Hild: A Novel (46 page)

“Look at the others.”

She slid them free again. On the smaller one, the hedgepig’s prickles were drawn in; on the smallest one, the hedgepig lay curled in sleep.

“One for you, one for me, one for Begu,” he said. “So we may drink to home wherever we are.”

*   *   *

Edwin sat on his chair under the oak, warming his hands over a brazier while Coelfrith stood patiently nearby. He seemed in high good humour.

“Clotrude is with child. My son is having a son!”

“May he be strong and lucky.”

“Of course he’ll be lucky.”

Hild bowed her head. An ætheling was always lucky. At first. “My lord…” She wasn’t sure how to say it. “My lord, there will be extra people returning with us to York.”

His hands slowed. “Extra? How many?”

“Fewer than a dozen.” So far.

Edwin turned to Coelfrith, who said, “Lord King, if we’re to make the journey tomorrow as you wish, with a dozen extra mouths the food might not stretch. As it is, by the time we reach York the horses will be skin and bone and our porridge gritty with the end of the sack.”

“We can feed ourselves,” Hild said.

“You can?” Edwin leaned back, hands on the arms of his chair, his eyes on Hild. “Hear that, Coelfrith? Perhaps I should put our seer in charge of provisioning. No doubt her seer sight would show the deer in the wood and the fish under the bank.”

“Or you could send Osric and his men directly back to Tinamutha instead of him going back through York.” It would keep him away from her mother.

The king waved away her suggestion. He looked her up and down, then smiled. “You may bring your people. But not a mouthful of our supplies, not a sip, not a bite, not for you nor any of your people. Still want them?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“It’s uncle now, is it? Ha!” He pounded the arm of his chair and laughed. “Coelfrith, bring my niece a stool, bring us a jar of mead, and either sit yourself or go pack something. And when you’re fetching the mead, get the Crow in here.” He stretched his boots to the brazier. “I’ll be glad to get back to four walls and a roof. So tell me, Niece, before that black-skirted crow gets here, how do you see Elmet?”

“Uncle?”

“The saddle’s barely off my horse and you appear to be acquiring a household. Why? What have you seen?”

“I have seen, as you have, Uncle, enough to gladden any heart. Take Aberford.”

“I believe I have. Twice.”

“Yes, Uncle. But it’s more than a fort. It’s surrounded by good sheep land. There’s water, a road—a path right to the Humber. Remember Eorpwald’s gold workshops? An overking could build folds and weaving huts by the score there, make cloaks for trade. Ship them to Coelgar at Lindsey. It would be the biggest exchange for wool in the land. The Frisians would come, and the Franks.”

He leaned down and pulled off one boot, scratched at his ankle. “Why Lindsey? Why let Coelgar’s people have a piece of it? If Eorpwald can build a w
ī
c for trade, so can I.”

“Where?”

“York. That was your mother’s idea.” He put his boot back on, wriggled his feet, stretched again. “What else should I know?”

Her mother’s idea. “There are bandits on the Whinmoor, trees for any purpose you could name south of the river, and good cattle country beyond that.” A w
ī
c. At York. Another weft in the great weave. “But the land’s half empty. The people … They hide. They don’t trust each other. They’d work if they felt safe. If they knew they had the king’s goodwill.”

“That’s why I brought them here.”

“That’s why you brought the Anglisc.”

The weir sounded suddenly loud.

She was in it now. “Elmet is … underused. It could grow rich.” Which means the king would grow rich. “But only if people work. Only if they know that the land they clear, the hall they build, and the corn they sow will be safe. That no one will be fighting. That they aren’t Anglisc taking from Loid or Loid taking back from Anglisc.”

“It seems you’ve already spoken for me on that, or so Coelfrith hears from Pyr: no more Anglisc, no more Loid, only Elmetsætne.”

He sounded more curious than angry. But you could never tell with a king.

“Uncle, lord King, they need to know they can’t take from each other, and that whoever the king names as their lord won’t take from them, either.” Osric and his whips. “The first two years are all work, and the winters will be hard. Why risk that, if someone will just come along and take it once the land is giving crops?” She paused. “But if you tell them protection with no tithe for three years, they’ll do it. In five years, your tithes will double.” A longer pause. He was still listening. “Tell them the king’s niece will do it, too.”

“She will?”

“Uncle, I’ve seen a place. Such a place! Two leagues north and west. A great ridge, overlooking a wooded mene. A valley with bog and beck and bramble. Somewhat wet, yes. But, oh, what it could be. What it once was. Fish and krebs, herbs and honey, a millstream, corn growing round about … It will be a land of lard and cream, of beef and strayberries and songbird pie!”

“You will show me this place.”

“I will, my king. Though it’s not on the way to York. And it’s … wet, just now.”

“People?”

“None that I saw. One of the Elmetsætne told me they all left in the long ago, when it grew wet.”

“Wet, you keep saying. It sounds like a bog. You’re daughter of an ætheling of Deira and a princess of Kent. Niece and seer to the overking. It wouldn’t be seemly for you to live in a bog.”

“I wouldn’t live there.”

“No, because you’re my seer. But you want it. Tithe free. With my sworn men here and at Aberford ready to protect it. For nothing. Because it will be an example to my would-be thegns.”

“I … Yes.”

“A birth day gift worth a bit more than that cup I gave you last year.”

“Then…”

“Then the mene wood is yours. But in exchange it’ll be your task, along with Coelfrith, to apportion Elmet to would-be thegns. Make sure they all understand this Elmetsætne notion of yours.”

She bowed. A king’s bargain. He gave her something worthless to him in return for something from her he wanted very much. But, there again, so did she.

“And tell Stephanus. He has some notion of writing it all down, scratch scratch scratch. Strange men, these Christlings. Ah, Paulinus. Come sit. We were just talking about bogs.”

“Bogs, my lord?”

“Bogs.” He turned back to Hild. “Describe it to Stephanus. To a limit of thirty hides. With no tithe for … five years.”

“Thank you, Uncle.” The whole valley!

“Only yours, mind. Everyone else gets three years. You have someone to run it?”

“I … Yes, Uncle.”

“Good. I need you by my side. And now you should go pack your things.”

When her people gathered at the board for their last meal in Elmet, Hild drew aside the man with the hood.

“Rhin. Tell me, yes or no. Are you the priest I sent Morud to warn, near Aberford?”

He met her gaze steadily—his eyes were big and red-brown, surrounded by fatigue-stained pits like those of a goshawk—but said nothing.

“That was a fine steading, a rich, strong holding where men of all kinds got along. If I said I need a man to help me make that happen in another place, a man who can read, what would you say?”

After a long pause, he nodded once, slowly.

“Let me tell you of the place, particularly of the pollarded oak at the head of the valley. Hollow, and dry…”

15

I
N YORK
, the first day of Blodmonath dawned unseasonably mild. High, bright clouds coated the sky as evenly as egg foam. Larks and starlings gathered in flocks on the stubbled fields on either side of the Fosse and every now and again lifted in rushes for the south. To the north, just beyond the louring yew woods, darker rain clouds drifted towards the walls of the inner fort, threatening the rebuilding.

The w
ī
c would grow in the fork of the Ouse and Fosse between the fort and the outer wall. The span of outer wall between Dere Street and the Ouse had long ago fallen into ruin. Edwin had cleared the rubble, redug the ditches, and drained the land. His two new Frankish stonemasons, rebuilding the walls of the inner fort, were notoriously finicky about the damp and the temperature of the strange sandy mud they mixed to stick the stone together. They worked slowly. Edwin fretted. To defend a w
ī
c a fort must be strong. They’d have to make do with a hedge to protect the northeast end of the w
ī
c field.

Hild rose without waking Begu or Gwladus. She wanted to see the laying of the great hedge.

What seemed to Hild to be half the women and men of the vale of York worked in the field that would be the w
ī
c. Children ran about with jars. No one seemed to care about the possibility of rain. They were happy to carry their billhooks and hand axes and knives to the scrubby flatland and work for good portions of food and beer while their children herded their pigs in the wood south of the river to fatten on the early mast fall. This year there would be enough for every pig. There would be bacon and ham and sausage to feed every family all winter. There would be plenty of pork fat to soothe chilblains and fry the mushrooms soon to sprout in the east pasture and along the ditches of the west fields. One or two old women muttered now and again, and shook their heads—such mildness was uncanny, and trouble would come of it—but old women always said such things.

Coelfrith’s woodsmen had already laid out the hedge lines, driving in elm stakes every two feet and marking scrubby trees for saving with splashes of ochre. The strong young men and strapping women grubbed up all the other bushes and saplings. Old men chopped the torn brush into manageable pieces for later. Younger women and unmarried girls cut wands of hazel, and nursing mothers and old women plaited the hazel into great open weaves.

The woodsmen set to work on plashing the marked trees. They lopped a branch here, a branch there—Hild tried to spot the pattern for their choice, but they worked too fast—and with a casual flick of the axe cut the tree almost through at the base and bent it over to weave between the stakes.

The dark, shaped saplings lay all one way like a cat’s just-licked fur. “They point away from the river,” she said to Detlin, the chief of the leathery little men with the hand axes.

He spoke without pausing. “Sap only flows uphill. Point ’em downhill and they’ll die. Just as they will if these splits don’t have time to close up before the frost shoves its fingers into the wood. So I’ll thank you to step aside, lady.”

Hild stepped to one side but didn’t stop watching as he cut and bent hawthorn, sloe, hazel, blackthorn, ash, and the occasional rowan.

“It’ll be pretty in spring,” she said. The thorn blossom would look like snow. In summer there would be sloes for the birds. Bright red rowan berries in autumn and winter.

“Rowan’s for luck,” he said unexpectedly.

Hild nodded. The uneasy weather had them all thinking of luck.

Detlin moved up the marked line. Hild stayed where she was, enjoying the scent of cut wood and torn earth. The combination was as rich and tangy as brine. Another rush of birds poured overhead, flying before the clouds, moving south. Perhaps they’d fly over the East Anglian fens. Perhaps Hereswith would see them. And Fursey. Perhaps it would remind her sister of the need to build a nesting place overseas.

By the time the rain reached them, the hedge was laid in an elegant line, the woven hazel binders laid over the pleachers, and Detlin sawing the stakes off neatly just above the binders.

It was beautiful: The bare hedge glistened thick and sinewy as a dark snake with the white-sliced stake tops like a dotted pattern along its back.

Hild joined the rest of the women, who, along with the old men, were tidying away the loppings, chopping them and bundling them with the grubbed up brush.

The drizzle came and went, a pulsing rhythm of damp that no one much minded, but they wanted to be done before the heavier clouds to the north and east arrived. They began to hurry. Hild helped an old woman and her broad-shouldered daughter tie a bundle of brush. One whippy thorn branch ran over her forearm.

“Gast!” Right over the still-pink scar left by Cian’s sword.

The old woman grinned toothily. “Watch the thorns, missy.”

Hild pressed the arm against her hip, to stop it stinging.

“Your fine dress, too,” said the daughter. Her mother cackled.

Hild wore her oldest overdress, too short by a hand’s width, but still no doubt finer than anything the old woman had ever seen. Gwladus wouldn’t be happy with the new stain. She thought Hild should look like a queen even when shearing sheep.
Why try to look like a farmwife? You’re taller than any two of them end to end. They all know who you are.

The old woman, looking behind Hild, stopped cackling. “Eorðe’s tits. Just what we need.” Hild turned: Coifi and two of his priests, wearing their white and green, walking towards the new hedge with great ceremony and deliberation.

They all looked at Coelfrith, who looked at the brush, at the approaching storm cloud, at the priests, and sighed. He motioned everyone to stop and step back to let the priests pass.

The daughter wiped the rain off her face with a meaty forearm and grabbed a jar from one of the runners.

By the westmost root of the hedge, near the road, Coifi used an ox’s shoulder bone to dig a hole, in which he put a rowan branch and a bird—a wren, Hild thought, but couldn’t tell from where she stood—and then the bone. His priests pushed dirt over bone, bird, and branch, and Coifi poured mead on the mound. Then he raised his arms and began to sing a prayer to Woden, for luck and blessing.

“Wish they’d put aside those fancy cloaks and do more than sing,” the daughter said.

Her mother huffed. “Have you ever seen a priest work?”

“The Crow’s priests are just the same,” Hild said, and the daughter passed her the jar. Ale, old and sour, but Hild was thirsty.

The rain picked up. Coifi sang faster.

As soon as the priests were mincing back to the road and thence to the safety of the walls, the women got back to work. The dirt was turning to mud, and the wood was slippery and cold; there was a lot to be done before dark.