King Hereafter (29 page)

‘You didn’t tell me,’ she said. ‘About Lulach.’

‘It was a surprise,’ said the Earl. His face was impassive as ever, but his eyes seemed to have become a shade lighter. He said, ‘It all depended on how Duncan felt.’

‘And you didn’t do homage for Caithness,’ Groa said. ‘Was that a surprise, too?’

‘It was, to Duncan,’ said Earl Thorfinn.

With difficulty, she weathered a reverent silence, then burst into whispers once more. ‘Then why didn’t he demand Caithness tribute? What made you think he’d grant favours?’

‘Because he’s just had some news and doesn’t know what to do about it,’
the Earl said. ‘And my hope is that by the time he’s made up his mind we’ll be on shipboard.’

‘News?’ said Groa.

‘Sad news. Remember all those Norse-Irish colonies I cleared out of the south-west for him? Perhaps you don’t, but I did.’

‘More fool you,’ said Groa boldly.

‘That’s Thorkel’s favourite comment. You must judge by results.’

‘They came back?’

‘They couldn’t come back. They were dead. No. It’s worse than that. A different lot of Irish-Norse have moved in and occupied all their lands.’

‘So he wants you to clear them out all over again? I don’t think you should,’ Groa said.

‘I don’t think I should either,’ said the Earl. ‘In fact, I don’t think even Duncan expects me to.’

At last, she became suspicious. ‘Why? Wait a moment. Who are the new Irish-Norse? Who is their leader?’

‘Eachmarcach,’ said her husband simply. ‘He’s just used all Duncan’s good bases to make himself King of Dublin.’

There was a long, long silence, during which twenty people offered to be liegemen to King Duncan and Groa heard none of them. At the end—

‘You are clever, aren’t you?’ she said flatly.

‘I married you. Otherwise—yes, I am certainly clever,’ said Earl Thorfinn agreeably. ‘It comes from living in Orkney. You will see when you get there.’

HAT SPRING
, Kalv Arnason and the bonder of Trøndelagen sailed from Ladoga to Sweden as soon as the ice broke and by summer had crossed Kolan to Vaerdalen and Nídarós, accompanied by the late King Olaf’s eleven-year-old bastard son Magnús. There, on the Eyrar of the river Nid, the bonder proclaimed Magnús the new King of Norway, and Magnús in turn declared an amnesty to all those concerned in his father’s slaying of five years before.

It was further decreed that Kalv Arnason was to be regent during King Magnús’s minority.

It was not proclaimed, because everyone noticed in any case, that wherever the boy-King Magnús might go, he was accompanied by his beautiful foster-brother: Rognvald son of Brusi the late Earl of Orkney.

The news came to Orkney with a trading-vessel and was brought by Thorkel Fóstri to Thorfinn, who did not swear this time even in Norse, but merely said, ‘So it seems, brave Kalv, that King Canute is not expected to live.’

He thought. ‘I seem to remember that Rognvald was once betrothed to my wife. Break the news gently to her, my foster-father—she may not be pleased to learn that she has married the wrong man.’

‘And is that all you have to say?’ Thorkel said. He knew now that he was not being told everything. It did not help to know that no one was in a better position. Since they came to Orkney, Thorfinn had taken no trouble to conceal the fact that he and his wife slept within separate partitions. ‘Perhaps you have married the wrong wife,’ Thorkel said.

‘What are you saying?’ Thorfinn said. ‘Her uncle is regent of Norway, and her mother’s cousin is King. By the way, I am taking eight ships to Dublin, not five. With all that going on, no one is likely to disturb us this summer except perhaps young Svein, looking for help or new subjects now that Magnús has deposed him. If he does, throw him out. Emma will like it.’

In the event, it was Thorfinn himself who came back from Ireland in time to sail south and show Duncan, in the throes of a minor invasion, how to dissuade Canute’s oldest son from the idea of landing in Fife on the east coast of Alba. There were enough men at his rear to make sure that, while facing
Svein’s spears in the front, the spears of his brother Duncan might not find their way through the back of his jacket, which had not been charmed by a Lapp. The well-known fact that he now held large parts of Strathclyde and Galloway in joint possession with Eachmarcach of Dublin and had just come back from establishing his interests in the Viking city of Dublin itself was not referred to by anybody.

By dint of collecting silver instead of heads from all the richer Danes he encountered, he returned to Orkney that autumn with a satisfied hird and a good deal left over to add to the shiploads he had already brought back from Dublin.

In November, King Canute died in Shaftesbury at a time that pleased everybody, since no one could go to war, and everyone could take time to sharpen their weapons and make allies and think what to do when the spring came.

It was the most interesting winter there had been for years.

Thore Hund, storm-stayed on his way back to Norway after his summer fur-voyage, remained part of the winter in Orkney with the Earl and his wife at their various halls.

He found a dozen others like himself, hemmed in by the gales and the currents and content to spend Yule as the guests of Earl Thorfinn, whose hearth and whose tables were always well plenished from the winter feast until spring-time, and whose generosity to the men who served him in Orkney and Caithness and to the stranger benighted at his door was already well known.

What the Earl gleaned from it all, in trade and news and future alliances, Thore Hund also began to recognise, as the feasting gave way to the talk, and the talk, sometimes when he was still there, to the planning. To Thorfinn’s famous wife Groa, whose uncle Kalv had wed Thore’s own sister, Thore Hund said, ‘I am not sure where I have not seen something to match this before, unless it were a geyser, that time I was trading to Iceland. I am not a man who often feels tired, but Thorfinn makes me feel tired.’

‘You have had a hard summer,’ Groa said. They were at Orphir at the time. Because, in their fecundity, the Earls of Orkney had had so often to divide Orkney among numbers of sons, the islands were plenished in every quarter with Earls’ halls, all commodious and built of good timber from Norway. And because the pasture was rich enough, except where the flagstones lay underground, the landed men, the
gae
ingar
of Orkney, were able to pay their Earl’s winter tribute in food and malt from each ounceland which from quarter to quarter would keep the Earl and his
hir
ma
r
and his guests until the seas opened again in the spring-time. And if there appeared a shortage of anything, a boat or two sent on a calm day to Caithness would replenish the storehouse.

Since the Moot Hill enthronement, Groa had come to know Caithness as well as her husband’s mysterious Orkney. Until then, she had seen it twice. Once, as a pregnant, mutinous child in a brief landing at Duncansby. And once, three years after that, when Gillacomghain had dragged her north to
share in the war which was to place his nephew in Caithness, aided by that treacherous fleet from the south under Carl, son of Thorbrand of York. The strange little war that changed her life.

The burned hall at Thurso had been rebuilt. In the event, Thorfinn had not taken her there, but to a new hall set on the heights overlooking the wide sweep of sands on the other side of the river. She had also stayed briefly at Duncansby, at Freswick, and at Canisbay, where stood the most recent hall-house of all, on the high ground which looked down to the little thatched church of St Drostan’s and the strand which ran along to the jetty at Huna. Two miles offshore lay the long green flank of the island of Stroma, with its snout pointing eastwards into the eddies.

The white shell-sand and the yellow sand of the rocks, the great broken headlands of sunlit red stacks circled with seabirds brought back, like the tide surging into a geo, the memory of all she had lost when she lost Austråt; and in the red cliffs and green turf of Orkney, she came face to face with her childhood itself. To her husband’s young church-friend Sulien, when for the third night she had barred herself, weeping, into her box-bed, she had said through the door, ‘It is nothing. I have come home, and among enemies.’

But she was not among enemies, because when, the next day, shame drove her to dress and to show herself, neither Skeggi nor Thorkel nor Starkad nor Arnór nor any of the argumentative host of her husband’s immediate circle made any comment, nor, when she met them, did their women. Sulien, even-tempered as ever, was kind as she knew he would be, and made no overtures. Earl Thorfinn, who had been away fighting, they said, brought back with him the same unmoving face and the disrespectful, impersonal tongue that made her hackles rise and drove her to untangle her wits and put them to use quickly once more.

Lulach, under the tutelage of Sulien, and of the big Abbot Dubhdaleithe of Deer, was growing, she saw from time to time, like a wand. The infant, in the women’s hall with his nurses, was fat and happy.

She was not among enemies: she had learned that, and she must not forget it. On the contrary. She was among people who did not hate their property, but conserved it and took care that no harm should befall it. She could hope to finish her days in peace and even in some sort of contentment, could she learn to think like a piece of good grazing-ground.

Even if you have nothing else, you have a partnership
. What idiot had propounded that? The Mercian woman whom Earl Thorfinn admired. To whom, evidently, it was all too plain that there was nothing else in this marriage. And she had been wrong, at that. Nine months before that, there had been several intervals of four minutes each which might count, legally, as evidence of a union. Since then, there had been none.

From the time Sigurd was two months of age, she had prepared, silently, for the expected accosting; and none had come. Her husband had brought her to Caithness and then had vanished to Ireland, and from Ireland down to Alba, where he had stayed, or been kept, until autumn.

Thorkel Fóstri had brought her in his absence to Orkney and had been the
first to introduce her to her husband’s own lands. If, when Earl Thorfinn came back, he was told anything of her three-day retiral, she had no means of knowing. Only, after the feasting on the first evening of his return, he did not even spend the night in the same hall, never mind lift the latch of her partition. And it was the same the following night, and the next.