Hild (The Hild Sequence, #1)

by Nicola Griffith

Quiet mouth, bright mind.”

“Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”

“A king doesn’t care if the folk are happy. He cares that they think him strong. Pass me the bitterwort.”

Sometimes Hild worked alongside him, exercising with a rock in each hand, as boys who hoped to be king’s gesiths must.

They remembered: We are us.

The summer’s war had ended early and the household was at Goodmanham.

Then Hild grew even happier when she realised that all the women, including her mother and Onnen, would be so busy fussing over Hereswith that she and Cian might now find time to sneak away to the bottomland at the foot of the sacred hill south of the vill.

All she heard was a blackbird, far away, and the burble of the spring. She wondered where the water came from. She wondered this in British, the language of wild and secret places.

it were night she would smell the perfume of bog myrtle, which her mother called sweet gale. At night, wood mice would sit atop the fallen tree, wiping dew from their whiskers in the moonlight. At night, she might see the water sprites she was sure lived here.

A cream-striped caterpillar humped its slow way over the mossy bark.

“I’m the light of the world.”

“Still water is not to be trusted. It shines and it gleams, but is not what it seems.”

Edwin, a compact man with chestnut hair, a grey-threaded beard, and heavy rings on both arms, sat on his carved stool under the oak, his chief steward Coelgar at his ear and his advisers about him, with his chin on his fist and his eyes on the petitioner, a one-handed local thegn, rewarded with five hides by Æthelric Spear years past for service rendered as gesith, who complained that a local widow had set eel traps in the river:

Edwin’s gaze moved from one to another and back again, head tilted. Hild had seen a dog look at his master that way when trying to guess which hand held the bone.

“One night, in the days when my belly was as flat as a loom and your father was out hunting more than deer, I dreamt of a light, oh such a strange and beautiful light, and the light turned into a jewel—”

“You will accept your wyrd. If Cwenburh isn’t well … Ah, but who knows?” Hild had no idea what the queen had to do with anything. Her wyrd. Light of the world.

dreamt of you, you are to be the light of the world. Of course you shall have gold. What is the matter with you?”

THE QUEEN’S ROOM at Sancton smelt of blood and weeping and, perhaps, Hild thought, something else.

Like the last time Cwenburh miscarried, her women had washed her and carried her away to a new apartment, so that when she woke she would not have to remember staring at the heroic embroidery of the white horse, or the blooming apple tree, or that knot in the pine cladding on the ceiling while she screamed and bled and pushed and wept: for a bladder-size sack of slimed slipperiness, for nothing.

Watch men and women, her mother had said, put yourself inside them. Imagine what they’re thinking. The little muscles around Coledauc’s eyes tightened. He was weighing information.

The childlike thing sitting on a cygnet-coloured gelding with a silvered saddle and wearing a brooch worth a son’s ransom must be the princess niece with a reputation as a seer and sorceress. Dunod said she’d known of Ceredig.

A gift. From a king. To her as the light of the world. What should she do?

Gold. Gold was power. Power was safety.

They talked. Hild recognised Eadfrith’s voice, the elder ætheling, and then her own name. “… that knife?” the woman said. “A slaughter seax, for a maid!” “Oh, she’s no maid,” Eadfrith said. “She’s a hægtes in a cyrtel.”

“Now, see, this is one reason they think you strange. Your eyes flash, but you never speak.”

“I’m not a hægtes.” “No, no. Of course not.” “I’m not,” Hild said. “I’m not a seer, either. I just notice things.”

“If you don’t want to be a prophet then stop prophesying. Or at least mix prophe...

She missed them. Oh, not her mother’s perpetual watching and thinking and manoeuvring for position, not her sister’s talk of Mildburh and husbands, alternating with the silent superiority of a sister with a girdle for one without. No, she missed their smell.

Another saying of her mother’s popped into her head: Women make and men break. She frowned. What about men in skirts, where did they fit? Skirt or sword, book or blade

She had found that people, especially people who spoke a different tongue, would get anxious if they didn’t get to have their say in their own way, even if they spoke in a long rush, hurrying to get their words out. Like the strange Psalter.

“The Psalms are all written together,” she said. “No beginning and no end, all in one long rush. Fursey says it’s to imitate the long breath of god.”

While Cian hefted his exercise stones up and down, up and down, and Begu wove daises together, Hild finished her story, and Cian laughed. Hild was glad. He hadn’t laughed for a week.

“I do like the smell of quenching iron. Quite makes me feel like a young gesith with his first sword.”

“Sweet gods! Cian is too young for his sword!

He must be the pip at the centre of an apple of perfect safety and unstinting bounty. He must be as close to a god as any but priests ever saw.

Beeches were rare north of the Humber, and she loved the way they whispered in the wind, like women before they fell asleep.

IN YORK, the days warmed and opened. Bluebells began to dot the west woods. Crabapple blossomed. The first larks flew at dusk. Along the little river, kingfishers caught newts and water beetles, and on the big river when Hild walked with her mother and the queen—talking, as always, of wool and trade—she saw the tiny paw prints of otter kits.

Osric’s vill felt more like a travel camp than a high lord’s hall: too much drinking and open rutting and men pissing in corners, while spitting and staring over their shoulders.