I was so consumed by the image that I would have walked straight past the shack, had Filipe not grabbed my arm again.
‘She’s in there.’
He indicated a rough wooden hut, thrown together from old ship’s timbers black with tar, and from driftwood bleached to ash-grey by the salt sea. The doorway was covered by a piece of frayed sacking and outside several nets lay drying over barrels. The stones around the hut were stained with rusty splashes of dried fish blood, and littered with empty mussel shells. It was a typical fisherman’s hut, the kind of shelter he would use to mend his nets and clean his catch. The place stank of fish guts, salt weed and cat pee. It wouldn’t be hard to persuade Silvia to abandon such a rat hole. However handsome her fisher-boy, her ardour would cool as rapidly as sea wind if she was forced to spend time in this hovel.
But Silvia would never admit that. She’d be in there now artfully posed, draped seductively over a bench, waiting for me. She’d try to look as if she hadn’t been waiting at all, but I’d just happened to come in whilst she was resting. She’d feign complete indifference until she considered she had punished me enough with her coldness. But she knew only too well it was that very aloofness and disdain that drew me to her like a dumb fish to a juicy worm, no matter how many times it gets hooked. Even though I knew every twist and turn of the game she was playing, I was powerless to resist it. I took a deep breath and pulled aside the sacking curtain.
But what I saw was not Silvia reclining on a bench. Light shining in from the broken board in the wall revealed two men sitting on upturned barrels, fishermen judging by the stench and filth on their breeches. In one glance I took in the grappling iron lying within a hand’s reach of one of them, and the sharp knife tucked in the belt of the other. Not that either of them would have needed weapons to attack a man, not with their great fists.
As rapidly as I had stepped in I backed out again, crashing straight into Filipe, who squealed as I trod heavily on his toe. But I was in no mood to apologize to him. The little rat had set me up. I’d get even with him later, but right now the only thing on my mind was to get as far away from that hut as fast as I could. I turned to run, but Filipe yelled after me, ‘Wait! They need to tell you about Silvia. Come back!’
I turned. The men had made no move to follow me. I hesitated, then cautiously edged my way back towards the hut, torn between curiosity and a healthy desire to stay out of danger. I am not a man who enjoys pain and besides, I needed my face to remain intact to earn a living, not to mention all my other appendages, of which I had grown rather fond.
‘What,’ I asked Filipe, ‘do those two cod-buggerers know about Silvia that you couldn’t have told me back at my lodgings?’
The tips of Filipe’s jug-ears turned scarlet and he squirmed like a schoolboy told to drop his breeches.
Comprehension dawned. ‘Ah, I see it. They want money for their information, that’s it, isn’t it? Well, you can tell them from me I haven’t got the price of my next meal, and even if I came into a fortune I wouldn’t give as much as a bag of goat’s droppings for information about that bitch. I don’t care where she is or what trouble she’s got herself into.’
Filipe cringed and darted an embarrassed glance towards the hut. It suddenly occurred to me that Silvia might be hiding somewhere near, waiting until the fishermen had been paid. I raised my voice so she could hear.
‘If she wants money, tell her to sell herself on the streets, she’s had enough practice. And when she’s sick of doing that, she knows where to find me, but she’d better hurry because if my bed gets any colder, I’ll be moving Bárbara in to warm it.’
I stole the name from the wind, for the truth was I didn’t actually know any Bárbaras, apart from an elderly aunt with a hairy black moustache, and I certainly didn’t intend inviting her into my bed. But I could have met someone since Silvia had left me and there was no harm in letting her believe I had.
Filipe was flapping at me like an agitated duck. ‘No, no, don’t say such things. Silvia is … I didn’t know how to tell you. That’s why I brought you here. I thought you should see for yourself. If it is her, I mean. I think it is … I’m sure it is.’
He ran back to the shack and held the sacking curtain up, pointing to something lying on the floor inside. A cold hand seemed to have thrust itself inside my chest as I realized what he was trying to say. But it couldn’t be true. I would have known. I would have felt it.
Slowly, on legs that felt as heavy and dead as ship’s timbers, I edged towards the door. The two fishermen hadn’t moved from their barrels.
The older of the two removed the long strip of dried fish he was chewing, and waved it at the curtain. ‘Drop it. Don’t want everyone seeing our business.’
Filipe nudged me inside and, following hard on my heels, dropped the sacking back in place.
Between the two fishermen a long bundle was stretched out on the floorboards, wrapped in a piece of old sail cloth. I hadn’t even noticed it when I’d first entered, in my shock at finding the fishermen inside.
‘Caught her in the nets this morning. Knew there was a floating corpse even before our nets snagged her, could see the gulls following something.’
The younger of the two men leaned down and peeled back a flap of the sail. I tried to stifle a cry as I reeled backwards into Filipe, the bile jumping into my throat. The body had evidently been in the sea for some time. I could only see its head and shoulders, but it appeared to be naked. The eyes were open but milk-white, the face grotesquely swollen and bloated. The skin was peeling away. Something had been nibbling at the lips and nose and they were half-eaten away, revealing sharp white teeth. Salt crusted the matted black hair, turning it grey even as I stared at it.
Gagging, I clapped my hands to my mouth, trying to stop myself vomiting. The two fishermen glanced at each other with undisguised contempt for my weak stomach. I stared up at the broken roof boards of the hut, and when I could finally trust myself to speak without retching, I shook my head.
‘That’s not Silvia. It looks nothing like her.’
Filipe laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘I know she’s swollen up in the water, but look at that amulet round her neck. It’s the eye of God. Silvia always wore –’
I did not look. ‘Thousands of women wear that amulet,’ I snapped.
‘But most wear a crucifix too, and that eye is much larger than –’
‘It isn’t her, I tell you. Some woman jilted by her lover probably. Hundreds of women a year drown themselves over men or unwanted brats or just from plain melancholy. Women are like that; they always have to make the dramatic gesture.’
‘’Cept this one didn’t drown herself,’ the old fisherman said quietly. ‘Not unless a corpse can rise and walk down to the sea. I reckon she was dead long before she ended up in the water. Look at those black marks about her neck. Plain as anything she’s been strangled, she has, had the life throttled out of her, then her body dumped in the sea.’
I couldn’t bring myself to look again at the body. I knew I’d be sick if I did. All three men were watching me intently. I could read the question written in their faces. But surely they couldn’t think that I would …
‘Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t hurt Silvia. I swear I never laid a finger on her. She’s alive. She’s found some other fool to take her in, but she’ll be back as soon as she becomes bored with him, you’ll see.’
Filipe shook his head sadly as if I was some dim-witted child. ‘Look at her, Álvaro, really look at her. It is Silvia. I’m … I’m not saying that you –’
‘No, no,’ I screamed at them. ‘That creature is not my Silvia. Don’t you think I’d recognize my own lover? It’s not her, I tell you. It’s some old witch, a monster. You don’t know Silvia like I do, a woman like that with so much life in her, so much passion, can’t just die. I’d know if she was dead. I’d know it!’
I turned and tried to push through the sacking, and only succeeded in tangling myself in it. In the end I
ripped it from the doorway and strode out.
As soon as I got outside I did vomit. Two women walking along the waterfront crossed themselves and rapidly retreated back the way they’d come, as though they feared to pass me in case I had the plague. I was shaking violently, but I forced myself upright and staggered back towards my lodgings, trying to obliterate that grotesque face from my head, but the image was seared on to my eyeballs.
It couldn’t be her. Why on earth would they even imagine it was? There were hundreds of dark-haired women in Belém, and who was to say she even came from this town? Why, she could have been thrown into the sea miles up the coast and drifted here, or even fallen from a ship. It wasn’t her. My Silvia was not dead.
It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t asked the fishermen what they were going to do with the body. Would they quietly dump it back in the water? They often did with corpses, safest way. No one wanted the trouble of reporting it, never mind losing a day’s work answering all those questions. And no man wanted his family threatened or worse if the murderer got to hear that he had reported a body. But if too many people already knew about the corpse, the fishermen would have no choice but to hand it over to the authorities.
Would Filipe swear on oath it was Silvia? If he did, I’d be the first person they would come looking for, and unless I could produce Silvia alive, there was no way I could prove my innocence. I had to leave my lodgings and leave now, today, before they came looking for me. It occurred to me then that Filipe had shown me the body to give me the opportunity to flee. If he was hoping for a reward for reporting the crime, then it would doubtless salve his conscience to give the man he was condemning to death a fighting chance to escape.
And I did have a chance, a damn good one. Dona Lúcia had promised to give me the money tomorrow. All I had to do was stay free for a night and a morning, then I could leave this town for good with a small fortune, enough to take me so far away from Belém they’d never find me.
I ran back to my lodgings and threw some clothes into a leather bag. Not all of them, of course. If Filipe did lead the authorities here, it must look as if I might return at any moment, and with luck they’d stay here to lie in wait for me.
Pio leapt for my shoulder, and I kissed him and stroked his tiny head, but I knew I couldn’t take him with me. You can’t sit in the dark corner of an inn or pass down a street with a monkey on your shoulder, without some child remembering.
I opened the shutter and placed him next to the window.
‘Go on, Pio, take yourself off.’
But he only turned his sad brown eyes on me and sat there squeaking plaintively. He was still sitting there, watching me, as I closed the door.
With the closing of the door, Álvaro vanished. Tomorrow Ricardo would charm the money from Dona Lúcia and then a third man, a stranger, would leave Belém for good. What he’d be called I didn’t yet know, but I had all night to work on that. As for Silvia, my poor little Silvia … no, no I couldn’t think about that now. I must keep my wits about me. All I had to do was stick to my plan; it was simple enough.
But the trouble with even the best-thought-out plans is that other people make them too.
Iceland Eydis
Tiercel – the male hawk, from the Latin ‘tertius’ meaning ‘a third’, for the male is a third smaller than the female.
I sensed the two men coming. Now I hear them scrambling down the rocks. There is another with them, someone both living and dead. I sense life and yet the life is not in this world.
I pull the veils over my sister’s face and my own. When people come to consult us we always keep ourselves veiled. They prefer it that way, not seeing our faces, as if they know their secrets will also be kept concealed. They are frightened of our naked gaze. We might see too far inside them. We might curse them with our stares. Our veils are their shields against us.
There is only one woman who has never feared us, Heidrun, an old, old friend. She told us she had watched over us whilst we were still in our mother’s womb, though my mother had never spoken of it to us. The first time I recall seeing Heidrun was the night that Valdis and I became seven years old. We’d been sleeping in the bed we shared and had woken in the dark to find Heidrun sitting in the room.
We had not been afraid. It seemed to us that we already knew her and had been expecting her to come. She had put her finger to her lips and held her hands out to us, pulling us from our bed and leading us out of the cottage right past where our parents lay sleeping. It never occurred to us to protest or ask her where we were going. We followed her as trustingly as if she were our own mother.
The year was drawing towards the end of summer, and though it must have been the middle of the night the sun hovered only just below the horizon, washing the sky behind the mountains with a shimmering pearly glow. It was neither dark nor light, but that strange owl light where rocks and people have no shadow and no substance, just an outline so thin and grey you think they might dissolve like smoke.
Heidrun strode over the short, springy turf and we scurried along behind her. I don’t know how long we walked, but we were neither cold nor tired, though we were climbing all the time. She led us between two towering rocks, black and sharp, that looked to us like crouching men, and we finally emerged in a valley which we had never entered before.
A turf-covered longhouse rose out of the valley floor. It would have been invisible had it not been for the lights blazing out from the open doorway. Heidrun reached the doorway and stood aside, smiling and motioning us to enter. Clinging tightly to each other, we edged inside. The longhouse was full of people, young and old, adults and children. A great fire blazed in the centre, musicians were playing, and the table was spread for a feast.
All eyes turned to us, and there was welcome written on every face. It seemed that they were all there to celebrate our birthday. A priest with a grave face but gentle voice gave his solemn blessing over the food and over us, for we had in that very hour become seven years old. Then we were whisked up to sit in a great chair that held the two of us side by side, and food was pressed into our hands – cakes sweetened with honey, fish so fresh and tender they must have been pulled from the lake no more than an hour before, and pungent pieces of shark that had been long buried in the earth till the flavour was as rich and strong as molten lava.
As we all ate, the musicians sang and soon the dancing began. People joined hands and danced in a circle around our chair of honour, their heels thumping on the earth floor. The wooden pillars of the hall vibrated to the pulse of that drum, which was covered with white bear skin and beaten with a long yellow bone. The rhythm of the dancers and drum was intoxicating, hot and heavy. The eyes of the dancers glazed over and their heads flopped forward or back, and still the drummer beat on and on, like the hammering of a mighty dragon’s heart.
The black ravens of the Lutherans had forbidden the circle dance, but it was still danced in those hidden valleys, even sometimes on the mountain tops to welcome the sun as our ancestors had done since the days when old gods ruled. Valdis and I had never seen the dance before, only heard it whispered about among the hired men and women who came to work on the farmstead. Our parents never talked of such dangerous things for they lived in constant fear of the Lutheran ravens.
The pulse of that drum must have soothed us, for stuffed with food and drunk with the music, we fell asleep in that great carved chair. Heidrun and others carried us back to our home, and slid us back into our bed as quietly as we had been taken from it. Our parents never knew we had gone. They would never have permitted us to go to such a place. But when we woke on that morning of our seventh birthday, our mother saw what she had long dreaded to see in our eyes, and that was the day she brought us to this cave.
The men are anxious, afraid. I wait for them, crouching in the shadows against the wall of the cave. It will be the first time anyone has come to our cave since Valdis died. The stench of her rotting corpse grows a little stronger each day. In the heat of the cave
it can hardly do otherwise. They say if you live with a smell night and day you cease to notice it. It is true that for a brief time it floats away from you, circling like an anxiety that you try not to dwell upon, but like your fear, it is always there, ready to force itself upon you again when you least expect it. But there are stronger stenches in the cave, so everyone tells me, the smell of bad eggs from the hot-water pool and a lifetime of our excrement accumulating in a dark corner. Maybe those smells will be strong enough to mask the odour of decay.
I do not want them to know she is dead, not yet. They will feel orphaned. Only one voice to guide them, can that ever be as certain as two? They trust two voices; the unity comforts them, assures them that our predictions will come to pass. And they will ask themselves what the death of one of the oracle sisters portends. They will believe it is a bad omen for them and for the land. And that much is true.
I need time to grieve before I can strengthen myself to help them deal with her passing. Her death means so much more to me than just an omen, a sign from the spirits. For that is all we are to them, that is all we have ever been since we were brought here – a sign, an oracle, a twin voice that speaks the same word.
The first of the men, a young, agile lad, lowers himself down through the slit and seems almost to be bounding down the rocks until he is nearly at the base. Still I cannot see him for the passage that leads to the entrance is hidden from the cave by a rocky outcrop. I hear him call up and a rope slithers and thumps down towards him. They are lowering a bundle down into the cave, but it is not dried meat or wood. I know the sounds of those. A second, heavier man climbs down with careful deliberation, as a man moves when his joints are stiffening with age.
The two of them come into view around the rock. Between them they carry a bier, fashioned from birch poles, covered with sheep skins hastily lashed together with leather thongs. The man who lies on it does not stir, not even when they lay the bier down in front of me.
The Falcons of Fire and Ice Page 8