King Hereafter (138 page)

He did not stay on the main island, but went everywhere: to the north islands and the south islands that had once belonged to his brothers. To Westray, where Rognvald’s hall was his now. With Paul and Erlend, to Sanday to fish, coming alongside the peat-boats from Eday with their sticky black load, the
torfskeri
rammed in at all angles, like quills on a hedgehog. He stood on the red cliffs that were made like shelves in a book-tower, their green caps cut into fingers of turf, and watched the sea at their base, scribbled and scrawled over with white, and the gulls fleeting below, faster by far than the fishing-boats underneath them.

Because it was spring, everything was covered with flowers: the grassland, the machair, the salt-marshes, the cliffs, the dunes and the wetlands, the moors and the peat-bogs, the shingle and the bare, rocky outcrops, the banks of the streams and the lochs.

Groa knew the names of them all: blue and yellow, purple and white, high and low. He knew the banks of yellow flags, the sky reflected in their broad leaves, and the sharp, sweet pink of the thrift. He knew better the wisps of bog-cotton, or the fleshy star of the insect-eater with its bald violet flower that told you, when running, where not to step.

He liked to see what was practical. The number of foals and suckling calves. The women pacing on a still day through their corn-plots, the straw basket of bere-seed strapped to the neck like the Brecbennoch, and no less full of prayers. The sound of a sledge pulled over wet turf just after dawn as someone went to rake lichen. An open barn-door with, inside, the coils of
rope of grass and heather and straw that had made the winter storms pass more quickly. A good horse, Isleifr said, kept itself in tethers from its mane and its tail.

The timber houses, silver-brown, which had weathered the gale, and the bright chestnut brown of new wood where a fresh home had been built. The new roofs, of sealskin and turf, grass and earth, woven reeds. The herringbone peat-stacks, layered like the red cliffs or like the tooled stones of the burial-mounds. The smell of sweet milk and the sound of a churn. The quack of hazel-rods, splitting for withies. The beehive towers of the brochs, forty feet high and a thousand years old, and still kept in repair for the same reason that they had been built, for the sea that made Orkney safe in winter was the path that led to her doorway all summer.

At a ford, a crossroads, at the neck of a pass, you built a fort. But where the Romans had long gone, or had never been, the only road was the one where a keel could run. Whoever held Orkney had to hold Caithness as well. Hence all the wars of his forefathers. For, unless you held your road by both margins, you had no security.

Hence also, you could not keep Fife without expecting and planning to hold Angus as well. If you possessed Lothian, you must, for safety, try to plant your people in southern Fife, on the opposite shore. If you lived in Brittany, you looked across the Narrow Seas to Dorset and Devon and Cornwall, as Juhel was doing. If you owned Flanders or Normandy, you might think your need was greater still.

Always, peoples had fought until they owned both sides of the road, or both banks of the river. And gave themselves no respite until they did.

That night, Sulien said, ‘It is time that we talked.’

They were at Orphir, and all that day Thorkel Fóstri had been talking of crossing to the mountains of Hoy, where the falcons were.

They could catch falcons without him. Thorfinn left them on the shore next morning, arguing about who was going to row, and took Sulien, riding alone, north to Birsay.

They rode in silence, over the hill and into the
sta
ir
country, where soon, against a low swell of hill, the Ring of Brodgar showed pale.

One of the monoliths had dropped in the gale. The rest still stood, some fifteen feet high; some brown and stooped, and weathered like rotten silk. He chose to ride past them, between the two lochs that had only once frozen, in his experience, and a swan rose in a flurry and, neck and body undulating, flew slowly round in a white, loosened coil. ‘The swans of Urd?’ he said to Sulien.

The spring of Urd, which also nourished its swans, was the spring of Destiny, and to it each day came the Norns to draw water.
Ur
r, Ver
andi
, and
Skuld
. Past, Present, and Future.

‘Lulach is helpless,’ said Sulien. ‘Give him love. He doesn’t deserve anything else. If you shut your mind to everything that has been said, it cannot hurt you.’

‘You mean it cannot alter things,’ Thorfinn said. A white hare, that had
forgotten the end of winter had come, looked at them with polished eyes and fled over the brown heath that it knew was hiding it.

‘I mean I can’t talk when I am riding,’ Sulien said. ‘But it might occur to you that you have always assumed that you had the power to alter things, and you have always been proved right. No one is going to take that power from you, unless you run away from it yourself.’

It was a ride of three hours to his new hall at Birsay, for they stopped now and then, for one reason and another, although they talked of nothing that mattered when they did. Marriage, thought Thorfinn, suited Sulien. He did not speak of his wife, but there were four children growing up near the monastery: Rhygyfarch, Daniel, Jevan, and Arthgen. Love for them all warmed Sulien’s voice when he spoke of them, but of the first, most of all.

He was a famous teacher now, the boy who had defied his own teachers to spend five years in Alba before reaching his intended training in Ireland. A great scholar; a composer of Latin verse. A man who divided his time, it would seem, between St David’s and Llanbadarn and any other group of pupils who needed him, and for whom the ring of a bishop was something not to be sought, but to be avoided.

It was not hard, when you had been his first pupil, to see why.

They reached the bay opposite the Brough about midday and had something to eat and drink in his mainland hall, along with the manager of the farms and his family. Then, without waiting for the causeway to dry out, he and Sulien took boat across the short distance from the mainland shore to the long slipway that led up through the cliff-rocks to the settlement and his new hall and church.

Once, before the ocean broke through the neck of it, the island of Birsay had been the north horn of this wide bay where the new boats lay trim in their nousts. Like Deerness, it had been a place of safety sought by many peoples. There was a broch still on its far tip, and there had been a Christian church and a Christian cemetery where now stood his new church.

He took Sulien there when he had greeted those people he should, and visited the hall and the house used by the priest when he came there. Outside the church was a grave-marker from the old cemetery, with the spider-drawings you saw by Forres and Glamis, and the disdainful eagle, and three stalking figures in Assyrian robes with their square shields and their spears. If any Pope-Emperor had ordered the implantment of that little church, it was more likely to be the lord of Greekdom than the lord of Rome.

Thorfinn said, ‘We built in the same place, since it was holy. As you see, the church is small.’

There were only fifty-five feet of it, in squared stones, carefully mortared. A rectangular nave, and a narrow choir, with an apse on the east side. Since the gale, the tower had never been rebuilt. Inside, it was sweet and clean, with fresh rushes in the nave and the smell of new carpentering. A plain cloth lay on the stone altar, for the gold easily dulled in the sea-air, and the most precious things were in the hall or the priest’s house. But those necessary for the Mass were in their places, and within the altar, in the box made to fit it, the first
banner Thorfinn had brought back, blessed by the Pope and sanctified at the tomb of St Peter.

‘Bishop Jon dedicated the church for us,’ he said. ‘To Christ and St Peter. The flag lies with others, which we use when they, too, have become potent by contact. A wise precaution, as it turned out. I wonder what happened to the first one? Somewhere a wound has miraculously healed, or a nest is breaking from the weight of eggs in it, or a murderer in his shroud is being admitted to Paradise.’

There was a bench along one wall, with straw matting on it. Sulien sat down and crossed his strong, bare feet in their sandals while the brown wool of his robe fell to the rushes. Except that he was beardless and had no shield and spear, he could have passed for one of the three calm, fierce warriors on the gravestone outside. He said, ‘I was foolish, seven years ago. I should never have talked to you of my disappointment at Rheims.’

Thorfinn sat himself on the edge of the choir flagstones and leaned back on his hands. ‘It would have made no difference. Pope Leo wanted to make the church stronger and purer, but he knew as well as anybody that he had no power at all unless he helped the Emperor hold down Lombardy and the old duchies and his more boisterous neighbours. And to keep the papal office in being, never mind get rid of the Normans encroaching on it, he needed to get money in every way possible, and especially by pleasing his wealthiest relatives. Then, in turn, his family will supply advisors and lords of the church to the Empire, and Popes to Rome; and very good, too, if the Pope is of the quality of Leo and the Emperor is of the quality of Henry. But it can’t always be so.’

‘You don’t hear me quarrel with you,’ said Sulien. ‘Although you have done the same here. Three good bishops, chosen by a good king. But it can’t always be so.’

Thorfinn said, ‘I thought once that the Celtic church could mould itself to the new needs and let us keep the best of the old style of worship. So did Juhel of Dol, I know. But there is too much against it. Even in Ireland …’

‘Even in Ireland, the Celtic church is failing,’ Sulien took his words. ‘Because the abbot-families are war-like, and it suits the kings to make them their allies. Your great Duftah of Armagh himself has just fought a pitched battle over relics with the Coarb of Kells and St Finnian. You can’t look to Ireland for aid. Nor to the Culdees. They will save your soul, but they won’t help you to rule. And you need a church that will do both, as the Emperor does. Even if when you die, as when an Emperor dies, the church holds your people to ransom. Am I right?’

‘I wish,’ said Thorfinn, ‘there was another way. Isleifr is lucky in Iceland. The great priest-families merely send their sons abroad to be trained, and when they return with good alliances, the old ways go on barely modified.… No. I am not serious. We are a land of many and disparate peoples. Iceland is not. It will take longer, that’s all, to find our solution.’

Silence fell. The smell and the sound of the sea came through the little window behind him, and a drift of incense, very faintly, from the new altar.

Sulien said, ‘They say Holy Church always limits the time men stay when they come to the Pontiff, for before very long the marble wearies them, and the gold and the fountains, and they long for their cabins at home.’

Thorfinn said, ‘You are asking if I lean towards Rome for other reasons? I suppose that is what is wrong with Bishop Ealdred and Geoffrey of Coutances, with their dreams of gold-laden cathedrals. But if you went to Norway, I don’t think you’d find King Harald trying to re-create the splendours of Constantinople.’