The Falcons of Fire and Ice - By Karen Maitland Page 0,109

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