The king’s gesiths’ belts and baldric buckles could each have rendered enough gold to buy a prize ram and two ewes. Osric’s were scarcely less splendid, and even the men of the Deiran thegns Wilgar and Trumwine could have been the gesiths of lesser kings. Many rode still spattered across face and sword arm with the blood of the sacrificial bullock. Coifi would stay in Goodmanham, home of his god, praying for an easy journey brimming with good fortune. He had promised the new enclosure by the time they returned. Hild still hadn’t asked Fursey what he’d meant by his remark about them only having a year or two to enjoy it. How did that fit into the great weave?
Fursey rode a creamy gelding. No priest pony for him. He rode now as a prince of Munster, with marten fur trimming his fine black robe and rings on his fingers—though being in skirts he carried no sword. And behind everything creaked the swaying wagons, pulled by oxen with white-painted horns. One wagon, the one with the gilded elm wheel hubs and the pliant willow bed covered with feather bolsters, Hereswith’s wagon, had a pale, sueded covering painted with the Deiran boar’s head in blood-red. Later, of course, that covering would be taken down and folded carefully until their triumphal entry into the vill of the king of the East Angles, and a plain brown leather awning raised in its stead. But even that leather was the finest cowhide, dyed in one batch to the colour of walnuts.
* * *
It took them nine days to travel from Goodmanham to Lindum, a prosperous wool-and-leather trading centre overflowing its crumbling Roman walls. The war band, taking it easy, could have done it in two—less if they’d been willing to abuse their horses—but the wagons were like houses on wheels and not to be hurried. They stayed only one night. The city reminded Hild of Caer Luel, though less ruined and more patched: thatching on the roofs where the tiles had fallen away, timber replacing broken stone lintels. The chief man, Cuelgils, called himself princeps. The walls of his great hall were painted like the fading pictures in the understorey of the hall at York.
“Princeps,” Fursey had snorted, during the usual ceremonies. “I doubt he can even read.” But he’d said it in Irish, just in case.
The milestone outside Lindum, beyond the city’s tannery and wool-fulling stench, was made of pale grey stone, as thick as Hild’s thigh and taller than a tall man on a horse. It was much taller than Fursey. Taller even than Lintlaf, the hero of the ride to Tinamutha and proud as Thunor of the new gold ring from the king, glinting at the hilt of his sword. But a hero needs to constantly burnish his deeds in the eyes of others, he must seek out opportunities to shine, and Lintlaf had appointed himself guardian to the strange maid and the prince-priest. The two reeked of wyrd. Something was bound to happen at some point, and his name would be gilded by songs of fresh prowess.
When they reined in by the stone, therefore, so did Lintlaf, and the column of wagons toiled on into the overcast afternoon.
When Fursey and Hild dismounted, Lintlaf sighed. He loosened his sword just in case, though the road hereabouts was well cleared of scrub and any possible hiding place for wild men and robbers.
While their horses stood patiently nose to nose, the maid and the Irish priest walked around the stone. The day was hot and bright as dirty water, with no sharp shadows, no clean wind. Perhaps the gods would fight later, throwing insult and thunderbolt at each other then weeping with rage until the ditches at either side of the road runnelled and gushed with their tears.
“‘Durobrivae something miles,’” the maid read to Fursey. She had to stand on her tiptoes to touch the wind-scoured numbers: LII. “The citizens of Lindum paid for this road. Is that right?”
“It is.”
“But on the last one it said Emperor Caracalla restored the roads ‘which had fallen into ruin and disuse through old age.’” The priest said nothing. “Fifty-two!” the maid said triumphantly. “Fifty-two miles to Durobrivae! What’s Durobrivae?”
“The place fifty-two miles farther south on this road.”
Which Lintlaf suspected meant he had no idea.
It was hot, and it seemed the stone would tell them nothing more. They walked back to where Lintlaf held their horses. He led the horses to a piece of stone—part of a broken wall of some redcrest building of long ago—which the priest used first to mount. As Lintlaf handed the maid her reins and she boosted herself into the saddle, he nodded at the milestone and said, “Are the runes favourable?”
“We’ll be in Durobrivae in … nine days. If the gods give us good weather.”
He looked at the sky and shook his head. “At least the rain will cut the dust.”
The priest rinsed his mouth with beer and spat. “Even dust is better than mud.”
“Too bad,” Lintlaf said. Gloomy lot, priests, no matter who they prayed to.
They cantered along the soft side of the road, Fursey sneezing in the wagon dust, until they reached the front, where they settled in behind the æthelings. Edwin beckoned Hild forward.
“What did the stones tell you?”
“That it’s the same distance to Durobrivae as we’ve travelled from Goodmanham.”
“And did the stones tell you that the road is very good for a while, so that we’ll do nine days’ travel in eight?”
She shook her head.
“I travelled this road eight years ago.”
Eight years ago. When he’d taken the throne that should have been her father’s, her father who died poisoned like a dog.
Edwin’s horse sidestepped. “Don’t look at me like that.” He had his thumb on his seax. Then he relaxed and laughed. “Eight years, eh, Lilla?”
Lilla said, “It rained then, too, my king.”
“So it did. But this time we have servants, and this time we’re in no hurry.” And he shouted at Coelgar’s young son, who was riding ahead with the standard-bearer. “Coelfrith! Send your men to find a place to stop.” He sniffed the still air. “There’s a river nearby. Bound to be a place to shelter and eat something hot before the weather gods start their games.”
* * *
They stopped a mile farther on, where a well-used trackway showed many travellers before had turned off the road to the graceful curve of a river with two convenient hills, a mixed hazel and oak wood, and what might have been the ruins of a bridge from the bank to the little island midstream.
The gesiths had time for an hour’s war play—they formed two shield walls and took turns pushing each other across the meadow and trying to stab at lower legs and feet with their leaf-bladed spears—and the housefolk to heat the porridge and roasted sheep and heather beer Cuelgils had given them in parting, before hissing rain turned their fires to ash and mud.
Some of the younger gesiths, half drunk, staged small group attacks with sword and shield. Like Hild, the older ones sought shelter. They knew from long experience that beer wears off by dark but clothes stay damp until morning, and wet blades and chain-link armour rust slowly and thoroughly if not sanded and regreased immediately.
Hild sat in her mother and sister’s wagon while the rain drummed on the waxed canvas pegged tentlike over the oiled leather canopy. The rain was coming straight down, so Breguswith had left the doorway unlaced, for the air and light.
They sat on the padded floor, their backs against cushioned chests cunningly carpentered to hold a variety of objects safely as they travelled. Breguswith and Hereswith talked quietly of etiquette in the south and eastern Angle courts, with Mildburh occasionally adding her perspective on the Saxons. Ædilgith and Folcwyn embroidered the sleeves of a dress, though Folcwyn spent more time wiping her forehead and neck than plying her needle. Hild lay with her head on Hereswith’s thigh, half listening, half drowsing, tolling through the carnelians around her wrist. She wondered what Ædilgith and Folcwyn thought about having to stay among the East Anglisc with Hereswith, and what Cian might be doing at the Bay of the Beacon.
Breguswith talked about ancestry. When she talked about her relatives, the Oiscingas of Kent, her Jutish accent broadened. Hild listened to the famil
iar chant. Her uncle Æthelberht, dead king of Kent. Her cousin Eadbald, now king of Kent. Æthelwald, her younger cousin, ætheling of Kent and prince of the West Kentishmen.
Hild tolled a bead, a big one, the one the colour of an old flame. Eadbald, uncle. She didn’t bother with Æthelwald—he was sickly—and Eadbald already had two sons.
Ricula, Breguswith’s aunt, married Sledd, of the East Saxons. Breguswith paused and looked at Hereswith, who chanted, “Sledd, father of Sabert, the father of Sæward, now dead, and Seaxred king.”
“And Seaxbald,” Mildburh said.
Hild tolled a little bead, the one with the brown occlusion like a drying wound. Seaxbald, cousin.
“They have a sister,” Breguswith said to Hereswith. “Saewara. Now wife to Anna.” Anna, Æthelric Short Leg’s younger brother and heir. “You’ll have a cousin at court.”
Saewara, cousin. Enemy or friend?
The West Saxons, Breguswith went on, Cynegils and his three sons, were friendly enough with their eastern kin.
She sorted through her beads to find the asymmetrical one, deep angry red. Cynegils of the Gewisse. Then three reddish-orange beads for his sons. One had a chip. She named that one Cwichelm, the eldest. Bad-tempered, all of them, and greedy.
Lightning cracked. Young, drunken gesiths hooted. Hild knew they would be jabbing their spears at the sky, daring Thunor to fling one of his bolts at them. She’d seen Thunor answer such a taunt, last year, just south of the wall. Thunor did not like to be made game of.
Fursey would be with the older gesiths and thegns, gaming, drinking, picking their thoughts. She pondered the Frankish horses in the Goodmanham byre, the fact that her mother had the news of Rædwald’s death before Edwin, before the king. Her mother was a daughter of kings, widow of a man who should have been king, mother of a future queen, cousin to every court in the land and not a few across the sea. And yet Fursey had had the news earlier still. How?
The rain surged. The wagon rocked slightly under the weight of water. The ropes thrummed. Breguswith’s voice rose and fell.
* * *
They rode through a land washed clean and humming with plenty, Lintlaf frankly dozing in the saddle behind them. His mail smelt of rust.
Hild tolled through her beads for Fursey, explaining who was the biggest and most brightly coloured, and why.
“You have forgotten the most powerful of all.” He leaned across her and tapped a small, fiery bead, almost yellow in the morning sun. “You forgot Christ.”
“A god?” He wasn’t supposed to talk about that.
“A decidedly worldly influence. The Frankish queen who married your uncle in Kent brought Romans with her. Not soldiers but priests. Bishops.”
She shrugged. “The wealh have bishops.” A mangy lot.
“Roman bishops are different. They’re as much ealdormen as priests.”
Hild scratched the back of her hand. After the rain, midges were swarming.
“These priestly reeves collect not for their king but for the bishop of Rome.”
The bishop of Rome. A kind of priestly overking, then, but unacknowledged. She tried to imagine a system of ealdormen who were reeving for an overking no one knew about. “Why don’t the kings kill the reeving priests?”
Fursey smiled.
“They’re useful to him?”
“Very. They read.”
They read.
The sense of the world shifting was so strong she swayed in the saddle.
They read.
One man in Kent or East Anglia could write something and give it to a man, who could gallop until he and his horse were half dead, then pass it to another man, a stranger, who also could gallop, or board a ship, and pass it to another messenger, and another. The message would cross the island in a day. It wouldn’t be garbled. It couldn’t be intercepted and understood by any but priests. Shave-pated spies. Not just skirt on one side and sword on the other but book balanced against blade.
“Close your mouth, it will fill with flies.” He looked enormously pleased with himself.
8
THE GLORY THAT WAS THE VAST AND GLITTERING vill of Rendlesham made Edwin very angry indeed. But he chewed his moustaches in private. In public—sitting at table with Eorpwald in the great and graceful hall with the beautifully tiled Roman-style floor and painted walls, riding past the golden cornfields to get to the king’s forest flickering with game, inspecting the vill’s port two miles away at Woodbridge with its acres of sail-making and rope-making yards—he smiled and smiled. His gesiths, who had seen this smile before, turned their dread into boasts and picked fights wherever they went; Breguswith was kept busy with willow bark and comfrey, mint and lavender oil, malt vinegar and honey. Even old Burgræd dislocated his knee in a wrestling match. Breguswith wrenched it back into place without a word and slapped on a poultice of warmed oatmeal. She did not offer him willow-bark tea or her more precious hellebore. She had no time for this foolishness: There were Kentish envoys, public and not so public, with whom she would rather be conferring. She, too, began to smoulder.
Hereswith was as tense as a dog before a fight. Æthelric, ætheling of the East Angles and prince of the North Folk, who called him Ecgric, would arrive that day from his hall at Deorham.
She drove Mildburh, Ædilgith, and Folcwyn to distraction changing her mind: She wanted the lapis braided into her hair and sewn to her veil; no, she wanted the garnets and pearls; no, the beryl and jet. Hild watched her hurl a veil at Mildburh, and then, as it floated airily to the polished board of the floor, snatch it back and tear it to pieces. Her sister wanted to cry, but she was a woman grown. No one must see her tears, not even her women, for fear of bringing shame on the family name. There was nothing Hild could do. This was Hereswith’s wyrd; it had been since Cwenburh’s death.
Fursey seemed untouched by the tensions of the rest of the Northumbrian party. He and Lintlaf had formed an unlikely friendship. One moment they would be laughing over a woman who dropped her basket of eggs when a crow lifted its wings and crak-crakked at her—a very bad omen, but only for the one so scolded—the next seeing who could skip a stone clear across the fishpond where the geese swam.
Hild found them annoying. They disturbed everything. One had to sit still and quiet to really see, really hear. She sent them to visit the temple Rædwald had built a decade before his death, and took herself off to the priests’ meeting place at the edge of the beech coppice by the stream. She settled out of sight in the deep, dappled shade cast by an uncoppiced tree. Beeches were rare north of the Humber, and she loved the way they whispered in the wind, like women before they fell asleep.
The black-robed Christ priests had flocked like crows to the vill after Rædwald’s death. They all worked for different kings, some with the crown shaved—Romans—some with the forehead shaved, but they all wanted Eorpwald to acknowledge the Christ god, all wanted to be allowed to start reeving among the East Angles in his name. Did the shaved foreheads have an overbishop, like the overbishop of Rome? When they rose one by one to speak to the group they spoke Latin, but from the smaller groups Hild heard Frankish, Irish, the comforting Jutish dialects of young Kentish priests, even, she thought, Greek. But no British.
Frankish was a strange, Latin-stained tongue. She understood perhaps one word in three. As always when trying to learn a new language, she opened her mind and let the sound wash through it.
An ant ran over her hand, and another. They shone in the sun like tiny drops of amber. When she was little she had crushed one creeping on a bench to find out what was inside it to make it glow like that. But it had left nothing but a dark smear on the wood. She ignored them.
A man was speaking intensely, passionately, with a strong accent, spattering words about him like molten glass. She closed her eyes. She didn’t understand most of it—heresy, apostasy, Gehenna—but he seemed upset about something Eorpwald had done.
She was tired of listening to irritable people. She stood up and brushed the ants and dust
from her skirts. She would go watch the goldsmiths. Eorpwald had two—and three armourers and two blacksmiths.
* * *
There were more than two dozen men and boys, and a handful of women, working in the bend of the River Deben. The air was busy with the rasp of files, the chink of chisels, and the shirring thump of the slurry tub. It smelt of charcoal and clay, hot metal and wax. Four guards in matching leather tunics stood beneath a huge elm. Sun glinted on the scabbard of her seax as she approached, and they straightened and lifted their spears. Then they saw it was only a maid and grounded their spears again. The two boys at the slurry tub paused in their shaking of the watery clay until a woman at the polishing bench shouted at them.
The chief goldsmith wore a thumb ring and a thick silver twist in his long hair, and his slave collar was a mere gesture, light as a lady’s necklace. He was a Svear. A long-ago sword cut had laid open the left side of his jaw and knocked out all the teeth there. Hild picked her way between the workbenches and waited quietly by his place, careful not to come between him and the light. Eventually the Svear paused, blinked at her, then shouted something mushy and broken over his shoulder. A slave—his collar was heavy—grumbling in Irish, stepped from the heat and shadow of the furnace shelter, wiping his brow with his forearm. He took one look at the cut of her dress, the gold at wrist and waist, that huge seax, and rushed to fetch a little three-legged stool.
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