Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  As the mist began to dissolve she could see the dark, wet beach. Long-legged birds speared shellfish, and women with sacks collected coal and driftwood, dodging the surf that ran up over the sand like the froth in a milkmaid’s pail. The sky showed as blue as twice-dyed linen. The sea was restless, glinting like napped flint. It, too, would turn blue if the sky stayed clear. Three ships were being loaded at the harbour on the mouth of the River Esk. Mulstan must be right. Her uncle must be winning. Though she didn’t know why she’d had no word.

  From the harbour, the river wound back through blossoming fruit trees and tangled copses choked with bramble. An arrowhead of black-barred geese flew out of the east, feathers rosy in the rising sun and yellow beaks tinted somewhere between marigold and pink—the same colour as Hild’s carnelians that were now safely nestled in their carved ivory chest. Unless Begu had borrowed them again.

  Hild turned to make sure. Begu was talking to the young son of the cowherd, one hand on the cow’s back, one on her hip. No beads at either wrist. She patted the cow as she talked, one of the small black cows favoured in these parts, less milk animals than meat-makers. The goats were the milkers.

  Begu looked a bit like a goat: a long, thin face with teeth grown every which way and wide-spaced eyes. Her hair was brown-blond, like a goat’s, and always coming undone. She had a fondness for farm animals, as Hild liked creatures of the wild.

  Except geese. They were landing on the beach and running, honking, wings spread, at women and sandpipers alike, until the beach cleared and the raucous things could pick the sand clean, and shit on everything, and leave still quarrelling. She hated geese, they made her anxious, she didn’t know why.

  “Hild!” Begu waved her over, bouncing in place she was so eager. She was always eager. “Cædmon says he has a book. A book!”

  Hild walked back to them. “Where?”

  The boy, Cædmon, blushed behind his freckles and shock of dark hair and muttered something.

  “Don’t be silly,” Begu said to him. She looked directly at Hild. Her eyes were hazel. “He thinks you’ll take it. You won’t, will you?”

  “The book is Mulstan’s.” This was his land, and Cædmon was his wealh. She waited. Eventually, Cædmon looked up through his ragged fringe. Cut with a knife. “What kind of book is it?”

  He shrugged, looked out to the horizon.

  “I wish to see it.”

  “It’s not here.” His voice was like the cowbells, soft-metalled and dull, but with music buried in it somewhere.

  “Where is it?”

  Another shrug.

  “Where did it come from?” He shrugged again. “Where did it come from?”

  “It was the priest’s. He died. We buried him with his beads, but his wife took the book.” Hild nodded. Books were precious, she was learning, especially the ones with gold and jewels. “Then she died. We buried her.” He gestured at the creamy-blossomed blackthorn hedge around the oval graveyard. The gate had fallen down. “Da took the book. To keep it safe for the new priest, he said. But there is no new priest. And Da’s forgotten about the book.”

  The cows were grazing close to the gap in the hedge. It was wicked to let such a place fall into ruin. “It’s good land up here,” she said. “Good grazing. Water. And you could see trouble coming for miles.”

  “Trouble?” Begu laughed her tumbling laugh. “There’s no trouble up here!”

  There was always trouble in the world. She thought of fighting at Tinamutha in the flaring torchlight by the dock with the Irish, and Osric’s men strangely absent. The scramble for the ship. The gesiths for whom there was no room on the last boat forming a wall with the dogs on the quay, dying one by one as Edwin and his party fled.

  Not here, she told herself. Not today.

  “Still, it should be farmed. If no priest is coming, the land should be given to someone to steward.”

  “It’s grazed,” Begu said, patting Cædmon’s cow.

  “Yes, but are these the lord’s cattle?”

  “Yes. Mostly.”

  “How many?”

  “Most.”

  Hild’s mother and Coelgar both would have known exactly, and from them, Hild would have known. Accounts must be kept, obligations fostered. “Cows shouldn’t graze by the dead. They shit on everything.”

  But Begu seemed immune to her reputation and just shrugged. “There’s a hedge around the graveyard. Mostly.”

  Hild gave up and said to Cædmon, “What does the book look like?”

  He made a frame in the air with his hands. Small.

  “What colour is it?”

  “Cow-shit brown.” They all grinned.

  “Can I see it?”

  He squinted at the sun, handed his switch to Begu, and said in his careful Anglisc, “Watch the cows.” He plunged down the scrubby hill towards the river.

  “It is good land,” Begu said, turning slowly and looking at the headland as though she’d never seen it before. “More than just grazing. Eel traps in the river. Hares on the edges of the woods. Mushrooms and mast in the woods. Cows, sheep, oysters, seagull eggs … Do you want to see the secret spring?”

  “A spring?”

  “Of course there’s a spring.” They started walking. “You thought there was just that pond? Huh.”

  “It’s not a bad pond. You could put fish in it.”

  “Why? There’s lots of fish out there.” Begu waved in the direction of the sea.

  Bebbanburg was by the sea. It could withstand the Irish because it had everything you could possibly need inside an unbreachable wall. But Begu was smiling at her and Hild couldn’t think how to explain without making that smile falter.

  “Here.” Begu stopped by a stand of ferns, knelt, and used the cattle switch to move them to one side. Hild smelt mint. “It was Sirona’s spring once, long ago.”

  Hild didn’t know Sirona. She didn’t know half the wealh gods of well and wall and wood.

  It was a rocky pool as wide as the biggest soup cauldron at Bebbanburg. But deeper. A blade of grass turned slowly, sunwise, on the surface. A little horn cup stood on a shelf of rock among the ferns. Begu dipped it in the spring and poured a thin stream out to the spring and the goddess, then handed it to Hild. Hild sipped.

  “It’s so cold!” She sipped again. “It tastes good.” Like fern and mint.

  “It’s the best water in the world, my mother said. We used to come here in summer when it was hot down below. She told me stories of how she came here as a lass.”

  Hild rolled the little horn cup between her hands. It felt old. She imagined Begu’s mother, Enynny, and Enynny’s mother, and her mother, and her mother before her, back into memory, sitting here by the ferns drinking the cold, minty water and talking quietly in British. So many. All gone into the mist. She felt a twist inside, a longing for a family and home that never was. “Do you miss her, your mother?”

  “Yes. I think so. It was a long time ago. I was very little.”

  “I miss my mother.”

  “But you’ll see her soon. You’ll see. My fa says no one can take Bebbanburg.” Hild didn’t say anything. “What’s she like?”

  “Tall.”

  “You’re tall.”

  “She’s very tall. Taller than the king.”

  “Is he very small?”

  “He’s as tall as Mulstan.”

  “No! Then she must touch the sky!”

  Hild laughed. “Nothing touches the sky. Except birds.” It was easy to talk to Begu. Perhaps because she said such strange things, perhaps because Hild got the sense she never took people seriously.

  Begu flung herself down on her back in the sun. “What do you suppose the sky feels like?”

  Hild put the cup carefully back in its niche and lay down, too. The grass was damp. They looked up and up at the blue sky. “Like mist. Like a blue veil. Like a cobweb.”

  “Do you suppose it goes up and up forever? A world of blue?”

  “And of black, at night.” When things
that weren’t birds flew.

  They were silent. The ferns whispered in the wind. Far away the sea hissed. Geese honked. Hild shivered.

  “Perhaps geese are part of your wyrd.”

  Hild looked at her.

  “What? You don’t like them. I’ve marked that.”

  “They’re loud and dirty.”

  “So are goats. They all taste good, though.”

  Hild turned back to the sky. She listened past the geese to the gulls crying in the distance. The sound seemed floatier up here, unlike the sharp piercing cries on the beach. The wind sounded different, too. No tall trees to rustle and shiver and speak. But then what was that rhythmic creaking?

  “What’s—” The creaking deepened, stopped, was followed by a loud bellow and a wrenching crash. She sat up.

  “The cows!”

  They ran.

  A cow, tempted by the tender grass among the graves, had tried to push through the fallen gate in the blackthorn hedge and got stuck. It was still stuck; it was thrashing and bellowing, destroying the hedge and driving thorns deeper into its neck and the tender pink udder. Blossom lay on the grass like snow.

  “Keep them together.” Begu threw the switch to Hild and ran straight to the distressed cow.

  Hild advanced on the cattle. “Sweff,” she called softly, as cowherds did. “Sweff sweff.” She walked slowly around them so they bunched together but not so tightly that they panicked. “Sweff sweff.” They began to lower their heads. One bent to the grass and tore a mouthful. Another swished its tail. This wasn’t so hard. It was not unlike reassuring dogs. She wondered what it was about the sweff sound, the shape or the fall, that the cows found so calming. “Swip,” she said, in the same tone. The browsing cow lifted its head. “Swip swip swip,” she said on a falling note. Eye rolls, a nervous snort. “Sweff sweff,” she said, with the proper rise and fall. They relaxed, though not as much as before.

  “What are you doing?” Cædmon, one hand still on the sapling he’d been using to haul himself up the steep slope, one holding something wrapped in sacking. “Why are—” He caught sight of the cow stuck in the hedge and swore. “Gast!”

  With Begu talking to her, the cow had calmed but was now lowing piteously. Begu was pondering the thorns. Cædmon dropped the sacking bundle, knelt by her, and patted the cow on the neck. He glanced at Hild. “Look to the others.”

  “They’re fine now you’re here.” They were: all grazing peacefully. She wanted to look at the book, see if she could puzzle out some words. “You should take her collar off.”

  Cædmon shook his head; he seemed as immune to her reputation as Begu. He pointed at the pierced udder. “This is what hurts most.”

  “Won’t she kick when you pull the thorns?”

  “She might. But we have to get every single one or in a few days she’ll leak yellow and stink.”

  She wasn’t a big cow, but she weighed more than all three children put together. Hild longed for Cian’s old wicker shield or, better still, the one of sturdy wood and hide with the painted boss the Bryneich had given him last year. She took a deep breath and knelt. Down here the hooves looked huge and sharp, and they were covered in the shit the cow had loosed in her panic. She set the book aside. “Where should I begin?”

  * * *

  An hour later, by the foot of the daymark hill, Hild and Begu put down their burdens, the collar and its bell—for Cædmon said the cow would need salve round her neck, not a collar, and Hild wanted to look at the bell—and the sack-wrapped book, and did their best to tidy each other up. Hild unbraided Begu’s left plait, and with the leather tie held in her teeth combed the hair through with her fingers, picking out thorns and blossom petals and bits of grass.

  Begu tried wiping her shoes on the grass.

  “It won’t help,” Hild said, replaiting.

  “It might.”

  “It won’t. They can probably smell us from here.” She tied off the plait, unbound the other. “Keep still. There. Now you do mine.”

  “Yours are fine and tidy. I don’t know how you keep them so.”

  “I have my fa’s hair. Not soft like yours.”

  “I like how yours feels, wiry and strong. Like you.”

  No one had ever said that to her before.

  “What’s wrong? Are you worried about the cow shit? I won’t let Guenmon shout at you.”

  Guenmon was a beginner compared to Onnen, but being protected, and by someone who only came up to her chin, was so novel to Hild that she had no idea how to respond.

  * * *

  Fursey pursed his lips and turned the little brown book over and over in his hands, then knocked the cover with his knuckles. His fine black robe gaped a little at the neck, showing more than usual of the splotch of spilt-wine birth stain that ran from his left shoulder to his jawbone. “Cowhide over wooden board. Home-tanned skin at that.” He opened it, shut it, opened it again. “A breviarium psalterii. And in a terrible hand, something a peasant might write. Is this anything to do with that Irish serf you wanted me to speak to?”

  “It belonged to a dead priest. What’s a”—she paused to sound it out carefully—“breviarium psalterii?”

  “A shortened kind of Psalter. Like this.” He took his own book, bound in fine-grained black calfskin, from his waist pouch and opened it one-handed to show her. Psalms. He’d shown her them before. She nodded. Looked at the dead priest’s Psalter in his other hand.

  “But the letters are different.” The letters were rounder and fatter, blacker. She held out her hand, and Fursey gave it to her. She hefted it, opened it again, peered at it. Fursey had been teaching her to read, but these letters were all run together; she couldn’t tell one word from another. There were no dots and other marks over certain letters, the way there were in Fursey’s book.

  “It’s old,” he said. “Versio Ambrosiana. It was old before your dead priest took his vows.”

  * * *

  Curled in the crook of the big lime by the beck she leafed through the book. The dappled light swam over the ink that was fading to brown. In a terrible hand, something a peasant might write. There were peasants who wrote? If her uncle found out it would irritate him, that a peasant could do something his seer could not. Yet.

  It would irritate Eadfrith, too. Even as their boat had crossed from the muddy surge of the Tine to the chop and heave of the sea, and men out of their wits moaned and the less injured laughed at their hurts when they remembered they should and looked as though they’d be grateful for their mothers when they didn’t, Eadfrith had been badgering his father about Fursey, who lay tied like a hog on the plank half deck between them.

  Eadfrith kicked the priest on the thigh. “Why does she get him? Does she get the hostage price, too?”

  Fursey, who was awake but gagged and so—uncharacteristically as she was to learn—silent, watched one then the other as if he was in hall at a scop’s contest.

  “She gets nothing but charge of an annoying god mouth who will explain the value of the book.”

  “But why can’t I have him?”

  “You didn’t earn him.”

  “Nor did she.”

  “He’s mine to dispose of as I please.” Eadfrith said nothing, but drew his foot back again. “He’s not yours to damage. Unless you want to buy him from me?”

  Eadfrith hadn’t done well in the fight—few had, it was more flight than fight—and had no bounty to show.

  “No? Just as well. You’ve no need of books. You have a blade.”

  While father and maybe-heir measured each other’s gaze, Fursey met Hild’s, raised his eyebrows, and looked pointedly at her seax.

  Edwin missed nothing. He leaned down and said in that pleasant we’ll-eat-the-horse tone, “She might wear a blade but she also wears skirts, priest, like you. So she will learn. Teach her. But not about your Christ. There’ll be others for that, in time.” And to Hild, “While he eats at my expense, see you learn the full use of these books, if any.”

  In the cr
ook of the lime tree by the beck Hild closed the book. Fursey was now eating—and drinking, always drinking—at Mulstan’s expense, not her uncle’s. The gift of kings, her mother said: to make others pay. Another saying of her mother’s popped into her head: Women make and men break. She frowned. What about men in skirts, where did they fit? Skirt or sword, book or blade …

  * * *

  “It’s a strange book,” she said to Bán in Irish, and he said, “Is it?” in Anglisc, because Hild had decided that was best. With Fursey unwilling to translate, that was how they would learn the most, one from the other. She would speak Bán’s tongue and he hers, so that when she left—for she would leave by summer, surely—when she was gone, he could talk to the folk at the hall. And she would know more of how Fursey’s tricky Irish mind worked.

  They were walking along a track raised between the rhynes. It was spring even here now, minty green leaves on everything, and the air full of the scent of blossom that in the valleys would already be tiny fruit. Assuming Osric’s men had joined Edwin’s, that their march up the coast had gone well, and that they had broken the host around Bebbanburg, the court would be moving to Yeavering, to the sweet green pastures and the constant wind on Goat Hill. But if they had, why was she still here? Why had no one come? Perhaps the Irish were still at sea. She reached for her seax but found her sash instead of her belt, and remembered she had lent it to Cian. It’s still mine, she’d said, but you may have the use of it, for a while. Only not when we play, because it is very sharp.

  As they walked, Cú would run into the meadowsweet, comfrey, and reeds that lined the banks, and sniff and scratch, and sometimes whine, and then Bán would go look and untangle the tall golden withies from one another so they would grow straight. The golden willow grew fastest, he said, but the black willow was best for baskets. He had to shape “basket” with his hands twice before he found the word, but although Hild knew what he was trying to say, she didn’t interrupt. She had found that people, especially people who spoke a different tongue, would get anxious if they didn’t get to have their say in their own way, even if they spoke in a long rush, hurrying to get their words out. Like the strange Psalter.