Nicola Griffith - Hild

Two days later Hild was back on her gelding, Ilfetu, and Cian on Acærn, travelling west on the road by the wall with the dogs running back and forth alongside. Hild was mesmerised by that road, so straight and wide and hard, rounding up in the centre like the horizon. The gesiths had spent countless summers on such things, and the few women of the band were so busy foraging for figwort leaves in the hazelwood understorey and nettle leaves in the ditches, bog myrtle for their travelling mattresses, wild garlic for the stewpot, and birds’ eggs for when game was thin on the ground, that they couldn’t care less. Cian was lost in the endless tales of glory the gesiths told each other as they rode, so Hild was left to muse on her own of the people who would build such a thing and then leave. She tried to remember to talk to people sometimes, but she recalled that Eadfrith thought her a hægtes and could not think of anything to say.

On some days Hild rode beside Edwin. Mostly the king was happy. In his winter campaign, he had taken the Isle of Vannin from Fiachnae mac Báetáin for the loss of only one ship, and that mainly carrying horses; the isle’s fort had surrendered immediately when they saw the size of Edwin’s band. And now the Bryneich at their backs were sworn to eternal friendship. And so, mostly, he was content as they rode to point out—sometimes just to her, sometimes to his sons, who had heard it all before, but it never paid for even blood relatives to ignore the king—some valley where in years past he had driven a rival king’s sheep, or the hilltop where he had fired a fort, or a lightning-blasted tree he remembered as an omen of a flood. But other times he would grow pensive at the sight of a flock of magpies shrieking in a field of spring barley, and he would pull at the stained leather of his reins until his mean-mouthed chestnut snorted and stopped, and demand that Hild tell him what the birds augured. She didn’t like those days. Nothing pleased him. He would constantly shift in his saddle and finger his sword; his eyes would become green and shimmery; he would make Lilla ride close and keep his shield unslung. She hated having to give him omens. And then one day she thought of Cian laughing and telling stories with his mutton ribs, and she spoke as though she were one of the birds: that fat one, there; no, the one with the uneven tail, he is cross with his brother, there, the one with the worm in his beak, because they had a fight over who should have the thorn tree for the nest and his brother won. And, ha!, Edwin said, then the fat one is not king. And he laughed and called over the æthelings, and then Lintlaf and Blæcca, and had her tell more stories about the birds and their wives. The gesiths roared. And so some days she rode surrounded by beefy warriors laughing at her imaginary conversations—birds, clouds, mice, dogs, furze leaves—while on others the king frowned and demanded a prophecy, and she gave it: The bird flies in from the south, as will your future wife, my king , for Hild remembered that long-ago talk of Kent, and where else would he be seeking a bride? Or: See how the thrush drops the snail on the stone? So will you crush Fiachnae mac Báetáin if he should rise again and creep forth from the Emerald Isle . For everyone knew Fiachnae would rise again, it’s what the Irish did, and mac Báetáin was cannier than most. As she watched the thrush beat its snail on the stone and saw its eyes like apple pips, she remembered Coifi’s eyes as he had watched her in the rain by the daymark elms, as a stoat watches a fledgling. And she said to Onnen that night by the fire, “Onnen, when you steal eggs from the nest, where are the birds who laid them?” and Onnen said, “Off finding worms for breakfast, no doubt. Why?” And Hild, who was tired from talk talk talking, all the time talking, couldn’t bring her thoughts from behind her eyes to her mouth. When she fell into sleep it was to evil dreams: Who protected the nest while the king was away finding worms? Who protected her mother and Hereswith? Old Burgræd and young Burgmod?

She missed them. Oh, not her mother’s perpetual watching and thinking and manoeuvring for position, not her sister’s talk of Mildburh and husbands, alternating with the silent superiority of a sister with a girdle for one without. No, she missed their smell. Here it was all horses and man sweat and the stink of the bushes in the morning, which she walked half a mile to avoid when she emptied her bladder. She missed the scent of weld growing in its pot, of cheese crumbling on a plate and fresh-baked bread.

Even the songs were different. On the road, between one settlement and another, as they swung along, sometimes on foot, their songs were not the heroic songs of the hall but coarse drinking songs that, when she understood them, she didn’t like. She didn’t like the way they made the men smell, the way they fingered under their tunics and looked at the hard, thin-faced camp women—strange women who spoke Anglisc and wore knives and strike-a-lights on their belts, but no distaffs, no spindles; women who darned and mended but never spun, never wove.

She befriended a one-eyed war dog by feeding him scraps and never teasing him the way the gesiths did, and by mastering her fear of him, most of the time. At night she curled with Onnen on her unrolled leather mattress with her cloak around her and her belt loosened but not removed—she could reach out and touch her seax—and listened to the long churr of the nightjars. She longed for the sound of girls’ voices or a woman singing as she fed chickens. They were moving through wild country now, nothing but moor and road. Onnen said that she’d heard from one of the bony camp women that by the time the larks had sung their last for the summer and the figwort flowers in the little wooded valleys had turned white, they’d be in Caer Luel, and then, oh, the wonder and the glory! And Hild fell asleep that night thinking with a smile of old Æffe’s scepticism about fountains and the young man of long ago hung like Thuddor the bull, and it was only later that the dreams turned to nightmares.

Crossing the Pennines was hard and cold; Hild learnt to use the slings the women used to bring down red squirrels and the occasional hare; she learnt to sit with them in silence, for the women didn’t mind silence, as they cut up the tiny morsels to mix with dried peas in a pot.

Hild was almost as thin and flint-faced as Onnen’s road friends the day they made camp by a rushing stream and Coelgar set every last man to searching for firewood. Hild went to find her uncle to ask him why. He was sitting on a tree stump overseeing the unfurling of his blue-and-red banner with the Deiran boar stitched in gold. The garnet eye, secured with silver thread, was loose, and Edwin was shouting good-natured orders at the two wealh holding the staffs and the woman with the needle and thread. He was in a good mood, for the only man he’d lost on the whole journey so far was Eadfrith’s friend, a young fool who’d boasted about his horse one night after drinking too much and felt obliged to race it the next day and had fallen and broken his thigh.

“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.”