The Falcons of Fire and Ice (45 page)

The man with the cudgel bounces the end of the stick against the palm of his other hand. I can hear the slap, slap of it as he walks slowly towards us through the fallen leaves. Grandmother pushes me behind her, one hand on my arm to hold me there. The man smiles at her. I can feel Grandma shaking and I want to tell her not to be scared. The man won’t hurt us. He is smiling at us.

The cudgel whistles through the air. It strikes my grandmother on the side of her head and she falls. The man raises the stick again and hits her hard on her back. He is beating her over and over again. She is crying. Grandmother never cries.

I call out to my father to tell him to make the man stop, but he is kneeling on the ground, cradling my little brother against his chest. Two men are hacking at him with their swords. I turn and run, but someone grabs me, lifts me off my feet. Thick, hairy arms are crushing me. I fight and fight, but I can’t get free. My lungs are bursting with the effort of trying to scream, but no sound comes out.

I woke with a violent jerk and lay sweating and trembling. The heads of both twin sisters were turned in my direction and I knew they were watching me beneath their veils. I felt the intensity of their gaze even though I couldn’t see their eyes. It was almost as if they were able to see inside my nightmare.

When I first entered the cave I thought I was dreaming then. My head was thick and heavy from hunger and exhaustion, and the heat which enveloped me was the last thing I expected, though at first I was glad of it. My father had taken me into caves before when we were away catching the passage falcons as they migrated. Some were shallow and dry, others deep and resonant, with water dripping from dark green ferns which overhung the entrance. But always the caverns were cool, even cold. I had never imagined that a cave could be warm and steamy, or that rocks on which I walked in the darkness so far below the earth could be as hot as stones that had lain all day in the summer’s sun.

But then I saw Eydis, and for a moment, I believed she was some demon chained there to guard the entrance to hell. I had to stop myself from crying out. When I looked again though, I saw she was no demon, but a woman like me. She was tall and thin, clad in a brown woollen skirt, but naked from the waist up. Her breasts were bound with a simple band of cloth knotted at the front. Her head and face were covered by a black veil.

But it wasn’t her clothes that made me shudder. There was a second woman, dressed exactly like Eydis, growing out of her side. Valdis, her twin sister, was joined to her at the hip. Each woman possessed their own head, arms and torso, but shared a single pair of legs. This second woman lolled out sideways from Eydis’s upright body. Her arms dangled limply beneath her and the nails on her twig-like fingers were black. Her head rolled backwards from its own weight, so that when Eydis moved she was compelled to put an arm around her sister’s shoulder and clasp her in a strange embrace to keep her upright, so that they could walk.

And this was not the worst of it. For while the skin on Eydis’s body and arms was firm and healthy, though very pale from having lived all her life without the sun or wind, the skin of her twin was a yellowish-brown, loose and wrinkled. Her body and arms resembled the mummified hands and feet of saints preserved in the reliquaries of the great churches and cathedrals of Portugal. I would have sworn she was dead and yet I knew she couldn’t be, for she turned to stare at us through her veil, and when she spoke I could see her lips moving beneath it.

Two thick iron hoops encircled the waists of both women. They were fastened to two long, heavy chains and these in turn were attached to a single iron ring embedded in the rock of the cave wall. You could see the calluses on the women’s skin where for years they had chafed and rubbed. Their chains were long enough for the twins to move freely around the cave, though not to get close enough to the entrance to peer up through the slit in the rocks high above and glimpse the sun or the stars.

I’d seen the mad chained up like that. People who rave and babble nonsense, who try to savage any who approach them and tear at their own hair and flesh till they’re raw and bleeding. But Eydis was not mad. I could hear the calmness in her voice, watch the sure and methodical way she tended the wounds of the poor injured man who lay unconscious in one corner of the cave. A madwoman couldn’t heal. It took great skill and reason to do that.

I felt an overwhelming surge of pity for Eydis, as I would if I had seen an eagle in a tiny cage, never allowed to stretch its wings or fly. Weren’t Eydis and Valdis already bound to each other for life, never able to have a moment’s solitude to walk alone, to fall in love? Why did others have to add to their misery by chaining them up below the earth?

Those first two days in the cave passed in a strange kind of limbo. I felt as if I’d died and was waiting in a chamber that was neither in heaven nor hell, nor on the earth, waiting for someone to tell us where to go. Ari couldn’t bear to be contained. He was constantly slipping down the passage to stand below the entrance, to see where the sun was in the sky, or if the moon had risen. Each time he went, I felt panic rising in me. The hours and days were sliding away. My father too was trapped away from the light, chained like the sisters. I couldn’t leave him there. I couldn’t leave him to die. I had to escape and search for the falcons. But each time I moved towards the passage Fannar barred the way.

‘Danir! Danes!’ he said, gesturing upwards.

Marcos and Vítor were restless too. Perhaps the confinement was making them also feel trapped and nervous, but there was a strange enmity between them. They’d certainly never been friends, none of the three men had, yet now Marcos seemed to go out of his way to sit as far away from Vítor as he could. Once I even saw him try to strike up a conversation with Unnur, just to avoid Vítor, though she looked completely mystified, not understanding one word of what he was saying.

I thought often about Hinrik. I prayed that they hadn’t hurt him, that they had let him go. He had been so terrified of being caught by the Danes, but surely they would quickly realize he was innocent of any crime? What had he done that they could possibly accuse him of?

I thought too about poor Fausto. Had poor little Hinrik been right after all when he said Fausto loved me? Was that why he’d made that brave, foolish attempt to return to the house? I’d been so certain he’d tried to kill me when he kicked my horse. Now that he was dead, I knew it must have been an accident, like Marcos had said.

What was wrong with me? How could I think that any one of these men who had risked their lives to defend me from the Danes would want to harm me? Perhaps it was the shock of knowing that everything I had been brought up to believe was a lie, that my parents, the people I had trusted the most in the world, had lied to me. It had made me suspicious of everyone. I’d even imagined that Vítor wished me harm, when in fact he’d done nothing but try to protect me. Like poor Fausto, Vítor and Marcos were both kind men and I was angry with myself for ever being suspicious of them.

But by the second night I could bear the waiting no longer. Whatever the danger from the Danes, I had to leave the refuge of the cave and hunt for the falcons. I felt so guilty, because Fannar and his family had lost everything they had to protect us. It was a betrayal of them to put myself in danger again, but I couldn’t just sit here and let my father, my mother and who knew how many more, burn.

I forced myself to stay awake and watch until the others fell asleep, though in the soporific heat of the cave it wasn’t easy to keep my eyes open. But finally, when I was sure they were all lost in their dreams, I rose quietly, tiptoed out of the cave and slipped around the rocky outcrop. I groped my way along the passage, trying to place my feet as carefully as I could so as not to dislodge any of the loose stones that littered the floor. At the far end was a heap of rocks and boulders that I knew formed a rough staircase up which you could climb to reach three or four rocky ledges one above the other, like the rungs of a ladder, leading up to the long narrow slit far above my head.

As I stood at the bottom, I could just make out a single silver star shivering in the blackness overhead, but its tiny light did nothing to illuminate the rocks. When I had first entered the cave Fannar had helped me down, holding my ankles and guiding my feet on to the next ledge and the next rock, but now I couldn’t see so much as a hand in front of me to find my way back up.

I cursed myself for not having the sense to bring a lamp, and wondered whether to return for one, but I remembered that even down here, the faint glow might be seen shining up through the crack at night and betray the hiding place of the others. I would have to feel my way up one boulder at a time. But as I was reaching up, trying to find a handhold, someone grabbed my shoulder. I whipped round, stifling a cry. Vítor was standing directly behind me.

‘I woke and saw you were missing,’ he whispered. ‘I was concerned for you. Where are you going?’

‘I … I just wanted to look out of the entrance,’ I said, keeping my voice as low as possible. ‘I feel so closed in and it’s so hot. I need some cold fresh air.’

‘I too would like the chance to breathe fresh air, but it is an extremely irresponsible thing to attempt. If you are seen and give away our hiding place, we will all suffer. You have a habit of wandering off, Isabela, first in France and then that first night in Iceland, and on both occasions you would have died, if we hadn’t –’

‘Don’t touch her!’

We both looked up, startled, to see Marcos stumbling towards us, tripping over the stones in his haste to reach us.

‘I assure you I have no intention of touching the young lady,’ Vítor said. ‘I was merely advising Isabela that it wasn’t safe to go out. She has an unfortunate history of accidents whenever she ventures off on her own. Fortunately none has yet proved fatal, but …’

‘You bastard,’ Marcos growled. ‘Don’t you –’

Fannar peered around the rock outcrop. He gestured impatiently for us to return to the cave, putting his finger to his lips and gesturing upwards. ‘Danir!’

We had no choice but to follow him back inside. Fannar was evidently grumbling to Ari and glowering in our direction. He lay down again but this time across the entrance to the passage, so that anyone trying to go down there would first have to step over him. We all lay down in our separate spaces. I was trembling with frustration. If it hadn’t been for Vítor detaining me and Marcos waking Fannar, I could have been out there now. Why did Vítor and Marcos have to follow me around as if I was a wayward child? What did it matter to them if I left or not? The tension between them was so palpable that I was sure if Fannar hadn’t woken up, they would have started wrestling each other to the ground like small boys. This confinement was getting to all of us. But I had to find a way out.

I found myself staring at the narrow ledge that ran alongside the pool. It went far back, disappearing through a tunnel beyond the pool, where the water rushed out. Was there a second cave beyond this one? Vítor, Marcos and Ari had all emerged from that tunnel the day Fannar brought us here. Perhaps if I followed the water, I would find another hole leading to the outside.

I wanted to leap up at once and try it out, but I knew I had to restrain myself until the others were sleeping. I didn’t want Vítor following me again. I sat upright, pressing my back against a sharp point on the cave wall to keep myself from drifting back into sleep in the warmth. I told myself I had to stay awake so that I could try once more to escape the cave, but deep down I knew that wasn’t the only reason. I was too scared to sleep in case my nightmares dragged me back into that forest where the men with swords and cudgels lay waiting for me in the darkness among the trees.

But in spite of all my efforts to stay awake, in that heat sleep was impossible to fight and I found myself beginning to surrender to it. My head cracked against the rock, as it lolled sideways, and I sat up sharply, rubbing the bruise. As I looked up, I suddenly saw Hinrik standing in the shadows on the opposite side of the cave. I scrambled up, overjoyed and immensely relieved to see that he was safe.

‘Hinrik, you got away! How …’

He took a step forward, holding something out in his hand. His face, his chest and arms were bruised and bloody, but only as he moved did I see the heavy rope noose dangling from his neck.

He opened his palm. A small white pebble lay in his hand. ‘The stone,’ he said. ‘I thought it was for the witch, but it was for you.’

‘Hinrik, you’re hurt. What have they done to you?’

‘Did you say
Hinrik
?’ Marcos whispered behind me. ‘Is the lad here?’ He moved closer, staring about him. ‘Where is he?’

I know that at twilight your eyes can be tricked into thinking dead trees are old men, or someone is seated in an empty chair. And I was sure that if I looked again I would see now that what I had taken to be Hinrik was just a rock, and what I heard was just the echo of a voice from a dream. But when I turned to look, Hinrik was still standing watching me, and my eyes couldn’t turn him into shadow again. Despite the heat of the cave, a cold wave of fear drenched me. I suddenly knew he had not escaped and now he never would.

I swallowed hard, trying to keep the fear from my voice. ‘I … I woke up and thought I saw the boy, but …’

Marcos yawned. ‘It’s this place, the damnable heat. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy. But I don’t think there’s much chance of seeing that poor lad again. I was going to try to cut him loose back there at the farmstead, but there wasn’t a hope of rescuing him, not when the fire started. Once those flames got going, if I’d tried to get anywhere near him I’d have been seen as clearly as if I was strolling around in summer sunshine.’

He half-lifted his hand and I thought he was going to pat my shoulder, but something must have stopped him for he let his hand drop. ‘Don’t worry. The boy comes from here. He’ll know how to handle the Danes. They’re bound to let him go in the end, but when they do I don’t think he’ll be in much of a hurry to find us again. He’ll already be back with his own family by now, telling them all about his adventures and convincing his sisters they made him captain before he left.’