King Hereafter

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Tuathal dismounted and helped the man up, and the King himself bent over and spoke to him, for that was all there was time to do. Then he spurred on to Forteviot. Men would always fight for Eochaid, and Ferteth and Cormac of course were their Mormaers. Men, it seemed, were ready to fight for himself, as well.

  At Forteviot, he went no further than the gateway to pick up more news. More than a hundred enemy horsemen had arrived from the Levenmouth landing two hours before noon. Thirty had cut through Glen Farg straight to Forteviot. The rest had overrun Abernethy and crossed the Earn higher up, by the last ford before it flowed into the Tay.

  There the intruders had divided. Fifty had continued upriver, on a course that would take them to Perth and to Scone opposite. Fifty had remained where they were, on the Tayside meadows called Rhind, where the estuary narrowed to river.

  ‘So that is where the landings will be. What look-outs do we have?’

  ‘Plenty on the north side of Tay, my lord. I doubt we’ll have lost our man on Moncrieffe Hill.’

  ‘We’ll put another there. And Prior Eochaid?’

  ‘Has gone to Scone, my lord, with fifty horsemen. He said that was all he would need. My lords of Strathearn and of Atholl have taken the rest of the horses to Rhind. It’ll be four hundred and fifty of them against the fifty enemy horse waiting there, and easy enough, you would think. But they say there’s a fleet coming upriver, and it may get to Rhind before they do.’

  ‘It won’t,’ said Thorfinn. ‘And, in any case, there are fifteen hundred men marching behind me. Can you hold out until they get here?’

  ‘Of course, my lord King,’ said the captain of Forteviot. ‘They’ll have this hall only when we are all dead.’

  The words followed Thorfinn as he flung his horse away from the gates. Confidence was a great thing. Under that roof, Erlend had been born. Behind him, Tuathal’s fractured voice said, ‘Marching behind us? They can’t get here for five hours.’

  ‘Oh, they might manage it quicker,’ Thorfinn said. ‘If Siward is chasing them.’

  Tuathal said, ‘I don’t suppose you mean that, but I’d prefer not to have heard it.’

  ‘Save your breath,’ said Thorfinn. ‘And start to think how best to welcome fifteen enemy ships who want to offload an army.’

  The longships were beautiful, and worth all he had paid King Svein of Denmark. The only thing wrong with them was that they flew the Northumbrian flag, and not his.

  They were already in sight when Thorfinn with Tuathal behind him rounded Moncrieffe Hill and dashed into the flat plain of Rhind, where the Earn joined the Tay. Distant in the big river, the line of vessels threaded the sandbanks, the sinuous pattern of poles moving past the green northern slopes of the estuary. Their wells were crammed with cone helmets and glittered with shield-hoops and the faggoted filaments that were spears. They looked like vessels infested with hornets.

  In front of the King, the marshes and mud-flats of Earnbank were already filled with struggling men as his own dismounted vanguard disposed of the last of the fifty intruders from the Forth landing. He sent someone to round up loose horses and looked for Cormac and Ferteth. Knots of horsemen, as far as the eye could see, were moving along the banks of the Tay, firing the jetties that were not already broken, and two ferry boats crowded with men were in midstream on the Tay, hazed with smoke as they struck tinder into their torches.

  Cormac appeared and said, ‘These horsemen were Swedish. Some Northumbrians and three Fife men. They’re all dead. I can only get forty over the river before the ships come, and they won’t have horses.’

  ‘They may discourage a landing on the north shore,’ Thorfinn said. There were bits of cornland and thatched buildings all over the firmer ground and the slopes of the hill behind him, some of them fired by the early arrivals but many intact. He said, ‘There’s cover. Let’s get the horsemen out of sight. And the bodies. They’ll want to land on this side anyway. It’s where they’ll be expecting the Levenmouth army to arrive in two or three hours to support them. They may not even know of the bogs.’

  ‘Ghilander and Fothaid are with them. They do,’ said Cormac; and plunged off, shouting orders.

  Ferteth at his elbow said, ‘I heard. I told the men along the banks not to come back, but stay to harry the march between the hill and the river. They’ll hide.’

  Thorfinn said, ‘If the landings take place on the north side, they’ll have to look for more boats upriver and get themselves across till we can come.’

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ said Ferteth.

  ‘No. Send someone. I need you,’ Thorfinn said. ‘It’s here, as they land, that we’ll need all the ingenuity we can get.’

  It was hardly past noon and in a few moments eleven hundred fresh fighting-men would be stepping ashore. Against them were five hundred men, less the fifty Eochaid had taken to Scone. Men who, since sunrise this morning, had fought in Siward’s first battle and had ridden thirty miles and more to arrive here, with two further skirmishes.

  They looked, as he felt, high-hearted and tireless. It would not last. But it was another moment, another gift from life, to put with the others.

  He had orders to give, and he gave them, swiftly making his rounds, and was ready when the first dragon-ship turned its baleful golden jaws to the land and ran towards him.

  The dragon-ships had been promised no opposition.

  They had expected some throwing of stones and worse from whatever straggle of peasants ventured down from the hills to the banks, and that they received. They were not even disturbed by the burning jetties, or the waiting batons of flame and black smoke that fenced the narrowing river beyond them. They did not intend rowing so far. Where they would land on the southern bank of the Tay was a spit of fine, shoaling sand lifting to watery meadows. Longship keels had no need of jetties, except to unload dry-shod merchants and unwieldy cargo. The springing swan-bows, neck by neck, would slide homing into the sand-flats like silk.

  They were surprised to see leather helmets and the glitter of ranked steel among the rock-throwing denizens of the north bank and to receive several arrows, harmless in the teeth of the wind, as they began to swing round to the south shore to accomplish their landing. Bows and arrows being the staple of every river vessel’s equipment, their archers shot back, with the wind, and had the satisfaction of seeing a few men and youngsters impaled.

  On the south bank, on the other hand, all was as it should be. Drawn up waiting for them were their friends: the men landed early that morning by their companion ships at the mouth of the Leven. The helmets and the shields were the same: they had designs you could hardly forget if you wanted to. And some of them were already quelling the fires on the landing-stages.

  The men on the shore cheered, shaking their swords and their spears, and the men on board the two leading ships cheered as well, as the seamen leaned forward, swinging the seventeen-foot oars for the stroke that would lift the prows safely home to their beaching.

  A valance of stones appeared in mid-air and fell, knocking oar blades and oarsmen.

  A fringe of arrows, whistling, followed it, thudding into wood, flesh, and leather. Men screamed. The leading longships, interrupted in mid-stroke, swung helplessly, half on and half off the shore-bank and fouling the ship close behind them. Archers and men-at-arms, knocked off balance, thrust and twisted and swore in both ships. In their sterns, men jolted over the gunwales found themselves swept away, sinking in midstream. Off the prows, the first man to jump knee-deep into the water clutching a mooring-rope met three feet of good German steel.

  The fifty men on the shore, whose shields were not now familiar at all, were in the water before anyone else, and started boarding. Following them was another double line of fifty, risen from nowhere. And then more and more, running from all directions. And there all the time, a line of kneeling archers, letting fly from behind their ranked shields.

  Each ship carried seventy-five men, closely packed, with little room to swing sword or axe against
roaring trolls high on the gunwales, who walked on men as on a highway and brought steel, thick and thin, hissing down, cleaving and searing. The fighting groups overbalanced into the shallower water and continued struggling there, ignoring the arrows beginning to fall from the following ships of the line, swinging up, oars flashing to fill the breadth of the river. The fighting spread from the two helpless ships to the third rammed behind them, now cramped fast with a grappling-iron and rocking with incomers from the two dying vessels ahead.

  A trumpet blew on the land. A fourth and fifth longship, shipping oars, slid to the rear of the third and locked, pouring fresh men over its stern. The dragon-ships of midstream, abandoning the dead in the first and the second, thrust forward and, turning rapidly in, ran up on shore further upriver and began to land men fast, under a renewed fall of arrows. On the bank, the trumpet twittered again, and the water became full of spray and hurtling bodies as shoremen left their attack and threw themselves back on the sand.

  Some of them, racing in from the river, met and clashed with running parties of mercenaries, cutting straight from their landings to intercept.

  Horns from the fleet drew back the mercenaries. To shouted commands, they threw up their shields and ran to take up defensive formation. Soon, behind a barricade of shields and of steel, the helpless ships were drawn off, and the rest of the crippled fleet began to come in, two by two, and make their proper landings.

  The misleading welcoming party with its treacherous shields had quite vanished, but for the dead and the wounded in the three leading ships and on shore. As the disembarked men were being lined up to march, a detail of mercenaries went from heap to heap, spitting those who still lived and removing what valuables they could discover.

  It was when, on their leader’s orders, they went to search the huts and hovels and woods beside and ahead of them to find signs of retreat or of ambush that the news they brought back seemed to unsettle their leader and the noblemen from Northumbria and from Fife whom he conferred with.

  Indeed, he gave the Northumbrians a taste of his temper.

  ‘Four hundred horses,’ he said. ‘My men say there are traces of at least four hundred horses. The men who attacked us just now all have mounts.

  ‘They will not, therefore, have retreated. They lie ahead, and since they can travel at twice our pace, we may be sure that for all the length of our march we shall be subject to ambush. I was not told, when we left, that I should have to fight a running battle with four hundred horsemen. I was told that a band from Levenmouth would be waiting, with a further support from the same source in three hours. I was told that your Earl Siward had the army of Alba immobilised in the south, and expected to overwhelm it. What has happened?’

  But the men from Northumbria and from Fife did not appear to know. And so, black with anger, hot for revenge, the nine hundred invaders, who had once been eleven hundred, marched, sword in hand, towards Scone.

  A third of the way towards Scone and when the running fight with the marching shipmen was at its hottest, the good news came to Thorfinn. Eochaid and his fifty horsemen had overcome the special detachment from Leven and were safely inside the monastery.

  Two-thirds of the way towards Scone, Thorfinn withdrew what was left of his horsemen and, leaving the damaged nine hundred to continue their march, raced on to Scone himself, with all the men he had left.

  He had sent word to Eochaid, and the gates opened. Around him in the yard, his men made water anywhere and, long-throated, poured down the mead and the ale and snatched bread and cheese while the monks clustered over the wounded. Eochaid said, ‘My lord!’

  ‘It’s other men’s blood,’ Thorfinn said. He caught a towel and, dragging his helmet off, scoured his face and his neck. He said, ‘They’re three miles away; about eight hundred and fifty. Did you get horses?’

  ‘Forty left of our own, and thirty of the besiegers’. They’ll be fresher than yours.’

  ‘Yes.’ Thorfinn tipped the ale-jug into his open mouth, and his throat became his own again, and the rest of his body. He said, ‘Give me the ten Forteviot men, mounted, and the best horses you have in exchange for our worst. That gives Cormac three hundred mobile men outside to harry them with, once the shipmen settle down to besiege you. Then the foot-army from Forth should be here to help you in about three hours from now. Do you want Ferteth to come in beside you?’

  ‘You’ll need him. You have your own Perth to guard, over the river. We can hold out for days. You know that,’ said Eochaid. ‘Is there any news from the Forth?’

  ‘We know the fifteen hundred got away and are coming. Bishop Jon sent word. We don’t know how Siward’s battle went. We should have news any moment. Look. Arrows and throwing-spears. We pulled a handcart off one of the ships.’

  ‘Keep the arrows,’ Eochaid said. ‘My flock aren’t archers.’

  Thorfinn had already noted that among the fighting-men and the monks and the household there were women, and boys with clubs in their grip, and old men with axes. Not everyone had taken shelter in the hill-forts. He said, ‘They have been fighting beside us, too, all the way along.’

  ‘You sound surprised,’ said Eochaid. ‘These are their brothers and sons who are riding with you. And don’t you remember your home-coming from Rome? Do you think they don’t care who protects them?’

  There was nothing, it seemed, that he was able to say. Eochaid lifted his hands to his neck and began to unfasten the chain of the Brecbennoch. Behind them, men were hurrying and horses trampling and snorting as Ferteth and Cormac prepared to withdraw. Eochaid said, ‘Why not take it? We have faith enough here. We shall save Scone if God wills it. And the invader will reach Dunkeld only over our bodies.’

  The chain was warm. The little relic-house, five inches long, hung from his fist. Thorfinn said, ‘It deserves better than I can give it. I shall take it to Tuathal.’

  ‘Take?’ said Eochaid. His fresh horse was waiting, with the King’s saddle on it.

  Thorfinn said, ‘There are friends of Malduin’s with the ship-army. Fothaid and Ghilander. We cut out a Fife man and made him tell us the plan for the men they dropped on the Forth. The foot-army from Levenmouth is coming up through Glen Farg and expects to cross the Earn at the nearest main ford and march to their friends here at Scone. They would double the numbers against you. They won’t be allowed to. I’ve sent Tuathal with a hundred horse to catch them in the ravine at Glen Farg.’

  ‘A hundred against nearly nine hundred?’ said Eochaid.

  ‘He won’t stop them all. But he might hold the rest at the Earn until our fifteen hundred come up from the south.’

  ‘And you are going to help him? Alone? There are still twenty Forteviot men here,’ Eochaid said. ‘And horses for them. Take them. I shall expect to see you back with your new army. You and Tuathal and Bishop Jon.’

  ‘In this world, it is a possibility,’ Thorfinn said.

  It was time to mount. For the first time that day, he felt the ache of loss, and without real reason. He gave the only gift in his power and, removing his eyes from Eochaid’s, dropped on one knee.

  Eochaid’s hand, still marked with ink, touched his hair, and he received Eochaid’s blessing.

  Then he rose quickly, and mounted, and turned his horse with his knees while he fastened his helmet and the Forteviot men collected behind him.

  Then, without looking back, he left Scone.

  It was seven miles to the river Earn ford. He crossed the Tay from Scone to his fort of Perth on the opposite side and transmitted encouragement, he hoped, to its captain. After that, he turned south, on a fresh horse, with twenty fresh men beside him and the afternoon sun hot on his right.

  He had been fighting, one way or another, since just after noon. He had been fighting or riding since three hours after sunrise this morning. And there were six hours to get through before sunset.

  The toisech among the men with him wanted to talk, and he was sharp with him, because he had to think. Later, he relented. To thi
nk was one thing. To shut his eyes as he rode was another.

  Three and a half hours after noon, he was close enough to the Earn to hear the shouting and deduce that the army landed that morning at Levenmouth had completed its march northwards through Fife and even its struggle, harassed by Tuathal, through the defile of Glen Farg, and was now here, on one side or the other of the Earn crossing. Then, rounding a hill and thundering over the plain to the river with goat-dung flung from his hooves, and smashed heads of ripe barley, and mussel-shells, he was able to see what was happening.

  Tuathal had crossed the Earn and was on this side, strung out with what remained of his hundred horsemen.

  On the opposite side were the men who had marched up from Levenmouth. More than eight hundred mercenaries, but not in battle order. Or only those detailed to keep guard against any hint of attack from Tuathal’s side of the river.

  Behind, the remaining hundreds lay on the grass; or sat chewing, their satchels open beside them and their leather flasks between their dusty cloth knees. There seemed to be a lot of wounded. Tuathal had made a good job, then, of his ambush.

  After that, of course, Tuathal had had to drop his attack and race to be first over the river, since he could not face eight times his number in the open plain between the Glen and the crossing. And the mercenary army, logically enough, had taken full advantage of the respite. Whether to care for their wounded or because the men had rebelled, tired from the long day’s march and from the fight in the defile, they were being allowed to eat and to rest.