Nicola Griffith - Hild

Onnen smiled sadly. “And before how many of his lords did he swear this?”

Hild didn’t say anything.

“Beware the ingratitude of kings.”

Hild gripped the rail. The wood had not yet been smoothed after the winter but she squeezed it as hard as she could, because it was real.

“I’m sorry, little prickle. But you must leave on the king’s ship, and Begu must stay.”

“I’ll be all alone,” she said, and she hardly recognised her own voice for the wobble. “You’ll be here, and Cian. Even Fursey… even Fursey…”

“You’ll have your mother. And Hereswith.”

“Hereswith will soon be peaceweaver elsewhere.” And maybe her mother would go with her sister. And then it would only be Hild and the king, and her cloak of otherness.

She said her goodbyes in the warmth of the hall and received gifts one by one and handed them unseeing to Eadfrith’s man. She walked alone into the rain, half mad with trying not to remember the soft warmth of Onnen’s motherly breast and the smell of her clothes, trying not to think of the glint of firelight on Begu’s escaping hair because then she’d remember it always, one more memory to torment her. She tried not to take deep, deep breaths of the scent of wind-whipped sea blending with rained-on cowgrass blowing down from the cliff, tried not to think of Cian, Cian woven through everything. We are us. Trying to shut it all out, keep it all away—

She walked up the gangplank while the ship creaked and rubbed against the wharf. The wood was slippery. Eadfrith, waiting impatiently at the top of the gangplank, called something to his man behind her. Hild paused at the top of the gangplank, looked into the bows, and found Fursey looking back at her.

She blinked.

Fursey. Whose ransom had been paid, who should be long gone on his way back to his people.

Eadfrith shouted again. Hild could make no sense of his words. She could make no sense of anything. The rain increased. Eadfrith’s man stood behind her, saying something. Then Fursey was there, giving her a hand onto the deck. She turned for one last look, for she might never see Mulstan’s holding again, but the bright yellow sail dropped between her and the little wharf.

Fursey said, “Come out of the rain,” but Hild was so rigid with not crying that she couldn’t move.

“You,” she said. “Why?”

“I was free to travel anywhere, and I remembered to myself your thrust at dinner: that I had not met any Anglisc who knew more than blade and blood and boast because I had not met your mother.”

“My mother.”

“Yes.” He smiled that smile.

The sailors shouted in rhythm and tugged on a hemp line that squealed a little as it ran over the wood, and the sail turned. It was a new sail, beautifully dyed and tightly woven, the work of ten women for a year. Beyond it, Mulstan’s man threw the end of a rope to a man in the bows, and the prow of the ship swung out a little.

“Can you afford passage?”

“I might have given Eadfrith to understand you wished me still as your tutor.”

She looked at him, at his sly eyes and stubbled tonsure. “Why?”

“You have a bright mind but lack subtlety. I could teach you. And life around Edwin will be interesting—oh, very, very interesting, if I’m any judge, which I am—for the next little while. And I’ve a mind to meet your mother.”

HILD WOKE TO THE SMELL OF WOOL. Goodmanham stank of it. The week had been full of the chaos of shearing, and Hild had taken her turn with most of the other women and girls. She climbed out of bed slowly. Her back ached—and the top of her thigh, where a wether had kicked her as she helped flip him onto his back. She had a barely scabbed cut, the shape of a cat’s long pupil, on the back of her left wrist where the shears had clipped her. But yesterday had seen the last of the pitifully naked sheep whistled out of their pens and herded back to the hills by the black-and-white dogs.

A brief memory of rhynes and rattling willow tried to take shape in her head but she pushed it away.

She stretched, pulled on her blue overdress, the hem of which was now three fingers shorter than it should be. Hereswith yesterday, as she and Mildburh dressed—more finely than Hild, even though they would spend the morning in the dairy—had said that no Yffing should look so shabby. Had she turned into a savage away from her family? But she had not had the time to nag at Hild about it, not during shearing season when even the peaceweaver must work like a wealh; and Hild was bone weary, and heart weary, and she didn’t care about her clothes.

She slung on her belt and settled her seax. The haft was newly wrapped with rough ray skin, one of Mulstan’s parting gifts—the rest of the ray skin would make her popular with the gesiths, Fursey said; he was scratching his head over whom they should favour. Later today, she and her mother would meet with Coelgar to discuss Hild’s treasure, which had gone to York from the wall, and to decide what equivalents from the Goodmanham hoard she should be awarded. Part of her personal treasure had been a bolt of silk given in Alt Clut, but Onnen had told her privately at the time that it was old and no doubt rotten in places.

Onnen had a better idea of what, exactly, had been on that packhorse, but Onnen was not here.

As she combed her hair with her fingers she turned, as was now her habit, to the north and east, the direction of the Bay of the Beacon, to Cian and Begu. She tucked her hair behind her ears. Perhaps Onnen combed Begu’s hair now.

Today she would attend her mother in the main weaving hut. Post-shearing, when hands were soft and smooth with sheep grease, was when the most intricate patterns using the most delicate yarns were set up on the looms. She was the only ungirdled girl to work on the main loom, the only one tall enough. The only one with the pattern-making mind, her mother said. The only one without a gemæcce.

She refused to think about the beautifully carved but clumsily painted box on its shelf above her bed, the eight ivory wafers wrapped in violet linen.

Fursey happened to be lurking at the bottom of the hall steps. His skirts were clean, well cut, and very black; his forehead tonsure smooth and shining; his cross made of heavy gold. Not long after they arrived at Goodmanham, Hild had seen a priest who had come about other business give him a freighted look, and she’d known, from watching her mother all these years, that later, when no one would see, there would be an exchange of information and a small, heavy purse.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said. Hild nodded. They both walked carefully, with their skirts held high; it had been a dry month. The dust made Fursey sneeze. In the distance four men shouted and swore as they whipped the oxen hauling a freshly cut oak for the expanded temple enclosure Edwin had given Coifi leave to erect. One ox lifted its tail and squirted shit.

Fursey said, “May they have time to enjoy their heathen temple.”

She wanted to know what he meant but in the game they played she lost points if she had to ask.

“I’d give them a year. Two at most.”

She said nothing, hoping her silence would goad him into explaining.

Two wealh, edge-rolling a half-full barrel of stale urine towards the hut where the fleece would be washed later in the day, saw Fursey and straightened. As they passed, Fursey made a hand gesture, the one Hild now knew was a sign of Christ’s cross. The darker wealh bowed. The urine stank. The barrel had been by the door of the hall for a month, gradually filling, but in the open air its sudden reek made Hild want to wipe the inside of her mouth with her sleeve.