Fynn started to bring some of his friends to visit while Matty recovered.
She liked Fynn’s friends and found their company lively. There was Rich Much, the miller’s son; Hubert Bigge, whose father was dead but whose mother was a brewer; and a handsome boy called Will Scarloke, son of the blacksmith. A few days later, Matty was even able to laugh when Fynn said, “Your face looks like a few squashed plums, and that egg over your eye—well, it’s gone down, more like a fried egg now.” The boys talked about roaming the forest of Barnsdale, hunting, fishing, and “adventuring,” as they called it. Matty longed to get well enough to join them.
It was while she was still propped up in her bed that Matty had her first falconry lesson. What was remarkable about this lesson was the way in which her father spoke to her.
“Matilda,” he began gravely, “we have lost so much. But we will live through these terrible times. A tyrant will not vanquish us. The rightful heir will return; and when Richard does, we will be prepared to serve him. But we must live to do that. The hawks will help us survive. I am going to teach you how to take care of them and how to gain their trust and become a master falconer. I am getting older. I can’t run with the hawks the way I once did. You are young, strong, and smart.”
Matty was astonished. She had never heard anyone speak of a girl in quite this way. He looked at her seriously and said, “I am counting on you.”
“How do you take care of them, Father?” she asked.
“You must learn, first of all, to see to their health in general and to the health of their feathers especially. Let’s start with imping.”
“Imping?”
“Imping—mending the broken feathers of injured hawks.”
It was a good first lesson. Hawks often damaged their feathers when hunting, and three of the returning hawks had suffered feather injuries. Every falconer kept a supply of molted feathers for the sole purpose of repairing broken ones. Luckily, Lord William’s box of feathers in the mews had not been destroyed when the upper part of the tower collapsed.
So Matty learned how to whittle a molted feather’s shaft so it could be grafted to the remains of the damaged one that still grew from the injured bird. She learned to use an imping needle to insert the new feather into the quill of the damaged one, and to fix it in place with a special paste. It was delicate work, and as she learned she felt herself begin to mend.
The first feather she imped was for Ulysses, a fierce and fearless bird. He had broken a tail covert.
“He’ll need that one done well. You’ll see, Matty. Ulysses is an expert in flying in tight spaces. A goshawk can follow prey through a maze of shrubs and thick brush, but he must have his tail for steering.” The immense bird nearly covered half her bed but was quite patient as Matty carefully worked. “You’ll begin to understand all this, Matty. You’ll see that to really know how a hawk flies you have to learn to think like a hawk.”
Think like a hawk! When her father had said those words six months ago, she had blinked in confusion. The words hinted at some kind of magical transformation. And, indeed, it did seem as though there was an end to the tedious life of being a girl who could prepare only for marriage. It would not matter if she could embroider a lovely altar cloth for the castle chapel or learn to dance the saltarello, which her mother claimed to have danced so superbly that she had captivated half a dozen noblemen, including Lord William. Within the space of a very short time, a time of deprivation that most considered terrible, Matilda Fitzwalter’s life changed completely…and she loved it.
During the long winter nights her father taught her how to play chess. She began to learn how to read, a skill considered most unfeminine. What man would ever want anything to do with a girl so clever she could read? Maidens were supposed to read—if at all—the Bible. But Lord William had a book on falconry and it was no time before Matty needed not only to read that book but also to write. Lately, she’d begun to learn how to hunt with her father and to keep meticulous records. She made observations of how the hawks flew, how they plunged, or stooped, in for a kill. Did they favor the left wing or the right? It was important to know their habits, their preferences. Matty wrote it all down.
Matty and her father, each with a hawk on the shoulder, walked the fields beyond the castle walls on this chill March day. Her eyes surveyed the muddy ground for any signs of game. As her father had predicted, falconry was no longer simply a sport for them. They were dependent on the hawks for food. The raids ordered by Prince John and carried out by the sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne had depleted Lord William’s coffers. The other nobles throughout the shire who were not in league with the prince could not help. They were also under attack. Lord William began selling the few castle treasures he had left—tapestries, jewels, art. His small herd of cows had stopped giving milk because they were starving. Then the flocks of chickens began to thin out. Now all the animals were gone except the hawks.
Game was scarce where Matty and her father were walking and she wished they could go farther, but her father could not manage great distances since the raid. And he was not about to let Matty go abroad alone. This morning she wore a falconer’s gauntlet on her left arm, and Moss the peregrine’s talons encircled the glove almost completely. Lord William looked at his daughter proudly. She was learning so quickly. This was only her third or fourth time out flying a hawk since she had regained her strength after that horrendous day.
As they crossed the field, Matty sensed a new alertness in Moss. The peregrine shifted her weight on the glove. A riffle ran through the sleek black cap of feathers on her head, and her shoulder coverts stirred. Matty’s father never spoke as she prepared to launch a hawk in flight. That had been part of the first lessons.
“I shall remain quiet, Matilda, when you are practicing launching. No man can tell another when a bird is fit to take flight.”
“I’m not a man, Father! I’m a girl.”
“Sorry, sorry. You will be the finest falconress in England.”
“No, just call me a falconer. No special word.” She paused and gave him a mischievous look. “But do remember I’m a girl.”
“How could I ever forget?” There was a sudden light in Lord William’s rheumy eyes. She knew that she was the cause, the jewel that was the source of this sparkle. She didn’t much like being thought of as a jewel any more than she enjoyed being called a falconress. But she was happy that her father seemed to have regained some of his former spirit.
Moss stirred again on her arm. With her right hand Matty started undoing the jesses. The peregrine began to make subtle movements signaling that she was in hunting order. Matty opened her mouth slightly and made a rough sawlike sound. This was the first thing that had astounded Lord William. He himself had hawked for nearly a half century but had never been able to master that back-of-the-throat language in which hawks often communicated. She was now readying Moss for the loft, not simply through her body’s motions but through language—a language Lord William had once believed was inaccessible to humans. And he knew that Matty was becoming more fluent each day. He often caught her speaking to herself as if practicing. Sometimes he almost felt that she was not merely thinking like a hawk but was herself part hawk.
Matty threw her left arm up. A high, shrill noise pealed from Moss’s throat as she spotted a duck rising from a grassy hummock. The hawk was in the air, her great wings spread against the flawless blue sky. Matty and her father squinted as they followed the course of the bold assassin. Their hearts raced as they saw Moss begin to fold her wings. This was the moment of truth, the dive of a peregrine, a moment unmatched by anything else in hunting. Moss took her prey in a steep vertical stoop, putting on a cunning burst of speed. The dagger points of her talons struck, blood splattered the sky. The duck died instantly.
“She’s binding to it!” her father whispered excitedly.
Moss gripped the duck as they tumbled to the ground together—rather gently considering the ferocity of the attack. A tr
ail of duck feathers streamed in their wake. Matty felt a sudden dizziness. Just for a second or two, it was almost as if she herself were tumbling through the air. And once again the boundaries that separated human beings from birds seemed to dissolve. If I can feel this, couldn’t I…? But she dared not wonder. The very thought seemed too bold to consider.
Moss was not Matty’s only avian teacher. Each hawk—be it a short-winged hawk like Lyra, a kestrel like Morgana, or a goshawk like Ulysses—had his or her own style of flying and hunting. Matty needed to learn them all. While Moss brought down the duck, Ulysses perched on Lord William’s shoulder. With his pale gray plumage the immense goshawk seemed to hover like a ghost. He was the largest of all the hawks and a commanding presence even when hooded. Ulysses had not been flown since Matty had imped his tail feathers when she was still recovering. But her father had brought him today.
Matty was nervous. This would be the true test of her skills. Would the imped feather hold? Her father had said that she had done a good job, but it wasn’t just the feather that made her worry. She had not yet worked with a goshawk but knew Ulysses’s style was to search for prey in confined spaces, and she had to be patient. One did not launch a goshawk from the glove like a peregrine. Instead, the bird perched above the falconer in a tree, keeping a lookout for prey from a higher vantage point. A goshawk went when he decided the time was right, and in this sense she and Ulysses were not partners. Any distracting motions from the falconer and a goshawk would stubbornly refuse to hunt.
“Now remember what I told you,” her father said as he transferred Ulysses to her shoulder. “You can take off his jesses long before you spot anything that might be prey, as long as you remain absolutely still. Ulysses is a bird of uncommon self-discipline—almost what I would call military. It was probably entirely unnecessary for me to have hooded him while you flew Moss.”
Matty and her father now followed a hedgerow that dipped into a meadow. With its thickets and occasional saplings it was an ideal territory for grouse and rabbits.
After she and her father settled under a dense overhang of brush, Matty began to unhood Ulysses. Catching her breath, she felt his piercing red eyes fix her with a commanding gaze. A dark patch of feathers that streamed like a black flame above his eyes made him appear even fiercer as he seemed to say, Are you prepared, my lady? I am. Matty prayed that the imped tail feather would not break.
She found that remaining still was the hard part: crouching in dense, prickly brush that poked at her and she could not move to scratch. It was a kind of torture. She hoped the prey wouldn’t be a fox. Matty supposed one could eat fox, but she never had and hoped she never would. A plump rabbit would be fine or, better yet, a hare, whose flesh was much richer. She had barely completed the thought when without any warning she felt a great gust.
Ulysses unfolded his enormous wings and flew straight up. Then, like a stone crashing down, he was on track of his prey. Matty’s eyes locked on the gray-brown tail of a hare. She watched in awe as Ulysses careened through the dense thickets, swerving and dodging in chase. The mended feather is working! Matty followed the swift motions of Ulysses’s long tail as he ruddered through the narrow spaces. Although the distance between Matty and the goshawk was increasing, she felt as if something within her was reaching out to him. She sensed every wingbeat as if it were a heartbeat inside her own chest.
“Ki…ki…kuh…kuh.” She was urging Ulysses on in the very distinct voice of a goshawk—low, subtle tones that seemed to say You can do it! Onward!
Quickly, Ulysses sank his talons into the hare, snapping its neck.
Chapter 2
THE NOTION OF A MERLIN
Learning to fly a hawk for hunting is a continuous process. To really understand how a hawk hunts, one must try to think not only like a hawk but as its quarry.
ULYSSES DROPPED THE HARE at Matty’s feet and stepped back, squaring his shoulders. He uttered a brief husky noise, then gave a short nod as if saluting his mistress. Matty nodded back and replied with a similar gravelly utterance.
“Well, Matty!” Lord William exclaimed. “I would say you did right by Ulysses with that imped feather and he’s done right by us with this hare.”
“Yes, I was glad that the imp didn’t break, but the rest of it—his flying—was amazing,” Matty replied.
Lord William shook his head in wonder as they headed back to the castle. “Before we lost everything, I had thought of getting a merlin. Too bad we don’t have a merlin.”
“Why is that, Father?” Matty asked.
“Well, it is said that learning to fly a merlin is what makes the consummate falconer.”
“But aren’t merlins called pigeon hawks?”
“Yes. It’s strange. They are said to be in the same family, but merlins are as unlike pigeons as birds could be. Clever, ambitious, able to feign slowness in flight to fool their prey…but they’re very difficult to raise. Many people try and then give up and let them loose, but by that time they are ruined. They don’t survive very long in the wild when that happens.”
“Did you ever have one, Father?”
“Yes, long ago. A bright little fellow. My pride and joy.”
“What happened?” Matty asked hesitantly.
Lord William stopped walking. He turned and looked at Matty, his face suddenly grim.
“He was killed?” Matty grew pale. She somehow knew that the bird had not been killed by another animal—had not been taken down in flight by a raptor or sprung upon by a hunting dog—but killed by a human.
“Who?” she whispered.
“Sir Guy of Gisborne.” Her father paused. “He seems to kill what he cannot have.”
“Kills what he cannot have? What else couldn’t he have?”
Lord William stopped, pressed his lips together, and looked at Matty.
“Father, tell me, what else did Sir Guy want and could not have?”
“Your mother, years ago.” Lord William bent his head and began to speak rapidly. “He claims that she had been betrothed to him. She wasn’t. She hated him and she loved me. In revenge he sent one of his servants to my mews to slay the merlin. Then he had it delivered to us on our wedding day.”
Matty gasped. “Fiends, Father. They are all fiends!”
“Yes, and he is Prince John’s right-hand man, while the sheriff, I guess one would say, is the left.” Lord William resumed walking.
“Father, when will Richard come back? He means to be a good king, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, yes, but he is occupied in France, fighting for the lands that belong to him. I have heard that in the past fortnight Prince John has plundered two castles to the north. Some say he even has the church in his pocket. You see, Matty, King Henry has grown old and feeble. When he dies, as the youngest son, Prince John has no inheritance while his older brother, Richard, inherits all his father’s lands. And John is a very greedy man. As the saying goes, when the cat’s away the mice will play.”
“But he’s a rat!” Matty said. “If you had a son, it would be the same, wouldn’t it, and I wouldn’t have anything? I mean, that is the custom, isn’t it? The oldest son gets everything.”
“Well, yes, but you’re no rat.” Lord William paused. “However, I think I would have to give you my hawks—son or no son.”
“You really mean that?” Matty asked.
“I certainly do.”
Matty dipped her head and smiled. She felt a surge of deep joy rise within her. “You went to France to fight for Richard and his lands, didn’t you—when I was a baby?”
“Yes, twice, once before you were born and once when you were an infant. I was not the only Englishman who could not tolerate the notion of Prince John ruling both here and in France. Richard is the better man. The whole world loves Richard. So what started as a family squabble became a war—one that we still seem to be fighting.”
That evening when Matty knelt, she prayed for her mother’s soul as she always did. But then she prayed for more.
“Dear Lord, may good Richard the Lionhearted come home and make everything right and just and prosperous again.” Then she paused, opened her eyes, and looked up. She was not sure if it was right to ask God for the next thing. But the words simply bubbled up in her like a spring unlocked from winter’s ice. “Dear God, my mother cannot come back and make me a fine lady, a lady suitable for love and marriage. I have no dowry for a wedding, but would that I had a merlin, I could become the finest falconer. Amen.”
SPRING 1189
Chapter 3
THE GREENWOOD
Falconry is an art and not merely a discipline. If a hawk has been properly taught, a bond will form between the teacher and the bird—and then and only then will the hawk do your bidding and more.
MATTY CAME OVER THE crest of the hill, knee-deep in the dry, brown winter grass, the peregrine on her shoulder. She stopped to look around and the falcon spread her wings. “Kush, Moss! kush nyeep…. Easy, Moss! I’m looking for the snare.”
For the past year, she had learned to hunt with all the hawks. Her father allowed her finally to go out alone whenever she liked. The hawks were still their main means of getting food, but she also got small game by setting snares.
The fields, divided by thick hedgerows into squares, spread before her like waves in a patchwork sea. She looked out to where the fields met a dark band on the horizon. The band, which grew thicker and darker, marked the edge of the woods of Barnsdale. This was where Matty longed to be. But first she must check the snare. And then on to the forest, or the greenwood, as it was called when winter finished and the trees leafed.
Matty knew she had set the snare nearby. It must be here somewhere, she thought. So foolish of her not to have checked it yesterday. But yesterday she could not leave the castle until well after noon, and then she had been in such a rush to join Fynn and the boys because the weather was finally turning good. The snow, which had lain in frozen thick sheets like a knight’s armor, had melted, unlocking the earth from winter’s grip. You could smell the green. So at last they could all play again. She was anxious to play after such a long, hard, and horrible winter.