Nicola Griffith - Hild

At night, when Gwladus was asleep on her pallet on the floor, Hild lay in her wide bed—her mother was elsewhere again; she didn’t want to think about that—and mulled the rumours and whispers, turning her carnelians, flicking the bright angry orange beads one way then another. Cwichelm. Sending embassies to all parts of the country—even the north. What was he planning? She mused on the words and beads for days but couldn’t see the pattern. There was a piece missing.

Fursey would know more, but he wouldn’t be back from Mulstanton for half a month.

Hild and her mother worked side by side in the still room. They stood hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder: Hild was now as tall as Breguswith. While her mother rinsed an ox horn with hot vinegar, Hild strained the onion and garlic mash, steeped in a copper bowl for nine days with wine and bull’s gall, through a fine cloth. When the liquid was clear, Hild poured it carefully into the clean horn. Breguswith pushed in the wooden stopper and Hild warmed beeswax to seal it. In winter, when eyelids were red and angry, they’d dip a feather into the mixture and use it to paint a line along the eyelash roots to treat styes. Eye infections were always worse in winter when everyone crowded together and the fires smoked.

“Did you harvest that figwort you said you’d found?”

Hild shook her head, but carefully; she didn’t want to spill the hot wax on the back of Breguswith’s hand. “Tomorrow, or the day after.”

That would be another morning of squeezing the orange sap into brass pots and warming it gently with honey. That mixture was good for pink eye, but it was best fresh.

Orange reminded Hild of Cwichelm. She told her mother of the rumours. “And the priests have been seen as far north as the Tine.”

Breguswith started stripping the leaves from the ribwort Hild had brought in that morning. “The Irish are always plotting something. Always sending their priests hither and thither.” She gave Hild a sideways look. “Not the only ones.”

“Fursey carries my messages to Cian and Onnen.” And Begu, but she had never told her mother about Begu. “He’ll be back any day. When I send him out again, are there any words you’d like him to take to Onnen?”

“None I’d trust a priest with.”

Hild realised her mother had deflected her somehow, as she always did.

While her mother chopped the ribwort, Hild dipped up sheep grease from the little pot on the shelf and rubbed it into her hand. This year there were so many housefolk at the vill, so many women arriving with the new folk, so many slaves given in tribute, that Hild, king’s niece, king’s seer, had not been called upon to help with shearing. If Hereswith were here, she wouldn’t be needed in the dairy.

There were many new gesiths, too, so many—Anglisc and Saxon, Irish and Frankish, Svear and Pict—swearing oaths to the new overking, feasting and gorging and drinking themselves to a heroic stupor, that beef and mead were running low and Coelgar scowled at the number of boastful mouths to be fed day in, day out. Edwin had taken to counting his arm rings. He would have to start another war soon to maintain his gift-giving.

War. Cwichelm. Cadwallon. Cuelgils. Osric? When would Edwin feel strong enough to openly oppose his cousin? What if he left it too late?

A thought struck her. What if he was planning to use her as a peaceweaver? She looked at her mother, who shifted slightly but didn’t acknowledge Hild’s attention. What was she planning?

Hild hung her hose in her belt and dabbled her toes in the pool where she had once sat with Cian, where she had made her offering, long ago. It smelt green and cool and secret.

Goodmanham drowsed, but Hild was wide awake.

The pattern was changing, she could taste it, feel it in the different weight and heft of her body every morning, in the way her mother looked at her. One day, to suit some purpose of their own, her mother or her uncle would pluck her from her life and send her to live in a fen with a man she didn’t know. In the world of skirt and sword, it was part of her wyrd. But not all her wyrd, and not yet. There was so much to learn, so much to know.

She stopped kicking and let the water re-form its smooth mirror. Her feet looked broken and badly set, like the stick she had shown Cian.

The bird cherry—so much fruit this year—whispered. The ripples on the pool’s smooth sandy bottom lifted and shimmered. Sprite breath.

She didn’t turn around.

“I know you’re there. Help me. I offered you my tooth. Help me.”

A cherry dropped to the grass. Dragonflies hummed.

The barley and wheat were cut and sheaved, the stooks drying, the hay baled, and Hild was looking for Fursey’s return, when the lords and chiefs began to arrive for the overking’s festival. Osric came first, with his great retinue, second only to the king’s. Then Hunric and Wilstan, Tondhelm and Trumwine, Cealred and Rhond, each with a dozen lesser thegns. They greeted Edwin with respect. Harvest had been early and yields good, from the wide valleys to the wild uplands, the sea to the mountains. Clearly the gods favoured this one. Coifi, as chief priest of the chief god of the chief king of the Angles, smiled and grew as sleek and self-satisfied as a seal.

This was the fruition of his ambition. He had spent a year supervising the building of Woden’s great enclosure, months boiling flax oil and wood tar and mixing them with pigment to make the vivid reds, whites, and blues to paint the wooden walls of the roofless one-storey corridor coiled like a snake around the great totem. His underpriests had coddled the white calf and the white sheep, had worked during the dark of the moon to ready the decoctions of the thung flowers, wolfsbane, and nightshade, and elixirs of certain berries and mushrooms. This was the pinnacle of their year: the ceremony of Edwin, overking, son of the son of the many-times son of Woden, god of the Yffings.

But change was coming. I’d give them a year. Two at most.

Hild wore green. The entire household wore green. They stood before the entrance of the enclosure as the sun began to set. Coifi, in white, stood in front of the doorway, flanked by two burning torches thrust deep in the turf; no cressets, for the god permitted no iron. He held an ancient birch bowl. Thin, eerie music—pipes and horns and drums—skirled about them with the evening breeze. The musicians were hidden at the heart of the enclosure; the music seemed to come from the sky. God music.

The gesiths were nervous. They were always nervous when they had to leave behind every blade, even their eating knives.

The king took the first sip from the priest’s bowl. As he passed between the flames, onto the path they would all walk tonight, he seemed to be trembling. Perhaps it was the breeze catching his clothes. The music rose and fell. Coifi nodded to the æthelings, who walked side by side. Another pause, then Osric. Hild followed immediately behind with Osric’s pale-skinned, dark-haired children. Little Osthryth took her hand. Hild looked down. Such a soft small hand.

She smiled up at Hild, and her milk teeth showed sharp and white as an ermine’s.

Hild let go of Osthryth and took the bowl in both hands. She sipped the thin, bitter stuff and swallowed.

Her lips went numb, and then the drug was coursing through her, cold as a cataract. Her tendons tightened and flattened against her bones. She trembled as she walked alone between the flames.

The corridor was high-walled and lidded by nothing but a now-lurid sunset. The king and Osric had vanished, gone ahead around the curve, and Hild walked, alone—they all walked alone—along the inwardly spiralling path painted with tales, the characters from songs she had heard in hall all her life, songs of music and magic and might, of heroes and beginnings. The story of the Yffings. As she walked their eyes stared from cunningly painted knotholes in the elm, the prows of their ships gleamed along its ridged grain: the three ships of long ago, filled with land-hungry lords and their men in old-fashioned helmets and hammered armour. She shivered, standing between the narrow wooden walls—and shivered as her ship’s keel ground up the pebbles and coarse sand of the beach in Thanet. Her throat bobbled as she leapt with her men from their ship, roaring. Ravens fought over broken bodies, Britons knelt bareheaded…