Hild: A Novel (45 page)

Cian put the jar down and leaned back on his hands. The crowd leaned forward.

“And then the Loid tucked his hen under his arm, stepped back smartly, and said, ‘Keep the fucking egg!’”

The crowd roared and Cian handed the beer to the Loid, who drank and passed it to the Angle, and shouted, “Someone give me that lyre!” and someone else shouted, “Sing the bread song!” and they laughed some more.

Hild motioned for Gwladus and Morud. “Bring more food, and wood for the fire. Tell Coelfrith I said so.”

*   *   *

The next day, as a stream of important Anglisc, those with six or more spears to their name, swore their oaths to the king before witnesses—who included, at the Crow’s suggestion, for he had been baptised, Cian Boldcloak—Hild accepted a trickle of lesser folk, Anglisc and Loid, who came to her in ones and twos.

Lweriadd brought Morud. “Lady, has he served you well?”

“He has.”

“Then it would please me for you to take him with you when you leave.”

Morud then knelt, put Hild’s hand to his forehead, and swore the threefold oath: to keep faith until the sky fell on his head, until the earth opened and swallowed him, until the seas rose and drowned him. He was standing behind her stool on one side, and Gwladus on the other, when Saxfryth approached with her young son.

Saxfryth held out Hild’s ring. Hild folded the woman’s hand around it. “A gift.”

Saxfryth’s smile was brilliant but almost immediately extinguished by indecision and anxious looks at her son.

Hild sighed to herself. “I don’t know your boy’s name.”

“Ceadwin, lady.”

“A strong name for a strong lad.”

“He is strong, lady, very strong for his age.”

“How many winters has he?”

“Five, lady.”

“In two years he’ll be old enough to foster.”

“Yes, lady.”

“Does he have brothers?”

“Not yet, lady.”

“When he does, or when he is seven, whichever is sooner, you may send him to me, if you wish.”

“Lady!” She looked as though she might fly apart with joy, but instead pulled the boy to her and hugged him so hard he began to struggle. Eventually she recovered her wits enough to pick up her skirts in one hand and take the boy’s little fist in the other and hurry away, stopping every stride or two to turn and say thank you.

“Her husband won’t thank you,” Gwladus said as they watched her go. “You wait, she’ll kill that man this winter trying to get another son.”

“Anglisc, Gwladus. Morud needs the practice. From now on, Anglisc, both of you, until we leave this place. And Morud, you will do as Gwladus tells you.” She sat back on her stool, watching the now-distant figures of Saxfryth and the boy. “Five. Really. What am I, a wet nurse?”

“Here comes one,” Morud said in otter-splash but understandable Anglisc.

“Another,” said Hild. “Here comes another.”

This time it was the young man with the ancient sword.

He was too young and tightly strung for any greeting. He simply drew his sword, knelt, and offered it to her, hilt-first over his forearm. “I am Oeric, lady, and I would serve you.”

She touched his hand. He looked up. Brown eyes, tight and anxious. Fading pimples. Strong bone at brow and jaw. Older than Cian by a year or so, but not as tall. But then few were.

His brown tunic, restitched with sleeves and padded in an approximation of a warrior jacket, was faded and patched. He would never be able to afford the mail shirt to wear over it. A knuckle on his right hand looked as though it had been crushed at some point but he’d had no difficulty handling the sword. The blade, as Cian had said, was ancient. Perhaps his father’s father’s grandfather’s. Part of its edge, near the point, was missing and the wire inset in the grip black with age. The blade itself, though, was lovingly polished of hammer-folded snakesteel.

“Your sword, it has a name?”

“Clifer,” he said. Claw. But he didn’t offer a lineage, and Hild wondered if he’d found it somewhere or taken it from a dead man.

“How would you serve me, Oeric?”

He blinked. “Lady?”

“How would you serve me?”

“I have a sword…”

Hild nodded. A sword. What use did she have for a sword? “Are you hungry?” Of course he was hungry. He was a stripling. He could eat an ox and still have room for a sheep and a score of loaves. “Morud here will bring you a stool and Gwladus will find us something to eat and you will tell me of your family.”

“My mother is dead—”

“But first you will get off your knees.” She must ask Gwladus to find a mat or a fur to put before her stool so these people didn’t have to get down on the muddy grass.

He scrambled to his feet.

“And put the sword away before someone gets the wrong idea.”

He sheathed it—not with the unthinking ease of a gesith but with more skill than she’d expected.

Morud came back with a stool and placed it with ceremony opposite Hild. Clearly he also made some kind of face at Oeric, who glared at him.

Hild pointed to the stool. Oeric sat. He perched gingerly on the padded embroidered cushioning but relaxed quickly enough when no god flung a thunderbolt at him for soiling such fine work with his farm clothes.

Adaptable, at least. “You were telling me of your family.”

His father was Grim, son of Grim the Elder. His mother dead these six years. When his mother’s sister’s husband had gone away one day and not come back, the widowed Grim had married her. Grim had three more sons now and a daughter. He farmed a hide south of the Aire, mixed land, some barley, some oats. Pigs, of course, they couldn’t get by without the pigs, who ate their bodyweight in mast every autumn, and two milch cows. Their horse, though, had died this spring when the grass came so late. The cows’ milk had been late, too. Perhaps without Oeric to feed they might have enough for a colt next spring.

“Perhaps your father could swap Clifer for a mare in foal.”

“Clifer is mine! From my mother’s father, who had no sons.”

Gwladus brought a tray with bread, bowls of barley stew with beef shreds, and the beautiful cup Edwin had given Hild in Lindsey. The cup was half filled with mead. She gave Hild one bowl of stew, Oeric another. Oeric took a spoon from his pouch, remembered to check that Hild had a spoon, and waited for her to take the first mouthful. Manners and restraint. Hild had seen worse at Edwin’s board. She took a taste so that Oeric could begin. It needed more salt. “Does your father know you’re here?”

Oeric swallowed hastily. “I am of age!”

Hild gestured for him to keep eating. She applied herself to her own bowl. “Why?” she said, when half her stew was gone. “Why me? Why not swear to the king?”

“Would he have me?” They both knew the answer. Oeric had a sword but no mount, no mail, no men. “They say you’re powerful. That you see a man’s wyrd. That you’ve used that seax.”

Hild studied him. “And you would swear an oath?” An Anglisc oath, from a man with a sword.

“I would.”

It wasn’t usual. But neither was she. And this boy with his old, broken sword wouldn’t threaten her uncle.

She stood, and gestured for him to do likewise. She put her hand on his chest. “I am the king’s seer. I shine light on the way. I look into men’s hearts. Is your heart free to make an oath, Oeric son of Grim?”

“It is.”

His heart beat high but steady, and he met her gaze—blushing but not looking away.

She picked up the cup. “Oeric, son of Grim, I, Hild, daughter of Hereric Yffing and Breguswith Oiscinga, do swear on my oath, on this mead by this river under this tree, that I will be as your lord. I will protect you, feed you, defend your name and person while you are true.”

She took a sip and passed the cup to Oeric. He took it with both hands, shaking slightly, and she remembered the weight of Edwin’s feast cup that Modresniht long ago.

He raised the cup to her. “I, Oeric, son of Grim, swear on my oath, on this mead by this river under this tree, that I will be your man. I will protect you, obey you, defend your name and person as long as I breathe.”

He sipped the mead. Smiled tremulously.

“Finish it,” Hild said. He was going to need it.

*   *   *

The king’s new thegns sent to their farmsteads for tools and men, and the great clearing by the Aire rang with hammers and adzes and clattered with lathes. The king’s hall rose.

The days grew colder and the nights colder still. Hild missed the warmth of Begu sleeping by her.

They woke to hedges salted with frost that didn’t melt until noon. The king rode out with Osric Whiphand, Paulinus Crow, Coelfrith Steward, and Cian Boldcloak to tour the land of his new thegns and inspect the fortifications at Aberford. While they were gone, Stephanus paired priests and parties of gesiths and sent them north and south and east and west to root out any wealh with a tonsure and drive them from Elmet. “None must remain,” he said. “They are spies.”

Hild persuaded Pyr that none would think him soft if the Loid workers were fed and sheltered, for a healthy Loid worked faster. And besides, she spoke for the king when she said that in Elmet now there were no more Anglisc, no more Loid, there were only Elmetsætne. She set Morud to making sure all grumbles reached the right ears.

More people, Loid and Anglisc, straggled in and sought her out, some to swear to her, some just to see for themselves the tall maid who called them all Elmetsætne. The daughter of a hægtes and an ætheling, some said—no, a wood ælf and a princess, said others—though that didn’t stop them wanting to touch her hem or catch up a fallen hair for luck. Farmers, coppicers, a dairymaid. A quiet man with a bow and a huge silent dog. Half a dozen ragged children, slings thrust through their twisted grass belts, who looked to have been living on their wits for a season. And one man, Rhin, older and footsore, whose tunic was too small and worn in places that didn’t suit his body, a man who didn’t take his hood off—he begged her pardon, he said, with a glance at Morud, who ignored him, but his ears were aching in the cold.

Hild sent the man with Morud to Oeric, for a meal at least, and said to Gwladus, “Do you trust him?”

Gwladus said, “He has the look of a man more used to skirts.”

Hild nodded. She should send him on his way. But he might prove useful. “Find out what you can. Ask Morud.”

That night she called Oeric to her wagon. She sat wrapped in a wolf fur on the step, and studied him. Perhaps it was that he was getting fed regularly, perhaps that he now had a ring on his pointing finger, her token, but he looked older, more solid.

“I gave you that ring so that you could do my bidding without hindrance. Why is Gwladus telling me some of my people are hungry?”

“We have food for eight days, lady. And some of these beggars are Loid who will move on.”

“When the king returns, we’ll be leaving. I doubt it will be eight days. But even if we stayed a month, I gave orders that all my people were to be well fed and well clothed. All. Take heed. In my service there are no Deirans, no Bernicians, no Loid or Anglisc, no Dyfneint or Elmetsætne. In my household there are only my people.” Her household. Yes. “Gwladus will speak in my name in the world of servants. You will speak in my name to freemen. You are mine, as are all those sworn to my service.” Her people.

The king came back from his tour. Cian came to Hild’s wagon, carrying his saddlebag over one shoulder, and accepted the cup of hot spiced wine Gwladus brought him outside.

Morud brought him a stool, set it by Hild’s.

Cian dropped his bag and sat. He unhooked his scabbard, propped it next to him against the wagon. “We leave for York in the morning.”

“All of us?”

He glanced at Oeric, who stood a discreet three paces out of earshot. “Stephanus and his priests will stay, as will Pyr and two understewards, a score of gesiths, and those men Grimhun has at Aberford.” He glanced at Oeric again. Oeric gave him a bland look.

“How is Grimhun?”

“Happy as— Why is that boy with the old sword here?”

“Oeric? He’s…” She beckoned him. “Cian Boldcloak, king’s gesith, this is Oeric, son of Grim, my sworn man.”

The two eyed each other, but Cian’s height, the cut of his clothes, his sword and jewels clearly overmatched Oeric’s. Oeric inclined his head. Hild waved him away.

Cian sat. “He’s sworn to you? He’s coming to York?”

“Him and more than a dozen others.”

“You have a
household
?”

“Will you help me?”

“Help you do what? Feed them? I’m a king’s gesith, not a landed thegn.”

“Just … help me. You and the brothers Berht could train Oeric, enough so he’d be more help than hindrance in a fight.” Then she remembered the brothers Berht were with Grimhun at Aberford, for now.

He drank off his ale and held out his cup for a refill. Gwladus took it. “Have you told the king?”

“Not yet.”

“Tell him.” He took the refilled cup from Gwladus, with a nod of thanks. “The lady’s a rare one, eh?”

“Yes, lord,” she said. “Will you want stew? Some of the new … household have an odd notion of king’s property and it seems some hares wandered into a snare and then somehow got dropped in a pot.” She turned to Hild. “Should I bring three bowls?” She tilted her head slightly in Oeric’s direction.

“Yes. No, wait. Bring enough for everyone. Put up a board. We’ll eat together, this one night, the household. Tell Oeric and Morud to help.”

When they’d left, Cian cleared his throat, drank more ale, rubbed his lip with his knuckle. Eventually he bent and lifted his bag to his lap.

“I made something.”

He untied the bag, lifted out a lump wrapped in sacking. Hefted it. Held it out.

Hild took the bundle, unwrapped it. Dark wood gleamed in the firelight.

Travelling cups, three of them. Tiny things, fitting one inside the other: small, smaller, smallest. Old wood, black with age. Carefully cut with the grain, smooth as a girl’s shoulder and as warm to the touch.

“I cut them from the root of the great thorn hedge. The biggest will hold two fingers of white mead.”

She put them back together. They felt dense and weighty in her palm. She turned them, it, over and over in her hands. Old in the days of Eliffer of the Great Retinue … “Oh.” Carved under the base was a tiny hedgepig, prickles out.