Hild: A Novel (12 page)

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 about 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 gallop 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.

She rode a thin grey horse, a thin grey hound ran at the hem of her blue-grey cloak, and she sat tall, an enamel copy of a ten-year-old girl, hard and cold.

*   *   *

It was just past a large farmstead by a bridge, where they’d flung hacksilver at the farm wife and taken every last drop of her milk, all her just-cured bacon, a great wheel of cheese, and a barrel of strange-tasting ale, and still been hungry, that the rider from Tinamutha found them.

“Lord King,” he gasped as he pulled up his foaming shaggy-maned pony. “Lord Osric sent me. He is besieged at Tinamutha. Your man got through, and there are boats aplenty, but no way of sailing them past Fiachnae’s hordes at the river mouth.”

The gesiths immediately began cursing, swearing vengeance and mighty deeds. The king looked shrewish and unhappy. Hild kicked Ilfetu until he shouldered the king’s chestnut, which made the king look at her. “Bebbanburg?” she said.

Osric’s messenger gave Hild a puzzled look. Who was this child? Then he saw her eyes and the huge seax at her waist. Perhaps she was an uncanny dwarf or a wall wight.

“What of Bebbanburg?” Edwin said to the man, as though Hild had not spoken.

“Fiachnae’s main force besieges the rock. They have slaughtered all the cattle on the moors.”

“How long ago?”

“A fortnight since. No more.”

Edwin shifted in his saddle, and Hild recognised the movement; he didn’t know what to do, and as a result wondered if he was being made a game of. She backed up Ilfetu, just in case.

A look passed between the king and Lilla, and the chief gesith took the messenger’s reins in his beefy hand. At his nod, a handful of warriors loosened their swords in their sheaths. Edwin half shuttered his eyes. “Two weeks? And no boats in or out of Tinamutha?”

“No, lord.” The messenger’s mount picked up its rider’s uncertainty. It snorted and tried to back up but its way was blocked.

“Then how did news reach your lord so fast if the way by sea is blocked?”

“My lord?”

“Dere Street is a fine road, but it’s a hard ride south and west to it from Bebbanburg. And then along this road east to Tinamutha, and then back west to us.”

“My lord?”

Edwin said, “We’ll eat the horse,” and turned away.

Lilla nodded to one of the gesiths, who drew his sword and swung at the messenger’s neck where it met his shoulder. The man shrieked and spurted and fell off his horse, which tried to rear, and the dogs did the rest.

5

M
ULSTAN, LORD OF MULSTANTON
, wiped his beard, sent the cup down the table, and watched the strange maid. She was turning those blood beads of hers again, turn turn turn. At least she wasn’t wearing that huge knife tonight. A maid the same age as his little Begu with a slaughter seax!

He’d made them all welcome, of course, the maid, her wealh woman and son, even that Irish tutor-priest, or hostage, or whatever he was. When your king arrives in a blood-splashed boat and departs in a hurry leaving behind a favoured kinswoman and her household for whom he demands hospitality, you give it. It doesn’t matter that she’s only ten. It matters that she’s the subject of a prophecy and has the most direct and uncanny gaze of any maid you’ve ever seen, and that one wrong word to the king would mean being staked out for the ravens. So you give her your own bed and the highest place at table—for this was a country hall, after all, not much removed from its British roots, where women feasted alongside their men—and try as hard as you might to remember to show the boldness and generosity expected of an Anglisc thegn looking to gain favour with a king whose fortunes were on the rise. Or who might be dead, depending. No, no, he was alive, for the trade boats were getting through and there’d been no reports of Anglisc slaughter from Bebbanburg.

He was old, near forty; his first wife and children had died in the great sickness before the maid was born, and when his first lord and king, Æthelfrith, died and he was released from his gesith’s oath, he had declined exile north of the wall with the æthelings and had, instead, settled in to farm this once-rich land by the sea. When Edwin took the throne, he had charged Mulstan to oversee the safety of the small trading harbour and to take the tithe for the king of all goods that came and went across the sea. And eventually Mulstan was happy to marry the beautiful Enynny and build himself a good solid farmstead in the woods by the beck, just half a mile from the tideland estuary full of oysters and mussels rounding into Streanæshalch, the Bay of the Beacon, with its harbour that saw trade from Pictland and the North British, from Lindsey and the East Angles, and even the people of the North Way, whose narrow ships brought furs and amber across the North Sea and down along the chains of islands and along the coast of Pictland. Last year they’d had a Frisian ship creeping up from its more usual harbour at Gipsw
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