The Blue Hawk Read online

  “Yes,” he said, “you were close to that place, I’m told. But I can’t follow those paths. You see, Tron, what they’re saying in the army is that the curse is still there. Half Her priests were slaughtered in the place, and of you three two died and one came near to dying. But if you will tell me plain that the curse is lifted, then I shall know it’s true. And if I know, I can persuade the others to come with me.”

  Tron hesitated. Truth? All he knew was misty, half-glimpsed, ungraspable. All he had done had been for the sake of the Gods. He had been a tool in Their hands, and the finished work was Their affair. But now he remembered that there were really two Trons—not only this obedient and willing tool but also a boy who had met a King in the shadow of a desert outcrop, and who had discovered there the obligations of friendship.

  “It’s difficult to explain,” he said. “Sometimes I think I understand, and sometimes I think I’m making it all up because I can’t help looking for some sort of explanation. But I’m sure the pass is clear.”

  “The curse of that kind woman is lifted?” insisted the King.

  “It wasn’t Her curse, it was the priests’. Oh, she was there, but … She was there because the Gods needed the Kingdom to be closed off, I think. But now She’s left. They’ve all left, all but …”

  “They’ll come back,” said the King, almost flippantly. “But you are sure that I can come and go through the pass and She will not care?”

  “Yes. The Kingdom is no longer closed.”

  “That’s true. D’you know, I had news from the north only five days ago that a party of merchants from beyond the marshes had made their way through somehow and were asking permission to trade! And another thing—do you remember how I took you that first day to show you the salt valley? Apparently salt is a valuable stuff in Falathi! That’ll be something to start on when this war’s over. Lord Sinu, but the Mohirrim are warriors! I’m beginning to think that if only I could set up some sort of alliance with them, train them and control them—if you can tame a Blue Hawk, Tron, I can tame the Mohirrim—why! perhaps that was a sign! What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. A sign? Of what?”

  “I’ve said this to no one else, Tron. Sometimes I dare not even say it to myself. But we’ve been cooped up too long between the marshes and the mountains, while outside there’s a whole world to conquer. I’m beginning to think that with the Mohirrim on my side I could do just that!”

  Sitting on the stool with his knees hunched under his chin, the King poured out plans and dreams. Tron was too tired now to listen in detail, but with a half-drowsing mind he saw that the King was, as it were, like the great river itself; even on the placid days when they had first met he had contained in himself energy and purpose, just as the calm reaches of the river contained their moving weight of water, building up the pressure that would roar in foam through the gorge and thunder over the falls. The struggle with the priests and this war were like that, but even in the flurry and hurl of them the King’s mind already sought the unknown lands beyond.

  Tron now knew himself to be quite different, two-natured, but beneath both natures something like a desert well, dug centuries ago, deep and still feeding on streams that had never seen the light. He knew too that if he was to answer his puzzle he must explore not only outward, like the King, but inward into those depths.

  “I’m tiring you,” said the King, rising suddenly. “I’ll come again as soon as I can. And you’ve got to get well, Tron, though the priest of Gdu who’s been in charge of you says that you’re healing faster than he dared hope. That’s good. I want to go hawking with you again before too long.”

  “Where is my hawk, Majesty?”

  “Here, and it’s being looked after. But it won’t let anyone near it without a fight. It is like a Mohir, you know.”

  “Majesty, there’s a shepherd’s shelter up above the Jaws of Alaan. Will you give orders for the hawk to be moved up there? And there’s a girl in the village called Taleel; she must feed it and keep the cave clean. It must see no one else.”

  “It’ll go quite wild again if you treat it like that, Tron.”

  “It is wild, Majesty. It cannot be tamed.”

  The King laughed, once more not understanding. He smiled his farewell, but Tron could see that as he vanished behind the tapestries he was already thinking of the next things he must do. His voice dwindled down the ward, a cheerful exchange of soldier-talk with the wounded men.

  For several days no new wounded came to Kalakal. Muscle by muscle Tron recovered the use of his limbs. Where he reached the fiery barrier of pain he found that if he needed to he could, by the use of his own will and the help of the power around him, roll the flames aside and pass through without flinching. The pain was there, but it was somehow outside him. But mostly there was no need; he discovered calm and gentle movements, without waking the fires, to exercise his mending body as he lay there. He also rested, thought, and sang in his mind long hymns of praise to Gdu.

  Ten days after the King’s visit the priest of Gdu was accompanied on his rounds by a red-robed priest whom Tron recognized as Tanta, the deputy he had first awakened that night in the Temple. He now carried the lion-headed staff on the One of Sinu. As they straightened from beside a mattress a few places away, Tron heard Tanta say, “You are indeed a Lord of healing, my brother. There were men we sent back from the battles whom I thought it would have been kinder to kill, and here I find them well on the road to health.”

  “Praise the God, not me, my brother. And this mountain air. Now, take this boy here …”

  The new One of Sinu stared down at Tron. It seemed somehow wrong that he was not also blind.

  “We have met,” he said drily. “The King sends you his good wishes, boy.”

  “What is happening, my brother, my father? Is he well?”

  “He is well. Nothing else has happened. No more of the blue demons have come through the pass, but the Lord Kalavin led a scouting party up there and found a great rope bridge across the place where the road was broken, a bridge strongly guarded. That seems a sign that the demons intend to come back, and come in greater force, so we are preparing for them. I have come to warn my brother that soon there may be many more wounded needing his care, and to arrange for those who are fit to travel to be carried back to the plains. Can the boy go, my brother?”

  “On a litter, certainly.”

  “No,” said Tron, “I must stay here.”

  “Your place is needed, boy,” snapped the One of Sinu.

  “I have a hut in Upper Kalakal,” said Tron. “It is mine. I built it. Let me be carried there.”

  “You may be the King’s friend …” began the One of Sinu angrily.

  “I remember this child, my brother,” said the priest of Gdu in a curiously quiet voice. “It has been puzzling me since he came here, like a dream one cannot recapture, but when he spoke just now … He was the child who took the hawk at the ceremony of Renewal, half a year gone by. I think the hand of the Gods is on him. He must do what he must.”

  The One of Sinu snorted and turned away. He was a true priest of the old sort, Tron could see, living by ritual and precedent. Though he and Tron had been for a moment allies, in his heart he wanted nothing to do with a child who broke rituals, built huts in remote shepherd villages, struck up friendships with Kings, crept around the Temple at night disguised as a austringer, and told Major Priests outright what they must and must not do. Watching him stalk stiffly away down the ward, Tron felt a surge of pity for him. There would be many like him left in the Temple—what would they do, now that the world was so changed? How many generations would they spend performing meaningless rituals in front of empty altars? He sighed and withdrew again into his own depths.

  Fifteen days later Tron was walking, with one arm around Curil’s shoulders, in front of the huts at Kalakal. Under his free arm swung one of Odah’s crutches, but he was standing straight and was now at last sure that in the end his back would heal complet
ely, and that he would once again walk like a normal man. But it was a slow business. After even a few minutes he seemed to be very tired, and the ache in his back began to seep outward along his nerves.

  “I must rest, Curil.”

  “That’s right. Haste was what made the hut fall down, they say. Hello! What’s that? News! Talk about haste!”

  Following the line of Curil’s arm, Tron could see the coming dust cloud, a puff of fawn smoke, narrow and glinting at its near end, several miles away through the mottled terrain of the scrubland beyond the ravine. To his eyes it seemed to be barely moving, but by the time he had rested and then made another feeble circuit he could just pick out the blue glimmer of the pennon on the rider’s lance. He allowed Curil to help him onto his cot in front of his hut, and lay there on his side, watching. At last a horn rang out and another answered it, and then the messenger led his horse between the sentries at the edge of the ravine. The animal looked near foundering. Tron saw the glint of brandished swords and a second later heard the sound of men shouting. A soldier ran off toward the spread of tents along the lower slopes. Curil was already striding down the hill when the uneven, wavering note of cheers began to spread through the wards of wounded men.

  Toward evening next day, long caterpillars of dust began to rise in the scrubland, where the first trains of litters and stretchers brought what seemed like an army of wounded soldiers toward Kalakal. By a promise of beer and roast mutton Curil coaxed one of them to come and sit with the villagers round their fire and tell them what had happened. This was a tough little man from the northern marshlands who’d had his shield arm horribly mangled by one of the Mohirrim war hounds. His twanging northern accent was made harder to understand by the slur from the poppy-cake he’d been given to dull the pain, but he repeated himself so often that at length his hearers puzzled his story out.

  “Sinu! But that was a fight! They’d left their women an’ wagons behind this time, an’ I don’t wonder. So many of ’em! An’ I’d thought we was a big army! Huh! They could’ve eaten us for breakfast if we’d let ’em! But we knew what we was doing. First we let one of their scouting parties get right along the road to where it ends in the big sands—y’know, it looks as if it’s not going anywhere from there, and you’ve only got to ride a mile into them dunes and you’re lost. That was while the main body of their army was still coming through the pass. And before that we’d spent a lot of time making two or three trails up toward the place where we wanted to lead ’em. We’d even built a couple of villages and made ’em look as if they’d just been abandoned—you know, just to make the savages feel they was getting somewhere at last. And we’d left other bits of signs along the way—a smashed chariot, a bit of dropped baggage with jewels and silk in it, campfires, that sort of thing. An’ we let ’em see our patrols, always from that direction.

  “They didn’t stop to think. They came after us like a dog after an otter. Sinu! they was quick. A couple of our patrols got caught and they wiped ’em clean out. But you see they got to be quick. Army like that can’t hang around in desert country—they got to get to where there’s water for their horses and food for themselves. We put up a bit of a fight at a couple of ravines, but then we let ’em bust through. We even let ’em capture our main camp—tents, bedding, hangings, clothes, wine—lashings of wine—a bit of food. But no water. Not one drop.

  “So we sat around that night among the thorn bushes and listened to twenty thousand men getting blind drunk. Noise! I daresay they thought it was music. Next morning they woke up (them as did wake up, ’cause there’d been something in some of that wine) and found themselves sitting in a flat desert bit between three ravines with us all around, grinning at ’em from the far sides. There was a narrow way out at one end, and that was where most of the fighting happened to begin with. I saw it like watching a hunting, because my Lord’s household was guarding the ravine to the right. The savages came swarming down, all disorderly, and our front rank gave a bit and gave a bit, slowing ’em down, and then the second ranks came through and punched ’em back into the mess of their own second ranks. Then they’d draw off and come again, just the same way, not learning anything.

  “Them dogs is a terror—I should know—till you work out how to deal with ’em. One man takes the dog and the other takes the savage, that’s the way. But the horses was pitiful. One charge, I saw a savage riding full tilt and before he reached our lines his horse dropped dead, just like that, died of thirst at full gallop! Y’see, that made a difference too, their horses not being fresh. They was a handful enough as it was.

  “Then, after quite a bit of that, they went back to the middle of their plain and thought about it, and then they did the sensible thing—nah, not sensible—sensible thing would have been to surrender—but at least they decided to try to break out all round at the same time. Not as difficult as it sounds, ’cause we couldn’t guard every yard of it. The bit they was on was, oh, couple of miles and almost twice that long. Our orders was to push ’em back where we could, but soon as they got across in any numbers to let ’em join up and send a runner back to the cavalry, lying in reserve behind us, and they’d come up in force and punch ’em back over the cliff. It worked a treat, far as anything works a treat in a battle. Quite a long while they was losing ten, twenty men for every one of ours. Y’see, in a lot of places they couldn’t get the dogs across, let alone the horses. Even so they kept on coming at us like madmen, never gave us a rest, an’ by the middle of the afternoon they’d got a couple of those bridges of theirs across farther up the ravine from us—don’t know how we let that happen—and then everything was a real mess for a bit. I expect it was really all under control if you’d been looking at it from the outside, but it didn’t feel like that from the inside, just dust, and yells, an’ a blue savage coming at you round a thorn bush an’ you’ve only got half a second to get your guard up, an’ you can’t relax even in the middle of your own troop, ’cause one savage will fling himself at half a dozen armed men soon as he sees ’em, an’ then there’s dogs whose masters have been killed racing up and down through the mess biting anything that isn’t blue—that’s how I got mine—things seemed to be calming down a bit by then, but he came at me from behind, an’ … well, that’s about all I saw with my own eyes, ’cause though I still had my good sword-arm my Lord sent me back to the rear saying it was as good as over anyway.

  “Our real camp was tucked away in another ravine, so I reported there. But there was wounded men coming in most of the night, so I heard what was going on. It finished up with the King taking his troops out of the place they’d first attacked an’ letting what was left of the savages get away that way while he cleaned up the ones who’d made it over the ravines—drove ’em back an’ let ’em straggle away up farther into the desert, fewer than us now, more than half of ’em on foot, no food, not much water up that way. There won’t be many of ’em left in a day or two, I shouldn’t think. An’ then when the army’s had a bit of rest he’s going to see if he can force the pass.”

  That night Tron dreamed a dream he’d had once before in Kalakal, about the great rock plain full of statues of the Gods, and his search for the Lord Gdu, and his finding a sand heap on which lay the Blue Hawk, dead, being eaten by ants. This time the dream continued. When he gazed round the plain he saw that all the statues had turned into ordinary pillars of rock, such as dotted the desert above the Temple of Tan. But there was still one statue of Gdu, smaller than the others, and becoming steadily less before his eyes. This remorseless dwindling seemed more horrible than anything else in the dream. He woke when the statue was no larger than a man.

  It was very early dawn. Carefully he rolled himself out of his bed, picked up the crutches, and laboriously swung himself away from the huts and along the hillside path. The green world was drenched with spray. He seemed to breathe strength from its sappy freshness, but even so he needed to rest every thirty yards. The sun rose with blazing suddenness and twinkled into its seven colors o
ff a million grass-poised droplets. Below him horn answered horn as the sentries changed posts. Sheep bleated, but he was over the round of the spur before the village truly woke.

  The hawk was in the cave, stiff on its perch and glowering at the morning brilliance. The moment it saw him it flung itself back with wildly beating wings, but the tug of its leg thongs threw it off balance so that it tumbled clumsily to the ground, still in a frenzy of pinions, too crazed with fear of his approach even to strike at him when he bent down to loose the thongs. Even in the worst days at the Temple of Tan it had never seemed so wild as this.

  White fire burned down his spine as he lifted the bird by the thongs, a blur of slate-blue wings. Unwincing, he gripped the legs above the talons with his left hand and moved the right to grip one wing close to the joint and force it back against the body. Another quick change of grip and he had the hawk the right way up, both wings held firmly folded. Blood oozed from a gash in the back of his left hand, in just the same place as that where the hawk had once struck the One of Gdu in the Temple. But apart from a few galvanic jerks the bird lay still between his hands, glaring furiously about it. He waited in stillness and let the pain in his back die away. Then he caught it unaware and managed to slip the hood over its head.

  With only one crutch, because he needed an arm to carry the hawk, the walk across the hillside was slow and painful. He found Taleel sitting on an antheap and winding wool into thread. He put the bird down on another hillock and hobbled toward her. She looked up and jumped to her feet.

  “Tron! You look awful. You oughtn’t to have come so far. Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I had to come.”

  He eased himself onto the grass and lay there for a while, letting the pain-sweat dry and watching her quick fingers, clever and thoughtless on the thread, and the hypnotic dance of her bobbin.