Nicola Griffith - Hild

Osfrith, cloakless like all the warrior gesiths, hunched a little and turned away from the wind coming off the river.

“So men will say he is afraid,” Hild said. “Would men be telling the truth?”

“Thunor’s breath!” He stared. “You are stranger than they say. Any man who says the king is afraid will have my sword to face.” He laid his hand on his sword hilt—his battle sword, not one of the new ones he’d received as gifts over the summer.

“I am not a man,” she said. “But nor do I say the king is afraid. I ask about those men who do say so, or might say so. Would they believe what they say?”

Osfrith looked baffled.

Hild sighed to herself. She needed Osfrith to sit a moment, to think. She considered. Boys and young men liked to eat. “Did the king feed you?”

Osfrith shook his head. The wind gusted hard and he hunched tighter.

“I know a woman in the kitchens. There’s a warm fire and cold hare and bannock bread.”

The bannock was nothing but crumbs, the hare splintered bones, and the pot of ale almost empty. Osfrith picked meat from between his teeth with a sliver of bone, looking more like an ætheling. “No,” he said, “it’s the boats that have Beli and his father muttering like old women.”

“Boats?”

“Irish boats were seen crossing the North Channel from Ireland to the Dál Riata.”

“When?”

“A month past. Or more. And many more than usual. More than enough for an army—”

An army.

“—but there’s been no fires,” he said, “no fighting, no stream of homeless south, no slaves for sale at the port. There’s been no battle.”

“Not here,” said Hild, and her hands were cold with dread. Where are the birds when we steal eggs from their nest? Now she knew.

Grey sky, grey rock, grey water. Edwin sat on a boulder overhanging the great flat estuary, throwing stones. Eadfrith ætheling and a knot of the younger gesiths stood nearby, but not too close. It was clear by the set of the king’s shoulders that he was best left alone.

Hild checked to be sure her mantle fell in deep folds, that the hair she’d had Onnen dress that morning was in place, that her pair of huge gilt brooches, Neithon’s gift, were not crooked. She adjusted her carnelians for maximum flash and sparkle, and laid a hand on the hilt of her slaughter seax. She stood tall. She was the bringer of light. Let them call her hægtes if they must. If she didn’t speak, her mother and Hereswith might die.

“King.”

He ignored her. One of the gesiths shouted over, “He’s in no mood for games, princess.”

“King.”

Another gesith detached himself from the knot. “Come away, little maid.” Lintlaf. “Come away.” He reached for her arm.

Hild drew herself up, fixed Lintlaf’s brown eyes with her fathomless gaze, then sought and found Eadfrith’s. In her seer’s voice she said, “You know I am no maid. And I have a dream to tell the king.”

That got Edwin’s attention. He held his hand out to Lintlaf: stop. And jerked his chin at Hild: speak. His eyes crawled green and black as buzzflies on old meat.

Last time her mother had been there to explain. Last time the king had been in a good mood.

“King.” The words, as they almost always did in Anglisc, caught in her throat like a bird bone or a mouthful of feathers. “The stoat steals fledglings from the nest when the birds are away catching worms.”

No change in Edwin’s expression. Why couldn’t he see? Why could none of them see?

“King. We’re the birds.”

Now his face was stone. “I am not a bird.”

“Boats,” she said desperately. “I dreamt of boats.” His whole face sharpened. “The stoat is coming in a boat. To the nest. My mother is there. And Hereswith.”

“Your— Bebbanburg. You’re talking of Bebbanburg?”

She nodded.

“And who is the stoat?” He was standing over her—when did that happen?

Her eyes were level with his throat apple. She raised them to meet his. “Fiachnae mac Báetáin. In a boat, going the long way around to take Bebbanburg.”

Edwin, once free from trying to make sense of a puzzle as ungraspable as mist, and with a clear prophecy to hew to, marched his war band south at lightning speed, ignoring the coastal strongholds of Galloway and their expected tribute. As they passed Dumfries, he said to Hild, “I know to the ounce what I should have taken from them. You’d best not be wrong.”

At the wall, they reloaded the pack ponies and Edwin detailed Eadfrith and Coelgar and twelve gesiths, including Coelfrith, to escort the treasure directly to the stronghold of York while the lightened war band rode for the port at Tinamutha and thence up the coast to Bebbanburg. Onnen gave Coelfrith a significant look as he mounted, and Hild knew she had reminded the steward’s son that some of the treasure belonged directly to the princess Hild, that there would be an accounting.

Edwin watched the ponies disappearing in the direction of Broac and then turned to Hild. “The ride will be hard. You will keep up, if I have to tie you to your horse. You will tell me of every thought, every dream, every twitch of your eye or flight of birds. If you are right, you will be honoured beyond mortal ken. If you’re wrong and we fail, I will strike off your head, feed your offal to my dogs, and bury your hægtes head by your buttocks in an unmarked hole.”

Hild faced him, unflinching, because Edwin was like a dog: show fear and he would chase you down. But then she broke her gaze. To challenge an uneasy king before his men was to invite death.

Edwin raised his hand and shouted to the nearly three hundred gesiths remaining. “We ride in service to a dream from the gods. If our dreamer’s horse fails, you will give her yours. If her food runs low, you will give your own. She will light our way. And now we ride.”

A horse died—already tired, its leg plunged through a burrow and snapped—at Haltwhistle, and its rider was abandoned in a ramshackle farm holding with a thin woman and her husband, a witless farmer. No doubt the place would have a new master come spring.

The first snows settled in the folds of their thick cloaks as they passed Chesters. At Corabrig they found a farmer with a tall horse—a raw-boned roan, but fresh and eager—willing to part with it for a silver arm ring, and lots were drawn for a lithe, hardy rider to gallop for life itself all the way to Tinamutha to set in motion ships for Bebbanburg. Lintlaf won and light travel foods—twice-baked bread, dried berries, smoked meat—were offered from all sides.

As Lintlaf packed his saddlebags, the roan, a farm horse and confused by the press, danced and kicked but eventually Lintlaf boosted himself into the saddle. He was more excited than the horse, his lips red as carmine and eyes brilliant. He would ride for the king and glory!

Edwin kneed his chestnut close, clapped Lintlaf on the back, and slung his cloak back to show his royal arm rings. “If you’ve ships for half of us ready to sail when we arrive, you shall have one of these, and not the least.” And Lintlaf rode into the east to wild cheering.

Every morning it was dark when they woke, dark as they struggled into the saddle, dark as they plodded along, walk, trot, walk, trot, on their tired mounts, dark even at midday when they stopped in the lee of a hill that seemed to touch a sky as heavy as the dark stones of the wall. The wind was relentless, blowing dry snow up and about them like sand, even on the leeward side of a hill. Hild looked at the hot spark and flicker of her carnelians and pretended they were coals. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been warm. Couldn’t remember even when she’d eaten something hot. Her jaws were powerful from chewing fire-smoked meat and waybread dunked in freezing water. Ilfetu’s ribs stood out like the strakes of a ship. Her dog, Od, was the only one of the pack that didn’t look like a hound of Hel, a running skeleton with burning eyes. And they all watched her, all the time, and none came near—except, in the dark of night, and only briefly, Onnen and Cian. She had accepted the mantle of the uncanny and until the end of this journey it was her fate. It was her vision they marched to, into a future she had dreamt for them.