The Constant Queen (52 page)

She was watching Maria and seeing Harald, his blonde hair entwined in their daughter’s dark locks as it had for so long been entwined in her own. She felt Ingrid at her side and Greta
behind, and sensed little Filip, so like Aksel as her young squire, fighting to go after Maria.

‘No,’ she heard Greta say, ‘not this time.’

The words were picked up on the rising wind and thrown around the broch –
not this time, not this time
. Elizaveta threaded her hands together, driving her nails into her palms, and
willed Maria on. The girl was feeling her way so, so carefully, picking the widest stones and the deepest gaps to plant her feet and grip with her dainty fingers. They were leading her round the
broch, towards the cliff side, spiralling upwards, and all their eyes followed. A cloud crossed the dying sun and was gone again as if God had winked. A gull dived in, screeching its protest at a
human striving so high, then whirled away, plummeting towards the sea in search of easier prey. And still Maria climbed.

The point of the wall split before Harald as if his soldiers, like him, were eager to throw up their shields and fight like men. Harald felt as if his body were filled with
blood. It surged through his veins and sang at his temples and pushed at his limbs, forcing them forwards. He was not simply in the battle; he was the battle.

The reserves were entering the fray. In the fading light he could see them beyond the English, cutting into the rear, and he thrust forward, slashing men from his path to meet them. Let these
Englishmen, like the last, pave his way to victory. Somewhere out there was Harold Godwinson. If Harald could find him, he could kill him and this would all be over. He cut again and again but
these Englishmen were stubborn. Their limbs were tough and their eyes fierce and now they were fighting on two fronts, turning back Otto’s men who seemed to be crumbling like soft cheese or,
perhaps, like men who had run twelve miles in full armour.

‘You might lose.’

Harald heard the thought but cut it away with a slash of his sword. He would not lose. He could not lose. Elizaveta was waiting. Elizaveta was waiting to join him on his throne. He stepped
forward, cutting a man to the floor with a single swipe of his sword, then felt pain rear, like an out-of-control stallion, across his arm. He stared at the ripped flesh, then at the man who had
attacked from his side and who looked almost as astonished as he.

‘No!’

Harald swung again, slashing the man to the ground, though pain rode high on every sinew of his flesh and his eyes saw red, nothing but red. He blinked furiously as the silk of the
land-waster clapped in the sharp wind above him and there was Tora, stood in the doorway of his pavilion, throwing back her cloak with a heavenly mix of shyness and audacity to reveal her nakedness
beneath. Then Lily, his Lily, dragging him onto her boatbuilder’s bed and ripping his clothes from him as her eagle-prow looked on – the eagle-prow that had crested the waves to
England.

‘Do not die in bed,’ Ulf had told him and he had been right to do so. Valhalla might not live in the skies but it lived in Harald’s heart. He cast around again for Harold
Godwinson, but the battlefield was a mass of swords and spears, and however hard he strained, even at his great height, he could not find him. He stretched out, his sword still swinging and his
shield still pushing men aside. The battle consumed him and he knew that whether he won or he died, either way would be glory.

He did not, in the end, feel the arrow as it pierced his throat. He just felt a searing stab, like the arousing anger of a beautiful wife, and he fell gratefully before her.

Maria did not call. She did not, as Filip had done, crow when she reached the top of the broch and threw her hose-clad leg over the sill. She said nothing at all. Neither did
she stand but sat, demure as the maiden she had professed herself to be, hands tight on the stone either side of her as she looked out to sea.

‘Can you see it?’ Ingrid called when no one could bear the silence any longer. ‘Can you see England?’

Still Maria did not speak but Elizaveta saw her lean forward a little, as if catching a cry on the wind. She saw her dark hair lift and watched, caught on the edge with her first-born, as she
raised a hand to the skies.

‘Maria,’ she wanted to call, ‘hold on,’ but she dared not break the spell holding her daughter to the top of the ancient tower.

‘I see nothing.’ Suddenly Maria’s voice came down to them, clear and sad. ‘I see nothing, Mama. ’Tis a fool’s errand.’

‘As I said,’ Elizaveta thought but she shored up the words, a painful ball inside her throat as, praise God, Maria turned and dropped one foot down to find a hold.

‘Go back,’ she threw at a servant, ‘go back and heat water. She will be chilled.’

She saw again Maria’s purpled flesh beneath her thin sleeves and prayed her daughter’s cold fingers did not lose their grip. She saw one foot find its step and the second move across
the broch, slowly, carefully.

The stone snapped as if whipped from the wall. It tumbled down and ricocheted off another where the wall turned outwards, spinning into the air and tumbling over the cliff. Maria’s foot
dangled a moment, suspended on the clouds, but somehow she found a hold beneath.

She paused against the wall and glanced down, safe, and Elizaveta breathed again. Their eyes met and Maria half-smiled before something, some sound in the sky Elizaveta did not catch, drew her
to look upwards and she seemed to jerk. She put a hand to her throat, her eyes twisted in their sockets, then her knee turned and her leg crumpled. Her hands scrabbled helplessly at the broch but
its ancient stone gave way in her frantic grasp and, in a shower of darkness, she fell – a stark, wingless angel.

She hit the earth with a thud and a crack of bone, her foot catching her sword and sending it flying into the air. It spun once, the amber hilt flashing red in the setting sun, and then dropped
over the cliff and was gone. Maria lay as still as the rocks around her.

For a moment Elizaveta was frozen too, but then she was running, clasping her daughter into her arms and shaking her limp, cracked body in a desperate attempt to free the life that had beat so
vitally within it just a moment before. How could she be gone? Surely a gull had just snatched her spirit, taken it for a mischievous dive into the waves. It would be back. Maria would breathe
again.

‘Come back,’ she begged. ‘Come back, Maria. We need you. I need you.
Papa
needs you.’

The word caught in her windpipe, tangling with her earlier protests at Maria’s desperate climb. She looked down at her daughter, into her dark, unseeing eyes, and pictured the sudden jerk
of her white throat at the top of the broch – Maria had felt something.

‘No!’

Elizaveta threw back her head and hollered. She sensed the others at Maria’s feet, heard their cries, their tears, their prayers to a God high above the careless Brough, but she knew now
that her dear Maria was not the entirety of their grief, just its beginning.

‘Hari,’ she whispered. ‘Hari, my love.’

She pulled Maria’s limp body as tight against her as she had pulled Harald that golden dawn before he sailed for England. She’d begged him to promise to return, but he had not
promised and he would not return. It had all been for nought.

Slowly she stroked the dark tangles of Maria’s hair away from her beautiful face and kissed her young eyes closed. For a moment she thought she saw a line across her cheek, the shadow of a
scar, and she traced it desperately with her finger, longing to find Harald in his daughter’s flesh, longing for this to be Stikelstad again – the start, not the end. But the lines
across her own old hand told her that could not be.

‘No!’ she cried again, tossing her defiance over the cliff as if it might somehow pull Harald back to mourn their daughter with her. But he was gone and the word was whipped
uselessly south – chasing her love, chasing her dreams, chasing her soul across an empty ocean.

Twenty Norwegian ships sailed back into Scapa Flow; twenty of the three hundred that had sailed so hopefully out of the mouth of the Sognafjord. They brought Harald’s
body, Otto’s beside him, and Elizaveta laid them both by Maria’s in the little stone church at the base of the Brough of Birsay. Even before they’d returned, she’d ordered
the broch torn down and its treacherous stones hurled over the cliff to bury any glint from the sword Harald had gifted Maria, and only the healing company of Ingrid, her quiet, golden little
Ingrid, stopped Elizaveta hurling herself after them. But when the ships came, she was glad she had not. For on board the first vessel was Aksel, scarred but whole, and with him Tora’s
Olaf.

Elizaveta ran, as Greta ran to Aksel, and Olaf clasped her in his arms as if she were his own mother, as, in part, she was.

‘He fought so well,’ was all he could say. ‘They trapped him, Lily, trapped him with only half his men and they barely armed, but still he fought so well. Right to the
end.’

‘Did you see him die?’ Elizaveta asked.

Olaf nodded and his face clouded.

‘From afar. I was with the ships and barely made it to the battlefield in time for the final stand but I saw Father die and Lord Tostig too. With them gone, we had little choice but to
surrender. Harold Godwinson pardoned me, released me. He was a noble opponent, truly.’

‘A worthy king after all?’

But at that the boy shook his head.

‘He is dead too, slaughtered by Duke William.’

‘The brigand Norman?’ Elizaveta choked out, Harald’s words echoing down to her, still rich with his dear tones.

‘Now King of England.’

It was a harsh end to all their hopes. Elizaveta thought of Agatha. She would be in danger. King William would not want Edgar around as a threat to his stolen throne. If they stayed in England
the boy might die, as his father had died ten years before, and she prayed that someone, somewhere, was helping them to escape this island of death.

Her thoughts strayed mercilessly on to the other Harold’s queen – Edyth. Was she in flight too? She must have been wed to him to hold England together, but instead England had torn
her life apart, as it had torn Elizaveta’s. Queens, it seemed, were made to be broken.

‘Ambition is a disease,’ she mumbled bitterly but at that Olaf caught her hands.

‘No. No, do not believe so. I saw Father die and it will scar my soul forever, but before that I saw him fight. I do not think, Elizaveta, that I have ever seen a man more alive than in
those last few minutes of the battle. He fought so well.’

‘You said.’

‘And he died in glory.’

‘As he wanted.’ She drew in a long breath. ‘Come,’ she said to Olaf, taking his arm and looking over to Aksel, lost in Greta’s embrace, ‘you must rest and
then we must sail. We must take those we have lost home and we must return you to your mother. She will be waiting for us. Tora will be waiting and we must go to her.’

She pictured her friend, stood on the jetties still, waiting to draw them into the safety of Norway’s rugged harbour, and for the first time since that terrible day a smile tugged at
Elizaveta’s lips. Turning her head into the wind, she felt memories whisper across them like a kiss from her lost husband – battles and fights of their own, but passion too, and love
and a life lived fully. Lived together.

Today, when she closes her eyes against the mourners lining the streets to honour Harald’s great coffin, Elizaveta can feel it still – the headlong, giddy
challenge of pitting herself against the world – and she is, once more, lost in the rush of that far-off race. She can feel the surge of water through the thin skin of the tiny canoe, the
sparkle of spray in her eyes, the rush of warm air against her face. And, above all else, she can feel the roar of her heart as, at last, she crests the tumbling river.

The walls of the city, high on the cliff, mingle with dark pines and sparkle in the sharp light as they lean in willing her on or, perhaps, waiting for her to up-end. The sun-blurred faces of
the crowds hang over the bank, all wide eyes and open mouths, their calls of encouragement scattering on the light breeze. And then there is the blue of the water; the endless, treacherous,
glorious blue of the water – hers to master.

She shudders, as years and sense fall away beneath the crash of life’s current, and she loses her grip on the paddle. It catches a rock and is pulled from her, splintering against the
jagged surface and flying into the air. She ducks but it is gone already and the boat rushes on, spinning wildly. She sees the dark cloud of the saving net but she is moving too fast now, shooting
too swiftly down the frothing current with no way of controlling her path.

She puts her hands to her eyes, watching her own fate between them as the canoe, giddy with freedom, dives into a sharp edge, smashing the craft apart and sending it whirling into the sky in
a splintering of strakes and bones. For a moment she is mid-air, flying freer than ever before, then she thuds into the water and is sucked down, down into its clawing grasp until there is no
breath and no beat and no sound.