Hild: A Novel (47 page)

Men threw the brush into carts. One was heading for the byres, tree hay for the cattle, the other for half a mile beyond the little river, the east fields and newly coppiced ash grove, to make thorny barriers against browsing deer and strayed goats. Hild and the women followed the field cart.

The daughter spat when they reached the outer field: The old brush barrier, settled and dense, still needed tearing out. A long, hard job, and dark was coming.

They sat on the edge of the ditch to gather their strength. A flock of blackbirds fell out of the sky from the east. One landed heavily, just one hop from half an ear of fallen barley, but it seemed stunned, too tired to move. More birds struggled in: redwings and fieldfares, all young or female, all exhausted. Fleeing weather, Hild thought, or even battling it over the North Sea. So that’s what the larks and starlings had been trying to get ahead of: a big storm or a sudden plummet in temperature. Either promised trouble for the new hedge and half-built tower. She stood.

“Leaving the rest to us, then?” the old woman said. “Creeping off to a hot bath and a warm fire?”

Hild grinned. “And don’t forget the bread dripping with grease, a sizzling slice of beef off the spit, and dried fruit with honey.” No one liked to be lied to. “I’ll send you something.”

“I’d love a bit of roast,” the woman said, and looked old and tired and used. “Never had that.”

“Tell them it’s for Linnet and her mother,” Linnet said.

“I’ll tell them it’s for everyone,” Hild said. “But I’ll tell my woman you’re to get the hero’s portion. A gift of the king himself.” They looked sceptical, but she knew once they saw it, they’d sing the praises of the king and his seer for a year. “But it might be some little while.”

“I don’t doubt we’ll still be here. Better send torches, too.”

“I will. First though, I’ve to tell the king weather is coming.”

“Weather’s here,” Linnet said, pretending to wring out her dress.

“Something more. Worse.”

“When?”

“Not tomorrow. But soon. Maybe tomorrow night, or noon the next day.”

“Bad?”

“Stay indoors if you can.”

“And the pigs?”

“Keep them close until you know the shape of it.”

*   *   *

There were plenty of torches fluttering and roaring under the leather awning the king had put up over his half-built tower—but the only men visible were gesiths bundled in cloaks against the wet. The Frankish masons had downed tools again. Hild decided to find Gwladus first. Her uncle would be irritable, not in a mood to listen to a dirty ragamuffin trying to tell him something he didn’t want to hear. She would have to look every inch the seer.

*   *   *

Hild stood to one side of the king’s hearth, glad of the heat on her tired legs.

“So,” said the king, “you’ve come. I’ve sent messages all day.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Where were you?”

“Watching the hedge-laying.” She accepted a cup of wine from Wilnoð, and smiled her thanks at the queen.

“At least that’s up,” Edwin said. “Or so Coelfrith tells me.”

She sipped, and nodded. “It’s beautiful.”

“Beautiful, ugly, who cares. It’s done. It’s the wall I care about now.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Good. Do something about those masons. If they’re not moaning about the sand, they’re complaining about the damp or fussing about the mallets. The wrong size, they say, the wrong weight, the wrong balance. Mallets!”

“They’ll work tomorrow because there’ll be no working for anyone soon. Bad weather is coming.”

Pine resin spat in the hearth.

“You’ve seen this?”

“The birds told me. Bitter cold, or fierce wind, or a hurtle of hail, I couldn’t say. But it’s bad, and it’s coming.”

Edwin swore and kicked his chair. “I want that tower up by Yule!”

*   *   *

Hild reached past her mother and Begu for the breast of mutton cooling in its own fat. She tore the top layer of skin away with her teeth and juice dripped on her overdress. Gwladus sighed—but quietly, Breguswith had a heavy hand—and passed Hild a torn loaf to soak up the worst of it.

Oeric stood by the door, relaxed enough to have set aside his sword, but not willing to sit with Hild with others present. Hild wondered what was wrong with his face, then realised he was trying to grow a beard.

Breguswith was talking. “… just hen birds, you say?”

Hild nodded.

“And tired? What about the chaffinches? No matter, we’ll have one of your people set a watch for the cock birds on higher ground tomorrow. Do any of them know enough to tell the difference? You need to train one of your swelling household in birds.”

“I can go myself if it comes to it,” Hild said. She would take Cian and Oeric. They could get in some practice away from prying eyes.

They discussed birds and clouds and other weather portents. Begu chipped in with a story about a magpie attacking a hen, or so she’d heard, she’d been very little, but she remembered her mother’s woman, Guenmon, saying—Guenmon, Hild remembered Guenmon, didn’t she?—saying it was because the magpie knew there’d be nothing left with the cold snap coming …

When Breguswith left—no doubt to find Osric—Hild held out her wrist for Gwladus to unfasten the carnelians. “Did you and Morud take that food to the east field?”

She nodded. “Though I could have done with Oeric’s manly strong arm to help.”

Oeric, staring stolidly ahead, blushed the colour of the coals. Hild reminded herself to have a word with him about not stooping to Gwladus’s lure. Lintlaf could kill him without breaking stride.

*   *   *

The sky was again high and white and the afternoon even warmer than the day before. At the east field, there was no sign of the flocks of exhausted redwings and fieldfares. She wondered if she had imagined the whole thing. Even Linnet and her mother, standing stiffly by the old grey matting of brush they’d piled to one side to be dragged to the walls and chopped into kindling chunks for the bread ovens, were calling her lady and giving her yes and no answers. Perhaps it was her gold, perhaps it was the presence of Cian and Oeric, though they were behaving like boys, throwing stones at a bare white branch poking from the brush.

She shaded her eyes against the high white brightness and studied the fields. Nothing but the tidy stubble, looking picked cleaner than the day before.

But as she turned to go she heard the rippling whistle,
Per-r-r-r-rit
, of a snow bunting—a month early—and hoped Detlin had driven the fence stakes extra deep.

*   *   *

The moon rose, a thin sliver. The torches by the wall roared. The Frankish masons shouted at their men to hurry. Another layer of carefully shaped stone rose above the foundation. It didn’t match the Roman work: different stone, different style.

Hild gestured to the chief mason, a burly, big-bellied man with no moustaches, his hair white with stone dust, who trotted over, a Christ amulet bouncing on his chest.

“Will it be wet or cold we should worry over?” he said.

“Both.”

“Both! Christ protect us! The king will be unhappy. The mortar is very difficult. If it’s to be wet, it’s one mixture, for cold, another.”

“Both,” she said. “Cold. Then wind. Then bitter cold. Cold enough to break iron. The first cold will come tonight. Tie everything down, and get the Crow to pray.”

“How long will it blow? Will it be wet?”

She stared at him. “Why don’t you ask your Crow to ask your Christ?”

He went back to his men. In the odd flare and pool of torchlight she watched him wave his arms, exhorting them to greater effort, pointing to her, telling them she could visit terrible consequences upon them if they didn’t give their best. Then they all crossed themselves.

Two chaffinches huddled together on top of a heap of stone. Young birds by their colour. Their first winter.

The wind died. The pour of the rivers in the distance seemed muffled. Something ghosted by her, flickering palely through the torchlight, then there was just one finch on the wall.

An owl, noiseless as a feathered cloud, glided away in the moonlight, a songbird in its left foot.
Fate goes ever as it must.

*   *   *

The rain puddles of the day before turned hard and milky white. Frost loosened the last leaves clinging to the oak and elm in the west forest. They dropped silently, startling the pigs rooting through the leaf mould for nuts. The masons, bundled in hoods and wraps, directed men to pack the walls in straw and tie everything down twice.

The king sent word for people to gather in hall. The queen opened her bower to her women and Hild. The king, trusted gesiths, and queen’s men, including Cian and Bassus and Lintlaf, disposed themselves about the bench in front of the hall side of the bower curtain. Helping Begu settle their bedding next to her mother’s reminded Hild of the early days, when Edwin’s household had been small enough to sleep together in one hall.

After noon, the wind began to pick up, sliding like a filleting knife between wool and skin. Black-bellied clouds sailed over the horizon from the north and east.

The gale ripped the last acorns from the branches, wrenched the branches from the trees, and tore the trees out at the root. Pigs, and a woodcutter and his family, died, crushed.

Then came the hail, angling over the fields, beating birds and foxes to death, thrashing the river to froth. Women and men who had to walk from the hall to the kitchens, or who emptied night soil on middens, came back battered and bloodied. After that, no one left. The hail turned to rain, then snow. The wind died then picked up. Two thrushes flew into the great hall and fluttered around under the rafters until they found a place to hide from sight. The next morning they woke half the hall with cheerful—but loud, so very loud—song. A gesith threw a beer mug at the great crossbeams, but it was still half full and splashed another, who rose with a roar, eating knife in hand, and stabbed the man next to him before he was fully awake.

Breguswith and Hild, wrapped in otherworldliness, left the queen’s bower to stride through the midden that the hall had already become and tend the man’s wound. Hild held his skin together while her mother sewed as impersonally as she would a torn shift.

It lasted three days. In hall, men drank, women whispered, and the scop sang himself hoarse.

The hall stank: No one wanted the door open. Drunk men wouldn’t go outside to expose their most tender parts to the weather. They pissed in corners. Many vomited and came back for more mead. Mead and song drove away the fear of famine, fear of homelessness, fear of the dark. The pain in their throats from shouting their own names, boasting of battles, affirming their ancestors—who had lived in the dim distant past and got through this, aye worse than this, who laughed in the teeth of a gale—made them feel human, alive. The sting of mead on raw throat made them feel brave. The stink of the piss and the gnawed bones and their unwashed muscle made them know their animal strength. Piss on the weather! Fuck the winter!

They rutted behind benches, arm-wrestled between torches, and laughed at their burns, lost themselves in the sight and sound and smell of people like them, their people. Them. They were all one.

By the third day they were maudlin. By the third night, resigned to their wyrd. What would be, was. This was the way it was because this was how it would be. They were threads in fate’s great weave, snowflakes in the gale of the world.

*   *   *

Hild, wrapped in two cloaks, stood by the crushed byre and sipped the cold, brilliant air carefully, afraid it might give her lung crackle. Men were hauling away timbers. The butcher was directing his man to bring an axe; nothing else would cut through the frozen carcass of the milch cow—and then they’d have to get moving on the pigs in their pen. But he spoke quietly, and the men stepped softly, afraid of the eerie quiet: The rivers had frozen.

Then Oeric was by her elbow to tell her some woman by the name of Linnet would like a word, and Linnet herself was bowing and bobbing and promising her anything the lady would name, anything, for, thanks to her warning, her boy was still alive—still cheeking her, Eorðe bless him. Her boy and their pigs, while their neighbour’s girl was dead, stiff as a smoked fish, and the man of the house weeping and silent and both pigs missing. But she was all right, her mother, too. Her mother sent all thanks, though she did want to know how in Eorðe’s name they would feed their pigs, with the whole forest floor littered with fallen tree stuff, the acorns buried knee-deep …

Then the Frankish mason was asking if the lady had a moment to be so kind as to tell him when it might be warm enough to get back to work on the wall …

“Oeric,” she said. “Find Coelfrith’s man. Tell him the rivers will flow again by moonrise. Tell him that unless the king wants his fine wall standing around a city of the dead he must send men to help clear the forest for the pigs. Besides, the remaining cows will need the fodder—half the hay was lost with the byre. Tell him today, understand? Not tomorrow. Then bring Cian to me. Tell him to bring any who’ll listen. And bring Begu, and Gwladus and my bundle.”

She turned to Linnet.

“I’m glad you and yours are well. The king’s men will set to work on the forest. I’ll come to your neighbour. We’ll walk by the hedge and see how it does.”

*   *   *

Within days, the byre was mostly rebuilt, a new milch cow installed—Hild wondered what farmer now wore a silver ring while he suffered the scolding of his wife—and the scop had a new song. The gesiths went back to drinking—the mead was unspoilt—and wrestling, heedless of Coelfrith’s men who rode out, grim-faced, to the steadings round about and of the constant refusal of beggared farmers at the king’s kitchens.

The hedge had survived. Hild suggested to Coelfrith that Detlin be sent a present—a sturdy knife, say, with a copper inlay, something he could boast about—so word of the king’s generosity to good craftsmen would spread. It was one way to counter the rumours of disaster spread by starving men turned away by their lord.

Edwin didn’t care about his reputation among the lowly, and Paulinus encouraged him.