The Falcons of Fire and Ice (28 page)

We lay in the gulley all night as the wind howled, the rain lashed down on us and the branches of the trees whipped and cracked all around us. Never had a night seemed so long or so dark. By morning intense pain and cold had left me barely able to move. My jaw had locked rigid, for I had been clenching my teeth so hard. As Vítor picked me up in his arms, I couldn’t even open my mouth to acknowledge him. I was dimly aware that it had stopped raining and the sun had already risen behind the trees.

Vítor carried me back to the end of the gulley and managed to raise me just high enough so that I could grasp the thick ancient roots of an oak tree, though my fingers were so numb I could scarcely hold on. Nevertheless, he was able to heave me over the lip of the gulley, and I collapsed on the sodden ground above. I no longer had the strength even to sit up.

Vítor heaved me into his arms and carried me back through the forest. Each time he stumbled a searing pain ran up my leg, making me cry out, though I tried to bite it back. Several times he was forced to set me down while he scouted around, trying to work out which direction the sea might lie in, but it wasn’t until we heard the faint sound of the trumpet in the distance that we were certain we were walking towards the shore. However, the notes, far from reassuring me, only renewed my fear. How long would it take us to reach the beach?

‘They will wait,’ Vítor said in answer to my unspoken question. ‘They won’t sail without us. They know I came to look for you.’

He set me down on the ground. ‘You rest here and I’ll run to the beach and explain that you’re hurt. I’ll bring some of the sailors back with me to help carry you.’

‘No!’ I grabbed his leg. ‘Don’t leave me here. What if you can’t find me again? What if some wolf or boar should scent me and attack before you can return? I can’t walk, never mind defend myself like this.’

But it was not the thought of wild boars or wolves that terrified me. For some reason, in spite of all his kindness since, I could not forget that image of him standing over me in the gulley. I knew I was probably imagining it, I told myself I was, yet I could not shake off the feeling that he had no intention of returning for me.

He hesitated and for a moment I almost convinced myself I was right, but then he scooped me up again and we struggled on. I roundly scolded myself for my doubts, and blamed them on the pain. People are like falcons, they lash out when they are hurt, believing everyone is their enemy, even those who are only trying to help them.

The beach was deserted when we emerged from the trees, save for some gulls picking over clumps of glistening emerald seaweed and stranded starfish washed up on the wet sand. Vítor stopped and stared out to sea.

‘They’re setting sail. The bastards are leaving without us!’

He lumbered over the sand and down to the shore, the wavelets lapping over his boots. ‘No, no, come back! You can’t leave us here!’

I felt as if a great black curtain was slowly closing around me. Hunger, cold, pain and fear finally engulfed me and I knew no more.

I swam in and out of consciousness as they laid me in the shore boat, and was carried over a seaman’s shoulder up the rope ladder, passing out cold again when the ship’s surgeon with the help of one of the sailors wrenched my knee back into place. And I was told it was the ship’s surgeon who strapped my leg with wooden splints to support it as it healed. Marcos apparently declined to take any part in this procedure, saying he was a physician, not a common bone-setter.

Afterwards, though, Vítor, Fausto and Marcos behaved like lovelorn suitors, each insisting on mulling wine for me in case I should take a chill, pressing their blankets upon me and almost falling over one another to be the one to fetch me meals as I lay on my pallet. But all I wanted was to be left alone, and I was profoundly grateful to Dona Flávia when she insisted the three men joined her and her husband at the table for meals, leaving me alone in the passengers’ quarters, though I know full well that she did not do it for my sake.

And during those few precious times when I was alone I could not help repeatedly taking the bone with its iron ring out of my scrip. The ring was a plain band of iron, flattened into a disc on the top on which a simple word been inscribed –
foi
. Was it a name? Was this a lover’s ring? Who were they, buried out there in the wastes of that forest with no church nor shrine? Who had interred them there? Was it a kindness they had performed for the dead or a cruelty, a concealment of bodies that were never meant to be found?

Each time I touched that ring and bone I felt a strange sense of grief, as if I had lost someone I had known and loved, as if I had just watched them being laid to rest in a cold grave. It was a feeling of utter desolation, and more than that – a fear, a horror that some nameless force was about to descend upon me. I longed to cast the bone away, but even if I could have dragged myself to the ship’s rail, I knew I could never have tossed it into the sea. The bone needed a resting place and because I had taken it, I must give it what it craved.

Eydis

Rouse –
the action of a hawk shaking its feathers.

I know she is drawing closer. I sense it. The draugr senses it too. I take up our
lucet
again, our cord-maker, our power. It will lead her to us. It must.

Our lucet is fashioned from a piece of deer-horn, but it was not carved by our hands. It is an ancient thing. The Vikings brought it on their long-boats when first they ventured to this land. When its owner died it was placed in the grave with her. And there it lay for hundreds of years, until a storm washed rock and earth and grave away, and we found it, lying among the brown bones and a scatter of amber beads.

Though we were scarcely five years old we knew at once what it was, for our mother had taught us the art of plaiting cords for our clothes, just as she had taught us how to cook lichen and clean pots. But our lucets were carved from rough pieces of mutton bone, not smooth and polished as a sea-washed stone, not curved as proudly as a horse’s neck … not a precious gift from the long-dead. We sensed even then our mother would fear to see it in our hands.

Now the cord I have woven twists from its twin prongs. It is long enough to reach the girl, but not yet long enough to pull her close. Each day I must add another finger-length to it. Each twist, each loop gently and slowly guides her footsteps to this place. Three strands of wool woven together to make a single cord – black to call the dead, green to give them hope, red to lend them strength.

I turn the stem of the lucet in my hand, twisting it always with the sun I cannot see but have never forgotten. And with each new knot, the cord tightens and tightens until she will feel it drawing her, and know it is the falcons calling her. Then she will come. She must bring them to us. For the dead who follow her are our only living hope.

Iceland Ricardo

Entraves
or
fetters
– the equipment used to prevent a bird of prey flying away, comprising the jesses attached to the legs, a swivel and a leash with which to tie her to the perch or block.

It would just have to be that snivelling little wretch Vítor who gave Isabela the news that the coast of Iceland had been sighted, wouldn’t it? I’d heard the cry go up from the watch, of course, but they were always hollering orders at one another in their own jargon with the sole purpose of trying to make the passengers feel inferior, so that I had long since abandoned any pretence of listening to them. But on this occasion it turned out the incoherent bellows were because land had been sighted, and Vítor came thundering down the steps into our sleeping quarters to convey the glad tidings, urging us to come and look, as if this was an uncharted land and he had personally just discovered it.

I was the more annoyed because, for the first time, I had actually begun to believe I was gaining Isabela’s trust. There is a moment in every scam when you know that you have succeeded in putting a halter on your victim and may lead them to wherever you want to take them. At first they are wary of you, then comes suspicion, distrust and even hostility, but you must hold your nerve, persist. Gradually you will see they are listening to you, pricking up their ears, sniffing the air, and then they begin to edge diffidently towards you. They ask a few questions which suggest they are thinking about the prospect. They give you a tiny inadvertent nod of agreement, a hesitant little smile, and this is the beginning of trust, but only the beginning, mind you. Move too fast at this stage and they will shy away, never to return, but offer soothing words, compliments about their good sense and judgement and you’ll find them snuffling ever closer. Believe me, I have conned enough men and women to know the signs. And Isabela was almost there, almost willing to allow me to lead her.

It was imperative that I got her to trust me before we reached Iceland. If I didn’t, it was all over. For her to come off that beach alive was bad enough, but to come off with an injured leg which meant she was confined to the safety of sleeping quarters where no
accident
could possibly befall her, was nothing short of a disaster, especially with Vítor and his companion sticking to her like birds to lime.

‘Don’t you want to see your first glimpse of Iceland?’ Vítor urged. ‘Isabela, won’t you allow me to carry you up?’

‘No, no. I can manage.’ She brushed his extended arm aside.

For a moment I thought I glimpsed an expression of fear in her eyes. It was not the first time I had witnessed such a look since she had returned from the beach. What had passed between them that night? Had the bastard tried to force his oily little carcass on her?

Isabela levered herself to her feet, steadying herself against the bulkhead as the ship rolled. She limped to the bottom of the short flight of steps. Once more, Vítor put out a hand to try to assist her, but she pretended she hadn’t seen it, and with grim determination hauled herself up the steps.

Over these past two weeks she had daily practised walking until she was exhausted. Even the ship’s surgeon had told her to rest, and that was certainly a measure of the seriousness of his concern, for it was rumoured he’d once told a man on his deathbed to shift his arse and stop lounging about cluttering the place up. But Isabela took not a jot of notice. She was going to walk without a crutch and splints if it killed her. And give the girl her due, she’d done it, though it was obvious her leg still pained her, not that she’d admit that to anyone.

Sometimes her stubbornness reminded me of my Silvia when she was working up to a fight, though Isabela was not the kind of woman who would shriek dockside obscenities and hurl her boots at a man, more’s the pity. Sweet Jesu, how I missed Silvia. Without warning, the maggot-white, bloated face of that woman’s corpse swam up before my eyes and I pushed it firmly back down again before racing up the steps behind Vítor.

To be honest, I had no idea what sight was going to greet me on deck. I hadn’t given much thought to what manner of place Iceland was and I’d never had any desire to find out. Ask me to imagine parting a wealthy widow from her jewels and I would have no trouble in picturing such a scene in exquisite detail. But tell me to imagine a place I never really believed existed except in tales of drunken sailors and I could no more picture it in my head than I could see heaven. And, to tell the truth, since the day we set sail I’d never believed I would actually get as far as Iceland.

My plan, if you can call it such, was to somehow dispatch the girl long before we ever got this far and then to disembark at some civilized port and find a ship to carry me home. I’d thought it was going to be so easy – a ship tossing about in stormy seas, slippery decks, dark nights and a fragile young girl – it was an accident waiting to happen, so what could possibly go wrong? Iceland wasn’t even worth wasting a stray thought on. And if I had been forced to think of Iceland at all, the image that would have occurred most naturally would have been that it was … well … icy … covered in snow, I guess. But somehow black was never the colour that came to mind when I heard the name.

Now I joined the others at the rail and stared as dumbfounded as they. Before us was a scene that might have been the gateway to purgatory itself. Towering columns and jagged shards of black rock rose from out of the cobalt-blue sea. Huge waves crashed against these pinnacles with such violence that spray was flung high into the air, so that it looked as if a pall of white smoke hung permanently above them. What I could see of the land itself was nothing more than a hunk of craggy black rock which jutted out into the sea, like a splintered jaw, without a single blade of grass or even a smudge of moss to soften it. The roaring waves hurled themselves into the cracks in the rock with such force that great plumes of foam exploded upwards and the white water streamed in waterfalls back down the stone and into the churning sea.

The air throbbed with the screams of seabirds. The gulls were much like those that used to drag me from my sleep in Belém with their raucous screeches, but others were some of the oddest-looking birds I’d ever seen, small black and white creatures with huge red, blue and yellow beaks covering most of their faces. The cook and a couple of the seamen were tossing weighted nets over the side trying to capture them as they bobbed about on the boiling foam as serenely as ducks on a village pond.

‘Dinner, if you can stomach it,’ the boatswain said glumly, as he joined me at the rail. ‘Still, you’ll be supping on shore soon and after a few weeks eating on this isle you’ll think that puffin and ship’s biscuit is the food of angels.’ He laughed, evidently relishing the misery he thought lay in store for us.

‘You’re surely not going to try to land here?’ I said, staring with horror at the fanged rocks and crashing seas.

The boatswain regarded me as if I was an imbecile. ‘You’d best pray we don’t get within spitting distance of that shore else it’ll be us that’s the dinner … for the fishes. No, the captain’s heading for a bay further round the cliffs, only a piss-poor village there but that suits the captain fine.’ The boatswain lowered his voice. ‘There’s a few little trifles he wants to unload.’ He tapped his nose and grinned.