Tim Severin - King's Man

Never too wise

No man should know his fate in advance

His heart will be freer of care.'

Harald grunted his approval of the verse, then dismissed me. 'Go back to your family in Vaster Gotland, Thorgils, and enjoy the rest of your days with them. You have more than discharged all your duties to me as a king's man, and I release you from that obligation. I will only send for you again if I can turn to no other.'

TWELVE

HARALD NEVER NEEDED to summon me again. When I did come back to his court a full ten years later, it was of my own free will and burdened with a sense of impending doom. I was in the sixty-sixth year of my life, and I felt I had nothing left to live for.

The unthinkable had happened: I had lost Runa. She died of disease when our peaceful corner of Vaster Gotland fell victim to one of those petty but vicious squabbles which plagued the northern lands. I was away from home on a trip to the coast to buy a winter supply of dried fish when a band of marauders crossed our previously tranquil territory, and of course they burned and pillaged as they went. My brother-in-law fled with his own family and Runa and the twins into the recesses of the surrounding forest, so they all survived unscathed. But when they crept out of their shelter and returned to our houses, they found the carefully hoarded stocks of food had been looted. There was no time to plant a second crop so they sought to lay in emergency supplies. I returned home with my purchases to find my family anxiously scouring the forest for edible roots and late-season berries.

We might have come through the crisis if the winter that followed had not been so harsh. The snow came earlier than usual and fell more heavily. For weeks we were trapped in our cabins, unable to emerge or seek assistance, though our neighbours would

have been of little help for they too were suffering equal distress. The fish I had brought back was soon eaten, and I cursed myself for not purchasing more. All my hoarded wealth was useless if we could not reach the outside world.

Gradually we sank into a numbed apathy caused by near starvation. Runa, as was her nature, put the well-being of our children ahead of her own needs. Secretly she fed them from her own share of our dwindling rations and concealed her own increasing weakness. When spring finally came and the snows began to melt and the days lengthened, it seemed that all of us would survive. But then, cruelly, the fever struck. Initially it was no more than a soreness in Runa's throat, and she found difficulty in swallowing. But then my wife began to cough and spit blood, and to suffer pains in her chest and shortness of breath. In her already weakened condition, her body offered no resistance to the raging of the illness. I tried all the remedies I knew, but the speed of her decline defeated me. Then came the dreadful night — it was only three days after she showed the first symptoms — when I lay awake beside her and listened to her rapid breathing grow more and more desperate and shallow. By dawn she could no longer lift her head, nor hear me when I sought to comfort her, and her skin was dry and hot to the touch, yet she was shivering.

I went to fetch a bowl of fresh water in which to soak the cloth I laid on her brow, and returned to find she was no longer breathing. She lay as still and quiet as a leaf which, after trembling in the breeze, finally departs from the bough and drifts silently downwards to settle, lifeless, on the earth.

Folkmar and I buried her in a shallow grave scraped from the rocky soil. A half-dozen of our neighbours came to join us. They were little more than walking skeletons themselves, their clothes hanging loose on their bodies, and they stood in silence as I knelt down and laid a few mementoes of Runa's life beside the corpse in its simple homespun gown. There were a pair of scissors, the little strongbox in which she had kept her jewellery, and her favourite embroidered ribbon which she had used to hold back her auburn hair. Looking up at the faces of the mourners and the heart-broken twins, I felt totally bereft, and the tears were streaming down my cheeks.

It was Folkmar who comforted me in his down-to-earth peasant way. 'She never expected so much happiness as you and the children brought her in her final years,' he said. 'If she could speak, she would tell you that.' Then, solemn-faced, he began to cover the corpse with earth and gravel.

It was another week before Folkmar gently stated what he and his wife had decided even as they stood at Runa's graveside. 'We'll take care of the twins,' he said. 'We will treat them as our own until you can arrange something better for them.'

'Better?' I said dully, for I was still too grief-stricken to consider any course of action.

'Yes, better. You should return to Harald's court, where you have influence and command respect. There you can do more for the twins than anything which can be found here. When the time is ripe, maybe you can arrange for them to be taken into royal service, or perhaps fostered to a rich and powerful family.'

Folkmar's trust in my competence touched me deeply, though I doubted that I could achieve half of what he expected. Yet he and his wife were so insistent that I could not bear to disappoint them, and when the weather improved sufficiently I took the twins for a long and melancholy walk in the forest until we came to a dank clearing, surrounded by dark pine trees. There, as the melting snow dripped from the branches, I told my children the details of my own life that they had never heard before. I described how I had been abandoned as an infant and brought up by kindly strangers, and made my own way in the world. As intelligent youngsters do, they already knew where my talk was leading, and looked at me calmly. Both of them had inherited Runa's light brown eyes, and also her way of waiting patiently for me to reach the conclusion of my little speeches. As I groped to find the right words, I thought to myself how strange it must be for them to have for their parent a man who was old enough to be their grandfather. That wide gap in our ages was one reason why I felt I hardly knew them, and I found myself wondering what they really thought of me. Their mother had been the link between us, and once again the sorrow of her death nearly overwhelmed me.

'Both of you — and I as well — must learn how best to live now that your mother is gone,' I ended lamely, trying to keep my voice steady and not show my grief, 'so tomorrow I'm going to travel to the king to ask for his help. I will send for you as soon as our future becomes clear.'

They were the last words I ever spoke to them.

I arrived in Harald's new capital at Trondheim just in time to attend what was to prove the most important council meeting of Harald's reign. A sea-stained merchant ship had put in to Trondheim with news from London. On the fifth day of January the king of England, Edward, had died without leaving a direct male heir. The English kingdom was in turmoil. The English council, the witan, had elected the most powerful of their number to the vacant throne, but he was not of royal blood and there was much dissent. There were other claimants to the kingship, chief among them the Duke of Normandy, as well as the brother of the newly appointed king, who felt himself overlooked.

'I have as good a claim as any,' Harald stated flatly as his council gathered in an emergency session to discuss the situation. Out of respect for my grey hairs and my long service to the king, I had been asked to attend the meeting. 'My nephew Magnus was promised the kingdom of England by Knut's son and heir. When Magnus died, his claim passed to me as his co-ruler.' There was a silence. There were those among us who were thinking privately that Svein Estrithson in Denmark had an equal or even better claim because he was the great Knut's nephew. 'I intend to press for what is mine by right,' Harald went on, 'as I did for the throne of Norway.'