The Blue Hawk Page 10

  But he backed away, knelt, and carefully cut the torn hem free from his tunic. With his hawking knife he pricked his forearm in the place that the hymns prescribe, and as he squeezed out the first drops of sacrifice he sang.

  “Brother of Gods,

  Son of Great Aa,

  I give you my blood,

  Answer my asking.”

  His voice, shivering off the note, was drowned by the boom of waters from below.

  He squeezed more blood from his arm and mopped it with the length of hem, then bound stone and cloth and meat together with the end of the cord. Standing up, he swung the whole contraption round his head, letting the cord run out through his fingers until the cloth-wrapped stone was flying round him, fluttering, blue and scarlet, a wounded bird. He began the shrill, quavering whistle of the austringer, but found it difficult to maintain as his lips were strangely numb and puffy. The hurling lure made him dizzier still. He staggered about, whistling and calling, and conscious in his darkening mind that he too was being called. Down. Down. Drown. Drown. Twice he almost fell over the edge, the second time coming so near that the gulp of panic cleared his mind and let him move back and sit on the soft turf with the lure loose beside him.

  As he rested there trying to swallow away the rasping soreness in his throat he heard a hiss and a thud, and there, flung down out of nowhere, was the Blue Hawk binding to the lure.

  By an effort of will he forced the fever out of his brain long enough to coax the bird onto his gauntlet and retie the thongs to its legs while it pulled disgustedly at the cooked meat. As his gloved fingers closed at last round the other end of the thongs his stupidity and feebleness came surging back. He rose and began to stagger back toward his cave. Suddenly, without warning, the hawk flung itself into a frenzy. He whispered to it, but it would not be still. A voice seemed to be calling to him again, but pitched above the water-thunder.

  “Revered Lord!”

  The shepherd girl was floating toward him, only a few feet away now. He turned his back on her and tried to hood the terrified hawk. There seemed to be two hoods, two curved beaks, two seats of shaking fingers. He shut his eyes, and with the Lord Gdu guiding his hand he did the job by feel. Then he opened his eyes to the swaying landscape and turned to face the girl.

  “O’s blessings,” she called cheerfully. “What’s that? It’s a blue hawk! Oh! I’ve never seen one so close. Didn’t you … didn’t the Revered Lord know they can’t be tamed? May I touch him?”

  “Gently,” muttered Tron. “Not used to … to … I’m sick. Fever. The cold and the wet. The cold and the wet. The cold …”

  He stood there mumbling the words over and over.

  “It’s funny Lord Gdu should carry you out of the Jaws of Alaan and then give you a fever,” she said.

  “Yes.…” Half-lines of little hymns began to run through his mind. Fever. Fever-bark. They won’t have it. He grasped at another little patch of memory.

  Three days, three nights

  Let the body sweat.

  Let the man drink often

  But eat no food.

  The God will heal him

  In warmth and sleep.

  “Why don’t you go down to the priest in Lower Kalakal?” said the girl. “He’ll keep you warm and say hymns for you too.”

  “I must stay in the cave,” muttered Tron. Though his mind was muddled with fever he still knew he must not seek help from a priest.

  “All right,” said the girl. “I’ll go back and fetch you a sheepskin and two blankets. Everybody’s gone down to Lower Kalakal to bale the wool to take north, so no one will see. You watch the sheep.”

  He remembered her trotting away. After that there was a clear little scene of his own hands pegging the hawk’s leg thongs down so that it could perch on a turf in a half-dark opening. Then there was nothing but the rank, warm sheepskins, the blankets that smelt of greasy cooking, and the dreams. They seemed like dreams even when he woke and saw the hawk perched motionless at the cave entrance, or when he crawled to the stream to drink again.

  He went down a dark tunnel with rock-hewn walls. There was nothing behind him, but he was afraid of the stone itself. Then he came out into a wide open place, a vast white plain on which the statues of the Gods stood in separate places, each as tall as the Tower of the Great Temple. He knew he was in the land of the Gods, and that he must seek out the Lord Gdu to tell him the message. But all the statues were wrong, many of Gods whom he did not know and some turning into pillars of raw rock at his approach. At last, far off, he saw the unmistakable winged shape and trudged toward it. The plain became darker. He could not remember the message. He raised his arms to sing to the great statue, but instantly it crumbled into a small heap of sand with the Blue Hawk lying dead on the slope of it. Ants crawled among the bright feathers. The boom of the falls brought him back to the land where the hawk still lived, and the boom followed him into his next dream.

  On the third evening he woke from a different sort of sleep, still and dreamless, and saw the hawk silhouetted as usual against the light in the cave mouth. Slowly behind it the sky changed, glowed, became fiery, bore bright colors on either side of the fire, until the whole triangle was filled with the blaze of O’s answer with the Blue Hawk perched in the middle of it, eyes closed, glistening all round its outline where the brightness caught the sheen of its plumage.

  So Gdu is my friend still, he whispered. I am punished for telling the girl untrue things about the Gods, trying to use Them for my own purpose. Alaan called me to pay with my life, but Gdu befriended me, and I pay now only with a little sickness. He let himself slide again into the good sleep and woke next morning weak but sensible.

  As he walked across the hillside to meet the girl, he remembered his first meeting with the King, that openness and trust and sense of shared humanity. He compared this with his own behavior to the girl, his imitation of the Major Priests to impress her, the distancing from her that his training imposed on him.

  She had brought bread for him, which he made her share, and meat for the hawk. He sat on the ground beside her and told her his story, trying to free himself from the formal language of the priests and to talk in the common tongue. There was a lot she couldn’t understand—it was impossible for her to imagine the life of the Great Temple, or indeed anything much more than her own village and hillside—but she listened with great excitement.

  “Revered Lord …” she began when he’d finished.

  “My name is Tron,” he said.

  “Oh, is it? I didn’t know priests had names. Tron. My name’s Taleel. What are you going to do next, Tron? You can’t stay in the cave for ever, can you?”

  “Tell me about your priest. Is he an old man?”

  “Oh no. His hair’s still black. He came to us the year my elder sister was born and she’s two years older than me.”

  (… they didn’t touch him that day. But by the time he passed for priest he was a cripple, so bad they had to carry him up to his village—some potty little place in the hills.…)

  “And he serves O?” asked Tron.

  “I didn’t tell you that,” she said, suddenly suspicious.

  He beat back the natural urge to pretend to strange knowledge.

  “Very few priests leave the Temple crippled,” he said. “He’s the only one I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve heard of him before. Look, I’ll go and see him tonight and try and persuade him to help me. Perhaps I’ll come back and stay in Upper Kalakal for a bit. You’ll have to pretend not to recognize me. Will I be able to find my way to Lower Kalakal in the dark?”

  “In the dark! You’re not … Oh, I suppose it’s all right for you. What it is to be a priest! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Yes, if you follow the stream by the cave—there’s a marshy bit just below Mangan’s Patch—you’ll have to work around that but it’s not deep, only smelly, if you do fall in.…”

  She chattered on while Tron ate hungrily of the bread—though not so hungrily as the hawk did of the
chicken neck and strips of raw mutton she’d smuggled out of her mother’s hut. Neither of them had eaten for three days. After that he watched the sheep with her and told her the story of the King of the Wise who by magic trapped Sodala in the body of a jackal and wouldn’t let the God free until he had been taken to the Land of the Gods and allowed to drink from the desert pool that contains the water of everlasting life, and as the King rose with his face dripping from that water, his reflection cleared and he found himself gazing at the rippled image of a jackal, who now lives for ever and howls in the desert night for his release.

  That evening as O’s answer began to glow in the mist she stood with bowed head while he blessed her and her flock with the Great Blessing.

  “You are a Revered Lord, then,” she whispered when he’d finished.

  “I don’t know,” muttered Tron. He paused. His mouth seemed to speak without his willing it.

  “The only Lords are the Gods,” he said clearly.

  She nodded, not at all surprised, then started her clatterers and led the flock away.

  Tron stood still, ears pricked. Above the western horizon Aa showed only a thin arc of silver. So this must be the night of Her Most Darkness, when Her creatures roam most freely and sniff most fiercely for those who have dishonored the Gods. Behind him the changeless column of smoke from the falls hid a huge patch of stars, and those he could see seemed smaller than they were when he had gazed at them from the desert. The hawk stirred on his gauntlet. The stream he had been following hissed through the grass. He could smell cooking and see the glowing remains of a village fire. A dog yelled. He froze.

  In the lumpish mass around the fire a spark of yellow light glowed, then began to move through the night with a curious, slow jerky rhythm. The creature that carried it was a hunched shape, bulky but no taller than a child. It moved out of the village on Tron’s right. With a thumping heart he stole around to intercept it.

  A hundred yards from the huts a low mound rose, twice the height of a man and hollowed at the top into a shallow basin in whose center lay a flat slab of undressed rock. Aa’s altar was the same in all villages. Crouched outside the rim of the mound, Tron watched the thing with the light make its painful way up the slope and vanish into the hollow. It was a man, dressed in a gold robe, moving his twisted body with the gait of a maimed beast. The lantern dangled from one of his crutches and from the other a closed basket, which contained, Tron was certain, a black cockerel, a little flask of oil, and a miniature loaf of priest-bread. Tron shivered on the slope. He dared climb no farther. To listen to the ritual on the night of Aa’s Most Darkness was dangerous enough. But to watch!

  The priest’s voice rose from the hollow, very soft but the true voice of O, golden at dawn and sunset.

  “Mistress of dark,

  Mother of Gods,

  Giver of terrible birth,

  Giver of kindly death,

  I bring the ancient gifts,

  Which are yours before I give them.

  You have taken the gold from the oil,

  You have taken the white from the bread,

  The red from the comb of the cock,

  And made them part of your dark.”

  There was a pause, though the priest must be too crippled to perform the dance. A current of excitement now ran through Tron’s fear. Because most of the boys in the Temple would one day be solitary priests in villages or the households of noblemen, they had to know the major rituals of Gods other than the one for whom they had been chosen. Tron had learned long ago the hymn of sacrifice on the night of Aa’s Most Darkness, but apart from the first two lines he had never heard these words or this chant.

  The crippled priest sang on, sometimes using familiar verses and sometimes strange ones. His voice became stronger, filling the night. He poured out the oil, crumbled the bread, killed the cock. Tron grew stiff with waiting and began to be afraid that his fever would come back. The hawk, disturbed by the night movement, griped and fidgeted. At last the rite ended and the lantern glow rose out of the hollow and came at its agonized gait down the slope.

  “Servant of O,” whispered Tron.

  The priest stood stock still.

  “Servant of O, you have changed the ritual.”

  The lantern shook. Basket and one crutch clattered to the ground. The priest’s hand dived to his pouch and came out with a knife, still glistening with the blood of the cock. The arm rose to strike, not at the voice in the dark but at the priest’s own heart.

  “No!” cried Tron. “I’ve been Goat too!”

  By the weak light of the lantern he saw the blade hesitate and drop.

  “Let me see you,” whispered the cripple.

  Tron straightened and stepped forward, but having seen how deft the priest’s arms were he stopped while he was still clear of a sudden slash with the other crutch. Bulbous eyes peered at him from under hairless brows. The hurt back forced the man to carry his head so that it craned up from the neck, like a tortoise head. He wore no beard.

  “A child?” he said. “Who is with you?”

  His speaking voice was high and smooth, as though he were on the edge of song still.

  “My Lord Gdu is with me,” said Tron. “I was chosen for Him, but at the Ritual of Renewal I was Goat. He spoke in my heart to take the Blue Hawk and carry it out of the Temple. Since then … since then He has guided me secretly here. I did not know I would find you here. Will you help me?”

  “Is that the same hawk? Tame?”

  Tron held it forward but it turned its head away and shut its eyes from the light and the stranger.

  “My Lord Gdu showed me,” he said.

  The priest coughed and nodded, thinking.

  “What do you want?”

  “I have had a fever. May I sleep in your hut?”

  The priest coughed again, then sighed.

  “It would be good to hear news from the Temple again,” he said.

  Tron picked up the fallen crutch and took the basket. As they made their slow way toward the village he heard a sudden growl behind them in the night, where two of Aa’s creatures fought over the remains of the sacrifice.

  X

  Curil, headman of Upper Kalakal, had an extraordinary wiry gray beard that stuck out all around his weather-beaten face like the ruff of an owl. His angry black eyes stared at Tron as he leaned on his crook.

  “We’ve never had two priests in Kalakal,” he said.

  “We’re not that rich,” said one of his sons, standing by his shoulder.

  “Not that stupid, you mean,” said the other.

  “No priest-dues will be taken,” said Tron in the proper half-chant. “The King’s Hawk fell ill. It is thought it may recover its health among the cliffs where it was born. The priest at Lower Kalakal can confirm the order. Send and ask him.”

  “There’s no priest-hut,” snapped Curil. “We’re too busy to build one.”

  “I can build a hut,” said Tron in an ordinary voice. “I can also bless the beer you’ve been brewing. Or curse it.”

  Their faces changed.

  “It’s not our fault,” said Curil more angry than ever with fright. “They send us a priest who’s too crippled to get up here and brew us a spot of beer. I don’t like drinking unblessed beer, no more than anyone else, but what do they expect us to do?”

  “Welcome a priest who offers to bless it for you,” said Tron.

  “That’s right,” said one of the sons.

  “You mean what you said, no priest-dues?” said the other.

  “Only bread for me. When the hawk is well we will hunt, and if we catch game you shall have it. I eat no meat.”

  “Priests!” jeered Curil automatically. “Well, that hut at the end’s empty since my father’s sister died. She’s been haunting it, so we’ve kept clear, but I dare say a priest won’t mind.”

  “You’ll know her if you see her,” said one son. “She could talk rocks to bits.”

  “Let’s get that beer blessed,” said the
other. “Last two lots went sour.”

  The Kalakals formed an island of pasture in the vast, savage upland below the Peaks of Alaan. The spray from the falls kept them green and deep ravines defended them all around from the wild. They were thirty miles from the nearest other village. Upper Kalakal was a crescent of nine huts built on a natural platform on the side of the hill, sheltered by a ridge from the faint spray which even in apparently bright sunshine drifted over all the area. It was a peaceful life. Night and day the Jaws of Alaan thundered. Every evening O’s answer remade itself. (“You’ve got to wait a hundred years to see that, down in the plain,” said. Taleel’s mother. “We see it every day.”)

  The men sat about most of the time drinking beer and gambling next season’s lambs on a complicated game that involved throwing three knucklebones into a pattern of squares scraped in the ashes of the village fire. The women did all the work and most of the talk, cooking, and weaving blankets to one ancient, elaborate pattern. The children minded the sheep.

  They all watched with curiosity and enjoyment as Tron dismantled the dead woman’s hut and did the silent dances that would help her nagging ghost to free itself from the place and travel to the Kingdom of Aa. The ghost’s son’s wife gave him a bright new blanket for this service without being asked. No doubt she had borne the brunt of the nagging.

  Unbuilding the hut and rebuilding it in a new place took Tron four days. Most of the time he found himself thinking about the crippled priest, whose name was Odah. They had passed a strange night together. Pain gave Odah little sleep, and he seemed to have spent most of his life at Kalakal lying in his hut and discovering new hymns and rituals. Despite his hideous appearance he had a character full of calm and sweetness and reverence for the Gods and the Temple.

  “But if it is in me to find new ways to praise the Gods how shall I not do so?” he said. “I cannot deny Their gift.”

  Some time before dawn he had sung a Great Hymn which Tron had never heard before, telling how Sinu went mad in his longing for Tan and tried to destroy all life, and how Sodala and Gdaal had gathered the animals of the world two by two into a secret valley and defended the place with magic and trickery against their mighty brother. This had seemed to Tron instantly right and true—as true as all the other Great Hymns—and yet it was new.