Robert Lyndon - Hawk Quest

Drogo clapped in mock applause. ‘What an excellent choice: a dumb falconer for a dumb enterprise. Now all we need is a crew to match. Oh yes, and a leader. I know,’ he said, pointing at the figure in the shadows, ‘why don’t we send Richard?’

‘I’d go. Anything to get away from here.’

‘We’ll commission an agent,’ said Margaret. ‘A merchant adventurer experienced in the northern trade.’

‘You’ll lose control the moment he sets sail. The chances are you’d never see him or our money again.’

‘Drogo’s right.’

It took Wayland a moment to work out that it was the Frank who’d spoken.

Vallon stood. ‘If breath were wind, by now you could have blown a fleet to Norway. But no ship leaves harbour without a captain. What kind of man are you looking for? He would have to be a man you trusted through and through. A man brave enough to cut through the known hazards and resourceful enough to navigate around perils as yet unseen. He would have to be a man who, if he couldn’t find a path, would make his own. You might find a man who has one of these qualities. You won’t find a man who has them all.’

Wayland sensed crosscurrents swirling about the chamber. Drogo cocked his head in puzzlement.

‘For a moment I thought you were proposing to take up the challenge.’

‘God forbid. I lack both the qualities and the incentive.’

Margaret slapped the arm of her chair. ‘He’s a stranger. His words carry no weight.’

But Vallon’s intervention had tilted the balance. Olbec rapped his stick on the floor. ‘I’d hazard my fortune if I was sure that it would secure Walter’s release, but it seems to me that we’d lose the one without gaining the other. No, my lady, I’ve reached my decision. I’ll send an ambassador to Anatolia and frankly state my position, offering a ransom more in keeping with our station. What do you think, Vallon? You know the Emir; you say he holds Walter in affection. Surely he’s open to reason.’

‘He’s a rational man. I’m sure he’d consider your offer carefully.’

Margaret shot out of her chair, her arms rigid by her side. Her eyes raked around the room. ‘Since none of you will help, I’ll make my own arrangements.’ Gathering up her skirts, she ran out of the chamber.

Drogo clasped Olbec’s hand. ‘Well said, Father. Too many times you’ve let your lady’s passions cloud your judgement.’

Olbec looked up at him with curdled eyes. ‘Not so clouded that I can’t divine your motives.’

The screen parted and a soldier rushed in.

‘What’s wrong?’ Drogo demanded.

‘Guilbert went outside for a piss. Didn’t see the dog in the snow. Next moment he’s flat on his back with that hellhound at his throat.’

Drogo turned on Wayland. ‘I warned you.’

Wayland stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Nailed feet hammered on the floor and moments later the dog loped through the curtain like a creature out of myth or nightmare, its eyes sulphurous yellow, its steely hackles rimed with frost. When it saw Drogo’s threatening stance, its muzzle wrinkled in black corrugations. Wayland hissed. The dog made straight for him, lay down at his feet and began licking its paws.

Olbec held up his cup for another refill. ‘I’m not wrong, am I? The boy can enchant the beasts.’

Raul was waiting when Wayland left the hall. ‘Are they going to send an expedition?’ he demanded, trotting alongside. ‘Are you going on it? Is there a place for me?’

Wayland waved him away. There were too many things to think about. When Raul persisted, the dog rounded on him, grating its teeth in warning. Wayland went into his hut and Raul kicked the door behind him. ‘I thought we were friends.’

Wayland tied the goshawk to her perch and lay back on his pallet. He watched the hawk in the smoky light. She’d eaten most of the pigeon and her crop bulged. She stropped her beak on the perch, lifted one foot, extended her middle toe and delicately scratched her throat. The movement agitated the bell on one of her tail feathers. She twisted her head about to settle the contents of her crop. Her feathers relaxed and she drew one clenched foot up under a downy apron. She was asleep. Tomorrow he’d cut one stitch from each eyelid. In a week she would be feeding outdoors in daylight. Another three weeks and she would be flying free. He’d won.

Strange, Wayland thought, how quickly hunger and exhaustion mastered fear and hatred. He was neither jessed nor seeled, rarely went hungry, and could come and go as he pleased. Neither necessity nor affection bound him to the castle, yet at the end of each day, some weakness on his part made him turn his steps back towards the people he loathed. He fingered the cross at his neck. He would escape when spring came, he vowed. He would leave at the same time as the strangers, taking his own path. He blew out the lamp. Turning on his side, he grasped the dog’s ruff and wrapped it round his hand, unaware that he used to do the same with his mother’s hair.

The dog was his only tangible link with the past, a place he tried to block off. Sometimes, though, it erupted in dreams that woke him in a sweat of horror. And sometimes, like now, it rose up like a picture emerging from a dark pool.

His mother had sent him and his younger sister to gather mushrooms in the forest. He’d been fourteen, his sister ten, the dog just a clumsy overgrown pup. Three years had passed since King Harold’s defeat, but Wayland had seen his first Normans only in the last month. From a safe distance he’d watched the soldiers in their ringed armour supervising the construction of their castle on the Tyne.

The farm where he lived lay ten miles upriver, a few acres of clearing in a remnant of ancient wildwood cut by a deep ravine. There were seven in the family. His mother was English, his father a Danish freeman, the son of a Viking who’d sailed for England in the bodyguard of the great Cnut. Grandfather was still alive, a bedridden giant who called on the Norse gods and wore a Hammer of Thor amulet. Wayland had an older brother and sister, Thorkell and Hilda. His little sister was called Edith. At his mother’s insistence, all the children had been baptised, the girls taking English names, the boys Danish.

It was a good autumn for mushrooms. As Wayland picked, he could hear the rhythmic blows of his father’s axe, a sound as familiar as his heartbeat. When the basket was full, Edith said she wanted to look for a bear. Wayland knew there were no bears left in the forest. Grandfather had killed the last one himself and had one of its teeth to prove it. Wayland wasn’t convinced that the claim was true, but he liked the story and he often asked the old man to tell it. Grandpa told him other stories when his mother wasn’t around — thrilling, pagan tales about treacherous gods and monsters and the battle at the end of the world.

He found fresh deer slots and began following them to the river, the pup ranging ahead. They could hear water sliding down the ravine. The pup sat and tilted its head on one side, listening with such comic intensity that Edith laughed. The sound of the axe had stopped. Wayland thought he heard a cry. He waited for it to come again, but it didn’t. The dog whimpered.

Wayland sat his sister down under a tree and told her not to wander away or wolves would eat her up.

‘I’m not afraid of wolves. They only cross the river in winter.’

‘Trolls, then. Trolls live in the Pot.’

The Pot was the deepest pool in the ravine, a cauldron of black water walled in by dripping cliffs and overhung by trees that gripped the earth with roots like gnarled fingers. Edith looked towards it through the mossy gloom. She brushed at her cross. ‘Can the dog stay with me?’