The Falcons of Fire and Ice

by Karen Maitland

  ‘He says,’ Hinrik told us in a subdued voice, ‘because it is law that no foreigners can remain on Iceland during the winter months. You can stay only for two weeks more. If you are caught here after that you will be arrested. And any man who gives you shelter will be punished.’

  We stared at him, dumbfounded. Isabela gasped in shock.

  The clerk made a curt incline of his head towards Vítor. ‘I regret to say, that includes you and your wife also. You may be Lutherans, but you are still foreigners.’

  The expression of sublime satisfaction on his face told us he was not actually regretting this in the slightest.

  ‘You and your wife should take a ship to Denmark and there wait out the winter. You can return in the spring, if you still want to.’

  He shrugged, as if to say he thought it most unlikely that anyone would elect to venture twice upon these shores.

  We followed him down the gangplank in stunned silence. The news had badly shaken all of us. I had the distinct impression from the grins that the captain was exchanging with the ship’s master that both of them had been fully aware of the law before they’d accepted the money for our passage, but what did they care? The only reason they’d wanted to carry passengers to Iceland was as cover for their real business of smuggling, and we had served their purpose well.

  I was sorely tempted to tell the little clerk about the dried cod in the hold and what his own men had been doing behind his back, but I suspected I’d have a hard time proving where the captain had got the fish, and besides, for all I knew the clerk had deliberately prolonged that search to give his men the chance to trade and was taking a cut of the profits. I’d had dealings with enough sailors in Belém to know that you don’t interfere in their business unless you want to find yourself floating face down in the sea with a knife in your back.

  I glanced at Isabela. She had turned very pale, and little wonder. She had just two weeks to find her falcons. I had no idea how difficult a task capturing falcons might be, but even I was pretty sure two weeks was cutting it fine. More to the point, I had just two weeks left in which to stage her accident, and right at that moment I didn’t have a single idea in my head about how to do that, especially as Vítor had now claimed her as his wife. I could hardly see him buggering off and leaving the two of us alone.

  But I reminded myself that this morning’s events had not proved a complete disaster. We had Hinrik, and every crusado we had spent on buying the boy, or should I say they had spent, was about to prove well worth it. Since we all now jointly owned him, and we all needed his services, it was the most natural thing in the world that I should travel with Isabela without it arousing any suspicion on her part. After all, we could hardly cut the lad into four, now could we? Of course, the drawback to my sweet little plan was that the other two men also showed every intention of coming with us for the same reason, but for the moment I could see no way to prevent that.

  So there you have it, my friend – three men, a girl and an urchin boy, setting off for God knew where in that bleak wilderness. And the only thing I knew for certain was that in two weeks I had to be on a ship out of here, and that meant by then the girl would be dead and her body rotting somewhere in this purgatory. All I had to work out now was how to get Isabela away from the others. If I could just find a way to get her alone, then killing her would surely be easy.

  Eydis

  Birds of the train – any captive bird used to train hunting hawks. Birds of the train might include pigeons, herons and kites. The birds were kept tied to a long line when they flew so that inexperienced falcons could learn to chase them.

  She has come. I hear her first footfall on the land reverberating through my bones, as if a herd of wild horses is thundering over my head. She steps from the cold, wild sea to the fiery earth, pulled by my cord. But she is not helpless, not my captive. It is her will that drives her on as fiercely as my will calls her to me. And the dead follow her, restless shadows slipping through the dark waves behind her. They come because of her. They come because they must, drawn to her as she is drawn to me. She can sense them like whispers at her back, but she has not yet found the courage to turn and face them. I knot another finger-length of cord on my lucet. Slowly, gently, she will be guided to us.

  Ari comes slithering down into the cave. I know his footsteps well now, that careless bounding down over the rocks and boulders, as if he is invincible, as is always the way with the young, then the pause, the nervous hesitation, as he braces himself to come around the rocky outcrop, fearful of what he might see.

  He slings the sack from his shoulder and pulls out the contents – wind-dried stockfish, a few strips of smoked mutton and a good measure of peas shrivelled until they are hard as stones.

  ‘Fannar sent this,’ he says, as if I need to be told.

  We read the seasons by the gifts they bring us. The weeks of eggs and fresh lake fish have gone. Berries and herbs have been eaten and grow no more. Now we enter winter, when everything will taste of smoke. There will be weeks when no one comes to us at all, because the snow lies too deep, endless days when the wind howls across the mouth of the cave and time is measureless. Often in the past, through those long winds of solitude, Valdis and I used to wonder if every man and beast had perished up there in the frozen world, and we were the only two who remained alive.

  Finally, when we fear the snows will last for eternity, they begin to drip, and the drips become streams, and streams become raging torrents powerful enough to drag great boulders as easily as grains of sand. Then come the hungry weeks of spring, when store cupboards empty, the animals bellow in vain for hay in the byres and fishing boats cannot put to sea. The people come, but they bring nothing but apologetic shuffles. They are ashamed to come empty-handed, but we can see the misery in their hollow cheeks and protruding bones. They swear they will bring us gifts when the first birds nest again. They keep their word, and so begins the time of eggs once more. Thus it has been since the day our mother brought us to this cave. But this year will be different – my sister is gone and I am alone with the nightstalker.

  The boy’s eyes dart sideways to the corner where the man lies. He knows it is dangerous to look, but he cannot help himself.

  ‘I know why you fear him, Ari.’

  ‘I don’t fear any man,’ he says, his chin jerking up like a child’s.

  ‘You should fear him. He is a draugr, a nightstalker.’

  He flinches at the words, and hangs his head, but I can see he already knows this.

  ‘It is what you feared he was. Who is he, Ari? What name was he known by in life?’

  He does not answer, nor will he look at me. I wait. He will tell me in his own time. The young, like the old, cannot be hurried. Finally Ari raises his head. His face is as pale as ashes in the torchlight.

  ‘I cannot be certain,’ he says miserably.

  ‘Tell me and I will know if it is true.’

  ‘A while ago … I was working as a deckhand on one of the local fishing boats. One of our lads happened to look back at the land and saw the way the clouds were building over the mountain. The wind was still only a cradle-rocker then, but we could see the warning, a wicked storm was brewing. We hauled in the nets and got to shore as quickly as we could. But some of the foreign fishermen, they couldn’t read the signs and kept on working their nets. The storm struck suddenly and it hit hard. Several of the foreign fishing boats were caught up in it, and saw that the safest course was to ride it out at sea well away from the rocks, but the men in one of the boats must have panicked and stupidly made a dash for the harbour. Likely they didn’t know this coast. They came too close to the cliffs and the wind smashed the boat straight on to the rocks and broke her back. Nothing anyone could do but watch it happen.’

  A spasm of anguish and guilt wrinkles Ari’s face. It is hard to stand and watch men perish and know that had the bones which the gods cast fallen differently, it would have been you drowning in the waves.

  ‘Was any man save
d?’ I ask him.

  ‘Sea dragged them all down before any of us could even whisper a Hail Mary for them.’ He stares into the flames of the fire. For a while he says nothing more, then he begins again.

  ‘Next morning, when the storm had passed, there was splintered wood and rope from the wreck tossed up all along the shore, that and dead fish, not much else. It was as if the boat was an egg that had been stamped on. It made your guts churn to think of the power that could do that to great timber beams.’ He shakes his head like a dog with sore ears, as if to rid himself of the memory.

  ‘Nothing man can create can withstand the fury of the sea when she is determined to destroy it.’ I glance back at the wreckage of the man in the corner. ‘But what does this storm have to do with him?’

  Ari’s head also turns momentarily towards the man, but he averts his gaze. ‘Every woman and child in the village was racing to gather as much wood as they could for the fire, before their neighbours snatched it. So it wasn’t long before they came across the bodies of three of the drowned fishermen lying sprawled over the rocks, half-tangled in their own nets. Two more were washed ashore further down the coast. Five corpses in all. I don’t know if that was all of the hands aboard or if the sea had taken the rest as her dues.

  ‘The pastor came down to the harbour and told us to take the corpses up to the store cellar next to his house and lay them in there … though it wasn’t so much a request as a command, as if we were his servants,’ Ari adds indignantly. His loathing for Lutherans is plainly as deep as Fannar’s.

  ‘The gravediggers set to and started to dig a grave in the churchyard, but the pastor stopped them. Made them dig a mass grave outside the village on unconsecrated ground, waterlogged, wasteland it is, the kind you wouldn’t even lay your dog to rest in. Said the men were Catholics, idolaters who shouldn’t lie with good Christian folk. He could tell that from the crucifixes and amulets they were wearing.

  ‘Once the bodies had been dumped into the pit which was already oozing with stinking water, he sent the gravediggers home and said he would fill in the grave himself that same night. It’s my betting he was afraid that some in the village might secretly try to anoint the corpses with holy oil, or pray for their souls, even hold a service for them, so the pastor wanted to make sure they were buried quickly before anyone got the chance.’

  Ari gestures towards the body of the man lying in the corner of the cave, but he studiously keeps his gaze turned from him.

  ‘That’s when I first saw him, or at least I thought I had. I would have sworn on my mother’s life he was one of the corpses that I’d helped carry up to the pastor’s store cellar. I mean, I had hold of the man’s ankles and his dead face was in front of me all the time we were carrying the body up the rise. A man’s features get burned into your mind, when you have to stare at him for that long.

  ‘But a few weeks later when I was working on Fannar’s land, I saw a man walking along the track. Right from the first moment I glimpsed him, I knew I’d seen him before, even though he was a foreigner. That’s what made me take such an interest in him – I was trying to remember who he was. I was so sure I knew him that I was on the point of climbing down to the track to greet him.

  ‘But the Danes got there first. Before I’d taken more than a couple of steps down the hillside, I spotted them walking towards him. I could tell from their jeers there was going to be trouble. They surrounded him and started beating him. So I ran for Fannar. By the time we returned he was unconscious. It was only when Fannar and I went to tend him that I remembered where I’d seen him before. Seeing him lying there, so near to death, was like seeing his drowned corpse all over again.

  ‘But I kept telling myself I must have been mistaken. The man I’d seen was long dead and buried in a grave. I’d carried him to the pastor’s house myself and I knew he was as blue and cold as any corpse could be. There wasn’t a breath of life in him. So how could a man who was dead be striding, full of life, along a track? It was impossible!’

  I do not ask the lad if he could be mistaken. I know with absolute certainty he is not.

  ‘The pastor who buried him, Ari, what do they call him?’

  ‘Pastor Fridrik.’

  ‘Fridrik of where, Ari?’

  The lad’s brow furrows as he tries to remember. ‘Borg … Fridrik of Borg, that’s what one of the gravediggers told me. Said it was a pity he hadn’t followed his father’s example and murdered himself, for he was turning out to be just as miserable a bastard as the old man was.’

  ‘So Fridrik has returned, has he?’ I murmur to myself, but the boy hears me.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘If his father was the farmer Kristján, then I know a little of the family, though not much of the son.’

  ‘Was the old man as sour as they say?’

  ‘I never spoke to him, but I knew his wife. She sometimes came to Valdis and me when her sons were infants for cures and charms. But each time she came we could feel more sorrow in her. She complained that Kristján treated her no better than a hired maid, even in his bed she was of no more worth to him than a brood mare, and she spoke the truth, we were sure of that. But every story can be told in many ways and we believed that Kristján wasn’t entirely to blame. Even he must have noticed his wife was deeply in love, but not with him.

  ‘We saw that she was set on a path from which there would be no turning back, and so it proved to be, for one day she ran off with her lover, Kristján’s own brother, abandoning not only her husband but also her sons, who were still only children. It filled the gossips’ mouths for weeks. Every man or woman who came here was chewing some new little gobbet of it. Kristján’s humiliation made him a bitter man and any shoot of tenderness he might have had even for his own children withered inside him.

  ‘Over the years we heard stories of his sons leaving the farmstead one by one as soon as they were old enough, unable to endure their father’s violent temper. With no kin left to help him, and no hired man willing to work for such a brutal master, the farm fell into ruin and finally Kristján hanged himself in his own byre. As for Fridrik, all we know is that for a while he worked as a hireling, then one day he boarded a ship and disappeared. But that must be more than seven years ago … So now he is back from across the water and a Lutheran pastor …’

  I lean forward. ‘Tell me, Ari, on which day of the week were the corpses of the drowned fishermen found, can you remember?’

  He stares at me, evidently puzzled by such a question. ‘How should I remember that … ? No, wait, it must have been a Friday, for though we’d lost a day’s fishing on account of the storm, we did no fishing the next day either, for no fishing boat’ll put to sea on a Friday. That’s how we came to be ashore when the corpses washed up and could carry them up from the beach, else we’d all have been back at sea … Why, what does it matter what day it was?’

  ‘Because if a corpse is to be raised using the black arts, it must be on Friday night before Saturday dawns.’

  Ari swallows hard. His voice is trembling a little. ‘You think he was the man I saw drowned and someone raised his corpse? But how?’

  ‘There are many ways to accomplish that. But if the corpse is newly dead, the sorcerer writes the Lord’s Prayer on a parchment using the feather of a water rail for a quill and his own blood for ink and he must carve the troll runes upon a stick. Then he must lay the stick on the corpse, rolling it as he reads the prayer he has written. Gradually, the body will stir, but before it gains its strength, the sorcerer must ask the corpse his name. If the corpse regains his strength before the question is asked or answered, then the sorcerer will never be able to master it and the draugr will kill him.

  ‘The draugr’s nostrils and mouth will bubble with grave-froth and this the sorcerer must lick off with his own tongue and place a drop of his own blood in the corpse’s mouth. Then great strength will come upon the draugr and he will attack the sorcerer and wrestle with him. If the sorcerer wins, the draugr must do h
is every bidding, but if the draugr wins, he will drag the sorcerer back down into death with him. It is an extremely brave or an extraordinarily bitter man who would risk raising the corpse of an adult man like this one, who would have enormous power. Most sorcerers fear to raise anyone except children whose strength they can master. Whoever raised the corpse of the drowned fisherman must have had a good reason for needing a grown man to do his bidding.’

  ‘Who?’ Ari asks. ‘Who would do such an evil thing?’

  I am certain I know, but I will not tell the boy. It is the worst of crimes to poison the young with hatred.

  Ari draws up his knees and clasps his arms tightly around them, staring into the flames of my cooking fire. ‘I heard my grandfather speak of a nightstalker that was sent by a jealous neighbour to terrorize a blacksmith and his family. He arrived one night as a stranger seeking shelter. They offered him their hospitality for they didn’t know what he was. But soon he made their lives a torment. He turned their winter stores of smoked meat rancid and the dried fish rotten. He caused every iron tool the blacksmith fashioned to crack, and every horseshoe he made to lame the horse it was nailed to until the whole neighbourhood was furious with the blacksmith and refused to bring their horses to him. My grandfather said the nightstalker kept the whole family constantly awake with his shrieking and singing of drunken songs, but he wouldn’t leave. Then, when they finally realized what he was, the blacksmith and his brothers circled him with sharp knives so he couldn’t escape, then they struck off his head with a great axe and burned the body.’

  ‘I know that the draugr in this cave has been conjured to do far worse than break tools or spoil stores. It is not animals he has been sent to destroy, Ari, but men.’

  It pains me to frighten the lad, but I must make him understand why I am about to ask him to undertake a task for me that will place him in such danger.