The Falcons of Fire and Ice

by Karen Maitland

  I wanted to leap up at once and try it out, but I knew I had to restrain myself until the others were sleeping. I didn’t want Vítor following me again. I sat upright, pressing my back against a sharp point on the cave wall to keep myself from drifting back into sleep in the warmth. I told myself I had to stay awake so that I could try once more to escape the cave, but deep down I knew that wasn’t the only reason. I was too scared to sleep in case my nightmares dragged me back into that forest where the men with swords and cudgels lay waiting for me in the darkness among the trees.

  But in spite of all my efforts to stay awake, in that heat sleep was impossible to fight and I found myself beginning to surrender to it. My head cracked against the rock, as it lolled sideways, and I sat up sharply, rubbing the bruise. As I looked up, I suddenly saw Hinrik standing in the shadows on the opposite side of the cave. I scrambled up, overjoyed and immensely relieved to see that he was safe.

  ‘Hinrik, you got away! How …’

  He took a step forward, holding something out in his hand. His face, his chest and arms were bruised and bloody, but only as he moved did I see the heavy rope noose dangling from his neck.

  He opened his palm. A small white pebble lay in his hand. ‘The stone,’ he said. ‘I thought it was for the witch, but it was for you.’

  ‘Hinrik, you’re hurt. What have they done to you?’

  ‘Did you say Hinrik?’ Marcos whispered behind me. ‘Is the lad here?’ He moved closer, staring about him. ‘Where is he?’

  I know that at twilight your eyes can be tricked into thinking dead trees are old men, or someone is seated in an empty chair. And I was sure that if I looked again I would see now that what I had taken to be Hinrik was just a rock, and what I heard was just the echo of a voice from a dream. But when I turned to look, Hinrik was still standing watching me, and my eyes couldn’t turn him into shadow again. Despite the heat of the cave, a cold wave of fear drenched me. I suddenly knew he had not escaped and now he never would.

  I swallowed hard, trying to keep the fear from my voice. ‘I … I woke up and thought I saw the boy, but …’

  Marcos yawned. ‘It’s this place, the damnable heat. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy. But I don’t think there’s much chance of seeing that poor lad again. I was going to try to cut him loose back there at the farmstead, but there wasn’t a hope of rescuing him, not when the fire started. Once those flames got going, if I’d tried to get anywhere near him I’d have been seen as clearly as if I was strolling around in summer sunshine.’

  He half-lifted his hand and I thought he was going to pat my shoulder, but something must have stopped him for he let his hand drop. ‘Don’t worry. The boy comes from here. He’ll know how to handle the Danes. They’re bound to let him go in the end, but when they do I don’t think he’ll be in much of a hurry to find us again. He’ll already be back with his own family by now, telling them all about his adventures and convincing his sisters they made him captain before he left.’

  Marcos smiled at me as if he thought he’d reassured me. ‘I should lie down, Isabela, and try to sleep again. God knows, there nothing else to do here.’

  So saying, he wandered back to his sleeping place and curled up again on the ground, obviously intending to take his own advice.

  I turned back, praying I would see nothing except the wall of the cave, but Hinrik was still there, the noose hanging from him. I ached to tear it away, to free him from it, but I knew I couldn’t. No one could take it from him now.

  I sensed a movement on the other side of the cave. Eydis was awake, and her veiled head was turned as if she was gazing straight at the spot where Hinrik stood. I was certain she could see him too. She held her hand towards him, palm up, as if she was welcoming a guest. In a way that gave me courage. At least I knew I wasn’t melting into madness. Hinrik turned towards her and it almost appeared as if they were speaking to each other, whispering, yet I couldn’t hear their voices. It was like when I had heard the gyrfalcons calling, hearing them, yet knowing that there was no cry to hear.

  Hinrik’s bloodied face turned back to me and his dark, hollow eyes met mine. I was so afraid, yet how could I be scared of someone I felt so much pity for?

  ‘Why … why have you come?’ I whispered.

  ‘You call the dead.’

  I stared at him, unable to believe what I heard, but before I could even try to make sense of the words I was thrown off my feet, and fell sprawling on to the rocks. The floor of the cave was trembling violently. Lilja and Margrét were shrieking in fear. It was as if some beast was roaring deep beneath us in the earth. The shaking only lasted moments, but stones and rocks continued to crash down in the passage even after it had stopped. We all fled towards the pool in terror that we were going to be crushed, but at that moment there was a great hiss and a jet of stinking gas erupted from the centre of the pool. Unnur dragged her daughters into the furthest corner of the cave away from the bubbling water. Only the unconscious man remained unmoved. Not even the shaking of the rocks had been able to rouse him. The rest of us gazed fearfully at the ledge on which Marcos and Vítor had stood, just two days before. Now it was invisible behind a dense cloud of hot white steam.

  When finally there was silence, Vítor and Ari ran to the passage. We all gazed about us. A deep crack had appeared, running across part of the wall of the cave, which I was sure had not been there before. Small fragments of rock still trembled on the floor where they had fallen from the roof. It was a miracle none of us had been hit. We were all holding our breath, terrified of what Vítor and Ari might discover in the passage. But they returned a few minutes later, breathing hard but looking immensely relieved.

  ‘Some rocks have been dislodged,’ Vítor said, ‘but the entrance is still open and we can still climb up to it, though it will be more difficult now.’

  Eydis pulled her twin upright, gripping her around her bare shoulders as she moved towards the pool. She held her hand over it for a moment as if she was commanding the waters. Then she backed away. She murmured something to Fannar and his family, pointing to the steam over the pool. Fannar looked troubled and his wife clutched her two children to her as if she was trying to defend them from Eydis’s words.

  Fannar marched over and seized the chains that tethered Eydis and her sister to the wall of the cave. He tugged on the ring embedded in the wall, as if he was trying to prise it loose. But Eydis stepped swiftly towards him and pushed him away from the ring. It sounded as if they were arguing, and Valdis had joined in too, her head swivelling round as Eydis supported the weight of her body in the crook of her arm.

  Eventually Fannar gave up and, with a shake of his head, he stomped away, still muttering angrily. Pausing only to growl at Ari, gesturing back at the sisters and then at us, he marched into the passage and minutes later we heard him scrambling up the rocks towards the entrance. Unnur bit her lip, staring anxiously in the direction of the sound. She looked despairingly at Ari, then, much like my mother, like all mothers probably, when there’s nothing else they can do, she sighed and started to rummage among the stores looking for food to prepare.

  ‘Help me,’ a voice said at my side. ‘You must help us.’

  I felt a sudden chill beside my arm. I did not turn to look. I knew Hinrik was standing behind me.

  ‘I can’t help you …’ I whispered. ‘I can’t undo what’s been done to you. Please … leave me alone.’

  Ricardo

  Crab – a fight between hawks. If a falcon is irritable or trying to attack another falcon it is said to be crabby.

  I was sodden with sweat in the steamy heat and I was sure I looked as flushed as if I’d swallowed half a bottle of brandy, though I hadn’t, more’s the pity, but Vítor’s face thrust arrogantly into mine was paler than ever. He’d finally managed to trap me in a corner. I’d been trying to avoid the little turd ever since we arrived, and believe me, that takes some ingenuity when you’re trapped in a cave, but this insufferable heat was making me careless. I’d
dropped my guard and he’d blocked my way so that I’d no choice but to listen to him. I knew what was coming. He’d been watching Isabela like a … no, not like a cat watches a mouse, because at least a cat does its own killing, if there’s murder to be done. Vítor put me in mind of a loathsome vulture hovering over the condemned until some other predator does what it doesn’t have the guts to do.

  ‘You do realize that we must leave this place soon,’ Vítor whispered. ‘The cave will grow too hot to remain in much longer.’

  I didn’t need a Jesuit to tell me that. We were all dripping with sweat. I thought nothing could be hotter than Belém in midsummer, but it was the steam that got to me here. My clothes, everything, were wringing wet, and it made you so exhausted, you didn’t want to move, just lie there gasping like a stranded fish. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the foul vapours stank of rotten eggs.

  ‘This is your chance,’ Vítor continued. ‘Ensure that Isabela remains in the cave after we leave and the steam will do the rest.’

  ‘Leave her to be scalded alive, you mean. That’s one way to ensure a bloodless death. You’ll be able to swear before your confessor that your hands are as white as the snow on the mountains, not dripping with her gore. I suppose Jesuits do make confessions, or are they so pure and holy they don’t need to?’

  Vítor looked at me as if I was an insolent schoolboy he was itching to birch. ‘I simply cannot understand why you thought nothing of strangling your lover with your bare hands and dumping her body, like a drowned puppy, for the crabs to pick at, yet now you throw up your hands like some delicate noblewoman and declare you couldn’t possibly kill vermin. But if you have suddenly discovered a conscience, then surely you must recognize that I am offering you a way out? You don’t need to kill the girl yourself. With everyone scrabbling to leave, you can easily ensure that you and she are the last two in the cave. Rocks have fallen before. They can easily be dislodged again to ensure that she cannot climb out.’

  ‘You want me to leave her to die in agony, slowly broiling to death?’

  Vítor gripped my arm so hard I thought he was going to break it, but he knew I could do nothing to stop him without drawing attention.

  ‘If you had left her to be swallowed up in the bog instead of dashing to her rescue, it would all be over by now. It is entirely your fault it has come to this. But if you really are so squeamish about her dying in pain, then hit her over the head, knock her out so that she will know nothing about it. I don’t know why you have to make difficulties, Cruz. It is really all quite simple.’

  For a moment I wondered if he intended to trap us both in the cave and leave us to die. That too would be quite simple, except that even he might believe that was murder, and he didn’t want the sin of one death, never mind two, on his soul.

  ‘Look,’ I said, trying to resist the overwhelming urge to knee him in the balls and doing my best to adopt a friendly, reasonable, we’re-both-men-of-the-world tone. ‘I quite understand that if we were back in Portugal, surrounded by the king’s men, the members of the Inquisition and their familiaries, you and I would have to kill this girl. We’d have no choice. A hundred people would know at once if we hadn’t. But who is there here to report us? She’s never going to catch this white falcon. We haven’t even seen so much as a feather of this wretched bird, much less captured it. I’m beginning to doubt they even exist here. And with half the Danes on the island out looking for us, how is she going to set traps or whatever it is they do? And if by some miracle she does get her hands on one, I can see to it that she loses any money she has to buy a passage on a ship. She’ll never get off the island.’

  I adopted an ingratiating smile, not easy when your face feels as if it’s melting and dripping off your bones. ‘Come on now, Vítor, we’ve enough problems of our own trying to get out of this mess alive to bother about this girl. Between this cave and the Danes we’ll need all our wits to survive ourselves without worrying about her. Why don’t we just let her go? You and I can return home and tell them she’ll not be coming back to Portugal, which is the truth. Neither one of us will have her blood on our hands. Then both our consciences will be clear.’

  Vítor lifted his chin and glared at me as though I had just suggested that he should bugger his bishop. ‘Are you suggesting that I, a Jesuit, a consecrated priest, should deliberately lie to my superiors, to the Holy Catholic Church and to my king?’ His tone was cold enough to freeze steam.

  ‘It wouldn’t be a lie to say –’

  ‘Kill her, Cruz. Kill her or I promise you that you will be returning to Portugal in chains and I will see to it that before you die you personally enjoy every single exquisite torment the Inquisition has in its mercy ever devised. Every heretic that lives is another nail in the hands of Christ. For every heretic we fail to bring into repentance or send straight to eternal hell, we his servants will be severely punished. And I do not intend to fail my Lord or my Church, Cruz. I want her dead, do you understand me? Not escaped … not free to live out her foul life in another land … but dead!’

  Eydis

  Cope – to trim the beak and talons of a hawk.

  We no longer have the time to wait. I have told Fannar he must take his family and the foreigners from the cave tonight. He has gone to try to find a safe place for them, and a safe route to take them there. He knows, as I do, that the shaking was only a warning. There will be others, and the next could cause the passage to collapse, trapping us all in here, sealing us in our tomb.

  Isabela has called Hinrik to this cave, but it is not enough. He is only a boy, as timid in death as he was in life, and who can blame him? If he stands against the draugr and the draugr overcomes him, as he surely will, then he will have the power to torment the boy for all eternity. What can an old woman and a boy do against a draugr? Though they are dead, they will not pass judgment against him. He will frighten them into silence. I need the girl to call the others, but she will not listen. I cannot make her hear me. I need her to understand what she must do. She speaks to the dead boy, but she is afraid of him, afraid of the dead.

  I must speak with her directly, make her trust me, make her strong. I have to find a place to talk to her where the spirit that infects my sister cannot hear us. He must not know what we are planning. But will Isabela go there? It is a place of terror to her. Does she have the courage to enter it of her own will?

  The rocks tremble again, not as violently this time, but far below I hear a rumble like thunder, deep in the earth. I dare not wait. If I cannot speak with her now it will too late for all of us. Hinrik is afraid to do what I ask, but he will do it. He knows that if the draugr cannot be destroyed, neither the living nor the dead will be safe from his terror.

  I cross to my stores and rummage among the jars until I find the draught I am searching for. I measure out the contents carefully – too little and it will not work as swiftly as I need it to do, too much and it will kill her.

  ‘Hinrik, you must make her come to me. There is no other way left now, no time, no time.’

  Isabela

  Jouk – when a hawk or falcon sleeps.

  The clinging cold on my arm was lifted, and for a moment I thought Hinrik was gone, but then I saw him, standing over the body of the injured man.

  It was as if all the other people in the cave were there, still talking, still moving, but their voices were distant. Yet Hinrik’s voice was loud in my ear as if he was talking inside my own head.

  ‘You must send the spirit back into this corpse.’

  This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. I was imagining it. Hinrik was not here. I was dreaming, still dreaming, and yet I couldn’t wake myself. But I found myself speaking as you do speak in a dream both to the dead and the living who come to you in your sleep.

  ‘He’s not a corpse. The man is sick, but he lives. Look at him, he is breathing.’

  ‘No.’ The word fell like lead upon stone. ‘He drowned many months ago. But there are some men who have the power to raise a c
orpse and make it walk again to destroy the living.’

  It couldn’t be true. That man wasn’t dead. Anyone could see that. He looked even healthier than Valdis and I knew she lived. And Eydis was tending him as if he was a sick, old man. If he was a corpse raised to hurt people, why would she do that?

  Unless … unless I had mistaken Eydis’s nature and there was a very good reason people had chained her up in here. Was she the sorceress who raised the corpse? Was that why she was trying to heal him?

  As if I had spoken these words aloud, Hinrik answered, ‘Eydis could not go to his grave and raise him. She cannot go to any grave. You must help her. You must help us all. You must meet her, so that she can tell you what to do.’

  I turned to stare at Eydis. Her head was turned towards me beneath the veil, her body was tense.

  ‘But I have met her,’ I answered stupidly.

  ‘You must meet in the place of your nightmares. Her spirit cannot leave the cave, but she can enter your dreams. She will not enter unless you invite her. But you must do it now.’

  Eydis was holding a small wooden beaker out to me. Was she offering me something to make me sleep or worse, a sleep from which I’d never wake? I stared at the injured man lying in the corner. Had she poisoned him? Had she given him one of her potions?

  ‘You must sleep. You must help us,’ Hinrik repeated. ‘Trust her.’

  Trust a woman whom I knew nothing of, no, not one woman, but two women grotesquely bound in one body? A monster that her countrymen had been so terrified of they had chained up in a cave? For all I knew Eydis had killed a dozen men or worse.

  ‘The white falcons. Eydis knows about the white falcons. She knows you need them. She knows where to find them. Help us and she will give them to you. But you must sleep or you will never find them.’