TWENTY

HE IRISHMEN IN Duncan’s army talked all the time; and there was a penance he didn’t deserve, after six years of suffering in the wake of his grandfather’s mistakes. They talked even at the outset, when the priest was blessing them for the great crusade they were launched on, for St Columba and Christ; or perhaps it was the other way round.

He didn’t even know who the priest was, because Malduin, the Bishop of Alba, had refused to come and do the job after the fiasco at Durham; or at least had become promptly invisible, so that no superior of his at Durham in later weeks could tap him on the shoulder and take away his living in Fife and Northumbria.

Duncan might be High King of Alba, but he could do nothing meantime about that, nor about the Irishmen. It was only the vision of Viking gold in Thorfinn’s strongholds in the north that was keeping them here as it was, after Durham.

He still couldn’t believe what had happened at Durham. He had got his army there fast, a third of it on horseback, and had swept the country before him, from Gilsland along Tyneside to the banks of the Wear.

There must have been hundreds rushing into the fort-town ahead of him, and he let them go. All the more mouths to feed. He didn’t intend to make an assault. Just to sit outside and wait while they starved, secure in the knowledge that neither Ligulf to his north nor Siward to the south would trouble him. And once he had Durham, so the theory went, he would have the whole of Bernicia from Teeside north to the Forth, and the control at last of the churchlands of St Cuthbert and Kinrimund in Fife and Lothian, whether Ligulf liked it or not. And of Westmorland and Cumbria as well.

Riding north with his shadow before him, and behind him the din of the Irishmen, Duncan recalled that it was Maldred who had stopped the three boatloads of ale from proceeding up the river to Durham, and who had failed to stop the contents from reaching the army. Afterwards, you might wonder who sent them. At the time, he was only thankful that there were enough sober to stay watching the high, rocky peninsula made by the loops of the river, so that nothing got in or out.

You wouldn’t think anyone, even Eadulf, would be fool enough to spend the night weakening the whole line of his palisade across the neck of the bluff. Or not, anyway, until the whole thing fell suddenly flat and a line of steel appeared, glittering, and bore down on the sleeping camp, with twenty more lines behind it.

He would never use horses again. Horses take an army quickly where you want it to go. Horses carry it out again even faster. He had been lucky to escape with as much of the host as he had. He hoped their brass spires caught a fire-bolt and melted all over the Congregation of St Cuthbert. He hoped that St Cuthbert would, at a convenient moment, return his attention to eider ducks.

Maldred rode up and said, ‘The Jura men have got wind of the plate in the monastery at Abernethy. They’re telling the others.’

They were riding through Fife at the time. Because they shared the same father, he needn’t like Maldred; and he didn’t. But because of Maldred and his father, they had the support of the Athollmen, and they were going to be able to get rest and supplies at Crinan’s abbey. He said, ‘I told you to break up the files so that the Fife and Angus men hemmed in the outsiders. Go and do it. And tell them Thorfinn took the plate long ago.’

He didn’t know if it was true, and he didn’t care. Somehow he had to get them north without looting. There were, he believed, enough land-owning men with him to protect their own until they got to the limits of Angus. But he had not called out the men of Mar and Moray, even though as King of Alba he was their overlord. That was Thorfinn’s territory, and before him his stepfather Findlaech had held it until his two nephews had killed him.

He didn’t think Moray would stand against him. Maldred disagreed, but then Maldred had no royal blood and was only a half-brother. Bethoc had produced only two sons: Duncan himself and Thorfinn, whom his grandfather should have killed years ago. Malcolm had disposed of everyone else: every second cousin, every half-nephew who might have divided the kingdom had been destroyed with great skill and thoroughness.

The injustice of it all overwhelmed Duncan. He said to Maldred, ‘The Abbot our father had plenty of chances as well. Why should it be left to us to get rid of Thorfinn?’

Maldred, who had just been abused by three men from Forfar, said coldly, ‘It was your grandfather’s idea. He preferred Thorfinn’s stewards, he said, to the King of Norway. And it kept the Irish from getting a bigger stranglehold on Mar and on Buchan. You notice, of course, the great success of that.’

‘I expect,’ said Duncan, ‘that he thought my lord Crinan might do something about it, other than counting his money while Dunkeld was burned.’ In no sense other than the physical one did he regard the Abbot Crinan as his father. It was because of Crinan’s neglect that Dubhdaleithe of Armagh and his brother had elbowed their way into Alba and might well snatch control of the Celtic church at the Fair of Teltown next month. Unless Duftah, as they called him, was got out of the way. Duftah, the monk who had been Abbot of Deer and was now, the most reliable couriers said, in the peninsula of Tarbatness with the Lady of Moray and her son and heir Lulach.

Duncan’s army camped that night in the fields about Perth, and the next night found all the supplies they required waiting for them in Crinan’s abbey of Dunkeld. But then, provisioning on this march had not been a problem. They carried with them enough to make sure that no one would starve, and all the way had been able to buy or barter. Although the bere was not yet in, somehow fish or cattle or game had been forthcoming—not lavishly, but to a degree that removed at least that care from his shoulders.

Then, when they entered Moray, they found matters better than he had dared hope. Half the houses on their march were empty—for days the beacons had been burning, and he had expected that. But those who had remained on their land watched them pass without interfering, and if they offered to buy, would sell something out of their barns.

The High King had passed that way already, and had been entertained in guest-quarters as was his right in each district. He did not impose on them now, but what he wanted they gave him within reason, and watched silently as the army moved past.

They did not love Duncan. But, it seemed, they loved Groa with circumspection, and Thorfinn their absent Mormaer commanded from them no duty at all.

The Lady of Moray. Groa. His grandfather had been disturbed, Duncan remembered, when Gillacomghain had married her, about the time King Olaf had been thrown out of Norway and Canute had been up in the Tay, taking promises of allegiance from everyone.

His grandfather had sent him to Inverness, and he had seen this red-haired child with the black brows and the light eyes.

That had been another miscalculation of his grandfather’s: the attack on Thorfinn that had ended in total disaster, with Gillacomghain dead, and Thorfinn in Moray and husband to the red-haired heiress.

She was young. She could bear ten children yet. After Gillacomghain and Thorfinn, any man would be welcome, he imagined, far less the King of all Alba.

And this time it would be the throne of all Alba he sat on. Not a boulder at Scone and an abbey at Dunkeld and a parcel of districts in Fife and Perth and Angus and Moray and Lothian.

Duncan was prince of Cumbria as his grandfather had been and, if matters went well, might remain so. To wrest more land from England, as his grandfather had done was, at the moment, beyond him. But if he ruled Alba from Carlisle to Duncansby, and put his own man into Moray as guardian of Lulach … and got rid of Forne … and forced the Bishop of Alba to stay in Kinrimund … he would be a greater king than Malcolm had ever been. With a red-haired wife.

The Irishmen talked; and Duncan, marching up the Vale of Strathbogie, heard them, and was no longer disturbed.

He was within reach of the sea, and his enemy.

*   *   *

Skeggi said, ‘I don’t like it. He’s too confident. I’ve prayed to Jesus and I’ve prayed to Odin Lord of the Gallows and still the barley jumps on the hearth every time I cast a grain down. I don’t like it, I tell you.’

‘Who’s too confident?’ said Thorkel Fóstri. ‘Thorfinn or Duncan?’

‘Now you mention it,’ Skeggi said, ‘both of them. How can Thorfinn know what Duncan is thinking? All this plotting is worthy of Loki, but if Duncan doesn’t do what Thorfinn says he’s going to do, then Odin or Saint Peter are going to have to throw dice for me.’

‘He said Duncan would let them light all the war-beacons, and he did,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. They were riding east, and very soon would part company, Skeggi to make for the Tarbatness Point and himself to get down to his command at Alness. The parting was something he was looking forward to.

‘That’s what I mean about confidence,’ Skeggi said. ‘Dear Thor and Christ, you have to be confident to bring a host on foot into enemy land this far north and make sure that the enemy knows that you’re coming.’

‘Well, Duncan doesn’t want to come all this way and find he’s only wiped out half of us,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘He can’t hold a country like the Normans do, by putting his own men into forts. He hasn’t got any spare men and we haven’t got any forts. He’s got to kill all the leaders and scare the survivors so much that they’ll pay him tribute and supply him with fighting-men whenever he asks them.’

Skeggi, staring ahead, was thinking of something else. ‘Three thirty-hundreds,’ he said. ‘That’s what they say Duncan has. Three thirty-hundreds, and we’re making a stand against them! Do you think we have a chance?’

Thorkel Fóstri halted. ‘This is where I go south. I don’t know what chance we’ve got. They’ve got more men, but they’ve also got Duncan.’

‘And we’ve got Thorfinn,’ said Skeggi. ‘Of good stock, though I say it myself, but a shade too inclined to run risks. You brought him up. In your opinion, is he the man to conduct a war of this kind?’

He had never thought much of Skeggi, but the question cut too near his heart, in this moment, to be ignored. ‘I don’t know,’ Thorkel Fóstri said. ‘Once I thought that I knew, but I don’t know any longer. All I can tell you is that if we are going to die, it will be in a blaze, and not in some sour, whining cranny.’

‘In a blaze. Like Gillacomghain,’ said Skeggi gloomily; and trotted off, with his men, through the bogland.

‘I thought,’ said the Lady of Moray, ‘that men of religion were supposed to be in the vanguard of battle these days. But I can see the trouble, of course. It must be quite hard to know what language to pray in, and even what god to pray to, when you bless this particular army.’

Standing beside her in the trees, looking down on the glittering stream of the Averon, Duftah of Buchan and the Clann Sinaidh smiled through the rug of his beard and slapped a scarred hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘If it will ease your mind, she’ll be out of her scabbard soon enough, whatever your husband has to say. There is MacBeathad son of Ainmire, the chief poet of Armagh, and his namesake playing Armagh off against Kells like a man stealing a hen from two foxes. And I thinking that, once the Welshman had gone, we should all be comfortable.’

‘We should be comfortable enough,’ Groa said, ‘fifteen long miles from Dingwall as we are. Provided that Duncan is stopped at Dingwall, of course.’

‘Ah,’ said Duftah, and expanded his great diaphragm, inhaling the scent of the fir trees. ‘Now, that I should not entirely count on. I should not count on it at all. I am a humble man, as you know; but, like Modomnoc’s bees, men strive to find me, no matter where I may conceal myself.… Does it seem to you, as it does to my stomach, that a bite and a sup might not come amiss before we settle down to watch these great lords shout at one another?’

The smell of food had already reached her from the charcoal-burners’ houses behind, where his people and hers had found shelter. Without speaking, she turned and led the way through the trees. He followed her, chuckling into his beard.

‘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.

And over and between the barriers, as they watched, rose a spray of glittering pink that began to fall arching towards them, bursting into familiar song.

Arrows; followed by spears; followed by catapulted balls of hay and pitch, blazing.

A third of them died in the first fifteen minutes, after which Maldred jumped into the sea, waving a shirt on a spearhead, and the rest swam and waded after.

The sun rose.

At St Colman’s on the north, Muiredach of Ulidia made no mistake about his landing.

The knörr sailed as close as it could, and Muiredach’s men jumped into the sea, dividing into sections as had been arranged, for there was a palisaded fort on the high ground above the sand and the rocks and the scatter of dark, silent huts.

They rushed the huts, one party covering another, but found them empty. The fort, when they reached it, was deserted, and the little church held nothing but the smell of dead incense to tell that someone had been there not so long ago.

It was not what they had expected, but simply meant that the monk and the woman must be in the west, where Archú’s party would find and take them, or Maldred’s men striking up from Rosskeen.

Meanwhile, their own plan of assault was quite clear. One small party, swords drawn, made its way to the east to scour the land between St Colman’s and the point at Tarbatness. The rest, in troops of fifty, turned west through the bogs and the marshes that separated them from their fellows at Westray.

They were competent men, and there was nothing wrong with their planning. They had arrived at first light, and by the time they set out on the twelve miles they intended to cover, the sky was just bright enough to show the mottled green-and-pink mounds; the bright green cushions sporting the straw-coloured treacherous grasses that betrayed the bog, with its brown peaty pools and its cottongrass jerked by the wind.

It seemed at first like God’s Judgement that, when they had skilfully steered clear of the marsh, the firm ground beneath them should start to give way.

They stood, half of that first party of fifty, arid tried to draw one black-slimed leg after another out of the sucking grip of the mire, while their fellows marched on through the short, dry grass and heather and were hardly deterred until they, too, had felt the water close around their ankles. They were near enough to warn the second force, but the third and the fourth had to find out in their own way that someone had been before them, doctoring the line of march that any sensible hillman would follow. Then the arrows came, and the spears; singly and from different quarters, and began methodically to thin them out.

Finally, on three fronts, they came face to face with a line of armed men: fresh, fully equipped, and on ground of their own choosing. They fought well; and most of them died.

The last ship of the three rounded the point at Tarbatness, passed the beach of St Colman’s, and made its way uncertainly west along the north shore of the peninsula towards Westray.

Uncertainly, because the steering-oar had broken and could not be mended, and the sail shackles had given way during the night, leaving the knörr to creep in under the power of her six pairs of oars.

It was not Archú’s fault, therefore, that she arrived at her appointed landing-place when the sun had already risen and when the tide had receded to such an extent that the river Tain ran out to the firth over a stretch of pink sand that seemed to stretch shorewards to infinity. Since the ship could not come any nearer, they disembarked on the flat sand and had marched halfway across it before they saw, against the bright sky, the size and shape of the armed forces drawn up ahead of them.

Unlike their fellows, they fought a straightforward pitched battle, against much greater numbers; and lost.

South of Dingwall, the army woke at dawn and heard Duncan’s speech, and the priest’s, and knelt to be blessed. At the appointed time, which would take them to Dingwall by mid-morning, they set out to march round the hill-shoulder and down to the Moot Hill.

To the east, as they marched, they looked along the sun-touched avenue of the firth for the snake-head of Maldred’s ship, but could not yet see it. Duncan was not unduly disturbed. Maldred’s men might already have landed, and the knörr drawn off, as arranged, to lift them after the battle. Or it might arrive with a timing still nicer, when battle was already engaged, and shock Thorfinn into flight or submission.

They marched round the hill and there, like a storm-beach of steel flagged with banners, was the army of Ross and Caithness awaiting him, with, bright as a sequin in front, the gilded helmet of Canute on the alpine head of Thorfinn his brother.

Round Thorfinn the men waited, and the sun shone through the white silk of the banner, so that the raven lay black on Thorfinn’s helm and shoulders, and flapped its wings as if in omen: as if Odin had sent them Huginn or Muninn, Mind or Memory, and soon the dedicatory spear would be thrown over their enemy’s heads: Odin owns you all. After which, there would be no quarter.

It would not be like that. But here they would have to fight, with none of the advantage of surprise that had been allowed their more fortunate colleagues facing Duncan’s other landings through the peninsula. Thorfinn had made that plain all along, and had repeated it before them all that morning.

‘The King has dispersed part of his forces beforehand through the peninsula; but so have we. He started with a far larger army than ours, and the difference between us is still in his favour. You will have to fight, and fight hard, at Dingwall. It is worth your while. Win this battle, and you will not have to fight it again. Lose, and the whole of the north will be a battlefield as’ Alba and Norway fight over it.’

And that was true, they all knew, and the men of the hird better than any. While Thorfinn held Caithness and Ross and Cromarty, he would defend them against every predator. He had called his brother King, and so he was, of Alba. But here in Ross he was no king of theirs, nor of Thorfinn’s. What Thorfinn might owe him for Moray was his own affair.

Nearly every man there, in one way or another, had fought for Thorfinn, on his raids, on his war-cruises, and most of them would claim to know him. None would claim to understand him, or the source of his energy. He was lucky, and in many things very successful. To stay with such a man made good sense. So, when the trumpets of Duncan’s army glittered and blared, and the pennants jerked, and the clatter of men marching quickly changed to the jingle of men moving into the run, their spears and swords ready and flashing, the men under the raven responded smartly, as they had been trained.

The shield-wall came up. The spears rose, hefted, ready for throwing, and the smooth swords slid singing out of the scabbard. Then above them all Thorfinn’s right arm rose, with the sword-blade barring the sun, written over with copper and silver. Then the long horns raised their thick voices and the air darkened as the birds of the land and the sea rose, alarmed, and circled.

The army were already shouting as they started to move. The shouting gained rhythm, and came to Duncan’s ears in spurts and snatches as they drew breath until the two sides were close enough, above all the noise of both, for their cry to be heard.

They were calling his brother’s pagan name. ‘Thorfinn! Thorfinn!’ The hoarse double syllable ran from hill to hill and up to the peak of Ben Wyvis, until the southern army caught it and opposed it with a cry of their own. Then the spearpoints came ripping down on either side, and ‘Thorfinn!’ and ‘Alba!’ came mixed with their screams and the rapping of metal on wood.

The shock as the two armies met was like the tumbling roar of a landslide, with flesh and cloth instead of earth, and steel on steel instead of boulder on boulder. Each side clove through the other, man so close to man that the sword bit as it forced its way up and slashed as it found its way downwards again. In such a press, mail-shirts and helmets were hardly more use than the hide helms and metal-sewn jackets that most of them wore. Speed of eye and of arm were what helped a man live, not the weight of his metal in the rising August heat with the stench of blood and of ripped guts and of fright beginning to rise, with the ghosts of past wars; and the flies coming already.

The first climax came; and the first pause, with the golden helmet still flashing on one side and the white mask of the King on the other. Then Thorfinn’s sword flashed again, and he shouted, ‘Back! Back, my men! Back!’

The Irish on Duncan’s side had recoiled. Sending to rally them, white with tension and fury, Duncan did not at first hear the call or realise what was happening. Then someone said, ‘My lord! My lord King, they’re retreating!’

For so long he had planned for this: how should he doubt it, now that it was happening? Duncan threw his head back and laughed. ‘Of course!’ said the King. ‘Maldred’s ship has arrived. The fools think they must fly or be caught between us. Where do you think Archú’s force is waiting now, to rise at their backs? Eh? Where do you suppose Maldred’s other men have been stationed, to give them the warm welcome they all deserve? Come, my stout lads of Alba. Forward, and thrash them!’

The sun reached its height, and hung, burning.

Far above it perhaps, in Valholl, the Hall of the Slain, with its six hundred and forty doorways, Heimdall the Watchman looked down and saw the northern army blown back like the keys of the ash tree, drifting into the thick of the empty peninsula, with the King’s men like a whirlwind pursuing them.

A peninsula empty, at least, of the contingents of Duncan of Alba, which should have been drawn up in the appointed places, awaiting their triumph. The men of Alba who had landed with Maldred and Archú and Muiredach lay among the bog cotton, or corralled wounded in corners, or already laid helpless in the two big-bellied knörrs that should have been lying off-shore to take off their victorious master, but in fact were afloat in midstream, waiting for orders from under a raven banner.

Instead, the three troops of Thorfinn’s which had vanquished them sheathed their swords and raced to join one another in the gentle green heart of Ulladule, with its church and its farmhouse, where the Strathrory river left its glen and wound down to the firth mouth. There, briefly, they waited.

Then men on garrons, who had run all day joining faction to faction, brought them word of Thorfinn their leader’s arrival, and silently the triple company redeployed as they had been told.

Duncan’s army swept through the heath crying victory, unaware that they were beating Thorfinn’s host back into the sword-blades of men who were dead. And the army that rose at Thorfinn’s rear and his flanks and behind Duncan’s own charging host was not the supporting army of Duncan’s triumphant Alba, but the angry men of the land they had invaded.