The Falcons of Fire and Ice (14 page)

My father stiffened as we heard footsteps hurrying down the passage towards us. The key grated in the lock and the door creaked open.

The flickering orange torchlight from the passage was obscured by the massive bulk of the soldier who had brought me.

‘Hurry, the guard’s finished his breakfast. I saw him from the window. He’s gone to the latrines for a shit, but he’ll be back any minute.’

He grabbed my wrist and yanked me to my feet, tugging me back out through the door. I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to my father, never mind hug and kiss him.

As the soldier pulled me along the slippery passage towards the stairs, I heard only a single word follow me.
Promise!

I did not go home. I couldn’t. I didn’t even want to look at my mother, much less be forced to talk to her. The cold, damp stench of the dungeon still clung to me and I couldn’t bear the thought of being inside any building, even my own house. I needed to be outside in the fierce, hot sunshine, breathing in pure, sweet air. I climbed high into the pine forest, wading through the ice-cold streams and scrambling past the great moss-covered boulders. The thick, sinuous roots of the trees had grown around and over the great stones. And even where the trees had fallen in a storm, or stood dead and blackened, the roots would not relinquish their stranglehold on the boulders, as if they had become rock themselves.

I was so intent on getting as far as I could from that stinking dungeon that I didn’t even pause if my skirts became entangled on branches. I simply strode on, letting them tear as I pulled them after me. The sound of ripping fabric was almost a relief, I needed to rip and break, to hurt and smash.

I was so frightened for my father and so bewildered by what he’d told me. Last night I prayed to the Blessed Virgin for him, certain of who he was and who I was, and in a single hour all that had been swept away. I was one of the despised, a Marrano, a Jew, and yet I could no more enter their world than I could return to the world of my childhood, for that door had been slammed shut and sealed for ever.

But I knew I had to return home eventually. Where else could I go? The sun was already low in the sky when I entered the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the table, her head resting in her hands. I had never come into the house before without seeing her bustling about, engaged in her ceaseless war against dust and dirt. Now her neat hair was dishevelled and her eyes red with weeping. She raised her head and stared at me as if I was a corpse risen from a grave. Then, with a little cry, she threw herself at me, hugging me so tightly I thought my ribs would crack.

‘What happened? What did they ask you? Did they hurt you?’

I felt the wetness of her tears on my cheek and heard her breath coming in heaving sobs. And for a moment I felt a twinge of guilt, as I realized that all this time she had thought that I’d been arrested and was chained up in some prison somewhere or worse.

‘Have they released your father too? Is he with you?’ she asked eagerly, peering over my shoulder as if she thought he was going to walk through the door behind me.

I felt a coldness come over me, a sudden hatred of this woman. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t answer her. I pushed her away and crossed to the big clay water jar in the corner, dipped in a beaker and drank it in a single draught, refilling it several times before my thirst was slaked. I sank down on the bench where only a few days before my father had retreated to eat his breakfast of sardines, while she had told us why poor old Jorge deserved to die. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

I told her all that my father had said, with a brutal harshness, sparing her nothing, not even the fact that my father had paid for
me
and not her to be brought to him. I knew I was hurting her, but for the first time in my life I didn’t care. I refused to play the game of pacifying her any more.

She stood pale-faced, her hand gripping the crucifix around her neck so tightly I could see the whiteness of her knuckles. I wanted to tear it away from her throat, just as I was ripping away the whole necklace of lies she had so proudly worn throughout her life.

‘All those foul things you said about poor Jorge and the other heretics, yet all the time you were saying them, you knew that we were exactly the same as them.’

‘We are not,’ my mother spat. ‘We’re not like them. They’re filthy Jews and always will be. There are no Jews in my family, nor in your father’s. We’ve always been Catholics. Always! Your father doesn’t know what he’s saying. Goodness knows what they’ve done to him in that place. It’s enough to turn anyone’s wits. They’re making him confess, but it’s not true. It’s all lies. We are Catholics, do you hear? Good, decent Catholics.’

A horrifying thought struck me. ‘Were you the one who reported Jorge?’

She flushed a dull scarlet and I knew it was true.

‘Why?’ I screamed at her. ‘Why would you do that? Don’t you see that it was as unjust as what they’ve done to my father?’

‘I am a good Catholic. I did it to prove I am a good Catholic. Your father wouldn’t do it, so I had to. Father Tomàs had been asking questions, asking if we knew Jorge, how long we had known him, how often we went to see him. I knew that meant they suspected him. Someone had to protect our family. You have to prove you are loyal. You see what happens if you don’t. You see what they’ve done to your father, because he refused to denounce Jorge.’

I felt the anger drain out of me. I saw now what my father had long understood, that arguing with her was hopeless. Even after all I’d told her she still wouldn’t accept why her husband had been arrested. I don’t believe that even the Grand Inquisitor himself could have made her admit the truth. She had lived the lie for so long, that like the tree roots and the rocks, she and the fantasy she clung to could not be separated.

‘We have to leave tonight,’ I said dully. ‘We must start packing.’

‘Leave here? But we can’t just go. This is my home. What about all my things, my furniture, my pots and linen? It will take weeks to pack. Besides, they’re bound to release your father soon, when they realize it’s all been a mistake.’

‘Mother! Haven’t you listened to a word I’ve said? They are not going to release him. They are going to kill him, kill us all, unless I can give them a pair of gyrfalcons in exchange for our lives.’

‘And just how do you propose to do that? You think we have the money to buy such birds?’

‘I will have to take them from the wild.’

My mother snorted. Contempt for my father’s occupation had become such a habit with her that even now she could not keep the expression of distaste from her face.

‘I know you and your father think I am stupid, that I don’t know anything about his precious birds. You both like it that way, don’t you? That private little world you share with him, laughing at me behind my back, cutting me out of your conversations. But you can’t be married to a man like your father for twenty-two years without learning something, and I know that gyrfalcons only breed in the Northern lands. They’re not passage birds. They don’t migrate through these parts. So you can’t set traps for them or take the chicks from the nest, because there are no wild gyrfalcons in Portugal.’

‘Then I will have to go to where I can capture them,’ I yelled.

It was only when I heard the words burst from my lips that I suddenly realized that was exactly what I had to do. There was no other way.

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ my mother began. ‘Even if you were the son your precious father always wanted, it would be impossible, but you’re only …’

I didn’t wait to listen to the end of her speech. I was not a son. I was not my mother’s daughter. I was not an Old Christian. In truth, I didn’t know what I was any more. The image flashed into my head of the young Marrano girl, weeping and clasping the little box of bones to her chest as they forced her to put it on the pyre and watch it burn. The only thing I knew for certain at that moment was that I would not become that girl. I would not stand there and watch the flames creep across the faggots of wood towards my father, as I had watched them slither towards Jorge.

I seized the edge of the linen cupboard, heaved with all my strength and felt it grate across the floor as I inched it away from the wall.
Under a loose flag
, my father had said.

‘What are you doing?’ my mother demanded.

‘The only thing I can do – I am going to the Northern lands to steal a pair of gyrfalcons.’

Belém, Portugal Ricardo

Passage hawk
– a hawk captured during migration.

‘Move aside, you useless pail of piss. You think I’ve got all day?’

A man hefting a huge bale on his bare shoulder pushed past me, almost pitching me into the stinking water of the harbour. I turned to remonstrate with the fellow and then saw that the oaf was a good foot taller than me and as broad as an elephant’s backside. I concluded it wasn’t worth giving the man a lesson in manners; he wouldn’t have understood a word.

It was impossible to walk in a straight line along the waterfront. If you weren’t sidestepping mooring ropes and gangways, you were being shoved aside by lumbering herds of sweating, reeking peasants all rushing to and fro carrying boxes, kegs and bundles of produce. Moorish slaves ran along the street with long planks of wood balanced on their heads. Girls wove in and out with baskets of silver fish, and men with accents as thick as their breath threw sacks to one another across the gap between ship and shore with the ease of a dolphin tossing a fish.

I forced myself to slow my pace to that of a hobbled mule, but only succeeded in being buffeted from one side to the other like a football in a scrum of boys. But it wouldn’t do to arrive at Dona Lúcia’s house too early. She might think I was overeager for the money, and worse still, that I had nothing better to do than wait on her. I was supposed to be organizing the supplying of a ship. I would have a thousand tasks to do, better to arrive a little late. Not late enough to cause offence, but just enough to convince her I was a busy man.

I paused to gaze out across the harbour at the Torre de Belém, the fortified tower that lay just offshore. The waves lapped all around her base and the white stones of her battlements sparkled in the sunshine. Silvia always used to stop just here when we were out for a stroll, especially at night when the tower was lit up by a hundred lamps that shone down on the black water. She dreamt of being entertained in one of the Governor’s private rooms, which she had convinced herself were decked out like a palace. She thought it was the most romantic place in Belém. Was that where the bitch was now? Had she finally succeeded in snaring an officer or even the Governor himself and installed herself as their whore?

As I turned away, I saw two soldiers approaching. My heart began to race. Were they looking for me? I crouched down near a fish seller and feigned interest in a basket of mussels, trying to keep my face averted until they had passed by. The rheumy-eyed old man who sat on a low stool beside his basket grew quite animated at the prospect of making a sale and prised one of the shells open, thrusting the contents halfway up my nose to prove they were fresh. When, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the soldiers strolling away from me, I pushed the old man’s trembling hand away and strode on, his whines following me.

Then I suddenly saw her, Silvia, walking ahead of me along the waterfront, a scarlet bandanna wound through her mane of glossy black hair. She was swaying with that easy stride of hers that made her hips swing as if she was beginning a dance. I called to her, but she couldn’t hear me. I hurried after her, shoving my way through the crowd, ignoring the curses and insults as I elbowed people aside.

‘Silvia! Silvia!’

Her head turned slightly, but she walked on.

I barged into one old lady with such force that she staggered and would have fallen had the press of the crowd not been so great, but a cascade of bright oranges tumbled from her pannier and bounced on to the street. She screamed curses at me as she struggled to retrieve them from under the feet of the crowd, but I didn’t stop to help her. I pushed on through.

Silvia had vanished. I gazed frantically round and finally spotted the scarlet bandanna disappearing round the corner of a side street. Mercifully this street, though narrow, was less crowded and I sped after her, dodging round piles of pots and dishes that the shopkeepers had stacked out in the street. I had almost caught up with her.

I seized her arm. ‘Silvia, my angel, I’ve been –’

She gave a squawk of indignation and pulled her arm out of my grip, turning to face me. I felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of icy water over me. It wasn’t Silvia.

Muttering incoherent apologies, I backed away straight into a teetering stack of jars that wobbled alarmingly. Trying to right myself and steady the jars at the same time, I heard the girl’s mocking laughter behind me, but I did not turn around.

I walked a few paces around the corner and sank down on my haunches under the shade of an almond tree. I’d been so sure it was her, but even as I touched her I’d known it wasn’t. Where the hell was she? Surely someone must have seen her. Was she still in Belém?

I hadn’t dared go to her usual haunts the previous night in case Filipe or the fishermen had reported the body and named me as her killer. I’d spent the night a short way out of the town, huddled behind a small shrine, with precious little sleep. Most of the night was spent cursing that witch Silvia. It was she who’d dropped me into this pile of dung. As I tossed and turned on the stony ground, without even the solace of a flagon of wine to comfort me or soothe my grumbling belly, I bitterly imagined how Silvia was spending the night. She’d be laughing and drinking in a tavern, tearing great strips of hot roasted chicken off the bone with her sharp white teeth and rolling into a warm soft bed with her newest lover. I can tell you that long before the morning sun had finally stirred its fat arse and bothered to clamber over the horizon, I was actually wishing Silvia really was lying dead on the floor of that stinking fisherman’s hut.