Hild: A Novel (13 page)

He swallowed more beer. Swefred was playing that song again, the one he liked about hearth and home. Couldn’t play half as well as that odd Irish priest the maid brought but at least he could understand the words. None of that Irish caterwauling. Ah, he missed his wife. By Thunor, he missed both of them. Though this Onnen woman who’d come with the maid—

The maid had stopped fiddling with her beads and was looking at him. “My lord Mulstan.”

He swallowed the wrong way and coughed. Had she read his thoughts about her wealh woman?

She waited patiently, which made him nervous. Royalty were rarely patient unless they were toying with you. At least she was talking now. For the first weeks she’d been mute and round-eyed as an owl. He’d seen gesiths with that look after their first shield wall.

“Who is the man who plies the withy beds?”

He wiped his beard. “I beg pardon?”

“The man. On the withy beds.” She cocked her head slightly, as though listening to a voice only she could hear. “He has a dog.”

“Black-and-white dog?” He slapped the board. “The willow man!” He immediately felt foolish. Of course the man in the willow withies was the willow man. “Irish,” he said, trying not to look into her fathomless eyes. Seen too much, those eyes. “Man to an envoy taken hostage so long ago no one remembers.” He’d never really thought about it before. Perhaps the envoy had died of sickness, perhaps he’d been freed but forgot to take his man with him. “But it’s said the man found his way to the priest of the tiny British church by the ruined beacon tower on the cliff. Long time ago, that. Never been a priest up there in my time. No doubt the priest had him work in the willow withies. But that was years ago, and now the willow man’s just the willow man. He doesn’t say much.”

Like you, little maid. But the willow man didn’t say much because no one much understood him. He just planted and pruned and harvested white willow and brown willow and buff willow, softened and dried it, boiled it and stripped it, so that now a person could visit the willow man’s bothy and exchange food or cloth or a copper pin for willow fit for any willow purpose and it was the finest for two days’ walk. The willow man lived in a world where he talked to no British, for long years had taught him the pointlessness of it; a world where the Anglisc were wights—and perhaps to him they were.

That priest was giving him one of those lean and wicked smiles. Must have said that last bit aloud. Had to watch that.

He tipped his beer horn. Empty. Onnen filled it and smiled. Thunor bless the woman. “Anyway, the willow man communes only with his dog and his boles and poles and stools and rods. Though he’s Irish, he seems harmless enough.” Of course the maid’s tutor-hostage, Fursey, was also Irish, some princely priest the king had taken in the bright clash at Tinamutha. Fruitless war, that. What was Fiachnae mac Báetáin, the king of the Ulaid, doing attacking his betters so far from home? And why had the king let such a little maid get mixed up in the blood and slaughter? “I hope the priest won’t take that amiss.”

Fursey rose and suggested smoothly that his lordship should pay no mind. For all knew that some Irish, especially the wicked Ui Neill, were known to be mad, to succumb to drink, to get too close to their horses and beat their dogs, and who could blame an Anglisc lord for not knowing the difference?

*   *   *

Hild, who had been living on this wild moor by the sea for some weeks now and, tutor or not, new friend Begu or not, was homesick and heartsick, listened but said nothing. More and more now she could tell the difference between what was real and what was a mix of memory and nightmare; more and more she felt sure that if she spoke she would be speaking to the living, not ghosts. Often now, Fursey’s instruction on letters and Latin seemed like something of this world and not the next. But still the effort of deciding whether or not it was right to speak would bring the memories: the Irish rising like a tide, the slip and slide in the mud on the mouth of the Tine, the cries of
Osric, where is Osric?
answered by ever more howling Irish. She felt the bruises still of the scramble into the boat, the fighting for space, the rock and tilt of the boat as an Irishman grabbed the gunwale with both hands …

She turned away from that memory. She would make friends with this willow man who also didn’t like to talk.

*   *   *

She crouched in the grey-brown sedge on the edge of the rhyne and watched. It might be spring half a mile away, down in the valley along the beck, but here, high on the marshy moor by the sea, it was a harsh, colourless world. Here there was no greening blossom, no curve of burbling stream or round river rocks. The rhynes ran spear-straight into the horizon, the willow beds running between them, all under a tin-grey sky. Steel-coloured water lapped and slapped against the dirt banks, and the willow canes, not yet in leaf, rattled and shook like tally sticks.

She wished Begu could be there, but Begu had been careless about keeping warm in the rain and she had been breathed on by sidsa and her nose was dripping. Onnen—who somehow had taken over Mulstan’s hall within a day of their arrival seven weeks ago—had ordered her to bed with a hot stone. So Hild had left her seax and belt with Begu, on the grounds that the willow man might be frightened by it, and wore her old sash instead. Then she had set out under the wide, scudding grey sky and found him here on the rhyne, the ditch between the withy beds, cutting white willow poles and stacking them in bundles, upright, in the water.

She had been watching the white-haired man and the black-and-white dog all morning. They were never apart. They knew she was there.

The willow man had looked at her sidelong once or twice and talked to his dog, whom he called Cú, or Dog, but more loudly than he would have if they’d been the only hot-blooded things on the moor.

The water slapped, the canes rattled, and man, girl, and dog all looked at the sky—clouds piling together, no longer tin but lead—then at one another. Hild, encouraged, stood, came closer—oh, her shoes were more mud cake than leather now—and pointed at the willow man, at his crinkly white hair, and said one of the Irish words she knew, “Bán.”

And he laughed, showing a toothless mouth, then loosed a torrent of Irish at her. His accent was strange. She understood three words of it,
ingen
(maid),
saxain
(Anglisc), and
occoras
(hunger), and shook her head. “
Mall
,” she said, “
mall
” (slow), and he said it all again. “
Mall
,” she said again and furrowed her brow while lifting her eyebrows:
Please.
And Cú tilted his head and whined, and then Bán spoke one more time in a jumbled Anglisc-British-Irish mix, and Hild listened with her whole skin, the way she listened to rooks in the field or wind in the trees. She understood, she thought. He was asking her if she was hungry.

She sat in the mud—Onnen would scold her raw—offered a fist to Cú, the first dog she had allowed near her since she watched Od eat the guts of Osric’s man, and repeated back to Bán as well as she could, with the words he had used, that she, the Anglisc maid, whose name was Hild, had hunger, a little, but that when she returned she would be very well provided for. And he nodded, but shook his fingers dismissively in that Irish way, just like Fursey, and tutted, and unfastened the sack at his waist and offered her half his cheese and a bite of onion, and a dip in the coarse grey salt collected in the seam of his sack.

When he waved the cheese Cú went painfully still and drooled and looked sad, as dogs do, and Hild and Bán laughed together and settled comfortably on the edge of the high bank between withy beds, where it was a little drier, and shared the cheese while Cú followed the movement of hand to mouth, and looked sadder and sadder. Both Hild and Bán were wise in the way of dogs, and they gave him none, and he stopped looking sad and instead went to sleep. And after, Bán let her climb into his flat-bottomed boat and coast up and down the rhyne with him while he used his little sharp knife to slide up along the grain of the growing willow rods, faster than she could see at first, and
snick snick snick
cut the little buds off the growing poles so they wouldn’t come in crooked. Overhead the clouds scudded and darkened and closed tighter than a lid upon the world, and again they glanced, man, girl, and dog, at the sky, and Hild persuaded him to come to the kitchen at the hall of Mulstan.

At the door, it was Guenmon, not Onnen, who gave her muddy shoes a look, Guenmon who raised an eyebrow at Bán and then said to Hild, “Don’t sit. Either of you. You’re all over mud.”

“He’s my guest.”

“Guest, is it? Well, Onnen would have my hair if she saw me feeding you in that state. And you dressed like that. Though it’s nice to see you’ve taken off that sword-knife.”

“I give him guest rights,” she said, and she gave Guenmon the look she’d perfected in the months she’d been apart from her mother, months of having to demand the rights of prince and priest and light of the world while in the guise of a rangy, chestnut-haired girl with a strong-boned face. And Guenmon, as everyone did when faced with that swelling gaze, sighed and gave in. “There’s some of my pasties, you know where they are, and I’ll fetch ale. But you’ll sit on the stoop til that mud dries, or Onnen—”

“Will have your hair, yes.” Hild took off her shoes, pulled a stool close to the shelf, stood on it—carefully, for her hose feet were wet—and lifted down the basket with the napkin-wrapped pasties. She handed one to Bán, took one for herself. “Where is she?”

“With the little mistress.” Guenmon set a poker to heat in the fire and then, despite her earlier words, took down two of the better copper cups and one wooden one, and from a walnut chest—she unlocked it with the latch-lifter that would usually hang on the belt of the lady of the hall—took a glazed clay pot of precious spice and added a pinch to each cup.

“Is she well?” Begu had looked miserable—dripping nose, sore throat, earache—but sturdy this morning. Being breathed on by sidsa could be a chancy business, yes, but usually only for infants and the very old.

“Nothing staying warm won’t cure. But that Onnen does fuss…” She shook her head and poured ale from a jar into the cups, and Hild understood this to be a comment on Onnen’s solicitousness for the lord’s daughter, and by extension the widowed lord himself. The lord, too, had been extravagant in his courtesies to Onnen, and the people of the hall—servants and highfolk alike—looked on with those wry smiles that Hild had seen grown-ups exchange before at these times. Perhaps they would mate. She had wanted to talk to Cian about it last night but Cian was being unaccountably surly, and Begu was already tucked up in her very own linden-wood bed. Onnen had sniffed at that when they’d first arrived—a ten-year-old girl, daughter of a country thegn and a deposed British lordling’s daughter, with her own bed and feather mattress! Wasteful, wasteful to build a whole miniature bed for a child—but had changed her tune quickly enough when Mulstan had made them all so welcome.

Hild understood and suspended judgement, as she had learnt to do in her strange position as the light of the world in a maid’s clothes. And yet she was ten, only ten, her heft only that of her gaze and words and bearing, especially on days like this when she had set out in her plainest short cyrtel and hose and left all her fine stuff safe and dry in Begu’s room.

So as Guenmon knocked the ashy scale from the glowing poker and plunged the hot tip into the first copper cup and sang a verse of a wealh song Hild didn’t know while the drink heated, Hild munched on her mutton pasty—Guenmon had a way of adding tarragon and vinegar that gave it a wild, hilly tang—and was grateful for warmth and food and the possibility of a new friend, one who didn’t belong here either.

Bán had finished his pasty and was looking about him. Cú was sitting quiet and well behaved, though there were suspicious-looking crumbs at his feet.

Guenmon handed out the ale. Bán sipped with caution, Hild with delight: mace and ginger! She watched the willow man lift his cup again, noted the calluses on his wrists, the suggestion of a thick scar around his throat as he swallowed. Mulstan didn’t use collars for his wealh, but Bán had been in a slave yoke at some time. And his tunic was threadbare. Did he even have a cloak? It might be spring but on the moorland and beach there would be two months yet of cold wind.

“Good ale,” she said, and Guenmon nodded as though such praise was her due.

“Ready yesterday, from the finest malting we’ve had this six-month or more, if I do say so myself.”

“Might we spare a jar or so?”

Guenmon folded her arms.

“And perhaps we have some cloth set by for rags that we might piece for a cloak.”

“And some sausage for the dog, while I’m about it?”

“Bán would no doubt be grateful,” Hild said, with a smile for Bán, who had recognised the word
dog
. She really wanted to talk to him. “Where’s Fursey?”

“Now how am I meant to know the whereabouts of that smooth-tongued, shave-pated Irish spy?”

And for a moment she sounded so like Breguswith that Hild missed her mother and sister fiercely.

*   *   *

Hild stood on the headland in the light mist of dawn with her toes hanging over the edge of the grassy east cliff. The edge of all things. Between day and night, between sky and earth, sea and land. The air smelt of iron and salt. Like Tinamutha. She rested her hand on her seax. No, not like Tinamutha: no stink of mud and marsh flats. No boats on fire. No armed men cutting their way towards her and the king. Just iron and salt. Her hand drifted from the seax. Behind her, behind the ruined stone beacon and the tumbledown wattle-and-thatch church, she heard cowbells. Their dull clank was almost tuneful, occasionally harmonious. She had never heard of such a thing, but now that she had, she wondered why every cow in the world didn’t have a tuned bell around its neck.

As the mist began to dissolve she could see the dark, wet beach. Long-legged birds speared shellfish, and women with sacks collected coal and driftwood, dodging the surf that ran up over the sand like the froth in a milkmaid’s pail. The sky showed as blue as twice-dyed linen. The sea was restless, glinting like napped flint. It, too, would turn blue if the sky stayed clear. Three ships were being loaded at the harbour on the mouth of the River Esk. Mulstan must be right. Her uncle must be winning. Though she didn’t know why she’d had no word.