King Hereafter (112 page)

He had put into words what they all knew. It released the voice of Osbern of Eu, his colour still high from the interview that had preceded this one. He said, ‘These fortresses can pin down a countryside, but they won’t stand against an army mustered for war.’

‘But an army mustered for war would overrun friend and enemy alike,’ Cormac of Atholl had said, ‘And Earl Siward has allies—hasn’t he?—to placate with land when this is all over, and rivals who would be better off settled in Lothian than snapping at his heels for a bigger share of Northumbria.’

‘I agree with you,’ Thorfinn had said. ‘To blacken Lothian would do him no service. He must attack Wedale, yes; and the Norman lands to the west and any fortresses near. But he’d be wise to leave the rest to be taken at leisure, and make positive use of his friends in the Lothians. Call them under his banner. Use them as signalmen between his army and any ships he has on the coast. Because if he’s going to take Lothian and settle it, he’s going to need all the friends he can get.’

Bishop Hrolf, hands on knees, was considering. ‘This man Siward: how can he hope to hold Lothian, so far from York and from Durham, with a strength such as yours massed to the north of him? He cannot, unless he destroys your strength first, or converts it into one friendly to him.’ He sat up. ‘I say he must either wreak his vengeance on Wedale and retreat, or he must go further and seek to destroy you and your whole power.’

‘Again, I agree,’ Thorfinn had said. ‘Where? Will he expect to find us massed against him at Melrose?’

‘Hardly,’ said Tuathal. ‘With disaffected Lothian behind you, and possibly sea-borne troops as well, by that time. But he might expect you to trust your estuary lands more than you should, and give him battle west of Dunedin, where he would have you between his ships and his army. Unless he knows more than we do about how soon your new longships are coming.’

‘I wonder,’ Thorfinn had said. ‘Can he rely on his fleet? He must know that I shall bring down some vessels from Orkney. He must know, at the very least, that a great many more are coming, through Svein, with men in them who are fighting for money. If he is unlucky, then there will be a battle at sea, and the best he can hope for is that none of our sea-borne army manages to make a landing. Consider, therefore. If you invade Alba through Wedale and, say, Tweeddale and you have no supporting ships, what do you do?’

No one answered, for there was no need to answer. Without ships, there was only one way to cross the river Forth to Fife and Strathearn: one key to the royal lands by Loch Leven; one way to strike north between the low hills to Forteviot and Perth and Scone; to strike upriver to Dunkeld, or across river to Angus, where lay Glamis and Forfar and Brechin. And that one way was the bridge and causeway at Stirling, the rock fortress on the river forty miles inland from Dunedin.

Then Cormac of Atholl had shifted in his place abruptly. ‘You would win a battle at the Forth crossing. But what if you are wrong? What if Siward has no interest in settling Lothian, but only in vengeance and money?’

Thorfinn had said, ‘To get to Dunkeld … to get to anywhere that matters, he would still have to sail up the Tay or march north by the Forth crossing. Our ships will have instructions. They will guard Taymouth as well as the Forth.’

‘Are there enough of them?’ said Bishop Jon.

‘No. But their seamanship is excellent, and they will have coastal signals to help them. The alternative is to divide our forces. I am not in favour.’

And they had accepted that, too, although to Groa it had been a questionable decision. By the time Siward’s army had reached the plains by the Forth, it would have marched a very long way, and suffered fighting, and would be drawn, in any case, only from those regions Siward was master of, for neither Wessex nor Mercia, it was sure, would waste men on extending Northumbria’s empire. And against this jaded, depleted army would be the whole resources of Thorfinn’s kingdom, from Moray south to the Forth, fresh and waiting. It was a small risk, surely, to deploy some of them, as an insurance, to Perth.

But that, after all, was the only discussion at which she had been present, and many conclusions, clearly, had been come to since then. Among them, and the reason for Thorfinn’s presence in the south-east, was the resolve to clear Lothian. When and if Siward of Northumbria and his army made their way to Wedale, they would find there neither Normans nor loyal families on which to expend the grief and fury of loss.

They were tired, then, these men sitting here in her chamber; tired enough, like Bishop Jon, to fall asleep. But to stretch himself to the limit should be the pride and destiny of every man, and she shared, in that part of her being that was not maternal, Paul’s disappointment at being excluded from such a brotherhood.

Whereas Lulach had come, and had not been welcome.

He knew it, she thought, the moment he entered the room and sought his
stepfather’s face, although he greeted Thorfinn, clearly, with light affection as he always did, and Thorfinn, distanced now from the moment’s irritation, showed no desire to hector him.

After satisfying herself to that end, she rose presently to give them a chance to be together, and to allow Bishop Jon to awaken without embarrassment. The toisechs’ and mormaers’ wives and daughters and sisters who always moved with the court would be waiting, and eager for news. It occurred to her, not for the first time, what a large part of her life was spent among women, now that the kingdom had changed. It had many advantages. She liked being with women she was fond of. But not perhaps quite so often.

She did not observe Eochaid, therefore, as he sat quietly watching the King with his stepson, or hear Lulach say, smiling, ‘You would like to shoot an apple from my head, like Palnatoke, and perhaps miss. It is natural. If Paul or Erlend or I were to die at Siward’s hand, you would feel as he does. Yet Siward, too, must have looked at his son Osbern sometimes and seen nothing but another man to sit in his chair.’

There was a pause, as if Eochaid’s presence had made itself felt, and the impending arrival of Morgund. Bishop Jon breathed gently, the stylus in his scrolled fingers voyaging up and down on the buoy of his abdomen. Thorfinn said, ‘I think I can look my successor in the face, provided I have even the illusion of free will. Whatever happens, you are not to blame.’

‘Yet you kept the rod,’ Lulach said. ‘The bough with leaves I once sent you. It came from Birnam.’

‘I kept it,’ said Thorfinn, ‘for a
hlauttvein
. A blood-twig to sprinkle and hallow with, after the sacrifice. I thought that was why you sent it.’

‘And you thought of it again when
Grágás
was lost,’ Lulach said. ‘It was a storm like that, wasn’t it, that sent down the
Bison
?’ And, smiling, he quoted softly:

Bishop Jon yawned. ‘The
Bison
?’ he said. ‘Thangbrand’s ship. Thangbrand, Willibald’s son. As bloody-minded a missionary as any I ever heard of, and if his ship went down, it was because God and the Aesir were pushing together.’

He opened one eye on Eochaid. ‘It’s his pleasure,’ he said, ‘that figure of mischief over there, to blow any piece of rubbish out of his mouth and challenge me to return it. Have you caught me out yet? Young Lulach?’

‘Bishop Jon,’ said Lulach, with laughter in his wide eyes. ‘When you are
awake, no one can catch you. Come and see me off. I am going back to Moray before the excitement begins.’

He could not have known. But he had barely been gone for an hour when there came the signal that Thorfinn had been waiting for.

He did what had to be done, and then went to find Groa.

‘Pack,’ he said. ‘And leave in the morning. Siward has called in his levies and has begun to march north.’

In the mouth of war, the names of honour, for three long days, were those of the signalmen.

Pinnacled above an empty land into which, hour by hour, a torrent of steel was being inducted, they sent the tidings from Soutra and Pentland, from the hills south of Traquair and east of Penteiacob to where Thorfinn waited with his army.

The Earl Siward and his Northumbrian army have crossed the river Tweed
.

They have moved through the moors, burning all they can find, and are spreading north and west through all the passes, leaving no living object behind them
.

They are between the hills and the Forth and are sparing nothing in Lothian, from the east coast to Dunedin. They are making no haste, and suffering no losses that matter
.

But for its refugees, Lothian and its southlands are dead
.

Cormac of Atholl said, ‘We were wrong. We thought he would court Lothian. We thought he would pass straight through Wedale to the north.’

‘I was wrong,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Outside the churches of St Cuthbert, he is allowing his men to ravage and rob where they wish, and at leisure. He has five thousand men, no more than we have, and Malcolm is not with him.’

‘Who is with him?’ said Cormac. ‘Has anyone caught sight of banners?’

‘Most of those who love us best,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Ligulf of Bamburgh, with the Bernician strength. Siward’s nephew of the same name, whom we met at Melrose. York and Durham, perhaps even in the persons of Aethelric and Cynsige, with the armed power of the church. My brother’s nephews Gospatrick and the second Maldred. Our friend Forne, who married my stepfather’s daughter, with Wulfgeat. Brand of Peterborough, and Leofnoth and Ulfcetel, since someone has to look after the army’s treasure-box. And, last but not least, my cousin Bishop Malduin of Kinrimund with, no doubt, his stepson Colban. Kineth of Angus, it is said, was seen with them.’

‘I dare say,’ Cormac said. ‘Good for troops to see men changing sides before battle. After it, if he’s any sense, Siward will execute the whole brood, including your cousin the Bishop, begging your pardon. So they are all there, kicking our teeth in. Is that all they are going to do?’

The summer breeze blew in his face. Waiting for the King to speak, he could hear the gust claw through the heather behind him and set the flowering whin, silk and tinsel, rubbing together, bough against bough.

It was because the moment of decision was approaching that they were up here on the hill of Dumyat, six miles from Thorfinn’s muster-point at
Dunblane, and half that from the crag on the Forth beside which, on one side or another, Thorfinn would take his stand against any Northumbrian advance out of Lothian.

Below them, from right to left, the river Forth ran to the sea: a silver inlay of zig-zags in a great plain chequered with corn and green mosses and the harsh buff and sliced resilient brown of peat-beds. Beyond the river, the plain married into wandering uplands where the low Lennox hills banded the horizon, a ridge thrusting eastwards above forest and hamlet to merge with the west Lothian hills and the Pentlands, and to end far to the left, where sea and sky met, with the crag, small and clear, of Dunedin.

Today there were no boats and no fishing-nets in the river. The cabins of wattle and clay, of timber, of turf packed with stone, showed no smoke from the woven-reed thatches, neat as favours for children, that mushroomed everywhere on high ground, and on the slopes of the rock-citadel opposite. No mill-oxen dragged by: no cattle stood in the marshes or sheep, lately shorn, walked with their lambs on the hills.

Sound had vanished as well: of the blows of a wood-axe and the shout of a drover, of children calling and the crow of a cock; the beast-sounds from the byres and the fields; the groan and clank of a winch at a well; the clack of loom-shuttles and women’s voices chattering over them; the brazen voice of a meat-cauldron being scoured and the squelch and fizz of cloth being pounded at the washing-stones in the side streams.

The women and children and old people had gone. The men fit for fighting were moving down there, in thick leather jackets and helmets, with their spears and hunting-axes, their clubs and their knives and their bows, with satchels packed by their wives with barley-bread and some lard, a goatsmilk cheese and a bit of dried fish and mutton, with a few onions, fresh-dug, for savour.

Their toisech would greet them, in his cone helmet with its metal noseguard and his tunic of ring-mail over leather, and would lead them to the wing of the army commanded by my lord Ferteth, their Mormaer, and my lord Gillecrist, the Mormaer for Lennox and Strathclyde. And there they would greet the men that they knew, and collect what news they could, and visit the cess-pits more often than they would like to admit, while turning all the time to look up here, where the King their leader was deciding what was going to save them from the army of Northumbria.

At least once in their lives, most of these men would have met Thorfinn: more perhaps than had come face to face with King Duncan in the six years of his reign and before, when he had been prince of Cumbria in the shadow of Malcolm his grandfather.

The men who had marched north with Duncan to dispose of his dangerous half-brother at Tarbatness had mostly died in that battle. The young men who had grown to manhood in the past fourteen years had had no experience of war, and little of fighting, other than the kind that might break out between neighbours, or the kind they saw during their service at court, when a raid on coast or frontier had to be repelled, or the King’s justice enforced.

Whereas Siward, as a direct vassal of England, had appeared on every battlefield with his Northumbrian levies and knew their strength, as they knew each other’s.

But it took more, surely, than fourteen years of moderate peace to erase the fighting instinct that had served a race through two hundred years and more of Viking attacks, through the civil onslaughts that led to the fusion of Pict and Scot, of Scandinavian and Gael; the wars of royal cousin against royal cousin as the descendants of Kenneth MacAlpin fought for the throne.