Hild: A Novel (16 page)

“Aren’t you old for games?” Cædmon, standing, rubbing his eyes. He’d fallen asleep inside the tower, waiting. He studied the odd sword for a moment. “Old for toys, too.”

Cian, ready for battle, slammed his sword hilt on his shield. “This is no toy!” The painted stone fell out of the sword.

Cædmon folded his arms and was about to smile when Begu said, “It isn’t a toy. Truly. My father just last night declared it a shield fit for an ealdorman. Didn’t he, Hild?”

“He did. And it was given to him by a Bryneich lord in the presence of the king. I was there. And the knife he wears slit the arm of a man of the Dál nAriadne.” Though she had been the one wielding it. “Begu and I are working on a baldric fit for a prince. And look, we have brought back your book.”

“And bell.” Begu, holding out the bell, looked about. “Where are the cows?”

“Having to do with the hall’s freemartin. Da thinks Winty—”

“The one caught with thorns,” Begu said to Hild.

“He thinks Winty might be in season and he wants to be sure before he begs the prize bull. Besides, I’ve not mended the hedge.” He unfolded his arms, took the bell and then the book. After a moment Cian sheathed his sword and slung his shield onto his back, then stooped to search for the fallen stone.

Cædmon unwrapped the book. He opened it upside down. “What does it say?”

“God things. Prayers.”

“Like songs?”

“Yes,” Hild said, surprised. “Like songs.”

He held the Psalter out. “Tell them to me.”

Hild stared at the black letters. “They are in Latin.”

“Then speak them to me in Anglisc. Here.” He pointed with his thick finger. “Tell me that.”

Hild remembered some of the words and could puzzle out others. She mouthed the Latin phrases to herself carefully, then thought about it. It would be easier in British, but then Begu wouldn’t understand. “And I am needy and poor. God, hurry for me. You can help me and save me. Lord, don’t dawdle.”

“God sounds like Guenmon,” Begu said. “Or your mam, Cian. Don’t dawdle! Hurry up!”

“Or was that his lord, not his god talking?” Cian said, picking up his painted stone.

“Lord and god are the same in this book, Fursey says.”

“A lord would never say don’t dawdle,” Cædmon said. He looked at Begu. “Would your da say that?”

“Not in hall. Up here he might.”

“Then”—Cædmon squinched his face up, thinking—“then maybe he would say, ‘And I am needy and poor. God, hasten for me. You are my help and saviour. O Lord, do not delay.’” He pointed again. “Tell me this bit.”

Hild traced the words with her finger, muttered the Latin to herself, and tried again. “Praise Him, sun and moon. Praise Him, shiny stars. Praise the Lord, you kings of the land and everybody, princes and judges, here.”

Everyone looked at Cædmon. He shook his head. “No.” No? He had no idea how difficult it was to read. To read in another tongue. To turn that tongue into Anglisc. She would never again make a difficult thing look easy. For a moment she missed being the bringer of light and having people truckle to her.

“No,” he said again. “Like this. ‘Praise Him, sun and moon. Praise Him, all you stars of light. Praise Him, you kings of the earth and all you peoples, you princes and all you judges of the earth.’ You have to say it like a hoofbeat. Like a song.”

Cian and Begu nodded. After a moment, so did Hild.

“Keep the book a while. Come up here at times and tell it to me. Once I get the hedge mended.”

*   *   *

The next morning Hild sought out Fursey and found him in hall eating oyster stew, drinking ale, and complaining to the young servingman about the size of the fire: “… so small it wouldn’t keep a rat’s arse warm, never mind a man about God’s work, and why are you gawping like that, you dim-witted spawn of a toadstool? More wood for the fire. More wood!”

He was talking in Irish of course, something he did on those days when he was still suffering from the night before but not yet drunk again.

“Father Fursey,” Hild said, also in Irish, for Anglisc at these times made him snappish. “Give you a good day. Might you be willing to talk to me, at all, about the worth of this priest’s
breviarium psalterii
?”

Fursey snorted, slurped up another mouthful of oysters, chewed and swallowed, and scratched his birthmark. “It’s worthless. A poor hand, and the text is corrupt, taken from an old, outmoded, and discredited translation of the Septuagint. And the old priest or, rather, someone who had gone before him made a personal and, might I add, eccentric selection of Psalms. Singularly without use or ornament.” Another slurp, more chewing, a noisy swallow followed by shouting for more ale, which the servant only understood when Fursey shook the empty leather cup in his face. “However, as a palimpsest—though it would take work and some pumice, which no doubt my lord Mulstan could acquire, him being so good at that and, ah”—he rubbed his hand over his chin—“pumice would be so welcome. Now what was I…? Worth. Yes. Well, as a palimpsest it could be worth as much as … Ach, give it to me.” He flipped through the pages, counting, measuring with his hands against the scarred board of the table. “Hmmn. Perhaps the skin of two lambs or one particularly small calf.”

“Thank you. Do you happen to know where Mulstan might be found?”

“I do so happen to know. And as soon as the misbegotten mushroom brings me more ale, I’ll be finding him, for it seems himself has need of my skills.”

“Perhaps you might be willing to name to me the place, so that I might find him and ask him a pressing question without taking up your most valuable time, and may god smile upon the rest of your day.”

“Does God ever smile, except perhaps at His more extravagant jokes?” Here he smiled mockingly, though whether at himself or the servingman refilling his ale cup, Hild could not tell. He took a long, long drink and shrugged. “Howsomever, Mulstan might be found at the dock house by and by, for there I’m to meet him and make record of some exotic shipment, but where he’ll be til then, the hairy creature, I couldn’t begin to say.”

*   *   *

Guenmon could say, and she did, and a lot more besides. She told Hild that if she hurried Mulstan might be found at the smithy, probably with Onnen. “And if you see that great boy skulking about tell him I have an errand or two. Hanging about his mam’s skirts like an unweaned calf…”

Fursey and Guenmon were both right, Hild saw, as she walked downstream beside the beck to the roaring furnace and stinking smoke of the smithy. Mulstan stood with Onnen just outside, out of range of the heat and sparks, watching whatever was happening within, while the smith’s hammer rang in that steady
bang-bing-bing
rhythm of a man intent upon his work. Mulstan was indeed hairy: His bushy hair, held back by a great gold ring inset with tortoiseshell, glinted red-gold in the sun, and his arms were furred like a fox. And Cian was, in fact, hanging about, standing a few dozen strides from Mulstan and his mother, out of earshot, pretending to be absorbed in a twig he was stripping, the twig he threw into the beck when he saw her.

He came to meet her. They stopped by the lime whose branches shaded a backwater of the beck. Its leaves were now bigger than her palms. When she’d first arrived the branches had been bare.

“Guenmon wants you,” she said.

Cian scowled.

“She has errands.”

“I’m busy.”

Hild said nothing.

“Look at them.” His voice shook with outrage.

Onnen had a hand resting lightly on Mulstan’s arm while he shouted something into the red-lit gloom for the smith; she was smiling.

“She’s happy.”

“She’s my mam!”

Onnen liked Mulstan, Hild could tell. She also knew Onnen liked the way he ran his holdings, though it lacked the fine and sharp efficiency a woman would bring to the household. She liked his daughter and his servants and the ease his housefolk felt in hall. And she leaned in towards him as though she liked his smell. And Mulstan liked her; Hild saw the way his nostrils flared as Onnen laughed at something he said and patted his arm.

“They’ll do what they’ll do, whether you’re here or not,” she said. Indeed, she’d be surprised if they hadn’t already done it. Cian knew that, too. They were both familiar enough with the ways of the hall at night, when a woman crossed to a man’s bench and crept under his blanket, and breathing got furtive, then fast. They’d seen the dogs, and the sheep at Yeavering, in the breeding pen by the River Glen; they’d even helped the horse master help the stallion with his stick that was so long he didn’t quite know where to put it.

Hild tried to imagine her own mother with a man with a stick so long he didn’t know where to put it, and couldn’t.

“Cian, come away. Come away now. We will do Guenmon’s errands together.”

She tugged on his belt, as she had when she was little, only now she did not have to reach up, and she realised that though he was tall, she would overtop him when they were both grown. She understood then that they were no longer quite children.

Something in her sudden stillness made him look down at her hand, and he nodded, and with one last look turned away with her down the path.

Once out of sight of the smithy, Hild stopped. “You go on. I must still speak to Mulstan. I’ll catch you up. Go on, go on now.”

She watched him walk down the path—whipping savagely with his sword at harebells by the way—then set about tidying her hair and smoothing her eyebrows. She tore a dock leaf from its stem and cleaned her shoes and straightened her sash. She missed her belt and seax.

Mulstan and Onnen looked up. Mulstan beamed through his beard. He looked like a grinning hedge. “Hild. Are you come to fetch me for something?”

Bang-bing-bing. Bang-bing-bing.

“No, my lord Mulstan.”

“Is something amiss? Is Begu well?”

“All is well, my lord.”

Both Onnen and Mulstan looked relieved.

Onnen smiled at him. “I’ll leave you to it, my lord.” She gave Hild a look, nodded at them both, and walked down the path—more slowly than usual and with a sway that Mulstan watched until she was out of sight.

He turned to Hild.

She tried to imagine how her mother might phrase a request that was not a request. “I’m come to ask a favour within your gift. Two favours. One for myself, and one in the name of my uncle, the king.” It was the longest thing she’d ever said in front of him. He peered about, startled, half expecting to see a voice thrower standing behind her.

He scratched his neck. “The king? Has a messenger come?”

“No, my lord. I owe a debt to one of your people. Royal kin should not owe debts, especially in troubled times.”

“No, no, I can quite see that,” Mulstan said, puzzled, but willing to go along with the odd maid who spoke with strange pauses, like someone receiving messages from the little people under the hill. She was, after all, high, very high, in the king’s favour. “To whom do you owe this debt?”

Bang-bing-bing
, followed by a loud hiss as metal was plunged into the water trough.

Mulstan turned and peered into the smithy. “I do like the smell of quenching iron. Quite makes me feel like a young gesith with his first sword.” The maid said nothing. “Yes. So. Now. Who did you say you owe a debt to?”

“One Cædmon by name.”

“My cowherd’s son?”

“Yes, my lord.”

He frowned. “And what is the nature and amount of this … debt?”

“I have a book from Cædmon worth, by Fursey’s estimate, one calf or two lambs, but I have neither to offer.”

Ting-ting-ting
: a smaller hammer. Whatever the smith was making it was not large, and it was almost done.

Mulstan smoothed his moustaches, perplexed. “How is it his book?”

“He saved it, when the old priest died. I thought to reward him for it.”

Mulstan pondered that. “And Fursey thinks it worth a healthy calf or two lambs?” The man must be mad. But this was the king’s niece, and one must tread carefully.

“He spoke of the
skin
of one calf or two lambs.”

“Ah, then that’s a different case.” He looked reflectively at the clouds, started to peer into the smithy again, thought better of it. “Cædmon. Yes, I know the boy. Dekke’s son. Mother dead of the flux that came through here long since.”

“The one that took Begu’s mother?”

The little people under the hill were clearly well informed. But no, the maid spent time with Begu. No doubt they talked as maids did. “The very same. So. No mother. An older sister, Bote, a milkmaid who forages at times for the kitchen. He seems like a good lad. Wealh, of course. Still, if you feel you owe him a debt then, yes, I’ll ask Guenmon what she suggests as good recompense. Perhaps a small pig, or a she-kid.”

Another great hiss from the smithy, then silence.

“Would such satisfy your honour?”

“Yes. Thank you. I shall recommend your generosity to my uncle.”

Her uncle the king. “Good, then. Good.” He looked relieved. Hosting people of influence was a chancy business. Then he remembered she had said two favours. “And there was another thing?”

She nodded, but this time imagining what her mother might say was no help, for her mother would not agree. She stood mute.

Mulstan put a hand on her shoulder. She was strange, this maid, but still only a maid and friend to his Begu. “Is this truly a serious matter?”

Hild nodded.

“Then you and I will withdraw to that rock.” He pointed to the boulder in the curve of the beck, worn smooth over the years, where the smith’s customers often sat on sunny days. “I find it easier to say a thing, sometimes, if I have another thing to look at.”

Mulstan sat with his knees wide apart and a great fox-furred hand on each massive thigh. Hild perched cautiously next to him. They watched the water. Insects darted to and fro.

“Are there fish?” she said.

“There are. And if we sit long enough, perhaps a trout will rise for a fly. And if we sit beyond that, perhaps a pike, a water wolf, will ease his way downstream from yonder backwater and find his dinner.” They listened to the splash and gurgle. “Now then. Straight as a spear: Tell me.”