* * *
Two days later, sitting in the middæg sun in the ruins of Broac, Brocavum that was, Cian was still lost in tales of Yr Hen Ogledd, this time of Ceneu and Gorbanian, the sons of Coel Hen, as told by Uinniau, Rhoedd’s younger sister-son, who had ridden with them to the remains of the fort. Hild, settled on a grassy earthwork, hair tucked behind her ears, listened with only part of her attention; the rest was lost in the flash and colour of the beads around her wrist: another gift, this time from the infant princess Rhianmelldt, a strange, ravaged ælf of a child whose eyes slid side to side ceaselessly. Hild forgot about the princess’s eyes when she saw the beads: seventy-three faceted carnelians.
She had fallen in love with the carnelians there and then. They were all different. In the light of the peat fires and wall torches of the hall, some had gleamed like the jewels of her mother’s dream, garnets in milk; others were more like pearls in blood, or amber in wine. But in the sun, they burnt like a living legend, something forged by a god from a dragon’s heart. They were strung on a cord of yellow silk braided with gold, fastened with a cunning interlocking gold clasp, the string long enough for a grown woman to wear around her neck and draped over her breast. Hild wore them wrapped four times around her left wrist. When the sun struck them, the toasted-bread colour of her skin, of the stone, of the gold and yellow silk was like a world she had never dreamt of.
She asked Uinniau where the beads came from—they had a redcrest look—and he beamed and said he could show her, if she liked, and Cian, too, and in fact it was most curious because it was just two summers ago, at old Broac, not far from the church named after a long-dead relative, Saint Uinniau. Had Hild heard of him? He was a very great saint. Would she like to see the church after they’d seen the fort?
And so she saddled Ilfetu, and Cian his Acærn, and Uinniau, small like many sons of wealh, climbed upon a mare far too big for him—he looked like a freckled apple perched on the saddle—and they trotted off. That is, Ilfetu and the mare trotted, Acærn had to break into a canter every now and again. Hild couldn’t help but think how much better Cian would look on the mare and Uinniau on Acærn. But the life tree didn’t always fruit as expected.
In the ruined fort, Uinniau was now talking in a singsong of Peredur ap Eliffer, beating on the sun-warmed turf with his hand, and Hild recognised the signs; any moment, he and Cian would leap up and start whanging at each other with sticks, and yelling, and trying to persuade her to play the to-be-vanquished enemy.
“I am going to the water’s edge,” she said, gesturing over to the bank where the hobbled horses cropped the grass near a stand of birches, and Cian nodded without taking his eyes off Uinniau.
Hild climbed the tallest birch. She settled in the saddle of a thick bough hanging over the water and thought of nothing in particular amongst the coin-size leaves whose undersides shimmered with water light.
A thin veil of cloud slid over the sun, turning the river from polished silver to dull pewter and the leaves back to matte green. A flash of brown in the reeds told her this would be a good place to find duck eggs in the spring.
From here, all that remained of the fort where they’d dug up the treasures and her beads were two turf banks. Once it had been home to half a hundred horse soldiers from far away. Perhaps their herds had cropped the same grass that Ilfetu nibbled now. She gazed down at the shoulders of her mare, the whorls of grey hair, the fly about to bite at the base of her tail.
She imagined the fort as it would have been in Uinniau’s ten-times great-grandsire’s lifetime: a square of tall wooden walls built of whole trees with their bark still on them and their tips sharpened, neat ditches and banks, a gate in the centre of every wall, the scent of fires cooking unimaginable food, and over everything the smell of horses, the sound of horses, the vibration of horses galloping away.
She always imagined them galloping away, leaving. That’s what the redcrests had done; they’d left. They left behind their stone houses in Caer Luel and beautiful white fountains, their red-tile roofs and straight roads, their perfectly round red bowls with pictures of dogs hunting deer around the rim, their exact corners and glass cups. And now the marble statues had lost their paint and stood melancholy white streaked with moss; tiles had blown off in storms and been patched with reed; men built fire stands directly on the cracked and broken remnants of once-brilliant mosaics.
But the fountain still worked. It was a series of white stone bowls arranged on a white stone stem, like a flowering pinecone made of cold, smooth marble. The spout, taller than Hild, was a leaping fish—a porpoise, said the town reeve. He seemed to know a lot. So Hild had dragged him around the town for hours and made him explain how the water came through pipes, pushed by its own weight downhill, from the hills to the north, how the baths and the hypocaust worked, where the redcrest chief had lived. After she had sent the reeve on his way, bowing and scraping and walking backwards, she returned to the fountain. She sat on the lip of the lowest, widest bowl and dabbled her hand in the cold, clean water and lifted her face to the spray. She thought of Cwenburh and the slow seep of bright blood. Cwenburh should have seen a fountain before she died. But if she had lived that long, Hereswith might not be peaceweaver, and Hild might not be on this journey, might not have seen the glory of water squirting into the sky like a whale’s breath.
* * *
Caer Luel was where she saw a Christ bishop snared by a spell, sitting at a bench holding a strange folded square of leather sewn from smaller pieces towards the light and murmuring. But when she pointed out the black-skirted bishop and asked if it was a ritual to do with light, Uinniau laughed and said he wasn’t a bishop, he was just a priest, and he wasn’t under a spell or making a spell, he was talking with a book. “Bishop Rhuel says a book is full of secret signs that tell a story. A god’s story. It sounds as though it should be interesting, but it isn’t. When he tried to say the story to me there were no heroes, no swords or galloping to battle. Just moony stuff about…” He frowned. “Well, I don’t remember. It was boring. But his book was covered in gold and jewels. Not like that old thing the priest’s reading. Perhaps because Rhuel was a bishop, an overpriest.”
Book, she thought. Secret signs. And gold and jewels. Hereswith might like that. And then she wondered what Hereswith was learning from their mother, and she missed them both.
* * *
It grew colder. They travelled north to Alt Clut, to the great rock fortress in the river mouth ruled by Neithon and his son, Beli. She was excluded from the war councils of Edwin and his sons and chief gesith, for Neithon and his sons were superstitious in the way of Christ people, and they kept making the fluttering sign on their chests when they saw her. Christ people didn’t hold with seers, and maids were not allowed in council. Unlike Rhoedd and the men of Rheged, the men of Alt Clut thought of themselves as equals to Edwin, allies, and he was unwilling to trespass upon their goodwill by insisting she be present. He told Hild this angrily, but he wasn’t angry with her; he was puzzled by something. Being puzzled made him anxious. Being anxious made him angry.
Osfrith, the younger of the æthelings, would sometimes tell her what he knew of the councils but he never remembered very clearly, just shrugged cheerfully and said, Well, it was boring—old men’s talk of corn yields and signs and portents. Hild was left to ask casual questions of the housefolk who carried the wine and built the fires for such meetings, to listen to songs—the Alt Clut seemed obsessed by tales of the Dál Riata to the north and west, of Aedan the Treacherous, who had died before Hild was even born, and of his son, now king, Eochaid Buide. Hild put together her information like a broken redcrest pavement and pondered the picture.
King Eochaid and his Dál Riata were enemies of the Irish Dál Fiatach. Everyone knew this. The Fiatach in turn were enemy to the Dál nAriadne whom Edwin and Rhoedd had beaten soundly on Vannin, and Eochaid was sheltering the Idings. Well and good: Edwin and Eochaid Buide of the Dál Riata were enemies. That was clear. Nothing puzzling a
bout it. So what was bothering Edwin? Whatever it was, it was getting worse.
Now not only did Lilla accompany him everywhere, shield unslung, but Lintlaf, and Coelgar’s son, Coelfrith, shadowed the æthelings. In addition, instead of heading south then east to collect tribute from many, ending with the Gododdin, before joining the women at Yeavering, Edwin began a series of interminable meetings with his own men.
Edwin’s temper grew fouler day by day. He had a woman whipped for spilling ale on his shoe. Eadfrith, only five years older than Cian, swung his new sword at a man at mead for calling him a stripling. He opened the space below the man’s ribs the way the butcher at Yeavering split a side of beef with a cleaver. Hild saw the bloody gape, the flash of white bone and sliced liver, a bubble and then a spurt of red. The man died a day later howling with pain and fever, and Eadfrith had to give up his fine new sword as weregild.
Hild’s dreams of birds stolen from their nests by stoats became so evil Onnen started to stuff her ears with tallow and threatened to find another sleeping place.
“He won’t decide!” Osfrith said one day to Hild, who caught him striding from the hall, his usually sunny face tight with displeasure. “Men will say he is afraid.” He kicked idly at a piglet rooting at the base of a dead section of hedge that ran along the inside of the great ditch before the wall. The piglet, used to such treatment, ran, ears flapping, under the hedge before Osfrith’s shoe connected. His pimples were fading and his jaw thickening. His shoe, once bright red, was now scuffed and mud brown. They had been on the road a long time.
Osfrith, cloakless like all the warrior gesiths, hunched a little and turned away from the wind coming off the river.
“So men will say he is afraid,” Hild said. “Would men be telling the truth?”
“Thunor’s breath!” He stared. “You are stranger than they say. Any man who says the king is afraid will have my sword to face.” He laid his hand on his sword hilt—his battle sword, not one of the new ones he’d received as gifts over the summer.
“I am not a man,” she said. “But nor do I say the king is afraid. I ask about those men who do say so, or might say so. Would they believe what they say?”
Osfrith looked baffled.
Hild sighed to herself. She needed Osfrith to sit a moment, to think. She considered. Boys and young men liked to eat. “Did the king feed you?”
Osfrith shook his head. The wind gusted hard and he hunched tighter.
“I know a woman in the kitchens. There’s a warm fire and cold hare and bannock bread.”
* * *
The bannock was nothing but crumbs, the hare splintered bones, and the pot of ale almost empty. Osfrith picked meat from between his teeth with a sliver of bone, looking more like an ætheling. “No,” he said, “it’s the boats that have Beli and his father muttering like old women.”
“Boats?”
“Irish boats were seen crossing the North Channel from Ireland to the Dál Riata.”
“When?”
“A month past. Or more. And many more than usual. More than enough for an army—”
An army.
“—but there’s been no fires,” he said, “no fighting, no stream of homeless south, no slaves for sale at the port. There’s been no battle.”
“Not here,” said Hild, and her hands were cold with dread. Where are the birds when we steal eggs from their nest? Now she knew.
* * *
Grey sky, grey rock, grey water. Edwin sat on a boulder overhanging the great flat estuary, throwing stones. Eadfrith ætheling and a knot of the younger gesiths stood nearby, but not too close. It was clear by the set of the king’s shoulders that he was best left alone.
Hild checked to be sure her mantle fell in deep folds, that the hair she’d had Onnen dress that morning was in place, that her pair of huge gilt brooches, Neithon’s gift, were not crooked. She adjusted her carnelians for maximum flash and sparkle, and laid a hand on the hilt of her slaughter seax. She stood tall. She was the bringer of light. Let them call her hægtes if they must. If she didn’t speak, her mother and Hereswith might die.
“King.”
He ignored her. One of the gesiths shouted over, “He’s in no mood for games, princess.”
“King.”
Another gesith detached himself from the knot. “Come away, little maid.” Lintlaf. “Come away.” He reached for her arm.
Hild drew herself up, fixed Lintlaf’s brown eyes with her fathomless gaze, then sought and found Eadfrith’s. In her seer’s voice she said, “You know I am no maid. And I have a dream to tell the king.”
That got Edwin’s attention. He held his hand out to Lintlaf: stop. And jerked his chin at Hild: speak. His eyes crawled green and black as buzzflies on old meat.
Last time her mother had been there to explain. Last time the king had been in a good mood.
“King.” The words, as they almost always did in Anglisc, caught in her throat like a bird bone or a mouthful of feathers. “The stoat steals fledglings from the nest when the birds are away catching worms.”
No change in Edwin’s expression. Why couldn’t he see? Why could none of them see?
“King. We’re the birds.”
Now his face was stone. “I am not a bird.”
“Boats,” she said desperately. “I dreamt of boats.” His whole face sharpened. “The stoat is coming in a boat. To the nest. My mother is there. And Hereswith.”
“Your— Bebbanburg. You’re talking of Bebbanburg?”
She nodded.
“And who is the stoat?” He was standing over her—when did that happen?
Her eyes were level with his throat apple. She raised them to meet his. “Fiachnae mac Báetáin. In a boat, going the long way around to take Bebbanburg.”
* * *
Edwin, once free from trying to make sense of a puzzle as ungraspable as mist, and with a clear prophecy to hew to, marched his war band south at lightning speed, ignoring the coastal strongholds of Galloway and their expected tribute. As they passed Dumfries, he said to Hild, “I know to the ounce what I should have taken from them. You’d best not be wrong.”
At the wall, they reloaded the pack ponies and Edwin detailed Eadfrith and Coelgar and twelve gesiths, including Coelfrith, to escort the treasure directly to the stronghold of York while the lightened war band rode for the port at Tinamutha and thence up the coast to Bebbanburg. Onnen gave Coelfrith a significant look as he mounted, and Hild knew she had reminded the steward’s son that some of the treasure belonged directly to the princess Hild, that there would be an accounting.
Edwin watched the ponies disappearing in the direction of Broac and then turned to Hild. “The ride will be hard. You will keep up, if I have to tie you to your horse. You will tell me of every thought, every dream, every twitch of your eye or flight of birds. If you are right, you will be honoured beyond mortal ken. If you’re wrong and we fail, I will strike off your head, feed your offal to my dogs, and bury your hægtes head by your buttocks in an unmarked hole.”
Hild faced him, unflinching, because Edwin was like a dog: show fear and he would chase you down. But then she broke her gaze. To challenge an uneasy king before his men was to invite death.
Edwin raised his hand and shouted to the nearly three hundred gesiths remaining. “We ride in service to a dream from the gods. If our dreamer’s horse fails, you will give her yours. If her food runs low, you will give your own. She will light our way. And now we ride.”
* * *
A horse died—already tired, its leg plunged through a burrow and snapped—at Haltwhistle, and its rider was abandoned in a ramshackle farm holding with a thin woman and her husband, a witless farmer. No doubt the place would have a new master come spring.
The first snows settled in the folds of their thick cloaks as they passed Chesters. At Corabrig they found a farmer with a tall horse—a raw-boned roan, but fresh and eager—willing to part with it for a silver arm ring, and lots were drawn for a lithe, hardy rider to gallo
p for life itself all the way to Tinamutha to set in motion ships for Bebbanburg. Lintlaf won and light travel foods—twice-baked bread, dried berries, smoked meat—were offered from all sides.
As Lintlaf packed his saddlebags, the roan, a farm horse and confused by the press, danced and kicked but eventually Lintlaf boosted himself into the saddle. He was more excited than the horse, his lips red as carmine and eyes brilliant. He would ride for the king and glory!
Edwin kneed his chestnut close, clapped Lintlaf on the back, and slung his cloak back to show his royal arm rings. “If you’ve ships for half of us ready to sail when we arrive, you shall have one of these, and not the least.” And Lintlaf rode into the east to wild cheering.
Every morning it was dark when they woke, dark as they struggled into the saddle, dark as they plodded along, walk, trot, walk, trot, on their tired mounts, dark even at midday when they stopped in the lee of a hill that seemed to touch a sky as heavy as the dark stones of the wall. The wind was relentless, blowing dry snow up and about them like sand, even on the leeward side of a hill. Hild looked at the hot spark and flicker of her carnelians and pretended they were coals. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been warm. Couldn’t remember even when she’d eaten something hot. Her jaws were powerful from chewing fire-smoked meat and waybread dunked in freezing water. Ilfetu’s ribs stood out like the strakes of a ship. Her dog, Od, was the only one of the pack that didn’t look like a hound of Hel, a running skeleton with burning eyes. And they all watched her, all the time, and none came near—except, in the dark of night, and only briefly, Onnen and Cian. She had accepted the mantle of the uncanny and until the end of this journey it was her fate. It was her vision they marched to, into a future she had dreamt for them.
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