King Hereafter (117 page)

The King waited a moment and then turned back, his bishops following. Earl Siward made a joke that was barely repeatable, even when changed into Anglo-Saxon, and pushed past Bishop Malduin into the forest, laughing and biting into his pork. It would be entertaining to see what the fellow would try to do next. It would teach him. It would teach him to strut about Lothian and Cumbria, treating Siward like some English underling.

He needed a lesson for that. For the death of Osbern his son, he needed another lesson, which he would receive also.

The next hour was, of course, highly unpleasant. Although there was no question of rising to it, the means of provocation were ingenious. Shield-hung hurdles were brought out into the field, and bowmen and slingshot-throwers behind them began to shred the trees with a descending curtain of missiles. He had to put archers and javelin-throwers of his own up all the climbable trees before he had them on the run, and lost a dozen men to no purpose.

The heat and the gnats were the next burden. As the sun rose into clear skies and burned down on the plain of the Forth, you would say the exposed army opposite would have the worst of it, despite their shields and their awnings.

But there in the open air they escaped the shimmering body of heat from the blaze on the other side of the highway. And since the wind changed, the smoke, once so unwelcome, had drifted north-east; and the armed hosts native to the wood had arrived in their thousands to attack the armed host that was not.

The army became restive. The army wanted to get out of the trees. The army wanted to slake its thirst and, rightly, was not prepared to believe their Earl when he quoted the number of ale-casks destroyed in the fire. A group of men who had come with Leofnoth found a broached cask and began to drag it out of the rear of the wood, and Siward had three of them hanged. He noticed that someone had moved the few horses they had managed to round up, and sent two men to find out where they had been taken. A shout from the front of the wood called him back to the edge of the field, where men were watching a group of the enemy busy with spades on the high ground to his left, near the wood where they stationed the Normans. Supervising the diggers was a large
man he recognised as the Irish-Scandinavian bishop from Saxony whose name be believed to be Hrolf.

Forne said, ‘They’re diverting the stream to come through the wood.’

‘Then shake your fist at them,’ said Earl Siward, slapping his neck. ‘For, by God, they don’t know it, but they couldn’t do us a better service. I’d send out and help them if it wouldn’t spoil everything.’

It was only a little after that, and before the damming had got very much further, that Ligulf said, ‘Siward?’

The Earl of Northumbria objected to the way Ligulf addressed him. He said, ‘Well?’

‘Send a man up to look at that part of the army,’ Ligulf said, ‘Is it as thick on the ground as it was?’

His best climber was standing by. Earl Siward snapped his fingers, and the man darted off. Siward said, ‘Where? I see. They’ve shifted them.’

‘Where to?’ said Ligulf. ‘Look along the line.’

‘It looks the same to me,’ Siward said. The banners are all there.’

‘They would be,’ said Ligulf. ‘Here’s your man.’

‘Well?’ said Siward.
Could Thorfinn be tricking us? Could Thorfinn be a Norseman?

‘My lord Earl,’ said the climber. His chest was heaving. ‘The men on the right wing and the men on the left have lost half the ranks behind them, although they’re spread out and from the front it looks just the same. My lord, fifteen hundred men must have gone.’

‘
What?
’ said Siward of Northumbria.

‘What a pity,’ said Ligulf his brother-in-law. ‘And we have wasted all this time resisting provocation, which was just what they wanted. But now, my dear Siward, I think the time has come to be provoked.’

‘God blind him!’ Siward said, ‘Is Thorfinn still there?’

‘Yes, my lord. I could see his helmet,’ said the scout.

Fifteen hundred men on their way to the Tay. No, two thousand altogether, including the horsemen who had already left. But fifteen hundred whom he had time to catch, provided he finished this business quickly. Against him, after all, was a force now only two-thirds of his in size, and lacking the Normans.

He said, ‘Prepare the men to give battle. To form up as before, but this time quietly. This time we shall surprise them. This time, they will not dream that we are coming until they hear the trumpet and see us marching upon them. In half an hour we shall be riding north, victors.’

In the event, however, the victorious half-hour expired and Siward of Northumbria was not even aware of it. For the army of Alba, it seemed, was not at all unprepared for the sudden emergence of the enemy from the wood and only waited politely, as before, for the troublesome stream to be crossed, together with a number of novel earthworks of Bishop Hrolf’s devising, before throwing itself in neat but different formation against Siward’s lines.

In the van, as before, flashed the white-and-gold helmet of Thorfinn, towards which Siward spent all his great strength in fighting. It was with
anger and astonishment, therefore, that he found, confronting that royal figure at last, that the face under the helmet was the minatory one of Bishop Hrolf.

He would have had no hesitation in sending the Bishop back to Saxony by celestial transport, save that at that moment the Normans emerged again from the wood.

He had seen them leave with his own eyes. Ligulf had seen them, too. It was all Ligulf’s fault.

The half-hour went by, but neither army, killing and being killed, was aware of it.

Under the same sun, Thorfinn of Orkney and Alba had crossed the river and was riding north with a handful of men and a fresh horse collected, with all else he required, at Dunblane. He led them round the range of the Ochils and swept through the strath down which the river Allan poured on its way to the Forth far behind him. In due course, he would meet with the Earn, flowing north and east in the opposite direction to add its waters to those of the Tay eight miles east of Scone.

Also behind him were fifteen hundred of his own men on foot, with Bishop Jon leading them.

Ahead, it was easy to see where Eochaid and the five hundred horsemen had already passed, leaving churned earth and dung on either side of the cart-wide stones of the road. All the steadings the King went by were empty, although hearth-fires still burned; and there was no one at the little monastery of Dunning. Eochaid would have taken the monks with him for safety, and those of Muthill as well. Or perhaps they had gone with their people to comfort them.

Then, just short of his hall at Forteviot, the King came across the first group of injured. Not men-at-arms, but a lad of eleven and another not much older, supporting an elderly man. He stopped.

They recognised him, or perhaps the gold band round his helmet. The man sank to his knees, but the boys were too excited to care. A group of thirty horsemen had come against Forteviot from the east an hour before, and had tried to set fire to it with burning arrows, and strike down the defenders with slingshot and spears. They were getting the best of it, too, for there were only serving-people left and a few armed men, since the rest went off north with the courier. But then my lord Prior of Scone had appeared like a miracle, with a great army behind him, and had killed every horseman. You could see them for yourself, past the next bit of wood. And they had been asked if they wanted to stay in the fort, since more soldiers had now been put into it, but they thought, since they couldn’t fight, they would rather go and hide with their people.

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.