Hild: A Novel (77 page)

“Tell my mother: They are my people. They are my path. It’s where I belong. She’ll understand.”

She whirled her cloak onto her shoulders, picked up her stave with one hand, and pulled Begu to her with the other. She squeezed Begu tight, and left.

*   *   *

She drove them at a killing pace. Nineteen horses and their cloaked riders. They could rest if they lived. She lay down at night, as they all did; she ate when food was put in front of her; she heard the talk around her, even sometimes answered, but her whole attention was focused on her target. She was falling, stooping to the kill, wings folded back, wind whistling past her pinions, eyes fixed on her prey. Waking and sleeping alike were a thing of hollowing air and falling.

They ran south along the old army road that turned in a great curve on the eastern flank of the Bernician upland. Thundered across three rivers. Tore through Corabrig on the wall, where they shed a messenger east for Tinamutha. Then the long, straight Dere Street—canter, trot, canter, trot—until the fork just north and west of York, where they shed another messenger, this time for York, then on to the west and south road, gaining speed, homing in, hurtling for Caer Loid.

Just before the road split into west, southwest, and south, Hild swerved to one side and looked out over the high moor.

Rain blurred the air. The moor smelt of that turn from winter to spring. Silence, but for blowing horses and champing bits: no birdsong, no rustle in the tussocky grass—they’d frightened everything for miles with their hurry.

To the west: road running over empty moorland. South: the great river valley, where the forest grew in a tangle of bare branches, grey and black and brown. She thought she saw the glint of the river. South and east: Caer Loid, hidden by a series of low rises. East: where the wood had gathered close to what was left of Ermine Street—London to Lindum to Brough, through Aberford, to York—birds lifted in a cloud thicker than smoke.

Hild pointed. They wheeled.

*   *   *

Bare branches dripped. On either side of Hild, behind ferns and a line of mossy, fallen trunks along the edge of a natural clearing, her men crouched behind their shields, swords in hand, breathing through their mouths. Five of the shields were newly painted. In the wet, the red wariangle ran and stretched into a gaunt nightmare bird. Behind them, a horse stirred, trying to rub the unfamiliar baffling from its bit. Hild turned her head slightly, but Gwladus was already offering the horse a sliver of dried apple and stroking its nose. Her gleaming hair was hidden by a grey cloth.

Hild stood sideways behind an elm in the centre of her line: seven men on one side, seven on the other, stave upright in both hands. She was no longer falling.

She listened. They were coming, straight for them: a small group, trying to hurry quietly through the tangled undergrowth, trying to escape. And behind them, shouts, the ringing clash of steel; the main group of Northumbrians fighting, slowing down pursuit.

Her men had exact orders. She waited.

She heard everything: the drip, the creak as one man eased his position, the sudden rattle of branches in a sough of late-afternoon wind, and closer, closer now the harsh breath of men tired beyond endurance and mindless with running.

There: three of them. No, four. Two men with Anglisc swords, carrying a rough litter, grunting with effort as they ran across the clearing, and a woman running alongside, knife in one hand, eyes starting in every direction. Her torc was Welsh. She was ripe with child.

Hild caught Oeric’s eye, held up four fingers, waited til he touched the shoulders of the brothers Berht and Eadric the Brown, who all turned to her and readied themselves as she mouthed,
One, two, three!

Men with big hands, men with the strength of desperation and the advantage of surprise: They grabbed each of the little group, one arm around the waist, one hand over nose and mouth, and heaved them past the tree line. Before the snatched could begin to struggle they faced a thicket of swords and the tallest woman they had ever seen, with one finger at her lips then pointing at the boar insignia on Eadric’s helmet—the boar that matched the banner lying beneath the battered man on the litter. Eadfrith.

The two gesiths lowered their hands, away from their sword hilts, and the Welsh princess blinked, nodded, and crouched behind the nearest fern.

As though it had been a signal, the clearing filled with the noise and stink of men shouting, straining; the flash and clash of steel; bright blood.

Wait
, Hild signalled,
wait
, and she let her mind float free, judging the wind on her cheek, the pace of the fighting men, their strength, the speed with which her men might step over the trunk …

“Now!”

And fourteen men slid neatly between pursuer and pursued, and locked their shields.

But these men hadn’t worked together as a shield wall before, and instead of one interlocked line, they formed two pieces. And the Welsh—a hundred of them, it seemed to Hild—filled the clearing with blades and sweat, and three fleeing Northumbrians were caught on the wrong side of the shields.

Hild howled and hurled her stave like a spear at the chest of the wealh swinging an axe at a man wearing a filthy cloak that might once have been red and black. The axeman fell. She saw the pale blur of Cian’s face, then her world dissolved into a whirl of grappling and kicking.

She was squeezing a man around the throat with her big hands, squeezing, kicking, kneeing, stamping, spitting in his eye. His sword was useless. He dropped it, clawed at her. She squeezed, squeezed.

Then he was gone, and she was running at the Welsh, seax-first, hacking, hacking at the men before her.

Then the men before her were nothing but backs, disappearing into the trees.

Her hands hurt. She lifted them. They were red.

She fumbled for her sheath.

“No,” he said. “You must wipe the blade first.”

Cian, holding out the corner of his bold cloak of red and black.
To hide the mud and blood
.

“Angeth?” he said. “Eadfrith?”

“Safe.”

“The others?”

Her head rang. Everything seemed rimmed with light. “Others?”

“Edwin king. The war band.”

“Three days north.”

*   *   *

They sat on their cloaks under the dripping trees, chewing twice-baked bread dipped in beer. Three women. Twenty-four men. One broken prince. One body.

Angeth tended Eadfrith, who was half-conscious but unaware. She wasn’t pale and dark-haired, nothing like the seal hunter’s daughter. She was brown and cream and tawny, like a lynx.

Hild sat knee to knee with Cian, alone in the centre. Not woman and man but commanders of men.

Hild chewed carefully. She’d bitten her tongue; she wasn’t sure how. Perhaps when she’d been hit by whatever made her jaw swollen. She wiped one hand absently on the moss, but the blood was dried on now, and the moss wasn’t wet enough to help.

She felt very calm. She looked at the body, the butcher-bird shield covering the worst wounds. “Poor Cynan.”

“He always lost at knucklebones,” Cian said.

He had a ragged cut under his chin, and was thinner and harder, yet more like the boy who took his wooden sword from Ceredig king than the thegn’s foster-son and then king’s gesith she had known. He belonged here, like this.

“You’re not surprised to see me,” she said.

“Elmet always has you in it.”

And though she was hurt and they might die, though they were damp and cold, though he had a wife who was with child, though he was a fool who had ruined everything, it was all right.

He dunked more bread, chewed. “And then, too, you are a seer.”

She laughed, and a score of pale faces turned her way. She waved off their attention. “They think I’m mad.”

“Perhaps you are.”

They spoke easily, as though they were children in the wood, poking the water with a stick after a quarrel. She wanted to sit closer, the way children do, or puppies. She didn’t move. “How many men has Cadwallon?”

“Fewer than he had.”

“Tell me.”

Cadwallon and Penda had caught Eadfrith and his men at Long Mountain. Eadfrith took a sword cut across the ribs, and six of his men had ridden with him to Deganwy, to Cian and his fifteen men.

“He escaped only with six? Out of sixty?”

“He left the rest at the head of the valley, to slow Penda and Cadwallon.”

Hild turned to look at the man murmuring to himself under the trees. He had left his men. “Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing.”

“He knew.” Cian’s face changed, and Hild knew he was thinking in British, thinking bitter thoughts. He rearranged it with an effort. He said sternly, more to himself than to Hild, “He is ætheling and eldest. He was hurt. He couldn’t have won.”

Hild kept her face still. It was done. She gestured for him to go on.

Between them, Eadfrith and Cian escaped with twenty-one men and Angeth. Penda didn’t give chase, but Cadwallon did, with more than fifty Welshmen and Bretons. Eadfrith couldn’t ride well with his wound. Cadwallon caught them crossing the Kelder. He had bowmen. They shot their horses out from under them. That was when Cian had lost his shield. Five men were killed and Eadfrith was injured again, this time kicked in the head and half drowned when he was trampled underfoot in the river.

“He’s been wandering in his wits since. And coughing.”

Hild nodded. Now was not the time to think of that. “Cadwallon. You said less men than he had.”

“We set traps along the way. He has less than forty now. Perhaps three dozen.”

“Your plans?”

“To get to Aberford.”

She nodded. That might have made sense, before Cadwallon caught them a second time. “Cadwallon’s?”

“To kill.”

“He’d kill his own daughter?”

“He hates Edwin, hates the north Angles. His hatred has made him mad.”

He was in Anglisc territory with just forty men, some of them only on loan from the king of Less Britain. He must know Edwin would be coming in force. Mad. Yes. But how mad? “Will he run now?”

“First he’ll kill and rape and burn, throw Anglisc babies on the fire. Caer Loid’s only … eight miles?”

“They have a stout stockade and a dozen gesiths to guard it. And I sent a message. He won’t get in. Not with three dozen men.”

“Then he’ll burn and kill outside.”

Menewood was most likely safe; it was hidden. But Lweriadd and Sintiadd and, beyond them, Saxfryth and Ceadwulf …

She stood and crossed to Angeth, who was crouched by the murmuring ætheling. The tawny woman stood. They regarded each other a moment, then turned to the man, who, though tied to his litter, moved ceaselessly. “How is he?”

“With a warm room and a dry bed I don’t doubt he’d live.” Her Anglisc had the up-and-down of the Welsh hills, with a skirl of wind and a hint of brook.

“May I?”

Angeth stepped aside. Hild knelt. Felt the back of his neck: hot but not raging. Pressed an ear to his chest: congested but no worse than a child with a snotty nose. Lifted the edge of the rough bandage on his ribs and sniffed: not going bad. “Hold his head.”

Angeth knelt at his head and gripped the back of his head with both hands.

Hild felt the clotted lump above his temple. Soft with swelling. She pressed gently. He moaned. She pressed harder, to be sure, but nothing moved under her hand. Nothing broken. She peeled both eyelids back. The right pupil tightened more slowly than the left. She’d seen that before: a woodcutter hit by a branch of a falling tree. He’d recovered, but it had taken a fortnight, and he’d had dizzy spells for a month and a headache for half a year.

“Thank you,” she said. She went back to Cian and sat.

“Too much more jogging about might kill him. His litter must go by road. Or it must not go at all.”

“We should stay here?”

Lweriadd, Sintiadd. “It’s your job to guard your prince. And Angeth. Mine to guard my people.”

“But we’re stronger together.”

She nodded at Eadfrith. “We can’t stay together.”

“The king’s coming—”

“And men, perhaps, from Aberford before then. Perhaps as early as tomorrow. But he can kill a lot of people before tomorrow.”

Eadfrith murmured. The trees dripped. Daylight was seeping away.

She stood. “We have one spare horse. Come with us.”

He stood, too. “No.”

“No?”

“I go after Cadwallon. My men on your horses. You and Gwladus stay here with Angeth and Eadfrith, with Oeric and your men.”

Silence.

“I know Cadwallon. I know his tricks. And your men couldn’t make a shield wall.”

She thought of Oeric coming to her with his old battered sword, Oeric who had wanted to look away when he killed his bandit. Bassus and his men who had guarded the queen for years and who had to add longer leather laces to their mail shirts to fasten them.

“When we fought in the wood, my stick was just a stick. For you it was always a sword. This is your path.”

Her people, but his path.

She turned and walked to Cynan’s body, lifted the butcher-bird shield. She held it out. “Don’t drop it.”

25

O
UTSIDE CAER LOID
, with his seer at his shoulder, his eldest son safe in a dry bed in a warm room, and his war band ranged around him, Edwin watched the Elmetsætne who had come to pay tribute to their king kneel first to Cian, who stood young and glittering with his wife, and call him lord.

“Lord,” said the thick-chested man with four daughters. “Thank you for saving my farm.” “Lord,” said the old woman who kissed the hem of his cloak, “for the chickens and the ewes and my son’s babby, may Christ set a flower upon your head.” “Lord, Lady,” said the brothers who made charcoal in the woods, “let the gods smile on you and your children.”

Edwin crooked his finger to Hild. She bent to listen.

“How far gone is she?”

“Perhaps six months.”

“He’d better pray it’s not a boy.”

“He’s loyal, body and soul. He saved the ætheling.”

“He saved me from Eamer. But a man changes his ambitions when he has a son. And his son, they say, would be a mix of Ceredig and Cadwallon, an heir to Elmet and Gwynedd. It doesn’t take a seer to foresee the north dreaming of Coel Hen come again and making trouble for the Yffings for all time. No, I want Cadwallon’s line stamped out, quenched forever. When it’s time.”