Hild: A Novel (69 page)

He leaned back, hands behind his head. “That’s not quite it. It’s more that he’s a man, though he likes to pretend otherwise.”

She waited but he did not seem inclined to say more. “He doesn’t think he’s a man?”

“No, no. Simply that as a man he can persuade himself of ridiculous things in order to persuade others.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Most of the time he believes he is truly saving all those hundreds of half-drowned baptisands.” He mused for a moment. “And when he doubts himself, I’d say he banishes those doubts by banishing his bodily needs, denying his humanness.”

Reminded, he eyed the wine jug. She nodded and gestured for him to go ahead. He poured and sipped.

“Ah. That’s a truly lovely wine. But when it comes to the joys of the flesh, I am weak. No doubt because I’m a mere deacon. Paulinus, being a bishop, is made of sterner stuff.”

“I’ve noticed that he doesn’t care for food or wine.”

“He thinks bodily joy—love of wine, of a handsome figure, of venison smothered in bilberries—a weakness, a sin.”

“But you don’t.”

“God made our bodies. And God is love. Love is never wrong. And so love of bodily joy, I think the Christ would agree, is never wrong.” He picked up his cup. “Except when it becomes greed. Which leads to gluttony. Which is most definitely a sin.”

“How can you tell the difference?”

“That, dear child, is a mystery. For today, let us say five cups of wine is love, and six gluttony.”

“Then you can have one more.”

He beamed. “That’s so.”

“I have another question.”

He waved a hand magnanimously.

“Why does God speak to some people and not others?”

She pretended to sip while he picked carefully through his thoughts. Next time she would suggest that the line between love and gluttony might be moved to eight cups.

“The only priests God speaks to, in my experience, are those who think they should be overbishop.” He raised his eyebrows: Did she understand?

She nodded. All priests lie. Except to the pope. “But God does listen to some people. He listened to some of the mothers when their children were dying.”

“Listening is not the same as speaking.”

“He will speak to me. Tell me how.”

“Oh, my dear. I wish we were sitting in the sunshine of Rome.”

She frowned. “Does sunshine make a difference?”

“No, no. But Rome does. There are Greek texts … The Greeks thought about these things. You’d like them.” He shook his head. “But I have none here. The bishop doesn’t see the value. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he reads it very well.”

“Teach me how to talk to him. I want to ask something.”

“Well, I don’t think the bishop would disagree with me if I said that God helps those who help themselves.”

She considered that. “So I can ask for something if I do something?” Give a gift, get an audience. That made sense. She had already arranged the alliance between deacon, queen, and seer. She would ask for an omen.

*   *   *

God sent an omen at dawn, tangled in a birder’s net.

Hild stood in a shaft of light in the king’s hall and held out the jay by its unnatural white legs. She shook it lightly. The king, the queen, even James stepped back.

“Look closely, my king.”

But Edwin wouldn’t come near it.

“White legs, white bill, white eyes. White as a ghost. But caught in a net, killed by hunters who already had full bags.” She gestured at two men by the door, with nets and slings tucked in their wide leather belts and bloodstained game bags at their hips. They looked as though they would bolt, but for Gwrast on one side and Oeric on the other.

Edwin ignored them. “Tell me what it means.”

“A warning about greed. Christ, they say, is often spoken of as a white bird.” She looked at James, who nodded. Doves were white birds, after all. “The people ask: Why would I want to be baptised if my wyrd is to end strangled in a net? Others say: Greed is what killed the white bird, the hunter’s greed. That sometimes the birds in the bag are enough. Greed and hurry, Edwin king.”

“Ah. You’re talking about the Crow. You want me to rein him in.” He looked at Æthelburh, who nodded, and at James, who bowed his assent. Then at Hild. “I’ll have to give him something to do,” he said.

“There’s Craven. We’re to go in summer. The bishop could go ahead of us.”

He thought about it. “Well, why not? Make him cousin Osric’s problem. But not too much of a problem. We can’t have more murmuring. The deacon here will go to keep an eye on him.”

22

A
T THE BEGINNING OF SUMMER
Edwin and his advisers joined Paulinus and James in Craven. They found Osric’s household in disarray. Osric had taken apart the old fort of the kings of Craven and built himself a grand new hall, but, according to Gwladus and Morud, who had already winkled out the story from kitchen hands and byre boys, the new ealdorman gave contradictory orders, and the housefolk never knew from one day to the next whether they should be weaving a tapestry, sowing a field, or slaughtering sheep. The roof didn’t leak, and there was food on the table and horsehair in the mattresses, but the atmosphere of the hall felt surly and nervous.

Edwin felt no need to impress Osric. He had allowed the queen—along with her ladies, including Begu and Breguswith—to go instead to Derventio. Osric had no wife, and his daughter was visiting her cousins in Arbeia. With few Anglisc women present, Osric’s vill felt more like a travel camp than a high lord’s hall: too much drinking and open rutting and men pissing in corners, while spitting and staring over their shoulders. Hild told Morud and Oeric to pass the word to the men of Craven that any who laid a hand on Gwladus would put his wyrd in the seer’s hand. She told Gwladus to pin her braids close to her head and wear a thick old dress. “I mean it. No flaunting.” But Gwladus was made as she was, and though she pinned her hair up, and though she wore an old dress and looked at the floor when she thought Hild would see, the looks she gave Osric’s men brimmed with the knowledge of her power.

On the third day, when James asked Hild to walk with him, she was glad to get out of the hall.

The river roared and tumbled down falls and through weirs, teeming with salmon and roach, dace and minnow. Its steep green banks were streaked with otter slides, and hard-beaked kingfishers watched from every birch and alder.

James seemed a different man. His stride was longer, his face leaner. They walked for a while, until they came to a stand of graceful white birch on a high bank. Here the grass at the foot of a smooth boulder was broken and flattened. She was not surprised when they sat.

The air smelt like a newly unfurled leaf. Just breathing made her feel good: no scent of dung or charcoal or rotting thatch, only leaping fish and rushing water.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” James said. “Fresh as the first day of creation. But dangerous. When it rains up in the hills, the water rises fast.”

Hild said nothing, happy to wait.

“He’s at it again. Baptisms. With no heed. I begged him to consider. Consider the will of the people. Consider the raging river itself. Last time we’d just finished—sixscore people in one baptism!—and waded to the bank when,
whoosh
, dead sheep swept by, bobbing and swollen. If we’d stayed in the water for one more immersion, just one, we’d have been washed away. Gone. Dead as the sheep.”

Below, something, she couldn’t tell what, swam against the current: a flash, a splash, and it was gone.

“As well as the baptisms, he’s forcing people from their fields and pastures to help him build a new church from the stones at the old Roman fort.”

“Osric has stoneworkers?”

“Dunod had one. Old now, but versed in the ways of tumbled Roman stone. So a new church is rising, and the bishop, in his zeal, will fill it with fresh souls. A new Rome, he says. Rome, in Craven! He’s run mad.”

Perhaps ambition drove everyone mad in the end. Power and ambition were two edges of the same sword, as she knew herself. She wanted to be powerful so she could protect her people; she had people because she was powerful. And there were different kinds of power: the still, pent power of the seer; the free, raging power of the butcher-bird. But did there have to be only one path?

James seemed to be walking a new path. “If you could choose, would you stay here or go back to York?” she said.

“I miss my choir,” he said. “But I love it here. So wild and young and pure.” And some steady yearning in his voice made her think of Uinniau when he spoke of Begu, and she knew James wasn’t talking about the river.

She smiled. “Perhaps the bishop would be better advised to focus on his church in York and leave his deacon to supervise the new church of Catterick?” He straightened. “And perhaps the deacon might find a local man to help recruit labour through payment and persuasion rather than force.”

“I have just the man. Quiet and strong, something of a leader in these parts.”

“I’m happy to hear it. I’ll speak to the king.”

A kingfisher dove and missed.

“And you?” he said. “You’re well?”

She nodded. “Though God hasn’t told me anything yet.” She kicked at her boulder, glanced up at him from under her brows. “Deacon … there’s … It’s said that God only listens to the pure of heart.”

“Then he listens to no one. We’re all sinners.”

“Sin.” She sighed. “I still don’t understand sin.”

“You don’t need to understand it. You need to confess it, be absolved, and approach your prayer afresh.”

She remembered Fursey’s long, rambling opinions on the matter of confession. “But confession is an admission of guilt. A king or a seer … we can’t just admit wrong. It’s not…” She couldn’t think what it was exactly. “Besides, what if we don’t think what we’ve done is wrong?”

He watched the river. “I counsel my flock that, if in doubt, they should consider the ten commandments.”

“Does Paulinus see it that way?”

“There are no commandments against love,” he said.

She ran through them in her head. Not unless someone was married.

“God is love,” he said. “Love is never wrong.”

She was thinking of a different commandment. “But sometimes we do have to kill people.”

“Then confess and be absolved.”

“Also, for a priest or a seer what, exactly, counts as helping yourself so God will help you, and what counts as a lie?”

James burst out laughing. Hild had no idea what was so funny, but seeing his eyes turn to slits, his face turn red under the charcoal, and his greying curls bob as he bleated made her mouth stretch despite herself.

He wiped his eyes. “‘What counts as a lie?’ You’re as slippery as a bishop. If only women could take the vow!”

Hild said solemnly, “What, exactly, counts as a woman?” And this time she laughed, too.

*   *   *

They stayed in Craven for a month. Edwin seemed to enjoy eating his new ealdorman out of house and home.

She walked every day with James. She asked those she met about bandits, but no one knew anything. He introduced her to a farmer and part-time farrier called Druyen, who was indeed tall and quiet and strong. She practiced praying while walking, while lying down, while kneeling—that hurt, and worked no better than anything else—then tried confession.

“It’s like picking out stepping-stones in the dark,” she said.

“You’re very good at it,” he said.

At night, she composed a letter in her head to Fursey, about love and killing and confession, and in his imaginary reply, he told her to take care, take very great care, and not to fall in.

*   *   *

She went through another growth spurt, this time putting on muscle and curves. Gwladus shook her head and said she hoped Hild had a lot of silver put by, because when they got to Goodmanham, her lady mother, who now thought of little other than wool—apart, that is, from her scop—would charge an arm and a leg to clothe such a giant.

Cian also changed. He, too, put on muscle, and the bones in his face grew harder and bigger. His height increased a little; not nearly as much as his weight. His neck seemed to swell overnight, and his jaw looked clenched all the time, there was so much strength in it. Something more than his size changed, too. His laugh was harder, his words edged. Men began to back down more quickly when he disagreed with them.

He had a new woman, though Hild didn’t know who. He disappeared at night and came back smelling of her in the morning. He still smiled, still told stories—to others. He had no time for walking, or riding, or sparring with her. No time even for talking. When he wasn’t with the gesiths, he was hunting and drinking with Uinniau and Oswine.

*   *   *

And then Fursey sent her a real letter. Or part of one.

“Looks as though it’s been eaten by a pig and shat out,” Morud said when Gwladus let him into the room and he handed it to Hild. Indeed, the folded scrap was filthy and bedraggled, with half torn away.

She pulled her robe around her and ignored the looks Morud was giving Gwladus, whose hair was hanging loose.

She read it fast, or as fast as she could—some of the tiny lettering was blurred, as though rained on, or dropped in a puddle—then again more slowly.
S sent word to your sister’s man that he arrives with arms and threescore men as soon as the weather is fair for war.

Fair for war. In the south the first ship crossing from Frankia to East Anglia could have been a month ago or more. Sigebert and his threescore gesiths could be with Æthelric’s war band already. How many men could Ricberht king-killer command?

She imagined her mother’s cynical smile: As many as see advantage for themselves.

For ealdormen and thegns, advantage was tied to the web of trade and obligation woven over generations: Who could give them more power, more gold, more land, more influence? Sigebert and the Christian Franks, or Ricberht king-killer? For farmers, it was about food: the hams hanging from the ceiling, the honey in the crock, the grain in the sacks. If the weather in the south and east was good for the next two years, they wouldn’t want anything to change; Ricberht would stay king.