The Blue Hawk Read online

  Tron heard a gasp and mutter among the litter-bearers. The short ritual was performed for peasants whose families could afford to pay for nothing better.

  “At last we came to that place. I knew it to be a stronghold of Aa, heavy with Her presence. I was afraid, although I am Her servant. We arrived a little before dawn, but because O does not shine into the valley for a long time after His rising we were able to rehearse the ritual that the One of Aa had chosen. It was a ritual of power and fear, especially in that place. At the heart of the ritual he was to chant a hymn, aloud, with his own voice, not using the Mouth of Silence.”

  He paused for another murmur among his bearers.

  “I have confessed that I was afraid. The Mouth of Silence told us that men might come to try to stop or interrupt the ritual, and that therefore one of us must stand sentry. I have keen sight, so I gladly offered myself, and was chosen. When O rose above the peaks my brothers went to rest under their canopies and I took up a post outside the valley where the shadow of a leaning rock shielded me from His rays. It was half a mile from the saddle of the pass, but from it I could see great stretches of the road where it climbed the mountains.

  “I lay there through the noon of O. I was teased with strange notions, that I should be up there alone, seeing what no priest of Aa had ever seen, all the vastness and richness of the Kingdom under the rays of O. The mountains are very silent. In the middle of the afternoon I heard a cry, which I thought must be that of a mountain bird. Then I heard more cries and knew them for human. And then, far off, I heard a chant begin. It was not the ritual we had practiced, and it began raggedly, and still the cries continued. I ran toward the valley, but before I reached the top of the road I was afraid again and I left the road and climbed the flank of the mountain until I could see into the valley. Before I finished climbing I recognized the chant. My brothers, it was the Great Curse of Aa, which we learn in a whisper, leaving out certain names, knowing that we shall never need to chant it aloud. Now I heard it.

  “I reached a place where I could see down into the valley. At first I did not understand what I saw. I thought my brothers were standing by the canopies where they had rested, chanting as if in the House of O and Aa, while a horde of blue demons on horses rode screaming round them, with strange gestures. Then I saw one of my brothers fall, and another, and I saw the demons were shooting at them with arrows, and huge dogs pranced beside the horses baying. So my brothers fell, one by one. I knew … I knew it was my work to stand and join in the chant. They had only reached the Third Naming, and already half my brothers had fallen to the ground. If I had taken up the chant I might have continued it to the Fifth Naming before the demons could reach me, and then perhaps Aa Herself … She was there, filling the valley.… She did nothing … and I was afraid. It was not my fear of the Goddess, but it was the ordinary fear of hurt and death, such as a peasant might feel. I lay down among the rocks and watched. The demons killed and killed, with terrible cries. I heard the chant dwindle, but I did not see any of my brothers move from his place or stop chanting until he died. The demons did not shoot the One of Aa, who stood in front of the front rank of my brothers, but when all the rest were killed one of them rode forward. There was a silence, in which I heard the voice of the One of Aa, still chanting. The demon took a sword and with careful aim hacked off his head.

  “Then the other demons got down from their horses and moved among my brothers, cutting off all their heads. And women and children of the demons—they were not blue but orange—picked up the heads and piled them into a cairn, laughing while they did so.…”

  He stopped. His black-gloved hand rose toward his face, hesitated and withdrew. He walked on in silence.

  “And then what?” said Odah in a tired voice.

  “That is all,” he whispered.

  “No. You stayed in the valley two nights and two days after this slaughter?”

  “Yes.… I was ashamed of my cowardice, my brothers. I knew that Aa was still in that place. I thought perhaps I had not been killed in order that I, alone, might perform the ritual we had rehearsed, so I decided to wait in that place until the night of Aa’s Most Brightness. She did not tell me to do this, but I thought it best. When the demons had finished their work they gathered themselves together and rode out of the valley and down the great road. I waited. When Aa was bright I went into the valley and said the full ritual for my brothers. After that I slept and watched and said the hymns and did the dances as if I had been back in the Temple. On the third day I prepared myself for the Great Ritual. I fasted. Indeed, the demons had taken almost all our bread, so I was forced to fast. Toward evening I was saying the hymns of purification for myself—who else was there to say them?—when I saw you three priests come into the pass. I hid. You did not see me. The One of Sinu I knew by sight, and the boy with the hawk I remembered from the Renewal, but my brother of O was a stranger. My ritual was prepared to begin at the noon of Aa. But as I listened to your ritual I began to perceive that I should never perform it. And when you finished I knew that the Goddess was gone.”

  Tron walked on in a daze, remembering the lively look of the One of Aa as he chomped his bread in the secret room, or sulked over his colleagues’ refusal to let him sacrifice a convenient boy. Below them the coloring of the plateau changed as the shadows shortened. The heat of O became a blessing, and later a burden.

  They camped in the ravine they had found on their way to the mountain, and there, quietly, the One of Sinu died. Tron knew from the little hymns of Gdu that the night chill in the pass had got into the old man’s lungs; but he also knew there was an illness mentioned in no hymns, an exhaustion of the soul after that ritual. He could feel it in himself. He could see it in the dullness of Odah’s eye. Since the night of Aa’s Most Brightness they had all three been, so to speak, half-loosed from their moorings in the living earth, ready at the snap of one more strand to drift down the river to Her kingdom. They said the full ritual for the harsh old hero and buried him among the rocks.

  Now at least Tron was able to ride in the second litter—with the mountain fever in him he could never have managed the trek across the blistering desert to the ravine from which they had first climbed. He lay all day under the canopy, dry-mouthed. If he opened his eyes the glare of O seemed to pierce to his brain like heated needles. If he closed them he found himself roaming dizzily through the darkness inside himself, searching for a way … a way into what deeper dark? He was not aware of the. moment, toward evening, when the litters were at last lowered into the ravine.

  Next day he was better in his body but worse in his mind. He rode in the litter again. The priests of Sinu were anxious to return to the King with the news that the task was performed and the One of Sinu dead, and were impatient at having to carry the litters across the difficult paths in the beds of the ravines. The black-lizard clan had moved camp and so, to their guides’ surprise, had the rock-owl clan. The ravines seemed empty. The hunters became almost distraught with worry.

  Next morning as they ate their priest-bread Odah said, “My brothers, we have done what we came to do. Tron and I are ill, and this hurrying does us no good. If two of the hunters will stay with us to look after us until we are well, the other can guide you back to your war.”

  Tron was too dismal in his soul to notice how faint were the murmurs of dissent, but despite his illness Odah enforced his will. Hymns of farewell were said, and so they parted.

  The first thing the two hunters did was to find hiding places for the four of them, and to make sure that Tron and Odah understood the signal to hide—a series of clicks at the back of the tongue which sounded like a few pebbles falling, accompanied by a sharp outward movement of the arm, palm down. Then they dismantled the litters and carried the poles and the betraying red canopies and cushions half a mile back up the ravine, where they piled scrub and boulders over them. All this was mere habit—from birth the hunters had been trained to see to it that a stranger coming to any ravine should find it
apparently empty—but as the day wore on Tron realized that his two guardians were extra nervous.

  He himself sat with his back against a rock, heavy-eyed, dull-minded, and drowsy with the scent from the white-flowered creeper that foamed down the cliff behind him. The strip of shade at the foot of the cliff narrowed as O rose. Soon he would have to stand up and cross the scorching boulders to shelter beneath the other cliff. It seemed a long journey. The two hunters were out on the tableland, looking for nuts and roots, termites, lizards, fat thorn beetles, and anything else they or the priests could eat.

  “How are you?” said Odah suddenly. “How is your soul, Tron?”

  “Empty,” said Tron. “Everything seems to have gone.”

  “The Gods have left the world, I think,” said Odah. “I have had strange … I do not know what to call them … not thoughts, not dreams, not visions … it is as if everything that has happened was an answer to a need of the Gods. We believed that we performed the ritual because the King needed the Pass of Gebindrath to be opened, but the King’s need was only part of a long plan, and so was everything else. The closing of the Kingdom, the struggle between priests and Kings, my going to Kalakal, your taking of the Blue Hawk, the coming of the Mohirrim to Falathi—all these things happened in order that such-and-such a ritual should be performed on such-and-such a night, because the Gods required it for quite other purposes.”

  “What?”

  “I do not know. I do not know that what I have just said is true. But the Gods have gone, and I think They have taken something out of us, because They needed that also. Sinu is dead. You say your soul is empty. So is mine.”

  “Have they gone forever?”

  Before Odah could answer there was a sudden urgent rustling above their heads. The creepers swayed wildly and the two hunters came almost falling down into the floor of the ravine. One made the clicking noise and the gesture, then they both bent and lifted Odah and carried him bodily to his hiding place. By the time Tron had crawled behind the scented vines and found a nook for his hawk the hunters were scuttling like disturbed spiders among the boulders, picking up nut kernels and other traces of their presence, and scattering handfuls of gravel over footprints. Then they too darted into hiding.

  Out of the noon silence Tron heard a noise begin to swell, at first no louder than the movement of his own blood, then seeming to drum through the rock against which he huddled. When at last he heard the sound waves directly though the air he recognized them for hoofbeats.

  Close beside him the creepers rustled and he started, but it was only Talatatalatatehalatena joining him in the green and tangled shadows. They waited in silence. Tron could see the sharp rim of the opposite cliff through two or three places between the vine leaves, but he was not in fact watching when he sensed the hunter beside him stiffen into extra stillness. He looked up. There, appeared from nowhere, silhouetted against the glaring sky, was a blue horseman, motionless, with his rangy great dog beside him. The man peered down into the ravine, turned back and gestured. Then he jumped from his horse, lowered himself over the edge of the cliff and began to climb down. He was nothing like as skillful as the hunters, but soon he was out of Tron’s sight.

  Several more of the Mohirrim came into view with the same startling suddenness, but simply sat there waiting. Through another gap in the leaves Tron saw the climber halfway down the cliff. All the time the hoof-beats came nearer, and above them Tron could hear cries, and very far off what seemed to be a trumpet. A few minutes later the creepers to his right shook and swayed as the man began to climb up. Soon Tron was covered in an itchy layer of falling debris. When the leaves were still again, he found that his viewpoints had changed and he could look at a place a little farther along the cliff where an archer was posed, all alone, aiming across the ravine. The bow snapped out of its arc and a fine cord floated across the gulf behind the arrow. Tron heard a cry above his head, and at once a heavier cord began to jerk its way over, in its turn pulling a good-sized rope, which was barely taut before two men came swarming across it with more cords trailing from their belts.

  The Mohirrim worked at their bridge with controlled frenzy, despite the ferocious heat. There seemed to be very few shouts of command; each man knew what to do, and did it with the strenuous coordination of a gymnastic dance. As soon as the main bearer ropes were taut they were braced against swaying with angled ropes anchored up and down the clifftop, ready to take the wicker platforms—the bodies of the dismantled wagons—which formed the actual surface of the bridge. While lashing one of these fast, a man lost his hold and tumbled horribly to the boulders fifty feet below. He made no cry as he fell, and his companions above seemed not even to pause in their toil. Last of all, one stout rope was stretched from two structures out of sight behind the clifftops so that it ran six feet above the platforms; but before this was in place a fair-haired woman walked onto the bridge with an orange baby on one arm and a wagon wheel slung from the other shoulder. Two larger orange children followed her, carrying pots and furs.

  Miraculously fast though the bridge seemed to spring into being, it must have taken a full two hours to build, and all this time Tron could hear, gradually seeping nearer from beyond the clifftop, the erratic pulse of hooves, harsh cries, and now trumpet calls. He could see no one until they came within two or three feet of the cliff edge, but soon he knew that more was happening than the arrival of these Mohirrim and their crossing the ravine by means of a rope bridge. Farther off men were fighting. The trumpets were the trumpets of the Kingdom. He guessed that the King’s first war party must have met a band of the Mohirrim—the ones he had hidden from on his way to the Pass of Gebindrath—and had driven them back, somehow turning them off the road. Now the Mohirrim were in flight, but if they could cross the ravine while their rear guard protected them, they would be able to destroy the bridge and be, for the moment, safe. Hence the frenzy with which they had worked in the full heat of O. For them, all depended on how long their rear guard could hold out.

  It was a slow process, crossing. They seemed to do it family by family, first the women and children, carrying everything they could, then the women returning to lead over the laden wagon horses. This was what delayed them, as each horse had to be lashed to the higher rope on a sort of traveling sling; it walked across, but if it missed its footing the rope above would save it. The bridge seemed only strong enough to take one horse at a time, and few of them crossed without at least once trying to back off again. When all of one family’s goods and wagon horses were over, their war dog would tread delicately across, followed last of all by the warrior leading his own horse, unburdened, ready for instant battle.

  Meanwhile the noise of fighting came steadily nearer, and Tron thought he heard once or twice a shout in a language he could understand. The hunter beside him hissed and turned his head; leaning carefully sideways Tron found a gap through which he could see a place two hundred yards down the opposite cliff where a man was advancing on foot toward the fight, a soldier of the Kingdom with his pointed helmet and leather armor. Something about the way this man moved told Tron that he must be keeping rank with another man out of sight beyond him. He must be the very end of a line of men who were closing in on the Mohirrim. Now another man—the end of a second rank—was visible behind him. There was a cry, a trumpet call, and a clash of metal. The soldiers halted, tense, watching something that was happening farther away from the cliff. The front man raised his shield to cover his throat and lunged with his sword—Tron saw only the dog as it leaped. The man’s thrust missed, but his shield caught the snap of the dog’s fangs. The man behind him jumped forward to his help. An instant later the head and shoulders of a blue horseman showed, with one arm drawn back for a lance-thrust at someone out of sight. Then that tiny corner of the battle moved away behind the leaves. Tron saw the first soldier get groggily to his feet—the dog must almost have knocked him over the cliff—wipe his forehead with the back of his wrist, and walk on.

  There was no
thing Tron could do. Even to climb inside the creepers to a point from which he could have seen more of the battle would have been to risk betraying all four of them to the murderous horsemen. Then, as he watched the battle from below, seeing only a few sharp glimpses of fighting men and those distorted by the strange angle of his viewpoint, he realized that this was how he had seen almost all the King’s struggle against the priests, a few snatched moments perceived from the quite different plane where Tron lived and moved in the service of the Gods. Though in the final clash with the priests in the Temple he had played his part like a warrior, though with his rational mind he was now anxious that the army of the Kingdom should defeat these raiders, in his soul he felt that it was proper that he should be seeing the fight in this remote manner, like a priest watching the rituals of some other God.

  All the time the Mohirrim, children, women, and men, were moving with hurried calm across the ravine. The warriors all looked exhausted, and one or two turned before they stepped onto the bridge and shook their weapons at the invisible enemy. The children were quick and obedient, the women more beautiful than any human Tron had ever seen, stepping with the confident pride of queens even when they were burdened with the belongings of their moving households. As the noose closed on the bridgehead, so its progress slowed. The Mohirrim seemed to know exactly what they were about. Tron thought that all but a very few would escape to safety.

  But suddenly he heard cries of alarm and warning above his head, and shouts and trumpet calls from the far side of the battle. For once the woman who was at that moment on the bridge turned to look at what was happening farther up the ravine; when she tried to go on, the horse she was leading jibbed; she tugged once at its reins and it began to shy; the bridge bucketed about; the woman drew a knife, leaned past the whirling hooves and slashed through the sling that held it safe to the rope above; unbalanced, it slipped sideways, fell, and with a screaming neigh slithered off the bridge. The woman was already running to the near cliff, and another woman leading her horse onto the bucking platforms.