Hawkmaiden

by Terry Mancour

  One of the raptors from the mountain was diving gracefully into the chasm, intent on some prey it had spotted. Dara watched, entranced, as the graceful bird struck at some rodent it had sighted below. She followed the bird’s path eagerly with her eyes until it was out of sight. Her uncle was still clutching her shoulder, but she barely felt it.

  “So beautiful,” she breathed. The tension from the fight was gone, for her, swept away by the whisper of deadly wings.

  “Are you well, Dara?” Uncle Keram asked, concerned. She could almost feel the falcon’s savage triumph as it tore into its prey. Dara realized that she was quivering.

  “I’m fine, Uncle,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Just . . . excited.”

  “I’m not certain the Hall can stand an excited Dara,” Keram – called “the Crafty” for his adept management of the estate at her father’s direction — chuckled, quietly. “Why don’t you go fetch the healing bag for me? Setting that bone is going to be tricky. Then go down to the herb house and get willow bark and poppy oil. With that and some spirits, I think my brother will be fine.” He still sounded worried, Dara realized. If her father was incapacitated, it would fall to Keram to lead the Westwood until he was well. And that was his older brother he was about to tend.

  “Right away, Uncle!” Dara called, as she ran to do as he bid. She felt guilty for focusing on the hawk when her father was hurt, but as she ran to the herb house behind the manor, she knew she couldn’t help it. The raptor had captured her imagination in a way nothing else had.

  She had to have one, she knew, no matter what it took to get it.

  Chapter Two

  The Cottage In The Nutwood

  The oldest part of Westwood Hall was the actual hall, a large square stone room which was dominated by the great round stone fireplace in its center, where the Flame lived. The fireplace structure was four feet tall and ten feet wide, with three grand pillars of rock supporting the massive stone chimney above it. The Flame was built, family legend had it, when the Westwoodmen first arrived at the Westwood, centuries ago. Everything else in the manor had been built after and around that central fireplace. The Flame was, literally, at the center of the Westwood’s existence.

  Supposedly the Flame had been burning continuously for hundreds of years, constantly tended by her family, but Dara somehow doubted that. It just seemed impractical. But the reverence her family displayed for the fire was profound, bordering on religious. That made them very odd to the rest of the Vale, who worshipped the proper Narasi gods when the monks and priestesses made their circuits through Sevendor. To them, fire was just fire.

  But a Westwoodman swore his most sacred oaths by the Flame, bore witness to the most important ceremonies, and he would not willingly lie in its light. Her people were wedded by the Flame, and when they died their funerals and wakes were held in its presence. Babies were named in the light of the Flame, and promises made there had to be kept.

  The great fireplace was where the meals of the house were served, where the family gathered to eat and socialize. The Flame was where the Hallfolk gathered to talk and drink and share stories, where anyone from the various cottages and homes of the Westwood could find warmth, comfort, a mug and a pipe. The hall around it was scattered with benches and chairs, while chests containing the estate’s more valuable property lined the walls.

  There were other fireplaces in the house, in the kitchen and in the additions to the hall that had been made over the years, but there was only one Flame. It represented the goddess Briga, the Westwoodmen told outsiders, because the Narasi fire goddess was something the people of the Vale understood. But the Flame was more than a shrine. It was the living heart of Westwood Hall, the light in the darkness, the heat against the cold.

  Everyone had a role in keeping the Flame burning, from the time they were children. The youngest were taught to guard it and bank it, while older children were tasked with cleaning the ashes away and feeding the flame. After adolescence, girls usually tended the flame until they married, while boys were responsible for supplying the great stack of hardwoods kept on the north wall. The Flame was eternally hungry, and it was the duty of the Westwood boys to feed it.

  Dara had taken her turn, in due course, and had spent plenty of time simply staring into the Flame. Now those chores were given to younger children. But when Kamen was brought inside to have his leg set, bound and bandaged, he rested and recuperated near the Flame, instead of his small room. It was considered beneficial to healing.

  Though Dara was now thankfully exempt from tending the fire, she and her siblings each took turns sitting with their father near the Flame to keep the normally-active man company for the next few days. Kamen was a robust Master of the Wood, and was used to spending his time ranging the forests or overseeing the various enterprises that supported the estate. As the manor’s Yeoman, he was responsible for fulfilling the castle’s requirements.

  Now that he was injured, however, Uncle Kamen had to take over seeing to the day-to-day operations of the estate. While he was fully capable of doing so, Kamen started complaining about things almost immediately. The forced inactivity soon had him irritated with nearly everyone in the Hall. After two days sitting next to the Flame with the youngest of the Hall, Kamen looked like he was ready to eat a basket of kittens.

  His youngest daughter proved to be one of the few people that did not invite his ire. Dara did her best to be entertaining, even singing to him in her disturbingly uneven voice. She tended and cared for him, to keep him from verbally abusing her Aunt Anira and other members of the family, but she quickly grew weary of the chore.

  That’s when she remembered the falcon’s nest on the peak of Rundeval, and the rumors that her father had once scaled the summit. Dara suddenly realized she actually had something to talk to the cranky old bear about. She could not come right out and ask him if she could go after the fledgling – he would refuse, of course, on the grounds that it was far too dangerous.

  But she could solicit information just by showing interest, Dara figured. She’d noticed that her father loved to talk about his exploits in his youth, back before he’d met and married her mother. In fact, most men she knew did. If she asked him the right questions, he would never know what she was planning.

  She began, innocently enough, when she brought him his afternoon tea. She gingerly stepped around his splinted leg, shaking her head as she handed him his great earthenware mug.

  “Poor Father! It’s hard to believe that broken leg once climbed to the top of the peak of Rundeval,” she said, with just the right amount of sass to her voice.

  Kamen warmed, patting the broken leg fondly.

  “Oh, aye, they’ve carried me from one end of Sevendor to the other,” he agreed. “And when I was a lad, they carried me all the way to the top of the mountain. It was glorious,” he recalled. “It was my cousin Kilmer, and his father Keshin, who was Master of the Wood at the time. We went all the way to Rundeval’s peak. It took hours.”

  “You scaled the entire cliff?” she asked in wonder. The raptor’s nest was three-quarters of the way up the steep slope of dark gray basalt mountain.

  “Scaled it? Nay, Little Bird. We went the long way around, the trail up the south side of the mountain. It’s steep, but we only had to scale the last forty, fifty feet to get to the peak. Why, my legs were ready to give out as it was – I can’t imagine scaling the entire front face!” he laughed.

  Dara’s face fell at the news, but she recovered before Kamen noticed. If even her powerful father had not considered scaling the cliff, how could she possibly think to do it?

  “But surely you could have, when you were younger?”

  “Younger . . . and had wings,” he snorted. “By the Flame, girl, the back ascent was difficult enough. Barely a handhold to speak of, the last twenty feet. There’s no more than a knob of rock the size of a hogshead atop the thing to keep you from sliding down the slope, and there are briars and needlebush everywhere. It was a test of ou
r manhood, scaling that mountain. It fought back. I could have hurt myself far worse than this,” he said, gesturing to the large wooden splint on his leg. “The mountain is no picnic site, Dara,” he said, seriously.

  “Just promise me that if you go up again someday that you’ll take me!” she said, with just a little too much girlish enthusiasm. She couldn’t let him forbid her to go, not in front of the Flame. That would end her plan before it was begun. But if she tried to get him to promise, he might back off telling her not to go, she reasoned.

  “Now, Dara, I’m not a young man, anymore,” he sighed. “I’ll never scale that mountain again.”

  “But if you do—!” she pleaded.

  “If I do . . . and gods alone know what would possess me to undertake such a fool stunt . . . but if the notion does take me, then yes, I will consider bringing you along,” he conceded.

  “Oh, thank you, Father!” she said, kissing his head with relief. That had been close. If he had made her promise not to try to scale the cliff in front of the Flame, she would have been compelled to obey. This way, he was the one who felt compelled to consider taking her, if he went. Someday, maybe.

  Dara was not inclined to wait. She didn’t have much more time before the fledglings she knew were in that nest would learn to fly on their own and that would be too late to train them, from what her Uncle Keram said.

  She had been haunting his steps, too, as he made the rounds from the curing sheds to the woodyard to the nuttery, asking him a thousand questions about falcons and hawks.

  He apprenticed under the castle falconer, briefly, as a youth, before the domain had changed hands. Then the new tenant lord, who had a love of boar hunting, had the mews dismantled and turned into a kennel. But for a year and a half her uncle learned about hunting birds. Dara asked him everything she could think of, without annoying him. And while he thought he was merely entertaining her, he was helping his niece assemble a list of the equipment she’d need.

  She considered all that Kamen and her uncle Keram had said, that night, and the more she thought about it, the more she realized that there had to be a way.

  At some point, she realized that she had committed herself to actually trying. She would find a way to scale that cliff, or die trying. That night her dreams were filled with wings and shadows, and in the morning she barely felt as if she had slept. But she already had the beginnings of a plan.

  If she wanted to succeed, she knew, she would have to be organized about it. And there was no half-measures involved. She was not just breaking the rules and risking punishment, she understood, she was endangering her life. No one in the Hall would be agreeable with that, regardless of how obnoxious she thought she was. It seemed insane to even consider such a stupid, stupid course of action.

  But the idea of such a magnificent bird perched on her arm was just too enticing.

  After helping serve her father his breakfast and gather laundry for the week, Dara dashed off to the tall spruce tree she and Kyre had perched on a few days earlier. Scaling it was easy, she proved, going up the smooth bark of the tree with the alacrity of a raccoon. She found her familiar perch, the one that offered the best view of the cliff overhead.

  She studied the bare rock face for hours, imagining every way she could possibly ascend to the cliff. Some routes she estimated brought her hundreds of feet in the air . . . but in the end, all of them met the sheer vertical face of the cliff, where handholds and resting points ceased altogether. The best route she’d envisioned to the nest still left her eighty or ninety feet shy.

  There was no way to do it, she could see. No matter how badly she wanted it to be so, there was no possible way the cliff face could be scaled. The raptor mother had found an impregnable site for her nest. There was no way any predator could sneak up on the vulnerable nest from below.

  Frustrated, Dara climbed down out of the tree and cast herself into the loamy ground below it. She seethed with frustration over having the chicks so near to her – near enough that she could almost imagine seeing them, if she squinted really hard. The clouds in the sky floated by serenely as the mother falcon mocked her with her beautiful flight over the vale.

  Dara watched the raptor fly for a while, until she could imagine what it was like to fly so vividly it alarmed her. She shook her head to clear it, and then saw the mountain peak again, upside down from her perspective on the ground.

  If only I could fly to the nest, Dara teased herself. Perhaps if I made wings, I could just descend from the sky . . . once that mountain peak moved out of the way . . . and light right there, on that cliff. And then you and I would be together, little chick, she promised.

  Come get me! she imagined the baby falcon was calling to her, in her mind.

  But even as she thought it, she knew it was pointless. The idea that she could find a way to steal away a fledgling, and then raise it and train it to hunt – all without her family or anyone else at the Hall knowing – was laughable, she knew.

  She was just being Dara the Dumb, as her big sister Linta called her sometimes when she asked too many questions. Dreaming impossible dreams far too big for a redheaded oddity of twelve. This was no different than when she had tried to build her own castle, out behind the tanning sheds. She’d gotten the help of several enterprising children who agreed that having their own castle would be the best way to guard against bad old Sir Erantal’s men. Together they had built a tiny hut out of stone that had collapsed the first time someone put weight on it.

  Dara the Dumb, she scolded herself. You can’t scale an impossible cliff, so now you dream of flying there yourself . . . because you’ll never reach that nest from below!

  Then something occurred to her, and she opened her eyes. They fixed on the very top of the peak, which seemed upside down, from her perspective. In the light she could make out the nest perfectly where it sat near the top of the mountain . . . only fifty or sixty feet below the peak.

  With stunning clarity she realized . . . she could reach the nest from the top of the mountain!

  The more she studied it, the more it looked possible. Indeed, the slope above the nest was not nearly so steep as right below it, and the ragged eastern side seemed to have handholds and rests aplenty . . . yet before she could reach that point, she would have to rappel down a rope . . . three or four hundred feet above the hard black rock below.

  She wasn’t certain that there was anything to anchor such a rope to until she remembered Kamen discussing his own ascent, and the “knob the size of a hogshead” that was at the peak of Rundeval.

  The very idea made her dizzy, and she wondered for a moment if perhaps she was crazed, as some had whispered. What sane girl wanted to risk her life for the sake of a pet? A pet that she couldn’t even be sure she could keep alive? From what Uncle Keram told her, many fledglings died in captivity. She could be risking her life for a dead bird, she realized.

  No, another part of herself reasoned, you are risking your life for the chance at a live bird. A great hunter. A master of the winds.

  When she thought about it like that, there was really no question.

  She was going to get herself that bird.

  * * *

  The next few days were busy. There were a lot of chores to do to prepare the Hall for winter and not all of them were pleasant. While her slight size spared her from the laborious task of washing laundry in the huge kettle over a fire in the courtyard with her sister and cousins, her Aunt Anira (who had stepped into the role of her mother since the day Dara was born) always seemed to find other things for her to do. Sure enough, Aunt Anira had a special assignment for her at the breakfast announcements.

  This time, however, the task was not too objectionable. Anira had thoughtfully given Dara a job suitable to her size, skill and ingenuity: repairing the nutwood cottages.

  There was a row of the tiny cottages against the far northeastern edge of the manor, up against the wood proper. Unlike the cots near the center of the estate, where young families lived in
a small hamlet behind the manor hall, these cottages were reserved for the elderly. Pensioners who had served the estate faithfully but were too old and frail for regular work. In other villages and manors, the old people were nearly cast aside after their productive years were behind them.

  But not in the Westwood. The Master took care of all.

  The Westwoodmen worked for the estate even in their dotage. The pensioners’ cots were close to a large stand of pecan and hazelnut trees intermixed with a few walnuts, cultivated over the decades as part of the manor’s economy. In the autumn the pensioners did the tedious but necessary work of gathering up the fallen nuts for the estate, and in return the manor provided for them for the rest of the year. Every month each cot was delivered a bag of flour, another of barley, and usually a little meat and some vegetables. That was in addition to the little gardens the pensioners grew, the nuts they gleaned, and the gifts they received from the younger residents of the manor. A few even still hunted.

  The cottages were very small, no more than fifteen feet on a side, constructed of sturdy poles and wattle-and-daub, with a thick lining of dried mosses to keep out the chill. The roofs were thatched with stiff ferns that kept the rain out better than the river reeds the people of the Vale used. A tiny fireplace with a clay chimney hugged the back wall of each cottage, allowing a fire sufficient to heat the cozy room, and two small windows permitted light inside, when the wooden shutters and leather curtains were thrown open. The cottages were large enough for a bed, a small trestle table, a cistern, and a chest or two for their belongings and stores. Most hung herbs and dried meat from the poles in their ceilings, and a few had hung ragged tapestries or trophies from their youth on the walls.

  The cottage of one of the pensioners, Widow Ama, needed to be cleaned and repaired after the old occupant had quietly passed on in her sleep at the end of last summer. Anira thought that the work was well within Dara’s capabilities. It was the Master of the Wood’s duty to look after those who had spent their lives caring for the estate, and she was the Master’s daughter.