Hild: A Novel (64 page)

“I’ll show you the scar they gave me?”

She nodded, and he thumped his wine cup on the board and his right foot on the bench. He took off his belt, unfastened the tie under his jacket, and peeled down his hose. The scar along his shin was the size of a grass snake, thick and twisting, blueish-white and sunken in the middle, pink at the edges. It hadn’t healed fast, and the infection had taken some of the bone with it.

“Worse than anything I took in a shield wall. Not made with good clean steel. An iron-edged spade,” he said. “Filthy thing. Still aches sometimes, when it rains.”

“I’ll send you something for it.”

“Thank you, lady.” It wouldn’t do to refuse.

He pulled his hose up again, tied them carefully, rearranged his jacket. He picked up his belt. Paused. “They fight with teeth and hands, slings and stones, sickles and spades. They turn on you, even when they’ve a hole torn right through the belly. Like mindless rats, never knowing when they’re beaten. You should hunt them like rats, with nets and clubs, or dogs and a ring of bowmen. Or poison. Kill them all.”

“Not all, surely.”

“All, lady. And their young.” She’d killed at Lindum, so they said. But you didn’t understand bandits until you’d had one turn under your heel like a broken-backed snake. “Some say bandits are good men fallen on hard times. And perhaps some begin that way. But they become savages.”

He ran his belt through his hands, half listening to the clink of gold fastenings won in his time as king’s gesith.

“Lady, it’s not like war. Bandits give no quarter, and you don’t offer it, you can’t, because they’ve no honour. None. I wouldn’t do it again, not for all the wine in Iberia.”

*   *   *

While Gwladus packed, Hild turned her wrist, tilting the ring this way and that. This way, even in the overcast, the carved garnet pulsed like lifeblood. That way turned it dark as a scab. Light, dark. King’s token, king’s fist.

King’s weight.

She checked her packets of healing herbs, tucked them into their pockets next to the bandages and needles, rolled the leather, and tied it.

When Gwladus put her own dress in the small pile by the leather saddlebags, Hild said, “No. You’re not coming.”

Gwladus stopped, looked at her. “Then who’s to attend you?”

“No one. Pack enough for a month.”

“A month? You can’t—”

“You’re not coming.”

“But—”

“Enough. I don’t want you.”

Gwladus flinched.

She wasn’t riding as Lady Hild, king’s niece, king’s seer. She was riding as Hild, king’s fist. She doubted it would be as bad as old Bassus thought, but it was clear bandit-hunting was not a task that required well-dressed hair or clean clothes. She wouldn’t ride with anyone who couldn’t kill, nor anyone who might recall her to herself. She had to be the king’s fist, a killer. She had asked for this task. It must be done.

*   *   *

She rode south into Elmet through the blazing heather, Morud running beside her, and Oeric and six gesiths arrayed in a jingling crescent about her: Gwrast and Cynan, Coelwyn and Eadric, and the brothers Berht.

She rode light, no spare clothes, just two slim saddlebags holding hard bread, mead, and her wound roll. She carried her tokens on her body: her beads, her seax, her cross, the cups Cian had carved, Begu’s snakestone, and Edwin’s ring. When the sun came out the stone on her thumb glowed, her carnelians burnt, and the gold on her belt and Ilfetu’s headstall gleamed.

They camped the first night in the lee of a lichened rock: the moor’s bones, poking from the thin soil. Apart from Oeric and Morud the men were used to the war trail and comfortable enough, though unhappy that she wanted them to take off their rings and wrap their horse gear in cloth.

“Even in the moonlight you’ll glitter like barrow wights. They’ll see you coming from a mile away.”

“Good!” Coelwyn said. “We’ll freeze their marrow.”

“Would you want birds to know the net is there?”

“Birds? We’re gesiths. We hunt fearsome beasts. We don’t bother with small frightened things.”

“You do now.”

She took off her beads, coiled them in her hand, dropped them in the purse on her belt.

“If we let them run, they’ll come back when we’re gone. We’re here to trap them, judge them, then settle or kill them.”

They nodded. They’d all seen her kill, except Oeric.

*   *   *

It was as their lady, dealer of wyrd and woe, that she judged the miserable bandits they chased down, the children, women, and men hauled cowering in groups of six from bramble thickets, hiding by twos in an overstood coppice, or snivelling alone over a half-eaten bird in the lee of a rock.

Children, weak and starveling, who could cry on command and, if you offered comfort, would poke your eye with a filthy finger and rip the pin from your cloak. That’s what had happened to Coelwyn. He would most probably lose that eye, though she’d done what she could.

Women, lush as a water meadow but with no teeth. Women with broken knives hidden in both hands. It served Gwrast right, she told him every night when she changed his bandage. It would be a while before he could carry a shield—but he didn’t need a shield to fight bandits.

Men, with muscles like steel bands and broken minds. Men who’d try to rape a nettle bush if it kept still.

Hild judged them all. She judged them as impersonally as a murrain or a bolt of lightning.

She sent children with milk teeth, even the wicked ones, to her mene wood, with Morud to guide and Coelwyn to guard. Morud brought back news that the beck glistened with eggs and flickered with flies; there would be a fine run of fish, sun or no sun. The mene would survive. Next year it might thrive. There would be plenty of work for healthy children. He also brought back two bow hunters and a netman; Rhin hoped the lady would return them by Blodmonath.

She was glad of the bow hunters: Bassus had been right about some things.

She rode from dawn to dusk, judging, settling, listening to the folk. Every steading had a story of a band of wolf’s-heads, bandit fiends who raped and murdered and slaughtered the kine, burnt the fields, shat in the well from sheer wickedness. But like the Cait Sith these fiends always seemed to visit misery on someone else, someone over the hill or in the next valley.

She smashed the right elbows of two brothers they found stealing cattle from a widow and her sons at Brown Crag. Without use of their arms they would only survive if there were people who loved them well enough to feed them for a few weeks.

She settled one couple and nearly grown son, whom they’d caught holding nothing but a handful of stolen carrots, with a farmer just west of Rhin’s old church. A week later, she led her band back to the farm hoping for an evening sleeping dry under a roof and a hot meal. They found the place smouldering, the farmwife raped and dead, and the husbandman’s guts spilt in the straw of the byre where the bandits had cut off the milch cow’s hind legs and tried to start a fire.

Hild looked at the dead couple, not skipping the gleam of bone and glisten of gut, the carefully mended shift now torn right across the wobbly weave. These people had taken the bandits in because she’d asked. Because she’d had mercy.

“Take what we can use, then finish what they started.” She looked at her men one by one. Her gaze rested on Oeric longest. “Burn it well. May the smoke of the dead follow the wolf’s-heads and carry their doom.”

*   *   *

Oeric shivered, and swallowed, and hoped he wouldn’t be sick. The bandit choked and his heels drummed on the turf; his shoes were more gap than leather, different shapes. Instead of hose he wore filthy wrappings from ankle to knee. The choking was the same sound Morud made when he hawked up phlegm before spitting, only the choking went on and on. Spitting made Gwladus angry. If Gwladus was here maybe then the lady would smile sometimes. Maybe she wouldn’t be so pitiless.

It began to rain, a fat pattering summer rain, lifting the scent of earth and gorse flowers. Three ravens circled. From over the rise where the others waited, a horse whickered.

“The horses are getting cold,” the lady said.

He had given an oath. Without that oath, without the lady, he’d be a farmer who bent the knee to any man with a sword. But men who carried swords must be able to use them. And it was just going to get worse. They were tracking a band, at least half a dozen, and now it looked as though the three from the farmstead had joined them. They would catch them soon. Tomorrow or the day after.

“Oeric.”

He drew Clifer. Maybe the bandit would just die. Maybe the lady would hit him again and finish it. But she only leaned on her staff and watched him choke.

Those eyes saw everything. The green saw your heart, they said, the blue your mind, and the black … the black drank in wyrd and your woe so others might be safe. Killing was nothing to what those eyes had seen.

He swallowed again. He should stab the bandit through the throat, it was the surest thing, but he couldn’t bear to look at what the heel of the lady’s staff had done to it, oak driven hard and sure, with all her terrible strength. Since burning the farmstead the lady never hesitated. The lady never seemed unsure. Perhaps he wouldn’t either once he had killed a man.

But this wasn’t the hot glory of battle, the stuff scops sang of. This was like killing a wether with a broken leg. Only the wether didn’t wear clothes, didn’t laugh, didn’t long for a swig of mead or the squeeze of a woman’s thighs. A wether didn’t try to kill your lady with a sickle.

His legs felt like wood. The hand wrapped around Clifer’s hilt could have been a stranger’s. The bandit stank.

“Don’t shut your eyes,” the lady said.

He lifted Clifer with both hands, plunged for the chest. Clifer jarred in his hands and skidded over the man’s ribs. He stabbed again, again, again. Gore slapped him across the mouth.

Then he was on his knees, not sure how he’d got there. He lifted his face to the rain. It smelt musty.

“Make sure he’s dead,” she said.

Of course he was dead, he was hacked almost in two. But always be sure, she said. Always check.

“When you’re done, clean your sword, then join us. Don’t take too long.”

The lady strode over the rise and it was just him and the dead man. A raven thumped into the turf.

The lady had said just yesterday,
An eyeless face discourages others.
He looked at that thick black beak and levered himself to his feet. He felt very tired.

*   *   *

By the fire, Eadric lent Oeric his bottle of linseed oil and Gwrast showed him how to use a chewed twig dipped in oil to work flecks of dried blood from under the wire wrapping on Clifer’s hilt. Hild watched him. His smiles were jerky, his eyes shone too bright, and he blinked a great deal, but she didn’t offer comfort. What he needed was the solace of ordinary companionship, of others like him.

*   *   *

Indigo drained from the predawn sky behind them. Flicks and flirts of wind ran over the sparsely grassed slope. Hild lay on her belly. Dew soaked slowly through her wool. She ignored it. To either side, her gesiths inched forward. She checked to the north and south: Both bow hunters were in place, bows strung, ready to block escape west with a rain of arrows.

Another flick of wind brought the smell of greasy ash, singed hair, smouldering hooves, and the thick stink of unwashed bandits. She counted the huddles around the remains of the fire below. Nine. Some were large enough for two. One was wrapped in a striped blanket that would be blue and green in daylight. The farmwife had been showing the bandit woman how to beat it clean the day Hild had ridden away feeling wise.

One of the lumps by the fire, she knew, was dead.

They’d tracked the family for four days, always heading north and west. On the second day they’d joined the band of wolf’s-heads: hard, lean, and armed. Not poor folk getting by the best they could.

She’d listened to them last night, drinking whatever it was they’d stolen from some steading, then singing and laughing, and taking it in turns to fuck someone to death. From the sound she couldn’t tell if it had been a woman or a stripling. Not a child. A child’s screams would have been higher. While they fucked and roared and giggled, the last of the rancid cow leg thrown in the fire burnt. They must feel close to safety. There was no watch, and whatever they’d been drinking was potent.

Nothing stirred. Light leaked into the hollow, though not enough to change the greys to colour.

One of the bundles twitched, then unfolded to become a thin woman who tottered two paces before slumping into a squat with her shift around her waist.

Hild looked right and left. Nodded. The hunters nocked arrows. Gesiths loosened their blades and checked their spears. She tightened her grip on her stave and settled her seax. Gathered her feet under her. Lifted her stave. Bowmen drew, gesiths rose.

She drew her hand across her throat: no mercy. Strings thrummed, spears lofted. She ran.

She ran silent as a deer, muscles pumping, heels thudding on the turf. Straight for the squatting woman.

A spear thumped into the woman’s foot and she started to shriek and turn, thin shit running down her leg. Hild was already swinging. Her stave took the woman in the throat. She felt the soft shock all the way to her shoulders, then she was leaping over the writhing ruin, lips skinned back, gaze fixed on the blanket.

“Death!” she howled. “Death!” And the dark hollow filled with men and spears and screams.

*   *   *

She stood on the brow of the rise, leaning on her staff, looking west and north to a great gap in the hills. They were twenty-five miles west of the Whinmoor. Those were the foothills of the backbone mountains. In the low sun the river running through the Gap glittered, and faint sheep tracks showed along the valley on either side. This was where the bandits had been heading: north, through the Gap, to Craven.

Cian was in Craven. It wasn’t so very far. She could lead her men through the Gap and find out if Osric was such a poor ealdorman he didn’t know about the bandits rooted on his land, or if he knew full well. Ealdorman Osric would have to kneel to her ring …