King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett

courtmen, with the Salmundarsons and the Havardsons and the Amundasons, they talked about the war until he had to forbid it, and then they went back to quarrelling about their women. When at last the wind veered and brought with it the Icelanders, always first into the sea, always first with the bad news, Thorkel hardly knew whether to be glad or to be sorry.
    The merchants and the bards were allowed everywhere and brought tales from everywhere. The bards recited their news, some of it, and for a week ofgood cheer and brave songs and new bawdy stories were worth their fine lodging and the silver they expected at the end of it. It was from them that he got his first pictures of Thorfinn as chief of King Canute’s housecarls, with a gold and silver inlaid axe and a house of two storeys in Winchester to sleep in. The King’s chief wife, the Lady Emma, had made him her special care, said the bards, adding a phrase or two that Thorkel ignored. And he had gone merchanting with the Lady’s ships, to Rouen and to Nantes and the Couesnon, and had been at the repairing of her fort at Exeter and the King’s fort at Dover before the days grew too short. There was word of a woman or two they wanted him to marry, but so far they were all middle-aged widows, and he had said no.
    It was well known, of course, said the bards, that the King of the Danes was preparing an army to invade and take Norway in the good weather, although he’d be lucky if he got as many as fifty shiploads of English to follow him. But of course, said the bards, young Thorfinn no doubt would be there in the foremost ship, with the Lady Emma behind him in some way or another, and about to make his name and fortune all over again.
    Thorkel became sick of the bards.
    Thore Hund sailed by very fast one day, going south, and did not stop. Afterwards, the tale came to Thorkel’s ears: how King Olaf’s tax-collectors had made Thore pour wine from the kegs on his ships to prove he had no money hidden, never noticing that the casks were double-skinned and the inside of them filled with a fortune in furs.
    King Canute, they said, would appreciate the coming of Thore. And his son, the surly Siward, had escaped to England in the same ship, together with a few others everybody knew about: King Canute hadn’t been mean with his money last autumn. And wasn’t that a fine new suit of ring-mail, said the bards, that Thorkel himself had got since they saw him last? It was an ill wind, said the bards.
    Thorkel threw the bards out, and his immortality with them.
    Then full spring arrived, and Canute with his armada crossed the seas and, without a blow struck, made himself master of Norway. Thorfinn, they said, had not been with him, but guarding the havens facing Normandy at his back. He did not come home.
    After a summer of vain counter-moves, King Olaf with his wife and son and the three loyal Arnasons left for Sweden and Russia, taking with them Rognvald, now seventeen, son of Earl Brusi of Orkney, and leaving behind them Erling Skialgsson, Haarek of Tjotta, Einar Tambarskelve, and Thorkel Amundason’s cousin Kalv, who had changed sides even quicker than Thorfinn and was by way, rumour said, of being King Canute’s new viceroy of Norway.
    Money arrived from Thorfinn, with a gold arm-band weighing sixteen ounces. A third of the coins were silver pennies from Cologne, and among the rest there were three from Baghdad. There was no message, but of course Thorkel could not read anyway. He took the ingot-mould out to the furnace and melted down the arm-band himself. He was pouring the gold when theuproar began in the yard with the pigs squealing, and the geese hissing and flapping, and half the folk from the huts and the farmstead running to help a messenger with some axe-work on him and only enough breath to tell the news from the south.
    The Earl Malcolm of Moray was dying: the elder of the two brothers who had burned their uncle in Alba all those years before. And Earl