King Hereafter

by Dorothy Dunnett

  In the spring, it would be different. In the spring, all Malcolm’s loyal men, all those who had struck a blow for the sole and rightful Bishop of Alba would come back, with their wives, to receive the land that was to be their reward. So Malcolm’s uncle Thorfinn in his time had taken war into Fife. So Thorfinn had usurped for the Crown, for himself and his Queen and his stepson, for the Prior of St Serf’s and his party of penmen and property-managers, the lands whose owners had died, leaving a line behind them that had lapsed, or whose heirs lay as yet in the cradle.

  In the spring, they would come back, and would be forbearing with the thralls and the little farmers who had found their way back to their land from Mar and Moray, wearied with living in earth-houses and cabins and tents, and with relying on meal and ale given in charity. A family liked to sow its own seed and till its own land, come the spring-time. Some of them would be allowed to come back. For the rest, there were peasants enough in Bernicia and west of Bernicia to work their land for them, if need be. Slaves were easily got. And with the booty they had, they could pay for them.

  There was a risk, of course. If Earl Siward had stayed as he should, and sent his ships back and forth with proper provisions, they might have got some buildings up now, and enough of a garrison, here and there, to make quite sure that their hard-won land was not snatched from them. It had wrecked their plans, that retreat of Earl Siward’s. There had been a time when, urged by Bishop Malduin, Malcolm had all but struck tent and marched off south after him. With Siward and Allerdale gone, and the King still alive, all the pains of conquest, it seemed for a moment, might have gone for nothing.

  But of course that was not true. Most of the fighting-men of Alba were dead, as were most of their leaders. The flag blessed by the Pope had proved worthless. The King himself was struck down. If Thorfinn lived, would anyone follow him? And if he raised an army tomorrow, how far could the tatters of Alba hold Scone, never mind Atholl, Angus, and Fife, and Siward’s Lothians and Allerdale’s Cumbria?

  It was not hard to guess what Malcolm must be thinking, and all the reports that came north went to confirm it. Before Thorkel Fóstri went home, it was clear beyond doubt that the few thousand men who had gathered at Scone were not going to stay there, a wintry outpost in a deserted country.

  And so it proved. By the time Thorfinn was rousing, at last, from his journey, Malcolm and Malduin and all their army had gone.

  As perhaps he would have wished, the hour when Thorfinn came to awareness was private to himself, for both his wife and his stepson were absent, driven elsewhere by the endless cries for help, the ceaseless battle to deal with the ravages of what had happened.

  The brethren at Monymusk, too, were hard-pressed by the needs of the sick and the dying outside the monastery as well as in it. The monk who, entering Thorfinn’s chamber at night, found the King lying awake and himself again thought it enough to run with the news to his fellows, and in the morning to break it in triumph to the two patients still in the outer room.

  When he had gone, the Prior of St Serf, the morning bristles fringing his pock-scarred face, swung his legs to the edge of his pallet and said, ‘I’m going to see him.’

  Bishop Jon, being from the waist upwards wholly restored, was shaving himself. He said, ‘I agree as to the necessity, but I can’t say I’m impressed by your chances. Your legs look like ribbons.’

  ‘Faith will uphold me,’ Tuathal said. He put his feet on the rushes and his knees creaked. He said, ‘I quote, in the teeth of you, St Brigit, who could hang her cloak on a sunbeam.’

  ‘It’s snowing,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘Ah, why am I worrying? I see you would hardly let down a thistle for swiftness and lightness.’ The scum from his half-naked jaw dripped unnoticed on to his towel, and his brow had creased in three directions. Tuathal limped quickly over the reeds and knocked on the jamb of the inner door.

  ‘Come in,’ said Thorfinn’s voice. And Tuathal pushed the hanging aside.

  There was nothing in the room but the bed, and a stool and table beside it, and a crucifix on the wall. No longer uncovered since the fever abated, the King lay with a decent quilt drawn to his waist. Above that, the white cage of bandaging still covered his shoulders and neck and his upper arms, holding his elbows close to his sides. His hands and forearms, which were quite untouched, were folded across his chest in the only manner, probably, that was open to him. Even the battle-swelling in his right hand had gone, that showed he had fought the last hours of the day using only his axe. Tuathal had seen Norsemen on raids plunge their right hands in cold water, in the course of a long killing, to restore them.

  Above the bandages, the beaked face with its tall brow had acquired no beauty from the strictness and pallor of illness. His hair, bundled black on the pillow, met the black, bristling line of new beard clothing his jaw and the shelf of his lip. And under the single black hedge of his eyebrows, his eyes stood open within the black, stocky line of his lashes: lashes so short and so scattered that you would say nature had excelled, yet again, in the economy with which she had made him.

  Tuathal said, ‘My lord King … How are you?’

  ‘Brooding,’ said Thorfinn.

  From the other side of the curtain, Bishop Jon heard his fellow-churchman utter a sound which was not a cry of alarm, but could almost have passed for a laugh. The murmur of voices, which had only just started, broke off; and then the King’s voice said something again, speaking quite normally although not very loud; and Tuathal replied in the same tone.

  After five minutes, the curtain stirred again and Tuathal, walking with a little more ease, limped his way back and dropped on his bed.

  ‘Well?’ said Bishop Jon.

  Tuathal said, ‘I wonder why he was denied comeliness?’

  ‘So that people will listen to what he has to say,’ Bishop Jon said. ‘He spoke to you, then?’

  ‘He knew how we would think before we did,’ said Tuathal. ‘He remembers very clearly what happened, and has used the night to contain it. I should like, were I not a Christian, to inflict as much on that fool of a monk.’

  ‘I see,’ said Bishop Jon. After a moment, he said, ‘And physically?’

  ‘I would say his life is secure. His weakness is something again, and the scale of his wounds. It will be a long business. He knows it.’

  ‘Will he stay apart in his room?’ said Bishop Jon.

  ‘He spoke,’ said Tuathal, ‘of joining us in here for Christmas, if there was going to be a Christmas this year.’

  Shortly after that, the Lady returned, and for the space of half an hour Bishop Jon read steadily aloud to Prior Tuathal from the writings of the Blessed Augustine, with whom he did not always see eye to eye, until the erratic conversation in the next room had given way to cadences of a more normal kind. By the time Bishop Jon shut the book, conversation itself had been replaced by what sounded like a public gemot.

  After an hour of answering questions, the Lady, with good sense, clearly prescribed an interval and emerged, flushed and smiling. Seldom in its ceremonial coif, her hair since its lopping was most often wrapped in a folded napkin of silk, from which dark red strands looped and waved. Whatever Thorfinn’s deficiencies as another Apollo, there was no doubt that he could bring those about him to bloom, one way or another.

  When she returned, after a long space, she had Morgund with her. It was a pattern that was to become familiar to the incapacitated churchmen in the outer room as, morning and afternoon, friends were ushered in: magnates of the north as well as the remaining mormaers of Alba, who entered the inner room reluctantly, to emerge thoughtfully, later, with a different look and a different step.

  Occasionally, observing the presence of the two invalids propped on their pillows, one would call a greeting or cross to make an enquiry. Pumped, they had no revelations to make that gave any inkling of what Thorfinn was thinking, beyond the fact that they felt better for seeing him.

  The Prior of Monymusk, appealed to on his daily visitation, rebuked
his patients for their curiosity and recommended that they think of nothing but getting well, whereby they could serve their King when he was ready for it. Since Prior Ruadhan’s familia now included not only the Culdees of Monymusk but the refugee monks of Muthill, Dunblane, Abernethy, and Monifieth among others, the Bishop at least realised that there were times when even a prince of the church should be seen and not heard, and ceased asking accordingly.

  The Lady, who came and went all the time, except when there were sickroom matters afoot, was not much more forthcoming. The King, it appeared, was slowly mending. As to his mood: ‘How can one tell?’ said Groa, looking them in the eye. ‘Resigned? No. Nothing so Christian. How does he look?’ she said to her escort of the moment, who happened to be the lord Lulach.

  Her son considered. ‘Grim, but calm,’ he said. ‘Would you say?’

  And with that, they had to be satisfied.

  The Feast of Columbanus had passed: a landmark in the calendar at Cologne and Luxeuil. Bishop Jon had at first been surprised to find the bears of Columbanus over here until he remembered the imprint of St Finnian of Clonard on all the churches hereabout, and the Irish strain in Angus and Mar that had brought the name Sinill into Bishop Malduin’s family.

  The lord Lulach, married to Sinill’s daughter, had attended Mass on that day, Prior Ruadhan had observed. Whether the celebration of the Eucharist had taken place in the inner room also, he did not say. If Thorfinn were not yet quite himself, the chances were, thought Bishop Jon, that it had. He wondered if the Responsaries had been sung to the setting of Pope Leo, and further wondered why, when he mentioned it, Tuathal withdrew into thought.

  Then he remembered Eochaid had been with the Prior at Rome. Eochaid, who had died at Scone and whose casket, perhaps, had brought the rest of them here. The Bishop said, ‘There was the decapitated head of Donn Bo, that turned its face to the wall and sang sweetly all night. The music survives.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Tuathal said.

  Then the Feast of St Finnian himself was upon them, and everyone withdrew to the church save themselves, weaklings that they were, and the occupant of the inner room.

  With the curtain drawn back, the King’s voice could now carry from his room to theirs, and for some days now they had established in this way a simple form of dialogue, consisting largely of greetings and the occasional question or comment. Since the first time, Tuathal had not attempted to return through the doorway, feeling that the traffic, for a sick man, was already heavy enough.

  On his side, Tuathal’s limbs were so much stronger that he was able each day to work himself up and down the small room, and even on one occasion out into the yard, which had proved more exhausting than he had expected.

  Bishop Jon, with a festering spear-wound to contend with, spent his days propped on the pillows, reading, gambling in a judicious, clerical way, and talking in his mellifluous voice about everything except the terrestrial future. Only in his prayers did he draw Tuathal with him in remembrance of those they had lost; and, for that, reserved all the passion so carefully blanched from his daily habit, that their dead might be waked with psalms and hymns and canticles wherever there were voices to pray.

  Today, undisturbed by ministering footsteps, lay or clerical, the two men rested in silence as over the roofs of the monastery there floated the rich, strenuous voices of the monks, raised in psalmody.

  The ring of it overlaid the lightest slur of the rushes, so that Thorfinn’s voice, close at hand, shocked with its suddenness.

  ‘This is not altogether the lunacy it may appear,’ it said. ‘But more an affirmation to the populace that their monarch is in vigour and ready to lead the other half to slaughter any time they may wish. There is an empty bed here?’

  The King had come through the doorway. Adhering in suspended motion to the boarding of the little room, he was robed from neck to ground in the heavy grey wool the monks wore, showing none of his injuries. Above it, his face was clean-shaven again, and made out of white laths.

  Tuathal flung his sheet aside. ‘There are two,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Or if anything goes wrong, they’ll blame you.’ He took two more steps round the wall and stopped again, measuring the open distance to the nearest bed. Because of the cold, both the door and the shutters were firmly shut, but the room was bright with candlelight and the glow of the fire, burning on its hearth at the end of the hut instead of the centre, where it might incommode the service between the two pairs of beds. A burst of singing rose again, fierce as a dog barking, and the rosin bubbled and fizzed in the moss-candles. Thorfinn said, ‘Can’t we afford wax any more?’

  Tuathal said, ‘You get used to the smell. Look, it won’t serve any purpose if they find you—’

  ‘—prostrate on the floor, reciting the formula of perseverance? They won’t,’ said Thorfinn and in three steps reached the central pillar between himself and the vacant bed.

  ‘It’s a remarkable style you have, though,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘Like a man walking on scaffolding. Friend Tuathal—’

  ‘I’ve got him,’ said Tuathal. It was half true. In fact, he had made of himself simply another pillar. Thorfinn could neither grasp nor be grasped. He stood still.

  After a while, Thorfinn said, ‘Don’t let me keep you, if you want to do anything else.’ And then, at last, ‘All right. To the bed. Then get back to your own. I shan’t need you. If I can’t get over this, I can’t hope to hold councils.’

  Bishop Jon said, ‘Judgement of God!’

  Tuathal moved with the King to the empty bed, and the King let himself fall in. The beds were built like coffins, boarded in to the floor to keep out rats and dogs and the draughts. He stood, and the mallet-thud of the King’s breathing studded the singing. Bishop Jon said, ‘Does he bleed, can you see?’

  Tuathal shook his head.

  ‘Then leave him,’ said Bishop Jon. ‘It is his achievement. He has to begin somewhere.’

  It was an achievement. It was what the men outside needed to know: that their King was walking again, and had strolled from one room to the other that morning, to chat with his friends. The surprise on Prior Ruadhan’s face when Mass ended and he and the Lady went across to the hospice had been worth seeing, everyone said. And the surprise on the Lady’s face, to find the King leaning back on his pillows, listening to Bishop Jon against the opposite wall discoursing on Predestination.

  ‘St Lucy, painted with the balls of her eyes in a dish. You look astonished,’ said Thorfinn.

  ‘Good,’ said the Lady. ‘What I feel is something I shall tell you later. I suppose we have St Finnian to thank that you have enough strength back to talk with at all?’

  ‘Feast days,’ said Thorfinn, ‘always bring their own special blessing.’

  That was December. By January, the kingdom of Scotia in its changed world had been skilfully reconstituted, and the inner council of three convalescent men who brought it about had been joined by a fourth.

  He came a week after the King had transferred himself into the company of Bishop Jon and Prior Tuathal, and his coming was heralded by a confusion of barking and shouting unusual even in the thronged community that the King’s presence had made of Monymusk. Tuathal, who had been making a speech, interrupted himself. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They’re practising what Archbishop Juhel used to call Les O of Advent,’ suggested Thorfinn lazily. ‘O Sapientia … It’s perfectly plain. Are you deaf to wisdom this morning?’

  ‘I wish I were deaf to … They’re coming here,’ said Prior Tuathal, the crossness fading out of his voice as the noise swirled outside the shut door of the hospice.

  The door opened, and Ruadhan, the Prior of Monymusk, stepped inside, his face pale with emotion.

  ‘My nephew Malcolm has arrived with an apology?’ said Thorfinn. ‘My wife’s cousin’s husband has appeared off the coast with a fleet of three hundred, come to pay a courtesy call?’

  ‘My dear lord,’ said Ruadhan, and stood aside to
give others entry.

  From the arm of the man who was helping him: ‘There was word,’ said Bishop Hrolf, ‘of a free bed in here. But if you are particular about your company, I can find another.’ Then, his eyes finding Thorfinn and resting on him: ‘Oh, my lord King,’ he said.

  ‘Can you feel your welcome?’ said Thorfinn. ‘We cannot speak it. There is a bed beside me. Bring him here.’

  He came limping; no longer the man who balanced on half-finished towers and climbed palisades to put ferrets inside the leather of an erring man’s sleeping-bag. His big-featured face, free of sawdust, was pale, and although his shoulders were broad as ever, the hands he stretched out as he came were too big for their wrists.

  Thorfinn took them in his own, and dismissed both the helper and Prior Ruadhan with a sign as Hrolf sank to his knees. The door closed. Thorfinn said, ‘That is an attitude for me, not for you. Your God can relent, after all.’

  Warned by nothing in the King’s face, but by some instinct of his own, Bishop Hrolf released Thorfinn’s hands and, grasping the edge of the free bed, drew himself to sit uncomfortably on its edge. ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘And so can men. You can thank Thor of Allerdale for looking after me.’

  Thor, who with Malcolm had stormed Dunsinane again and again, regardless of cost, to try to kill Thorfinn his kinsman.

  Tuathal said, ‘You were his bishop. We heard you were lost by the Forth, in Siward’s battle.’

  Hrolf turned. To Bishop Jon he said, ‘I heard you had fallen at St Cathán’s. It’s only a week since I learned that you were alive. It was a party of Allerdale men who found me and kept me for ransom, and when the fighting was over, Thor took me back to Cumbria himself, to be nursed until I could travel north.’

  He turned back to the King. ‘He made no trouble, either, when Alfgar helped to get the Norman families out of the country. He bears no animosity to anyone, now his purpose is achieved. Siward had promised him land in the border vales and in Lothian and even in Fife if he would help him. Now the way is clear, and in the spring he will take what he wants. He believes that there is no way that you or I or anyone left now can stop him. My lord, I have prayed for you.’