The Falcons of Fire and Ice - By Karen Maitland Page 0,105

the lad takes no notice of me. Although I can see he is terrified, I know by the hard set of his jaw he is resolved to see it through. He thinks it is the only way to undo the harm he has done. He starts across the floor of the cave, his knife raised high in both hands.

‘If you spill one drop of his blood, Ari, we will curse you to the grave and beyond.’

He ignores me, and I know that even if I utter a curse it will not stop him. But just as he reaches the man, there is a great clicking and whirring. A dense cloud of black beetles rises into the air and buzzes around Ari, dashing their sharp wings against his face over and over again. He flails his arms wildly, trying to beat them away. The knife flies from his hands as he staggers blindly across the cave.

‘Sit down, Ari! Sit and they will leave you.’

But so great is his panic that I have to shout twice more before I can persuade him to crouch down on the ground.

He kneels, hunched over, covering his head with his arms. The beetles fall back to the floor and scuttle back into the cracks in the rock.

Ari sits trembling for several minutes before he finally manages to find his voice again. ‘Eydis, I … I don’t understand. Why did you stop me? Why do you want this creature of hell to live?’

‘We don’t, Ari. We swear to you we would give our lives to see him destroyed, but for now he must live. His spirit has left his body. If the body is destroyed while the spirit is absent from it, his spirit will remain among the living and there will be no way to banish it. Not even the sorcerer who conjured up the corpse from the dead will be able to send the spirit back to the other world. The spirit will be capable of doing as much harm as the draugr itself, maybe more. Until the spirit returns to the body, we cannot risk destroying the corpse.’

Ari raises his head, despair etched into his face. ‘Then what can we do? Tell me what to do to put things right.’

‘Listen to me, Ari, the corpse is growing weaker. Soon it will be too weak for the spirit to return. We must heal the body. We have a jar of the fox fat we need and the dried herbs, but there is one ingredient, the most important, we do not possess. We need to prepare some mummy.’

The boy looks blank, as well he might. The ingredient is too costly for a hireling like him ever to have seen, never mind used.

‘Mummy is the render from a human corpse. It is one of the most powerful physics there is. The merchants bring a little in from Germany for the wealthy Danes, but it is costly, far beyond what most farmers could ever hope to pay, even if there were any for sale.’

A look of apprehension crosses the boy’s face. ‘You want me to steal some … from a Dane?’

‘No, lad. Even if we could discover who had some on his shelves, we could not risk you breaking into the house of a Dane. You would be caught and hanged without question. No, we must make it ourselves. But to do that we must have a corpse, or rather the head of one, for it is the render from the head that is the most powerful … Ari, listen to me carefully, we need you to break open a grave. You must choose the grave of someone not too long dead, so that some of the flesh and brains will still remain. You must cut off the head and bring it to me.’

He gags and the blood drains from his face so swiftly I fear he is about to faint.

‘Surely there must be something else that would heal him?’ he begs. ‘A root … a herb? It doesn’t matter how rare it is, only tell me what to look for and I promise I’ll search every mountain and valley. I won’t rest until I find it.’

‘Ari, believe me, I would not ask you to do such a thing if there was any other physic that would work.’

‘But to open a grave!’

‘If we cannot heal the corpse, then this man’s spirit will continue to serve the master who conjured it. To go to such lengths to raise a