Hild: A Novel (6 page)

It had been the principia of the Roman prefect, then the palace of the king of Ebrauc, and was now the feasting hall of Edwin, king of Deira and Bernicia. It was too big, too high, too hard. More stone than wood. Wealh. Really wealh, in a way Ceredig’s smoky great house had not been.

It was not smoky here. She could feel the air stirring about her. She dare not look up from the cup in case she spilled, but she knew the roof would be too far up, in too much shadow, to see. Perhaps there were windows up there. But she wasn’t cold.

Wood coals glowed in a series of pits down the centre of the room. You could lay a herd of cows on those coals, end to end. Torches roared and rushed in their brackets along the high second-storey wall (how had the housefolk lit those? ladders?) and matching torches burnt less vigorously along the inner colonnades, behind the benches where the men sat in two long—long, long—rows facing one another across the fire pit. The walls were draped with tapestries and smaller hangings brocaded in gold and stitched with jewels. The shadows gleamed.

In the centre of the right-hand row was Edwin’s bench. He wore red. Four huge bands glittered on his left arm, three on his right. Royal bands. Every time he reached for bread, muscles in his neck and shoulder bunched and corded. Any one ring would, she knew, make her cup seem light. His sons, Eadfrith and Osfrith, sat on his right; Lilla, his chief gesith, on his left. As Hild approached slowly with her cup, Edwin looked at her and put down his bread. The scop played a dramatic chord on his lyre. Many turned to look and saw the girl in yellow and blue, carrying gold. Conversation dropped from deafening to loud.

Hild moved with as much grace as she could muster until she stood before Edwin and slightly to his left so that her back was not quite turned to the guests—British in Anglisc clothes—across the way.

“Edwin king,” she said as loud as she could, and because her voice was higher than any other voice in hall it cut through the din and the hall quieted more. Now she could hear distinctly the hiss and roar of the torches. “My king,” she said. And her carefully prepared speech fled. What could she say before so many that any would want to hear? “Great King. For you, a drink.” And she held out the cup. She nearly lost her balance.

Edwin, smiling, stood, leaned over the table, and took the cup in one hand. “I will lighten it for you,” he said, and took a great swallow. The gold at his temple and throat and arms, pinned to his chest and along his belt, winked. He handed it back. Hild took it carefully. Then she turned to the eldest ætheling, Eadfrith, who stood and drank, then to his brother, Osfrith. All around her, men began to stand. Her arms ached, but she held the cup out straight, as though it weighed nothing. She moved down the bench to the chief gesith, held it out.

“Ah, empty it for the maid, Lilla,” Edwin said. “She can barely hold it.”

The gesith laughed and swallowed once, twice, three times, then turned it upside down to show it empty. The crowd roared. Hild stood straighter. The weight of the brooch at her chest was terrible. She looked over at the houseman behind Edwin’s chair.

“The cup is empty,” she said.

He ran with his jar all the way down to the end of the bench and all the way back up to Hild, where he knelt and poured into the proffered cup. How did he do that without seeming to look?

She said clearly, using her stomach the way the great hounds belled when hunting, “Fill it high. Then bring your jar, in case our guests have a great thirst.” She knew full well that now the guests would feel it necessary to empty the cup twice over, and then she would go back to Edwin and he would have to maintain Anglisc prowess and drink more than those British in Anglisc clothes. And wasn’t that the point of a feast, to drink and sing? She remembered Ywain in Ceredig’s hall saying,
Ah, if you make men drink they will sing, and if they sing, they are happy, and if they are happy, they throw gold to the harper and compliments to their guests.
And Onnen had told her who was among the guests.

She spilled not a drop, and when she got to the guest bench, she held the cup to the head guest, who stood, and his entourage with him. “Dunod ap Pabo,” she said. “Drink and be welcome.” Then, quietly, in British, as he took the cup, “If your lady wife were here, I would give to her greetings as a friend of Onnen, who is cousin to your wife’s brother, Ceredig ap Gualloc, who was king in Elmet wood.”

He paused, shot a startled look across the hall.

“Drink, my lord. And tell me, for Onnen, is he well?”

He sipped and swallowed, nodded slightly.

She switched back to Anglisc. “If you drink more the cup will be easier for me to hold and you will have my gratitude. And,” in British again, “the housefolk have said that the mead from the hall jars is not of a strength of that first poured for the king. He will be amazed at your steady head.” She grinned. “Though who knows who has paid which man to say what in the hope of foolishness?”

They took a moment, the grown man in clothes foreign to him and the young girl in splendour she could barely carry, and understood each other. He laughed.

“You are a strange little lass,” he said in Anglisc, for all to hear.

“I am the light of the world,” she said, clear and high, and the scop, always sensitive to dramatic possibility, drew an uncanny chord from his lyre, and at that moment a great gust of wind made the torches on the upper level gutter then flare.

The hall fell silent.

“I drink to you, little light!” He drained the cup, upended it, and the men beat their palms on the boards and the scop nodded to his whistle man and his drummer and they plucked a few measures of a lively air and, while the other women now moved to fill drinking horns along the benches, she could recross the hall without too many people paying attention.

But as she approached Edwin he gestured to a houseman, who ran down the benches, and up, and said, “The king desires that you sit with him for the feast if, being a little maid, you are not too tired. And he desires me to take the cup from you now, so that you may walk with ease to his bench. Your lady mother and sister may join also, should you wish it.”

Hild looked at Edwin and nodded. “Yes. I thank the king. But my sister can carry the cup. The girl with honey hair and the green dress.”

Another houseman ran to bring Breguswith to Edwin, and Hereswith to Hild, to take the cup. Hereswith, twelve years old, brilliant in beryl green, with a silvered-tin brooch at her breast, gave Hild a complicated look as she reached for the cup, but looked startled when she felt its weight. “Thunor!” she said. “That’s heavy.”

“Hold it tight,” Hild said, and she was glad to have a sister to walk beside her down the hall. The housefolk watched them closely. The boy who had stuck his tongue out at her poked his head through the curtained doorway and the houseman standing there—the kitchen chief, Hild saw—shooed him back. The chief seemed tense.

Hild understood: He couldn’t serve until the cupbearer sat. “Let’s go faster,” Hild said.

Breguswith timed her arrival at the head table to match theirs. Edwin stood, the æthelings and Lilla with him, and a fuss was made of seating them all: Hild, as cupbearer, to the king’s immediate left, her mother and Hereswith and Mildburh between the princes.

The minute they sat, housefolk poured into the hall with roast pigs in apple-scented crackling and tubs of roasted vegetables and great wooden bowls of soup. At other tables, Hild saw, the men and their women shared the soup, passing the table bowl back and forth as they would a drinking horn, but at the king’s bench, each guest was brought his or her own birchwood bowl.

Her mother gave her a meaningful smile—
Talk to the king!
—then turned to Osfrith. Hereswith looked at Eadfrith and nodded as though they had always sat side by side, and he said, “How do you, lady?” though his voice squeaked a little and his spotty skin reddened. The scop began a pleasant tune, with an endless feel to it, like spinning, and Hild understood she would be here a while. She wished her feet touched the floor.

The king lifted his bowl and slurped. He wiped his beard with a heavy-ringed hand, wiped his hand on the cloth running along the edge of the table, looked at Hild. His eyes were mostly blue around the pupil and mostly green around the edge. She lifted her own bowl; without her feet to steady her, it seemed heavier than it should. The soup smelt of parsnip and cream. The steam rising from it was hot. She blew on the soup, took a tiny sip, blew some more.

“A princess does not blow on her food in my hall,” said the king, with a smile.

Hild nodded, then remembered she should talk. “Then what must I do? The soup is too hot, yet if I sit and wait, the whole will grow cold.”

“An ætheling or a princess must never wait. Our food comes to the table just so.” He clapped his hands twice, clap-clap, and lifted her bowl. A houseman appeared at his shoulder with a fresh bowl. “See? Try that. Yes, perfect. And if it gets cold you learn to clap”—clap-clap—“for another.”

Another houseman appeared. Hild recognised him as a friend of Onnen’s.

The king ignored him. “A king’s table is always watched. They will have seen you blow; when you clap they understand your needs.”

The houseman stood right there, while the king talked in his presence the way he wouldn’t even talk before his dog unless he gave it a fondle of its ears. Then he drank his own soup again.

She tried not to see her mother’s swift glance up the table. She swung her feet to and fro, thinking.

“I like your tunic, lord King.”

He turned to her, puzzled.

“It is a very fine red.” She tilted her head. “Though with our hair colour, blue is better.” She couldn’t interpret the look on his face. “I could help you pick the colour, next time.”

“You could?”

“I could.”

“Well I thank you for that, little maid.”

“I am seven. Not so little as I was. Though I do wish my legs were longer and would reach the ground.”

“By all means, let us fix that.” Clap-clap. This time Hild watched. The houseman peeled himself from the wall and as he approached, another from farther along the room took his place. “Bring the maid a cushion.”

When the man left on his errand, Hild said, “Do you not know my name, King? It is Hild.”

“Hild,” the king said. “You are a strange little maid.”

“So Prince Dunod says.”

“What do you know of Dunod ap Pabo?”

“That he would be sad for his wife if her brother were to be killed.”

“He told you this?”

“No, King, but what sister wouldn’t grieve for her brother, and what husband wouldn’t hurl himself at the wind to try to keep his wife happy?”

Edwin leaned in. His pupils were expanding, drinking the blue centre from his eyes, until all was green and black. “You have seen this?”

“My king?”

He wrapped his huge hand around her right wrist. “Tell me true, now. You have seen Dunod ap Pabo go to war over the death of Ceredig ap Gualloc?”

Hild blinked.

Edwin shook her slightly, and it took Hild back to a time she couldn’t quite remember, the day her world changed, when her father died, and she saw the grey snakes of hair in Edwin’s beard and heard a voice:
Tell Cadfan that he or his son shall have to face this serpent one day.

“Cadwallon,” she whispered. Edwin let go as if scalded. “Cadfan’s son. Your foster-brother. He will have to face you.”

“Hild,” he said. “Now I know that name. You are the one in the lady Breguswith’s dream, the jewel who will light the way.”

Hild nodded. His face looked very strange, so pale that his eyes seemed to shine and crawl like summer flies.

“You will light my way.”

She nodded again.
Talk to the king.
“Yes, King. Though any light must have fuel to shine.”

“Fuel, is it?” The colour began to come back to Edwin’s face, and, along with it, a knowing look.

Hild felt encouraged. “Yes, King.”

“And what do you ask from me as your … fuel?”

“You are king, and do king things. My sister learns to weave. My—that is Cian—my mother’s … my mother’s gemæcce’s son, learns the sword. I want a path.”

“A path? That is your price?”

Price? She was aware of a houseman approaching bearing her cushion, but dared not pause now. “I want to learn, to wander and ask and think and listen like … like a priest or a prince.”

“Not gold?”

“Gold comes to priests and princes.”

Edwin threw back his head and laughed. “So now we get to it. Gold.” He stood, looked over at his scop. The scop’s rippling music stopped, and he struck two peremptory chords. “Hear me!” the king shouted. “I have a challenge.” Every warrior in the room came to attention. A feast challenge meant gold for the winner. “Though, as it is Modresniht, my challenge is for a maid.”

Puzzlement. Settling back of the men, leaning forward of the women. Breguswith’s eyes shone like blue glass.

Edwin stripped the lowest band on his left arm, wrapped both hands about it—they barely met around the circle—and lifted it over his head. It was soft yellow gold, thick as his thumb, worth a hundred cattle, two hundred, five hundred. He turned slowly, so it reflected light to the farthest ends of every bench. Then he threw it onto the table.

“Hild, princess and niece, jewel of Deira who will light our way in wisdom and prophecy, the gold is yours. To claim it, you must only fill our feasting cup to the brim, and carry it and the ring to our guest’s table without spilling a drop, and then back again.”

Hild stood, beckoned to a houseman, pointed to the cup. Her mother’s eyes glowed so hot they might melt. Gold, acknowledgement of her status, and a path. All for one trip across the hall.

It was impossible. The cup and ring together weighed more than half of what she did.

“Hild,” said her mother, and beat gently with the palm of her hand on the table as her daughter passed her. “Hild,” said Hereswith as her sister walked by.

“Hild,” said the women along the table, and then “Hild!” shouted one gesith, and now the drumming was like the surf at Bebbanburg, loud, unstoppable. “Hild. Hild. Hild.” There wasn’t a one among them who didn’t want to see her win an ætheling’s ransom from the king. She walked on the wave of sound the length of the tables and back up again until she stood before Edwin, on the other side of the board.