The Blue Hawk (20 page)

Nothing whispered in Tron's heart. The soldiers tramped about below, raising the dust in heavy dun-colored swirls. Tron glanced at the King and saw that the confident smile on his face was meaningless, a mask. He felt cold, as though in the aching heat Aa had breathed on his spine.
Twelve twelves of Her priests called Her power down
—
will She remove it for a blind man and a crippled outcast and a boy? Will She not rather
…
But who else can the King ask?

Tron looked at the fierce brown profile below the Eye of Gdu. He remembered a day's hawking above the Temple of Tan, a marigold scorpion, a glaring salt-flat.
The Gods have sent me no sign. Perhaps they mean that our friendship should be enough of a sign. I must offer to go, so that he does not have to ask.

Now, Tron stood in a ravine far to the south and watched the meeting ceremony of two clans of the wild hunters who had captured Onu Ovalaku. The warriors of each clan rushed at each other with the usual silent grimaces, then pranced face to face with fierce spear-thrusts, cunningly parried, until a warrior received a minute wound and cried aloud. Then the mock fight stilled, the chiefs of the two clans inspected the injury, and the man who had caused it was wounded to exactly the same extent. After that everyone sat down and began the weary process of bartering girl brides. Odah, hunched on his litter, watched this performance with a strange eagerness.

“It is a ritual,” he'd said to Tron after they'd first seen it four days ago.

“It's not a real ritual,” Tron had answered. “It's got nothing to do with the Gods.”

“Who knows? But it is a true ritual in this—that the men who perform it do not know its inner meaning. To the chiefs they are bargaining for the necklace that the child wears. Each girl child wears an ancient and famous necklace. You can see how often it has been repaired, and how reverently they handled it. The child merely happens to have the right to wear it. But by this means, you see, women not yet ready for marriage are exchanged from clan to clan, so that the blood is mixed and the breed remains strong. The chiefs do not think of that. They are concerned only with the necklaces. In the same way we think only of the rituals we perform as they appear to us—how should we know what they mean to the Gods themselves?”

Tron had shrugged, uninterested. In the past six days five separate clans had passed them on from territory to territory, always working along the ravines, in which the hunters lived like scorpions in the cracks of an old wall. At each meeting the same dance and bargaining had taken place (though at one there had been no girls to exchange, and the ritual had been performed with two dolls made of dry grass, wearing necklaces of leaves). Each time Tron had moved well away from the group, using the excuse that his hawk disliked company, but really because he needed to be alone to brood and dream, and to try to master his dread of the task they had come to perform.

Now O pressed with harsh heat on the tableland; even in the cooler ravines any rock on which He had leaned for an hour gave back His heat like a blow; along between the cliffs the air shimmered, distorting vision. The Gods are here, Tron suddenly knew. They have come back. The hot, still air prickled with Their presences. For a moment, as though from an enormous distance, he saw the circle of hunters where they sat in the shade of an old holm oak that clung to the cliff with half its roots scrubbed clean by sudden floods. Their figures, and the two bright litters and the red-robed priests who carried them, were tiny but like jewels, and moved with impossible slowness. Then the hawk beside Tron rattled a wing as it tore at the green finch that one of the hunters had snared for it, and Tron was looking at his friends with ordinary eyes again. Odah, he could see, had stopped peering at the hunters and was praying with closed eyes and moving lips. Tron whispered a hymn of welcome. The fear slid from his mind and he was glad to be doing what the Gods seemed to demand.

There were, he had come to realize, two Trons. There was a boy born to walk alone through wild country with a hawk on his wrist; there was a boy born and trained to serve the Gods. There were two hawks—a bird born to hover free between the roaring cliffs of the Jaws of Alaan, and a bird born and trained to come without resentment to swung lure, and to submit to long hours of hooded darkness. So Tron now welcomed the Gods and allowed himself to sink into stillness, neither praising nor asking, an empty bowl that They might fill if They chose. They sent him no sign of approval or disapproval, though he could feel Them filling the hot air with their presence as vividly as he could smell the sweetly peppery scent of the little white flowers that frothed all over the tangled creeper above him.

After a while the bargaining session became the midday meal, and when that was over the women wrapped their few utensils in twists of grass and packed them away in leather sacks so that nothing could clink or rattle, and then the rock-owl clan, after a final blessing from Odah, drifted away down the ravine with their usual silence, daytime ghosts; not even the boisterous little children seemed to click one pebble or crackle one twig.

The black lizard clan were now the priests' guides, first a group of hunters scouting ahead, then a wizened chief, then the priests, then the women and children, and finally a rearguard of more hunters. The stifling afternoon seemed much as other afternoons; one side of a ravine was usually in shadow, so it was possible to travel despite the heat of O: there was sometimes water in pools among the rocks; twice they had crossed roaring snow-fed torrents; but though all was much as before, all was changed for Tron by the invisible presence of the Gods. So it was no surprise when the chief halted his clan and explained in the smattered dialect of the Kingdom that he could go with them no further.

“Ntree mans ntake,” he said several times.

After some talk among themselves the hunters chose a mark on the floor of the ravine and threw their spears at it. The chief studied the fallen spears and from their position selected three hunters to continue with the priests. Gifts of farewell were exchanged, blessings given, and the black lizard clan stole back the way they had come.

When the priests moved on, the three guides seemed to have lost all confidence. They peered about them as if they were in strange territory, frowning and muttering, and scouted in scuttling dashes from cover to cover, but as soon as something rattled in the bushes on a ledge of cliff they threw down their spears and came rushing back to cower among the priests.

“What do you fear, my sons?” asked Odah, who had developed a marvelous bond of trust with the clans, so that they instinctively chose him as the one to obey. “No beast could frighten such hunters, I think. Is it demons or ghosts?”

“Ngoat! Ngoat!” moaned the leader.

Tron stared at Odah, suddenly reminded how their separate stories had begun with the Goat-Stone in the Temple. Odah stared calmy back, nodded as if accepting the sign and raised his right arm in invocation.

“Outcast spirits

O walks among you.

Beware, you dead!

To your black crannies

His light pierces.

In your cold caves

His fire burns.

Beware!”

The light and fire in his voice seemed to vibrate along the cliffs like the last shimmery notes of a gong. The hunters looked at one another, muttered in a more confident manner and moved on. Thus they covered another slow mile before the leading hunter stopped, pointed ahead, and beckoned to Tron to come up beside him.

The bridge ahead leaped the ravine in one clean arc from cliff to cliff. Only the Wise could have built it.

“What is the matter?” called the One of Sinu in his impatient, grating voice.

“I think we have reached the road to the pass,” answered Tron. “There is a great bridge across the ravine.”

“I praise O that I have seen such a thing,” said Odah a few minutes later. “Talatatalatatehalatena, my son, how are we to climb the cliffs? Can you find us a path?”

(It was part of Odah's nature that he should so easily have mastered the strings of syllables that made up the hunters' short-names. Their long-names consisted of the short-names of all their male ancestors back to the day when Gdaal had cut off the tails of nine black lizards, stuck them into the ground, and created the clan.)

The hunters halted and gazed about them, pulling nervously at their lips or scratching their ribs. One of them pointed to a great beard of creeper that flowed down a cliff, and at once the other two ran to it and began to swarm up the vines, shaking out a flock of gold and scarlet finches, which twittered away along the cleft.

“There is no path for me there, my brothers,” said Odah without bitterness. But when the hunters reached the top they took little flint hatchets from their belts and began to work along the cliff, hacking at the vines until a whole tangle of vine and leaf and flower flowed suddenly down onto the washed boulders below. At once the remaining hunter ran to the spot and began to sort out and test the thickest strands of vine.

“What do they do?” snapped the One of Sinu.

“They are making ropes to haul the litters out, my father, my brother,” replied Tron.

But it was a slow process, choosing and joining lengths of creeper. As usual when there was a halt, Tron moved away from the rest of the group, so that he could unhood the hawk in something like solitariness. He chose a place where another, smaller cataract of creeper flung itself down the opposite cliff, and as he stood in that pepper-scented shade the other Tron, the one who had been sleeping for so many days, suddenly took hold. There was time to spare, there was empty wilderness above, there was a creeper to reach it by. Why wasn't he up there, hawking?

Without thought he loosed the leg thongs and held his gauntleted hand above his head. The hawk opened and closed its wings twice, in a puzzled way, as though it too had forgotten its true nature; but then the whim took it and it shrugged itself into the air and started to circle upwards. Tron watched it with gladdened heart. It was in glorious condition, despite its lack of proper exercise during the journey. It found an updraft near the heated cliff and seemed to float into the sky like a child's kite.

Tron gripped two vines and began his climb; it turned out harder than the hunters had made it look, because of the way the vines swung to and fro, or slid beneath his weight, but the tangle was so interwoven that when he seemed sure to slither ridiculously down, something would hold and he could clamber on in a shower of insects and petals and bits of dead bark. After moving for so many days at the tedious pace of the litters, his muscles seemed to rejoice with the effort. He reached the top sweating but grinning and at once gazed upward to see the hawk poised a hundred feet above him, black against the heavy blue of the sky.

Though O was now well down toward the west, His heat still beat back off rock and gravel. He would have to shine only a little more fiercely, Tron felt, for the patches of wizened scrub around him to burst crackling into invisible flames. Nothing stirred in that heat. Pulling the lure out of his pouch, Tron began to walk away from the cliff edge. Suddenly, with a thump like one huge heartbeat, a covey of kingfowl exploded around his feet and curved clackering away, only three feet above the ground. The hawk flung itself out of the sky, the plunge of its path curving slightly to intercept the racing kingfowl. It came so fast that it seemed certain to shatter itself on the rocks, but there was no hesitation, no slowing. Its wings were half-folded, its whole body a shaped missile. At the last whistling instant its taloned legs jerked forward. Tron saw the puff of loosened feathers, then heard the double thump of the hawk hitting the kingfowl and the pair of them hitting the ground. In his excitement he longed to shout aloud, to run forward, but he controlled himself to a gentle pace. As he stood looking down at the hawk, so live and clean, perched on the mottled plumage of the kingfowl, it struck him for the first time how strange it was that the perfection of the moment had to end in a death. It was as though he were a God who needed the sacrifice of the kingfowl to fulfill His nature. Were the Gods indeed like that? No. It was the Blue Hawk that needed the death, to fulfill
its
nature. It was priests and Kings who needed the sacrifices. The Gods were quite otherwise.

“I shall never do this again,” Tron said, aloud, in a voice that sounded quite unlike his own, but which he knew still spoke the truth.

The hawk looked up and hissed at the sound, but skipped willingly to his gauntlet and gazed about it in a puzzled way, as though it had made its kill in a fit of absentmindedness. Whispering his praise to Gdu for all the happiness he knew he must now forsake, Tron carried the living bird and the dead toward the bridge.

The road speared toward the mountain, now very near and steep. Looking at the ground, one could not see, even on the bridge, that here was a man-made surface; the small stuff of the desert, sand and pebbles and even a few dry tussocks had drifted all across it. But the line of it through the rocks and scrub was still clear. Tron scuffed at the surface with his toe and uncovered the edge of a flagstone. Then he bent and stared, not at the place he had cleared but at a patch of half-firm sand beside it. On the bridge itself, where the covering was pure sand, the marks seemed clearer. He walked quickly back along the north side of the ravine and beckoned to Talatatalatatehalatena, who was supervising the process of hauling the first litter out from the depths.

The hunter grinned and rubbed his stomach when he saw the kingfowl.

“Will you come with me?” said Tron. “I want to show you something.”

On the road by the bridge Talatatalatatehalatena knelt and peered at the ground. He sniffed at one or two of the indentations, moved on to examine some invisible signs on harder ground, cast back a little way up the road and returned frowning.

“Mans!” he whispered. “Mans!”

He spread his hands in front of Tron's face, opening and closing his fingers a dozen times. Then he pointed dramatically toward the soaring peaks.