Nicola Griffith - Hild

Lilla put his hand on his sword as they approached, and Hild nodded at Eamer, who made a Hold gesture to her followers, and stayed with them while she approached the king.

“We near Lindum,” Edwin said. “What will we find?”

Leathers creaked as those close by leaned in to listen. Her mind was empty of everything but the feel of iron gritting through muscle and cartilage. She shook her head.

His eyes swarmed green and black. “You are a seer. You will tell your king.”

Hild stared at him, her mind as smooth as wax.

He kicked his horse, then reined it in savagely. “You knew the men in the tent. You couldn’t, but you did. And you witched them so they talked to you, Lilla said. Now you’ve witched my own men so they follow you like puppies. So tell me, or, by Woden, I’ll throw you in the river with your tongue and toes in a bag around your neck.”

He would do it. She had seen enough that day to know he would. Who would stop him?

With a white hiss, the world began to turn. The ground seemed a long, long way off. She clung to her saddle horn. If she fell now, he would kill her. She must hold on.

She held on.

It didn’t matter that she had nothing in her stomach, that she had pushed a spear into four men and snuffed their lives like guttering candles. It didn’t matter that she was an ungirdled girl in an army of men who would piss in a dead man’s mouth and leave another holding his own insides because to help was women’s work.

I am the light, she thought. I am not a maid. I am the light. Cold as a sword. I will show no weakness.

She stepped to one side of her feelings, like stepping out of her clothes. She did not hurt. She had no need to eat, no mortal concern with life. She could breathe easily.

She lifted her head.

“Edwin king, seven lords are arrayed against you.” Seven, a number brimming with wyrd. “I do not know every name. Yet.”

He assessed her, then turned to Coelgar. “Keep the men moving at a walk. Lilla, with me. No,” he said to Eamer, and then to the pack of gesiths who had followed, “you hounds will stay.” To Hild he said, “Come.”

“You’re lying,” he said when their horses were fifty paces down the trail. “Oh, not about the names you’ve given me: Cadwallon with Cuelgils and Eanfrith, Neithon, and Eochaid—the gold he must have promised for that unnatural pairing! Even Dunod. No, they’re true enough. But you’re not telling me something.” He tapped his teeth with his thumbnail, thinking. “The trap was for you on the west bank. A score of men. For you. Why?”

“Ransom?”

“Look at you. What are you worth as a niece?”

As a peaceweaver, more than an ætheling. But Hild did not bother to say so.

“You shouldn’t have let the Welshman die before he gave up the last name.”

“Men die, Uncle.”

“And that’s something you can’t do, eh? Shine your light beyond death.”

From the strange, cold distance in which she had placed herself, Hild wondered what he would do if she said she could see into the realm of the dead. He would believe her. They all believed her, no matter what she said.

She heard again Marro’s whisper. You know. So close. She did know, or could guess, the seventh name: Osric. He was an Yffing, a man in his prime, with an almost-grown heir. If Edwin died tomorrow half the kingdom would side with Osric against the young æthelings. But to betray Osric was to betray Breguswith.

“Well,” Edwin said, “we’ll have the truth of it from Cuelgils himself soon enough.”

They took Lindum before æfen. Lindum, city of tanners and fullers, stinking for generations of stale urine and skin turning to leather, stinking now of blood.

Edwin and his counsellors, each with his own man, sat at the scarred marble table that had belonged to Cuelgils. Hild, who had brought Lintlaf—for Forthere had reclaimed Eamer, and she didn’t even know the names of her hounds—sat a little apart. No one knew if she was in favour or not. Beyond the painted walls, gesiths hooted as they played kickball with the heads of Cuelgils’s sons. They were small heads. The head of Cuelgils himself was being washed, its hair carefully dried and moustaches combed, to be mounted on a gilded pike.

Edwin was relaxed and smiling. Cuelgils was dead in the fight, a pity, but he had Lindsey and its gold. A lot of gold. Enough gold to buy his way past any northern conspiracy. On his forefinger he wore a new ring, a massive garnet.

He threw a great golden collar, probably Irish work, to Coelgar, “Wisest of counsellors,” who bowed his head. An arm ring inset with silver and enamel to Lilla, “Bravest of men.” A cuff to Blæcca, “Most loyal thegn,” and on around the table, until everyone was looking at Hild.

Edwin extracted a small, heavy cup from the hoard. Polished silver from Byzantium, inlaid with gold: a lewd figure of a woman on one side and a stately queen on the other. Both women wore the same face. Edwin weighed it for a moment, then set it on the table with a click and pushed it to Hild. “For Hild, seer, prophet, and most favoured niece, on her birth day.”

Hild had forgotten. She was twelve years old.

THE WEATHER TURNED. The first leaves fell. In Goodmanham, Marro’s brother woke and died of the black vomit the same day. Hild hadn’t even learnt his name. Breguswith left for Arbeia the next day. She would return for Yule.

The court moved to York. Æthelburh’s people gradually took over the household: James the Deacon, the dark-skinned music master, took administration. Eormenfrith, her trade master, suggested the women embroider hangings he could exchange for a variety of goods from the continent. Paulinus, her adviser and priest, stayed at the king’s side, offering counsel, always accompanied by Stephanus. The queen herself became the woman that women went to with complaints, though her healing, Gwladus said, was as much a thing of prayer as of poultice.

Hild moved numbly in a cold world: the maid who killed, the maid who felt nothing. The maid with no mother or sister or friend, and a king uncle who had no more use of her for now. The maid with her own unsworn comitatus, nine gesith hounds who, when they had nothing better to do, tried to follow and protect her while pretending they were doing no such thing. Hild roamed the vale and its thicket of woods, collecting herbs and watching the world slow down, fade, and tidy itself away for winter. All but the peregrines.

She loved peregrines in winter: solitary, fierce, and dangerous, their cries clean and bright as a blade. She followed one male for three days, sleeping in the crisp understorey of the oak wood, huddled by a broken wall of a long-ago farmstead, wading, careless of the cold, along the pebbled bed of the beck he washed in every day. Her raggle-taggle band of gesiths tried to follow, but she shinned up a giant rowan, still dense with leaves, and watched them march past. Later she turned to watching otters on the Fosse, upstream of the walls. There she crouched in the reeds, ignoring the mud, unmindful of the wind rattling the stems, and watched their sleek brown play, their casual killing.

Cadwallon wanted to kill her. He wanted to hook her out of her stream and crunch her spine because she was an Yffing, and then go back to doing king things. Her king uncle didn’t trust her. She didn’t trust her mother. Her mother was with Osric the treacherous in Arbeia.

At night she dreamt of the Lindseyman crying out, It’s only a broken leg, for pity’s sake… and sometimes it was herself lying there broken, pleading. Sometimes the figure with the spear was Edwin, sometimes her mother, who wept, as she had wept, but showed no pity, as she had shown none.