Read Online The Falcons of Fire and Ice by Karen Maitland - Free Book Online Page A

often had that melting look in her wide indigo eyes that told you she was thinking of someone else. I frequently became insanely jealous. But when I shouted at her or implored her to give the other men up, she only laughed at me. Jealousy made no sense to her, for she was easily bored and would wander from lover to lover like a fly aimlessly buzzing around a butcher’s stall. She couldn’t ever understand that a man wants to believe he is a woman’s only lover.
    What had made her stalk out this time, I couldn’t remember. We’d had a fight. But that was nothing new. Silvia loved to whip up a storm, to rage and scream and hurl her shoes at my head, and once even a full chamber pot. But if our fights were wild, our lovemaking afterwards was wilder still. All that fury in her exploded into passion and she rode me like a marauding Tatar until we both collapsed into sleep from sheer exhaustion.
    But there’d been no intoxicating gallop this time, that much I do remember through the brandy fumes fogging my head. When I’d finally awoken the next morning, with a tongue as furred as a donkey’s arse, she was gone. I was sure she’d return that night but she didn’t, and no one at the inn had seen her since.
    ‘But it’s only been four days, Pio. As soon as she hears I’ve got money to buy her dresses and jewels, she’ll slither back in here. Just you wait and see, Pio. All the soldiers in the king’s army couldn’t keep her away.’
    A bright green lizard scuttled across a patch of rotting wood above my head. Sweet Jesu, but it was hot. The sweat was trickling down my face and stinging my eyes. The stench of putrid fish guts, tar and dried seaweed wafted in through the broken shutters, but there was scarcely a whisper of breeze to cool the tiny room. I slapped at a bedbug crawling into my armpit and tried to settle myself more comfortably between the lumps in the straw mattress.
    Below my window, I could hear the rustling and squealing of the rats fighting among the rubbish, too insolent even to bother to wait for the cover of darkness. But for the first time in weeks I didn’t resent any of these daily torments. Only five more days and then I’d be out of here for good, with money jangling in my pocket and a belly full of rich food. Life was a tree laden with sweet ripe peaches for those who knew how to pick them, and I was about to pluck one of the juiciest.

Iceland Eydis
     
    Mews – the building where hawks are kept, especially while they moult, or mew.
     
    My sister died today. I felt the life go out of her as I cradled her tightly to me. I had always thought the spirit took wing from the body like a beetle flying upwards to the light. First would come the shiver of death in the slow opening of the wings, testing, balancing, and then a sudden upward thrust and the soul would be gone.
    But it was not like that at all. It was water dripping slowly out of a cracked beaker. It was an icicle melting drop by drop. There was no moment of death, only a slow haemorrhaging of life, the heartbeat growing softer, a drum fading into the distance as the drummer walks away.
    Valdis didn’t speak, but I knew what she was thinking, I always knew. She was thinking of the mountain and of the river of blue ice that creeps from it so imperceptibly you cannot see it move, although you know it does. She and I used to watch it for hours when we were small children in the hope of seeing it change, but we never did. At night, tucked up together in the little bed we shared, we’d hold hands and listen to the ice-river singing to us under the bright cold stars. But some nights it did not soothe us with its lullabies. It crackled and cracked so loudly the boom of it would echo around us as if the mountains themselves were crashing into the valley. Then we clung to each other, afraid.
    That’s what Valdis was thinking of when she died, the nights of the blue ice. We always promised ourselves we would see that river again one day. One