Hild: A Novel (11 page)

“Why are we stopped?” Edwin said. “So that we may make fires, and eat hot food, and have light to clean our equipment by and warmth in which to sleep. So that the lookouts of Rhoedd of Rheged will see our fires and think us many hundreds strong. So that we have the leisure to sort through our baggage and choose our finest tunics and our brightest rings. And so that when we ride into Rhoedd’s stronghold tomorrow, we will look sleek and rested and well fed, our armour well tended and our swords sharp. And he will smile and open the gates to Caer Luel and prepare his tribute.” He laughed. “Oh, yes, in public he will smile. In private he will chew his moustaches. Last year his tribute was only ships to the Isle of Vannin, and he got them back safely, bar one. Plus sacksful of Irish gold and silver as his share of the booty. Rhoedd is the son of the brother of the son of a great man, and perhaps for a while he felt as big and fine as his grandsire, a real king. He might have got to thinking perhaps a king shouldn’t pay tribute. Yet here we are. We outnumber his war band three to one. We’re hard and blooded, bearing bright bitter blades.” He laughed. “Even you.” He scratched his beard, looked around at the hundreds of men, the boys, the women. “Rhoedd is prideful. It is easier on a man’s pride to truckle to a great king than to a starveling. And so we preen.”

Even the dogs were fitted with bright collars. Od the One-Eyed’s was spiked bronze.

Cian was beside himself with excitement. Lintlaf had lent him a bottle of linseed oil to tend the straps of his new shield and the hooves of his pony. Hild found him cross-legged on a flat stone by a gesith fire. He was trying on and taking off and adjusting his straps, over and over again.

He saw Hild and said, “Perhaps he will speak to me!” His eyes shone in the firelight.

“Who?”

“Rhoedd, son of Rhun, who was brother of Owein!” Owein, Cian’s hero, who had died at Catraeth. It was strange to hear his name surrounded by Anglisc words.

“We shall make sure of it.” In the firelight Cian’s hair was showing chestnut at the roots. Hild hoped Onnen would persuade him to rinse it before long. Though perhaps the time for that was past; Hereric had been dead seven years. Edwin was secure on his throne. Then she remembered the way he sometimes turned in his saddle and touched his sword, remembered the relief when the son of Morcant did not fight, and understood that a king never felt safe.

*   *   *

They stayed with Rhoedd for six days. Edwin, Hild learnt, was good at keeping his underking in countenance. He praised him lavishly, and toasted him heroically, and bade his own scop sing of Rhoedd’s illustrious forebears, back to Urien. He sang only the warrior songs, though Hild knew much of the cycle was written to make men laugh. As old Ywain, the bard of Ceredig’s hall in Elmet, had told her, a bard could sing anything of a man, that he is lazy, that he is stupid, that his word is no good, he could make all men assembled laugh at his subject—as long as he suggested that the man was the very god with the lasses, left them stunned and sighing and sated. Get them drunk, sing of their prowess between the thighs, and be showered with gold.

Even after all these years, Hild found it strange to hear those songs in Anglisc and accompanied on a flat, gut-stringed lyre.

In the crowded hall, Hild and Cian listened, rapt, as Rhoedd’s bard Gwaednerth then took up the tale, singing in British of the men of Yr Hen Ogledd, the Old North. Tales of Coel Hen, who ruled the whole of the north from Ebrauc that was, the York of long ago, when its walls were whole and its paint undimmed and the smell of the redcrests with their olive oil and grey wheat bread lingered in every corner. But as an old man, when the Scotti came from Ireland, Coel overreached himself. Cunning as only old men are, he conceived a plan to foment war between the Picts and the Scots. With his chiefs and lords and sons he camped by the waters of the Coyle and set out to fight first one side and then the other, wearing each time the captured regalia of the enemy …

Firelight ran along the harp’s bronze strings and the bard’s voice rose and dropped, not unlike the fells to the east, making a twisting, hypnotic rhythm of poised and perfect words. He was younger than old Ywain, his voice as supple as a withy-wound chariot. He could send his words trilling into the roof corners or scuttling through the floor rushes. As he sang at first of Coel Hen’s victories, of driving the Scots into the hills with shields flaming like bright wings in the sunlight, and of the evening’s fine triumph and boasts and eating of the hero’s portion, his voice was thrilling. Hild found herself thinking of her seax and how fine it might be to swing a sword whose blade ran like a river of silver in the moonlight, and whose battle cry made the enemy throw down his blade and crouch and shiver in the sedge, unmanned. But then the bard changed step, as suddenly as a horse reined in by its rider for a fence, and his voice became a hollow moan; his harp echoed as melancholy and strange as a song from Arawn, the otherworld. Now he told of the desperate Scotti, slowly starving in the hills, committing to one last desperate attack. On a moonless night—not unlike this night—the lords stripped their fine fish-scale armour, and their men their leather, hid their swords under the furze—not unlike the furze close by—and, knives clenched between their teeth, wormed through the heather to the camp by the waters. Coel’s men were drenched and drunk with glory and gloat. They were warm and well fed and gleaming with gold—not unlike tonight, Hild thought: even the sentries had set their spears against the doorposts to sing. And the Scotti crawled closer, closer, faces smeared with dung and ash, hearts beating like the drums of their enemy, blood surging stronger than wine.

Hild found herself listening beyond the hall, beyond the crackle of the fire, beyond the thumping scratch of a dog under the trestle, half expecting to hear an unearthly shriek as the sentry’s throat was cut.

Cian looked about uneasily. Lilla’s lips were parted and his great ham hand kept reaching for his baldric then stopping as he remembered his sword, like everyone else’s, leant upon his shield against the wall. He moved slightly closer to his king, whom he was sworn to protect with his life.

Hild saw that the bard was tapping his foot like a heartbeat, tapping
doom doom doom
—not unlike Coifi’s attempt by the daymark elms, but Coifi had been trying to sway men in cold morning light, not men full of wealh beer and yellow mead and sitting in the flickering hearth light of a strange hall a hundred miles from home. She smiled and considered nudging Cian and pointing to the tapping foot but he was lost and wouldn’t thank her for it.

*   *   *

Two days later, sitting in the middæg sun in the ruins of Broac, Brocavum that was, Cian was still lost in tales of Yr Hen Ogledd, this time of Ceneu and Gorbanian, the sons of Coel Hen, as told by Uinniau, Rhoedd’s younger sister-son, who had ridden with them to the remains of the fort. Hild, settled on a grassy earthwork, hair tucked behind her ears, listened with only part of her attention; the rest was lost in the flash and colour of the beads around her wrist: another gift, this time from the infant princess Rhianmelldt, a strange, ravaged ælf of a child whose eyes slid side to side ceaselessly. Hild forgot about the princess’s eyes when she saw the beads: seventy-three faceted carnelians.

She had fallen in love with the carnelians there and then. They were all different. In the light of the peat fires and wall torches of the hall, some had gleamed like the jewels of her mother’s dream, garnets in milk; others were more like pearls in blood, or amber in wine. But in the sun, they burnt like a living legend, something forged by a god from a dragon’s heart. They were strung on a cord of yellow silk braided with gold, fastened with a cunning interlocking gold clasp, the string long enough for a grown woman to wear around her neck and draped over her breast. Hild wore them wrapped four times around her left wrist. When the sun struck them, the toasted-bread colour of her skin, of the stone, of the gold and yellow silk was like a world she had never dreamt of.

She asked Uinniau where the beads came from—they had a redcrest look—and he beamed and said he could show her, if she liked, and Cian, too, and in fact it was most curious because it was just two summers ago, at old Broac, not far from the church named after a long-dead relative, Saint Uinniau. Had Hild heard of him? He was a very great saint. Would she like to see the church after they’d seen the fort?

And so she saddled Ilfetu, and Cian his Acærn, and Uinniau, small like many sons of wealh, climbed upon a mare far too big for him—he looked like a freckled apple perched on the saddle—and they trotted off. That is, Ilfetu and the mare trotted, Acærn had to break into a canter every now and again. Hild couldn’t help but think how much better Cian would look on the mare and Uinniau on Acærn. But the life tree didn’t always fruit as expected.

In the ruined fort, Uinniau was now talking in a singsong of Peredur ap Eliffer, beating on the sun-warmed turf with his hand, and Hild recognised the signs; any moment, he and Cian would leap up and start whanging at each other with sticks, and yelling, and trying to persuade her to play the to-be-vanquished enemy.

“I am going to the water’s edge,” she said, gesturing over to the bank where the hobbled horses cropped the grass near a stand of birches, and Cian nodded without taking his eyes off Uinniau.

Hild climbed the tallest birch. She settled in the saddle of a thick bough hanging over the water and thought of nothing in particular amongst the coin-size leaves whose undersides shimmered with water light.

A thin veil of cloud slid over the sun, turning the river from polished silver to dull pewter and the leaves back to matte green. A flash of brown in the reeds told her this would be a good place to find duck eggs in the spring.

From here, all that remained of the fort where they’d dug up the treasures and her beads were two turf banks. Once it had been home to half a hundred horse soldiers from far away. Perhaps their herds had cropped the same grass that Ilfetu nibbled now. She gazed down at the shoulders of her mare, the whorls of grey hair, the fly about to bite at the base of her tail.

She imagined the fort as it would have been in Uinniau’s ten-times great-grandsire’s lifetime: a square of tall wooden walls built of whole trees with their bark still on them and their tips sharpened, neat ditches and banks, a gate in the centre of every wall, the scent of fires cooking unimaginable food, and over everything the smell of horses, the sound of horses, the vibration of horses galloping away.

She always imagined them galloping away, leaving. That’s what the redcrests had done; they’d left. They left behind their stone houses in Caer Luel and beautiful white fountains, their red-tile roofs and straight roads, their perfectly round red bowls with pictures of dogs hunting deer around the rim, their exact corners and glass cups. And now the marble statues had lost their paint and stood melancholy white streaked with moss; tiles had blown off in storms and been patched with reed; men built fire stands directly on the cracked and broken remnants of once-brilliant mosaics.

But the fountain still worked. It was a series of white stone bowls arranged on a white stone stem, like a flowering pinecone made of cold, smooth marble. The spout, taller than Hild, was a leaping fish—a porpoise, said the town reeve. He seemed to know a lot. So Hild had dragged him around the town for hours and made him explain how the water came through pipes, pushed by its own weight downhill, from the hills to the north, how the baths and the hypocaust worked, where the redcrest chief had lived. After she had sent the reeve on his way, bowing and scraping and walking backwards, she returned to the fountain. She sat on the lip of the lowest, widest bowl and dabbled her hand in the cold, clean water and lifted her face to the spray. She thought of Cwenburh and the slow seep of bright blood. Cwenburh should have seen a fountain before she died. But if she had lived that long, Hereswith might not be peaceweaver, and Hild might not be on this journey, might not have seen the glory of water squirting into the sky like a whale’s breath.

*   *   *

Caer Luel was where she saw a Christ bishop snared by a spell, sitting at a bench holding a strange folded square of leather sewn from smaller pieces towards the light and murmuring. But when she pointed out the black-skirted bishop and asked if it was a ritual to do with light, Uinniau laughed and said he wasn’t a bishop, he was just a priest, and he wasn’t under a spell or making a spell, he was talking with a book. “Bishop Rhuel says a book is full of secret signs that tell a story. A god’s story. It sounds as though it should be interesting, but it isn’t. When he tried to say the story to me there were no heroes, no swords or galloping to battle. Just moony stuff about…” He frowned. “Well, I don’t remember. It was boring. But his book was covered in gold and jewels. Not like that old thing the priest’s reading. Perhaps because Rhuel was a bishop, an overpriest.”

Book, she thought. Secret signs
.
And gold and jewels. Hereswith might like that. And then she wondered what Hereswith was learning from their mother, and she missed them both.

*   *   *

It grew colder. They travelled north to Alt Clut, to the great rock fortress in the river mouth ruled by Neithon and his son, Beli. She was excluded from the war councils of Edwin and his sons and chief gesith, for Neithon and his sons were superstitious in the way of Christ people, and they kept making the fluttering sign on their chests when they saw her. Christ people didn’t hold with seers, and maids were not allowed in council. Unlike Rhoedd and the men of Rheged, the men of Alt Clut thought of themselves as equals to Edwin, allies, and he was unwilling to trespass upon their goodwill by insisting she be present. He told Hild this angrily, but he wasn’t angry with her; he was puzzled by something. Being puzzled made him anxious. Being anxious made him angry.

Osfrith, the younger of the æthelings, would sometimes tell her what he knew of the councils but he never remembered very clearly, just shrugged cheerfully and said,
Well, it was boring—old men’s talk of corn yields and signs and portents.
Hild was left to ask casual questions of the housefolk who carried the wine and built the fires for such meetings, to listen to songs—the Alt Clut seemed obsessed by tales of the Dál Riata to the north and west, of Aedan the Treacherous, who had died before Hild was even born, and of his son, now king, Eochaid Buide. Hild put together her information like a broken redcrest pavement and pondered the picture.