Nicola Griffith - Hild

But she could climb now, and sometimes when Cian wanted to play hero and she did not, she ran to a tree—she had favourites in every place—and climbed up among the leaves and stayed silent as he called. And if Onnen wanted to wash her hair and the weather was foul, there was a rooftree and its sloping rafters to clamber to. No one ever looked up, not even her mother. This was her secret. But she liked trees best. Hidden in the leafy canopy, sometimes she stayed so still and quiet even the birds forgot she was there.

Like today, a hot day for late spring, bright but sullen. It would rain later. Meanwhile, it was cooler inside the leafy hideaway of a pollarded ash drowsing by a woodcutter’s trail. She settled comfortably against the fissured bark and watched dumpy little siffsaffs hop from their half-built nests among the nettles and peck about in the leaf rubbish for soft stuff to line the nest.

She sat there, breathing the cool leafy air, so still that a sparrow hawk, intent on the siffsaffs beneath, landed on a bough by her face and turned its marigold eyes to hers. They regarded each other for an age. It blinked, blinked again, then tipped forward from its hidden perch, flapped, and vanished into the trees on the other side of the trail.

The court left Sancton before the siffsaff eggs hatched. Hild hoped the sparrow hawk wouldn’t eat them.

The summer’s war had ended early and the household was at Goodmanham. Hild was six years old—tall, strong-faced ( All bone , her mother said, like your father )—when one hot day her mother took Hereswith away and when she came back she wore a small girdle with various cases and boxes attached. She showed them to Hild one at a time. She was to get her own pin beater from Queen Cwenburh, the edgeless sword of some long-dead ætheling. She was to help the other women in the weaving hut. And wasn’t this gilded needle the very picture of beauty? The queen’s own cousin was to be her gemæcce: one to weave and weep with forever.

Hereswith looked happy, and Hild was glad for her—at last her sister had something of her own, something to compare to being dreamt of while in the womb. Then Hild grew even happier when she realised that all the women, including her mother and Onnen, would be so busy fussing over Hereswith that she and Cian might now find time to sneak away to the bottomland at the foot of the sacred hill south of the vill.

The bottomland, unlike most of the wolds, with its chalky soil, was dark and damp. Hild led them through an old wide dike full now of a tangle of oaks and holly and thorny crabapple, then over the bank mostly hidden by fern—Cian had to push the wooden sword through his belt, despite the imminent threat of marauding armies, and use his hands to scramble up—to the boggy dell with its quiet pool and the mossy boulder by the shallow end where the sun showed the muddy bottom. All she heard was a blackbird, far away, and the burble of the spring. She wondered where the water came from. She wondered this in British, the language of wild and secret places.

“I don’t like this place,” Cian said, and he spoke, too, in British, their preferred way when alone. “It smells of wood ælfs, and there’s no room to swing a sword.” He then proved himself a liar by pulling his sword free and lunging at an invisible opponent. It occurred to Hild that both Hereswith and Cian now had their paths. She had only her mother’s dream. “I shall make you a sword,” Cian said, “and we shall continue our fight in the gash.” He pointed to the fallen alder which, from long experience of these matters, Hild understood to be, in his mind, the top of the banked war ditch.

She did not sigh, though she disliked the trench-warfare game. It meant the firing of the furze, which meant many pauses while Cian waved imaginary firebrands and tested the imaginary wind.

“Make me a spear instead, and you can be the hero Morei while I play the great oaf on the top poking at you and soon to be raven food.”

That way she could stay on the water side and, during the brand-waving and wind-testing, she might study the pool and all the little things that came to its edges. Besides, he would have to go all the way back to the oaks for a long, strong limb.

While he was gone she settled back against her boulder and closed her eyes. If it were night she would smell the perfume of bog myrtle, which her mother called sweet gale. At night, wood mice would sit atop the fallen tree, wiping dew from their whiskers in the moonlight. At night, she might see the water sprites she was sure lived here. Meanwhile, she worried with her tongue at her front tooth, which hung by a thread.

Soon enough Cian had her spear. A fallen ash branch, thicker than her wrist, with a pronounced bend. Cian grinned and said, “Oh, I’ll slaughter a score of you spear wielders! Close your eyes now!” and leapt away. Hild sang the agreed-upon three verses— Adorned with his wreath the chief… adorned with his wreath the leader… adorned with his wreath the bright warrior —then she parted a fern on the alder and peered down. Silent. Still.

A cream-striped caterpillar humped its slow way over the mossy bark. Hild picked it up and looked for a place to put it safely out of the way of the coming battle.

In the end she chose the base of the bird cherry at the rocky end of the pool. It was old, for a cherry, with that odd, gnarled look of such trees that weren’t likely to reach the age of oaks and elms. With the haft of her bent spear she poked at the soil by the root. It was lighter and drier than the soil by the other end of the pool. She poked a little more. Her shoulder jostled her tooth.

“What are you doing?” Cian, standing on the fallen alder, looking sweaty and cross. “How can you abandon your post to dig?”

Hild, whose tooth hurt, spoke crossly in her turn. “How can you play the same game over and over?”

“It’s not a game!” Cian’s face pinked. His eyebrows, she saw, did not match his hair. “What are you doing that is so important?”

Hild, feeling perverse for no reason she could name but that she was sick of playing war, said, “I am digging with this stick.”

“It’s a spear .”

“It’s a stick.” And she stroked deliberately at the great kink in the wood, then pushed the blunt tip into her palm and showed him: no blood.

He rubbed his lip with his knuckle. “When we fight as heroes, it’s a spear.”

Please , his eyes said, please.

And just like that she didn’t want to hurt him anymore; she wasn’t sure why she had, only that she, too, wanted to say, Please, please. She settled on her hams by the root she’d been poking at.

“I’m following the root to see if Eochaid the slave is right and there is a rainbow at the tip, or if my mother has the right of it, and at the centre is the root of the world tree and the one-eyed god.”

“You’re forever finding things out.”

“I’m the light of the world.”

“Finding out the how and the why of things is for gossips and priests,” he said, not so much scornful as puzzled, not by the fact that she did it—she had always done it—but that they should be talking about it.

“Gossips and priests, yes, but also artisans and kings,” she said. “And was Morei not familiar with the ways of fire?”

“True,” Cian said, craning for a better view.

“And, indeed, heroes of old sometimes had need to bury their hoard.”

He scrambled over the fallen tree and landed next to her. “I will help.”

He found himself a stick—his sword was a sword only—and they dug, the sun warm on their backs.

“It goes ever down,” he said after a while.

“We will dig more tomorrow.”