Hild: A Novel (43 page)

Edwin said to Osric, “Take the men out to every farm and hamlet in Elmet. Tell the Anglisc to send men who can speak for them, to be here at the full moon.”

“They’ll be here.” He patted the whip in his belt. “If they like their skin.” His men laughed.

“They’re Anglisc, cousin, not wealh. Persuasion will work well enough. Promise them mead. I doubt they have anything at home but ale and milk. Mead and meat.”

“And song,” Hild said. Her stool was padded with a brown-and-marigold cushion.

The scop preened.

Edwin dismissed Osric with a pleasant smile and turned to Coelfrith. “Pyr will sort the feast. I need you to ride out on another task.”

The highfolk of Elmet and their spearmen would be his first shield wall, his buffer, should Gwynedd join with Mercia. But highfolk were only the crop of a land. To know the land itself, you had to know the fields the crop sprang from. You had to know the ways and byways of lesser folk.

When Coelfrith bowed and left, Hild followed him. He was only a dozen years Hild’s senior but lately his face was settling into worry lines like those of his father before he’d been named ealdorman of Lindsey.

“You’ll need men for this task who’ll behave,” she said. “I know who’d suit. You’ll need guides; I’ll find them. But I come with you.”

Coelfrith agreed. “Dawn.”

Hild went to find Lweriadd. She found her with a young girl and a stripling with a bruised arm, rolling a chunk of trimmed elm trunk to the foundation ditch of the new hall.

“The king requires a survey of Elmet: its strong places, sound and broken, and its husbandland, farmed and fallow.”

Lweriadd straightened. “Why should I care what he wants?”

The young girl spat. The stripling picked a splinter from the pad of his thumb, but Hild could tell from the cant of his head that he was listening. His chin had a look of Lweriadd and the bruise was very like those made by an ox goad.

“The king is not Osric Whiphand. And we are the king’s. We need folk we may trust to guide us.”

“We?”

“I ask it. Hild, daughter of Hereric, friend to the last king of the Loides. And Cian Boldcloak, who had his first sword from the hand of Ceredig king.” She nodded at the stripling. “And perhaps the guide may find less trouble while guiding than in the rolling of logs.”

*   *   *

They assembled at dawn in the white river mist: Coelfrith, Hild, Cian, Eadric, Grimhun, who had an eye for fortification, if no hand for the lyre, and the brothers Berht, who held torches that stained the mist an eerie red. Gwladus would stay by the river, Hild’s eyes and ears while she was gone.

With a swirl of mist, the stripling appeared, wearing a piece of patched cloak tied to his shoulders by an assortment of yarns and with nothing at his rope belt but a fist-size sack. The bruise on his arm had darkened from red to purple. He stood by Hild’s knee and touched a fist to his chest.

“Morud ap Addoc.”

She said to Coelfrith, “This is Morud son of Addoc, a man of the Loides commended to me.” She arranged her cloak and said to Morud in British, “You know what we want to see?”

That cant of the head. “The hard edges first, no doubt. Berewith and Aberford.”

“Berewith,” she said.

Morud trotted away, leaving them to follow in whatever order they chose.

At Berewith Grimhun shook his head without getting off his horse. “One good rain and water would run gushing through the wall, there, and soon your fort would be knee deep in mud.”

Berhtnoth tucked one foot up on his mount’s withers and scratched his left buttock. “So why did their king come here, then, if it’s so useless?”

Hild was watching Morud. “Tell us the story now, Morud ap Addoc, as we ride to Aberford. Tell us of the last of Ceredig king in Elmet. Was he fleeing?”

“He was not! He marched with his war band, proud and fair…”

Hild smiled to herself. They would all get dreamy-eyed and gesith-like now, for a while, lost in the just-so sparkle of setting sun on gilded armour, the brave snap and ripple of banners, the proud step of the horse. The marching through moonlight. The Anglisc didn’t even understand the words, but they knew the rhythm. And Cian, though he knew the song, would be lost for hours.

Ceredig had never made it to his last stand at Aberford. That was not his wyrd.

*   *   *

Grimhun fell in love with Aberford, the deep and narrow beck, the straight road with its sturdy bridge. “Look at that!” he said. “There’s no crossing it except by the bridge. And those walls! How high is that bank? It must rise eight paces. There’s even … yes.” He pointed at a narrow trench. “Just waiting for a stockade. Though they didn’t have time.” He scrambled down from his horse, which promptly began to crop the grass. “Banks, dikes, beck, a stone road…” He bent and cut the turf, ripped up a clod, crumbled the dirt between his fingers. “I could build with this.” He wiped his seax absently on his tunic, saying to Coelfrith, “With a score of men I could make this place tighter than a Lindsey maid’s—” He turned red and sheathed his seax without looking at Hild. “I could make it tight.”

Coelfrith dismounted, dug up his own clod. Sniffed his fingers. Hild could smell it from her mount: good dirt, rich, well drained. “How long would you need?”

“Good enough to delay an army? A month. Full moon after next, say.”

“And how fast could you make it strong enough to fight off a band of mead-mad farmers?” In case Edwin couldn’t win them with sweet words and strong drink.

“We’d need axes, shovels, rope—”

“I can have them here the day after tomorrow.”

Grimhun turned slowly, squinting. “And men?”

“I’ll bring them with the tools.”

“I’ll need a dozen, well fed.” Coelfrith nodded. “Seven days from today, then.”

They ate sitting on their cloaks on the south slope of Becca Bank.

“I’m happier out of that wood,” Berhtnoth said. “Drip drip drip.”

“It isn’t always like that,” Cian said.

“No,” said Berhtred. “Sometimes it snows.”

Cian threw a clod at his head.

They talked of the unusual weather: the early leaf fall, this unexpected sun.

“The first thing we’ll need is a shelter,” said Grimhun. “It won’t be warm when the sun goes down, and I know you’re all as soft as girls.”

Morud glanced at Hild, but she was used to the gesiths forgetting she was a woman unless it suited her for them to remember.

Later, she and Coelfrith walked east along the north bank of the fast-flowing beck, their shadows falling long before them. The ridge of Becca Bank, half a league long, followed the water. The ditch was rock-cut in places, and the rock had been used to buttress the north slope of the bank. They scrambled to the top of the rise.

He pointed to the south bank and another dike, almost as long, following the water at about fifty paces. “It’s a funnel.”

“Like a fish weir,” she said. Any invading army leaving the road to head west into the heart of the kingdom would be hemmed in, caught between the two lines, and slaughtered.

She squatted and laid her hand on the stone, staring down at the rushing water. An unsuspecting war band would startle when the spears flew. They would try to cross the beck to escape. They would drown. If Ceredig had marched half a day earlier, had had time to get to Aberford, even without the stockade. If Edwin hadn’t stolen the march. If her father hadn’t been poisoned like a dog.

*   *   *

Their fire burnt small and hot. A white, bright moon showed the picket line and the pale gleam of Cygnet’s shoulder as she shifted.

Grimhun was telling the tale of the seafarer from the lost land of the west. He couldn’t play the lyre, but he had a fine voice for the chant: the cry of a lonely gull, the slap of the water against the rudderless boat drifting, drifting in the mist. The brothers Berht took the verses of the seals. Coelfrith stared into the fire, face set in his habitual worried frown. Eadric dozed. Morud listened—Hild was sure he understood Anglisc well—and Cian whittled, pausing every now and again to tilt the wood to the fire or the moon.

Hild watched the delicate flex of his wrist. His rings glittered. The hairs on his fingers glowed like bronze wire one minute, silver the next. This way and that. He seemed to be taking unusual care with his little knife, flick, flick, pare. The wood was dense and twisted, a root of some kind, an old one. The shavings looked black.

*   *   *

The day dawned cool, with mare’s tails glowing pink in the not-yet-risen sun. Coelfrith and Eadric rode back to Caer Loid. Before they were out of sight Hild was calling Morud and Cian to her.

To the north and west, between the heartland of Elmet and the River Wharfe, lay the Whinmoor. Lonely land, said Morud, populated only by hare and partridge and peregrine, and the kind of wild men whom no one took in.

So they rode south and east, along the low-lying limestone escarpment that formed the eastern boundary of the Loid. The soil was well drained and loamy, crisscrossed with springs and becks and streams. Rich land. Everywhere on the gentle green slopes they saw sheep, like drifts of dirty cloud, but every flock was whistled away long before they reached hailing distance: The wink of sun on their rings and bits and hilts was visible for miles.

At the first Anglisc farm they accepted the farmer’s offer of ale and bread. Cian talked to the man and his son—a boy of five or six whose eyes stretched at the sight of Cian’s mail shirt and sword. When the woman of the house and her daughter brought out three leather cups, Hild motioned for a startled Morud to accept. They ate under a huge elm at the south end of a little coppice. Cian thanked their hosts—Ceadwulf and his wife, Saxfryth—and told them that Edwin king was by the Aire, rebuilding Ceredig’s hall, and would welcome them there on the night of the full moon.

“A feast!” the boy said.

“A feast,” Cian said. “With meat and mead and scop’s song.”

“Though I doubt the king’s ale can match this brew,” said Hild with a smile for the wife. In truth it was thin stuff, but the wife blushed prettily at praise from a woman wearing royal blue and more gold than she’d dreamt of in all the world. “And that’s a fine twill, beautifully dyed.”

Saxfryth smoothed her overdress proudly. “Nothing like yours, lady.”

Indeed, Hild’s dress was the rich, summer-afternoon-sky blue of royalty, a spin-patterned diamond twill, with neck and hems worked in scarlet and gold. She watched Saxfryth glance from the clothes to the glitter of their tethered horses’ headstalls, to their finger rings and the tiny agates sewn onto her veil band, and slowly understand the depth of the wealth before her. She grew rigid on her three-legged stool.

“Saxfryth. Look at me.” The woman lifted her head slowly. “I am Hild, daughter of Hereric.” Hild slid the yellow-stone ring from her little finger and held it out.

“Lady!”

“Take it.” The woman did. “Try it.” It fit the ring finger of her right hand. She moved it slightly, to catch the sun, then folded the hand in her lap, with the other curled around it protectively.

“Your men will come to Caer Loid Coit. Every man with a spear will come before the full moon. You will show that token and I will see that Edwin king knows of the hospitality offered today to his niece and seer.”

*   *   *

They rode, through a light shirr of rain, over five or six hides of cleared land surrounded by oak and elm. Two milch goats and a kid, stripping the weeds by the track, lifted their heads but did not pause in their endless side-slide chew. A bull—full-muscled, dark brown, sleek as a seal in the rain—glared from his own stone-walled pasture, beyond which stood a large sty with a half-filled water trough cut from elm. The pigs would be grubbing in the wood for early mast.

They began to see people: the men tall, the women rounded, and everywhere wealh and Anglisc working side by side, wearing the same competent tabby weave with good strong leather belts and sturdy shoes. The rain was so light most hadn’t bothered with their hoods. The place reeked of peace and prosperity.

Morud led the way across a little stone bridge of finely cut limestone, Roman work. They passed a deep track leading into the wood—clearly more than a woodcutter’s path—and after a moment’s thought Hild called Morud to her. “Run up that track. Find the priest or his wife. Tell them to fade into the wood for a fortnight or two, never mind the rain, and to take anything they value with them. They should bury the altar stone if they hope to come back.”

Not even the Crow would break his Christ’s holy stone, but he would drag it away and then the Loid priest would have nothing to come back to and no livelihood.

*   *   *

At Aberford two days later, the rain was coming down like rods of glass from an iron lid of a sky, and it was Cian and Hild who were gathering their reins to ride back to the king, and Coelfrith, drenched, standing by her knee. This time there was more than a score of men clearing the ditches and refacing the banks—even some boys carrying water and a handful of women relighting cooking fires under rough shelters.

“I’ll tell the king you’ll be back by the full moon,” she said.

“Before.” He pulled his cloak tight and peered east through the rain.

“Coelfrith.”

“Um?”

“Leave the locals to their work. They have my token. They have wool to card and grain to thresh, pigs to feed and wood to gather.”

“The king needs Aberford to—”

“The king wants the Elmetsætne to come gently, horses to the outstretched hand. Leave them to their work.”

She nodded to Morud, crouched under one of the shelters out of the worst of the rain. He flipped up his hood—she wasn’t sure when he’d acquired it—and stepped into the downpour. Cygnet snorted. Hild patted her neck. She said to Coelfrith, “Don’t worry so much. Grimhun can do as he promised. I’ll tell the king you have Aberford well in hand.”

As they rode west the rain eased. By the time they crossed Brid’s Dike the sky was torn into rags of blue and grey and darker grey, light grey tatters flying one way, dark another, and the sun bursting out like a child jumping from behind a tree and running away again. Hild threw her heavy cloak back from her shoulders. The world smelt like a just-ploughed field: rich, mysterious, waiting. She wanted to shout, or gallop, or set Cygnet at a wall.