Nicola Griffith - Hild

She rode a thin grey horse, a thin grey hound ran at the hem of her blue-grey cloak, and she sat tall, an enamel copy of a ten-year-old girl, hard and cold.

It was just past a large farmstead by a bridge, where they’d flung hacksilver at the farm wife and taken every last drop of her milk, all her just-cured bacon, a great wheel of cheese, and a barrel of strange-tasting ale, and still been hungry, that the rider from Tinamutha found them.

“Lord King,” he gasped as he pulled up his foaming shaggy-maned pony. “Lord Osric sent me. He is besieged at Tinamutha. Your man got through, and there are boats aplenty, but no way of sailing them past Fiachnae’s hordes at the river mouth.”

The gesiths immediately began cursing, swearing vengeance and mighty deeds. The king looked shrewish and unhappy. Hild kicked Ilfetu until he shouldered the king’s chestnut, which made the king look at her. “Bebbanburg?” she said.

Osric’s messenger gave Hild a puzzled look. Who was this child? Then he saw her eyes and the huge seax at her waist. Perhaps she was an uncanny dwarf or a wall wight.

“What of Bebbanburg?” Edwin said to the man, as though Hild had not spoken.

“Fiachnae’s main force besieges the rock. They have slaughtered all the cattle on the moors.”

“How long ago?”

“A fortnight since. No more.”

Edwin shifted in his saddle, and Hild recognised the movement; he didn’t know what to do, and as a result wondered if he was being made a game of. She backed up Ilfetu, just in case.

A look passed between the king and Lilla, and the chief gesith took the messenger’s reins in his beefy hand. At his nod, a handful of warriors loosened their swords in their sheaths. Edwin half shuttered his eyes. “Two weeks? And no boats in or out of Tinamutha?”

“No, lord.” The messenger’s mount picked up its rider’s uncertainty. It snorted and tried to back up but its way was blocked.

“Then how did news reach your lord so fast if the way by sea is blocked?”

“My lord?”

“Dere Street is a fine road, but it’s a hard ride south and west to it from Bebbanburg. And then along this road east to Tinamutha, and then back west to us.”

“My lord?”

Edwin said, “We’ll eat the horse,” and turned away.

Lilla nodded to one of the gesiths, who drew his sword and swung at the messenger’s neck where it met his shoulder. The man shrieked and spurted and fell off his horse, which tried to rear, and the dogs did the rest.

MULSTAN, LORD OF MULSTANTON, wiped his beard, sent the cup down the table, and watched the strange maid. She was turning those blood beads of hers again, turn turn turn. At least she wasn’t wearing that huge knife tonight. A maid the same age as his little Begu with a slaughter seax!

He’d made them all welcome, of course, the maid, her wealh woman and son, even that Irish tutor-priest, or hostage, or whatever he was. When your king arrives in a blood-splashed boat and departs in a hurry leaving behind a favoured kinswoman and her household for whom he demands hospitality, you give it. It doesn’t matter that she’s only ten. It matters that she’s the subject of a prophecy and has the most direct and uncanny gaze of any maid you’ve ever seen, and that one wrong word to the king would mean being staked out for the ravens. So you give her your own bed and the highest place at table—for this was a country hall, after all, not much removed from its British roots, where women feasted alongside their men—and try as hard as you might to remember to show the boldness and generosity expected of an Anglisc thegn looking to gain favour with a king whose fortunes were on the rise. Or who might be dead, depending. No, no, he was alive, for the trade boats were getting through and there’d been no reports of Anglisc slaughter from Bebbanburg.

He was old, near forty; his first wife and children had died in the great sickness before the maid was born, and when his first lord and king, Æthelfrith, died and he was released from his gesith’s oath, he had declined exile north of the wall with the æthelings and had, instead, settled in to farm this once-rich land by the sea. When Edwin took the throne, he had charged Mulstan to oversee the safety of the small trading harbour and to take the tithe for the king of all goods that came and went across the sea. And eventually Mulstan was happy to marry the beautiful Enynny and build himself a good solid farmstead in the woods by the beck, just half a mile from the tideland estuary full of oysters and mussels rounding into Streanæshalch, the Bay of the Beacon, with its harbour that saw trade from Pictland and the North British, from Lindsey and the East Angles, and even the people of the North Way, whose narrow ships brought furs and amber across the North Sea and down along the chains of islands and along the coast of Pictland. Last year they’d had a Frisian ship creeping up from its more usual harbour at Gipswīc.

He swallowed more beer. Swefred was playing that song again, the one he liked about hearth and home. Couldn’t play half as well as that odd Irish priest the maid brought but at least he could understand the words. None of that Irish caterwauling. Ah, he missed his wife. By Thunor, he missed both of them. Though this Onnen woman who’d come with the maid—

The maid had stopped fiddling with her beads and was looking at him. “My lord Mulstan.”

He swallowed the wrong way and coughed. Had she read his thoughts about her wealh woman?

She waited patiently, which made him nervous. Royalty were rarely patient unless they were toying with you. At least she was talking now. For the first weeks she’d been mute and round-eyed as an owl. He’d seen gesiths with that look after their first shield wall.

“Who is the man who plies the withy beds?”

He wiped his beard. “I beg pardon?”

“The man. On the withy beds.” She cocked her head slightly, as though listening to a voice only she could hear. “He has a dog.”

“Black-and-white dog?” He slapped the board. “The willow man!” He immediately felt foolish. Of course the man in the willow withies was the willow man. “Irish,” he said, trying not to look into her fathomless eyes. Seen too much, those eyes. “Man to an envoy taken hostage so long ago no one remembers.” He’d never really thought about it before. Perhaps the envoy had died of sickness, perhaps he’d been freed but forgot to take his man with him. “But it’s said the man found his way to the priest of the tiny British church by the ruined beacon tower on the cliff. Long time ago, that. Never been a priest up there in my time. No doubt the priest had him work in the willow withies. But that was years ago, and now the willow man’s just the willow man. He doesn’t say much.”

Like you, little maid. But the willow man didn’t say much because no one much understood him. He just planted and pruned and harvested white willow and brown willow and buff willow, softened and dried it, boiled it and stripped it, so that now a person could visit the willow man’s bothy and exchange food or cloth or a copper pin for willow fit for any willow purpose and it was the finest for two days’ walk. The willow man lived in a world where he talked to no British, for long years had taught him the pointlessness of it; a world where the Anglisc were wights—and perhaps to him they were.

That priest was giving him one of those lean and wicked smiles. Must have said that last bit aloud. Had to watch that.

He tipped his beer horn. Empty. Onnen filled it and smiled. Thunor bless the woman. “Anyway, the willow man communes only with his dog and his boles and poles and stools and rods. Though he’s Irish, he seems harmless enough.” Of course the maid’s tutor-hostage, Fursey, was also Irish, some princely priest the king had taken in the bright clash at Tinamutha. Fruitless war, that. What was Fiachnae mac Báetáin, the king of the Ulaid, doing attacking his betters so far from home? And why had the king let such a little maid get mixed up in the blood and slaughter? “I hope the priest won’t take that amiss.”