Hild: A Novel (8 page)

It was an undeniable omen. The old woman was clever. A war horn to call ravens. Hild would remember that.

The king, now in high good humour, looked at the Christ bishop. “And you, Anaoc?”

The Christ priests were mostly envoys from British kingdoms, come to talk to a rising king about trade and alliances and marriages. Anaoc was from the kingdom of the southwest wealh, or as they called it, Dyfneint, whose every other king seemed to be named Geraint.

“Christ and all his followers abjure
superstitiones
.”

The king, still smiling, said, “Don’t spit.”

Anaoc swallowed. “My lord, we refuse divination, idolatry, and the swearing on the heads of beasts.”

Superstitiones
. Hild tried the word in her mouth.
Superstitiones
. It must be Latin.

“But it works, Anaoc.”

“We have no quarrel with that, my lord. We who live in the light of Christ find
superstitiones
sinful not because they are not efficacious but because they are efficacious due to the intervention of demons.”

“Demons.”

“Servants of the devil, God’s adversary.”

Edwin scratched the snakes of his beard. “You’re a bold man. Does this boldness mean your prince no longer wishes my help against the Gewisse?”

“No, my lord! That is, yes, my lord, our need is as urgent as ever. It is only that I cannot help you because my God will not speak through animals or other portents.”

“Though your god’s enemies will?”

Anaoc nodded unhappily.

“So the god saying through his birds that I will have more children speaks as the enemy of your god?”

Anaoc said nothing.

“Now this is very interesting, priest. Am I to believe, then, that your god does not wish me to have more children?”

One of the drunker gesiths spat. Hild doubted he’d even been listening, but Anaoc swallowed again and bent his head. “My lord, forgive me, I am but a mortal. My God does not make His wishes known to me.”

“Then what use are you to man or beast?”

A gust of wind shook a spatter of raindrops from the daymark elms. Coifi’s bullock lowed.

Edwin smiled. “We’ll talk more of your Christ god and his enemies another time, priest. Coifi, the priest of Woden, has a calf whose innards wish to speak of our destiny.”

Anaoc bowed and withdrew. When he thought no one was watching, he wiped his shaved forehead with his sleeve. The Dyfneint’s petition would fail because Anaoc had failed; the kingdom would soon fall to the Gewisse and its people be sold into slavery. Hild wondered if the priest’s god would be a comfort to him then.

She turned her attention to Coifi, whose attendants had the bullock by the nostrils and who himself was beginning the slow one-handed drumbeat. Dum-
dum
, dum-
dum
, like a heartbeat—though, without the hard enclosure of the ritual place, the drum had no resonance, no menace.

The drum beat faster, like a heart speeding up. Away from the usual ceremonies it sounded thin and wrong. Perhaps it was because childbirth was a woman’s issue, and Woden was leader of the Wild Hunt, carrier-off of the dead, god of gods, a man’s god; even the elms they stood by were men’s trees.

The nearest stand of ash was a good mile or so up the river. Hild had been there with Cian only a few days ago. It had been wet then, too, and Cian had been wondering aloud, again, who would sponsor him for his sword. The leaves would fall soon, he said, and it would be his birthday, and Hild’s, and one day his fifteenth birthday would come and there would be no one to give him his sword. Hild had told him, again, that all would be well, she knew it would be, she just wasn’t sure how.

The drum stopped. Coifi handed it to the young man behind him, raised his bare arms. “Woden! All father! Husband to Eorðe.” Edwin leaned forward and Hild sensed her mother move slightly; she had realised something. But Hild didn’t dare look at her. “Here stands your many times son, Edwin the son of Ælla, the son of Yffi, the son of Wuscfrea, the son of Wilgisl, the son of Westerfalca, the son of Sæfugl, the son of Sæbald, the son of Segegeat, the son of Swebdæg, the son of Sigegar, the son of Wædæg, the son of Woden, god of gods, and of his wife, Eorðe. He asks that you both guide my hand as I give to you a bullock, so that you may speak your wills in the matter of a peaceweaver for your son and his wife, Cwenburh.”

He held out his hand to the assistant with the drum, who handed him the black knife.

At Goodmanham, and in the enclosure here at Sancton, Coifi had roofless temples floored in boards that were scrubbed white before every sacrifice. Hild wondered how the blood patterns would be read on the wet and already slippery grass.

The bullock knew something was up. Perhaps he smelt the blood awareness in the tightening attention of the gesiths. He bellowed and tried to kick out at Coifi’s assistants but one managed to grab the bullock’s tail and lift it, and the bullock stretched out his neck and lowered his head. Coifi, slick as goose grease, slashed its throat with one diagonal backhand slice. Blood dropped like a red sheet from the open neck, like something in a mummer’s play. It spattered and gurgled and just as the bullock’s front legs buckled Coifi moved again, but this time Hild saw his muscles bunch and strain as he whipped the knife along the beast’s underside. Its guts fell out.

They fell in one neat package, a good omen, though still attached by the intestine, and in some ugly turn of fate looked like nothing but a gigantic stillbirth, dangling its umbilical cord. Coifi cut the gut cord swiftly, but everyone had seen it.

“The blood, my king,” he said, and pointed with the knife. His whole forearm was red-sleeved and glistening, but even as Hild watched wiry hairs on his arm sprang upright, like red worms after rain.

The king, like all of them, had difficulty moving his eyes from the obscene gut package to the edge of the blood moving sluggishly, as a cold snake might, downslope to the elms.

“Woden has spoken!” Coifi shouted. “He calls the blood to him. He accepts your sacrifice. You will have your peaceweaver.” But without the enclosure his voice was trained for, his pronouncement sounded insubstantial, a cast skin rather than the snake itself.

No one said anything for a moment. The smell of blood was overwhelming, thick and sweet. The gesiths didn’t like it, it reminded them of too many brothers fallen. Edwin was shaking his head. He didn’t like it, either.

Clouds thickened and darkened overhead and birdsong changed. It was about to rain again.

Breguswith slung one side of her wrap over her shoulder and stepped forward, her hand touching the crystal seer stone on her belt. She gestured at the sack of entrails glistening by the gutted bullock. “This is the smell of the queen’s bed.”

Edwin said, “You have seen this?”

“Waking and sleeping.” Dreams were the most powerful of all prophecies. “There will be no peaceweaver from this queen.”

This queen.

Hild’s stomach tightened down to a lump as hard as twice-baked bread. The smell was terrible and her mother would make it happen again, over and over. Couldn’t they see?

She lifted her face to the sky. The clouds were as dense as the tight black wool of the upland sheep. She wished it would rain now.

“And you?” Edwin said to her, his eyes glimmering and green in the darkening morning. “You have seen this, too?”

Hild had a sudden hideous thought: What if everything that had ever died lay rotting where it fell? All the frozen birds, the misborn lambs, the leverets savaged by foxes. One stinking charnel pit. What if the world never came clean? “It will all wash away,” Hild said desperately. It always had before. “It will rain, and the blood will wash away and the carcass will be taken away and all will be fresh and new.” Wouldn’t it?

Then a fat droplet burst against the back of her neck. She lifted her face to the rain, cold and clean.

Coifi looked at her. His eyes were black and blank, like a stoat’s when it eyes a fledgling fallen from the nest, but then Breguswith pulled her mantle up over her head and her elbow broke the priest’s line of sight. Though not Edwin’s, not the gesiths’, not Anaoc’s. Her mother wanted them to remember what she’d said:
All will be fresh and new.
She had no idea why that was important and her heart was kicking like a hare. But she had been trained to show a still face so she raised her own mantle and looked back. Anaoc made that flickering hand gesture over face and chest that Christ priests made when they were afraid.

The drover reappeared, this time with Coelgar. As they spoke to the king, the drover shifted from foot to foot. Edwin listened and nodded and turned to his entourage.

“The wagons are miring themselves so rapidly they’ll sink to meet the root of the one tree if we delay much longer. We will leave now.” The look he directed at Coifi and Anaoc as they backed away respectfully was dissatisfaction. The gesiths ambled off as they pleased; they were the king’s chosen, they had never needed to learn the obsequiousness of priests.

Edwin turned to her. “So you’re a weather worker, too.”

She started to shake her head but her mother put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed and said, “She is filled with a light she does not yet understand, my king.”

“Though you do, of course.” He laughed shortly. “Then ride in my wagon and we will discuss Cwenburh and her health and where to look for these new beginnings.”

In the wagon her mother and uncle talked of marriage prospects. Hild listened as best she could, recognising the names of some Kentish princesses and East Anglisc æthelings and, to her surprise, Hereswith. That’s what Edwin wanted: not just the alliance forged by a peaceweaver but a new wife, bringing her own, even more powerful bond to another kingdom. Coifi hadn’t understood. Her mother had, and had plans … But Hild had had a fright and was now safe from the priests and with her mother. She didn’t want to think about it. She fell asleep.

*   *   *

At York, Edwin’s counsellors and thegns and gesiths agreed that the Isle of Vannin, midway between Ireland and the mainland, could and should be taken. The war band left just as the leaves began to turn. Cwenburh’s belly grew during the two months before Yule, grew during the twelve days of feasting at the kingless court, grew as the royal women and their personal retainers—men like Burgræd and his now-strapping son, Burgmod—made their slow way by ship down the river to Brough and then transferred to bigger ships and sailed up the rocky coast of the northern sea to Bebbanburg. As the sea dashing against the fort’s stone foundation turned from the cold, heavy waves of winter to the restless turbulence of spring, the queen’s belly grew. It grew as news came that the cattle at Yeavering were swollen with calf and in the vales the bumblebees were out early and in large numbers and it would be a spring of plenty.

In the stone fastness Hild watched her mother, who, in Edwin’s absence and Cwenburh’s absorption in her belly, tightened her reins on the running of the household and laughed with the queen at her happiness. She seemed unperturbed by the queen’s continuing good health. As the days lengthened, she spent time teaching Hereswith and Mildburh the intricate work of piled weaves. It must have been difficult, because it made Hereswith bad-tempered. In the evenings, with the light good for nothing but spinning and skeining, they joined the other women of the household in their gemæcce pairs, old woman with old, young with young, women who had woven and spun and carded together for years, through first blood and marriage and babies, who had minded each other’s crawling toddlers and bound each other’s scraped youngsters, and wept as each other’s sons and daughters died of the lung wet, or at hunt, or giving birth to their own children—all while they spun, and carded and wove, sheared and scutched and sowed. Hereswith and Mildburh, Breguswith and Onnen, Cwenburh and Teneshild, old Burgen and Æffe. Onnen was the only wealh. Hild watched them, and the other not-yet-girdled girls—Cille and Leofe, who were already meant for each other, and half a dozen younger—and wondered when her mother might choose her gemæcce and who it might be. She was taller than all the unmatched girls, even the ones with breast buds, just as her mother was taller than the queen and Cian was unusually tall for a boy with a wealh mother. In the stories, tall and royal ran in the same breath.

It was usual that a highborn girl was paired with one who was slightly less so, that they might travel together when one married. In Hereswith and Mildburh’s case, Mildburh might be the queen’s cousin, but Hereswith was the highest ranking unmarried female blood relative of the king. She was the default peaceweaver. But perhaps not for long, not if Cwenburh brought her child to term and it was a girl.

Tonight, they were using beeswax tapers, a new luxury, because Ædilgith, recently returned with her gemæcce, Folcwyn, from the court of the East Angles, said that Rædwald’s queen and daughters made magnificent embroideries by such light, and the court was the richer for it. And indeed, Hild thought, as she rewound Ædilgith’s skein of blue-green wool while Ædilgith held—for Folcwyn was shaking with the ague, caught no doubt from the East Anglisc marsh they had passed on their way to the coast—the tapers cast a light as white and clean as moonlight. Though moonlight never wavered the way the taper light did when one of them flicked a veil back over a shoulder—Ædilgith said the East Anglisc wore their veils longer, too—or stood to rearrange her dress and then resettled on her stool or the cushioned travelling chests.

Ædilgith tapped the side of Hild’s hand and motioned for her to pay attention to the tension on the yarn between them. “I like this colour.”

“It’s uneven,” Hild said, thinking about the East Anglisc. Good enough only for housefolk.

Ædilgith glared at her. Hild glared back. After a moment Ædilgith decided to ignore the insult. “Folc thinks that if the year is as rich as it seems it could be, and trade is good and the king generous, we might buy indigo. Think of it. Weld and indigo would make a green bright as a grebe’s feather.”

“Like your eyes,” Hild said, to be friends again. Ædilgith was notoriously vain about her eyes. Her most prized possession was a beryl ring, and Hild had overheard her tell Folcwyn that she wouldn’t marry any man who couldn’t give her beryls for her ears and green garnets for her veil band. Hild wondered who Hereswith might marry, then remembered that mention of her name in the king’s wagon. Already it seemed a long time ago. Hereswith’s bleeding had come more than a year since; it was past time, Onnen said, to find her a husband. But would she marry as peaceweaver to a victorious overking or as the gemæcce of the cousin of the queen by marriage of a defeated northern warlord? It all depended not only on Cwenburh but on the fight for the Isle of Vannin, and they’d had no word.