Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  Hild sat with the women. Her mother had told her she’d been spending too much time alone—the rumours of hægtes and etin blood were starting again. Hild wasn’t sure how sitting with a handful of tow before the spikes of what looked like an etin’s comb would dispel those rumours.

  Pulling the fibres through the spikes, over and over, until the tow was fined down to line, was normally hot and dusty work, but the Winterfylleth sun was as cool as glass and the air damp with the burly river and soon-to-fall leaves. Every now and again a light ruffle of wind brought the scent of pork roasting with wildling apples and damson—legacy of the Roman gardens—and Hild’s mouth watered.

  Over the last few days she had rarely lifted her hand from her seax and had eaten nothing not prepared by Gwladus. Then she had begun to wonder about even Gwladus. She started awake at the sound of footsteps, stood more than a sword’s length from every gesith, and listened and listened and listened, until she thought her ears might start twitching like a cat’s.

  But no one popped from behind a mulberry bush with an axe, no one slipped poison in her beer, and even fear lost its grip after a while. Now, at the scent of pork and apples, she was hungry.

  She sat with her mother, next to old Burgen and Æffe. Æffe was bundled in a scarf and a cloak, as was Burgen. Hild, after years of roaming the valleys and ridges, or sitting in the top of a tree in the moonlight, had long since hardened off. She was warm. She considered unpinning her sleeves and hanging them in her belt but decided not to: She would be the only one, and the muscles in her shoulders would just fuel the rumours.

  Four of the queen’s women sat at the next bench. Their chatter was flat with Jutish vowels; Breguswith’s vowels sometimes flattened in sympathy. Beyond them were Teneshild, the old queen’s gemæcce, and Ædilgith, whose gemæcce, Folcwyn, had died in childbirth last year—though some thought the ague more to blame—and with them the young pair girdled only the summer before last, Cille and Leofe. Leofe, who barely came to Hild’s shoulder, was already big with Forthere’s child.

  “What are you shaking your head at?” her mother asked.

  “Leofe. Forthere is so big and she’s so small.”

  Old Æffe leaned forward and leered. “Not as big as I hear your sister’s man is.”

  “Eh?” said Burgen.

  Æffe repeated herself at a shout.

  “Does she remember my advice about goose grease?” Burgen said. “Ask her. I did tell you young ones about goose grease, didn’t I?”

  Æffe shouted, “I can’t ask her, you old fool, she’s long gone, away in that infested swamp with her new man, Æthelric Short Leg.” She cackled. “Short leg!”

  But Burgen was getting anxious. “I did tell you?” she asked Hild. “I did, didn’t I?”

  “You did, Mother,” Hild said. She gestured at Leofe with a handful of tow. “And clearly one at least listened.”

  “And you, young giant,” Æffe said, “do you have your eye on a man yet? I see those pretty beads of yours. Some heroic gesith, eh?”

  “No, Mother. These were a gift from the princess Rhianmelldt.”

  “Who?” Burgen looked about, fastened on the queen’s women. “Which one is Rhianmelldt?”

  Æffe started a shouted explanation of the genealogy of Rheged—though she was getting it wrong, forgetting that Urien was long dead—and Hild was reminded of Alt Clut and the songs of the men of the north, and wondered if, even now, they were sharpening their swords and boasting of who would kill the king and his uncanny niece.

  Her mother was looking at her.

  “Æffe is old. But she’s not wrong. Unless I’m mistaken you’ll be bleeding by summer. We should consider husbands.”

  Hild pulled her tow through the heckles. If she married and left court she would no longer be counted an Yffing.

  “How do you find Oswine?”

  Hild bent and brushed the rind dust from the hem of her skirts. Oswine, son of the treacherous badger Osric.

  “He is handsome, don’t you think?”

  “No.”

  “His prospects are handsome,” Breguswith said, softly now, as the old women shouted in the background. “How would you like to be married to Oswine, to be, say, lady of Elmet?”

  Hild had a fleeting memory of jackdaws in the elms, a smoky hall. “I like Elmet,” she said eventually. “But Ceredig king is said to be alive still, somewhere.” And Oswine’s father hadn’t stopped Fiachnae mac Báetáin from trying to kill them. At some point, Edwin would either have to publicly forgive Osric the trouble at Tinamutha or kill him.

  “At some point your uncle will make it worth someone’s while to kill him.”

  Hild nodded, then realised her mother wasn’t talking about Osric but Ceredig. With Ceredig gone, Elmet would get its own ealdorman—traditionally a royal kinsman. If Osric was still alive when Ceredig died, Elmet would go to him. “Would Osric step aside for his son?”

  “What if he didn’t need to?”

  Hild pondered her mother. Breguswith’s eyes were hard, bright blue, with none of that milky aging Hild saw in Æffe’s and Burgen’s eyes. Her fingers were beginning to thicken at the knuckles, yes, and her honey-gold hair looked dusty, but it was still thick, the skin at her throat was still firm, and her breasts full. She still bled every month. Bed games were one thing, keys another.

  “Will you marry Osric?”

  “Your uncle would not permit it.” Her mother’s voice was rich and round with secrets. Hild tried a trick she had learnt from Gwladus, and studied her mother through half-closed eyes while she lowered her head to her apparent task. Breguswith was smiling to herself.

  Hild changed direction. “Would my uncle want me to marry Oswine?”

  Her mother lowered her own eyes and said conversationally, “Your uncle won’t live forever.”

  Hild’s heart squeezed.

  Breguswith nodded at Hild’s hands: keep working. Hild pulled the tow through the heckles. Behind them, Burgen was cackling about something, and the other women were calling out good-natured insults. She leaned forward a little.

  Breguswith’s voice was very soft. “At Arbeia, a West Saxon has been indiscreet. You know something of this.”

  It wasn’t a question. She should have expected her mother to know she knew.

  “Osric doesn’t understand his danger, though the danger is nigh. But a word in the right ear, a careful word, would break that egg before it hatches.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It will hatch soon.”

  “But—”

  “Are you whispering about love?” Æffe shouted. “Of course you are. Empty-headed youngsters—look at that tow. You’ve heckled it to ruination.”

  * * *

  When the moon was up, Gwladus brought Fursey to the byre.

  “What is it that won’t wait for me to finish my food? The last of the damson and fresh-killed pork. And I don’t know where they found those apples but they were the sweetest…” Hild stepped forward so the moon caught her face, thin and pale. “Ach. Well, at least it’s warm in here.”

  Gwladus turned to leave, but Fursey barred her way.

  “Gwladus, my honey, bring us food. Bring us a lot of it. Your lady is all bone; her face looks sharp enough to cut cheese.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Be a lamb and don’t talk. Run. Bring food—and mead, of course—and I’ll absolve you of all that sin you’ve been gathering to yourself.” He watched Gwladus pick her way across the yard, already beginning to glitter with frost, and turned back to Hild. “Now let us sit on the bales by that post.” They sat. “What is it?”

  She said nothing for a moment. Around them the horses, which had stirred when she came in, began to settle back to their dreams.

  “Osric knows of Cadwallon’s plot against Edwin. The plot that’s begun.”

  “Begun?”

  “In Lindsey. My mother told me.”

  “She told you. Why?”

  “I don’t know.” She clenched h
er hands around her belt. He assumed she wished it were her mother’s neck. He certainly did. “If Edwin finds Osric is plotting, he’ll kill him.”

  “And if he doesn’t find out, Cadwallon will eventually kill Osric, plot or no. He’s Yffing, too.”

  “I know that!”

  “Osric is stupid.”

  “Yes—”

  “But your mother is not.”

  “She wants me to tell Edwin there’s a plot, and stop it, and keep Osric out of it.”

  Fursey nodded. “She wants him alive and to herself.”

  Silence. She seemed to be staring at the post. Some stable hand or gesith, bored while waiting for his mount, had carved a stallion into the new wood. A stallion with improbable natural attributes.

  “She wants me to take my knowledge to Edwin, clothed in portents. She wants me to start the war to keep that treacherous oaf safe. She is weaving a spider’s web and I must rush about at her bidding. Again.”

  “Stopping the plot would save all the Yffings’ lives. Including yours.”

  The child strangled her belt slowly with both hands. “That’s just part of it. She’s aiming for something … I can’t … Why is she doing this? Why is she defending him? Osric’s men could have killed me at Tinamutha!”

  “Strictly speaking they were Fiachnae mac Báetáin’s men. As I was. Am.” Ah, she’d forgotten that. Well, the child needed reminding sometimes.

  “You’re confusing me.”

  “It’s a confusing world.”

  She pulled her seax, leapt, and stabbed the post with a vicious overhand thrust. The mare in the nearest stall swung her head around and huffed down her nose.

  His heart thumped like a rabbit. She was so fast. And strong. The battle-hard tip had sunk three fingers deep into the elm.

  “If she had just asked! But no. She pushes me into a corner where there’s no choice.”

  “It’s what women do: weave the web, pull the strings, herd into the corner. It’s their only power. Unless they’re seers.” He was proud that his voice didn’t shake.

  The child massaged her hands.

  “Your mother has built you a place where you can speak your word openly. Now she asks you to use that for her, and for yourself of course.”

  Outside someone, several someones, crunched over the frozen grass.

  He turned. It was Gwladus, now wearing a cloak against the cold—and because the russet colour made her hair shine like sunlit water, he suspected—and two housemen he didn’t know. The men stood behind Gwladus and flinched when Hild looked at them. They were afraid of the child. Fursey didn’t know whether to pity her or be glad for her. Fear could always be used.

  He raised his eyebrows at Gwladus.

  “You said bring a lot. And this should be enough to buy me a forgiveness. Two of them. One now and one tomorrow, for the sins I’ll gather tonight.” She smiled to herself as she stroked her cloak, then noticed the seax stuck in the wood. She gestured for the housefolk to put down the trays. “We’ll leave you to your business.”

  She swept out. The men almost trod on her cloak in their eagerness to get away from the hægtes.

  Hild began to work her seax free while Fursey fussed with the food. “I’m not hungry,” she said without looking up from her task, but her stomach growled.

  “Of course not. But humour an old man and eat anyway. There’s pork in its crackling. Damsons, oh so plump and running with juice. And what’s this? Oh, blessings upon that girl. Horse mushrooms fried in pork grease. Hazelnut with the apples. Good sharp cheese. And, may she be thrice blessed, wine.” He sniffed. “The Crow’s special cache, unless I’m mistaken.”

  She sheathed her seax and sat. “She stole the Crow’s wine?”

  Was that a smile? He handed her a round of floured bread, a pot of chestnut paste—more fruit of Derwent’s Roman past—and a birch cup with a silver rim. “We’d better drink up the evidence.”

  The moon was high and small by the time she sat back and sucked the fat from behind the last piece of crackling. Fursey finished the wine while she chewed on the skin.

  “You look better.”

  She nodded, picked the last hazelnut from the tray and crunched it. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll go to my uncle tomorrow, in the middle morning, with his counsellors about him.”

  “Kings can be dangerous when surprised.”

  The child pondered that. “I should talk to him privately first?”

  He nodded. “Seek him all ravaged with dream. He’ll call his counsellors and you can speak in more certain terms.” And pray. Pray no one is clever enough to look beyond the child to her mother and the terrible ambition there.

  * * *

  Hild studied herself in the polished silver. “Wilder about the eyes,” she said, and lowered the mirror for Gwladus to dab ash in quick sweeps beneath her eyes. This time the king wasn’t puzzled and far from home. This time he was newly married and content. It would take every portent she could muster. And dreams were the most potent seeing of all.

  “Wait,” Gwladus said, “hold still,” and she dipped a chewed twig in Hild’s ewer of water and streaked the ash deftly. Once, twice. “Look at that,” she said with great satisfaction.

  Hild looked. She looked like a tear-streaked maid sleepless under the weight of unbearable knowledge. She smiled.

  “Don’t smile. It makes you look mad.”

  Hild looked at her.

  “You could try trembling your bottom lip. Go on. Just try it.”

  Hild lifted the mirror and tried it. Gwladus was right. The tremble turned her from madwoman to frightened maid.

  Gwladus arranged her hair to an artful tousle and draped her with a heavy crimson robe: the very picture of a seer of the royal blood who leaps from her loyal bed to warn her king.

  She strode from the room, calling for Burgmod.

  * * *

  In his sleeping apartment, Edwin, beard uncombed, sat on a stool. He had thrown a cloak over his sleeping tunic—though it was not cold, for the king’s fire never went out.

  Hild stood, but not too close. Even frowsy and hardly awake enough to be wary, kings did not like those who loomed—even royal kin. Especially royal kin. Was the queen listening from the curtained bed? She must speak up, just in case.

  She had dreamt of eagles, she said, like to the eagles of Gwynedd, nesting over Lindum, with one eaglet pushing its brother from the nest.

  “Cadwallon!”

  In her dream she had swooped through the air alongside a jackdaw that flew into a just-dyed red cloth hanging by the Lindum gate and stained its beak scarlet.

  He frowned.

  “A common bird tangling with royal crimson, King. In Lindum.”

  “Cuelgils! That jumped-up ceorl. Intriguing with Cadwallon.”

  Hild bowed.

  “Go on, go on.”

  And then she had woken, to hear that the vill’s newest bull calf, “the same liver brown as the Lindsey Bull, lord King,” had died, and some swore they had seen boar tracks around the pen.

  This last was true, the death at least; Gwladus had told her.

  Edwin turned his head and shouted, “Forthere!” The huge gesith stuck his head around the door. Hild caught sight of Burgmod beyond him, scratching at the back of his neck, tilting his helmet forward over his nose. “Is the new bull calf dead?”

  “Bull calf, King?”

  “Bull calf. Born yesterday. Is it dead or isn’t it? Find out.”

  Housefolk, alerted to the king’s early waking, hurried to bring hot water, breads, breakfast beer. One man slid the cloak from the king’s shoulders and folded it while another unlaced his shirt. His chest hair glinted here and there with grey. A puckered and twisted spear scar ran along his left ribs.

  His scowl was hidden briefly as his bodyman dropped a new tunic over his head.

  No one offered Hild anything.

  When his warrior jacket was fastened Edwin looked considerably more alert. His bodyman was combing his beard when F
orthere stuck his head through the doorway again.

  “It died, King. The freemartin born with it, too.”

  Edwin pushed his man away and looked at Hild. “The freemartin?”

  “It signifies nothing.”

  He gave her a sly look.

  “The bull calf is the one that matters, lord King. The calf the colour of the Lindsey Bull.”

  “Unless you’re wrong.”

  “Have I ever been wrong?”

  “So Cadwallon allies with Cuelgils to raise Lindsey.” He stared at the fire, calculating. “Yet no armies have marched from Gwynedd.”

  “Not yet.”

  “It is winter.”

  His meaning was clear: If he took the war band to Lindsey in this weather and found nothing, he would have no spoil to share among his gesiths. He would have to gift them from his personal hoard. He would take his losses out of her hide.

  “The armies of Gwynedd will come to Lindsey in spring. If Cuelgils still rules.”

  The long silence was broken only by the crackle of flames taking hold of the new wood on the fire. Edwin was looking at her.

  “How old are you now?”

  “Eleven, King.”

  “You want me to go haring off to Lindsey on the dreams of a maid of eleven years…” It was not a question, and in any case Hild had no answer. She simply stood. “So when I swoop upon Lindsey and slaughter them all, how will I know if you were right or not?”

  Hild had no idea. “You will know.” And now her life hung on her mother’s information.

  * * *

  A maid of eleven years. A child.

  Facing a formal summons to the king’s hall, a woman girdled and veiled would have bolstered her breasts and painted around her eyes, cinched her girdle tight to accentuate her hips and the symbols of her rank hanging about them: the keys and crystal and weft beater.

  Very well.

  Hild unpinned her sleeves to show arms tan and tight as a stripling’s, wore a light cloak in royal blue flung back from her shoulders gesith-style, and tucked her hair behind her ears, to remind them of a fighting man with greased-back hair.

  When she was escorted by Lintlaf and Coelfrith into the hall she stopped four paces from Edwin’s great chair, rather than the usual three, to stand in the shaft of winter light so that her hair blazed more chestnut even than the king’s. She stood tall—she overtopped all but Forthere now—with her hand on her seax, and let rich royal certainty invade her every word: Cuelgils was a traitor. Remember Bebbanburg. Remember treachery.