“It is.”
His heart beat high but steady, and he met her gaze—blushing but not looking away.
She picked up the cup. “Oeric, son of Grim, I, Hild, daughter of Hereric Yffing and Breguswith Oiscinga, do swear on my oath, on this mead by this river under this tree, that I will be as your lord. I will protect you, feed you, defend your name and person while you are true.”
She took a sip and passed the cup to Oeric. He took it with both hands, shaking slightly, and she remembered the weight of Edwin’s feast cup that Modresniht long ago.
He raised the cup to her. “I, Oeric, son of Grim, swear on my oath, on this mead by this river under this tree, that I will be your man. I will protect you, obey you, defend your name and person as long as I breathe.”
He sipped the mead. Smiled tremulously.
“Finish it,” Hild said. He was going to need it.
* * *
The king’s new thegns sent to their farmsteads for tools and men, and the great clearing by the Aire rang with hammers and adzes and clattered with lathes. The king’s hall rose.
The days grew colder and the nights colder still. Hild missed the warmth of Begu sleeping by her.
They woke to hedges salted with frost that didn’t melt until noon. The king rode out with Osric Whiphand, Paulinus Crow, Coelfrith Steward, and Cian Boldcloak to tour the land of his new thegns and inspect the fortifications at Aberford. While they were gone, Stephanus paired priests and parties of gesiths and sent them north and south and east and west to root out any wealh with a tonsure and drive them from Elmet. “None must remain,” he said. “They are spies.”
Hild persuaded Pyr that none would think him soft if the Loid workers were fed and sheltered, for a healthy Loid worked faster. And besides, she spoke for the king when she said that in Elmet now there were no more Anglisc, no more Loid, there were only Elmetsætne. She set Morud to making sure all grumbles reached the right ears.
More people, Loid and Anglisc, straggled in and sought her out, some to swear to her, some just to see for themselves the tall maid who called them all Elmetsætne. The daughter of a hægtes and an ætheling, some said—no, a wood ælf and a princess, said others—though that didn’t stop them wanting to touch her hem or catch up a fallen hair for luck. Farmers, coppicers, a dairymaid. A quiet man with a bow and a huge silent dog. Half a dozen ragged children, slings thrust through their twisted grass belts, who looked to have been living on their wits for a season. And one man, Rhin, older and footsore, whose tunic was too small and worn in places that didn’t suit his body, a man who didn’t take his hood off—he begged her pardon, he said, with a glance at Morud, who ignored him, but his ears were aching in the cold.
Hild sent the man with Morud to Oeric, for a meal at least, and said to Gwladus, “Do you trust him?”
Gwladus said, “He has the look of a man more used to skirts.”
Hild nodded. She should send him on his way. But he might prove useful. “Find out what you can. Ask Morud.”
That night she called Oeric to her wagon. She sat wrapped in a wolf fur on the step, and studied him. Perhaps it was that he was getting fed regularly, perhaps that he now had a ring on his pointing finger, her token, but he looked older, more solid.
“I gave you that ring so that you could do my bidding without hindrance. Why is Gwladus telling me some of my people are hungry?”
“We have food for eight days, lady. And some of these beggars are Loid who will move on.”
“When the king returns, we’ll be leaving. I doubt it will be eight days. But even if we stayed a month, I gave orders that all my people were to be well fed and well clothed. All. Take heed. In my service there are no Deirans, no Bernicians, no Loid or Anglisc, no Dyfneint or Elmetsætne. In my household there are only my people.” Her household. Yes. “Gwladus will speak in my name in the world of servants. You will speak in my name to freemen. You are mine, as are all those sworn to my service.” Her people.
The king came back from his tour. Cian came to Hild’s wagon, carrying his saddlebag over one shoulder, and accepted the cup of hot spiced wine Gwladus brought him outside.
Morud brought him a stool, set it by Hild’s.
Cian dropped his bag and sat. He unhooked his scabbard, propped it next to him against the wagon. “We leave for York in the morning.”
“All of us?”
He glanced at Oeric, who stood a discreet three paces out of earshot. “Stephanus and his priests will stay, as will Pyr and two understewards, a score of gesiths, and those men Grimhun has at Aberford.” He glanced at Oeric again. Oeric gave him a bland look.
“How is Grimhun?”
“Happy as— Why is that boy with the old sword here?”
“Oeric? He’s…” She beckoned him. “Cian Boldcloak, king’s gesith, this is Oeric, son of Grim, my sworn man.”
The two eyed each other, but Cian’s height, the cut of his clothes, his sword and jewels clearly overmatched Oeric’s. Oeric inclined his head. Hild waved him away.
Cian sat. “He’s sworn to you? He’s coming to York?”
“Him and more than a dozen others.”
“You have a household?”
“Will you help me?”
“Help you do what? Feed them? I’m a king’s gesith, not a landed thegn.”
“Just … help me. You and the brothers Berht could train Oeric, enough so he’d be more help than hindrance in a fight.” Then she remembered the brothers Berht were with Grimhun at Aberford, for now.
He drank off his ale and held out his cup for a refill. Gwladus took it. “Have you told the king?”
“Not yet.”
“Tell him.” He took the refilled cup from Gwladus, with a nod of thanks. “The lady’s a rare one, eh?”
“Yes, lord,” she said. “Will you want stew? Some of the new … household have an odd notion of king’s property and it seems some hares wandered into a snare and then somehow got dropped in a pot.” She turned to Hild. “Should I bring three bowls?” She tilted her head slightly in Oeric’s direction.
“Yes. No, wait. Bring enough for everyone. Put up a board. We’ll eat together, this one night, the household. Tell Oeric and Morud to help.”
When they’d left, Cian cleared his throat, drank more ale, rubbed his lip with his knuckle. Eventually he bent and lifted his bag to his lap.
“I made something.”
He untied the bag, lifted out a lump wrapped in sacking. Hefted it. Held it out.
Hild took the bundle, unwrapped it. Dark wood gleamed in the firelight.
Travelling cups, three of them. Tiny things, fitting one inside the other: small, smaller, smallest. Old wood, black with age. Carefully cut with the grain, smooth as a girl’s shoulder and as warm to the touch.
“I cut them from the root of the great thorn hedge. The biggest will hold two fingers of white mead.”
She put them back together. They felt dense and weighty in her palm. She turned them, it, over and over in her hands. Old in the days of Eliffer of the Great Retinue … “Oh.” Carved under the base was a tiny hedgepig, prickles out.
“Look at the others.”
She slid them free again. On the smaller one, the hedgepig’s prickles were drawn in; on the smallest one, the hedgepig lay curled in sleep.
“One for you, one for me, one for Begu,” he said. “So we may drink to home wherever we are.”
* * *
Edwin sat on his chair under the oak, warming his hands over a brazier while Coelfrith stood patiently nearby. He seemed in high good humour.
“Clotrude is with child. My son is having a son!”
“May he be strong and lucky.”
“Of course he’ll be lucky.”
Hild bowed her head. An ætheling was always lucky. At first. “My lord…” She wasn’t sure how to say it. “My lord, there will be extra people returning with us to York.”
His hands slowed. “Extra? How many?”
“Fewer than a dozen.” So far.
Edwin turned to Coelfrith, who said, “Lord King, if we’re to make the journey tomorrow as you wish, with a dozen extra mouths the food might not stretch. As it is, by the time we reach York the horses will be skin and bone and our porridge gritty with the end of the sack.”
“We can feed ourselves,” Hild said.
“You can?” Edwin leaned back, hands on the arms of his chair, his eyes on Hild. “Hear that, Coelfrith? Perhaps I should put our seer in charge of provisioning. No doubt her seer sight would show the deer in the wood and the fish under the bank.”
“Or you could send Osric and his men directly back to Tinamutha instead of him going back through York.” It would keep him away from her mother.
The king waved away her suggestion. He looked her up and down, then smiled. “You may bring your people. But not a mouthful of our supplies, not a sip, not a bite, not for you nor any of your people. Still want them?”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“It’s uncle now, is it? Ha!” He pounded the arm of his chair and laughed. “Coelfrith, bring my niece a stool, bring us a jar of mead, and either sit yourself or go pack something. And when you’re fetching the mead, get the Crow in here.” He stretched his boots to the brazier. “I’ll be glad to get back to four walls and a roof. So tell me, Niece, before that black-skirted crow gets here, how do you see Elmet?”
“Uncle?”
“The saddle’s barely off my horse and you appear to be acquiring a household. Why? What have you seen?”
“I have seen, as you have, Uncle, enough to gladden any heart. Take Aberford.”
“I believe I have. Twice.”
“Yes, Uncle. But it’s more than a fort. It’s surrounded by good sheep land. There’s water, a road—a path right to the Humber. Remember Eorpwald’s gold workshops? An overking could build folds and weaving huts by the score there, make cloaks for trade. Ship them to Coelgar at Lindsey. It would be the biggest exchange for wool in the land. The Frisians would come, and the Franks.”
He leaned down and pulled off one boot, scratched at his ankle. “Why Lindsey? Why let Coelgar’s people have a piece of it? If Eorpwald can build a wīc for trade, so can I.”
“Where?”
“York. That was your mother’s idea.” He put his boot back on, wriggled his feet, stretched again. “What else should I know?”
Her mother’s idea. “There are bandits on the Whinmoor, trees for any purpose you could name south of the river, and good cattle country beyond that.” A wīc. At York. Another weft in the great weave. “But the land’s half empty. The people … They hide. They don’t trust each other. They’d work if they felt safe. If they knew they had the king’s goodwill.”
“That’s why I brought them here.”
“That’s why you brought the Anglisc.”
The weir sounded suddenly loud.
She was in it now. “Elmet is … underused. It could grow rich.” Which means the king would grow rich. “But only if people work. Only if they know that the land they clear, the hall they build, and the corn they sow will be safe. That no one will be fighting. That they aren’t Anglisc taking from Loid or Loid taking back from Anglisc.”
“It seems you’ve already spoken for me on that, or so Coelfrith hears from Pyr: no more Anglisc, no more Loid, only Elmetsætne.”
He sounded more curious than angry. But you could never tell with a king.
“Uncle, lord King, they need to know they can’t take from each other, and that whoever the king names as their lord won’t take from them, either.” Osric and his whips. “The first two years are all work, and the winters will be hard. Why risk that, if someone will just come along and take it once the land is giving crops?” She paused. “But if you tell them protection with no tithe for three years, they’ll do it. In five years, your tithes will double.” A longer pause. He was still listening. “Tell them the king’s niece will do it, too.”
“She will?”
“Uncle, I’ve seen a place. Such a place! Two leagues north and west. A great ridge, overlooking a wooded mene. A valley with bog and beck and bramble. Somewhat wet, yes. But, oh, what it could be. What it once was. Fish and krebs, herbs and honey, a millstream, corn growing round about … It will be a land of lard and cream, of beef and strayberries and songbird pie!”
“You will show me this place.”
“I will, my king. Though it’s not on the way to York. And it’s … wet, just now.”
“People?”
“None that I saw. One of the Elmetsætne told me they all left in the long ago, when it grew wet.”
“Wet, you keep saying. It sounds like a bog. You’re daughter of an ætheling of Deira and a princess of Kent. Niece and seer to the overking. It wouldn’t be seemly for you to live in a bog.”
“I wouldn’t live there.”
“No, because you’re my seer. But you want it. Tithe free. With my sworn men here and at Aberford ready to protect it. For nothing. Because it will be an example to my would-be thegns.”
“I … Yes.”
“A birth day gift worth a bit more than that cup I gave you last year.”
“Then…”
“Then the mene wood is yours. But in exchange it’ll be your task, along with Coelfrith, to apportion Elmet to would-be thegns. Make sure they all understand this Elmetsætne notion of yours.”
She bowed. A king’s bargain. He gave her something worthless to him in return for something from her he wanted very much. But, there again, so did she.
“And tell Stephanus. He has some notion of writing it all down, scratch scratch scratch. Strange men, these Christlings. Ah, Paulinus. Come sit. We were just talking about bogs.”
“Bogs, my lord?”
“Bogs.” He turned back to Hild. “Describe it to Stephanus. To a limit of thirty hides. With no tithe for … five years.”
“Thank you, Uncle.” The whole valley!
“Only yours, mind. Everyone else gets three years. You have someone to run it?”
“I … Yes, Uncle.”
“Good. I need you by my side. And now you should go pack your things.”
When her people gathered at the board for their last meal in Elmet, Hild drew aside the man with the hood.
“Rhin. Tell me, yes or no. Are you the priest I sent Morud to warn, near Aberford?”
He met her gaze steadily—his eyes were big and red-brown, surrounded by fatigue-stained pits like those of a goshawk—but said nothing.
“That was a fine steading, a rich, strong holding where men of all kinds got along. If I said I need a man to help me make that happen in another place, a man who can read, what would you say?”
After a long pause, he nodded once, slowly.
“Let me tell you of the place, particularly of the pollarded oak at the head of the valley. Hollow, and dry…”
15
IN YORK, the first day of Blodmonath dawned unseasonably mild. High, bright clouds coated the sky as evenly as egg foam. Larks and starlings gathered in flocks on the stubbled fields on either side of the Fosse and every now and again lifted in rushes for the south. To the north, just beyond the louring yew woods, darker rain clouds drifted towards the walls of the inner fort, threatening the rebuilding.
The wīc would grow in the fork of the Ouse and Fosse between the fort and the outer wall. The span of outer wall between Dere Street and the Ouse had long ago fallen into ruin. Edwin had cleared the rubble, redug the ditches, and drained the land. His two new Frankish stonemasons, rebuilding the walls of the inner fort, were notoriously finicky about the damp and the temperature of the strange sandy mud they mixed to stick the stone together. They worked slowly. Edwin fretted. To defend a wīc a fort must be strong. They’d have to make do with a hedge to protect the northeast end of the wīc field.
Hild rose without waking Begu or Gwladus. She wanted to see the laying of the great hedge.
What seemed to Hild to be half the women and men of the vale of York worked in the field that would be the w�
�c. Children ran about with jars. No one seemed to care about the possibility of rain. They were happy to carry their billhooks and hand axes and knives to the scrubby flatland and work for good portions of food and beer while their children herded their pigs in the wood south of the river to fatten on the early mast fall. This year there would be enough for every pig. There would be bacon and ham and sausage to feed every family all winter. There would be plenty of pork fat to soothe chilblains and fry the mushrooms soon to sprout in the east pasture and along the ditches of the west fields. One or two old women muttered now and again, and shook their heads—such mildness was uncanny, and trouble would come of it—but old women always said such things.
Coelfrith’s woodsmen had already laid out the hedge lines, driving in elm stakes every two feet and marking scrubby trees for saving with splashes of ochre. The strong young men and strapping women grubbed up all the other bushes and saplings. Old men chopped the torn brush into manageable pieces for later. Younger women and unmarried girls cut wands of hazel, and nursing mothers and old women plaited the hazel into great open weaves.
The woodsmen set to work on plashing the marked trees. They lopped a branch here, a branch there—Hild tried to spot the pattern for their choice, but they worked too fast—and with a casual flick of the axe cut the tree almost through at the base and bent it over to weave between the stakes.
The dark, shaped saplings lay all one way like a cat’s just-licked fur. “They point away from the river,” she said to Detlin, the chief of the leathery little men with the hand axes.
He spoke without pausing. “Sap only flows uphill. Point ’em downhill and they’ll die. Just as they will if these splits don’t have time to close up before the frost shoves its fingers into the wood. So I’ll thank you to step aside, lady.”
Hild stepped to one side but didn’t stop watching as he cut and bent hawthorn, sloe, hazel, blackthorn, ash, and the occasional rowan.
“It’ll be pretty in spring,” she said. The thorn blossom would look like snow. In summer there would be sloes for the birds. Bright red rowan berries in autumn and winter.
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