King Hereafter (102 page)

It seemed a long time since, a girl of seventeen, she had run Gillacomghain’s household and then Thorfinn’s with the aid of one steward, who would handle the stores and the incoming tributes and oversee the managers of the land that was farmed, while she saw that the cloth was woven and bought, and that the sewing and shoemaking were done, and the supply of men and girls and skilled women was always enough for the household’s needs in cooked food and service. If no one else was there to do it, she bought new
oxen herself and hired smiths or leatherworkers, and herself settled a case of wife-stealing or theft, or herself complained to the miller about badly ground bere.

Now it was all too large, and growing larger. The changing group of mormaers and men-at-arms who advised and attended the King had to be fed, and his churchmen and scribes as well as his household, quite apart from the special councils and feasts. There were always envoys or other visitors.

To accommodate all that, the lands held directly under the King, providing for his sheep and corn and swine and cattle and horse-breeding, his hunting and his fisheries, had had to grow also, for the ownerless lands of Fife that had come to him after Duncan’s death had not proved enough. Now, if a holding fell vacant through death or misdemeanour, Thorfinn would often choose a man of his own to run it under the Crown.

All that was beyond the scope of one steward now. Every aspect of daily life, from the upkeep of buildings to the itinerary of the household, from the maintenance and making of arms and of tools to the building of ships, the felling of timber, the care of the horses, had to be in someone’s hands, usually those of a man who was either a mormaer or a kinsman of one. Men who already had land, or access to it, and who, so far, could be rewarded with excitement, with companionship, and with silver.

So far. But Thorfinn must remember how, once in Orkney at least, once in Alba at least, rulers had bought the swords of their subjects in time of crisis by offering them in free gift the lands they had hitherto maintained as tenants. And how, later, necessity had forced the ruler or his descendants in every case to take back the gift.

In allotting more land to these Normans, Thorfinn was offering a hostage to fortune. For his own men in time to come would look for advancement; and to provide it, the food-barns would have to be full, and the chests of silver, locked in Dunkeld there.

On the other hand, if she had thought of it, then Thorfinn undoubtedly had also. And, despite everything, had gone ahead.

To Lulach, who had stayed at Perth for several weeks after the council meeting, Groa one day broached the subject obliquely. They were alone in Thorfinn’s quarters in Abernethy, between the hills and the broad water-meadows of the Tay, and Thorfinn himself was absent in Angus.

Once, he was never
absent
, for wherever he was, there was the kingdom, and herself at his side. But for years there had been no methodical progress from region to region of the kingdom, hearing complaints, meting out justice, consuming tributes in kind.

Or no, that was wrong. Of course the household had travelled, incessantly. But the moves were not so frequent. Instead, Thorfinn himself made of each resting-place a base from which, day by day and week by week, he rode from place to place, wherever there were people, with a band of picked helpers. Fast and tirelessly mobile, he went where the household was too cumbersome to go, and where his presence was demanded. Between one move of the household and the next, he could be in Orkney and back.

She did not ask to go with him, and he did not invite her. The reasons were obvious. She was no more than in her mid-thirties and could ride as long as he did. But the household needed her presence, and the kind of business he was transacting, the kind of relationships he was establishing with these his subjects, did not.

He needed her to help him rule the kingdom. But it was a long time since he had needed her personally, as on the day he had come back from Rome, strained beyond his resources by months of meticulous work with the powerful men he was wooing, with the young courtiers he was training. Since that occasion, he had not turned to her for help or understanding. And even then the comfort she had given him had been of limited duration. The open air and the sea had been his real need, and his salvation.

So to her son Lulach, who had spent a serene morning hawking and seemed to miss neither his wife nor his new-born daughter in Moray, Groa said, ‘I wonder what sort of court King Malcolm kept in his day? Full, I’m told, of Norse-Irish women and no wives. And yet he could hold off the Vikings and defeat the English in pitched battle.’

‘I don’t think Thorfinn has any Norse-Irish girls,’ said Lulach dreamily. ‘In fact, I’m sure he hasn’t.’ Steam rose gently from all his clothing, and a strong smell of horseflesh. His hair, against the wood of the settle, was pink as dawn snow in the firelight.

‘Well, that’s good,’ said Groa with some irritation. ‘Don’t you know how Malcolm ruled?’

Lulach tasted the mead in his cup, drank from it, and set it down once again on the floor. He said, ‘He didn’t have Normans, if that’s what you mean. He had his daughter’s husband to call on whenever Vikings were needed, and his mother’s people in Ireland whenever Vikings ran short. His household, I suppose, was like that of any Irish king of his day with no sons. He fought for his people in return for his keep. You don’t have to run a very big household for that.… Didn’t Thorfinn tell you the Normans were coming?’

He always got to the root of the trouble, and it was always painful. You had to be very even-tempered to live with Lulach. Groa said, ‘I think it’s a little dangerous.’

‘But at first,’ Lulach said, ‘weren’t you surprised by his cleverness? I think he wanted you to be surprised by his cleverness. You are the only person whose opinion really matters to him.’

Her eyes flickered, and she bent to pick up the gold spool she was working with, turning away from the heat of the fire. The linen cord in her lap was half-covered with bullion already, with a speck of blood on it where the fine wire had opened her thumb. Lulach said, ‘Do you want me to speak to him?’

Her eyes cleared. ‘No,’ said Groa. She looked up. ‘So long as nothing is wrong. You didn’t tell him anything new?’

‘He doesn’t want to know, any more,’ Lulach said. ‘And it wouldn’t make any difference. Don’t grieve because he isn’t brought low with doubt, or with pain, or despair. When he does call on you, it will be for something even you will find almost impossible to give. Save your strength for that day.’

The wire fell from her lap and leap-frogged in thin golden coils over the flags and into the glowing red core of the fire. ‘Because of the Normans?’ she said. ‘Lulach, I think I want to know.’

Lulach’s perfect teeth showed in his slow, charming smile. ‘Then you should have read my account of the Normans,’ he said. ‘Hugh and his friend Osbern Pentecost flying north from their castles to take refuge with King Macbeth. Pentecost, someone said, was God’s answer to Babel, but we seem to have more languages now, don’t we, than ever we had? … I wish you wouldn’t cry. It doesn’t change anything.’

‘Next time I say I want to know,
don’t tell me anything
,’ Groa said. ‘And meantime, whom do you know who would like gilded firewood? The ultimate decadence. As we sink into financial chaos, men will look down on our ruins and murmur:
Like Egypt, like Rome, like Byzantium, these men of Scotia went down in their glory
. Yes, what is it?’

She wondered if she had been overheard. But the man of her chamber who entered was much too engaged with his own news.

‘My lady, a harbinger has arrived. The Bishop of Alba is on his way here, hoping for an audience with the King.’

Before she had drawn breath, Lulach was on his feet beside her. ‘The King is on his way back from Angus. I’ll meet him. My lady will be happy to see the Bishop and entertain him until the King comes.’ He turned to Groa. ‘If that is right?’

He could change so quickly. It was perfectly right, and the course of action that, given time, she would have propounded. Lulach left while she was still giving orders for the guest-quarters to be made ready, and the Prior sent for.

It was some time later, when changing her robe in the hands of her women, that she realised to the full her position. Whatever she thought of the Normans, she now faced the prospect of excusing their presence to the man whose superior in York had just abetted the return of Earl Godwin, the Normans’ chief enemy.

It appeared that there were ways in which she could help her husband the King after all. She let them pleat her hair and knot pearls into it, and then selected with care the objects to hang at her girdle: enough to outmatch York but not enough to make her walk like a draw-bullock.

Then, having delegated the Prior to offer the Bishop an opportunity for rest and refreshment, Groa sat back with her ladies and waited, thoughtfully, for the Bishop to present himself after his supper. After (she had impressed on the Prior) his excellent but somewhat lingering supper, with no lack of generosity in the matter of wine.

Bishop Malduin was aware, flushed in the heat, that the table of the pure and humble brethren of Abernethy had undergone a transformation since his last truncated visit, and put it down, with accuracy, to the presence of a royal hall and a greater sophistication in the matter of how to handle a bishop.

And the King Thorfinn, or Macbeth, was not present.

The Bishop’s stomach, wizened with the burning tokens of apprehension,
began to whine and cluck its way into neutrality, and then on to appetite. Instead of water, to which, facing the King, he would have confined himself, he allowed himself a little wine.

Not too much. He had the Lady to see, and no doubt she would find some way of summoning up a new, tough mormaer or even a usurping bishop to try and shake his confidence before the King arrived.

A little wine, however, would do no harm. He had never been better prepared for any encounter with this upstart kinsman and his acolytes who had turned his comfortable bishopric into a badgersett. Forne and Gamel, Ligulf and Orm, Earl Siward himself, over and over again, had discussed the matter with him, so that he fully understood everything that was at stake.

His wife had understood, too, when he told her. His wife who had inherited a nice bit of land about York, and who had married him because he was once a nephew by marriage of the heiress of Scotland and had been promised a bishopric.

He was not, like some other men, in danger of killing himself with his own cunning, or a hulking bully fit only for the battle-field. He was not, he admitted, a man of his unsavoury times. But it had seemed then that he could not fail. If King Malcolm or his grandson Duncan took Durham, then the Bishop of Alba their kinsman would surely become Bishop of Alba and Durham as well, with the lands and the tributes of the whole of the church of St Cuthbert in his keeping.

Or if, as the cynicism of King Malcolm and the quality of his grandson King Duncan emerged, the dice fell in the opposite direction, the Bishop of Alba was still there, discreet, well trained, helpful to his superiors, to enable an Earl of Northumbria to add the lands of Cumbria and Lothian to the lands of St Cuthbert he already held and appoint the Bishop of Alba over them all.

In all the years of their association, Siward had never in so many words promised Bishop Malduin the bishopric of St Cuthbert’s town of Durham, but he had taken it for granted that, sooner or later, it would fall into his obedient lap. The present Bishop was in trouble over money matters: everyone knew that; and the one before that had bought his cross and his ring quite openly from King Hardecanute; while Bishop Aldhun had become richer and more powerful than anybody by marrying his daughter to Earl Uhtred, who had been killed by Carl Thorbrandsson’s father, and whose granddaughter Earl Siward had married.

None of these attractive things had so far happened to Bishop Malduin, and, while waiting, his daughter had been forced to make a marriage of only modest prospects, and his stepson Colban, whose clerical failings still marred the book-rolls in York and in Durham, was now spreading equal despair from the desk of Ghilander, his own half-brother in Angus.

None the less, he had never given up hope. He could never make a friend of Siward, this fur-trader’s bullying son from the mountains of Norway. The Orkney strain in the Bishop’s blood, tamed and muted by years of study and civilised living, recognised nothing familiar there. But Siward, year by year, was growing stronger and richer, and the new Archbishop of York, they said,
was as eager to get his hands on the northern diocese as Siward was.

Hence the disbelief with which he had heard his cousin Thorfinn’s ultimatum.
Persuade Earl Siward to allot you the living of all the St Cuthbert churches in Lothian as well as your charges in Alba, or I will make life in Alba so unbearable for you that you will have to retire
.

In effect, that was what Thorfinn had threatened, and that was what the Bishop had told Earl Siward and his wife. He had dreaded his wife’s response even more than that of Earl Siward, and with reason. His wife had had time to make her attitude very clear in the weeks of waiting that followed his report to Earl Siward.

The weeks of waiting, he now believed, had a lot to do with the progress of Earl Godwin’s bid to return to power after his exile. The subsequent delay was due, he knew very well, to the extraordinary, the outrageous news that had arrived from Cumbria.

Thorfinn of Alba had given shelter to a troop of powerful Normans escaping from the authority of the Godwin family in the south. And was proposing to settle them, among other places, in the lands south of the river Forth. In Lothian.

The thought of it made his mouth dry, but he sipped very carefully. He was not a big man, and he made it a rule never to appear unsteady or dishevelled. Every detail of his appearance should be correct and was, from his clean-shaven chin to his pointed slippers, with his immaculate robe tailored smoothly over the little pot-belly kept firm by hunting. He hardly noticed how Thorfinn’s wife looked when he finally entered her chamber: he was wondering at the time whether she knew enough to put a proper value on his fur trim, and had noticed the new ring Earl Siward had sent him as a little present on leaving.