The Falcons of Fire and Ice (2 page)

‘Did you …’ She swallowed hard. ‘Did you get the foreigner what he wanted?’

Jóhann reached beneath his shirt, flinching as the coarse woollen cloth rasped over the cuts on his hand. He pulled out a leather draw-string purse and let it fall on to the bed. The purse looked well stuffed, but that told Elísabet little about the value of the coins inside.

‘He has the chicks, both of them,’ Jóhann said wearily. ‘They’re alive … and strong enough to survive the sea voyage back to Portugal.’

‘But to kill the white falcons … the last white falcons on this mountain … Don’t you understand what you’ve done? Anyone who kills that bird is cursed until the day they die. You promised me, Jóhann, you promised that no harm would come to the adult falcons … You took an oath on the life of our unborn child.’

Elísabet touched her rounded belly where only the night before her husband had laid his own warm hand, as he’d sworn to her he would not hurt the birds.

‘The foreigner will pay good money for the chicks,’ he had told her. ‘The falcons will have more young next year and I’ll see to it that nothing disturbs them, even if I have to guard their nest day and night. But I must do this. I have to pay back the money I borrowed for the cattle, and with the baby coming, this is the only way we can survive. What else would you have me do?’

He meant the
dead
cattle, which had all perished the same summer he’d bought them when the cloud of gas from the volcano had poisoned the grass. Four years of misery and hunger for man and falcons alike, when the grass had withered and the ptarmigan, the prey of the white falcons, did not venture into the high valley. Before the poison cloud swept over them, a dozen white falcons had circled in the skies above the river of blue ice. But they had starved to death or flown away to the north, and the single pair that still soared over the frozen river had not laid eggs for three years.

‘Don’t you see, it’s a good omen,’ Jóhann had told her. ‘The falcons have bred once more, that means they know the ptarmigan are returning and the grass is sweet again. With the money I’ll get for the chicks we’ll be able to buy more cattle. The foreigners will give a heavy purse for the white falcons they sell to the royal houses of Europe.’ He laughed. ‘They say that kings will pay more for a single white falcon than for a whole palace.’

Elísabet stared down at her husband’s bloodied head. Last night Jóhann had been so sure that their luck was changing. Now look at him – was this the change of fortune he’d promised her?

‘But you swore to me, Jóhann, on our child’s life … Why … why have you done this to us? What possessed you to call down such evil on us … on your own family?’

Jóhann opened his eyes, but he didn’t look at his wife. He gazed fixedly into the flames of the cooking fire as a despairing man stares down at the sea before he drowns himself. Finally, and in a voice that barely rose above a whisper, he answered her.

‘We waited until the adults had gone hunting. I’ve never climbed so high up the cliff face before. It was a long, slow climb. Then, just as I was within a man’s length of the nest, the adult falcons returned. They began diving at me, slashing me with their talons, screaming at me till I was so deafened I couldn’t think. My arms were stinging from the gashes and my fingers were so slippery with my blood that a dozen times I nearly fell from the rock face. I realized I’d plunge to my death if I tried to carry on, so I climbed back down.

‘The foreigner was yelling at me. I didn’t know what he was saying, but I didn’t need words to understand he was furious. The Icelander who had brought him to me told me that if I didn’t go back up and get the chicks, they would tell our Danish masters that they’d caught me trying to raid the nest. He said the Danes would hang me on the spot.’

Jóhann looked up at his wife, his tired blue eyes pleading for understanding. ‘I didn’t want to do it, Elísabet, but … if I was to have any chance of capturing the chicks and getting back down safely, I had to drive the adults off. I thought if I shot an arrow at one of them, the other would fly away. I aimed for the male, which was flying low. I only meant to clip his wing feathers, but he crashed down on to the rocks. The female circled higher and higher, till I could no longer see her. I was certain she’d taken fright and had gone.

‘I started to climb back up to the nest, but just as I reached it she dived at me again. I was slashing at her with my knife, trying to keep a grip with my other hand on the rock. As if she knew I’d killed her mate, she fastened her claws on my shoulder, stabbing at my head with her beak. I was in agony and terrified she would blind me. I lashed out wildly with my knife. I didn’t mean to kill her, just to make her let go. Then I felt her collapse against me. But even though she was dead, her talons gripped my shoulder as fiercely as ever.

‘When I carried her chicks down from the nest her claws were still locked deep into my flesh. Her dead body was swinging from my shoulder. Even when I reached the bottom, her talons were still impaled in me. They had to cut them out of me, before they could tear her body off me … But I can still feel her talons gripping me. She won’t let go of me. She’ll never let go of me.’

He was sobbing, and Elísabet knew she should go to him and put her arms around him, but she couldn’t. She could see the white bird beating its wings against her husband’s face. She could hear its cry of fury. The whole room was suddenly full of flailing wings and the screams of
murder, murder!

Elísabet fought her way out of the tiny cottage and ran as fast as her swollen belly would allow, but too soon she was forced to stop and gasp for breath. It was summer, but the great river of blue ice that lay below the cottage never melted, never moved. And now the chill, damp air rose up as if every breath she took sucked the cold towards her, turning her lungs to ice. She stared up at the clear blue sky above, but it was empty. Not a single bird flew, not a single cry was heard, as if every creature in the world had died with those falcons, the last falcons in the valley.

A boom echoed round the mountains, louder than a thunder clap. Startled, she stared down at the ice. A huge crack had opened in the frozen river, leaving a hollow in the ice like the inside of a giant white egg. Even as she gazed at it, Elísabet saw a great black shadow running down the valley, staining the sparkling blue-white ice until it was as dark as the bog pools. Terrified, she glanced up. It was only a cloud passing over the sun … only a cloud creeping out from behind the mountain … only a cloud where there had been none before.

Elísabet gasped as the child in her belly kicked. Tiny fists punched into her, thrashing furiously as if her child was trying to fight its way out. She could sense its fear, feel the small heart fluttering and racing like the heartbeat of a snared bird. But even as she listened to the tiny frantic pounding, she realized there was not just one heart beating in her belly, but two. Two little heads butted her. Two pairs of minute arms thrashed about inside her in their terror. She sank to the ground, pressing her hands to her belly, gently rubbing their little limbs through her skin, trying to comfort them as if she could grasp those frightened, angry little fists and calm them.

‘They know,’ a voice said behind her.

Elísabet twisted herself around as best she could. A young woman was standing in the shadow of a rocky outcrop. She was taller even than Jóhann and she held her back as straight as a birch tree.

‘An oath sworn on the life of an unborn child cannot be broken without a terrible price being paid. You should not have let him swear on the infants in your womb. If an oath was to be made, it should have been on your own heads, not on innocent lives. Your daughters are marked now. The spirits of the falcons have entered your belly. But I will do all I can to protect them if you entrust them to me.’

Elísabet stared aghast into the eyes of the stranger, eyes that were as grey and dark as a winter’s storm. She saw something else too in that handsome face, a tiny ridge beneath the nose where a groove should have been.

‘Get away from me,’ she screamed, desperately trying to scramble to her feet. ‘I know who your people are. You’re evil, wicked, every last one of your tribe. You’re child killers. Everyone knows what happens to the children you steal from decent people like us. I won’t let you near my babies. I won’t let you take them, do you hear? Get away from us!’

Her eyes wide in terror, Elísabet backed away, desperately making the sign of the cross over herself and her belly as if this would drive the stranger off.

But the woman regarded her impassively as she might have watched a screeching gull riding the wind. After a long moment, she reached beneath her shawl and unlooped a long knotted cord of white and red wool from about her waist. She drew the cord three times through her right hand, before holding it out to Elísabet.

‘This will help ease the birth and undo some of the harm that has been done. Loosen one knot each time the pains come upon you.’

Elísabet backed away, holding her hands behind her as if she feared the cord might fly into them unbidden. ‘I don’t want it! I won’t have it in my house. I’d never take anything you or your filthy brood have touched.’

The stranger’s placid expression did not change, but she tossed the cord on the ground between them. The scarlet and white cord lay among the rusty grass stalks, limp, inert. Then the stranger lifted her hand and without warning the cord reared up in front of Elísabet and slithered towards her. But even as she cried out, it burst into flame and vanished into smoke.

The woman lifted her head and her eyes were as sharp and hard as the black rocks on the mountains of fire. ‘Remember this – in the days that are coming it is not my people you should fear. You have cursed your own babies and day by day, as they grow, so will your dread of them, until you and all your people will become more terrified of your daughters than of any other creatures on this earth. When that day comes, we will be waiting!’

Chapter One

Anno Domini 1539

The queen of Spain once had a dream, that a white falcon flew out of the mountains towards her and in its talons it held the flaming ball of the sun and icy sphere of the moon. The queen opened her hand and the falcon dropped the sun and the moon into her outstretched palm and she grasped them.

The falcon perched upon her arm and spread its wings. And, as it stretched them, the white feathers grew longer and wider until they enveloped the queen like a royal mantle.

Then the queen dreamt that a traitor had entered her presence and at once the white falcon rose and flew to him. It alighted on the man’s shoulders and the talons of the falcon were so strong and sharp they severed the man’s arms from his body. Streams of blood poured out from his body and the queen knelt and drank the blood of the traitor.

Lisbon, Portugal

Enter
– a term meaning to give a falcon the first sight of the prey which the falconer wants it to hunt and kill.

On a bleak winter’s morning in Lisbon, in front of a howling mob, Manuel da Costa was burned alive. Only he died that day, a lone, pathetic figure on the pyre. He was a poor man, an insignificant man, a man that few would have troubled to mourn. But hundreds of men and women who even then were huddling behind closed doors would have chilling cause to remember Manuel’s death. And all through the bitter, blood-soaked years to come they would whisper into the darkness how on that winter’s day and in that very hour the devils of hell were made flesh and dwelled on earth.

If young Manuel had only kept his head down, averted his eyes, held his tongue, if he had just kept walking, he might have stayed alive. And if he had survived, who knows, maybe the thousands of others who came after him might have lived too. But Manuel had no warning of the nightmare that was about to ensnare him. How could he?

So, just as he did every day, one February morning, shortly after dawn, he closed the door of the tiny room he rented and hurried through the narrow, twisting streets of Lisbon. Even a passing stranger would have spotted Manuel’s occupation at once, for though he was only in his twenties his chest was already as round as a barrel from years of blowing glass and his olive hands scarred with a hundred healed burns.

With his head hunched down against the wetted wind, Manuel would never have noticed the small crowd gathered at the far end of the square in front of the church had it not been for a small boy who ran headlong into him. With a curse worthy of a sailor the brat dodged around him and scampered across the square. Only then did Manuel lift his head to see what was attracting the lad. The crowd was swelling fast, with men, women and children hurrying towards it in twos and threes. As they joined the gathering, they simply stood and gazed at the church as if it was the most astounding thing they had ever seen.

Manuel hesitated, torn between curiosity and his fear of being late for work. Curiosity won. He hurried across the square and joined the back of the crowd. An old woman, dressed in widow’s black, was trying to elbow her way to the front. Manuel knew her. She occupied one of the tiny squalid rooms two houses down from his own lodgings. He wasn’t surprised to see her here. If there was any trouble or misfortune anywhere in the neighbourhood she was always the first on the scene. He sidled closer to her.