The Constant Queen

by Joanna Courtney

  A part of her wished she was like Harald and Elizaveta with their seawater veins and their adventurous spirits. She longed to know what it must feel like to have this itch inside you and yet it seemed such an uncomfortable, painful way to be ruled. Harald was a true Viking and everyone loved him for it, yet he worried about his pagan heart, as if it did not really belong in their modern world. Did Tora’s yearning for peace fit the new, more stable way of governing better, or was her time yet to come? If so, she feared she would not live to see it, even safe on her own shores.

  A huge cheer went up from the bay as Harald’s eagle cut through the waters at the cusp of the open sea, the flag edged with her own embroidery flying proudly above it, and she shook her foolish musings away. What did it matter where anyone’s spirit truly lay when their fate was in the here and now? They all had to fight. Harald and Elizaveta would sail forth into the attack and she – she would stand as bravely as she could here, at home.

  Standing on her tiptoes to see as far over the treacherous horizon as she possibly could, Tora waved at Olaf and at Harald and at Elizaveta as they shrank and then tipped over the edge of her world. And when, finally, they were all gone, she took Magnus’s arm and turned her steps back inland to wait.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Orkneys, August 1066

  ‘Lily, wake up!’

  Elizaveta stirred, opened her eyes. Harald was stood over her, fully dressed, and she started awake.

  ‘What is it Hari? You’re not going already?’

  ‘No. Hush.’ He kissed her quiet. ‘I just couldn’t sleep. The day is dawning, Lily – our day is dawning. Will you come and see it rise with me?’

  She looked up into his eyes, more gold than grey as they shone eagerly down at her in the half-light.

  ‘Of course I will.’

  She flung back the covers, drawing in a sharp breath as the autumn air bit at her bare skin, and gratefully pulled on the shift Harald held out for her. She covered it swiftly with the fine gown Greta had laid out last night. It was a rich purple, trimmed with gold, and was intended to make her look regal as she waved the troops off on their great mission but for now she was just grateful for its warmth.

  Harald was already at the door of their bower and she pushed her feet into her calfskin shoes and went to join him. A single line of pink hovered along the horizon and she took his hand as they stepped out towards it.

  ‘The girls . . . ?’

  She glanced back; Maria and Ingrid were on the upper floor of the bower.

  ‘They are well. I looked in on them.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Just to check. They’re so funny, Lily, even now they are all but women. Ingrid is tucked up tight, even her hair neat on the pillow, and Maria is all limbs.’

  ‘You like her best.’

  ‘No. She just . . . lodges more sharply in my heart.’

  ‘And you in hers. They are sleeping?’

  ‘Like babies.’

  Elizaveta smiled.

  ‘As should we be.’

  ‘Nay, wife – why sleep when there are adventures to be had? Come!’

  He tugged her forward and together they crept across the central yard of Thorfinn’s great compound, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the sleepers in the halls and outbuildings all round. They made it out into the meadow and began to climb the Brough just as, to their left, the topmost part of the sun broke free of the soft waves of the bay and reached out sparkling fingers across the land.

  The light caught in the dew, so thick on the rough sea grass that it seemed for a moment as if the whole land were a pool of gold and their every step a ripple in the dawn. Elizaveta clutched tight at Harald’s calloused fingers and he smiled down at her.

  ‘All will be well, Lilyveta, I know it.’

  She nodded but her body was too clogged with the effort of storing up the imprint of his hand to speak. She trod onwards but the calfskin shoes she’d foolishly chosen were sodden already and she could feel a chill damp penetrating to her toes. Lifting her heavy skirts, she looked down at the delicate leather, dark with moisture.

  ‘My feet are wet, Hari.’

  He stopped.

  ‘I’ll carry you.’

  ‘No!’ She batted him away. ‘I’m too heavy. You can hardly go into battle with a limp caused by lifting your wife.’

  ‘Here then.’

  He bent and untied his own sturdy soldier’s boots then, before she could protest, lifted up one of her feet and, shoe and all, slid it into one of the boots.

  ‘Hari . . .’

  ‘And the other one. Perfect, Lily. Is that not perfect?’

  ‘They sort of fit,’ she admitted.

  ‘Good.’ He tied them around her ankles, his fingers like tiny spiders across her skin. ‘Now hurry – I want to beat the sun to the top.’

  She laughed and let him pull her forward again, though her feet were awkward with the new weight and she clumped after him like a fool.

  ‘See, Lily,’ he encouraged her, wriggling his own bare toes in the grass. ‘Now you know what it’s like to walk in my shoes.’

  ‘I do. It is heavy, Hari.’

  ‘I am trained to it.’ He kissed her again. ‘We’re nearly there, my sweet. Look – there are the first of our ships.’

  They’d crested the rise now and, sure enough, Elizaveta could see the tips of myriad masts poking up into the sky, swaying gently on the morning breeze.

  ‘Like lances,’ Harald said, ‘ready to strike.’

  He was right, she supposed, though she’d never have seen that for herself. She was standing in his shoes but she could not quite see with his eyes. Adventure she understood deep in her own soul, but war? War was his alone.

  ‘You are sure about this invasion, Hari?’ she said, pulling him to a halt in the shadow of the old broch.

  ‘You ask me that now?’

  She leaned in against him and felt his arms enfold her as they had done for so many years, even when she’d pushed him away.

  ‘We have been on this journey a long time,’ she whispered into his chest.

  ‘And have plenty of years still to go – the best yet.’

  ‘You will be careful?’

  She heard his laugh, low and sweet against the sudden cry of a seabird rising over the cliff.

  ‘You sound like Tora.’

  Elizaveta tried to laugh with him but her mirth was fractured by a memory of her friend, stood on the jetty back in Norway. She had always before thought of Tora as a woman of presence with the big, voluptuous body of her own solid mother, but that day, on the arm of the son Elizaveta could so vividly remember being born, she had looked tiny.

  Elizaveta had felt herself huge with excitement and anticipation in comparison and had pitied Tora’s tight little frame as it had receded into a dot on the narrow stretch of the Sognafjord. This morning, though, with her own fears suddenly battering at her chest, she remembered Tora differently – her shoulders square against her fears and her back straight with her responsibilities.

  ‘Perhaps Tora was right, Hari,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should have contented ourselves with Norway.’

  ‘And miss this?’

  He reached down and gently took hold of her chin, tipping it up and out towards the sea. Elizaveta stared. The sun was a perfect disc atop the ocean, casting a path of white light all the way to their feet.

  ‘’Tis as bright as your hair,’ she murmured, caught in its beauty.

  ‘A sign,’ he replied. ‘I told you, Lily, all will be well. We were not content in Norway, not really.’

  ‘You were.’

  ‘Momentarily distracted, that’s all. You freed me; took me back to my true self.’

  ‘The man with seawater in his veins?’

  He smiled and turned them both to the ocean below.

  ‘When I limped away from Stikelstad aged fifteen, Lily, I became an adventurer – a Varangian. I was bitter at the time but I have seen so much because of it, done so much, and I
have loved it all.’

  Elizaveta looked across the water into the sun, embracing the intensity of its light.

  ‘And me?’ she asked. ‘When did I become an adventurer, Hari? When I saw you?’

  He kissed her, long and hard.

  ‘Oh no. You, my Lilyveta, were born an adventurer and I love you for it. You will wait for me?’

  ‘Always. You will come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Because you will come to me. You will come to me in Westminster, to be crowned as Queen of England.’

  ‘You promise?’

  At that though he shifted, pulled away a little.

  ‘I cannot promise, Lily, you know that, but have I ever failed to return from battle?’

  She sighed. Calls were sounding from the ships below as men rose, stretched, checked for their swords. The sun’s light was spreading, calling everyone to the day, and their stolen moment was leaking away. Hardly able to bear it, she pulled her husband’s arms back around her and, locked together, they watched the Viking army unfurl before them.

  ‘We are in God’s hands now,’ Harald murmured but Elizaveta shook her head fiercely.

  ‘Not quite yet,’ she insisted. ‘For a few minutes more, Hari, we are still in each other’s.’

  Those precious minutes were soon swallowed up in the voracious jaws of a preparing army, and after that came two weeks of emptiness. Thorfinn, like Ulf, had gone to God last year and his two sons had sailed with Harald, taking Idonie along to visit the Scottish King Malcolm, to whom the family owed partial allegiance. The great compound on the Brough, therefore, was empty of all but a handful of servants, and Greta, Elizaveta, and their children rattled helplessly around in it. In the long days after the great fleet set forth from Scapa Flow, summer seemed to sigh itself out and autumn raced across the beautiful islands, turning the leaves golden and whipping them almost immediately from the trees as if refusing them their glory. Elizaveta had to fight herself hard not to see it as an omen, for that way madness lay.

  Earlier in the year the night skies had been riven by a falling star, trailing fire like a backwards dragon. Many had hailed that as an omen, but of what? As Harald had calmly pointed out, the same star would blaze its trail across England, Normandy and Norway alike and who was to say which it favoured? The same was true now – the falling leaves could mark a loss for any of the contenders for the throne of England, or they could just be falling. And the winds, at least, would carry Harald’s ships swiftly south, which was worth more than any imagined favour.

  Exactly two weeks after Harald had left, Elizaveta pulled her cloak around her and took her viol up to the ancient broch. It was foolish, she knew – the very winds that had taken Harald to England would prevent his messengers reaching her, but at least up here on the cliffs at the edge of the Brough, where they had stood together that precious golden dawn, she felt as close to him as she could possibly be.

  Was he there in Westminster yet? Were the messengers on their way to fetch her to him as he had promised? Was he, maybe, laughing with Agatha as he took the throne of the English from the upstart Earl Harold? Was he preparing to lead both his own men and the English against the Normans? Or had the Normans got to Harold first and it was Duke William he must now face to secure the throne? Surely, either way, the English would aid him in seeing off the upstart duke and his presumptuous Flanders wife?

  Elizaveta tried to imagine Westminster but could only find images of Kiev, though there was no way the English first city could be like her childhood home, far away in the Rus. She had quizzed anyone she’d encountered who had ever been near London – though they were pitifully few – and she knew from Agatha’s letters that Westminster was a low-lying island set within the embrace of a great river called the Thames, a wide, flat, rolling water without the cliffs and rapids of the Dnieper.

  The rest of London, her sister had said, sprawled out from the palace and abbey at its heart, across what had once been meadowland and marshes, eating up new villages into its eager embrace with every passing year. It was built largely of wood, its streets were no more than trampled earth, and it was protected only by a palisade, and that bare in places. It was not, then, Kiev, with its paving and its cupolas and its rooved walls though there were apparently, at least, traders and merchants of all nations living there so it should be more at the centre of the advancing world than remote Norway. And so what if it lacked architecture? She could create that, as she had created it for Oslo. Yes, she tried hard to imagine Westminster for sometimes it felt like the only positive thing she could do.

  Elizaveta fingered her viol bow, wondering how it must feel to wield instead an archer’s bow, or a sword. She thought of Harald seeing lances in the ships’ masts and remembered standing on Kiev’s walls to watch her father’s forces beat the Pechenegs – the only war, despite how many had raged around her, that she’d ever seen. That had been the summer weedy little Magnus had ridden to Norway in Harald’s place. She had been so angry – too angry to even pay much attention to the battle.

  From where they’d stood, some hundred paces from the fighting, it had been hard to see faces, to spot individual deaths, and Elizaveta’s overwhelming impression had been of an evershifting sea of limbs, some flesh, some metal, moving like a changing tide on a piercing wind of pain. Her mother had tried to steer her into admiring her father’s tactics – the precise movement of blocks of troops to enclose the crazed Pechenegs – and Elizaveta had heard enough of Harald and Ulf’s talk since to now appreciate the skill of command. At the time, though, she had been too intrigued by the relentless smash of steel on bone to see the patterns.

  ‘Where is Papa?’ was all she’d wanted to know.

  ‘A good commander stays in the rear,’ her mother had assured her. ‘He must view the whole field, not just the man in front of him.’

  Elizaveta had seen that day how true that was, but only if the commander were winning. The Pecheneg leader had sunk with his lowliest soldiers, his battle-patterns, if he’d ever had any, carved to nought. She drew her bow determinedly across the strings. The winds whipped her notes away almost before they could form but that suited her for the poor instrument was old now and warped from its travels and she wanted it less for music than distraction from the discord of her own thoughts.

  ‘Mama?’

  She looked up to see Maria in the doorway of the broch, her dark hair whipping behind her as if one with her carelessly slung cloak.

  ‘Maria! Come inside. There is precious little warmth but the walls keep the worst of the winds away.’

  The young woman, newly turned twenty, stepped carefully over the rocky sill and joined her.

  ‘You look for ships?’

  ‘Foolish, I know.’

  Maria did not contradict her.

  ‘Josef is not well,’ she said instead, ‘so I have brought Filip out to give him and Greta some peace.’

  Elizaveta leaned forward to see the twelve-year-old kicking a pig’s bladder against the wall of the broch. The rough stones sent the ball flying in all directions and she envied Filip his concentration on its path. She was grateful Greta had chosen to come back to the Orkneys with her when Aksel had been made one of Harald’s commanders in the mission to England. She was good company and the children were a blessed distraction and, besides, Greta had been with Elizaveta last time and last time Harald had returned – more omens!

  ‘That’s kind,’ she said to Maria.

  ‘It’s not as if I had anything else to do, save drive myself insane with imaginings.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Yes. Ingrid is happy in Thorfinn’s drying room, doing something strange with leaves. She’s made a drink to bring Josef’s fever down and is now concocting a potion to help soothe wounds but what’s the point in that? I would rather be with the warriors, Mama, fighting alongside Papa with my sword, than stuck here like a cripple.’

  ‘You love him very much, Maria.’

  ‘A
s do you.’

  Elizaveta looked at her.

  ‘I do. I have been lucky. And you – you are looking forward to your wedding?’

  Maria blushed.

  ‘I am. It feels, Mama, as if everything between us has been on hold for this invasion.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yes – everything!’ Maria said indignantly, adding, ‘Though not for want of Otto’s trying.’

  ‘Clearly I have brought you up well.’

  Maria smiled suddenly, releasing a cheeky dimple that made her look four years old all over again.

  ‘I’ve been tempted. I used to think Papa was the only man in the world worth marrying but Otto has changed that. He’s so handsome, Mama, and when he looks at me I, I . . .’

  ‘Melt?’

  ‘No! Goodness no, nothing so soft. I flame.’

  Elizaveta kissed her cheek.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with that, Maria. It is, indeed, a blessing – or it will be.’

  Maria rose and paced the inside of the broch, running her hands along the wall as if feeling for its heartbeat.

  ‘I was angry at him,’ she said eventually.

  ‘At Otto?’

  ‘Yes. I was angry that he agreed to postpone our wedding for England. He was all caught up in being Papa’s marshal and happy to do anything he said. I thought it was wrong to wait. I . . . I shouted at him.’

  Elizaveta went to her daughter.

  ‘Maria, sweetheart, I swear I have shouted at your father more times than I have broken my fast but he always comes back for more.’

  ‘Maybe, but did he ride to battle in between?’

  ‘You argued here?’

  ‘The night before they sailed, yes. He wanted us to, to . . .’

  ‘Know each other fully?’

  ‘Yes. And I said that had he not let Papa postpone the wedding we could have known each other for weeks. I said . . . I said that if I had to wait, he had to wait too.’

  ‘You said that?’ Elizaveta gasped.

  ‘Was I wrong?’

  ‘No! Oh Maria, no, it’s exactly what I said to your father in Kiev when he chose to sail back to Constantinople as a bachelor Varangian instead of with me to Norway.’