Nicola Griffith - Hild

Hild, Begu, and Cian sat on the freshly ground limestone flags of the strange, bare, high-ceilinged room that was to be the Derventio chapel. Under the Crow’s supervision men had cut a row of windows high along the length of the eastern wall. There were no shutters. Everything but those pale, gritty flags had been mudded, plastered, and limed.

“The air stings my tongue,” Begu said, and tipped back her head to look at the ceiling. “A god is going to live here?”

“The Christ,” Hild said.

“It’s a cheerless space for a god,” Cian said. He leaned back on his hands, turning this way and that. His scabbard chape scraped the floor and the sleeves of his warrior jacket rose a little. Hild saw the tip of a new scar snaking over his forearm. “Cold, too.”

Hild, stung, said, “There will be silver and jewels, silk hangings, and gilded carvings to put old King Coel to shame once the walls dry. And the Crow will send to Frankia for glass for the windows!”

“Glass? In a wall?” Begu said, and Cian shook his head. Who had heard of such a thing.

Hild felt reproved, caught in a childish need to show off. Cian was a young warrior, a thegn’s foster-son. Begu was a girdled woman, the thegn’s marriageable heir. Hild might be touch-the-ceiling tall, the seer who saved Bebbanburg and predicted the fall of Lindsey, but she was still, officially, a child. It seemed another lifetime since they had rolled in the kitchen garth at Mulstanton, shrieking with laughter about gods and worms, and dogs and demons.

The silence lengthened.

“I like the queen,” Begu said. A wisp of hair was escaping her forehead band. She noticed Hild looking. “I use your comb every day.”

Hild touched her pocket. “I carry your snakestone.”

“I hoped you’d like it. Cian practically sleeps in his belt buckle.”

“I do not!” His flush emphasised the new strength of his jaw, the thickening bone of his brow. He jumped to his feet. “I hear singing. They’ve broached a new cask. I’m going to drink.”

They watched him leave. The muscles wrapping his knees were bigger, too.

“He doesn’t like to be teased anymore,” Begu said.

He never had, Hild thought. Perhaps they weren’t so changed after all. But Begu, Begu sitting there in her veil band and girdle, amber and gold glinting at her ears.

“What are you staring at?”

“Your veil band. It’s…” It’s a veil band. A woman’s veil band. “It’s lovely.”

“Onnen made it for me. She made one for you, too. I brought it with me. And a girdle. Just in case your ma didn’t remember to. Though she said I wasn’t to say that. Oh.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, then Hild laughed. “I’m glad, so very glad you’ve come.”

Begu laughed, too, that shimmery, silvery laugh Hild would always associate with light along a wet beach and the smell of the sea, and took her hand. “I said I’d come. I said we’d use those tablets. Onnen would have come herself—she’s very agitated for you, but that’s Cian’s to talk about, I don’t know what’s going on, no one tells me anything—but she couldn’t.”

Hild had forgotten how Begu’s thoughts flocked like starlings, flicking this way then that. It took her a moment to sort through what Begu had said. “Onnen’s ill?”

Begu stared. “Didn’t I tell you? No, perhaps I didn’t. But your veil band— Oh, it’s so pretty! It’s the exact colour of—”

“Begu, tell me what? What’s the matter with Onnen?”

“Why, nothing.”

“Then—” Hild took a breath, let it go. “Tell me how she is.”

“She’s well. She’s cross that she can’t come. She nagged and nagged and nagged Cian: Make that lass understand, mind, make her understand. Oh, she’s like a bee in a bottle, and big as a house. Fa is happy, though. He thinks it will be twins. Just like Winty. Though of course he doesn’t know Winty really. Did I tell you about Winty?”

“Onnen is with child?”

Begu looked surprised. “Well, of course. I just said so. She’s due any day.”

Hild took another breath. This was just how Begu was. She would talk to Cian about Onnen and her message. “You liked the queen, you said.”

“She seems nice. But what was she doing out and about with those gesiths? She could birth if a bird sang suddenly. Any time. Maybe even today. You can always tell when they waddle like that and go white about the lips. The baby’s dropped. And what’s that perfume you smell of?” She lifted Hild’s hand, sniffed her wrist. “You smell like her.”

Hild was getting back the habit of plucking the meaning from the flying words. “Jessamine. It’s a flower oil. And she is nice. For a queen.” But Hild didn’t want to talk about the queen. “What colour’s my veil band?”

“Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s like that colour between moss and the sea. To match your eyes. Onnen spent all winter on it. And your girdle! She nagged and nagged at Fa until he gave her the stones.” She frowned, which made her look just like a goat pondering whether to eat a thistle, and tilted her head, listening. The gesiths were singing more loudly. “Do you suppose Cian is getting drunk? I promised Onnen I’d look out for him. She said I was to remind him to keep his sword in his scabbard, that here he’s just a man with a blade, and a young one at that, not the lord’s son.”

Hild had no idea how Begu could protect Cian from quarrelsome, bloody-handed gesiths. She stood. “We’ll go make sure he’s all right.”

When they left the chapel, they paused and blinked in the cold wind, then started across the rough grass—Hild could already see a path between the serving door of the hall and the chapel, where the grass had been flatted by housefolks’ feet—towards the singing.

By the good-natured sound of it, they were not yet very drunk:

“It makes no sense,” Begu said. “No one’s ears are that long.”

“They’re not singing about ears.”

“Oh.”

The gesiths, ten of them, had dragged two benches outside and leaned them against the south wall at the east end of the hall. It was a favourite spot for the younger men and their dogs to lounge: sheltered from the wind that had been blowing cold from the northwest these last few days and bright with midmorning sun. Also close enough to call out to the housefolk passing and repassing and demand food and ale. Two, the black-haired brothers Berhtred and Berhtnoth, were bare-chested and just sheathing swords after a demonstration bout.

Berhtred wiped his chest with his jacket and straddled the bench facing Cian. “And that, young chestnut, is how we did it at Lindum.” Then he deliberately took the wooden bowl sitting before Cian and drank from it.

Hild clamped her hand on Begu’s shoulder, and Begu turned to look at her. But Begu hadn’t seen these men killing Lindseymen and thinking it of no more account than the slaughter of geese.

The men—her hounds; she saw Gwrast, the young Bryneich lord, and his cousin Cynan; Wilfram, son of Wilgar; Lintlaf; Eadric the Brown and his friend Grimhun; and Coelwyn, Coelfrith’s much younger brother; though not Eamer the Gewisse, who hadn’t exchanged so much as a word with her since Lindsey—sat back and waited to see how Cian would respond.

Cian reached for the ale jar, refilled the bowl, and gestured for Berhtred to drink again. “I honour you for it.”

Berhtred’s lip curled: The stripling was a coward.