Nicola Griffith - Hild

“Crops must have been good the last two years,” Breguswith said to him as he groaned with pleasure. “You’re plump as a prime bullock.”

He agreed that the gods had been kind and the weather favourable. They talked for a while about the crop in his valley to the north and his farmers, and after a while she slapped him on the arm and handed him his warrior jacket.

Wilgar eased the jacket back on, squinting against the late-afternoon sun. He twisted this way and that. “It feels better.” He sounded surprised.

“You’ll do,” Breguswith said.

They watched him head back to the hall and brace himself for Trumwine’s punch in the shoulder in the doorway.

Breguswith said, “The man is getting fat,” in the kind of voice that meant she was thinking more than she was saying.

Hild looked in the pot. “Will there be enough left for the women?”

Breguswith wiped her hands on her apron. “Do you see any women?”

There were only housefolk hurrying with yokes of beer buckets and platters of bread to the hall. She shook her head.

“Why you suppose that is?”

She pondered. “Because girls don’t show off?”

Breguswith huffed in amusement, sat on the bench, and wiped now at her forearms. “You’re not wholly wrong, but there’s more. Men’s arms are stronger than ours. That strength is their weakness. They forget—” A gust of laughter rolled from the hall. The drinking and boasting had begun. Breguswith stood. “I’ve things to see to. We’ll talk another time. Watch women and men, put yourself inside them. Imagine what they’re thinking. And remember what I’ve said.”

Two days into the retting, the river was sluggish and the air still and heavy with the ret stink. Breguswith and Onnen were inside the undercroft of the great timber hall, sorting cloth into bales for merchants and bales for the household, and Hereswith and Mildburh were in the weaving hut tying weights to the warp on a piece of tabby. Hild was long since tired of watching women and men from the loft in the byre and under a bench in hall (the rooftree at Goodmanham was low, close enough to the fire pits to make her cough and choke the one time she had tried it). All they seemed to do was lie to each other; the women did it while giggling and the men while boasting. She had no idea what that had to do with strength.

So today she forgot about it and, with Cian, followed the king and his household—his advisers, the various bands of warrior gesiths and their war hounds and sight hounds, the priests and petitioners and housefolk—into the meadow. The dogs settled down in the shade of a stand of alders in the bend of the river, and Hild, with Cian behind her, cautiously held out a fist to Gwen, the huge scarred wolfhound bitch whom they fed sometimes, when they could, and who consequently allowed them to approach on occasion. Gwen sniffed, then lifted a lip at Brannoch, the leader—a boarhound, and mad, though not as mad as the brutalised war hounds—and after some grumbles he licked his chops and lowered his nose to his paws, and the children sat themselves slowly, and Hild dared to lean against Gwen’s flank, and they all settled in to half doze and half listen to the run of the river, the whine of flies, the laughter of drunken fighting men, and the king’s petitioner.

Edwin, a compact man with chestnut hair, a grey-threaded beard, and heavy rings on both arms, sat on his carved stool under the oak, his chief steward Coelgar at his ear and his advisers about him, with his chin on his fist and his eyes on the petitioner, a one-handed local thegn, rewarded with five hides by Æthelric Spear years past for service rendered as gesith, who complained that a local widow had set eel traps in the river: his river, his.

Æthelric Spear. Hild’s grandfather. Hild paid closer attention.

Edwin had his face turned to the man, and smiled and nodded in the right places, but after a sentence or two his feet began to move this way and that on the turf. Hild plucked herself a blade of grass, sucked on the fat end, and pondered him. His gaze roved over his household: the priests—a bishop from the British west (spy of his foster-brother Cadwallon ap Cadfan, her mother said), a soft-voiced Irishman (bearing news of the Dál Fiatach and their hopes for the Isle of Vannin), Coifi, the ambitious young priest of the great temple, a woman who tended the well of Eilen (or tended first the needs of the scruffy local priest of Saint Elen, some would say)—the warrior gesiths (calling for more ale, more mead, “More white mead,” “White mead, at this hour!” the houseman muttered as he broached a second cask and gestured for a wealh to remove the empty), the confidential adviser from Eorpwald, the sulky new king-to-be of the East Anglisc, and his two sons, the young æthelings Eadfrith and Osfrith (no daughter, no future peaceweaver as yet). Edwin’s gaze moved from one to another and back again, head tilted. Hild had seen a dog look at his master that way when trying to guess which hand held the bone.

Gwen woke from some dream with a muffled bark and shook Hild off into the grass and scratched mightily, and stretched, and set the whole pack to shaking and stretching and scratching, and Hild after a moment tried it, too: the long stretch with both arms, then the legs, one at a time. It felt good. The push of her feet against the turf, the long line of her back. She did it again. Cian, next to her, copied her, limb for limb. Then he tried to scratch behind his ear with his right foot and fell over, giggling, and then, though she knew it was impossible, she had to try, too. They howled with laughter, and the dogs bayed and one, confused, snapped at another, and soon they were snarling and foaming and the warriors shouting and flinging arm rings as bets. One hound clamped another’s muzzle between its teeth and, neck rigid, haunches bulging and shining with effort, hauled it, screaming and bleeding, across the turf, clods of dirt ripping free as both fought to push in different directions. Hild was glad when Domnach, the Irish dog boy, came running with whip and raw meat and beat the hounds into whining submission. She stared at the bloody trails gouged by both dogs.

The king used the distraction to send the petitioner away with a fine knife and no decision.

Hild was seven, in the stone undercroft of the palace at York, helping her mother count the tuns of honey. Her mother told her she would be seated at the high table for Modresniht, one of the twelve winter feasts.

“You’re to sit by the king. The queen, too. If she’s well. You’re to talk to him.” She counted on her fingers again. “That makes three dozen. Do you have the tally sticks?”

Hild held up the smooth, notched sticks. You’re to sit by the king . You , not We . But she had learnt to say nothing until she understood. She would think about it later.

She loved the undercroft. It was vast and cool and mysterious, room after room, with water running along the southern wall in a sharp-edged gravel-bottomed channel. One room, with thick walls, no windows, and a stout, banded door, was full of treasure, but Edwin kept a man outside it at all times, even during feasts, and Hild had never seen the hoard of gold and garnets that Cian—one early evening, as they ate small wrinkled apples and hard cheese and fresh hazelnuts—assured her were heaped in piles on the tile floor. Hereswith had snorted and said Cian had never seen it, either. And then the two of them fell to throwing nutshells at each other and pulling each other’s hair. They did that a lot now, since Cian had carelessly months ago boasted that his father was a real king, with a real kingdom, and Hereswith shouted back that Ceredig was the chief of a tiny wealh forest who, even now, was being hunted like a wounded boar through the wood he’d once called home for killing her father, and Hild’s, who if he’d lived would one day have been overking of all the isle.