‘God blesses Norway,’ he called out to his people. ‘He sent a fine harvest last year – so fine that the byres bulge even now and despite the winter’s snows we all bulge also.’
He patted his belly and his people laughed delightedly. Elizaveta, however, was not impressed.
‘He does fatten,’ she said.
‘Lily!’ Tora, at her side, put a finger to her lips.
‘Well, he does. Too much sitting around on his throne looking at plans for churches. He used to have seawater in his veins, Tora, but now, it seems, he has limewash.’
‘Lily, hush! You wanted a city.’
Elizaveta sighed.
‘I know, I know.’
‘And at least he is safe on his throne.’
‘Bored.’
‘He doesn’t seem bored.’
‘Not him.’
Tora chuckled.
‘You need something to do, Lily.’
‘I have my viol.’
It was true and she loved it still. It was a little battered now and Harald had offered to buy her a new one last Yuletide but she had declined. The instrument had come with her from Kiev and she could not bear to cast it aside. She still sometimes recalled that harsh winter when she and her siblings had danced in their own private, ice-bound world. She had felt bored then too but looking back it seemed idyllic.
Her family had danced on, though, weaving their influence across many countries – putting Yaroslav’s stitches into the fabric of several royal houses to grow down the ages. Her brothers had married into the courts of Poland, and the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires and her sisters, without exception, had now all produced sons for their royal husbands. Agatha had borne Edgar in 1051 and then, as if the Kievan blood had suddenly remembered how to do it, Anne had produced Phillipe and Anastasia, Solomon and, barely a year later, David. Anastasia’s delighted relief had gushed across the vellum when the news had come to Oslo, though the other two had thankfully been more tactful.
The one sadness was that Yaroslav was no longer here to see his bloodline run through so many royal houses. He had followed their mother to heaven three years ago and now Elizaveta’s eldest brothers ruled the lands of the Rus as a triumvirate. Yaroslav had died, what was more, before the greatest news of all had permeated the family’s letters – that Agatha had travelled to England and his first lost prince, Edward, might finally be able to pay him back as he had always desired: with power. And what power!
Elizaveta had hardly been able to believe it when her littlest sister’s letter had arrived in the hands of a hard-ridden emissary a month ago. Somehow, just as the Norwegian jarls had come to Kiev for Magnus and the Hungarian rebels for Andrew, Englishmen had arrived on the Danube to invite Edward home after forty years. The English King Edward, the prince’s uncle, had no heir and with his wife, Aldyth Godwinson, now past childbearing, was unlikely to produce one. Aldyth’s brother, Earl Harald, had therefore come himself to invite Edward to return to his heritage and be proclaimed aetheling – an ancient Saxon term marking him out as throneworthy.
Can you believe it, Lily? Agatha had written, her words tumbling onto the page, as wild as the dark curls Elizaveta recalled so fondly. England. Remember how we used to talk of her? I made Edward learn her tongue for when he would be her king. He only agreed to please me but I was right; I was right, Lily, and now it might come true. Edward might be the next King of England and I – I might be her queen.
It was an exciting prospect indeed and a potentially lucrative one. England was but two days’ sail from Norway with a fine wind. She was a wealthy country with a powerful government and close links with her rulers could only help Norway. Harald had been delighted at the news.
‘We will surely have what we want from England now, Lily,’ he’d said, spinning her around, ‘without any of the bother of conquest.’
She’d frozen, her own delight suddenly frosted.
‘The bother of conquest, Hari?’
For her, it had said everything about her husband’s new, relaxed, from-the-throne style of ruling and it made her nervous. Complacency didn’t suit him; and it certainly didn’t suit her.
‘This year alone,’ he was now saying to the crowd, ‘we have opened three new mints and our coins are amongst the finest in the world.’
‘Coins,’ Elizaveta muttered crossly. ‘What use are coins?’
‘Well actually . . .’ Tora started but Elizaveta waved her words away.
‘Fine, fine. I understand. What fun are coins?’
‘Life can’t all be fun, Lily.’
‘I know that but surely some of it could be?’
Tora touched her hand.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I told you, I’m bored. It’s all so, so smug – all this sitting around congratulating ourselves on our churches and our mints and our law courts.’
‘Is it not good to be secure, at peace, prosperous?’
Elizaveta waved an impatient hand.
‘Of course it is but if we are so secure we should be looking for more.’
‘More?’ Tora looked out to the crowd gathered below them in a rich array of colours like butterflies crowded into the rocky hollow. ‘What more is there?’
Elizaveta let out a strangled choke.
‘Have you ever been out of Norway, Tora?’ she demanded.
‘You know I have not. Why should I?’
‘Why should you not? Did you hear those men last night, the Icelanders?’
‘Sssh!’ Tora nodded to the people nearest who, drawn by Elizaveta’s rising voice, were looking their way. ‘Tell me later,’ she whispered.
Cross, Elizaveta folded her hands into her lap and pursed her lips shut. She let Harald’s talk of new administrative offices drift easily over her, recalling instead the tales of the travellers last night. Their gruff voices had sounded so like Halldor her heart had ached and even without his elaborate rhetoric she had been drawn into the world they had conjured up.
‘An expedition has sailed west from Reyjavik,’ they had told the court, sat on sturdy benches around a vast hearth beneath God’s thankfully dry heavens. ‘Their plan is to sail further even than Greenland, into the unchartered waters beyond as once our ancestors sailed west from Norway and found great riches.’
Now Elizaveta looked out down the Sognafjord. Here, towards its mouth, the sharp channel was opening out, its edges softening, its water swirling eagerly around the Solund islands – the last beautiful lumps of Norwegian land – excited to be free. No one could say where sea became fjord, or fjord sea, for it was a natural movement – one that had drawn men three hundred years ago to take those first voyages into the unknown.
Had they been scared, Elizaveta wondered, those pagan adventurers with their fickle gods and their strong hearts? Had they feared for their lives as they pointed their ships to the horizon? Had they dreaded falling off the edge or had they simply yearned to see over it? They had proved, those first men, that there was no edge. They had found the Orkneys, Shetland, England; England where even now Agatha could be arriving to join the great royal family in a place of honour. They had found Ireland and the Isle of Man – rich lands full of treasure. They had found Iceland and Greenland too – wilder places. Some said that the further west you went the harsher the land but no one knew that. Over the next edge might sit another Constantinople – a Miklegard of the west waiting to be discovered.
Elizaveta yearned to know more of this expedition, yearned to meet the men who would wager their lives on an unknown horizon. It had all started here, along this rugged evening-facing coastline on which they now sat in such splendour. Behind them, in Sweden and Denmark, men had sailed south, carving their way down the great rivers towards the golden waters of the Byzantine Empire, creating new worlds as they went – new worlds that included her own dear Kiev and its Rus lands. Here, though, in Norway, the true adventurers had set sail, not down rivers or over lands but across the open sea. Yes, it had all started here and now, it seemed,
it had all stopped.
‘I have a joyous announcement to make,’ Harald was saying and Elizaveta felt Tora nudge her in her ribs.
‘Stand up,’ she hissed.
Obediently Elizaveta stood, though her eyes were still on the sea which seemed almost to be winking at her as the low sun caught the ripples at the cusp of the open water.
‘My daughter, my beautiful Maria, is to be betrothed.’
Elizaveta’s attention snapped back to her husband. She looked around for Maria to pull her up but her daughter was already there at her side, standing tall and proud as all eyes turned their way. Elizaveta was pleased to see she had not brought her sword and stood like a lady, but her heart shook to see her so grown. Her daughter was not yet quite ten; so young to be betrothed.
‘You were young too,’ a voice whispered in her ear as if a troll had crept up and settled behind her. ‘You were young when you first saw Harald and offered to become his treasure-keeper and already hoped for more. Yet you thought yourself more than ready for the world.’
Maria was taller than she had been and her body was already curving towards womanhood. Elizaveta glanced at her daughter’s hips, praying they would expand as her own had never done, for she would not wish her childbed experiences on her. Not that it need come to that yet. This betrothal was a formality, no more, and at the moment the only man Maria was devoted to was her father.
‘I welcome Jarl Otto as my son,’ Harald cried across the gathering. ‘He is all I can ask for in a man – a strong warrior, a loyal servant and a true Norwegian.’
‘A true Norwegian?’ Elizaveta muttered sardonically and, like an unexpected scratch, she heard Kalv’s sly voice – ‘I don’t believe anyone can ever truly be at home away from their birth country.’ She had vehemently denied it at the time but was it true? She recalled her mother, every part of her the Grand Princess of Kiev, telling stories of trolls at bedtime, her eyes aglow in the candlelight. These northern lands had been a part of Elizaveta’s mother in a way Elizaveta had never truly understood, as Maria and Ingrid would never understand the Rus in her, especially not if they married within their own shoreline, however beautiful.
‘You do not approve?’ Tora whispered over the raptures of the crowd as Otto, with great flamboyance, led his bride up to the law-rock to receive Harald’s public blessing. ‘I thought you were pleased?’
Elizaveta struggled to recall. She had been pleased when this had been proposed, had she not? Otto, Tora’s brother, was a fine man, older than Maria by some years but honourable and handsome and true.
‘A true Norwegian,’ Elizaveta echoed.
‘That is not, you know, a bad thing,’ Tora said, her voice as near to angry as it ever could be, and Elizaveta put out a hand to her.
‘I know and I’m sorry. I was just remembering my own father and how determined he was to marry us into new lands – to extend his borders and, beyond that, his influence. He was a very outward-looking man.’
‘And Harald is not?’
‘I thought he was; now I’m not so sure.’
Tora shifted her feet beneath her skirts.
‘Otto is a worthy groom.’
‘I know that, truly, Tora.’
‘And when they wed we will be family.’
‘Are we not already?’
Tora smiled awkwardly and turned to join in the clapping as Harald presented the couple to the crowd. Elizaveta clapped too, smiled, waved a little – she was good at this now.
‘I’m truly sorry, Tora,’ she said, nudging her. ‘It is good. It is all good. I used to admire my parents’ solid partnership when I was younger, you know. I used to believe the Rus could be strong just because they were, but it seems maybe three is an even more solid alliance. I just . . . Oh, you know me – I am restless. Sometimes I long for it to be as it was when Harald and I first sailed for Norway.’
‘Tense and bitter and torn into factions and plots?’
Elizaveta smiled.
‘You see everything so clearly, Tora, and so widely. You think more of Norway than of yourself.’
‘Is that not what a queen should do?’
Elizaveta nodded and looked to the skies as Harald handed the newly betrotheds down from the law-rock and settled himself to the serious business of law-giving.
‘You are a better queen than I,’ she remarked but Tora shook her head.
‘Harald,’ she said quietly, ‘would never agree,’ but that did not settle the spiky feeling in Elizaveta’s stomach.
‘I think I shall ask him,’ she persisted.
Tora simply sighed.
CHAPTER THIRTY
‘Good business, was it?’ Elizaveta demanded.
Harald, watching his wife of fourteen years pacing their bedchamber, answered her warily.
‘Did you not think so?’
‘Everyone seemed very satisfied.’
Her voice had an all-too-familiar edge to it and he tried not to let himself get too distracted by the way the light from the brazier was cutting through her shift, illuminating her still-lithe body.
‘Save you?’ he suggested.
‘No.’
It was all she offered and, uncertain what to do with the curt word, he rose and went to her, waving away her new maid as he clasped his wife close.
‘Come to bed, Lily.’
She was rigid in his arms.
‘I have to say my prayers.’
Harald raised an eyebrow at that. They carried an elaborate prayer stool with them wherever they went but neither of them was often to be found upon it.
‘You are unhappy, my sweet?’
‘Not unhappy, Hari. Just . . .’ She moved to the pavilion door and lifted the flap to look out. Young men were gathering on the law-rock. She could see their naked forms silhouetted against the bruised sky as they gathered to jump and she pulled instinctively towards them, but at her side a guard stood instantly to attention and with a sigh she dropped the fabric back into place.
‘Just . . . ?’ Harald prompted.
Elizaveta waved him away.
‘Do you think those men will find land?’
Harald blinked, confused.
‘Which men, my sweet?’
‘Which men?! The Icelanders – the ones who have sailed west.’
‘Oh. I see. How would I know?’
‘How indeed.’
Another cryptic remark. Harald sank onto the edge of the bed.
‘Would you like, perhaps, to send for word of their journey?’
She whirled round.
‘I would like, Harald, to go on it.’
‘Oh.’ God, she looked beautiful blazing towards him, eyes flashing. ‘But Lily, it will be very dangerous.’
‘Good.’
Harald swallowed. Lily, herself, was dangerous in this mood. ‘You are bored, my sweet?’
‘Are you not?’
‘I’m very busy. The new law code is causing much debate and . . .’
‘New law code?’ The words burst out of her mouth as if fired from a catapult. He did his best not to flinch.
‘You object to the laws?’
‘No. I’m sure they’re lovely laws, with lovely lawyers to sort them out. I object, Harald, to them being the only thing you think about.’
So that was it!
‘They are not all I think about, truly. Only just now I was thinking how much I would love to have that shift off you and . . .’
Her scream of fury made him jump. The flap shuddered and a guard called out: ‘All well, my lord?’
‘Quite well,’ he called hastily back, grabbing his wife and whisking her onto the bed.
Elizaveta fought beneath him but he held her until she stilled and said petulantly, ‘I hate that you’re stronger than me.’
‘Only in arm,’ Harald said ruefully. ‘Look, Lily, what would you like me to think about? Your father, you know, was famed for his law code.’
She huffed.
‘My father is dead, Hari.’
; ‘And his laws live on.’
‘You used to want to be remembered for your deeds, not your laws.’
That stung. Letting go of her, Harald sat back.
‘That is true. But Lily, I am doing much, truly I am. Norway is thriving.’
‘So you said.’ She pushed herself up the bed. ‘Do you think I’m a good queen, Harald?’
‘Of course, Lily, you’re . . .’
‘Only Tora seems to care much more about Norway than I.’
‘Tora cares about her sons.’
‘As she should. They are your sons too.’
Harald swallowed. Friendly as his wives seemed, thankfully, to be these days, there were still tricky moments, from Elizaveta at least. He felt carefully for an answer but before he could form one she was talking again:
‘Agatha might be in England by now.’
Another change of direction; he fought to keep up.
‘She might well be. I am sure Harold Godwinson will see them there safe. He is a great warrior, they say.’
‘Like you?’
‘Like me, Elizaveta, yes.’
‘But not, I’ll warrant, grown fat.’
She poked at his stomach and he looked down.
‘I’m not fat,’ he said indignantly.
It was true that there was a little more give in his skin than there had once been but was it any wonder? He was forty-two now and entitled to a little flesh. He seized Elizaveta’s face in his hands to draw her eyes up from his midriff.
‘I thought Agatha said King Edward promised the inheritance of England to Duke William of Normandy when he paid court to him back in 1051?’
She shifted.
‘She did mention it, but why would he?’
‘King Edward was harboured for many years by William’s father and, indeed, by William himself in the early years of his rule.’
‘He was a lost prince too?’
‘There are a lot of them around, Lily, and not enough crowns to suit.’
She frowned.
‘So Duke William and King Edward are friends?’
Harald laughed bitterly.
‘From what I hear, Lily, no one is “friends” with Duke William. The Normans are a ruthless race. I saw them operating in Italy and Sicily and their passion for blood and for gain made my own men look like girls fighting over a posy. The English won’t want a Norman duke as king.’
The Constant Queen Page 27