Hild: A Novel (10 page)

Coledauc gave Eadfrith a sword. Eadfrith unhooked his own sheathed sword grandly and offered it in return, with a flourish and a smooth and princely speech. Except that Hild knew his sword had a great blue stone set in its pommel and cunning gold wires twisted about the lip of the red leather scabbard, and the sword he gave Coledauc was scabbarded in black, with a silver-gilt chape and red glass in the pommel.

He’d been expecting this.

Osfrith also gave and received a sword. His pimples burnt a deep and ugly red and he looked younger than his fifteen years as he began to stumble his way through a prepared speech.

Everyone knew their words but her. Why hadn’t anyone prepared her? Did they think the light of the world would foresee it? She looked down at her brooch. Her uncle had foreseen it. But he’d said nothing. He hadn’t been sure. And if he’d admitted he expected his niece to be gifted by Coledauc, and then she wasn’t, he would have to take notice and assume insult. This way was better—for him. But she didn’t know what to do.

Her mother would know. But her mother wasn’t here, and Onnen was back with the other women, with Cian.

The brooch at her shoulder was a graceless thing, but massive. Worth more than anything this king was likely to give in return. And her uncle had told her to pin the gilt-copper brooch out of sight. Perhaps he meant that if they gave her a brooch or other jewellery of sufficiently low worth she should give them the gilt-copper wheel now pinned inside her cloak.

As Osfrith stumbled on, the wind twitched briefly and blew from the east, the fort, bringing the scent of roasting meat. Behind her, a horse stamped and tossed its head, setting others to the same with a great clinking of bits and harness jewels. A gesith coughed. They were getting restless. They wanted the feast they could all smell cooking.

Osfrith finished his speech and backed his horse into line.

A gull wheeled overhead, its underside lit to pink and gold. Gold. Gold was power. Power was safety. What should she do?

And then she saw what the bard handed Coledauc, and, as it had long ago with Cian by the pool, her mind turned smooth with want.

*   *   *

Hild leaned back from her half-eaten bread trencher and fingered her black-handled seax. It was a big blade, far bigger than any ten-year-old should wear by rights, a slaughter seax. But it was a gift from a king and to not wear it in his hall would be an insult. Though judging by Coledauc’s pale lips when the bard had handed it to him, she thought perhaps the choice of gift would not have been his. But she’d kneed Ilfetu forward, unpinned her great gold kneecap of a brooch, held it to glint in the last of the sun, and proclaimed in a strong voice, in British, a thousand blessings upon Cuncar ap Coledauc and his house and their renewed friendship with the house of Yffing, which would last forever, in token of which she hoped they’d accept this trifle to remember her by. Then she’d said it less well in Anglisc, adding that the food smelt fine and they were all happy to go eat now. And the gesiths and Coledauc’s men had roared and banged their shields, and it would have taken more than two kings to get between the warriors and their mead.

At their high bench the two kings huddled together as the first casks of ale—sweet brown wealh ale—were broached. When they broke and clasped arms, both looked well pleased with their discussions. It seemed they found it convenient to take Hild’s proclamation as prophecy: a thousand blessings on Coledauc and his house and eternal friendship between Yffing and Bryneich. A prophecy sealed with a blade gift. So despite Onnen’s pointed look as she poured Hild’s mead, Hild had smiled and told her she would keep the blade and wear it. Anything else would risk the prophecy. And then she grinned at Cian, whom she’d made sure sat next to her.

Feasting and song followed, with very free drinking—Edwin’s forces outnumbered those of the Bryneich prince so heavily that it was no dishonour to give tribute rather than battle, and hearts were high; no one would die that week—and more than one joke about a marriage in the future between Hild and the baby Cuncar, who had been brought out by his nurse briefly, and who to Hild looked remarkably like a sucking pig. Even the two packs of war dogs made a kind of peace and lay down together.

The seax was handsome, with a black horn hilt and a blade inlaid with patterns in a silver-and-copper mix, and hung edge-up in its supple black sheath suspended by two loops parallel to her belt, silver chape to her left. It had a battle edge with a very hard, sharp point. It could open a man’s throat, or cut the twice-baked road bread, or joint a roast. That is, she was sure of the two last because she’d already tried it out, and had no doubt of the former.

Cian tried hard not to be jealous, and something of his look, or perhaps the fact that he was allowed to sit with Hild, and that she laughed as he made puppets of his mutton ribs and spoke for them, alerted one of the Bryneich lords, who whispered in the ear of his prince. They didn’t know Cian was wealh like them, because he was tall, like the Anglisc, and he dressed like them and spoke like them—even Onnen spoke nothing but Anglisc among the untamed wealh—and during the toasts the prince had grandly given Cian an old but beautifully painted shield with an enamelled boss, and a sound little nut-coloured pony for his own, which he promptly named Acærn.

*   *   *

As the waning moon stood high and the boasting and singing surged and the flames roared, Hild slipped away to sit in the moon shadow of a tufted dune with the sheathed knife in her lap and listen to the night breeze in the grass, and think about nothing in particular.

She woke to the sound of a man and woman panting with each other, like overheated hounds, and then laughter. They talked. Hild recognised Eadfrith’s voice, the elder ætheling, and then her own name. “… that knife?” the woman said. “A slaughter seax, for a maid!”

“Oh, she’s no maid,” Eadfrith said. “She’s a hægtes in a cyrtel.”

Then they stopped talking for a while. Later Eadfrith agreed to help the woman haul her share of the water from the stream to the fire, as long as no one would see him doing women’s work, and if she agreed to dally further, later.

Long after they’d gone, Cian found her. She wouldn’t speak to him. He left. Onnen came. She sat beside a wide-eyed Hild and wiped at her cheek with her thumb. “So you’ve heard what your own people say. Does it surprise you?”

Hild said nothing.

“Now, see, this is one reason they think you strange. Your eyes flash, but you never speak.”

“I’m not a hægtes.”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“I’m not,” Hild said. “I’m not a seer, either. I just notice things.”

“If you don’t want to be a prophet then stop prophesying. Or at least mix prophecy with some other talk. People know you’re thinking, but they don’t know what. It frightens them.”

“Does it frighten you, too?”

Onnen’s face was white and black in the moonlight, like a mummer’s face smeared with ash. After a moment she said, “I caught you as you slipped from your mother. I taught you your first words.”

It was neither yes nor no. But then Onnen folded Hild in her arms and that familiar sharp woman smell overlain by peat smoke. “Oh, my little prickle.” And Hild breathed deep and wondered why her own mother never held her this way. “You’re like a sharp bright piece broken from a star. Too sharp, too bright, sometimes, for your own good.”

Two days later Hild was back on her gelding, Ilfetu, and Cian on Acærn, travelling west on the road by the wall with the dogs running back and forth alongside. Hild was mesmerised by that road, so straight and wide and hard, rounding up in the centre like the horizon. The gesiths had spent countless summers on such things, and the few women of the band were so busy foraging for figwort leaves in the hazelwood understorey and nettle leaves in the ditches, bog myrtle for their travelling mattresses, wild garlic for the stewpot, and birds’ eggs for when game was thin on the ground, that they couldn’t care less. Cian was lost in the endless tales of glory the gesiths told each other as they rode, so Hild was left to muse on her own of the people who would build such a thing and then leave. She tried to remember to talk to people sometimes, but she recalled that Eadfrith thought her a hægtes and could not think of anything to say.

On some days Hild rode beside Edwin. Mostly the king was happy. In his winter campaign, he had taken the Isle of Vannin from Fiachnae mac Báetáin for the loss of only one ship, and that mainly carrying horses; the isle’s fort had surrendered immediately when they saw the size of Edwin’s band. And now the Bryneich at their backs were sworn to eternal friendship. And so, mostly, he was content as they rode to point out—sometimes just to her, sometimes to his sons, who had heard it all before, but it never paid for even blood relatives to ignore the king—some valley where in years past he had driven a rival king’s sheep, or the hilltop where he had fired a fort, or a lightning-blasted tree he remembered as an omen of a flood. But other times he would grow pensive at the sight of a flock of magpies shrieking in a field of spring barley, and he would pull at the stained leather of his reins until his mean-mouthed chestnut snorted and stopped, and demand that Hild tell him what the birds augured. She didn’t like those days. Nothing pleased him. He would constantly shift in his saddle and finger his sword; his eyes would become green and shimmery; he would make Lilla ride close and keep his shield unslung. She hated having to give him omens. And then one day she thought of Cian laughing and telling stories with his mutton ribs, and she spoke as though she were one of the birds: that fat one, there; no, the one with the uneven tail, he is cross with his brother, there, the one with the worm in his beak, because they had a fight over who should have the thorn tree for the nest and his brother won. And, ha!, Edwin said, then the fat one is not king. And he laughed and called over the æthelings, and then Lintlaf and Blæcca, and had her tell more stories about the birds and their wives. The gesiths roared. And so some days she rode surrounded by beefy warriors laughing at her imaginary conversations—birds, clouds, mice, dogs, furze leaves—while on others the king frowned and demanded a prophecy, and she gave it:
The bird flies in from the south, as will your future wife, my king
, for Hild remembered that long-ago talk of Kent, and where else would he be seeking a bride? Or:
See how the thrush drops the snail on the stone? So will you crush Fiachnae mac Báetáin if he should rise again and creep forth from the Emerald Isle
. For everyone knew Fiachnae would rise again, it’s what the Irish did, and mac Báetáin was cannier than most. As she watched the thrush beat its snail on the stone and saw its eyes like apple pips, she remembered Coifi’s eyes as he had watched her in the rain by the daymark elms, as a stoat watches a fledgling. And she said to Onnen that night by the fire, “Onnen, when you steal eggs from the nest, where are the birds who laid them?” and Onnen said, “Off finding worms for breakfast, no doubt. Why?” And Hild, who was tired from talk talk talking, all the time talking, couldn’t bring her thoughts from behind her eyes to her mouth. When she fell into sleep it was to evil dreams: Who protected the nest while the king was away finding worms? Who protected her mother and Hereswith? Old Burgræd and young Burgmod?

She missed them. Oh, not her mother’s perpetual watching and thinking and manoeuvring for position, not her sister’s talk of Mildburh and husbands, alternating with the silent superiority of a sister with a girdle for one without. No, she missed their smell. Here it was all horses and man sweat and the stink of the bushes in the morning, which she walked half a mile to avoid when she emptied her bladder. She missed the scent of weld growing in its pot, of cheese crumbling on a plate and fresh-baked bread.

Even the songs were different. On the road, between one settlement and another, as they swung along, sometimes on foot, their songs were not the heroic songs of the hall but coarse drinking songs that, when she understood them, she didn’t like. She didn’t like the way they made the men smell, the way they fingered under their tunics and looked at the hard, thin-faced camp women—strange women who spoke Anglisc and wore knives and strike-a-lights on their belts, but no distaffs, no spindles; women who darned and mended but never spun, never wove.

She befriended a one-eyed war dog by feeding him scraps and never teasing him the way the gesiths did, and by mastering her fear of him, most of the time. At night she curled with Onnen on her unrolled leather mattress with her cloak around her and her belt loosened but not removed—she could reach out and touch her seax—and listened to the long churr of the nightjars. She longed for the sound of girls’ voices or a woman singing as she fed chickens. They were moving through wild country now, nothing but moor and road. Onnen said that she’d heard from one of the bony camp women that by the time the larks had sung their last for the summer and the figwort flowers in the little wooded valleys had turned white, they’d be in Caer Luel, and then, oh, the wonder and the glory! And Hild fell asleep that night thinking with a smile of old Æffe’s scepticism about fountains and the young man of long ago hung like Thuddor the bull, and it was only later that the dreams turned to nightmares.

Crossing the Pennines was hard and cold; Hild learnt to use the slings the women used to bring down red squirrels and the occasional hare; she learnt to sit with them in silence, for the women didn’t mind silence, as they cut up the tiny morsels to mix with dried peas in a pot.

Hild was almost as thin and flint-faced as Onnen’s road friends the day they made camp by a rushing stream and Coelgar set every last man to searching for firewood. Hild went to find her uncle to ask him why. He was sitting on a tree stump overseeing the unfurling of his blue-and-red banner with the Deiran boar stitched in gold. The garnet eye, secured with silver thread, was loose, and Edwin was shouting good-natured orders at the two wealh holding the staffs and the woman with the needle and thread. He was in a good mood, for the only man he’d lost on the whole journey so far was Eadfrith’s friend, a young fool who’d boasted about his horse one night after drinking too much and felt obliged to race it the next day and had fallen and broken his thigh.