King Hereafter

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He thought he knew the force of the wind. He had not observed that, from the gale it had been, it had risen through level after level of violence to a power that no man living on Orkney had ever experienced or was to experience again.

  He reached the top of the wall and, lying flat on the thatch, pulled himself quickly upwards until his body lay slanting just under the spine and, by raising himself a fraction, he could look over the roof-tree and down to where the beach lay.

  The gale, pouring over the roof, caught him before he had even started to make his next movement. It lifted him for a moment before it threw him down, so that for a second he saw what he wanted: that the sea had already overrun the beach and the rocks and the shingle and was advancing like a black wall rimmed with white over the slipways and grasslands of Orphir. He saw men scurrying over the yard, their faces white in the lantern-light, leaning back into the wind with their knees and legs taking the strain as the storm behind tried to bowl them over.

  None of them saw him. The wind grabbed him under the arms and flipped him outwards and back as it had the torn raven banner already. It was the folds of the banner, lying thick and cold in the shelter below, that saved his life, but not his skull from the blow that deprived him of consciousness.

  Paul Thorfinnsson woke to find himself lying, his hair whipping his face, in the arms of someone who was running. For seventeen, he was big and heavily built, but the man who carried him was so tall and held his weight so easily that there was no doubt who he was. Only for a moment did he pause and face the buffeting wind with an effort, and Paul recognised in that moment his own struggle with bales of wool before the same door. Then the door of the Earl’s hall slowly yielded, and his father carried him in and laid him on the same bales.

  He moved as he was placed there. His father’s voice said sharply, ‘You’re awake? Where are you hurt?’

  He did not know himself. He moved and felt dizzy. ‘My arm. My shoulder. I could walk.’

  ‘It’s too late.’

  It was. There was a rapping noise at the shutters, as if someone had thrown a handful of pebbles against them. He said, ‘The others?’

  ‘Up the hill. I told them not to wait. Or to come back.’

  ‘They will,’ said Paul. They loved his father. He knew that now, and was proud of it.

  ‘I told them I’d be safe in the hall. Whether I found you or not. Paul.’

  ‘Yes?’ he said. The wool was soft under his shoulder. Out of all Europe, out of the whole kingdom of Alba and Cumbria, out of all Moray and Caithness and the myriad islands of Orkney, his father was here, only here, and alone with himself.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Thorfinn. ‘At least, listen. If the shutters burst, the bales will float for a while, and there will be oars and benches moving about to take hold of. Do you hear me?’

  It hurt to fill his lungs, but he said loudly, ‘Yes!’ The shutters rattled and clattered under another onslaught of stones, and yet another. The yard must be full of water, the first probing lines running ahead of the oncoming battalions and bringing their debris. First pebbles, then big, rounded stones from the storm-beach, bounding and pounding against the timber walls and the planks of the shutters.

  He sensed that his father had moved away and guessed what he must be doing: fortifying the boards with the heaviest things he could drag: the sack of provisions, the bench-boards, the high chair itself.

  The hall became a sounding-board. Within its shaking beams, there was nothing to be heard and nothing to be felt but the scream and roar of the wind, and the clattering percussion of objects striking the walls and the shutters, and the thunder of water outside, becoming louder and louder under a chattering ground-base of discarded boulders.

  Then the main wall of water struck the building, and the shutters burst inwards like reeds, and the salt water rushed white and green into the hall at Orphir, thrusting obstructions aside, while a slap of water, heavy as lead, fell on the thatch and through it, to pour foaming down on the deepening sea on the hall-floor.

  The bales under Paul moved, but he was kept from slipping by his father’s hand, firm on his good arm. Behind the King’s back he could see the white-flecked water still flooding in; then it dwindled. He wondered what would have happened if the thatch had opened over their heads. His father said, ‘All right. Pressure inside and out. The walls will stand.’

  He could hear him better because the noise was less between waves. His father made no attempt to mend the wrecked shutters. His father had been shielding him from the stones coming through. The bales knocked together again, but the fall from the roof-breach had dwindled, and so had the rush from the windows. The wind, seizing on the hole in the roof, tugged and groaned, and spewed wet straw down over his hair and into the water. His father said, ‘Now, that is a problem. Or we’ll have the roof off.’

  He spoke as if playing a board-game. Paul said, ‘The sea? My lord?’

  His father adjusted the bales, splashing about, and took a grip of his arm again. A faint radiance, investing what remained of the roof, indicated that, whatever happened, dawn still intended to come. His father said, ‘Either the sea comes to stay, or it attacks and runs off. We seem to have been at the end of its reach on this occasion. I think we’ll find that it is drawing back.’

  Now, for the first time, he felt the real fiery ache of his arm and his shoulder; but he would not be less nonchalant than his father. ‘There’s another high tide this evening,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed there is,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Well, you can stay for that one if you like. I’m going to be busy.’

  In the cold dawn, with the wind pushing them so that they could hardly face each other, the King and his wife met on the slope above the battered hall.

  The sea had receded, and the yard and the grasslands were a wilderness of sand and mud and wriggling fish, of stones and pebbles and seaweed, of driftwood and shellfish. Half the buildings between the hall and the shore had disappeared.

  Thorfinn’s face was hollow, as hers was. Only Erlend, drunk on the night and the excitement, jumped up and down, swinging on his mother’s arm.

  Thorfinn said, ‘Paul’s arm is broken, but he is all right. They’ve taken him off to a dry house. How did you manage?’

  ‘The roof came off!’ Erlend said. ‘The roof came off a woman’s house, and we all helped to save what we could. The milk-vat ran away. And I saw a hen get killed. It got blown against a thatch-stone and got killed. And her loom fell about and got broken.’

  ‘They said you were in there with Paul,’ Groa said.

  ‘He looked after me very well,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But we can’t really invite anyone there until we’ve lifted the codfish out of the tapestries.’

  ‘How much longer?’ said Groa.

  He turned and faced into the wind.

  Above, the sun shone: a disc of pale, hazy yellow in a milky grey sky, below which unrolled a waste of glittering white.

  Like melting ice, it dazzled the eye. The sparkle of spray, the glassy mist hanging over the water were pretty enough to taste on the tongue. Now and then, as they rolled, you could see the flanks of the waves, swollen fawn with sand and with mud, or pale green gorged with half-consumed white.

  She said, ‘They say a south-easterly can last for a week.’

  ‘Taliesin had a riddle,’ he said. ‘Figure who it is, created before the Flood, a mighty creature without flesh, without bone, without veins, without blood, without hands, and without feet.… It will last no longer than you can bear. That I promise you.’

  No one who really knew him would ever let him down, she thought. But sometimes a man’s best would not be quite enough. She said, ‘Thorfinn. Where are the rest of the ships?’

  And knew, by the fact that he did not turn, that she had guessed right.

  ‘When I know myself,’ he said, ‘I shall tell you.’

  The storm lasted five days, and to ride over Orkney after that was like riding through a great field the day after beggars ha
d left it.

  There were no trees to overturn, as happened in Ireland or Moray. But seaweed and stones lodged in the uprooted bushes that littered the low hills and meadows; beehives were found where they rolled in the bed of a stream; fish lay silver in farmyards, and drowned sheep on the shore. Dead birds were to be seen everywhere, and live ones, in quarrelling flocks, feeding on the burst stacks and blown seed-corn; stabbing the cheeses that shone in the short winter grass; pecking at the dried skeins of fish; fluttering trapped beneath torn scraps of net.

  Three farmsteads were nothing but black, glittering wood and a column of smoke where a vat of fish-oil had overturned into a brazier, or a roasting-fire got out of hand, or a guttering candle caught hangings.

  On the west, they said, the waves had ranged a hundred feet high up the cliffs, scouring the bird-ledges clean and breaking through bridges and tunnels of rock where no gap had existed before. The ships at Sandwick had been lost, Grágás with them.

  In the Pentland Firth, they said, the waves had overrun the island of Stroma from end to end, piling fish and wreckage on the top, and destroying the steading and boats of Thorfinn’s steward. At Thurso, the long beach had disappeared into the sea, and the tide had swept over the grassland behind it, taking twenty drekar and pinnaces with it.

  At Birsay, no boat left in the nousts had survived. The big ships, those drawn up far on the shore, had tumbled together, smashing one another to powder. The new slipway to the island was broken with rocks, and the tower of its new church, its mortar still wet, had staggered and fallen.

  The rest of the fleet was in the Sudreyar, wintering ready for defence or for trade in the spring-time. For two weeks, while he worked with his people to patch up his earldom, Thorfinn heard no news he could trust. Then the seas settled a little, and a boat came, carrying a crew he recognised and a Skyeman he knew well, but who would not meet his eye.

  Which was how Thorfinn of Orkney and Scotia learned that the wind had achieved what neither Rognvald nor Norway had managed to do.

  Two-thirds of his fleet was wrecked or missing.

  And until he could replace them, he was crippled.

  THREE

  T MIGHT BE supposed that the loss of his ships, with Grágás his flagship among them, was the greatest single blow that a sea-lord such as Thorfinn might receive.

  That he appeared to treat it philosophically, as he had accepted and dealt with the reversal in Ireland, the death of the Lady Emma, the restlessness on his southern borders, was therefore partly a matter of pride, but also the mark of what had become his nature.

  His Norman guests, from whom he made no effort to conceal what had happened, were inclined, on his return, to admire him for it.

  Being Normans, they had spent the winter in relative cheerfulness, bedding women, hunting, and exploring those parts of the country unknown to them, in the absence of the winter wars they were accustomed to. Against the advice of their hosts, they ventured into regions of mountain and marsh that occasioned difficulties never encountered in the well-drained chalklands of the Pays de Caux, and returned with an altered view of the country in whose service they had placed themselves.

  Whereas in Normandy the boundaries between region and region were artificial, imposed by conquest and maintained by fortifications, here they were geographical. Some areas here were almost empty: settled only by herdsmen and fishermen, and hardly feeding themselves, never mind raising corn to feed others, or a surplus of men to defend themselves.

  Other regions were much richer in cropland and pasture, with good timber and fisheries, and there people prospered and multiplied, or had been doing, it was clear, under this King’s guidance. But for the whole country to flourish, the richer regions must yield all they could spare to help feed and develop the poorer; and the manpower, too, must be deployed where it was needed to defend the vulnerable harbours and pirate bases of the north and the west, with all the consequent problems of travel in that wild land of mountain and river.

  Hugh de Riveire, a man as able as his older cousin Osbern of Eu, considered the changed circumstances over the fire in the privacy of their quarters at Scone, and reached a conclusion.

  ‘We know the country as a whole can’t be wealthy. Therefore, most of the King’s resources must have been bound up in those ships and the various uses he could make of them. So what now?’

  Baldric, well informed through long dealings in Flanders, said drily, ‘You would be surprised what he could do with those ships. But he still has some left. And they are expert builders.’

  Osbern of Ewias grunted. ‘You’ve seen what the gales did. In Orkney, they take extraordinary precautions, and yet look what happened. Here, everyone was ready for the winter storms, but not for what they got. It’ll be a long, long time before anyone in Orkney or Scotia has the time or the heart for shipbuilding, and if the King’s stupid enough to force it on them, they’ll defy him, or starve. On the other hand, he’s got money.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said his cousin. ‘He could commission ships: Svein of Denmark has built for him before. And buy in food, if he has to, and if anyone has a surplus to sell and wants to sell it to him. But money won’t last for ever, and in the meantime, people may have taken their business elsewhere.’

  ‘So long as he still has silver to pay us with,’ Flodwig said.

  ‘That he’ll find,’ said Osbern of Eu. ‘Until he gets the kingdom on its feet, he’s going to need all the allies he can get.’

  It was to be a spring, it seemed, of repairs.

  In Scotia and in Orkney, the work went on as fast as resources would allow, and more speedily than it might once have done because of the cleared roads and the stations of help that now existed through the newborn network of local churches and local leadership.

  In England, the rents torn in the fabric by the departure of the Normans and the return of the Godwin family were being mended also, without overmuch trouble. Ulf, the bishop whose capabilities had so little impressed Bishop Ealdred, had disappeared from view and been replaced at Dorchester by a Saxon, Wulfwig, who was known to be on good terms with Leofric of Mercia.

  The Bishop of London stayed abroad for a while, and then discreetly returned and was found to be in office again, and so effectively that no one troubled to make an issue of it.

  The outlawed Archbishop of Canterbury made a successful appeal to the Pope, who at once denounced all those who had taken it upon themselves, without papal advice or authority, to outlaw an archbishop. He dispatched a legate to Winchester conveying his reproaches and anger, and excommunicated Stigand, the Bishop of Winchester, whom the King and Earl Godwin had appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in Robert’s place.

  The appeased Archbishop of Canterbury left the Pope’s side and returned to await events in his former abbey of Jumièges, where, unhappily, he was taken ill and subsequently died. His land in England, together with that of Bishop Ulf’s, was divided between Harold, the eldest son of Earl Godwin, and his sister the Queen, who had been retrieved from her convent. Tostig, the brother of Harold and Edith, was not a beneficiary.

  In the absence of any Archbishop of Canterbury other than the excommunicant Stigand, a stream of newly promoted churchmen, including Archbishop Cynsige of York, took themselves to the Continent to be consecrated. They were lucky if they caught the Pontiff. After a busy Christmas of bargaining, the Pope had finally traded the temporal claims of Bamberg and Fulda for the town of Benevento among other possessions of the Empire in Italy. More importantly, Emperor Henry had also agreed to send an army to help throw the Normans, once and for all, out of Apulia.

  When the Emperor changed his mind and recalled his forces, the Pope determined to march south without them. Seven hundred Swabian infantry joined him, raised by Frederic of Lorraine, the Pope’s chief lieutenant. As soon as he began to march south, German mercenaries and then men from the non-Norman states came to offer their services. Not everyone was a friend of the de Hautevilles. So mighty was God, there was even a prom
ise of help from the Greeks.

  Trailed under the four-pointed flags by anxious English abbots, Pope Leo took time to ratify a bull defining the privileges of the great metropolitan church of Hamburg and Bremen over the Swedes, the Danes, the Finns, the Norwegians, and the Baltic Slavs, and over Orkney, Iceland, and Greenland, to take the place of the Pope in these regions, and to ordain bishops for them, as brought into the fold of Christ.

  To Archbishop Adalbert himself, Leo confirmed the honours of the pallium, the use of the Roman mitre, and the privilege of a white horse-cloth and pearl caparisons, as the Pope himself used. Then he replaced his white-and-gold helmet, caused the horns to be blown, and proceeded south once again with his army.

  In Scotia, which had not been mentioned as part of the Archbishop Adalbert’s spiritual kingdom, a few members of the Norman party left at short notice, to be more than replaced in the next week or two by friends and kinsmen who wanted their posts. Viscount Nigel-Constantine and the elderly Bishop Hugh of Lisieux waited until the agreed time and took ship, with decorum and in an atmosphere of surprising goodwill. Carl Thorbrandsson went south with the Abbot of Mont St Michel, the late Emma’s cousin, who had business to transact in Cornwall. Both the agreements and the plans drawn up between the King of Scotia and the Normans at the start of the winter began to be implemented, and the camp at Scone became empty.

  In the spring, the news arrived that Swegen, the eldest of Earl Godwin’s family of seven sons and four daughters, had died on pilgrimage. In a swift readjustment of his property, Somerset and Berkshire were reunited with the earldom of Wessex, and Oxfordshire and Hereford went to Earl Ralph the King’s confused nephew. Tostig, Earl Godwin’s third son, received nothing extra.

  In April, Earl Godwin died of a stroke, and his eldest son Harold became Earl of Wessex while Alfgar, son of the Earl of Mercia, was restored to his still-warm earldom of East Anglia. Tostig, Earl Harold’s second brother, was not made noticeably better off; but he did, of course, possess certain lands and was married to Judith of Flanders.