The Falcons of Fire and Ice - By Karen Maitland Page 0,123

will you, quick as he can.’

Hinrik translated and the farmer spat on to the ground and muttered something. Clearly the drink had left him with a foul hangover.

‘He says fetch them yourself,’ Hinrik said.

I felt my own temper rising as fast as Vítor’s. ‘Then where are they?’

‘He says back with their owner by now.’

‘But we are the owners,’ Vítor said indignantly. ‘We paid a great deal for those beasts.’

‘How are the horses to know that?’ Hinrik giggled, then, catching sight of Vítor’s face, abruptly stopped himself.

‘Tether does not hold them,’ he said. ‘He says you should have taken them to the stone fold and hobbled them. Horses return home first chance they get. Everyone knows that.’

Vítor railed furiously at the lad and followed it up with a hard clout across the boy’s head which, thinking he fully deserved it, I made no attempt to prevent. But finally, even Vítor could see that no amount of shouting or raging was going to recover the animals. In the meantime, as I reminded him, Isabela was getting further away.

We assembled our packs, abandoning all but the essential items we could carry on our own backs, and set off in pursuit of Isabela, with Vítor still muttering that the farmer had probably stolen our beasts himself and was hiding them somewhere until we were safely out of sight. If he hadn’t been so anxious to find the girl, he said, he would have searched every inch of the place and would most assuredly do so when he returned. There was only one consolation in all this, and that was that Isabela had apparently been forced to depart on foot as well, so that I was sure it wouldn’t be long before we caught up with her.

The Jesuits were not joking when they said this would be like a pilgrimage. Climbing up the steps of some monastery on your knees would be less painful than marching over that terrain. I’m used to city streets, not dirt tracks, and when I wasn’t sinking knee-deep in freezing mud, I was barking my shin on a rock, or flaying my legs on thorns. One of the sailors told me that when Satan saw that God had created the world, he was jealous and demanded the right to create just one little piece of land himself. He laboured hard for a week, throwing into it all the skills he had to create a piece of hell on earth, and the country he made was Iceland. Never was a truer story told.

After several hours of walking, I was almost at the point of refusing to take another step when we heard laughter and raised voices carried towards us on the wind almost at the same time as we saw the men ahead of us on the track. All four of us hesitated and peered warily ahead to see what might be amusing them.

When you live by your wits in the streets of Belém or Lisbon, you learn to read a crowd. Not that this was a crowd – I could dimly make out three, maybe four, figures – but still it becomes second nature to peer round the door of a tavern or pause before entering a square. You sense, just by the way people are gathering, that trouble is bubbling up like foul water in a ditch. Then, unless you are itching to get your nose smashed or a dagger in your back, you know it’s time to slip quietly away before anyone notices you. I’m fond of my face and want to keep its features exactly as God made them.

But there are some men who have the brains of bulls. Wave anything in front of their squinty little eyes and they’ll charge at it, without even bothering to look to see if they are making straight for a spear. Vítor, instead of turning away, simply quickened his stride.

I ran a couple of steps and grabbed his arm, pulling him round.

‘This way,’ I whispered. ‘Quickly, take cover behind those rocks. If we cut across behind this rise we can avoid them and rejoin the track further up.’

Vítor jerked his arm away. ‘They’ve got hold of someone. It’s obvious they mean mischief,’ he added as a cry of pain cut through the bellows of raucous laughter that drifted back towards us.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘So let’s avoid a fight and go round them. We can’t afford any delays if we’re to catch up with Isabela. Besides, we don’t even know if