The Blue Hawk Page 9

  As they plunged toward the smoke, this sound drowned all others, so that Tron felt that he would not even have heard a scream close to his ear. The surface of the river lost its foam and tumble and became glassy, boiling in places but stretched taut, as though it were being hauled by a God into the smoke.

  All at once, without thinking, Tron knew what caused the smoke.

  “Lord Gdu! Save me!” he yelled, flinging the hawk with all his force into the air and rushing across the deck toward the nearest cliffs.

  The sheer rock raced past, hopelessly out of reach. But then the barge twisted suddenly in toward it. Tron tensed for the impact, but the swing of the barge continued until they were actually moving against the main current, upstream, quite slowly, about ten feet from the glistening wet stone. The curve of their course continued out into the main current again, and once more they were rushing with stately smoothness toward the smoke. This time Tron saw against the whiteness the long, wrinkled rim of water that seemed almost motionless as it strained over the edge and flung itself down in foam.

  But again the big eddy carried the barge in toward the cliff and now he saw what was causing it. Right against the cliff, jutting out several yards along the rim of the fall, ran a sort of wall, sheer-sided and square-ended as if it had been dressed stone. Its top was a horizontal line about eight feet above the surface of the water. It formed a stubby barrier, forcing the current outward around its edge but at the same time trapping some of the water to turn in this dizzying circle.

  Now they were moving toward the cliff again, with the upcurving prow of the barge actually scraping the smooth wall. Tron stood still, hypnotized by noise and fear. Then, as if an invisible hand pushed him on the shoulder to break the spell, he darted forward, grasped the prow with one hand, trod unhesitatingly on the gunwale, flexed his legs, and flung himself upward. His hands clutched at the rim of stone, his arms convulsed as he swung his body sideways and up. A knee and elbow hugged the cold surface, then dragged his body up to lie on the flat stone, gasping in the steady downpour.

  The barge held his gaze. More brilliant than ever with wetness, it nuzzled its way along the wall and then moved slowly up the cliff, probing here and there against the rock like a huge insect searching for a cranny. Because it was close in to the cliff the eddy took it farther upstream than before and then farther out into the current. The rush of water caught it and carried it clear. In three heartbeats it was at the rim of the fall, poised on the brink, tilting, gone.

  Crawling to the other side of the barrier on which he lay, Tron gazed down. He was very tired. The unimaginable weight of water foamed endlessly down, seeming to move slowly like something in a dream, following set paths and patterns. It dragged at his mind. The face down which it fell was not sheer, but curved outward, not much but in a strange, smooth arc. The foam smothered most of the curve, but the wall on which he was lying protected the part immediately below him, and he could see hundreds of feet down, though not to the bottom. At the limit of his vision the rock face had ceased to be a cliff and become a very steep slope.

  So this was the end to which the King—countless Kings—had traveled. This fall into nothingness was the gateway to the country of the Gods. He stared and stared, appalled.

  His own sneeze shook him aware. He was drenched and icy cold. I must leave this place, he thought. Lord Gdu, I am part of Your purpose. You saved me from the falls so that I might continue to serve You. Your hawks know this place. Lord Gdu, save me again.

  He rose to hands and knees and, not daring to walk so close to that beckoning drop, crawled along the wall to the cliff. There he found that the rock face was a smooth surface—so smooth that man must have made it so—but that to his left a flight of steps climbed into the smoke. Up these, dizzy with the bellow of the falls, he made his way. Everything streamed with water. In places the folds of the cliff gathered the falling drops into rivulets and little cataracts, which drizzled around him. Thirty steps up he looked back and could no longer see the surface of the river or the rampart that had saved him. His teeth chattered and his body shuddered in fierce spasms. He was terrified of climbing alone into this icy blankness.

  “But Gdu is here,” he said, unable to hear his own voice through the boom of falling water. The smoke thickened as he climbed on, and soon he came to a place where a larger rivulet had washed six steps away, leaving only the stubs of them sticking out from the cliff. Spreadeagled on the rock he forced his body through the numbing stream and knelt gasping on the far side of the gap.

  When he had strength he climbed again, and found quite soon that the steps turned back on themselves so that he was now directly above the flights he had just climbed. The smoke thinned. The streams on the rock face dwindled. His own limbs gained a faint warmth from the effort of climbing, but he was still colder than he’d ever been when the smoke turned gold and he climbed out into sunlight—sunlight veiled and feeble, but enough to cast a shadow. Ahead of him the line of steps snaked up the cliff. Below and slightly behind, the boiling waters plunged over the fall.

  He climbed slowly on up the endless steps until the mist thinned enough for O’s caress to warm him fully. Here he found a small platform from which the next flight zigzagged back into the smoke, so he rested and looked down into the gorge. Slowly his awe of the falls changed to amazement—amazement at their enormous boom, and the smokelike pillar of spume that towered a mile above the cliffs on either side, and the strange, clean beauty of the moment the water went over the edge. From this height the rim of the fall seemed not to be moving at all, despite the turmoil on either side of it. It lay across the gorge in a single sweep like hard glass, following a line as exact as Gdaal’s half-drawn bow in a Temple painting. It seemed impossible that nature had cut so perfect an arc, or that man—even the Wise—had performed so stupendous a work, though man had clearly made the rampart that had saved him and the steps on which he now stood. But the falls could only be the work of a God. Quickly he whispered the incantation that must be used when one stumbles by accident on a secret ritual:

  “If I have seen

  What the Gods had hidden

  If I have walked

  Where the Gods forbade

  Undo my deed

  Lords of all life

  Take back the minute

  Lords of all time.”

  As he spoke the last line the gorge altered. O in His westward journey had been slanting directly between the cliffs, but now, as if sending a sign, He moved beyond the rim, and the chill shadow of the rock swept across the platform. Tron praised Gdu again, then climbed on.

  Almost at once Gdu seemed to fail him. Some two hundred steps above the platform the stair vanished at a point where it had once leaped across a thirty-foot cleft on a climbing bridge. Tron could see the jagged supports of that old arch on either side of the gap, and looking up he could also see where the same thing had happened again as the steps swung back out of the mist. There seemed to be a few holds and crannies in the rock, but not enough, and even if he were to edge across that hideous traverse and climb on into the smoke he would have the same crossing to make again a hundred feet higher.

  For the moment he couldn’t face it. He sighed and started despairingly down the steps in the faint hope that in his absorption with the falls he had failed to notice some other way up from the platform. When he was about halfway back he was startled by a sudden whimper in the air and a blur of slate-blue plumes hovering at his side. Habit raised his left arm chest-high and thrust slightly forward. The Blue Hawk settled, ruffled and sulky. Habit again made Tron feel in his pouch and find the thigh of the dove that had died in the King’s coffin. The hawk accepted it with no grace at all, but gripped savagely at his arm while it tore at the tough sinews.

  The pain pierced Tron’s tiredness and numbness like a trumpeter’s alarm piercing to the brains of sleeping soldiers. Gdu had sent him this signal by His servant the hawk, saying “Here! It is here!”

  He looked about him. Below
the falls boomed on, unpitying. But above him the cliff was split by a jagged, sloping fissure, which vanished over a jut of rock. Carefully he eased the hawk from his bleeding wrist and settled it onto one of the fallen stones that lay in places on the stairs, where it continued to rend at its meat with absorbed gusto. He reached into the crevice with a hand and a foot, found holds, and pulled himself clear of the steps.

  The dances of the Temple, precise but strenuous, do not teach how to climb raw rock. But they do make the body strong and supple, give it true sense of balance, and most of all teach the limbs to move exactly to the demands of the will, so that if a movement is physically possible the body can perform it Tron didn’t consider this. Wherever he rested and hung panting he praised Gdu for still continuing to lead and guard him.

  Beyond the jut of rock the crevice widened and deepened, then tilted from the vertical so that for a long way he was able to crawl inside it up a very steep slope with plenty of jags and roughness to cling to. When it closed and forced him out onto the cliff face again, he found a narrow ledge running upward toward the smoke, and this in turn reached an area of broken cliff where there was a crisscross pattern of fissures to use as holds. Nothing was as difficult as the start, and even where he was clinging to a cranny above some plummeting drop, Tron wasn’t afraid. He knew that Gdu was showing him the way and would give him strength to reach the top.

  He climbed continually to his left, so reached the upper stair just at the edge of the cleft from which the bridges had dropped away. The remains of the man-made supports gave him the footholds he needed to wriggle up onto the first unbroken step. Here he rested, in case Gdu should be moved to send him the hawk once more; either as a sign or a companion, though he had no lure and it was useless to cry or whistle against the monotonous roar of the falls. As he waited, lonely above that deadly drop, he became more and more piercingly aware of how much of himself had gone when he had flung the hawk into freedom. But it is Gdu’s servant, not mine, he thought as he turned once more to the stairs.

  They seemed to climb on for ever, but ended abruptly where a fall of earth and boulders had filled a narrow ravine. Out of the earth grew tussocks and shrubs, lush with the ceaseless spray, and clinging to these he climbed on without much difficulty, coming at last to the top almost unaware. From below it had seemed to be just another grassy ridge, which he clambered onto with elbow and knee; but then he looked up and found himself staring into the setting sun across an upland of close-cropped grass, a huge, rising wold dotted with sheep. Between him and them sat the shepherd, facing away from the falls and dressed in a shapeless smock of undyed wool. He hesitated, then walked forward, raised his right hand, and began to speak the common blessing.

  The shepherd looked around. It was a child, a girl about ten years old. Her brown face went pale. As she leaped to her feet her scream was a clear, harsh note, piercing the steady boom from the falls.

  IX

  Exhausted though he was, Tron smiled at the strangeness of it. The first woman he had heard had been a coffin-robber in the dark. The first he spoke to screamed at the sight of him.

  “O watches us. Aa sleeps. What do you fear?” he said, automatically falling into the half-singing speech which he had been taught to use to peasants, but pitching it loud enough to be heard through the drumbeat of falling waters.

  “I … I thought you were a ghost … Revered Lord. I thought you’d crept out from the Jaws of Alaan. It’s full of ghosts down there.”

  She had a sharp, perky little face, on which curiosity sat more naturally than fear.

  “The Jaws of Alaan!” he exclaimed, awe and astonishment piercing the priest-trained calm.

  “Down there. Didn’t the Revered Lord know? That’s His voice, roaring. That’s His breath you can see.”

  The Jaws of Alaan! How many of the hymns spoke of that chasm of mystery and fear, that home of ghosts, not to be visited by living men! But I have set foot there. I have seen Gdaal’s bow curving across the rim of the falls, where He was forced to leave it when He rescued Tan from the lightless kingdom. I have walked among spirits, under the wing of Gdu.

  “I was on the river in a boat,” he said. “Tan swept us between cliffs. Then a mist came down and I slept. And in my dream my Lord Gdu carried me to the clifftop, and there I woke.”

  “What it is to be a priest!” she answered. If Tron had ever lived among villagers he would have recognized this as an everyday remark picked up from the child’s elders, half sneer and half acceptance of a fact of existence. He turned his back on her, raised his arms and praised Gdu, Alaan, and Tan. His knowledge of where he had been filled him with deep awe and made his voice as solemn as a Major Priest’s. When he had finished he saw that the child was watching him with almost absurd respect.

  “May I milk an ewe for the Revered Lord to drink?” she said.

  “I drink water,” he answered. “Have you any bread?”

  “A … a little, Revered Lord. And there is a stream of good water over the rise there, by the cave.”

  A cave, a stream. Bread. Gdu guided him still.

  “Child,” he said solemnly. “I do not know why my Lord Gdu brought me to this place, but I do know that it is dangerous even for priests to interfere with the plans of the Gods. So until my Lord Gdu has spoken to me and shown me His will you must tell nobody that you have seen me, not even your own priest.”

  “Oh, we hardly ever see our priest in Upper Kalakal,” she said. “He lives in Lower Kalakal, and he’s a cripple, so when we want him to bless a hut or something he has to be carried up. Curil—that’s our headman, brews his own beer, but of course he doesn’t tell anyone. Oh!”

  “And I will not tell anyone,” said Tron, “just as you will not tell anyone about me. I will take the bread from you as a sign.”

  She opened a sheepskin satchel and took out a strange, flat loaf, very dark. Tron broke it in two and gave half of it back to her, at which she seemed surprised. As she was replacing her half in the satchel, he saw a roll of stout cord there.

  “I will take that cord also for a day and a night,” he said. “Will you need it?”

  “Oh no, that’s only for training lambs that won’t follow my clatterer. The Revered Lord can … that’s meat! Priests don’t eat meat!”

  “It is for my companion,” said Tron, hacking away a corner of tough mutton. When he rose he saw that she had gone pale again, and was glancing round her with her eyes while trying not to move her head.

  “He will do you no harm,” said Tron. “He is quite small.”

  “I must go, Revered Lord.”

  “There is nothing to fear.”

  “No. Look. It is time.”

  She pointed back over his shoulder and he turned. O’s beams now lay flat across the grassland. Tron’s shadow reached almost to the cliff edge. To the right, where the last of the falling spray drifted across the hill, a gold arch began to rise, made out of nothing. It was vast, though there was no more of it than the start of a curving column, which now gathered colors to it and stood there glowing.

  “Lord Gdu!” said Tron. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you … doesn’t the Revered Lord know? That’s O’s answer.”

  “I know the hymn,” said Tron stiffly. “I had not seen the thing.”

  “It means I must take my flock home before Her time.”

  “Go then,” said Tron. “This cave and stream are easy to find?”

  “Just beyond that ridge, Revered Lord,” she said. She picked up from beside her satchel two slabs of shaped wood and clacked them together, making a rapid rhythmic rattle, which pierced the boom of the falls. At once all the sheep raised their heads and started to drift toward her.

  “They won’t come if the Revered Lord stands too close,” she said.

  “I will go,” said Tron. “Will you bring me more bread tomorrow, and a little raw meat?”

  Her eyes widened, but she seemed relieved and pleased when he gave her the common blessing. He walked we
arily away, but looked back from the ridge of the hill to see her moving slowly across the slope, followed by an obedient line of brown backs. He blessed her again in his mind.

  The stream was formed in a cup of land that gathered the spray from the falls but sloped away from the gorge. The cave was a dark little hollow where a wall of stones and turfs had been piled beside a big sloping boulder to provide shelter from the endlessly falling droplets.

  Tron was very stiff as he did his dances, and for the first time for many years his tongue muddled the hymns. He found it difficult to eat more than a little of the tough, salty bread, and difficult too to stop drinking from the stream. He slept uneasily, drifting in and out of muttering dreams, and woke feeling sore in all his joints, thirsty, and dizzy.

  When he had drunk from the stream he chose from its bed a suitable stone, then walked through the drenched grass back to the gorge. At the rim he paused. O had barely risen, and all the depths below him were dusky with the trapped remains of night. The roaring gulf made him dizzier still, seeming to call to him, to suck at his will, as if there was a voice below the roaring which said, “Down. Down. Drown. Drown.” If he hadn’t been carried on by the impetus of the plan he’d made last night he would simply have stood on the brink shivering with fever and irresolution.