The Falcons of Fire and Ice (58 page)

I turned away and walked along the harbour. There were no more ships. I had just watched my only hope of escape from this midden sail off across the horizon and now I was stuck here at least until spring. Somehow I’d have to find a way to survive. But given what I’d been through in the past few weeks, I wasn’t going to let a little thing like an empty purse defeat me.

There might not be any diamonds in those mountains, and I certainly wasn’t stupid enough to go back into any of those caves to find out, but this mummy was proving to be a profitable little venture. Of course, I’d have to find more dead seals and other villages and towns to sell it in. Keep moving, that was the secret, never stay long enough for them to find out it didn’t work. But then, who knows, maybe my powder would cure them as well as the real thing. If people believed in something strongly enough, miracles had been known to happen. Wasn’t that what the priests called faith? And the more people paid for something, the more faith they had in it. The Icelanders were as poor as corpses in a common grave, but there had to be some wealthy Danish widows around somewhere, and stuck on this island they must be starving for the company of a charming man who knew how to woo a lady. Who knows, they might even consider taking another husband.

I stared down into the clear green water. A naked woman was floating just beneath the surface. Her brown skin was soft and smooth. Her raven hair fanned out all around her, undulating in the waves. An amulet in the form of a single blue eye lay between her firm, round breasts which shamelessly thrust up through the ripples at me. She was smiling, her full lips parted in lustful desire, her arms held wide to embrace me. She wanted me to come to her, to lie with her in the cold, lonely depths. Silvia wanted her revenge.

I kissed my fingers to her. ‘Not yet, my sweet Silvia. Not yet. Patience was never one of your virtues. One day you’ll take me down there with you, and you’ll torment me for all eternity in death just as you did in life. I will pay the price for you eventually, but I’m not ready to surrender to you yet, my beauty. Haven’t I always said, life is a tree laden with sweet, ripe peaches for those who know how to pluck them. And I have many more juicy peaches yet to steal, my darling, a great many more.’

Eydis

Sails –
the wings of a falcon.

Isabela stands beside the rail staring at the coast slipping by, as the fragile ship weaves around the murderous rocks. She sees the towering rivers of ice inching towards the crashing waves of the shore. She sees the deep blue water surge around the barren cliffs and break on the black sand. She sees waterfalls thundering down in rainbow sprays and a thousand birds ebbing and flowing like the tides.

Soon the ship will break from the shore and there will be nothing to watch but the sea. She will mark the passage of each day and night, desperate for the ship to sail faster, frightened that she will not reach home in time or at all. A thousand anxieties swarm through her head. Can she keep the birds alive? Will she find a ship in Antwerp? Does her father still live? Will they keep their promise and release him, or will they simply take her too?

Her fingers stray to the lucet around her neck. She rubs the horn against her cheek, comforted by its cool smoothness. One day, she will begin to fashion a new cord with it. She will remember that she can call the dead. She will always fear death, but not the dead. They are her friends now and they will surround her. She will draw them to her with the cord and they will come to her. The dead can never be lost to her. The grandmother and the child, Hinrik and Jorge, Valdis and me, we all travel with her, and when the time comes to face the evil she will know we will all stand with her – the door-doom of the dead.

The black thread of death to call us from our graves.

The green thread of spring to give her hope.

The red thread of blood to lend her our strength.

Rowan, protect her.

Fern, defend her.

Salt, now bind us to her!

Historical Notes

Portugal

In 1492, Jews fleeing from the Inquisition in Spain were allowed to settle in Portugal on payment of eight crusados. The Jews were considered vital for trade and industry in the expanding Portuguese empire. But when, in 1497, King Manoel I of Portugal married the daughter of the Spanish king, his new bride insisted that both the Portuguese and exiled Spanish Jews be ordered to leave Portugal or be baptized as Catholics. The Jews were given ten months to decide.

However, just three months later, King Manoel commanded all Jews to gather at the ports. They believed they were going to be given passage out of the country, but instead they were told no Jew was now allowed to leave Portugal. Their children were seized and every Jew was ordered to convert to Christianity. Those who refused were either killed or forcibly baptized. The converts and their descendants became known as New Christians, or Marranos, which meant
pigs
.

King João III (1521–57) allowed the Grand Inquisition of the Catholic Church to establish itself in Portugal in 1536, but in the first three years it was only permitted to gather information on heretics and apostate Christians, not to act. Their particular targets were the communities of Marranos who, though outwardly Christian, were suspected of practising Judaism in secret. But the king would not allow the Inquisition to unleash its full power, because he needed the New Christians for their crafts and trade links. The Inquisition was growing increasingly frustrated.

Then in 1539, banners appeared on all the churches in Lisbon proclaiming that Jesus was not the Messiah. A young Marrano, Manuel da Costa, was arrested and under torture confessed that he was responsible. He was executed, and the scandalized populace, whipped up by the priests, demanded that Portugal be cleansed of its heretics. The king finally granted permission for the Inquisition to round up Marranos, Muslims and Lutherans, the last being identified as anyone found in possession of a Bible translated into Portuguese. Any Christian convert who was suspected of having secretly returned to their former Jewish or Muslim faith was considered a heretic and liable to be arrested, tortured and executed. And so began the reign of terror under the Inquisition.

Some readers may be wondering what became of little King Sebastian, the child-king in the novel. In 1578, aged just twenty-four, he embarked on a war to aid the deposed ruler of Morocco, Abu Abdallah Mohammed II Saadi, in defeating his Turkish-backed uncle. Portugal had lost several important trading stations in Morocco which were vital for its route to India. At the Battle of Alcácer Quibir – the Battle of the Three Kings – Sebastian was last seen charging into enemy lines and was presumed killed. His great-uncle, Cardinal Henry, succeeded him as king until his own death in 1580, when Sebastian’s uncle, Philip II of Spain, claimed the Portuguese throne.

Although Philip later claimed to have recovered Sebastian’s body and interred it in the monastery at Belém, rumours persisted that Sebastian had survived the battle and had been taken prisoner for ransom, and that he would one day return to claim his throne. Over the years several men appeared, each purporting to be Sebastian and saying that he, not Philip, was the rightful king of Portugal. The last of these claimants was hanged in 1619. But the rumours lived on, and down the centuries the legend grew that, like King Arthur of England, Sebastian was merely sleeping and would one day return as
O Encoberto
or
The Hidden One
, to aid his country when it was in grave peril, a belief held by some right up until the nineteenth century.

Iceland

From
AD
874 when Iceland was first settled by the Norwegian Viking, Ingólfur Arnarson, it had to a greater or lesser extent been ruled by Norway. But in 1397 at Kalmar, under the terms of the Scandinavian union pact between Norway, Denmark and Sweden, the sovereignty of Iceland was transferred from Norway to Denmark. So when Lutheranism was established in Denmark in 1537, it also spread to Iceland.

At first, the Catholic bishops of Iceland declared it heresy, but even after they were replaced by Lutheran bishops, the Reformation had little impact and was largely ignored by the Icelandic clergy and laity. But in 1550, when a Catholic bishop was arrested and murdered, the Icelanders took revenge by slaughtering Danes. Denmark was then determined to impose Lutheranism on Iceland. The Lutherans seized all the assets of the Catholic churches in Iceland and stripped them bare of all images of saints and religious decoration. They closed abbeys and monasteries, driving out priests, monks and nuns. They confiscated Latin Bibles, relics and religious items from Icelandic families and from the churches. The Reformation also destroyed much of the traditional cultural life of Iceland, because many of the long-established arts such as circle dancing were considered pagan and outlawed.

In 1602, Denmark imposed a complete trade monopoly, which together with a division of the country into four commercial districts, preventing trade between the districts, brought the population to near starvation. One man had his entire house contents taken because he gave garments his wife had knitted to an Englishman in exchange for two fishing lines. Another was flogged for selling fish to a neighbour who lived just over the border in another trading district.

Independence for Iceland came slowly, beginning in 1830 when Icelanders were granted two seats out of seventy on the Danish board that governed the island, but it was not until 1 December 1918 that the Icelandic flag finally flew over its own land, and full independence was not achieved until 17 June 1944.

Huguenots

The Huguenots were French Protestants, a movement which evolved in the 1500s from a number of different religious and political movements. They were mainly townspeople, literate craftsmen and noblemen from the south of France, who were opposed to the rites and rituals of the Catholic Church and were heavily influenced by both Luther and Calvin. They sought to live a life of simple worship and adherence to biblical commandments, relying upon God rather than the mediation of the Church or priests for salvation.

The Huguenots faced constant attack and persecution from the beginning, but King Francis I (1515–47) tried at first to protect them. However, in October 1534, anti-Catholic documents appeared overnight pinned up all over Paris. One was even attached to the door of the royal bedchamber while King Francis was asleep. This action so alarmed the king that it turned his sympathies against the Protestants. Many suspects were rounded up and burned, giving the signal for open hostility and persecution of the Huguenots.

Over the subsequent years many Huguenots fled to the Netherlands, Switzerland, the New World and England. A charter of Edward VI of England in the mid-1500s permitted the first French Protestant church to be set up in England. Its descendant, which can still be visited, is now in london’s Soho Square.

The elaborate, and highly symbolic, Huguenot cross we know today was of a much later design and so would not have been used on the graves in the period covered by this novel.

Black Cloud

In the novel, the little child Frída is brushed by a black cloud travelling at great speed. Several early travellers in Iceland wrote that they had witnessed or been told about this phenomenon. What all their stories have in common is that having being touched by the cloud, the victims appeared to suffer terrible pain, and babbled incoherently. They frequently tried to kill themselves, though whether this was in an attempt to end their agony or was due to hallucinations, no one seems sure. Most of the victims recovered spontaneously after a few days or weeks. It has been suggested that, if these stories have any basis at all in fact, the cloud may have been a ball of gases and ash ejected from a volcanic fissure, often heralding a bigger seismic event. This would account for the speed at which the cloud appears to travel.

Draugr

A nightstalker or draugr (the plural is
draugar
) is a revenant, or animated corpse. They appear in many early tales from all over northern Europe. These include the nightstalker Grendel in the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon saga of
Beowulf
; the ghosts described by Yorkshire’s Canon William of Newburgh in his
Prodigiosa
, written in the twelfth century; and the fourteenth-century Glam, who appears in the Icelandic
Grettis Saga
. Encounters with these revenants continued to be recorded right up until the nineteenth century in Iceland.

Early tales of the draugar suggest terrifying, monstrous creatures, whose eyes shot flames and who caused great destruction by tearing off the roofs and doors of the halls they attacked. In these stories, the draugr only appears during the hours of darkness, vanishing at dawn. But by the later half of the Middle Ages, the draugr takes the form of an apparently normal human, who remains visible and tangible both day and night, but is possessed of great physical strength and a voracious appetite. The draugr was also thought to be able to control the weather and was a shape-shifter who could take the form of creatures such as a flayed bull, or a savage cat who would sit on a sleeping person, growing heavier until it crushed their chest, suffocating them. Those who had been drowned at sea often appeared as a draugr whose head was a mass of seaweed.

Stories are told of both Catholic and Lutheran clergy in Iceland who were learned in magic and dabbled in the black arts, including the raising of corpses. They often studied the black arts through books, but legends recount how some clergy attended ‘the Black School which lay over the water’. Some folklore experts have suggested that the ‘Black School’ referred to in the legends was in fact the University of Paris, otherwise known as the Sorbonne.