King Hereafter (92 page)

Within the gauze, her face was pale as tinted enamel. Her eyes, searching his face, were light as quartz under her black brows. Then the King placed his hands lightly on his wife’s shoulders and kissed her on the mouth.

It was a formal embrace, before crowds, with sunlight and shadow tumbling about them from the tossing awning, and the roar of the continuing welcome thundering still against the ears. Their lips met and drew apart, and no one could have guessed at the unguarded moment of oblivion that came to them both, or the wonder of recognition that followed it.

Then the King said, ‘There is no story, they say, without its song following it. You have carried my shield for six months. Now lay it down: for from today I shall take all your burdens.’

The Queen said, with no less formality, ‘Your mormaers bore your shield. Here are the others, waiting to welcome you. And Sulien.’

The voice of Erlend said, shrill with eagerness, ‘Father, he’s married! Sulien is married!’

‘Ah,’ said the King, and turned to his soul-friend.

Sulien smiled, saying nothing.

‘The girl I know of?’ said the King.

‘Yes. We are happy. She is with child, so I have left her in Wales,’ Sulien said. ‘And here are your mormaers. Your lady thought—’

The Lady had thought that the King, as custom required, would sup in hall with the reunited officers of his kingdom before the latter dispersed to their families over the river, there to await the banquet of state and the public accounting.

The people thought otherwise. The people surged forward as the formal greetings came to an end, shouting questions to which, drunk with emotion, the voyagers began to attempt impossible answers. Tuathal, his arms in the air, surrounded by excited, purposeful faces, looked at Odalric, who caught the eye of Malpedar, who looked at Hlodver, who attracted the attention, jumping, of Otkel.

As if endowed by divine locomotion, Thorfinn, King of Alba, rose in the air and, chaired to the brink of the river, embarked on a boat that, followed by dozens, deposited him on the opposite shore. From there, levitated likewise among the throngs of his people, he arrived at the Moot Hill, where, ten years before, he had been elected as King, and where, again brought by his people, but this time by common as well as by noble, he was set and, gathering breath, proceeded to address them.

It was not the address that three days later he would give in his great hall of Perth to the men who led the tribes of his kingdom. It spoke not of trade or of planting, or of timber, of shipbuilding and the making of roads; little of the building of warehouses and the spinning and dyeing of wool, the improvement
of tanning and the better breeding of garrons, the keeping of bees and the fencing of parks, and the training of scholars and scribes and of artificers, craftsmen in wood and iron and leather, gold and silver, whose work could make Alba great and envied of peoples.

He told them instead that St Peter the Apostle of Christ had taken them under his protection, and the Emperor of the Romans, his friend. He told them of the churches that would be built to revive the Word of God as men had known it of old, from Orkney to Allerdale. He reminded them of the old saints, of Servan and Drostan and all the rest, who had once interceded for the ancestors of every man present, and who once more would intercede for them as a people. And he showed them, chief of all the priceless gifts the Sovereign Pontiff had given this kingdom, the banner blessed by the Pope, and the gospel, bound in gold and in gems, that would lie now and for ever in this their church of Scone.

Then Tuathal, standing there in his travel-stained cloak, read from the book and Eochaid, raising his voice, led the praise: the noise of hundred upon hundred strong, untrained, lusty voices addressing the Lord, as did Constantine in his half-pagan innocence, while the Sun, His vehicle, sank in a glory of flame in the west.

Gillocher of Lumphanan turned to Malpedar of Buchan and smiled through the veils of his joy. ‘We convinced him,’ he said. ‘All those arguments, but we convinced him, in the end.’

Then there followed the supper.

When the speeches were over and the mormaers had gone, on the heels of the King’s pilgrim-companions who survived, in the teeth of their various needs, barely more than a couple of hours, the King rose and, as the company stumbled to its feet, made at last for his chamber.

Groa was there.

The room they shared was quite large, opening from the small hall where his servants slept, and where hers were within call. Inside, the walls were reeded with timber, against which light cloths had been hung, woven with pictures, and the floor had been strewn with flowers, over the herbs. There was a window, but it was shuttered.

In the half-hour since she left table, she had been disrobed and dressed again, in a stiff gown with long, open sleeves, tied from neck to hem with tassels of silk between thickly worked braiding. Her hair remained twisted and pleated as it had been under her veil. Where she sat, on a little low stool with her head resting back on the wall, it burned and flamed in the glow of a little gilt lamp set in a bracket above her. Her skirts lay about her like petals, and her face, as on the shore, was clear and pale as enamel.

Then the door opened and closed, and Thorfinn was standing there, his shoulders against it, motionless in the rosy gloom. His face was in darkness and he did not speak, or she could not hear him above the hammering of her heart.

She wondered what his inner eye saw. Not a wooden hut whose earth floor
was clad only in rushes; whose light might be a taper or fulmar-oil; whose window was an open space between bark; whose bed was a board padded with down packed in linen. Not a wife who was an earl’s daughter from Norway and had never in all her life trodden floors of mosaic or marble, or worshipped amid silver and gold in the footsteps of hundreds.

It did not help to know that Thorfinn’s men during the supper had most likely, in their euphoria, been exaggerating. It did not help to suspect that they had not.

And yet … Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have said, ‘I am home. For you, I have achieved such and such. Now I am beyond belief tired. Comfort me.’

He had said,
You have carried my shield for six months. Now lay it down, for I shall take all your burdens
.

He had said:
There is no story without its song following it
.

Groa rose and walked across the room and, standing before him, slid her hands through his arms and rested them flat on the door at his back, where his own hands were spread, keeping him upright.

‘Take your shield back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There is nothing to tell you. There is nothing to ask you. Tonight is for sleep.’

Thorfinn said, ‘I failed nobody else.’

‘Must you be perfect?’ said Groa. After a moment, she said, ‘If you fail, you should fail with your lovers. Findlaech. Thorkel Fóstri. Sulien. Lulach. And me.’

He turned his face away. ‘And that should be your reward?’

‘The gift of your absolute trust? Yes,’ said Groa.

She released his hands from the door and, bringing them forward, held one on each of her shoulders. ‘I am your crozier. Where shall I take you?’ she said.

Thorfinn said, ‘To your knee.’

In the end, she took her seat again under the lamp and sat for a long time, her fingers at ease in the thick of his hair, breathing the scent of bruised spices. After a long time, the lamp flickered, the oil growing low; and he stirred and lifted his head under her hand.

‘Your hair,’ he said. It was still pinned in its coils.

‘I shall do it,’ she said. There had never been a time when they were together at night and he had not unpinned her hair and let it down, like a robe in his hands.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I have something for you.’

Something had revived. He rose of his own accord, who so lately had needed her crozier, and, crossing to the first of his boxes, drew from it a casket, and from the casket something burning with green and crimson and gold that he brought, cupped in his hands, to the lamp.

‘It was worn,’ he said, ‘by the Empress Irene. But you are not dressed for it.’

‘Am I not?’ She looked down.

‘No.’

Carefully, using one of his hands and two of hers, the cords of her
night-robe were opened, from her neck to her throat, and the robe sank like a sheath, first from her shoulders and then, as her arms were drawn free, like a calyx framing the stem of her waist, and the white skin above and below, finely marbled with veins.

‘That is how she would look,’ Thorfinn said; and did not move for a long time. Then he stepped forward and clasped the necklet high round her throat.

It was heavy. She stood very straight, cuffed in gold while the fine almond jewels glowed and blazed in their network and trembled among the spurs and fringes of gold that trickled over her breasts and between them.

Thorfinn drew a long breath.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Now the hair should come down.’

But only half was ever unpinned. It fell sweetly, smothering the gold of the necklace and cradling the sphere of one breast, touched to life by the warmth of its coil. Then the leisurely, unpinning hands were there no longer, or the space between them, or pity, or thought itself. Against his cheek, when her lips were free, she said, ‘If you wish.’

And from Thorfinn, who never laughed, there came a sound that might have been a laugh.

Thou gem of valour,’ he said, ‘and princess incomparable. You hold a fool in your hands who has strength for the business of six minutes, or perhaps only for four; and who will do nothing for you, for afterwards sleep will carry him off as if to the grave. And if that is true failure, and it is, I still cannot spare you it.’

He was right. Of all the vast energy of which for nine months he had been the everlasting torrent and reservoir, there was tonight nothing left but one last golden coin, sent spinning into the air for six minutes, or perhaps only for four. But because she was already attuned to the moment, she, too, caught the flash of the coin at its zenith: the brief explosion of light before darkness came, and peace, with her husband asleep in her arms.

For six months, this bed had been her own, as had the beds in all her lodgings. The lamps in each were to her liking, and the place where her robes lay, and where her mirror and comb were to hand. The manner in which her girls and Sinna and Unna attended her followed the path that pleased her best, and that everyone knew.

For six months, lying here unencumbered on the coolness of linen, with the shutters pulled wide to admit the soft airs and noises of night, she had tried to see with Thorfinn’s eyes and think with his brain and share the common experience of his uncommon journey: the daily assault of exchange and confrontation, of decisions to be taken and problems to be passed on or dealt with.

Then, insensibly, her mind would pass instead to the problems she herself would face with the dawn, and the decisions she would have to make or unmake, and the men whom she must court, or check, or pacify. And she would find in the quiet order of her chamber a solace that itself disturbed her, because one day she must relinquish it.

Today. And tonight she knew that she would have lain on a moorland, with
the wolves at her back, provided only that, of all the souls in the world, one ugly man lay sleeping like this at her shoulder.

Towards dawn, his breathing quietened and changed. Then, very lightly, for he thought her asleep, his fingers began to trace on her body the subtle pattern, the overture to a journey he had created over the years, drawing on arts that had nothing to do with his Nordic blood, and which was the presage of not four minutes or six, but long, slow combers of joy with only the sun and the moon for their hourglass.

So, last of the travellers, Thorfinn himself found his release. As a tired blade, tempered over and over, will regain its value and lustre, so, between dawn and rising, he took his refreshment.

And then, upon rising, he took up the shield of his kingdom.

S IN THE
time of Hakon of Norway, who came to power
at mun banda
, with the goodwill and to the pleasure of the gods of his sanctuaries, the Lord of the Apostle Peter was, it seemed, content with his homage, and blessed Alba and Orkney both with peace and with fruitfulness.

None remembered a year such as followed. Whatever shadows fell on the countries about her, Thorfinn’s land seemed untouched.

At home, the growing-season was cold. But because of the new tools and the new kilns and the new warehouses, there was food in Alba where corn and milk and fruit were wanting in Ireland.

Overseas, the great Finn Arnason, the Queen’s father, had proved his loyalty and his worth to King Svein and was favoured above all men; while the King of Denmark himself continued to be neighbourly to the Archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, as was his wont, but did not delay in sending a ship full of rich gifts to Alba, whose mission to Rome had been attended by so many benefits.

With the ship, King Svein sent a crop-headed young woman called Ragna, who the previous month had been delivered of a large purple infant with a shock of black hair. It proved to be a daughter, so King Svein sent the baby as well, assigned to the King of Alba’s personal cook.