King Hereafter (47 page)

‘He was her husband’s housecarl. Yes. I thought you knew. Yes, he knows the Lady Emma,’ the Bishop said. ‘But that is a long time ago. The Lady Emma has not seen him for years. But his recent visitors have included Earl Alfgar. And my lord Crinan, the late King Duncan’s father.’

‘I wonder,’ Earl Eadulf said, ‘that he did not ask you to stay to adorn his new kingdom. He knows now, if he has exchanged greetings with Winchester, that while Hardecanute is King I cannot take Cumbria or send an army further north: as far as the Lady Emma is concerned, I am too strong here already. So there is little doubt, is there, what ruler Alba will choose?’

Bishop Malduin did not answer, for this was his opinion as well, and he saw no need to make matters worse by confirming it.

In Alba, as the time set aside for consultation drew to its end, the small doubt there had been was no longer evident. Beneath the gloved hand of Thorfinn, the country lay silent, sullen, and waiting. Seated in his carved chair before an empty desk, by a stand-desk that was also empty, the Earl of Orkney looked at his foster-father with something like anger and enquired, ‘Well?’

‘You have only to lift your hand,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. And after a moment, ‘What else were you born for?’

‘Why not happiness, like other men?’ Thorfinn said.

‘You have that,’ said his foster-father. ‘But if you try to trap it, it will change. Why do you resist? It is your right.’

‘I resist because it is no use resisting,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Do you not think that is unfair? I shall be King because I was King; and I shall die because I did die; and did I remember them, I could even tell what are the three ways it might befall me.’

He stood up and walked round the desk, and turned, facing Thorkel Fóstri. He said, ‘Prepare your men and mine for marching. You will lead them to Caithness. The Moray men, and the Moray men only, will go with me to Scone.’

Thorkel Fóstri looked at him. ‘Then you will take the throne?’

‘If they offer it,’ Thorfinn said.

‘They will offer it,’ said his foster-father. He paused. ‘I would gladly be there.’

‘No,’ said Thorfinn. ‘You are of Orkney.’

T TRIBUTE-TIME
, in October, the new Abbot of Kells crossed from Ireland and was given a princely escort to the monastery at Scone by the man who had summoned him, the lord who was half-brother to the late King Duncan of Alba.

To the monastery or to Perth, or to the guest-quarters about both, came other churchmen, including the Abbot Duftah of Tain, and his brother the Abbot of Deer, and the Bishop of Alba, returned once more, rebelliously, at the behest of both his masters.

But, most important of all, there came to the Moot Hill that October the men of Alba, with their tributes, in sufficient numbers to put beyond doubt the decision of the tuaths. In the absence of another natural leader—in the absence, indeed, of any leaders at all—they were prepared to accept the heathen, the foreign grandson from the north, and remain to give their silent endorsement to the brief ceremony that made him so: the truncated Mass held within the church, the walk to the Court Hill, the robing and oath-taking ritual upon the stone on which Duncan had sat six years before.

None made jokes this time about a ritual marriage with mares, for the hird, his closest friends, were absent: Arnór and Thorkel Fóstri; Starkad and Eachmarcach. No man from Orkney or Caithness saw their great Earl Thorfinn become Macbeth, King of Alba. Only the men of Alba, with among them Sulien of Llanbadarn, and Lulach his stepson, standing tall and white-haired and watchful, and his wife.

Sulien stood, his hands folded together, and watched chieftain after chief step up the hill and, kneeling, take the vow of allegiance, his hands between the hands of the tall man who, twelve years before, had come to Chester, nervous, obstinate, gallant, to tackle King Canute and his grandfather both and outface them, somehow, with the newly freed Alfgar gambolling about him and Duncan watching, apprehension on his face.

Now there was the face of a man, instead of the bony, flickering features of youth; and instead of the
hlā
, there was a thin band of gold confining his hair, for Alba’s kings wore no crown. And in place of the cloak sunk below the waters of Dee, the silken robe woven with gold that had crossed many lands to be made into a vestment fit for a king.

The ceremony was to be no pagan shout of triumph: it was, of design, quick and quiet.

The feast afterwards told a different story.

Even Sulien, who knew something of Thorfinn’s possessions, caught his breath when he entered the hall with the rest and saw the hanging lamps, with their scented oil and golden twined beasts, and the glistening silk of the hangings, and the burden of glass and of silver and gold on the woven cloth of the long boards, set Saxon-style with the cross-table at the far end.

There stood the chair Malcolm had used, and Duncan after him, with its posts foiled in gold and wrought with pebbled stones of different colours. ‘He keeps fine state, for a berserker,’ someone said, as Thorfinn stood there, with his wife and his stepson, and then sat, so that all could sit.

Not Thorfinn. Macbeth. For evermore now, his baptised name, even if it seemed to be no part of him. Sulien wondered if either he or his wife had heard that remark, and knew that if they had, it would seem no more than just. Even Groa, before the day began, had said, thinking of all her husband must do, ‘Well, Sulien. At least his Gaelic is good; or so it seems to me after all I learned in Moray. Do you think so?’

And he had looked at her and said, ‘My lady, he is almost pure Gael: have you never realised it? Of his four grandparents, three were from Alba or Ireland, and the fourth was a quarter-Gael by descent. I don’t know who my lord Crinan’s mother was, but I doubt if Duncan could claim as much. Remind him.’

‘Remind him that he and I come of different races?’ Groa had said.

‘You are here, alone of his friends,’ Sulien said.

‘I am here as the widow of the Mormaer of Moray, and Lulach as his son,’ had said Groa flatly.

And it was true. She was there to remind the men of Alba that their new King was not only an Earl of the north but already, for eight years, had taken his place at their side as Mormaer of Moray. The churchmen were here to reassure the devout: the faithful would not be required to sue Odin or eat horseflesh or expose their latest-born children. The gold and the silver were there as a reminder of material things: with a simple oath of allegiance they had bought not only a man but a fleet, an army, a wealth of moveable riches.

Abbot Duftah of Tain, smiling, was sitting beside him. ‘I have just heard a man say,’ he said, ‘that in England they pay Danegeld to make the Danes go away, and here in Alba we pay them to come. Nevertheless, he does well, I should judge. What of Cumbria?’

‘The question of Cumbria,’ Sulien said, ‘was settled at the Feast of Teltown. Were you disappointed that none of your line became the new Abbot of Kells?’

Duftah laughed. ‘Would I be human if I were not?’ he said. ‘But it takes the sting out of the disappointment, I will say, to find that Crinan’s house failed to supply the post either. He is a good man, Abbot Robhartach, and there’s a justice about the affair that you’ve maybe not noticed. It was the Abbot’s own father Ferdomhnach that ousted Crinan’s line
from the abbacy thirty years ago. So friend Crinan is feeling the cold?’

‘I would guess so. At least he offered Thorfinn joint rule of Cumbria so long as he could have access to Dunkeld and stay Abbot there.’

‘I see,’ said Duftah, ‘that you have the same difficulty as myself, Thorfinn. It is a name I shall miss, though Macbeth is a better. Son of Life, it means, or of the Elect. Well, that you might say he now is, whether the trumpeter angels have observed it or not. Ah, praise God. The food.’

The food came, in profusion. The drink, when it came, proved to be wine, not ale, and was served with a more careful hand. The aim, clearly, was to encourage the guests to relax, but not to render them either quarrelsome or incapable of listening to what their host wished to say to them when the time came.

Malduin, Bishop of Alba, ate with both hands and watched everything from his high seat not far from his northern cousin, who had exchanged his thunderbolt so easily for the cross and the symbols of kingship.

After the tension of the ritual and what preceded it, the present comfort, the Bishop saw, was already bringing relief. There were few women present: no man had been certain enough of this gathering to risk wife and family unless it might be more dangerous to leave them at home. But each man at least knew his neighbour, and though talk at first was subdued, so that one could hear plainly the sound of the harp, and then of the flutes and some stringed instrument playing out of sight somewhere, shortly there was a little laughter and some louder exchanges. Presently, when the tumblers came in, and then a man who sat on a stool and sang a long, reflective ballad about a number of people they knew and did not like, the occasion almost began to take on the colour of a celebration.

In any case, he, Malduin, must make the best of it, for this time he would not be going back. That had been made quite clear by Earl Eadulf. If his cousin took the throne, he was to stay at his side and act in the best interests of Durham while (it was implied) depleting the treasury of his cousin and not that of Eadulf.

And since this time he had not been asked to leave, he supposed that he would have to obey. Down the board, he saw the faces of the monks he had brought back with him beginning to brighten a little now when they saw that there was good food about, and no shortage of silver. Beside the woman Groa, the new Abbot of Kells was laughing heartily, his tonsure red with the summer’s sun. He was probably right to be merry, with full tithe-barns behind him after his first progress round the Columban churches in Ireland and the dues of Dunkeld still to come, with whatever the new King cared to give him as his enthronement-gift.

The new King, whose hair was not the red-gold of the Celt or the straw-white of the Norseman but black as that of the Picts who had ruled this land two hundred years ago. Whose nose and cheekbones and jaw might have been chipped out by a chisel underneath the tall brow, round as an egg below the gold band and the thickness of his hair. His cousin Thorfinn-Macbeth, who was rising to speak.

He spoke in Gaelic, beginning, as was the custom, with a toast to the church and the Trinity. Much of what he said after that had already been affirmed on the Moot Hill, and had to do with the undertakings he had made: to see justice done; to protect and foster their interests. He touched, to end with, on other matters.

‘I will not bring men from Orkney or Caithness south to hold your mormaerdoms. They have their own frontiers to guard. Therefore, if we are to defend this country, I shall need your help.

‘I do not propose on your behalf, either, to claim more land than my stepbrother Duncan held, and my grandfather before him. Lothian will, as before, allow the dues of its churches ruled by St Cuthbert to go to St Cuthbert. Cumbria, as before, will be held under the King of England and ruled on his behalf. I have the promise of the late King’s father, my lord Crinan, that I shall have his aid in this.

‘Those of you who are concerned for the future of the Christian church need not fear. As you see, the Bishop of Alba is returned among us, and we have the care once more of the church of Columba. Christianity in Orkney is only fifty years old, but long before that men had freedom to worship as they pleased, and this will continue. I have taken one step already to help with the cure of souls in Fife, which has long, through no fault of Bishop Malduin’s, been without pastors. With the leave of the Loch Leven hermits, I am causing the monastery there to be rebuilt, and a group of monks, led by Prior Tuathal, will settle there.’

He paused. They were not, Sulien saw, greatly stirred by the new church, except to wonder what land or dues it might require of them. They were, however, interested in weighing up what they had got for a king. So far, they had accorded him silence, and the atmosphere at least was not inimical.