The Falcons of Fire and Ice

by Karen Maitland

  I turn back to Heidrun, but before I can speak Isabela cries out. She is staring in fear up at the dark sky. A long ribbon of bright green light is ripping across it, obliterating the stars. Another, fainter, one undulates behind it. Great bands of opalescent green light begin to fill the sky, writhing and dancing. The air vibrates with singing. I spin around watching the waves of green and yellow and purple leap like flames across the dark sky, as if the whole night is afire.

  Isabela and Marcos are standing motionless, gazing upwards. I do not know if she even realizes Marcos is holding her hand, for she is lost in utter awe, no longer afraid now, but consumed with the sheer wonder of it.

  I gaze up the length of the blue river. The spirals of light flickering in the sky above are captured in the ice, making a thousand tiny gold-green lights tumble and spin in the heart of the frozen water. I hold out my hand to Heidrun. She takes it and helps me to clamber up on to the ice.

  Isabela, still hardly able to draw her gaze away from the flames in the sky, tries to climb up and follow us. But Heidrun turns and shakes her head. She points to some rocks close to the base of the hill. She is telling them to wait there for us. What I have to do now for Valdis cannot be witnessed by them.

  I watch the pair of them wandering off, still hand in hand, their heads craned up, transfixed by the rippling curtains of light in the sky. Then I turn and, clasping Valdis’s body tightly in my arms, I slowly follow Heidrun up the river of blue ice, stepping carefully around the crevasses and over the rough peaks of frozen water. And as we three walk silently together, the cold green flames dance above us in the dark sky and blue ice answers them with its ancient song.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At the very dawn of creation there appeared in northern lands a snow-white egg, the like of which had never been seen before or since. The shell of this egg cracked open and two birds were hatched from it, the gyrfalcon and the ptarmigan, twin sisters born from a single egg, and like the egg from which they sprang, the feathers of both birds were as white as the hills in winter.

  The gyrfalcon flew up high into the mountains and found a home among the rocky crags, while the ptarmigan sought shelter in the long grasses of the plateau. They lived apart for so long that the two birds forgot that they were sisters. They each built their nests and laid their eggs, but when the chicks hatched they cried for food.

  The gyrfalcon saw her chicks were hungry and she went hunting. She spread her white wings and glided down across the valley and over the plateau. For a long time she hunted, but she could find no prey. Then her sharp eyes spotted something running. She stooped down upon it and, seizing her kill in her sharp talons, she carried it off to her nest. She tore at its breast until the flesh was bare and bleeding and fed it to her chicks. Only then did she look upon its face. Only then did she recognize the face of her sister, the ptarmigan. When she realized who it was she had torn apart with her cruel beak, her grief knew no bounds. And her cry of sorrow, krery-krery-krery, will ring out to the end of time, for she repeats her murder daily and daily repents too late.

  Isabela

  Hot gorge – when a falcon is allowed to feed on prey it has just killed. A bird may be permitted a full gorge – to eat until its crop is full – or a half gorge or quarter gorge.

  I woke with such a start that I must have lashed out, for my arm hit something soft and I heard a grunt of pain beside me. For a moment I didn’t know where I was. The light was startlingly bright as if a thousand candle flames were being shone in my face. I was numb with cold. Then I realized that the light was coming from a low, bright sun dazzling over the top of a hill, and I was lying not in the warm cave, but on damp mosses tucked under an overhang of rocks. Marcos was lying in front of me, curled up like a baby, and groaning as he stirred awake.

  Embarrassed at finding myself pressed into a man’s back, I could not think how to extricate myself, since I was wedged between his body and the rock. I nudged him again, hoping it would make him move away, but he turned over and opened his eyes, staring with a frown up at the lightening sky as if he had never seen it before.

  He crawled out from under the overhang and staggered painfully to his feet and gazed about him. ‘Sweet Jesu, I thought I’d just dreamt this!’

  I scrambled up, trying to smooth my clothes and tousled hair. My clothes clung damply to my goose-pimpled skin, and the breeze only made me feel wetter and colder. But when I glanced up to where Marcos was staring, all the discomfort and cold vanished as I too gaped at the sight.

  We were standing on the edge of a broad flat plain of dark green mosses and golden sedges. Above us towered a great mountain of sparkling bluish-white ice, tumbled down between two jagged black peaks. The frozen river flowed out around the base of the rocks, ending abruptly about four or five feet above a shelf of black sand. Little streams of water were running from beneath the ice and trickling into a wide, dark lake in whose ruffled surface the white ice and black rocks trembled. Ribbons of soft white mist drifted across the ice-river and above it the sky was such a dazzling blue it hurt my eyes to look at it.

  Marcos slowly shook his head. ‘That … that could never have been a river, could it? How could anything that deep freeze solid?’

  For a few minutes all we could do was stare transfixed. Then, as the breeze once again reminded me how cold I was, I glanced around.

  ‘Can you see Eydis anywhere?’ I asked. ‘I thought the other woman said to wait for her here. She should be back by now, but I see no sign of her.’

  Shielding his eyes with his hand from the glare of the sun bouncing off the ice, Marcos pivoted slowly around.

  ‘Look there. Is that one of those hot springs or is it smoke?’

  I followed where he pointed. Half-hidden behind the rocks where we had taken shelter, a thin plume of lavender smoke was swirling gently in the breeze. I caught the whiff of what smelt like fish grilling.

  ‘It’s a cooking fire.’ I tried to smile and discovered my face was so numb with cold I could hardly move the muscles. The thought of being able to warm my hands over a fire seemed more precious than gold right then and I turned to hurry around the rocks, but Marcos grabbed me.

  ‘Wait,’ he whispered. ‘It might not be Eydis. Remember the Danes are still looking for us.’

  My heart suddenly began to thump. What had been an awe-inspiring expanse now suddenly became menacing, with little cover in which to hide.

  ‘Get back behind the rock,’ Marcos whispered. ‘I’ll edge round and see if I can see anything.’

  I crept back under the overhang, crouching, my body tense, ready to run, though I had no idea where to make for. Marcos crept along the rocks, but even before he reached the end where he might have been seen, a woman’s voice rang out,

  ‘Marcos, Isabela, gerðu svo vel. Come and eat, you must be hungry.’

  Marcos peered around the rock. ‘It’s that woman who took the sisters up the frozen river last night.’

  The relief I felt was like being plunged into a warm bath. I crept out of my hiding place and saw the tall woman crouching by a fire she had built on a flat slab of rock. She was twisting a stick on which several small fish were skewered, their skins charred and bubbling.

  ‘Come, warm yourselves. I am Heidrun, a friend of Eydis and Valdis. I have known them since they quickened in their mother’s womb.’

  We both crouched as close to the fire as we could, rubbing our hands, our clothes steaming where the heat touched them.

  ‘Where is Eydis?’ I asked.

  ‘She is close by. Eat first, then I will take you to her.’

  We breakfasted on the fish which was so fresh that it tasted as if it had only been pulled from the lake minutes before. Heidrun ate hers slowly and delicately, smiling to herself as Marcos and I burned our fingers and mouths in our haste to eat. I hadn’t realized it was possible to be so ravenously hungry. Never had anything tasted so good.

  But suddenly I was back in our kitchen in Sintra eating grilled sardines, hearing
the thunderous hammering on the door, tense with fear as I waited for it to open, then watching as they bound my father’s hands and dragged him away. What was he eating this morning? Was he even still alive? I had wasted so much precious time.

  ‘Eydis was going to show me where the white falcons are. Do you know how far away they are from here?’

  I knew even as I asked the question that it was cruel and unfeeling. The poor woman was grieving for her sister. What right had I to ask her to show me the birds in the midst of her sorrow? Yet I had to insist. I didn’t know how else I was going to find them.

  ‘They’re not far. You will see them.’

  We drank from the trickles of water which ran from the end of the frozen river. The ice was as wrinkled as the skin of an old crone who has lived for a thousand years, and scored by dozens of cracks and crevices. When we had drunk our fill, Heidrun climbed gracefully up on to the ice shelf, holding out a warm hand to help me scramble up. Seeing her walk on it with such practised ease, I hadn’t realized how slippery it was, and I would have come crashing down had she not continued to steady me. Marcos clambered up too and almost slid straight off again.

  Holding both our hands, Heidrun led us up the frozen river. Once we were away from the edge that was wet and smooth with melting water, the surface became harder and rougher, easier to find a foothold without your shoe slipping out from under you.

  The coldness rose up from the ice and enveloped us. Our breath hung about in puffs of white. Although I longed to look up to see the vast expanse of ice towering above, the moment I raised my eyes, I would trip over the frozen peaks or stumble as my foot slipped into the cracks. The further we walked, the broader the crevices became until they were wide enough for a man to fall into and so deep that he would never be able to clamber up the glass walls. Follow one line of solid ice, and you could suddenly find yourself stranded with deep ravines on three sides of you and no way across. But Heidrun seemed to be able to pick her way round this maze of crevasses, as if following a track, though there was nothing that I could see that marked the way.

  Finally, as we reached the place where the ice-river angled sharply upwards, she stopped. We found ourselves facing an oval hole in the ice like the entrance to a cave, easily big enough to enter.

  ‘Come,’ Heidrun said. ‘Eydis is inside.’

  I had spent enough time in a cave in the past few days never to want to enter one again. Even to look at it brought panic surging up into my throat, the terror of being trapped down in the mountain. Standing there alone in the darkness, sure that the entrance had been sealed and there was no way out for me, then finally the relief of seeing that tiny pinpoint of light, a single star showing the gap was still there. Then climbing up and up and that awful moment of despair again when I realized I could not reach the world outside. Groping over the surface of the walls, desperate to find a hole, a stone jutting out, the smallest thing I could use to stand on, terrified to reach too far in case I slipped and went crashing down, perhaps to lie there mangled but still alive at the bottom.

  I saw Marcos watching me, and knew my face must be revealing the horror I felt when I looked at that ice cave.

  ‘You don’t have to go in,’ he said. ‘I’ll find her and bring her out to you.’

  But Heidrun said softly, ‘You must go in to her, if you want to find the white falcons. It is the only way.’

  She turned, as if she expected me to follow, and ducking her head, went inside.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Marcos whispered.

  But I knew that I did. Trying to fight down the desire to turn and run, I too ducked into the ice cave. But it was not like the first cave at all. It was shallow, almost egg-shaped inside. I had thought it would be dark, but I found myself bathed in an iridescent blue light, brighter and more intense than a hundred lamps burning together. It was as if all the rays of sunlight outside were being sucked through the ice and concentrated in that cave. When I moved my head even slightly, the colours of every rainbow that had ever arched through the skies rippled through those walls of ice.

  ‘Eydis is here,’ Heidrun said.

  Her voice startled me. I’d almost forgotten why I was in the cave. She drew to one side, so that I could see. A long low ledge of ice ran along the back of the cave. Eydis and Valdis were lying on it, their hands clasped in one another’s. Then I saw something else – a single white bone, the bone which I had taken from the forest in France. The ring had been removed and the bone was clasped between the sisters’ entwined fingers, just as a lover might hold a rose in death, or a Christian grasp a crucifix.

  Ice was slowly creeping up over the bodies of Eydis and Valdis, over their single pair of legs, their arms and heads. Their hair was already fully embedded in the ice. Soon the rest of them would be completely encased.

  ‘Eydis is dead,’ I breathed. ‘But I thought she had come to release the spirit of her twin. I thought when she’d done that she would be free.’

  ‘She is free,’ Heidrun said. ‘They both are. Look at them.’

  Now that their faces were no longer veiled, I saw that they were strikingly handsome, and as alike as two matched pearls. Both women’s eyes were open, and as blue as the ocean, and there was an expression of childlike wonder in them.

  ‘But, I thought she would live,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know she had come here to die. Did she know? Did she know where you were taking her?’

  ‘She knew she was coming here to seek life,’ Heidrun said.

  ‘But she’s not alive,’ I screamed. ‘She’s dead. All those years chained up in the cave, and she finally managed to escape, and now … and now … It isn’t fair!’

  I turned and blundered out of the cave, slipping and sliding on the ice, banging my shoulder on the edge of the cave entrance, but I was too angry and shocked even to notice the pain.

  Marcos had remained outside, though he must have heard all that passed between us. He caught my arm, trying to stop me charging back down the river of ice.

  ‘Wait, we need Heidrun to guide us back, otherwise we’ll end up down one of those crevasses.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I yelled, but, of course, I did.

  His warning was enough to make me stop, but I couldn’t look at Heidrun when she emerged from the cave.

  Marcos shuffled his feet awkwardly. ‘I suppose we should have realized, poor woman. You could hardly cut them apart, not without killing Eydis in the process.’

  ‘They were born as one, Eydis knew they would die as one,’ Heidrun said as calmly as ever. ‘They will lie there unchanged long after we are dead. The ice-river moves slowly, but one day, in time, their bodies will reach the lake and from the lake they will drift into the river and with the river they will flow into the sea and become one with it. Just as a single drop of water that falls as rain will in time become a whole ocean always moving, always changing, but always the sea.’

  Without turning to see if we followed, Heidrun set off down the ice-river again, picking her way carefully between the great ravines and cracks. We followed without speaking until we reached the lip of the ice and Marcos bounded down, reaching up to help first Heidrun and then me clamber down on to the black sand and mud below.

  I stood gazing back at the ice. Somewhere in that, though I could no longer see the place, Eydis and her twin lay entombed. How could I have been so stupid as even to imagine that Eydis could free herself from her dead twin? As Marcos said, it was impossible. It was obvious she’d come here to die.

  Grief welled up in me as a hard lump in my throat. Tears sprang to my eyes and I scrubbed them away. I wasn’t crying for her. Why should I? I barely knew her. I was crying for poor old Jorge burning in front of that screaming mob, for the girl who’d tried to hold on to the casket of bones, for the murdered family in the forest, for poor little Hinrik, for Fausto, for my father and, though I refused to admit it, I was crying most of all for myself.

  I thought of myself as far away from home in a strange land. I had longed to re
turn to the place I knew and loved as a child, to the old familiar smells and sights, the hot summer sunshine, the scent of the pine groves and the camellias. But in that moment I finally grasped that I had no home to return to. I was a Marrano. We did not belong anywhere. There was no land we could own as ours, no place to raise a family in peace, no tomb to bury our parents in that would not be desecrated. Even that little strip of land that we might call our grave, our resting place, was not permitted to us. There was no river of blue ice waiting for me, calling for me to return to it.

  Heidrun took my hand and gently pulled me round to face the calm, dark lake.

  ‘I am not like Fannar and Eydis. I am their friend, but not of their people. They call me a huldukona, a hid-woman. We live among them, but we are not of them. We too were once driven out of our homes. But we still keep our own ways. We teach our children the lore which our mothers taught us and their mothers taught them since first this land was made. We do not forget who we were and who we are, and we will remember it for ever. I see it in you. You are like us. You must remain hidden. You must appear to be as one with the people you live among. But you are not. Learn the old ways of your people as we do in secret, teach them to your children, tell them who they were and make them remember. Your home is in your lore. As long as you remember the old ways and teach them, within that knowledge you will always find the place where you belong.’

  ‘But I don’t understand why you must remain hidden,’ I said. ‘Are you afraid of the Danes?’

  She smiled sadly. ‘I am afraid of nothing, except forgetting. Come.’

  She walked ahead of us, leading us back to the cooking fire which still glowed on the rock. She retrieved a withy basket which she had tucked into the shelter of the rocks. She opened it and pulled out two live birds about the size of a bantam hen, with dark strips over their eyes. The backs of the birds were grey-brown mottled with white and the belly and flanks were white. They lay quietly in her hands, their big brown eyes staring up at us.