much later, when there were only a hundred or so men left in the hall, all of them Harald’s and most of them drunk.
Drunkest of all, you would say, was King Harald himself, whose great frame, through all the evening, had been dealt horn after horn of French wine, followed, as his taste started to blur, with ale from the casks in the corner.
An ordinary man would have succumbed. Harald would pick up the dice, throw them, and call; then, lurching out to the yard to make water, would plunge himself bodily into some trough and take his place five minutes later, hair and beard streaming like straw, water pooling the floor and the board from the squelching remains of his finery.
The last time, standing holding the bench, he put up his hand, swearing, and ripped the clogged silk from his shoulders and chest, down to the underlinen over his hips. Then, stepping out of the mess, he sat down, naked but for his leggings and ankle-boots, and looked at Thorfinn.
‘What are you afraid to show, cousin?’ he said. ‘The knife you have under there, or the tool you haven’t?’
Thorfinn looked up, the coin-brown eyes sparkling under the bar of his brow. He said, ‘It is, of course, the privilege of a host to ask his guests to strip, whatever their sex. However, the fire is burning low. And I would point out that, although the game is exciting, I am not yet wet.’
Thorir of Steig, a cousin of Harald’s, bent over Thorfinn and said, ‘The King sits naked before you. Where are your manners, that you keep on your coat?’
Thorfinn looked round. ‘Alas!’ he said. ‘Are you telling me of a new custom? You must forgive me. It has not yet reached the hovels of Orkney. When the King strips, we all strip. Cousin Harald, there are a hundred men of yours here. Where shall we all put our clothes, to be sure of finding them in the morning?’
No one moved. Behind Thorfinn, Ulf Ospaksson, Harald’s marshal, put a finger and thumb of each hand to the top of his royal guest’s collar. Thorfinn said, ‘In any case, there are more important things to speak about. The King has been cheating.’
Then, men moved.
Thorfinn looked round. He said drily, ‘In Norway, it seems, there are good grounds for suspecting a man who will not take off his clothing.’
Harald watched him. Thorfinn stood, shaking off the grip at his collar, and around him steel moved and sparkled. Thorfinn lifted his hands and slowly and carefully took off his tasselled jacket, and the belt and light tunic under, and his linen. He said, ‘Although I have a bow and arrow in each, I should like to keep my boots on.’ He waited, and when Harald jerked his head, he sat down. He wore, it could be seen, a bracelet on each arm.
Thorfinn said, ‘Now I shall say it again. Your dice are doctored.’
‘I find this tedious,’ King Harald said. ‘And the sight of you is not as amusing as I thought it would be. You won the second game with dice of your own choosing, and I did not complain. Either you finish this match or you cede Orkney to me in any case. Choose.’
‘Why trouble to finish the match?’ Thorfinn said. ‘Prove to me that your dice are fair, and you can have Orkney now.’
Harald rose to his feet. Browned by the suns of the Middle Sea, his skin bore upon it the white scars of all the long years of his fighting, and in the set of his head you could see, without being told, the strength of physique and of character that had made him the greatest of the Varangian chiefs. He said, ‘I have been insulted enough in my own hall. A guest may miscall my honour once, or even twice, if he is related. The third time, he forfeits his immunity.’
‘Very well,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Provided that, before I am struck down, you appoint one of your men to make public test of your dice before anyone leaves. You have won the Tróndelagers by your marriage. Show them that they can also trust you to lead them in truth and in justice.’
There was an axe hung on the wall. Harald looked at it.
Orm, who had married Finn Arnason’s other daughter, said, ‘My lord King. What my brother offers is just. Moreover, there are men in Caithness and Alba who might seek vengeance for such a deed.’
Harald took down the axe.
Thorfinn said, ‘My dice are on the floor, in my belt-purse. If Thorir will lift them to the board, I shall offer them to test as well.’
Harald turned, the axe in both hands, and Thorfinn rose and stood before him.
Thorfinn said, ‘For mine were loaded as well; and he might as well have the testing of both of them.’
Harald screamed, and the fumes of it rolled through the room. He lifted the axe, scattering the men who stood around him. He swung it round and let himself spin with it, so that his waist wore a circle of silver. He let it go, and it flashed over heads and out through the door into darkness. He flung himself forward and caught Thorfinn’s neck with one elbow, while with the other fist he fetched him an underhand, vicious, and crippling blow in the soft lower part of the belly.
Harald’s laugh howled through the room, and his blood-veined eyes, dancing, raked over the company. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he shouted. ‘Here is something to celebrate! A man who will risk his life to divert us. A man who will gamble with an axe on the wall to amuse Harald of Norway. What can your verses do, Arnór, that can match that?’
He roared with laughter and, staggering back, sat down heavily. ‘For your dice were loaded as well! Drink! Drink! My cousin is overcome! Bring us something to drink!’
The beakers were brought, amid uproar, and Thorfinn took his and straightened. Harald said, ‘A boon. A jester is worth the whole expense of his master. You must name what you want, and I shall give it to you.’
Someone had banked up the fires. Sweat ran down their cheekbones and shone on the faces and throats of the men yelling and drinking about them. Thorfinn said, ‘There is no such thing as a fee between cousins. It would be agreeable, to be sure, to have your confirmation that Orkney for all time is mine, and will be asked to pay nothing to Norway.’
‘Is there any question of it?’ Harald said. ‘Two-thirds were always rightly yours, and since Rognvald’s death, I can think of no one better to take over his share and his father’s.’
He drank; and cold blue eyes gazed into cold brown. ‘It will disappoint the Archbishop,’ Thorfinn said.
‘Adalbert?’ Harald laughed, and the ale drenched the mat on his chest, and his thighs, and discoloured the kid of his boots. He said, ‘Adalbert is Denmark’s confessor, not mine. I wish him well. But it won’t take him long to find out that none of my bishops will come his way for consecration, and if he wants your trade, my friend, he will have to seek it through Denmark or England. Will he get it?’
Thorfinn considered. ‘Compared to Orkney,’ he said, ‘what have Denmark and England to offer me? Apart from money, that is.’ Several men, laughing, blundered into them, and Harald pushed them off. Arnór the bard was asleep at his feet.
‘I wonder,’ Harald said. The blue eyes smiled. ‘Thora’s mother is cousin by her aunt’s marriage to this man Siward, Earl of Northumbria. And Edward of England, I am told, is somewhat weak.’
‘I am sorry to say you are right,’ said Thorfinn. He drank again, his colour restored. He said, ‘He is, however, surrounded by other strong earls, and there is an even stronger army of kinsfolk waiting in Flanders and Normandy. Also, his treasure-chests, I am told, almost equal your own.’ He bent and, picking up his tunic, prepared to pull it over his head. He said, ‘As you see, I am not easily offended, myself. I think you may find it useful, as well, to keep whatever friends you may have.’
‘Agreed,’ said Harald. He watched the other man dressing. He said, ‘Then we have made a bargain?’
Thorfinn fastened his belt and stood up. No one paid any attention. He stirred Arnór with his toe and, when he did not get up, walked away from him.
‘A bargain? My empty purse hasn’t noticed it,’ Thorfinn said; and wound his way out of the hall.
Groa was awake. ‘Thorfinn?’ she said.
‘Half of him,’ Thorfinn said.
‘The wrong half, unfortunately.’
She sat up. ‘What?’
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I was making a joke, before I forgot how. Orkney is mine. He won’t interfere meantime. He’s too uneasy about your dear Trøndelagers.’
‘What about my father?’ Groa said. ‘And Thorberg and Arne and Kolbiorn and the rest? Will they be safe, now he has married Thora?’
‘I don’t know,’ Thorfinn said. He stopped pulling off his footgear and, without undressing any further, lay back on the sheet as he was. He said, ‘I have a feeling the first wife is not too far away. They say the Empress Zoe doted on Harald. Perhaps it was the moustaches. I made an expensive mistake when I shaved.’
‘You had to. It all got burned off,’ Groa said. She added quickly, ‘In any case, what conquest were you planning on?’
‘None,’ said Thorfinn. ‘I hoped for a small service, perhaps. There was a time when I could barely stop you from undressing me.’
Her face relaxed. She said, ‘I thought you were only half a man?’
‘That’s why I don’t want to undress myself,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Tell me. When we leave, will you find the parting too hard? You missed your father.’
She untied the tasselled jacket and laid it open. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But there are other things I should miss even more. There was a time in Moray when I would lie weeping for the sunsets of Austråt.’
‘And now?’ said Thorfinn. His fingers touched her and drew her softly down to his side.
‘Now we lodge in Alba,’ Groa said. ‘And it is the sunsets in Orkney that I weep for. And if I do … Thorfinn, can you do it? No man has done all this before.’
‘I have an idea,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I shall give you up. And with the strength I have left, I shall take over the Empire.’
TWO
AN YOU DO it alone?’ Thorfinn’s wife had asked. And, naturally, he had been guarded in his reply.
Afterwards, she realised that he had set himself a studied programme, as once before, when first he found himself on the throne, and that it was intended to occupy all the four seasons that followed the wedding of her cousin Thora in Norway.
In Orkney, Thorkel Fóstri ruled with all the powers of an earl, and the men of Rognvald’s lands had long since recognised Thorfinn’s renewed over-lordship. In Caithness, the land lay peacefully under Thorkel’s kinsfolk and all those other families which now had ties on both sides of the firth. And in the isles and the fjords of the west, the island communities and the scattered farms were protected by Kalv.
In Alba, because of the King’s long absences on Rognvald’s account, much of his previous work had to be looked to again. But, on the other hand, a new generation of young men was growing which had no close ties with the old house of Duncan and Malcolm.
Her own son Lulach was now of an age to take his inheritance of Moray and, with Morgund and the other good friends she had left there, to begin to learn what a mormaer’s work meant. She knew the world’s opinion of Lulach, but as a man he had learned how to subdue the fancies that his kinsfolk found so disconcerting. And beneath it was an excellent and unimpaired brain.
Since Duftah had left two years before to become Lector of Armagh, and since Aedh his brother had died, the community of monks at Tarbatness had reshaped itself, and Deer and Buchan were now in the hands of Duftah’s cousin Mael-Isu.
In the south-west, the lands that had once been Strathclyde and the lands of Cumbria lay under the attentions of Thorfinn’s man Thor of Allerdale.
The rest of the land that had been Alba, from Cumbria north, was now Thorfinn’s primary concern. He had soon put his print on it. With Each-marcach, newly restored, as his agent, Thorfinn recovered the boy Maelmuire from Ireland and restored him to the care of the Mormaer Cormac at Dunkeld.
* * *
News of her husband came to Groa in Fife, in the dower lands Thorfinn had given her when Lulach had come of age to take Moray. Since the slaughter of Duncan’s adherents, the King and the Bishop of Alba had held between them in Fife all that was not bog or stony wasteland.
So that the Culdees of the province might begin to play the part that he planned for them, Thorfinn had already given Prior Tuathal some of his land, and forced the Bishop to do likewise.
As his wife, Groa had needed no forcing. It was the first time she had seen her name with its title, the title that the Lady Emma used, Thorfinn said, on her charters: Gruoch Regina. And Thorfinn, as he must be in Alba, was again Macbeth, the name Lulach had remembered, on parting, to call him.
‘But not Macbeth, King of Orkney,’ Groa had corrected. ‘Macbeth of Alba.’
The clear blue eyes mocked her, gravely, from under the feathered white hair. ‘When I was Caradoc of Llancarvan,’ said Lulach, ‘Macbeth, King of Orkney, is what I called him. Do you want to argue about it?’
‘No! No!’ she had said, laughing, and pretending to ward him off as he returned her laughter. She shut the door.
‘Now no one will hear me,’ said Lulach.
Through the winter, she stayed in Fife, as once she had done in Moray, and served the country as was its due from an officer of the crown, woman or man. Of what was happening elsewhere in Alba she knew only the surface. Food was not plentiful: as Christmas approached, she saw nothing like the great stores that men were used to in Caithness and Orkney. Since the wars, there had been no slave-employing landowners in these parts, and few enough left in the farms to look after the beasts and the crops.
She worried about Thorfinn’s retinue. The hird were in Caithness and Orkney. Here he had a king’s train: of some younger sons from Ireland, some men of birth from the landed families in Alba and Cumbria, all of whom had to be supported or else given land on which they could support themselves.
In Alba, there was no land to spare except forest and waste that had not yet been brought into cultivation. Nor could he maintain a great household for long on the cheeses and malt, the sticks of eels and firkins of honey, the grudging flitches of bacon and the sparse sacks of wool that were all the farms had to spare. So he had to buy what he needed.
Hence, of course, the visit to Norway and the chestloads of silver he had wrung from it. So he had to have silver. But when the silver one day came to an end, he must depend on the north to serve Alba, and that could not continue or it would split the kingdom before ever it had united.
From the ships in the Tay—the constant passing and repassing of longships from the north to Dunkeld, where Thorfinn’s clerks where—she gleaned the news, as Thorfinn must be doing, of the course of King Harald’s husbandly interest in Trøndelagen.
It did not look promising. King Harald was greedy, men said, and overbearing, and beginning to insist on more than his legal rights from his farmers. He had made some friendly overtures towards England, and when two of his wife’s uncles took a fleet of twenty-five ships to Sandwich and pillaged all over Essex, selling the booty in Flanders, he disclaimed all responsibility at once.
Groa’s mother sent word that no one was to be disturbed, as they had plenty of stout hearts as well as weapons in Nídarós. In the same ship was a box from the King of Norway to the King of Alba containing a set of ivory gaming-pieces, a gold cup, a roll of Russian furs, and a bag of silver pennies minted mostly in Lille.
At Yule, Groa joined her husband in the new feasting-hall at Perth, where she found Lulach waiting, along with many of Thorfinn’s chief landowners.
Her other two sons she did not expect. Since he turned seven, Erlend’s place had been in Caithness with his foster-parents; and Sigurd, who was now Paul, lived with Thorkel Fóstri, as his father had done, but at thirteen had no call to sail friendless to Norway to outface a king in pursuit of his heritage.
They were honest, good-hearted boys: fair, now, as her mother had been, and would be seen by the people of Orkney on this feast day to be what they were: the future joint Earls of a flourishing country.
Future Kings of Alba she did not see there, and was not sorry.
He brought Lulach to her. ‘We have been discussing,’ said Thorfinn, ‘the thorny question of marriage. We have also surveyed Bishop Malduin’s daughter and concluded that on no account could we risk a closer acquaintanceship with her.’
It was a matter on which she had been, privately, apprehensive. ‘I am glad to see,’ Groa said, ‘that your good taste in the matter of women has not wholly deserted you. Is there anyone else?’
‘I have another proposal,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Sinill, a cousin of Bishop Malduin’s, has a daughter whom Lulach seems to think may be harmless. Sinill had a claim to Angus, as Malduin has. There is the added advantage—’
‘—that Sinill’s daughter might just conceivably be the daughter of the late King Malcolm?’ Groa said.
‘Did you hear that? I thought I was keeping you too busy at the time,’ Thorfinn said.
‘Then you have a very short memory,’ Groa said. ‘No. Everyone knew your grandfather spent all his last years at Glamis. Lulach, what do you say? You know how these things must be arranged.’
His bright lips smiled, and his eyes were clear as rainwater. ‘No one knew who she was,’ he said. ‘Of course, arrange it as you wish. She should be pleased. She will have thirty years of life for her dowry.’
Over his head, Thorfinn looked at his wife, the boy’s mother. ‘She will be pleased,’ he said.
* * *
And the next day, Arnór Jarlaskáld came home.
‘Well?’ said Thorfinn. The times they had spoken together since Rognvald’s death had been few, and when the hour had come to leave after Thora’s wedding, Arnór could not be found. Later, they heard some of the verses he had made for King Harald.
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