The Blue Hawk Read online

  As soon as his mind was free of the business of making these small arrangements, fear came seeping back. Aa, he calculated, was now moving toward the night of Her Most Darkness and would not rise for several hours. But when She did … That glaring eye would look down on the desert and the fields and the shining river and inspect everything that man had done during the day. It would see the barge, see the slit bands, see through deck and curtain to a boy who had broken the Ritual of the King’s Going and now lay huddled and helpless on a coil of rope.… The fear closed around him. It was like a pool of darkness in which he was drowning. He was suddenly certain that the only safe place for him was back in the coffin—the birds and the other things could stay where they were. He pulled the curtain aside and scrambled out onto the deck.

  There, in the last of dusk, he saw the spread arch of the canopy, which had shielded the coffin from the sun all day, painted above and below with the image of Gdu in flight, still dimly visible. He whispered his hymns to the God, and then a late farewell to O. While he was doing this he noticed that Tan was beginning to make a mist on Her surface and knew that by the time Aa rose the barge would be veiled from Her seeing. Then distantly through the dark he heard the chant and clatter of yet another village waiting to help the King on his journey. Feeling he was doubly protected by kind Gods, he crept back and hid in the curtained cave.

  This time the scene was lit by flaring bundles of dried reed soaked in wax, and the villagers were protected from the dark by a priest of Aa, to sanctify their presence in the night. Tron, peeping through the curtain, shrank back when he saw that cowled figure as black as a midnight shadow amid the glitter and glare. It was said that Aa gave Her servants power to see in the dark. Tron was suddenly certain that the eyes hidden in the shadow of the black cowl would notice that there was something wrong with the linen bands, or even pierce through the curtain and see him crouching there. But the priest made no sign, the villagers did their age-old duty to the Dead King, and at last the clatter and flame dwindled back into the night.

  An hour later, on the other bank, another village passed the barge on in much the same way. Then it became very dark as the mist hid the stars. Tron slept.

  A heavy thud woke him. He was just thinking that the barge must have drifted into an unexpected sandbank when a voice swore, fiercely but softly. He lay rigid. Something scraped. Another voice whispered. “No harm done. I’m aboard. All fast this end.”

  Kalavin, thought Tron. He must have brave servants to come and look for me in the utter dark of Aa. He was just about to call out when the man spoke aloud, his voice sharp with anger and surprise.

  “Gdaal’s arrow! Someone’s been! This band’s cut!”

  A different voice told him to keep his mouth shut, then cried out with equal anger that the other band was cut too. With extreme care Tron twisted and peeped through the curtain. By starlight he could just make out the bulk of the coffin and the curve of the canopy over it. Outlines changed as the lid heaved open.

  “In you go, Kintali,” whispered a voice. “Feel about. They may have missed something.”

  “I’m frightened,” said a child in a whimpering voice.

  “Gdaal gave you the right, boy. I robbed the King’s coffin when I was no older than you. How can you teach your son if you don’t do it yourself?”

  After a long, shuffling pause the boy’s voice said, “But there’s a lot of things here!”

  “Hand them out one at a time. Got it. Hnff! That’s spices. Tip ’em over the side, Anagdaal—we can’t have the priest sniffing out myrrh under the floor of your hut. Right, Kintali. Got it. Got it. What in Gdaal’s name is this? A dead bird! That’s new. Better put it back. Got it. No, Kintali, that’s his sword. That stays. We never take the weapons. That all? Sure? There’s usually a couple more boxes and some food.”

  “The other thieves must ha’ took ’em,” said the second man.

  “Why didn’t they take it all, then?”

  “Not time. They’d have to get it done in that reach between Tan’s elbow and Para-para.”

  “Perhaps they took some and left some so that we should be satisfied, and not cause trouble,” said a softer voice.

  “It’s never happened before,” said the leader angrily.

  The soft voice chuckled at him. Tron heard them lower the lid, refasten the bands, cast off, and ripple into the dark. He lay still at first, locked in shock at the callous blasphemy. But slowly, like warmth after chill, a sort of exhilaration crept through him at the discovery that there were people in the riverland living a secret life, unknown to the priests, and had been living it for generations. And yet they too believed in the Gods. The man had said that Gdaal approved of this hunting, and the woman had been named for that God.…

  The woman. The softer voice! The chuckle in the dark! Tron had known that when he was eventually confirmed into the service of Gdu he would most probably be sent to be the household priest of some noble family, blessing their hawks and healing their serfs, and that there he was bound to meet with women. He had never dreamed that his first encounter with that half of his own species would come as he crouched in hiding and listened to the talk of a family of hereditary coffin-robbers.

  The chill of dawn on the river caused Tron to wake thinking he was still in the Temple of Tan, and then to realize that quite early on the previous afternoon he must have drifted past that house of ghostly Gods without seeing it. When he edged his curtain aside he found both banks of the river hidden in mist, so it seemed safe to explore the barge again and check that the robbers had set all to rights. They had done better despite the dark, he discovered, than he had managed by daylight, except that they had left the dead dove lying against the foot of the coffin. He picked it up and took it back to his hiding place, where he cut its leg off and gave the drumstick to the hawk to tear at. The thigh he dropped all bloody into the pouch of his tunic, having already acquired the hawker’s absentminded habit of carrying odd gobbets of raw meat around.

  He merely whispered his morning hymns, in case he was close enough to either unseen bank to be heard. While he ate breakfast he looked at the paintings with which the coffin was covered; they told the story of the wanderings of Saba in the land of Aa, and showed him riding a wicked-looking black goat from adventure to adventure. On the barge too, every inch of wood above the water was covered with garish pictures. The canopy over the coffin was bright blue, and the winged Gdu that had appeared black in the previous dusk turned out by daylight to be a blaze of blue and gold. The barge rode on the sludgy torrent like a brilliant-scaled beetle on a ditch.

  Soon O sucked the mist off the river and Tron found himself being swept across an enormous flatness. Yesterday, though the flood had raised the river by twice the height of a man, it had still channeled between steep banks. Here, over a thousand floods, it had lifted its own banks above the level of the plain by building up ramparts of silt on either side. Though these embankments were the work of Tan, men had adapted them to their own needs, leveling and strengthening them and then cutting wide notches through which they allowed the flood waters to flow in a controlled surge to fill the hundreds of miles of canals and ditches that covered the plain. At every notch a swarming gang of peasants toiled with balks of timber, sheaves of reed, and thousands of earth-filled sacks to raise the floor of the notch to keep pace with the rising waters. All these materials must have been made ready since the last flood in accordance with exact instructions in the hymns. The banks were still too high to see over, but through each opening Tron could watch the whole vast plain swing by, apparently limitless rich earth pimpled with the huts of ten thousand villages.

  Crouched at the gunwale, keeping to the west of the barge so that the small round of his head should be invisible against the glare of O’s rising, Tron stared hypnotized. As the barge surged past in midstream the peasants would straighten their backs and cry out for blessings, then bend at once again to their work. Tron was appalled by the hugeness and richness of the
land, and the enormous system invented by the Wise and still organized from the Temple, which saw to it that the plain neither dried out into desert nor flooded into one ruinous vast lake. It was terrifying to think of meddling with a system like this, which worked as it had worked through O and Aa knew how many generations. If the system broke down there would follow ruin, chaos, deaths in tens of thousands.

  And yet the land was dying. The King said so, and the vision had confirmed it. Dying despite the cleverness of the Wise and the labor of the people. The King was like a priest of Gdu who held his knife poised over the abdomen of a patient. If the priest made his cut in exactly the right place, and continued so, he might come to the cause of sickness and remove it, and the patient might live. If his knife slipped either way by the thickness of a fingernail, the patient was sure to die. Though Tron’s part in the operation was no more than that of the boy who holds the lamp, he was afraid.

  The fear broke the spell. He tore his eyes from the plain and gazed forward along the line where the river drove south, almost as straight as a canal, toward the Peaks of Alaan. They were much nearer. The snow line was no longer an unsupported twinkle above the southern horizon. Now the crags were there, dark blue with distance, seeming steep as the walls of the Temple, streaked with ravines. Unused to guessing distances, Tron thought they might be twenty miles away, a day’s march. The arid air deceived him. The plain ended not in foothills but in a sudden tableland, which climbed abruptly for a few hundred feet, then tilted imperceptibly toward the mountains. It was from this tableland that they rose sheer, more than a hundred miles to the south.

  All morning the barge plunged down the middle current; O rose steadily; the banks and the laboring peasants seemed hardly to vary. Tron started to fret with the idleness and the heat. How was he to know when he neared Kalavin’s house? How was Kalavin to reach him, among so many watchers? From time to time he raised his head and peered forward from where he lay beside the hawk and the coffin in the shade of the canopy, and when he did so he began to see the end of the plain approaching, a wall of hill, smooth and rounded like the muscles of an arm, lion-colored. The river surged straight onward, though there seemed to be no way past the barrier; the surface of the water changed from a steady, driving current full of eddies to knotted, hummocky waves and patches of foam. The barge rocked and staggered as the river swung in a vast plunging curve and headed eastward. In three miles it fell from ten feet above the plain to twenty feet below. On the north side the embankment was punctuated with elaborate stairs of waterwheels, but the south bank was now a series of pale cliffs carved out from the rim of the tableland. The current ran strongly under the cliffs, driving the barge faster than it had so far traveled and bringing it closer and closer to the rock surface. Tron hid in his cave, because from each of these cliffs dangled a crude platform manned by peasants with forked poles who fended the barge away from the rocks and sent it undamaged on its journey. Not all the platforms were needed, but for mile after mile Tron had to crouch in hiding, alarmed by the new sense of hurry in the waters, the feeling that they were racing forward to a final destination.

  It was lucky that he stayed in hiding, for the roar and grumble of the river along the rock face almost drowned the clamor of the next group waiting for the barge. A long stone quay lined the bank and curved out into the river, making an artificial bay of calmer waters, into which the barge drifted stern-first. Through the slit in the curtain Tron could see the whole scene. First he slid past a group of shepherds led by a brown-robed priest of Sodala. The men were blowing reed pipes and the women rattling tambourines; all wore coarse sheepskin jackets and wide straw hats. Next, after a small gap, came a typical group of peasant cultivators standing behind their green-robed priest of Tan, with their drums and flutes and bull-roarer, the priest singing a different hymn from the priest of Sodala and the band thumping out a different rhythm. Beyond them stood a small tribe of Gdaal’s people, half-naked, wearing tangled hair to their waists, howling like jackals round their yellow-robed priest. Soldiers in armor were ranked behind the red-robed priest of Sinu on the curve of the quay; their brass trumpets blared, and they shouted and stamped in unison to their priest’s hymn. The quay itself was thronged with the brilliant-liveried household of a great noble, including an orchestra of harps and oboes that twittered quite inaudibly behind the uproar of the lesser people; the noble himself, a small gray-bearded man dressed in green and yellow, sat on a brown horse at the very end of the quay. Beside him, as was proper, stood his priest of Gdu in the blue robe.

  Tron stared at the crowd in panic. This must be Kalavin’s house. The man on the horse must be his father, General of the King’s Southern Levies. This must be the end of the King’s river journey, the destination to which the river had been racing. From here on he must journey by land to Alaan. But how was Kalavin to rescue Tron, unseen by all these people and five separate priests?

  As Tron crouched there, biting his lip, six rivermen stepped forward from between Tan’s people and Gdaal’s. They wore the General’s livery (dark green skirts and yellow sleeveless jackets) and carried poles, with which they cunningly twisted the barge on its axis and then propelled it steadily along beside the stonework. Once they were round the curve they leaned with all their strength against the poles, straining to shoot the barge as fast as possible out into the main current. The shouts of the people rose. The barge reeled with the shock of surging out of stillness into the turbulence of the racing waters that boiled round the point of the quay. Tron stared back with ice in his stomach. The hawk, perched on an emerald-crusted box, flapped for balance.

  Now most of the crowd was hidden, but the priest of Gdu was still clear, chanting, arms raised. The General sat on his horse as still as a hooded hawk. On the downstream side of him, hitherto hidden by the horse, stood a tall young man with a bent nose. Tron knew him at once, though he had only seen him briefly in the shadow of the rock outcrop above the Temple of Tan.

  Kalavin’s face was working with distress. He laid a hand on his father’s knee, but his father turned his head away and gently removed the hand. Kalavin snatched a glance over his shoulder, checked that he was unwatched, raised his arms as if to dive into the furious river and then, still poised on the brink, made swimming motions with his arms until the General dropped a warning hand on his shoulder.

  The barge began to turn again on the current. A slow revolution carried the whole scene out of sight.

  “Swim,” Tron muttered aloud. “I was not chosen for Tan. I cannot swim.”

  Kalavin had spoken to his father, but his father had forbidden him to act and insisted that Tron must ride on with the Dead King. Kalavin had failed.

  VIII

  The barge bucked and heaved on the hurrying waves. Its turning was no longer a steady, stately revolution but an erratic twisting. It was like a lizard wriggling in the grip of a hand. As soon as a spur of the southern hill hid the crowd on the quay Tron slid out of his cave and looked around. The land had closed in on the northern side now, too, and there was nothing to be seen but brown, featureless slopes, except where the rub of the river had scoured out bare rock and made a cliff. There were also occasional ravines carved into the south side, contributing little trickles of water to the brown flood.

  At first when the current carried him toward one bank or the other Tron craned over the gunwale, searching the water for shallows where he might hope to survive. But he soon found that the current took the boat always through the deepest places, so he settled down in the bows and ate a little of the strange, soft court-bread. O was past noon, but far less fierce than in the desert. The dun hills stumbled backward, unpeopled.

  At last, in the early afternoon, there came another change, a stretch of boiling and clashing water in which the barge hesitated and circled where a fair-sized river foamed down white rapids from the east and the mingled waters turned south and ran straight into the hills. For a while Tron was certain the barge would founder in this turmoil, but it rode it
out, shipped very little water, and finally staggered into the gorge. On either side now, cliffs rose sheer. The black rocks hissed and drizzled. The surface of the water was roaring foam, and wild eddies, and patches of greasy smoothness that came and went. The barge lurched toward the far cliff, then plunged away again, but in that instant of panic Tron could see that the drenched rock offered no footholds if he had summoned up the nerve to leap for it. And they were now traveling so fast that to jump would have been like being thrown from a height against the cliff.

  He staggered back to his cave, took the live dove from its basket and flung it in the air. It rose, terrified. He watched as if it were an omen.

  Out of the strip of harsh blue sky between the cliff-tops a dark shape hurtled, striking the dove with that familiar impact that loosed the little puff of white down. Four wings battled as, locked together, a white and a slate body fell. Then, less than a man’s height above the torrent, there was a Blue Hawk climbing steadily away with the dead dove clasped in its talons.

  “You are here also, Lord Gdu,” said Tron in a croaking voice. “I praise Your name.”

  He fetched his own hawk from the jeweled box and undid its leg thongs, so that it could fly in its regained freedom with no danger of tangling the leather around some branch and there starving. Its plumage, bedraggled yesterday by the heat of the coffin, had been preened smooth but had not yet recovered the armored gloss of real health. He held it up to fly but it clung to his gauntlet, looking about it with the air of an old priest who has just remembered a hymn forgotten since childhood.

  In the bewildering chaos, with the barge twisting and dodging on the breakneck foam, it was hard to know even which way the river was taking them. The gorge was a crooked crack in the tableland and often seemed to end in a sheer black wall, which turned out a minute later to be a place where the river raged round a zigzag corner. In one such place they touched a hidden rock. The barge groaned through all its planks, staggered and tilted, then rode on with an inch of water slopping to and fro around the gaudy coffin. At the next bend the sky, which a moment before had been an intense, jagged strip between the dark cliff edges, paled to pearly white. All shadows vanished. Tron and the hawk were drenched as if by one of those freak desert thunderstorms he had experienced only once in his life. The gorge ahead seemed filled with smoke, and above the rush and racket of the river there rose a deep, growling bellow.