King Hereafter (3 page)

The soft-focussed eyes considered his. ‘Not really,’ said Finn at length. ‘No, that is not hard to guess. I only wondered if you were thinking that you had picked the wrong child to foster.’

Gulls squealed over the masthead. Near at hand, against the creak of wood and the rush of the sea there sounded the rap of thrown dice, and men’s voices, and the harsh bellows-breath of the sleepers. Thorkel said, ‘What other child is there?’ But he knew. Of the boy’s four older brothers, only one had had a son.

‘Why,’ Finn said, ‘Rognvald, Earl Brusi’s son. Ten years old and so pretty he could have fifty mothers to take the place of his own. He’s here with his father. You know that Earl Brusi’s in Nídarós?’

The youth Arnór Thordarson the song-maker halted beside them with a fan of hot smoking mutton on skewers, and Thorkel took one politely, as if the interruption were of no consequence. Thorkel said, ‘You’ve seen Earl Brusi, then?’ He bared his teeth for a bite.

‘And spoken to him,’ said Finn, watching him chew. ‘He’d just had a talk with the King. Don’t you want to know why Earl Brusi is here? You killed his brother. Or arranged for it.’

Thorkel gave his close attention to the meat. ‘If you know why Earl Brusi is here, then I suppose you are going to tell me.’

Finn said, ‘He isn’t here because of the murder. He’s here to complain to the King about your foster-son. Your foster-son Thorfinn, his little half-brother, who has promised him no peace, it seems, unless Brusi hands him half of Orkney.’

Despite himself, Thorkel’s face grew red round his smile. As if he meant it, he said, ‘It seems fair. Thorfinn and Brusi are the only two brothers left.’

Finn said, ‘Brusi is a grown man with a son to look after, and Thorfinn is a child by a different mother. Earl Brusi claims both his own third of Orkney and the third willed him by the brother you killed. King Olaf agrees.’

‘Does he?’ said Thorkel.
Thorfinn
, his mind said.
Thorfinn, the stupid, half-grown, cocksure little fool
.

‘Yes. The King promised, if need be, to support Brusi’s cause with an army,’ said his cousin Finn mildly. ‘At a price, certainly. King Olaf doesn’t give something for nothing.’

‘Whatever the King wanted, I’m sure Brusi would give it him,’ Thorkel remarked. The ship kicked to the current, and he flung the half-eaten mutton away.

‘The King wanted sovereign rights,’ said Finn, ‘over all Brusi’s Orkney inheritance. Overlordship of two-thirds of Orkney. Of course, Brusi agreed.’

‘Kneeling?’ said Thorkel. He laughed.

‘Kneeling, naturally. That is why,’ said Finn his cousin, ‘I wondered if you hadn’t picked the wrong princeling to foster.’

Successfully, Thorkel laughed again. ‘You think I might have found the dainty young Rognvald more promising? But I should have had to kill his father Brusi first, shouldn’t I? And what would be the use, with his land under King Olaf now anyway?’

Stupid, half-grown, cocksure little fool
. Long after the conversation had ended, the oars beat the words through Thorkel’s head. He hardly noticed the change in the stroke as the fleet came within sight of Nídarós, or the bustle about him, or the high, gilded profile of
Charlemagne
, berthed where the King had disembarked half a day earlier.

The first time Thorkel came from his thoughts, it was to find the boat docked and on the jetty an illusion; a nightmare; a grotesque and familiar figure he had believed to be safely at home, five hundred miles west of Nídarós.

Not the complaining Earl Brusi. Not the lovely young Rognvald his son. But a scowling juvenile, thin as a half-knotted thong, with a monstrous brow topped by a whisk of black hair over two watering eyes, thick as acorns.

It raised one arm and called. Its voice had not even started to break.

‘Thorfinn,’ said Thorkel, and the word itself was a groan. Here in Norway, here in Nídarós, here on King Olaf’s jetty was the child-Earl of Caithness and Orkney. His foster-son.

Deliberately, Thorkel Amundason stepped ashore. Deliberately, he stalked towards the belligerent brat on whom for seven long years his hopes had been centred, and stopped before him. He said, ‘Thorfinn Sigurdarson: if you have put a foot wrong, I will take you into a close-house and thrash you over the stool.’

He did not remember, just then, that Finn his cousin was behind him. He was concerned only, as so often before, to search the boy’s face, looking in vain for what was his due in the unyielding, bellicose features, the half-grown nose, the wired lips, the challenging stare. The boy said, piping, ‘Thorkel Amundason: I am nearly thirteen years old and of full age, and you are my servant. Who gave you leave to kill men in Maere for Norway?’

‘My cousins,’ said Thorkel. He took the boy’s arm and turned him,
walking, in the direction of the house he had been given. The boy shook himself free. ‘I didn’t notice,’ added Thorkel, ‘that you objected when Earl Einar’s head rolled into the fire.’

‘You mean you could have sewn it back on again?’ the treble voice said. ‘You did well there. Einar’s share of the land went to Brusi, and Brusi ran squalling to Norway as soon as I complained. You wouldn’t know. You weren’t there. You ran off to Norway as well.’

‘I thought you could wipe your own nose,’ Thorkel said. ‘I was wrong. You stupid fool: of course Earl Brusi ran to Norway if you threatened him. I told you to sit still for once and do nothing.
Nothing!
’

The steep, cobbled path between the wood-and-thatch houses was filling with yelling people and handcarts as the ships were unloaded. As the boy did not answer at once, Thorkel pushed him into a space between two wattled walls and said, ‘So how did you threaten him? As if I couldn’t guess.’ Behind him, he was bitterly aware, Finn was lingering helpfully.

‘I told him you’d come and pick holes in his wall-hangings,’ the boy said in a mutter. He was tall for his age, the women kept saying, but put together in a ramshackle way that gave him no physical presence. In the draught between walls, his eyes were thinly watering once again.

Thorkel said, ‘You told them you’d send your grandfather’s army. You told them to hand over half Orkney or King Malcolm of Alba would attack. Didn’t you?’ Despite his level voice, he was breathing hard, and the boy’s eyes flickered once and then stared back stonily.

‘I haven’t time to bother with that,’ his foster-son said. ‘If you think yourself my advisor, then say something intelligent. I’ve just come from King Olaf. He says if I don’t give him overlordship of my share of Orkney, he will take it and put an Earl of his own to rule under him.’

It had become very quiet. ‘… And?’ said Thorkel.

‘And I said, of course, that I couldn’t do him homage, as I was already an Earl of the King of Alba my grandfather, and his vassal.’

‘And he said,
of course
, that such only applied to the Caithness lands you hold through your mother, and that the King of Alba had nothing to do with Orkney, which was by rights a Norwegian colony?’

‘Yes,’ said the boy.

‘And then you told him to keep his hands off your bit of Orkney or the King of Alba would attack?’ The yapping voice was easy to mimic. Any other boy would have been shamed.

‘I said,’ said the boy, ‘that, being only young, I should like to go home and consult my counsellors before I gave him my answer. He said I couldn’t go home, but he’d give me an hour to think it over. The hour is almost up.’

Thorkel said, ‘What did you need an hour for? Your brother Earl Brusi became vassal for his share of Orkney right away.’

The boy’s mouth opened. He said, ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Don’t believe it?’ said Thorkel. ‘What else could be the outcome when you sent brother Brusi scuttling to Norway with the whole of Alba seemingly
threatening his tail? He needed help, and King Olaf saw that he would pay the right price for it.’

The boy said, ‘He can’t use that weapon with me.’

‘My God. My God,’ Thorkel said piously. ‘He doesn’t have to, does he? He’s got
you
. Brusi runs crying to Norway, and you run screaming after. All you’ve both done is make Olaf a present of Orkney while you two or some other friend of his runs it for him. Your royal grandfather won’t attack Olaf. He won’t attack him even if you never come back from Norway. He has another grandson with much more convenient attachments. And who in all Alba or Ireland or Cumbria would he find to set sail and battle for you?’

‘I notice,’ said the boy, ‘that men will kill for money. Or power.’

‘Well, your grandfather has little of either to spare,’ Thorkel said. ‘And now you have none either. Go back and promise anything King Olaf may ask. That way you’ll leave here alive. Then go home and tell your mother’s new spouse how his great plan succeeded. It was all Findlaech’s idea, I take it?’

‘No. It was mine,’ the boy said. ‘If I start taking other teachers, I will tell you so.’

That afternoon, the trumpets were blown for King Olaf, and men came to hear what news the King had, and to learn the terms of the settlement between the two Orkney Earls, Thorfinn and Brusi.

It was raining, and the mist had come down almost to man-height, so that most of the folk standing on the cobbled stretch in front of the king-house had their hoods over their ears, except when the intimations seemed to be veering towards trading-rights or harbour dues, in which case they were hooked smartly sideways.

The King and Queen Astrid were dry, being seated under a canopy in front of their hall, its carved timber and gilding glinting under the eaves and the wet, brooding row of royal pennants.

On one side of the royal couple sat Earl Brusi of Orkney, a mild man whose round, sulky face still reflected a recent exchange with Thorkel Amundason. His tunic and cloak, decently rich, echoed the clothes of his ten-year-old son Rognvald. In no other way did Rognvald resemble his father, being straight-backed and milky of skin, with lustrous blue eyes and yellow hair, satin-flat as if sheened by a glass-smoother.

Thorfinn, the twelve-year-old Earl, had a red cloak with a gold brooch like a dish on it, above which his neck appeared like a wick. Beneath the towering forehead, he possessed no other feature as significant as the short, charcoal line of his eyebrows.

The King rose and, using his sea-going voice, disposed briefly of welcome and courtesies and launched into the terms of the pact by which the brothers Brusi and Thorfinn, joint Earls of Orkney, had delivered Orkney into his, King Olaf’s, hands and had pledged themselves to be his, King Olaf’s, vassals. By which right, said King Olaf, he was pleased to announce the allotment of Orkney each could expect from him.

To Brusi, one-third of the islands. To Thorfinn, another third, just as he had
had before. And the third share, that of their dead brother Einar, he, King Olaf, now took in his keeping, to dispense in due course at his pleasure.

Beneath the canopy, Earl Brusi’s mouth opened. That had not been in the bargain. Standing among the bonder, Kalv Arnason grinned, his arm round his new wife’s neck, more to keep her from walking away than from any budding affection. Beside him, his brother Finn, with a child at each hand, peered at the king-house, for it seemed to him that under the thatch-drips the black-browed Thorfinn, the boy-Earl, was laughing.

However, when presently the younger Earl rose to follow his brother and kneel and promise homage to Norway, even Finn could see that the boy was not laughing at all, and that the look he exchanged with Thorkel, his handsome protector, was filled with venom.

Then the King called out Thorkel himself, as avowed slayer of Einar of Orkney, and decreed the amount he must pay to the two Earls to compensate for the loss of their brother. No sentence of outlawry was imposed on him.

So honour was satisfied, and so was King Olaf of Norway. Like Olaf Tryggvasson, he had laid the Orkneys under Norway again. The green, fertile islands with their mild climate and clever, boat-building peoples, with the rich, bounding blood of the Picts and the Irish, the Norse and the Danes and the Icelanders, to nourish their life-stream. Orkney, with its hundred small beaches and harbours: the crossroads where every merchant-ship rested, where every tax-boat and warship and supply vessel ran for shelter in the wild, open seaway between Norway and the Viking cities of Ireland; between Norway and her colonies in the western isles, the ports of Wales and the markets of western England, the wine road to Bordeaux and the Loire, the pilgrim road and the fighting road down to Spain and Jerusalem.

Everyone had to pass by the islands of Orkney. And only seven little miles separated Orkney from Caithness and the north part of Alba.

‘So you see what you have thrown away,’ Thorkel Amundason snapped at his foster-son later, in the cold, empty room of his guest-quarters.

Down at the jetty, the half-decks were already in place on the vessel taking them home, and all Thorkel’s six months’ of impedimenta were being thrown aboard quickly, with the meagre roll of his foster-son’s baggage. It would be as well, had advised the Arnasons, to leave early rather than later.

The boy stood, his face lowering. ‘My father paid taxes,’ he said. ‘Earl Sigurd my father used to send taxes to the old Earls of Norway before King Olaf arrived. My—They told me in Caithness.’

The door was open and the wall-hangings swirled. Thorkel said, ‘Oh, yes. The Earl your father flung a bone to the dog now and then. But none in my hearing ever heard him called
vassal
after Olaf Tryggvasson died. It took his fifth and last son so to honour his grave. The blood of Alba, one supposes.’

It was unfair. Brusi had done the same. It was unfair, but Thorkel was past caring.

‘Then you can suppose somewhere else,’ said the boy shrilly. Outside the door, a yellow-haired child arrived and stood on the cobblestones, snivelling.
Neither of them paid any attention. The boy said, ‘Go on. Take your things off my ship. If you write me a bill of promise, I’ll even lend you the blood-fine for Brush.’

Thorkel, who could not write, said, ‘Why not? I’ll do better here under King Olaf than under a vassal of his.’ His voice stayed slow, but he was breathing fast under it.