Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  “Your lord is dead and your oath with him,” Breguswith said to Burgræd one dark afternoon as Hild half drowsed at Onnen’s hip, lulled by the repetitive twist-twirl of spinning. “He left only the girls, no æthelings whose honour you can fight for. And perhaps swearing your sword and honour to Ceredig now seems to you worthy. He is a king. But even as this peat burns Edwin retakes Deira. Before the frost he’ll be secure and he’ll turn to Elmet. He will crush it. Ceredig can no more stand against him than a leaf can defy winter.” She leaned back, the very picture of ease and Anglisc wealth with her smooth honey hair, fine-draped dress, and gold winking at throat and wrist. “No doubt there will be much glorious death.” She looked over at his stripling son playing knucklebones with Ceredig’s men. “Though not Ceredig’s.”

  Burgræd, a stocky man with grey streaks on either side of his mouth and one cheekbone higher than the other, ran a callused finger around the rim of his cup and said nothing.

  “You will die for him, for you’ll keep your oath. You’re Anglisc. But would he die for you? How much is a wealh oath worth?”

  She took his cup and poured him ale, and as she took up her own she glanced about the hall. Hild shut her eyes tightly. Even at three, she understood the danger of overhearing a hint that a king in his own hall was an oath-breaker: Never say the dangerous thing aloud.

  They sipped. A servingman laid more peat on the fire; it hissed. When he had gone, her mother said, more softly than before, “Know this. We will leave this wood before Edwin king falls on Ceredig. We’ll go to him in Deira. In time my daughters will rise high in Edwin’s favour. You could rise with us. And you wouldn’t be sworn to a gesith’s oath. You could take it back anytime.”

  After Burgræd left, her mother bent down and whispered, “Quiet mouth, bright mind, little prickle.”

  For a while it seemed nothing would change. Cian wouldn’t walk anywhere without his wooden sword and wicker shield, and he became tedious, issuing challenges to vicious branches or charging without notice at a shelf of mushrooms growing from a sickly birch. It made Hild’s time at the edges of things less than easy. How could she be still and listen and watch when Cian’s yell made the rooks croak and fly away or the deer bound into the undergrowth? How could she study an old dog fox who sat in the thin morning sunlight to comb his chest hair with his tongue, if he ducked into his run when Cian rolled and tumbled with invisible enemies in the leaves?

  She helped Onnen collect eggs and was proud to break not a one, and tried to help gather hazelnuts with everyone else, though she had to be carried when the walking grew too much. She sat with Hereswith as her mother explained the sunwise and widdershins twist of spinning yarn and how by mixing the two you could make spin-patterned cloth. In the shadowy hall she listened to the cool clicking tiles of wealh bishops’ Latin and to old Ywain, when he was well, play the harp. She liked the sound of the old man’s voice as he warmed it to himself, then of the men setting aside their weapons, the thunk of heavy hilts laid down on the boards, and the bronze-and-gold sound of the strings. Hereswith said at home all Anglisc men took turns with the lyre, but Hild knew that was silly. How could warriors with their burst voices sing like Ywain? Besides, their real home had been overrun by Æthelfrith Iding’s war band before Hereswith had been born, and now the Idings were being driven out in turn by Edwin.

  And then Hild would remember her father was dead and now she never would have a home, and she would hum along with Ywain’s heroic song and try to make her breastbone buzz the way she was sure Ywain’s did when he sang “Calan hyddrev, tymp dydd yn edwi / Cynhwrv yn ebyr, llyr yn llenwii: The beginning of October, the falling off of the day / Tumult in the river mouth, filling up the shore.” Tumult in the river mouth, she sang to herself, tumult in the river mouth.

  * * *

  And at the next new moon as the wind whipped there was tumult in the dark: tumult as someone bundled Hild in a cloak and carried her, tumult as Cian and Hereswith, Onnen and Breguswith, the gesiths—so few!—and their slaves boarded a boat. Tumult during the days as they beat north in the driving rain, the sea roaring like the elms in autumn. Tumult then at the river mouth, and at the dock far up the wide, wide river.

  Torches hissed and fluttered and Hild was more or less asleep when she was carried down the gangplank, but she still saw the rich trappings of the horses there, and the gleam of jewelled hilts and brooches clasped at cloak necks. And she woke fully when an apple voice, so firm and round as to be almost scented, said, “Lady Breguswith, Edwin king welcomes you home.”

  2

  IN SOME WAYS, Hild’s new life was not so different. Her days, the court’s days, were ones of constant movement from royal vill to royal vill: Bebbanburg in the lean months for the safety of the rock walls and the cold grey sea, and Yeavering at the end of spring, when the cattle ate sweet new grass and the milk flowed rich with fat. Then south to the old emperor’s wall, to the small towns built of stone, and a day at Osric’s great house in Tinamutha, and a boat down the coast to that wide river mouth, wide as a sea, and up the river to Brough in early summer, and then, sometimes, Sancton, and always to Goodmanham’s slow river valley at summer’s height—the rolling wolds crimson with flowers, the skeps heavy with honey, and the fields waving with grain. Then the twenty-mile journey to York, with its strong walls, its river roads for carrying the last of the sweet apples and the first of the pears, and its high towers in case of bitter war, winter war.

  The king and his court spent a month here, a two-month there, eating their way through the local offerings, levying and taking tribute, listening to local troubles and rendering judgement.

  “But why?” Hild said when they had to pack up and leave Sancton, again, just as she’d got to know the rooks in the beech spinney and the frogs by the south pond, and one particularly fine old hornbeam whose bent boughs even she could climb. She watched her mother and Onnen folding dresses and rolling hose, and threw her own box of treasures on the floor. “I don’t want to!”

  Her mother’s irises, pale blue as forget-me-nots under unseasonable frost, tightened, though her voice stayed even. “You will pick those up.”

  “No.”

  “Very well. Then we’ll leave you—”

  “I’m the light of the world!”

  “—and when we’re gone the wolves will come, and the foxes, and the wights.”

  Hild wasn’t afraid of foxes, perhaps not even of wolves, not in summer when they were well fed. But wights …

  Her mother was nodding. “They will breathe on your face as you sleep and you will be trapped in a cold dream forever and ever and ever.”

  Hild picked up her box, began searching for her treasures—the wooden brooch Cian had carved and painted for her, the shark’s tooth Hereswith had given to her last Yule, her magic pebble that fit just right in her hand. She frowned. The pebble seemed smaller than it had.

  “But why?” she said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do we move all the time?”

  “It’s how it is.”

  “But why?”

  “Because otherwise we’d eat ourselves out of house and home.”

  Hild pondered that. “When Fa was ætheling, we didn’t send all the gallopers first.”

  “An ætheling is one of many, a maybe-king,” Breguswith said. “Your uncle is the one king. He travels with five hundred people. The king can’t just pack a loaf and a sack of salt and head for the horizon. He must first send a message to his reeves: How was the harvest? How are the roads—and the wood supply? Where is the honey flowing, where are the royal women needed for the weaving, where do bandits need to be warned away, and where is the hunting good? Then he must gather food and other supplies for the journey. And then his galloper rides ahead—tells the vill steward to begin brewing beer, slaughtering cattle, strewing rushes. Only then may we travel.”

  “And when we get there,” Onnen said, “we eat them out of house and home and move on.”

  Hild set her pe
bble aside. It was just a pebble. “But why can’t we stay? Why can’t Uncle Edwin have a home like everyone else?”

  “The whole land is his home.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  “He must be seen.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And he can’t simply have a steward on each estate sending him tribute. Because a steward, unless reminded by the presence of the king, begins to think himself a thegn. He begins to see the land as his, to wonder why he shouldn’t send only a portion of his food, his ale, his honey, to the king. The revolt always begins when the steward wants to be king. A lesson the Franks never seem to learn.”

  But Hild was no longer listening. She was playing with her special pinecone, remembering the tufty red squirrel she had frightened away the day she found it.

  * * *

  Every summer Edwin took war on the road with his war band, tenscore gesiths, sworn to death or glory, and their men, their horses and wagons, a few handfuls of shared women. They were always back before autumn, weighed down, depending on the war, with Anglisc arm rings and great gaudy brooches, British daggers with chased silver hilts—though the blades were no match for Anglisc or Frankish work—or strange heavy coin, and they would wind themselves about with boasts and intricate inlaid sword belts. And always by the end of summer there was a double handful more of big-voiced, hard-chested men glittering with gold. Not all were Anglisc, but they drank and shouted and boasted alike. Hild’s mother told her to stay out of their way. “Our time is not yet come. For now we live like mice in the byre. Everyone knows we’re here, but we’re not worth attention. Quiet mouth, bright mind.”

  Breguswith taught her the gathering and drying of herbs, and began to spirit Hereswith away for mysterious lessons that, when her sister tried to share them with Hild, made no sense.

  They were sitting with a tablet weave—the simple band weaving that would do for a border on a neck or cuff—and Hild was telling Hereswith about how swallows never came until the white butterflies born from colewort were outnumbered by the black-and-red jewel-winged kind.

  “Beat the weft,” Hereswith said.

  “But I beat it just after I turned,” Hild said. “It’ll spoil the pattern.”

  “Do as I say. I’m older.”

  And Hild, because Hereswith had that sulky look that meant she was unhappy, tapped the cross threads down to lie more densely across the warp threads. She smiled tentatively at her sister, who said, “Ma says there are different ways to smile at people.”

  “How—”

  Hereswith overrode her. “If the king notices me, I do this.” She straightened her spine and smiled a proud, glad smile that shocked Hild. “Try it.”

  Hild shook her head.

  “Try it.”

  “No. I’m not happy.”

  Hereswith laughed. “That doesn’t matter! Well, never mind, I expect you’re too young to understand.” She turned the tablet.

  Hild beat the weft. The pattern was already spoilt. She might as well please her sister.

  Hereswith nodded. “Good. And this, too: If you think you’re going to smile at a gesith’s boast, you must let your hair fall to hide your face. Like this.”

  “I know that one!” Hild remembered her mother’s words exactly—the light of the world must remember everything. She repeated them proudly: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”

  Hereswith blinked. Her face curdled. She leaned forward, punched Hild in the arm, and burst into tears. “I hate you!” She flung the tablet weave to the dirt and fled.

  Hild picked up the weave, mystified. What was all that about? She would ask her mother. Or maybe not. Lately whenever she put a question to Breguswith she got answers that made no sense—if she got answers at all. “Where do swallows go in winter?” had merited a pause in the grinding of herbs, followed by a question in turn: “Winters are uneasy times. Why does the king hold feasts at Yule?”

  “Because it makes people happy?”

  “A king doesn’t care if the folk are happy. He cares that they think him strong. Pass me the bitterwort.”

  Hild passed the bitterwort. She thought about winter, and home, and strength in one’s own hall. “Oh,” she said. “Stronger than anyone else. Like not having a steward who stays in the vill.” It came out wrong, but she knew what she meant.

  So did her mother; she always knew the words Hild couldn’t find. She smiled but said only, “This root was pulled too early. Bitterwort is best harvested in autumn.”

  * * *

  Hild grew taller. Her milk teeth loosened. Now she could cross her legs and balance on her hands, and she could name all the king’s hounds and all his horses. She had worked her first perfect tablet weaving, and she remembered enough of the names of the heroes of Gododdin to argue with Cian when he named them as they fell under his wooden sword. Sometimes Hild worked alongside him, exercising with a rock in each hand, as boys who hoped to be king’s gesiths must. Sometimes she swung a stick sword; she had learnt long since that it made him happy for her to pretend to be Branwen the Bold, just as it made her happy for him to be still when she was watching and listening. They remembered: We are us.

  But she could climb now, and sometimes when Cian wanted to play hero and she did not, she ran to a tree—she had favourites in every place—and climbed up among the leaves and stayed silent as he called. And if Onnen wanted to wash her hair and the weather was foul, there was a rooftree and its sloping rafters to clamber to. No one ever looked up, not even her mother. This was her secret. But she liked trees best. Hidden in the leafy canopy, sometimes she stayed so still and quiet even the birds forgot she was there.

  Like today, a hot day for late spring, bright but sullen. It would rain later. Meanwhile, it was cooler inside the leafy hideaway of a pollarded ash drowsing by a woodcutter’s trail. She settled comfortably against the fissured bark and watched dumpy little siffsaffs hop from their half-built nests among the nettles and peck about in the leaf rubbish for soft stuff to line the nest.

  She sat there, breathing the cool leafy air, so still that a sparrow hawk, intent on the siffsaffs beneath, landed on a bough by her face and turned its marigold eyes to hers. They regarded each other for an age. It blinked, blinked again, then tipped forward from its hidden perch, flapped, and vanished into the trees on the other side of the trail.

  The court left Sancton before the siffsaff eggs hatched. Hild hoped the sparrow hawk wouldn’t eat them.

  * * *

  The summer’s war had ended early and the household was at Goodmanham. Hild was six years old—tall, strong-faced (All bone, her mother said, like your father)—when one hot day her mother took Hereswith away and when she came back she wore a small girdle with various cases and boxes attached. She showed them to Hild one at a time. She was to get her own pin beater from Queen Cwenburh, the edgeless sword of some long-dead ætheling. She was to help the other women in the weaving hut. And wasn’t this gilded needle the very picture of beauty? The queen’s own cousin was to be her gemæcce: one to weave and weep with forever.

  Hereswith looked happy, and Hild was glad for her—at last her sister had something of her own, something to compare to being dreamt of while in the womb. Then Hild grew even happier when she realised that all the women, including her mother and Onnen, would be so busy fussing over Hereswith that she and Cian might now find time to sneak away to the bottomland at the foot of the sacred hill south of the vill.

  The bottomland, unlike most of the wolds, with its chalky soil, was dark and damp. Hild led them through an old wide dike full now of a tangle of oaks and holly and thorny crabapple, then over the bank mostly hidden by fern—Cian had to push the wooden sword through his belt, despite the imminent threat of marauding armies, and use his hands to scramble up—to the boggy dell with its quiet pool and the mossy boulder by the shallow end where the sun showed the muddy bottom. All she heard was a blackbird, far away, and the burble of the spring. She wondered where
the water came from. She wondered this in British, the language of wild and secret places.

  “I don’t like this place,” Cian said, and he spoke, too, in British, their preferred way when alone. “It smells of wood ælfs, and there’s no room to swing a sword.” He then proved himself a liar by pulling his sword free and lunging at an invisible opponent. It occurred to Hild that both Hereswith and Cian now had their paths. She had only her mother’s dream. “I shall make you a sword,” Cian said, “and we shall continue our fight in the gash.” He pointed to the fallen alder which, from long experience of these matters, Hild understood to be, in his mind, the top of the banked war ditch.

  She did not sigh, though she disliked the trench-warfare game. It meant the firing of the furze, which meant many pauses while Cian waved imaginary firebrands and tested the imaginary wind.

  “Make me a spear instead, and you can be the hero Morei while I play the great oaf on the top poking at you and soon to be raven food.”

  That way she could stay on the water side and, during the brand-waving and wind-testing, she might study the pool and all the little things that came to its edges. Besides, he would have to go all the way back to the oaks for a long, strong limb.

  While he was gone she settled back against her boulder and closed her eyes. If it were night she would smell the perfume of bog myrtle, which her mother called sweet gale. At night, wood mice would sit atop the fallen tree, wiping dew from their whiskers in the moonlight. At night, she might see the water sprites she was sure lived here. Meanwhile, she worried with her tongue at her front tooth, which hung by a thread.

  Soon enough Cian had her spear. A fallen ash branch, thicker than her wrist, with a pronounced bend. Cian grinned and said, “Oh, I’ll slaughter a score of you spear wielders! Close your eyes now!” and leapt away. Hild sang the agreed-upon three verses—Adorned with his wreath the chief … adorned with his wreath the leader … adorned with his wreath the bright warrior—then she parted a fern on the alder and peered down. Silent. Still.