Free Sworn Brother by Tim Severin

her perch so her neck and body muscles grew strong, and held out my glove, a much stouter one this time, so she could hop from perch to hand. Within a month the gyrfalcon was quiet enough to wear a leather hood without alarm, and she and I were allowed outside the hack house, where the splendid white and speckled bird flew on a long leash to reach lumps of meat I placed on a stump of wood. A week after that and Edgar was tossing into the air a leather sock dressed with pigeon’s wings, and the gyrfalcon, still tethered, was flying off from my glove to strike the lure and pin it to the ground and earn a reward of gosling. ‘You have the makings of a first-class falconer,’ Edgar commented and I glowed with satisfaction.
    Two days after Aelgifu’s outburst at the banquet, we allowed the gyrfalcon to fly free for the first time. It was a critical and delicate moment in her training. Soon after dawn Edgar and I carried the falcon to a quiet spot, well away from the burh. Edgar whirled the lure on its cord. Standing fifty paces away with the gyrfalcon on my glove, I lifted off the leather hood, loosed the leather straps, and raised my arm on high. The falcon caught sight at once of the whirling lure, thrust off from the glove with a powerful leap that I felt right to my shoulder, and flashed straight at the target in a single, deadly swoop. She hit the leather lure with a solid thump that tore the tethering cord from Edgar’s grasp, then carried the lure and its trailing cord up into a tree. For a moment Edgar and I stood aghast, wondering if the falcon would now take her chance to fly free. There was nothing we could do. But when I slowly held up my arm again, the gyrfalcon dropped quietly from her branch, glided back to my glove and settled there. I rewarded her with a morsel of raw pigeon’s breast.
    ‘So she finally comes to claim her royal prerogative,’ Edgar said quietly to me as he saw who was waiting beside the hack house as we walked back. Aelfgifu was standing there, accompanied by two attendants. For a moment I resented the mischievous implication in Edgar’s comment, but then a familiar feeling washed over me. I felt light-headed at being in the presence of the most beautiful and desirable woman in existence.
    ‘Good morning, my lady,’ said Edgar. ‘Come to see your falcon?’
    ‘Yes, Edgar,’ she replied. ‘Is the bird ready yet?’ ‘Not quite, my lady. Another week or ten days of training and we should have her fit for the hunt.’
‘And have you thought of a name for her?’ asked Aelfgifu. ‘Well, Thorgils here has,’ said Edgar.
    Aelfgifu turned towards me as if seeing me for the first time in her life. ‘So what name have you chosen to call my falcon?’ she asked. ‘I trust it is one I will approve.’
    ‘I call the falcon Habrok,’ I answered. ‘It means high breeches, after the fluffy feathers on its legs.’
    She gave a slight smile which made my heart lurch. ‘I know it does; Habrok was also the “finest of all hawks” according to the tales of the ancient Gods, was it not? A good name.’
I felt as if I was walking on air.
    ‘Edgar,’ she went on, ‘I’ll keep you to your promise. In ten days from now I begin hawking. I need to get out into the countryside and relax. Two hunts a week if the hawks stay fit.’
    So began the most idyllic autumn I ever spent in England. On hawking days Aelfgifu would arrive at the hack house on horseback, usually with a single woman attendant. Occasionally she came alone. Edgar and I, also mounted, would be waiting for her. The hawks we carried depended on our prey. Edgar usually brought one of the peregrines, myself the gyrfalcon, and Aelfgifu accepted from us the merlin or one of the sparrowhawks, which were lighter birds and more suitable for a woman to carry. We always rode to the same spot, a broad area of open land, a mix of heath and marsh, where the hunting birds had room to fly.
    There we tethered the horses, leaving them in the care