Hild: A Novel (26 page)

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.”

“Girl children.”

“Indeed. I pointed that out. And Onnen snorted at me again. Then when I ventured that on occasion a woman could sound very like a pig, I was struck by a memory of your little adventure at the w
ī
c.”

Hild flushed.

Fursey scratched at his ankle again, then took off his shoe—he did not wear sandals when travelling. Ridiculous footwear, all gap and space. “And speaking of your adventure, where is that wealh with my repast?”

Hild shrugged.

“A waste of three scillings,” Fursey said. “Though no doubt the moony gesith would argue. She has him firmly under her, well, let us say thumb.”

Hild picked a new daisy and split its stem.

“So. Onnen. I told her of your knife fight, and your purchase, and she told me, gravely, to tell you to have a care with the girl. She said wealh and Anglisc do not walk the same path or dream the same dreams. And she should know.”

Hild wasn’t listening. He wondered what paths she walked in her head.

“But you haven’t asked of your little goat-faced friend.”

She looked up briefly. “She isn’t goat-faced.”

“Of course she isn’t. Nor is she a chatterbox and a magpie—I do believe I saw her considering stealing my cross.”

At least that brought a smile. But the smile was so careful it cut Fursey to the quick. How long had it been since the child laughed and played with others her age?

“Very well,” he said. “I will concede on the goatish front. She is little, though.”

“Is she, still?”

“Compared to you, and to Cian, yes. Compared to Onnen and that other harridan who is very near with the honey cakes—”

“Guenmon.”

“The very same. Compared to them, she is well grown for a girl her age.”

Hild looked down at her chest.

“As are you,” Fursey said hastily. “As are you.” Repeating the lie did not help. “Howsomever.” He opened his satchel and rooted about until he found a linen-wrapped object half the size of his fist. “She sent you this.”

Hild dropped the daisies and took it, hefted it in one hand then the other. She unwound the linen to reveal a hard slate-grey curl of a stone, like a frozen worm.

“A snakestone,” Fursey said. “The local legend is of some harried god turning all the snakes into stone so that he could get some peace from the peasants’ pitiful petitioning.”

Hild stroked the tight stone coils with a fingertip.

“Begu also says to tell you she found a dragon in the cliff.”

Hild lifted her eyebrows.

“The girl does like to imagine, yes. But this I saw for myself.”

“Truly?”

“Truly. A great skull and wings, entombed in the cliff in another age and showing now where some of the cliff had tumbled into the sea. The wings must have been eight ells long! The thing was still mostly buried, so I couldn’t pace it out. But the skull was”—he stretched his arms wide—“bigger than I could reach. And all of stone.”

“Bones of stone…”

“And black as the devil’s eyes.”

Hild shivered.

“Think,” he said. “It must have been a cataclysmic event: such a beast hurling itself into solid rock.” Fursey fastened his satchel. “Begu, too, begs you to come visit. She says she misses you. She said to tell you someone called Winty birthed fine fat twins this spring.”

He paused briefly, but Hild was walking her interior landscape again. Wherever it was, it seemed bleak.

“She also said she was very pleased with her comb, then she spoke of demons in worms and fish and dogs, and demons in hair and combs but became so wound about with her own mirth it was difficult to extract her meaning.”

Hild seemed to pull herself back from wherever she had been. She smiled, but it was a disturbing, hard flexing of bone and muscle. “Winty is a cow. If I’m ever to keep Begu’s messages straight she must learn to read. She must learn, Fursey.”

“I mentioned a priest to Mulstan—the man is more hairy than ever—but he laughed and said, ‘All in good time!’ and clapped me on the back hard enough to make me spit out my meat.”

“You must go again. You must make him understand.”

“Must?”

“He has to understand. Cian and Begu must learn to read. They must all learn. Hereswith in East Anglia, too. But her need isn’t so great.”

“So great as whose?”

She ignored him. “Yes. You will go back. You will tell him that I order it so.”