Nicola Griffith - Hild

They hurried away.

“It’s madness!” Begu said. “Why not ride with the king’s men? What can you do with only a score of raggle-taggle gesiths? And why Elmet?” Hild tied her seax tightly into its sheath. “At least wait for morning.”

“The king doesn’t see,” Hild said.

“Then make him.”

Hild shook her head.

There was no time. Penda would have Gwynedd by now, would stay in Gwynedd. What was needed was not a well-supplied army marching deliberately to meet the Mercians but a small band to race south, to fling itself like a shield between the remaining Northumbrians and the chasing Cadwallon until Edwin’s war band rolled in. But Edwin was in no hurry. His son would have sped safely away while Boldcloak guarded his back. Edwin was no doubt half expecting to hear word from York that the ætheling was there and safe even before the royal war band set out from Bebbanburg. What was Boldcloak to him? A half-wealh gesith who had reached too far. Edwin’s main aim was to trap Cadwallon outside his homeland and crush him so finely he would never rise again. Besides, as he saw it, Boldcloak was probably dead. But she knew, as surely as if the Christ whispered it in her ear: Cian was fighting, furlong by furlong, north, to Elmet, to home. And Cadwallon’s Welsh and Breton wolves were following. And no one would stand between the mad king and Pyr and Lweriadd in Caer Loid, Saxfryth and Ceadwulf, Grimhun in Aberford, Rhin and the folk of Menewood.

“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?”