Hild: A Novel

by Nicola Griffith

  As they rode away, none of them blinked, no one’s smile wavered. But in her head, Hild was already imagining her toast to Hereswith on her own birth day next month, and the simple message she would send on her sister’s birth day in Œstremonath.

  And when she had imagined every dot of ink and wrinkle of parchment, she began composing messages to Cian and Begu and Onnen.

  9

  IN YEAVERING, AT ŒSTREMONATH, Hild stood in the doorway of the women’s hall and faced the late-morning sun. She raised her cup of grass-rich buttermilk and drank to Hereswith, and felt, for a moment, the sun warm on Hereswith’s back as her sister faced north by northwest and lifted a cup of mead to Hild. But she didn’t send a message: There was no one to trust with the spoken words, no one but Fursey, and East Anglia was too far.

  But she could send him to the Bay of the Beacon. And when spring turned to summer and travel was easier, she did.

  And now they were back in Goodmanham, and it was almost Weodmonath again. Fursey should be back in a month. On the rough northern pasture, the lambs looked nearly as burly as their shorn mothers. In the valley and on the southern slopes, barley heavy with seed bent its whiskers towards the sun-beaten earth; the weeds stood out livid green against the dark gold grain. Children took turns banging sticks to drive away crows. The crows crak-crakked and rose like black smoke, then settled in the next field and watched with oily black eyes, or indulged in aerial shows with the jackdaws that lived in the elms. During æfen, while the urchins frightened each other with tales—of ghost crows, and giant crows, and breath-stealing crows—Coelgar’s understewards pulled at their beards in frustration as the birds flitted quietly back to the grain and ate their fill.

  A week before harvest, the children went out with wide baskets to pull the weeds, which they then fed to the goats. The milk began to taste strange, as it did every year at this time.

  The wild taste fed Hild’s restlessness. She climbed her favourite ash tree but couldn’t see anything but pictures of Hereswith in childbed, screaming for her sister.

  She strode the woods, wondering if Fursey had given Cian his belt-buckle knife, if he liked it. What if he laughed and thought it foolish? Begu would like her comb, surely. But Begu had such a flighty mind, always flitting from one thing to another. Who? she imagined Begu saying to Fursey. Hild? Oh, yes, she was here last year.

  And Onnen. Learn to read, she’d told Fursey to tell her almost-mother. You must learn to read. But Onnen, she knew, would always think of her as the child squirming at the washtub as the cold water ran down her back, or the foolish girl who misled Begu about being gemæcce. She wouldn’t listen.

  Hild tramped the wolds, watching birds at the edges of things and gathering plants for her mother. Whatever she did she would find herself thinking of people who weren’t there: Surely Guenmon checked that Bán had a new cloak before winter, or Did Fursey remember to seek out Cú and give him a honey cake all for himself? Once, she remembered she’d sent no message for Cædmon.

  And then she was back to Hereswith, to the empty bed in her room and the constant listening for the pointed comment that never came.

  * * *

  And Herewith’s absence was not the only change.

  Gwladus voiced strong opinions of what was and was not proper for Hild—she was worse than Onnen that way—and in the vill Hild found herself dressed more splendidly and fed more regularly. She shot up like one of the weeds in the barley field and grew tender breast buds.

  Gwladus also grew. She had been eye-catching before but now her pale hair—paler than barley, paler than wheat, paler even than the bryony growing by the alders along the beck—gleamed, her skin grew smooth and tight, and she smelt like wild honey. Lintlaf and the other gesiths seemed mazed by her. For Hild this was useful. Gwladus listened to many conversations between men who forgot to take care, and she repeated them to Hild word for word: Cwichelm, eldest of the ambitious West Saxon brothers, was rumoured to intrigue with old Cadfan of Gwynedd. Young Cadwallon ap Cadfan was in Ireland. British and Irish priests had been seen everywhere—even with Cuelgils of Lindsey, even at Arbeia, Osric’s house in Tinamutha—carrying messages back and forth.

  At night, when Gwladus was asleep on her pallet on the floor, Hild lay in her wide bed—her mother was elsewhere again; she didn’t want to think about that—and mulled the rumours and whispers, turning her carnelians, flicking the bright angry orange beads one way then another. Cwichelm. Sending embassies to all parts of the country—even the north. What was he planning? She mused on the words and beads for days but couldn’t see the pattern. There was a piece missing.

  Fursey would know more, but he wouldn’t be back from Mulstanton for half a month.

  * * *

  Hild and her mother worked side by side in the still room. They stood hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder: Hild was now as tall as Breguswith. While her mother rinsed an ox horn with hot vinegar, Hild strained the onion and garlic mash, steeped in a copper bowl for nine days with wine and bull’s gall, through a fine cloth. When the liquid was clear, Hild poured it carefully into the clean horn. Breguswith pushed in the wooden stopper and Hild warmed beeswax to seal it. In winter, when eyelids were red and angry, they’d dip a feather into the mixture and use it to paint a line along the eyelash roots to treat styes. Eye infections were always worse in winter when everyone crowded together and the fires smoked.

  “Did you harvest that figwort you said you’d found?”

  Hild shook her head, but carefully; she didn’t want to spill the hot wax on the back of Breguswith’s hand. “Tomorrow, or the day after.”

  That would be another morning of squeezing the orange sap into brass pots and warming it gently with honey. That mixture was good for pink eye, but it was best fresh.

  Orange reminded Hild of Cwichelm. She told her mother of the rumours. “And the priests have been seen as far north as the Tine.”

  Breguswith started stripping the leaves from the ribwort Hild had brought in that morning. “The Irish are always plotting something. Always sending their priests hither and thither.” She gave Hild a sideways look. “Not the only ones.”

  “Fursey carries my messages to Cian and Onnen.” And Begu, but she had never told her mother about Begu. “He’ll be back any day. When I send him out again, are there any words you’d like him to take to Onnen?”

  “None I’d trust a priest with.”

  Hild realised her mother had deflected her somehow, as she always did.

  While her mother chopped the ribwort, Hild dipped up sheep grease from the little pot on the shelf and rubbed it into her hand. This year there were so many housefolk at the vill, so many women arriving with the new folk, so many slaves given in tribute, that Hild, king’s niece, king’s seer, had not been called upon to help with shearing. If Hereswith were here, she wouldn’t be needed in the dairy.

  There were many new gesiths, too, so many—Anglisc and Saxon, Irish and Frankish, Svear and Pict—swearing oaths to the new overking, feasting and gorging and drinking themselves to a heroic stupor, that beef and mead were running low and Coelgar scowled at the number of boastful mouths to be fed day in, day out. Edwin had taken to counting his arm rings. He would have to start another war soon to maintain his gift-giving.

  War. Cwichelm. Cadwallon. Cuelgils. Osric? When would Edwin feel strong enough to openly oppose his cousin? What if he left it too late?

  A thought struck her. What if he was planning to use her as a peaceweaver? She looked at her mother, who shifted slightly but didn’t acknowledge Hild’s attention. What was she planning?

  * * *

  Hild hung her hose in her belt and dabbled her toes in the pool where she had once sat with Cian, where she had made her offering, long ago. It smelt green and cool and secret.

  Goodmanham drowsed, but Hild was wide awake.

  The pattern was changing, she could taste it, feel it in the different weight and heft of her body every morning, in the way her mother looked at her. One
day, to suit some purpose of their own, her mother or her uncle would pluck her from her life and send her to live in a fen with a man she didn’t know. In the world of skirt and sword, it was part of her wyrd. But not all her wyrd, and not yet. There was so much to learn, so much to know.

  She stopped kicking and let the water re-form its smooth mirror. Her feet looked broken and badly set, like the stick she had shown Cian.

  The bird cherry—so much fruit this year—whispered. The ripples on the pool’s smooth sandy bottom lifted and shimmered. Sprite breath.

  She didn’t turn around.

  “I know you’re there. Help me. I offered you my tooth. Help me.”

  A cherry dropped to the grass. Dragonflies hummed.

  * * *

  The barley and wheat were cut and sheaved, the stooks drying, the hay baled, and Hild was looking for Fursey’s return, when the lords and chiefs began to arrive for the overking’s festival. Osric came first, with his great retinue, second only to the king’s. Then Hunric and Wilstan, Tondhelm and Trumwine, Cealred and Rhond, each with a dozen lesser thegns. They greeted Edwin with respect. Harvest had been early and yields good, from the wide valleys to the wild uplands, the sea to the mountains. Clearly the gods favoured this one. Coifi, as chief priest of the chief god of the chief king of the Angles, smiled and grew as sleek and self-satisfied as a seal.

  This was the fruition of his ambition. He had spent a year supervising the building of Woden’s great enclosure, months boiling flax oil and wood tar and mixing them with pigment to make the vivid reds, whites, and blues to paint the wooden walls of the roofless one-storey corridor coiled like a snake around the great totem. His underpriests had coddled the white calf and the white sheep, had worked during the dark of the moon to ready the decoctions of the thung flowers, wolfsbane, and nightshade, and elixirs of certain berries and mushrooms. This was the pinnacle of their year: the ceremony of Edwin, overking, son of the son of the many-times son of Woden, god of the Yffings.

  But change was coming. I’d give them a year. Two at most.

  * * *

  Hild wore green. The entire household wore green. They stood before the entrance of the enclosure as the sun began to set. Coifi, in white, stood in front of the doorway, flanked by two burning torches thrust deep in the turf; no cressets, for the god permitted no iron. He held an ancient birch bowl. Thin, eerie music—pipes and horns and drums—skirled about them with the evening breeze. The musicians were hidden at the heart of the enclosure; the music seemed to come from the sky. God music.

  The gesiths were nervous. They were always nervous when they had to leave behind every blade, even their eating knives.

  The king took the first sip from the priest’s bowl. As he passed between the flames, onto the path they would all walk tonight, he seemed to be trembling. Perhaps it was the breeze catching his clothes. The music rose and fell. Coifi nodded to the æthelings, who walked side by side. Another pause, then Osric. Hild followed immediately behind with Osric’s pale-skinned, dark-haired children. Little Osthryth took her hand. Hild looked down. Such a soft small hand.

  She smiled up at Hild, and her milk teeth showed sharp and white as an ermine’s.

  Hild let go of Osthryth and took the bowl in both hands. She sipped the thin, bitter stuff and swallowed.

  Her lips went numb, and then the drug was coursing through her, cold as a cataract. Her tendons tightened and flattened against her bones. She trembled as she walked alone between the flames.

  The corridor was high-walled and lidded by nothing but a now-lurid sunset. The king and Osric had vanished, gone ahead around the curve, and Hild walked, alone—they all walked alone—along the inwardly spiralling path painted with tales, the characters from songs she had heard in hall all her life, songs of music and magic and might, of heroes and beginnings. The story of the Yffings. As she walked their eyes stared from cunningly painted knotholes in the elm, the prows of their ships gleamed along its ridged grain: the three ships of long ago, filled with land-hungry lords and their men in old-fashioned helmets and hammered armour. She shivered, standing between the narrow wooden walls—and shivered as her ship’s keel ground up the pebbles and coarse sand of the beach in Thanet. Her throat bobbled as she leapt with her men from their ship, roaring. Ravens fought over broken bodies, Britons knelt bareheaded …

  For a heartbeat she was Hild again. Huge, vivid scenes of great faces and blood-spattered swords, all outlined in black, loomed from the curving walls. Everything stank of wood tar. Then she was in the forest, running through the mist to the pounding beat beat beat of her heart, driving the sinews of her forefather as he howled and ran, tireless, through the ferns and brambles, leaping the stream, pounding through the heather, burning out the Britons, sweeping the ghosts of the slain to the hills, taking their gold.

  Then she stood in the heart of the enclosure. A massive carved totem reached up and up into the now-inky night sky. A shadowy crowd thronged the space—not only her uncle and her mother, her cousins Oswine and Osthryth, but all those who had gone before: her father and his father, and his, and back to Wilfgisl the Wide and his father, Westerfalca, whose chestnut hair sprouted from their nostrils and the backs of their hands like burnished wire, back farther to Swebdæg and Sigegar, who had the same ermine-pale faces and sharp teeth as her cousins, to Wædæg and—embodied in the great totem—Woden himself.

  A circle of torches caught and flared around the totem with a soft whump. The light and music swelled, rose to a point, and threw the attention of the living up and up where the great totem vanished into the well of the sky. It was built of three oak trunks cunningly laid end to end and carved and painted and gilded with the most magical totems of their people: the boar and the raven, the flame and the eagle, the lightning and the sea, and He Who Holds It All—god of weather and war, life and death, and the turning of the world, Woden himself, with his beard and hands wrapping around and around and around in a dizzying whorl. Clouds unfurled from the moon. God’s eye drenched them in white light.

  The gesiths sang. Hild thought she sang, too, but she also thought perhaps she was flying, like the soft indigo clouds far, far away. Then the torches were guttering, and the stars were out, wheeling, and the totem seemed like the axle around which the whole world turned.

  * * *

  A fortnight after most of the lords had left Goodmanham—though Osric lingered—Fursey dropped his bulging satchel on the grass by the stream and sat down next to Hild. “Your wealh woman said I’d find you here.”

  She nodded and split the daisy stem with her thumbnail.

  “What, no ‘Welcome home, my hero, was it a terrible hard journey? What news from Mulstanton?’”

  “It’s an easy journey down the coast and up the river. You probably slept and diced most of the way.”

  That was in fact exactly what Fursey had done. “Well. I took the liberty of directing your woman to the kitchens to bring us sustenance. And I told her if she brought small beer I would shrivel her soul.” Hild plucked another daisy. “She was with that moony young gesith again.”

  Hild slotted the second daisy stem through the first. She was making a chain. His sisters used to do that. “It suits me to have it so.”

  Fursey looked at her more closely. “What’s wrong, child?”

  “I’m not a child. Not anymore.”

  “Stand up for me.” After a moment, she did. “Ah. I see. Yes. You’re as tall as that bird cherry there.” And beginning to bud. A difficult time. The child’s mother should be taking more care. She would flower soon. “And your lady mother? She is well?”

  Hild sat again, arranging her skirts carefully. “She is becoming friendly with Osric.”

  “Ah,” he said again.

  She lifted her gaze to his. He’d seen the North Channel west of Manau swell and heave like that before the storm that killed his older brother. He looked away.

  He pulled his satchel to him. “Then let’s on to what I have from Mulstanton. Cian sends his
best love, wishes me to tell you he could take the hero Owein and Gwvrling the Giant one-handed, and thinks he is second only to God in the favour of everyone female.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “No,” Fursey said comfortably, “but he was thinking it.”

  “Is it true?”

  Fursey laughed. “Of course it’s not true! The boy is not yet seventeen. But he’s fine and handsome, a proper warrior, and foster-son, only son, of a lord. He’s tall, and will be taller when he gets his full growth, though not your height, I don’t think, not quite, and the girls, well, the girls are beginning to notice.”

  “Does he notice back?”

  “He does indeed. From the flirty little grins he thought were so private I believe he might have tumbled one of the dairymaids.”

  “Bote, Cædmon’s sister?”

  Fursey shook his fingers. “I couldn’t say. But she’s a pretty thing.”

  “And Cædmon?”

  Fursey sniffed. “I had no occasion to talk to a cowherd.”

  “Onnen?”

  “Ah, now there’s a woman.” Fursey scratched at his ankle. “She has Mulstan barking like a seal and fat as a hog.”

  “But is she well?”

  “Oh, she’s very well. More than well. And she bids you to visit. If your mother sees fit.”

  At the mention of her mother the child pulled the head off a daisy. He waited until she’d unthreaded it from the chain and picked another.

  “I told her you would be pleased to think you were welcome, that you would find it a joy to visit, fate and family circumstances allowing. And that no doubt your lady mother felt the same.” No jerk this time. She learnt control so fast. “At which point she snorted—most unbecoming for the lady of the household—and said”—he half closed his eyes—“‘And no doubt, priest, the freemartin will give milk and the swallows fly north for winter,’ and she asked about Hereswith, your sister. We spent some time worrying about her situation in the fens, with a man who already has a woman and two children.”