The Blue Hawk (7 page)

Tron picked his way westward until at last the ridge tilted abruptly down toward the river. Now O lay almost on the horizon so that the whole sky was aflame with His going. Beneath it the irrigated plain stretched endlessly away, a monotonous dun expanse that looked as if it were covered with ashes, not dying but already dead. Nearer, the gold sky glowed again, reflected in Tan's curve round the promontory, and against this fiery arc the pillars of Her Temple stood black as the priests of Aa.

V

The three days passed at a dreary pace. Even hawking seemed curiously savorless. Tron was watching under the shade of the archway into the Great Courtyard when the King came down the slope to one side of the ancient road, striding from rock to rock. Before he reached the sand-strewn paving he sat down and took off his sandals.

“I'm bound to leave footprints,” he said, grinning. “Bare feet will look like yours, or the slave's who brings you your food. Phew! I'd forgotten how hot sand could get. How does your hawk stand this heat? Blue hawks are mountain birds, you know—it's cooler up there.”

“I try to hunt near dawn and dusk, Majesty, and rest when O is high. The hawk's asleep in my cell now. The stonework is thick enough to keep it cool.”

“Is it thick enough to hide secrets, Tron? Have you found anything?”

“A door, Majesty, but …”

“Good! Let's see.”

Tron led him to a long, low room, which must have been one of the eating halls, and turned to a deep-carved relief of Gdaal, fox-headed and carrying the sacred bow. Around the God ran a dance or procession of wild animals, hares and lions and desert asses and antelopes. Tron gripped the horns of one of the antelopes and twisted inward and up, sliding that small section of the frieze along hidden grooves into the cavity behind.

“The catch is like that of an ordinary door,” he said. “This one was so corroded that I had to break it. There are three doors I can't move at all. I think the sand must have clogged under them.”

The King grunted, then fiddled with the secret section, trying its movement along the grooves. He looked at the floor.

“You swept the sand clear here?”

“I had to. There was sand on the other side too, but I rocked the door to and fro till I could squeeze through. It moves quite easily now. Look.”

The slab swung silently under his weight and he led the way into a bare little chamber lit from above by a shaft. River owls nested here and had covered the floor with their mutes and droppings. The King grunted again.

“You won't be able to hide the fact that this door's been opened,” he said. “Not on the inside, anyway. But when we've finished you'd better sweep the sand back on the outside. Where now?”

“I … I haven't explored very far, Majesty. I … I was afraid.”

“No wonder,” said the King, looking at the two narrow slits of darkness that led out of the chamber. “Let's try this one. I'll go first.”

The slit was so narrow that Tron had to edge sideways along it. Even when it was still faintly lit by the light from the chamber they had left Tron felt that the massive walls were poised to move in and press him into nothingness, like a midge between a man's fingers. He crept along, tense to snatch himself back from any touch or rustle.

“Hello!” said the King's voice some distance ahead. “Steps, going up. Light at the top … twelve steps, Tron. Ah. Come and look at this.”

The light was only a faint grayness, but Tron yearned toward it as though it were safety and sanity. When he reached it he found the King gazing through an irregular shaped opening, two inches across at its widest.

“Know where we are?” said the King, giving way.

The spyhole tunneled down and gave on a patch of sandy floor, mottled to a regular pattern. The taloned feet of a colossal statue of Gdu showed at the upper rim of vision.

“That is a side aisle in the House of Tan,” said Tron.

“What made those marks on the floor?”

“I did, Majesty. I do my dances to my Lord Gdu morning and evening.”

“Yes, of course. And that's where the King would sit during the Rituals. One would think this hole was big enough to spot from down there. What's on this wall of the aisle?”

“I think we are looking out of the ear of Sodala, Majesty.”

“Hm. I wonder how far these tunnels lead.”

They seemed endless. For an hour the two of them crept like spiders along the crannies between the Temple walls, and still Tron trembled with the horror of the darkness and closeness of these secret ways. They were never wholly lost, because of the frequent spyholes which gave onto every major room or courtyard in the Temple.

“Are there any hymns of Temple building?” said the King suddenly.

“No, Majesty. That knowledge was lost with the Wise.”

“I just wanted to know whether these passages were built on purpose for spying, or whether they would have built the walls hollow anyway, and just took advantage of the fact to make this network. I think that must be it. There're places so narrow even you can't get along, and other passages that don't lead anywhere. Now, I want to try something else. Stand still. Listen.”

Tron shut his eyes and waited, straining for sounds. Nothing stirred. Then, against all his training, he cried out with shock as a hand touched his face, and the cry was muffled into silence by a hard palm over his mouth. The King laughed and let go.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I wanted to practice. It looks as though there'll be passages like this in the Great Temple—yes, even in the walls of my own palace. So I'll have to explore them and that'll take some delicate stalking. You didn't hear me coming?”

“No, Majesty … but the boys chosen for Aa learn a dance called Flying Shadows. The steps are done blindfold, swiftly and in silence, with a knife of sacrifice in the hand.”

“Hm.… Are you afraid of this place, Tron?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

“So am I. It's going to be heart-stopping work. Let's leave now. I don't think there are any more secrets to be found here—it's just the same secret, repeated and repeated.”

The King was wrong. In the narrowness of a dark crevasse he disturbed a roost of bats. Tron, following some paces behind, felt them whirl past like a sudden soft wind, musty and rustling. He stood rigid, locked in fright and revulsion, and when they had gone reached out to pat the solid wall, to reassure himself with the reality of stone. His hand, however, touched nothing.

He moved it about, and found a rectangular opening containing a bronze latch.

“Majesty,” he called. “Here is another door!”

A tug, and the latch clicked up. The door swung easily.

“Lord Sinu! What is this?” said the King blinking in the blaze of light.

“It's a Room of Days and Years,” whispered Tron. “But … but …”

“You said there wasn't one. Look, that door's been bricked up.”

He stepped inquisitively down into the drifted sand on the floor, but Tron stood where he was, staring in dismay. The room was a desolation. Its windows looked west across the river, but as the wall ran sheer to the water they could only have been seen from a boat or the far bank. Beneath them ran the proper sloping rack, but heaped with dust and bird-mess and tumbled bits of nests. Even from the door Tron could see that beneath the mess the rack was all disordered. In the Great Temple he had been awed by the ranked mystery of the rods, the sense of their counting away the generations, themselves unchanging. Here they seemed to lie all hugger-mugger. When he overcame his shock and stepped down into the room his foot scuffed up a rod from the floor, and brushing the mess off the rack he found places where twenty or thirty rods lay side by side, quite neatly, but then there would come a gap, a rod lying sideways, and then a stack of rods trying to fill a single place. The medallion of O lay in an empty space; the medallion of Aa he found leaning against one of the stacks, as though the Goddess Herself had begun to hold back the orderly march of days.

For all his pleasure in his own new freedom Tron still felt a rooted reverence for the order and discipline of the Temple, for the pattern of life that brought two thousand priests each exact to his place, each to chant the same line of the same hymn as their predecessors had chanted in that place a thousand flood-times ago. Though the Lord Gdu had chosen to set Tron free from this pattern for a while, and though he would have liked to continue that freedom, he still knew that his own happiness was nothing compared to the continuing life of the Temple. He had promised to help the King, and the King was fighting to break the power of the priests, but until this moment he had not understood how little might be left when the fight was over. If it should end like this!

“Lord Gdu,” he whispered. “How can I choose? Send me a sign.”

Leaning on the bar that ran along the bottom of the rack he stared out of a window to where the vast flatness of the irrigated plain lay shimmering under the noon of O. Out there, invisible, were peasant villages—but now he saw one, a circle of huts each with its pointed reed roof like the helmet of a Temple Guard. The huts seemed to float toward him. There was the Headman's eldest daughter feeding the communal fire with dried cow-dung, as was her right and duty according to the hymns. There was a green-robed priest performing a prayer-dance before Tan's square mud shrine. There were the men talking over their priest-brewed beer, and the women hoeing between the half-grown beans. And now he could hear the steady, heavy knock of the village water-lift as it raised its allowed gallons into the irrigation ditches. The vision came and went as if half-veiled by the heat haze. Now the women were bending between the stunted bean-plants, picking up irregular scales of gleaming white stuff and throwing them into baskets. The village men fell silent as two priests glided out from behind the shrine, one in green and the other black-robed, black-cowled, black-gloved. The priests paced slowly toward the hut where a woman lay in labor, about to give birth to the thirty-third child in the village since last the Gods demanded their due.…

The vision was broken by a sigh. Tron took a moment to realize that it had come from his own lips.

“What's the matter?” said the King gently.

“The fields are dying. The people are sick.”

“Yes, I told you. That's one of the things you and I are going to change.”

“But if it ends like this!” said Tron, turning with a gesture that swept the abandoned room.

“I don't understand about this,” said the King. “The Room of Days and Years is a priests' mystery. Kings aren't shown it or told about it.”

“I've seen the one at the Great Temple,” said Tron. “It was all in careful order. And later the Keeper of the Rods told us that if he made one mistake in how he moved the rods, that mistake would repeat itself again and again, and each time it would cause other mistakes, which would repeat themselves too, and cause more mistakes, until he couldn't tell from the rack whether Aa was full-faced or veiled, and whether it was flood-time or harvest-time.”

He picked up a white rod banded with one black ring and one brown.

“Look,” he said. “I don't know what this means—up at the Great Temple they paint a black ring onto the rod of the day on which a King dies. Perhaps the One of Sodala died that day in another year. It probably told a lot more, in itself and combined with the rods around it. The Keeper of the Rods could have read it then. Now it says nothing.”

The King leaned across the rack and blew the dust off the medallion of Aa, but when he realized what it was he drew sharply back and cupped his hands to make the good luck sign.

“Yes, I see,” he said. “And that's what happened here? You'd think they'd have sent up to the Great Temple, when things started to go wrong, and copied the position of the rods up there. In fact the Wise must have meant there to be two racks, so that one could check the other.… That's it! Look Tron—there
were
always two racks, for that reason. But when this one began to get disordered the priests at the Great Temple refused to allow it to be corrected by their rack.”

“But why …”

“Priests! They were jealous. Or perhaps this Temple supported the King … in fact, it would be much easier to be King in a country where there are two factions of priests to set against each other, and that would be reason enough for the priests at the Great Temple to try to close this Temple down. They could say that the disorder of the rack was proof of the Gods' displeasure. When I'm truly King I'll bring the priests back here, and set this rack in order again. It's madness to rely on one rack only. Do you think that's why the Gods caused us to meet, Tron—why They have sent you such signs?”

Tron turned again to stare out of the window, but no vision came, no word whispered out the distances. Even so he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I think this room is a sort of sign, like your salt valley, Majesty. They let us find it, but when I felt I couldn't help you if it was all to end like this, They sent me a vision of the land dying. I don't know what it means.”

“Good,” grunted the King. “No doubt it's a great thing to restore a Temple to the service of the Gods, but I feel … have you ever seen the river at the very start of the flood, Tron? It takes a fisherman's eye to notice that there's anything different at all; the ripples hump against the reeds, there are smooth patches like stretched silk between the wavelets, then the lungfish begin to croak … everything that's happened so far to us, even my father's murder, feels like that—little signs that tell of a huge change coming. The Gods don't send me visions, but I'll tell you how I read this room. It's a sign like the salt in the fields. It says that a country cannot be ruled without system and order, just as the Gods cannot be worshipped without rituals. But if the order and rituals are so stiff and unchanging that they cannot alter, ever, then when a time of change comes they become like this. They die.”