King Hereafter (41 page)

And over and between the barriers, as they watched, rose a spray of glittering pink that began to fall arching towards them, bursting into familiar song.

Arrows; followed by spears; followed by catapulted balls of hay and pitch, blazing.

A third of them died in the first fifteen minutes, after which Maldred jumped into the sea, waving a shirt on a spearhead, and the rest swam and waded after.

The sun rose.

At St Colman’s on the north, Muiredach of Ulidia made no mistake about his landing.

The knörr sailed as close as it could, and Muiredach’s men jumped into the sea, dividing into sections as had been arranged, for there was a palisaded fort on the high ground above the sand and the rocks and the scatter of dark, silent huts.

They rushed the huts, one party covering another, but found them empty. The fort, when they reached it, was deserted, and the little church held nothing but the smell of dead incense to tell that someone had been there not so long ago.

It was not what they had expected, but simply meant that the monk and the woman must be in the west, where Archú’s party would find and take them, or Maldred’s men striking up from Rosskeen.

Meanwhile, their own plan of assault was quite clear. One small party, swords drawn, made its way to the east to scour the land between St Colman’s and the point at Tarbatness. The rest, in troops of fifty, turned west through the bogs and the marshes that separated them from their fellows at Westray.

They were competent men, and there was nothing wrong with their planning. They had arrived at first light, and by the time they set out on the
twelve miles they intended to cover, the sky was just bright enough to show the mottled green-and-pink mounds; the bright green cushions sporting the straw-coloured treacherous grasses that betrayed the bog, with its brown peaty pools and its cottongrass jerked by the wind.

It seemed at first like God’s Judgement that, when they had skilfully steered clear of the marsh, the firm ground beneath them should start to give way.

They stood, half of that first party of fifty, arid tried to draw one black-slimed leg after another out of the sucking grip of the mire, while their fellows marched on through the short, dry grass and heather and were hardly deterred until they, too, had felt the water close around their ankles. They were near enough to warn the second force, but the third and the fourth had to find out in their own way that someone had been before them, doctoring the line of march that any sensible hillman would follow. Then the arrows came, and the spears; singly and from different quarters, and began methodically to thin them out.

Finally, on three fronts, they came face to face with a line of armed men: fresh, fully equipped, and on ground of their own choosing. They fought well; and most of them died.

The last ship of the three rounded the point at Tarbatness, passed the beach of St Colman’s, and made its way uncertainly west along the north shore of the peninsula towards Westray.

Uncertainly, because the steering-oar had broken and could not be mended, and the sail shackles had given way during the night, leaving the knörr to creep in under the power of her six pairs of oars.

It was not Archú’s fault, therefore, that she arrived at her appointed landing-place when the sun had already risen and when the tide had receded to such an extent that the river Tain ran out to the firth over a stretch of pink sand that seemed to stretch shorewards to infinity. Since the ship could not come any nearer, they disembarked on the flat sand and had marched halfway across it before they saw, against the bright sky, the size and shape of the armed forces drawn up ahead of them.

Unlike their fellows, they fought a straightforward pitched battle, against much greater numbers; and lost.

South of Dingwall, the army woke at dawn and heard Duncan’s speech, and the priest’s, and knelt to be blessed. At the appointed time, which would take them to Dingwall by mid-morning, they set out to march round the hill-shoulder and down to the Moot Hill.

To the east, as they marched, they looked along the sun-touched avenue of the firth for the snake-head of Maldred’s ship, but could not yet see it. Duncan was not unduly disturbed. Maldred’s men might already have landed, and the knörr drawn off, as arranged, to lift them after the battle. Or it might arrive with a timing still nicer, when battle was already engaged, and shock Thorfinn into flight or submission.

They marched round the hill and there, like a storm-beach of steel flagged
with banners, was the army of Ross and Caithness awaiting him, with, bright as a sequin in front, the gilded helmet of Canute on the alpine head of Thorfinn his brother.

Round Thorfinn the men waited, and the sun shone through the white silk of the banner, so that the raven lay black on Thorfinn’s helm and shoulders, and flapped its wings as if in omen: as if Odin had sent them Huginn or Muninn, Mind or Memory, and soon the dedicatory spear would be thrown over their enemy’s heads:
Odin owns you all
. After which, there would be no quarter.

It would not be like that. But here they would have to fight, with none of the advantage of surprise that had been allowed their more fortunate colleagues facing Duncan’s other landings through the peninsula. Thorfinn had made that plain all along, and had repeated it before them all that morning.

‘The King has dispersed part of his forces beforehand through the peninsula; but so have we. He started with a far larger army than ours, and the difference between us is still in his favour. You will have to fight, and fight hard, at Dingwall. It is worth your while. Win this battle, and you will not have to fight it again. Lose, and the whole of the north will be a battlefield as’ Alba and Norway fight over it.’

And that was true, they all knew, and the men of the hird better than any. While Thorfinn held Caithness and Ross and Cromarty, he would defend them against every predator. He had called his brother
King
, and so he was, of Alba. But here in Ross he was no king of theirs, nor of Thorfinn’s. What Thorfinn might owe him for Moray was his own affair.

Nearly every man there, in one way or another, had fought for Thorfinn, on his raids, on his war-cruises, and most of them would claim to know him. None would claim to understand him, or the source of his energy. He was lucky, and in many things very successful. To stay with such a man made good sense. So, when the trumpets of Duncan’s army glittered and blared, and the pennants jerked, and the clatter of men marching quickly changed to the jingle of men moving into the run, their spears and swords ready and flashing, the men under the raven responded smartly, as they had been trained.

The shield-wall came up. The spears rose, hefted, ready for throwing, and the smooth swords slid singing out of the scabbard. Then above them all Thorfinn’s right arm rose, with the sword-blade barring the sun, written over with copper and silver. Then the long horns raised their thick voices and the air darkened as the birds of the land and the sea rose, alarmed, and circled.

The army were already shouting as they started to move. The shouting gained rhythm, and came to Duncan’s ears in spurts and snatches as they drew breath until the two sides were close enough, above all the noise of both, for their cry to be heard.

They were calling his brother’s pagan name. ‘
Thorfinn! Thorfinn!
’ The hoarse double syllable ran from hill to hill and up to the peak of Ben Wyvis, until the southern army caught it and opposed it with a cry of their own. Then the spearpoints came ripping down on either side, and ‘
Thorfinn!
’ and ‘
Alba!
’ came mixed with their screams and the rapping of metal on wood.

The shock as the two armies met was like the tumbling roar of a landslide, with flesh and cloth instead of earth, and steel on steel instead of boulder on boulder. Each side clove through the other, man so close to man that the sword bit as it forced its way up and slashed as it found its way downwards again. In such a press, mail-shirts and helmets were hardly more use than the hide helms and metal-sewn jackets that most of them wore. Speed of eye and of arm were what helped a man live, not the weight of his metal in the rising August heat with the stench of blood and of ripped guts and of fright beginning to rise, with the ghosts of past wars; and the flies coming already.

The first climax came; and the first pause, with the golden helmet still flashing on one side and the white mask of the King on the other. Then Thorfinn’s sword flashed again, and he shouted, ‘Back! Back, my men! Back!’

The Irish on Duncan’s side had recoiled. Sending to rally them, white with tension and fury, Duncan did not at first hear the call or realise what was happening. Then someone said, ‘My lord! My lord King, they’re retreating!’

For so long he had planned for this: how should he doubt it, now that it was happening? Duncan threw his head back and laughed. ‘Of course!’ said the King. ‘Maldred’s ship has arrived. The fools think they must fly or be caught between us. Where do you think Archú’s force is waiting now, to rise at their backs? Eh? Where do you suppose Maldred’s other men have been stationed, to give them the warm welcome they all deserve? Come, my stout lads of Alba. Forward, and thrash them!’

The sun reached its height, and hung, burning.

Far above it perhaps, in Valholl, the Hall of the Slain, with its six hundred and forty doorways, Heimdall the Watchman looked down and saw the northern army blown back like the keys of the ash tree, drifting into the thick of the empty peninsula, with the King’s men like a whirlwind pursuing them.

A peninsula empty, at least, of the contingents of Duncan of Alba, which should have been drawn up in the appointed places, awaiting their triumph. The men of Alba who had landed with Maldred and Archú and Muiredach lay among the bog cotton, or corralled wounded in corners, or already laid helpless in the two big-bellied knörrs that should have been lying off-shore to take off their victorious master, but in fact were afloat in midstream, waiting for orders from under a raven banner.

Instead, the three troops of Thorfinn’s which had vanquished them sheathed their swords and raced to join one another in the gentle green heart of Ulladule, with its church and its farmhouse, where the Strathrory river left its glen and wound down to the firth mouth. There, briefly, they waited.

Then men on garrons, who had run all day joining faction to faction, brought them word of Thorfinn their leader’s arrival, and silently the triple company redeployed as they had been told.

Duncan’s army swept through the heath crying victory, unaware that they were beating Thorfinn’s host back into the sword-blades of men who were dead. And the army that rose at Thorfinn’s rear and his flanks and behind Duncan’s own charging host was not the supporting army of Duncan’s triumphant Alba, but the angry men of the land they had invaded.

HERE BEING
conventions in war, as in everything else, it was to these that King Duncan looked for succour when it came to him, finally, that this was a battle he was going to lose.

At first, he did not fully understand his plight, any more than did his leaders. His own army, pursuing, had lost some of its order, although the centre, with himself in the lead, was compact still. Thorfinn’s army, retreating, had lost any pattern it once might have had, and the gilded helm of the Earl his brother flashed like marsh-fire, first in one quarter of the flying army and then in another.

It was an irritation to Duncan, who had expected a standing battle, man to man, of a kind that Thorfinn, despite the conventions, was unlikely to have survived. Or if no accident befell him in the first phase, then the men of Maldred or Arch? or Muiredach would see to it in due course that the campaign received a clean finish, with no tedious aftermath of ransom or oath-taking to trouble about. When Thorfinn’s army broke and ran, keeping so far ahead in their fear that the only fighting was peripheral, Duncan began to feel some concern for his plan, so well protected did Thorfinn appear to be. When Thorfinn’s men began to break pace, in a confusion of yelling, and finally stopped, fenced about with a ring of clean steel, Duncan’s first feeling was one of relief followed by a fervent prayer that vanity would drive his brother out from the centre and into the spearhead of a counter-attack, on which later his skald could produce some deathless battle-elegy. After all, northmen hardly cared how they lived, everyone knew, so long as they ended in glory.

Instead of ending in glory on Maldred’s sword-edge, his brother Thorfinn seemed to have got the idea that he should reverse his army and stand to do battle with Duncan. Duncan had no objection. Urging onwards the spearmen about him, he found a grim satisfaction in the vigour with which his men flung themselves at the foe. Only when engaged and fighting himself did he see that the impetus shown by his host was due to an alien army risen from nowhere behind them.

He looked round for the banners of Maldred and Arch?, and did not see
them. Instead, answering his first desire, he saw the helm of Thorfinn his brother driving towards him. And behind Thorfinn, with every face to the front, a massive host, bigger by far than the one he had confronted at Dingwall. A host gaining momentum towards him, undivided in purpose, with no harrying armies at its flanks or its rear. A host of men who were all his enemies, as were the men enclosing his army behind him.