The Falcons of Fire and Ice (38 page)

The creature is silent now. He is trying to read my thoughts. I can feel his spirit prowling round me looking for a way in, trying to guess what I am planning to do. But he dares not enter me, not yet. He fears that if he does I will learn his name and I will use it. He knows he must wait until I am weaker. We are both waiting, watching for our moment, our one chance to overcome the other, and there will be only one chance.

The foul steam rises from the clay pot and spirals up into the roof of the cave. An old woman, her cheeks hollow with hunger, her lips withered with age, hangs in the vapour of her own head. She stares out through the smoke at me, surprised, fearful even, as if I am the shadow on the wall of her childhood.

‘There is nothing to fear, Mother. You are the first, the first to be summoned to the door-doom of the dead.’

‘You are the last, Mother, Mother,’ the harsh voice mocks. ‘You are old, feeble. Do you really imagine you can command me? Mother, Mother, will you return to the grave with me? I should enjoy that. I will tear your skin from your wizened old back slowly, slowly as if I was peeling a plum, and you will feel the agony of it every hour, except that no hours pass in the grave. Time will run out, but torment never will.’

The old woman’s mouth opens wide in terror.

‘We will not let him enter your grave, Mother,’ I tell her. ‘Others are coming, you will not be alone.’

‘But they will not come in time, Eydis, Eydis. The mountain is stirring. The pool is answering.’

The draugr raises Valdis’s head and blows through her dead lips, a violent gust that shatters the ghost of the old woman, tearing the grey shadow of her into a hundred pieces and sending the wisps of vapour swirling up into the darkness above.

The old woman cannot stand against him alone. I grasp the iron ring about my waist, cursing it, cursing those who have bound me. I cannot reach out beyond the cave and bring the dead here. I can only call the girl, and if she does not come soon … The pool is answering, just as Heidrun said it would. The water is growing hotter, the heat building in the rocks under my feet and in the air. With every passing day, the steam hangs a little more densely over the pool. Bubbles of gas are popping from it, as if the great monster beneath it we have always feared is finally wakening. Soon the water will begin to boil. I know what that will mean for me, trapped here in the cave, unable to escape the scalding steam.

My grandfather often told us of a lake he used to swim in as a boy. The water was so warm that he was able to swim even when the snow lay thick upon the ground. The lake sides were very steep and they said that it was so deep in the middle of the lake that no one had ever been able to reach the bottom and whatever was lost in there could never be found. Some said the lake reached so deep that those in hell could look up and see the blue of it and imagine it was the sky.

One day, my grandfather and his friends had been swimming naked as usual, diving and chasing one another like seals. He had clambered out and to dry himself he had begun to kick about a calf’s bladder which he had fashioned into a ball. All his friends climbed out too to join in the game, all that is but one of them who had swum further out than the others. He was swimming back towards the shore when he began to scream, thrashing about in the water. His friends laughed, thinking he was playing the fool, but then they saw his face and arms were scarlet, and blistering.

My grandfather ran to the edge and prepared to dive in to rescue his friend, but just in time his companions grabbed him and pulled him back. Seeing the dense clouds of steam rising from the surface, my grandfather bent down and touched his finger lightly to the water. He drew it back with a shriek of pain. The water was scalding hot. His friend was being boiled alive.

But that was only the beginning, only a warning of what was to fall upon them. For fire and rock exploded from the mountains of Hekla, Herdubreid and Trölladyngja. Great torrents of red molten lava rushed down the mountainsides and into the valleys, hot ash and smoke shot into the air poisoning the land and suffocating people and animals alike. I know this. I have seen the bones of those who perished piled up like great scaffolds on the wasted lands.

My family survived. But the day the lake boiled, the skin was burned from my grandfather’s finger, a burn so deep the finger withered up, blackened and useless until the day he died. Every time he looked at it, he felt again the searing agony of body and heart. And now I realize that the monster in our pool is far more terrible than even the one Valdis and I feared as children. My grandfather could run from his burning lake, we cannot.

And when our pool boils, nothing will be able to survive in this cave, not the mice or the beetles, not the corpse and not me. If I cannot escape this cave, I will die in agony, scalded alive, like the boy in the lake. But I cannot leave Valdis. I swore I would take her body back to the river of ice so that her soul can be released to fly, I promised her. But if the draugr is not gone from her by then, I cannot take her from this place and release that monster into the world to destroy and murder. I will not leave her alone with that creature. I never left her side in life. I cannot abandon her in death. I will die in here as she has, chained to this rock. I press my hands together to keep them from shaking at the terror of it. Will I have the strength to do it?

I stare into the embers of the fire as the clay pot bakes. Three days before I can even begin to heal the draugr’s corpse. Three long days and nights of waiting. But how long will it be before the monster in the pool starts to roar. Weeks? Days? Hours? Minutes? How long can I survive in the cave as the water boils and steam rises ever more densely? I need time, enough time to find a way to send his spirit back, but however desperately you plead for it, time is not always granted. The water that drips from a leaking bowl will not run back into it again.

Chapter Eleven

Hausse-pieds
,
teneur
and
attombisseur
were the names given to the three falcons cast off one after another when their master was hunting a heron.

Hausse-pieds
, ‘raised feet’, was the first falcon. Her role was to rise above the heron in the sky, then harry and distract it.

Teneur
, ‘holder’, was the second. Her task was to stoop on the heron in the air and grasp it or ‘bind to’ it.

Attombisseur
, ‘the one who causes the fall’, was the third. She brought the heron down to the earth and killed it.

Isabela

Wait on
– when a hawk soars high above a falconer and the dogs, waiting for the game to be found and flushed out of the cover so that she can stoop on it.

‘Where are you running off to now, boy?’ Vítor shouted, as Hinrik clambered up a ridge towards a great heap of small stones that had been piled up there.

Hinrik carefully added his own stone to the top before clambering back down. He stood in front of us, his bandy legs astride, looking at each of us expectantly. Then he squatted down, picked up another stone from the track and handed it to me. ‘You must all pay a stone or you will have bad luck.’

‘What is this nonsense, boy?’ Vítor snapped. Hunger and tiredness were making us all irritable.

‘First time you pass a
gröf
… a grave like this with stones, you must add a stone to it.’

‘Whose grave is it, lad?’ Fausto asked.

Hinrik shrugged. ‘Witch or wizard. They must be very powerful to be buried out here. They will curse you if you do not give them a stone. You must do it,’ he added anxiously.

Vítor snorted. ‘I’m certainly not going to make any offerings to witches. That’s blasphemy, boy.’

‘Oh yes, I was forgetting you’re a strict Lutheran pastor now, aren’t you, Vítor?’ Marcos said.

‘You know very well I am not a Lutheran,’ Vítor said, his voice crackling with ice. ‘I am here to map this island.’

Marcos and Fausto exchanged looks which plainly said neither of them believed a word of that.

‘Then why didn’t you stay at the coast? Isn’t the shore where map-makers usually start?’ Fausto said. He bent down and selected a stone from the many that lay scattered about, fallen from the steep peaks above us. From the expression on his face, I half-thought he was going to use it to batter Vítor.

It was hard to say which of the two men disliked Vítor the more, for both took every opportunity to goad him as well as each other. Over the last few days, struggling to survive out in the open, hunger and exhaustion had only made their tempers worse. Fausto and Marcos were forever snapping and snarling at each other and at Vítor. Of the three, only Vítor never seemed to lose his chilling self-control, which only made me more wary of him.

‘The coast is already well mapped, Senhor Fausto, as you would have seen if you had taken the trouble to show any interest in the navigator’s work while we were at sea, which I can assure you I did. But my masters are interested in the interior of the island, the mountains to be precise, of which few details are given on the charts. Why do you imagine we are travelling in this direction?’

‘And who are your masters exactly?’ Marcos said.

Vítor allowed himself a half-smile. ‘I, unlike some, am known for my discretion. I was chosen for this task because I could be relied upon not to gossip about their business like some market crone.’

‘Anyway,’ Fausto said with the tone of a petulant child, ‘who says we’re travelling this way for your convenience?’

‘An excellent question, Senhor Fausto, and one I’ve been meaning to ask you. I have patiently explained why I wish to venture into the mountains, not that it is any concern of yours, so perhaps you would care to enlighten us about your reasons.’

‘Diamonds,’ Fausto said brazenly, without the slightest hesitation or embarrassment. ‘Where else would they be found except in the mountains?’ Then he suddenly seemed to recall that I was standing there listening. ‘Isn’t that so, Isabela?’

His eyes met mine. There was something in that tone and look that went far beyond asking me not to expose his lie. It was almost a threat, warning me to keep silent. He offered his hand to me with a slight bow.

‘Come, Isabela. Shall we cast our stones together to appease the old witch? We don’t need any more ill luck, we already have an albatross trailing after us as it is,’ he said, glaring at Vítor.

I shrank away from him. Did he really think I would be so foolish as to clamber up on that ridge alone with him? I could see exactly what he was planning. If Fausto succeeded, the witch wouldn’t be the only corpse lying under a pile of stones. Ignoring Hinrik’s frantic pleas, I turned and walked on up the ravine. I knew the men would follow. No matter what I did, I couldn’t lose them. The more desperate I became to get away, the more determined they seemed to keep me close.

The land had grown more strange and wondrous the further we had travelled from the coast. Once we passed a great flat plain dotted with pools with raised clay sides like little washing tubs. All around them the earth was stained every colour that you can imagine – vivid blue, gentian and red, green, yellow and ochre. I thought at first the wool and cloth dyers had been at work there, but when we walked up to them we saw that the pools contained not water but boiling mud that glooped and bubbled like a thick soup on a cooking fire. Then suddenly behind us a jet of pure, clear water shot high into the air straight out of the ground and fell to earth again, leaving behind nothing but a cloud of steam. As we walked further, we came across more pools of boiling mud and found to our horror that the earth was falling away beneath our feet with every step. Terrified of plunging down, we ran for higher ground.

But the hills and high ridges were not without their hazards either, for we often had to cross wide rivers of loose shale that threatened to sweep us down the hillside. Hinrik showed us how to drop on our hands and knees and dig with a stick a few inches beneath the shale to find the firm rock on which we could crawl across. I copied him and Fausto followed, but Vítor and Marcos were still vying with each other and neither would humiliate himself by kneeling, until Vítor, trying to walk across it, slipped on the loose stone and was carried halfway down the hill by it before he could stop. He soon learned to crawl then. But it was slow, painful work and our knees and hands were cut and bruised by the end of it.

Each time I could safely drag my gaze from the ground I was searching the skies for the falcons, but though I saw many waterfowl winging their way between the rivers and lakes, and even a tiny merlin, I didn’t see a single white falcon, nor its prey the ptarmigan. Whenever I could safely do so, out of earshot of the others, I asked Hinrik where the ptarmigan were. Had he seen any? When did he think we would see some? The poor lad began to look alarmed every time I approached.

‘They are not here,’ he said wearily each time. ‘I told you. In the mountains. High in the mountains.’

‘But if you see one you will show me at once,’ I begged him.