The Falcons of Fire and Ice (26 page)

I willed the seamen to hurry. Just a few more minutes and we would be sailing out of the bay and all my problems would be marooned for ever on this shore. That old familiar thrill shuddered through my belly, as it did whenever I was certain I was going to win on the throw of the dice. It was all over and I hadn’t had to do a thing.

Naturally, that would not be the story I would tell the Jesuits. I wasn’t going to give them any excuse not to pay me what they had promised. I would confess to her murder. Confessing a sin you haven’t committed is no crime. There were saints who confessed to sins of pride and lust, greed and faithlessness every day. How could they be saints and have committed those sins? It was merely excessive humility on their part. Yes, I’d confess sorrowfully to her murder. They’d ask me how I’d done it, of course. And I would tell them that I –

My breath turned to stone in my throat. There was someone hurrying down towards the beach. Vítor, was it Vítor? He was clutching what looked like his bedroll in his arms. Suppose Isabela was following behind him? He might have run on ahead to alert the ship. I turned sharply away. Maybe no one else would see him. The sailors were all intent on their tasks. The anchor was clear of the water. They were just securing it. I searched for the ship’s master. He was standing on the forecastle, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun as he squinted up into the rigging.
Give the order to set sail
, I willed him. What was he waiting for? Everything was ready.
Go! Go!

As if he heard me, the order came: ‘Set the mainsail.’

But the words were barely out of his mouth when that ship’s brat, Hinrik, scampered up the steps like a monkey and tugged on his arm, gesticulating wildly towards the shore where Vítor stood. I haven’t ever in my life felt a greater urge to strangle a lad than I did at that moment.

I turned once more and looked again at the man standing on the shore. As he waded out into the shallows, I realized that the bundle in his arms was not blankets but something far more substantial. A woman? Was it Isabela? If it was, she was not moving.

Iceland Eydis

Haggard
– a wild falcon which is more than a year old when it is captured and has passed through its first moult, or mew, and therefore has its mature plumage or livery.

I wake suddenly to find Heidrun looking down at the man. I did not hear her enter the cave. I never do. She is just as I remember her though it must be five years or more since I’ve seen her, tall and slender, her back as straight as a razor cut. Her hair is as grey as the cloud over the mountains and her eyes, I know, are the colour of the winter’s sky, though she does not turn to greet me.

‘He should not have lived, Eydis. You knew that. You sensed that.’

‘But I do live,’ the dark voice growls from Valdis’s lips.

‘I did not know his spirit would enter my sister, Heidrun. Tell me how I can force him to release Valdis. You know these things.’

The dark voice laughs. ‘It’s no good pleading with her, Eydis. She is as powerless to force me out as you are, my sweet sister. Tell me, woman. You walk through the world. You know all that passes. I charge you to tell me the truth of it. Did the farmer Jónas do what I told him?’

Heidrun turns and for the first time looks at Valdis and me. Over all these years she has hardly changed since the first time I saw her when she took us to the circle dance on the night of our seventh birthday, the night of our awakening. She has an angular but handsome face, though where most people have a groove above their upper lip, she has a ridge. But now her pale eyes are cold with a fury I have never seen in them before.

‘Pétur’s mares were seized with fright and they all galloped madly off, running further than any horse would ever do had it merely been affrighted by a human whipping it or a noise startling it. Pétur and his sons tracked them on foot for two days, but by the time they found them it was too late. They’d run over the edge of a cliff and smashed themselves on the rocks at the bottom. When Pétur’s sons climbed down they found some of the mares still lived, but their bones were so badly broken they could do nothing to help them except cut their throats to put them out of their pain.’

‘And Jónas’s daughter?’ I ask her.

‘Frída recovered, as you knew she would. If Jónas had listened to you, she would have come to her senses without the need for any healing herb or charm save that of time. You read her malady well. The cloud came from the mountain, not Pétur.’

‘And does Pétur know who slaughtered his mares?’ I ask.

‘He will,’ Heidrun says with an icy certainty. ‘His thoughts are creeping towards that knowledge even now. When he returned from tracking the horses, Pétur was in such a rage, he made all in his household swear on the Holy Book to say what they knew of the matter. His serving girl tearfully confessed that she had slipped out to meet her lover and thought she saw in the distance a man crouching near the stream where the mares come to drink. She couldn’t be sure and, besides, didn’t want to alert her master for fear he would demand to know why she was wandering abroad when she should have been about her work on the farm. Pétur’s sons searched the place where she said she had seen a man and found the death coin glinting in the stream. It will not take long for Pétur to discover who placed the coin there, and when he does, he will take revenge on Jónas and all his kin.’

This is exactly the outcome I had dreaded. If Pétur took revenge, then Jónas and his family would retaliate. Such blood feuds have been known to last for generations and involve even distant relatives and hired help from both farmsteads.

‘I tried to stop Jónas,’ I tell her. ‘But he would not listen.’

Heidrun’s expression is grim. ‘You had the power to stop him, but you didn’t. For as long as you and Valdis spoke with one voice, you needed no more than words to control the people. Even a gentle shower of rain if it continues long enough will persuade a man to cover his head, so you let your words fall softly on them and they hurried off in the direction you sent them. You had grown used to that and thought nothing more was needed. So you’ve let the power you were born with shrivel up like an unused limb. But now you must fight to make your words heard.’

My sister’s black eyes stare up at Heidrun. Her peeling lips part as the voice speaks through them.

‘Eydis can’t fight me. I tell the people what they want to hear, and so they will do it. Prince or pauper, priest or pagan, a man will always listen to the words that echo the desires of his own soul, and he will act on them.’

‘Who is it that speaks through my sister’s mouth, Heidrun?’ I ask her, trying desperately to ignore the mocking voice. ‘You above all must know.’

‘He was not born on this isle. Every man, woman and child whose birth blood has fed this land is known to me by name, but not those who come from over the water. The boy, Ari, knows where he comes from, I think, but he will not speak of it. He is afraid.’

‘And so he should be,’ the dark voice says with pride.

Heidrun ignores him. ‘But though I don’t know his name, I know what he is. He is a draugr, a nightstalker.’

A cackle of mocking laughter pours from my dead sister’s lips and echoes from the walls of the cave as if the man has a hundred brothers hovering behind him in the shadows.

A deathly fear grips me. I sensed from the moment they brought him to me that his life was not of this world. But I refused to trust my own gift. As long as I could convince myself he was only a man, I could go on believing that if only I could make his body live, then his spirit would leave my sister and possess its earthly home once more, but now I know it will take far more than that to force him out of her.

‘Heidrun, tell me what to do. Tell me how to save Valdis.’

She walks across to the pool of bubbling water and for a long time says nothing as she gazes into its clear depths. The palms of her long hands move over each other as if she is grinding something between them.

I wait in silence. Valdis’s head swivels round in the direction of the pool. The draugr is waiting too.

At last Heidrun turns back to face us. ‘You know already the man’s body must be kept alive, if his soul is to leave your sister, for only when his body and spirit are reunited can the wrong which has been done to this man be undone and he can be freed. But his body can’t live long without his spirit inside it. Soon it will be past the point where the spirit can re-enter it. You must heal the physical wounds, and you can. You possess that knowledge and skill, if you will use it.’

Once again she makes the grinding motion with her palms. ‘But, Eydis, you must know that only those who are themselves dead can force his spirit to return to the body, only they can control him for he comes from the realm of the dead. You must summon a
door-doom
, a door-doom of the dead who walk. They shall pass sentence upon him. Only their judgment can rule him. I cannot help you bring their spirits here. I don’t have the power over them, but you do.’

‘But I do not. You above all people know that I do not!’ I seize my chain and strike it furiously against the iron hoop about my waist. The clang echoes from the walls of the cave. ‘Have you forgotten, Heidrun, I am bound by iron? They did this to us so that we would have no power.’

‘No power to send your spirit out into the world. But there is much you can do in this cave.’ She points with a long, sharp finger towards my sister. ‘Remember, a band is fastened about her waist too. As long as she is bound by iron, so too is the spirit that infects her. You and he are matched in your limitations and your strength. Only your fear of him can make you weaker.’

‘But she does fear me,’ the dark voice growls. ‘Even bound by iron I am three times stronger than her. I can sense her every feeling. I know her most fleeting thought. I know her more intimately than any lover and can be that too – her lover, her master, her destroyer. I have not even begun to show her what I can do.’ Valdis’s head twists around to gaze first at Heidrun and then at me with those great cavernous black eyes.

But Heidrun ignores the voice as if it had not spoken. She walks away across the cave floor as noiselessly as she entered. Is that all she is going to tell me, all the help she will offer me? Does she not understand that I am trapped alone with this creature? I need her. I desperately want to beg her to return, but I cannot, for then the draugr will know how much I fear him.

Heidrun pauses beside the rocky outcrop which screens the passage to the entrance. ‘If he escapes this cave he will bring terror and death to every hovel and farmstead across the land. Where he crosses a threshold by night not a man, woman or child in that dwelling will be found alive come dawn. Where he walks along a path, no human soul who crosses that track will live long enough to reach home. You must send him back to his body, while you are both bound by the iron. That is your only hope and it is the only hope for the hundreds of innocent men, women and children who will lose their lives if you fail. If he is freed from the iron, neither you nor anyone will be able to stop him destroying every living thing in his path.

‘But there isn’t much time, Eydis. The mountains are stirring again. The rivers of fire will run. Remember the black cloud that struck Jónas’s child? You spoke the truth about that cloud. You know what it means. The mountain has spoken, and soon the pool in this cave will answer it. When it does, you will know time is running out – for all of us.’

Chapter Eight

In the later half of the thirteenth century a Mongol emperor was so passionate about hunting with falcons and gyrfalcons, that he ordered the sides of a valley near the palace to be sown with a huge variety of grains to help breed more wild partridge and quail for the hunt. Near his palace in Chandu he enclosed a park with rich grazing and many streams in which he kept deer and goats which were bred purely to feed the two hundred falcons kept there during their moult. He also kept eagles for hunting wolves.

Every year in March the emperor went to Manchuria for the great hunt, taking ten thousand falcons and an equal number of soldiers to guard the hunting birds. The emperor rode out in a pavilion covered with cloth of gold and lined with lion skins, which was borne by four elephants. Inside he kept his twelve favourite gyrfalcons and twelve favourite officers to amuse them. When those on horseback reported the sighting of game he would open his curtains and cast off the falcons.

When they finally reached the plains, a camp was set up for the falconers, nobles and the emperor’s wives, who also had their own falcons, and for a month they would disport themselves with hunting.

Each falcon bore on its leg a tiny silver tablet giving its owner’s mark, and a man known as the ‘guardian of the lost’ would set up his tent on a rise with a banner flying above it so that in the vast camp he could easily be seen. Any owner seeking a lost bird would go to him, and any man finding a lost falcon would take it to the guardian, so that the one might be reunited with the other.