Nicola Griffith - Hild

The king and his court spent a month here, a two-month there, eating their way through the local offerings, levying and taking tribute, listening to local troubles and rendering judgement.

“But why?” Hild said when they had to pack up and leave Sancton, again, just as she’d got to know the rooks in the beech spinney and the frogs by the south pond, and one particularly fine old hornbeam whose bent boughs even she could climb. She watched her mother and Onnen folding dresses and rolling hose, and threw her own box of treasures on the floor. “I don’t want to!”

Her mother’s irises, pale blue as forget-me-nots under unseasonable frost, tightened, though her voice stayed even. “You will pick those up.”

“No.”

“Very well. Then we’ll leave you—”

“I’m the light of the world!”

“—and when we’re gone the wolves will come, and the foxes, and the wights.”

Hild wasn’t afraid of foxes, perhaps not even of wolves, not in summer when they were well fed. But wights…

Her mother was nodding. “They will breathe on your face as you sleep and you will be trapped in a cold dream forever and ever and ever.”

Hild picked up her box, began searching for her treasures—the wooden brooch Cian had carved and painted for her, the shark’s tooth Hereswith had given to her last Yule, her magic pebble that fit just right in her hand. She frowned. The pebble seemed smaller than it had.

“But why?” she said.

“Why what?”

“Why do we move all the time?”

“It’s how it is.”

“But why?”

“Because otherwise we’d eat ourselves out of house and home.”

Hild pondered that. “When Fa was ætheling, we didn’t send all the gallopers first.”

“An ætheling is one of many, a maybe-king,” Breguswith said. “Your uncle is the one king. He travels with five hundred people. The king can’t just pack a loaf and a sack of salt and head for the horizon. He must first send a message to his reeves: How was the harvest? How are the roads—and the wood supply? Where is the honey flowing, where are the royal women needed for the weaving, where do bandits need to be warned away, and where is the hunting good? Then he must gather food and other supplies for the journey. And then his galloper rides ahead—tells the vill steward to begin brewing beer, slaughtering cattle, strewing rushes. Only then may we travel.”

“And when we get there,” Onnen said, “we eat them out of house and home and move on.”

Hild set her pebble aside. It was just a pebble. “But why can’t we stay? Why can’t Uncle Edwin have a home like everyone else?”

“The whole land is his home.”

“Yes, but why?”

“He must be seen.”

“Yes, but—”

“And he can’t simply have a steward on each estate sending him tribute. Because a steward, unless reminded by the presence of the king, begins to think himself a thegn. He begins to see the land as his, to wonder why he shouldn’t send only a portion of his food, his ale, his honey, to the king. The revolt always begins when the steward wants to be king. A lesson the Franks never seem to learn.”

But Hild was no longer listening. She was playing with her special pinecone, remembering the tufty red squirrel she had frightened away the day she found it.

Every summer Edwin took war on the road with his war band, tenscore gesiths, sworn to death or glory, and their men, their horses and wagons, a few handfuls of shared women. They were always back before autumn, weighed down, depending on the war, with Anglisc arm rings and great gaudy brooches, British daggers with chased silver hilts—though the blades were no match for Anglisc or Frankish work—or strange heavy coin, and they would wind themselves about with boasts and intricate inlaid sword belts. And always by the end of summer there was a double handful more of big-voiced, hard-chested men glittering with gold. Not all were Anglisc, but they drank and shouted and boasted alike. Hild’s mother told her to stay out of their way. “Our time is not yet come. For now we live like mice in the byre. Everyone knows we’re here, but we’re not worth attention. Quiet mouth, bright mind.”

Breguswith taught her the gathering and drying of herbs, and began to spirit Hereswith away for mysterious lessons that, when her sister tried to share them with Hild, made no sense.

They were sitting with a tablet weave—the simple band weaving that would do for a border on a neck or cuff—and Hild was telling Hereswith about how swallows never came until the white butterflies born from colewort were outnumbered by the black-and-red jewel-winged kind.

“Beat the weft,” Hereswith said.

“But I beat it just after I turned,” Hild said. “It’ll spoil the pattern.”

“Do as I say. I’m older.”

And Hild, because Hereswith had that sulky look that meant she was unhappy, tapped the cross threads down to lie more densely across the warp threads. She smiled tentatively at her sister, who said, “Ma says there are different ways to smile at people.”

“How—”

Hereswith overrode her. “If the king notices me, I do this.” She straightened her spine and smiled a proud, glad smile that shocked Hild. “Try it.”

Hild shook her head.

“Try it.”

“No. I’m not happy.”

Hereswith laughed. “That doesn’t matter! Well, never mind, I expect you’re too young to understand.” She turned the tablet.

Hild beat the weft. The pattern was already spoilt. She might as well please her sister.

Hereswith nodded. “Good. And this, too: If you think you’re going to smile at a gesith’s boast, you must let your hair fall to hide your face. Like this.”

“I know that one!” Hild remembered her mother’s words exactly—the light of the world must remember everything. She repeated them proudly: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”

Hereswith blinked. Her face curdled. She leaned forward, punched Hild in the arm, and burst into tears. “I hate you!” She flung the tablet weave to the dirt and fled.

Hild picked up the weave, mystified. What was all that about? She would ask her mother. Or maybe not. Lately whenever she put a question to Breguswith she got answers that made no sense—if she got answers at all. “Where do swallows go in winter?” had merited a pause in the grinding of herbs, followed by a question in turn: “Winters are uneasy times. Why does the king hold feasts at Yule?”

“Because it makes people happy?”

“A king doesn’t care if the folk are happy. He cares that they think him strong. Pass me the bitterwort.”

Hild passed the bitterwort. She thought about winter, and home, and strength in one’s own hall. “Oh,” she said. “Stronger than anyone else. Like not having a steward who stays in the vill.” It came out wrong, but she knew what she meant.

So did her mother; she always knew the words Hild couldn’t find. She smiled but said only, “This root was pulled too early. Bitterwort is best harvested in autumn.”

Hild grew taller. Her milk teeth loosened. Now she could cross her legs and balance on her hands, and she could name all the king’s hounds and all his horses. She had worked her first perfect tablet weaving, and she remembered enough of the names of the heroes of Gododdin to argue with Cian when he named them as they fell under his wooden sword. Sometimes Hild worked alongside him, exercising with a rock in each hand, as boys who hoped to be king’s gesiths must. Sometimes she swung a stick sword; she had learnt long since that it made him happy for her to pretend to be Branwen the Bold, just as it made her happy for him to be still when she was watching and listening. They remembered: We are us.