The Falcons of Fire and Ice

by Karen Maitland

  Ari is retching now, sweating with shock and fear. He is praying desperately that one man at least has survived, just one. But then he sees him, Fannar. His head has been torn from his shoulders, and lies, eyes still open, between his legs. He still grasps his axe in his hand, but the blade bears no blood. How could it? What chance did he have, what chance did any of them have against that monster?

  Ari flees from the stench of blood. He hurtles back down the darkened passageway, desperate to get out of the house of death, as if somehow he will find life waiting outside.

  I see him emerge from the broken doorway. I move towards him, wanting to comfort him, but I see the terror spreading across his face. My arms are spread wide, but he backs away from me, pleading, sobbing. I taste my cold, fetid breath. I feel the grave mould creeping across my face, eating into the skin. My lips curl into a snarl and I feel the strength pounding through my hands like rivers of fire. I know I am going to crush him as I crushed Unnur. I know I am going to rip his limbs from his body as I twisted Fannar’s head from his shoulders. I know I am the draugr and I will destroy them all!

  It takes all my strength to tear my gaze from the dark mirror and send the wooden hollow clattering to the cave floor. As my mind returns to the cave, dark laughter rolls around its walls. I look down. Valdis’s mouth is open wide, her head thrown back.

  ‘What did you see that frightened you so, my sweet sister? Could you see me, Eydis, Eydis? I think you did. You are growing fond of me, I knew you would. Let me in. You can’t close your mind to me for ever. It weakens you to try. Sooner or later I will creep in. I will slip between your sleeping and your waking. I will slide into your dreams. You will grow weary and careless, you know you will. It is only a matter of time, my sweet Eydis, and I can wait, oh yes, the dead are well schooled in the art of waiting.’

  I try to close out the words. I have to take more care. I am sickened by what I have seen in the black mirror. I knew that the draugr would use us if I could not drive him back into his own body, but to see the shadow of it, taste the foulness of the grave in my mouth, see death in my hands – that goes beyond knowledge, it enters the very soul. And it will happen exactly as I have seen it, if I cannot find a way to stop him.

  And Fannar and his family will only be the beginning of the destruction he will wreak across the land. In his hatred and jealousy of the living he will kill as surely as a cloud of poison gas. With each slaughter he will grow in strength. With each drop of blood he spills, his craving for murder will increase. And no one, not even the man who raised him, will have the power or strength to stop him then.

  I did not mean to see Fannar’s fate. Heidrun is right, I have allowed my powers to wither. Having to fight, both sleeping and waking, to close my mind to the draugr takes all that strength I possess. When my spirit is inside the black mirror I am vulnerable. I cannot defend myself against him. I know that now. I dare not risk using it again when I am alone with him.

  But the girl is in danger. If she does not reach the cave, if she cannot bring the dead here, then all is lost. I have to try to protect her, to make her turn back to me.

  The cave is growing warmer. The heat makes me drowsy, but I must not surrender to sleep, not yet. I push myself to my feet and cross to my stores, moving aside jars and bundles until I find what I seek – fern seed to make the girl invisible to evil spirits; dried blood-red rowan berries to summon the spirits of the dead to battle. I take a few flakes of precious salt and mix it with the water from the hot bubbling pool, stirring it three times with my little finger as the sun turns. I reach for my horn lucet which hangs from my waist and dip the cord which dangles from it three times into the salt water. Then I loop and knot, loop and knot, fastening the rowan berries and fern seed deep inside the heart of the cord.

  ‘The black thread of death to call the spirits from their graves. The green thread of spring to give them hope. The red thread of blood to lend them our strength. As we turn the cord towards the sun, so we turn the eyes of dead towards the living. Rowan, protect her. Fern, defend her. Salt, bind her to us!’

  Valdis’s head twists up to gaze at me from eyes that are all black. ‘You could plait a cord as long as the ocean is deep and you won’t reach her, my sweet sister. What feeble charms and powers you think you possess cannot reach beyond the walls of the cave. That is why they chained you up in here. That is why they bound you in iron to make you powerless and stop you reaching out to them. You can no more protect the girl than you can bring her here. You are weak, Eydis, Eydis. Accept it, accept me. Let me join myself to you and I will give you power to take vengeance for what they have done to you. I will give you the strength to destroy them all!’

  Chapter Ten

  The lord of Sassay was granted the right to hunt throughout the diocese of Evreux with a pair of male and female goshawks together with six spaniels and two greyhounds. He was permitted to carry his goshawks into the church of Our Lady of Evreux and could set them to perch on the main altar at whichever position was most convenient to him. So that his day’s hunting was not interrupted, he could order Mass to be said at any time that pleased him and the curé of Ézy could say the Mass at that church whilst wearing his hunting boots and spurs and with a drum beating instead of music.

  The lords of Chastelas were granted the privilege of taking their place among the canons of the church of Auxerre carrying their sparrowhawks on their fists, wearing their swords as well as their surplices, carrying the amice (priestly stole) on their arms and sporting a hat covered in feathers. And the treasurer of this church could assist at Mass while carrying a sparrowhawk on his fist, a right he demanded because the treasurer of the church at Nevers had also been accorded this prerogative. For the hunting bird was deemed to be a bird of noble blood and therefore could no more be denied its place at the high altar in the church than could a lord or a king.

  Isabela

  Truss – when a falcon seizes the quarry in the air and flies off with it.

  I was just beginning to think that Hinrik had been imagining the farmstead, when we crested a low hill and the horses ambled to a halt. Hinrik swivelled around on his horse’s back and pointed ahead of him. I could see nothing except some turf-covered hillocks, but then I noticed that a thin plume of lavender smoke was meandering from the top of one of them. As we drew closer, a wooden door became visible in the side of the hillock. Great boulders formed the base of the walls of the strange house, but higher up they seemed to be fashioned from nothing more solid than sods of earth pressed between thin strips of turf. Hinrik, sliding effortlessly from his horse, marched up and hammered with his fist on the great wooden door. The boom echoed back at us from out of the hillside.

  The horses moved restlessly as we waited. Vítor was grasping the hilt of the dagger in his belt, though he had not drawn it from its sheath. From the stance of the others and the tension on their faces, I guessed their fingers had also strayed close to their knives. The wind cut through my wet clothes and I had to clench my teeth to stop them chattering.

  Eventually the door was flung open and a man ducked out, closely followed by a small woman with a half-naked toddler balanced on her hip and a runny-nosed boy of about four or five clinging to her skirts. Hinrik spoke rapidly to the man whose gaze flicked over each of us in turn as he listened to the boy in silence.

  Finally he took a step towards us. ‘Gerðu svo vel!’ The expression on his face was grim.

  Vítor and Fausto glanced uncertainly at each other, their hands still on the hilts of their daggers. I tried to smile at the woman, but she merely stared sullenly at us, her shoulders hunched, wary. Her free hand crept down and grasped the shoulder of the little boy who peered around her legs, as if she was frightened we would snatch him away from her.

  ‘He says to enter,’ Hinrik said.

  The man’s expression was hardly inviting, but Hinrik stepped confidently through the door, and rather more cautiously we followed. We squeezed through a small, narrow passageway until we e
merged in a long room smelling of acrid smoke and damp. This hall must have occupied the whole length of the mound we’d seen from the outside. Wooden panelled berths were ranged down either side and heaped with patched wool blankets and old fox-fur skins which had lost most of their hair and stank. The roof was held up by several stout wooden posts placed at intervals down the length of the hall, and tiny cracks of light filtered down between the sods which covered the roof.

  I couldn’t believe the blackened walls were just made of sods and touched one to find out. It really was earth, and wet earth too, blackened with mildew. The floor was covered with ashes from the fire as well as numerous fish and animal bones which had been stamped down into it to make a hard surface. A long fire pit had been cut into the middle of the floor, on which a couple of cooking pots bubbled. The smoke wandered out through a vent in the cobwebbed roof ridge, which was also the only source of daylight. A few stone lamps were fixed to the wooden posts, and from the dim mustard light and stench of stinging smoke coming from them I guessed they were burning fish oil.

  The farmer motioned us to sit with a grunt and a jerk of his head, but we could see no chairs.

  ‘You sit there on the beds.’ Hinrik gestured towards the berths. ‘No!’ he yelped as I attempted to do so.

  ‘Men sit this side, on the port side, women must sit on the starboard of the badstofa … the great hall.’

  I crossed to the other side and hesitantly sat down. The mattress crunched beneath me, releasing a smell of mouldy hay and dried seaweed. Opposite me on the men’s side, a wizened old man was hunched in the corner of the bed, a heap of patched and tattered woollen blankets pulled up to his chin, saliva dribbling continuously from his mouth on to the corner of the blanket. His red-rimmed eyes peeped fearfully over the top of the bedclothes, and his hands shook as he pulled the edges even higher up over his face.

  We all stared awkwardly at one another in a silence that no one seemed to know how to break. The woman brought us beakers of watered-down milk, which Hinrik informed us was called bland, at least that’s what I thought he said. Even across the dimly lit hall I could see the expressions of distaste on the faces of Marcos and Fausto, though if Vítor also hated it, he was disguising it well.

  The fishy steam from the pots, the smell of damp wool, musty earth and the smoke from the dried cow’s dung burning on the fire, created such a fug that I could hardly breathe. I almost longed to be back out in the cold air again. I was desperate to change out of my filthy, wet clothes, the skirts of which were beginning to steam at the bottom from the heat of the fire, though none of the Icelanders took any notice of my state. But there didn’t seem anywhere private I could strip off and I couldn’t bring myself to ask Hinrik.

  The woman ladled the contents of one of the bubbling cooking pots into wooden bowls fashioned from staves and hoops, with hinged lids. These eating bowls were nearly as heavy as my mother’s cooking pots. We ate still sitting on the beds, grateful for the food to give us something to do other than stare at one another. I discovered I was ravenously hungry, but the food was almost as tasteless as the watered milk: dried cod, softened only a little by boiling in water, and flavoured with a sour white butter. I saw the woman watching me anxiously as I ate and I immediately felt guilty. I beamed at her, trying to look as if I was relishing every mouthful.

  The meal seemed to be the signal to talk, at least for the men, with Hinrik translating. The farmer asked nothing about what had brought us to Iceland, but he wanted to know about life in Portugal, how many horses we had, how many cattle, what crops we grew. He seemed baffled when the men told him they lived in towns and had no need to farm.

  All the time they were talking, I was barely listening. There was one thing I was desperate to learn, but I dared not ask directly for fear of arousing suspicion. Try as I might, I couldn’t think how to work the conversation round, so in the end I just blurted out the only thing that came to mind.

  ‘Hinrik, I’ve heard that the wild animals on this island are white as snow, because it is so cold. Is that true?’

  The Icelanders stared open-mouthed at me as if amazed that I was addressing them. Hinrik thought for a moment, frowning, then answered without bothering to translate the question for the farmer.

  ‘Dogs … no, like dogs … foxes! They are white in winter. And great white bears, sometimes they come from Greenland on the ice. They must be hunted. White bears kill even a strong man with one blow.’

  ‘And birds, white birds, do they come here?’

  Hinrik laughed. ‘Ptarmigan? Not down here, but up in the mountains there are more than there are gulls at the shore. Good eating, if you can catch them.’

  ‘I heard stories of a falcon, a white falcon. Is it true, does such a bird exist here?’

  The boy shifted uneasily, then muttered something to the farmer. A long discussion followed and I could barely contain my impatience.

  ‘What’s he saying, Hinrik?’

  ‘He says where there are ptarmigan on the ground to eat there will always be white falcons in the sky above. They follow them. They are sisters. Strange sisters, for ptarmigan are worth nothing, but the falcons are worth sacks of gold. He says the Danes would sell their own wives and children for them. Two hundred white falcons they took last year. The hunters have to pay much money to the Danes for permission to capture the birds … He says how can a wild bird belong to any man? The falcons belong only to the sky. It is as crazy as a man saying he owns the fire in the mountains or the rain that falls.’

  The farmer spoke again and whatever he said made Hinrik laugh. He turned to Marcos, Vítor and Fausto sitting beside him on the bed.

  ‘He says he hopes you have not come here to steal a white falcon. Last year, there was a boy from Bolungarvík. The Danes caught him with a sack. He swore inside was a white ptarmigan. But they opened the sack and pulled out a white falcon. The boy said he must have grabbed the wrong bird when the falcon attacked the ptarmigan. But they did not believe him. So …’

  Hinrik put his hands round his throat in the manner of a noose. Lolling his tongue out and crossing his eyes, he made a gurgling sound which caused the farmer’s little son to giggle so much he almost tumbled off the bed.

  My three companions laughingly assured him they would attempt no such crime, but Vítor’s smile faded rapidly and he stared at me, frowning as if he somehow knew why I had raised the question.

  ‘I was just asking,’ I said hastily, ‘because I’d love to see one of these birds flying. I’ve heard they are beautiful. Are there any nests in these parts?’

  ‘Not here, they nest in the north. When it is summer the hunters climb the rocks to take the chicks. Many men die. You know where a white falcon nests on a mountain, for the bones of the hunters lie at the bottom.’

  The conversation drifted away to hunting. The woman fetched a leather bottle and poured a measure of thick liquid into beakers for each of the men. Whatever it was, they seemed to relish it much more than the bland and soon their eyes began to shine in the firelight and laughter came easily and grew louder, as they reclined and drank deeply whenever the woman refilled their beakers – all, that is, except Vítor, who had taken one sip and no more.

  The more the farmer drank, the wilder his tales of his hunting prowess became. Through Hinrik, he regaled the men with stories about the wild horses he had captured, of the white bears he had fought and the foxes he had killed for their valuable pelts. He even told us that once, when he was a boy, he and his friends were tracking a huge fox which tried to escape them by crossing a great river of ice. This frozen river was criss-crossed by crevasses and ravines that were so deep and slippery that if a man tumbled into one he would never be able to clamber out again and would die of starvation, if he didn’t freeze first. His friends were too scared to venture on to the ice for they all knew of men who had fallen to their deaths down those treacherous crevasses, but the farmer was determined to get that fox, so he fearlessly went on alone to capture the beast and liv
ed to tell the tale. He thumped his chest with pride as he recounted this story. He sounded just like the nobles at Sintra when they returned from their hunting, always full of impossible tales of courage and daring. I listened only because I was desperately hoping that when he’d drunk enough the farmer might speak again of the white falcons, but he didn’t.

  I could not afford to wait till summer to take an eyas from its nest like the hunters, though I knew that would be the easiest way to capture a bird and give me the best chance of bringing it back alive. It would be too late to save my father by then. I would have to try to trap a pair of adult birds as they searched for their prey. Follow the ptarmigan, like the falcons. But where would I find the ptarmigan? And how would I recognize them? I’d never seen one before – was it as small as a swallow or as large as a duck? But I dared not ask more. I had already shown too much interest.

  I rose as cautiously as I could and slipped across to the passage. Vítor’s head jerked up.

  ‘I need to relieve myself,’ I muttered.

  I felt my way down the damp, narrow passage. It took all my strength to heave the great wooden door open, but outside all was quiet. Not a spark of light showed anywhere in the cold, clinging blackness. If I took more than few steps from the house, I would never find it again. I edged along the rough stones of the wall, hoping that my eyes would accustom themselves to the darkness. If I could take one of the horses, while the men were all occupied inside, then I could put as much distance as I could between myself and them, before anyone realized I was gone. The horse would surely be able to find the track even if I couldn’t. I had no idea where our packs had been stored, but if I couldn’t find them I would have to go without them. This might be the only chance I got.

  The wall seemed to go on for ever, but eventually I came to the end and I stared out into the darkness, listening for the crunch of horses’ hooves as they shifted in the coarse grass, straining to hear the snorting and whining they make when they smell a human approaching, but I could hear nothing except the wind stirring the dried stalks and the sharp, insistent cry of some bird or animal I didn’t recognize.