you forgotten, Heidrun, I am bound by iron? They did this to us so that we would have no power.’
‘No power to send your spirit out into the world. But there is much you can do in this cave.’ She points with a long, sharp finger towards my sister. ‘Remember, a band is fastened about her waist too. As long as she is bound by iron, so too is the spirit that infects her. You and he are matched in your limitations and your strength. Only your fear of him can make you weaker.’
‘But she does fear me,’ the dark voice growls. ‘Even bound by iron I am three times stronger than her. I can sense her every feeling. I know her most fleeting thought. I know her more intimately than any lover and can be that too – her lover, her master, her destroyer. I have not even begun to show her what I can do.’ Valdis’s head twists around to gaze first at Heidrun and then at me with those great cavernous black eyes.
But Heidrun ignores the voice as if it had not spoken. She walks away across the cave floor as noiselessly as she entered. Is that all she is going to tell me, all the help she will offer me? Does she not understand that I am trapped alone with this creature? I need her. I desperately want to beg her to return, but I cannot, for then the draugr will know how much I fear him.
Heidrun pauses beside the rocky outcrop which screens the passage to the entrance. ‘If he escapes this cave he will bring terror and death to every hovel and farmstead across the land. Where he crosses a threshold by night not a man, woman or child in that dwelling will be found alive come dawn. Where he walks along a path, no human soul who crosses that track will live long enough to reach home. You must send him back to his body, while you are both bound by the iron. That is your only hope and it is the only hope for the hundreds of innocent men, women and children who will lose their lives if you fail. If he is freed from the iron, neither you nor anyone will be able to stop him destroying every living thing in his path.
‘But there isn’t much time, Eydis. The mountains are stirring again. The rivers of fire will run. Remember the black cloud that struck Jónas’s child? You spoke the truth about that cloud. You know what it means. The mountain has spoken, and soon the pool in this cave will answer it. When it does, you will know time is running out – for all of us.’
Chapter Eight
In the later half of the thirteenth century a Mongol emperor was so passionate about hunting with falcons and gyrfalcons, that he ordered the sides of a valley near the palace to be sown with a huge variety of grains to help breed more wild partridge and quail for the hunt. Near his palace in Chandu he enclosed a park with rich grazing and many streams in which he kept deer and goats which were bred purely to feed the two hundred falcons kept there during their moult. He also kept eagles for hunting wolves.
Every year in March the emperor went to Manchuria for the great hunt, taking ten thousand falcons and an equal number of soldiers to guard the hunting birds. The emperor rode out in a pavilion covered with cloth of gold and lined with lion skins, which was borne by four elephants. Inside he kept his twelve favourite gyrfalcons and twelve favourite officers to amuse them. When those on horseback reported the sighting of game he would open his curtains and cast off the falcons.
When they finally reached the plains, a camp was set up for the falconers, nobles and the emperor’s wives, who also had their own falcons, and for a month they would disport themselves with hunting.
Each falcon bore on its leg a tiny silver tablet giving its owner’s mark, and a man known as the ‘guardian of the lost’ would set up his tent on a rise with a banner flying above it so that in the vast camp he could easily be seen. Any owner seeking a lost bird would go to him, and any man finding a lost falcon would take it to the guardian, so that the one might be reunited with the other.
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