Strange Visitors Threaten the Old Gods

Chapter 4 | Hild's Tale | A Serialised Historical Fiction Novel

Chapter 1 of Hild’s Tale was featured on Top In Fiction!

This is Chapter 4 of Hild’s Tale, a historical fiction novel based on (though not tied to) real events that took place in the kingdom of the Northumbrians during the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Abbess Hild, or Saint Hild as she later became known, was a woman who defied social and political expectations to become one of the most powerful people - yes, people, not women - in seventh-century England. Despite this, she was sidelined in the major contemporary histories; this story aims to give back the spotlight she so rightly deserves.

Chapter 3 saw Bede begin his research in the library of Whitby Abbey, the great foundation that Hild ruled over as abbess. As the light faded and his eyes began to grow heavy, Abbess Æthelhild handed him a resource of inestimable worth, a Life of Abbess Hild in her own words. Reading the first few lines he knew he needed to sleep first in order to take it all in, and we find him the next morning reading the opening pages of Hild’s Life, beginning in Chapter 4.

🎙 Members can find the audio version of Chapter 4 at the end of this post.

📚 You can read all previous chapters at the link below.

INDEX OF CHAPTERS

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Chapter 4

She always told me never to go too close to the edge.

The edge, you see, stood threateningly close to that in-between space, the one that stands astride our own world and the one to come.

My mother knew that many a troublesome child, and even a few troublesome adults, had fallen foul of its siren calls and tried to warn me away from it. The ground was too crumbly, too unstable, to traverse with any confidence, great chunks of earth being claimed by the sea each time a storm battered our coastal headland.

“You’ll be safest inside the walls of the fort, Hild. You must stay there.”

Perhaps I should have had more sympathy for my mother’s fears, borne as they were from losing her own troublesome brother to the edge’s intrigue.

The edge, though, with all its tantalising mystery, pulled deep at my inner sense of adventure.

And so I went there.

I stood at what felt like the edge of the known world, gripped the hard rock as the bracing, icy wind pounded against my fragile body. The sea extended for miles, hundreds of miles, before me, shimmering in the weak winter sunshine, rocky outcrops breaking its surface like the spikes on a dragon’s back. Tiny boats peppered the broad sandy shoreline, their sailors where I should be, unwilling to fight with the gods for life out on the sea.

After that first time, though, I snuck out to the edge whenever I could, drinking in its wild and rugged life-giving power.

And it was there, on one of those early spring mornings when the sea is as calm as a millpond, a slight chill holding back the warmth of the day, that I saw the golden prow of the king’s ship emerge proudly around the headland to the east.

I had met the king before, of course, despite having spent only nine or perhaps ten winters in the world by then. My father, a near-relative of the king and important warrior in the kingdom, regularly played host in his great hall that towered above the edge and its neighbouring coastline. The king would always arrive in a fleet of ships, sails dyed red and purple, his great war horns declaring to all at the fort that their lord would soon be amongst them.

Yet this time, he brought strange visitors with him.

And this time, my father stormed out on the king.