Nicola Griffith - Hild

Hild understood and suspended judgement, as she had learnt to do in her strange position as the light of the world in a maid’s clothes. And yet she was ten, only ten, her heft only that of her gaze and words and bearing, especially on days like this when she had set out in her plainest short cyrtel and hose and left all her fine stuff safe and dry in Begu’s room.

So as Guenmon knocked the ashy scale from the glowing poker and plunged the hot tip into the first copper cup and sang a verse of a wealh song Hild didn’t know while the drink heated, Hild munched on her mutton pasty—Guenmon had a way of adding tarragon and vinegar that gave it a wild, hilly tang—and was grateful for warmth and food and the possibility of a new friend, one who didn’t belong here either.

Bán had finished his pasty and was looking about him. Cú was sitting quiet and well behaved, though there were suspicious-looking crumbs at his feet.

Guenmon handed out the ale. Bán sipped with caution, Hild with delight: mace and ginger! She watched the willow man lift his cup again, noted the calluses on his wrists, the suggestion of a thick scar around his throat as he swallowed. Mulstan didn’t use collars for his wealh, but Bán had been in a slave yoke at some time. And his tunic was threadbare. Did he even have a cloak? It might be spring but on the moorland and beach there would be two months yet of cold wind.

“Good ale,” she said, and Guenmon nodded as though such praise was her due.

“Ready yesterday, from the finest malting we’ve had this six-month or more, if I do say so myself.”

“Might we spare a jar or so?”

Guenmon folded her arms.

“And perhaps we have some cloth set by for rags that we might piece for a cloak.”

“And some sausage for the dog, while I’m about it?”

“Bán would no doubt be grateful,” Hild said, with a smile for Bán, who had recognised the word dog . She really wanted to talk to him. “Where’s Fursey?”

“Now how am I meant to know the whereabouts of that smooth-tongued, shave-pated Irish spy?”

And for a moment she sounded so like Breguswith that Hild missed her mother and sister fiercely.

Hild stood on the headland in the light mist of dawn with her toes hanging over the edge of the grassy east cliff. The edge of all things. Between day and night, between sky and earth, sea and land. The air smelt of iron and salt. Like Tinamutha. She rested her hand on her seax. No, not like Tinamutha: no stink of mud and marsh flats. No boats on fire. No armed men cutting their way towards her and the king. Just iron and salt. Her hand drifted from the seax. Behind her, behind the ruined stone beacon and the tumbledown wattle-and-thatch church, she heard cowbells. Their dull clank was almost tuneful, occasionally harmonious. She had never heard of such a thing, but now that she had, she wondered why every cow in the world didn’t have a tuned bell around its neck.

As the mist began to dissolve she could see the dark, wet beach. Long-legged birds speared shellfish, and women with sacks collected coal and driftwood, dodging the surf that ran up over the sand like the froth in a milkmaid’s pail. The sky showed as blue as twice-dyed linen. The sea was restless, glinting like napped flint. It, too, would turn blue if the sky stayed clear. Three ships were being loaded at the harbour on the mouth of the River Esk. Mulstan must be right. Her uncle must be winning. Though she didn’t know why she’d had no word.

From the harbour, the river wound back through blossoming fruit trees and tangled copses choked with bramble. An arrowhead of black-barred geese flew out of the east, feathers rosy in the rising sun and yellow beaks tinted somewhere between marigold and pink—the same colour as Hild’s carnelians that were now safely nestled in their carved ivory chest. Unless Begu had borrowed them again.

Hild turned to make sure. Begu was talking to the young son of the cowherd, one hand on the cow’s back, one on her hip. No beads at either wrist. She patted the cow as she talked, one of the small black cows favoured in these parts, less milk animals than meat-makers. The goats were the milkers.

Begu looked a bit like a goat: a long, thin face with teeth grown every which way and wide-spaced eyes. Her hair was brown-blond, like a goat’s, and always coming undone. She had a fondness for farm animals, as Hild liked creatures of the wild.

Except geese. They were landing on the beach and running, honking, wings spread, at women and sandpipers alike, until the beach cleared and the raucous things could pick the sand clean, and shit on everything, and leave still quarrelling. She hated geese, they made her anxious, she didn’t know why.

“Hild!” Begu waved her over, bouncing in place she was so eager. She was always eager. “Cædmon says he has a book. A book!”

Hild walked back to them. “Where?”

The boy, Cædmon, blushed behind his freckles and shock of dark hair and muttered something.

“Don’t be silly,” Begu said to him. She looked directly at Hild. Her eyes were hazel. “He thinks you’ll take it. You won’t, will you?”

“The book is Mulstan’s.” This was his land, and Cædmon was his wealh. She waited. Eventually, Cædmon looked up through his ragged fringe. Cut with a knife. “What kind of book is it?”

He shrugged, looked out to the horizon.

“I wish to see it.”

“It’s not here.” His voice was like the cowbells, soft-metalled and dull, but with music buried in it somewhere.

“Where is it?”

Another shrug.

“Where did it come from?” He shrugged again. “Where did it come from?”

“It was the priest’s. He died. We buried him with his beads, but his wife took the book.” Hild nodded. Books were precious, she was learning, especially the ones with gold and jewels. “Then she died. We buried her.” He gestured at the creamy-blossomed blackthorn hedge around the oval graveyard. The gate had fallen down. “Da took the book. To keep it safe for the new priest, he said. But there is no new priest. And Da’s forgotten about the book.”

The cows were grazing close to the gap in the hedge. It was wicked to let such a place fall into ruin. “It’s good land up here,” she said. “Good grazing. Water. And you could see trouble coming for miles.”

“Trouble?” Begu laughed her tumbling laugh. “There’s no trouble up here!”

There was always trouble in the world. She thought of fighting at Tinamutha in the flaring torchlight by the dock with the Irish, and Osric’s men strangely absent. The scramble for the ship. The gesiths for whom there was no room on the last boat forming a wall with the dogs on the quay, dying one by one as Edwin and his party fled.

Not here, she told herself. Not today.

“Still, it should be farmed. If no priest is coming, the land should be given to someone to steward.”

“It’s grazed,” Begu said, patting Cædmon’s cow.

“Yes, but are these the lord’s cattle?”

“Yes. Mostly.”

“How many?”

“Most.”

Hild’s mother and Coelgar both would have known exactly, and from them, Hild would have known. Accounts must be kept, obligations fostered. “Cows shouldn’t graze by the dead. They shit on everything.”

But Begu seemed immune to her reputation and just shrugged. “There’s a hedge around the graveyard. Mostly.”

Hild gave up and said to Cædmon, “What does the book look like?”

He made a frame in the air with his hands. Small.

“What colour is it?”

“Cow-shit brown.” They all grinned.

“Can I see it?”

He squinted at the sun, handed his switch to Begu, and said in his careful Anglisc, “Watch the cows.” He plunged down the scrubby hill towards the river.