The Constant Queen (49 page)

Elizaveta looked across the water into the sun, embracing the intensity of its light.

‘And me?’ she asked. ‘When did I become an adventurer, Hari? When I saw you?’

He kissed her, long and hard.

‘Oh no. You, my Lilyveta, were
born
an adventurer and I love you for it. You will wait for me?’

‘Always. You will come?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Because
you
will come to me. You will come to me in Westminster, to be crowned as Queen of England.’

‘You promise?’

At that though he shifted, pulled away a little.

‘I cannot promise, Lily, you know that, but have I ever failed to return from battle?’

She sighed. Calls were sounding from the ships below as men rose, stretched, checked for their swords. The sun’s light was spreading, calling everyone to the day, and their stolen moment
was leaking away. Hardly able to bear it, she pulled her husband’s arms back around her and, locked together, they watched the Viking army unfurl before them.

‘We are in God’s hands now,’ Harald murmured but Elizaveta shook her head fiercely.

‘Not quite yet,’ she insisted. ‘For a few minutes more, Hari, we are still in each other’s.’

Those precious minutes were soon swallowed up in the voracious jaws of a preparing army, and after that came two weeks of emptiness. Thorfinn, like Ulf, had gone to God last
year and his two sons had sailed with Harald, taking Idonie along to visit the Scottish King Malcolm, to whom the family owed partial allegiance. The great compound on the Brough, therefore, was
empty of all but a handful of servants, and Greta, Elizaveta, and their children rattled helplessly around in it. In the long days after the great fleet set forth from Scapa Flow, summer seemed to
sigh itself out and autumn raced across the beautiful islands, turning the leaves golden and whipping them almost immediately from the trees as if refusing them their glory. Elizaveta had to fight
herself hard not to see it as an omen, for that way madness lay.

Earlier in the year the night skies had been riven by a falling star, trailing fire like a backwards dragon. Many had hailed that as an omen, but of what? As Harald had calmly pointed out, the
same star would blaze its trail across England, Normandy and Norway alike and who was to say which it favoured? The same was true now – the falling leaves could mark a loss for any of the
contenders for the throne of England, or they could just be falling. And the winds, at least, would carry Harald’s ships swiftly south, which was worth more than any imagined favour.

Exactly two weeks after Harald had left, Elizaveta pulled her cloak around her and took her viol up to the ancient broch. It was foolish, she knew – the very winds that had taken Harald to
England would prevent his messengers reaching her, but at least up here on the cliffs at the edge of the Brough, where they had stood together that precious golden dawn, she felt as close to him as
she could possibly be.

Was he there in Westminster yet? Were the messengers on their way to fetch her to him as he had promised? Was he, maybe, laughing with Agatha as he took the throne of the English from the
upstart Earl Harold? Was he preparing to lead both his own men and the English against the Normans? Or had the Normans got to Harold first and it was Duke William he must now face to secure the
throne? Surely, either way, the English would aid him in seeing off the upstart duke and his presumptuous Flanders wife?

Elizaveta tried to imagine Westminster but could only find images of Kiev, though there was no way the English first city could be like her childhood home, far away in the Rus. She had quizzed
anyone she’d encountered who had ever been near London – though they were pitifully few – and she knew from Agatha’s letters that Westminster was a low-lying island set
within the embrace of a great river called the Thames, a wide, flat, rolling water without the cliffs and rapids of the Dnieper.

The rest of London, her sister had said, sprawled out from the palace and abbey at its heart, across what had once been meadowland and marshes, eating up new villages into its eager embrace with
every passing year. It was built largely of wood, its streets were no more than trampled earth, and it was protected only by a palisade, and that bare in places. It was not, then, Kiev, with its
paving and its cupolas and its rooved walls though there were apparently, at least, traders and merchants of all nations living there so it should be more at the centre of the advancing world than
remote Norway. And so what if it lacked architecture? She could create that, as she had created it for Oslo. Yes, she tried hard to imagine Westminster for sometimes it felt like the only positive
thing she could do.

Elizaveta fingered her viol bow, wondering how it must feel to wield instead an archer’s bow, or a sword. She thought of Harald seeing lances in the ships’ masts and remembered
standing on Kiev’s walls to watch her father’s forces beat the Pechenegs – the only war, despite how many had raged around her, that she’d ever seen. That had been the
summer weedy little Magnus had ridden to Norway in Harald’s place. She had been so angry – too angry to even pay much attention to the battle.

From where they’d stood, some hundred paces from the fighting, it had been hard to see faces, to spot individual deaths, and Elizaveta’s overwhelming impression had been of an
evershifting sea of limbs, some flesh, some metal, moving like a changing tide on a piercing wind of pain. Her mother had tried to steer her into admiring her father’s tactics – the
precise movement of blocks of troops to enclose the crazed Pechenegs – and Elizaveta had heard enough of Harald and Ulf’s talk since to now appreciate the skill of command. At the time,
though, she had been too intrigued by the relentless smash of steel on bone to see the patterns.

‘Where is Papa?’ was all she’d wanted to know.

‘A good commander stays in the rear,’ her mother had assured her. ‘He must view the whole field, not just the man in front of him.’

Elizaveta had seen that day how true that was, but only if the commander were winning. The Pecheneg leader had sunk with his lowliest soldiers, his battle-patterns, if he’d ever had any,
carved to nought. She drew her bow determinedly across the strings. The winds whipped her notes away almost before they could form but that suited her for the poor instrument was old now and warped
from its travels and she wanted it less for music than distraction from the discord of her own thoughts.

‘Mama?’

She looked up to see Maria in the doorway of the broch, her dark hair whipping behind her as if one with her carelessly slung cloak.

‘Maria! Come inside. There is precious little warmth but the walls keep the worst of the winds away.’

The young woman, newly turned twenty, stepped carefully over the rocky sill and joined her.

‘You look for ships?’

‘Foolish, I know.’

Maria did not contradict her.

‘Josef is not well,’ she said instead, ‘so I have brought Filip out to give him and Greta some peace.’

Elizaveta leaned forward to see the twelve-year-old kicking a pig’s bladder against the wall of the broch. The rough stones sent the ball flying in all directions and she envied Filip his
concentration on its path. She was grateful Greta had chosen to come back to the Orkneys with her when Aksel had been made one of Harald’s commanders in the mission to England. She was good
company and the children were a blessed distraction and, besides, Greta had been with Elizaveta last time and last time Harald had returned – more omens!

‘That’s kind,’ she said to Maria.

‘It’s not as if I had anything else to do, save drive myself insane with imaginings.’

‘You too?’

‘Yes. Ingrid is happy in Thorfinn’s drying room, doing something strange with leaves. She’s made a drink to bring Josef’s fever down and is now concocting a potion to
help soothe wounds but what’s the point in that? I would rather be with the warriors, Mama, fighting alongside Papa with my sword, than stuck here like a cripple.’

‘You love him very much, Maria.’

‘As do you.’

Elizaveta looked at her.

‘I do. I have been lucky. And you – you are looking forward to your wedding?’

Maria blushed.

‘I am. It feels, Mama, as if everything between us has been on hold for this invasion.’

‘Everything?’

‘Yes – everything!’ Maria said indignantly, adding, ‘Though not for want of Otto’s trying.’

‘Clearly I have brought you up well.’

Maria smiled suddenly, releasing a cheeky dimple that made her look four years old all over again.

‘I’ve been tempted. I used to think Papa was the only man in the world worth marrying but Otto has changed that. He’s so handsome, Mama, and when he looks at me I, I . .
.’

‘Melt?’

‘No! Goodness no, nothing so soft. I flame.’

Elizaveta kissed her cheek.

‘There is nothing wrong with that, Maria. It is, indeed, a blessing – or it will be.’

Maria rose and paced the inside of the broch, running her hands along the wall as if feeling for its heartbeat.

‘I was angry at him,’ she said eventually.

‘At Otto?’

‘Yes. I was angry that he agreed to postpone our wedding for England. He was all caught up in being Papa’s marshal and happy to do anything he said. I thought it was wrong to wait. I
. . . I shouted at him.’

Elizaveta went to her daughter.

‘Maria, sweetheart, I swear I have shouted at your father more times than I have broken my fast but he always comes back for more.’

‘Maybe, but did he ride to battle in between?’

‘You argued here?’

‘The night before they sailed, yes. He wanted us to, to . . .’

‘Know each other fully?’

‘Yes. And I said that had he not let Papa postpone the wedding we could have known each other for weeks. I said . . . I said that if I had to wait, he had to wait too.’

‘You said that?’ Elizaveta gasped.

‘Was I wrong?’

‘No! Oh Maria, no, it’s exactly what I said to your father in Kiev when he chose to sail back to Constantinople as a bachelor Varangian instead of with me to Norway.’

Maria stared at her.

‘And what happened?’

Elizaveta smiled.

‘Much, Maria, including more arguments, but in the end he rode back to me – rode down an icy river and leaped a burning ship to claim me as his bride.’ Maria laughed,
disbelievingly. ‘It’s true!’

‘It sounds like one of Halldor’s stories.’

‘It does, doesn’t it? Stories though, you know, can carry much truth.’ As one they looked to the roughly arched window on the seaward side of the broch. ‘And
heroes,’ Elizaveta added, ‘do exist. We must trust to that. Trust and pray.’

York, September 1066

R
iding high on his horse Harald approached the walls of York and seeing the frightened huddle of women above the gates knew that news of his
victory had reached the city. He smiled. Victory! It hadn’t been easy but nothing worth winning ever was and besides it was good practice for the battles yet to come. If the men of northern
England, their veins supposedly running with Norse blood, had put up such a fight, there would be battle aplenty in the south but he cared not. He was ready. He felt alive, on fire, like a bolt of
smoothest silk shot through with gold. He would be king of this pretty country.

Not that the marshlands at Fulford were pretty now. It had been a bitter fight. The English earls had caught them halfway to York, their troops lined up between a wide, unfordable stretch of
the Ouse to the west and marshlands to the east. It had been a brave stand, Harald had seen that from the moment he’d ridden over the hill. He’d admired the young commanders’ guts
in leaving themselves little room for retreat, but he’d also seen all too swiftly how that could be exploited.

Earls Edwin and Morcar had hit him fast, barely before he’d lined up his front troops and with half his army still strung out along the road from the ships at Riccall – though
strung out, crucially, behind him so that as the front lines were engaged he was able to keep on filling his ranks from behind. He’d soon outnumbered the defenders – just the way he
liked it.

‘They will have to surrender, Sire.’

Harald was drawn from his thoughts by Torr, riding proudly at his side as if he had been instrumental in the battle, which in a way he had. The exiled earl had led them safely to the enemy
and, once there, Harald had been able to station his rag-taggle troops to the right, in the marshiest of the marshy land the English had forced them to fight from. The enemy had been unable to
resist the lure and had driven hard into them. Torr had not looked so cocky then, with men falling all around him, but he had, at least, held out long enough for Harald to send his own powerful
force driving round the side to push the English, giddy on their initial success, deep into the marshland. The fighting had been long and hard but with more troops still arriving from up the road
Harald had slowly but surely decimated the English and once their earls had turned tail it had all been over.