Nicola Griffith - Hild

The hall stank: No one wanted the door open. Drunk men wouldn’t go outside to expose their most tender parts to the weather. They pissed in corners. Many vomited and came back for more mead. Mead and song drove away the fear of famine, fear of homelessness, fear of the dark. The pain in their throats from shouting their own names, boasting of battles, affirming their ancestors—who had lived in the dim distant past and got through this, aye worse than this, who laughed in the teeth of a gale—made them feel human, alive. The sting of mead on raw throat made them feel brave. The stink of the piss and the gnawed bones and their unwashed muscle made them know their animal strength. Piss on the weather! Fuck the winter!

They rutted behind benches, arm-wrestled between torches, and laughed at their burns, lost themselves in the sight and sound and smell of people like them, their people. Them. They were all one.

By the third day they were maudlin. By the third night, resigned to their wyrd. What would be, was. This was the way it was because this was how it would be. They were threads in fate’s great weave, snowflakes in the gale of the world.

Hild, wrapped in two cloaks, stood by the crushed byre and sipped the cold, brilliant air carefully, afraid it might give her lung crackle. Men were hauling away timbers. The butcher was directing his man to bring an axe; nothing else would cut through the frozen carcass of the milch cow—and then they’d have to get moving on the pigs in their pen. But he spoke quietly, and the men stepped softly, afraid of the eerie quiet: The rivers had frozen.

Then Oeric was by her elbow to tell her some woman by the name of Linnet would like a word, and Linnet herself was bowing and bobbing and promising her anything the lady would name, anything, for, thanks to her warning, her boy was still alive—still cheeking her, Eorðe bless him. Her boy and their pigs, while their neighbour’s girl was dead, stiff as a smoked fish, and the man of the house weeping and silent and both pigs missing. But she was all right, her mother, too. Her mother sent all thanks, though she did want to know how in Eorðe’s name they would feed their pigs, with the whole forest floor littered with fallen tree stuff, the acorns buried knee-deep…

Then the Frankish mason was asking if the lady had a moment to be so kind as to tell him when it might be warm enough to get back to work on the wall…

“Oeric,” she said. “Find Coelfrith’s man. Tell him the rivers will flow again by moonrise. Tell him that unless the king wants his fine wall standing around a city of the dead he must send men to help clear the forest for the pigs. Besides, the remaining cows will need the fodder—half the hay was lost with the byre. Tell him today, understand? Not tomorrow. Then bring Cian to me. Tell him to bring any who’ll listen. And bring Begu, and Gwladus and my bundle.”

She turned to Linnet.

“I’m glad you and yours are well. The king’s men will set to work on the forest. I’ll come to your neighbour. We’ll walk by the hedge and see how it does.”

Within days, the byre was mostly rebuilt, a new milch cow installed—Hild wondered what farmer now wore a silver ring while he suffered the scolding of his wife—and the scop had a new song. The gesiths went back to drinking—the mead was unspoilt—and wrestling, heedless of Coelfrith’s men who rode out, grim-faced, to the steadings round about and of the constant refusal of beggared farmers at the king’s kitchens.

The hedge had survived. Hild suggested to Coelfrith that Detlin be sent a present—a sturdy knife, say, with a copper inlay, something he could boast about—so word of the king’s generosity to good craftsmen would spread. It was one way to counter the rumours of disaster spread by starving men turned away by their lord.

Edwin didn’t care about his reputation among the lowly, and Paulinus encouraged him.

“What does their opinion matter?” he said. “They aren’t baptised. If any want to test my lord King’s rumoured weakness, they’ll meet a wall as implacable as nightfall, bristling with half a thousand spears.”

The new tower began to rise again. The mason swore on his son’s head that the king would have it, aye, and a rebuilt east wall by Yule.

Yule, the queen said, would be the most magnificent ever seen in York. She had Bassus select men to accompany him on the hunt: venison, she said, and boar, swan and blackbird pie, enough to make the undercroft burst at the seams.

Meanwhile, she and James set about rehearsing music in hall, and once again the place was stripped of all its soft furnishings while the choir sang. The scop sulked. The queen laughed at him, and said she and the lady Breguswith were planning the most magnificent new tapestry for the east wall, to hang behind the king’s table, and he should make a song about that.

Breguswith looked to her store of herbs. Hild saw that these were heavy on the comfrey and garlic and other wound-care medicines but said nothing. The seas were now closed to trade, which meant Osric would come down from Arbeia for Yule. She’d winkle out her mother’s secrets soon enough. There could be no war in this weather. Meanwhile, she had secrets of her own.

She wrote a letter to Rhin and sent it with Morud. “If he’s not about, put it in the hollow oak and come back.”

Morud came back with a reply: Rhin had ten and seven men and women with him now, and six children, and had cleared two fields. The goats and pigs were doing well. The cold had not found its way to the mene wood. “And he says, lady, that he has dug out the millrace and found the old millstone, but thinks the building of a new mill to bear the weight of that stone might be beyond him.”

Morud watched her sort yarn but made no move to leave.

“What else?”

“It’s said that Stephanus”—he looked around for a place to spit, thought better of it—“Stephanus, on orders of the Crow, is now beating priests before driving them off.”

“What else?”

“I didn’t meet all of Rhin’s new men. My guess is one or two of them will be wearing hoods for a while.”

At least Rhin was being careful.

Later she walked to the west wall, listening absently to the birds: thrush, sparrow, winter wrens, and tits with song so high she could barely hear it, in the distance a quarrel between resident rooks and a flock of winter incomers. Beyond that the steady, reassuring roar of the rivers. Clouds slid by in layers of grey and white: no sun, but no rain, either. A good day.

The mason could advise her about the mill. A mill would be a fine thing, a steady source of income for her household in years to come. A hen for a sack of meal. A milch goat for three of flour. She had no idea how many farms were growing corn round about, though perhaps more would if there was a mill.

Paulinus was there, looming over the chief Frank: a hole in the light, a hole in life, next to the white-dusted mason. His mate was mixing mortar on a board with a paddle, slush-scrape-slough , pretending not to hear anything. Hild stepped quietly to one side of a pile of stone and elm timbers, out of sight, and watched Paulinus. Paulinus, beater of priests, spurner of beggars.

“No, my lord Bishop,” the Frank was saying. “I would, but I daren’t. You’ll have to find help for your church elsewhere. The king wants his wall by Christ Mass.”

“God looks kindly on those who help His servants.”

“Yes, my lord. And I would. But it’s the Anglisc king’s word.”

“The Anglisc Hel is a dark, cold hole, I’m told,” Paulinus said. He was thinner, if that was possible, formidable in his black robes, with the massive amethyst weighting his left hand. In the winter light, its purple glimmer was otherworldly. “But the hell you will go to if you thwart God’s will is not cold. You will burn. Have you ever watched a pig roast? First, the stink of singed hair. Then the eyes melt. The skin bubbles. The fat runs into the coals and the flames burn higher, higher, higher. Imagine if the pig, by some blessing or damnation, still breathed.”