Thirteen years before, Thorfinn had made an alliance with Wales, and on the heels of it, Gruffydd had ravaged Llanbadarn, the school of Sulien’s youth, and of King Alfred’s great scholar Asser. Now Sulien was attempting again to build in Wales a retreat, a citadel of art and of learning, even while the spears and axes flashed about him. And he still cared what happened to Alba.
Groa said, ‘Sulien has a wife and two children now. How safe is he?’
‘As safe as he wants to be,’ Thorfinn said.
Eachmarcach was dead, and Ireland was lost, as his father had lost it.
The year, the twisting, dangerous year, moved on its way, and still there was no news of a battle for England, or a conquest, or a pact, or a surrender.
Then, in September, word came. The town of London had declared for Earl Godwin of Wessex, and on opposite sides of the Thames there stood in challenge at last King Edward’s fifty ships and his foreign friends and his levies, against the combined fleets of the men of Earl Godwin.
‘What will happen?’ said Groa. They were, for reasons she could not fathom, in one of their seldom-used lodges in Teviotdale, with a clutter of pavilions outside containing Gillecrist of Strathclyde and a number of men from north Cumbria.
‘Did you imagine the King would fight Godwin?’ Thorfinn said. ‘They’d merely lose the best men from both sides, and the foreign heirs would move in for the pickings. My guess is that the King will hold a public gemot, a council, and will receive the exiled Godwin and friends to his bosom. It is Emma’s power that they have been bidding for. Emma’s power, not the throne of King Edward. You should hear tomorrow, or the next day, what happened.’
‘I shall?’ said Groa. She looked at her husband. ‘What messages have been passing between you and Chester and Sulien? Thorfinn?’
‘I’ll tell you when I come back,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Wait for me. I’m only going to the Mercian border.’
‘I’m too simple to understand why?’ Groa said. ‘Or you don’t know what you are doing in any case?’
‘I don’t know what Emma was doing,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But she seemed to have everything planned, and I don’t mind playing the pieces for her. What is it?’
‘What would have happened,’ said Groa, ‘if you and Emma had married each other?’
‘I should be a widower, and free to marry you,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And Eustace of Boulogne would be your stepson. He and Lulach would pass through a world of horror together.’
As always, he left her laughing; but it was different when he had gone, six months after Emma’s death, to do Emma’s bidding.
* * *
Thorfinn of Scotia, with a king’s escort, pitched camp at Kirkby, the agreed spot on the north Mercian border, and had been there only a matter of hours when, below the birdsong and the chatter and rattle about him, there came the vibrating thud of many hooves and the rumble of wheels and finally, into distant view between trees, the banner of Mercia, followed by other, unknown banners jerking behind it.
The standard-bearer bore Leofric’s badge, but was unfamiliar: presumably a minor official of Leofric’s household performing the office of safe-conduct.
The long column of cavalry and footmen behind looked foreign as well as unfamiliar as they came near the brink of the boundary-stream. That is, the hooded chain-mail tunics were commonplace, but the conical helms with their nose-guards were Norman, as were the circular haircuts and shaven napes of the stirrup-servants running beside them.
Then they began to traverse the stream, the advance testing the bed for the wagons lumbering behind, piled with boxes and gay with the head-veils of women. The sun shone on the water, and on the long harp-shields with their gilded bosses, and on the bright spears and horse-harness; the tips of the bows and the crowded, filigreed quivers; on the worked heads of sword and of axe and of dagger in silver and gold. The spurs, rowelling the horses over the stream, reflected gold into the muddy water, and a footsoldier, with a shout, held up a lance on which a live fish flashed and curled, silver against the blue sky.
So Edward of England, it appeared, had forgiven the Godwinssons. And before the ill-will of the Godwinssons, Emma’s friends and the boyhood friends of her son were in flight.
Thorfinn could hear his men counting. For the moment, numbers mattered less to the King than did the identities of the leaders, of whom there were more than a dozen. Then they came closer, and he began to distinguish the faces.
Some of them, as he expected, were those of war-leaders of reputation and birth from the duchy of Normandy: men such as the triumphant Godwin family were unlikely to suffer in England. Others were more surprising: an exiled vicomte, an excommunicated bishop he remembered, and, with them, an even more powerful abbot, all of whom, one had to suppose, had found themselves trapped in England when Earl Godwin was reinstated.
Among the younger faces was one remarkably like that of Goscelin de Riveire, the junior interpreter-monk whom he had met in Rome with his second cousin Alfred of Lincoln and Dorset. In fact, surveying the party, there was hardly one noble lord to whom the south-west coast of England was not as familiar as the halls of power in the Norman shores opposite them.
The second last man to arrive, with irony behind the formality of his greeting, was Carl Thorbrandsson, landowner in twelve English counties, whose life Thorfinn had spared once on the deck of a longship off Orkney.
The last was the scarred and powerful figure of Osbern of Eu, whom Thorfinn had first met nearly twenty years before at the enthronement of Duncan his brother. Osbern, uncle of Sheriff Alfred and nephew of the late Queen Mother Emma.
It came to Thorfinn that every landed man he could see, with perhaps one exception, was related to the late Lady Emma. But then, the ducal blood ran throughout Normandy.
‘My lord King,’ said Osbern of Eu. ‘I see that you are a man of your word. So am I.’
‘We have enemies, each of us; and in time to come, no doubt we shall have more. Here is my arm and my sword to protect you and yours. I ask in return only that we and our countrymen over the water may think of you, as we have always done, as a friend and an ally.’
‘If it were not so, you would not be here, nor should I,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Be welcome; and come to the camp.’
‘I won’t say no,’ Osbern said, ‘not now I smell what you’re cooking. We haven’t stopped to eat for eight hours. Did you know the Godwin brothers picked up your young nephew Donald in Ireland? Found where Siward had stowed him after his invasion failed, and brought him back, screaming and kicking …
‘My God, what a lot we’ve got to tell you,’ said Osbern. ‘We match well, you and I. Wait till we start campaigning. Then you’ll know what it’s like to live again.’
Part Four
WHAT IS THE NIGHT?
… Untie the winds, and let them fight
Against the Churches.
—and now a wood
Comes toward Dunsinane.
—So shall I, Love.
ONE
O, AS THE Saxons to England, and the de Hautevilles in late years to Italy, the fighting friends of Duke William of Normandy entered the federation of lands known as Scotia; and the Norns were seen to smile.
The King of Scotia, ignoring the smile, set his intellect and his energy to handle the flamboyant newcomers.
First, he delayed their arrival in the north until they had lost their belligerence.
It was not difficult. They were tired from the swift journey from Hereford, and sore with defeat.
Since Earl Godwin had challenged King Edward in London, everything had turned out as predicted. Faced with a large and threatening army, the King had offered a mollified ear when Earl Godwin laid his axe by the throne, knelt, and begged for forgiveness.
He received it, to the cheers of the populace. To rather more violent acclaim, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London and Dorchester were proclaimed outlaw, together with all those Frenchmen, said the council, whose bad laws and advice had led
the King into error.
Exception was made for the elderly, the wholly inefficient, and the friends the King wanted to hunt with. These included several horse-marshals and sheriffs, two half-Bretons, the chamberlain, the chancellor, and several people satisfactorily tied into English property, such as Bishop Hermann of Wiltshire, Dudoc of Wells, Leofric of Exeter, and Alfred of Lincoln and Dorset. Ralph the King’s nephew remained because he was brainless, occupying still the Hereford earldom of Godwin’s son Swegen, who had gone to Jerusalem, not before time. Richard, the sheriff who had raised the fortress at Overton, the most exposed quarter of the Welsh border, had been allowed to stay because he was a good administrator and no one else would take the job anyway.
Ewias castle, under Osbern of Eu, had been different. The English of the southern march who grew the castle’s food and suffered from the high spirits of its garrison had made no effort, like their lord Swegen, to disguise their fear and resentment of the foreigners planted in their midst, and the resulting failure of the castlemen, lacking proper co-operation, to keep out the Welsh had only embittered them further.
Ewias, on its steep escarpment ten miles south of Hereford, was, with its garrison, the one sure target earmarked by the returning Godwin family for destruction. The other Normans who had incurred the Godwin displeasure were equally aware of their danger.
The south coast, gateway to Normandy, was sealed off by Godwin’s ships and Godwin’s adherents. Without waiting for official dismissal, or for the five days’ grace to which they were entitled, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Dorchester with their friends fought their way out of the East Gate of London and fled north to Essex, where Ralph, one of the favoured half-Bretons, had his castle, and where the Abbot of Ramsay, which had supplied so many bishops to Dorchester and which had already sheltered a Bishop of London, kept a fishing-boat or two at Eadulf’s Ness.
They escaped, because of their speed and the unexpected direction of their flight. The rest of the Normans, debarred from the south and the Severn, rode west to the temporary shelter of their fellow-countrymen at Ewias castle and, from there, north through Mercia.
‘You were lucky. You were lucky Earl Leofric gave you a safe-conduct,’ observed Thor of Allerdale, riding into camp at Thorfinn’s invitation to renew old acquaintanceships and hale them away, as it turned out, for a bit of boar-hunting. Thor, to whom the years of authority had brought a broader waist and a drift of sand through the fiery starkness of his hair and his beard, was full of hearty advice to the men, with most of whom, over the years, he had done some kind of business or other. His son Dolphin, made in his image, was with him.
Osbern of Eu, who saw Thor’s kind every day, said, ‘He didn’t run much of a risk. Alfgar’s going to lose East Anglia to Harold again anyway, so they’ll let Leofric make his gesture. He wouldn’t give us shipping.’
It had been Thor’s first concern: to discover which of the refugees, if any, were merely waiting to take ship back to Normandy, and which intended to stay. He had seen them all now, and identified them. There, for example, was Hugh de Riveire, whose family had helped fortify Emma’s Exeter. And hence also, one supposed, Carl Thorbrandsson, who had once run the Exeter mint.
They were all pretty well related. You could say that much. But you couldn’t say there was any clear pattern of loyalty, to Duke William or against him. Maybe Thorfinn was merely seeking a safeguard against whatever might happen south of his frontiers. Maybe he was simply protecting his trade. And maybe Osbern of Eu was doing the same. His nephew Alfred was still there in England, nursing his lands in case the Godwin family ever got kicked out again. And if they didn’t, here was Alba, all ready to be exploited under Thorfinn. Or over him. Or instead of him.
Thor of Allerdale said to Thorfinn, ‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how business alters partnerships? I suppose you and Carl have met a dozen times since Crinan, of blessed memory, evolved his great plan to take over Cumbria and Northumbria and persuaded Carl and your wife’s first husband that the north would be safer without you. But of course you killed Gillacomghain and took over Moray as well, which meant that Duncan, being of limited talents, was doomed. I often wonder how clever my lord Abbot Crinan really was.’
‘Clever enough,’ said Carl Thorbrandsson agreeably. A short, springy man now in his fifties, he had no need to speak otherwise: every sensible man in Alba and England treated him with the respect due to his record. He said, ‘If Duncan died, Crinan still had his son Maldred or his son-in-law Forne to promote. Remember the five daughters of Ealdred, and the network of power across the north? Crinan wasn’t to know that my lord Thorfinn here would spare my life. Or that the husbands of two of the daughters would come to Dunkeld one day and kill him.’
‘Why talk as if it were all in the past?’ Thor of Allerdale said. ‘You still have your lands in Yorkshire, haven’t you? And Siward is still there, and Forne and Ligulf and Orm. Only Alfgar is close to inheriting Mercia, and Duncan is dead and two of his sons now in England. You heard that, Thorfinn? Donald has been brought out of Ireland again. What do you think the Godwin family will do with him and Malcolm?’
‘Groom them for the earldom of Northumbria?’ Thorfinn said. ‘They have equal claim, you might say, with Siward’s son, or Alfgar’s three, or Ligulf’s two, or Forne’s two, or Orm’s only male heir. The idea should keep Siward quiet for a while, anyway.’
‘While you annexe Lothian?’ said Thor of Allerdale, and laughed adroitly. ‘You’ll have Bishop Malduin back shortly, won’t you, now Siward sees which way the wind is blowing?’
No one rose to the bait, to his disappointment, and Thorfinn was not even listening, but answering someone’s query about boar-nets.
In any case, it was unwise to probe. Thor of Allerdale got up, found his son, and flung himself, with enthusiasm, into the business of sport, while making a private resolve to send Leofwine soon to pay a short visit to Alba.
Leofwine’s ideas of policy were rubbish, but there were times when his defects were useful.
Bishop Malduin came back at the beginning of winter, when the Normans were all safely ensconced in their temporary quarters in the great timber camp round the Moot Hill of Scone.
That, too, had been effected smoothly because Thorfinn’s second step, on arriving home with his vastly more amenable guests, had been to call a council of his own magnates in Perth.
Because he had taken the precaution of testing the views of the more important beforehand, some of those with furthest to travel, including Thorkel Fóstri and Lulach his stepson from Moray, were in Perth already.
It was therefore before a large gathering of leaders from all parts of the country that Thorfinn introduced one by one the men who had escaped the vengeance of the Godwin family in the south, and affirmed that, for the good of the kingdom as well as by reason of friendship, he had offered harbour to any who wished to remain in the country.
Because of the weather, he spoke to them indoors, in the big timber hall above the river, and his voice filled it without difficulty, against the rustle of rain on the roof and the hurrying, orderly turmoil in the yard outside: the rap of horse-hooves and the rumble and thud of wood being unloaded from wood, and the voices of men from the jetty, impatient to get in from the wet. A profound smell of seething meat unrolled from the door-jambs and made common cause with the smell of hot ale that lingered from the welcome-cauldron.
To his mormaers and abbots and bishops, to his clerks and his toisechs, including those men who had been with him in Rome, it was familiar, and they gave him a reasonable hearing, for a man of reason was what they had found him to be.
‘Many of them,’ said Thorfinn, ‘are friends and associates of yours already, as well as of mine. They would have me tell you that they are not here as beggars. What they have brought with them will feed them for a long while, and will pay their way for longer.
‘What they require after that, if they remain with us, they have offered to pay for with services.’
Thorfinn said, ‘You know what has happened in Ireland. You know that our western shores are now at risk, whereas in the last years we have had peace to repair the damage latter wars have done, and to prepare for prosperity. I would have you know that I am not prepared to throw away all that has been done in these years in a bid to reclaim my rights or the rights of my father in Ireland. The laws and the programme I have laid down will continue. But if danger should offer, from whatever source, we now have a shield: the men you see with me, and their followers.’
How old was Osbern of Eu? In his fifties, Thorkel Fóstri calculated. The scar on his face, serrated now as he smiled, was an old one. Not young, but in full fighting vigour, and the veteran of God knew what campaigns, in Normandy or out of it. The newest tactics, the newest weapons: Osbern of Eu and his friends would earn their keep, all right.
Thorfinn was speaking again. ‘In two or three years, I hope, we shall ourselves be restored, and armed, and ready to defend our country against any aggressor. Until then, we owe the best living we can offer to those who share our burdens. The force is, as you see, presently in winter quarters here at Scone. In the spring, it will disperse. The west coast is the source of greatest concern, and especially that part nearest Ireland and furthest from Orkney. Tribute-hills and gathering-places exist in every quarter and will provide a temporary encampment, but fortifications will have to be built, and lands allotted to feed the defenders and house them.
King Hereafter Page 75