Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  Edwin screamed at him and stabbed the table to tatters: Had his nithing, criminal god stolen his brains in the night? Did he not understand that, in Gaul, Sigebert was kissing the ring of the Franks for aid against the East Angles? The Franks! What was he, Edwin: fried tripe? You’d think so the way the Gododdin were becoming so bold. And now Rheged was mulling an alliance with the Dál Riata. On top of that, Cadwallon was readying Gwynedd for war, and Penda marching his Mercians to meet the West Saxons. He’d win. And then anything could happen, anything, and it was the priests’ job to pray to their mighty god and bring some fine weather and a good end to the queen’s term. And failing that, he should shut his mouth or by the gods he, the king, would pull his bishop’s guts through his belly button and nail them to a tree. And the bishop of Rome could shove that up his arse and shit around it.

  “At least Coifi knew his place!” he shouted at his retreating bishop, and followed it with a hurled bowl, which clipped Stephanus on the back of the head.

  Hild watched the elm bowl roll in a tight circle on its silver rim, then settle upside down. She knew how it felt: round and round, everyone watching. She longed to throw something: at Paulinus, at Cian, at the king. Or stab something. Anything but stand calm and still and wait, always wait for things over which she had no control but had predicted boldly. A son. And healthy. But no one would know for a month or two.

  “Wooden-headed, skirt-wearing lily-livers. Someone bring me another drink. And you,” he said to Hild, “tell me something good.”

  Even if she had something good to offer, he wasn’t in the mood to hear it. What he wanted was to shout and stab. After a moment she said, “Coifi was no better. But he at least isn’t here.”

  “Ha. Tell me something I don’t know. I wish Osric joy of him. And speaking of our cousin, is the Gododdin folly his doing? It was once his job to keep them quiet.”

  “Once,” Hild said.

  “Maybe he’s meddling, sending men to stir them up.”

  She said nothing. Her uncle saw plots under every bench but it didn’t make him wrong. Besides, Osric was a fool. Those who bet on the behaviour of fools lost.

  Edwin’s eyes glittered. “He could be plotting with any of them: Cadwallon, Penda, Dál Riata, Gododdin, Rheged. Any of them. All of them.”

  “We need a spy in his hall, someone in his counsel.”

  “I’ve a better idea. I’ll take his son.”

  Pointy-toothed Oswine. She turned that in her mind. War was coming, it didn’t take a seer to foresee that. They needed Craven’s iron ore, its willing men. “Cloak it as an honour. Send an honourable man to say…” She saw it, sudden and complete. “To tell Osric that Oswine is to be groomed for a great task. To win renown and position.”

  “It better not cost me money.”

  “Rheged,” Hild said. “Rhoedd needs to marry off Rhianmelldt. Why not to Oswine?”

  “Are you quite mad?”

  She saw the opening. She could twist the sword up and away. “Rheged can’t stand alone anymore. It must choose a protector. Let it be Northumbria. Oswine isn’t Osric, he wasn’t raised to believe Deira was his. Rheged will seem a plum. Much better than Craven. Bring him here, smother him in gold and flattery, and he’ll be yours. So will Rheged.” The vision trembled before her, like a drop of rain on an outstretched fingertip, brilliant, beautiful, perfect.

  “Oswine, king of Rheged?”

  “Ealdorman of Rheged. Your man.” Couldn’t he see? Northumbria from sea to shining sea. “Think of the ports. Northumbria from coast to coast. Cadwallon will be cut off from the north Britons.”

  She imagined the tufa, the boar banner, cracking in the wind, the weight of the red ring.

  She took a breath, dropped her shoulders, smoothed the impatience from her voice.

  “Bring Oswine here, Uncle. And Prince Uinniau. They can make friends under your eye, sword brothers, sworn to you. And Uinniau would be a hostage for Rhoedd’s good behaviour. They would both come, if you sent the right man.”

  “Eadfrith Sweet Tongue is with his brother, bringing the Gododdin to heel.”

  “Not Eadfrith. A man the wealh might trust.”

  “And who might this totem of trust be?”

  “Cian Boldcloak.”

  * * *

  A midsummer with no sun. Hild felt wrapped in cloud, suffocated, as though the air were wool. She sat with the king’s counsellors, listening but not speaking, tolling her beads, lingering on the yellow. Christ, the most important of all. He is everywhere. She was missing something. And the queen swelled every day.

  She longed to clear her head, stride the moors above Mulstanton, lean into the wind on the cliff by the Bay of the Beacon. She envied Cian riding in Craven with his gesiths, one of many, free to laugh, to shout, to sing. To do, not be stared at and whispered over. Not waiting for the sun, not waiting for the queen to give birth.

  A message came from Rhin: Bandits were preying on the people of Elmet. Saxfryth. Lweriadd. Her people. Her Elmet.

  “Where’s the king?” she asked Gwladus.

  “Hunched in his hall like a moulting hawk, I expect.” She already had out Hild’s favourite earrings, the moss agate and pearl, suitable for delivering bad news to a king. “Keep still or they’ll end up hanging off your nose.”

  Hild moved her head, impatient. She wished she hadn’t sent Cian to Craven. She needed him for this.

  “Keep still.”

  She was tired of being still. She batted Gwladus’s hand away. No, she wouldn’t wait. Why should she? What could Cian do that she could not? “Put those away. Give me my staff instead.”

  At the east doorway, Lintlaf saw her coming, folded his arms, and leaned against the doorpost.

  The chief gesith glittered; he was growing rich. For most people, a nod to his gesiths to step aside cost something pretty, something precious. He was just another kind of bandit, one who had gripped Gwladus’s wrist hard enough to leave marks.

  She met his gaze, then looked him up and down. He had too much weight on one leg. One swing at his knees would have him on the floor before he’d even unfolded his arms. Neither of his gesiths was paying attention: She was the king’s niece, and she didn’t even have a sword.

  Cian was better than any of them, and she didn’t always lose against him. They wouldn’t get their blades free before her staff heel took them in the face. Yes. Long sweep to the knees. Snap of heel to one mouth, snap of tip to another. Scatter-patter of teeth. Sharp warmth of blood. Flipping the end of her stave up with her left hand, legs bent. Both hands pulling the length down in a whistling overhead arc. The splitting crack of oak on kneecap. Then kneeling, and the seax to Lintlaf’s balls. The smell of shit.

  Should I make a prophecy about spilt yolk and no sons, Lintlaf? No gesith would gallop to war with a doom on his head.

  She smiled a creamy smile.

  Lintlaf stepped aside.

  Edwin was brooding in the shadows at the end of his hall, alone but for a few housemen standing against the wall. A small fire burnt, but the air was damp. She relayed Rhin’s message.

  He stared at her for a long moment after she’d finished. “Bandits? What do I care about a few bandits on the Whinmoor?”

  “They’re becoming bold. Farmers fear for their lives and livestock.”

  “Am I nursemaid to the world? I’m sick of men holding out their hands and bleating.” He slapped the board. His cup jumped. “A man must hold his own steading.”

  “At least send men to Pyr at Caer Loid.”

  He lifted the cup. A houseman glided over, filled it, and faded back against the wall. “I’m spread thinner than a miser’s butter. Who should I send? My sons are in the north. Coelfrith’s with the Crow in York. I’ve Idings in the north plotting with Scots at one end of the far wall and Picts at the other. Rheged and the Bryneich rumbling below that. In the west Cadwallon’s gathering an army. Nithing!” He slapped the board again. Wine slopped. “Baying at our arse from the middle of the isle, we’ve P
enda and his Mercians. In the south and east—”

  “Send me.”

  Silence. “You?”

  “Me, and twelve gesiths.”

  “For bandits?” He picked up his cup, eyed her over the rim. “It would be … messy.”

  “Needs must.”

  “Well, well.” They faced each other, gazes locked. Yffing to Yffing. He sipped, swallowed, put his cup down with a decisive click. “Six gesiths.”

  “Eight, and your token to show Pyr in Caer Loid.”

  “My token.” He flexed his hand—open, closed—studying her, watching her watch his ring. He opened his fist. Smiled. Nodded once. “Six. And my token. Though you’d better not have to use it.” He pulled the great carved garnet off his pointing finger, and leaned forward. “You’ll ride straight for the Whinmoor. No meddling with Pyr’s work.”

  She held out her hand. “Yes.” He dropped it in her palm. She hefted it. She slid it onto her thumb and made a fist.

  “King’s fist.”

  She felt rather than saw the ripple of attention run through the housemen standing along the wall. King’s fist.

  “It suits you, Niece. But I’ll want it back.” He sat back, then swore and turned his arm to look at his elbow. His jacket was sodden with wine. “Someone clean up this mess!” Two housemen leapt to obey. “That goes for you, too, Niece. Clean it up.”

  * * *

  In the queen’s guardroom, Bassus frowned—not at the king’s niece, the king’s fist, but at her question. What did she want with bandits?

  He waved the houseman out and threw a log on the fire himself. She poured them both wine, unbidden. She wore the Yffing token. She didn’t need anyone’s permission.

  Bandits.

  “I hunted them in Kent, when Eadbald was ætheling.” He immediately felt foolish. The girl—not girl, king’s fist—wouldn’t care who’d been ætheling. He lifted his cup and sniffed it. Iberian. His favourite. The same colour as her ring. “It’s hard and filthy work. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

  The log caught, setting shadows dancing along the wall and the Yffing token glinting blood-red. He wished his words back: She was the king’s fist. It didn’t do to use the word enemy in the same room.

  “I’ll show you the scar they gave me?”

  She nodded, and he thumped his wine cup on the board and his right foot on the bench. He took off his belt, unfastened the tie under his jacket, and peeled down his hose. The scar along his shin was the size of a grass snake, thick and twisting, blueish-white and sunken in the middle, pink at the edges. It hadn’t healed fast, and the infection had taken some of the bone with it.

  “Worse than anything I took in a shield wall. Not made with good clean steel. An iron-edged spade,” he said. “Filthy thing. Still aches sometimes, when it rains.”

  “I’ll send you something for it.”

  “Thank you, lady.” It wouldn’t do to refuse.

  He pulled his hose up again, tied them carefully, rearranged his jacket. He picked up his belt. Paused. “They fight with teeth and hands, slings and stones, sickles and spades. They turn on you, even when they’ve a hole torn right through the belly. Like mindless rats, never knowing when they’re beaten. You should hunt them like rats, with nets and clubs, or dogs and a ring of bowmen. Or poison. Kill them all.”

  “Not all, surely.”

  “All, lady. And their young.” She’d killed at Lindum, so they said. But you didn’t understand bandits until you’d had one turn under your heel like a broken-backed snake. “Some say bandits are good men fallen on hard times. And perhaps some begin that way. But they become savages.”

  He ran his belt through his hands, half listening to the clink of gold fastenings won in his time as king’s gesith.

  “Lady, it’s not like war. Bandits give no quarter, and you don’t offer it, you can’t, because they’ve no honour. None. I wouldn’t do it again, not for all the wine in Iberia.”

  * * *

  While Gwladus packed, Hild turned her wrist, tilting the ring this way and that. This way, even in the overcast, the carved garnet pulsed like lifeblood. That way turned it dark as a scab. Light, dark. King’s token, king’s fist.

  King’s weight.

  She checked her packets of healing herbs, tucked them into their pockets next to the bandages and needles, rolled the leather, and tied it.

  When Gwladus put her own dress in the small pile by the leather saddlebags, Hild said, “No. You’re not coming.”

  Gwladus stopped, looked at her. “Then who’s to attend you?”

  “No one. Pack enough for a month.”

  “A month? You can’t—”

  “You’re not coming.”

  “But—”

  “Enough. I don’t want you.”

  Gwladus flinched.

  She wasn’t riding as Lady Hild, king’s niece, king’s seer. She was riding as Hild, king’s fist. She doubted it would be as bad as old Bassus thought, but it was clear bandit-hunting was not a task that required well-dressed hair or clean clothes. She wouldn’t ride with anyone who couldn’t kill, nor anyone who might recall her to herself. She had to be the king’s fist, a killer. She had asked for this task. It must be done.

  * * *

  She rode south into Elmet through the blazing heather, Morud running beside her, and Oeric and six gesiths arrayed in a jingling crescent about her: Gwrast and Cynan, Coelwyn and Eadric, and the brothers Berht.

  She rode light, no spare clothes, just two slim saddlebags holding hard bread, mead, and her wound roll. She carried her tokens on her body: her beads, her seax, her cross, the cups Cian had carved, Begu’s snakestone, and Edwin’s ring. When the sun came out the stone on her thumb glowed, her carnelians burnt, and the gold on her belt and Ilfetu’s headstall gleamed.

  They camped the first night in the lee of a lichened rock: the moor’s bones, poking from the thin soil. Apart from Oeric and Morud the men were used to the war trail and comfortable enough, though unhappy that she wanted them to take off their rings and wrap their horse gear in cloth.

  “Even in the moonlight you’ll glitter like barrow wights. They’ll see you coming from a mile away.”

  “Good!” Coelwyn said. “We’ll freeze their marrow.”

  “Would you want birds to know the net is there?”

  “Birds? We’re gesiths. We hunt fearsome beasts. We don’t bother with small frightened things.”

  “You do now.”

  She took off her beads, coiled them in her hand, dropped them in the purse on her belt.

  “If we let them run, they’ll come back when we’re gone. We’re here to trap them, judge them, then settle or kill them.”

  They nodded. They’d all seen her kill, except Oeric.

  * * *

  It was as their lady, dealer of wyrd and woe, that she judged the miserable bandits they chased down, the children, women, and men hauled cowering in groups of six from bramble thickets, hiding by twos in an overstood coppice, or snivelling alone over a half-eaten bird in the lee of a rock.

  Children, weak and starveling, who could cry on command and, if you offered comfort, would poke your eye with a filthy finger and rip the pin from your cloak. That’s what had happened to Coelwyn. He would most probably lose that eye, though she’d done what she could.

  Women, lush as a water meadow but with no teeth. Women with broken knives hidden in both hands. It served Gwrast right, she told him every night when she changed his bandage. It would be a while before he could carry a shield—but he didn’t need a shield to fight bandits.

  Men, with muscles like steel bands and broken minds. Men who’d try to rape a nettle bush if it kept still.

  Hild judged them all. She judged them as impersonally as a murrain or a bolt of lightning.

  She sent children with milk teeth, even the wicked ones, to her mene wood, with Morud to guide and Coelwyn to guard. Morud brought back news that the beck glistened with eggs and flickered with flies; there would be a fine run
of fish, sun or no sun. The mene would survive. Next year it might thrive. There would be plenty of work for healthy children. He also brought back two bow hunters and a netman; Rhin hoped the lady would return them by Blodmonath.

  She was glad of the bow hunters: Bassus had been right about some things.

  She rode from dawn to dusk, judging, settling, listening to the folk. Every steading had a story of a band of wolf’s-heads, bandit fiends who raped and murdered and slaughtered the kine, burnt the fields, shat in the well from sheer wickedness. But like the Cait Sith these fiends always seemed to visit misery on someone else, someone over the hill or in the next valley.

  She smashed the right elbows of two brothers they found stealing cattle from a widow and her sons at Brown Crag. Without use of their arms they would only survive if there were people who loved them well enough to feed them for a few weeks.

  She settled one couple and nearly grown son, whom they’d caught holding nothing but a handful of stolen carrots, with a farmer just west of Rhin’s old church. A week later, she led her band back to the farm hoping for an evening sleeping dry under a roof and a hot meal. They found the place smouldering, the farmwife raped and dead, and the husbandman’s guts spilt in the straw of the byre where the bandits had cut off the milch cow’s hind legs and tried to start a fire.

  Hild looked at the dead couple, not skipping the gleam of bone and glisten of gut, the carefully mended shift now torn right across the wobbly weave. These people had taken the bandits in because she’d asked. Because she’d had mercy.

  “Take what we can use, then finish what they started.” She looked at her men one by one. Her gaze rested on Oeric longest. “Burn it well. May the smoke of the dead follow the wolf’s-heads and carry their doom.”

  * * *

  Oeric shivered, and swallowed, and hoped he wouldn’t be sick. The bandit choked and his heels drummed on the turf; his shoes were more gap than leather, different shapes. Instead of hose he wore filthy wrappings from ankle to knee. The choking was the same sound Morud made when he hawked up phlegm before spitting, only the choking went on and on. Spitting made Gwladus angry. If Gwladus was here maybe then the lady would smile sometimes. Maybe she wouldn’t be so pitiless.