The Falconer's Tale

Half Title
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Epilogue
By Gordon Kent
Copyright
About the Publisher

A steady, cold rain fell from low clouds on the naked rock
of the hillsides and became white waterfalls plummeting to
the coarse grass below, soaking the thin soil and filling the
streams and rivers.

Piat had walked up the valley from the road at Horgsa
without wetting his feet, but the stream between his legs
now roared. Where he stood to cast on a tongue of gravel,
the water rose around his ankles and then his shins, pushing
heavily against him. The river came down the mountain
behind his left shoulder and curved in front of him before
running into a long, slow, deep pool forty meters long, and
from there falling away into a canyon.

His hands were slick and nearly numb on the cork grip of
his rod, and when he raised his arm to flick another cast
over the river, more water ran down from his wrist to his
armpit, soaking his old wool sweater.

After a long, slow retrieve, he cast again, then pulled the
line with his rod just as the fly struck the water so that it
moved an inch on the surface before sinking. A sea trout
struck just after Piat thought he had missed again, the pull
before the first leap sending a shock down the rod to Piat's
wet hands. Then the fish jumped again, three quick jumps,
pulling line off the reel after each one, and then ran away
upriver.

Piat, burning with adrenaline, steadied himself by replanting
his feet. One of his wellies filled with water. The big trout
took almost a hundred feet of line in a continuous stream
from Piat's reel, and then the weight on the line changed.
Piat's first thought was that the fish was gone—a fraction of
a second's pressure on the rod, and then he could tell that
the fish had changed direction, running in at him and his
submerged gravel beach. Piat began to reel up as quickly as
he could. His reel was too small, too light for this kind of
action, but he knew what he was doing, and he pulled line
and reeled up and raised his rod as high as he could, risking
his footing in the rising stream and filling his other boot with
a considered advance into the deepening water.

The fish leaped again and then again, the leaps shorter,
farther apart, and Piat caught up with the line on the reel
and started to use the rod to work the fish. It felt his first
real effort at control and reacted like an unbroken horse,
fighting the rod with a new series of short jumps and fast
pulls that served only to tire it faster. Piat had time now, and
he ratcheted up the drag on his reel to make the fish's task
of taking line off all the more difficult. He took his first careful
shuffles toward the safety of the bank. He was in too deep,
and when his heel caught on a rock in the gravel, he almost
went down—he turned his head, caught his balance, and the
fish was moving again, this time toward two straggling weed
beds to his right. He tried to turn it, using the strength of
the rod and the line against the fish, but even now the fish
was too strong.

Piat took a long, gliding step up the bank, his filled boots
clumsy. With his feet planted, he risked a strong pull and
turned the fish. The sea trout leaped once more, its silver
length flashing across the low gray clouds.

He didn't have a net, and it took him more time to get
the fish up on the gravel above the water line. The trout was
a little smaller than he had thought; the poetic clarity of its
last leap had suggested a much larger fish, but he wrestled
it under his arm and hit its head with his knife handle. It
thrashed, and he hit it again until it was dead.

Only after he had its guts out and his hands and knife
clean did he take off his socks and wring them out. He had
nothing to dry the insides of his boots, so he dumped out
the water and the gravel, used the socks to towel his feet
and the insides of the wellies, and wrung them out again
before pulling a dry pair from his pack. The change was
immediate—even rammed back into wet rubber boots, his
feet were warm.

The rain slowed. He poured himself a celebratory cup of
coffee from the thermos in his pack and admired the fish,
now lying on a patch of grass.

While he sipped his coffee, the rain stopped altogether and
the low cloud blew off down the river valley toward the sea.
In a minute, the vanishing curtain of rain and cloud revealed
the vast landscape of the valley and the rise of mountains
beyond. Before his coffee was gone, he could see for miles
across the river, the mountains high and snow-capped to his
left and the river valley descending in deep-cut canyons to
his right until it vanished a mile away where it crossed the
road to town. He was content. A rare feeling for him.

He poured a second cup of coffee and watched a distant
falcon soaring above the river. A flicker of color on the most
distant hillside caught his eye and he glanced up to see one
of Iceland's many buses stopped on the high road above him,
hardly more than a white dot amidst a tumble of rock. It
was well over a mile away. A ray of cold yellow sun flashed
off the windscreen; it must have been that that had diverted
him from the falcon. Even without binoculars, he could see
a passenger get off, and paranoia made him suspicious—there
was nothing to get off the bus for out here except fishing.
Perhaps serious rock climbing.

He went back to his study of the falcon, finished his coffee
and changed his fly. His hands were warmer and more nimble
after holding the coffee. He smiled when he saw the fish on
the grass, considered bagging the rest of his fishing and going
back down the valley to his room, but he had paid the last
of his diminishing supply of cash for three days' fishing on
this river and he didn't want to waste it, although this first
fish satisfied his need. He had caught a
good
fish.

He wished he had waders. He looked at the river, now
moving with considerable speed, still beautifully clear despite
the press of water.

I need waders,
he thought. But he didn't have money for
waders. And they couldn't be bought anywhere short of
Reykjavik.

He made several lackluster casts. The wind had changed
and developed flaws; the combination made casting tricky.
He moved to his left along the rocky shore and cast again.
As his eye followed the fall of the fly, another dot of color
caught his attention. The bus passenger had donned a yellow
slicker and was coming down the hillside. Piat had climbed
that hillside himself, and he wished the late-season hiker
luck in negotiating the steep, sodden marsh that passed for
a trail, with grass tussocks surrounded by ankle-twisting holes
you could go into to the knee. He noted that the hiker did
not have a rod.

Piat fished automatically until he focused again to
discover that he had moved to a place with no weed and
no wind—and no fish. The casting was easy, but to little
purpose, and he reeled up and started back to the beach.
The pale sun became stronger at his back. Out in the river,
a fish rose noisily. Piat looked up to see the size of the
ring, checked on the hiker's progress with the same glance,
and was startled by how fast the hiker was moving. He
was almost down to the base of the hill, walking purposefully.

Piat went to his pack and took out binoculars. He took a
careful look. Then he carefully dried the lenses with a cloth,
replaced the binoculars in their case, and put them in his
pack with his thermos and the fish wrapped in a plastic sack.
He broke down his rod, stowed it, pocketed his reel, and
started back down the valley. No one watching him would
have thought him hurried or panicked.

The streams really were full, and Piat remembered having
crossed four on his way up from Horgsa. He crossed the
second one that he came to with trepidation; the third was
running so heavily that he turned and followed it rather than
crossing. He knew that the stream should bring him down
the glen to Horgsa. A narrow track ran along the side, cut
so deep into the turf by rivulets of water that he had to catch
himself constantly to keep from falling. Patches of gravel
were like rest stops. Even a few steps on solid ground felt
like a holiday.

Piat pushed on, crossing a boulder field and passing over
the last crest before all the land fell away to the sea three
miles distant.

He did not look back.

The stream he had followed roared along to his right,
sometimes close beside him and sometimes more distant as
he followed the gentlest contours. He had a sense that he
was too far to the east and might have a long walk on the
road once he reached it, but he relished the thought of a
walk on the shoulder of a paved road, no matter how narrow,
and his unease was growing.

The hillside suddenly became steeper and the stream fell
into falls, straight to the plain more than a hundred feet
below. Piat stood at the top for several minutes, watching
the falls and trying to gauge his chances of either crossing
the stream above the fall or making his way down the cliff.
He didn't like either, but neither did he relish the notion of
backtracking up the long hillside behind him. He felt that he
was being watched.

He started down the cliff, following another deep-cut track.
Luck revealed an old road that seemed to spring from nowhere
and ran along a hedge of boulders for a hundred meters. Piat
couldn't imagine what conveyance could have climbed a road
so steep, or how much effort it must have taken to hew the
road. Just as suddenly, the road vanished into steep rock fall,
but he was around the very worst of the cliff and he began
to move cautiously straight down, grasping handfuls of grass
at every step.

The last of the climb down took twenty minutes. When
he at last reached the base of the cliff, he jumped across a
feeder of the waterfall stream into the backyard of a local
farmer. He crossed the yard into a farm road and walked
down the hill past an old byre full of Icelandic sheep. In half
a mile he was on the main road, and in fifteen minutes he
was waiting at the bus stop.

Only then did he look down his back trail. Even with
binoculars he couldn't find the yellow slicker, or the man
who had been wearing it—a man he had seen several times
through various lenses, and never met. Nor did he wish to.
He cursed the loss of his fishing.

The bus arrived on time. Piat climbed wearily aboard, paid
his fare, and settled into one of the high-backed seats after
placing his backpack in the rack.

He was just opening his book when a voice said, “Hello,
Jerry.” It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a man he
didn't want to see just then. Mike Dukas.

“Hello, Mike,” he said.

“Good to see you, Jerry.”

It was a day to see people he didn't want to see. Piat had
been walked, gently but firmly, from the bus to a private car,
and from the car to the lobby of the Kirkjubaejarklaustur
Hotel, and from thence to the bar. In the bar, a bright,
modern, Nordic bar with good Norwegian wood counters
and clean glasses hung from wooden racks, sat Clyde Partlow.
Piat knew a great deal about Partlow, and he didn't like him
much.

“I wish I could say the same, Clyde.” Piat shook hands,
not
quite
ready to cross the social line and refuse.

“Sun is over the yardarm, Jerry. Want a drink?” Partlow
indicated the bar and the bottles with a proprietary hand
that indicated that Piat could help himself—and that Partlow
had complete control of the hotel.

Piat walked over to the bar, feeling his wet socks inside
his wellies and the weight of the fish in the bag on his
shoulder. He'd cleaned it—it'd keep for a few hours. Odd
thing to worry about. He knew he was rattled—rattled by
the men who had picked him up, rattled by Partlow, who
looked prosperous and well groomed, rattled that they had
taken him so easily. It was unlikely he was even going to
eat the fish. He poured himself a stiff shot—more like two
shots—of twenty-five-year-old Laphroaig. It looked to be the
most expensive scotch on the bar.

Partlow raised his glass. “Old friends,” he said.

“They're all dead,” said Piat. He drank anyway, a little
more than he had intended. “Okay, cut the soft crap, Clyde.
What do you want?”

“As you will, Jerry.” Partlow reached into an expensive
leather bag and retrieved a file. “A project has resurfaced one
of your old agents, Jerry. We'd like you to bring him in.”

Piat struggled with the scotch and the adrenaline to hide
his relief. It could still be a trap—they could still arrest him
or turn him over to Icelandic immigration or any number
of other things. But the file looked real, and it all seemed
a little elaborate for an arrest. In fact, now that his hour-
long panic was beginning to subside, it had
all
been too
elaborate for an arrest. He hit his panic with a little more
scotch.

He circled to the chair that had been placed opposite
Partlow, slipped his fishing bag over his shoulder to land on
the floor, removed his rain jacket, and sat. “Who?”

“Not so fast, Jerry. You are aware, I think, of your status
with us—nil. In fact, you are a wanted man, aren't you? So
try to keep your usual greed in check, Jerry. First, I want
your agreement that you'll go and fetch this fellow for us.
Then there will be some documents to sign. Then we'll talk
about who it is.”

Piat looked at Partlow for a few seconds, and his hand
holding his scotch began to shake. Piat took the plunge
anyway. “If I'm a wanted man, Clyde, then you'd better arrest
me, hadn't you? Because otherwise you'll be in defiance of
an executive order about dealing with known felons, won't
you, Clyde?”

The two men glared at each other for seconds. Partlow
shook his head. “Really, Jerry, you are wasting my time.”

“I'm not the one who just got kidnapped,
old boy
. So thanks
for the scotch. I'll be going now. I paid a mint for the fishing
that Mike Dukas interrupted.” Piat rose to his feet and started
to don his jacket, thinking—
now we'll see what cards he really
has. Fuck, my hands are shaking
.