The Falcons of Fire and Ice - By Karen Maitland Page 0,54

his arms as if trying to shield himself from a great boulder that is about to crash down on him. Then he turns and scrambles over the rocks towards the entrance of the cave. I hear the shower of small stones rattling behind him as he hastily climbs back up and out through the slit.

The cave seals itself again in silence, save for the gentle bubbling and gurgling of the pool. I look down at the man. At his temple a tiny pulse flickers beneath the skin like the wingbeat of a moth. That is the only sign of life in him. Since they brought him here, he has not moved nor opened his eyes, but beneath her veil my dead sister, Valdis, turns her head towards me and laughs, a dreadful mocking laugh, and the walls of the cave tremble.

Chapter Five

A fable relates how once a falcon refused to return to his master’s fist. A cockerel, watching this, thought, I am just as fine a bird as any falcon, yet I am forced to scratch for scraps in the dust at my master’s feet. Why should I not ride upon his fist and be fed choice meats from his fingers?

So the cockerel flew up on to his master’s fist. His master was delighted and praised the bird for its cleverness. Then he killed it, and held up its body as a lure for the falcon, which at once returned to his fist and devoured the cockerel’s flesh.

Torre de Belém Ricardo

Man – to accustom the hawk to being handled by the falconer and to make the bird accept the equipment used to control it, such as hoods, jesses, etc.

The guttering orange flames of the torches high on the walls of the dungeon glinted on the black water as another icy wave surged in and splashed across my legs. I shivered violently. My bare chest was wet with the salt spray. I could no longer feel my feet as I stood knee-deep in water, and my arms were numb from hanging in the chains. But at least I no longer felt the terrible panic of the first night, when the guards had chained me here promising that, with the coming of the high tide, the dungeon would flood. They roared with laughter as they climbed up the stairs of the tower, leaving me to wait in agonized terror for the first wave to come rolling in through the openings and race across the stone slabs. Just how high would the tide reach?

I had stood there in the darkness with my hands gripped painfully either side of my head by the fetters that bolted me to one of the great pillars, feeling the water creeping higher and higher up my legs with each breaking wave. How long before the tide was at its highest? How many hours had passed? And the cold! Oh, sweet Jesu, that bitter, biting cold. I had no idea how agonizing cold could be. It was as if my bones were being slowly crushed in the vice of it.

Then, when something solid bumped against my groin, it suddenly occurred to me that eels, octopuses and worse, much worse, also made their home in the sea. If the water could flow in, what was to prevent them swimming in with it? Was that an eel even now gnawing at my numb flesh, or a crab tearing strips of my skin off with its claws? Was that just a ripple I could see in the torchlight, or some huge fish carried in on the tide, a stinging jellyfish, a shark? What was swimming around me in that dark, swirling water, its mouth open, its teeth dagger-sharp?

But I was not drowned or devoured that night, nor had I been in the fourteen tides that followed, for I count my days in tides now. But what would happen when there was a storm? And sooner or later there would be one. I’d seen the waterfront at Belém flooded more than once when high winds lashed the sea. I knew just how much higher those waves could rise. And tall as I was, they would only need to rise a few more feet to cover my head.

But even when the tide was low and the water had drained away, I couldn’t get warm. The heat of the sun didn’t penetrate the dungeon of the tower, though I could glimpse it sparkling on the blue water through the openings in the walls as if