The Constant Queen (36 page)

The midwives had shown her how to use moss to keep out his seed. Aksel had collected it for her but who would get it now? For a moment she felt dizzy then she looked at Tora, puffy-eyed with
grief, and pulled herself together. She could take Maria and Ingrid moss-gathering. Maria would think it a great adventure to go into the forests, and quiet little Ingrid was already showing a
remarkable understanding of plants and healing and would relish the chance to pick what she could. But if
she
did not bear Harald children . . .

‘Surely you must have his heirs?’ she said awkwardly, crossing back to Tora.

The other woman looked at her, her pretty head tipped on one side, and suddenly her eyes sparkled with more than just tears.

‘I think he has enough heirs,’ she said with a trace of laughter.

‘Not if he wins Denmark and England – then he will need kings to put in both.’

‘That is his plan? Really?’

‘So he says – he needs another prince.’

Tora, however, shook her head, pushing her blonde hair back out of her drying eyes.

‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘Maria could rule any country. She even has the sword for it.’

Elizaveta laughed.

‘Perhaps, though I pity the poor husband who’d have to go along for the ride.’

‘She is very like you.’

‘I suppose she is. Is that terrible?’

Tora tipped her head on one side.

‘Not terrible, no, though a little . . . scary perhaps.’

Laughter burst from Elizaveta, surprising herself as much as Tora, and suddenly they were both laughing, clutching at each other and shaking with tears and merriment and relief and release. They
laughed, unheard by the men huddled around the fire, unheard by Harald, or by their sleeping children, or by anyone under the cloud-clamped moon save each other, but that suited them. It was a
strange new alliance but one that might just help them both.

Sognafjord, Western Norway, March 1057

‘T
his is Norway!’ Elizaveta watched as Harald, feet planted on the great law-rock, flung his arms out wide to the blue fjord behind him
and the hills looming beyond. ‘This is
our
Norway and she is thriving.’

The cheers of the crowd rang around the rocky valley and up into the bright skies above. It was the day of the Western Assembly out on Norway’s evening-facing shores and spirits were high.
People had trekked from far up and down the jagged shorelines to see the king and his court and to hear justice being dispensed. Some had brought grievances, some prisoners to be tried of crimes
greater than the local lords could penalise, but most had just come to see government in action.

Their tents were all across the grasslands behind, rough versions of the elaborate royal pavilions clustered on a low ledge at the base of the hillside. There would be feasting tonight. The
people would dance, marriages would be made and sealed in the welcoming crevices of the rocks, and when the moon was at its highest, the bravest – or most foolhardy – would dive from
the law-rock into the ever-clear waters of the Sognafjord below.

Every year that Elizaveta had watched this tradition she had yearned to try it for herself but the custom was to dive naked and as queen – even her own, wild-edged version of queen –
this was one step too far. Not dignified. She tore her eyes away from the crystal waters and back to the law-rock where Harald was addressing his nation, his great figure silhouetted against the
dipping sun. His raven banner hung, as always, above him, though to Elizaveta it looked limp and almost purposeless in the still evening air.

‘God blesses Norway,’ he called out to his people. ‘He sent a fine harvest last year – so fine that the byres bulge even now and despite the winter’s snows we all
bulge also.’

He patted his belly and his people laughed delightedly. Elizaveta, however, was not impressed.

‘He does fatten,’ she said.

‘Lily!’ Tora, at her side, put a finger to her lips.

‘Well, he does. Too much sitting around on his throne looking at plans for churches. He used to have seawater in his veins, Tora, but now, it seems, he has limewash.’

‘Lily, hush! You wanted a city.’

Elizaveta sighed.

‘I know, I know.’

‘And at least he is safe on his throne.’

‘Bored.’

‘He doesn’t seem bored.’

‘Not
him
.’

Tora chuckled.

‘You need something to do, Lily.’

‘I have my viol.’

It was true and she loved it still. It was a little battered now and Harald had offered to buy her a new one last Yuletide but she had declined. The instrument had come with her from Kiev and
she could not bear to cast it aside. She still sometimes recalled that harsh winter when she and her siblings had danced in their own private, ice-bound world. She had felt bored then too but
looking back it seemed idyllic.

Her family had danced on, though, weaving their influence across many countries – putting Yaroslav’s stitches into the fabric of several royal houses to grow down the ages. Her
brothers had married into the courts of Poland, and the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires and her sisters, without exception, had now all produced sons for their royal husbands. Agatha had borne
Edgar in 1051 and then, as if the Kievan blood had suddenly remembered how to do it, Anne had produced Phillipe and Anastasia, Solomon and, barely a year later, David. Anastasia’s delighted
relief had gushed across the vellum when the news had come to Oslo, though the other two had thankfully been more tactful.

The one sadness was that Yaroslav was no longer here to see his bloodline run through so many royal houses. He had followed their mother to heaven three years ago and now Elizaveta’s
eldest brothers ruled the lands of the Rus as a triumvirate. Yaroslav had died, what was more, before the greatest news of all had permeated the family’s letters – that Agatha had
travelled to England and his first lost prince, Edward, might finally be able to pay him back as he had always desired: with power. And what power!

Elizaveta had hardly been able to believe it when her littlest sister’s letter had arrived in the hands of a hard-ridden emissary a month ago. Somehow, just as the Norwegian jarls had come
to Kiev for Magnus and the Hungarian rebels for Andrew, Englishmen had arrived on the Danube to invite Edward home after forty years. The English King Edward, the prince’s uncle, had no heir
and with his wife, Aldyth Godwinson, now past childbearing, was unlikely to produce one. Aldyth’s brother, Earl Harald, had therefore come himself to invite Edward to return to his heritage
and be proclaimed aetheling – an ancient Saxon term marking him out as throneworthy.

Can you believe it, Lily?
Agatha had written, her words tumbling onto the page, as wild as the dark curls Elizaveta recalled so fondly.
England. Remember how we used to talk of her? I
made Edward learn her tongue for when he would be her king. He only agreed to please me but I was right; I was right, Lily, and now it might come true. Edward might be the next King of England and
I – I might be her queen.

It was an exciting prospect indeed and a potentially lucrative one. England was but two days’ sail from Norway with a fine wind. She was a wealthy country with a powerful government and
close links with her rulers could only help Norway. Harald had been delighted at the news.

‘We will surely have what we want from England now, Lily,’ he’d said, spinning her around, ‘without any of the bother of conquest.’

She’d frozen, her own delight suddenly frosted.

‘The
bother
of conquest, Hari?’

For her, it had said everything about her husband’s new, relaxed, from-the-throne style of ruling and it made her nervous. Complacency didn’t suit him; and it certainly didn’t
suit her.

‘This year alone,’ he was now saying to the crowd, ‘we have opened three new mints and our coins are amongst the finest in the world.’

‘Coins,’ Elizaveta muttered crossly. ‘What use are coins?’

‘Well actually . . .’ Tora started but Elizaveta waved her words away.

‘Fine, fine. I understand. What
fun
are coins?’

‘Life can’t all be fun, Lily.’

‘I know that but surely
some
of it could be?’

Tora touched her hand.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I told you, I’m bored. It’s all so, so smug – all this sitting around congratulating ourselves on our churches and our mints and our law courts.’

‘Is it not good to be secure, at peace, prosperous?’

Elizaveta waved an impatient hand.

‘Of course it is but if we are so secure we should be looking for more.’

‘More?’ Tora looked out to the crowd gathered below them in a rich array of colours like butterflies crowded into the rocky hollow. ‘What more is there?’

Elizaveta let out a strangled choke.

‘Have you ever been out of Norway, Tora?’ she demanded.

‘You know I have not. Why should I?’

‘Why should you not? Did you hear those men last night, the Icelanders?’

‘Sssh!’ Tora nodded to the people nearest who, drawn by Elizaveta’s rising voice, were looking their way. ‘Tell me later,’ she whispered.

Cross, Elizaveta folded her hands into her lap and pursed her lips shut. She let Harald’s talk of new administrative offices drift easily over her, recalling instead the tales of the
travellers last night. Their gruff voices had sounded so like Halldor her heart had ached and even without his elaborate rhetoric she had been drawn into the world they had conjured up.

‘An expedition has sailed west from Reyjavik,’ they had told the court, sat on sturdy benches around a vast hearth beneath God’s thankfully dry heavens. ‘Their plan is to
sail further even than Greenland, into the unchartered waters beyond as once our ancestors sailed west from Norway and found great riches.’

Now Elizaveta looked out down the Sognafjord. Here, towards its mouth, the sharp channel was opening out, its edges softening, its water swirling eagerly around the Solund islands – the
last beautiful lumps of Norwegian land – excited to be free. No one could say where sea became fjord, or fjord sea, for it was a natural movement – one that had drawn men three hundred
years ago to take those first voyages into the unknown.

Had they been scared, Elizaveta wondered, those pagan adventurers with their fickle gods and their strong hearts? Had they feared for their lives as they pointed their ships to the horizon? Had
they dreaded falling off the edge or had they simply yearned to see over it? They had proved, those first men, that there was no edge. They had found the Orkneys, Shetland, England; England where
even now Agatha could be arriving to join the great royal family in a place of honour. They had found Ireland and the Isle of Man – rich lands full of treasure. They had found Iceland and
Greenland too – wilder places. Some said that the further west you went the harsher the land but no one knew that. Over the next edge might sit another Constantinople – a Miklegard of
the west waiting to be discovered.

Elizaveta yearned to know more of this expedition, yearned to meet the men who would wager their lives on an unknown horizon. It had all started here, along this rugged evening-facing coastline
on which they now sat in such splendour. Behind them, in Sweden and Denmark, men had sailed south, carving their way down the great rivers towards the golden waters of the Byzantine Empire,
creating new worlds as they went – new worlds that included her own dear Kiev and its Rus lands. Here, though, in Norway, the true adventurers had set sail, not down rivers or over lands but
across the open sea. Yes, it had all started here and now, it seemed, it had all stopped.

‘I have a joyous announcement to make,’ Harald was saying and Elizaveta felt Tora nudge her in her ribs.

‘Stand up,’ she hissed.

Obediently Elizaveta stood, though her eyes were still on the sea which seemed almost to be winking at her as the low sun caught the ripples at the cusp of the open water.

‘My daughter, my beautiful Maria, is to be betrothed.’