a slave or even simply throw me overboard. They couldn’t know who I was, so why should either man want to do me harm? Yet I could not shake off the feeling that that was exactly what they intended.
And it wasn’t just my own life that they had threatened. If I was killed or badly injured and I couldn’t return with the falcons, my father, my whole family would go to their deaths believing I had deserted them. And if my father, a Marrano, was executed for killing those royal birds, they would use the outrage of the people to round up others. How many other innocent lives would end in the flames? How many more sobbing girls would place a box of bones on the pyre? How many Jorges would die in agony, their mouths bound so tightly they couldn’t even scream? Suddenly the enormity of what rested in my hands almost made me vomit with fear.
I had to get away from these men, and soon, before either of them could try to harm me again. My mistake before had been to involve the boy, Hinrik. This time I would have to do it alone.
Eydis
Mantle – when a falcon spreads her wings and her tail, and defensively arches over her food to protect her kill from other birds which might snatch it from her. If a falcon without a kill adopts this sitting position it is a sign she is irritated or feels threatened.
I lift the piece of black bog oak in my hands. It is an old friend, a friend I both respect and fear. The wood is oval like a giant egg, but it has been sliced down the middle and hollowed out, the hollow polished until it gleams in the firelight. It is a black mirror in whose labyrinthine depths the spirit wanders freely to see what it already knows but cannot yet give form.
I gaze unblinkingly into the black centre of the hollow. At first I see nothing but my own smoky reflection, but I know that I must sink beneath its surface, allow my sight to be pulled deeper and deeper into its heart until the hollow becomes bottomless, timeless, eternal, until I can see into the eighth day.
I am staring down a long, dark tunnel. A girl is standing at the far end. She is gazing towards me, as if she senses I am there, but cannot quite see me. She knows where she must go. But something has changed. A man is standing behind her. He is not one of the dead who follow her. He is alive and he is coming close to her, too close. He means her harm. She knows it and she is afraid. She turns away from me. Her fear is driving her, separating her from me, as a dog cuts out a single sheep from the flock. She is in danger, mortal danger. Even as I try to call out to her, she vanishes.
Someone is walking ahead of me. But it is not the girl. I recognize him. It is Ari. He is walking towards a farmhouse. It is the darkest hour of the night, and a chill wind is rolling down from the mountains. His step falters. He stops. He knows that something is terribly wrong. The farm dogs are howling, not barking excitedly at his approach, but whimpering in terror. They know him. He feeds them. They love him. At any hour when he approaches the farm, they recognize his tread, smell his scent on the wind and come running to leap up and lick him. But tonight they are cowering, trying to hide. They shrink from the house as if even to brush its walls terrifies them. All, that is, save one. This dog is screaming and jerking convulsively where it lies helpless on the ground. Ari can see at once that its back is broken.
He moves to try to help it, but he never reaches the poor creature, for his gaze is drawn instead to the door of the farmstead. Since the days of the Vikings, men have constructed such doors to withstand the onslaught of sword and spear. It is a craft learned from their fathers and their fathers before them. But now the stout timbers have been smashed open with such force that only a few splinters of wood dangle uselessly from the hinges and one of the great doorposts has crashed to the ground. Silence, as icy as a