A cream-striped caterpillar humped its slow way over the mossy bark. Hild picked it up and looked for a place to put it safely out of the way of the coming battle.
In the end she chose the base of the bird cherry at the rocky end of the pool. It was old, for a cherry, with that odd, gnarled look of such trees that weren’t likely to reach the age of oaks and elms. With the haft of her bent spear she poked at the soil by the root. It was lighter and drier than the soil by the other end of the pool. She poked a little more. Her shoulder jostled her tooth.
“What are you doing?” Cian, standing on the fallen alder, looking sweaty and cross. “How can you abandon your post to dig?”
Hild, whose tooth hurt, spoke crossly in her turn. “How can you play the same game over and over?”
“It’s not a game!” Cian’s face pinked. His eyebrows, she saw, did not match his hair. “What are you doing that is so important?”
Hild, feeling perverse for no reason she could name but that she was sick of playing war, said, “I am digging with this stick.”
“It’s a spear.”
“It’s a stick.” And she stroked deliberately at the great kink in the wood, then pushed the blunt tip into her palm and showed him: no blood.
He rubbed his lip with his knuckle. “When we fight as heroes, it’s a spear.”
Please, his eyes said, please.
And just like that she didn’t want to hurt him anymore; she wasn’t sure why she had, only that she, too, wanted to say, Please, please. She settled on her hams by the root she’d been poking at.
“I’m following the root to see if Eochaid the slave is right and there is a rainbow at the tip, or if my mother has the right of it, and at the centre is the root of the world tree and the one-eyed god.”
“You’re forever finding things out.”
“I’m the light of the world.”
“Finding out the how and the why of things is for gossips and priests,” he said, not so much scornful as puzzled, not by the fact that she did it—she had always done it—but that they should be talking about it.
“Gossips and priests, yes, but also artisans and kings,” she said. “And was Morei not familiar with the ways of fire?”
“True,” Cian said, craning for a better view.
“And, indeed, heroes of old sometimes had need to bury their hoard.”
He scrambled over the fallen tree and landed next to her. “I will help.”
He found himself a stick—his sword was a sword only—and they dug, the sun warm on their backs.
“It goes ever down,” he said after a while.
“We will dig more tomorrow.”
He stood and stretched, said to the horizon, “And now will you be a hero with me and take the wall, shoulder to shoulder?”
“Am I to be Branwen again?” And she couldn’t help the sigh in her voice.
“Be who you like,” he said, ever the generous lord. “You choose.”
“Owein,” she said. “His sword was blue and gleaming, his spurs all of gold—”
“No, I am Owein. I am always Owein.”
“Then I will be Gwvrling the Giant: He drank transparent wine, with a battle-taunting purpose; the reapers sang of war, of war with shining wing, the minstrels sang of war—” She spat out her tooth. It lay white and red on the turf at her feet. They stared at it.
Hild bent and picked it up. Her tooth, from her mouth.
“Soon you will grow another, and stronger.”
She nodded.
“You must put it in your belt, or a sorcerer could steal it for a spell.”
She pushed it into her sash.
“You are bleeding.”
She wiped her mouth with her hand. A tiny, bright smear.
“Bright was the blood,” she said, the next part of the verse of Gwvrling the Giant.
“And bright was the horn in the hall of Eiddin!” Cian said, relieved. He held out his digging stick. “Gwvrling must have a sword. Come!”
And they scrambled over the tree trunk and swung their swords at invisible foes together: Y rhag meiwedd, y rhag mawredd, y rhag madiedd—in the van are the warlike, in the van are the noble, in the van are the good.
As usual, after a while they found it more exciting to swing at each other, and, as usual, Hild got hit more often because Cian’s reach was greater than hers, his sword longer, and he had a shield.
After one particularly hard smack at her shoulder, Hild jumped back. “Let us swap arms for a while.”
She had never dared ask before, but today she had bled, like a real Yffing. Cian considered, then held out his sword for Hild’s stick and slid the shield from his arm.
They leapt together again, and Hild found that taking a blow to a shield was a much finer thing than a blow to the ribs. She hacked with enthusiasm.
“Swap back now,” Cian said, panting a little.
“Just a while longer.”
“I want it. It’s mine.”
Hild didn’t want to give them up, and the wanting turned her mind smooth and hard as a shield wall. “It is yours, absolutely and only yours, given from the hand of Ceredig king. No one of this earth could dispute it. I do not dispute it. I ask for your great favour, a hero’s generosity.”
Cian blinked.
“And as we fight you may think secretly to yourself, Those arms are mine, I have but to say the word and they are in my hand again, I have the power to take them back anytime, anytime.”
He rose up on his toes, and back down, thinking. “Anytime?”
“Anytime.”
“It is mine?”
“It is yours. That is your secret power.” Holding secrets, her mother said, made a man feel mighty.
“Well, then. You may keep the shield for a time.” He lifted his stick and charged. They battled for a while.
Once again, Hild stepped back. “Now here, back to you, are your sword and shield.”
And he took them, returned her stick, and smiled. “These are mine. But you shall borrow them again. Tomorrow. Tomorrow when we come back to dig your hole.”
She nodded.
“It’s hot,” he said.
They sat by the pool. Hild slid her stick in and out of the water. The cherry leaves whispered in a slight breeze.
“You like the water.”
“I do.” She laid the stick aside and watched a waterbug dimple the surface and skate across it.
“And you’re not afraid of the sidsa?”
Her mother’s word for sorcery or witchcraft, not the immanence, the wild magic of these hidden places—there was no Anglisc word for that. Sprites live in rivers and springs, and are not to be meddled with, Onnen said. “I’m not afraid.” She was the light of the world. Besides, her mother said it was still water that was bad. She frowned slightly, as Breguswith did, and said, in Anglisc, “Still water is not to be trusted. It shines and it gleams, but is not what it seems.”
They both giggled. It shines and it gleams, but is not what it seems.
“And yet it is so … magic,” Hild said, in British. “Watch.” And she slid her stick in again at an angle. “See how the water breaks it?”
“I do!”
“And yet when I pull it out, it is whole.” She slid the stick in and out, in and out. Whole, broken, whole, broken. “What spirit breaks and remakes? Or is it only a glamour? Now, listen.” The cherry leaves whispered again, and again more strongly as air moved over them and the pool. “Feel the breath of it? Now look you down there. The mud seems rippled, does it not?”
“It does.”
“Yet it is not.”
“It is too. I can see it.”
“Then put your hand to the bottom.”
“The sprite will eat me if I disturb her magic.”
“She will not. I will give her an offering.” She drew her tooth from her sash and threw it into the pool. The soft silty mud closed over it and it was gone.
“You have given yourself to the sprite!”
“I ha
ve offered my tooth, of which I’ll soon have more.” But she touched her tongue to the raw place on her gum and hoped the new tooth wouldn’t belong to the sprite, hoped it didn’t mean she would drown one day when the sprite reclaimed what was hers. “Put your hand to the bottom.”
He rolled up his shirt sleeve. Slid it gingerly into the water.
“Now lay your palm on the bottom. And tell me, is it rippled?”
“It is smooth.” He patted the muddy bottom, sending up a swirl of brown. Hild had a sudden fear he would find her tooth and bring it out.
“Gently, gently. You may take your arm out now.” She lifted her face to the sky. The wind had died once more. “The beast begins to sleep again, and so forgets to weave its spell. See you now, the sand is smooth in appearance as well as fact. It is only when the water sprite breathes that it casts its veil on our eyes.”
Cian rubbed his arm dry on the turf, then on his tunic. “Tomorrow you shall show me more magic.”
“Tomorrow I shall show you the great frog who swallowed the heart of a hægtes.”
* * *
But the next day the Goodmanham steward declared it an auspicious time to harvest the rest of the flax—the base of the stems had turned yellow—and every able-bodied member of the community, young and old, was drafted, even the visiting thegns Wilgar and Trumwine. Men pulled the plants whole from the ground; housefolk, mostly wealh, gathered and tied the stems into bundles, then leaned them into stacks to dry. They laid cloth on the ground and shook the already dried bundles until seed rattled out; children carefully folded the cloth and carried it to the women who funnelled the tiny golden-brown seeds into jars and sent the cloth back to be laid again; at which point other wealh pulled the bundled stems through the coarse-toothed ripples set like arrowheads into posts to pull free the empty seedpods. It was thirsty, scratchy work; the children, highfolk and urchins alike, ran to and fro with jars of gruit—heather beer.
From the resinous scent of it, it was her mother’s special batch, heavy with sweet gale, which Hild already knew would lead to loud laughter and the energy to work all day. Many of the women did not drink and sent her instead with empty jars to the river.
* * *
Her mother scooped out three fingers of salve, handed the pot to Hild, and warmed the greasy stuff between her palms. When she worked it into Wilgar’s back, Hild thought he looked like a bristly black hog smeared with lard before going on the spit. She put the pot at the end of the bench out of the sun and watched her mother kneading the slablike muscles, pushing into his fat with her thumbs, running along lines of sinew like a saddlemaker pushing the needle through thick leather.
“Crops must have been good the last two years,” Breguswith said to him as he groaned with pleasure. “You’re plump as a prime bullock.”
He agreed that the gods had been kind and the weather favourable. They talked for a while about the crop in his valley to the north and his farmers, and after a while she slapped him on the arm and handed him his warrior jacket.
Wilgar eased the jacket back on, squinting against the late-afternoon sun. He twisted this way and that. “It feels better.” He sounded surprised.
“You’ll do,” Breguswith said.
They watched him head back to the hall and brace himself for Trumwine’s punch in the shoulder in the doorway.
Breguswith said, “The man is getting fat,” in the kind of voice that meant she was thinking more than she was saying.
Hild looked in the pot. “Will there be enough left for the women?”
Breguswith wiped her hands on her apron. “Do you see any women?”
There were only housefolk hurrying with yokes of beer buckets and platters of bread to the hall. She shook her head.
“Why you suppose that is?”
She pondered. “Because girls don’t show off?”
Breguswith huffed in amusement, sat on the bench, and wiped now at her forearms. “You’re not wholly wrong, but there’s more. Men’s arms are stronger than ours. That strength is their weakness. They forget—” A gust of laughter rolled from the hall. The drinking and boasting had begun. Breguswith stood. “I’ve things to see to. We’ll talk another time. Watch women and men, put yourself inside them. Imagine what they’re thinking. And remember what I’ve said.”
* * *
Two days into the retting, the river was sluggish and the air still and heavy with the ret stink. Breguswith and Onnen were inside the undercroft of the great timber hall, sorting cloth into bales for merchants and bales for the household, and Hereswith and Mildburh were in the weaving hut tying weights to the warp on a piece of tabby. Hild was long since tired of watching women and men from the loft in the byre and under a bench in hall (the rooftree at Goodmanham was low, close enough to the fire pits to make her cough and choke the one time she had tried it). All they seemed to do was lie to each other; the women did it while giggling and the men while boasting. She had no idea what that had to do with strength.
So today she forgot about it and, with Cian, followed the king and his household—his advisers, the various bands of warrior gesiths and their war hounds and sight hounds, the priests and petitioners and housefolk—into the meadow. The dogs settled down in the shade of a stand of alders in the bend of the river, and Hild, with Cian behind her, cautiously held out a fist to Gwen, the huge scarred wolfhound bitch whom they fed sometimes, when they could, and who consequently allowed them to approach on occasion. Gwen sniffed, then lifted a lip at Brannoch, the leader—a boarhound, and mad, though not as mad as the brutalised war hounds—and after some grumbles he licked his chops and lowered his nose to his paws, and the children sat themselves slowly, and Hild dared to lean against Gwen’s flank, and they all settled in to half doze and half listen to the run of the river, the whine of flies, the laughter of drunken fighting men, and the king’s petitioner.
Edwin, a compact man with chestnut hair, a grey-threaded beard, and heavy rings on both arms, sat on his carved stool under the oak, his chief steward Coelgar at his ear and his advisers about him, with his chin on his fist and his eyes on the petitioner, a one-handed local thegn, rewarded with five hides by Æthelric Spear years past for service rendered as gesith, who complained that a local widow had set eel traps in the river: his river, his.
Æthelric Spear. Hild’s grandfather. Hild paid closer attention.
Edwin had his face turned to the man, and smiled and nodded in the right places, but after a sentence or two his feet began to move this way and that on the turf. Hild plucked herself a blade of grass, sucked on the fat end, and pondered him. His gaze roved over his household: the priests—a bishop from the British west (spy of his foster-brother Cadwallon ap Cadfan, her mother said), a soft-voiced Irishman (bearing news of the Dál Fiatach and their hopes for the Isle of Vannin), Coifi, the ambitious young priest of the great temple, a woman who tended the well of Eilen (or tended first the needs of the scruffy local priest of Saint Elen, some would say)—the warrior gesiths (calling for more ale, more mead, “More white mead,” “White mead, at this hour!” the houseman muttered as he broached a second cask and gestured for a wealh to remove the empty), the confidential adviser from Eorpwald, the sulky new king-to-be of the East Anglisc, and his two sons, the young æthelings Eadfrith and Osfrith (no daughter, no future peaceweaver as yet). Edwin’s gaze moved from one to another and back again, head tilted. Hild had seen a dog look at his master that way when trying to guess which hand held the bone.
Gwen woke from some dream with a muffled bark and shook Hild off into the grass and scratched mightily, and stretched, and set the whole pack to shaking and stretching and scratching, and Hild after a moment tried it, too: the long stretch with both arms, then the legs, one at a time. It felt good. The push of her feet against the turf, the long line of her back. She did it again. Cian, next to her, copied her, limb for limb. Then he tried to scratch behind his ear with his right foot and fell over, giggling, and then, though she knew it was impossible, she had to try, too.
They howled with laughter, and the dogs bayed and one, confused, snapped at another, and soon they were snarling and foaming and the warriors shouting and flinging arm rings as bets. One hound clamped another’s muzzle between its teeth and, neck rigid, haunches bulging and shining with effort, hauled it, screaming and bleeding, across the turf, clods of dirt ripping free as both fought to push in different directions. Hild was glad when Domnach, the Irish dog boy, came running with whip and raw meat and beat the hounds into whining submission. She stared at the bloody trails gouged by both dogs.
The king used the distraction to send the petitioner away with a fine knife and no decision.
* * *
Hild was seven, in the stone undercroft of the palace at York, helping her mother count the tuns of honey. Her mother told her she would be seated at the high table for Modresniht, one of the twelve winter feasts.
“You’re to sit by the king. The queen, too. If she’s well. You’re to talk to him.” She counted on her fingers again. “That makes three dozen. Do you have the tally sticks?”
Hild held up the smooth, notched sticks. You’re to sit by the king. You, not We. But she had learnt to say nothing until she understood. She would think about it later.
She loved the undercroft. It was vast and cool and mysterious, room after room, with water running along the southern wall in a sharp-edged gravel-bottomed channel. One room, with thick walls, no windows, and a stout, banded door, was full of treasure, but Edwin kept a man outside it at all times, even during feasts, and Hild had never seen the hoard of gold and garnets that Cian—one early evening, as they ate small wrinkled apples and hard cheese and fresh hazelnuts—assured her were heaped in piles on the tile floor. Hereswith had snorted and said Cian had never seen it, either. And then the two of them fell to throwing nutshells at each other and pulling each other’s hair. They did that a lot now, since Cian had carelessly months ago boasted that his father was a real king, with a real kingdom, and Hereswith shouted back that Ceredig was the chief of a tiny wealh forest who, even now, was being hunted like a wounded boar through the wood he’d once called home for killing her father, and Hild’s, who if he’d lived would one day have been overking of all the isle.
Hild: A Novel Page 3