The Emperor sipped, and continued in his dry voice. ‘Provided, therefore, that there is no other difficulty—that your presence is not immediately required in your kingdom; that your resources permit; that such a step is within the compass of your spirit—the matter is simply arranged. My messengers ride daily to Rome: the Archbishop will acquaint His Holiness of your intention. You may even have company for most of your journey: the Pope’s kinsman and mine, Adalbero, Bishop of Metz, is to attend both the Easter ceremonies and the synod and, were I to warn him, would await you with pleasure at Strasbourg.’
He smiled. ‘Does such a prospect interest you?’
‘Who would not be stirred,’ Thorfinn said, ‘by such a mark of the Emperor’s thoughtfulness? It is also true that I have no call to speed back to my country, having intended to linger in Bremen and Denmark. I am much moved to do as you say.’
‘You would not regret it,’ the Emperor said. ‘The ceremony of the golden rose, alone, is a wonder men yearn to see. Nor will you lack common ground with His Holiness. Was that not an address by the Pope to his ancestress that your gifted young bard sang just now? Those who passed through Altorf and Hohenbourg in the Pope’s train last November brought back two such songs he composed there.’
‘The Emperor recognised the source. I am gratified,’ said the King of Alba. ‘If, then, I may presume to act upon your imperial lordship’s generous proposals, my churchmen and the officers of the Archbishop of Cologne might examine the details?’
The Emperor laid down his goblet with gentle care, glanced at the door, which opened, and rose unhurriedly to his feet. ‘You will go from here to Rome? I congratulate you on the decision. The Archbishop, I know, will do all he can to smooth your way for you. And, were there no other reward, the blessing you will receive at the Tomb of the Apostles will be as a light to the end of your days.’
Everyone stood. The Emperor’s guests, bowing, moved forward to leave. The Emperor said, ‘Archbishop Herimann tells me that five Irish kings have taken the pilgrim’s road to Rome in the last twenty years alone. As Bishop of Toul, the present Pope crossed the Alps annually, and my wife’s father also travelled every year either to Rome or to Compostela. But, to our knowledge, Mak Betta, you will be the first King of Alba to present himself at the Throne of St Peter.’
‘And the first Earl of Orkney,’ remarked his guest; and departed.
Two days later, in brilliant spring weather, the retinue of the King of Alba set out for Fulda, banners waving, mounted on eighty good, local horses supplied by the Emperor of the Romans, and accompanied by an armed imperial escort and a large train of sumpter-mules bearing the King of Alba’s neat baggage and the Emperor’s gifts.
The Emperor, in a scarlet mantle, raised his hand as the cavalcade passed under his balcony, and among the glittering throng of his courtiers the Queen laid back her blue veil and raised her hand also, her other hand restraining two jumping small girls.
Her salute was returned by the King; and also by a middle-aged man in priest’s clothes riding behind him, whose cowl could not hide the fact that his cheek was marked with a tear.
‘Isleifr!’ said Odalric of Caithness, jogging beside him. ‘He ate up his keeper and the whole of the Emperor’s vivarium.’
Isleifr’s face hitched in a sniff, but Isleifr’s dignity, it was plain, was not going to permit him to answer. Odalric looked round and caught someone else’s bright face and laughed aloud.
‘Rome!’ Leofwine of Cumbria had shrieked when, two evenings before, Tuathal had left Thorfinn’s side to bring his followers news of the journey. ‘Pope Leo! No one told me I was going to meet Bruno le Bon!’
Prior Eochaid had glanced at Tuathal and sat down, opening the neck of his gown where it had become a little too tight in the course of the evening. ‘He did tell you to expect a long trip. We should be home by midsummer, as we anticipated.’
Malpedar of Buchan had said thoughtfully, ‘Ceremony of the Rose? That’s a coincidence. Do you remember that iron box that arrived when we were at Aalborg?’
Ferteth had said, ‘A lot of things arrived while we were at Aalborg. Wait a minute. Cadou, who taught you that song?’
Eochaid, Prior of Scone, said, ‘I did. And in my turn I got it from Sulien of Llanbadarn, at the King’s suggestion, in Denmark.’
‘Wasn’t Sulien also at Scone?’ Gillecrist had said. ‘Come to think of it, what a lot of churchmen there were at Scone, Prior Eochaid. Including the Abbot of Kells, that lad Muiredach’s father.’
‘And don’t you remember,’ had said Otkel of Orkney, ‘something else that Sulien mentioned? The Archbishop of Dol has been summoned to Rome to appear at this synod.’
Silence fell.
Morgund of Moray said, ‘He’s had this planned since Lulach’s wedding.’
Prior Tuathal said, ‘He’s had this planned since he made up his mind to work us into becoming a nation.’
‘God forgive me. I like this King,’ said Morgund of Moray.
SEVEN
HE FIRE AND the chill of many temperings go to the fashioning of a nation. The kingdom of Alba, you might say, was forged in one sense as the cavalcade of young men who were its heirs moved Past the engraved milestones of Agrippa and took the royal road south to Rome the Golden.
And every day the future was fixed to the past as they came face to face with the ghosts of their ancestors: the blue-eyed, ruddy-haired Celts who fifteen hundred years earlier had begun to move west and north from their cradle of iron and salt. The Celts, who treasured their enemies’ heads embalmed in cedar oil; whose own carved almond heads looked up from the earth or down from some coign wherever their feet had trodden. Heads in gritstone, in sandstone, in limestone, in granite, glared with ringed, pebble eyes at their children: the harrowed bands of their pates caught the flickering light in dim churches: their slit mouths and wedge-noses stamped the stone with exclamation-marks of indignation and horror.
In Payerne, where the Emperor’s father had been crowned King of Burgundy, the close-set, gooseberry eyes and fringed hands belonged to the Prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, Daniel and Ezekiel, and to the Evangelists who crouched on their shoulders.
Four men upon four: it was a tradition old already in Ireland when Colgu Ua Duineachta taught Alcuin, who bore it to Tours. In the church of St Sebastian in the Barberini vineyard at Rome, the Prophets and the Evangelists, new-painted over the apse, supported one another and waited for the footsteps of their kind while they offered their tithe to the long, silent choir of the centuries.
Also on his way to Rome, although a week or two later, Bishop Ealdred of Worcester, whose affinities were not Celtic but high-born Anglo-Saxon, discovered quite early in whose footsteps he was following.
‘Thorfinn!’ said Bishop Ealdred. ‘Or rather, Macbeth. He’ll want to be called Macbeth now. We must remember. But how interesting. How very interesting. So there is something going on. I thought so. I wonder why he made such a long stay at Woffenheim?’
The Pope’s parents had built the abbey of Woffenheim; the Pope’s aunt was its abbess, and the Pope’s nephew was the abbey’s advocate. ‘I can’t imagine why,’ said Bishop Hermann of Ramsbury, Wiltshire. He was ten years younger than his fellow-envoy, and three stones lighter, and, in eight years of doing business together, had never ceased to enjoy the spectacle of Bishop Ealdred conducting an intrigue; or to rejoice when the result surprised Bishop Ealdred.
Bishop Ealdred said, ‘Use your brains. If he wants the Pope’s favour—and he does—he ought to have kissed the shrine and got out, leaving behind a nice box of something on the altar. However. If he’s run short of money, the stay at Romainmtier’ll have put new heart into him. A mule-load of almonds a year: that’s all the Pope wants from the monks in taxation.’
‘I don’t expect,’ said Bishop Hermann, ‘that they grow almonds in Alba. I suppose eels would travel.’
Behind him, young Alfred giggled. A sheriff at twenty-two, Alfred might be frivolous, but was by no me
ans unintelligent. He was also well-connected. For example, Osbern of Eu, who captained one of the new Welsh frontier forts in the service of Edward of England, was his uncle by marriage.
Bishop Hermann dropped back to ride beside Alfred. He said, ‘Wasn’t your uncle Osbern in Alba for the last King’s enthronement? Has he had many dealings with this one?’
Alfred grinned. As with Duke William, bastardy caused him no inconvenience. The Breton blood showed itself in the brown, knowing eyes and black hair, and the Hainault in the short, stocky build and powerful calves gripping his gelding. He said, ‘If there’s money in it, you’ll find Osbern there. He and Juhel did a lot of trading with Orkney, but I can’t see Osbern giving up Bordeaux wine and Welsh girls for the snowy mountains of Alba. Our friend Macbeth ought to feel at home here.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Bishop Ealdred. He stood in his stirrups to shout an order to the pack-mule driver ahead, and his horse belched and slid in the slush. He sat down again.
‘I was there in the north when this fellow made his Norwegian marriage. September, and you’d get the same weather in Hereford. Except for the wind. East-coast wind. Knocks you over. Makes them into good seamen, though.’
‘He was trading,’ shouted the monk Goscelin de Riveire, the fourth of the party. The wind here, too, could knock you over. It had pursued them ever since they left the north shore of Lake Leman. It had whirled from behind the tall, icy spires and wrenched and tugged at their furs when they came out of St Maurice, and now, as they climbed up from the monastery at St Pierre, it came scouring behind like a broom, so that the wet on their path trembled and scurried uphill before them, between the high, moulded mountains of snow.
Ealdred said, ‘Well, there would be little sense in coming all this way without trading. Give your horse its head: it knows how to pick its way better than you do. What’s wrong? Your fingers won’t freeze.’
Hermann smiled abstractedly. Goscelin was second cousin to Alfred, but had none of his impudence. Goscelin was worried about his hands because he held a pen with them. Of course the agents of Alba would take the chance to trade on this journey, as the English party had done. Not for nothing did Bishop Ealdred’s diocese include Bristol, one of the five great English trading-ports. And anyway, a visit to Ghent was part of their mission: to deliver the dues from the church’s holdings in England.
Hermann had kept Goscelin out of the delicate bargaining, for Goscelin had no head for business: only a fevered compulsion to write about other men’s lives, from devotion.
For that, he, Hermann, was to blame, who had advised the Lady-Dowager Emma that her history should be set down at St Bertin’s on the border of Flanders and Normandy.
He was not to know that the Abbot Bovo would go mad, or that the writing of Lives—almost anyone’s Lives—would become the enduring concern of the monastery.
Or of two of the monks, anyway. Since he got hold of both English emissaries at the synod of Rheims, Fulchard, for his sins but certainly not for theirs, was launched on the careers of the saintly brothers Adelulf and Botulf. Goscelin, breathing on his fingers beside him, was disputing with the same Fulchard the right to embark on a Life of St Bertin from Luxeuil, one of the monastery’s founders.
It was, of course, the right time to do it, with an Alsatian Pope, and the trade running as fast as horseflesh could take it along the path beaten out by history: from the mineral springs of Luxeuil to St Riquier and St Bertin’s, and from St Bertin’s to the mineral springs of Bath and Wells, re-stocked by monks from St Bertin’s a hundred years since. And between Bath and Ghent the cloth trade, with its roots further back even than that, in the days when Alfred the Great refounded Bath and married his daughter in Flanders.
The old route for cloth, and for doctors, and for biographers who spoke Norman-French and Alsatian-German and were protégés, as he was, of the Queen of England and the King’s mother Emma of Normandy.
That day, they reached the top of the Alpine pass of Mount Jupiter, eight thousand feet higher than sea level and free, since King Canute made his complaint, of the bandits that used to plague it. Just before King Canute was born, Saracens had held the passes, brought in by some fool of a French-Italian monarch. Now, from Augustus’s road, where the ruins of the Roman temple still stood, rose the smoke of a group of bright wooden buildings, their warmth greening the snow all about them.
They were new. The previous spring, the Archdeacon Bernard of Aosta had brought his monks and his workmen from the Italian side of the mountains and had built the hospice of St Nicholas, whose guestmaster stood on its threshold, and whose hot soup and great fires were soon warming them.
‘The passes are open. It is well. We have food,’ the guestmaster said. ‘When there is a synod in Rome, the Bishop makes special provision. Some men are more used to mountains than others. We had a party from the north of the world, from Alba, two weeks ago.’
‘On all fours?’ said Alfred. ‘In animal pelts?’
‘Like you or me. You would notice no difference,’ said the guestmaster kindly. ‘They tell me they have seen Roman cities.’
‘Anyone who has seen York or Winchester, or Bath or Chester or Exeter, has seen a Roman city,’ said Bishop Ealdred. ‘The Romans were in England for five hundred years.’ He blew his nose, which was dissolving in the heat.
‘I wonder where the King of Alba will stay,’ Bishop Hermann remarked.
It was a matter of more than ordinary interest. Secular Rome and its republic of senators was not free with its hospitality. Since the time of Constantine the Great, only two Roman emperors had ever lived in the city, and in living memory the young half-Greek Emperor Otto had been besieged in his house on the Aventine. Notoriously, every coronation ended in conflict between the imperial troops and the Pontiff’s militia. Charlemagne himself had had to lodge over the river, in what was now the Leonine City, the Borgo, the suburb where all the foreigners and their monks set up their hostels.
The English hospice was there. ‘Not in the English hospice, at least,’ Bishop Ealdred said. ‘The King of Alba a pensioner of King Edward’s? No. Not the figure he would wish to cut. I wonder.’
‘What do you wonder?’ said Hermann. He remembered a little exhibition in Winchester, mounted by Emma, in which this man Thorfinn had performed, along with Alfgar of Mercia and young Alfred’s kinsman the Archbishop of Dol. It struck him that after a week or so more of Ealdred’s company, he might be quite ready to have the King of Alba staying at the English hospice.
Ealdred said, ‘I wonder why he stayed so long in Woffenheim.’
Within the golden dunghill of Rome, the Pope came back from Siponte as the fourth week of Lent drew to its close and the theatre of the city began to draw back its curtains for Easter.
The box from Woffenheim had arrived. Like Pope Leo himself, his aunt the Abbess was particular about dates. That Sunday, Laetare Sunday, he rode, as was the tradition, from the basilica of Constantine, his home on the Caelius Hill, eastwards to the Sessorianan Palace, once Constantine’s also.
For eight hundred years, the central hall of the palace, converted into a church, had held the fragment of the True Cross brought to Rome from Jerusalem by St Helen, Constantine’s mother. The church was called Holy Cross of Jerusalem. His parents’ abbey of Woffenheim was named after the Holy Cross also. It was fitting that as he rode the short distance under the banner of St Peter, with the great cross from the Lateran flashing before him, and the steel-lined causeway before and behind him crammed like a flower-filled river with colour, with scent, and with song—it was fitting that the rose he bore in his hand, the golden rose scented with balm and with musk, the emblem of Christianity, should emanate from his family, the family of Bruno of Nordgau.
Seated in his ivory chair below the half-dome of the apse, he listened critically to the Introit: Oculi mei semper ad Dominum, and felt the hand of Constantine again on his shoulder. Constantine the Great, who had recognised the Pope as Christ’s Vicar on Earth and had made over to
St Sylvester the imperial palace of the Lateran, where he now lived, beside the basilica now known as St John’s. At this altar, Pope Sylvester had died while saying Mass: died in Jerusalem, as had been prophesied.
Rome was full of churches built by Constantine, most of them in need of repair. He had pointed them out to the bishop from the other Constantine’s city, Coutances in Normandy, who had shared his expedition to Italy. To build a new church in Coutances was admirable. But to save the souls of his unfortunate kindred, Bishop Goisfrid might not find it unwise to invoke the aid of Saints Peter and Paul in their basilicas outside the walls, into which the roof tiles were leaking.
There was a voice of some stridency in the choir. Pope Leo frowned and looked up at the rafters, whose gilding showed no sign of dampness. He had given the returns from this monastery, only last year, to Richer of Monte Cassino, sitting over there unmoved, apparently, by any defect in the praises.
Richer had admired the rose in the Pope’s hand. It was not, of course, the rose his aunt the Abbess had been instructed to send, although it encompassed it. What he held was a wand wound about with rose leaves and half-open roses. In the centre was the golden rose, weighing two Roman ounces, that he had stipulated as Woffenheim’s annual tribute.
With the wand, his aunt had sent a note of explanation. The smithwork on the rose he recognised. It came from Essen. The wand, he fancied, was English. Soon, showing it to the people, he would be required to discourse on it.
So that Rome might have roses for pious use, Constantine had provided Pope Mark with a rose-farm. He, Leo, did not propose, in the present state of unrest, to encourage the throwing of roses from church roofs. But of the symbolism of the wand he could make something. Aaron’s rod, bringing forth blooms in the tabernacle; signifying God’s chosen race, set aside for the priesthood.
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