Nicola Griffith - Hild

“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.”

OUTSIDE 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.”