Nicola Griffith - Hild

“I wouldn’t carry it all the time.”

“A weapon’s no use if it’s not to hand. A gesith is always ready.”

“I’m not a gesith.” She pondered. “How about a staff? They’re everywhere. The handle of a rake, a spade, a broom—”

“Or a crooked tree limb by a pool?”

She laughed. “We are us!”

He sighed. “We are us.”

The midges were breeding and biting when Eadfrith brought back the remainder of the war band. Cwichelm and Cynegils had escaped.

Hild, alerted by a message from Begu, who’d had it from the queen, was sitting in the shadow by the hall’s western door by the time Eadfrith, filthy and stinking of horse and worse, arrived and took a seat at the board with Edwin, his counsellors, the glazed-looking Osfrith, and Paulinus. Hild laid her left arm carefully on her lap, palm up, to hide the scabbed slice along her left forearm where the tip of Cian’s sword had caught her. The great bruise on her shin was covered by her dress. Her mother, by the queen, gave her a look. Hild wondered if she’d winced.

Gesiths—Cian among them—lounged nearby pretending to dice and drink.

“The West Saxons had help,” Eadfrith said. “From Penda.” He paused to strip the meat from a cold pork rib with his teeth. His normally pale hair—like Osfrith, he had inherited the gilt hair of his mother—was dark with sweat and dull with dust. “I left Tondhelm to treat with the Dyfneint, with a score of swords at his back. I told him to help them rebuild Caer Uisc. We can’t have the Mercians and West Saxons”—he paused to drink and the hall was so quiet Hild heard his every gulp—“can’t have them joining forces without argument. Not now, not with Cadwallon king.”

“No,” Edwin said. He pushed a loaf at his son. “What’s the mood?”

“Cadwallon, they say, is eager for a fight.”

“We’ll make him bend the knee.” Edwin scratched his chin. He gestured at Stephanus to make a note, and said to Eadfrith, “In a fortnight, once you’re rested, you’ll take the war band to Gwynedd.”

Eadfrith glanced at Osfrith, clean and well fed, then at his father.

Edwin leaned forward. “That’s my word.”

Hild breathed softly. Since the attempt on his life, Edwin couldn’t abide being questioned, even sideways. He trusted no one. Lesser folk would be whipped around a tree for such insolence. The gesiths paid attention to their dice.

But then Edwin laughed and tossed another loaf at Eadfrith, who caught it without thinking. “Of course it must be you. You’re the eldest. Besides, your brother’s still mazed with marriage.” He raised his hand so the garnet glinted blood-red. “You’ll wear my token and speak with my voice.”

Breguswith looked thoughtful. Hild wished she could talk to Fursey. She had no idea what path her mother’s thoughts might be taking.

Just inside the elm wood west of Sancton, in a glade where dragonflies glinted like enamelled pins as they swept the air clean of midges, where just a week ago Hild had seen a young fox play-stalking a hare and the leaves smelt of afternoon sun and unstirred dust, Cian swung hard and two-handed at Hild’s neck. Hild met his blade with her staff, met it at the right angle with the right speed so that oak and steel rang and sprang apart. Cian lifted his left hand, palm out, sheathed his sword, and reached for the new shield leaning against a gnarled crabapple.

While he attended to the business of adjusting his straps, Hild sighted down her staff to make sure the sword hadn’t weakened it. It was unmarked. She was getting better at judging the angle to swat aside the flat of the blade. She wiped her forehead with her forearm and hitched her kilted shift tighter. There was no wind. There had been little rain for a fortnight. The glade sweltered.

A wood pigeon called from deeper in the trees. A flick of red caught her eye as a robin redbreast hopped on the fallen trunk nearby. She had seen him here before. Sometimes he pretended to study the clump of blue speedwell by the mouldering roots or to peck for ants on the flaking bark, but Hild thought he just liked to know what was going on.

She twirled the staff in her hand, enjoying the heft and balance. She liked oak best, it was hard and sure, solid as an ox’s shoulder under her hand. Ash was more plentiful—broken and discarded spears, or green poles cut from one of the coppices found near every royal vill—and whippy, which had its advantages. Birch was soft wood, and light, almost useless. Elm wasn’t much better—softer than oak, less whippy than ash. But if she had to, she could fight with a staff made of anything, whether smoothed and seasoned heartwood or a knobbed bough recently fallen.

She preferred something her own height and as thick as a boar spear, but she had practiced with axe handles, with split-lathe poles and a lumpy cudgel made of blackthorn root. Wood was everywhere, as common as air; she always had a weapon to hand. She practiced with Cian every day and often when she was alone. The exercises came easily: She had spent time every day of her childhood stamping and swinging alongside Cian and his wooden sword. In addition to her tree-climbing calluses she now had a knot against the inside of both middle fingers. She had distinct muscles along both forearms that danced when she rippled her fingers, and shoulders as wide as a stripling. She knew the strength and speed needed to send a man’s sword flying, to crack his neck, to sweep his feet from under him or punch out a rib. She knew the play of muscle from its anchor on the ribs, across the front of her chest, and running up over her collarbone like a rope over the lip of a well. She knew the knack of using her fingers and the muscles in her forearms to lift the tip of the staff just a little, until it balanced itself, as one dairy bucket on a yoke balances the other. She knew pain. But she’d had worse falling out of trees. Pain was just pain. She healed quick as a young dog.

Now, with a full-length oak staff, a moment’s warning to get distance, and an opponent without a shield, she might not lose.

Shields, though. Shields were a problem.

Cian had a new one, painted with his colours: the red and black of that first baldric Hild and Begu had made at Mulstanton. Fine red leather around the rim. With the spoils of his fighting against the West Saxons he had persuaded the smith to add a layer of gleaming tin to the iron boss and two silvered fish mounts, one on either side. He breathed on it now and rubbed it with the hem of his tunic.

“Very pretty,” Hild called, and edged east a little, so that when he looked up from his strap and buckle the sun was in his eyes. “But while you hurred and polished, I stole the sun.”

He just smiled his crooked smile, slid a hand through the straps, and swung the shield up. Reflected sunlight leapt from the boss and dazzled her. She jumped to one side but he was too fast. He ran at her, knocked the staff away with his shield, and walloped her across her left hip with the flat of his blade. She went down—but rolled efficiently to her feet, remembering to avoid the fallen tree, blinking furiously, trying to see, testing her weight on her left leg. It held. He’d pulled his blow, again, and outwitted her, again.

They circled each other warily. Hild kept her gaze very slightly unfocused and spread wide, as she did in the woods, to see change: the unmoving shadow, the flick of a fox ear against wind-bent grass, the hunching back ready for the spring. With Cian it was the trick he had of moving the point of his sword a finger’s width to the right before he moved his feet. While she watched, she let her own feet find their way; she knew every root, every rut and hare scrape, every fallen bough in this glade.