Stories by per Hallström
The Falcon
Renaud’s eyes took the color of the day: dim, lustreless and dark at twilight; gleaming molten gold when the sunshine flitted across his hair and outstretched neck, so that they sparkled with widening and contracting flames as they looked out over the fields toward the blue haze against the slanting red of the dawn, or toward the rustling of hares in the thicket, of frightened birds and swaying branches.
Indolent and proud was his glance, the reflection of gilded steel on a sheathed dagger, of the luck-piece on the brown bosom of a gipsy girl; indolent and proud, too, the rhythmic motion of his naked feet, and the line of his arms as he laid himself down at full-length in the passion of the moment with his hands under his head and heard the horns jubilating in the distance and the earth quivering with the thud of the huntsmen.
But when it grew quiet—a quiet wonderfully intense, as if spread out in a domed vault of restless waiting, with two black huddled specks that rose in circles at the top—then Renaud raised his glance, as he leaned on his elbow, his eyes wide and lips half-parted. And when the specks came together and fell,—one subsiding in broken curves, the other dropping always above it in a line straight as a spear,—and the blue welkin rang again with voices, and the riders galloped forward to see the falcon and the heron finish their fight, the boy ran up close. He screamed with delight when the falcon, still trembling with ardor, was lifted on his master’s glove, its wings drooped and its eyes blinded under the hood.
He often followed along to Sir Enguerrand’s stable yard and saw the falconers bathe the yellow feet of the hunting birds in metal bowls, drying them carefully as if they were princes’ children each with its crested cloth, and caressing their necks till they shut their naked eyelids and dreamed against the shoulders of the attendants.
Renaud would have given ten years of his life or one of his ten fingers to be allowed to hold them like that, the proud, silent creatures; but they might not be touched by everybody, they were noble. They had each its glove ornamented according to its rank, each its hood with embroidered pattern, each its special food, and people talked to them in a strange, archaic speech with elaborate etiquette. Renaud almost blushed when he met their great eyes filled with languid repose, especially before Sir Enguerrand’s white Iceland falcon, which had a crimson hood, a gold and crimson glove, a jess with silver bells on its foot, and a glance full of proud disdain and the yellow sunlight of heroic story.
The young birds, which still quivered with rage over their captivity and dreamed under the night of their hoods of hunting free and of lifting their necks to scream, birds that were being tamed by hunger and darkness,—them he might sometimes lift out of their cages. He might show them the light and see them first totter with blinded eyes and claws clasped about his wrist, then grow more calm, as their pupils contracted, almost gentle indeed when he gave them a bit of warm, bloody meat. But them he cared not for, them he soon wearied of, and he quickly learned to perceive that none had the Iceland falcon’s breast-muscles of steel, its long wide wings and quiescent strength. But it was the most delightful thing possible to see how the young falcons were trained to hunt according to the wise rules of King Modus, when they had reached the time that their memory of freedom wore off and they sat, heavy and blind, dozing on their perches.
The first thing was to accustom them again to fly, but with a cord on the foot, till they had learned at the falconer’s cry to swoop down upon the red cloth dummy fitted with a pair of large heron wings, which he swung in the air on a string in oddly deliberate circles—that was fine to see!—and to which he had tied the breast of a quail or a piece of chicken. This the falcons afterwards devoured, the rage at their confinement being dulled by thirst of blood. Soon they grew so accustomed to this procedure that they never strained at their cord, no gleam of wildness remained in their eyes; they at once looked about calmly for the decoy and only rose according to rule, ascending in a curve at the proper time to swoop down indolently and playfully in a wide circle; and when the cord was taken off, they hardly seemed to notice.
The time had now come to train them for hunting, each for its particular quarry; the smaller for quail, partridge or sparrows, the larger for hare or heron or kites, the ignoble kites which had the nature of crows along with their powerful talons and beaks and which could never be tamed to eat at a knightly board.
First they were given decoys like their quarry, with a piece of their favorite food inside for them to search out; then disabled birds, which they could strike their claws into at once and tear to pieces in half-roused fury; and so on to prey that was harder to catch, until they learned to enjoy the intoxication of the hunt. Their old wild instincts awoke once more in full strength, but controlled and ennobled, so that they calmly dropped their dying quarry after a short mad drink of blood and ate only from their ornamented dishes, without greediness, as is fitting for the birds of a knight.
Their eyes grew indolent and proud and took on the color of the day, black when their hood was lifted off, brightening to molten gold when they rose in the sunlight, burning with flakes of fire above the shriek of their prey. They bent caressingly toward Renaud’s brown hand, but none of them was like the Iceland falcon with the weary, kinglike disdain in its glance, and he grew disgusted with them all, pressed their beaks harshly shut when they tried to play, and threw them from him carelessly, and mimicked the shriek of the kite so that they trembled with disquietude and left the aviary with men’s curses behind them and the wide brown plain before them.
Sir Enguerrand rode out hunting every day, nearly always wearing his red, gold-embroidered glove, for only the bell-tinkling flight of the Iceland falcon could awaken song within him and cause him to breathe the sharp, volatile morning air with delight as if he drank living wine. One day the falcon had struck a heron, bleeding, into a swamp behind a thicket, where the huntsman found it and cracked its neck; but the falcon itself was gone, either lured after a new quarry or recoiling from the brown water or capriciously letting itself be lifted and carried along by the wind. In vain they searched, in vain they called it by the prettiest names, in vain they made the notes of the horn rebound from every hill. Sir Enguerrand smote the mouth of the head falconer bloody with his red glove and rode straight home across the tussocks of the swamp with his lips shut more sharply and his eyelids sunk over the listless pupils more gloomily than ever. The falcon they did not find.
But Renaud found it, its jess caught in a wild rose bush, awaiting death by starvation with its grip fast on a branch, one wing drooping, the other lifted defiantly, its narrow head stretched threateningly forward with the eyes fixed and beak sharp—a splendid sight it was among the blood-red berries. Renaud’s hand trembled with eagerness as he loosed the jess from the thorns, as the bells tinkled around his fingers and the ring with Sir Enguerrand’s crest, and he cried aloud with joy when the sharp claws cut into his sinewy arm and he felt that it was his, the falcon of broadest breast and longest wings and proudest eyes of burning gold.
It was the more his in that he never would be able to show it to anyone, for he knew that strict laws protected the sport of the nobles. In the woods he would have to build a cage for it, early in the morning he would steal thither before the bird had shaken off its chill, they would go together across the open with searching looks directed at the whitish heavens, they would grow fond of each other as they let the sunlight rise and fall over their heads and the wind carry their silent thoughts along, and the falcon would never miss its red glove or the constraint of its pearl-sewn hood. He tied it again and ran down to the pond, returning shortly with a duck which he had killed with a stone. The falcon took it, and Renaud’s brain grew numb with intoxication, for that was a sign that it did not despise him, that it was willing to be his.
It became his; it bent its head forward, listening, with tranquil wide-open eyes when the frosty branches cracked under his step in the stillness of morning; it hopped lightly down from its cage and stretched out toward his hand, beating its wings as for flight, but it did not fly—that was only a reminder—and therewith they hurried out to the softly glowing expanse of the moor.
Their eyes glanced searchingly toward the dark-red welkin. Black lay the hills and thinning thickets, and the trees slept, their boughs heavy with silent birds. But the heavens grew brighter, flaming with gold and red and the lines of the plain turned to blue, and the owl sped close to the ground, seeking its covert, and the day birds stretched their wings and chirped softly because of the cold, and dark their flight cut through the gleaming air. But Renaud and his falcon went quickly on, for these were sparrows and thrushes, no prey fit for them. Down toward the marshes sounded already the drawling cry of the herons and wide-circling beat of their long wings, yonder was the quarry they sought. Then the falcon was cast with breast already expanded and wings prepared to beat, and Renaud saw it gilded by the sun as he stood with blinded eyes and dizzy head while the bird crouched against the deep blue, and heard how the clang of its bells mocked the shout of the herons.
They whirred like wheels in their terror; now they tended to shoot down to the shore and hide their long necks and stupid frightened heads with backward-pointing tufts under the dark wooded banks, now they tried in wavering uncertainty to rise up in a spiral, thrusting in their broad wings to attain higher than the enemy could follow, and they swerved like reeds in the terror of their pale hearts.
But the falcon singled out at the start one of the strongest, one of those that flew immediately aloft, because it loved to prove its strength and to feel sharp, light air under its wings, and it rose as fast and straight as if circling around a sunbeam. Soon it was uppermost; smaller than a sparrow it looked, but something in the poise of the wings, in the gathered strength of the body, made one divine the sparkling savagery of its eye, its outspread talons. Of a sudden it fell, heavy as steel, on the defenseless upturned neck of the quarry, and they dropped like a single stone, hardly once eddying aside by a wing’s breadth. Then Renaud ran and swam and waded so as to arrive before the heron, which had been stunned by the stroke, could gather itself together and in the wildness of its desperation make use of its pointed bill. The falcon gave it the death blow sharply and swiftly, turning its great eyes, already tranquil, on its master, for it did not care to soil its feathers with blood, and waiting to have the warm heart given to it.
Afterwards it did not fly any more that day; when Renaud cast it and ran ahead with a shout, it only took a couple of wingstrokes and lighted again on the lad’s shoulder close to his laughing face with proud composure. It seemed to despise all play and Renaud soon made an end, his expression taking on the far-gazing seriousness of the falcon. He grew more fond of it than he had ever been of anything; it seemed to him that it was his own soul, his longing, with its broad wings and its glance confident of victory. But there was suffering in his love, the dismal premonition of a misfortune. Sometimes he was afraid that the bird would fly away from him in a fit of indifference; would vanish in a mocking sound of bells, and that would be his death, such an empty existence. Or it seemed to him that the falcon was honor, gleaming with sunlight against the blue, which rested itself on his shoulder for new exploits; and in the midst of his joy he was oppressed with his own insignificance, so that he hardly dared to look at it. There was grief at his heart that the bird would never share his delight, that its glance would never melt warmly into his, and he fled to the realm of dreams.
He laid himself down in the midst of the moor with the red heather under his head, and the clouds glided past like human destiny, heavy and light, gathered within a firm outline or scattered on high, with the winds’ invisible hand ever at their shoulder, while the bushes bent their rustling golden branches and Renaud told stories to the falcon.
King Arthur was come again, once more from out the British sea was handed to him his sword Excalibur, blue as the chill nightly heavens; his twelve knights lifted their heavy heads from the stone table and shook off their sleep, the earth resounded with their tread. Gareth was there, the prince’s son who put on the attire of a scullery boy and turned Lynette’s ringing scorn into love. Renaud was there, too, was of noble birth, his horse danced beneath him, and the falcon which now slept with sunken head sat high on his hand and sought his glance with eyes that gleamed with joy and the yellow sunlight of heroic story.
But the clouds glided past like human destiny, were driven dark, one over another into a gigantic vault, from the apertures of which fell sunbeams pale and sharp as spears, and the falcon dreamed dismal dreams of impotent wrath and waked with a shriek.
Before long some roving lads chanced to see Sir Enguerrand’s falcon on Renaud’s hand, and the knight’s men seized him and bore him to the castle. His heart froze within him when they took away the falcon, motionless and proud as ever, without a turn of its bended neck or a look from its cold, calm eyes. They took it to its master, but he had not a single caress for the missing favorite that had let itself be touched by ignoble hands. Sir Enguerrand looked down at Renaud in silence and more and more clearly in his thoughts took form the memory of an old hunting law from the time when the nobleman’s foot pressed, steel shod, on the neck of the common people, and his enjoyments fluttered unassailable around his shoulders. And Sir Enguerrand’s eyebrows contracted about the certainty that the old law had never been repealed. The law commanded that he who stole a falcon with a knight’s crest on its jess should pay twelve sols of silver or six ounces of flesh from his ribs under the beak of a hungry bird of prey.
Sir Enguerrand knew of Renaud’s poverty and, looking at his naked brown breast, extended his hand and touched it with an experimental, unfeeling gesture. He then sent a message to the neighboring castle which reared its pointed roof above the woods, and invited the seneschal and his two daughters to be his guests three days later and see some falcons fly, after they by their presence had heightened the solemnity of punishing a thief—and they were to come before daybreak.
Renaud’s eyes had widened from the darkness of the prison; they were black and motionless, and the gleaming pupils contracted but slowly to mirror the thin-worn clouds and rising sun of the east. Behind Sir Enguerrand was borne the Iceland falcon, its talons fiercely clasped in the glove, with the hood over its wakeful and famished glances that had not seen food for three days.
But further behind curved a line of color that flamed and burned: six bright horses, almost blue in the gloaming, were led by pages at a run, with cloths of red velvet on their bending necks. Red was the wagon which they drew, and within it gold shone heavy on the tender bosoms and slender arms of the seneschal’s daughters. Six damsels rode after it with hair blonde as grain, their pointed feet playing beneath the hem of their kirtles; six huntsmen blew calls which seemed to dance and swing like wheels from the mouths of the crooked horns. The contours of the plain danced with them and shot past one another in wine-colored mist, while the clouds above had glittering borders like the wings of butterflies.
The party formed into a semi-circle, plume by plume, shoulder by shoulder, around a bush where the captive was tied. The horsecloths flapped in the wind; the red taking on depth in the shadow, heavy as hopeless yearning; the red burning in the light, gay as the clamor of victory. The maidens’ delicate necks leaned forward out of the wagon, and their conical hoods flowed into one with the descending line of their shoulders. They were like herons, thought Renaud, and he almost expected to hear them add a shrill shriek, when the notes of the horns fell far away like hurled stones, and all became silent. But when he saw them more plainly with their thin, straight lips and strange, dreaming eyes, which were always leveled in a chill ecstasy on something infinitely distant, and their white, indolent hands in their laps, and the long folds of their garments—they seemed to him wondrously beautiful, like the most gorgeous saints’ pictures with a dimming glow of wax tapers at their feet, and it pained him that they should see him bound. He let his gaze leap further, past the damsels—shy, jaunty birds that he wanted to frighten with a whistle—past the red faces and inquisitively gaping mouths of the grooms, past the brown plain, where he had run himself tired and dreamed himself tired.
He knew what doom awaited him, but when the Iceland falcon was borne forward and he realized it was this which was to exact the penalty, he laughed in his joy, and his heart throbbed with pride, as when he possessed the bird and the long sunny days and the plain with the listening winds and the swaying trees of autumn yellow.
When the falcon beheld the light and turned to look around, it gathered its strength for flight, expecting to be swung on the arm of the bearer, while its glances rapidly sought its prey in the air; these glances were sharp and fierce with hunger, flaming as with sparks, and they had no memory in their depths, they recognized no one. But Renaud’s eyes were fixed in anxious searching on those of the bird and were filled with tears of sorrow at not meeting them. They should have mirrored his life’s bold longing, his contempt, and his dreams on the red heather, but they only waited greedily for their prey, grimly and coldly as the human spirit of curiosity or jesting on the thin lips of Sir Enguerrand. He felt his sorrow smart more bitterly than before and turned aside his head to recover himself, his eyelids closed and his thoughts fluttering.
He lay thus while the herald proclaimed the law—“twelve sols of silver—six ounces of flesh over the heart—thus does Sir Enguerrand safeguard the pastime of the nobles.” He did not look up when his skin was cut so that the scent of blood should attract the falcon, and when it sank its beak in his breast he gave no cry, merely trembled, so that the bird’s eyes flamed up in rage and its wings were spread out as if to beat.
The seneschal’s daughters leaned their heads forward with a gleam of interest in their strange dreaming eyes, but they did not raise their hands from their laps, and their garments lay as before in tranquil folds. The horses snorted at the smell of blood and stamped on the frosty ground so that the red horsecloths flapped against the pallor of the deepening blue, but Renaud lay silent, and the huntsmen stood needlessly with expanded cheeks and horns to their mouths ready to drown his cries.
The first agony had clutched at his finest fibres, it seemed as if his heart would come out with them; but afterwards he had grown numb almost to the degree of pleasure, and while the blood flowed warmly from the wound, and the pointed beak tore at his breast, Renaud dreamed himself into the high blue heaven of his visions, until he understood everything, death and honor, feeling how it burned and dazzled—the yellow sunlight of heroic story.
When Sir Enguerrand thought that the legal six ounces had been paid, he gave his men a sign to blow, and the falcon was lifted off, sated with blood, its eyes filled once more with tranquil pride, and the troop set itself in motion more gaily even than before toward the sedge that gleamed yellow in the distance. But Renaud could not be wakened, he had dreamed himself to death, and they merely loosed him and let him lie with the red heather under his head.
The Iceland falcon, however, might never sit on its master’s hand, for Sir Enguerrand did not care to drink of a cup where another’s lips had pressed a kiss.