The Falconer’s Tale. Gordon Kent

If he was careful, the money would see him through the winter. By then it was possible that he would find something in the antiquities market to sell.

      Because Dave had taken the window seat, Piat got up and pulled a sweater out of his bag. It was a very nice sweater—Burberry, more than a hundred pounds in Oban on the High Street. Piat had never been able to resist spending other people’s money. He had purchased a wardrobe that would last him five years—good stuff, if you liked English clothes. Piat liked anything that lasted. He pulled the sweater over his head and added the clothes to his list of positives. He could leave Partlow holding his baggage now—there was nothing in it worth as much as the clothes he had just encouraged Dave to buy for him. Scratch that thought—Piat wanted the rods back. He sat and admired his wool trousers and smiled again.

      Dave didn’t even look up. He was reading The Economist with an air of self-importance that Piat longed to puncture. He shrugged internally. Why bother? Piat took out a guide to the early European Bronze Age and browsed it, trying to separate the useful facts from the clutter of drivel about prehistoric alphabets and runic stones. The early European Bronze Age was the hottest market in antiquities. Piat tried for fifteen minutes, but the book didn’t hold his attention.

      Why does Partlow need me? Piat chewed the question. Hackbutt was a handling nightmare—did Partlow know that?

      He looked at the cover of his book and wondered if any of the Roman authorities had commented on the world before Greece. All too damned speculative. He allowed his eyes to skim past the usual photos; a bronze breastplate, a helmet, a spectacular sword with an early flanged hilt, some badly decorated pottery. He knew all the objects. They decorated major museums. It needed a remarkable coincidence of durability, placement and luck for anything that old—the second millennium BC—to be found in northern Europe. Even to survive.

      Partlow is doing something around the rules—above, below, whatever. He had to be. He’d involved Dukas—Piat went back with Dukas, not exactly as pals but with some respect. He’d involved Alan Craik. Piat didn’t love Craik but he had seen him in action. Dukas and Craik were buddies. Dukas and Partlow were not buddies at all.

      And Hackbutt was into falconry—and Partlow had said right out that’s why they wanted him. Most of the Arab bigwigs were into falconry, too. No big leap of logic there.

      Like speculating on what classical authority might have a bearing on the Bronze Age, speculating on Clyde Partlow’s motives from the deck of the ferry wasn’t getting Piat anywhere.

      I can find a partner and a dig when I get back to Lesvos. Worst case, I’m a few thousand richer, and I have some new clothes.

      Piat shrugged, this time physically. It made Dave glance up at him from his magazine. For a moment their eyes met. Piat smiled.

      “I’m trying to read,” said Dave.

      Piat nodded, still smiling. He started to prepare himself to meet Edgar Hackbutt, bird fancier, social outcast, and ex-agent.

      Piat swung the rented Renault down into Tobermory’s main street, reminding himself to get over to the left, toward the water. The morning was brilliant, with thin, pale-blue mare’s tails high up against a darker blue sky. The tide was in, and big boats rode alongside the pier; as always when he saw them, he thought, I could live on one of those, but in fact he never would. Too much a creature of the land, or perhaps too suspicious of the predictability of a boat, too easy to find. On land, you could always get out and walk.

      He drove along the waterfront, brightly painted buildings on his right, memorizing them—hardware store, chandler’s shop, bank, grocery—and then pulled up the long hill out of town and around a roundabout to the right, heading not down the island’s length but across its northern part. A sign said “Dervaig”; he followed it, passed a chain of small lakes (Mishnish Lochs, fishing, small trout—he’d pretty much memorized a tourist brochure) and, with a kind of fierce joy, drove the one-lane road that twisted and switch-backed up and down hills. He played the game of chicken that was the island’s way of dealing with two cars driving straight at each other: one would have to yield and pull into a supposedly available lay-by. Locals drove like maniacs and waved happily as they roared past; tourists either went into the lay-bys like frightened rabbits or clutched the wheel and hoped that what was happening to them was an illusion. Piat, flicking in and out of lay-bys, waving when he won, giving a thumbs-up when he didn’t, had the time of his life.

      He climbed past a cemetery above Dervaig and, following a map in his head, turned left and south. Halfway down the wide glen would be a road on the right; from it, a track went still farther up and then briefly down. At its end, Dave had assured him, Hackbutt’s farm waited. Piat drove slower, head ducked so he could look out the windscreen. He’d have said that landscape didn’t interest him, but in fact, it fascinated him, only without the sentimentality that led other people to take photos and paint watercolors. He always saw possibilities—for escape, for hides, for pursuit. Here, the sheer scale of the place surprised him: this was an island, and Tobermory was almost a toy town, but out here was a breadth of horizon that reminded him of Africa. Even with the mountains. The glen was miles wide, he thought, the mountains starting as rolling slopes that careened abruptly upward and became almost vertical climbs to their summits. Strong climber could shake anybody up there. The landscape was brown and green and gray; grass, not heather; bare rock and bracken. You could walk and walk. Or run and run. If the footing is okay.

      He found the road to the right and drove it more slowly; it was ancient tarmac, crumbling along the edges, potholed, hardly wider than the car. He came over a rise and almost ran into a goofy-looking runner, some old guy wearing what looked like a giant’s T-shirt that flapped around him in the crisp wind. Hardly noticing him, the runner plodded on. Piat thought, I could give you half a mile and still get there first. After another mile, the road forked and he went right. Almost there. When he had gone half a mile farther, he pulled up just short of a crest and got the car into a lay-by and stopped. “Please do not park in the lay-bys,” the tourist brochure had said. You bet.

      Piat got out and spread an Ordnance Survey map on the hood, traced his route from Tobermory, found the fork, followed with his finger, and judged from the contour lines that if he walked over the crest, he’d be looking down on Hackbutt’s house. Or farm, or whatever the hell it was. His aviary, how would that be?

      He had borrowed a pair of binoculars from good old Dave—Swarovskis, 10x50, nice if you didn’t have to carry them very far—and walked the hundred feet to the top of the hill. He made his way into the bracken and moved toward a rock outcrop, keeping himself out of sight of the house he’d glimpsed below, until he reached the outcrop and put his back against it and turned the binoculars on the house.

      It could have been any house on the island—central doorway, two windows on each side, a chimney at one end, second storey with two dormers. The color of rich cream but probably stone under a coat of paint, possibly an old croft fixed up but more likely built in the last hundred years. At the far side of the house, clothes blew in the wind on a circular contraption with a central metal pole. Behind it, as if to tell him it was the right house, were pens and little shacks like doghouses that he took to be sheds for the birds; beside a half-collapsed metal gate, a dejected-looking black and white dog lay with its head on outstretched paws, beside it what was apparently supposed to be a doghouse made out of boxes and a tarp. The bird pens seemed to have been set out at random, the hutches put together by somebody who didn’t know which end of a hammer to hit his thumb with. That’d be Hackbutt, for sure.

      Piat studied the place. He hoped to actually see Hackbutt so he’d go in with that advantage. They hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years; let the other guy feel the shock of change. Hackbutt would have an idea he was coming but wouldn’t know when: Piat had sent him a postcard with a picture of a bear on the front, a nonsense message on the back signed “Freddy.” From “ready for Freddy.” It meant “get ready;” the bear was the identifier, an old code between them. Would Hackbutt remember? Of course he would. In fact, Piat thought, he’d piss his pants.

      After fifteen minutes, nobody had appeared near the house. Piat