The Falcons of Fire and Ice (32 page)

Chapter Nine

The king of Persia once owned a white falcon worth more to him than his own palace. He cast the falcon after a crane, but when he drew close to where his bird had made the kill, he discovered that the falcon had slain an eagle instead of the crane. To honour his falcon’s courage and valour the king had a lavish dais erected for her to perch on and placed a miniature golden crown on her head, then he ordered that the falcon’s head be struck from her body, because she had killed her sovereign lord.

In the same manner a king of England cast off his falcon, but before the falcon could seize its prey, a wild eagle, king of all the birds, stooped down upon it. The falcon dived to the ground and hid itself among a flock of sheep, and when the eagle thrust its head into the flock to find the falcon, the falcon struck the eagle hard on the head and killed it. All the knights and noblemen who rode with the king cheered and praised the brave little bird. But the king of England, hearing their praises, had the falcon hanged as a salutary lesson for anyone who might dare to dream of rebellion against the Crown.

Isabela

To mount a horse like a falconer
– a falconer always mounts from the right side and with the right foot, because they hold the bird on the left fist.

I couldn’t believe what Hinrik was saying – we were allowed to stay here for only two weeks. I had just fourteen short days in which to capture the gyrfalcons! Surely, the boy had made a mistake. He’d used a wrong word. He meant
months
not
weeks
. But he was adamant, and I could see by the grin on the face of the official that it must be true. The man would hardly have advised us to go home otherwise. It was all I could do not to howl aloud with frustration and misery, but I couldn’t afford to let myself sink into despair.

I swallowed hard and tried to think. When my father and I had gone to the plains in Portugal to trap migrating hawks and falcons we had caught a dozen in just a few days. I only had to capture a pair. I must surely be able to do that in two weeks. And in any case I couldn’t afford to stay here longer than that. With every day that passed the shadow of the pyre crept closer to my father. Even before the year was up, weakened by hunger, he could die of prison fever in those fetid dungeons. And what if they were torturing him, trying to force him to confess to killing the falcons, trying to make him betray others … No, no! Even two weeks was too long. I had to find those birds now – at once.

As we walked away from the quayside we clambered up on to the rough track that wound between the little turf huts. Racks of dried fish lined the upper slopes, but their rotting guts paved the path, along with mutton bones, offal and every kind of excrement, which was trodden into the dirt. The smoke from the cooking fires stank of burning dung, charred fish bones and scorched seaweed. It made my eyes sting. Vítor, Marcos and Fausto were all holding kerchiefs over their noses and looked as if they were about to vomit, but Hinrik was grinning and sniffing the air. To him it must have been the smell of home, but I remembered the stench of another fire, a fire that smelt of burning flesh and death. I shuddered.

Then I heard it.
Krery-krery-krery
– it was the cry of a hunting gyrfalcon. I frantically scanned the skies. Only gulls wheeled over the dark blue water. But even as I strained to find the call again above the screams of the seabirds, I knew I wouldn’t hear it. The cry of the falcon had come not from the skies, but from somewhere deep inside me like a second heartbeat, or a tiny bubble of memory that rose and burst in my head. I gazed out across the bay towards the distant mountains, their tops hidden in the swirling grey clouds. Somehow in that moment I knew that’s where I must go. If the white falcons existed anywhere on this island that is where I would find them. But it would take days to walk there – days I did not have.

Fausto clapped a hand on Hinrik’s shoulder. ‘Now, my lad, you can start earning the money we paid for you by finding us a decent inn for the night. Even in this goats’ byre there must be one that doesn’t stink like a piss-pot and serves a good supper. My belly is howling for some fresh, juicy meat after all that dried-up old salt pork.’

Vítor pushed the boy aside. ‘No, we can’t seek lodgings here. That clerk will be watching every move we make, or at least his spies will.’ He jerked his head behind him, to where three men stood in the shadow of a hut, their gaze fixed on us.

‘And there was me thinking that now you’d confessed to being a Lutheran, you and that popinjay were best friends, or was that another of your lies?’ Marcos spat out the words loaded with venom.

Vítor shrugged. ‘Obviously, I had to tell him something. I couldn’t very well say I’d come here to map this island, he’d have me arrested as a spy.’

‘In that case I’m sorry that I didn’t tell them,’ Marcos said. ‘He would have entertained us like kings if we handed him a spy.’

‘Or arrested you as accomplices,’ Vítor said with a granite smile. ‘I think you will find they don’t trouble themselves with minor inconveniences like evidence before they hang a man on this isle. You should be grateful to me, at least it got him on our side long enough to let us land.’

I knew from the weeks aboard the ship that quarrels like this could occupy them for hours, but for once I was grateful. The men were so busy glaring at one another that I could slip away unnoticed. I had already seen a man ambling across the track ahead of us on a tiny, shaggy horse, leading half a dozen small horses who crowded behind him, their bodies pressed tightly together and their heads resting on each other’s backs. If I could ride, I could reach those mountains in a quarter of the time it would take me on foot.

I moved closer to Hinrik, and lowered my voice to a whisper. ‘That man, do you think he would sell me a horse? Can you ask him?’

As I hoped, Vítor, Fausto and Marcos were so busy snarling at one another that they didn’t even notice the boy and me walking off. The horse-owner glanced at me several times as Hinrik explained what I wanted, but his face told me nothing of what he might be thinking. Finally he waved his hand over the small herd, inviting me to choose. I had already studied the stocky, shaggy little beasts and pointed to a pretty honey-coloured mare, which, unlike some of the others, showed no sign of lameness. I urged Hinrik to hurry and negotiate a price, but it seemed that no business was ever done in haste in Iceland. Finally, the horse-owner seemed satisfied, and I was just about to claim my beast and mount when to my dismay I saw the others hurrying towards us along the track.

‘Well done, my lad,’ Fausto said. ‘Horses – just what we need, since Vítor is so determined on not letting us rest here.’

He glared resentfully at Vítor. Then he stared in dismay at the little horses. Not one of them was bigger than thirteen hands and he was a tall, broad man.

‘Ask this man where he keeps his larger mounts. Those couldn’t carry us more than a mile.’

Hinrik answered without bothering to translate. ‘They can carry you easy for miles at the
tölt
.’

‘At the what?’ Fausto said.

Hinrik wrinkled his nose as he struggled to explain. ‘You know, fast. Not as fast as a gallop … but you will not be thrown about like a trot.’ He shrugged at our blank faces. ‘You will see. You want to buy five more, one for the packs and for me too?’

‘Of course for you too, you little maggot,’ Fausto said. ‘We paid good money for you. You’re coming with us. We want our money’s worth.’

Our bundles were stacked in a heap, together with some wind-dried fish and a small iron cooking pot which had been much patched and repaired. The owner was reluctantly persuaded to load the beast for us, but not until he received yet another coin for his trouble. He laid two fresh turfs on the horse’s sides and over these tied a flimsy wooden frame, studded with pegs, fastening it under the creature’s belly. Then, using lengths of wool knotted like fishing nets, he wound them round the pegs and over our bundles.

As the man worked, Fausto peered dubiously at the frame. ‘This wool won’t hold for long. Have you nothing stronger? Rope?’

The Icelander briefly lifted his head, frowning up at the seabirds drifting in the grey sky, as if he thought the question had come from them. Then he resumed his work, knotting the strands of wool so slowly that it seemed it would take the whole winter for him to finish.

A crowd of adults and children had gathered a little way off and stood silently watching us, their eyes following our every move, like a clowder of wild-eyed cats hungrily watching a flock of sparrows. With a groan of frustration at the slow pace of the Icelander’s painstaking work, Fausto elbowed him aside and seized the strands of wool, winding them rapidly several times in a loop over the frame and under the horse’s belly.

‘Come on, let’s go while we’ve still a chance of reaching the next village before dark. I’ve no desire to spend the night sleeping in the open in this purgatory.’

Fortunately my skirts were full enough to allow me to straddle my mount, though it had a very broad back for such a short creature. But the moment I was in the saddle, my horse tried to throw me off and was only stopped by the owner grabbing her head. I moaned, rubbing my knee which was throbbing from where I’d gripped the horse’s sides to prevent myself falling.

‘He says she is called Gilitrutt after the troll-wife,’ Hinrik said, grinning. ‘Let your legs hang. If you squeeze her it will make her bolt. Do not pull on the reins. It makes them gallop.’

‘Then how am I to bring her to a halt, if I can’t rein her in?’

Hinrik shrugged. ‘She will stop … when she wants to.’

The rough track that led away from the village was only wide enough for us to ride single-file, although the horses seemed desperate to walk next to one another and kept trying to squeeze past rocks to get closer together. The boy rode ahead, followed by Marcos and Vítor, who was leading the packhorse behind his own mount. I came next and, behind me, Fausto brought up the rear.

Hinrik led us between great towering mounds of dark soil and rock piled in haphazard layers, like carelessly heaped slices of bread. Broad streams, teeming with swan, duck and grebe, meandered across the valley floor, their waters riffled by the stiff breeze into little peaks and troughs, like a newly ploughed field. Great cushions of grey moss snuggled around the base of jagged black rocks that stuck out of the ground like rows of shark’s teeth, and between the patches of dark, wiry grass were vivid splashes of a strange pink plant I’d never seen before. At the base of the hillsides long stretches of marsh pools shone like broken fragments of mirrors as the light caught them, and white-tufted cotton grass swayed in the wind. Ahead of us in the distance a huge rounded mountain rose into the grey afternoon light, as if it was a sleepy giant curiously watching us tiny creatures crawling towards it.

I heard a deep, croaking
pruk-pruk-pruk
above me. A pair of ravens was circling round the black rocks up on the hillside, their wings outstretched, gliding on the wind for the pure joy of flying. Suddenly I saw this was not the entrance to purgatory at all, but to heaven. It was the most wildly beautiful place I had ever seen. I half-turned, wanting to share my excitement with my father as I had done so many times when I was a little girl, when he took me with him to trap the wild falcons. But even as I opened my mouth, I realized with a sickening jolt that he was not riding behind me, but lying in a dark dungeon deep beneath the earth. I gazed up at the sky, desperately hoping to hear that cry or see the familiar outline of the gyrfalcon circling above me, but there was no sign of the birds.

I was so intent on searching the skies for the falcons that at first I didn’t see what was happening, until shouts and curses from the men jolted me back. The packhorse which Vítor had been leading behind his own mount had stopped and was jerking its head, trying to pull away from the leading rein. The pack which Fausto had helped to tie to the beast had slipped sideways, so that now all the weight of our bundles and the iron cooking pot hung on her left side. The horse flopped down in the track and tried to rid herself of the irritation by rolling on her back and thrashing violently.

Vítor dismounted and, flinging his reins at Marcos, marched back to try to pull the packhorse up on to her feet. Marcos dismounted too and, holding tightly to both horses, led them forward, looking wildly around for somewhere he might tether them, but there was not a tree or a post anywhere. Hinrik, who had been riding ahead, was plainly oblivious of the commotion behind him and had disappeared around one of the mounds of soil.

Vítor glanced up at Marcos. ‘Hurry up and give me a hand. We’ll have to get this pack off her before we can get her up.’

He tugged at one of the knots in the wool, but it only seemed to make it tighter. Exasperated, he pulled out his knife. ‘I’ll have to cut it.’

Up to then I had kept my seat, but I saw the most useful thing I could do now would be to dismount and help to hold the beasts while the others freed the packhorse. Behind me, Fausto was still mounted too. I half-turned my head and saw his horse drawing level with mine.

‘Can you hold her while I dismount?’ I handed him the reins and, seizing a handful of the horse’s mane, I leaned forward, about to swing my leg over its back, when I felt something hit my horse’s flank, as if someone had kicked the beast hard. She whinnied and sprang forward off the track. Fausto dropped the reins, but before I could grab at them, the horse galloped away with me frantically clutching at her mane. I had lost the stirrups and was desperately trying to keep my seat by gripping her sides tightly with my legs.

Hinrik’s warning flashed through my head. I knew that by pressing the horse’s sides I was only encouraging her to go faster, but I couldn’t help myself. I was only holding on to her mane and I was terrified that if I relaxed my grip with my legs I would be thrown straight on to those sharp, jagged rocks.