The Falcons of Fire and Ice

by Karen Maitland

  Even now he was lying in the Inquisitor’s jail in Lisbon, deep in the earth. Were they hurting him? Torturing him? Did he have food in his belly tonight or clean water to slake his thirst? I felt suddenly guilty that I had complained about the tastelessness of the fish. My father and many like him would have been glad of just a fragment of what I’d forced down my ungrateful throat. I had the clean cold streams to drink; I had sweet fresh air to breathe, while they lay in dungeons so fetid that every breath they drew in choked them. And my mother, where was she, and what was she eating tonight?

  ‘Listen!’ Vítor whispered urgently. ‘There’s someone moving about out there. Scatter. Hide yourselves.’

  We scrambled behind rocks, and crouched low. I was thankful for the darkness that concealed us, but also cursing it for I could see nothing and was terrified I had put myself directly in the path of whoever was moving towards us.

  Someone called out softly and we held our breath, not daring to move. There was a muttered exchange in words I didn’t understand. It sounded as if there were two men close by.

  ‘Who are they, boy?’ Vítor whispered to Hinrik.

  ‘Icelanders. They say they are friends.’

  ‘We have no friends here,’ Vítor said.

  The same young voice called out again.

  ‘He says they’ve come to help. He says we must hurry! We must come now.’

  None of us moved or made a sound. I cautiously peered around the rock. Two men were standing beside the fire. I couldn’t see their faces.

  ‘Stay here,’ Vítor whispered fiercely. ‘Not you, boy, you’re coming with me.’ He grabbed Hinrik by the back of his jerkin and pulled him out from behind the rocks. They took a few paces towards the fire, Vítor’s fist clenched tightly around the hilt of his dagger.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded.

  The younger of the two knelt down and, as if to show he was no threat, warmed his hands over the glowing dung. The firelight lit up his smooth cheek and the red-gold of his hair. He spoke rapidly and quietly. Hinrik whispered back. Vítor shook his shoulder to remind him to translate.

  ‘He says his name is Ari. The man is Fannar. He has a farm two valleys from here.’

  ‘What do they want with me?’ Vítor demanded.

  ‘He asks if we have a girl with us and two other men.’

  Hinrik seemed to be on the verge of answering this question himself, but Vítor jerked him backwards.

  ‘Tell him no. Say there are just two of us.’

  Ari frowned, looking round at the rocks as if he could see me hiding. The older man, Fannar, bent his head close to the lad and they muttered together.

  Ari turned back to Hinrik, gesticulating as he spoke.

  ‘He says Danes on horseback are tracking three men and a girl who attacked their sons. When they catch them they will tie them to the horses and run them back. It is what they always do. Most die before …’ Hinrik was plainly so terrified he could not bring himself to translate what would happen to us, if we survived long enough to reach a town.

  ‘Tell them if I see these people, I’ll warn them.’ Vítor was still giving nothing away.

  Ari sighed, plainly exasperated by the game, and spoke again to Hinrik.

  ‘Ari says if he can find you, the Danes can too. They are fools, but not dead fools. They can see the glow of a fire in the dark and smell smoke and fish cooking. They know only an outlaw would be camping out at this season. If we want his help, Fannar will give it.’

  ‘And why would this Fannar risk his own life to help strangers?’ Vítor asked.

  ‘Fannar hates the Danes and they say …’ Hinrik hesitated, exchanging glances with the older man, ‘He has heard the girl is of the old faith.’

  ‘And he is of the old faith, the Catholic faith?’ Vítor said carefully.

  Marcos suddenly stepped into the circle of firelight. ‘What are you playing at, Vítor? The three of us can’t fight off armed men on horseback. These men are offering to help us.’

  Vítor tried to say something, but Marcos took a step forward, pushing him aside and addressing himself to Hinrik. ‘Tell them we’re the ones the Danes are hunting, but we didn’t attack them, they were trying to rape the girl.’

  I rose from my hiding place and edged forward a few paces. ‘It’s true. They were only trying to help me.’

  When Hinrik translated the older man nodded and grunted, as if he had guessed as much, then spoke to Hinrik, gesturing to him with an impatient wave of his hand to tell us.

  ‘Fannar says those boys are evil. But what can you expect with such fathers? But it is not safe here. He says he will hide us until the Danes have moved on. But we must come now. We –’

  Fannar grabbed Hinrik and clapped a broad, meaty hand across the lad’s mouth. The boy struggled until Fannar whispered something, then he stood rigidly still. Ari motioned us to be silent. We all stood still, listening.

  ‘Hestur!’ Ari whispered.

  Just at that moment I heard it too, drifting up from the bottom of the ravine, the unmistakable ring of horses’ shoes striking stones and the creaking of leather. Before any of us could move, Ari had tipped the contents of the pot over the fire, extinguishing the flames with a hiss of fishy steam.

  I felt my hand grabbed by someone in the darkness. For a moment, frightened it might be Fausto or Vítor, I resisted, but then realized it was Ari. He was pulling me between the rocks, as if he could see exactly where we were going. I was running blind, stumbling and slipping. I didn’t know if the others were following or not. All I could do was cling to Ari’s hand and trust him. The ravine was filled with the sound of hooves, shouts and yells as the riders urged their mounts up the steep track. But we did not stop to look back. We ran for our lives into the darkness.

  Ricardo

  Haute volerie – ‘the great flight’, when the quarry bird such as a kite, raven, crane or heron climbs high into the air and the falcon tries to fly above it to stoop down on it, resulting in a great aerial battle of life and death.

  The world was suddenly plunged into darkness as Ari extinguished the fire. I couldn’t even work out which was up or down, but when I heard the horses’ hooves clattering over the stones, I wasn’t going to stop to find out. It sounded as if there was a whole army down there. I turned and fled in the opposite direction to the shouts below. Stones were kicked down as someone scrambled up the rocks ahead of me. It’s not often a fellow has reason to be grateful for dirt being kicked in his face, but at least it meant I could follow the trail. I just hoped they didn’t dislodge anything bigger.

  A broad, heavy hand suddenly clamped down on my arm and hauled me into the shelter of some overhanging rocks, nearly dashing my brains out on the stone. I yelped, but another hand shot over my mouth to silence me. We huddled together, crouching in the darkness, listening to the sounds of one another’s rasping breath and the roar of the river as it galloped down the hillside. We were all straining to hear if the Danes were following us. We could hear them blundering about below us, but their voices did not seem to be getting closer.

  Fannar whispered to Hinrik who in turn relayed the message to us. ‘He says he will go ahead to guide us. We must follow one after another, but keep close. Hold on to the person in front until he says it is safe to let go. If we fall off the track, we will fall a very long way down. Come.’

  ‘No, wait. I think someone is missing,’ Isabela whispered urgently.

  In the darkness it was impossible to see who anyone was, but we each whispered our names and realized that it was Vítor who was not with us.

  The Icelander muttered something that I’m sure was a curse or two.

  ‘You don’t think Vítor would tell the Danes …’ Isabela began, but trailed off.

  Fannar whispered to Hinrik in a gruff voice.

  ‘He says he will go back to look for Vítor. Ari will guide us to the farm.’

  Before any of us could stop him, Fannar was gone, sliding back into the darkness.

&n
bsp; There was a pause, then we heard voices.

  ‘That’s Fannar talking! Have they caught him?’ Isabela asked.

  I could hear the fear in her voice. I reached out and took her hand. It was as cold as marble. I chafed it gently to warm her, but she jerked it away as if I’d burned her.

  Hinrik had crept a little way out of the overhang to listen. He came scuttling back on all fours, as silently as a spider. ‘He tells them the fire they saw was his fire. He was searching for lost sheep and got hungry so he cooked himself some supper.’

  ‘Do they believe him?’ I whispered.

  ‘If they do, they’ll ride on and Fannar can look for Vítor, if not …’ He did not need to finish the sentence.

  With Ari leading we trailed up the mountain track. I was holding on to Isabela as we stumbled through the dark, edging round great lumps of rock on one side of the gut-churningly narrow path, with nothing but a yawning black abyss on the other. As we climbed the wind grew stronger, buffeting us as if it was trying to push us off the track. I pressed my free hand against every boulder I could feel on the side of the path, in the desperate but vain hope that I would be able to grab hold of something solid if I slipped.

  Occasionally one of us would kick a stone and we’d hear it fall away in the darkness, rattling and bouncing down the steep hillside in a drop that seemed to go right down into hell itself. I asked myself a dozen times how on earth I had come to be wandering blindly along a path in the pitch dark, following a mountain goat of a boy I’d never met in my life before, when every step I took could see me plunging down to certain death. Was Ari even human? Maybe he was a demon or one of those trolls Hinrik talked about. How would I know? All I did know was that I had to be as mad as a mooncalf to be putting my life in his hands.

  And yet, as I felt the warmth of Isabela’s back, the flexing of her muscles beneath the cloth, smelt that strange, sweet perfume of her hair, I found myself willing to be led anywhere.

  Finally, to my immense relief, I felt the track beginning to descend, but I quickly discovered a new hazard, for it seemed to be far easier to slip walking down. In front of me Isabela was limping badly. If my knees were protesting at the slope, her weakened leg must have been giving her agony, but she didn’t so much as let out a squeak of pain or ask to rest. That girl had more spirit than a vat of brandy.

  But soon we found ourselves walking on a flatter, smoother track. Every now and then the moon would peer round the curtains of cloud at us, like some inquisitive old lady determined to see who was passing along her street. Its silver light appeared just long enough to reveal that we were in a high valley, with the sharp ridges of mountains on either side, before darkness closed in again.

  God alone knows how far we walked. Now that we were no longer in single file, Isabela was walking at my side. Several times she stumbled, and in the end I put my arm around her to help her along, and though she resisted at first, eventually, limping and exhausted, she leaned into me. If she hadn’t been with us I’d have collapsed in the grass and refused to take another step, but I had to keep going for her sake. I could hardly let her think I was weaker than a woman. Besides, that little mountain goat, Ari, was still bounding along as if he’d just been taking a summer’s evening stroll around town. He might not have looked like a troll, but he certainly wasn’t human. No normal man could ever have that much energy. There are times when a fellow could really loathe the young.

  Fannar and Vítor arrived at the farmstead not long after we did. Fannar’s wife, Unnur, had just served us with some kind of broth that tasted of nothing but smoke, when they stumbled in. Fannar was in high spirits. Apparently he had managed to convince the Danes that he was alone, and they had finally ridden off. Vítor who, so he claimed, had lost his bearings in the dark, had hidden nearby, emerging only when he heard the Danes ride away.

  Fannar’s wife, a dumpy little woman, looked thoroughly alarmed when the story was recounted, clearly not believing even the Danes could be so foolish as to think a farmer would go looking for sheep at night without dog or lantern, but Fannar thought it was a huge joke.

  ‘Fannar says Unnur worries too much,’ Hinrik told us. ‘The Danes think Icelanders are so stupid that they believe nothing is too crazy for us to do. He could have told them he was fishing for whales in the stream, and they would have asked him how many he had caught.’

  Hinrik and Fannar clearly thought this was hilarious, as did Fannar’s two daughters, Margrét and Lilja, but his wife bit her lip and went to the cooking pot to ladle out more broth, the frown deepening on her face.

  I must have fallen asleep where I sat out of sheer exhaustion, for when I finally managed to prise my eyes open it was morning and the hall was almost deserted save for Unnur and Hinrik. Unnur seemed to have been waiting patiently for me to wake, for as soon as I stirred she thrust a bundle of unsavoury-looking rags at me. I prodded the cloth dubiously.

  ‘What is this for?’ I asked, pronouncing the words slowly and loudly. ‘Cleaning?’

  I mimed polishing one of the wooden bowls, though nothing in the house looked as if it had ever been cleaned. Everything from the floor to the rafters, including Fannar’s wife, seemed to have been smoked to the same shade of grey-brown.

  ‘Unnur wants you to put them on,’ Hinrik explained. ‘If you are seen in your clothes, everyone will know at once you are a foreigner.’

  Unnur said something, and Hinrik sniggered. ‘She says you look like an erupting volcano, with your white, black and red.’

  That was some cheek coming from a woman who was dressed like a bog.

  ‘She asks how you can work with all that padding in your jacket and breeches.’

  ‘And can you give me one good reason why I should want to work?’ I said.

  Hinrik translated this for Unnur and she stared at me in disbelief, as if I had asked her why I needed to breathe.

  I sighed. I could tell it was pointless trying to explain that the voluminous slashed and padded clothes were intended as a proclamation to all the world that the wearer had no need to soil his hands with manual labour. But when I looked down at my doublet, even I was forced to concede that my clothes weren’t exactly shouting ‘man of substance’ any more. Several nights of sleeping rough, the fight with the Danes and then blundering across the hills and valleys in the dark to evade the horsemen, had covered my breeches, hose and doublet in thick, greenish mud. The fabric had been ripped in nearly a dozen places, so that half the padding was falling out, and most of the trimming and a part of one sleeve had been torn away. I hadn’t seen a mirror since I had left Portugal, and for once I was glad to be spared the sight of the ruin I had undoubtedly become.

  Seeing that Unnur was consumed with curiosity about what garments I wore underneath my clothes – at least I hoped that was why she was watching me with a fascinated expression – I removed my outer clothes and pulled on the plain brown breeches and shirt she offered. They stank as if they’d been stuffed up a chimney for years, and the cloth was so rough that within minutes I was scratching and chafing, though it didn’t take me long to realize that it wasn’t just the coarseness of the cloth that was making me itch.

  ‘Unnur says you can go outside,’ Hinrik said. ‘But do not go far from the house, and if we hear the dogs barking, we must run inside and hide. She will show us where.’

  Unnur led Hinrik and me out of the hall into a passageway so narrow that we could only walk down it in single file. She opened another low door.

  ‘This is the store chamber. If anyone approaches the farm we must hide in this place until one of them comes to tell us it is safe to come out,’ Hinrik told me.

  The only light in the room filtered in through the open door from the passage. A few barrels, a loom and several small chests stood in the centre away from the damp earth walls. The cold air rolled up from the muddy floor. I shivered. I hoped none of Fannar’s neighbours would decide to come calling for dinner. I didn’t fancy spending even a few minutes in there, never mind seve
ral hours.

  ‘Does she think the Danes will come here?’ I asked Hinrik.

  ‘She says if they suspect Fannar was not telling the truth, they will. She does not think they are as easy to fool as her husband believes.’ Hinrik darted an anxious glance up at me. ‘I think she is right.’

  I had no sooner ducked out of the low doorway into the blessed fresh air than Vítor grabbed my arm without so much as a by-your-leave. ‘I need to talk to you. Come with me.’

  He strode around the side of the turf building, where we couldn’t be overheard, dragging me with him. I was sorely tempted to shove him off and walk away, but curiosity got the better of me.

  ‘Isabela,’ he announced, ‘is still alive.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she be?’ I asked him, startled by the oddness of the statement. Then I looked round in alarm. ‘Has something happened to her?’

  ‘No, but that, my friend, is precisely my point. We both know something should have happened to her by now, but it hasn’t, has it?’

  I shook off the grip he still had on my arm. ‘Vítor, I thought you were a tedious little turd the first moment I clapped eyes on you, but now I’m convinced you are not merely tedious, you have the brains of a senile goat. I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about, and I rather fear, my friend, that you haven’t either.’

  ‘Then let me make it plain for you. The girl you were sent here to kill still lives.’

  Suddenly the breath seemed to have been sucked out of my lungs.

  ‘Kill … I … I beg your pardon,’ I stammered, trying to regain control. ‘Do I look like a murderer?’

  ‘No,’ Vítor said, with chilling calmness. ‘You don’t look like a murderer, which is exactly why you were chosen, but you are a murderer, aren’t you? Silvia. I believe that was her name.’