The Falcons of Fire and Ice (36 page)

We are able to rid ourselves
… So he intended to attach himself to me, maybe even get rid of Marcos and travel alone with me. It was almost as if Vítor was really starting to believe I was his wife. Was he planning to make it so? I had no experience of being wooed, but even I was sure that what I saw in Vítor’s eyes was certainly not love.

And as for Fausto, had he told me that story about killing a man to let me know that he was capable of murdering me too? Had he been about to make a more explicit threat before Vítor interrupted him? If I had not been certain before, what had just happened outside had me convinced that I must get far away from both of them as quickly as I could.

I lay huddled uncomfortably on the bed. The dried seaweed and mouldy straw which filled the pallet crunched deafeningly in my ear every time I or the woman and her children moved, releasing a sickening stench. I was determined to keep awake, but there was little danger of falling asleep. The three men lay hunched under the threadbare blankets and furs in the opposite bed stalls, with Hinrik, the farmer and his old father. I couldn’t see their faces, but I sensed that while the others might be snoring, Vítor, like me, was still lying awake.

The blood-red glow of the embers in the fire pit drew my gaze back to it. There was a whole landscape in miniature contained in that smouldering, blackened pit – rock-strewn valleys and mountains, with veins of fire running through them, dark caves and white ash peaks. As I stared into its depths, I could almost feel I was walking through those rocks, climbing the side of that mountain, sliding into the cave.

Krery-krery-krery!

I started up on one elbow, staring about the hall. The cry was so close that it was as if I was again in my father’s mews. But surely the farmer was not keeping a gyrfalcon hidden in his house, after all he had said about the dangers?

Krery-krery-krery.

It was fainter now, but insistent as if it was screaming from a distant mountain, yet was determined its cry be heard. But where? Hinrik had said there were no falcons in these parts, and besides, the white falcon did not hunt at night.

I half-sensed a movement, and turned my head back to the fire pit. An elderly woman was standing in front of it. In the owl-light of the hall I couldn’t see her clearly, only the shape of her blocking out the fire beyond. Was she wife to the old man in the bed? She was holding a little child by the hand, trying to push her behind her own body. She raised her other arm over her face, cringing, as if trying to ward off a heavy blow. Then, as if the blow had fallen, she crumpled into the darkness of the earth floor and was gone, leaving behind her only a cold, damp breeze which lifted a tiny flake of white ash in the fire pit and sent it soaring into the shadows above. Had I just imagined her there? Without knowing why, my fingers reached for the white finger bone hanging in the bag around my neck.

Krery-krery-krery.

I could barely hear it. It was only the breath of the scream, not the cry itself. But it was enough.

Ricardo

Summed –
when a falcon has fledged and grown all her flight feathers, or has grown new feathers after the moult, and is ready to fly.

I woke with what tasted like a beggar’s armpit in my mouth, and my head ringing like a blacksmith’s anvil. It took a few moments to realize where I was, and even longer to work out that I was lying with someone’s foot halfway up my arse and a hairy arm draped across my head. I struggled out of the tangle of groaning bodies, balding furs and musty blankets.

There was no sign of Hinrik, but the old man snored on in his corner of the bed, propped upright just as he had been last night. Even his own farts didn’t wake him. The farmer’s wife was stirring a great pot over the fire, and shot us a look of disgust that would have outdone even my Silvia’s scathing glances, and, as all the saints know, Silvia could floor a man at twenty paces with one of her withering looks.

As her husband and my two companions struggled upright, she silently handed each of us a bowl of what looked like grey glue, so thick and glutinous that I was certain it could never be coaxed from the bowl. I managed a couple of spoonfuls before the whole mess tried to crawl its way back up my throat again. I dashed out of the hall and only just made it through the door before my breakfast made its bid for freedom.

I leaned weakly against the turf wall and drew in great gulps of cold air. What the devil had been in that drink last night? I didn’t remember a thing, except for a dim memory of hating Vítor for some reason, but then that didn’t tell me much. I’d loathed the man since he first set foot on the ship.

Hinrik sauntered around the back of the house. He grinned when he saw me. ‘It was a good night, yes?’

I groaned and rubbed at my eyeballs which were as swollen and raw as if they’d been skinned. How had he managed to sleep in that fug of smoke and look so lively in the morning? The impudent puppy plainly found my misery hilarious. I would have kicked his arse just to remind him I owned him, if I could have trusted myself to do it without falling on my own backside, but the lesson would have to wait until the ground stopped tilting.

I stumbled over to a trough and dashed some water on to my face. How it hadn’t frozen, I don’t know, for it was far colder than ice. I can only guess that it was so thick with slime and dirt that nothing would make it freeze. Every animal on the farm seemed to have pissed in it, but at least the cold cleared my head a little.

Vítor emerged from the doorway. ‘Have you seen Isabela?’ he demanded as I walked back towards the house.

His face was the colour of a squashed slug and he seemed to be holding his head very stiffly as if it was thumping as much as mine, which was at least some consolation. But it couldn’t have been from the drink, for he’d taken hardly any last night, though sleeping in that fug was enough to make anyone bilious.

‘Isabela, where is she?’ he repeated impatiently.

‘Isn’t she inside?’ I said, staring around vaguely.

I couldn’t recall seeing her since I’d woken, but then it had taken all my concentration just to get my limbs to move in a vaguely co-ordinated fashion.

‘I’d hardly be asking you if she was,’ Vítor snapped. ‘Hinrik, have you seen her?’

‘She’s gone. She took some smoked puffin meat. The breakfast was not cooked then. Too early.’

Vítor leapt forward and seized Hinrik by the shoulders, shaking him till his teeth rattled. ‘She’s left? All by herself? You stupid half-wit, why didn’t you wake us? Why did you let her go?’

Hinrik was goggle-eyed with fear. I dragged Vítor off the boy and both of them stood there panting. The lad looked on the verge of taking to his heels.

‘You saw what happened yesterday,’ Vítor yelled at him. ‘She doesn’t know how to look after herself in this place.’ He took a deep breath as if he was making a great effort to regain control. ‘How long ago did she leave? Which way did she go?’

Hinrik was watching Vítor apprehensively as if he thought he would launch another attack at any moment.

‘Before the sun was up. She went …’ The lad tentatively gestured along the track which led in the direction of the mountains.

‘Did she say
where
she was going?’ Vítor demanded impatiently, looking as if he was about to try to shake the information out of him again. ‘Didn’t you ask?’

‘Look, we’re wasting precious time standing around here,’ I said. ‘Let’s just saddle up and go after her as quickly as we can, before she gets herself into any more danger.’ I turned to the farmer who was stumbling out of the door, his face as crumpled and creased as a whore’s petticoats. ‘Hinrik, ask him to bring us our horses, will you, quick as he can.’

Hinrik translated and the farmer spat on to the ground and muttered something. Clearly the drink had left him with a foul hangover.

‘He says fetch them yourself,’ Hinrik said.

I felt my own temper rising as fast as Vítor’s. ‘Then where are they?’

‘He says back with their owner by now.’

‘But we
are
the owners,’ Vítor said indignantly. ‘We paid a great deal for those beasts.’

‘How are the horses to know that?’ Hinrik giggled, then, catching sight of Vítor’s face, abruptly stopped himself.

‘Tether does not hold them,’ he said. ‘He says you should have taken them to the stone fold and hobbled them. Horses return home first chance they get. Everyone knows that.’

Vítor railed furiously at the lad and followed it up with a hard clout across the boy’s head which, thinking he fully deserved it, I made no attempt to prevent. But finally, even Vítor could see that no amount of shouting or raging was going to recover the animals. In the meantime, as I reminded him, Isabela was getting further away.

We assembled our packs, abandoning all but the essential items we could carry on our own backs, and set off in pursuit of Isabela, with Vítor still muttering that the farmer had probably stolen our beasts himself and was hiding them somewhere until we were safely out of sight. If he hadn’t been so anxious to find the girl, he said, he would have searched every inch of the place and would most assuredly do so when he returned. There was only one consolation in all this, and that was that Isabela had apparently been forced to depart on foot as well, so that I was sure it wouldn’t be long before we caught up with her.

The Jesuits were not joking when they said this would be like a pilgrimage. Climbing up the steps of some monastery on your knees would be less painful than marching over that terrain. I’m used to city streets, not dirt tracks, and when I wasn’t sinking knee-deep in freezing mud, I was barking my shin on a rock, or flaying my legs on thorns. One of the sailors told me that when Satan saw that God had created the world, he was jealous and demanded the right to create just one little piece of land himself. He laboured hard for a week, throwing into it all the skills he had to create a piece of hell on earth, and the country he made was Iceland. Never was a truer story told.

After several hours of walking, I was almost at the point of refusing to take another step when we heard laughter and raised voices carried towards us on the wind almost at the same time as we saw the men ahead of us on the track. All four of us hesitated and peered warily ahead to see what might be amusing them.

When you live by your wits in the streets of Belém or Lisbon, you learn to read a crowd. Not that this was a crowd – I could dimly make out three, maybe four, figures – but still it becomes second nature to peer round the door of a tavern or pause before entering a square. You sense, just by the way people are gathering, that trouble is bubbling up like foul water in a ditch. Then, unless you are itching to get your nose smashed or a dagger in your back, you know it’s time to slip quietly away before anyone notices you. I’m fond of my face and want to keep its features exactly as God made them.

But there are some men who have the brains of bulls. Wave anything in front of their squinty little eyes and they’ll charge at it, without even bothering to look to see if they are making straight for a spear. Vítor, instead of turning away, simply quickened his stride.

I ran a couple of steps and grabbed his arm, pulling him round.

‘This way,’ I whispered. ‘Quickly, take cover behind those rocks. If we cut across behind this rise we can avoid them and rejoin the track further up.’

Vítor jerked his arm away. ‘They’ve got hold of someone. It’s obvious they mean mischief,’ he added as a cry of pain cut through the bellows of raucous laughter that drifted back towards us.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘So let’s avoid a fight and go round them. We can’t afford any delays if we’re to catch up with Isabela. Besides, we don’t even know if they’re armed, and there are only three of us.’

But at that moment we heard a shout. It was a woman’s voice and she was yelling in our own tongue.

‘That
is
Isabela,’ our companion shouted.

In a trice he was throwing off his pack, and with his hand already drawing his dagger, he had sprinted past Vítor and me down the rough stony track with a bellow loud enough to make one of the men turn round. Vítor and I struggled to disengage our own packs, tossing them over the rocks on the edge of the track before we followed him.

Isabela was pinned down on the grass by three youths. One of them, his face covered with the red pimples of adolescence, was kneeling astride her, trying to yank up her skirts, and a second was standing on one of her wrists, holding her to the ground while she fought desperately with her free hand to fend off her attacker.

The third youth had wheeled round to face us, a short-bladed knife in his hand.

‘Let her go,’ I demanded.

‘Hvem er du?’

I’d no idea what he said, but there was no mistaking the insolent tone. I looked round for Hinrik, but the wretched little coward was nowhere to be seen. I only hoped he was hiding and hadn’t run off, not that I would blame him after the way Vítor had yelled at him.

A squeal from Isabela, as the bastard ground her wrist hard into the ground, recalled me to the point.

‘Leave her alone!’

‘Hun er Katolik.’ The youth pushed his cabbage face close to mine. ‘KATOLIK!’ He stepped back and jabbed the knife upwards.

‘Skrub af, gamle! Eller skal du ha’ taesk?’

I may not have understood the words, but I all too nearly got the point. I think, roughly translated, he was inviting me to leave before I got a knife between my ribs. The ill-mannered youth looked back at his friend who was kneeling astride the writhing Isabela and gestured impatiently at him with his blade.

‘Skynd dig nu, eller lad mig komme til.’

There’s one thing I’ve learned about fighting – if you really can’t avoid it, then make damn sure you get your blow in first. As the youth turned his knife and, more foolishly, his attention away from me, I grabbed his wrist and twisted. The knife flew out of his hand and at the same time I brought my knee up hard into his balls. It’s a girl’s trick, I know, but I make no apologies, for believe me it works most effectively and, unlike a punch, avoids any risk that your opponent will be able to deliver a counter-blow to your own jaw. He yelped as he sank slowly to his knees and rolled on to his side, clutching himself between the legs, his eyes screwed up in pain.