King Hereafter

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘… Dreams,’ Archbishop Adalbert said. ‘Dreams and their interpretation. I think, with the Greeks, that they have much to tell us. Bishop John (who, I trust, is entertaining your Irishmen adequately) would not agree. The Greeks are pagan, he says. But sometimes the Lord speaks through strange instruments, and in any case the Greeks are pagan no longer. My new church at Bremen, which you have not yet seen, is built as a compliment to the church at Benevento. The beauty of its ritual, of which you may have heard, is meant to echo the glory of St Sophia, that struck the eyes and ears of the Russian and drew him forthwith from other gods. Who interprets your dreams?’

  One cold winter, the ink froze at Fulda. ‘In Alba,’ Thorfinn said, ‘matters are slightly different. Other people have the dreams, and I interpret them. Or should if I knew Greek. There is a disturbance?’

  It was only reasonable that the fellow should draw attention to it: the shouting had been going on outside for five minutes. The Archbishop felt himself paling with anger. He had wished to talk about dreams. He turned and snapped his fingers.

  From the doorway, a man ran towards him.

  A second man, entering uninvited, melted discreetly to the end of the table, where sat Isleifr with some of the King of Alba’s companions. Isleifr said, ‘Oh, Christ and Odin.’

  ‘What?’ said Odalric, who had the quickest wits. Then he grinned. ‘Christ and Odin? Isleifr: the bear?’

  The Archbishop stood up, brilliant as Charlemagne, two hundred years dead against the elephant silks. He said, ‘The Greenland bear has escaped. Men with weapons are running to find it. Until it is killed, none should leave the church buildings.’

  Thorfinn’s face, wholly bland under the level black bar of his eyebrows, looked across at Isleifr. He said, ‘Where will it go?’

  ‘Oh, Christ and Odin,’ said Isleifr, whose vocabulary, it seemed, had suffered some impairment. ‘There’s a vivarium, isn’t there? You know where he’ll go, then. He’ll make straight for the Emperor’s fishpond.’

  ‘It seems a pity to kill him,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Can’t you catch him? You would need a few men who can swim, and poles and forks and a fishnet.’

  Isleifr said, ‘I told you. He’s eaten his keeper. No one swims at this court.’

  ‘You do,’ said Thorfinn. ‘I’ve seen you. So do Odalric and Hlodver and Otkel. So do I.’

  ‘Holy Christ,’ said Isleifr, laying hands in extremity on a variant. ‘My bear kills the King of Alba while he’s under the protection of the Emperor of the Romans, and what’s my life worth?’

  ‘You’d better come and protect me, then,’ said Thorfinn, shaking himself free of his over-robe. He turned at the door. ‘If my lord Archbishop permits? An occasion such as tonight does not deserve to be marked by death and disaster, even to the Emperors fish.’

  ‘It rather seems,’ said Abbot Maieul, ‘that our host has entered upon his night’s sleep. I am sure he will not mind if we disperse quietly. Or as quietly as we can. There seems to be a great deal of noise going on outside. Who is that at the door?’

  ‘Gillocher of Lumphanan,’ said the face at the door, which appeared to be lit from within like a lantern. It said, ‘Tuathal, can you or Eochaid swim?’

  ‘Swim?’ said Abbot Tuathal. ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I can swim,’ said Sigurd the Dubliner unexpectedly. ‘Why?’

  ‘Follow me,’ said Gillocher of Lumphanan, and disappeared.

  They followed.

  When Bishop John woke, the room was empty.

  His robe was creased, and his ring had bitten into his cheek. There was a channel of wet running from the corner of his mouth. He did not feel very well.

  He sat up.

  The servants would have to be spoken to once again: he would get Bovo to help. Last night’s supper lay uncleared on the table, and the candles sat in their pools, hoary as marsh-spirits. They had all gone, without leave, to the ceremony.

  He could hear there was a ceremony. The cheering came through his half-shuttered window, and the blaze of lights: they must have lined the whole courtyard with torches.

  If there was a ceremony, then the Archbishop would be in charge of it.

  If the Archbishop was presiding over anything, his court of churchmen, including his bishops, ought to be present.

  He, John, had forgotten something, and the Archbishop was going to be, rightly, very grieved.

  Bishop John rose stiffly, wiped his face, shook out his gown, smoothed his hair, and walked carefully out of the room and along to the doorway of his lodging. He opened the door. Light and noise burst upon him.

  It was, near enough, as the square looked at tribute-time, when the ewes crowded in, rearing and jumping, with their knuckles on each other’s shoulders, and the heifers blundered, mouths open, and swerved, sending younger beasts rolling, and from each braying head the yell of protest made itself heard: a various, unceasing uproar that sped, rising and falling, from wall to wall of the square.

  Except that these were not sheep or cattle or goats, but men he knew, making their way in shrieking dispersal down the great slope from St Mary’s.

  He saw faces he knew. Abbot Maieul, laughing. He had been talking to Abbot Maieul—hadn’t he?—only recently, and the Abbot had said nothing of an engagement. Two monks from the cathedral, with a basket of fish—fish? At this hour of night?—swinging between them. Servants and noblemen of the court: plenty of those, and behaving no differently from the others. Three men whose faces he vaguely recognised as belonging to the train of the King of Alba. They, it seemed, had been fishing also.

  And there … There, walking alone, shaking off with a gesture of irritation two or three men who appeared to wish to serve him, was his own master, the Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, making his way, very erect and not laughing at all, to his quarters in the halls of the cathedral.

  If he, John, had been remiss, then the sooner he confessed and made his peace the better.

  Bishop John left the doorway and ventured out into the courtyard. A number of people called to him, and he smiled cautiously in return. As he drew nearer to the new church, the crowd thinned and he found it easier to keep the Archbishop in view. Indeed, as if God had laid a path for his feet, a carpet of silver, it seemed, unrolled between Bishop John and his master.

  Bishop John followed the silver carpet. It led through the great doors and across the inner yard to the suite set apart for the Archbishop. Bishop John tapped on the door and waited a very long time, making patterns on the silver carpet with the toe of his slipper. Then it came to him that perhaps he had not really tapped at all, and he did so again, rather loudly.

  The Archbishop’s voice, also loud, answered crossly. Bishop John opened the door.

  The Archbishop stood in his chamber, naked but for his breeches of linen; and the water of his uncanonical ablutions ran from his hair to his shoulders and chest, and from his underbreeches over his knees to the floor.

  Tears welled into Bishop John’s eyes. He lowered his head.

  ‘My lord, my lord. I shall pray for you,’ said Bishop John, and sadly turned, and walked back to his lodging.

  ‘Who pushed him in?’ Thorfinn said. ‘Can’t one of you cretins stop laughing? Isleifr?’

  Isleifr wailed, and choked, and wailed again, holding his ribs. Tears poured down his face. Malpedar of Buchan said, ‘It was one of the monks. I saw him. But I don’t think the Archbishop realised it. My lord, you swam like a fish, getting him out.’

  ‘That was the bear,’ Thorfinn said. ‘It was holding me by the ankles. Is it all right? Isleifr?’

  ‘The bear,’ said Isleifr, whining a little, ‘is in excellent order. The King’s fishpond is a different matter. Thorfinn …’

  ‘What?’ said Thorfinn. He continued with what he was doing, which was wrapping a band of white cloth round a missing strip of brown flesh on his forearm.

  Isleifr said, ‘You came here to get the Archbishop’s goodwill, and the Emperor’s. Has this harmed you?’

&n
bsp; Thorfinn looked up, a strip of cloth in his teeth. ‘Do you think I am doing this for amusement?’ He finished tying the cloth and lay back, soaking a number of cushions.

  ‘What you mean is this: we have turned the Emperor’s court into a barbarian sports-ground, as he would expect of King Svein or King Harald.

  ‘He knows now that I am not St Columba: angelic in appearance, graceful in speech, holy in action. But neither am I Harald or Svein, or the kind of leader that lurks in forests with robbers, stealthily eating mare’s flesh off a wooden griddle. Now he knows that as well.

  ‘I have no objection to this Emperor or this Archbishop perceiving that the men of Alba have blood in their veins. You did well. We all did rather well. And when the Archbishop has had time to think it all over, his conclusions will do us no harm either.’

  Cormac of Dunkeld blew his nose, wiped his eyes, and, resting his chin on his arms, looked blearily and lovingly at his master, the monarch of Alba.

  ‘My lord Thorfinn,’ he said. ‘We have had a vote, all of us in your court. We think you should be King of Vinland as well, and take us with you.’

  ‘Perhaps. Come to me,’ said Thorfinn, ‘when you can swim.’

  On the third and last day of their stay, when the Archbishop of Hamburg had gone, and the Archbishop of Cologne had arrived, and the Emperor had recovered sufficiently to give the promised banquet of state, the King of Germany and the King of Alba met at last, as had been intended, face to face in an antechamber of the great salon.

  ‘His conclusions will do us no harm,’ Thorfinn had said; and in that he had been proved right. Beginning on the morning after his soaking, gifts had appeared, and delicacies from the Emperor’s table. Wealthy courtiers took the King hunting, and officials of the mines and of the mint conveyed the King, as he desired, up the great hill of the Rammelsberg, against whose cheek the King’s palace rested. A tailor begged an appointment, and a tunic, abbreviated in the French style, arrived to take the place of the one drenched in the fishpond. With it was a floor-length gown, tight-sleeved, of yellow taffeta sewn with flowers and tendrils, to wear at the banquet; and a mantle cut like a cope and trimmed in bands and lozenges with goldsmith’s work.

  Prior Tuathal said, ‘You look like the Pope. Or Archbishop Adalbert. What did you give the Emperor?’

  ‘The Arabian horse,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Among other things.’

  On the day of the banquet, he wore the robe and the cope and, passing uphill with his men in procession between the Emperor’s guard and the trumpeters, made his way to the terrace and through the arch under the audience balcony. At the top of the stairs, the Emperor and his Queen stood awaiting him.

  Despite his French wife, the French mode of the bare chin had not commended itself to the Emperor. The thin nose and narrow face, pallid still, tapered to its conclusion in silky black hair that feathered also his upper lip and curled a little over his ears, under the jewelless band of the Patrician of Rome. Not for today, it would seem, the hinged octagonal crown, half laurel wreath and half helmet, with its queer graven enamels nearly a hundred years old: King David as the symbol of Justice, King Solomon as the symbol of wisdom.

  The Emperor’s wife, small, firm, precise as a bird, wore her crown over her veil: a gold filigree band two inches deep, set with designs of pale stones—amethysts, aquamarines, rock crystals, pearls. She had Lombard eyes and her cheeks and lips were coloured a little. As she smiled and spoke in greeting and lifted her mantle to lead the way to the banqueting-hall, she showed ankle-slippers all sewn with sirens and gryphons, with needle-fine toes and soles of perfect neats’ leather.

  The hall, the Aula Imperialis, was a hundred and fifty feet long and, along that length, clothed with Bohemian lions and one-headed imperial eagles in scarlet and rose-purple silks. The throne, in open-work bronze surrounded by cage-walls of heavy worked marble, stood against the wall-hangings and looked to the row of six triple windows piercing the opposite wall and giving entrance, in their midst, to the balcony.

  Through the windows, beyond the sunlit slope of the courtyard and the trees and the rooftops of the cathedral lay the little hill of St Peter, and to the south the green wooded horizon also rose gently, to the slopes of Hahnenberg and great Rammelsberg itself.

  The tables ran lengthwise, with that of the Emperor on a dais, where he sat not on his throne but on a high, cushioned, carved chair beside those for his Queen and his guest Macbeth, King of Alba.

  The Queen had been watching her guest, the King from the north. As they turned to their seats, she spoke to him gravely. ‘You look at our hills and think of Alba, whose hills you have left?’

  He made an answer with equal gravity, but not the true one. I look at your hills, and I think of the sea, that I have exchanged for a fishpond. I look at this hall, and I think of the chamber at Orphir with my wife Groa in it.

  The two hours of the banquet passed quickly.

  There were familiar faces and strange ones: Anno, Provost of Goslar, with his tassel-hair and his scowl; Abbot Maieul and his superior, the Archbishop of Cologne, with his famous crucifix in which Christ wore the piled hair and blue and classical features, carved in lapis-lazuli, of the Empress Livia. The Archbishop’s sister Richeza of Poland. The Queen’s young kinsman Robert le Bourguignon, great-nephew of her mother, with whom she had shared her childhood.

  They asked the King of Alba what he thought of William of Normandy and of Earl Godwin’s oldest son Harold, and he answered with perfect truth that he had not met either of them.

  They asked the King of Alba who were his heirs and what rivals they had, and he named them. They asked him whether he expected the sons of his dead brother Duncan to fight for the throne on his death. He replied that such a thing was quite possible; as it was possible that one or all of the four claimants to the throne of Edward of England might have to fight the sons of Edmund Ironside, wherever they might be hidden.

  They discussed the weather.

  Then the banquet was over and they listened to music by the Emperor’s court musicians, and a rendering of exceptional quality by Cadou, the King of Alba’s household harpist, of a song to the happy virgin Odile, the blind patron saint of Alsace, which Archbishop Herimann applauded with deliberation, his large white hands beating together so that his rings flashed.

  The private audience followed.

  This time, the room held ten people but only two chairs. In one sat the Emperor, with the Archbishop of Cologne and the Provost of Goslar standing closest behind him. Opposite sat the King of Alba, while at his back Eochaid’s well-formed, tranquil head and the scarred and folded face of Prior Tuathal appeared embossed in the lamplight, like the one-headed eagle with its chevronned breast and striped wings on the hanging behind them.

  In his hand, Thorfinn held wine in a goblet of gold moulded between walls of thin antique glass. On a table nearby lay a cushion on which rested the Arabic sword of Charlemagne, with its curved fishskin handle and its steel blade flowering with bright gilded copper.

  The Emperor said, ‘An agreement has already been reached, as you know, between our officers. To make the way safe for merchants and pilgrims was a care King Canute also took upon himself. You have asked my Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen to help you spread the word of God in your country, and to send you bishops to train your priests and ordain them. He has received your supplication with joy, as have I; and I shall make it my task to see that His Holiness hears your request, and that he instructs that it should be forthwith fulfilled from the ranks of whatever good men may be suitable.’

  ‘I ask this with diffidence,’ said the King of Alba, his eyes round and unrevealing as bronze pennies. ‘One day, God willing, my people will be united in prosperity, but to sustain a levy is at present beyond them, and the land I could offer any man of the church is of little worth. Also, such men would require the gift of tongues.’

  The Emperor turned his head on his shoulder. The Archbishop Herimann said, ‘What do your people pay already, my
lord, for the services of baptism and confirmation and burial, for the visitation of the sick and the dedication of altars and the ordaining of men to holy orders? From pagan times, priests have grown greedy in these matters and, without order, may well take more from the needy than Mother Church with her tithes could ever do. But, as the Emperor has said, we understand that northern nations are not as others, and that a fixed see and a fixed tribute may not at first be possible. We should be poor Christians if we debarred any man from Christ on those grounds. His Holiness, I am certain, will give his consent.’

  The Emperor turned his head gently. At thirty-three, the composure of long training gave him an air of maturity and even of saintliness. His private life, as was well known, was without blemish, and negotiations and policy-making, battle and journeying for the sake of the Empire and the sake of his church filled all but the least of his days.

  He said, ‘His Holiness will require of us, naturally, an assurance that any bishop or bishops sent you will have the support and respect of a King whose own life is a worthy one in the eyes of the church and of his subjects. Your confessor stands behind you. But your peoples are diverse, as you say, and your father was not a Christian born. Has it never seemed to you that the ancient Christian peoples over whom you now rule may falter sometimes in their allegiance, unsure of your faith? Has it ever occurred to you that a purpose might be served, beneficial to you and to the peoples you lead, in presenting yourself for absolution to His Holiness himself at Rome?’

  Prior Tuathal’s mouth opened.

  ‘How would this be possible?’ the King of Alba said.

  The Emperor lifted a finger, and his wine-server brought forward a pitcher. ‘The present Pope has revived the custom of an annual synod at Rome after the celebration of Easter. It takes place this year at the end of the month of April. Princes of the northern nations are made welcome in Rome at this time, and the Icelandic priest Isleifr has a writ with my seal, as you may know, to enable him to travel there through my dominions. Two bishops from England, Ealdred and Hermann, are going from Flanders, I hear.’ He glanced again at the Archbishop of Cologne, who nodded.