Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  Hild swallowed. “I don’t sing.”

  “What would you like to do?” She kept unfastening her shift.

  Do? She gazed into the interesting swell and shadow.

  Gode made a throaty sound that Hild thought might be a laugh and pushed the smock from her shoulders. “Come here.” She opened her arms.

  It was an astonishment, a blessing, a gift. To feel a nipple swell in your mouth, to not know whose breast was plump on whose palm, to feel the thing pour back and forth between you, her breath harsh as a hound on your shoulder, her eyes turning black. The strength in her shudders.

  And she was strong. They were both strong. They held each other down, let each other up. Like drowning, like swimming, like breathing.

  Afterwards, they lay together under Hild’s fine blue cloak. “It’s different with a woman,” Gode said. “But not so different.” She stroked the soft cloak.

  “Why did you think I was an ælf?”

  Gode, fingering the dense weave, said, “Because you’re taller than the world. Because I watched you sit and open a spell.”

  Hild hitched herself up on her elbow. “A spell?”

  “You opened it and it leapt into you and possessed you. You didn’t move for an age.”

  “Oh. No. That’s a letter. A message. Words from someone far away.”

  Gode nodded. “Magic.”

  “No.” But it was magic, in a way.

  “And you looked so like him, but you weren’t him, not quite. And you smell like flowers, like someone from the land of summer who finds herself in winter.”

  The jessamine. “But you invited me in.”

  “Your belly growled, and I saw the way you looked at me. Besides, this cloak wasn’t made by ælfs.”

  “I’ll send you one.” But not in royal blue. She lay back and folded her arms behind her head. “Have you ever seen an omen?”

  “Everything’s an omen. The cry of a seal. The colour of a cloud’s belly at sunset. But everyone disagrees about what they mean. My ma and da disagreed. They drowned.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You said that. People die. Omens lie.”

  “Not always.”

  Gode shrugged. “When you don’t know if they’re lying or not, it’s best not to listen.”

  “I’m never wrong.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. Only … I don’t know how to make this one come true.”

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. That’s what Ma always said.”

  But Hild knew there was no way for this. Never.

  “There again, she’s dead. Da said the trick was to know what you want, exactly. He’s dead, too.”

  Hild knew Gode wasn’t really listening to her and wouldn’t understand even if she were. But she had to tell someone, before she let it all go forever. And so, as the firelight turned from yellow to orange to red, she told this woman she would never see again about the nest, and the doves and starlings, and how Cian had ruined it all, just thrown it away. “My whole life, wherever I’ve been, I’ve known where he was, and part of me has pointed towards him, the way cows and deer point south when they chew. I thought he pointed to me, too. We are us. Whatever I did, I thought about how I’d tell him about it, how I’d explain what it means. If I could make him understand, then it was real. Even when I was angry with him, even when I thought he was stupid, I was angry with him. And I’ve been angry. So angry. Thinking about how I’ll fight him when he gets back, how I’ll shout, how I’ll make him understand.”

  But he wasn’t coming back. Not to her. And now her anger was running out of her like the tide, leaving her empty.

  * * *

  “You didn’t eat a thing tonight,” Begu said when they undressed for bed. “Was it that song about Branwen?”

  “Um?”

  “I told Oeric a fortnight ago to bribe Luftmaer so he didn’t sing any of those maudlin things, especially the ones Cian used to sing. But I forgot to remind him. Besides, I thought you were getting better, until today.”

  Begu turned down the cover.

  “Anger always spends itself in the end. I thought I’d be glad when you weren’t angry anymore, but I’m not. I don’t like this look. Like a calf standing by its dead dam, too forlorn even to bawl.”

  They climbed into bed.

  “You’re the king’s seer. You can’t go around with a face like that. I think you frightened Luftmaer so much he forgot himself.”

  “Listen,” Hild said. “The seals are singing.”

  Begu said nothing, but she stretched out her arm. “Come here. Don’t argue.”

  Slowly, carefully, like an orphaned foal folding itself down on the straw by a cat and her litter, Hild tucked herself alongside Begu and laid her head on her shoulder.

  “You smell of seals,” Begu said.

  Silence.

  “Hild, gemæcce, talk to me. You’re frightening me.”

  “I did something today. It was … No one even knows she exists. But it was stupid. She and Cian used— I thought, is this what it’s like for him? Does she look like the Welsh princess? Well, that wasn’t why. But it was part of it.”

  “Did you kill something?”

  “In a way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Pick people who don’t matter, my mother said. But people who don’t matter aren’t equals. We pick them up, play with them, then put them down.”

  “Not if you get married.”

  “I’d have to leave here. Marry an enemy. Or at best be like Æthelburh. Never quite belonging. Careful. Always careful.”

  “But you are now.”

  “But I hoped. I thought one day … Tonight, I looked at the men singing. I looked at their belts. I wondered what it would be like to hold on to one of them, to stand next to a man and think, We are us. Do you think I could ever do that with Penda?”

  “So it’s Penda?”

  “Today I understood: It’s real. All of this. I was angry: He ruined everything, all my plans, even the ones I hid from myself.”

  “Penda?”

  “Forget Penda.” She would never marry Penda. She knew that now. She pressed her cheek into Begu’s arm. “A princess of Gwynedd is not a dairymaid at Mulstanton or a sealer’s daughter on the beach. A princess of Gwynedd isn’t a passing fancy. She’s a knife in the table, there for all to see. He’s made his choice: That’s his place, she’s his path.”

  They listened to the wind and the waves.

  “But what’s my path? I’m the light of the world. The king’s seer. And I can taste it in the wind, I can feel it in every move Penda makes, every threat from Cadwallon and battle fought by Idings…” But she couldn’t say it aloud, not even to Begu: The Yffings would fall.

  * * *

  At meetings of the king and his counsellors—Paulinus, Coelfrith, and Æthelburh, and Stephanus scratching at his wax tablet—she stood hard and plain as a spear. No one spoke without glancing at her. Even the dogs watched her. She listened to everything everyone said, and weighed it against her own choices, and kept silent.

  Paulinus had news that Ricberht was winning.

  “No,” she said. “Sigebert will win. Ricberht will die.”

  Paulinus’s gaze fastened on hers.

  “God made me a seer,” she said. “Listen or not.”

  The Yffings would fall, and Paulinus with them. But she was going to live. She would find a way.

  * * *

  A letter came to her from Rhin: The king of Less Britain had given Cadwallon three ships and the men to crew them. Three ships: sixty men, seventy-five at most. Not enough to retake Gwynedd. She said nothing.

  A message came to the king from Eadfrith: He had left Clemen of Dyfneint in Caer Uisc and would wend a lazy, meet-the-people route back to Deganwy, where Cian Boldcloak held the fort.

  Three days later, Penda besieged Caer Uisc.

  “Send the prince Eadfrith back,” Paulinus said. “We will ride down to meet him with the cross o
n our banners and save Dyfneint from the pagans. Penda will flee and Dyfneint will kneel before God and his rightful representative.”

  “No,” Hild said to Edwin. “Let Clemen fall. Let Eadfrith rejoin Boldcloak at Deganwy as fast as he can. Faster than fast.” Three ships from Less Britain. “Cadwallon is coming.”

  * * *

  She sat in her room with Gwladus and listened to the screams of two women giving birth at once. One wailed and moaned, the other cursed. Both voices planed along the iron-hard walls and floors of the fortress, echoing until they seemed to come from everywhere at once.

  “You’re wan as a wight,” Gwladus said. “You should eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Eat anyway.”

  They ate cheese and wrinkled apples. Gwladus, as she always did, sniffed at her apple before she bit it, and smiled, as at some memory.

  “Do you miss Dyfneint?”

  “I miss the smell of cider in autumn. There’s nothing like it: The air tastes sticky, sweet with that tang like copper. And the buzz of wasps. Wasps everywhere during cider season. But it was long ago and far away.”

  Home was never far away. “Do you mind that I said we shouldn’t rescue Clemen?”

  “What do I care for kings? He doesn’t know me. I don’t know him.”

  Late the next morning a ship beached on the white sand of the hythe, and a frightened, filthy messenger made his way to the counsellors: Cadwallon, with a retinue of men from Less Britain, had joined Penda at Caer Uisc and slaughtered Clemen. Two days ago. Petroc Splinter Spear had fled west.

  Silence. Then Edwin said, “Who the fuck is Petroc Splinter Spear?”

  “Clemen’s heir,” Hild said. A king with no country, king now of western rock cliffs and a burnt and broken city. All kings fall. Fate goes ever as it must. And, oh, she had been stupid.

  “You’re turning grey,” Edwin said.

  “Women worry,” Paulinus said.

  Her rib cage was too small. She couldn’t breathe.

  “At least the prince Eadfrith wasn’t caught there, my lord,” Coelfrith said.

  “And now we know where that nithing is,” Edwin said with some satisfaction.

  “With Penda,” Hild said. “With Penda. They broke Caer Uisc and now have a port for more ships to join them from Less Britain. Any day. They won’t need to keep many men there. So they can strike north together. North to retake Gwynedd.”

  Gwynedd, where, in the absence of Eadfrith, Cian was playing at prince with Cadwallon’s daughter. Lord of the hall. Men at his command. At ease. At home. No longer wearing armour at meat. Sitting with Angeth on his lap, twirling her dark hair around his finger, eyes shining at some song when armed men burst through the door, men with swords already bloody from the slaughter of his guards at the stockade. He would have time to drop his ale—sudden sharp scent under the peat smoke—and draw his sword. Then they’d be on him, bright and brutal, grunting, sharp steel shoving through soft skin.

  No, it wouldn’t happen that fast. She knew the songs. The Welsh liked their punishments slow and public. They would beat the woman, hack off Cian’s hands, stake him out on the mountain for children to throw stones at in the morning, ravens to blind in the afternoon, and wolves to tear into by night.

  She closed her eyes, willing her vision to rise from the blood-spattered green mountainside.

  In her mind’s eye, she rose like a hawk turning on a pillar of air, rising, widening, taking in the whole isle. She marked boundaries and vills, roads and ditches. Nodded to herself. Yes, if she were Penda, that’s what she’d do. Gwynedd’s ports, and Caer Uisc, and the middle of the country …

  Penda was remaking the great weave.

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice was thin and keen, the cry of a hawk on a clear morning. She opened her eyes. “They will strike for Gwynedd. No doubt. None. How many men does Eadfrith have?”

  Coelfrith said, “Fourscore under his command. Some with him, some with Boldcloak.”

  “Penda?”

  “Four hundred.”

  She turned to Edwin. “Even if Clemen fought hard and killed like a hero, they outnumber your son five to one.”

  Silence. Behind her lids, Hild watched armies move. Bebbanburg was a long, long way from Gwynedd.

  “Lord King,” Paulinus said, “I will pray. I will hold a Mass tonight, and vigils.”

  “We need to do more than pray, Bishop.” Toenails scratched the stone floor as the dogs stirred; they recognised the tone. We’ll eat the horse. “Coelfrith.”

  “Lord King?”

  “When can the war band ride?”

  “Two days.”

  Hild’s mind soared over the isle, seeing, weighing, judging. Not soon enough. Even today wouldn’t be soon enough. From Bebbanburg to Deganwy was half again the distance as from Caer Uisc. If Penda had left immediately, he had probably arrived before the messenger’s ship had passed Tinamutha.

  If Eadfrith and Cian were still alive, they’d be running for their lives. No, not they. Eadfrith was ætheling. Cian would stay and fight a rearguard action while his prince escaped north. But Cian would gradually be forced north, too. If he lived.

  If he was dead, there was nothing she could do, so she wouldn’t consider it. He was alive. Alive and running north, one step behind Eadfrith. Who would give chase, and how many?

  An army needed food. Food wagons travelled slowly. Penda could march his men north through Gwynedd on what they could carry, but then he would have to wait for their wagons to catch up before heading north. And after a siege, Penda’s wagons would be empty.

  But Cadwallon was fresh. And Cadwallon was a madman who wanted to wipe Edwin and all his kin from the face of the earth. If Eadfrith were known to be running, the Welsh king would give chase, even to Bebbanburg.

  Then, in her hawk’s eye, she saw clearly how it would be. Elmet. It had always been Elmet.

  * * *

  Begu stared at her as though she’d lost her mind. “You can’t,” she said. “Gwladus, tell her she can’t!”

  But Hild hardly heard her. She was calculating miles, days, rations … She tightened her heavy travel belt and said to Oeric, who was clammy and pale, “Tell Bassus an extra five men might make the difference for the ætheling’s life. The queen is safe as the sun here in Bebbanburg.” To Morud: “Reckon on Bassus’s men. Food for five days, not a sackful more.” If they lived, Elmet would feed them. To Gwladus: “We leave an hour before æfen, ready or not.”

  They hurried away.

  “It’s madness!” Begu said. “Why not ride with the king’s men? What can you do with only a score of raggle-taggle gesiths? And why Elmet?” Hild tied her seax tightly into its sheath. “At least wait for morning.”

  “The king doesn’t see,” Hild said.

  “Then make him.”

  Hild shook her head.

  There was no time. Penda would have Gwynedd by now, would stay in Gwynedd. What was needed was not a well-supplied army marching deliberately to meet the Mercians but a small band to race south, to fling itself like a shield between the remaining Northumbrians and the chasing Cadwallon until Edwin’s war band rolled in. But Edwin was in no hurry. His son would have sped safely away while Boldcloak guarded his back. Edwin was no doubt half expecting to hear word from York that the ætheling was there and safe even before the royal war band set out from Bebbanburg. What was Boldcloak to him? A half-wealh gesith who had reached too far. Edwin’s main aim was to trap Cadwallon outside his homeland and crush him so finely he would never rise again. Besides, as he saw it, Boldcloak was probably dead. But she knew, as surely as if the Christ whispered it in her ear: Cian was fighting, furlong by furlong, north, to Elmet, to home. And Cadwallon’s Welsh and Breton wolves were following. And no one would stand between the mad king and Pyr and Lweriadd in Caer Loid, Saxfryth and Ceadwulf, Grimhun in Aberford, Rhin and the folk of Menewood.

  “Tell my mother: They are my people. They are my path. It’s where I belong. She’ll understand
.”

  She whirled her cloak onto her shoulders, picked up her stave with one hand, and pulled Begu to her with the other. She squeezed Begu tight, and left.

  * * *

  She drove them at a killing pace. Nineteen horses and their cloaked riders. They could rest if they lived. She lay down at night, as they all did; she ate when food was put in front of her; she heard the talk around her, even sometimes answered, but her whole attention was focused on her target. She was falling, stooping to the kill, wings folded back, wind whistling past her pinions, eyes fixed on her prey. Waking and sleeping alike were a thing of hollowing air and falling.

  They ran south along the old army road that turned in a great curve on the eastern flank of the Bernician upland. Thundered across three rivers. Tore through Corabrig on the wall, where they shed a messenger east for Tinamutha. Then the long, straight Dere Street—canter, trot, canter, trot—until the fork just north and west of York, where they shed another messenger, this time for York, then on to the west and south road, gaining speed, homing in, hurtling for Caer Loid.

  Just before the road split into west, southwest, and south, Hild swerved to one side and looked out over the high moor.

  Rain blurred the air. The moor smelt of that turn from winter to spring. Silence, but for blowing horses and champing bits: no birdsong, no rustle in the tussocky grass—they’d frightened everything for miles with their hurry.

  To the west: road running over empty moorland. South: the great river valley, where the forest grew in a tangle of bare branches, grey and black and brown. She thought she saw the glint of the river. South and east: Caer Loid, hidden by a series of low rises. East: where the wood had gathered close to what was left of Ermine Street—London to Lindum to Brough, through Aberford, to York—birds lifted in a cloud thicker than smoke.

  Hild pointed. They wheeled.

  * * *

  Bare branches dripped. On either side of Hild, behind ferns and a line of mossy, fallen trunks along the edge of a natural clearing, her men crouched behind their shields, swords in hand, breathing through their mouths. Five of the shields were newly painted. In the wet, the red wariangle ran and stretched into a gaunt nightmare bird. Behind them, a horse stirred, trying to rub the unfamiliar baffling from its bit. Hild turned her head slightly, but Gwladus was already offering the horse a sliver of dried apple and stroking its nose. Her gleaming hair was hidden by a grey cloth.