Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  Edwin was not happy. “It’s slipping like yolk between my fingers!” he shouted at Coelfrith, whose latest tallies were not cheering: The northern cattle tithe was down, fewer men had come to bend the knee, and more of them brought complaints. More lords told of families selling themselves into their thegn’s keeping because they could no longer feed themselves. Robbery and banditry were on the rise. There were rumours of murrain in the highlands and ague in the lowlands. Folk murmured about ill luck.

  “My lord,” Paulinus said, “if we have a good harvest this summer, all will be well.”

  Edwin looked at him. “And will Christ give us a good harvest, Bishop? Oh, I forgot, he doesn’t speak to you of prophecy.” He looked at Hild.

  “Sick and hungry farmers don’t harvest as much as those who are well and safe,” she said.

  “They will work for God,” Paulinus said. “I will baptise them, and Christ will wash their hearts clean.” Sometimes he sounded as though he believed what he said.

  “And then they will gratefully pay a further portion in tithe,” Stephanus said.

  “With which we will beautify the church,” Paulinus said. “And so fill their souls with awe.”

  “Awe will not give them back the seed you demand in tithe,” Hild said. “Awe will not heal them of ague.”

  The gesiths around the room nodded: Nothing healed the ague, which came from the uncanny air stirred by the wings of mosquitoes.

  “If they believe, Christ will heal them.”

  Edwin waved his hand: A few folk with ague were neither here nor there. “You promised Christ would bring luck and full coffers,” he said. “But all he’s brought is bad weather. He sent his luck to the Idings. They grow strong to the north, and Penda to the south. Pray harder, Bishop.”

  “With more souls to pray, Christ will listen.”

  “Then, by all means, go baptise. And you”—he turned to Lintlaf—“put a stop to the murmurings.”

  Hild knew how Lintlaf would go about that. To be token and totem, the light of the world, meant protecting people from more than blades and hunger. It meant shielding them from fear. One people at peace, content from sea to shining sea …

  She slipped out and found Morud. “Delay Lord Lintlaf. I need to speak to Boldcloak.”

  She found Cian with Uinniau and Oswine. Cian would have seen that she wanted to talk alone and found a charming dismissal for his friends. Boldcloak saw it and didn’t care. He gave her a flat look and didn’t even stand.

  She planted her staff before her. She had learnt to talk to others; she could learn to talk to this stranger. “Lintlaf is to be sent out to stop the murmurs,” she said. “No doubt you’ll ride with him.”

  “Sending me on another errand?” His tone was as flat as his expression.

  Uinniau stood. “Come on, Os.”

  “But—”

  “Come on.”

  When they’d gone, she said, “I’m not sending you. The king is. But I’d like to find you men. To ride under your orders.”

  “My orders?”

  “Yours. Lintlaf … You know how Lintlaf is.”

  He neither agreed nor disagreed.

  “The more men go, the faster the murmurs stop. It will make the king happy. If the king’s happy, we’re all safer.” The Cian who had rubbed his lip might never have existed. “Say something.”

  He gave her that look and said, “You’re a woman.”

  Her heart dropped into her belly.

  “You could ask the queen for men.”

  She blinked. The queen. She should have thought of that. She turned her staff in her hands. “You’d lead them?”

  After a long moment, he nodded once.

  The queen smiled when she made her request. “Of course. Bassus would be glad to have something to do. I’m glad you came to me. I was beginning to wonder if I’d offended you in some way. We’ve missed you.”

  Hild wanted to believe her, but she had been different since Wuscfrea was so ill. At the best of times queens hid their true feelings; it was the way of the world. And Begu had spoken of her being on her knees to Christ all the time, terrified of the omens. Hild wondered how it must feel to have someone you didn’t quite trust make prophecies about what mattered most to you in the world.

  The brothers Berht were happy to go, along with Eadric and Grimhun. Oswine and Uinniau, of course, went wherever Boldcloak went.

  “Listen,” Hild said to the assembled gesiths. Half of them had a shine in their eyes she remembered from the field at Lindum, and the firelight as they painted their shields. For them, she didn’t need a ring. “Heed me: honey, not vinegar. Nothing but good words about the generosity and strength of our king.”

  “For the bandits, steel, not words,” Cian said.

  She couldn’t tell how he meant that. “Yes. For the bandits. For ordinary folk, food and kind words.” She gave them sacks of bread and a small keg of mead each. “For the folk, not for you.”

  “Though we’ll have to drink with them,” Cian said to his men with a smile, and Uinniau hooted. They rode out, still hooting, horses high-stepping, glittering with gold and jewels.

  Hild and Begu waved until they were lost to sight.

  “Three princes,” Begu said. “Like a hero song.”

  It was true. Cian carried himself like a prince, and Prince Uinniau looked up to him, as did Oswine, who would one day—if Edwin’s plans worked—be ealdorman of Rheged. Everyone knew the tale of Ceredig king and the boy with the wooden sword. Cian Boldcloak: a far cry from the boy who almost wept at the thought of being in the same hall as the son of the son of the son of Owein, his sword blue and gleaming, his spurs of gold.

  Paulinus rode out in even greater state with Stephanus and the new priest, Hrothmar, an oddly pale man with eyes the colour of water and white hair. It wasn’t long before news trickled in to Hild of feverish mass baptisms on the River Glen, of men and women dragged from their homes and forcibly submerged in the fast, cold waters. To save their souls. To save the Anglisc.

  She shared the news with the queen one afternoon as they compared the blue of their most recent dye batch to their standard, a loose skein and a swatch of fullered cloth kept in a tightly woven bag against the light.

  “He’ll turn the whole north against us,” Æthelburh said. “How can we stop him?”

  Hild rewound the new skein. She could never be certain of the queen’s feelings, but perhaps on this they were of the same mind. “James the Deacon could help.”

  * * *

  James arrived from York in a hurry of mud. Morud led him to the queen’s chambers, where Hild waited.

  “Your bishop has gone mad,” Hild said, in Latin and quietly. Gwladus was at the door, but there was no point in taking chances. “He’s baptising anything on two legs, willing or not. The whole north is murmuring. We have to stop him.”

  James stood there. Eventually he said, “It wasn’t the queen who sent for me, was it?”

  She poured wine. Rhenish, his favourite. “She’s at meat with the king. She knows I’m here.”

  “You speak for her?”

  “We share the same worry.” She handed him a cup. After a moment he took it. They both sat. “The north is balanced on a sword edge. Your bishop could tip it the wrong way.”

  “What is it you want from me?”

  “First, tell me exactly, tell me clearly, why he’s forcing baptism.”

  “Boniface won’t give him the pallium, won’t make him archbishop of the north, until all the north is converted.”

  “But how will Boniface know? Does God keep count and drop tally sticks from heaven on the bishop of Rome’s head?”

  “Stephanus keeps the tally. He sends it to me. I compile the report that goes out under the bishop’s name.”

  “If you wrote that we were all baptised, would Paulinus get his white wool shawl and leave us alone?”

  “I can’t lie to the pope!”

  “Why?”

  “Because.” But she fixed
him with her steady gaze. He sighed. “The pope is God’s representative on earth. Lying to His Holiness would be like lying to God Himself. I’d go to Gehenna.” The hot hell where you burnt like a pig on the spit, forever. “It would be a sin.”

  Sin: an oath-breaking, a straying from the path. She sipped her wine. “The Crow has to stop. The north will turn if he doesn’t. The king could make him stop. But the king hears only what he wants to hear. Someone must persuade him the Crow is mistaken.”

  “Child—”

  “Do you want the church in York to rise and your choir’s voice to rise with it? Then the king must stay on his throne and ensure the church’s tithe. He won’t stay on the throne if the north turns. The north will turn unless your bishop is muzzled.”

  “How is that something the king will want to hear?”

  “He’ll hear if there’s more than one voice. I’ll speak. The queen will speak.”

  “The queen?” He looked into the distance, calculating the benefit. After a long moment he said, “It can’t get back to the bishop.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Thank me by pouring me another cup. In York they’re very near with the wine when the king’s away.”

  She wondered why he didn’t ask his Christ to make wine out of water, but no doubt he’d have an answer for that, too. She poured, then excused herself to check with Gwladus, who told her that in hall the king had called for the scop; there was no hurry.

  She went back to James. They drank steadily. He told her of the church in York: The Frankish stonemasons were skittish about every omen, fractious about the weather, finicky about the food. The choir, on the other hand, was beautiful, just wondrous, like heavenly angels.

  His eyes glistened, his chin lifted. He stroked his carved cup. The wine made him happy. When you understood what made people happy, you understood them.

  “Deacon,” she said, “have you ever seen Paulinus happy?”

  He ran a finger round the rim of his cup. “I have seen him uplifted in the service of God.”

  “Especially when it is in service to himself?”

  He leaned back, hands behind his head. “That’s not quite it. It’s more that he’s a man, though he likes to pretend otherwise.”

  She waited but he did not seem inclined to say more. “He doesn’t think he’s a man?”

  “No, no. Simply that as a man he can persuade himself of ridiculous things in order to persuade others.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Most of the time he believes he is truly saving all those hundreds of half-drowned baptisands.” He mused for a moment. “And when he doubts himself, I’d say he banishes those doubts by banishing his bodily needs, denying his humanness.”

  Reminded, he eyed the wine jug. She nodded and gestured for him to go ahead. He poured and sipped.

  “Ah. That’s a truly lovely wine. But when it comes to the joys of the flesh, I am weak. No doubt because I’m a mere deacon. Paulinus, being a bishop, is made of sterner stuff.”

  “I’ve noticed that he doesn’t care for food or wine.”

  “He thinks bodily joy—love of wine, of a handsome figure, of venison smothered in bilberries—a weakness, a sin.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “God made our bodies. And God is love. Love is never wrong. And so love of bodily joy, I think the Christ would agree, is never wrong.” He picked up his cup. “Except when it becomes greed. Which leads to gluttony. Which is most definitely a sin.”

  “How can you tell the difference?”

  “That, dear child, is a mystery. For today, let us say five cups of wine is love, and six gluttony.”

  “Then you can have one more.”

  He beamed. “That’s so.”

  “I have another question.”

  He waved a hand magnanimously.

  “Why does God speak to some people and not others?”

  She pretended to sip while he picked carefully through his thoughts. Next time she would suggest that the line between love and gluttony might be moved to eight cups.

  “The only priests God speaks to, in my experience, are those who think they should be overbishop.” He raised his eyebrows: Did she understand?

  She nodded. All priests lie. Except to the pope. “But God does listen to some people. He listened to some of the mothers when their children were dying.”

  “Listening is not the same as speaking.”

  “He will speak to me. Tell me how.”

  “Oh, my dear. I wish we were sitting in the sunshine of Rome.”

  She frowned. “Does sunshine make a difference?”

  “No, no. But Rome does. There are Greek texts … The Greeks thought about these things. You’d like them.” He shook his head. “But I have none here. The bishop doesn’t see the value. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he reads it very well.”

  “Teach me how to talk to him. I want to ask something.”

  “Well, I don’t think the bishop would disagree with me if I said that God helps those who help themselves.”

  She considered that. “So I can ask for something if I do something?” Give a gift, get an audience. That made sense. She had already arranged the alliance between deacon, queen, and seer. She would ask for an omen.

  * * *

  God sent an omen at dawn, tangled in a birder’s net.

  Hild stood in a shaft of light in the king’s hall and held out the jay by its unnatural white legs. She shook it lightly. The king, the queen, even James stepped back.

  “Look closely, my king.”

  But Edwin wouldn’t come near it.

  “White legs, white bill, white eyes. White as a ghost. But caught in a net, killed by hunters who already had full bags.” She gestured at two men by the door, with nets and slings tucked in their wide leather belts and bloodstained game bags at their hips. They looked as though they would bolt, but for Gwrast on one side and Oeric on the other.

  Edwin ignored them. “Tell me what it means.”

  “A warning about greed. Christ, they say, is often spoken of as a white bird.” She looked at James, who nodded. Doves were white birds, after all. “The people ask: Why would I want to be baptised if my wyrd is to end strangled in a net? Others say: Greed is what killed the white bird, the hunter’s greed. That sometimes the birds in the bag are enough. Greed and hurry, Edwin king.”

  “Ah. You’re talking about the Crow. You want me to rein him in.” He looked at Æthelburh, who nodded, and at James, who bowed his assent. Then at Hild. “I’ll have to give him something to do,” he said.

  “There’s Craven. We’re to go in summer. The bishop could go ahead of us.”

  He thought about it. “Well, why not? Make him cousin Osric’s problem. But not too much of a problem. We can’t have more murmuring. The deacon here will go to keep an eye on him.”

  22

  AT THE BEGINNING OF SUMMER Edwin and his advisers joined Paulinus and James in Craven. They found Osric’s household in disarray. Osric had taken apart the old fort of the kings of Craven and built himself a grand new hall, but, according to Gwladus and Morud, who had already winkled out the story from kitchen hands and byre boys, the new ealdorman gave contradictory orders, and the housefolk never knew from one day to the next whether they should be weaving a tapestry, sowing a field, or slaughtering sheep. The roof didn’t leak, and there was food on the table and horsehair in the mattresses, but the atmosphere of the hall felt surly and nervous.

  Edwin felt no need to impress Osric. He had allowed the queen—along with her ladies, including Begu and Breguswith—to go instead to Derventio. Osric had no wife, and his daughter was visiting her cousins in Arbeia. With few Anglisc women present, Osric’s vill felt more like a travel camp than a high lord’s hall: too much drinking and open rutting and men pissing in corners, while spitting and staring over their shoulders. Hild told Morud and Oeric to pass the word to the men of Craven that any who laid a hand on Gwladus would put his wyrd in the seer’
s hand. She told Gwladus to pin her braids close to her head and wear a thick old dress. “I mean it. No flaunting.” But Gwladus was made as she was, and though she pinned her hair up, and though she wore an old dress and looked at the floor when she thought Hild would see, the looks she gave Osric’s men brimmed with the knowledge of her power.

  On the third day, when James asked Hild to walk with him, she was glad to get out of the hall.

  The river roared and tumbled down falls and through weirs, teeming with salmon and roach, dace and minnow. Its steep green banks were streaked with otter slides, and hard-beaked kingfishers watched from every birch and alder.

  James seemed a different man. His stride was longer, his face leaner. They walked for a while, until they came to a stand of graceful white birch on a high bank. Here the grass at the foot of a smooth boulder was broken and flattened. She was not surprised when they sat.

  The air smelt like a newly unfurled leaf. Just breathing made her feel good: no scent of dung or charcoal or rotting thatch, only leaping fish and rushing water.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” James said. “Fresh as the first day of creation. But dangerous. When it rains up in the hills, the water rises fast.”

  Hild said nothing, happy to wait.

  “He’s at it again. Baptisms. With no heed. I begged him to consider. Consider the will of the people. Consider the raging river itself. Last time we’d just finished—sixscore people in one baptism!—and waded to the bank when, whoosh, dead sheep swept by, bobbing and swollen. If we’d stayed in the water for one more immersion, just one, we’d have been washed away. Gone. Dead as the sheep.”

  Below, something, she couldn’t tell what, swam against the current: a flash, a splash, and it was gone.

  “As well as the baptisms, he’s forcing people from their fields and pastures to help him build a new church from the stones at the old Roman fort.”

  “Osric has stoneworkers?”

  “Dunod had one. Old now, but versed in the ways of tumbled Roman stone. So a new church is rising, and the bishop, in his zeal, will fill it with fresh souls. A new Rome, he says. Rome, in Craven! He’s run mad.”

  Perhaps ambition drove everyone mad in the end. Power and ambition were two edges of the same sword, as she knew herself. She wanted to be powerful so she could protect her people; she had people because she was powerful. And there were different kinds of power: the still, pent power of the seer; the free, raging power of the butcher-bird. But did there have to be only one path?