The Blue Hawk Read online

  “Where will the boy do the training?” asked the Keeper of the Rods.

  “The Temple of Tan,” said the One of O.

  “Yes, there’s good open ground above that,” said the One of Gdu. “If it can be done, that will do. I shall choose a discreet priest to help him.”

  “No,” whispered the Mouth of Silence. “He must do it alone. He and none other, or why did the Gods choose him? Praise the Gods, boy, and be happy. You serve in a great business. There is no doubt that Gdu spoke in your heart.”

  III

  Tron had seen the One of Gdu train a common river hawk to complete obedience in fifteen days. But Tron had been at the Temple of Tan thirty-seven days before the Blue Hawk settled again onto his own wrist and stayed there without a frenzied struggle against the leg throng. It was another twenty before, flying on a long, fine leash, it learned to return to a swung lure and thence without fuss to Tron’s gauntlet. He knew that he would never have progressed even that far without the help of the Gods.

  The deserted Temple of Tan stood at the point of a large sloping triangle of rocky desert, around which the river curved in a vast, abrupt bend. On the far bank spread peopled miles of fields and irrigation ditches, but the Temple on the promontory was deserted, except for the little scurryings of bats and lizards and the huge presence of the Gods. Their statues watched him as he moved across courtyards deep in blown sand, or along corridors slimy with bird droppings and bat mess; Their slow breathing seemed to fill the evening air; Their voices whispered in his dreams. At times the fear of Them so overcame him that he longed to run out into the desert, to run and then walk and finally stagger and fall and sink into Aa’s embrace and thus be free of the pressure of Them.

  Only the hawk kept him sane. That was his work, and the fear of the Gods concentrated him onto it. While he was with the bird—simply sitting beside it to accustom it to his presence, or stitching a hood, or coaxing it to take a scrawny gobbet of meat from his hand, the work occupied his mind and freed him from dread. This was what the Gods had asked him to do, so the Major Priests had said. How could there be anything to fear? Or perhaps the Gods had sent the fear to help him understand the bird, whose terror of his presence was much the same as his own terror of the presence of the Gods, a wild and useless struggle to escape, a blank failure to realize that he meant only good.

  The nights were worst, when Aa ruled the cold desert sky and there were no black-robed priests to weave a web of spells over the Temple, a barrier against the nightmare creatures of Aa. There was not even any sweetwater to drug him so that he didn’t wake and see the staring statues of the Gods, frosted with silver and casting shadows blacker than the cave of Aa. Sometimes the dark sky was full of a sudden whirl of bats. A fox would bark in the desert. Something large would rustle against the Temple wall.…

  Then he would look at the hawk, sleeping on its perch, indifferent, and think, We are both servants of Gdu. Gdu will guard us both, the hawk knows.

  Once the hawk had learned to fly readily to the lure there came a great change. Every day it seemed to learn new things. When he picked it up in the morning it ruffled its feathers with an eager air, as though it looked forward to the day’s training. Within ten days he had taken the heart-stopping but inescapable risk of letting it fly free, watching it curve away, hesitate, mount into the sky above him while he made the falconer’s wavering whistles, and then come plunging to the lure. When it stood on his gauntlet again tearing at a bloody tidbit Tron found that all his own veins were tingling with a new, wild joy, something he had never felt before and would never know again to the same degree, the establishment of a bond of trust and partnership between the pair of them, sealed by this single, intense moment.

  Four days later the hawk made its first kill. It was an accident. They were still training to the lure and the hawk had swung to its proper height above him when a small gray wading bird came carelessly out of a reedbed on the riverbank. The hawk plunged. The wader made a zigzag dash for the next reedbed, but the hawk, hurling down with half-folded wings, crashed into it a yard from safety, coming with such an impact that there was an audible thud and a puff of gray down in midair. When Tron came up, the hawk was neatly plucking out the victim’s thigh feathers, but raised its head and made its silent hiss at his approach. He spoke quietly to it, the usual lines from the little hymn, and it jumped to his wrist without trouble. With his free hand he finished plucking the wader’s leg, cut off the drumstick and gave it to the hawk, who tore at it, full of the lust of the kill.

  The training went well for eight days. Then Tron lost the Blue Hawk. Being a mountain bird, it suffered more than he did from the bludgeoning heat of noon, and even Tron was glad to rest for the hours of O’s greatest anger in the shade of the massive stone of the Temple, so for both their sakes he preferred not to stray far from there. Faint breezes off Tan’s surface made the river-banks a little cooler than the still dry heat of the desert, and there was plenty of easy game along this haunted and unpeopled shoreline. Besides, though Tron was aware of the danger of hawking close to a barrier that he could not cross, he had begun unconsciously to feel and act as though the Gods would not let him fail.

  Of course he avoided the areas where the reedbeds made too much cover. The fat little rust-colored bird that rose at his feet looked straightforward enough, but it must have been some kind of burrower because, just as the hawk came whistling down it flicked into a neat hole in the bare scree of the bank. The hawk rose, baffled, but before Tron could begin to swing the lure, a flight of small black duck rose scuttering from the water. At once the hawk was after them, but they were far too fast for it, moving like fish shadows above the calm surface and disappearing among reeds on the far bank. At the limit of his vision Tron saw the hawk rise to search along that bank, a tiny dot, wavering and vanishing and coming again in the hot, unsteady air. Quite soon he could not see it at all.

  All afternoon he swung the lure, whistled, hooted. Loss was like cold fire burning his bones. He wasn’t afraid of what the priests might do to him, or even of the anger of the Gods at his stupidity. It was the breaking of his bond with the hawk, a feeling that half his soul had been snatched from him—that was worse than any deaths. O settled in the west, making the pillars of the deserted Temple half a mile up the bank glow as if they had been taken fresh from a smithy furnace. The gold-wrinkled river blinded his eyes. Despairingly he prayed to Gdu, whistled, and swung. Then out of the glaring sky the hawk dropped to the lure. The first he knew of it was the thud of its striking. It tore eagerly at the meat tied to the lure and then at the tidbit he gave it when it was safe on his wrist, so he knew that Gdu had prevented it from catching any prey on the far bank, and perhaps had arranged for the burrowing bird and the duck to teach him not to rely too much on the goodwill of the Gods.

  That night he slept little, but for the first time since he had come to the Temple of Tan he lay in the dark, unafraid. He realized that he had become a different person. He had discovered how to be alone.

  The great Temple had always been full of noises, the throb of gongs, the steady pulse of hymns—either the priests singing the deep praise of some God or the shriller noise of the boys learning a fresh section of the million lines they needed to know: one of Sodala’s little hymns about the cure of sheep maggots; or Tan’s describing the choosing and shaping of wood for a water-wheel; or Gdu’s listing the symptoms of marsh fever. Then there had been the cracking cry of the dance-masters as they led their groups through the exercises that kept limbs supple for the great rituals, and from over the Palace wall the slap of wood on leather and the shouts of young nobles learning the arts of war. And the silence of night had been concealed by the sweetwater drugs.

  Except in that sleep Tron had never spent more than a few minutes at a time without the consciousness of sixty other boys all around him, eating the same bread, moving the same limbs to the cry of the dance-master, muttering the same lines of a hymn. That tide of boys was all he knew. He could r
emember nothing else. He had no idea—in fact, he had never asked himself before now—how he had come to the Temple. He must have been born somewhere. Aa was the sole God of birth, as She was of death; but Gdu’s priests had to know many little hymns about the sicknesses and cures surrounding the process of birth, so Tron supposed he had a mother who had endured the normal human pain of bringing him into the world. But boys never asked questions; what they needed to know they were told in due time.

  Now, lying in the dark, Tron saw how he had changed. A boy brought from the Temple to this loneliness would be like an ant taken far from its nest to a flat place where there are not even any hostile nests. The ant would meander about, aimlessly, or stand still for long minutes, but neither its stillness nor its dashes hither and thither would have meaning or purpose. Those things belong to the nest.

  However Tron’s life had meaning and purpose, in the hawk. This was not the priests’ mysterious purpose, nor the Gods’. It was a purpose in itself, the contact between the soul of a man and the soul of wildness in the bird. He had placed its perch so that from where he lay on his mattress the hawk was outlined against an arched window that gave onto the moonlit courtyard. Now he whispered, as he had done so often, not only with his lips but with his movements and glances and the reaching out of his soul, the words that Gdaal had spoken to Tan when they had met in the mists of the first morning,

  “I will not be your master

  I will not be your servant

  I will be your companion

  As two horns on one antelope

  Two wings on one bird

  Two eyes in one head.”

  Perhaps the bird heard his whisper, for it stirred on its perch and settled again. But in that moment he felt the bird’s soul reach out to meet his. They touched. Soon after that he slept.

  Next morning Tron walked a couple of miles inland, thinking as he peered around the shapeless hummocks of sour earth and tumbled rock and the occasional stunted scrub that there wouldn’t be much to hunt here. But he found great sport. There was a harelike creature that would dash at great speed for fifty yards and then cower and become a mottled rock; he found that if he marked the exact spot where it finished its first dash he could put the hawk into the air above him and walk forward to startle the hare again—if he missed it by three feet it would not move—and then the hawk could hurl into it from above, using its height to reach a speed that would match the hare’s. So fierce was the impact of that dive that the only hare they killed that first day—they missed a couple—died with a broken neck and its fur barely marked by its blood. There was a slower yellow bird about as big as a dove, which had the ability to sideslip almost at right angles in flight at the last instant, dodging the hawk’s dive as it labored on to cover. Then followed a swirling and jinking pursuit, which the yellow bird usually won until the hawk taught itself a technique of turning so rapidly out of its first dive that it could hit the yellow bird on the upstroke. It took a week to learn this, but after that it seldom missed.

  Meanwhile, the two of them had discovered by accident the best prey of all. Walking forward to put up a cowering hare, with the hawk poised sixty feet above him, Tron was startled by an explosion of hitherto invisible large birds, eight of them whirring out of the rocks around him. Instantly the hawk stooped from its height into a whistling dive, talons foremost, hitting into the fattest of the bunch with a smack like two fists struck hard together. When he picked the dead bird up, Tron found that it was something like a guinea fowl, but brown and streaked with black. He knew because of its occasional appearance among the Temple paintings that it must have some ritual significance, but he didn’t know what. (If he had been chosen for Gdaal, he would of course have known the names and habits of all these creatures from the little hymns, long before he ever saw a live specimen.)

  The thrill of hunting this bird came from its shyness. It moved about in small coveys and seemed always to have a keen-eyed sentry at watch, for often a flock would rise and lumber away when Tron was half a mile off. Then it was a matter of putting the hawk into the air, letting it gain its full height, and walking carefully forward to the spot where he had seen them settle. The presence of the hawk in the air discouraged them from moving off again until Tron was almost among them, and if the hawk was flying too low they would not rise at all. This meant that provided Tron had marked the birds down accurately he was close enough to see the marvelous moment when a hawk plunges from a hundred and fifty feet in one clean dive into a prey twice its own size, knocking it out of the air by the speed of its onrush. It was difficult. It depended on teamwork and luck. Three times out of four Tron failed to put the birds up at all. But when it worked it was glorious.

  Tron, though aware of his changing nature, did not put into words the question how a boy reared in the machinelike, minute-filling ritual of the Temple should make the leap from the ordered satisfaction of a hymn well learned or a dance well done to the vivid thrill of the moment when a hawk strikes home. But he knew that this was something true to his own nature, a nature that had found no outlet in the Temple until that moment when Gdu had whispered in his heart and he had lifted the Blue Hawk from its jeweled perch. When he woke each morning, stiff among the motionless Gods, his first thought was of the day’s hunting. When he lay waiting for sleep each night his mind was full of hoarded images, the eye of a hare glazed with death and the dribble of purplish blood from its mouth, a yellow bird making the last jink to the safety of a scrub patch, the hurtle of the hawk’s dive.

  Except for what he needed to feed the hawk he gave the creatures they killed to the deaf-and-dumb old man who came every third day with supplies. He accepted them with slavering amazement. Otherwise Tron saw nobody while Aa veiled and unveiled her face three times, and the whole land waited for flood time.

  IV

  One morning a particularly shy covey of the large birds took Tron farther from the Temple of Tan than he had yet explored, and by the time the hawk had made its kill O was beginning to make breath scorch in the nostrils, the ground burn under the feet, and the whole landscape seem to jump and waver in the unsteady air. The heat would have been unbearable by the time they had got back to the Temple, so Tron made for a large rock outcrop in the hope of finding an overhang or gulley where they could sweat out the worst of noon.

  Rounding the boulders on the northern side, he found that there were men there, on the other edge of a pebbly arena that stretched away from the rock. He saw three nobles on horseback with hawks on their wrists, two servants carrying a stretcherlike framework on which more hawks perched, several other servants erecting gaudy parasols and beginning to lay out cushions and baskets of food.

  Tron froze and began to back away, but one of the nobles had already seen him. This man spoke, but stayed where he was. Another noble wheeled his pony and came trotting over, frowning—a middle-aged man, heavy-shouldered, his hair and beard curled and dyed bright orange. He reined in and stared at Tron, craning forward in his saddle as if to study him better. The Blue Hawk began to fidget at this unknown presence, so Tron slipped its hood on its head and it quietened. (He never used a hood, but he had trained the hawk to accept it because the little hymn told him to.) Despite his apparent anger, the noble thought it proper to wait until Tron had dealt with his bird.

  “So priests want to be nobles now?” he snarled. “What do you hunt, priest? Men?”

  Tron unslung the coarse bag he had made for carrying game and took out a hare and the covey-bird. The noble leaned forward to peer at them, so Tron held them up. The noble’s expression changed. Shock struggled with anger.

  “That’s royal game!” he cried.

  “I did not know,” said Tron.

  The noble called, but already the two others were trotting across. One was a tall young man with a bent nose. The second was also young, and Tron knew his face before he saw the Eye of Gdu in the center of his forehead. It was not the same King who had listened to the Great Hymn in the House of O and Aa, but it w
as the King—the same hawk look, the same wary but arrogant regard. Tron stiffened inside himself. More and more he had become certain that the Gods approved of all he had done, and the priests too. But what about this King, whose father had died because a certain boy had taken the Blue Hawk from its perch—and died, too, not by the direct working of the Gods, but because the priests had seen to it that he should die? Would he make any allowances for the will of the Gods?

  “Look, Majesty,” said the older man. “Priests are hunting kingfowl!”

  “Hunting well, too,” said the King in a cheerful voice. “A hare. Kingfowl on foot. Chancy sport.”

  He looked at the hooded hawk, stared, and then studied Tron’s face. Not a muscle changed but a withdrawn look came into his eyes. His horse scuffed a hoof. He shrugged. His smile was thin.

  “My Lords,” he said, “I must talk to this priest who hunts my birds. Have them send food and shade over to that slab of rock there. And two stands.”

  He slipped neatly down from his pony without unsettling the large and fantastically hooded hawk on his own wrist. The younger noble took the reins and led the pony away while Tron followed the King to a flat red boulder almost like an altar slab, which shouldered out of a scree of smaller stuff. The King dusted the surface of the slab with a gauntlet and sat down. Tron stood waiting.

  “How do you catch kingfowl on foot?” asked the King.

  Tron explained. The King nodded.

  “You must mark them down well,” he said. “That needs a hunter’s eye. I will see that after we’ve eaten. Yes, I’d like to see the Blue Hawk in flight before I go to that kind woman.”

  Tron blinked. He knew that the common people of the Kingdom would never pronounce the name of Aa, but always found other ways of talking about Her. He hadn’t realized that even the King acknowledged the same fear. The King didn’t notice his surprise, but sat brooding, then studied the hawk again.