The Blue Hawk (11 page)

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.

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