Hild: A Novel Read Free Page A

everyone else, though she had to be carried when the walking grew too much. She sat with Hereswith as her mother explained the sunwise and widdershins twist of spinning yarn and how by mixing the two you could make spin-patterned cloth. In the shadowy hall she listened to the cool clicking tiles of wealh bishops’ Latin and to old Ywain, when he was well, play the harp. She liked the sound of the old man’s voice as he warmed it to himself, then of the men setting aside their weapons, the thunk of heavy hilts laid down on the boards, and the bronze-and-gold sound of the strings. Hereswith said at home all Anglisc men took turns with the lyre, but Hild knew that was silly. How could warriors with their burst voices sing like Ywain? Besides, their real home had been overrun by Æthelfrith Iding’s war band before Hereswith had been born, and now the Idings were being driven out in turn by Edwin.
    And then Hild would remember her father was dead and now she never would have a home, and she would hum along with Ywain’s heroic song and try to make her breastbone buzz the way she was sure Ywain’s did when he sang “ Calan hyddrev, tymp dydd yn edwi / Cynhwrv yn ebyr, llyr yn llenwii : The beginning of October, the falling off of the day / Tumult in the river mouth, filling up the shore. ” Tumult in the river mouth, she sang to herself, tumult in the river mouth.
    *   *   *
    And at the next new moon as the wind whipped there was tumult in the dark: tumult as someone bundled Hild in a cloak and carried her, tumult as Cian and Hereswith, Onnen and Breguswith, the gesiths—so few!—and their slaves boarded a boat. Tumult during the days as they beat north in the driving rain, the sea roaring like the elms in autumn. Tumult then at the river mouth, and at the dock far up the wide, wide river.
    Torches hissed and fluttered and Hild was more or less asleep when she was carried down the gangplank, but she still saw the rich trappings of the horses there, and the gleam of jewelled hilts and brooches clasped at cloak necks. And she woke fully when an apple voice, so firm and round as to be almost scented, said, “Lady Breguswith, Edwin king welcomes you home.”

 
    2
    I N SOME WAYS , Hild’s new life was not so different. Her days, the court’s days, were ones of constant movement from royal vill to royal vill: Bebbanburg in the lean months for the safety of the rock walls and the cold grey sea, and Yeavering at the end of spring, when the cattle ate sweet new grass and the milk flowed rich with fat. Then south to the old emperor’s wall, to the small towns built of stone, and a day at Osric’s great house in Tinamutha, and a boat down the coast to that wide river mouth, wide as a sea, and up the river to Brough in early summer, and then, sometimes, Sancton, and always to Goodmanham’s slow river valley at summer’s height—the rolling wolds crimson with flowers, the skeps heavy with honey, and the fields waving with grain. Then the twenty-mile journey to York, with its strong walls, its river roads for carrying the last of the sweet apples and the first of the pears, and its high towers in case of bitter war, winter war.
    The king and his court spent a month here, a two-month there, eating their way through the local offerings, levying and taking tribute, listening to local troubles and rendering judgement.
    “But why?” Hild said when they had to pack up and leave Sancton, again, just as she’d got to know the rooks in the beech spinney and the frogs by the south pond, and one particularly fine old hornbeam whose bent boughs even she could climb. She watched her mother and Onnen folding dresses and rolling hose, and threw her own box of treasures on the floor. “I don’t want to!”
    Her mother’s irises, pale blue as forget-me-nots under unseasonable frost, tightened, though her voice stayed even. “You will pick those up.”
    “No.”
    “Very well. Then we’ll leave you—”
    “I’m the light of