The Blue Hawk

by Peter Dickinson

  This room was full of purposes, layers under layers—the General’s to fulfill his Obligation to the Falathi; Onu Ovalaku’s to bring help to his country; the King’s to provide that help and thus to reassert his own power, and in the end to break the power of the priests; the priests’ to retain that power; and so on. But under all these lay the invisible purposes of the Gods, Who had willed this meeting, Who had used the One of Sinu and now were letting him sleep, Who had used Tron and now …

  Tron shivered again. This was what he was afraid of. Glad and happy though he’d been to serve the Lord Gdu always in dance and prayer, he did not feel that he could endure again adventures such as those that had taken him to Kalakal, to serve Their purposes. And yet the Mouth of Silence had said that he was still on that journey.

  “Well, Revered Lord?” said the King as the lesser priests of Sinu withdrew. His voice sounded light and careless, but his right hand was taut around the hilt of his dagger, below the table, out of sight of all but Tron.

  “Majesty,” said the Keeper in a flat and passionless voice, “ask yourself why we were so certain that this treaty was a lie. The answer is that we already knew that the Gods had rejected the Red Spear which this stranger brought, and thus shown him to be accursed. And we knew why. You have now shown that the treaty is true, but it would have been better to have left it as a lie. Because, treaty or no treaty, you can never lead your army through the Pass of Gebindrath. The Great Curse of Aa is on that place.”

  He turned to the Mouth of Silence, whose dry, painful voice took up the story.

  “That curse is the greatest of our Great Rituals,” he said. “It is performed by twelve twelves of priests, led by the One of Aa, chanting with his own lips. It has been heard only twice in three hundred floods. Each new generation of priests learns it in a whisper. Majesty, do you think your levies will follow you through a place where such a curse is laid?”

  “And there is no other road through the Peaks of Alaan,” said the Keeper. “The stranger must have come that way. That is why the Red Spear was rejected by the Gods. That is why he is accursed.”

  “Majesty …” began the General, but the King held up a hand.

  “Keeper,” he said. “You count the days and years. Can you tell me why the Pass of Gebindrath was closed with a curse? And why the paths through the northern marshes which used to be known are now lost? And why the desert wells which were built by the Wise are now poisoned, so that no merchants can cross the sands? Why?”

  “It was the will of the Gods,” said the Keeper. “There are no hymns about the closing of the Kingdom. The Gods said, ‘Let it be done,’ and it was done.”

  “That is all?” said the King in a slightly mocking voice, and then with sudden urgency added, “Mouth of Silence, is that all?”

  Tron saw how well he had chosen his man and his moment. The One of O might have ducked the question, and the Keeper would have blandly lied. But the Mouth of Silence served the Gods in a simpler manner.

  “The passes and the marsh roads and the desert are all closed,” he said, “for one great purpose. We must keep the Kingdom holy, serving the Gods. There was a certain King, Dathardan the Ninth, who fought a war against a people on the far side of the desert and returned with many captives, one of them a woman for whom he became mad with love. And because of this love he built her a Temple for the God she worshipped, a snake god, false and abominable. And Dathardan made for the woman a jeweled image of the snake god, and for her sake on a certain day he fell at its feet and worshipped it. That night, as he and the woman slept, Aa took them. And next day Sinu raised up a holy madness in the people, priests, nobles, and peasants, so that they hunted down and killed all the strangers. Then Dathardan the Tenth reigned, and he was a child, so there was a Council of Regency, and the Gods made known their will to the Council, that the Kingdom must be closed thenceforth and for ever.…”

  The tired voice droned on, hypnotic. This was not a hymn, true, but Tron could tell from the stiff turns of phrase that it was something learned and passed down through generations of priests, a secret knowledge that threaded through all the unchanging rituals of the Kingdom just as the secret ways threaded in darkness through the Temple. In a half-trance he saw the green-robed priests of Tan supervising the demolition of the canals that drained the barrier of marshes to the north; he saw the small party of priests of Gdu making every ten years the appalling journey to add more poison to the desert wells; he saw an army of laborers breaking down the wonderful road cut by Gebindrath, and leaving sheer cliff; he saw the slow dunes beginning to creep across that other road, built by the Wise, that led to it. He felt, across the stretching years, the power of the Gods drawing the Kingdom close around Them, just as a hunter draws his cloak around him against the chill of the desert night.

  “… and finally,” said the Mouth of Silence, “the One of Aa with twelve twelves of his priests journeyed to the pass and made the Great Ritual, calling down the power of Aa upon that place, to hold it closed against man and beast until the Gods unmake what They made.”

  “So the pass is sealed and the road is broken,” said the Keeper of the Rods. “And with good reason. Majesty, you cannot and you must not cross the peaks.”

  “What men have broken men can mend,” said the King. “What priests have done priests can undo. I have an Obligation to Falathi.”

  “But the Gods have already rejected your Obligation,” said the One of O impatiently. “They made that clear when they rejected the stranger’s offering, brought here by him through the Curse of Aa.”

  “But he didn’t come that way!” burst in the General.

  Every head turned toward him.

  “There is no other way,” said the Keeper. “The hymns of Alaan are clear.”

  “He climbed,” said the General. “He has drawn pictures to show me. At one point he fell three hundred feet down an ice-scree. Both his guides died. And six other Ambassadors set out, of whom only he has come through. But still he didn’t use the Pass of Gebindrath, so the curse is not on him. That’s clear.”

  “It’s also clear I cannot take an army the way he came,” said the King. “Revered Lords, the curse must be lifted from the pass.”

  They looked at him in silence, their faces unreadable. Tron realized that the muffled, repetitive chant from the courtyard had ceased and was being replaced by a new sound, or rather a shuddering of air, a note so deep that it seemed to quiver along the bones rather than be heard through the ears. It lasted through twenty heartbeats, and as it faded the voices of the priests of Sinu came in with a harsh, unmusical yell.

  “Sinu! War! Sinu! War!”

  The shudder of air began once more.

  “What is that?” asked the One of O, sounding mere mortal and nervous.

  “That is the breath of Sinu. That is the Horn of War,” said the King. “You heard the One of Sinu give the order to sound it. Now it is done, and all according to ritual. Now, until the peace offerings are laid on His table, Sinu is supreme in the Kingdom. At dawn tomorrow my messengers must ride to my Generals of Levies, carrying the war tokens so that the army can begin to gather. You cannot stop me now.”

  “We cannot stop you,” said the One of O heavily. “The Gods can. You will never lead your army through the Pass of Gebindrath. It takes priests of three orders to lift such a curse as lies on that place. It takes a ritual known only to the servants of Aa. No servant of Aa will tell you the ritual. No priest of any other order than Sinu’s will help you. Do you think one man of all your soldiers will follow you through the pass, with the curse unlifted? King, you are doomed.”

  “Doomed,” said the Keeper.

  The One of Aa’s pale hands swept through a slow arc.

  “Doomed,” croaked the Mouth of Silence.

  In the courtyard below, the long note of the Horn of War began again, making it seem as though the whole world shuddered.

  XIV

  Even that end had been only another beginning. Twelve days la
ter Tron stood with his hawk in the shade of a creeper-tangled cliff and remembered his last conversation with the King. It had taken place two days after the confrontation in the room above the Gate of Saba.

  “Yes,” Tron had said doubtfully, “if a lost ritual has to be found again, then I think Odah, servant of O, might do it.”

  “And perform the ritual too?” the King had asked.

  “Yes, I think so. But he’s very crippled. He’ll have to be carried to the pass.”

  “So will the One of Sinu. If you take him to Kalakal, Tron, you can talk to this Odah, can’t you? You can persuade him?”

  Tron shrugged. He felt sick and uneasy. The King turned on the balcony, where they’d been watching the parade of one of the first levies to arrive at the Temple.

  “We must be quick, you see, Tron,” he had said. “In about fifteen days I’ll be able to get the first war party up to the pass, to hold it and start to repair the road. The longer I leave that, the more chance there is of these Mohirrim reaching the pass first. And the longer I sit idle here the more time it gives the priests to start working against me. There’s nothing like an army for rumors. They’re saying that this very dawn a priest of O, singing the Welcome on the tower, saw the face of the God as He rose, all streaked with blood. They say the vision was so powerful that two other priests were needed to stop him throwing himself off the tower.”

  “It may be true,” Tron had said.

  “Perhaps. It’s a sign you could read several ways. But Tron, have you asked yourself why the God guided you to Kalakal? Why, if not so that you should find not just the Ambassador but also this priest, Odah? Listen.…”

  But at that point a horn had sounded in the courtyard and the King had been forced to turn and salute the parade of gaudy banners passing below. While the fretted colonnades had echoed to the rhythmic clash of sword blades on shields, while cascades of petals had streamed down from the screened balconies of the women’s rooms, Tron had seen and heard nothing. He will ask me to travel with Odah and the One of Sinu to the pass. The One of O said it takes priests of three orders to lift the Great Curse of Aa.… Lord Gdu, is this what you ask?

  Nothing whispered in Tron’s heart. The soldiers tramped about below, raising the dust in heavy dun-colored swirls. Tron glanced at the King and saw that the confident smile on his face was meaningless, a mask. He felt cold, as though in the aching heat Aa had breathed on his spine. Twelve twelves of Her priests called Her power down—will She remove it for a blind man and a crippled outcast and a boy? Will She not rather … But who else can the King ask?

  Tron looked at the fierce brown profile below the Eye of Gdu. He remembered a day’s hawking above the Temple of Tan, a marigold scorpion, a glaring salt-flat. The Gods have sent me no sign. Perhaps they mean that our friendship should be enough of a sign. I must offer to go, so that he does not have to ask.

  Now, Tron stood in a ravine far to the south and watched the meeting ceremony of two clans of the wild hunters who had captured Onu Ovalaku. The warriors of each clan rushed at each other with the usual silent grimaces, then pranced face to face with fierce spear-thrusts, cunningly parried, until a warrior received a minute wound and cried aloud. Then the mock fight stilled, the chiefs of the two clans inspected the injury, and the man who had caused it was wounded to exactly the same extent. After that everyone sat down and began the weary process of bartering girl brides. Odah, hunched on his litter, watched this performance with a strange eagerness.

  “It is a ritual,” he’d said to Tron after they’d first seen it four days ago.

  “It’s not a real ritual,” Tron had answered. “It’s got nothing to do with the Gods.”

  “Who knows? But it is a true ritual in this—that the men who perform it do not know its inner meaning. To the chiefs they are bargaining for the necklace that the child wears. Each girl child wears an ancient and famous necklace. You can see how often it has been repaired, and how reverently they handled it. The child merely happens to have the right to wear it. But by this means, you see, women not yet ready for marriage are exchanged from clan to clan, so that the blood is mixed and the breed remains strong. The chiefs do not think of that. They are concerned only with the necklaces. In the same way we think only of the rituals we perform as they appear to us—how should we know what they mean to the Gods themselves?”

  Tron had shrugged, uninterested. In the past six days five separate clans had passed them on from territory to territory, always working along the ravines, in which the hunters lived like scorpions in the cracks of an old wall. At each meeting the same dance and bargaining had taken place (though at one there had been no girls to exchange, and the ritual had been performed with two dolls made of dry grass, wearing necklaces of leaves). Each time Tron had moved well away from the group, using the excuse that his hawk disliked company, but really because he needed to be alone to brood and dream, and to try to master his dread of the task they had come to perform.

  Now O pressed with harsh heat on the tableland; even in the cooler ravines any rock on which He had leaned for an hour gave back His heat like a blow; along between the cliffs the air shimmered, distorting vision. The Gods are here, Tron suddenly knew. They have come back. The hot, still air prickled with Their presences. For a moment, as though from an enormous distance, he saw the circle of hunters where they sat in the shade of an old holm oak that clung to the cliff with half its roots scrubbed clean by sudden floods. Their figures, and the two bright litters and the red-robed priests who carried them, were tiny but like jewels, and moved with impossible slowness. Then the hawk beside Tron rattled a wing as it tore at the green finch that one of the hunters had snared for it, and Tron was looking at his friends with ordinary eyes again. Odah, he could see, had stopped peering at the hunters and was praying with closed eyes and moving lips. Tron whispered a hymn of welcome. The fear slid from his mind and he was glad to be doing what the Gods seemed to demand.

  There were, he had come to realize, two Trons. There was a boy born to walk alone through wild country with a hawk on his wrist; there was a boy born and trained to serve the Gods. There were two hawks—a bird born to hover free between the roaring cliffs of the Jaws of Alaan, and a bird born and trained to come without resentment to swung lure, and to submit to long hours of hooded darkness. So Tron now welcomed the Gods and allowed himself to sink into stillness, neither praising nor asking, an empty bowl that They might fill if They chose. They sent him no sign of approval or disapproval, though he could feel Them filling the hot air with their presence as vividly as he could smell the sweetly peppery scent of the little white flowers that frothed all over the tangled creeper above him.

  After a while the bargaining session became the midday meal, and when that was over the women wrapped their few utensils in twists of grass and packed them away in leather sacks so that nothing could clink or rattle, and then the rock-owl clan, after a final blessing from Odah, drifted away down the ravine with their usual silence, daytime ghosts; not even the boisterous little children seemed to click one pebble or crackle one twig.

  The black lizard clan were now the priests’ guides, first a group of hunters scouting ahead, then a wizened chief, then the priests, then the women and children, and finally a rearguard of more hunters. The stifling afternoon seemed much as other afternoons; one side of a ravine was usually in shadow, so it was possible to travel despite the heat of O: there was sometimes water in pools among the rocks; twice they had crossed roaring snow-fed torrents; but though all was much as before, all was changed for Tron by the invisible presence of the Gods. So it was no surprise when the chief halted his clan and explained in the smattered dialect of the Kingdom that he could go with them no further.

  “Ntree mans ntake,” he said several times.

  After some talk among themselves the hunters chose a mark on the floor of the ravine and threw their spears at it. The chief studied the fallen spears and from their position selected three hunters to continue with the priests. Gif
ts of farewell were exchanged, blessings given, and the black lizard clan stole back the way they had come.

  When the priests moved on, the three guides seemed to have lost all confidence. They peered about them as if they were in strange territory, frowning and muttering, and scouted in scuttling dashes from cover to cover, but as soon as something rattled in the bushes on a ledge of cliff they threw down their spears and came rushing back to cower among the priests.

  “What do you fear, my sons?” asked Odah, who had developed a marvelous bond of trust with the clans, so that they instinctively chose him as the one to obey. “No beast could frighten such hunters, I think. Is it demons or ghosts?”

  “Ngoat! Ngoat!” moaned the leader.

  Tron stared at Odah, suddenly reminded how their separate stories had begun with the Goat-Stone in the Temple. Odah stared calmy back, nodded as if accepting the sign and raised his right arm in invocation.

  “Outcast spirits

  O walks among you.

  Beware, you dead!

  To your black crannies

  His light pierces.

  In your cold caves

  His fire burns.

  Beware!”

  The light and fire in his voice seemed to vibrate along the cliffs like the last shimmery notes of a gong. The hunters looked at one another, muttered in a more confident manner and moved on. Thus they covered another slow mile before the leading hunter stopped, pointed ahead, and beckoned to Tron to come up beside him.

  The bridge ahead leaped the ravine in one clean arc from cliff to cliff. Only the Wise could have built it.

  “What is the matter?” called the One of Sinu in his impatient, grating voice.

  “I think we have reached the road to the pass,” answered Tron. “There is a great bridge across the ravine.”

  “I praise O that I have seen such a thing,” said Odah a few minutes later. “Talatatalatatehalatena, my son, how are we to climb the cliffs? Can you find us a path?”