Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  She knew … she knew the Welshman’s name … knew they were brothers … had foreseen everything … she’d vanished from sight … fell from the sky like an eagle … wouldn’t die even when a score, twoscore, threescore Lindseymen attacked from ambush … hadn’t she saved them at Bebbanburg?… she had the true sight …

  At the edge of the field a man shrieked; a sow rooted in his belly. “Eamer, please. Kill him.”

  “Lady, I must stay at your—”

  “Please.”

  But it was another gesith who drew his sword, ran to the edge of the field, and brought his blade down hard, once, twice, three times, and threw a clod of dirt at the sow. She ran off, hoinking in outrage, but didn’t go far.

  The gesith ran back. “He’s dead, lady.”

  “Thank you.”

  Another gesith drew his sword, and another. They looked at her, as though for permission. “I thank you, too.” They moved off through the strewn field, swords rising and falling. Killing at a seer’s bidding was fit work for gesiths.

  Hild bent over and vomited stinging bile, then, through her weeping, killed the man at her feet.

  * * *

  They left their wounded with a handful of wealh to care for them and to strip the dead enemy of arms and armour, and rode hard for Lindum. Hild’s eyes would not stop leaking. Lilla dropped back through the ranks long enough to give her his flask. Mead. “Drinking helps.”

  * * *

  Sometime later her eyes dried. Not long after that, the horses dropped to a walk and the message came back: The king wants the maid. Hild and her shadow, Eamer, cantered forward. Others cantered behind her: the gesiths from the field. Nine, all told.

  The gesiths they passed sang a cheerful, ugly song. One in four rode with poles topped by the brutalised heads of Lindseymen. They did not look human. Hild pretended they were not.

  Lilla put his hand on his sword as they approached, and Hild nodded at Eamer, who made a Hold gesture to her followers, and stayed with them while she approached the king.

  “We near Lindum,” Edwin said. “What will we find?”

  Leathers creaked as those close by leaned in to listen. Her mind was empty of everything but the feel of iron gritting through muscle and cartilage. She shook her head.

  His eyes swarmed green and black. “You are a seer. You will tell your king.”

  Hild stared at him, her mind as smooth as wax.

  He kicked his horse, then reined it in savagely. “You knew the men in the tent. You couldn’t, but you did. And you witched them so they talked to you, Lilla said. Now you’ve witched my own men so they follow you like puppies. So tell me, or, by Woden, I’ll throw you in the river with your tongue and toes in a bag around your neck.”

  He would do it. She had seen enough that day to know he would. Who would stop him?

  With a white hiss, the world began to turn. The ground seemed a long, long way off. She clung to her saddle horn. If she fell now, he would kill her. She must hold on.

  She held on.

  It didn’t matter that she had nothing in her stomach, that she had pushed a spear into four men and snuffed their lives like guttering candles. It didn’t matter that she was an ungirdled girl in an army of men who would piss in a dead man’s mouth and leave another holding his own insides because to help was women’s work.

  I am the light, she thought. I am not a maid. I am the light. Cold as a sword. I will show no weakness.

  She stepped to one side of her feelings, like stepping out of her clothes. She did not hurt. She had no need to eat, no mortal concern with life. She could breathe easily.

  She lifted her head.

  “Edwin king, seven lords are arrayed against you.” Seven, a number brimming with wyrd. “I do not know every name. Yet.”

  He assessed her, then turned to Coelgar. “Keep the men moving at a walk. Lilla, with me. No,” he said to Eamer, and then to the pack of gesiths who had followed, “you hounds will stay.” To Hild he said, “Come.”

  * * *

  “You’re lying,” he said when their horses were fifty paces down the trail. “Oh, not about the names you’ve given me: Cadwallon with Cuelgils and Eanfrith, Neithon, and Eochaid—the gold he must have promised for that unnatural pairing! Even Dunod. No, they’re true enough. But you’re not telling me something.” He tapped his teeth with his thumbnail, thinking. “The trap was for you on the west bank. A score of men. For you. Why?”

  “Ransom?”

  “Look at you. What are you worth as a niece?”

  As a peaceweaver, more than an ætheling. But Hild did not bother to say so.

  “You shouldn’t have let the Welshman die before he gave up the last name.”

  “Men die, Uncle.”

  “And that’s something you can’t do, eh? Shine your light beyond death.”

  From the strange, cold distance in which she had placed herself, Hild wondered what he would do if she said she could see into the realm of the dead. He would believe her. They all believed her, no matter what she said.

  She heard again Marro’s whisper. You know. So close. She did know, or could guess, the seventh name: Osric. He was an Yffing, a man in his prime, with an almost-grown heir. If Edwin died tomorrow half the kingdom would side with Osric against the young æthelings. But to betray Osric was to betray Breguswith.

  “Well,” Edwin said, “we’ll have the truth of it from Cuelgils himself soon enough.”

  * * *

  They took Lindum before æfen. Lindum, city of tanners and fullers, stinking for generations of stale urine and skin turning to leather, stinking now of blood.

  Edwin and his counsellors, each with his own man, sat at the scarred marble table that had belonged to Cuelgils. Hild, who had brought Lintlaf—for Forthere had reclaimed Eamer, and she didn’t even know the names of her hounds—sat a little apart. No one knew if she was in favour or not. Beyond the painted walls, gesiths hooted as they played kickball with the heads of Cuelgils’s sons. They were small heads. The head of Cuelgils himself was being washed, its hair carefully dried and moustaches combed, to be mounted on a gilded pike.

  Edwin was relaxed and smiling. Cuelgils was dead in the fight, a pity, but he had Lindsey and its gold. A lot of gold. Enough gold to buy his way past any northern conspiracy. On his forefinger he wore a new ring, a massive garnet.

  He threw a great golden collar, probably Irish work, to Coelgar, “Wisest of counsellors,” who bowed his head. An arm ring inset with silver and enamel to Lilla, “Bravest of men.” A cuff to Blæcca, “Most loyal thegn,” and on around the table, until everyone was looking at Hild.

  Edwin extracted a small, heavy cup from the hoard. Polished silver from Byzantium, inlaid with gold: a lewd figure of a woman on one side and a stately queen on the other. Both women wore the same face. Edwin weighed it for a moment, then set it on the table with a click and pushed it to Hild. “For Hild, seer, prophet, and most favoured niece, on her birth day.”

  Hild had forgotten. She was twelve years old.

  11

  THE WEATHER TURNED. The first leaves fell. In Goodmanham, Marro’s brother woke and died of the black vomit the same day. Hild hadn’t even learnt his name. Breguswith left for Arbeia the next day. She would return for Yule.

  The court moved to York. Æthelburh’s people gradually took over the household: James the Deacon, the dark-skinned music master, took administration. Eormenfrith, her trade master, suggested the women embroider hangings he could exchange for a variety of goods from the continent. Paulinus, her adviser and priest, stayed at the king’s side, offering counsel, always accompanied by Stephanus. The queen herself became the woman that women went to with complaints, though her healing, Gwladus said, was as much a thing of prayer as of poultice.

  Hild moved numbly in a cold world: the maid who killed, the maid who felt nothing. The maid with no mother or sister or friend, and a king uncle who had no more use of her for now. The maid with her own unsworn comitatus, nine gesith hounds who, when t
hey had nothing better to do, tried to follow and protect her while pretending they were doing no such thing. Hild roamed the vale and its thicket of woods, collecting herbs and watching the world slow down, fade, and tidy itself away for winter. All but the peregrines.

  She loved peregrines in winter: solitary, fierce, and dangerous, their cries clean and bright as a blade. She followed one male for three days, sleeping in the crisp understorey of the oak wood, huddled by a broken wall of a long-ago farmstead, wading, careless of the cold, along the pebbled bed of the beck he washed in every day. Her raggle-taggle band of gesiths tried to follow, but she shinned up a giant rowan, still dense with leaves, and watched them march past. Later she turned to watching otters on the Fosse, upstream of the walls. There she crouched in the reeds, ignoring the mud, unmindful of the wind rattling the stems, and watched their sleek brown play, their casual killing.

  Cadwallon wanted to kill her. He wanted to hook her out of her stream and crunch her spine because she was an Yffing, and then go back to doing king things. Her king uncle didn’t trust her. She didn’t trust her mother. Her mother was with Osric the treacherous in Arbeia.

  At night she dreamt of the Lindseyman crying out, It’s only a broken leg, for pity’s sake … and sometimes it was herself lying there broken, pleading. Sometimes the figure with the spear was Edwin, sometimes her mother, who wept, as she had wept, but showed no pity, as she had shown none.

  As the weather worsened and the last of the leaves fell, she roamed the half-ruined wings of the old redcrest fort within a fort. One afternoon she ran into Paulinus—trailed by Stephanus—who ignored her wild hair and mud-smeared dress and served her a political smile and the information that he was surveying the wing for the queen. She wanted the royal ladies to have their own suites—including, of course, the lady Hild. Whom he hoped to call on soon in order to discuss the glories of Christ the Lord.

  “Not my lord,” she said. “My lord is the king. My uncle.”

  His smile didn’t waver but Hild heard the false note when he turned to Stephanus and said in Latin, “Note that many of these bricks are crumbling.”

  Stephanus obediently pressed his stylus to the wax. Hild saw that what he wrote was Of course the bricks are crumbling! and she snorted.

  Paulinus fixed her with his black eyes, and Hild knew she had made a mistake.

  * * *

  The next day, Hild stood by the queen, who had summoned her, in the centre of the echoing great hall of York. They watched as James the Deacon prepared to lead his tiny choir, four lay brothers selected because “they sing like cherubim, cherubim,” for the queen.

  James’s face, up close, was the colour of charred alder. She wondered why Stephanus was called “the Black,” but James was not. He had coarse grey hair fizzing around his tonsure and eyes like jet beads. But his mien was not dark. He laughed a lot and spoke Anglisc with a bubbling Latin accent though he had admitted, cheerfully, that when it came to music and administration he had the soul of a torturer. According to Gwladus he had certainly tormented the housefolk that morning. “Take down all the hangings, all. And sweep out the rushes, every one. No, I don’t care that the king has said it is never to be moved. Talk to the queen. No, no cushions! No hangings! Get rid of them. All, I say. We are to have real music, music for the praise of God and the pleasure of the queen, for which I want this basilica as bare as a bone.” And in response to their pleas the queen had sent word to the household: Do as he asks, it’s just for today, and it will be a good excuse to clean the old cave.

  The hall—basilica—without the fires, without the hangings, looked alien and old, and was as cold as death. Everyone in it stood wreathed about by their own breath. The queen wore a mantle tipped with beaver fur, the same sleek rich brown as her hair. Her great beaded gold necklace and cross gleamed at her throat. Hild stood cloakless, impervious to the chill. It fed the legend—the maid who felt nothing.

  She knew why she was here, and she had let Gwladus see to it that she was clean, tidy, and heavily jewelled, but she was in no hurry to begin. She could outwait a hawk in the wild. She could certainly outwait any queen from the south. Indifference was her cloak and shield.

  While James fussed with placing his choirmen, she pondered the floor. This was the first time it had been swept bare in perhaps a generation. She scuffed at the crusted dirt with her toe, trying to tell what kind of stone it was. She was aware of the brothers straightening, James the Deacon tapping time, their heartbeat of focus, but she didn’t look up. Perhaps it was limestone.

  The music, when it came, with a rush, a gush of voice seeking its note, ripped away her indifference and tore through her as sudden and shocking as snowmelt.

  She forgot the floor. Forgot the queen. She felt hot, then cold, then nothing at all, like a bubble rising through water, then floating, then lifting free.

  It was cool music, inhuman, the song stars might sing. Endless, pouring, pure. Were it water, it would turn any bird that drank it white.

  The music soared. Hild soared with it.

  The queen, standing with Hild in the centre of the hall, where James had insisted the fire pit be covered by a board, reached and took Hild’s hand.

  At some point the men stopped singing but for a moment the music soared on under the rafters. When even that faded, the queen squeezed and let go. Hild’s hand tingled and remembered what she hadn’t felt: a cold hand, smaller than her own, smooth but not soft.

  Æthelburh brushed at Hild’s cheek, at her tears, and Hild caught the queen’s scent—some kind of flower, one Hild didn’t know. She filled with a sudden gaping hunger for the scent of her sister, for Begu or Cian, for Onnen, even for her mother.

  She wiped her face with her sleeve, aware now of the texture of the linen, the cold on her cheeks.

  James walked to them, sandals slapping on the bare stone. He walked with a light step, as quick as Onnen’s. “You liked it!” he said.

  “Yes,” said Æthelburh.

  “It will get better, of course,” James said. “Once we plaster those rafters and hang some doors instead of that pernicious cloth. And you,” he said to Hild. “You liked it.”

  She nodded. But she didn’t know how to say it had made her heart feel the way she imagined a gull might, hanging over a swell held by only the wind. That it had made her forget the stink of the insides of Lindseymen. That it had reminded her of the wordless, untouchable patterns she sensed when she counted the petals on a daisy or watched ripples on a pond.

  She tried. “I liked … I liked the way it climbed, up and over on itself.”

  He beamed.

  The queen patted him lightly on the arm, a dismissal, then she and Hild assessed each other.

  The queen was pregnant, though no one was supposed to know. Gwladus, who had befriended Arddun, the wealh who attended the queen’s gemæcce, told Hild that there had been no blood on the queen’s sheets since the wedding night, that the king must be as fertile as old Thuddor: done the deed the first month of their coupling. You wouldn’t know to look at her: planed face, polished hair, and thin wrists.

  “They say you feel nothing,” the queen said. “But that’s not true, is it? Though clearly you don’t feel the cold.”

  Hild waited.

  “Paulinus says you know your letters. I never heard of a person who knows her letters but doesn’t know Christ.”

  Silence.

  “My gesiths say you are a sorceress. Or perhaps hægtes. They say you can fly. I wish I could fly. The music is as close as I come to it.”

  For a moment, Hild was cycling, soaring endlessly again with the song.

  The queen reached up and brushed her new tears away. “You will speak.”

  “What’s the flower you smell of?”

  Æthelburh blinked, then laughed. “Jessamine, a precious oil from the East. A gift from my brother, who had it from our mother’s people in Frankia. I will give you a little.”

  Hild did not protest. Her mother had trained her to accept
every advantage: to smell like the queen would be a mark of great favour, one people would notice without knowing it.

  “And you, you will walk with me every day. We are cousins but you may call me aunt. You will talk to me. We will get to know each other.”

  * * *

  They walked along the river—upstream, away from the landing’s shout and stink and the fretful reeve’s men, who often turned to the queen now that Coelgar, seconded by Blæcca, was so busy taking the reins in Lindum on Edwin’s behalf—with Lintlaf and Bassus, the queen’s red-cloaked captain, following ten paces behind.

  “We have nine women working now on the embroidery for Clothar king,” Æthelburh said. “It’ll be finished by Yule.”

  A skein of greylag geese took flight just beyond the trees at the curve of the river. “Nine?”

  Æthelburh nodded. “Teneshild is a skilful hand. And Æffe. And Burgen might be deaf but her eyes are good and she knows how to make the colours dance.”

  And with their sly comments, Burgen and Æffe would soon have the Kentishwomen and the Northumbrians gossiping together like old gesiths on the war trail. “You’re clever.”

  “I am queen.” Æthelburh laid her hand on her stomach. For those who knew to look, she was beginning to show. “The question is, what are you? A maid without a mother.”

  “I have a mother. Your aunt.”

  “Yes.” There was a world of complication in that one word. “You really don’t feel the cold, do you? Like my brothers. Perhaps you will teach me that trick.”

  Hild couldn’t imagine this queen in her beaver furs riding rough over half the north, starving and harried, thrusting spears into the brains of the enemy.

  “I miss my brothers. Perhaps you miss your sister.”

  “Your cousin.”

  “My cousin. But she’s with the East Angles now, and you are here.”