A picture of the Great Temple, unmistakable, was cut into the clay. Beside it was a figure of a King, wearing the Hawk Crown. Below this were several ranks of meaningless little shapes made by pressing a sharp triangular object into the clay. On the other side of the tablet was a strange arrangement of lines, which at first seemed almost accidental, but suddenly, without altering their position, became a picture of the Kingdom, seen from above, with Tan running down the center to the Peaks of Alaan at the bottom. Tron nodded and returned the tablet, but the man, his strength now clearly seeping back, staggered to his feet and thrust the tablet under Tron’s face. Pointing with one finger to the triangular marks, he said, “Bah ahnshent tretty ahn bah durr Rehd Shpear ah carl durr Kaing tuh ayerd oos.”
The third time he said it a few words stuck out of the jumble of sound.
“The King. The Red Spear?” said Tron.
The man pointed. Leaning against the cave wall by the saddlebag was an object like a long but feeble bow, with two strings wound round with red ribbon and at the top end a bunch of scarlet feathers from which a fine bronze spike protruded. The man began to say the sounds again. At last they made sense.
“By ancient treaty and by the Red Spear I call the King to aid us.”
When Tron repeated the words the man nodded eagerly and made as if to stagger out of the cave, but suddenly remembered his spear and gear and turned to pick them up. The hunters cried out angrily. In a flash Tron saw what had been happening. Once when O had been wandering in a wild place disguised as a man, He had been captured by ghosts, who had tied Him to a tree and waited for Him to die so that they could take His possessions without the guilt of killing Him, because they didn’t want so strong a ghost stalking that place as their enemy. O, of course, had not died, and the ghosts had grown so thin with waiting that they turned into centipedes, and then O had burned His bonds and returned to His heaven. Just so the hunters had been waiting for their prisoner to die, so that they could take his belongings without his returning to haunt them. Now they were afraid that they would get nothing after all their trouble.
Tron tried to make the stranger understand by signs that he must pay some kind of a ransom, and even undid the saddlebag himself, took out a soft leather belt with a gold clasp, put it into the stranger’s hands and pushed him toward the chief. The stranger looked furious for a minute, then shrugged and undid the black belt he was wearing. He passed this, dagger and all, to the chief, who laughed aloud and buckled it round his stomach. The fat bulged grossly over the leather.
With solemn dignity the stranger undressed down to a pale linen shift; another of the hunters got his leather jacket with its bronze shoulder plates, another his brilliantly patterned shirt, and so on. The babies even returned the piece of purple cloth so that he could give it back to them. Then, still as solemnly as if he were taking a part in a ritual, the man dressed in the clothes from the saddlebag. They were strange gear to take into the wilds—curl-toed gold slippers, green pantaloons, a long yellow robe of incredibly fine weave, a jeweled belt, a soft blue cap with a ruby in it, and last of all a gold chest-medal the size of a man’s spread palm. When he put out his hand and grasped the Red Spear, the hunters sighed and drew back. Once more the chief bowed to the ground and knocked his head on the floor. When he rose he seemed deathly afraid, and fumbled with the buckle of his stolen belt as if eager to give it back; but the stranger pushed out his hand, palm foremost, as a sign that the chief must keep the gift.
Suddenly the chief laughed and the tension broke. In no time Tron found himself sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cave beside the chief amid the clamor and guzzling of a hunter’s feast. The stranger, whose name seemed to be Onu Ovalaku, sat on the chief’s other side and accepted with dignified little bows the tidbits of roast lizard which the chief kept offering him. The hunters seemed to know somehow that Tron would not eat meat, and one of the women sat just behind him, cracking sweet little nuts for him between two stones. The men danced and boasted in their many-syllabled language, the women sang wailing songs, and the children ran hither and thither, treating the bodies of the seated adults as boulders to clamber over or play hide-and-seek among.
The pillar of smoke was gold with O’s going, though O’s answer was hidden behind the ridge, when Tron helped Onu Ovalaku up the last stretch of path, through the thorn barrier, and into the pastures. As they trudged up the slope, Onu Ovalaku, who seemed now a little delirious, kept saying anxiously, “Durr Kaing? Durr Kaing?”
“Yes,” said Tron again and again. “We will go tomorrow.”
He himself was very tired with the weight of Onu Ovalaku’s arm around his shoulders, and now he was overwhelmed by a great flood of sadness at the idea of leaving Kalakal. He loved these gold pastures, and the freedom, and the sense of being part of a contented community, and he was appalled and frightened at the idea of returning into the Kingdom. There was no need for that, surely. Curil could take Onu Ovalaku to the house of Kalavin’s father, who would know his Obligations and send the ambassador on to the King. What part had Tron to play in any of this? Hadn’t he done all that the Gods could require?
No, said Gdu in his heart. No. Go.
XI
Between the hills and the desert, between the realm of the Gods and the Kingdom of Men. Scenes from that journey.
The twinkly shade of a sparse grove of eucalyptus. At its far edge Curil and Onu Ovalaku halt, outlined against the hammering glare of O. Tron, leg-weary and footsore from the endless and undifferentiated track across the hills, stops a few feet behind them, to take full advantage of the spice-smelling shade and to keep the Blue Hawk clear of the fret of their presence, which it seems to sense even through its hood.
But when Curil points ahead and Onu Ovalaku claps him lightly on the shoulder to show pleasure, Tron strolls forward to join them and finds that they have come to the edge of the plateau.
Four miles ahead and several hundred feet below them, Tan drives toward the east; beyond Her the brown hills shoulder up, like the ridged backs of gigantic cattle, but over to the left and incredibly blue and green after the barren upland, a vast flatness stretches away. Onu Ovalaku lets out his breath in a slow gasp and for want of language makes an absurd gesture with his arms as though he could hold all that vastness in his embrace.
“Durr Kaingland?” he says.
“Yes,” says Tron somberly, “that’s the Kingdom.”
Night. Firelight. Onu Ovalaku cross-legged on the earth by the fire, wearing the livery of an upper servant in the household of Kalavin’s father, the General of the Southern Levies. The General on a stool beside him. The light casts masklike shadows on their contrasting faces, Onn Ovalaku’s round, smooth, solemn and eager, the General’s arrogant and impatient. Tron is still puzzled by the General. The old man seems so ready to break into a furious outburst at the slightest deviation from accepted behavior—a tiny mistake in dress or speech or even food can throw him into a passion—and yet at the same time he is prepared to break all rules and rituals, however important, in order to fulfill his Obligation to convey Onu Ovalaku and the Red Spear safe to the King. Now he cranes forward to watch while once more his guest attempts to explain his mission.
Onu Ovalaku smooths out a patch of mingled ash and dust, dampens it and smooths it again. Deftly on this surface he draws pictures with the point of his dagger—horsemen, naked, with great dogs leaping beside them.
“Mohirrim,” he says drily.
He adds a group of armored men fighting against the horsemen.
“Falathi,” he says, then repeats the word, tapping himself on the chest.
He wipes the picture out and draws again. This time the naked horsemen are burning a house. One of them has speared a woman, and a dog is leaping at a child. Onu Ovalaku destroys that picture and draws another and another, and another. Each time there are the same horsemen and dogs, fighting, killing, destroying; and each time he draws them he says the same word, “Mohirrim.”
Tron, d
izzy from the first day’s jolting chariot ride, half-hypnotized by the tranced monotony of the passing plain, the waterways and the banked fields and the placid villages, endlessly repeated, sits a little back from the other two, understanding that the country beyond the peaks has been attacked by a horde of savage horsemen and that Onu Ovalaku has come to ask for help, but not much caring. This is the King’s affair, and the General’s and Onu Ovalaku’s.
But Tron, when he shuts his eyes and draws into himself, can sense, even here in the General’s way-house, that he is part of some other purpose. He is being watched, but not by human eyes. It is as if he were some desert creature crossing a wide, bare tract—this journey—under the gold-eyed stare of a leopard crouched invisible on a rock that he must pass: the tip of the hunter’s tail may twitch as it watches the coming prey, but its instinct tells it, “Wait. Not yet. Not yet.”
Crossing the river. The stench of mud and the sweetness of sappy new growth. The big-muscled ferrymen lean against the sweeps, singing to set the rhythm a slow and gurgling chant about a frog who had two wives on opposite banks of the river and wore himself out trying to keep them both happy. On the bank the ferry has left a green-robed priest of Tan angrily blesses the crossing. It has taken three hours of argument and a thumping bribe to the village headman to get the ferry to move at all. The priest has taken omens and declared that the Goddess was in no mood to carry chariots that day; but the headman, rheumatic and wily, has coaxed him into rereading the signs. Now the General lolls by the steersman’s side, smiling to himself, and teasing the stiff curls of his beard. Tron understands quite well what has happened: the priest has seen the General come storming north, with only a few of his household and only four chariots; no village priest can question so great a noble about his comings and goings, but he can delay him for a day, send word ahead, arrange for further delays, and thus give the Major Priests time to prepare themselves for whatever this strange journey may mean. The General is smiling because he has outmaneuvered the priest. Tron smiles too, thin-lipped and sad. As if the Gods cared about any of this!
Desert soon after dawn. The jolt and bucket of the chariot, the clatter of wheels and hooves, a tiny mess of movement on the causeway corrupting that huge silence. Outwardly Tron seems to be part of the judder and noise; his body is braced against the chariot’s sidebar, his feet firm in the cloglike footholds fixed to the chariot’s floor; he is wearing the same gaudy livery as the General’s servants. But inwardly, as he whispers the hymn of how Gdaal made the desert, he is part of the stillness.
Above the clatter rises a sudden shout of warning and a yell of surprise; a horse screams. A wheel floats into Tron’s vision, spinning along the causeway so close that he could touch it if he were not trapped in the slow daze of his trance. Tron’s charioteer is hauling on the reins; the next chariot is a wreck of wicker and wood, but Tron himself is hypnotized by the turning wheel as it curves with strange slowness off the paving and strikes with perfect aim into a small granite pillar, carved with the figure of Alaan and set there to mark the miles. It seems to burst quite silently and still with the same unearthly slowness, losing its shape like a storm-stripped flower. Five spokes twirl upward, dark against the dawn glare, floating as though they meant to soar off into the blue.
Then, in an instant, time asserts its grip. The spokes flop back into the sand. The wheel lies broken. Tron climbs down from the stopped chariot and goes around to hold the horses’ heads while the charioteer runs back to help with the wreck behind. A man is sitting by the road with his head in his hands, but nobody else seems hurt and both horses are on their feet. An argument breaks out about whether the smash was caused by a charioteer’s carelessness or by a priest at last night’s way-house tampering with an axle pin. The General stamps about on the causeway, furious at the prospect of arriving at the Temple with a train of only three chariots, as if he were a common second-level lordling. But Tron stands in silence by the quivering horses, absorbed in the sign of the bursting wheel, though he cannot yet read its meaning. Several times he relives its slow instants before he shakes himself and looks around him.
At once he is aware that the desert has changed, becoming mere heaps of sand. The Gods have withdrawn. Gone too is the sense he had of being watched, as if by a leopard in ambush. So it is They who have been watching him during the journey north, and have now shown him this strange sign as They left. Though he still cannot read it, he is aware that he has come to a point where time pivots over like the heavy beam of a water-lift when it has emptied its load into an upper channel. He realizes that ever since he took the Blue Hawk from the House of O and Aa he has been somehow a focus, a central point in the Gods’ attention to the world. Now, with the Temple a bare eight hours away, They have departed on Their own affairs. Whatever happens next will be achieved by men in a world of men.
XII
It was strange to stand at the Great Gate of the Temple and watch the little procession move through it to the steady throb of a gong and the clear note of a priest of O singing the Hymn of Welcome to Strangers. One priest of O and one of Aa led the procession; then came Onu Ovalaku in his outlandish ambassadorial robes, holding the Red Spear high before him; then the General, frowning and stiff; and then two Temple guards, snapped out of their lounging arrogance by the presence of these great people.
Tron watched them go and turned away to walk behind the chariots. He found himself swallowing with nerves, though there seemed little to be afraid of; his part of the adventure seemed over, he was under the protection of a great noble and the King himself, and there wasn’t even much danger of his being recognized, in livery, with his hair a two-month mat and his already dark skin almost black from living all day under the glare of O. But he was still afraid. The Lord Gdu had left him, and he felt naked and companionless.
The path round to the palace passed beneath the enormous statues of the Gods, lining the Temple wall, patched with sharp angular shadows by the slant rays of O. At the foot of each was a priest of that God, standing by a stone bowl. Tron saw the charioteers ahead pause at the feet of lion-headed Sinu, throw a small coin into the bowl, and receive a blessing from the red-robed priest. But Tron as part of his disguise carried on his wrist the General’s pretty little crested sparrowhawk—his own Blue Hawk was hidden in one of the chariots, in a basket which it hated and feared—so it was natural for him to make his small sacrifice to Gdu. The bowl held a mound of mixed coins, and as Tron’s tinkled among them a blue-robed priest paced forward out of the shadow of the taloned feet to chant
“For this service,
O Lord Gdu,
Take the pain
And clear the eye.
For this service
Smooth the skin,
Heal the sickness,
O Lord Gdu.”
For a moment Tron stared at the priest, who stared back until he suddenly realized that he had made a mistake. All day he’d been trotting out the same blessing to visitors who had journeyed across the desert to consult the God about some illness, and now he’d automatically chanted it once more, when he should have blessed this boy’s lord’s hawking. He grunted and turned away, obviously not prepared to produce two blessings for one small coin.
A month before, Tron would have been appalled, but now he began to smile to himself as he walked on. The statue was empty, the God was not there, to heal or bless. But Tron found, whispering the words to himself, that he began to feel a little less afraid. Fear, after all, is a kind of sickness of the soul.
It seemed a long way round the huge-slabbed, windowless walls to the Palace Gate. When he had lived in the Temple it had seemed to Tron to be a whole world; during his travels it had shrunk in his mind to something no more than a big group of buildings, a place where a lot of priests happen to live; now once more he discovered how vast it was, and how the huge mass of its stones seemed to weigh the desert down, in much the same manner that the centuries of priest rule seemed to weigh down the Kingdom. O’s light lay l
evel across the dunes as he followed the chariots into the Palace Courtyard.
This was built as a mirror image of the Great Courtyard in the Temple, but was a whole world different in feel. At its center, round a stone-rimmed pool, rose a small grove of date palms, and in their shade a group of young nobles, fresh from some war game, were laughing and drinking; elsewhere men and women lounged or bustled, all at their own pace, doing what had to be done or what pleased them. A group of young men were singing at the foot of a wall; above their heads was a screen of fretted stone through which small hands emerged, opened, and showered petals down on the singers. The arrival of three chariots and a dozen servants were hardly noticed in this bustle, but suddenly one of the singers broke out of the group and came striding across.
“Atholin!” he called. “What in Sinu’s name are you doing here?”
“The General has come north, My Lord,” said the head charioteer. “He brought a stranger with him. This boy knows more than I do.”
The young man swung round, frowning and pulling at his broken nose. Tron knew him for the King’s friend, Lord Kalavin, the General’s son, but he stared at Tron in humorous bewilderment.
“You’re not one of our people,” he said. “Why are you wearing our livery?”
“My Lord the General gave me that honor,” said Tron carefully.
“Well, what’s all this about?”
Tron felt a need to be cautious. The General had not talked in front of any of his own servants about the reasons for his sudden dash north.
“My Lord,” he said. “Do you remember a day, hawking above the Temple of Tan, when kingfowl were caught by a stranger?”
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