The Falcons of Fire and Ice - By Karen Maitland Page 0,3

as a winter’s storm. She saw something else too in that handsome face, a tiny ridge beneath the nose where a groove should have been.

‘Get away from me,’ she screamed, desperately trying to scramble to her feet. ‘I know who your people are. You’re evil, wicked, every last one of your tribe. You’re child killers. Everyone knows what happens to the children you steal from decent people like us. I won’t let you near my babies. I won’t let you take them, do you hear? Get away from us!’

Her eyes wide in terror, Elísabet backed away, desperately making the sign of the cross over herself and her belly as if this would drive the stranger off.

But the woman regarded her impassively as she might have watched a screeching gull riding the wind. After a long moment, she reached beneath her shawl and unlooped a long knotted cord of white and red wool from about her waist. She drew the cord three times through her right hand, before holding it out to Elísabet.

‘This will help ease the birth and undo some of the harm that has been done. Loosen one knot each time the pains come upon you.’

Elísabet backed away, holding her hands behind her as if she feared the cord might fly into them unbidden. ‘I don’t want it! I won’t have it in my house. I’d never take anything you or your filthy brood have touched.’

The stranger’s placid expression did not change, but she tossed the cord on the ground between them. The scarlet and white cord lay among the rusty grass stalks, limp, inert. Then the stranger lifted her hand and without warning the cord reared up in front of Elísabet and slithered towards her. But even as she cried out, it burst into flame and vanished into smoke.

The woman lifted her head and her eyes were as sharp and hard as the black rocks on the mountains of fire. ‘Remember this – in the days that are coming it is not my people you should fear. You have cursed your own babies and day by day, as they grow, so will your dread of them, until you and all your people will become more terrified of your daughters than of any other creatures on this earth. When that day comes, we will be waiting!’

Chapter One

Anno Domini 1539

The queen of Spain once had a dream, that a white falcon flew out of the mountains towards her and in its talons it held the flaming ball of the sun and icy sphere of the moon. The queen opened her hand and the falcon dropped the sun and the moon into her outstretched palm and she grasped them.

The falcon perched upon her arm and spread its wings. And, as it stretched them, the white feathers grew longer and wider until they enveloped the queen like a royal mantle.

Then the queen dreamt that a traitor had entered her presence and at once the white falcon rose and flew to him. It alighted on the man’s shoulders and the talons of the falcon were so strong and sharp they severed the man’s arms from his body. Streams of blood poured out from his body and the queen knelt and drank the blood of the traitor.

Lisbon, Portugal

Enter – a term meaning to give a falcon the first sight of the prey which the falconer wants it to hunt and kill.

On a bleak winter’s morning in Lisbon, in front of a howling mob, Manuel da Costa was burned alive. Only he died that day, a lone, pathetic figure on the pyre. He was a poor man, an insignificant man, a man that few would have troubled to mourn. But hundreds of men and women who even then were huddling behind closed doors would have chilling cause to remember Manuel’s death. And all through the bitter, blood-soaked years to come they would whisper into the darkness how on that winter’s day and in that very hour the devils of hell were made flesh and dwelled on earth.

If young Manuel had only kept his head down, averted his eyes, held his tongue, if he had just kept walking, he might have stayed alive. And if he had survived, who knows, maybe the thousands of others who came after him might have lived too. But Manuel had no warning of the nightmare that was about to ensnare him. How could he?

So, just as he did every day, one February morning, shortly after dawn, he closed the door