Nicola Griffith - Hild

Fursey seemed untouched by the tensions of the rest of the Northumbrian party. He and Lintlaf had formed an unlikely friendship. One moment they would be laughing over a woman who dropped her basket of eggs when a crow lifted its wings and crak-crakked at her—a very bad omen, but only for the one so scolded—the next seeing who could skip a stone clear across the fishpond where the geese swam.

Hild found them annoying. They disturbed everything. One had to sit still and quiet to really see, really hear. She sent them to visit the temple Rædwald had built a decade before his death, and took herself off to the priests’ meeting place at the edge of the beech coppice by the stream. She settled out of sight in the deep, dappled shade cast by an uncoppiced tree. Beeches were rare north of the Humber, and she loved the way they whispered in the wind, like women before they fell asleep.

The black-robed Christ priests had flocked like crows to the vill after Rædwald’s death. They all worked for different kings, some with the crown shaved—Romans—some with the forehead shaved, but they all wanted Eorpwald to acknowledge the Christ god, all wanted to be allowed to start reeving among the East Angles in his name. Did the shaved foreheads have an overbishop, like the overbishop of Rome? When they rose one by one to speak to the group they spoke Latin, but from the smaller groups Hild heard Frankish, Irish, the comforting Jutish dialects of young Kentish priests, even, she thought, Greek. But no British.

Frankish was a strange, Latin-stained tongue. She understood perhaps one word in three. As always when trying to learn a new language, she opened her mind and let the sound wash through it.

An ant ran over her hand, and another. They shone in the sun like tiny drops of amber. When she was little she had crushed one creeping on a bench to find out what was inside it to make it glow like that. But it had left nothing but a dark smear on the wood. She ignored them.

A man was speaking intensely, passionately, with a strong accent, spattering words about him like molten glass. She closed her eyes. She didn’t understand most of it—heresy, apostasy, Gehenna—but he seemed upset about something Eorpwald had done.

She was tired of listening to irritable people. She stood up and brushed the ants and dust from her skirts. She would go watch the goldsmiths. Eorpwald had two—and three armourers and two blacksmiths.

There were more than two dozen men and boys, and a handful of women, working in the bend of the River Deben. The air was busy with the rasp of files, the chink of chisels, and the shirring thump of the slurry tub. It smelt of charcoal and clay, hot metal and wax. Four guards in matching leather tunics stood beneath a huge elm. Sun glinted on the scabbard of her seax as she approached, and they straightened and lifted their spears. Then they saw it was only a maid and grounded their spears again. The two boys at the slurry tub paused in their shaking of the watery clay until a woman at the polishing bench shouted at them.

The chief goldsmith wore a thumb ring and a thick silver twist in his long hair, and his slave collar was a mere gesture, light as a lady’s necklace. He was a Svear. A long-ago sword cut had laid open the left side of his jaw and knocked out all the teeth there. Hild picked her way between the workbenches and waited quietly by his place, careful not to come between him and the light. Eventually the Svear paused, blinked at her, then shouted something mushy and broken over his shoulder. A slave—his collar was heavy—grumbling in Irish, stepped from the heat and shadow of the furnace shelter, wiping his brow with his forearm. He took one look at the cut of her dress, the gold at wrist and waist, that huge seax, and rushed to fetch a little three-legged stool.

He dusted it with his hand, withdrew a pace, and cleared his throat.

“Would the little miss care for some water, at all? It being a hot day. And there being a spring close by.” But he kept glancing back at his furnace.

“What’s your name?”

“Finmail. Fin.”

“Fin, you have something on the fire?”

“I do, mistress.”

“Then see to it.” She looked at the benches of enamellers, chasers, polishers. “I am not here.”

Fin frowned.

“I am not,” she said in Irish, and met his sky-blue gaze with her own. He bowed and retreated.

She turned to the Svear, spoke clearly and carefully. “I will watch, if I may.”

He nodded and went back to his work, moulding something palm-size from wax.

At the next bench, a towheaded man rolled wax into little sticks and, with a knife heated in boiling water, cut their ends and fused them to another tiny wax sculpture.

A boy ran up with a heavy faggot of stripped ash twiglets, the kind of thing left after the cattle have eaten everything useful from their winter tree hay. He added it to the fire. The towheaded man put the wax model carefully on a wooden tray. A woman took the tray—again, carefully—and carried it to the slurry tub. At the tub, another woman was lifting out a slurry-coated net; she hung it on a line in the sun next to others. She checked two of the nets at the far end of the line, took them down, carried them to a bench where an old man with gentle hands coated the hard-slurried model in thicker clay, smoothing carefully until there was nothing but a ball of clay like a wasp’s nest. The faggot boy carried the clay to one of the kilns.

Bellows squeezed and furnaces roared. Tiny hammers chink-chinked. The river flowed.

Two creamy white butterflies—the same colour as the Svear’s wax—danced together around the tip of one guard’s spear, while he half dozed.

Hild returned her attention to the goldsmithing. She had watched the bronze casters at Bebbanburg. This was different. It was like watching seasoned gesiths marching from three corners of a rough field to slot smoothly into a shield wall, or listening to a bard build a familiar song. The Svear didn’t have to watch the furnace or mind the kiln, he didn’t have to shake the slurry, he had only to think of pleasing shapes and build them in wax—smoothly, unhurriedly—so that a clay mould could emerge from the kiln and be filled with gold. She thought of women always having to break the flow of their spinning to catch a child back from the fire, or pause in the heckling of tow to bind a wound…

Hereswith, married, with a child. Her nephew or niece. But she might never meet them. She should give Hereswith something to remember her by, something beautiful, something precious.

The sun climbed higher. The Svear stood, grinned—the way his cheek gaped was hideous; her mother would have stitched that when it was still raw—and gestured for her to follow. She followed him from table to table. She watched the melted wax poured carefully from a clay mould and saved for later; gold poured into the hot mould; the mould set in sand to cool slowly; a raw gold cast, a buckle, getting its gold spines snipped off—always one slave watching another when they were handling naked gold—and polished, then engraved. Back to the enameller’s table, where a man with a squint used the tiniest spoon Hild had ever seen to dip into various bowls of powder and tap the grains carefully into the minute compartments on a gold brooch, made by fusing fine gold wire to a flat gold surface.

“Red,” said the Svear blurrily, pointing to one bowl. “Blue,” pointing to another. They all looked white and cream and grey to Hild.

“How can you tell?”

He picked up a pinch and rubbed it between his fingertips. “Different.” Which war had captured him? His right palm did not have the sword-callus stripe; his left knuckles were not flattened from blows through a shield boss. He touched his finger to his tongue. “Taste different, too.” He held his finger out for her to try. Hild stuck out her tongue.