King Hereafter (81 page)

The same way that King Svein wanted something that Thorfinn had,’ said the Atholl man, Cormac.

‘The Lady?’ said the Moray toisech, and grinned. ‘That was a game. This is
serious. The Archbishop wants to be patriarch of the north, and Thorfinn can help him. Or the Archbishop
thinks
he can help him.’

‘And is the Archbishop mistaken?’ said Otkel of Orkney. ‘Or perhaps half mistaken? I should rather like to know. Ferocious wolves take large bites. I don’t think I’d like the Archbishop for my enemy.’

N HIS LODGING
near the King’s Mill and under the knoll of St Mary’s, Bishop John, the saintliest man in Goslar, was innocently tiddly. The wine which, being Sunday, he had been able to serve along with a reasonable meal was only one of the causes. The other was the sound in his ears: the joyous sound of five Gaelic voices vying with one another in the accents of Ireland and Alba.

There had been a point, earlier in the evening, when the noise had made him apprehensive. This was what Abbot Ekbert complained of in Fulda, and Archbishop Pilgrim had found so disturbing in Cologne that he had tried to dismiss Abbot Ailill of St Martin’s and St Pantaleon and his brisk communities of Irish monks.

But Abbot Ekbert was not here, and Archbishop Pilgrim was asleep in Christ these fourteen years, and the present Archbishop of Cologne, in whom ran the blood of Popes and Emperors, had things on his mind other than the conduct of the Irish monks in his diocese. Other things, such as un-Christian dislike of Bishop John’s own lifelong hero, Adalbert of Hamburg and Bremen.

Thinking about it, Bishop John cried a little, and Abbot Maieul, his friend and Ailill’s successor from St Martin’s Cologne, patted his hand without faltering in the conversational duel he was conducting with the King of Alba’s prior over a cryptogram.

Everyone knew, of course, that the King of Alba was important because he had a fleet; and it was to be expected that he did some trading. It had been a surprise, however, to find his two priests so congenial. The Prior, Eochaid, was a lettered man, as you would expect of anyone trained in Armagh. The visiting Abbot, Tuathal, had studied in Swords, and for several years, it would appear, he and Abbot Maieul had been exchanging riddles and acrostics and even secular verses, one of which they were now chanting together. It sometimes seemed to Bishop John that the happy nature of Maieul of Cologne led the Abbot alarmingly close to frivolity.

Bishop John looked up, his eyes refilling with tears, and Prior Tuathal, who was holding his other hand, leaned over and explained the import of the last
two lines of the secular verse, which were so unexpectedly witty that Bishop John swallowed his tongue and had to be given drink and banged on the shoulderblades.

His fourth and fifth guests, who had come with Abbot Maieul from Cologne, watched, smiling with rueful affection. The younger, who had the good Irish-Breton name of Muiredach, said, ‘If you give him any more, he will fall asleep.’

Muiredach mac Robartaig might be the son of the Abbot of Kells, but he was only sixteen. Bishop John said, ‘Is it for the guests, now, to advise the host what he is drinking, and the mouths of them wet with the hospitality broth?’

‘He said something,’ said Sigurd. Bishop John heard him quite clearly. It was unlike Sigurd to be obtuse. Sigurd had been sent especially from Cologne to join the brethren at Goslar and tend the workshops. The Archbishop’s welcome had been cool, but that was because he did not yet know Sigurd as Bishop John did. Bishop John said, ‘Was I talking to you? It was Muiredach here whose manners need watching.’

‘I don’t know what he’s saying either,’ said Muiredach. ‘Give him another drink.’

They gave him another drink, and because arguing made him tired, Bishop John went to sleep.

When they had made him comfortable, ‘We don’t often breed saints,’ said Abbot Maieul of Cologne. ‘Let us make sure this one comes to no harm. Tuathal. Your King is here to obtain Bremen-consecrated bishops. Why, I wonder? Merely to promote alliance?’

‘You are half right,’ said Tuathal. The acumen that had led Thorfinn to place him in Fife, the storm-centre of his new kingdom, was there to be seen in his sharp eyes and thick, pock-marked face. ‘We need alliances because we lack organisation, except at sea. We need Frankish-trained men, with Gaelic as one of their languages.’

‘For Orkney?’ said the Abbot of St Martin’s. ‘And what of Malduin, the Gaelic-speaking Bishop of Alba you have already? I do not see him here.’

Tuathal said, ‘Bishop Malduin was consecrated at York. And York means Northumbria, whose ties to Norway are strong. As for Orkney, Celtic monks have had a stake there and in Caithness from the earliest times. In theory, Irish bishops could serve there.…’

‘But Irish bishops don’t know how to organise?’ said Abbot Maieul.

Eochaid answered. ‘There are other objections. The Bishop of Dublin is consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury in England. The Welsh bishops, too. For Canterbury, my King has nothing but respect. But in England, since the time of Gregory, the souls of the northern peoples are held to be a matter for the churchmen of York. And that, as I have explained, holds its dangers.’

‘I fear it is true,’ said the Abbot of St Martin’s. He glanced to the pallet where Bishop John, his fur robe tucked around him, was sleeping musically.

‘Is it mannerly, do you suppose, to summon the servants in the absence of one’s host and request a little more wine? Sigurd, you are more of this establishment than anyone.’

‘His name is Sigurd?’ queried Prior Tuathal as the man thus addressed, with no reluctance, sprang to his feet and departed.

‘He is an Irish Norseman from Dublin, trained at Kells. His name in Christ should be Jon, but we do not use it here. Muiredach and I thought you would like him. He does not enjoy the prospect of working at Goslar close to Archbishop Adalbert.… Ah, Sigurd. The wine.’

Pouring the wine with his powerful hands, the priest Sigurd, it could be seen, wore a half-smile. Tuathal said to him as he sat down, ‘So you have been here a week. How do you like Goslar?’

‘As well as any battle-field,’ Sigurd said. A burly man in his forties, his crucifix shone like a mirror and his tonsure had been drawn with a compass. He added, ‘They tried to get me dictating in the scriptorium, till they discovered my stutter.’

There was a pause. ‘I was not aware,’ said Abbot Maieul, ‘that you had a stutter?’

‘You should see,’ said the priest Sigurd amiably, ‘the thirty-two copies of Livy that thirty-two monks are rewriting in half the number of pages. There are other things I’m better at.’

He rummaged down at his girdle and laid a silver disc on the table. Half an inch in diameter, it bore the legend
HERRENNUS EPS, COLONIA URBS
.

‘Producing those, for example. They brought me here to run the Goslar mint. You know about the mines in the Rammelsberg? Silver, copper, and lead. That’s how Goslar came to be here at all.’

Tuathal said, ‘We have silver in Cumbria.’

‘But no coins?’ Sigurd said. ‘We had coins in Dublin.’

‘The Vikings had,’ Tuathal said. ‘But the tribes don’t use coin. They’ve no roads or bridges to pay toll on and they do their own fighting. They don’t even expect coin for their prisoners: the Irish fight to kill, not to ransom.’

‘But the Irish,’ said Abbot Maieul, ‘as we have just said, are not organised. Isleifr wished, I think, to see the furnaces to compare them with those at Hervordin, and one of your noblemen—Leofwine?—professed an interest also. It may be that the mine-workings would interest your King Macbeth as well.’

‘Macbethad. A fine Irish name. Son of Life,’ said Bishop John thoughtfully.

His guests turned.

The Bishop, his eyes on the painted wood ceiling, smoothed the fur over his chest with one gentle, ringed hand. ‘The leader of his king’s forces in the north—was it not so? Regent for his king in the north, and he fought his master and killed him. So barbarians take the throne. King Olaf. King Canute.’

Eochaid flushed, but Prior Tuathal only smiled and, leaning over, drew the fur robe a trifle higher. ‘King Olaf has been made a saint,’ he said. ‘And it was after a fair fight that King Duncan met his end.’

The soft eyes turned. ‘But he is a king,’ said Bishop John. ‘Do his people follow him?’

‘Yes,’ said Tuathal. He drew back.

‘In adversity?’ said Bishop John. ‘A man needs a God-fearing king, a shriven king, in adversity.’

Abbot Maieul came over and knelt. ‘Cease to concern yourself,’ he said. ‘King Macbeth is here because he knows what his nation needs, and is preparing for it. And how better to look for salvation than through the church of Bremen and Archbishop Adalbert?’

Bishop John’s eyes were closing. He smiled. ‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘There is Christ risen again, one would say. But for the ablutions. Save him, Mary, Mother of God, from the sin he has, of resorting to so many ablutions.’

‘… Dreams,’ Archbishop Adalbert said. ‘Dreams and their interpretation. I think, with the Greeks, that they have much to tell us. Bishop John (who, I trust, is entertaining your Irishmen adequately) would not agree. The Greeks are pagan, he says. But sometimes the Lord speaks through strange instruments, and in any case the Greeks are pagan no longer. My new church at Bremen, which you have not yet seen, is built as a compliment to the church at Benevento. The beauty of its ritual, of which you may have heard, is meant to echo the glory of St Sophia, that struck the eyes and ears of the Russian and drew him forthwith from other gods. Who interprets your dreams?’

One cold winter, the ink froze at Fulda
. ‘In Alba,’ Thorfinn said, ‘matters are slightly different. Other people have the dreams, and I interpret them. Or should if I knew Greek. There is a disturbance?’

It was only reasonable that the fellow should draw attention to it: the shouting had been going on outside for five minutes. The Archbishop felt himself paling with anger. He had wished to talk about dreams. He turned and snapped his fingers.

From the doorway, a man ran towards him.

A second man, entering uninvited, melted discreetly to the end of the table, where sat Isleifr with some of the King of Alba’s companions. Isleifr said, ‘Oh, Christ and Odin.’

‘What?’ said Odalric, who had the quickest wits. Then he grinned. ‘Christ and Odin? Isleifr: the bear?’

The Archbishop stood up, brilliant as Charlemagne, two hundred years dead against the elephant silks. He said, ‘The Greenland bear has escaped. Men with weapons are running to find it. Until it is killed, none should leave the church buildings.’

Thorfinn’s face, wholly bland under the level black bar of his eyebrows, looked across at Isleifr. He said, ‘Where will it go?’

‘Oh, Christ and Odin,’ said Isleifr, whose vocabulary, it seemed, had suffered some impairment. ‘There’s a vivarium, isn’t there? You know where he’ll go, then. He’ll make straight for the Emperor’s fishpond.’

‘It seems a pity to kill him,’ said Thorfinn. ‘Can’t you catch him? You would need a few men who can swim, and poles and forks and a fishnet.’

Isleifr said, ‘I told you. He’s eaten his keeper. No one swims at this court.’

‘
You
do,’ said Thorfinn. ‘I’ve seen you. So do Odalric and Hlodver and Otkel. So do I.’

‘Holy Christ,’ said Isleifr, laying hands in extremity on a variant. ‘My bear kills the King of Alba while he’s under the protection of the Emperor of the Romans, and what’s my life worth?’

‘You’d better come and protect me, then,’ said Thorfinn, shaking himself free of his over-robe. He turned at the door. ‘If my lord Archbishop permits? An occasion such as tonight does not deserve to be marked by death and disaster, even to the Emperors fish.’

‘It rather seems,’ said Abbot Maieul, ‘that our host has entered upon his night’s sleep. I am sure he will not mind if we disperse quietly. Or as quietly as we can. There seems to be a great deal of noise going on outside. Who is that at the door?’

‘Gillocher of Lumphanan,’ said the face at the door, which appeared to be lit from within like a lantern. It said, ‘Tuathal, can you or Eochaid swim?’

‘
Swim?
’ said Abbot Tuathal. ‘No. Why?’

‘I can swim,’ said Sigurd the Dubliner unexpectedly. ‘Why?’

‘Follow me,’ said Gillocher of Lumphanan, and disappeared.

They followed.

When Bishop John woke, the room was empty.

His robe was creased, and his ring had bitten into his cheek. There was a channel of wet running from the corner of his mouth. He did not feel very well.

He sat up.

The servants would have to be spoken to once again: he would get Bovo to help. Last night’s supper lay uncleared on the table, and the candles sat in their pools, hoary as marsh-spirits. They had all gone, without leave, to the ceremony.

He could hear there was a ceremony. The cheering came through his half-shuttered window, and the blaze of lights: they must have lined the whole courtyard with torches.

If there was a ceremony, then the Archbishop would be in charge of it.

If the Archbishop was presiding over anything, his court of churchmen, including his bishops, ought to be present.