Nicola Griffith - Hild

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.