Hild: A Novel (21 page)

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

T
HE 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.

He dusted it with his hand, withdrew a pace, and cleared his throat.

“Would the little miss care for some water, at all? It being a hot day. And there being a spring close by.” But he kept glancing back at his furnace.

“What’s your name?”

“Finmail. Fin.”

“Fin, you have something on the fire?”

“I do, mistress.”

“Then see to it.” She looked at the benches of enamellers, chasers, polishers. “I am not here.”

Fin frowned.

“I am not,” she said in Irish, and met his sky-blue gaze with her own. He bowed and retreated.

She turned to the Svear, spoke clearly and carefully. “I will watch, if I may.”

He nodded and went back to his work, moulding something palm-size from wax.

At the next bench, a towheaded man rolled wax into little sticks and, with a knife heated in boiling water, cut their ends and fused them to another tiny wax sculpture.

A boy ran up with a heavy faggot of stripped ash twiglets, the kind of thing left after the cattle have eaten everything useful from their winter tree hay. He added it to the fire. The towheaded man put the wax model carefully on a wooden tray. A woman took the tray—again, carefully—and carried it to the slurry tub. At the tub, another woman was lifting out a slurry-coated net; she hung it on a line in the sun next to others. She checked two of the nets at the far end of the line, took them down, carried them to a bench where an old man with gentle hands coated the hard-slurried model in thicker clay, smoothing carefully until there was nothing but a ball of clay like a wasp’s nest. The faggot boy carried the clay to one of the kilns.

Bellows squeezed and furnaces roared. Tiny hammers chink-chinked. The river flowed.

Two creamy white butterflies—the same colour as the Svear’s wax—danced together around the tip of one guard’s spear, while he half dozed.

Hild returned her attention to the goldsmithing. She had watched the bronze casters at Bebbanburg. This was different. It was like watching seasoned gesiths marching from three corners of a rough field to slot smoothly into a shield wall, or listening to a bard build a familiar song. The Svear didn’t have to watch the furnace or mind the kiln, he didn’t have to shake the slurry, he had only to think of pleasing shapes and build them in wax—smoothly, unhurriedly—so that a clay mould could emerge from the kiln and be filled with gold. She thought of women always having to break the flow of their spinning to catch a child back from the fire, or pause in the heckling of tow to bind a wound …

Hereswith, married, with a child. Her nephew or niece. But she might never meet them. She should give Hereswith something to remember her by, something beautiful, something precious.

The sun climbed higher. The Svear stood, grinned—the way his cheek gaped was hideous; her mother would have stitched that when it was still raw—and gestured for her to follow. She followed him from table to table. She watched the melted wax poured carefully from a clay mould and saved for later; gold poured into the hot mould; the mould set in sand to cool slowly; a raw gold cast, a buckle, getting its gold spines snipped off—always one slave watching another when they were handling naked gold—and polished, then engraved. Back to the enameller’s table, where a man with a squint used the tiniest spoon Hild had ever seen to dip into various bowls of powder and tap the grains carefully into the minute compartments on a gold brooch, made by fusing fine gold wire to a flat gold surface.

“Red,” said the Svear blurrily, pointing to one bowl. “Blue,” pointing to another. They all looked white and cream and grey to Hild.

“How can you tell?”

He picked up a pinch and rubbed it between his fingertips. “Different.” Which war had captured him? His right palm did not have the sword-callus stripe; his left knuckles were not flattened from blows through a shield boss. He touched his finger to his tongue. “Taste different, too.” He held his finger out for her to try. Hild stuck out her tongue.

“Hild,” Fursey said from behind. “What on God’s green earth is so fascinating about watching yet another stinking savage make jewellery?”

Hild felt like a dragonfly batted to the dirt. She turned, angry. Then she took in Fursey’s mottled face. “What’s the matter?”

“Apostasy!”

That word again. She still didn’t know what it meant. Eorpwald’s guards might not know what it meant, either, but they didn’t like the tone. They unslung their shields. Lintlaf came up on his toes.

Men with weapons: as predictable as dogs.

“Stand down,” she said to Lintlaf.

“They are paid men,” he said, with the sting and twist guaranteed to provoke anyone’s temper. The guards levelled their spears.

“Doubtless you could take them even with your sword in your left hand,” she said to Lintlaf. “But you will not.”

No one moved.

Her thoughts came together, smooth as a shield wall: The fact they could check becomes the prophecy they must believe. She fixed her gaze on Lintlaf but spoke to all four men. “I have seen two lives dancing in the guise of butterflies about their spear blades; butterflies dancing with death. Lives waiting to be lost. I have seen it.” In her side vision she caught one of the East Angles nodding: Butterflies, he had seen them. “But no blood will be spilt, no lives lost here today. I say so. You will both walk with me.”

She nodded at the enameller, then to the Svear, and swept away, as her mother would have. They followed.

“Apostasy, heresy, evil!” Fursey hissed in Latin as they walked along the river, then sneezed, which made Hild want to smile, but she remembered Hereswith’s punch on her shoulder and didn’t. Which reminded her that she wanted to give her sister a gift.

Fursey was still spitting like a cat. She looked at Lintlaf for an explanation. He shrugged. “He went into the temple his usual sunny self—ha!—and came out like that.”

It took two hundred strides or more for Fursey to calm himself enough to speak Anglisc. Even then, Hild couldn’t make much sense of it.

“Stop,” she said. “Two altars? One altar for the Christ, one for our gods? Why is that bad?”