The Blue Hawk

by Peter Dickinson

  “What is it?” said Tron. “Why is it so white?”

  “The white is salt, priest. In my great-grandfather’s time that was a fertile valley. Those lines are water channels. It was good earth and grew huge crops. Then the yield diminished. We deepened the channels. The soil turned sour. Cakes of salt began to form on the surface. It was the King’s land, so armies of peasants were gathered to carry the salt away. More water was poured on the land, but the soil died. My grandfather built that rampart so that a high flood couldn’t reach into the valley and carry the salt out to other fields.”

  “Perhaps the Gods …”

  “If the Gods were angry with my fathers, who served them well, then they’re angry with the whole kingdom. The same thing is beginning to happen everywhere, always on the best land. We can dig new channels to cultivate poorer land, but that is no answer. We’ve been building up a sickness in the soil, too slowly for a man to see in one lifetime. But soon it’ll be too late and the soil will die, except for two narrow strips along the river-banks where Tan brings down fresh silt each year. So we must change the way we farm.”

  “Change?”

  The King laughed at Tron’s astonished tone.

  “That’s the priest in you. All knowledge is in the hymns. The hymns never change. Only the priests know the hymns. Who teaches the herdsman’s son the management of cattle? His father? No, the priest of Sodala. Who teaches the noble’s son to fly a hawk? An austringer? No, a priest of Gdu—though, mark you, old Tandal, who taught me, was a lord of his art and fun to hunt with too, not like this One you’ve got now. Huh! Think, Tron. Must I live in comfort and do nothing but hawk and feast and practice warfare while my kingdom is dying, dying because nothing can change, dying because every year the One of Tan measures the flood level and from that moment the hymns decree exactly how much water must be lifted by how many turns of each wheel into which channels, and what seeds are to be sown in every yard of my land? Are you surprised that I enjoy hunting? Gdaal knows where the hare crouches, but the One of Gdaal doesn’t!”

  Tron stared in dismay at the glaring valley.

  “Is it because of the salt that we left the Temple of Tan?” he asked.

  “It was empty long before my great-grandfather’s time. My guess is that the priests withdrew into the desert partly to increase their mystery and partly so that they could not see with their own eyes what they were doing to the fields. But you, Tron—you’ve tamed a Blue Hawk, so you’ve changed the hymns. Will you help me change more?”

  “I … I owe you my life four times, but I … I am a priest.”

  “I released you from those Obligations. Besides, I owe you one back. I shall find a reason to sleep in another room, one with plain walls. That’s nothing. But because of the bread we’ve broken … Listen, Tron. Do you know how you came to the Temple?”

  Tron shook his head.

  “I guessed they wouldn’t tell you. You were the thirty-third child born in some village since the last priest was taken. If you’d been a girl you’d have been sacrificed, still wet with the birth-fluid, to the God of your village—Gdaal, I should think in your case—a lot of those desert hunters have your dark skin, and you seem to have the knack of stalking, and there’s one or two other things you can’t have learned from the hymns … never mind. You were a boy baby, so they let you live. Your mother suckled you for a year, then the priest paid your father five bronzes and sent you away to the Temple. Your father paid the priest five bronzes to make beer for a village feast, so the money came back to the priests.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “That’s what I thought. I’ve heard that sometimes a mother will mark her boy—cut off the top joint of his little toe or something like that—so that she can tell him if ever she meets him. But the priests of that kind woman, who look after the babies in their first years, inspect them when they are brought to the Temple and give to Her any who’ve been marked. They do everything they can to separate the priests from the people … somewhere, Tron, you have a village, and brothers and sisters, and a mother who fed you at the roundness of her brown breast.”

  “And a father who sold me.”

  “What else could he do? Kalavin’s elder brother is now a priest, and he was the firstborn son of the General of the Southern Levies. Only the priests know which priest he is. His father doesn’t. But Tron, you and he … in spite of everything they can do, you are still part of my people. Has your blood changed, which your mother gave you?”

  “Perhaps, Majesty. The Gods …”

  “The Gods are powerful, but They left you the step of a hunter. Tron, you’ve spent twelve years in the Temple and three months in the desert. What will you feel when you go back to the Temple?”

  Tron stood silent, gazing at the unreachable snow line of Alaan. Never to walk alone again, with a hawk on his gauntlet, every sense sharp, and a whole long day before him!

  “It’s hard for you,” said the King. “That’s another thing. Your whole training is mapped out so that you never have to make a single decision for yourself. Everything is laid down. That’s why, in the end, priests are bound to make bad rulers—they’ve never learned to decide.”

  “Majesty, you talk as though they did not serve the Gods, as if all they were interested in was keeping themselves in power. But they do, they do.”

  “Oh, yes, they do. A lot of people serve me, in my place and in my kingdom, but not all of them serve me well. Will you serve me, Tron?”

  Tron hesitated. He didn’t know what to say or do, or what he wanted, or how to fend off the onslaught of the King’s appeal.

  “I can serve only my Lord Gdu,” he muttered.

  He wanted to turn away but the King’s eyes held his, eyes like his murdered father’s, a look of defeat, fierce and sad. Nobody had ever trusted Tron before. They had given him orders and known he would obey, but that was not trust. Nobody had befriended him; he had companions living with him under the same rules of fear, but that was not friendship. Now the King offered him trust and friendship but …

  He wrenched his eyes away and stared at the glaring valley. Out of its whiteness a shape seemed to swim, a hawk, a Blue Hawk, his own hawk, sick and bedraggled as when he’d first seen it. He had broken the ritual to take it out of the House of O and Aa. Now it came to him again as a sign.

  “I’ll try to help you,” he said. “I cannot serve you, but I’ll try to help you.”

  “Good,” said the King, unsmiling. “In fact, better. I saw your face change, Tron. What did you see?”

  “He sent me a sign,” said Tron with a vague gesture at the salt-flats below.

  The King nodded, accepting it as a fact.

  “I come here often,” he said. “Whenever I feel I can’t fight them anymore. That place is a sign to me. It isn’t only that the fields are dying, Tron. That’s true, but the Kingdom is sick in a quite different way. It’s sick like a caged hawk. We’ve been cramped into these plains for too long, between Alaan and the marshes and the desert. D’you know, in my Obligations there are a dozen trade routes that I’m supposed to keep open, and they’re all closed. There are wells in the desert too that I ought to guard, but I can’t because whoever drinks their water falls sick and dies. When I look at those dead fields it seems to me that we must either burst out of this trap or die. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I think so. The Temple’s like that, in a way. You don’t realize it while you’re inside it, but now I’ve learned to be free.… What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing yet. But … is the Temple of Tan built at all like the Great Temple?”

  “Well, there’s no Palace, and there doesn’t seem to be a Room of Days and Years. But other bits are exactly like.”

  “So there might be hidden doors and passages in it? Will you look? I’ll come there at noon in three days’ time. We haven’t got very long. The embalmers finished my father’s body nine days ago. It’s less than twenty before the flood begins and he must go on his journey
.… Listen! that’s Kalavin’s horn! I’d like you out of sight before they come, in case one of them recognized you. Then they’ll think I took you off alone so that I could kill you and bury you somewhere back there. Hurry! Noon in three days’ time!”

  Trained to obedience, Tron moved quietly away down the ridge, crouching until he was hidden by a belt of sprawling cacti. Killed me? Buried me? He began to reason it through. A King is suddenly confronted with a boy who helped to murder his father and is now a threat to himself and his whole dynasty. What does he do? Seems friendly, breaks bread as a sign of trust, finds a reason to go alone with the boy into a tract of wilderness, and there, unwitnessed, the murder is avenged, the threat broken, and the boy vanishes. This King, though—perhaps he had considered it, and then had taken the greater risk of offering trust and friendship—not just for the sake of having a spy among the enemy, but because it was his nature to be direct and open, wherever he dared. He had the soul of the hawk in him.

  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.…