casting a piece of meat some distance from the hawk. The bird would glance at the titbit, then leave the gloved hare to be killed and bagged by Sigarni. But not today.
Sigarni lifted her arm and whistled for Abby. The hawk dived obediently from the high branch and landed on the outstretched fist, her cruel beak fastening to the tiny amount of meat Sigarni held between her fingers.
‘What’s wrong with you, Abby?’ whispered Sigarni, stroking the bird’s breast with a long pigeon feather. ‘Are you sick?’ The golden eyes, bright and impenetrable, looked into her own.
Returning to the cabin, Sigarni did not take Abby to her bow perch but carried her inside and sat her on the high back of a wooden chair. The cabin was cold and Sigarni lit a fire, banking up the logs and adding two large lumps of coal from the sack given to her by Asmidir. From the cupboard she took her scales, hooking them to a broad beam across the centre of the cabin. Fetching Abby, she weighed her. Two pounds seven ounces: five ounces above her perfect killing weight.
‘What am I to do with you, beauty?’ she asked softly, stroking the bird’s^head and neck. ‘To keep you obedient I must feed you, yet if you do not fly you get fat and lazy and are useless to me. If I starve you, all your training will disappear and I will be forced to start again as if it never was. Yet you are intelligent. I know this. Is your memory so short? Mmmm? Is that it, Abby?’ Sigarni sighed. Taking the hawk’s hood from the pouch at her belt, she stroked it into place. Abby sat quietly, blind now, but trusting. Sigarni sat by the fire, tired and listless.
Lady scratched at the door and Sigarni opened it, allowing the hound to pad inside and stretch her lean black frame in front of the fire. ‘I hope you’ve already eaten,’ she told the hound, ‘since we’ve caught nothing today.’ Lady’s tail beat against the floor and she tilted back her head, looking at Sigarni through one huge, brown eye. ‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘I don’t doubt you have. You’re the best hare hound in the Highlands. You know that, don’t you? Faster than the wind -though not as fast as Abby.’
The darkness was growing outside and Sigarni lit a small lamp which she hung over the fireplace. Stretching out her legs, she removed her wet doeskin boots and her oiled leather troos. The warm air from the fire touched the bare skin of her legs and she shivered with pleasure. ‘If only I wasn’t hungry,’ she said aloud, stripping off her buckskin shirt and tossing it to the floor. The fire crackled and grew, casting dancing shadows on the walls of the cabin.
‘I have the bells of Hell clanging in my head,’ said Gwalch, walking from the bedroom, clutching his temples.
‘Then you shouldn’t drink so much, Gwal,’ she said, with a smile.
‘All right for you but I…” He stopped as he saw her nakedness. ‘Jarka’s balls, woman! That’s not decent!’
‘You said you’d be gone, old fool. It would be decent enough were I alone!’
‘Ah, well,’ he said, with a broad grin, ‘I think I might as well make the best of it.’ Pulling up a chair, he gazed with honest admiration at her fire-lit form. ‘Wonderful creatures, women,’ he said. ‘If God ever made anything more beautiful He has never shown it to me.’
‘Since your eyes are standing now on reed stalks, I take it that you are a breast man,’ she said, with a laugh. ‘Now Fell is a legs and hips man. His eyes are naturally drawn to a woman’s buttocks. Strange beasts, men. If God ever made anything more ludicrous She’s never shown it to me.’
Gwalch leaned back and roared with laughter. ‘Blasphemy and indecency in the same breath. By Heavens, Sigarni, there is no one like you. Now, for the sake of an old man’s feelings, will you cover yourself?’
‘Feel the blood rising, old man?’
‘No, and that is depressing. Dress for me, child. There’s a good girl.’