establish where the blame lies later. Which falcons have we lost?’
Wayland stood panting, casting desperate looks around. ‘The white haggard and one of the eyases — the screamer.’ He gave a despairing laugh. ‘Drogo knew how much the haggard meant to me, and he was always complaining about the eyas’s racket.’
‘Is there anything to be done?’
Wayland stared across the river, trying to think straight. The reed beds on the other side harboured wildfowl. If the falcons were hungry, that would be the logical place for them to go hunting. But the chances of finding them in that maze of marsh and inlets were next to none. He turned to face the empty steppe. A dirty wind blew from the south-west, hazing the boundary of earth and sky. He fought for calm.
‘Trained falcons often return to the spot where they were released. I’ll wait close by with live lures. Send everybody you can spare into the steppe. If they spot a falcon, they must ride back as fast as they can.’
‘We’ll use all the horses and send parties on foot to search up and down the river.’
‘If we haven’t found her by midday, it means she’s left the area.’ By ‘her’ Wayland meant the haggard. The eyas had never known liberty and was too weak to cope in the wild. She’d either been blown miles downwind or had pitched into the grass somewhere, an easy meal for wolf or jackal.
Wayland and Syth rode out into the steppe carrying a basket holding two live pigeons. They stopped about a mile from the river and watched the seven horsemen fanning into the distance. Soon they were alone, the riders gone into the immense sea of grass. Every time Wayland thought of the haggard, he felt her loss like a punch in the gut.
It was a long and miserable wait before the first of the Vikings returned. ‘Didn’t see a living thing,’ he said.
The other riders rode back with equally dismal news.
Vallon cantered in last. ‘I had one moment of hope when a large bird flew overhead. It was too dark to be one of your falcons. I think it was an eagle.’
Wayland gathered his reins. ‘I’ll search for her.’
‘By now she could be a hundred miles away. You don’t even know which side of the river she’s on. If by some miracle you caught up with her, you won’t be able to call her down. She hasn’t been made to the lure.’
‘I trapped her wild, didn’t I? If I find her, I’ll bring her to hand.’
Vallon looked back into the distance. ‘The steppe goes on for ever, the horizon always retreating before you. Don’t let it take you too far from the river. Nomads rode this way not long ago. I saw the trails left by their sheep and passed one of their campsites. Make sure you return by evening. We still have enough falcons to meet the Emir’s demands.’
‘This wouldn’t have happened if you’d left Drogo in Novgorod.’
‘Save the recriminations until you get back.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Syth.
He almost rejected her company. Searching for a lost hawk could be a long, tedious and soul-destroying undertaking.
‘Take her,’ Vallon said. ‘Take a sword, too. It’s a lonely world out there.’
They rode off, Wayland heading across the wind.
Syth galloped alongside. ‘How will you know where to look?’
Wayland had only one tenuous hope. In England he’d searched for lost hawks many times and discovered something that flew in the face of the lore peddled by Olbec’s keeper of falcons. This man, ageing and unimaginative, insisted that lost hawks always made their way downwind. That might be true of unfit birds, but Wayland had flown only confident and well-muscled hawks, and when he’d lost them, he’d usually found them upwind of the place where they’d disappeared. It was only logical. A fit falcon in hunting mode flies into the wind to gain height. Once she’s reached a high pitch, she tends to circle across the wind, covering the sky with minimum effort.
As Wayland rode, he looked for the telltale signs that a falcon was in the vicinity. Back home rooks towering into the sky often betrayed a hawk’s presence. Crows or magpies protesting in a tree sometimes marked where a hawk fed on a kill. Here on the steppe there were no signs to be seen, nothing but endless vistas of wind-bent grass, the occasional bush or stunted tree. Occasionally he put up a hare, and once they surprised a herd of gazelle that fled like a cloud shadow. Of birds he saw only a few and they had no tale to tell. A flock of cranes making a late passage south. A harrier quartering the grass. A raven that mocked them with its croaks.
His eyes processed hundreds of square miles of sky. The wind played tricks on his mind, drawing him on after the imagined sound of the falcon’s bells. He rode an eccentric course, diverting to every rise where he stopped and swung a lure, shouting until his voice grew husky. The light began to go and the faint hope of finding the haggard sank into the sickening certainty that he would never see her again.
Syth rode up, pale with fatigue. ‘It’s growing dark. We’d better return.’
Wayland looked back and realised that he was lost. ‘We won’t reach the river before dark. We’ll keep searching as long as there’s light to see.’
The ground beneath their feet was almost invisible when he called a halt in a hollow that offered some shelter from the wind. He left Syth to scavenge brush for a fire, working his way up a ridge. He reached the crest. Far away but not far enough another wilderness traveller had lit a fire, its flames the only light in the universe. He put down his load of fuel and felt his way back to Syth.
‘I couldn’t find any wood.’
They ate biscuits and cold meat, then Wayland drew a blanket over them and clutched Syth close for warmth. She shivered in his arms.
‘She’s gone, isn’t she?’
‘Yes. Gone for good.’
‘What will we do?’
Wayland trembled with anger. ‘I’ll kill Drogo.’
Syth gripped tight. ‘Let Vallon deal with him.’ She hesitated. ‘I meant what will happen to us if we don’t deliver four falcons.’
Wayland had never let himself imagine that prospect. ‘I don’t know.’
Syth began to weep. ‘It’s not fair. After all our hard work, all we’ve been through … it’s not fair.’
Wayland held her close. ‘Hush.’ He kissed her brow. ‘We’ve still got each other.’
Long after Syth had fallen asleep, Wayland lay agonising over the haggard’s loss, wondering where she was, worrying about whether she’d eaten. He imagined her flying back to the arctic, winging north above the clouds, steering by the stars.
In the night the wind dropped and the clouds slid away, uncovering a sky frigid with stars. Wayland rose while it was still dark and climbed the ridge. The fire still burned to the west. He made his way back to Syth and shook her. ‘Wake up. We have to leave.’
She sat up in his arms, limber as a sleepy child. ‘Why the hurry?’
‘We’re at least twenty miles from the river. If we don’t start now, we won’t reach it until gone midday.’
Wayland took his bearings from the stars. Greying sky ahead showed that he was travelling in roughly the right direction. The horizon bled and the sun rose on the frozen steppe, each grass stem glazed with ice crystals that collapsed into powder at a touch. Wayland searched the sky and every so often he glanced behind.
The sun was well up, the river not yet in sight, when a gamebird erupted under his horse’s feet with a startled cry. He struggled to control his mount. The bird rose on rattling wings, its panicked take-off a signal for a hundred others to flush. They were larger than grouse, with longer wings that drove them through the air arrow fast, their pinions producing an extraordinary whistling sound. Wayland watched the flock stream away and lifted his gaze in slim hope. If the haggard was aloft, she would have seen the game rise from miles away and might fly over to investigate. He marked the path they took and saw them set their wings and glide to earth beyond a distant ridge.
Syth rode up. ‘What were they?’
‘Some kind of bustard.’
He waited. The sky remained empty. He shook his head and rode on.
