‘I have news,’ Arnór said.
‘It must be bad news,’ Thorfinn said, ‘to bring you home from the laden tables of King Harald. Unless Thjodolf Arnarsson the poet is a son of yours we haven’t heard of? How did his last verses run?’ And, gazing at the rafters, Thorfinn quoted melodiously:
‘Subjects of King Harald
Must show their subjection
By standing up or sitting
Just as the king wishes.
All the people humbly
Bow before this warrior;
The king demands obedience
To all his royal orders.’
Arnór had flushed. ‘He is no relation of mine,’ he said. ‘We are on the best of terms, King Harald and I. I was about to tell you. He has married my third cousin Ulf, the marshal, to Jorunn, his wife Thora’s sister. So that your wife, my lord, and Ulf are now cousins. As it were.’
‘My lady?’ Thorfinn said. And as Groa turned: ‘Come and greet your third cousin Arnór, newly landed from Norway. He will enlighten you in a moment, when he has told us the rest of his news. There is more?’
‘My parents?’ said Groa.
‘They are well. They send greetings. They are all well.’ Arnór looked from Thorfinn to Groa and back again. He said, ‘You’ll have heard that Isleifr came back from Hervordin. A priest now, can you imagine it? He came to see us at Nídarós, but left after the troubles began. They say he is back in Iceland again.’
‘Arnór,’ said Thorfinn. ‘There is a bench. Sit down and tell us. What troubles?’
Which was how the news came to Alba of the killing of Einar Tambarskelve and his son Henry. Einar, who, courted by Canute, had still become reconciled in the end to King Olaf. Einar, who, with Kalv, had brought young King Magnús back from Russia. Einar, who, spearhead of the stubborn Trøndelagen opposition to King Harald’s heavy measures, had been struck down and killed in a darkened room by King Harald’s men, with his son.
Groa said, ‘Tróndelagen will rise against Harald. Einar’s widow has half the Lade fortune since her two brothers died. All Einar’s friends will support her, and the Lade grandchildren. Svein of Denmark is married to one of them.’ Her sister Sigrid was married to another. She did not need to say so.
Thorfinn said, ‘Would Trøndelagen rise against the Arnmødling family?’
They looked at one another.
Arnór said, ‘There is no one in the whole of Norway so respected as Finn Arnason your father, my lady.’
‘After Christmas,’ Thorfinn said, ‘we ought to be thinking of a spring feast for Paul’s fourteenth birthday, and in any case by March food is not always so plentiful in these parts. I can leave Alba for a month. So can you. I shall tell Thorkel Fóstri to expect us at Canisbay.’
She said nothing, for there was nothing to say. He could not interfere. But he would be within reach when the snows melted in Nídarós.
They melted, and brought with them to Canisbay not the flying wrack of her family but a housecarl on his way west to the Sudreyar, bearing messages from Finn Arnason to his exiled brother Kalv.
Groa knew the man, and he told them his news while he ate. Then she sped him on his way, her eyes on Thorfinn’s face. He said nothing.
The courier took a day to find Kalv. The day following that, Kalv himself sailed into the river below the great hall at Thurso and bounded up the hill to greet Groa his niece and her husband. ‘You will have heard! Now, where is the man who says that patience in hardship doesn’t bring its own reward!’
He flung his arms round Thorfinn, scrubbed him with his whitened bristles, and then did the same to his niece Groa, kissing her roundly. Pushing fifty now, he had developed a little belly from his two years in the isles west of Alba, and the tuber of his nose hinted at the closeness of his acquaintance with the Dublin wine-wharves.
Kalv said, ‘Perhaps, good friends that you are, you sent a message to Queen Thora? Here, rubbing his back among swine in the Sudreyar, is the Viking leader your uncle, who saved the Earl of Orkney’s life against Rognvald his nephew, dear though the boy was. What can we do for him? And what has Queen Thora done?’
He laughed, so that those members of the farm and household who were standing about the hall entrance, looking busy and smiling, were able with justification to turn round and smile more broadly still.
‘She has given me back all my lands!’ Kalv exclaimed. ‘Egge is mine! I am on my way home to Norway again!’
‘Come in,’ said Groa, ‘and tell us all about it.’
She did not look at Thorfinn. For he knew, as Kalv did, that the concerns of Queen Thora his niece carried no weight with King Harald, who had lost no time in recovering his first wife with her daughters from Tønsberg and placing them in the new hall he was building at the top of the fjord east of Ringerike.
Kalv’s years of exile were ending because Finn his brother had struck a bargain.
For Kalv’s sake, Finn his brother had called a meeting in Nídarós, and had persuaded his friends not to rise in revolt because of the murder of Einar Tambarskelve.
Because men trusted Finn, the threatened rebellion was over, and his brother Kalv had been invited back home to regain all his estates and his revenues.
‘And Sigrid your wife?’ Groa asked, when she judged that Kalv had talked enough, and perhaps drunk enough as well. ‘And your household? When do they follow?’
‘In the spring,’ Kalv said. ‘In the summer. In the autumn, with any luck. You know women and the things they think they have to pack. And it will take as long, I suppose, to call back my men from whatever little farm they have found for themselves over the winter. We shall be taking new blood back to Egge, Thorfinn, mark my words! Egge will have more cradles with black-headed children than you two have managed to fill, I can tell you!’
‘Kalv,’ said Thorfinn. ‘I have here a horn full of wine I was keeping for a very special occasion. See, hero that you are, if you can finish it all in one draught.’
Presently, turning Kalv on his side: ‘Half as much,’ Groa said, ‘would have sufficed.’
‘There are some things,’ said the King, ‘that I prefer to be sure about.’
Kalv Arnason died in battle in Denmark that summer, killed in an attack on Fyn island to which King Harald had promised his support but failed to give it.
The news came to Thorfinn in his chamber at Perth, and the man who brought it, a trader-cousin of one of the Salmundarsons, was of the opinion that Kalv deserved all he got.
‘Any fool,’ said the trader, ‘could tell that Harald isn’t the man to forgive anything, far less the murder of his own saintly half-brother. If he invited Kalv back, it wasn’t because he married an Arnmødling, I can tell you.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Thorfinn said.
‘How can I be sure? He sent the great warrior Kalv to command the attack, and then held back his reinforcements until Kalv’s spearhead had been slaughtered. It was plain enough to satisfy Finn Arnason, anyway. Thirty years of service to the royal house, and he’d been tricked by King Harald into luring back his own brother. Now Finn has left Norway. So should I in his place. Your lady wife ought to know. Her father has left Norway for Denmark.’
Thorfinn said slowly, ‘Finn Arnason has taken his family to serve under King Svein of Denmark? When?’
‘Just before I came away. The tale is that Svein welcomed him like a brother and gave him Halland, the earldom opposite Aalborg, to defend against Harald. He’ll do it, too. And many a Trøndelager will sympathise with him.’
He paused. ‘So I hope King Harald of Norway owes you nothing. You won’t see it now.’
‘I think,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that it is rather the other way about. Did you see my wife on the jetty?’
‘My lord King,’ said the trader, ‘there were about forty men on that jetty, watching the horses step ashore and trying to stroke them. You’ll have paid more for these than a peat-carrier would take in a day. Will you fight them?’
The door opened,
and the Lady of Alba came in.
‘Now,’ said Groa, ‘I have seen everything. In the whole of Alba, there are to my knowledge two stretches of firm, level ground where those Koran-worshipping creatures will neither break an elegant leg on the stones nor sink up to the ribs in a morass. You have horses from Ireland and Moray and Iceland and Galloway and your grandfather’s stud farm in Angus, and I never heard a word of complaint. Have you gone out of your senses?’
‘I hear there were forty people down at the jetty,’ Thorfinn said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Groa. ‘You would think a new sort of woman had arrived. As for harness, anything less than goldsmith-work is going to look like penury. I beg your pardon.’
‘This is Hogni from Iceland. He is just leaving to eat in the hall,’ said Thorfinn. To Hogni he said, ‘You will be asked for your news. There is no need to conceal it.’
‘What news?’ demanded Groa, as he knew she would, the moment the door closed on the trader.
And so he told her.
When he finished speaking, she raised her hand and drew the linen slowly down the curve of her hair until the folds fell and were stilled by her fingers. Over her down-bent lids, her brows were as black as his own, but shapely, and sheened with light, like the smooth purple-red of her hair. He never tired of looking at Groa.
She said, ‘You couldn’t have stopped Kalv going back. No one could.’
He never tired of her thinking. He said, ‘Your father had no real choice either. He couldn’t have denied Kalv the chance. Finn is safer in Denmark.’
‘Fighting against his friends?’ Groa said. She pulled down the rest of her veil and began, slowly, to unpin the brooch at her breast. She said, ‘No more boxes of new silver pennies. I wonder what Harald will do. You need peace so badly. You must have peace to do what you have to do.’
‘I’m not in any present danger from Harald,’ Thorfinn said. ‘As you say, no more chests of new pennies. But Denmark is not proving easy to swallow, and now he has Finn’s friends in Nídarós lying waiting to pounce at his back.… Peace? There has been peace in Alba ever since I came to the throne nine years ago. Only I didn’t know then what to do with it.’
‘You spent seven years of it fighting for Orkney,’ Groa said. ‘Paul and Erlend are not going to tell you that you were wrong.’
‘Neither would Siward of Northumbria, were you to ask him,’ Thorfinn said. ‘The fact remains: the united kingdom of Orkney, Caithness, Cumbria, Moray, and Alba is two years old instead of nine. Do you think Sulien might come to Lulach’s wedding-feast? I shall have to construct my excuses.’
‘I have observed,’ Groa said, ‘that at moments of self-doubt Sulien is always present to watch you take the wrong turning. You want to see Lulach settled soon? August, in Glamis?’
‘September, in Scone,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Unless you and he have any grave objections. The girl, I take it, will do as she is told.’
‘I’ve been to see her,’ Groa said. ‘She laughs a lot.’
‘Introduce her to Alfgar,’ Thorfinn said. ‘I see that, like me, Lulach counts not the cost where the state is concerned.’
‘I don’t recall laughing a lot,’ Groa said. ‘Except at Inverness, when my men speared you. You won’t remember. I did it quietly.’
‘I remember,’ said Thorfinn. ‘And how I stopped it, as well. I must tell Lulach.’
Then he took her into the hall and the hall became warm, as if someone had carried a brazier into it.
There were gale-force winds blowing in Scone in September, and a strong smell of fish, and of money.
The priest Sulien of Brittany and Llanbadarn did not arrive, unsurprisingly, for Lulach’s wedding Mass. ‘I hardly know why,’ remarked Dubhdaleithe, Abbot of Armagh, looking about him. ‘You seem to have invited half the churchmen of the northern world: is there a flaw in the marriage contract? Groa, you get handsomer as this fellow gets uglier. What are you? Thorfinn or Macbeth?’
‘Macbeth, for the moment. I hear you’ve hardly stopped fighting since you left Tarbatness. Ireland must be breathing a sigh of relief this day, with Duftah abroad.’
‘Oh, the church is in a desperate state in Ireland,’ said Duftah blandly. The mighty beard and scarred hands were the same, and the voice that had comforted on the night before Thorfinn had fought his half-brother Duncan for the throne. ‘The holy relics are jumping from altar to altar at a price you wouldn’t believe, and some disciples of the Lord you and I know are not above thievery. I see you still depend on Kells for the occasion. Robhartach’s looking his age.’
‘If you forget,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that your great-uncle was once Abbot of both Armagh and Kells, you’ll find that Robhartach suddenly looks younger. We’ve had timber halls put up instead of pavilions. You’ll find your kins-people easily.’
‘I noticed,’ said Abbot Duftah, ‘that someone seems to have come by a fortune. Also, there’s a strong smell of fish.’
‘That’s Isleifr,’ said Thorfinn. ‘You remember. Gizur the White’s son from Iceland who left me for Ireland and Westphalia to train as a priest. He’s on his way back to Saxony. Go and see him.’
‘Where?’ said Duftah.
Groa said, ‘You said there was a strong smell of fish. Follow it.’ She smiled at the Abbot’s expression and looked after him as he turned and strode through the crowds, moving from building to building under the banners.
Thorfinn said, ‘Should I have warned him?’
‘No,’ said his lady wife. ‘But I shouldn’t give the same advice to Bishop Malduin your cousin.’
‘If you look a little more closely,’ said the King, ‘you will note that the prelate who has just joined Abbot Duftah and is making his way to Isleifr’s is none other than Bishop Malduin my cousin.’
* * *
Inside the priest Isleifr’s booth, the bride Finnghuala ceased screaming for a moment when the door opened, and then continued from where she lay on the ground. Far from going to her aid, Lulach her bridegroom of the next day sat weeping and hugging his knees on the far side of the booth. Maelmuire, his fifteen-year-old cousin of the half-blood, lay beside him, beating clenched fists on the ground, while Paul and Erlend, the bride’s young second cousins, were clinging together, the elder attempting to comfort the younger, who, bawling with fear, was sitting shut-eyed on the ground.
The noise, the smoke from the fire, and the astounding aroma of fish at first disguised from both Dubhdaleithe and his fellow churchman the full horror of the occasion. Then the Bishop, leaving the doorway, cried, ‘That is the voice of my niece!’ and rushed through the fog towards the bride.
It was natural that he failed to observe, crawling on all fours in his path, the naked hindquarters of a small yellow man with black hair. And that, falling headlong over this obstacle, Bishop Malduin should only then perceive, hanging before him, the little creature’s discarded clothes, racked on the wet, shining teeth of a white Greenland bear-cub.
In a flurry of red-and-white wool and gold braiding, the Bishop landed full on the bear, and the bear, confused, responded according to the promptings of nature with its teeth, its claws, and its bladder.
The stench of fish sprang freshly thickened into the tainted atmosphere, and the bride, squealing with uncontrollable mirth, sprang to her feet and dashed from the booth, dragging her hooting bridegroom behind her.
The three boys followed, the youngest still tremulous.
The small yellow man stood up yelling. The cub shoved itself free and sat up. The Bishop lay on the ground. The Abbot of Armagh sank on his knees by the Bishop, put out a hand, and drew it back again.
The priest Isleifr, emerging stocky and practical from the obscurity, exclaimed, ‘Dear, dear. What a girl you have there! You’ll have to forgive her. High spirits, no more. She stuffed some fish up his … No harm done, I assure you. Teeth small as a kitten’s. Bites that fade in an evening …’ He came to a halt and looked down. ‘It’s a pity about the robes,’ Isleifr said.
It was
a good, hearty wedding, and the marriage feast was without parallel in the experience of any man visiting Alba, as were the guest-gifts each received on departure.
On the second day of the feast, Lulach led his bride from their chamber, kissed his mother, and said, ‘How could I fail with such a pedigree? Lulaig mic Gillacomghain mic Maelbrighde mic Ruaidhrí mic Morgaind mic Domnall mic Cathmail mic Ruaidhrí mic Aircellach mic Ferchair fhoda … My wife was overcome. I could hardly persuade her from her knees.’
‘You are happy,’ said Groa.
‘Finnghuala is happy,’ said Lulach. ‘When this night’s work brings me a son, I think I should call him Snaebjorn.’
It meant Snow-bear.
‘If you wish your uncle by marriage to expel you from his communion,’ Groa said.
‘Then Snaekolf,’ Lulach said. ‘I had a forebear called Snaekolf. Or was it Melsnati?’
Groa was seldom disturbed by her son. She said, ‘Whatever it was, I suggest you borrow some other name from your pedigree until Bishop Malduin is with his forebears, white or otherwise.’ And waited, smiling, while the bride laughed and laughed.
On the last day of the feast, Sulien of Llanbadarn walked into the hall, saying, ‘It seems that no marriage feast has taken place in Alba worth mentioning, for all anyone is talking about is some tale to do with a bear. Have you a married son here or not?’
It was nine years since his last, brief visit to Alba, when he had stood beside Thorfinn’s sickbed at St Andrews and his throne on the Moot Hill of Scone. Now he was thirty-eight, but the slight, buoyant carriage was the same as when, a boy fresh from Brittany, he had run on the ship’s oars at Chester, and his tonsured hair was still dark. Only perhaps in the seamed brow and dark-lidded gaze, the eye of a friend could trace the weight of thirteen years of exile and study.
He had made an entrance, and so men looked at him. But all those who knew Thorfinn best looked nowhere after that first glance save at the High Chair.
Aware of it, Thorfinn showed nothing except perhaps by his stillness. Sulien also, though his smiling glance swept the King’s, brought his attention to rest solely on Lulach, the boy of twenty who had been his care and his foster-child, and who now rose, white hair silk above the bright bridal silks, clear face untroubled and empty as the face of the sky, and said, ‘Come and meet my wife, who will tell you.’
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