The Constant Queen (15 page)

‘Harald will not ride, Lily,’ Ingrid had told her, ‘not yet,’ but she had newly given birth to yet another son, Boris, and Elizaveta had put her negativity down to the
weakness of the childbed.

When Harald was back, she’d been sure, things would be different but now Harald
was
back and it was all infuriatingly similar.

‘You are grown soft, Harald,’ she flung at him now. ‘Soft and self-indulgent.’

His reply skidded along the cold walls.

‘No one else talks to me as you do, Elizaveta.’

‘Which is precisely why you are grown weak,’ she flung over her shoulder. ‘You are too used to being the hero, Harald.’

‘Rubbish. I am a soldier, no more. I do my duty and I do it well. I have been promoted to the elite guard.’

She spun round to face him.

‘How nice for you. I’m sure the uniform is very pretty.’

‘It is actually, it . . .’ Harald cut himself off. ‘Lily, please . . .’

‘Do not call me that.’

‘You are disappointed.’

‘Disappointed? Hah! I am furious, Harald.’

‘And I understand that.’ He came cautiously towards her. ‘I am furious too but fury is not enough to carry a man into battle. Battles require logic, timing,
calculation.’

‘Courage.’

He winced.

‘I am sorry you think so poorly of me.’

‘I am sorry too.’

‘Lily . . . Elizaveta, please. This is a setback, no more. It does not change my plans to reclaim the throne, just delays them a little.’

‘Really? I have something for you.’

He stopped before her, surprised.

‘You do?’

She cursed her own impatience. The raven banner was beneath her cloak but now was not the time for it. She turned away.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Lily!’

He caught at her arm and she lost her grip on the parcel. It fell to the ground between them and they both stared at it. Elizaveta started forward to gather it up but she was too slow.

‘A present?’ Harald asked. ‘For me?’

‘That was the idea,’ she agreed crossly, ‘but I don’t suppose you’ll need it now.’

He turned the parcel over and over in his hands, then suddenly pulled on the ribbons that bound it. The flag fluttered open and caught in the sharp breeze cutting across the top of Kiev. For a
moment the raven seemed to soar above them and Elizaveta heard Harald gasp.

‘’Tis magnificent.’

She flushed despite herself.

‘You like it?’

‘’Tis the finest thing I have ever owned, truly. You stitched it yourself?’

‘Of course.’ Pleasure flooded through her as he ran his fingers reverentially over the fine stitching, picking out the edges of the legendary bird. ‘It was meant to lead you
into Norway.’

He grabbed her hand so that the silk tangled between them.

‘And it will, Lily. Truly it will. How can I fail with such a gift – with such a wife? We must just bide our time, that is all. Magnus is proclaimed as Norway’s new king. He is
Olaf’s son and I hear tell that they are hailing Olaf as a saint now for his work in taking Christ to our nation. Can you not see that if I ride against Magnus, even under such a beautiful
banner, I will be the usurper, the tyrant, not the saviour?’

‘You will be the rightful king.’

‘Bless you for thinking so, my sweet, but in truth I have no more right than my nephew.’

Elizaveta laughed bitterly.

‘Your nephew has few rights, Harald. He is in the hands of the northern jarls and they will play him to their own ends.’

‘And keep him safe too. It would be a futile challenge, Elizaveta.’

‘But a glorious one.’

Harald nodded slowly and leaned over the parapet to look out across the plateau. The snows were covering the blood-stained battlefield and Kiev looked peaceful and proud. Yaroslav had declared
after the battle against the Pechenegs that he would extend the walls, make them as long as those of Miklegard itself, to keep all his people safe and Kiev buzzed with the promise of the New Year.
Up here, though, outside the chatter, nothing felt right.

‘Perhaps you speak true, my Princess,’ Harald said softly, running the flag tenderly through his calloused warrior’s hands.

‘True about what?’

‘That I should ride home and die in glory, not hide down here in shame. ’Tis the Viking way after all – Valhalla welcomes valiant fools.’

‘Harald! Valhalla is a pagan myth.’

‘As the raven is a pagan symbol – and a good one. What, then, does our Christian God seek from us, Elizaveta? Surely he would rather I turned the other cheek and gave my blessing on
Magnus’s reign?’

Elizaveta shifted uncomfortably.

‘You could rule jointly,’ she suggested. ‘You spoke of it before.’

‘You would like to be half a queen, my sweet?’

She glared at him.

‘I would like to be your wife.’

‘I would like that too, truly, more than anything.’

He tried to take her hand but she shook her head, cross again.

‘That’s just not true, Harald.’

He sighed.

‘No,’ he agreed heavily, ‘it is not exactly true, no more than it is for you. Neither of us could retire to a farm and live just for each other.’

‘I did not mean . . .’

‘Could we? Truly? We are royal born, you and I, Elizaveta. It is a privilege and a responsibility. I
will
marry you, my love, and I
will
make you a queen but the time must be
right. We must be patient.’

‘Patient?’

‘’Tis not your strength, my love?’

‘I am not patient, Hari, no – but I am constant.’

He smiled and pulled her close.

‘My constant queen?’

He leaned in to kiss her but she pulled back at his words.

‘I would be, Harald, given a chance, but it seems I will never be a queen, constant or otherwise.’

Anger flared inside her once more, the same bitter rage that she had nursed across a long, hard summer and all for nought. She took the landwaster from him, folding it small.

‘I still do not see it,’ she protested. ‘If you wait, Magnus will only grow stronger.’

‘And Einar weaker as a result. Norway can no longer be won just by war, Lily, but by diplomacy and it is a more devious game. Our time will come.’

‘You swear it?’

‘I swear it.’ He leaned in, his lips grazing her neck, and softly took back the banner, tucking it carefully into his belt. ‘I swear, Elizaveta, that I will make you a queen;
Queen of Norway, Denmark and England – Empress of the North. Can you trust me, my necklace goddess? Can you trust our future to me?’

Her fingers gripped the wooden parapet as his face pressed closer to hers. Her head was spinning with the ambitious list of titles but they were not reality yet.

‘I have little choice, Harald,’ she said tartly. ‘I can hardly ride north alone.’

He groaned.

‘You are very sexy when you are angry, do you know that?’

‘And you are very pathetic when you are grovelling.’

‘’Tis true but I want you so badly, Lily.’

He yanked her suddenly in against him and she felt his desire ripple up her body and her own pulse raced treacherously in response.

‘I want you too,’ she admitted, her voice cracking.

‘We are, you know, to be wed . . .’

Her eyes narrowed.

‘Do you, then, take all your betrotheds to bed?’

‘Lily . . .’

‘I told you not to call me that.’

The anger was back and she pulled away and stalked down the walkway, longing to run but fearing she might slip on the icy boards. Harald skittered after her and she stopped dead so that he all
but tumbled at her feet.

‘No, Harald,’ she flung at him. ‘We are royal, remember? It’s a privilege and a responsibility and I am not birthing your bastard whilst you play soldiers in the Greek
sea.’

He looked so sad, staring down at her, looking for apologies she might believe, but she was done with apologies. He was right – she was disappointed, torn apart by disappointment, and much
as she ached for him, he had to understand that.

‘If I must wait,’ she told him firmly, the words misting in the Kievan night, ‘then so, too, must you.’

Austratt, Northern Norway, September 1038

T
ora kicked her horse into a canter and rode the autumn winds, tossing back her hair and welcoming the thin tears they drew from her eyes. She
should have cried before. She should have cried when they laid Pieter, her husband, in the ground and said prayers over his wasted body. Her mother had cried, her sister Johanna too – though
she cried at anything – but Tora had just felt numb.

She had been forced to the church door with Lord Pieter when Einar had brought not Harald but the boy-king Magnus back to Norway, a defiantly shamefaced Kalv in his wake, but it had been a poor
marriage. Pieter had been a kind enough husband, but feeble, and she had been more nurse than wife. Already, just days after his passing, her brief marriage felt like a rogue part of her life
– more story than memory.

‘God bless his soul,’ she called into the newly sharp air as her horse stretched out across the great plain above the jagged cliffs of the northern coastline.

She meant it truly but to her shame she was glad to be riding away. She should miss Pieter, she knew, but she did not. Maybe, she tortured herself when waking from an easy sleep every morning,
she was just weak-hearted?

It would do her good to be back in Austratt where she had grown up. It was so much livelier in her Uncle Finn’s town-edge farm than out on Pieter’s remote island of Giske. Travellers
called all the time on their way down the fjord to Nidaros to trade and Finn kept his doors wide open. There were often entertainers in his hall – skalds and poets, acrobats and musicians.
Rarely were there less than a hundred men sleeping in the alcoves of his huge farmhouse and often there were pavilions erected on the flat land in front of it to house more.

They brought gifts for their lodgings, these men – sometimes game or fish for the table, sometimes ale or mead or strange firewaters that made the men splutter and kindled their ever-ready
laughter as high as the hearth flames. Sometimes, though, she recalled them gifting Finn stranger things – birds in cages with feathers as colourful as their tails, bright-eyed little dogs,
not hounds to run in the hunt but curiosities to keep in the bower. They brought exotic foodstuffs and spices – Tora would never forget the one they called chilli that had felt like a brazier
had been lit in her mouth. They delivered wonderful glassware and jewellery and unusual tools that kept the artisans wondering for weeks. And news – news even from Constantinople where she
heard tell Harald was fighting the Saracens in some island called Sicily.

Tora kicked her horse into a gallop as their little group turned inland towards Austratt, pushing against the raw truth that she could not grieve for Pieter as she should because of the giddy
joy that she was free again – free for when Harald returned. The thought that he might have wed elsewhere had often tormented her but surely such news would have travelled back to Norway?
Besides, how could it happen? Harald was Tora’s; and she his. She knew that and she just prayed that he remembered it too.

It had been the night before he rode to battle in 1030. They’d both been fifteen and had seen plenty of each other since their midsummer ‘betrothal’ three years before, though
usually it had been amongst others. The northern lords often gathered for celebrations – Yule, All Hallows, Easter, midsummer, weddings, christenings, funerals; the usual turns of life
– as well as travelling across Norway for the great assemblies that formed the backbone of the country’s government. Harald and Tora had usually been with the other youngsters and,
though they had danced together often, they had kissed but rarely – until that night.

Tora had not seen fifteen-year-old Harald for some months as he’d been off a-viking with her Uncle Kalv and she had been fascinated by his sudden transformation from boy to man. He had
always been tall but he seemed to have shot up so he was already on a level with Finn, no small man. His shoulders had squared off and his moustache grown thick and full and as shiningly blonde as
his long hair. He had seemed, too, to move with new confidence and purpose, for he was mustering men to lead into the hills to meet the returning King Olaf, his half-brother, and to help restore
him to his throne.

He’d had a new mail coat and a gilded helmet, paid for from his own pelt-trading at Nidaros, and he’d looked every inch the warrior. It had seemed to Tora that girls followed him
everywhere, pointing and giggling and trying to engage him in conversation – or more. Their betrothal was still talked of but increasingly as a fairy story, an example of Harald’s
reputation as a lover rather than a confirmation of his commitment to Tora Arnasson. She’d had to act.

It had taken all her courage and a healthy dose of some strange, clear Rus spirit she’d sneaked from her father’s table, to get her to Harald’s door. He had been sleeping in a
rich pavilion amongst the seven hundred or so men who’d answered his call to arms, eschewing his usual rich bed in Finn’s hall to be amongst his soldiers, so she’d waited until
the farmstead and camp were silent at last and escaped the bower. She could remember now how her heart had pounded so loudly she’d feared the men would think it a drum calling them to arms
and come from their tents. She could remember how her hands had shaken as she’d hidden in the trees at the edge of the camp to remove her linen nightdress and wrap her nakedness in her cloak
and how it had been such a warm night that she had been sweating beneath its heavy layers by the time she had approached his pavilion.