The Falcons of Fire and Ice

by Karen Maitland

  ‘Your neighbour has done this. A Sending has been conjured to harm the child.’ The voice which suddenly booms out in the cave might have been my own and yet I did not speak. There is a harshness to it which I do not recognize.

  Jónas turns to look at my veiled sister. ‘My neighbour?’ he asks, as if he expects her to answer him, and I cannot understand why, until I remember he does not know she is dead.

  ‘Is there anyone who has a grudge against you?’ the voice says.

  I stare at the body of the man lying in the corner of the cave, even though I know it is my sister’s voice I can hear. But he remains motionless, his eyes closed, his lips cracked and still.

  ‘Pétur, it has to be that bastard Pétur,’ Jónas says vehemently. ‘I sold him a stallion to cover his mares, but he said the beast died. Claimed it was sick when I sold it to him. He’s come to my farm several times demanding the return of the money, but I wouldn’t give it to him. It’s been more than three months since I sold him the stallion. If the horse had been sick when I sold it to him it would have died long before this, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. Now he’s taken his revenge on my poor innocent daughter. What can I do to help her?’ Jónas is still addressing my sister as if he expects her to answer him.

  ‘If you do exactly what I say, the child’s wits shall return,’ she says.

  My hands are trembling. I slowly turn my head towards Valdis’s body, not wanting to look but knowing I must. There beneath the flimsy cloth of her veil, I can see her lips moving.

  ‘Go to the graveyard,’ she says, ‘and open a grave of one newly buried. Take from it the coin that is placed on the man’s tongue. Carry the coin to Pétur’s farm and there hide it in the bed of the stream at the place where his mares come to drink. But make sure you do this during the daylight hours. At night, the ghost of the corpse will follow his coin to the farm to take back what has been stolen from him, but ghosts cannot enter running water, so he will not be able to retrieve the coin. In his frustration, he will take his vengeance out on the nearest living creatures, Pétur’s mares, and kill them. Then the child’s wits shall be restored.’

  Jónas shudders. ‘The wretch deserves to lose his mares and more besides after what he’s done to my beautiful daughter, but I would sooner kill his horses with my own hand than rob the dead.’

  ‘Dark magic harmed your child, only vengeance from the spirit world can undo the curse. It must be done as I have told you,’ Valdis tells him.

  I am so horrified at hearing the voice come from my dead sister’s lips that I have barely taken in what is being said, but the words finally penetrate through the veil of fear and revulsion in my head. I know what she is telling him to do is wrong, terribly wrong.

  ‘No! No, that is not what ails the child.’

  Jónas turns to me, puzzled, as well he might be, for my sister and I have always before uttered the same thought.

  ‘The cloud was not a Sending. There was no malice in it, no life in it, no spirit.’

  ‘Just look at the child,’ Valdis jeers. ‘How can you say there is no malice in this?’

  ‘The child is sick, but I sense that no human hand lies behind this. The cloud came from the mountain, not from your neighbour Pétur. Frída will –’

  But Jónas interrupts me. ‘Your sister Valdis is right, whoever heard of a cloud moving so fast and why did it make straight for my daughter? Her friend said it was as if an arrow had been fired at her.’

  He scoops the child up and slings her again over his shoulder, his face grim with resolve.

  ‘What Valdis says about the Sending is the only explanation that makes sense. I’ll do as she says. I’ll take a dead man’s coin to Pétur’s farm. Even if I have to dig up a hundred corpses before I find such a coin, I will do it to cure my child. What father wouldn’t be prepared to risk the wrath of a thousand ghosts if it was the only way to save his daughter?’

  ‘No, please listen, Jónas,’ I beg, but he strides away, determined not to hear me.

  As soon as I hear him scrambling out of the crack in the rock above, I steel myself, then slowly pull the veil from my sister’s face. Beneath the cloth, her skin is yellowed like old parchment, the features wizened and sunken as if every drop of moisture has been sucked from her body by the heat of the cave. Her lips have shrunk back from her teeth. Her arms swing limp, the fingernails blackened, the skin cold as the grave.

  But though I closed her eyes tenderly when she died, now suddenly they are wide open and looking straight at me. But it is not my sister’s soft blue eyes that stare up at me. I have known and loved her eyes all my life. I could not mistake them now. The blue is gone, the whites of the eyes have vanished, only two huge black pupils remain like great gaping holes. I am staring into twin open graves. I gasp in horror and the eyelids slowly blink.

  Chapter Seven

  A French nobleman was suspicious that his wife had a lover. So he locked her up in a high tower, with only a narrow window at the top and walls no man could scale. Then he set his sister to keep watch on the tower whenever he was absent from it. But when the nobleman left the tower each day to go hunting, the woman’s lover transformed himself into a goshawk and flew in through the narrow window. There he turned into a man again and made love to the woman, before flying away. And so they continued for many months, blissfully happy in each other’s arms.

  But the woman’s sister-in-law noticed the goshawk flying in and out of the tower. One day she followed the bird, and when he alighted on the ground, she watched him resume his human form. She told her brother, who fitted sharp spikes to the window, then pretended to go hunting. The lover, believing it was safe to visit the woman, transformed himself into the hawk and flew in through the window, and impaled himself on the spikes. The wounds were fatal and he died in his lover’s arms. But his beloved was already pregnant with his son and that infant grew up to become a great hero of France.

  Coast of France Ricardo

  Ruff – when the falcon strikes its prey without seizing it.

  ‘The men will row you ashore now,’ the ship’s master said. ‘Take your water kegs. There’s a stream and my quartermaster says the water is sweet. You can fill them before we return.’

  ‘Why are we disembarking here?’ the merchant demanded. ‘The bay’s deserted. There’s no town. Not even a house to be seen for miles. We must continue to a well-appointed harbour where –’

  ‘Where we can sleep in a decent bed on land and eat a meal that’s fit for civilized people,’ his wife finished for him. ‘Why should we set one toe on this desolate beach? How do we know you won’t just sail off and leave us there to starve? I’ve heard about such things – passengers being abandoned on some remote island to die, or sold to marauding pirates.’

  ‘You’d have to pay pirates to take that harridan,’ I muttered to one of the sailors waiting to help us to climb down into the shore boat.

  He grinned, showing a mouthful of stubby, blackened teeth. ‘They wouldn’t take her if you gave them all the gold in the New World. A night with her and they’d be begging the judges to hang them.’

  ‘Senhora,’ the master said, in the tone of one who was barely restraining himself from throwing her overboard, ‘the ship will not abandon you because she will not be sailing tonight. Have you not seen?’ He gestured towards the towering clouds rising up over the distant headland. ‘There’s a storm coming. We know this coastline well. The nearest inhabited port is miles away, and with this wind against us, we haven’t a hope of reaching it before the storm breaks. If we attempt to sail any further we’ll be sailing straight into the storm and we’ll be caught out at sea when the full force of it hits us. This bay at least offers us some protection, though we’ll still take a beating.’

  ‘And you expect a fragile, delicate woman like my wife to spend the night on the beach in a storm?’ the merchant said, his expression as black as the gathering clouds.

  The sailors sniggered. Dona Flávia was about as delicate as a whale
.

  The master spat copiously into the waves below. ‘She can stay aboard, if she’s a mind to, as can any of you, but I warn you now, you’d best make sure that you are lashed down as tight as the boxes and barrels, for once the ship starts being pounded, you’ll be thrown around so much you’re liable to get your brains dashed out on the bulkheads. And I hope you’ve a strong stomach, for if you’ve felt seasick before now, I can assure you that you’ll all be praying to drown once this ship starts plunging up and down.’

  Dona Flávia shrieked and clutched frantically at Isabela’s arm as if it was a holy relic. ‘But if the storm is going to be so terrible, we’ll all be swept away by the sea if we spend the night on the beach. We’ll all drown!’

  The master closed his eyes as if he was praying. ‘Then I suggest, Senhora, you don’t spend the night on the beach. The boatswain tells me there is a stone cottage among the trees beyond the beach. It’s not inhabited, but it will shelter you for tonight. Now, unless you want to ride out the storm on the ship, get into that shore boat before the wind grows any stronger else you’ll all end up at the bottom of the bay.’

  I don’t know who invented the rope ladder, but whoever it was should have been made to dangle from it over a pit of vipers while men swung it violently to and fro, because that’s exactly what it felt as if I was being forced to do, as I clambered down from the ship’s towering side into the pathetically small shore boat below. The boat was not only bucking up and down, but also crashing into the side of the ship and then rolling away, leaving a great yawning gap of churning water just at the precise moment when you were trying to step into it.

  I finally managed to hurl myself into the little craft, but not without banging my shin hard on the gunwale. I hunched in the boat, massaging my leg, as the wind dashed icy water into my face, and long before the next passenger had climbed down I was already soaked to the skin. I closed my eyes against the stinging salt, and the bloated, rotting face of that drowned woman rose up in front of me. Once again I was back in the tower of Belém, feeling the cold waves creeping up my legs. I opened my eyes rapidly.

  Most of the passengers had climbed down into the boat now except the girl Isabela, and the merchant and his wife. Isabela already had her little foot on the ladder. I stood up, ready to help catch her as she descended. I hadn’t planned it, but it came to me as suddenly as the image of the drowned woman, that I could cause that accident now. One little push as she stepped down on to the gunwale of the boat and she would slip over the side, between the boat and the ship. With luck, she’d hit her head as the two vessels clashed together, and would sink like a lead coffin. The scene played out perfectly in my head as if it was already happening.

  The girl stood on the bottom rung, both arms clinging to the ladder, gazing fearfully down as the boat was dragged back from the ship. As the sailors hauled on the ropes, trying to pull the boat closer to the ladder again, she raised her foot in readiness. I reached up to clasp her waist, but at that moment a wave lifted the boat, and I overbalanced. I found myself slipping over the side. I flailed desperately, but could find nothing to grab on to. Then I felt a strong hand seize the back of my doublet and haul me into the boat again, where I sat trembling with shock.

  ‘Do you want to get yourself killed, Senhor?’ the boatswain shouted. ‘Sit down and leave it to us. You nearly pulled the girl into the sea along with you.’

  He put his brawny arm about Isabela’s waist and lifted her bodily into the boat, seating her firmly on the plank in front of me.

  She took a few gulps of air to steady herself, then smiled trustingly at me. ‘Thank you for trying to help me, Senhor. It was very kind, but you shouldn’t take such risks for me.’

  I tried to return the smile, hoping that she would not notice how my hands shook. But Isabela was already distracted by Dona Flávia’s shrieking descent. Her husband had insisted that a rope be fastened under his wife’s armpits, in case she should slip, though it would need the anchor windlass to winch her up again if she did.

  Dona Flávia thrashed wildly around with her foot trying to find the next rung. She looked like a cow attempting to dance. Isabela’s face was a picture of concern, though she was biting her lip as if she was trying to suppress her laughter, while the sailors and other passengers made no effort to conceal their grins.

  Isabela was a pretty little thing. Her skin was a rich sweet caramel, lighter than my Silvia’s nut-brown body, but at least it wasn’t as pale as those insipid skins of the noblemen’s daughters who are constantly shielded from the sun and who are so colourless they remind me of fat white grubs dug up from the earth.

  Isabela’s eyes were a greenish-blue and couldn’t seem to make up their mind which shade to be. Her hair, though dark and curly, was not the great silky mane that Silvia possessed, but the kind that tends to frizz up at the first sign of dampness. Her breasts weren’t Silvia’s either. I grant you that I hadn’t had the opportunity to examine them in any detail, but they swelled over the top of her gown perkily enough, though they were as small as half lemons in comparison to Silvia’s luscious ripe fruits. In short, she was not wildly beautiful or voluptuous, but she possessed the kind of sudden radiant smile that would entice any man to her side.

  And had things been different I would probably have amused myself by seducing her. I might have found my task easier to accomplish if I had. But the moment I set eyes on Isabela I discovered that knowing you are going to murder a girl cools any lust you might feel as rapidly as water thrown over an amorous dog. The thought of killing a woman might excite some men, but not me, not if I was going to have to murder her in cold blood. It’s different, of course, if you don’t know that a woman will one day die at your hands, then you can enjoy her to the full. But if there was one thing I was certain of on this voyage it was that Isabela had to die and I was the one who would have to ensure that she did.

  I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what answer I gave to the two Jesuits when they returned to the tower of Belém. It wasn’t the promise of the wealth they offered me. Naturally, if it had been a simple matter of theft or deception, I wouldn’t have hesitated to take their money, except, of course, to try to bargain my fee up. But murder, that’s an entirely different matter.

  But it was the sight of that corpse which persuaded me to agree, knowing that after weeks of torment, one day the tide would rise and keep rising until it was over my head and then I would become that foul abomination lying on the paving slabs. You think I was a coward? Well, you just imagine descending into a crypt, gagging on the foul stench of maggots and decay, then lifting a coffin lid and seeing your own rotting face in that coffin staring sightlessly up at you. Picture that if you can, then tell me honestly, if you’d been offered a way out of that accursed tower, would you have chosen instead to hang there in chains, unable to move as the cold waves broke over you, and wait day after day for that fatal tide? Would you have chosen to stay and watch that body rot before your eyes? Would you?

  The Jesuits had seen to it that I was bathed and given such clothes, bedding and money that I would need for the voyage. They had ensured not only that Isabela found a suitable ship, but also that I obtained a passage on the same one. The agent had been bribed with a generous purse not to demand papers or inquire too closely into the identity of his clients. The priests had done all they could to make things easy for me, as they said. What happened after that was in my hands. But the question was – how to do it? And I had no more ideas about that now than I’d had when I first boarded the ship.

  Isabela must have felt me studying her for she suddenly turned and bestowed another of her smiles in my direction. ‘Poor Dona Flávia. I do believe she will kiss the ground when we reach England.’

  And so would I. At least with her and her husband gone from the ship, I might be able to get Isabela alone. Every time I had tried, particularly after dark, Dona Flávia descended like a huge blubbery angel determined to defend the girl’s honour. She seemed to regard safeguardin
g Isabela’s virtue as her personal mission, though of course she made use of the girl as if she was her own daughter, sending her to fetch things from the sleeping quarters or massage oil of lavender into her temples when she declared herself unable to sleep.

  But even if I could get the girl away from Dona Flávia I couldn’t just walk up behind her and pitch her overboard. There were always too many eyes on watch and though I had made a friend of one of the sailors by buying wine from him, paying double what the dog piss was worth, I was pretty sure even he would raise the alarm if I tried to throw someone into the sea. It had to be made to look like an accident.

  Even when pig-boy and his father, and Dona Flávia and her husband had all left the ship, there would still be two other passengers who were travelling on to Iceland and those two men seemed equally determined to make friends with Isabela. Hardly surprising since she was the only girl aboard. But it was going to be hard to prise their attentions away from her.

  The boat rocked alarmingly as Dona Flávia finally plopped down into it, gasping and wailing that she would never, never set foot on that rope ladder again. When her husband mildly pointed out that she would have to climb up it again tomorrow as there was no other way back on board the ship, she declared she would rather stay on the shore and live in the stone cottage for the rest of her life. The sailors smirked at one another and cast off.

  By the time we reached the shore, though, no one was smiling or even had the energy to talk. With our rolls of bedding slung over our shoulders and little water kegs tucked under our arms, we staggered over the sand behind the boatswain, who carried a stout barrel hoisted on one shoulder, which I devoutly prayed was full of wine.