Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  He dusted it with his hand, withdrew a pace, and cleared his throat.

  “Would the little miss care for some water, at all? It being a hot day. And there being a spring close by.” But he kept glancing back at his furnace.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Finmail. Fin.”

  “Fin, you have something on the fire?”

  “I do, mistress.”

  “Then see to it.” She looked at the benches of enamellers, chasers, polishers. “I am not here.”

  Fin frowned.

  “I am not,” she said in Irish, and met his sky-blue gaze with her own. He bowed and retreated.

  She turned to the Svear, spoke clearly and carefully. “I will watch, if I may.”

  He nodded and went back to his work, moulding something palm-size from wax.

  At the next bench, a towheaded man rolled wax into little sticks and, with a knife heated in boiling water, cut their ends and fused them to another tiny wax sculpture.

  A boy ran up with a heavy faggot of stripped ash twiglets, the kind of thing left after the cattle have eaten everything useful from their winter tree hay. He added it to the fire. The towheaded man put the wax model carefully on a wooden tray. A woman took the tray—again, carefully—and carried it to the slurry tub. At the tub, another woman was lifting out a slurry-coated net; she hung it on a line in the sun next to others. She checked two of the nets at the far end of the line, took them down, carried them to a bench where an old man with gentle hands coated the hard-slurried model in thicker clay, smoothing carefully until there was nothing but a ball of clay like a wasp’s nest. The faggot boy carried the clay to one of the kilns.

  Bellows squeezed and furnaces roared. Tiny hammers chink-chinked. The river flowed.

  Two creamy white butterflies—the same colour as the Svear’s wax—danced together around the tip of one guard’s spear, while he half dozed.

  Hild returned her attention to the goldsmithing. She had watched the bronze casters at Bebbanburg. This was different. It was like watching seasoned gesiths marching from three corners of a rough field to slot smoothly into a shield wall, or listening to a bard build a familiar song. The Svear didn’t have to watch the furnace or mind the kiln, he didn’t have to shake the slurry, he had only to think of pleasing shapes and build them in wax—smoothly, unhurriedly—so that a clay mould could emerge from the kiln and be filled with gold. She thought of women always having to break the flow of their spinning to catch a child back from the fire, or pause in the heckling of tow to bind a wound …

  Hereswith, married, with a child. Her nephew or niece. But she might never meet them. She should give Hereswith something to remember her by, something beautiful, something precious.

  The sun climbed higher. The Svear stood, grinned—the way his cheek gaped was hideous; her mother would have stitched that when it was still raw—and gestured for her to follow. She followed him from table to table. She watched the melted wax poured carefully from a clay mould and saved for later; gold poured into the hot mould; the mould set in sand to cool slowly; a raw gold cast, a buckle, getting its gold spines snipped off—always one slave watching another when they were handling naked gold—and polished, then engraved. Back to the enameller’s table, where a man with a squint used the tiniest spoon Hild had ever seen to dip into various bowls of powder and tap the grains carefully into the minute compartments on a gold brooch, made by fusing fine gold wire to a flat gold surface.

  “Red,” said the Svear blurrily, pointing to one bowl. “Blue,” pointing to another. They all looked white and cream and grey to Hild.

  “How can you tell?”

  He picked up a pinch and rubbed it between his fingertips. “Different.” Which war had captured him? His right palm did not have the sword-callus stripe; his left knuckles were not flattened from blows through a shield boss. He touched his finger to his tongue. “Taste different, too.” He held his finger out for her to try. Hild stuck out her tongue.

  “Hild,” Fursey said from behind. “What on God’s green earth is so fascinating about watching yet another stinking savage make jewellery?”

  Hild felt like a dragonfly batted to the dirt. She turned, angry. Then she took in Fursey’s mottled face. “What’s the matter?”

  “Apostasy!”

  That word again. She still didn’t know what it meant. Eorpwald’s guards might not know what it meant, either, but they didn’t like the tone. They unslung their shields. Lintlaf came up on his toes.

  Men with weapons: as predictable as dogs.

  “Stand down,” she said to Lintlaf.

  “They are paid men,” he said, with the sting and twist guaranteed to provoke anyone’s temper. The guards levelled their spears.

  “Doubtless you could take them even with your sword in your left hand,” she said to Lintlaf. “But you will not.”

  No one moved.

  Her thoughts came together, smooth as a shield wall: The fact they could check becomes the prophecy they must believe. She fixed her gaze on Lintlaf but spoke to all four men. “I have seen two lives dancing in the guise of butterflies about their spear blades; butterflies dancing with death. Lives waiting to be lost. I have seen it.” In her side vision she caught one of the East Angles nodding: Butterflies, he had seen them. “But no blood will be spilt, no lives lost here today. I say so. You will both walk with me.”

  She nodded at the enameller, then to the Svear, and swept away, as her mother would have. They followed.

  “Apostasy, heresy, evil!” Fursey hissed in Latin as they walked along the river, then sneezed, which made Hild want to smile, but she remembered Hereswith’s punch on her shoulder and didn’t. Which reminded her that she wanted to give her sister a gift.

  Fursey was still spitting like a cat. She looked at Lintlaf for an explanation. He shrugged. “He went into the temple his usual sunny self—ha!—and came out like that.”

  It took two hundred strides or more for Fursey to calm himself enough to speak Anglisc. Even then, Hild couldn’t make much sense of it.

  “Stop,” she said. “Two altars? One altar for the Christ, one for our gods? Why is that bad?”

  And Fursey exploded again like a duck from its covey, this time his Latin peppered with Irish.

  “I don’t understand,” Hild said. “Are we in danger?”

  “Our immortal souls are in peril! Christ will strike down the apostates! He will—”

  “I’m not an apostate. Am I? Good. Are you? Lintlaf, then? No? Then stop it. Answer me this instead. Did the East Angles ever fight the Svear?”

  “What?”

  “The East Angles. Did they fight the Svear?”

  Fursey, speechless, turned away. She looked at Lintlaf.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then how did Eorpwald, or Rædwald, capture Svearish slaves?”

  Fursey, despite himself, said, “He probably bought them.”

  “You can buy slaves?”

  “Certainly you can buy slaves.”

  Lintlaf said, “Coelfrith says that at Gipswīc, you can buy anything. Anything at all. It’s Rædwald’s great wīc. Eorpwald’s now. Like a vill, but a port.”

  “Like Woodbridge.”

  Fursey snorted. “Like Woodbridge the way Mulstanton is like York.”

  Hild felt very rustic. It made her cross. And the fumes of the gold-working had made her head ache. “We shall visit Gipswīc. We shall buy a slave.” A wedding gift for Hereswith. More practical than a gold brooch. Someone to help her sister when Hild could not.

  “My apologies, lady,” said Lintlaf. “But not today. Burgmod told me specially that you’re to be there for Æthelric Short Leg’s arrival.”

  * * *

  The men—Yffing and Wuffing alike—were already at their board, and Eorpwald’s womenfolk were being seated while the visiting women waited behind the hanging separating the women’s quarters from the hall. Mildburh peered through a convenient gap between curtain and wall, and gave Hereswith, Hild, an
d Breguswith a running commentary.

  “And now Æthelric Short Leg is standing,” Mildburh said. “He’s escorting the queen to her place. He does it so well. And now he’s returning to his seat at Eorpwald’s right hand. He doesn’t limp.” She giggled—a very annoying giggle, Hild thought, like a whinnying horse. But she had such a headache; everything was irritating her. “And his legs are the same length. And not short.”

  Mystifyingly, Hereswith blushed and looked at her mother.

  “Saewara was right, then,” Breguswith said, and Mildburh giggled again. Hild knew what that meant: It was something to do with what a man and a woman do in the dark. She pushed Mildburh out of the way so she could see.

  Æthelric’s hair was beautifully combed, as thick and lustrous as a beaver pelt, and caught back with a blue-enamelled gold ring. His arm rings were inlaid with garnet and more blue enamel. Like Anna, his brother, he had the dark hair and eyes and fine bones that hinted of a mother with west wealh blood somewhere in her family, though the muscle snaking around his wrists and cording at his neck and throat were anything but delicate. His quilted warrior jacket was the colour of old bronze, with marigold borders. His hose and boots were half a shade darker, the exact brown of his eyes.

  Hild looked at Hereswith’s hair, shining like corn and gold; at her overdress of red and marigold; at the ivory underdress embroidered in blue and gold and red, the ivory wool veil secured with gold and garnets. Her sister could not have complemented Æthelric’s colours more closely if she’d tried, nor he hers. Even his enamel matched her eyes.

  She put her eye back to the gap just in time to catch Saewara, as she took her place next to her husband, shoot a significant glance at the hanging behind which they stood.

  Of course. Cousins. Her sister and gemæcce already had the beginnings of a kin web here in this foreign land. They wouldn’t be all alone.

  The king’s scop struck a chord and the steward drew back the hanging with a flourish. The pipers piped and drummers drummed. Everyone stood. Even the flames seemed to roar as they entered.

  Gold gleamed from every shadow, every hanging and dish, every arm and waist and veil. Jewels glittered at ears and throats and fingers. White wax tapers burnt like stars in silver holders down the middle of every board. Light sparked and shot and bounced from every fold and every corner. It hurt Hild’s eyes.

  The noise and heat and music were overwhelming. Food and drink poured into the hall.

  A swan on a great silver platter, its feathers boiled clean and glued back on with honey. Wine like blood, and mead the colour of sunshine. A sea of jellied eels. Sturgeon in a lake of bilberry sauce. Pearl-white bread. And music, music from all sides of the hall and from the centre, all playing parts of the same song. It was like being inside a lyre, inside a drum, inside a pipe. Hild thought her head might burst.

  Eorpwald’s flat-faced queen carried the great cup from guest to guest, and one by one important men from different kin groups stood to toast. It seemed to Hild that Æthelric and his North Folk formed a distinct group, one of three: the North Folk; Eorpwald and his men; and another thegn, Ricberht, whose men seemed easier with the king’s gesiths than Æthelric’s. He looked Wuffing, but something about the bunch and flex of his shoulders, the aggressive jut of his chin, made her think perhaps he was from a lesser branch and easily offended. Like Osric? Her mother would know.

  Edwin smiled at every toast, and drank and drank. Hild was offered the great cup, and again. White mead. She drank deep.

  More food. More wine. Another gulp of the guest cup, and another. The world seemed as though she was peering at it through a hollow reed. She drank more of the white mead and it writhed down her gullet like a fiery snake. She drank again. The burning was something to hold on to as her headache threatened to engulf the world.

  More food. More wine. Flames burning higher. Speeches. Songs. Long recitations of kin. Hereswith the daughter of Hereric, the son of Æthelric Spear, the son of Ælla, the son of Yffi, the son of Wuscfrea, the son of Wilgisl, the son of Westerfalca, the son of Sæfugl, the son of Sæbald, the son of Segegeat, the son of Swebdæg, the son of Sigegar, the son of Wædæg, the son of Woden.

  Hereswith, she thought, sister of Hild. And she didn’t even have a gift.

  Guests stood one by one and pledged mighty gifts. And Hild, drinking again from the guest cup, saw her wavering face reflected on the surface of the white mead, like a face slipping over the sea, leaving, leaving, and then she understood: heresy, apostasy, dancing with death. Her mother was right: Eorpwald was weak, he couldn’t even decide between gods. He would die. Æthelric would be king. But what Hild knew now, what her mother hadn’t yet seen, was that Æthelric, too, would fall. He was self-satisfied, pleased with his vanity, and not deigning to work for the respect of other men. Hereswith would flee to her nearest family: her mother’s kin across the sea.

  Hild stood. She raised her arms. She was the bringer of light, seeker of patterns. She had just the gift for Hereswith, something to help her in the time to come: the truth.

  * * *

  Hild was lying down somewhere and every time she opened her eyes the world began to spin. She closed her eyes. Her mouth tasted of vomit.

  “What possessed her?” Hereswith’s voice. “What did she mean by it?”

  “I don’t know, child.” Her mother.

  “But why did…”

  Hild’s mind slipped off the table. When she came back Fursey was talking.

  “Possessed her? No. She isn’t possessed.”

  “She—”

  “With respect, Lady Hereswith, although Eorpwald king has apostatised, using the word possessed where Romanists can hear you is not healthy.”

  “But—”

  “Go back to the table, child,” Breguswith said. “It’s your feast. Don’t let your sister’s gift spoil it.”

  “Gift? She prophesied my—”

  “Gift,” Breguswith said firmly. “Your husband will be king. Your son will be king. You will live long and happily … overseas, with kin. Go back. Smile at your betrothed. Tell your uncle all is well.”

  The world was muffled for a time.

  Someone slapped her right cheek. “Child. Wake up.” A hand behind her head, tilting it. A cup against her lips. A vile smell. “Drink.”

  Hild squirmed weakly. But the hand was implacable. She drank.

  A blink later she was on her side and vomiting violently.

  The hand again, and then the cup. “Drink.” This time it was water. “Rinse and spit. And open your eyes. You can hear me.”

  Hild opened her eyes: her mother, squatting by her head, a dull pewter cup in her hand.

  “Good.” Breguswith nodded at the wealh to take the bucket of vomit away. She put the cup back to Hild’s lips. “Drink.”

  Hild swallowed the lukewarm water.

  “Now this.” Her glass-claw beaker.

  “What is it?”

  “Necessary. Now drink. Only a little.”

  It tasted like burning earth. Hild felt her face turn instantly red.

  “Again.”

  “I’ll be sick.”

  Breguswith laughed grimly. “You won’t.” Hild drank. “You will lie there for the count of fivescore. Then you will stand, wipe your face, check your dress, and walk with me back into the hall. You are a seer overwhelmed by vision, not a silly maid who can’t hold her drink. You will not hide. You will not hang your head. You will smile. You will eat. You will make a show of drinking your wine. One more sip of this. Good. Now gather your wits.”

  Hild didn’t remember much of the rest. Her muscles trembling. Her insides hot and tight. The hall swollen with light and heat. Rows of pale faces with staring eyes. Gold gleaming from deeper shadows, though darker now, grimmer, like the stuff of dragon hoards and monsters and exiles … Æthelric saying something to her of a burial—would she see it? Smiling and agreeing. Smiling and sipping, hanging on, hanging on.

  * * *

  They approached Rædw
ald’s burial mound from the river at dawn.

  Hild, on the first boat with Eorpwald and Edwin, smelt it before she saw it: the old, cold scent of deep, turned dirt; the smell of bones. Then bluffs on the eastern bank emerged from the mist. The mound loomed long, high, and oval against the horizon. Bare earth, easily twoscore ells long, longer than Edwin’s great hall at Yeavering. The gilded stem and stern post of a ship reared from each end. Six ells high at least. The carved eyes, gilded and inset with glass, glimmered with an otherworldly light.

  Æthelric Short Leg stood at the prow of the second boat, his chief gesith beside him. His eyes burnt like a wight’s. He knew his fate: a warrior’s fate, a king’s. He would be ring-giver, hero, laid into the earth with his treasure like his uncle Rædwald; sung for on the river at dawn, in hall at night, on the road at noon. Remembered. Renowned. She had said so, before every Angle in hall.

  The three boats cut silently through the clear water, then slowed. Slack tide, when the muscular surge of the water stops, is just gone, like a dying man’s breath.

  Water slapped the bank. Boats rocked.

  Eorpwald said in a strong voice, “My father, who was king.”

  “Rædwald, who was king,” Edwin said.

  And Hild and Breguswith, and the gesiths of the north and the East Angles, and Æthelric and Hereswith, and Anna and Saewara murmured, “Rædwald.” “King.” “Lord.”

  The scop stroked his lyre and struck a pose. He plucked a chord and chanted:

  Hold, earth, now your hero cannot

  the treasure of kings!

  Wrested from your dark

  torn from your deep

  by men

  who laughed

  laid it in swords

  boasted and beat it

  into cups.

  Heroes who killed

  each the other

  for the glory

  for the gleam

  for the gold of kings.

  For Rædwald, king.

  “Rædwald, king,” they said.

  Now there is none

  to burnish blade

  to lift the golden cup.

  For he is gone.

  He is gone.

  “He is gone.”

  So, too, goes