Hild: A Novel (27 page)

“And if I prefer not? If I choose to simply walk away one day and take a boat for Ireland?”

“I’ll have you brought back. And whipped.”

“Child—”

“I am
not
a child.” Under the ferocity Fursey heard the howling loneliness. But ferocity was winning. “Priest or not, I will have you whipped if you try to leave. Who’s to stop me, who in all the world? Only the king, and he gives me what I ask. So who is to stop me? No one.”

“Then I tell you truly, you must learn to stop yourself.”

Silence. A crow cawed, then another. She said, “That will be Gwladus with your food.”

More silence.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know what’s got into you, but I don’t think you’re sorry.”

He held her gaze this time, though it made him sweat, and this time it was she who looked away. “Please,” she said. “Go to Mulstan. They must learn to read. I have no one else.”

He sighed. “I’ll go. But first I’ll take a fortnight’s rest here.”

“We leave for Brough in less than that—at the new moon. Æthelburh is coming.”

“At the new moon, then.”

“But it’ll be raining by then.”

“Nonetheless.” The weather seemed to him set for fair, but even if it rained like Noah’s flood he wanted time to talk to Gwladus, and to Lintlaf—if the idiot gesith could keep his brains out of his hose long enough to think. He must find out what the witch woman, the child’s mother, was up to with Osric, he of the kingly ambitions. He’d heard talk. And this child would soon be living in very dangerous times indeed.

10

T
HE DOCK AT BROUGH
was almost invisible in the rain. It sheeted down, beating itself to froth on the huge wharf timbers, drumming on the roof of the great warehouse, irritating the party waiting beneath. Edwin overking was not used to sharing his presence with baled wool and sacks of grain. But Æthelburh’s ship was due, and this was the only shelter.

A half-drowned river man was shown through the side door: He had seen the red sail! They’d be in, he reckoned, by the time he got his reward, begging your pardon.

On Coelgar’s nod, Coelfrith gave the man half a silver penny. Edwin straightened his gold-crusted belt and the gold band on his forehead, which he’d taken to wearing on important occasions. Breguswith smoothed her skirts. Hild shrugged her shoulders to make sure her long mantle fell in perfect folds. She drew her hood up. The gesiths—in their most gaudy splendour, cloaks thrown back over their shoulders to show their hero-ringed arms—rolled their moustaches between their fingers so that they hung thick and manly, just so. Lilla nodded, and Forthere and a wiry red-haired man new to the household, a West Saxon by his brooch, hauled open the big warehouse doors. The æthelings and Osric and Oswine went first, walking in careful step at the corners of the great canopy that sheltered Hild and Breguswith. Edwin’s betrothed was to be met and tended only by honoured family. Æthelburh had been only four when Breguswith left but, still, she and her daughter were blood kin.

There was little wind, just the gush and runnel of rain. Hild and her mother could barely see beyond their canopy.

Even in the rain, the scent of the river and its mudflats overwhelmed her: old and cold and wide. She wondered if Fursey’s boat had crossed Æthelburh’s wake downstream. Then ropes were being thrown and a gangplank slid out, and the gesiths behind her drew taut as a dozen armed men in red cloaks marched down the plank. Then came a cluster of black-clad priests, six or seven, hunched and hidden in their wet cowls. Then came Æthelburh, escorted by five women and Paulinus Crow.

*   *   *

Paulinus Crow. Bishop Paulinus. Tall, stooped, and black-haired, even at his age. Black-eyed, too, with the high-bridged nose she had seen on broken statues. “Want on legs,” Gwladus said when she saw him. “Though for what, I don’t know.”

Hild did. She saw it for the first time the morning Paulinus and Stephanus stood with her in a cold room of the ruined Roman palace on the River Derwent, just a mile south of the ford.

It was the beginning of the moon of Winterfylleth, when the nights became longer than the days. Osric had finally departed for Arbeia. Hild hoped he had drowned at the mouth of the Tine. The rain had stopped days ago and the mornings had turned dry and crisp. Inside the ruined palace, sun as thin as whey seeped through the gaps under the eaves and washed over the mosaic floor. The priests looked pinched and cold, though Hild didn’t feel the chill. Even inside a broken building it was warmer than up a tree or on the brow of a hill searching for figwort.

“Here, child,” Paulinus said, and pointed with his bishop’s jewelled crook at the picture by his foot: a fish and a cup pieced together of tiny green squares. “Christ’s sign. Those who lived here were good God-fearing citizens.”

Those who died here, Hild thought, looking at the axe marks on the fresco on the wall where someone had hacked out the iron lamp brackets, at the hollowed and charred circle where they had dug out the floor and tried to build a fire.

The Crow turned to Stephanus and dictated instructions in Latin about rededicating the building as a chapel to Saint John. Stephanus lifted the wooden board covered with wax that always hung from his belt and scribbled with a stylus. Hild gave no sign she understood any of it.

No one but her uncle knew that under Fursey’s tutelage she could make her letters or that she understood Latin if it was spoken slowly—and even he seemed content to let her learn privately. Until she knew how these newcomers thought and what they wanted, she would keep it that way, keep her dice rattling in her cup. It was foolish to throw before all bets were on the table.

More Latin. More writing on the tablet. Rebuilding didn’t make sense to her. If the priests wanted a place by the river, they should just tear these ruins down and start afresh.

“Why do you care about this broken place?”

“The people remember Rome. Old and mighty, it stands as a wise father to errant children.” Breath whistled through his bony nose and his olive cheeks darkened. “Here Rome will rise again, shining like a beacon for those who have eyes. We will rebuild here and at Campodunum and at York, at Malton and along the wall, and the people will see Rome come again, and they will fear us and praise us. Even the kings of this isle will fear us and praise us. The faithful will flock to our standard.”

He stood straight and stern, and Hild understood he wasn’t seeing the overking’s tufa but his own silk banner of a cross sewn with pearls, and himself standing at the head of a congregation of faithful, the chief Christ priest of the isle. His ambition was so naked she wondered why the king allowed it.

No doubt her uncle had his reasons. She thrust her hands in her pockets and turned her snakestone over and over. She found it helped her think.

Her uncle had to have reasons for such big changes. Six priests, a deacon—like the trader she had seen at Gipsw
ī
c, he had charcoal skin—and a bishop was more god people than the household had ever held. Coifi was unhappy. He wasn’t the only one. The rhythms of the household had changed. The queen and her women, and the Kentish warriors—no longer king’s gesiths but queen’s men—who escorted her everywhere when the king did not, ate only fish on one day of the week. They went to a ceremony called Mass on another. Their housefolk brought different traditions: at the turn of the moon, turn all the silver. They liked watered wine with breakfast rather than small beer. Their clothes were different.

The king had to have a reason.

As she turned her stone and watched Stephanus make neat rows of letters on his wax, she wondered if that was it. Something to do with writing. But that’s what he’d kept Fursey for, to teach her—though since she’d returned from the Bay of the Beacon her uncle had ignored her.
Everything a king does is a lie.
She would watch and learn. Find out why Paulinus was taking such an interest in her, the king’s niece, why he seemed to want to persuade her of his god.

*   *   *

Gwladus, on her way to the kitchens, told her Fursey was back. Hild ran all the way to the byre and got there in time to see him beating the dirt of travel from his skirts and a young byre hand lead his horse away. She shouted and laughed and surprised them both by hugging him.

“Christ’s sweet smile, but you’ve grown again!” He held her at arm’s length. “You seem well.”

“Yes,” she said, “I am, now that you’re here.” And it was true; she was glad, very glad, to see him. “Fursey, I’m sorry. For making you go. You were right, I wasn’t sorry before, but I am now.” He smiled again, pleased, but it didn’t hide the tightness in his jaw, the worry and weariness. “What’s wrong?”

“We’ll talk in the byre,” he said in Irish, and bent to his saddlebags.

“Let me.” She slung them over her shoulder without effort.

The guest byre, recently rebuilt and stinking of raw timber, was full, but the other animals had been tended to long since. The only person about the place was the boy rubbing down Fursey’s horse.

“Will we be sitting here now?” she said, and pointed to the hay bales along the wall opposite the stalls.

“Your fine dress—”

“This?” She regarded her beautifully embroidered overdress in dark blue. “I suppose it is fine, isn’t it? But Gwladus insists, especially since the queen and her ladies arrived.” She dropped the bags and sat. She brushed at the dust on her shoulder. “Well, sit before you fall. Say your piece then we’ll find you food and clean clothes.”

“It’s not an easy message to deliver quick off the tongue.”

Something horrible had happened to Cian or Begu. Or Onnen. She closed her eyes.

“Ach, no, no, they’re all well.” She blinked. “I’m tired to stupidity. My apologies. No, everyone is well. But Onnen bids me give you news. She reminds you that she is cousin to the wife of the lord of Craven—”

Hild nodded while her heart calmed down. Cousin to the sister of Ceredig of Elmet, Dwynai, who married Dunod ap Pabo of Craven, whom some called prince of that land—the first guest she had ever offered the cup to.

“—and messages are exchanged with kin often and often, especially in times of unrest.”

Unrest. Hild fixed him with her gaze.

“Onnen, the lady of Mulstanton should I say, has word from her cousin Lady Dwynai that Cadfan of Gwynedd is not long for this world, may his soul find swift peace. And that his son, Cadwallon, wishes you dead.”

“Me?”
Dead?

“You and every root and branch of Edwin’s kin.”

“Yes, but I’m only—”

“Only? You are Edwin’s bringer of light and seer. You saved Bebbanburg. You are his niece, his peaceweaver. Must we have this conversation again? There is no more
only
for you.” He tapped her on the knee. “Listen, now. Cadwallon has boasted at mead that when he is king he will wipe the Yffings from the face of the earth. He has sworn it. To that end he is talking now to any lordling who will listen. He has talked to Cuelgils of Lindsey—”

The man who called himself princeps, who had fed them on their journey south, at Lindum.

“—and to Ciniod of the Picts.”

“But Ciniod is sending a man to my uncle in friendship! Or so said the messenger in hall last night.”

“Yes. No doubt Ciniod sends a man in friendship because, indeed, he refused Cadwallon’s embassy.”

“I don’t—”

“But his fosterling did not.”

“His…” Hild was momentarily at a loss. Then she remembered. “Eanfrith Iding.”

“The same.” The eldest son of Æthelfrith and his first wife, Bebba. Ciniod’s fosterling. Enemy.

“We had heard Eanfrith took a Pictish princess to wife.”

“Indeed. And now they have a son, Talorcan.”

The name said it all. Talorc, like Beli, was one of the names reserved for potential Pictish overkings.

She thought furiously. “Will Ciniod lend Eanfrith his war band?”

“Perhaps. Unofficially.”

“But my uncle’s war band is huge now, easily twice the size of any other. It would be madness. They couldn’t hope to— Ah, but if Cuelgils…”

Fursey was nodding. “Yes. If Cadwallon persuades Lindsey, then the Saxons might throw in their bet, too—at which point Ciniod might see an opportunity, using Eanfrith as a puppet. Then your uncle would be caught between the hammer of the Picts and the anvil of the massed Saxons and Lindseymen and Welsh.”

“Not just the Picts,” said Hild.

If the Pictish war band rose and joined Gwynedd, Cadwallon and Eanfrith between them might also carry the men of the north, the Bryneich and Gododdin, who might bring Alt Clut. Even Rheged. It would be like watching the birth of a winter bourne: a trickle becomes a chattering stream then a roaring spate tumbling boulders before it, tearing out trees. Hundreds upon hundreds marching, singing their songs of wealh glory.

All would go down in red ruin.

But there was nothing she could do. Ciniod’s mouthpiece, when he came, would smile and know nothing. Seer or not, no one would listen until there was something to point at. Something she could prove. She would have to wait until it began.

They wanted her dead …

*   *   *

On the east bank of the Derwent the day glittered with scent-of-winter sunshine. The women sat at their heckling benches, wooden boards set with dense clusters of iron spikes. In the distance Coelgar supervised the hammering and adzing of the snug new settlement rising alongside the shell of the broken Roman remains. The king was with the queen. The gesiths had taken the dogs hunting. The few housefolk not labouring with adzes were asleep and the place was quiet.

Hild sat with the women. Her mother had told her she’d been spending too much time alone—the rumours of hægtes and etin blood were starting again. Hild wasn’t sure how sitting with a handful of tow before the spikes of what looked like an etin’s comb would dispel those rumours.

Pulling the fibres through the spikes, over and over, until the tow was fined down to line, was normally hot and dusty work, but the Winterfylleth sun was as cool as glass and the air damp with the burly river and soon-to-fall leaves. Every now and again a light ruffle of wind brought the scent of pork roasting with wildling apples and damson—legacy of the Roman gardens—and Hild’s mouth watered.