Hild: A Novel (40 page)

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.

“So will you ask to go with Eadfrith to Gwynedd?”

“Why?” He feinted with his shield but Hild didn’t blink.

“Because you’re a gesith and there might be glory.”

“Glory,” he said. The healing bite on his jaw darkened very slightly; he leapt in the air, sword high, but Hild wasn’t there when he landed.

They were both breathing harder now.

“What’s wrong with glory?” She shifted her grip slightly, watching, watching. His new shield seemed heavier than his old one. She could find a way to use that. “You’re a sworn gesith.”

“Sworn to the king, not his son,” he said.

Hild stabbed with the end of her staff at his face and, fast as a tiddler squirting from its nest, again at his knee. She almost got him. “You’re slow with your pretty new shield.”

“It’s yew.”

Hild nodded. Denser, springier, harder than lime. Good for a shield wall. Good against axes and thrusting spears. She feinted. He feinted. They circled. The robin flew off, offended.

“Besides,” Cian said, “there won’t be fighting. You heard the king. It will be all talk talk talk. That’s why he’s sending Eadfrith. Cadwallon will bend the knee.”

“He might not.” Those warps were not yet ready to be woven into the same tapestry.

He didn’t respond. She blinked hard and shook her head, as though she had something in her eye. But he knew her too well and didn’t take the bait. She would have to distract him some other way.

“Cadwallon hates Edwin king.”

“He’s always hated the king. What does it matter? You know the songs: Cadwallon’s word turns corners no one else can see. He’ll smile and bow while we’re there, and lead an army when we’re not looking. But it’s just Gwynedd.”

“Just Gwynedd? Land of heroes! Remember Gwyrys:
Bull of the host, oppressor of the battle of princes
.”

“We’re all Anglisc now.” His attention never wavered.

“You had your first sword from Ceredig of Elmet!”

“He’s dead. To be wealh is to be dead or a slave.”

“Cadwallon is a king. Not a slave, not dead.”

He shrugged. He made it look easy, despite the sword, despite the shield. Wouldn’t he ever get tired?

“Do you remember those little streams in the dell at Goodmanham?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. By the boggy place, where the hægtes frog lived.”

He smiled. “I didn’t believe you.”

“You did.”

“Did not.”

“Did.”

They both laughed, but didn’t stop circling.

“Besides, they weren’t streams,” he said, “they were trickles. Not much bigger than the sweat running down your face.”

Now she wanted to wipe her face with her shoulder. Oh, he was clever. “Trickles, then. Little, harmless—on their own. But if they joined together, they’d cut through that soft bank in a week.” She tried a lunge followed by a swift uppercut. Nearly. “Penda’s Mercian trickle has already joined the Saxon trickle of Cwichelm and Cynegils—”

“And if Gwynedd joins them they’ll wash us all away. Yes.” He lifted his sword high and back, and his shield over his body. “But they won’t join Mercia.”

Hild retreated, unsure of his intent. “They might. Because Cadwallon hates Edwin king.”

Cian advanced. “Aye, he hates like a wealh.” Cut. “And like a wealh he won’t say so to an Anglisc face.” Cut. Backhand cut. “And any vow he makes will be a worthless wealh vow.” Thrust.

He sounded hard, bored, careless. A stranger. And he kept coming. She swung hard, right, left, but the shield was always there and the oak and painted yew thumped dully.

His lips skinned back. The vein in his neck throbbed. He swung hard, at her ribs, edge-on. She only just deflected it. He kept coming. She backed away.

“Cian…”

He wasn’t listening. She swung at his head, at his legs, even at his wrist. But it was a big shield, and he didn’t seem tired at all.

He came on like the tide, relentless, eyes hard and blank as blue slate. She stabbed, she swung, she stepped back and back.

Her back was against a tree. Nowhere to go. He raised his sword.

The world slowed. A dragonfly glinted to her left. She could see each back-and-forth of its see-through wings, as though the air they beat was as thick as honey.

He was so close: sweat inching its way over the great vein in his neck; his tunic dark with it, and his hair. Did her hair, too, turn that shade, dark wet chestnut, at the temple? He smelt as tangy as new cheese.

“I win,” he said, and the world turned again with its usual speed. He grinned and lowered his shield. “You looked as though you expected to wake in the hall of Woden.”

She laughed, harsh and metallic with relief. She wanted to shout and hug him but settled for pushing herself off the tree with a writhe of her spine and giving him a friendly thump across his rump with her staff.

*   *   *

They sat by the river, by the smooth slope of an otter slide and a fallen alder rotting into pinkish punk. She dabbled her feet in the water. He sat cross-legged, whittling a fist-size lump of pale fawn birch.

She breathed the rich scent of the dark water, the reeds, the glossy mud.

She said, “I thought you’d gone mad.” He didn’t say anything, the way only he could: an easy silence, no hurry to know. “The things you said, your face.”

He looked up. “We were fighting.”

“What you said about wealh. Did you mean it?”

“We were fighting.” He turned the nub of wood in his hands. It was the beginnings of a duck.

“It sounded true.”

“I’d say I wanted to fuck your mother if it would make you blink.” Now it was her turn to say nothing while he whittled. Perhaps she wasn’t as good at it as he was: He cut too deep.

He sighed and threw the birch in the river.

“Perhaps I did mean it.” He sheathed his knife. “In the shield wall I must be one of many, one of the same. Anglisc, not wealh. To the man on my right my mother is the lady of Mulstanton; to the man on my left, I’m a thegn’s foster-son. We’re all king’s gesith.”

“Don’t hate her,” she said. “She’s your mother.”

He threw a pebble into the river.

“Is her word worthless? Was Ceredig’s? He gave you your sword—”

“A wooden sword.”

“—as he would any prince of the blood at that age. A sword from the hand of a king.”

“A prince of the blood…” He aimed to sound careless. “Yet my mother never spoke of it.”

They had grown up closer than most brothers and sisters, played together naked as eels. He would know if she lied outright.

“She didn’t need to: He gave you the sword.”

“But not in public.”

“Does it need to be witnessed for it to be real here?” She tapped his breastbone with two fingers. It made a round sound, like a drum. A strong sound. She leaned back on her hands. “You had your first sword direct from the hand of a king, and your mother was a royal cousin. Royal, of the blood of Coel Hen. The same blood as Cadwallon. Go with Eadfrith to Gwynedd. Look your royal cousin in the eye. See again a king in a king’s hall—a king from a line ancient when my people were over the sea. And when Eadfrith—or Osfrith if he’s not so married by then—is sent to Craven to take it from Dunod, go there, too. Meet your people—the warriors, the kings, the bards at their harps.”

“Perhaps I will.” He threw another pebble. “But it will still be all talk talk talk. They’re even sending priests. Priests don’t fight.”

Hild shook her head. “Paulinus is a Roman bishop. Fursey says wealh bishops and Roman bishops are like cats and dogs. The one will always hiss and the other bark. The wealh bishops will never kiss the Crow’s Roman ring, not even if Cadwallon bends the knee to the king. Paulinus wants Cadwallon to fight and die. Otherwise he can’t be overbishop of the isle, to Edwin’s overking.” Kings picked the chief priest who then picked the underpriests. It was how it had always been. The name of the god didn’t matter.

Cian considered that. “So no matter what presents Edwin sends or what pretty words Eadfrith speaks, Paulinus will spoil it all by flinging insults about like a dog shaking off the rain?”

Hild nodded. “Cats and dogs. They won’t be able to help it.”

He pulled a plate of bark from the alder and drew his knife. “I’m still not sure I want to go to Gwynedd. Eadfrith … worries me.”

She remembered the Eadfrith of long ago, nuzzling a girl in the heather, laughing, telling her Hild was a hægtes in a cyrtel. She had never liked him.

He turned the bark this way and that in the light. “Eadfrith’s like the king.”

“The king has won all his battles.”

“But he has a dint in his arse from sitting so much on the fence.”

“He does jump, in the end.” But she wondered about her mother’s thoughtful look.

“But will Eadfrith?”

“Um?” She thought about it. “It depends how many men the king sends.”

He tossed the bark into the river. It floated away like a tiny raft. He sheathed his knife. “Lintlaf thinks the Gwynedd war band is fourscore.”

Triple the enemy number was usually held to be the right number for overwhelming force: a guarantee of Cadwallon bending the knee. But twelvescore was a lot of men to send just for a talk, especially when the West Saxons and Mercians were allied, Elmet unsecured, and the harvest due.

She fished her carnelians from her purse and wrapped them around her wrist. “Still, you should go. Meet your people.” She let the beads flash in the sun and grinned. “Besides, you might get presents.”

*   *   *

Five days later Edwin sent Eadfrith west with Paulinus and four priests, sixscore gesiths, and Cian. Osfrith went back to making Clotrude squeal every night—and during the day, too, Gwladus said, and in this heat!—Edwin to brooding like a moulting hawk in his hall, and Æthelburh and James the Deacon to conferring about music.

“I don’t know what she sees in it,” Begu said to Hild as they counted the skeins of yarn from Elmet that Breguswith had asked them to sort. “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. That makes threescore of the red. It’s nothing you can hum.” She pulled a soft sack closer and peered dubiously at the green skeins inside. “And this is nothing we can use.” She lifted a badly dyed hank of wool to the light. “More yellow than green.”

Hild was thinking about the king. Dint in his arse indeed. Sixscore against fourscore. A bold war leader certain of his men might force a battle at those odds. But if Eadfrith did not no one would call him craven out loud. Not in enemy territory. Cian would be angry. But at least he’d be safe.

“They should be whipped.”

“Um?”

“The Elmetsætne. They should be whipped.”

At least it was Anglisc people she wanted to whip this time. “Give it to me.” Hild pulled a thread from the skein and rolled it between forefinger and thumb. Poor stuff: short-fibred, coarse, and uneven. Not even worth redyeing. She would tell her mother. Her mother would tell the king that he was being fed worthless goods as tribute from the leaderless Anglisc of Elmet. Edwin would brood further and build elaborate stories in his head about why he had not yet brought Elmet firmly into the Northumbrian fold. “Put everything back in the sacks,” she said. “Gwladus will carry it— Where is Gwladus?”