The Blue Hawk

by Peter Dickinson

  “Will she sit on my wrist, d’you think? Is she a female, by the way?”

  Tron had never considered that question. There were no females in his world, other than Aa and Tan.

  “I do not know, Majesty,” he said. “But they would not choose a female for … for …”

  He saw where the King’s question had led him.

  “For the Renewal,” said the King with the same bitter smile. “I thought it was that hawk. I thought you were that boy. I saw you from the side aisle when you murdered my father.”

  O burned on Tron’s scalp and shoulders, but his stomach was cold. Chill crept outward along all his flesh.

  “Don’t say anything till the food’s come,” said the King. “Turn away now. Rohan’s too shortsighted to have seen what kind of hawk it is, and Kalavin’s my one friend. But servants …”

  Tron turned away and made a slow business of adjusting the hawk’s leg thongs. The bird, hooded though it was, seemed to sense his fear and stirred uneasily. When the King told him to turn again he found that a gold parasol had been set up to shade the rock and a blue one over a pair of hawk stands. The King was peering into a basket of food, but he patted the rock beside him.

  “Put your bird on a stand and come and sit with me,” he said. “How old are you?”

  “I do not know, Majesty. I have been in the Temple twelve years.”

  “Thirteen, then. It doesn’t matter. This is the main advantage of hunting—you can go where you like and think what you please—but I never thought I’d get the chance of cornering a priest to talk to. Come on. Sit down. What’s your name?”

  “Tron, Chosen for Gdu,” said Tron. Shyness made him perch on the very edge of the rock, and he had to throw out a hand behind him to steady himself. Something tickled his second finger.

  “Stay still!” hissed the King.

  His arm moved, fast as a striking snake. His loose-held gauntlet slapped stingingly against the back of Tron’s hand.

  “That hurt, I’m afraid,” he said. “You know how to obey orders, at least. Look. Gdu knows no cure for that one’s sting.”

  Tron twisted his head to see. The orange scorpion was not an inch long, apart from the curling tail. The little hymn that deals with the bites of poisonous insect ends baldly:

  “Last the small scorpion,

  Colored like a marigold.

  If a man be stung by it

  Give him poppy for the pain

  And start the ritual

  To send him to Aa.”

  “My life is yours, Majesty,” Tron whispered.

  “Four times over now,” said the King. “Have some duck.”

  He held out a drumstick that reeked of rich cooking.

  “I … I may not eat meat,” stammered Tron.

  “Seriously? I’d bet my best horse that your Major Priests stuff themselves with goodies when nobody’s watching.”

  “No, Majesty. I have seen them eat. Only priest-bread and cheese. They drink water. Their chairs are bare wood. Their tunics are as coarse as mine. The riches and jewels are for the Gods.”

  The King started to smile, changed his glance, and nodded, as if some puzzle had been explained to him. Tron took his loaf from his pouch, broke off a corner and nibbled.

  “May I try that?” said the King, stretching out a hand. “Thanks. Gnff, dry as a dust devil. Good for the jaws, I expect. Well, Tron, now we’ve broken bread together, so there’s an Obligation between us. Tell me what they promised you if you took the hawk from the House of O and that kind woman.”

  “Promised me?” said Tron. “Nothing, Majesty. In fact the One of Gdu was so angry that he demanded that I should be sent at once to Aa.”

  “They wanted my father’s soul renewed?”

  “I don’t know … but … they were not ready, I think. And that the ritual should be broken so publicly, and by a priest …”

  “Yes, of course … so why did you do it?”

  “Gdu spoke in my heart, Majesty.”

  “No arguing with that, is there? And then my father died, just like that, uh?”

  “Majesty,” muttered Tron, “I … I …”

  “Tron,” said the King, dropping his gossipy tone and speaking as formally as a priest, “you owe me your life four times. That is four High Obligations you are under. I release you from all of them. But we have broken bread together. I do not release you from that.”

  “A powder was mixed for the One of Aa by the One of Gdu,” whispered Tron.

  “All my father’s food was tasted before he ate.”

  “They asked if the King’s bed had been moved. The One of Aa signaled that it had not. There are powders which are death to breathe …”

  “I am watched? In my bedroom? Lord Sinu!… The powder could be blown through a tube into the face of a sleeping man, do you think? What might the symptoms be?”

  Tron quoted from a little hymn of Gdu:

  “The lips blue, the veins

  Hump on the back of the hands,

  Blood bright behind each cheek,

  The eye’s black center wide,

  No antidote.”

  “That’s it,” said the King. He sat silent, picking little yellow grapes from a tight bunch.

  “Majesty,” said Tron hesitantly. “My life four times? One for the scorpion, one for the King … but …”

  “One for the kingfowl—didn’t you know? One for myself.”

  “Yourself!”

  “They decided not to send you to that kind woman, because they still had a use for you. What was it?”

  “To train the hawk.”

  “Did they give you a time limit?”

  “By flood rise, when the Dead King goes to Alaan.…”

  “And the live King is shown to the people … and in front of those people—most of them will be priests, of course, but there’ll be a few of the real people—as I stand to be proclaimed as the finder of the feather, the man with the soul of the hawk untamable, a boy-priest comes out with a Blue Hawk on his wrist, trained and tame. What does the hymn say? ‘I breathe into you now the Blue Hawk’s soul, the soul of my loved one, the hawk that consents to sit on no wrist, that cannot be tamed.’ And then this boy flies the hawk and it returns docile to his wrist. Can you read the sign, priest?”

  “The hymn cannot be wrong,” said Tron slowly. “That must mean that the hawk that I fly is not truly a Blue Hawk, though it has all the plumage of one. And this was the hawk sent by the Lord Gdu to renew your father’s soul. So He sent it as a sign that your father was not truly King!”

  “And therefore that I am not either, eh?”

  “I suppose so. But why …”

  “I am at war with these priests, Tron. So was my father and my grandfather. It’s a war without soldiers and without battles, but no less deadly for that. In the old days the Kings ruled in partnership with the priests, working together to honor the Gods and guard the people. But the priests grew jealous of the Kings, and slowly, slowly they have taken our power from us, working always (they say) for the honor of the Gods, but in reality judging all matters according to whether they will increase or decrease the power of the priests. For three generations my family has fought against them. If they kill one, then there is another to take up the fight. But suppose they could discredit the whole branch of us … I have several cousins who would make good Kings in a priest-ruled land.”

  By the end of this speech the pride and scorn in the King’s voice had darkened toward despair. Tron sat still, brooding in the stifling heat. Nothing had changed, but everything had changed. What had the Mouth of Silence whispered? “You serve in a great business.” A great wickedness, more likely. Somehow until this moment Tron had accepted that the Major Priests had to do everything they did, even taking the King’s life so that the ritual of Renewal should be shown to have power. But now …

  “The Lord Gdu did speak in my heart,” he muttered. “The hawk is truly a Blue Hawk. Those are not lies, Majesty.”

  “Yes …
yes. We must hold to that. So perhaps I am the true King. What do you think?”

  The King’s tone was taunting, but Tron looked earnestly at his face. How would you tell a true King? By the Eye of Gdu? No. By the look of pride and fierceness and command? No. These were no more than the hawk’s plumage. How could you see the soul untamable? You couldn’t, but at instants you could know it was there. Just as in the House of O and Aa Tron had felt all the vague confusions of the world narrow down to the sharp certainty that he must lift the hawk from its perch, so now was suddenly sure that the brown-faced young man smiling at his side was somebody to serve and to love.

  “You are the true King,” he said.

  “Good,” said the King, relaxing. “I think so too. In fact in my soul I know it, but … Anyway, and we’ll hold to that. And the hawk is a true hawk, and the God spoke in your heart. So if the priests intend to read the signs the way you read them just now, they’ll be mistaken. That’s not so bad, after all. Do they let you eat grapes?”

  Tron took the bunch unnoticing.

  “If the hawk doesn’t fly …” he began.

  “Oh, I can hold on for a while. But we are coming to a crisis—they just weren’t ready for it when you took the hawk … but you aren’t reading the signs, Tron. Gdu did speak in your heart. I am the true King. So the Gods are preparing for something else, which we know nothing about yet. If you don’t want those grapes I’ll finish them.”

  Gingerly Tron slid one of the little gold globes into his mouth and was almost overwhelmed by the shock of unknown sweetness. He handed the bunch back, smiling for the first time.

  “I had better not spoil my taste for priest-bread,” he said.

  The two of them spent the afternoon hawking. The King sent his retinue away by another route and walked off alone with Tron. He chose for himself a sulky-looking black-headed kite, almost twice the size of the Blue Hawk, but they couldn’t fly both birds together for fear of a fight in midair. It is far harder for two people to stalk game than one, but after one missed chance they were lucky. Tron put up, almost at his own feet, a covey that curled away toward the flank where the King was coming carefully up, so the hawk made its kill barely ten paces in front of the King and he saw at close quarters that astonishing dive and impact, the deed the hawk was shaped for.

  “Lord Sinu!” he said. “She strikes home like a lancer, full tilt. I’m glad to have seen that. That’s how I’ve always imagined a cavalry charge … oh, we train and train for warfare, but no war comes. You priests wouldn’t care for one, would you?”

  “I think priests are as brave as anyone else.”

  “Braver, in some ways. That wasn’t what I meant. Suppose I blew the Horn of War and gathered my army and fought and won. The Gods love a conqueror, and I’d have my nobles about me, armed and eager. They fret as much against the priests as I do.”

  “The Horn of War?”

  “Yes? They don’t teach you about that? Why should they? It’s a vast thing—takes four priests to carry it and a fifth to blow it with a sort of bellows … I don’t know what kind of noise it makes. My father never heard it either.”

  “But if it’s the priests who blow it …”

  “Ah, Tron, you see the priests as a single mind, because that’s how they teach you. One mind doing the will of the Gods. But in fact there are as many minds as there are men. Do you know the One of Sinu?”

  “I have seen him. He’s blind, isn’t he?”

  The King nodded but said nothing for a moment. Tron thought about the One of Sinu, a tall gaunt man, yellow-skinned with age and quite bald, leading his red-robed followers through the processions and rituals of his angry God, sightless but knowing every step and every position because the rituals never changed and he had performed them since he was Tron’s age.

  “Yes, he’s blind,” said the King suddenly. “That helps to cut him off from the others. I see quite a bit of him, at initiations of cadets into military orders and things like that. He’s a proud man, and angry—angry that the other Major Priests are slowly making less and less of his order as part of the process of whittling away at my power. If my Obligations called me to fight, he’d blow the Horn of War, and once that was done the others couldn’t stop me from mustering my army.”

  “But who is there to fight?”

  The King snorted.

  “You don’t imagine we’re the only nation in the world?” he said. “Why, I could reel you off a dozen High Obligations I have to other Kings, beyond the deserts and mountains and marshes. It’s the priests who’ve closed the Kingdom, though they say it’s the will of the Gods—but the Obligations are still there … supposing the other Kings remember them.… You’d better pick up your bird before she’s gorged herself too stupid to fly.”

  The King’s voice was harsh with frustrated energies; even if he had kept it quiet and steady his mere presence would have fretted the Blue Hawk. As it was it took Tron some time to coax the bird onto his gauntlet and slip its hood into place; and then it didn’t settle into its normal stillness but fidgeted with its talons and made half-movements with its wings as though longing, blind though it was, to soar away from his wrist.

  “My hawk will never fly in the Temple,” he said slowly. “Not in front of all the people. Even one stranger …”

  “Yes,” said the King. “I thought of that some time ago. I was bothered about whether I oughtn’t to tell you. Perhaps I would have. But I have to fight with what weapons I’ve got, you see. What will they do when you fail?”

  “Send me to Aa.”

  “Hm. Yes. The One of Gdu must know it can’t be done, surely.”

  “Yes—but he was so angry, I think he’d prefer me to fail. I must run away.”

  “Not easy. Every village has its priest. Every face is known, because every man is bound to one village. There are no vagabonds in my country … if I could get you to the far south, to Kalavin’s house near the Jaws of Alaan. His father … hm …”

  When the King thought, his face became unreadable. During the hunt he had lived, as it were, entirely on the surface of his being, taking all his pleasure in the minute of action. Now he seemed to turn inward and explore his own depths. Tron waited until he laughed and returned to the moment.

  “I’ve an idea,” he said. “Tell you later, when I’ve worked it out. Mustn’t waste good hawking time. My turn now.”

  He led the way southwest at a steady march, far too fast for serious hawking. Once he put up a hare but was slow in loosing his hawk, which turned out to fly in a quite different style from the Blue Hawk. It hunted level, and very fast, but the hare escaped it by a sudden break to the right; the hawk’s pace carried it far too wide on the turn, and by the time it was ready to pick up the line the hare was still, a rock with the other rocks. At a cry from the King the hawk lolled back to his wrist without a lure, as though it were used to missing its prey.

  “She’s lazy with hares,” said the King. “I’d like you to see her after kingfowl someday. My method is brisker than yours, at least, and a lot more dangerous. When we spot a covey we simply ride them down. They rise and rise again, but if we go hard enough we get among them. We yell and tootle our horns to keep them on the move, too. It’s rough riding, half a dozen of us, hawk on one wrist, horn in the other hand, reins loose on the pony’s neck—you’ve got to have a pony who knows the game and can pick its own line, but it’s up to you to keep him going flat out, come rough come smooth. I’ve seen plenty of bones broken, including some necks, but the risk of that is part of the fun. And yet … it’s only a game compared to your way. Your way is the real thing. You use as little as you need, but use it to the utmost. If ever I fight a war, it will be like that.”

  He gave up all pretense at hunting and walked beside Tron, asking questions about the life of priests.

  “Where will you sleep tonight?” he asked suddenly.

  “At the Temple of Tan.”

  “Whew! I told you that priests were braver than us in some ways. We d
on’t go near it. It’s not just that it’s priest-ground, but … you know, I’m a servant of the Gods, just as much as you. But I don’t think the Gods are altogether what the priests say they are … at least, I’m certain that the priests try to use the Gods, in the same way that they try to use you and me.… Now, here. I wanted to show you this.”

  For the last half mile they had been striding through thorny scrub land, hopeless for hawking, so it was startling to come out into an open place from which it was possible to see for a hundred miles. The King had led Tron to the southern edge of the rock plateau. O was halfway down the sky to their right and His slant beams lit the enormous tract of land that the river had smoothed out in her passage toward the Jaws of Alaan. They stood not two hundred feet above the plain, but in that dry air eyesight seemed to reach on forever. Far to the left in a gray and yellow line lay the beginnings of the dunes of the true desert. Even farther to the south Tron could see a line of blueness bluer than the sky and separated from it by a faint, erratic, glistening thread that was the snow that lay all year long upon the impassable Peaks of Alaan. To the west the plain was dimmer, veiled in sun glare. The river flashed like steel where it rounded the Temple of Tan at the point of the plateau, then became a black snake wriggling endlessly toward the mountains.

  “Look there,” said the King. “What do you make of that?”

  He pointed almost at the foot of the ridge on which they stood, then gestured along to the left. The plateau didn’t immediately give way to the silted plain. Instead a lower line of hills came curving out of the southeast and almost joined the main mass, leaving only a tongue of flatland half a mile wide. As it reached eastward this tongue widened into a broad, empty plain of extraordinary whiteness over which ran a series of strange lines, almost like veins, branching into lesser lines or sometimes widening into regular-shaped flats. It was hard to see from above whether the lines or flats were above or below the main level. They did not look natural, and certainly the earth rampart that blocked the narrowest part of the tongue seemed man-made.