The Blue Hawk Read online

  “Tell me, brother and father,” he had said. “You have changed hymns and I have broken rituals. Gdu spoke in my heart and led me. Aa did not take me though I traveled in the Dead King’s coffin. I have been in the Jaws of Alaan. I have seen Gdaal’s bow. But … is it allowed for everybody to discover new hymns and change rituals and pry into secrets?”

  “If the Gods wish it They will bring it about.”

  “But if two people—I suppose they need not be priests—disagree about what the Gods wish … or if somebody says, ‘The Gods have spoken in my heart,’ when They have not … he might be mistaken, or just seeking his own ends.…”

  “I do not know how to argue with such a person. But I do know what I would do in such a case. I would look in my heart, and if the Gods spoke there also I would say so. But if They did not I would not change the ritual simply because another man said he had been spoken to. I have made hymns, lying here, of which I was proud and glad. And then after some days I saw that I had made them only for my own pleasure, so I forced my mind to forget them.”

  “Three nights ago I dreamed the Gods were dead,” Tron had whispered.

  “Aa sends that dream. I have seen it many times, in many forms. Listen. If the dream has a meaning, the meaning must have come from somewhere. The dream must have been sent. By whom? A God. If the dream has no meaning, then it is just froth on the mind, and there is no need to try to read it.”

  So Tron did the dances to free the ghost and rebuilt the hut and sang the hymn to bless the roof exactly according to ritual, not varying by one step or syllable from the teachings of the Temple, though the Gods stayed silent in his heart and he could not tell whether They were pleased, or angry, or indifferent.

  Next day he said to Curil, “I must take the King’s hawk hunting, and I’m afraid to fly it near the Jaws of Alaan or I may lose it. How do I cross the ravines?”

  “There’s leopards out there. Lions and snakes, too. Ghosts. Daytime ghosts.”

  Curil shook his head. Now that he’d overcome his -suspicion he was thoroughly pleased with the new arrangement as it cost him almost nothing and raised the status of Upper Kalakal to that of a full village, with its own priest, instead of a mere appendage of Lower Kalakal. But he walked with Tron across the stream, up the slope, and over the brow. The green, sheep-nibbled pastures sloped away south, ending in the hard, dark line of the ravine, beyond which began the wilderness, mottled and dun and ragged with rocky outcrops, stretching through pale bands of distance to the feet of the mountains.

  “We’re the last people in the Kingdom,” said Curil proudly. “Nothing south of here. General of the Southern Levies—he’s our Overlord—he came here three years back. Hadn’t been for eight years before that. That’s how far south we are.”

  “I expect you visit him, though,” said Tron.

  “Got to, to pay our taxes, haven’t we? And there’s the wool and the blankets to sell. We’re better off than a lot of villages farther north, I can tell you. Ragged lot, some of them. I’ve got a silver cup to drink out of, feast days. We cook our mutton with spices come from O knows how far. Now, here you are. Sure you want to go?”

  Curil appeared to have led Tron to a thorn thicket growing on the lip of the ravine, but as they came close to it Tron saw that it consisted of a number of large bundles of thorn piled with the spiky ends facing outward and the other ends tied to stout stakes to prevent the pile slipping or being pulled over the cliff. Curil heaved several of these bundles aside, making a gap, which opened onto a steep track running sideways down the cliff face.

  “I’ll put these back but I won’t lash ’em down,” he said. “What you do is take that pole with you and leave it on the other side. Then you can use it to hummock the thorn out of the way when you come back. Supposing you do come back. You thought of that, Revered? What’ll the King say to me? What’ll he do to me?”

  “If I don’t come back, send to Kalavin, the General’s son. He’ll tell the King what happened. The King’s lost hawks before. He’ll pay for my keep. He won’t be angry.”

  As he crossed the ravine Tron saw that there were sometimes floods here too which shoveled the boulders about, scoured the cliff walls, and drove the bed a little deeper below the upland each time. The bed was dry now; he stopped on a water-smoothed rock and spoke a quiet hymn to Alaan. The path up the far wall was little more than a sloping ledge and led to a forbidding area of dry scrub, a place where it would be possible to get lost in a very few strides. He looked over his shoulder and checked on the tower of smoke above the falls—he would have to journey many miles before that ceased to be a landmark.

  It was bad hawking country, full of dense cover into which game could dive at the flip of a wing; a place, too, where it would be easy to lose a hawk. Tron had never belled his bird because he hadn’t expected to fly it in a place where he couldn’t see for half a mile, but now he wished he had. There was plenty of game in the place, spoor everywhere and sudden rustles in the bushes as he passed, but it was all very shy as though it were used to being hunted. He risked only two short flights. The first was blank and the second made a kill of a strange sort. Tron had loosed the hawk at a fat little gray bird that he saw flopping across a small clearing, but this prey turned out to be as fleet as a dove when it wanted and slid into a thicket on the clearing’s edge. While the hawk hovered overhead Tron picked up a dead branch, worked his way around to the other side of the thicket, and thrashed against the twigs, in the faint hope of driving the gray bird out across the clearing again. Almost at once the hawk launched itself into its dive. Tron heard the thud of impact as he edged back around the bush and was astonished to find the hawk struggling with something more than twice its size in the middle of the clearing; there was a flurry of dark wings and long gray legs, but by the time he reached the fight it was over, with the hawk perched on its victim’s body and gripping with the talons of one foot a writhing, snakelike neck. As usual the hawk watched his approach with a fierce eye, hissed and almost struck at his hand, but allowed itself to be taken up and given a gristly tidbit for reward.

  This prey was a bird, brown-feathered, bald-headed, with absurd useless wings and huge thighs made for running. Later Tron saw another dashing with incredible speed down a path, but he had already decided not to risk another flight until he found more open country, so he circled back to the ravine, restacked and lashed the thorn barrier at the top of the steep path, and trudged up the hill to Kalakal.

  “What it is to be a priest!” said Curil’s elder son, eyeing the running bird.

  “What it is not to be one!” said Tron, laughing as he gave it to him. Curil’s daughter hung it outside her hut for a week until one could smell it from several yards away; then she cooked it with twenty different herbs. Taleel said that this was a famous dish, but rare, and even the smallest children would get a mouthful, but Tron was glad he was not a meat-eater.

  A month passed, but time at Kalakal was strangely different from time in the Temple, though the days seemed almost as unvarying. It was not a sleepy place—even the idling men seemed lively and glad—but it was a place full of a steady, deep content. Tron thanked Gdu daily for his new happiness. It seemed to him that the God was rewarding him for having endured so many fears and dangers in order to further a mysterious purpose, in which his own part was now finished. He would have liked to send news to the King and to get news back, but he remembered the unyielding face of the General of the Southern Levies, Curil’s Overlord, and the five priests on the quayside. Any message to the court would have to go through the General’s household, and probably need the General’s permission. Tron was afraid to take the risk. If my Lord Gdu wants me to stir again, he thought, He will send me a sign. I am happy here. Praise Him.

  Meanwhile he explored the scrubland. It turned out to be crisscrossed with sudden ravines, so that from above it must have looked like an enormous mudbank, dried by the sun into an endless pattern of cracks and flats. It sometimes took him half a day to fi
nd a way past one of these obstacles. Some had small pools in the bottom but most were dry. The hawking was never very good, but the hawk usually killed at least once.

  Climbing down into one of the ravines, Tron almost trod on a leopard. He was poised for a jump onto the speckled rock below when it moved, a fanged mouth yawned, and two brilliant eyes gazed into his for one of those instants which strike through the surface clutter of the mind and embed themselves in a layer of deep memory. The leopard twisted from its perch and flowed down the cliff in one lithe rush, then streaked along the floor of the ravine too fast for him to pick out the movement of individual limbs.

  That had happened too suddenly for fear. Tron felt the prickle of nervousness, though, whenever he came across the imprint of a huge cat-pad on bare earth, but he saw no more leopards and no lions. The most frightening moment came when he flew the hawk near a big rock pillar that turned out to be the home of a flock of bright blue starlings, which rose screaming to mob the menace. The hawk fled, bewildered. Tron swung the lure and whistled and suddenly it dropped to his wrist, but still the starlings mobbed bird and boy as he ran. He suffered only a few unimportant pecks, but he was terrified by the screaming, unescapable whirl of blue all around him. They left him quite suddenly and he stood panting. It was as though he had strayed by accident into a sacred place and didn’t know what furious God to appease.

  He saw snakes, too, and a big black eagle that preyed on them. There were small herds of fleet-footed deer with horns like curved swords. There were scorpions, huge spiders, centipedes as long as his foot, brilliant lizards, birds of fifty shapes and hues, and an unseen world of burrowing creatures. By the time Aa had reached Her Most Dark again, Tron had explored a fair tract of land, and had decided that the place was very ancient. He thought that the ravines had been made over thousands of years by sudden meltings of the snow on the peaks of Alaan, and that once, perhaps, the soil had been fertile, but now the water level had sunk too far below the roots, so that only wizened and enduring thorn or cactus could survive.

  Always looking for more open country, he explored steadily farther to the west until one day he came to a ravine that was larger and deeper than most. For a while he worked his way south, looking for somewhere to cross, until he was forced away from the cliff edge by an impenetrable thicket of thorn. He had moved a few yards along this barrier when something rustled in the middle of it and he stooped to peer in, hoping that it might be one of the running birds, which could be driven out for the hawk to fly at. The noise came only from a yellow lizard, but as it flicked farther into the bush Tron noticed something else, a patch of loose earth under the thorn that bore the imprint of a human heel. Looking round him he saw that his own footprints showed in what had seemed to be wind-grooved sand—but there had been no wind all day. He moved the hawk to his right hand and with his gauntleted left reached into the thicket and tugged. A whole section of bush moved.

  Carefully he pulled it free, walked through the gap and closed it behind him, then resettled the hawk on the gauntlet and slipped its hood into place. A narrow but well-worn path led to the cliff edge and then down, slanting from ledge to ledge and in places reinforced with branches and flat boulders. There was water under the stones in the bed of the ravine, and occasionally a clear but shallow pool. The path seemed to lead close under the cliff. He whispered a hymn to Gdu, asking for protection, and stole along with a priest’s silent step. A faint odor of wood smoke and burned meat came and went. He heard the low mutter of voices, and hesitated by a jut of cliff.

  It would have been possible to inch forward and peek round the rock at whoever it was—a troop of Gdaal’s people, no doubt. But it went against all Tron’s training to be seen by peasants while acting in an undignified, unpriestly fashion, so he continued his solemn glide round the corner and stopped only when he was a foot or two past it.

  The corner was the end of a space where flood-water had cut hard into a curve of cliff, making a wide but shallow cave, in which a group of about twenty people were moving or sitting. It took Tron a long stare to be sure that they were not some kind of ape. They were naked, yellow-skinned, and no taller than himself. Their buttocks stuck out below their spines in a fashion that made it look as though their hips were differently hinged from other people’s. Some of the men carried spears. Two babies rocked about on the cave floor tugging at either end of a piece of purple cloth. Over the almost smokeless fire a woman was turning a spit that skewered a green lizard as big as a dog. Beyond the fire another man, very pale-skinned, sat leaning against a boulder with his head lolling on his shoulder and his eyes shut. His clothes were of no fashion Tron had ever seen.

  A head turned. A voice spoke. The mutter instantly became silence. Then five men were on their feet rushing at Tron with spears held high. Their faces were contorted, as if they were yelling war cries, but they swept forward in total silence, daytime ghosts.

  Another part of a priest’s training is to learn not to flinch from an expected blow, not to let an eyelid quiver, a muscle flick. Those painful lessons kept Tron still. He forced his lungs to breathe slowly and shallowly so that all his body should seem motionless as a statue.

  Five feet away from him the tumbling rush halted. Spears drew back for throwing, but wavered. Tron stared straight forward, not into any one pair of bulging eyes, seeing the men in the blur of his peripheral vision, where their contorted faces looked like those of demons. Thus they all stayed for five heartbeats. The group convulsed as a man strode through them from behind, shoving the others to left and right.

  He was old, his hair and tight-curled beard yellow-white. The fold of flesh above his left collarbone had been pierced and a bird’s thighbone pushed through as an ornament. His eyes, which were level with Tron’s chin, were bloodshot. The huge, flabby bulge of his chest and stomach was painted with stripes of white and gray mud. He carried a black club decorated with shells.

  Once through the crowd, he stood looking at Tron’s soiled blue tunic, at his face, and then at the hawk on his wrist. The others jostled to see what would happen. The old man’s knees bent. He put his club on the ground beside him, then folded himself over his immense stomach until he could beat his grizzled forehead on the path in front of Tron’s feet.

  Tron raised his right hand and sang the hunter’s blessing:

  “Gdaal send the bird to your net,

  Gdaal lead the buck to your bow,

  Gdaal mark the trail of the hare,

  Gdaal bring you safe to your camp.”

  As he stopped the chant the men clicked their spearheads together and made a light, continuous rattling that echoed off the far cliff. The old man rose to his feet, smiling with enormous pleasure. Tron bowed sedately, keeping his face stiff as a mask.

  “Agdaal mbring,” said the old man, dragging the words out of some strange pocket of memory. Gaining confidence, he pointed at the hawk.

  “Agoods,” he said. “Mbird agoods. Agoods.”

  “Yes,” said Tron clearly. “The bird is good. It is Gdu’s bird.”

  “Agdu, Agdu mbird,” agreed the old man, grinning. He swept an arm around to gesture at the cave.

  “Agdaal us agod,” he said, miming the drawing of the bow and puckering his lips to the arrow’s hiss.

  “You are Gdaal’s people,” said Tron. This must be so, though they clearly had no sort of kinship with the hunters of the Kingdom.

  “Who is that man?” he asked, pointing at the figure beyond the fire. The men moved aside from his gesture as though lightning might suddenly flash from his fingertip; their movement let him see that the man was bound by leather thongs to the boulder against which he lay. The old chief frowned and pouted.

  “Mbads,” he said. “Man mbads. Man ngdie, uh?”

  He looked consoled by this final notion.

  Still keeping his face masklike, Tron glided between the hunters at his ghostly pace. As they moved aside for him he heard them whispering, but the words were not those of the language of the Kin
gdom. The babies on the floor stopped their tug-of-war to stare at him. The women put their hands over their eyes and turned away. Tron paid no attention to any of them as he settled the hawk on the boulder, then knelt and felt for the man’s pulse, moving all the time with the slow rhythm of a dance. At his touch the man opened his eyes and muttered. It took him some seconds even to notice Tron, but when he did so he frowned, shook his head as if trying to clear it, and gasped, “Durr Kaing? Durr Kaing?”

  He said the words several times, varying the sound as though he wasn’t sure that he was pronouncing it right. Tron suddenly made sense of the two syllables.

  “The King?” he said.

  The man nodded, ran a swollen tongue across dry lips and gazed with bright-eyed eagerness into Tron’s face. Then his glance slid away and his expression changed to despair as he saw the watching hunters. Tron rose and turned to them.

  “Give the man water,” he said, cutting each word clear of the next. “Untie the man. The man goes to the King.”

  The hunters hesitated. The old chief frowned.

  “Water,” said Tron, pointing at a brimming half-gourd by the cave wall. “Do I say to Gdaal that you are bad men?”

  He spoke the last sentence in full chant, all on a single note which echoed around the cave. The chief smiled ingratiatingly and said something to one of the women, who uncovered her face, picked up the gourd and carried it to the prisoner’s lips. One of the younger men undid the thongs. The prisoner seemed not to realize that his limbs were free at first, but when he did he pushed away the gourd and tried to rise. He had got no farther than a half-crouch when his legs gave way and he collapsed on the floor. The women laughed, a tinkling, happy sound.

  The man rolled himself onto his knees and crawled painfully across the cave to a leather saddlebag that was propped against the cave wall. The chief frowned and muttered until Tron held up an arm for silence. With shaking hands the man undid the straps of the bag and pulled out of the side pocket a flat, rectangular red brick, which he studied for a while before crawling back and handing it to Tron.