Free The Falcons of Fire and Ice by Karen Maitland

daughter has two suitors, which should she take as a husband?’
    ‘My husband has not returned from the sea, has he drowned or has he left me?’
    ‘Shall I buy my neighbour’s farmstead, will it prosper?’
    ‘My son has been murdered, who is his killer?’
    They want curses to punish their mothers-in-law, spells to defeat their rivals, blessings to protect their infants and cures for their ailing cows. We hear all life as it passes through here in their quarrels and triumphs, their griefs and their joys, but we do not see life, except in our visions. We do not live it.
    They are afraid of us, afraid of what we might do if the iron rings are removed from our bodies. They know it is only those rings that keep our spirits in this cave. If that iron ever broke, we could transform ourselves into falcons. We could fly into the blinding sunlight, or soar among the frosted stars, and like our mother who brought us to the cave, they are terrified of what we might do then.
    But in here we are tamed, their captives, and they need us, now more than ever, for a long shadow of evil creeps across the land. The Lutherans have destroyed the abbeys and monasteries, driven out the Catholic priests and executed the bishops. They raid homesteads and cottages, searching for the images of saints and the charms and amulets of the wizards and wise women that have protected the Icelanders since the old gods ruled this land. All the old certainties, the faith, the hope that people clung to down through the centuries, have been torn away from them. They are frightened. They are lost. They are defenceless. They need us. And I need Valdis.
    One day, my sister, one day we shall return to the blue ice. I will find a way back to the light. I will take you back. I swear to you on your corpse, I will not fail you.

 

Chapter Three
     
    Tamerlane wanted to possess the power of his great enemy Khan Tokhtamysh. He knew that if he could steal the eggs from the khan’s prize gyrfalcons he could weaken the mighty khan and gain his strength. So Tamerlane bribed one of the khan’s guards to smuggle out the falcons’ eggs and give them to him.
    When the eggs hatched, Tamerlane reared the birds with his own hand. As the falcons grew, so Tamerlane became stronger, and the khan weakened. And thus it was that when next they met in battle the great Khan Tokhtamysh was defeated and fled.

Sintra, Portugal Isabela
     
    Bow-net – a baited trap to catch a falcon, which springs around the bird when a peg is dislodged.
     
    ‘It was his own fault,’ my mother said savagely. ‘The old man should have confessed when he had the chance. Then they’d have given him the mercy of the garrotte before they burned him.’
    She scraped five sardines smoking and blackened from the griddle on to my father’s pewter plate, and set it down with such a heavy thump in front of him on the table that the candle flame trembled. I shivered, pulling my shawl tighter around me. The sun had not yet risen, and the tiny room was icy, as if the heat from the charcoal stove was being pushed back by the chill of the room.
    ‘What was the point of holding out? All that needless pain. It was his own fault he suffered. You tell me, what was the point of it?’ It was the only question she had asked since Father had told her about our neighbour Jorge, and she just kept repeating it, as if the answer held the key to all the mysteries of the world.
    ‘You can’t simply confess,’ my father told her. ‘They won’t believe you have repented, unless you give them the names of others.’
    ‘Not when he was already sentenced to death. Once he’d been handed over to the king, they couldn’t do anything. He could have recanted on the pyre. Then it would have been over in a trice. But no, he wouldn’t do it, would he, the stubborn old fool.’
    I shuddered. We had returned from Lisbon only yesterday evening, a full three days after the burning, but I could still smell the stench of that