Hild: A Novel (31 page)

Hild moved numbly in a cold world: the maid who killed, the maid who felt nothing. The maid with no mother or sister or friend, and a king uncle who had no more use of her for now. The maid with her own unsworn comitatus, nine gesith hounds who, when they had nothing better to do, tried to follow and protect her while pretending they were doing no such thing. Hild roamed the vale and its thicket of woods, collecting herbs and watching the world slow down, fade, and tidy itself away for winter. All but the peregrines.

She loved peregrines in winter: solitary, fierce, and dangerous, their cries clean and bright as a blade. She followed one male for three days, sleeping in the crisp understorey of the oak wood, huddled by a broken wall of a long-ago farmstead, wading, careless of the cold, along the pebbled bed of the beck he washed in every day. Her raggle-taggle band of gesiths tried to follow, but she shinned up a giant rowan, still dense with leaves, and watched them march past. Later she turned to watching otters on the Fosse, upstream of the walls. There she crouched in the reeds, ignoring the mud, unmindful of the wind rattling the stems, and watched their sleek brown play, their casual killing.

Cadwallon wanted to kill her. He wanted to hook her out of her stream and crunch her spine because she was an Yffing, and then go back to doing king things. Her king uncle didn’t trust her. She didn’t trust her mother. Her mother was with Osric the treacherous in Arbeia.

At night she dreamt of the Lindseyman crying out,
It’s only a broken leg, for pity’s sake …
and sometimes it was herself lying there broken, pleading. Sometimes the figure with the spear was Edwin, sometimes her mother, who wept, as she had wept, but showed no pity, as she had shown none.

As the weather worsened and the last of the leaves fell, she roamed the half-ruined wings of the old redcrest fort within a fort. One afternoon she ran into Paulinus—trailed by Stephanus—who ignored her wild hair and mud-smeared dress and served her a political smile and the information that he was surveying the wing for the queen. She wanted the royal ladies to have their own suites—including, of course, the lady Hild. Whom he hoped to call on soon in order to discuss the glories of Christ the Lord.

“Not my lord,” she said. “My lord is the king. My uncle.”

His smile didn’t waver but Hild heard the false note when he turned to Stephanus and said in Latin, “Note that many of these bricks are crumbling.”

Stephanus obediently pressed his stylus to the wax. Hild saw that what he wrote was
Of course the bricks are crumbling!
and she snorted.

Paulinus fixed her with his black eyes, and Hild knew she had made a mistake.

*   *   *

The next day, Hild stood by the queen, who had summoned her, in the centre of the echoing great hall of York. They watched as James the Deacon prepared to lead his tiny choir, four lay brothers selected because “they sing like cherubim, cherubim,” for the queen.

James’s face, up close, was the colour of charred alder. She wondered why Stephanus was called “the Black,” but James was not. He had coarse grey hair fizzing around his tonsure and eyes like jet beads. But his mien was not dark. He laughed a lot and spoke Anglisc with a bubbling Latin accent though he had admitted, cheerfully, that when it came to music and administration he had the soul of a torturer. According to Gwladus he had certainly tormented the housefolk that morning. “Take down all the hangings, all. And sweep out the rushes, every one. No, I don’t care that the king has said it is never to be moved. Talk to the queen. No, no cushions! No hangings! Get rid of them. All, I say. We are to have real music, music for the praise of God and the pleasure of the queen, for which I want this basilica as bare as a bone.” And in response to their pleas the queen had sent word to the household: Do as he asks, it’s just for today, and it will be a good excuse to clean the old cave.

The hall—
basilica
—without the fires, without the hangings, looked alien and old, and was as cold as death. Everyone in it stood wreathed about by their own breath. The queen wore a mantle tipped with beaver fur, the same sleek rich brown as her hair. Her great beaded gold necklace and cross gleamed at her throat. Hild stood cloakless, impervious to the chill. It fed the legend—the maid who felt nothing.

She knew why she was here, and she had let Gwladus see to it that she was clean, tidy, and heavily jewelled, but she was in no hurry to begin. She could outwait a hawk in the wild. She could certainly outwait any queen from the south. Indifference was her cloak and shield.

While James fussed with placing his choirmen, she pondered the floor. This was the first time it had been swept bare in perhaps a generation. She scuffed at the crusted dirt with her toe, trying to tell what kind of stone it was. She was aware of the brothers straightening, James the Deacon tapping time, their heartbeat of focus, but she didn’t look up. Perhaps it was limestone.

The music, when it came, with a rush, a gush of voice seeking its note, ripped away her indifference and tore through her as sudden and shocking as snowmelt.

She forgot the floor. Forgot the queen. She felt hot, then cold, then nothing at all, like a bubble rising through water, then floating, then lifting free.

It was cool music, inhuman, the song stars might sing. Endless, pouring, pure. Were it water, it would turn any bird that drank it white.

The music soared. Hild soared with it.

The queen, standing with Hild in the centre of the hall, where James had insisted the fire pit be covered by a board, reached and took Hild’s hand.

At some point the men stopped singing but for a moment the music soared on under the rafters. When even that faded, the queen squeezed and let go. Hild’s hand tingled and remembered what she hadn’t felt: a cold hand, smaller than her own, smooth but not soft.

Æthelburh brushed at Hild’s cheek, at her tears, and Hild caught the queen’s scent—some kind of flower, one Hild didn’t know. She filled with a sudden gaping hunger for the scent of her sister, for Begu or Cian, for Onnen, even for her mother.

She wiped her face with her sleeve, aware now of the texture of the linen, the cold on her cheeks.

James walked to them, sandals slapping on the bare stone. He walked with a light step, as quick as Onnen’s. “You liked it!” he said.

“Yes,” said Æthelburh.

“It will get better, of course,” James said. “Once we plaster those rafters and hang some doors instead of that pernicious cloth. And you,” he said to Hild. “You liked it.”

She nodded. But she didn’t know how to say it had made her heart feel the way she imagined a gull might, hanging over a swell held by only the wind. That it had made her forget the stink of the insides of Lindseymen. That it had reminded her of the wordless, untouchable patterns she sensed when she counted the petals on a daisy or watched ripples on a pond.

She tried. “I liked … I liked the way it climbed, up and over on itself.”

He beamed.

The queen patted him lightly on the arm, a dismissal, then she and Hild assessed each other.

The queen was pregnant, though no one was supposed to know. Gwladus, who had befriended Arddun, the wealh who attended the queen’s gemæcce, told Hild that there had been no blood on the queen’s sheets since the wedding night, that the king must be as fertile as old Thuddor: done the deed the first month of their coupling. You wouldn’t know to look at her: planed face, polished hair, and thin wrists.

“They say you feel nothing,” the queen said. “But that’s not true, is it? Though clearly you don’t feel the cold.”

Hild waited.

“Paulinus says you know your letters. I never heard of a person who knows her letters but doesn’t know Christ.”

Silence.

“My gesiths say you are a sorceress. Or perhaps hægtes. They say you can fly. I wish I could fly. The music is as close as I come to it.”

For a moment, Hild was cycling, soaring endlessly again with the song.

The queen reached up and brushed her new tears away. “You will speak.”

“What’s the flower you smell of?”

Æthelburh blinked, then laughed. “Jessamine, a precious oil from the East. A gift from my brother, who had it from our mother’s people in Frankia. I will give you a little.”

Hild did not protest. Her mother had trained her to accept every advantage: to smell like the queen would be a mark of great favour, one people would notice without knowing it.

“And you, you will walk with me every day. We are cousins but you may call me aunt. You will talk to me. We will get to know each other.”

*   *   *

They walked along the river—upstream, away from the landing’s shout and stink and the fretful reeve’s men, who often turned to the queen now that Coelgar, seconded by Blæcca, was so busy taking the reins in Lindum on Edwin’s behalf—with Lintlaf and Bassus, the queen’s red-cloaked captain, following ten paces behind.

“We have nine women working now on the embroidery for Clothar king,” Æthelburh said. “It’ll be finished by Yule.”

A skein of greylag geese took flight just beyond the trees at the curve of the river. “Nine?”

Æthelburh nodded. “Teneshild is a skilful hand. And Æffe. And Burgen might be deaf but her eyes are good and she knows how to make the colours dance.”

And with their sly comments, Burgen and Æffe would soon have the Kentishwomen and the Northumbrians gossiping together like old gesiths on the war trail. “You’re clever.”

“I am queen.” Æthelburh laid her hand on her stomach. For those who knew to look, she was beginning to show. “The question is, what are you? A maid without a mother.”

“I have a mother. Your aunt.”

“Yes.” There was a world of complication in that one word. “You really don’t feel the cold, do you? Like my brothers. Perhaps you will teach me that trick.”

Hild couldn’t imagine this queen in her beaver furs riding rough over half the north, starving and harried, thrusting spears into the brains of the enemy.

“I miss my brothers. Perhaps you miss your sister.”

“Your cousin.”

“My cousin. But she’s with the East Angles now, and you are here.”

Hild couldn’t disagree.

“You prophesied her doom.”

“Not hers. Æthelric’s.”

“Paulinus would say a woman’s doom is her husband’s.”

“Why?”

The queen, startled, laughed. “It probably comforts him to think so.” They walked quietly for a while. “You learnt your letters from the Irish priest, Fursey.”

Hild nodded.

“You will introduce him to me. You will not speak of it to anyone.”

Hild glanced at her.

“You must learn to speak those thoughts of yours sometimes, child, or those who watch—like those gesith hounds of yours—will decide for themselves what you think, who you are, whose side you’re on. For there are sides. Though I don’t know which is yours.”

If Hild thought of sides, she thought of plots, of her mother, of Lindsey, its blood, its stink, and the world began to dissolve in a white hiss so that she wanted to step from her body and become the marble maid again. She breathed slowly, carefully. She was in York, by the river, with the queen, her cousin. Or aunt. Who had offered her a gift of perfume. Who was trying to be her friend. Maybe.

She would offer a gift in return, and an answer of sorts. “I shall sew with your women.”

“Thank you. We’d be glad to have you.”

It hadn’t occurred to Hild that they might not be. She pretended to watch a pair of swans gliding by.

“And your mother, do you think she would sew with us? When she returns?”

Hild thought of the old queen dying in a pool of blood and the world began to turn cold around the edges.

“Never mind. We’ll leave that for another time.”

*   *   *

She introduced Fursey to Æthelburh, but what discussion they had Fursey didn’t share.

The ice came early. An illness swept the city, racking old and young alike with wet coughs. The fingers and toes of wealh and then even of royal Anglisc grew red and shiny with chilblains. Hild offered the parsley in her pots for the royal table, but suggested privately to the queen that she might not want to eat it, in her condition. The queen declared that all, even wealh, would get cheese as well as barley bread or oats for breakfast.

Hild sewed with the queen’s women in the morning, when the light was good. In the afternoon twilight she walked along the river, and at night she listened to the music with one ear and to the gesiths as they boasted and drank, and the thegns who manoeuvred for favour, with the other. The men drank gallons of beer and as much white mead as the women of the household could freeze out overnight from the yellow mead poured into the special tall barrels—all men but Paulinus Crow, who drank sparingly of the wine Æthelburh provided. Hild suspected that James the Deacon—who did not eat in hall but with his boys—was not sparing. James and Fursey had become friends, though Hild did not know if it was a natural affinity or at the direction of the queen.

For a while, she enjoyed a life in which she behaved exactly as she should: a royal maid with no secrets. She sat at her place of high honour on the bench, often near the æthelings Eadfrith and Osfrith, who were now men with no time for a maid, and sipped her mead. She let the ebb and flow of the hall wash over her, much as she sometimes sat behind bracken at the edge of a clearing or by reeds at the edge of a pool. Life, death, change, they happened most at the edges of things: where forest meets clearing, air meets water. A spider has only to spin at the edge of a puddle to catch the fly that dives to drink. A shrew has only to watch in turn for the spider. For the fly must come to the edge to drink, and the spider must follow the fly.
Fate goes ever as it must.

*   *   *

Yule approached. Breguswith returned from Arbeia, followed a day later by Osric.

In Hild’s room, mother and daughter regarded each other silently. “You’ve grown,” Breguswith said. “Your woman is taking good care of you.”

“I’ve told her to make up a bed for you next to mine.” Despite her best intentions, Hild’s voice rose in a question.