Hild: A Novel (49 page)

She didn’t remember the first time she had spent Solmonath in the burg, though it had been a time when Edwin was newly king, his household much smaller. But the rhythms were the same: The king paced his small hall like a trapped wildcat, demanding information his counsellors did not have. His counsellors vowed to send out another messenger—to York, to the north, to Lindsey, to Rheged, to Elmet—and to post another lookout on the stockade’s western tower with his eyes fixed on the overland path. They even watched from the seaward tower, though only a fool or a god would attempt a voyage at this time of year.

Osric had returned to Arbeia after Yule, dissatisfied but mollified by Edwin’s declaration that his dear cousin didn’t need to come with the other thegns in spring—he, Edwin, would come to Osric. Breguswith stayed, but Hild had no idea what her mother thought of all this. Though she seemed pensive. Hild watched anxiously for what herbs she might call for, but it was just the usual remedies for this time of year, for pink eye and lung crackle. They were well stocked, and the Crow was always at the king’s side—priests in black robes seemed to skulk everywhere in the thronging shadows of the short days—and Hild had little to do.

The household stewed in its own juice and kegs of mead and winter ale, and gossip and rumour flowed into the gap: The Idings were marching with the Dál Riata—no, the Picts. Cadwallon had allied with Rheged, and the men of the north would stream down the beach in the dead of night. Penda had already taken Lindsey and was even now burning Elmet.

Quarrels, love, hate, alliances, and whispers flared and died and flared again, and every night men fell asleep longing for colewort or nettle leaves or even a pint of cow’s milk—and a time when blue sky promised warm air and not killing frost. Teeth loosened, belts tightened, tempers frayed.

Slate sea on one side, white field on the other, beach scattered with rock to the north and south. At night, Hild listened to the seals moan.

One evening she stood with Cian on the wooden walkway at the highest corner of the stockade and watched the sun setting over the white fields like a winter apple, small and shrunken, staining the snow with its tired juice. The air smelt of iron and brine.

“The weather’s changing,” she said.

“It will never change. It will be like this forever. We will grow old and die and be forgotten, and the foxes will gnaw at our bones.”

He always got like that after spending too much time indoors. “Come with me tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“There’s a farm two leagues west.”

“Two leagues over the snow and two leagues back? With Hel and the frost giants ready to take us if we turn an ankle in a badger hole?”

“The weather will change.”

“It hasn’t changed yet.”

But the next day, just after noon, Hild pointed out puffy little clouds sailing in from the south and west, very white, followed by larger ones, greyer. “The snow is melting inland.”

“But not here,” Cian said.

“Not yet.”

*   *   *

The field, ringed by bare trees, was silent but for the crackle of their breath—no robins, no wrens, no sparrows—and beneath that the faint whisper and rustle of snow melting. The crest of the field showed patches of brown ridge but the low point where they stood was unbroken snow. At their feet lay a dead wood pigeon. What was left of it looked thin.

Hild pointed to the odd, knobby prints on either side. “Peregrine kill. That’s where its talons dug in the snow. There’s where its wings touched when it mantled.”

“A hawk made this mess?”

“Then a fox, then a crow,” she said, pointing. “They’re all hungry.”

Cian pulled his bold cloak more tightly about him, and they walked on. Not far from the farm Hild thought she saw a stoat—blotched, like the field, with brown—but didn’t bother to point it out. She wondered what it could be eating with most of the birds gone, the hedgepigs and squirrels asleep, and peregrines and owls, foxes and crows fighting over the rest.

Their shadows were slanting by the time they reached the farm.

“Look,” he said. Mixed with the brown melt ridges she saw a very faint hint of green: the tips of winter colewort. Hild swallowed and wiped her mouth. Soon. Two weeks or three.

Hild came to the farm most years but this year she was greeted not by the old man but a child, sitting on a greasy fur in the sun by the hut’s low door, half naked, hair matted, jamming a pebble in its tiny-toothed mouth.

“Aurgh!” it said.

A man burst through the door brandishing a hatchet.

“Peace,” Hild said, empty hands out. “Ulf, he’s fine.”

“I’m not Ulf,” said the man, lowering the axe. Indeed, he wasn’t. He was too young. “I’m Rath. Rathlaf. My father has gone on.”

“I’ll miss him,” she said. “And my friend, Cian Boldcloak, will miss him, too. He has heard how strong and clever he was, how canny a husbandman. We’ll drink to his memory.”

Cian—who had never heard of Ulf or his son, Rath—nodded agreement and swept back his cloak to show the two bottles hanging by straps from his shoulder.

*   *   *

The hut stank of people and goat and leaf litter crushed and soiled all winter, and something else, something rank that Hild couldn’t place. Rath’s wife, Cille, produced a round of stale gritty bread, a pinch of precious salt, and two elm bowls.

Hild shook her head and took the beautifully carved travel cups from her belt. She unstoppered the white mead, filled the smallest cup for Cille, the medium cup for Rath, and the largest for her to share with Cian. Cille looked terrified of such beauty.

“To Ulf, the finest farmer on the coast, father of Rath, who lives on in…” She looked at the child.

“Hathlaf. Hath.”

“Hath, a fine and sturdy farmer-to-be.”

They drank.

“Good luck on this house,” Cian said, and they drank again.

“To spring,” said Rath.

The fire burnt high and clean. They ate the bread with salt, and drank, and studied one another.

Rath was about Cian’s age but already with an eyetooth missing and the knuckles of his right hand beginning to thicken. In eight years he would be stooped, in twelve bent, and in fifteen dead—and Hath’s knuckles beginning to swell and his back to bend.

When the bread was gone they talked: of the lung crackle that had taken Ulf, the hornbeam crop and how it made their pork taste like earth, of the colewort poking up on the ridge of the field. Hild and Rath agreed that they would have to trust to luck that no new frost killed its tender leaves. Cille—her voice was reedy as a pipe—said they might swap some colewort for a milch cow next month. “The lordling looks surprised,” she said, “and I would be, too, but it’s not just for colewort. Though people are famished for greens before the hedgerows sprout, I can tell you. Famished. No, they owe us for the seal meat, and the doctoring.”

So then there was nothing for it but to hear about the terrible winter storm that had brought the seals out of their way when Rath was gathering wood from the beach, and how he’d killed a bull seal, killed it dead, if you please, with his knife, and then dragged it up onto the dune grass out of the reach of the tide and walked all the way down to Heah and Din’s croft—did they know Din and his wife? No? Well they had a lovely daughter, Gode, just lovely, she was surprised the tale of her beauty hadn’t spread far and wide, yes, even as far as Din Guaïroï itself, even to the king! What did young men think about these days …

At which point Rath took over and talked in his slow—and ever slower—voice: of the king, and the harvest, and the milch cow, and his son, and the weather. Hild saw it slowly dawn on Cian that they would be spending the night in this seal-stinking hut, and she was amused. But she wanted to hear everything they had to say. This was why she’d told Cian to bring two bottles of mead.

The boy fell asleep in a heap and Cille tucked him in a wrap in a nest by the fire where she could see him. The fire burnt down and Rath added wood—driftwood: the flames spat blue and green—and the fire burnt down again. High then low, high then low.

Soon they were telling stories. A selkie tale first, from Cille, one they’d all heard before, but told as though true, as though it had happened to her and just yesterday. Then Cian told the story he’d told to Loid and Angle. “… keep the fucking egg!” And they all laughed until they wept. And in the moment of silence when they were done they heard, from far away, in the cold dark hills, an unearthly caterwauling.

Rath put more wood on the fire and told the tale of Cait Sith, the uncanny black wildcat killed, so they say, in times past in the byre of this very farm but still walking the night—aye, and the day, too, when ill luck was abroad—for the cat had been no cat but a hægtes trying her luck with stealing a milch cow for her very own. As she lay gushing out her blood on the straw, she had turned back and sworn with her dying breath that she would return, one bright noon when the tragedy was to befall the farm, and she would have her revenge. And sometimes you could hear her in the night, yowling for the blood of the farmers who had taken her land, yowling …

*   *   *

The wind turned raw and wet. “Just like it is before spring at Mulstanton,” Begu shouted happily, hair blowing every which way, as they roamed the beach. To the south, past the rocks, in the dunes, stood the carved posts of the graveyard. Bebba lay there, it was said, and other queens, Anglisc and British, including Cwenburh. It was ill luck to linger by the dead, so they walked—they ran, they skipped, they laughed, their dresses kilted up like they were children, bags of bread and beer bouncing, noses streaming—north, to the islands.

In summer it would be a short row from one sandy beach to another, but the water was still too rough. They did, however, find a rocky causeway to scramble over to one of the bigger islands. It was deserted but for a little heap of ruined huts.

On the east beach, they couldn’t hear themselves think: It was seal season, and seals of all colours, white, grey, brindled, black, brown, lay hauled up on the sand barking and moaning. They smelt bigger, like cattle long in the rain.

“They look like shaggy horses,” Begu said. “The same colours, same whorling of hair. Fur. But their eyes are not the same.”

They were not. Hild stared into the eyes of one seal, which stared back: black pools, otherworldly eyes.

Begu sat down on the rough grass of the dune. “Tell me that selkie tale again.”

So Hild did, and then they ate their bread and drank their beer and watched the guillemots and puffins, counted the water rail, dropped their jaws at a sea eagle falling between sky and water like a bolt of lightning.

“Will we have a home one day by the sea?”

Hild took her hand. “Yes.” They would have many homes. But that was for later. For now, her face ached with the cold and the wind and happiness.

*   *   *

The wind died down, and Hild and Cian took to riding out along the beach with the hounds and Oeric. Cian would give Oeric an exercise, and Grimhun—or the brothers Berht, or Gwrast and his cousin Cynan, or Eadric the Brown, or Coelwyn—would hoot and laugh and fall to arguing, with demonstrations, that it wouldn’t work, couldn’t possibly be of any use, but here’s a better way, and Hild and Cian would edge away unobtrusively to find a spot where they could talk and practice alone. The gesiths were used to this. They would nod and wink but say nothing. Hild ignored them and thought Cian didn’t notice. She doubted it would occur to him what the gesiths might be thinking—at least not in terms of her. She’d seen him eyeing the lasses of Bebbanburg, and she knew he slipped away now and again to the crofter to the southwest with large breasts and big feet.

Once they rode out to the cot of Heah and Din and their daughter, Gode—Cian noticed her, Hild saw, and indeed she was supple-handed and fresh as the morning, with a neck pale as milk and a mouth like the promise of summer plums, and young, only a year or two older than Hild, a leaf newly unfurled—and on the way back Hild, unaccountably cross, finally found a way to beat a gesith with a shield.

They had stopped by a stream guarded by a wind-thrawn oak, and Hild attacked Cian furiously, thinking of neck and mouth and supple, supple hands. Cian, with shield and sword, fought back with equal fury, driving her back and back until her back foot was against a root of the tree. No, she thought, this time I will not flinch, I will not lose, and she punched at his face with the end of her staff, threw it up into the tangled branches, and pulled herself up after it. The stream roared, in full spate. The tree creaked a little under her shoes.

Cian shouted, “Come down!”

“Come make me!”

He sheathed his sword, threw his shield aside, and jumped for the branch Hild was standing on. She moved to the other side of the trunk.

He scrambled up, clumsy in his war boots, panting, cursing, then stopped. The heel of Hild’s staff was a foot from his nose. He was defenceless.

“I worked out how to beat you.”

“But I don’t have my shield!”

“That’s right. How to win against a gesith with a shield: Make him drop his shield.”

“No, no, no. What if there isn’t a tree?”

“Let’s see,” she said, and dropped lightly to the ground.

She walked with her staff away from the tree and waited near the stream. Cian dropped more heavily, picked up his shield, and they did it all again: him driving, driving, driving her back to the stream.

She jumped in, half waded, half swam to the other side, climbed out. Cian stayed where he was.

“What if there’s no stream?”

“Come over and we’ll find out.”

“My armour!”

“Yes. A pity. It’ll take a lot of work to polish it.”

“As a favour to me. How can I persuade you?”

Hild wrung out her hair, thinking. “When the harp comes around tonight, sing for me. Sing the song of Branwen.”

“Done.”

She waded back across, shivering, walked past him, then turned, so that he was between her and the stream. “Now come at me fast, for I’m freezing.”

And, again, he drove her back and back and back, and she waited until he smiled in anticipation, and then she turned and ran.