FIVE

O AVENGE THE death of a son is not hasty work, if he is to be honoured.

To raise major levies, King Edward’s leave would have to be sought by Earl Siward. To muster an army would take time—but not too much time, for men were hard to come by at harvest. In high summer, provisions were plentiful, but would have to be gathered and loaded. Auxiliary shipping was not unlikely, to carry reinforcements and food and extra weapons and take off the wounded. York’s ships were mostly trading, in summer-time. To collect a small fleet would take a week or two.

So Norse mind interpreted Norse, as Alba moved, prepared by her King, from the state of armed defence to the state of imminent war.

Those were the weeks when the minutes were measured like mancuses of purest gold. When Thorfinn was never to be seen in one place for more than a few hours, and when he no longer looked like a man with a fleet ready loaded for sea, but like a man already on board and lifting his ship to meet the first swell of the storm.

The first wave, and the next, and the third. The news that Kinrimund was empty and Bishop Malduin, his wife, and his household had vanished, no one knew where.

The news that the Bishop of Alba was in York, and that two young Fife men, Fothaid priest-son of Maelmichael and Cathail son of Dubhacon, had travelled there with him.

The news, received much later in silence, that Ghilander also had fled, with Colban the Bishop’s stepson, and that Kineth of Brechin had gone with them, leaving Angus leaderless.

The secret news from Dunegal of Nithsdale, using a name that only Thorfinn would recognise, that Thorfinn did not talk of at all, at least before Groa.

His energy, she saw, was not abated, or his confidence shaken. In place of zest, there was determination, that was all.

She moved into Fife to be near the Forth estuary, where Thorfinn was oftenest to be found. He visited her there one evening, Bishop Jon and Eochaid in tow, and the three men talked without ceasing, before food and through food and after it, Bishop Jon making notes in his own hand on a slate with a stylus that squealed. Then he ceased to make notes and listened, his clean-shaven jaw sinking lower and lower until, with a small thud, the slate dropped to the floor and Thorfinn, turning, saw that he was asleep.

‘Don’t wake him,’ said Groa. ‘Morgund will be here soon anyway. He arrived this afternoon and I sent him off to rest. He had Lulach with him.’

‘Lulach?’ said Thorfinn. ‘I didn’t send for him.’

‘You are calling on Moray to fight for you,’ Groa said.

‘I shall be calling on the northern fleet, such as it is, to fight for me,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But I expect Thorkel and Hlodver and Odalric to stay where they are and look after my interests until I tell them otherwise.’

Somehow she had ruffled him: a rare occasion indeed. Otherwise, he would never have referred to the only point upon which he and his advisors were at odds.

At no time since the earliest plans were drawn up would Thorfinn consider drawing men from the north to fight on land in Alba.

With his ships, he had been liberal. Only one fighting-ship remained off the island of Man, and two of moderate size further north in the Sudreyar. Six were at sea, on the business of trade—an act of faith that he might have cause to regret. The rest were on the Caithness coast, refitted and waiting, with men of Orkney and Caithness to man them.

If the new ships came from Denmark, the Caithness flotilla might not be needed. If the new ships did not come, the handful now in the north represented the only sea-force Thorfinn could lay against any fleet Siward might bring.

Few as they were, they might be sufficient, for the men in them would be seasoned seamen and raiders who would brawl for the love of it, on shipboard anywhere; who would defend their own northern lands to the death, on land or on sea; but who would never march south in cold blood to throw away life defending a foreigner’s ground. One day perhaps, but not yet. There had not been time to teach them. That Groa understood, even if Thorfinn’s southern council did not.

He had carried the day, of course, for although in fourteen years he had made himself supreme King in Alba, he was born to the north, and from Moray to the northernmost island of Orkney he was the leader men trusted and knew.

One day, when he was gone, they would turn to Paul, and to Erlend when he was old enough. It was to safeguard Orkney that Paul was being left there at this moment. It had hurt him, Groa knew, that his father did not need him at his side now, in the first hour of real danger since Rognvald had tried to claim the north seven years before. But he had been reared to rule Orkney, and he would keep his place.

There had been little dispute about anything else Thorfinn had wanted to do since the day he was told of the fighting in Lothian. That evening, pacing the floor of his chamber before the most able of his mormaers and his churchmen, he had said, ‘What would I do if I were Siward and I had just lost all hope of my heirs ruling Northumbria? And he has, make no doubt of it. The only other son is a child, and his nephew will have no better chance than the rest of his brothers-in-law and their offspring against the brethren of Wessex, once Siward goes. What would you do, my lord Prior?’

And Tuathal, whose authority Groa had watched advance through the years, had said, ‘I should make for Wedale straight off, and every fortified place with Normans in it. And I shouldn’t leave Lothian until I had killed every Norman I could find, and all the families who were supporting them. I should destroy the crops and burn every building, and flatten what wouldn’t burn.’

‘How well you know Siward,’ Thorfinn had said. ‘But would he do that all over Lothian, or only in Wedale? The St Cuthbert churches elsewhere are his, you must remember, and their lands and their people. The rest of the churches are mine, and the fringe of land south of the Forth estuary, but there are not necessarily Normans in all of them. Also, my share of the Lothians has been in the care of my cousin the Bishop of Alba. They may have come to share his lack of discrimination.’

He had put into words what they all knew. It released the voice of Osbern of Eu, his colour still high from the interview that had preceded this one. He said, ‘These fortresses can pin down a countryside, but they won’t stand against an army mustered for war.’

‘But an army mustered for war would overrun friend and enemy alike,’ Cormac of Atholl had said, ‘And Earl Siward has allies—hasn’t he?—to placate with land when this is all over, and rivals who would be better off settled in Lothian than snapping at his heels for a bigger share of Northumbria.’

‘I agree with you,’ Thorfinn had said. ‘To blacken Lothian would do him no service. He must attack Wedale, yes; and the Norman lands to the west and any fortresses near. But he’d be wise to leave the rest to be taken at leisure, and make positive use of his friends in the Lothians. Call them under his banner. Use them as signalmen between his army and any ships he has on the coast. Because if he’s going to take Lothian and settle it, he’s going to need all the friends he can get.’

Bishop Hrolf, hands on knees, was considering. ‘This man Siward: how can he hope to hold Lothian, so far from York and from Durham, with a strength such as yours massed to the north of him? He cannot, unless he destroys your strength first, or converts it into one friendly to him.’ He sat up. ‘I say he must either wreak his vengeance on Wedale and retreat, or he must go further and seek to destroy you and your whole power.’

‘Again, I agree,’ Thorfinn had said. ‘Where? Will he expect to find us massed against him at Melrose?’

‘Hardly,’ said Tuathal. ‘With disaffected Lothian behind you, and possibly sea-borne troops as well, by that time. But he might expect you to trust your estuary lands more than you should, and give him battle west of Dunedin, where he would have you between his ships and his army. Unless he knows more than we do about how soon your new longships are coming.’

‘I wonder,’ Thorfinn had said. ‘Can he rely on his fleet? He must know that I shall bring down some vessels from Orkney. He must know, at the very least, that a great many more are coming, through Svein, with men in them who are fighting for money. If he is unlucky, then there will be a battle at sea, and the best he can hope for is that none of our sea-borne army manages to make a landing. Consider, therefore. If you invade Alba through Wedale and, say, Tweeddale and you have no supporting ships, what do you do?’

No one answered, for there was no need to answer. Without ships, there was only one way to cross the river Forth to Fife and Strathearn: one key to the royal lands by Loch Leven; one way to strike north between the low hills to Forteviot and Perth and Scone; to strike upriver to Dunkeld, or across river to Angus, where lay Glamis and Forfar and Brechin. And that one way was the bridge and causeway at Stirling, the rock fortress on the river forty miles inland from Dunedin.

Then Cormac of Atholl had shifted in his place abruptly. ‘You would win a battle at the Forth crossing. But what if you are wrong? What if Siward has no interest in settling Lothian, but only in vengeance and money?’

Thorfinn had said, ‘To get to Dunkeld … to get to anywhere that matters, he would still have to sail up the Tay or march north by the Forth crossing. Our ships will have instructions. They will guard Taymouth as well as the Forth.’

‘Are there enough of them?’ said Bishop Jon.

‘No. But their seamanship is excellent, and they will have coastal signals to help them. The alternative is to divide our forces. I am not in favour.’

And they had accepted that, too, although to Groa it had been a questionable decision. By the time Siward’s army had reached the plains by the Forth, it would have marched a very long way, and suffered fighting, and would be drawn, in any case, only from those regions Siward was master of, for neither Wessex nor Mercia, it was sure, would waste men on extending Northumbria’s empire. And against this jaded, depleted army would be the whole resources of Thorfinn’s kingdom, from Moray south to the Forth, fresh and waiting. It was a small risk, surely, to deploy some of them, as an insurance, to Perth.

But that, after all, was the only discussion at which she had been present, and many conclusions, clearly, had been come to since then. Among them, and the reason for Thorfinn’s presence in the south-east, was the resolve to clear Lothian. When and if Siward of Northumbria and his army made their way to Wedale, they would find there neither Normans nor loyal families on which to expend the grief and fury of loss.

They were tired, then, these men sitting here in her chamber; tired enough, like Bishop Jon, to fall asleep. But to stretch himself to the limit should be the pride and destiny of every man, and she shared, in that part of her being that was not maternal, Paul’s disappointment at being excluded from such a brotherhood.

Whereas Lulach had come, and had not been welcome.

He knew it, she thought, the moment he entered the room and sought his stepfather’s face, although he greeted Thorfinn, clearly, with light affection as he always did, and Thorfinn, distanced now from the moment’s irritation, showed no desire to hector him.

After satisfying herself to that end, she rose presently to give them a chance to be together, and to allow Bishop Jon to awaken without embarrassment. The toisechs’ and mormaers’ wives and daughters and sisters who always moved with the court would be waiting, and eager for news. It occurred to her, not for the first time, what a large part of her life was spent among women, now that the kingdom had changed. It had many advantages. She liked being with women she was fond of. But not perhaps quite so often.

She did not observe Eochaid, therefore, as he sat quietly watching the King with his stepson, or hear Lulach say, smiling, ‘You would like to shoot an apple from my head, like Palnatoke, and perhaps miss. It is natural. If Paul or Erlend or I were to die at Siward’s hand, you would feel as he does. Yet Siward, too, must have looked at his son Osbern sometimes and seen nothing but another man to sit in his chair.’

There was a pause, as if Eochaid’s presence had made itself felt, and the impending arrival of Morgund. Bishop Jon breathed gently, the stylus in his scrolled fingers voyaging up and down on the buoy of his abdomen. Thorfinn said, ‘I think I can look my successor in the face, provided I have even the illusion of free will. Whatever happens, you are not to blame.’

‘Yet you kept the rod,’ Lulach said. ‘The bough with leaves I once sent you. It came from Birnam.’

‘I kept it,’ said Thorfinn, ‘for a hlauttvein. A blood-twig to sprinkle and hallow with, after the sacrifice. I thought that was why you sent it.’

‘And you thought of it again when Grágás was lost,’ Lulach said. ‘It was a storm like that, wasn’t it, that sent down the Bison?’ And, smiling, he quoted softly:

Bishop Jon yawned. ‘The Bison?’ he said. ‘Thangbrand’s ship. Thangbrand, Willibald’s son. As bloody-minded a missionary as any I ever heard of, and if his ship went down, it was because God and the Aesir were pushing together.’

He opened one eye on Eochaid. ‘It’s his pleasure,’ he said, ‘that figure of mischief over there, to blow any piece of rubbish out of his mouth and challenge me to return it. Have you caught me out yet? Young Lulach?’

‘Bishop Jon,’ said Lulach, with laughter in his wide eyes. ‘When you are awake, no one can catch you. Come and see me off. I am going back to Moray before the excitement begins.’

He could not have known. But he had barely been gone for an hour when there came the signal that Thorfinn had been waiting for.

He did what had to be done, and then went to find Groa.

‘Pack,’ he said. ‘And leave in the morning. Siward has called in his levies and has begun to march north.’

In the mouth of war, the names of honour, for three long days, were those of the signalmen.

Pinnacled above an empty land into which, hour by hour, a torrent of steel was being inducted, they sent the tidings from Soutra and Pentland, from the hills south of Traquair and east of Penteiacob to where Thorfinn waited with his army.

The Earl Siward and his Northumbrian army have crossed the river Tweed.

They have moved through the moors, burning all they can find, and are spreading north and west through all the passes, leaving no living object behind them.

They are between the hills and the Forth and are sparing nothing in Lothian, from the east coast to Dunedin. They are making no haste, and suffering no losses that matter.

But for its refugees, Lothian and its southlands are dead.

Cormac of Atholl said, ‘We were wrong. We thought he would court Lothian. We thought he would pass straight through Wedale to the north.’

‘I was wrong,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Outside the churches of St Cuthbert, he is allowing his men to ravage and rob where they wish, and at leisure. He has five thousand men, no more than we have, and Malcolm is not with him.’

‘Who is with him?’ said Cormac. ‘Has anyone caught sight of banners?’

‘Most of those who love us best,’ Thorfinn said. ‘Ligulf of Bamburgh, with the Bernician strength. Siward’s nephew of the same name, whom we met at Melrose. York and Durham, perhaps even in the persons of Aethelric and Cynsige, with the armed power of the church. My brother’s nephews Gospatrick and the second Maldred. Our friend Forne, who married my stepfather’s daughter, with Wulfgeat. Brand of Peterborough, and Leofnoth and Ulfcetel, since someone has to look after the army’s treasure-box. And, last but not least, my cousin Bishop Malduin of Kinrimund with, no doubt, his stepson Colban. Kineth of Angus, it is said, was seen with them.’

‘I dare say,’ Cormac said. ‘Good for troops to see men changing sides before battle. After it, if he’s any sense, Siward will execute the whole brood, including your cousin the Bishop, begging your pardon. So they are all there, kicking our teeth in. Is that all they are going to do?’

The summer breeze blew in his face. Waiting for the King to speak, he could hear the gust claw through the heather behind him and set the flowering whin, silk and tinsel, rubbing together, bough against bough.

It was because the moment of decision was approaching that they were up here on the hill of Dumyat, six miles from Thorfinn’s muster-point at Dunblane, and half that from the crag on the Forth beside which, on one side or another, Thorfinn would take his stand against any Northumbrian advance out of Lothian.

Below them, from right to left, the river Forth ran to the sea: a silver inlay of zig-zags in a great plain chequered with corn and green mosses and the harsh buff and sliced resilient brown of peat-beds. Beyond the river, the plain married into wandering uplands where the low Lennox hills banded the horizon, a ridge thrusting eastwards above forest and hamlet to merge with the west Lothian hills and the Pentlands, and to end far to the left, where sea and sky met, with the crag, small and clear, of Dunedin.

Today there were no boats and no fishing-nets in the river. The cabins of wattle and clay, of timber, of turf packed with stone, showed no smoke from the woven-reed thatches, neat as favours for children, that mushroomed everywhere on high ground, and on the slopes of the rock-citadel opposite. No mill-oxen dragged by: no cattle stood in the marshes or sheep, lately shorn, walked with their lambs on the hills.

Sound had vanished as well: of the blows of a wood-axe and the shout of a drover, of children calling and the crow of a cock; the beast-sounds from the byres and the fields; the groan and clank of a winch at a well; the clack of loom-shuttles and women’s voices chattering over them; the brazen voice of a meat-cauldron being scoured and the squelch and fizz of cloth being pounded at the washing-stones in the side streams.

The women and children and old people had gone. The men fit for fighting were moving down there, in thick leather jackets and helmets, with their spears and hunting-axes, their clubs and their knives and their bows, with satchels packed by their wives with barley-bread and some lard, a goatsmilk cheese and a bit of dried fish and mutton, with a few onions, fresh-dug, for savour.

Their toisech would greet them, in his cone helmet with its metal noseguard and his tunic of ring-mail over leather, and would lead them to the wing of the army commanded by my lord Ferteth, their Mormaer, and my lord Gillecrist, the Mormaer for Lennox and Strathclyde. And there they would greet the men that they knew, and collect what news they could, and visit the cess-pits more often than they would like to admit, while turning all the time to look up here, where the King their leader was deciding what was going to save them from the army of Northumbria.

At least once in their lives, most of these men would have met Thorfinn: more perhaps than had come face to face with King Duncan in the six years of his reign and before, when he had been prince of Cumbria in the shadow of Malcolm his grandfather.

The men who had marched north with Duncan to dispose of his dangerous half-brother at Tarbatness had mostly died in that battle. The young men who had grown to manhood in the past fourteen years had had no experience of war, and little of fighting, other than the kind that might break out between neighbours, or the kind they saw during their service at court, when a raid on coast or frontier had to be repelled, or the King’s justice enforced.

Whereas Siward, as a direct vassal of England, had appeared on every battlefield with his Northumbrian levies and knew their strength, as they knew each other’s.

But it took more, surely, than fourteen years of moderate peace to erase the fighting instinct that had served a race through two hundred years and more of Viking attacks, through the civil onslaughts that led to the fusion of Pict and Scot, of Scandinavian and Gael; the wars of royal cousin against royal cousin as the descendants of Kenneth MacAlpin fought for the throne.

Against invasion, such people would always fight, with all the skills of a hard daily life, with bow and spear and axe to aid them. What they would not yet do, and what Thorfinn had not asked them to do, was to fight as a nation, north beside south, no matter what the threat.

Between them, Canute and his sons had achieved it in England. They had had to farm Cumbria out, but Siward was England’s man, fighting England’s enemies. The difference, Cormac thought, was that under Emma’s care Northumbria had never been allowed to become a threat to Wessex. Whereas, under Thorkel Fóstri, under his sons of Orkney and Moray, Thorfinn might well command the north to come to the aid of Alba the south and might well be obeyed. But the south, witnessing the brilliant array of fighting-men that the north could so amply provide, and their foreign tongue and alien ways, might well think their better safety lay with the enemy.

In the distance, the smoke lay over the land like a corpse-veil. Over the river, the banners glinted red over the fort, and the long line of its shadow began to creep down its rock to the east. Thorfinn said, ‘He’s arrived at the coast and judged our numbers. He ought to muster and start south before nightfall, if he’s going south.’

The Norman Hugh de Riveire, hands on his hips, moved from his viewpoint to the King’s and studied the skyline. ‘Is he a man who would punish and run, this Siward?’ he said. ‘Even with equal numbers?’

‘He is not the man to punish and run,’ Thorfinn said. He turned, and the flash of his movement drew every eye within range. ‘Nor is he the kind to come north at all without a very sure chance of success. I don’t think our strengths are meant to be equal. I think he has come to a rendezvous. In which case, we don’t wait. We cross the Drip ford at nightfall and attack, or provoke an attack as soon as there is light enough.’

The Norman said, ‘What rendezvous? No second army has come into Lothian. I have heard your couriers. Not even a ship has been sighted. And if it were, there is your fleet waiting out in the estuary to welcome it. Your excellent ships. Ten, did you not say, in the Forth and two held back, waiting at Taymouth? A small fleet, but no smaller then Siward’s will be, considering what manpower he has. The reinforcements will never land.’ Polite reason vying with impatience made his French quicker and more idiosyncratic.

He added fretfully, ‘Your own new ships will come sooner, that you have purchased from Denmark. You fight now, and perhaps you throw away your biggest advantage.’

‘I had thought of that,’ Thorfinn said. Only once had he ever lost his temper with the Normans. His eyes rested on de Riveire’s face. ‘There was a danger that allies of Siward’s might approach him from the south-west. There is no sign of them so far. But we would be as well to take no risks. The Danish ships have taken too long already. They may well arrive when this is all over.’

‘From the south-west?’ There was coming anger as well as puzzlement in de Riveire’s face. He frowned at Cormac.

‘My lord of Atholl has been told,’ Thorfinn said. ‘And my lord of Eu also. We had no wish to spread alarm. We hoped that, in time, our fears would prove baseless. We still have no proof. But Earl Siward’s delay is inexplicable otherwise. He also must know that my ships from Denmark might arrive at any moment. It is wiser to attack while we can.’

‘From the south-west?’ the Norman repeated. His brow had cleared. Given a military problem, Osbern of Eu and his men resembled nothing so much, Cormac thought, as a starving man with a knife set before a belly-piece of fat pork and an ale-horn. He was smiling at the King with something that, under normal circumstances, might have been admiration. ‘More of your cousins or your brothers marching against you, my lord? We have the same trouble in Cotenville.’

‘A third cousin, merely,’ Thorfinn said. ‘But, unluckily, he could bring the power of Cumbria with him. His name is Thor of Allerdale.’

It still had the power to turn the stomach, that whisper of shifting allegiance that Thorfinn himself had picked up weeks ago, and that Dunegal of Nithsdale’s hurried warning of danger had seemed to confirm.

Dunegal of Nithsdale had not come to Thorfinn’s standard, nor had any of the men of Dumfries and the western lands of St Cuthbert. Absent also was Leofwine, who had taken Thorfinn for King as Cormac had, or so it seemed, on the glorious journey to and from Rome, and who had stood trembling as Cormac had on the steps of St Peter’s, one of a brotherhood that had seemed to promise a future none of them had so far dreamed of.

They were not here, nor was Thor of Allerdale himself; but, after all, it was strategy such as this which had kept Allerdale free despite the wolves at his frontiers. And the wolves had not all come north. The banners gathering there on the banks of the Carron on the other side of the Forth did not include those of Orm or Gamel, the kindred of Siward’s wife, or of Osulf her cousin, whose father Siward had killed, or Copsi or Carl Thorbrandsson or Archil, all powers in York.

They did not include the banners of Edward of England, or the Fighting Man or the Dragon of Harold of Wessex. Whatever else they had sent, the south of England had not supported Siward with an army. Some of the magnates of York had not shared his ambitions either, one had to believe. Not every thane had been left behind to act as a watchdog.

But some had. And with Northumbria there, even half-manned at her borders, Cumbria had to keep guard.

So one might argue. But the arguments did not convince. For, as Thorfinn had said, his royal nephew Malcolm was not with his uncle. And without Malcolm, the excuse for conquest had gone.

Thorfinn said, ‘The night will be short enough. The men should have a good supper and rest. Let us go down.’

They strode down and found more news already arriving. The enemy, having mustered at Dunedin, was not turning south. Instead, it was marching west, six thousand strong, along the opposite bank of the river towards them.

At the door of his tent, Osbern of Eu looked at the King.

‘You are not disturbed?’ he said. Therefore, there is no danger of an attack during the night?’

‘No,’ said Thorfinn. ‘He’ll manage twenty-five miles or so by nightfall, and that will bring him to the stream over there called the Carron, with a dozen miles of forest and boggy ground between himself and the main river-crossing. He’d never traverse that in the dark, and his men will be tired. He’ll probably take them over the Carron and put them into the coille torr, the forest there, for the night.

‘By morning, we ought to be on the same side of the Forth as they are, and facing the open space to the west of the forest. There’s a Roman road there, and some firm ground if you know where to look. Bishop Hrolf will tell you all about it in a moment. Unfortunately, Forne and the Fife and Angus men will know of it as well.’

‘If they are waiting for reinforcements,’ remarked Osbern of Eu, ‘they will be in no hurry to fight in any case. Then what?’

‘Then we send an invitation,’ said Thorfinn. ‘A pressing one.’