Nicola Griffith - Hild

“It belonged to a dead priest. What’s a”—she paused to sound it out carefully—“ breviarium psalterii ?”

“A shortened kind of Psalter. Like this.” He took his own book, bound in fine-grained black calfskin, from his waist pouch and opened it one-handed to show her. Psalms. He’d shown her them before. She nodded. Looked at the dead priest’s Psalter in his other hand.

“But the letters are different.” The letters were rounder and fatter, blacker. She held out her hand, and Fursey gave it to her. She hefted it, opened it again, peered at it. Fursey had been teaching her to read, but these letters were all run together; she couldn’t tell one word from another. There were no dots and other marks over certain letters, the way there were in Fursey’s book.

“It’s old,” he said. “Versio Ambrosiana. It was old before your dead priest took his vows.”

Curled in the crook of the big lime by the beck she leafed through the book. The dappled light swam over the ink that was fading to brown. In a terrible hand, something a peasant might write. There were peasants who wrote? If her uncle found out it would irritate him, that a peasant could do something his seer could not. Yet.

It would irritate Eadfrith, too. Even as their boat had crossed from the muddy surge of the Tine to the chop and heave of the sea, and men out of their wits moaned and the less injured laughed at their hurts when they remembered they should and looked as though they’d be grateful for their mothers when they didn’t, Eadfrith had been badgering his father about Fursey, who lay tied like a hog on the plank half deck between them.

Eadfrith kicked the priest on the thigh. “Why does she get him? Does she get the hostage price, too?”

Fursey, who was awake but gagged and so—uncharacteristically as she was to learn—silent, watched one then the other as if he was in hall at a scop’s contest.

“She gets nothing but charge of an annoying god mouth who will explain the value of the book.”

“But why can’t I have him?”

“You didn’t earn him.”

“Nor did she.”

“He’s mine to dispose of as I please.” Eadfrith said nothing, but drew his foot back again. “He’s not yours to damage. Unless you want to buy him from me?”

Eadfrith hadn’t done well in the fight—few had, it was more flight than fight—and had no bounty to show.

“No? Just as well. You’ve no need of books. You have a blade.”

While father and maybe-heir measured each other’s gaze, Fursey met Hild’s, raised his eyebrows, and looked pointedly at her seax.

Edwin missed nothing. He leaned down and said in that pleasant we’ll-eat-the-horse tone, “She might wear a blade but she also wears skirts, priest, like you. So she will learn. Teach her. But not about your Christ. There’ll be others for that, in time.” And to Hild, “While he eats at my expense, see you learn the full use of these books, if any.”

In the crook of the lime tree by the beck Hild closed the book. Fursey was now eating—and drinking, always drinking—at Mulstan’s expense, not her uncle’s. The gift of kings, her mother said: to make others pay. Another saying of her mother’s popped into her head: Women make and men break . She frowned. What about men in skirts, where did they fit? Skirt or sword, book or blade…

“It’s a strange book,” she said to Bán in Irish, and he said, “Is it?” in Anglisc, because Hild had decided that was best. With Fursey unwilling to translate, that was how they would learn the most, one from the other. She would speak Bán’s tongue and he hers, so that when she left—for she would leave by summer, surely—when she was gone, he could talk to the folk at the hall. And she would know more of how Fursey’s tricky Irish mind worked.

They were walking along a track raised between the rhynes. It was spring even here now, minty green leaves on everything, and the air full of the scent of blossom that in the valleys would already be tiny fruit. Assuming Osric’s men had joined Edwin’s, that their march up the coast had gone well, and that they had broken the host around Bebbanburg, the court would be moving to Yeavering, to the sweet green pastures and the constant wind on Goat Hill. But if they had, why was she still here? Why had no one come? Perhaps the Irish were still at sea. She reached for her seax but found her sash instead of her belt, and remembered she had lent it to Cian. It’s still mine , she’d said, but you may have the use of it, for a while. Only not when we play, because it is very sharp.

As they walked, Cú would run into the meadowsweet, comfrey, and reeds that lined the banks, and sniff and scratch, and sometimes whine, and then Bán would go look and untangle the tall golden withies from one another so they would grow straight. The golden willow grew fastest, he said, but the black willow was best for baskets. He had to shape “basket” with his hands twice before he found the word, but although Hild knew what he was trying to say, she didn’t interrupt. She had found that people, especially people who spoke a different tongue, would get anxious if they didn’t get to have their say in their own way, even if they spoke in a long rush, hurrying to get their words out. Like the strange Psalter.

“The Psalms are all written together,” she said. “No beginning and no end, all in one long rush. Fursey says it’s to imitate the long breath of god.”

“Father lord Fursey is a godly man,” Bán said absently, in Irish, and then stopped to test the suppleness of the withy. “Not now,” he said to himself. “Not yet.” They walked on.

“But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is how, if it’s the breath of god, it’s a different breath to Fursey’s little book. Fursey says there is only one god, but surely that’s wrong.”

“It is not. There is God, only God, and God lives in everything. In the air and in the earth, in the rhyne and the willow, in you and in me and in Cú. How can there be two when God dwells in everything?”

Hild was glad she was speaking in Irish, because in Anglisc gods lived in particular places. In Anglisc it made no sense to say god was everywhere. Gods were called Thunor and Eorðe and Sigel, and they lived in their own places, in oak, or a deep well, or the sun. She wished Fursey were allowed to talk to her of his god. “If your god lives in your dog, why don’t you kneel before him?”

“Because God is in me, too.”

Hild pondered that as they walked. The sun was warming her back. “Once I met a British Christ bishop, Anaoc. He said prophecy was demon work. Is his Christ the same as your Irish god, and Fursey’s?”

“There is only one Christ.”

“Then if his god is in everything, too, where do the demons live?”

Bán looked at her helplessly, then said, “The willow in the yard will be dry now. Will I show you how to strip the bark?”

In the kitchen garth that had become the children’s place at the end of the afternoons once the kitchenfolk had taken the herbs they needed for cooking, Hild finally found a way to tell the story of dogs and gods and demons in Anglisc to Begu and Cian. She had no idea why it was so much harder for her to talk in Anglisc to anyone but Begu, it just was, though these last weeks she was learning how to let the words come. It helped if there was no weightiness behind them, no import; if they were only words with no life or death hanging in the balance.

While Cian hefted his exercise stones up and down, up and down, and Begu wove daises together, Hild finished her story, and Cian laughed. Hild was glad. He hadn’t laughed for a week.