She rode a thin grey horse, a thin grey hound ran at the hem of her blue-grey cloak, and she sat tall, an enamel copy of a ten-year-old girl, hard and cold.
* * *
It was just past a large farmstead by a bridge, where they’d flung hacksilver at the farm wife and taken every last drop of her milk, all her just-cured bacon, a great wheel of cheese, and a barrel of strange-tasting ale, and still been hungry, that the rider from Tinamutha found them.
“Lord King,” he gasped as he pulled up his foaming shaggy-maned pony. “Lord Osric sent me. He is besieged at Tinamutha. Your man got through, and there are boats aplenty, but no way of sailing them past Fiachnae’s hordes at the river mouth.”
The gesiths immediately began cursing, swearing vengeance and mighty deeds. The king looked shrewish and unhappy. Hild kicked Ilfetu until he shouldered the king’s chestnut, which made the king look at her. “Bebbanburg?” she said.
Osric’s messenger gave Hild a puzzled look. Who was this child? Then he saw her eyes and the huge seax at her waist. Perhaps she was an uncanny dwarf or a wall wight.
“What of Bebbanburg?” Edwin said to the man, as though Hild had not spoken.
“Fiachnae’s main force besieges the rock. They have slaughtered all the cattle on the moors.”
“How long ago?”
“A fortnight since. No more.”
Edwin shifted in his saddle, and Hild recognised the movement; he didn’t know what to do, and as a result wondered if he was being made a game of. She backed up Ilfetu, just in case.
A look passed between the king and Lilla, and the chief gesith took the messenger’s reins in his beefy hand. At his nod, a handful of warriors loosened their swords in their sheaths. Edwin half shuttered his eyes. “Two weeks? And no boats in or out of Tinamutha?”
“No, lord.” The messenger’s mount picked up its rider’s uncertainty. It snorted and tried to back up but its way was blocked.
“Then how did news reach your lord so fast if the way by sea is blocked?”
“My lord?”
“Dere Street is a fine road, but it’s a hard ride south and west to it from Bebbanburg. And then along this road east to Tinamutha, and then back west to us.”
“My lord?”
Edwin said, “We’ll eat the horse,” and turned away.
Lilla nodded to one of the gesiths, who drew his sword and swung at the messenger’s neck where it met his shoulder. The man shrieked and spurted and fell off his horse, which tried to rear, and the dogs did the rest.
5
MULSTAN, LORD OF MULSTANTON, wiped his beard, sent the cup down the table, and watched the strange maid. She was turning those blood beads of hers again, turn turn turn. At least she wasn’t wearing that huge knife tonight. A maid the same age as his little Begu with a slaughter seax!
He’d made them all welcome, of course, the maid, her wealh woman and son, even that Irish tutor-priest, or hostage, or whatever he was. When your king arrives in a blood-splashed boat and departs in a hurry leaving behind a favoured kinswoman and her household for whom he demands hospitality, you give it. It doesn’t matter that she’s only ten. It matters that she’s the subject of a prophecy and has the most direct and uncanny gaze of any maid you’ve ever seen, and that one wrong word to the king would mean being staked out for the ravens. So you give her your own bed and the highest place at table—for this was a country hall, after all, not much removed from its British roots, where women feasted alongside their men—and try as hard as you might to remember to show the boldness and generosity expected of an Anglisc thegn looking to gain favour with a king whose fortunes were on the rise. Or who might be dead, depending. No, no, he was alive, for the trade boats were getting through and there’d been no reports of Anglisc slaughter from Bebbanburg.
He was old, near forty; his first wife and children had died in the great sickness before the maid was born, and when his first lord and king, Æthelfrith, died and he was released from his gesith’s oath, he had declined exile north of the wall with the æthelings and had, instead, settled in to farm this once-rich land by the sea. When Edwin took the throne, he had charged Mulstan to oversee the safety of the small trading harbour and to take the tithe for the king of all goods that came and went across the sea. And eventually Mulstan was happy to marry the beautiful Enynny and build himself a good solid farmstead in the woods by the beck, just half a mile from the tideland estuary full of oysters and mussels rounding into Streanæshalch, the Bay of the Beacon, with its harbour that saw trade from Pictland and the North British, from Lindsey and the East Angles, and even the people of the North Way, whose narrow ships brought furs and amber across the North Sea and down along the chains of islands and along the coast of Pictland. Last year they’d had a Frisian ship creeping up from its more usual harbour at Gipswīc.
He swallowed more beer. Swefred was playing that song again, the one he liked about hearth and home. Couldn’t play half as well as that odd Irish priest the maid brought but at least he could understand the words. None of that Irish caterwauling. Ah, he missed his wife. By Thunor, he missed both of them. Though this Onnen woman who’d come with the maid—
The maid had stopped fiddling with her beads and was looking at him. “My lord Mulstan.”
He swallowed the wrong way and coughed. Had she read his thoughts about her wealh woman?
She waited patiently, which made him nervous. Royalty were rarely patient unless they were toying with you. At least she was talking now. For the first weeks she’d been mute and round-eyed as an owl. He’d seen gesiths with that look after their first shield wall.
“Who is the man who plies the withy beds?”
He wiped his beard. “I beg pardon?”
“The man. On the withy beds.” She cocked her head slightly, as though listening to a voice only she could hear. “He has a dog.”
“Black-and-white dog?” He slapped the board. “The willow man!” He immediately felt foolish. Of course the man in the willow withies was the willow man. “Irish,” he said, trying not to look into her fathomless eyes. Seen too much, those eyes. “Man to an envoy taken hostage so long ago no one remembers.” He’d never really thought about it before. Perhaps the envoy had died of sickness, perhaps he’d been freed but forgot to take his man with him. “But it’s said the man found his way to the priest of the tiny British church by the ruined beacon tower on the cliff. Long time ago, that. Never been a priest up there in my time. No doubt the priest had him work in the willow withies. But that was years ago, and now the willow man’s just the willow man. He doesn’t say much.”
Like you, little maid. But the willow man didn’t say much because no one much understood him. He just planted and pruned and harvested white willow and brown willow and buff willow, softened and dried it, boiled it and stripped it, so that now a person could visit the willow man’s bothy and exchange food or cloth or a copper pin for willow fit for any willow purpose and it was the finest for two days’ walk. The willow man lived in a world where he talked to no British, for long years had taught him the pointlessness of it; a world where the Anglisc were wights—and perhaps to him they were.
That priest was giving him one of those lean and wicked smiles. Must have said that last bit aloud. Had to watch that.
He tipped his beer horn. Empty. Onnen filled it and smiled. Thunor bless the woman. “Anyway, the willow man communes only with his dog and his boles and poles and stools and rods. Though he’s Irish, he seems harmless enough.” Of course the maid’s tutor-hostage, Fursey, was also Irish, some princely priest the king had taken in the bright clash at Tinamutha. Fruitless war, that. What was Fiachnae mac Báetáin, the king of the Ulaid, doing attacking his betters so far from home? And why had the king let such a little maid get mixed up in the blood and slaughter? “I hope the priest won’t take that amiss.”
Fursey rose and suggested smoothly that his lordship should pay no mind. For all knew that some Irish, especially the wicked Ui Neill, were known to be ma
d, to succumb to drink, to get too close to their horses and beat their dogs, and who could blame an Anglisc lord for not knowing the difference?
* * *
Hild, who had been living on this wild moor by the sea for some weeks now and, tutor or not, new friend Begu or not, was homesick and heartsick, listened but said nothing. More and more now she could tell the difference between what was real and what was a mix of memory and nightmare; more and more she felt sure that if she spoke she would be speaking to the living, not ghosts. Often now, Fursey’s instruction on letters and Latin seemed like something of this world and not the next. But still the effort of deciding whether or not it was right to speak would bring the memories: the Irish rising like a tide, the slip and slide in the mud on the mouth of the Tine, the cries of Osric, where is Osric? answered by ever more howling Irish. She felt the bruises still of the scramble into the boat, the fighting for space, the rock and tilt of the boat as an Irishman grabbed the gunwale with both hands …
She turned away from that memory. She would make friends with this willow man who also didn’t like to talk.
* * *
She crouched in the grey-brown sedge on the edge of the rhyne and watched. It might be spring half a mile away, down in the valley along the beck, but here, high on the marshy moor by the sea, it was a harsh, colourless world. Here there was no greening blossom, no curve of burbling stream or round river rocks. The rhynes ran spear-straight into the horizon, the willow beds running between them, all under a tin-grey sky. Steel-coloured water lapped and slapped against the dirt banks, and the willow canes, not yet in leaf, rattled and shook like tally sticks.
She wished Begu could be there, but Begu had been careless about keeping warm in the rain and she had been breathed on by sidsa and her nose was dripping. Onnen—who somehow had taken over Mulstan’s hall within a day of their arrival seven weeks ago—had ordered her to bed with a hot stone. So Hild had left her seax and belt with Begu, on the grounds that the willow man might be frightened by it, and wore her old sash instead. Then she had set out under the wide, scudding grey sky and found him here on the rhyne, the ditch between the withy beds, cutting white willow poles and stacking them in bundles, upright, in the water.
She had been watching the white-haired man and the black-and-white dog all morning. They were never apart. They knew she was there.
The willow man had looked at her sidelong once or twice and talked to his dog, whom he called Cú, or Dog, but more loudly than he would have if they’d been the only hot-blooded things on the moor.
The water slapped, the canes rattled, and man, girl, and dog all looked at the sky—clouds piling together, no longer tin but lead—then at one another. Hild, encouraged, stood, came closer—oh, her shoes were more mud cake than leather now—and pointed at the willow man, at his crinkly white hair, and said one of the Irish words she knew, “Bán.”
And he laughed, showing a toothless mouth, then loosed a torrent of Irish at her. His accent was strange. She understood three words of it, ingen (maid), saxain (Anglisc), and occoras (hunger), and shook her head. “Mall,” she said, “mall” (slow), and he said it all again. “Mall,” she said again and furrowed her brow while lifting her eyebrows: Please. And Cú tilted his head and whined, and then Bán spoke one more time in a jumbled Anglisc-British-Irish mix, and Hild listened with her whole skin, the way she listened to rooks in the field or wind in the trees. She understood, she thought. He was asking her if she was hungry.
She sat in the mud—Onnen would scold her raw—offered a fist to Cú, the first dog she had allowed near her since she watched Od eat the guts of Osric’s man, and repeated back to Bán as well as she could, with the words he had used, that she, the Anglisc maid, whose name was Hild, had hunger, a little, but that when she returned she would be very well provided for. And he nodded, but shook his fingers dismissively in that Irish way, just like Fursey, and tutted, and unfastened the sack at his waist and offered her half his cheese and a bite of onion, and a dip in the coarse grey salt collected in the seam of his sack.
When he waved the cheese Cú went painfully still and drooled and looked sad, as dogs do, and Hild and Bán laughed together and settled comfortably on the edge of the high bank between withy beds, where it was a little drier, and shared the cheese while Cú followed the movement of hand to mouth, and looked sadder and sadder. Both Hild and Bán were wise in the way of dogs, and they gave him none, and he stopped looking sad and instead went to sleep. And after, Bán let her climb into his flat-bottomed boat and coast up and down the rhyne with him while he used his little sharp knife to slide up along the grain of the growing willow rods, faster than she could see at first, and snick snick snick cut the little buds off the growing poles so they wouldn’t come in crooked. Overhead the clouds scudded and darkened and closed tighter than a lid upon the world, and again they glanced, man, girl, and dog, at the sky, and Hild persuaded him to come to the kitchen at the hall of Mulstan.
At the door, it was Guenmon, not Onnen, who gave her muddy shoes a look, Guenmon who raised an eyebrow at Bán and then said to Hild, “Don’t sit. Either of you. You’re all over mud.”
“He’s my guest.”
“Guest, is it? Well, Onnen would have my hair if she saw me feeding you in that state. And you dressed like that. Though it’s nice to see you’ve taken off that sword-knife.”
“I give him guest rights,” she said, and she gave Guenmon the look she’d perfected in the months she’d been apart from her mother, months of having to demand the rights of prince and priest and light of the world while in the guise of a rangy, chestnut-haired girl with a strong-boned face. And Guenmon, as everyone did when faced with that swelling gaze, sighed and gave in. “There’s some of my pasties, you know where they are, and I’ll fetch ale. But you’ll sit on the stoop til that mud dries, or Onnen—”
“Will have your hair, yes.” Hild took off her shoes, pulled a stool close to the shelf, stood on it—carefully, for her hose feet were wet—and lifted down the basket with the napkin-wrapped pasties. She handed one to Bán, took one for herself. “Where is she?”
“With the little mistress.” Guenmon set a poker to heat in the fire and then, despite her earlier words, took down two of the better copper cups and one wooden one, and from a walnut chest—she unlocked it with the latch-lifter that would usually hang on the belt of the lady of the hall—took a glazed clay pot of precious spice and added a pinch to each cup.
“Is she well?” Begu had looked miserable—dripping nose, sore throat, earache—but sturdy this morning. Being breathed on by sidsa could be a chancy business, yes, but usually only for infants and the very old.
“Nothing staying warm won’t cure. But that Onnen does fuss…” She shook her head and poured ale from a jar into the cups, and Hild understood this to be a comment on Onnen’s solicitousness for the lord’s daughter, and by extension the widowed lord himself. The lord, too, had been extravagant in his courtesies to Onnen, and the people of the hall—servants and highfolk alike—looked on with those wry smiles that Hild had seen grown-ups exchange before at these times. Perhaps they would mate. She had wanted to talk to Cian about it last night but Cian was being unaccountably surly, and Begu was already tucked up in her very own linden-wood bed. Onnen had sniffed at that when they’d first arrived—a ten-year-old girl, daughter of a country thegn and a deposed British lordling’s daughter, with her own bed and feather mattress! Wasteful, wasteful to build a whole miniature bed for a child—but had changed her tune quickly enough when Mulstan had made them all so welcome.
Hild understood and suspended judgement, as she had learnt to do in her strange position as the light of the world in a maid’s clothes. And yet she was ten, only ten, her heft only that of her gaze and words and bearing, especially on days like this when she had set out in her plainest short cyrtel and hose and left all her fine stuff safe and dry in Begu’s room.
So as Guenmon knocked the ashy scale from the glowing poker and plunged the hot tip
into the first copper cup and sang a verse of a wealh song Hild didn’t know while the drink heated, Hild munched on her mutton pasty—Guenmon had a way of adding tarragon and vinegar that gave it a wild, hilly tang—and was grateful for warmth and food and the possibility of a new friend, one who didn’t belong here either.
Bán had finished his pasty and was looking about him. Cú was sitting quiet and well behaved, though there were suspicious-looking crumbs at his feet.
Guenmon handed out the ale. Bán sipped with caution, Hild with delight: mace and ginger! She watched the willow man lift his cup again, noted the calluses on his wrists, the suggestion of a thick scar around his throat as he swallowed. Mulstan didn’t use collars for his wealh, but Bán had been in a slave yoke at some time. And his tunic was threadbare. Did he even have a cloak? It might be spring but on the moorland and beach there would be two months yet of cold wind.
“Good ale,” she said, and Guenmon nodded as though such praise was her due.
“Ready yesterday, from the finest malting we’ve had this six-month or more, if I do say so myself.”
“Might we spare a jar or so?”
Guenmon folded her arms.
“And perhaps we have some cloth set by for rags that we might piece for a cloak.”
“And some sausage for the dog, while I’m about it?”
“Bán would no doubt be grateful,” Hild said, with a smile for Bán, who had recognised the word dog. She really wanted to talk to him. “Where’s Fursey?”
“Now how am I meant to know the whereabouts of that smooth-tongued, shave-pated Irish spy?”
And for a moment she sounded so like Breguswith that Hild missed her mother and sister fiercely.
* * *
Hild stood on the headland in the light mist of dawn with her toes hanging over the edge of the grassy east cliff. The edge of all things. Between day and night, between sky and earth, sea and land. The air smelt of iron and salt. Like Tinamutha. She rested her hand on her seax. No, not like Tinamutha: no stink of mud and marsh flats. No boats on fire. No armed men cutting their way towards her and the king. Just iron and salt. Her hand drifted from the seax. Behind her, behind the ruined stone beacon and the tumbledown wattle-and-thatch church, she heard cowbells. Their dull clank was almost tuneful, occasionally harmonious. She had never heard of such a thing, but now that she had, she wondered why every cow in the world didn’t have a tuned bell around its neck.
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