King Hereafter (80 page)

Foreigners, it was to be assumed, had little interest in this. It was best to halt, admiring the view, and then to lead the way down into the basin, past the basilica of St George and its discarded residence, through the muddy marketplace, and up to the King’s Bridge over the Gose, running narrow and clear over its pebbles, where the Emperor’s guard stopped them again, but only as a formality: the Bishop’s harbingers had done their work properly.

From the bridge, you could see the cathedral at the top of the rise: yellow-white against the blue sky and green hills. And as you reached the cathedral, there opened up on your right the great slope of busy, paved courtyard, enclosed with haphazard building, that ended in the new palace.

It stood printing the sky like a piece of horse-harness, engraved in pale gold and black with arched windows, and the banners on the long, plunging roof flew and chattered like jungle-birds.

There was a strong smell of fish.

‘Can I help it?’ cried Isleifr of Iceland.

Scarlet with joy, he thrashed in the King of Alba’s iron, one-handed embrace, and a seam opened with a ladder of sound across his priestly black shoulders. ‘Look, you’ll have me in rags. It’s six months since Lulach’s wedding in Scone. Can I help it if men follow my bear as if they have come into season? Do you know what I have suffered? Can you imagine how much a Greenland bear can grow in six months? He has eaten his keeper and torn up three Germans already.’

‘Not the Emperor?’ said Thorfinn, releasing him. ‘I heard he was poorly. Isleifr, why bring a bear to the Emperor?’

‘Because I wanted him to remember me,’ Isleifr said. ‘And I’ll wager he’ll remember me when the visitation from Alba has gone from his memory. In any case, you’d better get out of your travelling-clothes. They’ll send a deputation to summon you any minute, and I’ve had enough trouble educating them over Iceland. They thought I’d wear goatskins laundered in cow-piss.’

‘Compared with stale fish,’ Thorfinn said, ‘that would be tolerable. A deputation to meet the Emperor?’

‘Are you nervous?’ Isleifr said. ‘I’ll sell you a Frankish phrase book.
Altdeutsche Gespräche
, it’s called.
Erro e guille trenchen
, id est,
ego volo bibere
. So long as you know Latin, it’s simple.’

Irony was a new thing for Isleifr. He stared at Thorfinn, his face even redder. ‘Am I shouting? It’s because you speak my name the right way.’

‘I must remember not to,’ said Thorfinn. ‘And we’ll talk later. In the meantime, whom shall we see?’

‘Not the Emperor,’ Isleifr said. ‘He’s got Roman fever and won’t be up for three days or a week. No. The Emperor’s easy, so long as you look holy and timid. You’ll wish you had to deal with the Emperor before this night is over.’

‘You alarm me,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Then let me guess. We are in the new cathedral’s guest-house, under the beneficent protection, daily approaching, of the bones of SS Simon and Jude. But the Bishop of Osnabrück, whose care it should be, has vanished, and the Bishop of Hildesheim, who shares his duty, has gone home. So who is left to act host? Who in Saxony, my saintly Isleifr, can be as dangerous as your smile seems to suggest? Your Greenland bear?’

‘No. Very nearly. The Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen,’ said Isleifr soberly.

‘But no music,’ said Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg and Bremen, smiling at the King of Alba, who was wearing a robe whose folds clacked against his own whenever either of them moved in his chair-stall.

‘No music, which, I hold, arrests conversation. Sanctioned by God and agreeable to Man: such are good talk and hospitality.’

The Archbishop gave a second agreeable smile, and his servants lost some of their terror. For the evening entertainment of the King of Alba, the mule-carts had been sent to the Archbishop’s own lodge in the mountains, and the eating-hall of the cathedral, barely finished, had been hung with the Archbishop’s famous silks with the elephant cartouches, and the tables laid with his silver, and the kitchens packed with the white bread, the wines, the delicate fish from the vivarium, the plump birds and fine, scented meats from his storehouse.

All had been done, and in time. So now the Archbishop gave that agreeable smile, addressing his guest. ‘You have noticed the elephants. You know their history?’

‘I am dazzled. Tell me,’ said Thorfinn. On his other side, the Provost of Goslar gave a cough which almost extinguished the snort that preceded it.

‘You will have heard it. How, fifty years ago, the Emperor’s great-great uncle opened the tomb of Charlemagne in Aachen, the second Rome, my dear Mak Betta. And there sat the great King in his jewels, with one glove, pierced by his fingernails, holding the sceptre. A sight to inspire awe. The Emperor received reverent attention. He was laid in silks from this bale, among elephants, and the tomb was resealed. Look at them. Look at my elephants. Are they not a wonder, with their black Eastern eyes and their toenails? From the imperial workshops of Byzantium to Svatioslav, and from Kiev as a gift to the Emperor.

‘The Rhine,’ said the Archbishop, ‘is where you will still find the best compound twills. In Mainz or Cologne. We buried my old friend Pope Clement three years ago in Bamberg in a length made in Thebes, as fine as any I have ever seen: Provost Anno will remember. I sent a bale very like it the other day to Edward of England.’

‘As a hint?’ said Thorfinn.

His handsome face composed, the Archbishop considered the remark.
Then he laughed. ‘The King supported us with his fleet shortly thereafter, in the Emperor’s chastisement of the Duke of Lorraine,’ he said. ‘If that is what you mean.’

‘I expect,’ said the King of Alba, ‘that is what I meant. I am glad, at any rate, that the Emperor’s ailment has proved less than serious.’

‘He is better. In a day or two, he will receive you. And the Queen. A remarkable woman. She has taken the greatest interest in the gift of our friend Isleifr here. Along with, of course, the delectable doves, her little daughters.’

Someone removed Thorfinn’s platter and put down another, of silver.

‘I believe,’ said Thorfinn, ‘that the Emperor’s oldest daughter, the niece of King Edward, is Abbess of Quedlinburg, very near here? Perhaps Duke Casimir plans to visit his kinswoman.’

On the Archbishop’s other side, the pallid cheeks of the Duke of Poland paused in their exercise and then continued. Archbishop Adalbert said, ‘He hears you, but his grasp of Saxon is uncertain at times. Of course, his father was a cousin of King Canute, Beatrice’s grandfather. I had forgotten. You knew King Canute well, I am told, and even as a young man served the Lady Emma in England?’

He held out a dish with his own hands to his awkward guest, having side-stepped the matter of Quedlinburg. His own mother had been brought up in that convent, and for a child of eight to be appointed abbess was only natural when the child was royal and the place the stronghold that it was. He wished that Casimir, having received the imperial forgiveness, would stop sulking, take the Emperor’s gifts, and go home, preferably before the end of the banquet.

Casimir said, in excellent Low German, ‘Perhaps I should call on her. Perhaps I should call on the Abbess and tell her how Bratislav took our church treasure, and carried hundreds of Poles off to slavery, and seized the bones of the apostle Adalbert. Have you no interest in the bones of the apostle Adalbert, Archbishop Adalbert?’

The Archbishop laid down his dish and turned patiently, releasing a scent of rosewater that betrayed, insidiously, that he had had his uncanonical daily cold bath. He said, ‘Matters for the council chamber have been disposed of in the council chamber. We must think of our guests from afar, who are tired and wish to be entertained.’

‘I am tired,’ said Duke Casimir. ‘Tired of being treated as a child because I have a German mother kin to the Emperor. I am Polish. I do not wish to sit with you any longer.’ He stood up.

The Archbishop rose as well. ‘You have a touch of fever. I can see it,’ said the Archbishop kindly. ‘Here is the Provost, who will see you to your quarters, and I shall send my own physician to attend you. A bath of hot salt, I always recommend. I know that some are against it. But for the Emperor, as you see, it works wonders.’

Smiling, he sat down, arranging his wide-skirted gown, as the company half-rose and sat again, and the Provost of Goslar got to his feet with no great
alacrity and the Duke of Poland, after staring for a moment, turned on his heel and stalked out.

‘I am a great believer in salt,’ said Archbishop Adalbert to the King of Alba.

‘… They tell me,’ said the Archbishop of Bremen, ‘that your peoples north of Alba prefer to call you Thorfinn, the pagan name of your forefathers. Old beliefs are hard to uproot, I know, and old practices; and both Orkney and Iceland have had little more than fifty years of Christian witness. What backsliding there has been among the barbarians here, I need hardly tell you, or what pockets of sin still untouched. The Estonians adore dragons and birds, and sacrifice slaves to them. You have seen, sanctified in the church here, the altar to the Saxon god Krodo, made within this last year. In Uppsala, horses and dogs hung with men in their sacred groves until very recently and unless we have care, may do so again.’

‘That Christian witness may falter is known to everyone,’ the King of Alba said gravely. ‘Or perhaps I should put it differently. A people cannot be converted until it learns to stop killing its missionaries. And sometimes that is something that only a temporal power can do.

‘Olaf Tryggvasson offered Christ to my father in Orkney on the point of a sword, and sent his priest, steel in hand, to baptise the father of your good priest Isleifr there, and through him convert Iceland. In later years, King Olaf the Saint similarly persuaded his countrymen. The end of each, you perhaps know. To those of us who are but common clay, it offers small inducement to multiply churches and found bishoprics. Should the throne weaken and totter, the pagan will return a hundredfold. As threatens in Norway.’

‘Because the church in Norway is weak,’ said Archbishop Adalbert. ‘Because its bishops are consecrated no man knows where, in booths and on carpets, and its priests fly to their homeland like hares as king succeeds enemy king. In Germany, the King and the church are brother and sister.’

‘But,’ said Thorfinn, black-browed face pensively bent, ‘Germany is the market-place of the world, and has rich lands with which to clothe and nourish its sister. Alba and Orkney are poor, and have to spend the little they have to defend themselves.’

‘Forgive me,’ said the Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, ‘but, in your modesty, you would have us ignore both your own effects and the more than seemly attire of your courtmen. Either you are richer than you care to boast, or you wear the skins of your countrymen on your backs.’

The King of Alba, it seemed, never smiled. The tall brow lifted itself and fell again. ‘The rings? The brooches?’ said Thorfinn. ‘The horse? That came from Spain to Ireland, and was a gift from the King of Dublin for services my fleet had rendered, and tribute owed me. The rest came mostly through trade, which is dwindling as tolls and taxes abroad become higher. The silver that paid for our clothes and the ivory triptych I placed on the altar at Hamburg came, before we fell out, from King Harald of Norway. I hesitated to bring you the triptych, but thought that in the bosom of Hamburg, fruitful mother of peoples, it would come by no defilement. It was plundered, as the
inscription makes plain, from the shrine of St Olaf at Nídarós.’

‘King Harald should take heed,’ said the Archbishop, and the full, shapely lips pressed together. ‘King Harald should take heed, lest we visit him with the rod of correction and claim from him the obedience of a man who has offended the Lord. I hear King Svein bravely withstands his grievous assaults upon Denmark.’

‘King Svein asked me to help him,’ said the King of Alba. ‘But of course I refused.’

‘Refused?’

Thorfinn looked apologetic. ‘How can my fleet ply for silver if they are fighting? Already, the Norwegian trade is lost to us. Slaves are expensive. The tilled land and the pastures are still producing far less than they should, and there is no money for roads and for bridges that would join market to market, and allow workshops to flourish, and provide myself and my priests and my governors with an income from taxes and tolls. I cannot offer a hand to an ally. I cannot offer, as I should, even a son’s welcome to Mother Church.’

‘So you say,’ said Archbishop Adalbert. ‘But I wonder if you have considered what Mother Church may offer you? The services of seasoned farmer, of scribe, and of steward: the repository of wisdom in all those places where it may be wanting in the matter of tax-collecting and justice and government. Such things are unknown or unheeded in the innocent and unworldly sphere of the Celtic tribes, and while their hermits may pray for your souls, they will not tell you how to order your bodies, which are the temples and defence of your spirit. Nor are we harsh to the humble flocks who have just crossed our thresholds. The church of Ribe pays no dues to Bremen. None. And yet all our wealth, both of earth and of heaven, is at the disposal of King Svein. It could be yours as well.’

‘It’s working,’ said Odalric of Caithness. ‘At least, Thorfinn’s just drunk off his wine, which ought to mean the worst bit is over.’

‘You mean,’ said Leofwine in his Welsh-Gaelic, ‘that the Emperor is to waive harbour and market dues and see that all river shipments are toll-free on Thorfinn’s boats in future?’

Ferteth, the Dunblane toisech, said, ‘Be careful. The place is full of monks who speak Irish.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Isleifr. ‘They’re all at Bishop John’s, supping with Tuathal and Eochaid. You haven’t known Thorfinn for very long, have you?’

The Dunblane toisech was sweating. He said, ‘He’s fond of money. It’s natural.’

‘Oh, he’s ambitious,’ said Isleifr. ‘You don’t start life as the fifth and last son of an island earl and finish it as head of a kingdom without hacking a long, bloody furrow. He’s ambitious and heathen, and Adalbert is ambitious and holy. But Thorfinn has got something that the Archbishop wants.’