‘Or Bishop Ulf of Dorchester,’ Thorfinn said, ‘racing so slowly to beg the Pontiff to confirm him in his enormous see.’
‘And the Pope will do it,’ Juhel said. ‘Bishop Ulf may even be allowed to shift his seat into Lincoln, which is what he really wants. After all, the un-Saxon Leofric was allowed to take over Exeter. And Hermann isn’t content, of course, with Berkshire and Wiltshire, any more than Ealdred is happy with only Worcester. What’s more, they’ll get what they want. The Pope will give every encouragement. He thinks these changes are progress; that the bishops, Roman-fashion, are coming in from the country. The bishops in fact are stepping aside from the earls and preparing to make themselves into princes.
‘That is the other danger of bishops. Archbishops are worse.… Tell me,’ said Archbishop Juhel, ‘what was the fee for your shriving? Did you promise to erect a bishop’s seat in a city? The opinion on the Aventine was that you had, in return for St Peter’s somewhat distant protection and a bone of St Andrew.… Why should I lower my voice? I thought the Fool for Christ had already crossed to your shores?’
Thorfinn removed his hand. ‘There is a place called Hexham,’ he said, ‘that I should prefer to have a monopoly of St Andrew until the spiritual boundaries between myself and Northumbria are a little more clearly defined. I’ve promised nothing I shan’t carry out. I shall build churches. I shall accept bishops. But there will be no Roman system, yet. Not until we have towns.’
‘Hasn’t Sulien told you?’ Juhel said. ‘Towns corrupt. For towns, you must have rules.’
‘The early church was pure and free, with few rules,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But the desert offers no protection to the young and the old and the sick.… You have heard it all before.’
‘I know it better than you do,’ said Juhel of Dol. ‘The heathen overran Europe, and the Celtic church stayed through the centuries the loving guardians of faith and of learning. But now the lands and the peoples they served are beginning to change.… When Emma invited you to Canute’s court, she planned to use you and your people as mercenaries, the way King Salomon used the Norse, and your grandfather used your father’s men and the Irish.’
‘I know that, of course,’ Thorfinn said. ‘A mercenary is what I was.’ His voice was neutral.
The Archbishop glanced at him, and went on. ‘We talked of the dangers of vassaldom. The Lady-Dowager is still using you. Everything that happens in England today has to do with this childless King and his possible heirs. You know that. The Lady Emma is still using you, to counterbalance the power of Norway, as well as of Mercia and Northumbria in the north.’
‘Emma is using me?’ Thorfinn said.
They looked at one another.
‘Is that all you wanted to know?’ Thorfinn said. ‘That when Emma dies, my policies will be the same? Then you had better learn that they may not remain the same, but they will remain mine. They have always been mine.’
‘Good,’ said the Archbishop of Dol. ‘A man I can’t move to anger is a man I’d rather not deal with. What and who you are is important. To me, and to many people. You know that. You have just put it to the proof. You were represented to me, when I first heard of you, as a half-pagan jarl with a collection of Christian lands from which he took tribute.’
‘And now?’ said Thorfinn. ‘The plaything of princes? I am willing to be flattered, but I do not intend to lend you any more money.’
‘Now, Macbeth of Alba,’ said Archbishop Juhel. ‘Now you are a king with a kingdom. Perhaps a great king, about to make a great kingdom. What is it like up there on your pinnacle?’
He was not expected to answer. He had no intention of telling the truth. He did not dislike his pinnacle; except that it was land-locked, and noisy.
ELEVEN
USPENDED LIKE BUTTERFLY wings in the haze, under banners of white marked with gold, the dragon-ships of the pilgrim King of Alba moved into the mouth of the Tay, and on either side of the river the first bonfires shimmered into the air.
They were expected. By merchant-ship, by mule-train, by courier; there were ways, however leisurely, of passing news between Alba and Rome. A king requires to be assured of the safety of his kingdom: a kingdom requires to know the exact whereabouts of its king. An envoy of Archbishop Herimann’s, riding relay-horses, had borne the message that summoned Thorfinn’s ships to meet their lord at Cologne. And before the King himself reached the city, the news was on the high seas and on its way home.
Behind it, the cavalcade of the King swept northwards almost as swiftly, escorted by song and clamour and laughter; by contests solemn and ludicrous; by endless talk and at length by argument: argument with Thorfinn himself that went on day and night in the way to which his hird were long accustomed.
But three-quarters of these men were not of his hird, and until this journey he had been a stranger to them. Also, they were landsmen who recognised but could not share the sudden liberation of the spirit that the sea bestowed on her exiles.
From the Rhine to the Tay, Odalric, Otkel, and Hlodver sailed the ship with their souls, and occasionally, out of goodwill, joined Thorfinn and the rest in the well, where the talk was still good and the laughter burst out when it was calm, and still, in the skirl of the wind, the brassy bugles of triumph were ringing. Then land rose out of the sea: the cliffs and meadows and beaches of Alba; and they stood in silence, holding the rigging, for whereas men of the north could recall the summer hosting and the long months of raiding and fighting with perhaps a winter abroad at the end of it, laid up with a broken ship, or a wound, or a girl, men of the land seldom left their wives, or their parents, or their children for long.
To them, the tranquil investment of the broad estuary was a thing that caught at the throat, personal as a bereavement. The sand-flats on either side moved slowly closer, and the turf and the trees and the low hills behind became greener, and the scattered cabins and their fields more distinct. The smell of wood-smoke came over the water, and of cow-dung, and bracken, and honey; and instead of rafts of small birds and seaweed, there were swans floating through amber reed-beds, and nets on the beach, and small jetties.
Somewhere over a ridge, a lamb issued grating complaints and dogs had started to bark, the sound knitting from shore to shore with the voices of people. First one or two, and then a great many, running, and moving in groups, and calling, their hands hooding their greetings.
Their faces were rosy, and some of them wore coloured clothes. A rowing-boat put out from one bank, and then two or three from another. They came round three sides of the dragon-ships and settled there, more and more of them, like fish at the trawl, rowers calling and smiling to rowers.
Ahead, the river wound glittering over its meadowlands. On their right hand and on their left, and ahead in the mountains of Atholl, joy-fires flamed, gold against the blue sky, like a garland.
‘My lord King,’ said Eochaid. ‘Your people are making you welcome.’
There were flags flying from the citadel of Perth, and from the Hill of Tribute and Eochaid’s monastery opposite. The flickering colours were the first things to catch the eye as the dragon-ships with their flotilla rounded the deep bend of the Tay above Earnmouth. Then you could see the shadows of them dancing on the thatched and slatted roofs of the new hall and its huddle of buildings about it, and coloured cloths, red and yellow and green, hung over the shining palisade of timber that crowned its green mound.
Below that, the land to the water’s edge, where Almond joined Tay, was packed with folk, tight as a mussel-bed. The river beyond was hedged with small boats, and at the long wharf an awning had been raised, bright with streamers, to protect from sun or from rain the King’s lady with her sons, and his mormaers standing about her.
An impartial eye, had there been one, would have noticed that on board the King’s ship, men stood, their faces shining, in a packed knot about him, while on shore Ghilander and his company waited apart from Thorkel Fòstri and Starkad and theirs; that Mael-Isu and Thor of Allerdale claimed e
ach a different stance on the quayside, and that the King’s stepson Lulach was surrounded by his people of Moray, as Maelmuire, the King’s young nephew, held a separate place with the Prior of Dunkeld and his family.
In the centre waited the Queen, jewelled and still as an icon in her straight robe, with a fillet binding her brow over the pale gauze that lay close round her face and her shoulders. On either side of her stood the King’s sons. Paul, to whom the year between fourteen and fifteen had given his father’s nose and something of his height, together with a diffident fairness that came from another quarter. And Erlend, short and flushed, whose straw-coloured hair parted, whatever he did, on each side of his nine-year-old ears.
Then the ships began to swing in to the shore, and the shouting, that for the last mile had never stopped, but had become part of the sky, like a migration of geese or of bees, heightened and became suddenly intimate.
It was Morgund, stiff Morgund of Moray who had viewed his Queen’s marriage with nothing but disapproval, who raised his hand and shouted first, smiling at Lulach and then at his Queen. And Lulach, his face satin-brown beneath the glowing white hair, smiled his open, affectionate smile and then transferred it, deepening, to his father.
To those who knew Thorfinn, the response was there, in his eyes. To the people, under the white banner given by God’s own apostle, stood a man half a head taller than the tallest, in a blowing, brilliant cloak, on a golden galley lined by glittering shields, above which laughed the faces of his oarsmen and his friends.
The oars lifted; the beam of the galley touched wood; the ropes fore and after were thrown ashore and the gangplank laid through the opened gunwale, the crowd running round it.
It dropped at the feet of Thorkel Fóstri, and he started forward. Behind him, the Breton priest Sulien raised a swift hand to restrain him, hesitated, and then dropped it, at the Queen’s smile.
First of all the King’s subjects to greet him, Thorkel Fóstri boarded Grágás as if in battle again, and took in his grip the twelve-year-old boy with burned hair who had defied him at Nídarós. For the rights of a king’s wife and king’s sons are not as the rights of a father.
On shore: ‘I shall begin with the youngest,’ said the King, standing under the awning. ‘Erlend, what do you wish for most?’
‘A helmet?’ said Erlend.
‘I have brought you one,’ said the King. ‘Paul: how is my Orkney?’
‘In good order, my lord,’ his son said. His voice, rumbling through the thin frame, came from his feet. The King said, ‘Then you have done well. I am pleased with you. Maelmuire?’
Cormac of Atholl, one arm round his wife, was ruffling the boy’s hair with the other. He gave the youngster a little push, smiling, and Duncan’s son went to his uncle.
‘You are keeping Dunkeld, as your grandfather did. Is it safe?’ asked the King.
Although he, too, was fifteen, Maelmuire’s voice still betrayed him now and then. It did so now and he blushed, but recovered as the King paid no attention, and spoke for the well-being of Dunkeld, the warmth still round his shoulders where the lord Cormac’s arm had gripped him.
‘Then I am pleased with you, too,’ the King said. ‘And now, the lord Lulach?’
‘I am here,’ said Groa’s son, smiling beside him. ‘My lord King, I have to tell you that Moray is in good heart, and so are we all. And that as from last week you have a grandson.’
For the first time, the King paused. Then he said, ‘In Rome, men showed me a church dedicated to St Mary of the Snow after a miracle.’
‘Mael Snechta is the name of my son,’ Lulach said. ‘Bishop Malduin is not here, and so has not been able to object.’ His eyes were dancing.
‘Then,’ said Thorfinn, ‘I have brought you a blessing, which is perhaps more than you deserve, considering the nature of your labours, but which I shall certainly give to Finnghuala. It is news fit for trumpets, and you shall have them.… My lady?’
It seemed that until then the King had hardly looked at his wife where she stood, behind her three sons and her nephew. Now they faced one another.
Within the gauze, her face was pale as tinted enamel. Her eyes, searching his face, were light as quartz under her black brows. Then the King placed his hands lightly on his wife’s shoulders and kissed her on the mouth.
It was a formal embrace, before crowds, with sunlight and shadow tumbling about them from the tossing awning, and the roar of the continuing welcome thundering still against the ears. Their lips met and drew apart, and no one could have guessed at the unguarded moment of oblivion that came to them both, or the wonder of recognition that followed it.
Then the King said, ‘There is no story, they say, without its song following it. You have carried my shield for six months. Now lay it down: for from today I shall take all your burdens.’
The Queen said, with no less formality, ‘Your mormaers bore your shield. Here are the others, waiting to welcome you. And Sulien.’
The voice of Erlend said, shrill with eagerness, ‘Father, he’s married! Sulien is married!’
‘Ah,’ said the King, and turned to his soul-friend.
Sulien smiled, saying nothing.
‘The girl I know of?’ said the King.
‘Yes. We are happy. She is with child, so I have left her in Wales,’ Sulien said. ‘And here are your mormaers. Your lady thought—’
The Lady had thought that the King, as custom required, would sup in hall with the reunited officers of his kingdom before the latter dispersed to their families over the river, there to await the banquet of state and the public accounting.
The people thought otherwise. The people surged forward as the formal greetings came to an end, shouting questions to which, drunk with emotion, the voyagers began to attempt impossible answers. Tuathal, his arms in the air, surrounded by excited, purposeful faces, looked at Odalric, who caught the eye of Malpedar, who looked at Hlodver, who attracted the attention, jumping, of Otkel.
As if endowed by divine locomotion, Thorfinn, King of Alba, rose in the air and, chaired to the brink of the river, embarked on a boat that, followed by dozens, deposited him on the opposite shore. From there, levitated likewise among the throngs of his people, he arrived at the Moot Hill, where, ten years before, he had been elected as King, and where, again brought by his people, but this time by common as well as by noble, he was set and, gathering breath, proceeded to address them.
It was not the address that three days later he would give in his great hall of Perth to the men who led the tribes of his kingdom. It spoke not of trade or of planting, or of timber, of shipbuilding and the making of roads; little of the building of warehouses and the spinning and dyeing of wool, the improvement of tanning and the better breeding of garrons, the keeping of bees and the fencing of parks, and the training of scholars and scribes and of artificers, craftsmen in wood and iron and leather, gold and silver, whose work could make Alba great and envied of peoples.
He told them instead that St Peter the Apostle of Christ had taken them under his protection, and the Emperor of the Romans, his friend. He told them of the churches that would be built to revive the Word of God as men had known it of old, from Orkney to Allerdale. He reminded them of the old saints, of Servan and Drostan and all the rest, who had once interceded for the ancestors of every man present, and who once more would intercede for them as a people. And he showed them, chief of all the priceless gifts the Sovereign Pontiff had given this kingdom, the banner blessed by the Pope, and the gospel, bound in gold and in gems, that would lie now and for ever in this their church of Scone.
Then Tuathal, standing there in his travel-stained cloak, read from the book and Eochaid, raising his voice, led the praise: the noise of hundred upon hundred strong, untrained, lusty voices addressing the Lord, as did Constantine in his half-pagan innocence, while the Sun, His vehicle, sank in a glory of flame in the west.
Gillocher of Lumphanan turned to Malpedar of Buchan and smiled through the veils of his joy. �
�We convinced him,’ he said. ‘All those arguments, but we convinced him, in the end.’
Then there followed the supper.
When the speeches were over and the mormaers had gone, on the heels of the King’s pilgrim-companions who survived, in the teeth of their various needs, barely more than a couple of hours, the King rose and, as the company stumbled to its feet, made at last for his chamber.
Groa was there.
The room they shared was quite large, opening from the small hall where his servants slept, and where hers were within call. Inside, the walls were reeded with timber, against which light cloths had been hung, woven with pictures, and the floor had been strewn with flowers, over the herbs. There was a window, but it was shuttered.
In the half-hour since she left table, she had been disrobed and dressed again, in a stiff gown with long, open sleeves, tied from neck to hem with tassels of silk between thickly worked braiding. Her hair remained twisted and pleated as it had been under her veil. Where she sat, on a little low stool with her head resting back on the wall, it burned and flamed in the glow of a little gilt lamp set in a bracket above her. Her skirts lay about her like petals, and her face, as on the shore, was clear and pale as enamel.
Then the door opened and closed, and Thorfinn was standing there, his shoulders against it, motionless in the rosy gloom. His face was in darkness and he did not speak, or she could not hear him above the hammering of her heart.
She wondered what his inner eye saw. Not a wooden hut whose earth floor was clad only in rushes; whose light might be a taper or fulmar-oil; whose window was an open space between bark; whose bed was a board padded with down packed in linen. Not a wife who was an earl’s daughter from Norway and had never in all her life trodden floors of mosaic or marble, or worshipped amid silver and gold in the footsteps of hundreds.
It did not help to know that Thorfinn’s men during the supper had most likely, in their euphoria, been exaggerating. It did not help to suspect that they had not.
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