The Falcons of Fire and Ice (23 page)

I don’t know who invented the rope ladder, but whoever it was should have been made to dangle from it over a pit of vipers while men swung it violently to and fro, because that’s exactly what it felt as if I was being forced to do, as I clambered down from the ship’s towering side into the pathetically small shore boat below. The boat was not only bucking up and down, but also crashing into the side of the ship and then rolling away, leaving a great yawning gap of churning water just at the precise moment when you were trying to step into it.

I finally managed to hurl myself into the little craft, but not without banging my shin hard on the gunwale. I hunched in the boat, massaging my leg, as the wind dashed icy water into my face, and long before the next passenger had climbed down I was already soaked to the skin. I closed my eyes against the stinging salt, and the bloated, rotting face of that drowned woman rose up in front of me. Once again I was back in the tower of Belém, feeling the cold waves creeping up my legs. I opened my eyes rapidly.

Most of the passengers had climbed down into the boat now except the girl Isabela, and the merchant and his wife. Isabela already had her little foot on the ladder. I stood up, ready to help catch her as she descended. I hadn’t planned it, but it came to me as suddenly as the image of the drowned woman, that I could cause that accident now. One little push as she stepped down on to the gunwale of the boat and she would slip over the side, between the boat and the ship. With luck, she’d hit her head as the two vessels clashed together, and would sink like a lead coffin. The scene played out perfectly in my head as if it was already happening.

The girl stood on the bottom rung, both arms clinging to the ladder, gazing fearfully down as the boat was dragged back from the ship. As the sailors hauled on the ropes, trying to pull the boat closer to the ladder again, she raised her foot in readiness. I reached up to clasp her waist, but at that moment a wave lifted the boat, and I overbalanced. I found myself slipping over the side. I flailed desperately, but could find nothing to grab on to. Then I felt a strong hand seize the back of my doublet and haul me into the boat again, where I sat trembling with shock.

‘Do you want to get yourself killed, Senhor?’ the boatswain shouted. ‘Sit down and leave it to us. You nearly pulled the girl into the sea along with you.’

He put his brawny arm about Isabela’s waist and lifted her bodily into the boat, seating her firmly on the plank in front of me.

She took a few gulps of air to steady herself, then smiled trustingly at me. ‘Thank you for trying to help me, Senhor. It was very kind, but you shouldn’t take such risks for me.’

I tried to return the smile, hoping that she would not notice how my hands shook. But Isabela was already distracted by Dona Flávia’s shrieking descent. Her husband had insisted that a rope be fastened under his wife’s armpits, in case she should slip, though it would need the anchor windlass to winch her up again if she did.

Dona Flávia thrashed wildly around with her foot trying to find the next rung. She looked like a cow attempting to dance. Isabela’s face was a picture of concern, though she was biting her lip as if she was trying to suppress her laughter, while the sailors and other passengers made no effort to conceal their grins.

Isabela was a pretty little thing. Her skin was a rich sweet caramel, lighter than my Silvia’s nut-brown body, but at least it wasn’t as pale as those insipid skins of the noblemen’s daughters who are constantly shielded from the sun and who are so colourless they remind me of fat white grubs dug up from the earth.

Isabela’s eyes were a greenish-blue and couldn’t seem to make up their mind which shade to be. Her hair, though dark and curly, was not the great silky mane that Silvia possessed, but the kind that tends to frizz up at the first sign of dampness. Her breasts weren’t Silvia’s either. I grant you that I hadn’t had the opportunity to examine them in any detail, but they swelled over the top of her gown perkily enough, though they were as small as half lemons in comparison to Silvia’s luscious ripe fruits. In short, she was not wildly beautiful or voluptuous, but she possessed the kind of sudden radiant smile that would entice any man to her side.

And had things been different I would probably have amused myself by seducing her. I might have found my task easier to accomplish if I had. But the moment I set eyes on Isabela I discovered that knowing you are going to murder a girl cools any lust you might feel as rapidly as water thrown over an amorous dog. The thought of killing a woman might excite some men, but not me, not if I was going to have to murder her in cold blood. It’s different, of course, if you don’t know that a woman will one day die at your hands, then you can enjoy her to the full. But if there was one thing I was certain of on this voyage it was that Isabela had to die and I was the one who would have to ensure that she did.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what answer I gave to the two Jesuits when they returned to the tower of Belém. It wasn’t the promise of the wealth they offered me. Naturally, if it had been a simple matter of theft or deception, I wouldn’t have hesitated to take their money, except, of course, to try to bargain my fee up. But murder, that’s an entirely different matter.

But it was the sight of that corpse which persuaded me to agree, knowing that after weeks of torment, one day the tide would rise and keep rising until it was over my head and then I would become that foul abomination lying on the paving slabs. You think I was a coward? Well, you just imagine descending into a crypt, gagging on the foul stench of maggots and decay, then lifting a coffin lid and seeing your own rotting face in that coffin staring sightlessly up at you. Picture that if you can, then tell me honestly, if you’d been offered a way out of that accursed tower, would you have chosen instead to hang there in chains, unable to move as the cold waves broke over you, and wait day after day for that fatal tide? Would you have chosen to stay and watch that body rot before your eyes? Would you?

The Jesuits had seen to it that I was bathed and given such clothes, bedding and money that I would need for the voyage. They had ensured not only that Isabela found a suitable ship, but also that I obtained a passage on the same one. The agent had been bribed with a generous purse not to demand papers or inquire too closely into the identity of his clients. The priests had done all they could to make things easy for me, as they said. What happened after that was in my hands. But the question was – how to do it? And I had no more ideas about that now than I’d had when I first boarded the ship.

Isabela must have felt me studying her for she suddenly turned and bestowed another of her smiles in my direction. ‘Poor Dona Flávia. I do believe she will kiss the ground when we reach England.’

And so would I. At least with her and her husband gone from the ship, I might be able to get Isabela alone. Every time I had tried, particularly after dark, Dona Flávia descended like a huge blubbery angel determined to defend the girl’s honour. She seemed to regard safeguarding Isabela’s virtue as her personal mission, though of course she made use of the girl as if she was her own daughter, sending her to fetch things from the sleeping quarters or massage oil of lavender into her temples when she declared herself unable to sleep.

But even if I could get the girl away from Dona Flávia I couldn’t just walk up behind her and pitch her overboard. There were always too many eyes on watch and though I had made a friend of one of the sailors by buying wine from him, paying double what the dog piss was worth, I was pretty sure even he would raise the alarm if I tried to throw someone into the sea. It had to be made to look like an accident.

Even when pig-boy and his father, and Dona Flávia and her husband had all left the ship, there would still be two other passengers who were travelling on to Iceland and those two men seemed equally determined to make friends with Isabela. Hardly surprising since she was the only girl aboard. But it was going to be hard to prise their attentions away from her.

The boat rocked alarmingly as Dona Flávia finally plopped down into it, gasping and wailing that she would never,
never
set foot on that rope ladder again. When her husband mildly pointed out that she would have to climb up it again tomorrow as there was no other way back on board the ship, she declared she would rather stay on the shore and live in the stone cottage for the rest of her life. The sailors smirked at one another and cast off.

By the time we reached the shore, though, no one was smiling or even had the energy to talk. With our rolls of bedding slung over our shoulders and little water kegs tucked under our arms, we staggered over the sand behind the boatswain, who carried a stout barrel hoisted on one shoulder, which I devoutly prayed was full of wine.

My clothes were sodden and the roll of blankets felt no drier. So much water had washed into the boat that my shoes had filled up and my numb toes were splashing about in their own private pools. The wind buffeted us so fiercely that it was hard for any of us to walk in a straight line. The blown sand savagely stung our skin and we were reduced to peering through our fingers to stop ourselves being blinded.

We floundered over a steep dune, our feet sinking in the loose sand, and saw, stretched out in front of us, an area of dry scrub and gorse which seemed to be growing right out of the sand. Behind that a dense forest rose up all around, obscuring any view of what lay beyond. The towering trees were already swaying and bending in the strengthening wind.

‘There you are.’ The boatswain nodded to a low stone building half-hidden among the bushes. ‘Nice little nest for the night.’

Dona Flávia gave a squawk that put me in mind of an affronted hen. ‘The captain cannot mean us to sleep in there. Have you brought us to the right place, my man? There must be a house somewhere, this is just a byre.’

She peered earnestly around the scrubland as if there might be a commodious mansion or castle in the vicinity which we had somehow failed to notice.

‘This is it,’ the boatswain said, with the cheerfulness of one who thinks watching other men being tortured is the height of entertainment. ‘Course, if you don’t fancy spending the night here, you can always come back with me and climb that rope ladder again.’

He flung open what was left of the wooden door and dumped the barrel inside before emerging. ‘Stream cuts through the dunes over there. So you’ll not want for water. If the storm passes, captain’ll want to set sail first light, that’s if there’s no repairs to make. If it hasn’t blown over we’ll maybe be stuck here for a day or two, more even, so you’d best ration the food in case. But don’t go wandering off too far. When the captain’s ready to sail he’ll have the trumpet sounded and the shore boat’ll come back to take you off the beach. So make sure you stay within sound of the ship. He’s not a patient man, isn’t the captain. And he’ll not waste precious sailing time searching for any man or woman that doesn’t come back to the beach when the trumpet’s blown.’

Suddenly, this wild, empty corner of the world didn’t seem so bad. Maybe I wouldn’t need to kill the girl, after all. All I had to do was to ensure she didn’t get back on that ship. If she was left behind it would be up to her whether she survived or not. There was bound to be a town or village somewhere beyond the forest. If it took her two or three days to walk there, so much the better, there’d be no chance of her catching up with the ship or finding another. When I returned without her, I could tell the priests she was dead and there’d be nothing to prove she wasn’t. She’d never show up in Portugal again, not if she had any sense. Who in their right mind would walk back into the wolf’s lair, after they’d escaped? But if she perished from starvation here, then it wouldn’t be my fault. I’d have given her the chance to live. My conscience would be clear.

Coast of France Isabela

Wake –
when a falconer sits up all night with a newly trapped falcon in order to tame her by keeping her awake.

We all crowded into the tiny one-roomed cottage, if indeed that was what this place had once been. But it must have been many years since anyone had called it home. Only the rotting remains of a table crouching in the corner and a faded red crucifix painted crudely above the door showed that humans had ever inhabited this place. The floor was covered in sand that had blown into small drifts against the far wall. The timber tiles on the roof were cracked, and the shutter had long since fallen from the only window. But its thick stone walls still provided some shelter, or at least a flock of goats had evidently thought so, for the floor was littered with their droppings and strands of their hair were caught on the stones of the wall.

For a few minutes no one in the party seemed to know what to do. We just stood there, clutching our bundles, staring around as if we expected an innkeeper to come bustling in and show us to our rooms.

Vítor set his bundle down against the wall. He glanced at me, then looked round at the other passengers.

‘We should quickly gather as much dry kindling and firewood as we can, enough to last for several days, and stack it in here before the storm breaks. We must separate and hunt for whatever we can find, especially thick branches of dried wood which will burn the longest.’

‘I hope, Senhor Vítor, you are not expecting me to go out gathering wood. I’m not a peasant,’ Dona Flávia said indignantly.

‘Naturally I did not mean you, Dona Flávia. I thought you might stay here and perhaps collect up the goat dung to clear the floor. The pellets seem dry and will burn –’

‘Me! Gather goat dung!’ Dona Flávia’s indignant shriek must surely have been heard back aboard the ship. ‘I’ve never heard anything so preposterous in my life, but what can you expect from a man who thinks it sport to see us all devoured by ferocious sea monsters?’

‘I assure you sea monks don’t devour –’ Vítor began, but was cut short by Marcos.

‘Dona Flávia, as a physician I would strongly advise that after your terrible ordeal getting here, you should not exert yourself at all, but simply rest as best you can in here.’