please. We can easily break the band when the time comes, but not yet. Promise you’ll leave it.’
Valdis’s head swivelled in my direction. She was calling out, and it didn’t sound to me as if she was thanking me. In fact, she sounded more than a little angry.
‘Are you sure that’s what she wants? She doesn’t sound too happy.’
Isabela bit her lip. ‘Eydis wants it this way. She knows what she’s doing. You have to trust her … you should rest now. You must be exhausted.’
These Icelanders were crazier than a rabid dog at the full moon, but I wasn’t going to argue. My fingers were swelling up like sausages and, to be honest, I wasn’t at all sure I could have managed to saw any more, even if she’d begged me to. Stretching my back, I made my way across the steamy cave towards the pail of hot water.
I staggered backwards as a sudden rumbling filled the cave and jets of stinking steam burst out of the pool, filling the cave with a dense white fog. Someone was screaming, but I couldn’t see whom. The dripping cave walls seemed to cool the steam a little as it rolled towards me, but it was almost impossible to breathe in it. Ari was shouting. I could scarcely see anything in the hot steam, except the smudged shapes of people moving as they loomed in and out of the fog.
‘Marcos, help me get the hoops off them!’ Isabela yelled.
I stumbled blindly across the cave, slipping on the wet stones, but I couldn’t see where Isabela was, never mind the sisters. Everyone was shouting. Shapes were forming and disappearing again in the steam.
I was terrified I was blundering in the wrong direction and might end up falling into the boiling pool. All I actually wanted to do was to get the hell out of that inferno as quickly as I could. If it had just been a matter of saving those two mad sisters, frankly I would have made straight for the passage and the way out, but Vítor was somewhere in this maelstrom, and I was damned if I was going to leave Isabela to his tender mercies.
I dropped to my knees, crawling over the rock. I discovered it was just a fraction easier to breathe closer to the ground. Then I saw them. Ari was crouching behind Valdis who was writhing and twisting. Isabela was frantically trying to pull open the iron hoop about Eydis’s waist.
‘Help me, Marcos!’ Isabela looked terrified, as well she might.
‘Can’t you get the sisters to sit still?’ I yelled in exasperation as the iron band slipped for the third time out of my sweating hands. ‘We’ll never get anywhere if they keep wriggling about. What the hell is Eydis trying to do, anyway?’
I was suffocating in the steam. My fingers were so wet I couldn’t grip the metal. Isabela crawled away, and for a moment I thought she had given up, then she returned with a blanket pulled from the sisters’ sleeping pallet.
‘Use this to hold it,’ she said, pushing the sodden cloth into my hands.
I wrapped my fingers in the edge of the blanket and seized the hoop in both hands, and as I pulled I felt the iron band begin to bend.
‘Here,’ I said to Isabela, ‘take the other side, now brace your feet against my legs and pull backwards.’
We strained against each other as the hoop slowly widened, and then it shattered. The force of its breaking was so unexpected we tumbled over. There was a bellow of rage which cut over all the other screams and shouts in the cave. Beside me, Isabela had struggled to her feet, and she was staring out into the cave, her eyes wide and frozen with terror.
Eydis
Ramage or rammish – a hawk or falcon which is wild and hard to catch, or an escaped bird that has fully returned to the wild and is extremely difficult to reclaim.
The draugr is fighting to break the iron band around Valdis’s waist. But he only has her hands to use. Bound by the iron, his strength is only her strength and her hands are weak, atrophied. But if Ari or the foreigner helps to break that iron before I can drive him out of Valdis, his strength will surge and I will not be able to prevent it. I must pull Isabela out of this time and take her to the place of the dead, before her iron circle