Hawksmaid (2 page)

T
HE HAWKS HAD COME
back as Lord William had predicted—not all of them, but four returned. “The stalwarts,” he called them. Moss had been the first, flying into the chapel during Lady Suzanne's funeral. Matty had not attended; she was unconscious from being knocked on the head by fragments of the mews walls. Hodge's wife, old Meg, hovered around her bed for endless hours. Nelly Woodfynn, mother of Fynn, was there as well. She had come to help nurse, and Fynn paced anxiously nearby.

Matty had been lying motionless for nearly two days, her lips drained of color, her eyelids so swollen
that barely a quiver could be detected. But after his wife's burial, Lord William had taken the peregrine into the chamber, and Matty began to rouse.

“Look, my lord!” Fynn cried as Moss flew to perch on Matty's bed. “Her eyelids are fluttering!”

“Robert, I believe you're right.” Lord William never called Matty's friend Fynn but by his proper Christian name. His father was the warden of the woods of Barnsdale. Fynn, who was a year and a half older than Matty, had played with her at the castle when his parents had come there on business. Lord William often gave them food from the larder in exchange for Nelly's nursing his family and servants. She was known to be the best midwife in the shire and one of the few who would treat lepers.

Fynn stepped closer to the bed. “She's coming around, my lord, I tell you. She's trying to say something.”

“Free…free,” Matty kept muttering. Her face was bruised more colors of purple than Fynn had ever seen. One eye was swollen completely shut. Above the other was a yellowish bump the size of a hen's egg. But by some miracle Matty had survived with no broken bones.

Perched on the bedstead, Moss began making
strange guttural sounds. A hush fell across the room. Everyone sensed a further quickening of Matty's slumbering spirit beneath the lumps and bumps and bruises. “Free…free,” Matty said more clearly. And then the words stopped, replaced by a slow gurgling sound from back of her throat.

“She can't breathe!” Fynn lurched toward the slight form in the bed. Lord William shot out his arm and stayed him as Moss raised her feathers threateningly and then in one quick hop landed on Matty's pillow. It was an odd picture, the long deadly talons digging into the soft goose down. But Matty's eyes suddenly opened.

“You came back!” she whispered to the peregrine. “You came back!”

 

Within hours, one by one, the other birds arrived: Morgana the kestrel, Ulysses the goshawk, and Lyra the short-winged hawk. They came back to their master, Lord William Fitzwalter, whose wife had been murdered; whose silver and gold and jewels had been stolen; whose larder had been emptied; whose fields had been burned; and whose servants, peasants, and vassals had gone. But most of his hawks had come back.

 

Fynn started to bring some of his friends to visit while Matty recovered.

She liked Fynn's friends and found their company lively. There was Rich Much, the miller's son; Hubert Bigge, whose father was dead but whose mother was a brewer; and a handsome boy called Will Scarloke, son of the blacksmith. A few days later, Matty was even able to laugh when Fynn said, “Your face looks like a few squashed plums, and that egg over your eye—well, it's gone down, more like a fried egg now.” The boys talked about roaming the forest of Barnsdale, hunting, fishing, and “adventuring,” as they called it. Matty longed to get well enough to join them.

It was while she was still propped up in her bed that Matty had her first falconry lesson. What was remarkable about this lesson was the way in which her father spoke to her.

“Matilda,” he began gravely, “we have lost so much. But we will live through these terrible times. A tyrant will not vanquish us. The rightful heir will return; and when Richard does, we will be prepared to serve him. But we must
live
to do that. The hawks will help us survive. I am going to teach you how to take care
of them and how to gain their trust and become a master falconer. I am getting older. I can't run with the hawks the way I once did. You are young, strong, and smart.”

Matty was astonished. She had never heard anyone speak of a girl in quite this way. He looked at her seriously and said, “I am counting on you.”

“How do you take care of them, Father?” she asked.

“You must learn, first of all, to see to their health in general and to the health of their feathers especially. Let's start with imping.”

“Imping?”

“Imping—mending the broken feathers of injured hawks.”

It was a good first lesson. Hawks often damaged their feathers when hunting, and three of the returning hawks had suffered feather injuries. Every falconer kept a supply of molted feathers for the sole purpose of repairing broken ones. Luckily, Lord William's box of feathers in the mews had not been destroyed when the upper part of the tower collapsed.

So Matty learned how to whittle a molted feather's shaft so it could be grafted to the remains of the damaged
one that still grew from the injured bird. She learned to use an imping needle to insert the new feather into the quill of the damaged one, and to fix it in place with a special paste. It was delicate work, and as she learned she felt herself begin to mend.

The first feather she imped was for Ulysses, a fierce and fearless bird. He had broken a tail covert.

“He'll need that one done well. You'll see, Matty. Ulysses is an expert in flying in tight spaces. A goshawk can follow prey through a maze of shrubs and thick brush, but he must have his tail for steering.” The immense bird nearly covered half her bed but was quite patient as Matty carefully worked. “You'll begin to understand all this, Matty. You'll see that to really know how a hawk flies you have to learn to think like a hawk.”

 

Think like a hawk
! When her father had said those words six months ago, she had blinked in confusion. The words hinted at some kind of magical transformation. And, indeed, it did seem as though there was an end to the tedious life of being a girl who could prepare only for marriage. It would not matter if she could embroider a lovely altar cloth for the castle chapel or
learn to dance the saltarello, which her mother claimed to have danced so superbly that she had captivated half a dozen noblemen, including Lord William. Within the space of a very short time, a time of deprivation that most considered terrible, Matilda Fitzwalter's life changed completely…and she loved it.

During the long winter nights her father taught her how to play chess. She began to learn how to read, a skill considered most unfeminine. What man would ever want anything to do with a girl so clever she could read? Maidens were supposed to read—if at all—the Bible. But Lord William had a book on falconry and it was no time before Matty needed not only to read that book but also to write. Lately, she'd begun to learn how to hunt with her father and to keep meticulous records. She made observations of how the hawks flew, how they plunged, or stooped, in for a kill. Did they favor the left wing or the right? It was important to know their habits, their preferences. Matty wrote it all down.

Matty and her father, each with a hawk on the shoulder, walked the fields beyond the castle walls on this chill March day. Her eyes surveyed the muddy ground for any signs of game. As her father had
predicted, falconry was no longer simply a sport for them. They were dependent on the hawks for food. The raids ordered by Prince John and carried out by the sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne had depleted Lord William's coffers. The other nobles throughout the shire who were not in league with the prince could not help. They were also under attack. Lord William began selling the few castle treasures he had left—tapestries, jewels, art. His small herd of cows had stopped giving milk because they were starving. Then the flocks of chickens began to thin out. Now all the animals were gone except the hawks.

Game was scarce where Matty and her father were walking and she wished they could go farther, but her father could not manage great distances since the raid. And he was not about to let Matty go abroad alone. This morning she wore a falconer's gauntlet on her left arm, and Moss the peregrine's talons encircled the glove almost completely. Lord William looked at his daughter proudly. She was learning so quickly. This was only her third or fourth time out flying a hawk since she had regained her strength after that horrendous day.

As they crossed the field, Matty sensed a new
alertness in Moss. The peregrine shifted her weight on the glove. A riffle ran through the sleek black cap of feathers on her head, and her shoulder coverts stirred. Matty's father never spoke as she prepared to launch a hawk in flight. That had been part of the first lessons.

“I shall remain quiet, Matilda, when you are practicing launching. No man can tell another when a bird is fit to take flight.”

“I'm not a man, Father! I'm a girl.”

“Sorry, sorry. You will be the finest
falconress
in England.”

“No, just call me a falconer. No special word.” She paused and gave him a mischievous look. “But do remember I'm a girl.”

“How could I ever forget?” There was a sudden light in Lord William's rheumy eyes. She knew that she was the cause, the jewel that was the source of this sparkle. She didn't much like being thought of as a jewel any more than she enjoyed being called a falconress. But she was happy that her father seemed to have regained some of his former spirit.

Moss stirred again on her arm. With her right hand Matty started undoing the jesses. The peregrine began to make subtle movements signaling that she was
in hunting order. Matty opened her mouth slightly and made a rough sawlike sound. This was the first thing that had astounded Lord William. He himself had hawked for nearly a half century but had never been able to master that back-of-the-throat language in which hawks often communicated. She was now readying Moss for the loft, not simply through her body's motions but through language—a language Lord William had once believed was inaccessible to humans. And he knew that Matty was becoming more fluent each day. He often caught her speaking to herself as if practicing. Sometimes he almost felt that she was not merely thinking like a hawk but was herself part hawk.

Matty threw her left arm up. A high, shrill noise pealed from Moss's throat as she spotted a duck rising from a grassy hummock. The hawk was in the air, her great wings spread against the flawless blue sky. Matty and her father squinted as they followed the course of the bold assassin. Their hearts raced as they saw Moss begin to fold her wings. This was the moment of truth, the dive of a peregrine, a moment unmatched by anything else in hunting. Moss took her prey in a steep vertical stoop, putting on a cunning burst of speed. The
dagger points of her talons struck, blood splattered the sky. The duck died instantly.

“She's binding to it!” her father whispered excitedly.

Moss gripped the duck as they tumbled to the ground together—rather gently considering the ferocity of the attack. A trail of duck feathers streamed in their wake. Matty felt a sudden dizziness. Just for a second or two, it was almost as if she
herself
were tumbling through the air. And once again the boundaries that separated human beings from birds seemed to dissolve.
If I can feel this, couldn't I…?
But she dared not wonder. The very thought seemed too bold to consider.

 

Moss was not Matty's only avian teacher. Each hawk—be it a short-winged hawk like Lyra, a kestrel like Morgana, or a goshawk like Ulysses—had his or her own style of flying and hunting. Matty needed to learn them all. While Moss brought down the duck, Ulysses perched on Lord William's shoulder. With his pale gray plumage the immense goshawk seemed to hover like a ghost. He was the largest of all the hawks and a commanding presence even when hooded. Ulysses had not been flown since Matty had imped his tail feathers when she was
still recovering. But her father had brought him today.

Matty was nervous. This would be the true test of her skills. Would the imped feather hold? Her father had said that she had done a good job, but it wasn't just the feather that made her worry. She had not yet worked with a goshawk but knew Ulysses's style was to search for prey in confined spaces, and she had to be patient. One did not launch a goshawk from the glove like a peregrine. Instead, the bird perched above the falconer in a tree, keeping a lookout for prey from a higher vantage point. A goshawk went when he decided the time was right, and in this sense she and Ulysses were not partners. Any distracting motions from the falconer and a goshawk would stubbornly refuse to hunt.

“Now remember what I told you,” her father said as he transferred Ulysses to her shoulder. “You can take off his jesses long before you spot anything that might be prey, as long as you remain absolutely still. Ulysses is a bird of uncommon self-discipline—almost what I would call military. It was probably entirely unnecessary for me to have hooded him while you flew Moss.”

Matty and her father now followed a hedgerow
that dipped into a meadow. With its thickets and occasional saplings it was an ideal territory for grouse and rabbits.

After she and her father settled under a dense overhang of brush, Matty began to unhood Ulysses. Catching her breath, she felt his piercing red eyes fix her with a commanding gaze. A dark patch of feathers that streamed like a black flame above his eyes made him appear even fiercer as he seemed to say,
Are you prepared, my lady? I am.
Matty prayed that the imped tail feather would not break.

She found that remaining still was the hard part: crouching in dense, prickly brush that poked at her and she could not move to scratch. It was a kind of torture. She hoped the prey wouldn't be a fox. Matty supposed one could eat fox, but she never had and hoped she never would. A plump rabbit would be fine or, better yet, a hare, whose flesh was much richer. She had barely completed the thought when without any warning she felt a great gust.