The Blue Hawk

by Peter Dickinson

  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.”

  Tron shook his head again, knowing that even if change was what the Gods desired, he was afraid of it. Not for him the King’s excitement at the prospect of riding the flood wave. He understood very well how strong was the priests’ desire to hold the Kingdom to its ancient, rigid ways. But for the Goat-Stone and the Blue Hawk, he could well have grown to be a priest of that very kind. He sighed once more.

  “Who are you to be afraid of change, Tron?” said the King mockingly. “You began it all. In fact it’s like what you told me about these rods—each change causes further changes. Because of what you did at the Renewal the priests themselves are planning to change the ritual of my Showing to the People, by letting you fly your hawk then. And because of that … you know, you’re like a child who takes one pebble out of a great cairn of stones and brings the whole pile rumbling down.”

  Tron didn’t answer, and was glad to leave the ruined room and to close at last the door into the secret ways. Though he said nothing more about it, the King seemed aware of his need for assurance. They shared a meal of priest-bread by the river and spent the heat of the afternoon lazily trying to snare the young bream that loitered beneath the undercut mud banks. Tron fell in, and the King jumped after him to help, though he was in no danger. After that they lay on a bank of almost burning gravel to dry their clothes in O’s rays.

  In the heavy, steamy silence, where no life seemed to stir, something gave a sharp and rasping bark. Another bark echoed it before the silence closed in again.

  “What was that?” said Tron.

  “Lungfish waking,” said the King somberly. “I told you it was a sign. The flood is coming sooner than I thought. The priests will send for you in a very few days, Tron. I must get back to the Temple and try to find out what they’re planning.”

  VI

  The priest-litter swayed to the trudging step of the slaves. Tron had never ridden in one before, and sat awkwardly in it with the Blue Hawk on the pole beside him hooded and still. He was near the end of the procession. First came a detachment of Temple guards, each with his own slave marching beside him to carry the spindling parasol that kept the sun off the soldier, then the three litters—Tron’s last—and finally a smaller party of guards. They moved in a rigidly straight line across the desert, constrained by the causeway that the Wise had built. Already the Great Temple rose lumpish on the horizon, looking like a natural outcrop of sandstone. Even the Tower might have been a pillar of wind-carved rock.

  As the distance slowly closed, fear came and went in waves, and Tron was glad when a guard came to draw the litter curtains so that nobody should see him, leaving him alone with his hawk in a stifling, swaying, cloth-walled box. He closed his eyes and tried to drive the fear away by remembering the details of the morning’s strange hawking.

  Five days after the King’s visit to the Temple of Tan a young priest of O had brought him a message to be ready. Late next morning the three litters had been carried into the Great Courtyard, one empty, the others containing the Mouth of Silence and the One of Gdu. Guards and slaves had been sent out of sight, and then the One of Gdu had put his hand into the closed basket he carried.

  “Now let us see what your hawk can do,” he had snapped, tossing the dove into the air. Tron had hooded the hawk so that it shouldn’t be flustered by the strangers; his fingers were awkward with nervousness; it was several seconds before he was ready, and by then the dove was spiraling upward, so white that it glinted like metal against the even blueness of the sky. The hawk had missed its morning’s hunting and rose eagerly, apparently without yet seeing the dove. But the dove’s wingbeat quickened as though it were trying to escape by climbing into the sky itself. The hawk rose slowly up the tower of air to seek its natural height to hover and search. The three watchers in the courtyard craned upward, their necks aching with the angle. The Mouth of Silence shaded his face with a black-gloved hand.

  Suddenly it was almost as though the dove’s nerve had cracked. It broke from its spiral and headed east, diving for extra speed. Now there was no hope of the hawk catching it. A wild dove can outfly any hawk, and even a Temple dove with
that advantage of height had nothing to fear. The hawk for another full circle took no notice, simply continuing to climb, while the dove fled toward the desert. Tron began to pull the lure out of his pouch.

  But the dove was a Temple dove. Its home was among pillars and crannied statues, not the featureless wild. When it was almost out of sight it turned, seeking the familiar safety of buildings. It was halfway back when the hawk flung itself out of its circle, arrowing down. The dove twisted aside, but was now too low to gain speed by a dive of its own. The hawk hurled down, fast as a flung stone. The lines of flight converged, vanishing behind the Temple wall, but before the watchers could stir or comment they saw, framed under the brilliant arch of the main gateway, the terrible moment of impact signaled by a puff of white down.

  “You gave the boy no time, brother,” began the Mouth of Silence. “I have heard of hawks lost.”

  Tron was already running for the gateway and didn’t hear the answer. Beyond the gate he slowed, so as to move calmly up to the kill. He found the hawk perched on its prey, and, as usual, delicately plucking away the thigh-feathers. When it gave its customary silent hiss of warning at his approach, Tron paused in his stride.

  For an instant he saw the two birds, living and dead, with different eyes. It was as though time had loosed its hold on this little orb of matter, so that everything in it would endure for ever. The slate feathers and the white became untarnishable metal; the clear, fierce eye was a topaz; the ball of blood at the joint of the dove’s closed beak was a ruby. Tron knew that a God was using his human eyes to look at these things.

  The instant itself was timeless. The priests at the gate probably didn’t notice his hesitation before he moved in and whistled the hawk to his gauntlet. He slipped the hood on, then cut the dove’s leg free at the joint. The hawk was tearing at this morsel as he carried it back to the gate.

  The One of Gdu looked sulky still. The Mouth of Silence was saying, “There is a suitable passage in the Hymn of the Birth of Sinu, I think. After the fight with Ktimmu O speaks thus …”

  The One of Gdu had been barely listening. Though his head was attentively bowed, he had stared at boy and hawk with bright-eyed fury.

  Now, in the swaying litter, Tron worked out meanings. The One of Gdu had come hoping for failure, and had done his best to see that it happened, but Gdu had turned the dove back toward the Temple and the hawk had made its kill. So the failure would take place in front of King and people, with great loss of prestige to the priesthood of Gdu. That was certain. Both the One of Gdu and Tron knew that the Blue Hawk, trained to the presence of a single quiet-footed boy, would revert to wildness if they tried to fly it before three thousand priests, nobles, and people in the humming crush of the Great Temple Courtyard.

  The Mouth of Silence, meanwhile, was considering how the priests could justify this change in the Ritual. If they were to use the flight of the Blue Hawk to break the King’s dynasty, they must be able to prove that they had not done this for their own purposes, but because it was something they could not avoid, something they were ordered to do by the unquestionable hymns.

  Both those things were clear. But what was the meaning of the vision? Tron was sure that Gdu had sent him another sign, but he couldn’t yet read it. Was it a warning that the King (the Blue Hawk) would after all destroy the Temple (the dove)? A promise that what Tron and the King had begun would come to its wished-for end? There was no telling. The hawk gaped on its pole, distressed by the airless heat. Faintly through the muffling curtains Tron heard the wavelike pulse of the Farewell to O, sung from the Tower by the choir of gold-robed priests. This sound had marked the rapid fading of daylight since he could remember, with a mixture of comfort and dread—dread at the approach of Aa, comfort at the protection of the Rituals. Now all comfort was gone from it. Succeed or fail, he guessed that the Major Priests would have no further use for him once the Live King had been shown to the people. The Temple would be his tomb.

  Only the King had a plan. Just as the hawk seemed to have lost the dove that morning, so Tron felt he had lost all contact with the King. But Gdu had turned the dove back.

  Once again he drank sweetwater. He and the hawk were alone in a small, north-facing room. It was already too dark for him to look for spyholes without being seen to do so. The King and his plans seemed far away—in fact he was not sure that the King would even know about his return to the Temple. So for the moment it seemed safest to act in everything as though he were the priests’ obedient tool.

  The water was sweeter than he’d remembered, or perhaps they’d mixed it stronger for him. He carried his bowl of offering to the sill with the drug already dragging at his mind. As he whispered his night hymn he found himself thinking, I shall not leave here alive. It would be better if I died. He did not remember lying on his mattress. Next instant, it seemed, he was waking to the old clear note of welcome from the Tower as the rim of O’s disc broke the desert horizon.

  The drop from his window was thirty feet sheer. The room had its own latrine, an arrangement that Tron knew of nowhere else in the Temple. He guessed this must be a prison cell—not one of the “tombs,” of course, those cramped cubes of darkness below the Tower in which erring priests crouched the hours away, but a place to keep a prisoner safe without seeming to punish him. So it would be well watched. The inner wall was covered with an intricate carving which told the story of Tan’s imprisonment in the Country of Alaan. Tron looked at all the pictures with interest, as was natural, and found two spyholes and a place that he was sure must hide the catch of a secret door, though he didn’t dare try it.

  The breadboy who brought him food and water wouldn’t meet his glance, a bad sign. The breadboys had a strange knack of knowing what was happening in the Temple. No one else came, but Tron occupied the lonely hours with the slow and difficult job of splicing a new end into a broken tail-feather, an operation that the hawk bore with great patience. He moved its stand to the window, and sometimes it stirred and ruffled as a flight of doves swung past. He decided to let it fast for a day. For his own reasons he was anxious that it should be eager to fly.

  That dusk, knowing where the spyholes were, he decided it was safe to stand at the window and merely pretend to drink his sweetwater. When he tilted the bowl, the slight slope of the sill carried the water outward and let it trickle down the Temple wall without a sound. In the middle dark he woke to a stir of air and a faint rustle. A blackness blocked the lower half of the window. His heart thudded. Had they come to inspect the sill for traces of the spilt drug? Would its smell taint the night air? The figure vanished and the air stirred again as the stone slab closed. Tron took a long time to sleep again.

  Next morning he found two red beans in his bowl of offering. He smiled, taking it for a God-sent sign, though the priest who had brought them had been only plotting to keep him content. That day they sent him out into the desert in a curtained priest-litter to show the Keeper of the Rods and the One of O what the hawk could do. This time he set the hawk up into the air before they loosed the doves. It killed two almost perfunctorily among the sullen dunes. The Major Priests looked pleased.

  “The flood begins to rise,” said the One of O. “In two days Tan must carry the Dead King on his journey, and that evening the Live King will be shown to the people. You will have your hawk ready?”

  “If it takes a full crop now it can fast tomorrow,” said Tron.

  “Like a priest, eh?” said the Keeper of the Rods, jolly and friendly. He glanced at the hooded bird, then at Tron, then away, much as the breadboy had done. Tron shivered.

  No sign came that night. If anyone slipped into the room Tron slept through their visit. Next day was stillness and loneliness. As the last notes of the Farewell to O sucked the light out of the sky a new noise filled the dark, a deep, windy, repeated groaning. It was so eerie and inhuman that for a moment Tron felt that some vast creature of Aa had stirred from its lair below the dunes and was lurching, slow as a toad, toward the Temple. The
n human voices answered, thin and high, and then the unmistakable bass chant of priests singing one monotonous phrase again and again. A fourth sound joined in, more rhythmic even than the priests, a heavy and repeated thud that seemed to jar the bones of the Temple. Then Tron understood. The huge painted coffin in which lay the embalmed body of the Dead King had been carried down to the Palace courtyard. The groaning noise came from some enormous funeral horn. The King’s wives were wailing their farewell, and the Priests chanting their welcome, while one heavy beam was swung and swung again to break down the wall that blocked the Gate of Saba so that the coffin could be carried through and lie all night alone in the House of O and Aa. Tomorrow, when the Live King had been shown to the people, he would be carried back through the Gate of Saba on a litter gay with the symbols of the blessings of all the Gods, and then the Gate would be walled up once more, not to be opened until he too went on his journey.

  The thought of the King filled Tron with fears and imaginings which bustled around in his skull, swelling and shrinking and then repeating themselves as though they were quite new fears when they were old, old. He dared not even sigh for sleep in case some watcher saw that he had not drunk his sweetwater. Once more his priest’s training, the habit of stillness, helped. In the end, without his noticing the moment, fears became dreams.