Hild: A Novel (52 page)

The translator, white-faced, didn’t move. It was Paulinus who strode forward, took the package, unfastened it, and went to one knee before Edwin’s chair.

Edwin took the tunic, shook it out, held it up to the light.

It was purple, with a silklike lustre and sheen.

“It drapes beautifully,” Edwin said. “Don’t you think?”

Dead silence.

Edwin smiled at the messengers. “There’s going to be a reply.”

*   *   *

Hild poured wine for James and for herself. They both drank fast. She refilled their cups. They drank again.

“By Christ I thought he’d kill them,” James said.

They drank more.

“No, by God, I thought he’d kill the bishop.”

Edwin couldn’t kill Paulinus. He planned to trot him out to all the great houses of the north on the grand progress to York for Easter. “The king likes a brave man.”

“Well, I was quaking like a jellyfish. But I’m a mere deacon. A lesser mortal than a bishop. Though indeed he’s now practically an archbishop.”

“That’s what his letter said?”

“Oh, yes. He gets a pallium the day the Anglisc come to Christ. He can feel it on his shoulders. Then he won’t have to bend the knee to Archbishop Justus in Kent.”

What would the Mercians think of that? And Cadwallon? An overbishop in the court of the overking tilted the balance. The threads of trade and tithe and obligation were about to run through Edwin.

While Frisians had always traded directly with the Angles of the east and the Saxons in London, Franks mostly went through the Jutish Kentishmen. Justus, the overbishop in Kent, Paulinus’s overbishop, reported directly to the bishop of Rome. It had always made Edwin unhappy. An overking’s priest should not be lower than a lesser king’s priest.

But soon Paulinus would be overbishop in his own right, reporting directly to the bishop of Rome. And Frankish trade would come through the new w
ī
c at York. More gold meant more gesiths, which meant more victories and more gold again.

And Paulinus’s priests had already tightened their grip on Elmet, cutting off information to the north, to the Idings.

*   *   *

While Gwladus combed Hild’s hair, Begu told Hild about the pope’s letter to the queen. She couldn’t remember much about it, only that it mentioned something about becoming one flesh with the king, once he accepted Christ. “But they did that already. Or does the pope person think Eanflæd fell from the sky? Or, oh, maybe that’s what the queen’s been waiting for, before she weans Eanflæd. Eorðe knows, if she wants a son she should be getting started. But the presents were nice, a silver mirror—it’s like looking in a pond!—and a gold-and-ivory comb. You’ll do my hair after hers?” This to Gwladus. Then, to Hild, “Not as nice as the one you gave me, of course, but it’s heavy. Very heavy. Which is silly when you think about it, because who wants a comb so heavy you can’t use it? I suppose now we’ve had the Witganmot, we’ll be packing up again. When do we go to Mulstanton?”

“After Osric’s house, at Arbeia.”

“How long will we be at Arbeia?”

“Not long.”

“You don’t like it there, do you? I can hear it in your voice.”

She hadn’t been back since she and the king and three dozen gesiths had escaped with their lives. “I have to go. But you don’t. My mother is thinking of taking a boat from Tinamutha to the bay as soon as we arrive.”

“Not staying with Osric?”

“She has things to sort out with Onnen. You could go with her.”

Begu’s face lit like a candle. “Oh! Home! And Cian could come, too. Couldn’t he?”

“If you persuade the queen to persuade the king to give permission.”

“But what about you?”

“I’m the king’s seer. But we won’t be at Arbeia long. The king would kill Osric, else. And, besides, I’ll have Gwladus.”

17

T
HE MOUTH OF THE GREAT RIVER
seemed like another country in another time.

Arbeia was an ancient house, built with stone and plaster and slate. Two hundred years of Anglisc occupation had added wooden wings with thatched roofs and new doorways knocked in two sides, but its bones resisted change. Even the bakehouse was stone, and a stone colonnade ran along the south wall. The walls were high: a stronghold built by the same redcrests who raised the great wall, to oversee all the trade of the north. Ironstone and silver, pearls and pelts, wheat and wool: Goods from Anglisc farmland, from the kings of the north, Rheged and Alt Clut and Gododdin, all flowed into and along the river or down the coast. Tinamutha was the best port north of the Humber.

A man is lord of his own hall, and Hild hated Osric’s hall, hated the men who lounged in its oddly sized rooms—Roman rooms, Osric said proudly—the men with bright blades, whose eyes turned first to Osric and only then to the king. She found herself looking at the forearm of every man she met, looking for that curling scar she had put there with her slaughter seax on that nightmarish flight so many years ago.

At night she dreamt, again and again, of the hand gripping the gunwale, the curve of muscle, the tendons standing out. Over and over she drew her blade along that curve, over and over the skin opened like a flower and she looked at his arm and saw a blossom of meat, red bone, yellow fat, blue vein, plump muscle, before the blood welled up and poured over the memory, blotting it out.

As the king’s seer she should have stayed in those small rooms and watched those men, listening and weighing, judging their interest as Edwin and Paulinus talked to them of the Christ and the bishop of Rome, and the righteousness of a strong shield arm and preferential trade. But she couldn’t settle. She felt restless and trapped. She thought of Hereswith:
Æthelric my husband has not put aside his woman … I am with child.
She had sent a note with her mother, who, on the way to Mulstanton, would find someone heading south:
Flatter Sigebert. And get better at your letters, or have Fursey set them down for you!
She needed a window onto what was happening down there.

So instead of sitting in strange cold rooms ignoring her own fear and the sideways looks of Osric’s men, she roamed the estuary, drowning her dreams in the flight of birds, endless flocks of them—goose and redshank, oystercatcher and tern, lapwing and plover, and, for two days, settling drifts of heron and egret. They lifted on the third day at dawn and left the mudflats desolate, flat and ugly and stinking. Did Hereswith’s swamp smell like this?

She walked down to the harbour, watched men and some women bringing in their catch of cod and haddock, mackerel and herring while the gulls wheeled and shrieked and squabbled, and offshore the heads of seals bobbed up and down as they swam. She wondered how that would feel, to swim naked through the heavy, cold water. To navigate the simple currents of brine, not politics.

That night she dreamt of seawater coursing over her glistening skin, of flying underwater and over it, and woke in the glimmer of dawn with a shivering yearning, delicious and unnameable. Gwladus, sleeping at the foot of Hild’s bed, didn’t stir. Hild watched for a while. The curve of her cheek, the top of her shoulder where her shift had slipped, had the bloom and sheen of just-risen cream ready to be licked.

She followed Gwladus’s form under the blanket, the flare of waist to hip. The child didn’t show. Pennyroyal and sweet gale, that’s what she’d recommend. Parsley in a pinch. But she hadn’t seen any yet, this far north, and they weren’t herbs she carried for wound care.

The next night Hild joined the king at mead with his host and their sons and thegns and counsellors. The only woman. She stared at them, still half dreaming of birds lifting, seals diving. One of Osric’s thegns touched his amulet and made a sign.

Edwin threw a duck bone at the man’s head. “You don’t like my seer? You’re in good company. My pet bishop doesn’t like her, either. He tells me he half expects her to dissolve and disappear in a shriek of oily smoke when she’s baptised at Easter.”

Osfrith, sitting next to Hild, and well used to her, laughed, and others laughed cautiously along with him. It struck Hild that the younger ætheling was now seen as a man to be laughed along with, a man in his own right, no longer just a stripling prince. Since his marriage he had found his way. He was becoming the king’s man of business, negotiating affairs of trade with other kings and chieftains the way his brother, Eadfrith, negotiated affairs of state.

But as men laughed she saw the discontent in Edwin’s eyes: like the nights he smiled with Eorpwald at Rendlesham. She remembered Begu telling her of the pope’s letter to the queen.
One flesh with the king, once he accepted Christ.
The æthelings might be useful but an overking could not abide a rival. The letter from the pope, backed by Paulinus once he was chief priest of the Angles, might be enough to blunt his rivals’ tines. Rivalry, the disease of kings.

Hild became aware of Paulinus’s unwinking gaze. His nose was more bladelike than usual, the muscles around his mouth set and hard. He was angry, no doubt as much for being referred to as a pet, and for disclosure of his thoughts, as for her presence. Righteous anger, the disease of bishops.

The sound of mead, poured into the silver cup next to her hand by a pretty servingwoman—not as pretty as Gwladus—seemed unnaturally loud. The woman’s hand was shaking. Hild motioned
Enough
; if the woman spilt anything at the overking’s table, she’d be whipped. Being surrounded by the stink of fear, the disease of seers.

She picked up the cup. They all watched. She turned it in her hand. Rivalry, anger, fear.

“I have one very like this,” she said. “A gift from our generous overking. For Lindum.” She smiled at them over the rim.

They looked away. They’d all heard of the seer’s deeds at Lindum.

Edwin laughed. “Perhaps I should have given her something for Bebbanburg.” The room stiffened—like estuary mud drying in the sun, Hild thought, a sucking bog under the cracking skin, treacherous.

Bebbanburg. Osric always denied that he had betrayed them to the Irish, and Edwin, at the time not wholly secure, had deemed it prudent to accept his word. Osric was Yffing, with a claim to be king and the men to back it up. With the Irish swarming, and the æthelings not quite of age, the king had needed his cousin. But now Osric was just another rival.

She sipped her mead. Fine, very fine. She sipped again, rolled it around her mouth, swallowed. “Good mead,” she said to Osric, but pitched to be heard at the farthest tables. “Made from southern honey. No, farther away than that, a land of blossoming walnut groves and poppies.” Obvious, now that she thought about it. “You didn’t tell us you were trading with the Franks, cousin.”

Silence rippled outwards.

Edwin looked at her, nodding. His eyes were ordinary, not black in the middle and banded with swarming green. He wasn’t surprised. He’d just been waiting for her to declare it openly. She nodded back and raised her cup, as though she had known for a week and had waited for the proper moment. But her heart thumped. So obvious but she had nearly missed it. She had nearly missed it.

Edwin smiled at Osric, showing too many teeth. “The Franks, kinsman?” He shaped
kinsman
with particular edge. They all heard the threat: Being kin will only take you so far. He sipped his Frankish mead. “I’ll take my cut of that trade when we reach York for the baptism. And no doubt the bishop here will put in a word with his god once you donate an equal sum to the glory and beautification of his new church.”

*   *   *

Osric had been king of his hall at Tinamutha, but here, by the Bay of the Beacon, Mulstan was king of his.

He was on his feet, cup in hand, making one of his rambling but heartfelt speeches welcoming the king and his household to his humble abode. The abode the king’s niece had seen fit to grace just a few short years ago, which visit brought his dear wife and lady, Onnen, to him …

Hild found it eerie to see all the people in her life drawn together: Onnen, with Mulstan on her right, and Cian and Begu to her left. The king, without his usual coterie—Paulinus, Osric, and the æthelings had all headed straight to York from Arbeia—to Mulstan’s right. Hild had chosen to sit on the left side, with Onnen’s people, including her mother.

Breguswith and Onnen had reached some understanding. Begu had given her the news breathlessly that afternoon, jumbled in with news of Cædmon and Winty—that is, Winty’s calf’s calf, who looked just the same, even to the golden tips of her ears—and Guenmon. She thought Guenmon and Gwladus would take to each other very well. And wait til Hild saw Onnen’s twins! Plump as geese and only a little less toothless. Oh, but Hild didn’t like geese. Plump as, as … pigeons! But Bán, Bán she was very sorry to say, had, according to Onnen, died just that winter of the horrible cough that swept through the people around the bay. And his dog, well, that was very sad. His dog had died just a moon before Bán himself …

“Why such a long face?” her mother asked as Mulstan wound up his speech and called for Swefred to
Play that song, you know the one
. “Not what you remember?”

“It’s just the same. We’re even eating Celfled’s eels. Swefred will now sing the tale of the wight who haunts the wrack, and glare suspiciously at anyone who praises him too much.”

“But?”

“But there are people missing.”

“Yes.” She laid a hand briefly on Hild’s cheek, which startled Hild so much she nearly knocked her cup over. “There are always people missing. And sometimes I see their ghosts.” She looked briefly at Cian, who was laughing at something Begu had said, and, in his polished mail, with long chestnut hair falling about his shoulders, looking every inch the foster-prince of the hall. His eye gleamed, his muscles shone like greased piglets, his bones were as strong as oak. He was the tallest man in the room and shone the brightest. A young god.

It was the closest they had ever come to speaking of it. “Are you … Do you mind?” Hild said.

“If I do, it’s not the son or his mother I blame. Not any more.” Another roar of laughter from down the table. “Even his laugh is the same.”