King Hereafter (40 page)

‘You would say,
Let the pig into the house and it will make for the kitchen
,’ he said.

‘I would say,
Big ships going to the bottom, and pails floating
,’ said Groa. ‘Come and bless the food. No doubt it needs it.’

At Forres, as Duncan had expected, the folk from the rath settlement and the river had all taken their beasts and locked themselves behind the palisades of the hall-mound. The thatched houses stood about, with a dog or two nosing inside them, but nothing else had been left, and when a group of Ulstermen broke into the little church, they found it also quite empty.

Duncan hanged one of them as an example, and set a strong guard round the mount so that no one could get out and carry tales, for this time it mattered. And then he walked down to the riverbank and stood, helmet in the crook of his arm, with his moustache ruffled by the afternoon breeze and his firm cheeks russet with pleasure.

The three ships were there. The round-bellied knörrs paid off by Hardecanute had been making a nuisance of themselves round the east coast, picking up bits of cargo here and there when he had found them at Berwick, and paid off the portreeve who was about to take them off to his lord, and sobered one or two of them up enough to explain what he wanted.

They had made a nuisance of themselves here also, he expected, drinking off the last of their pay and haggling over their cargo. But there was nothing to connect three hired ships with the advance of his, Duncan’s, army, and by the time anyone realised it, the thing would be over.

He sent his scouts out, and they came back with the news he had been hoping for. Eskadale, on the next firth, was undefended. Thorfinn was coming down to stop him from the north, gathering men hurriedly as he came. But, however quickly he marched, he could not get them south, so they reported, in time to save the Cromarty peninsula. So the stance would be made further north, at Dingwall.

‘You were right,’ Maldred said, when he heard; and if there was a thread of astonishment in his voice, it was no more than his half-brother had come to expect. ‘So we put the first plan into effect. I sail, and you march to Dingwall. Unless you’ve changed your mind?’

He had not changed his mind, because Dingwall was where Thorfinn would be. There he had the big hall and the Moot Hill by the mouth of the river Peffer, where the long sea inlet reached into the hills. To gain the Tarbatness peninsula, a marching army would have to pass between the sea and the mountains of Easter Ross, where Dingwall, the assembly-place, lay. Unless Thorfinn wanted to lose Tarbatness as well as Cromarty, he would have to stand there and bar Duncan’s way.

Nor would Duncan have him wait there in vain. At a carefully chosen hour, say halfway between dawn and midday, this half-breed brother would stand among his hammer-struck heathens and see the army of his overlord fill the plain before him with its steel.

Perhaps he would turn tail. Perhaps, as they came nearer, he would be encouraged to think that there were fewer of them than he expected: a number much the same as his own, and far from their homeland. Duncan hoped that he would feel emboldened—even contemptuous. He hoped to be there when Thorfinn’s expression changed—for at some point, face to face with his King and his Maker, Thorfinn’s face, surely, would change. Until it was changed for him, one way or another. Eadulf had made a show with the heads of a few Irishmen. He, Duncan, proposed to take home the head of the Earl of Orkney on the masthead of one of his ships.

For the ships were his little surprise. He was sorry, in a way, that he was not sailing himself, but even if Maldred’s performance was usually indifferent, the two leaders with him were good. Even if only two out of the three landings succeeded, that would be enough. And one of them surely would find the monk, and the woman. And, having found them, would move south to Dingwall to close in on Thorfinn’s back.

In the Mormaer’s hall at Dingwall, Arnór Jarlaskáld hung up his harp, shook his arm free of cramp, and said, ‘They’re all going to sleep out there. How can you let them go to sleep, with Duncan’s army just over the river? They don’t want to sing any more: they just want to go to sleep.’

‘So do I,’ said Thorfinn. ‘And I’m going to, over there, with the lamps out, so the rest of you had better do the same. Otkel?’

‘I’ll wake you, my lord Earl, if there’s news,’ Otkel said. In the last year or two, a number of young men had appeared, serving the hird, Arnór noticed. He settled down beside Starkad and said, ‘How many runners does he have? I passed one on his way out again as I came back to the hall.’

Starkad said, ‘They’re in relays across the peninsula. Don’t ask foolish questions. Go to sleep.’

‘I still don’t know how he thinks it’s safe to sleep,’ Arnór said. ‘And if that’s a foolish question, I’d rather ask it and stay alive than the other way about.’

Starkad snored. A voice on his other side said, ‘Arnór: it’s to do with the
tides. Now will you be quiet? You will have all tomorrow to think of your verses.’

There were, of course, men of war who knew nothing of tides, but no prince brought up within reach of the Tay or the Solway would fail to know how important they were, or to find the right man to tell him about them.

Maldred, whose ship would make the first landing, sat on a bale of raw fleeces with the master’s lamp and studied again the bit of vellum with the drawing of the peninsula: a hatchet-shape jutting into the sea, with Tarbatness at the peak of the blade and his own landing-place, at Rosskeen in the estuary, under the notch of the axe-beard. On the same shore, fifteen miles to the west, lay Dingwall, with Duncan’s army presumably now settled within reach and poised for battle.

To the north, across the thick of the peninsula, was the Westray shore, on which Muiredach of Ulidia would make his landing, fifteen miles west of St Colman’s, where Archú’s men would be dropped, just inside the point of Tarbatness. The numbers had been carefully worked out; for though the northern settlements were small, this was where, rumour said, Thorfinn’s wife and the monk had their houses. There would be defences there, and in the vale of Ulladule, in the centre, and of course at Rosskeen, where he, Maldred, was landing. Thorfinn was not so simple as to expect his enemy to throw all his force against Dingwall when a crossing might be made here, by determined men with rafts or coracles, from one side of the firth to the other. There might be a hundred men hidden there on the shore, waiting, as they thought, to pick off an offshoot of Duncan’s army as they paddled painfully across the mile of water that separated firth from firth.

A hundred men who would cringe when the first light revealed a cargo-ship looming up, with three hundred armed men leaping ashore to attack them.

Maldred folded the map just as the lamp toppled over and the prow bucked along the first of the ocean rollers coming up from the south-east. He began to fall. His palm hit the flesh of the sheepskins and saluted them, ending up over his head, with a fistful of sheep’s grease and maggots.

He lay on the lurching thwarts, and his mouth watered.

Once, her mother had stayed waking through a night such as this. ‘When men go on a journey of the grave,’ Bergljot had said, ‘it does not behove women to sleep,’

So Groa did not try, but left the little huts she shared with the people from the farm and the smith’s house below, beyond the bogs of the river.

Somewhere a child cried, and somewhere there was a murmuring: others, too, found it hard to find sleep. The monks, she supposed, prayed, but if so, they did it quietly. Outside, by the hollow which had once been an old forge, the moon shone through the trees on a world of darkness and silence, and the only sounds were those of the wild, for the cattle had long since been driven up into the hills beyond the loch, with the dogs. From the edge of the little hill,
she looked into the blackness east and south, and felt the wind lift her hair, and wondered what the morning would bring.

Duftah’s voice said, ‘A wise man said,
If thou loathest death, why dost thou love sleep?
 … Do you need me, or not?’

‘I might ask the same,’ Groa said.

‘Ah yes,’ the monk said. ‘It does not do to forget: you are well versed in the ways of the child, and so of the man. I think tonight we need each other.’

The wind blew, and the tree shadows moved in the moonlight. Groa said, ‘The smith is away, fighting for Thorfinn. His wife says his smith-work is famous.’

‘There is an old tradition,’ Duftah said. ‘There was a monastery once in Westray; and bog iron, and oak trees for charcoal, and the smith made cauldrons and ploughshares and rivets and ladles, and sometimes silver bowls and cast crosses. When the Norse settled, they kept the smithy for swords and harness and axes.… It will make crosses again. His sons are there, in the hut.’

She did not answer. After a while, he said, ‘Is it the beauty of the night, or your sons? You would be right to weep for either.’

‘My father is losing his sight,’ Groa said. ‘I have not seen him for thirteen years.’

She knew that he had turned towards her. ‘My poor daughter,’ he said. ‘It is a very little bulwark to hide behind, but I shall join you there if you wish, till you find better refuge.’

‘There is none,’ she said. Surely … surely there were two shades of black to the east where a moment before there had been one? Surely the wind that stirred her robe was sharper, with the sea in it as well as the lost rumours of woodsmoke and peat, of grass and wet mosses and night-breathing plants. Duftah murmured in Gaelic, and she half-listened, expecting a prayer; and found that instead it was something different.

‘… When all seems lost, some things remain,’ Duftah said.

Duncan said, ‘When we make the attack, look for the gilded helmet. Thorfinn always wears Canute’s helmet. I suppose it reminds him of the days when he learned to live like a lord. Where’s the priest?’

The priest, in an unpriestly fashion, had been sleeping. Duncan had him wakened and brought to the tent. Confession didn’t take long: in twenty-four hours in the field, there had been little opportunity to collect more than a minor transgression. After the ritual was over, he kept the priest by him, rehearsing the speeches he intended them both to make next morning, and getting his poet to write them down, in case when the time came he could not catch all the words. As morning drew near, Duncan realised, to his satisfaction, that he felt unafraid and quite happy.

With the move into the firth, the motion of the knörr settled down, and the three hundred soldiers she carried began to groan and sit up.

It was still dark, which was as it should be. They were to land, Duncan had decreed, when there was just enough light for a footing, and then to overwhelm whatever party might await them on shore, being careful to leave no survivors. One-third of the company would then strike northwards to Ulladule, there to rendezvous with the other two parties, while two-thirds returned to the knörr and sailed up the firth, there to land at a place called Clachan Biorach and attack Thorfinn’s army from the rear.

In all these years of Saxon speech, Maldred had found little occasion to use his Gaelic and indeed had found conversation with Muiredach and Arch? quite troublesome during the long wait at Forres. It was just as well that most of the men fighting under them were of their own race, as it happened. For himself, he found it a relief to talk to the shipmaster, who was Swedish, and whose tongue you heard any day in Northumbria. At least he knew the man understood him.

All the same, there was a confusion of purpose almost as soon as they began to sail up the inlet to Rosskeen—Maldred requiring that the knörr should down sail and row, and the master objecting on the grounds that the current was far too strong for the few oars that the cargo-boat carried. Which was all very well, but, as the diagram clearly showed, the channel up to Rosskeen consisted of shallow water running through swathes of flat sand, and demanded skilful manoeuvring. He got the vellum out again and tilted it towards the lamp and the vague pink light from the east that was beginning to suffuse the sky and the sea. The captain took the map from him, and the lamp, and carried both to the rear of the ship to show it to his steersman: the oarsmen followed him, peering.

In the prow of the ship, the spears and helms and shield-bosses glittered red, and so did the thin wash of waves, far away, running on to the sands of Rosskeen. Whatever knowledgeable eyes there might have been on board, none saw the glaze on the sea exactly halfway between ship and shore, or heard the lazy surfing of water that came not from the shore but from the sandbank immediately ahead of the knörr’s painted snake-mouth.

From the masthead, someone screamed, ‘Aft! Run aft! Quickly!’ and to the best of their ability, three hundred men did. The knörr hit the sandbank and flew up it with the ease of a snow-sledge on runners.

Inside, the three hundred fell down, slicing one another, while the master and crew, including the man at the masthead, silently disappeared overboard. Righting themselves, bloodied and cursing, Maldred and his landing-party found themselves lodged, firmly and inescapably, on a large tract of sand completely surrounded by water beyond which was a beach, glimmering in the brightening light.

Set upon the beach, in a graceful half-moon, was a fence of linked wattle barriers.