The Blue Hawk (25 page)

A knee and an elbow drag up the body to lie exhausted on cold, flat stone, stone vaguely lit, stone level and stretching between vast pillars, a peopled cavern, the Cave of Aa.

Ranked between pillars, each in his place the priests stand watching a different entrance, so a boy can creep unseen, unbreathing, to his proper place in the foremost rank before the dark altar.

On the cupped slab one crippled body, gold-robed, twisted. Its eyesockets are empty. The clay that covers the lips of the singer has dried into cracks.

Odah, my father!

The whisper echoes in the cave of whispers, grows and becomes a cry, a full chant. Black cowls turn all with one movement.

I am Goat!

On the end of the cord where the Goat-Stone should hang, only the bleached skull of a hare.

The body of Odah smokes on the altar. The smoke swirls, gathers, draws in on itself and becomes a hovering darkness.

Tron, says the woman, speaking from darkness, How shall I judge you? Before I go, how shall I judge you? You lied to the Gods, you murdered the King, you spilt your sweetwater, you robbed the King's coffin. Who gave you the right?

(One name. One known word. Gone from the tongue. Gone from the mind. Gone from the world.)

Nearer hovers the darkness. Nearer. The Cave is empty. Only the Gods, stone-faced, tunnel-eyed, watch uncaring. The darkness knows all places of hiding.

(One name. One lost word. Gone from the world. Gone beyond distance.)

Cupped in a crevice where two flagstones meet a slate-blue feather, sharp as a jewel.

Blue feather. Blue Hawk.

Lord of the falcons

Lord of healing

“Gdu! Save me!”

The whisper echoes in the cave of whispers, grows and becomes a cry, a summons, a full-chanted hymn.

Tiny with distance, sharp as a jewel, a boy, blue-robed, lying among water-worn rocks. A feathered arrow-shaft juts from the center of a seeping circle of blood. Reluctance and weariness and something else unnamable. The rush of coming, the hawk's plunge to the lure.

The darkness dwindles, puzzled among the echoes. A touch on the feather and it floats away, down, down into a ravine of harsh light as the crevice widens, light that is pain in the shadowed cavern.

Leaping after the feather, falling into light, falling and trusting.

Angry scrub-desert, thorned, rock-pillared, and the King striding through it. A pace to greet him, but he stalks by unfrowning, unsmiling, his brown, fierce eyes looking straight ahead and the jewel fallen from the gold circlet that binds his forehead.

A flat, bare plain, salt to the white horizon. Buried in salt a chariot wheel. The hawk on the wrist hooded in iron, and tied to the gauntlet with twenty thongs. The wheel is free. It begins to turn, to race through the plain. It bursts asunder like a storm-stripped flower. The spokes fly upward, grow, change, and become the flying statues of all the Gods. Huge, they darken the desert noon. They dwindle, dwindle, vanish in distance.

Now out of distance one God returns with the plunge of a hawk. Enormous, He settles on the empty whiteness, a crannied pillar, cool shade beside Him. Shade, dark shade, a hovering darkness. Out of the darkness, blue starlings, screaming. Blue horsemen, blue priests, blue ghosts in a circle, closing, closing. Two hoods, two curved beaks, two sets of fumbling fingers tugging at drenched knots. Ah, now, in the instant chosen and given, a sweep of one arm flings up the hawk to ride in the enormous freedom of air, seen there, poised as the blue cloud blots out the sky.

To float in a pool of light. Clutch at a spiky tussock, drag twisted body onto scouring gravel, stand heavy and bent. A scrape and a click as crutches swing that body through known paths among rustling thickets. Not far now to the nibbled pastures, and beer brewing in Curil's hut, and the reek of fresh-woven blankets, and the long roar of the falls, and O's answer building itself in the fire of His going.

XVIII

Tron shifted a numb arm. Instantly fire flowed from a point near his spine all down his right leg. He lay deathly still, while the sweat of pain sprang out over his body, and waited until the fire withdrew itself into its dully throbbing center. Only then did he dare to open his eyes.

He was lying on his side in a sort of tunnel of pale blue—no—under a long canopy of blue cloth with the sides let down. The hummocked shape only three feet away was a man lying under a coarse brown blanket. There seemed to be another man lying beyond him, and possibly more beyond that. Out of sight someone gave a long, fluttering groan. Tron's own blanket was of the fine Kalakal weave and pattern, and could well have been the one given him by the ghost's daughter-in-law.

He couldn't move his head without waking the fire again, and his body seemed to be strapped to the bed to prevent him from tossing about, so he shut his eyes again and lay still, listening. The canopy was full of little mutters and stirrings, and once or twice more the same groan of barely endured pain. From farther away came the occasional bleat of sheep, and from farther still, quite loud but so constant that the ears forgot to notice it, the ceaseless boom of the falls. So he was indeed back at Kalakal. He didn't remember crossing the ravine. The last thing he remembered was using Odah's crutches to hobble back … no, that had been part of the dream, surely. But the dream had been so real, so clear. Though it had been full of things he didn't understand, it still seemed as true as anything else in his life, as true as the moment when he had first lifted the hawk onto his wrist in the House of O and Aa, as true as the pain in his back.

For a long while he lay quiet, thinking his way through it, piecing the brilliant images into a meaning he could grasp. He didn't notice the stir of movement in the tent until a steady hand took him by the wrist and felt for his pulse. When he opened his eyes he saw the blue robe of a priest of Gdu six inches from his face. Pain warned him not to flinch.

“Awake, then?” said the priest. “Don't try to move. How's the back?

“It hurts. But it's not too bad if I lie still.”

“Ugh. You've got to expect that. It's mending, so I've taken you off poppy-cake. You don't want to stay on that longer than you have to. I expect the Gods have sent you some pretty odd dreams, hey?”

“Yes. How long …”

“You've been six days in my care. For the first two I thought you were going to Aa, but then you began to mend. You won't be walking for a couple of months, mind you. All right? If you think you can't stand it I'll put you back on poppy-cake for a bit longer, but you're better without it.”

“Yes. I know. Thank you, my brother, my father.”

The priest grunted and moved away. Tron noticed that when he talked to the other patients he did so in the proper half-chant, and not in the brusque conversational tones he had used when talking between priests. It was strange that he didn't yet know that they were now living in an altered world, where none of that mattered any more. Strange, strange. And I have been in the Cave of Aa, and returned alive, as no man has done since Saba. Strange, strange.

The days passed with a slow, appalling pace. Men were carried out, half-healed to convalesce in other tents, or dead to be buried. More men were brought in, savagely wounded, to lie and groan and mutter. Tron shut his mind to all this, lying perfectly still through the creeping hours, summoning into himself the great invisible healing force that lay over the meadows. The pain steadily lessened.

On the fourth day he heard ceremonial horns sounding, and the clink of harness and the thud of horse-hooves. Young priests of Gdu lifted the four beds nearest him and carried them elsewhere; in their place an ornate tapestry was raised to screen him, so that he lay gazing at a brilliant scene of Gdu flying above a plain where a group of nobles rode hawking. Then the tapestries parted and the King came in laughing.

He looked very tired. His face was drawn and crusted here and there with a mixture of sweat and dust, but the air around him seemed to tingle with his excitement and happiness. He stretched his arms down in a gesture that would have become a hug of joy in their meeting if Tron had not been wounded; life and warmth seemed to flow from his fingertips.

“Ah, Tron,” he whispered, squatting onto a little stool beside the mattress, “I came as soon as I could—I've been riding since dawn. They told me three days ago that you'd woken—we've had a messenger ride each day from Kalakal with news of you—but we had to deal with another swarm of Mohirrim first.”

“What's happening, Majesty?”

“Too early to say. They won't go on coming like this, a few hundred at a time. So far we've rounded most of them up—d'you know we've not taken a single prisoner, man, woman, or child?—but some of this last lot got back through the pass. So fairly soon I think we'll have a real horde to cope with. We'll manage provided we can keep them up on the tableland, because we know the ravine crossings and the watering places. If I get it right we won't have to do much real fighting. Thirst will do our work for us. But after that … Tron, what happened in the pass on the night of Her Most Brightness?”

“We performed a ritual and the Gods left.”

“Left? You mean … that's not what I wanted. I need to know whether I can take an army through the Pass Gebindrath without coming under the curse of that kind woman.”

“Yes.”

“Is that all? Yes, just like that? Listen, Tron, you've no idea what an army's like for rumors. The priests of Sinu who had carried your litter came back from the pass with the news that their One was dead, but that he had said that the curse was lifted. Then we got news that you were wounded and likely to die, and that the crippled priest of O …”

“He has died also.”

“How did you know? I gave orders that you were not to be told.”

“I saw his body in the Cave of Aa.”

In the mid-rush of explanation the King stopped short, like a racing horse hauled back onto its haunches. His face wore its closed, armored look while he stared at Tron unblinking. At last he sighed.

“Yes,” he said, “you were close to that place, I'm told. But I can't follow those paths. You see, Tron, what they're saying in the army is that the curse is still there. Half Her priests were slaughtered in the place, and of you three two died and one came near to dying. But if
you
will tell me plain that the curse is lifted, then I shall know it's true. And if I
know,
I can persuade the others to come with me.”

Tron hesitated. Truth? All he knew was misty, half-glimpsed, ungraspable. All he had done had been for the sake of the Gods. He had been a tool in Their hands, and the finished work was Their affair. But now he remembered that there were really two Trons—not only this obedient and willing tool but also a boy who had met a King in the shadow of a desert outcrop, and who had discovered there the obligations of friendship.

“It's difficult to explain,” he said. “Sometimes I think I understand, and sometimes I think I'm making it all up because I can't help looking for some sort of explanation. But I'm sure the pass is clear.”

“The curse of that kind woman is lifted?” insisted the King.

“It wasn't Her curse, it was the priests'. Oh, she was there, but … She was there because the Gods needed the Kingdom to be closed off, I think. But now She's left. They've all left, all but …”

“They'll come back,” said the King, almost flippantly. “But you are sure that I can come and go through the pass and She will not care?”

“Yes. The Kingdom is no longer closed.”

“That's true. D'you know, I had news from the north only five days ago that a party of merchants from beyond the marshes had made their way through somehow and were asking permission to trade! And another thing—do you remember how I took you that first day to show you the salt valley? Apparently salt is a valuable stuff in Falathi! That'll be something to start on when this war's over. Lord Sinu, but the Mohirrim are warriors! I'm beginning to think that if only I could set up some sort of alliance with them, train them and control them—if you can tame a Blue Hawk, Tron, I can tame the Mohirrim—why! perhaps that was a sign! What do you think?”

“I don't know. A sign? Of what?”

“I've said this to no one else, Tron. Sometimes I dare not even say it to myself. But we've been cooped up too long between the marshes and the mountains, while outside there's a whole world to conquer. I'm beginning to think that with the Mohirrim on my side I could do just that!”

Sitting on the stool with his knees hunched under his chin, the King poured out plans and dreams. Tron was too tired now to listen in detail, but with a half-drowsing mind he saw that the King was, as it were, like the great river itself; even on the placid days when they had first met he had contained in himself energy and purpose, just as the calm reaches of the river contained their moving weight of water, building up the pressure that would roar in foam through the gorge and thunder over the falls. The struggle with the priests and this war were like that, but even in the flurry and hurl of them the King's mind already sought the unknown lands beyond.

Tron now knew himself to be quite different, two-natured, but beneath both natures something like a desert well, dug centuries ago, deep and still feeding on streams that had never seen the light. He knew too that if he was to answer his puzzle he must explore not only outward, like the King, but inward into those depths.

“I'm tiring you,” said the King, rising suddenly. “I'll come again as soon as I can. And you've got to get well, Tron, though the priest of Gdu who's been in charge of you says that you're healing faster than he dared hope. That's good. I want to go hawking with you again before too long.”

“Where is my hawk, Majesty?”

“Here, and it's being looked after. But it won't let anyone near it without a fight. It
is
like a Mohir, you know.”