The Blue Hawk

by Peter Dickinson

  (It was part of Odah’s nature that he should so easily have mastered the strings of syllables that made up the hunters’ short-names. Their long-names consisted of the short-names of all their male ancestors back to the day when Gdaal had cut off the tails of nine black lizards, stuck them into the ground, and created the clan.)

  The hunters halted and gazed about them, pulling nervously at their lips or scratching their ribs. One of them pointed to a great beard of creeper that flowed down a cliff, and at once the other two ran to it and began to swarm up the vines, shaking out a flock of gold and scarlet finches, which twittered away along the cleft.

  “There is no path for me there, my brothers,” said Odah without bitterness. But when the hunters reached the top they took little flint hatchets from their belts and began to work along the cliff, hacking at the vines until a whole tangle of vine and leaf and flower flowed suddenly down onto the washed boulders below. At once the remaining hunter ran to the spot and began to sort out and test the thickest strands of vine.

  “What do they do?” snapped the One of Sinu.

  “They are making ropes to haul the litters out, my father, my brother,” replied Tron.

  But it was a slow process, choosing and joining lengths of creeper. As usual when there was a halt, Tron moved away from the rest of the group, so that he could unhood the hawk in something like solitariness. He chose a place where another, smaller cataract of creeper flung itself down the opposite cliff, and as he stood in that pepper-scented shade the other Tron, the one who had been sleeping for so many days, suddenly took hold. There was time to spare, there was empty wilderness above, there was a creeper to reach it by. Why wasn’t he up there, hawking?

  Without thought he loosed the leg thongs and held his gauntleted hand above his head. The hawk opened and closed its wings twice, in a puzzled way, as though it too had forgotten its true nature; but then the whim took it and it shrugged itself into the air and started to circle upwards. Tron watched it with gladdened heart. It was in glorious condition, despite its lack of proper exercise during the journey. It found an updraft near the heated cliff and seemed to float into the sky like a child’s kite.

  Tron gripped two vines and began his climb; it turned out harder than the hunters had made it look, because of the way the vines swung to and fro, or slid beneath his weight, but the tangle was so interwoven that when he seemed sure to slither ridiculously down, something would hold and he could clamber on in a shower of insects and petals and bits of dead bark. After moving for so many days at the tedious pace of the litters, his muscles seemed to rejoice with the effort. He reached the top sweating but grinning and at once gazed upward to see the hawk poised a hundred feet above him, black against the heavy blue of the sky.

  Though O was now well down toward the west, His heat still beat back off rock and gravel. He would have to shine only a little more fiercely, Tron felt, for the patches of wizened scrub around him to burst crackling into invisible flames. Nothing stirred in that heat. Pulling the lure out of his pouch, Tron began to walk away from the cliff edge. Suddenly, with a thump like one huge heartbeat, a covey of kingfowl exploded around his feet and curved clackering away, only three feet above the ground. The hawk flung itself out of the sky, the plunge of its path curving slightly to intercept the racing kingfowl. It came so fast that it seemed certain to shatter itself on the rocks, but there was no hesitation, no slowing. Its wings were half-folded, its whole body a shaped missile. At the last whistling instant its taloned legs jerked forward. Tron saw the puff of loosened feathers, then heard the double thump of the hawk hitting the kingfowl and the pair of them hitting the ground. In his excitement he longed to shout aloud, to run forward, but he controlled himself to a gentle pace. As he stood looking down at the hawk, so live and clean, perched on the mottled plumage of the kingfowl, it struck him for the first time how strange it was that the perfection of the moment had to end in a death. It was as though he were a God who needed the sacrifice of the kingfowl to fulfill His nature. Were the Gods indeed like that? No. It was the Blue Hawk that needed the death, to fulfill its nature. It was priests and Kings who needed the sacrifices. The Gods were quite otherwise.

  “I shall never do this again,” Tron said, aloud, in a voice that sounded quite unlike his own, but which he knew still spoke the truth.

  The hawk looked up and hissed at the sound, but skipped willingly to his gauntlet and gazed about it in a puzzled way, as though it had made its kill in a fit of absentmindedness. Whispering his praise to Gdu for all the happiness he knew he must now forsake, Tron carried the living bird and the dead toward the bridge.

  The road speared toward the mountain, now very near and steep. Looking at the ground, one could not see, even on the bridge, that here was a man-made surface; the small stuff of the desert, sand and pebbles and even a few dry tussocks had drifted all across it. But the line of it through the rocks and scrub was still clear. Tron scuffed at the surface with his toe and uncovered the edge of a flagstone. Then he bent and stared, not at the place he had cleared but at a patch of half-firm sand beside it. On the bridge itself, where the covering was pure sand, the marks seemed clearer. He walked quickly back along the north side of the ravine and beckoned to Talatatalatatehalatena, who was supervising the process of hauling the first litter out from the depths.

  The hunter grinned and rubbed his stomach when he saw the kingfowl.

  “Will you come with me?” said Tron. “I want to show you something.”

  On the road by the bridge Talatatalatatehalatena knelt and peered at the ground. He sniffed at one or two of the indentations, moved on to examine some invisible signs on harder ground, cast back a little way up the road and returned frowning.

  “Mans!” he whispered. “Mans!”

  He spread his hands in front of Tron’s face, opening and closing his fingers a dozen times. Then he pointed dramatically toward the soaring peaks.

  “Mans here, ndere,” he muttered. “Two nday. Tree.”

  So there was no more hawking, only waiting with as much patience as possible for the second litter to come creaking up. While the last four litter-bearers followed, Tron told Odah and the One of Sinu what he had found.

  “There are footprints on the road,” he said. “Talata thinks that a large group of men went toward the pass two or three days ago.”

  “Temple guards, of course,” said the One of Sinu. “A Major Priest to give them their orders. They will stop us performing the ritual. Twelve litter-bearers and three hunters cannot fight armed men.”

  “What should we do, my brother?” asked Odah.

  “Find a safe place to camp tonight. Tomorrow let the hunters scout well ahead of us as we move, and in this way come as close as we are able to the pass and wait there for the King’s first war party to clear a path for us. Then I will show these dogs what it means when Sinu rules in the Kingdom!”

  “In two days comes the night of Aa’s Most Brightness,” said Odah.

  “And in thirty days another such night,” snapped the One of Sinu. “One moon is not a long time to wait in a war.”

  The peaks were now pinky-gold with O’s going. About a mile beyond the bridge and a few hundred yards from the road one of the hunters found a small crater among the rocks which would do for a camp. The hunters built a fire of smokeless dry wood and were already roasting the kingfowl when Odah hobbled painfully up the slope of the hollow to sing his Farewell hymn. He did not vary words or notes in any way from those that the listening priests had heard every evening since their first year. In this place, barren, savage and haunted, he seemed to build a canopy of ordered safety over himself and his companions.

  “How did we let such a voice leave the Temple?” asked one of the litter-bearers when the last note had followed the fallen God.

  “If you had asked me a month ago,” said Odah, “I would have told you a story of foolish pride and foolish pain. But now it seems to me that long ago the Gods chose that I should be ready at Kalakal, un
used and forgotten by men, waiting for these few days. And my brother of Sinu and my brother of Gdu, we have all three been chosen to perform this ritual—not by the King, not by ourselves, but by the Gods. They are already gathered here to accept or reject. They will not let a party of Temple guards prevent us. Can you not feel them all about us, waiting?”

  Next morning Odah sang his Welcome. The hunters covered the ashes of the fire with sand, and with twigs brushed out all trace of human presence. The bearers lifted the litters. Tron set the hawk on his wrist. Without a word they were on the march again, brisk with the strength of that first hour when the shadows stretch in spindly bars across the night-cooled sand.

  “My brothers,” said Odah quietly. “We must talk. I have made this journey, until last night, with a feeling of emptiness and dread. When we agreed on the ritual we would perform I thought it acceptable, but I thought so only with my mind. My heart did not speak. And the Gods were far off and sent us no sign. Yesterday I felt Them return.”

  “Yes,” said Tron, “so did I, when you were eating under the holm oak.”

  The One of Sinu grunted, expressionless.

  “Last night,” said Odah, “I did not sleep. I emptied my mind of thought and fear. I emptied my body of pain. I waited for the Gods, but still They did not speak, either to say yes or no. Then, at the noon of Aa, She came. She filled the emptiness of my soul, but not with dread. I knew the depth and the weight and the power of Her dark that lies behind the stars. Odah, servant of O, ceased to exist though his body lay open-eyed under the night. I became a part of Aa. Then, gently, after an enduring time, She sent me back into this crooked body, and I found it was still the noon of Aa. The shadows had not moved. Then until dawn I worked to unravel and make sure of the ritual She had shown me. Listen. This is what She demands if She is to lift Her curse from the pass.”

  The road reached on. The peaks changed outline and color as O rose through the sky. His beams became burning swords, piercing the feeble flesh. The rocks and bushes lost shape behind the layers of heated air. Tron did not notice. He felt neither heat nor thirst. When the hawk fidgeted, longing for shade, he soothed it without thinking. All that long march he walked beside Odah’s litter, repeating with his lips the words he must say and in his mind the movements he must make. Neither he nor the One of Sinu asked any questions or made any suggestions. From the moment Odah began to speak they were absorbed into the preparation for the ritual, and in the idea of the ritual itself, a perfectly shaped, growing, branching, blossoming structure of word and chant and dance, a Great Ritual to be made for the service of a God, made not to be repeated again and again unchanging through the centuries, but this once, on the night of Aa’s Most Brightness, on Her dark altar on the knees of Alaan.

  When it became too hot for walking the hunters led them off the road to a place where a number of gawky, branching cacti, twice the height of a man, made little patches of shade in which it was possible for one or two people to hide from O’s heat. Tron and Odah and the One of Sinu would not be separated, so the priests rigged the scarlet canopies of the litters to make a wider square of shade and the hunters covered them with brushwood. Even then each breath burned in the nostrils, and all the time the sweat streamed down their flesh. But Tron and Odah and the One of Sinu might have been sitting in a cool stone cell in the Temple, as they rehearsed in quiet voices the ritual which, in two days and a night, they must perform.

  It was long past noon before they had finished. One of the priests brought them bread and water and despite the heat they ate heavily, knowing that from now until the night of Aa’s Most Brightness nothing but water must pass their lips. Suddenly the One of Sinu spoke.

  “I have served the Gods for sixty-two floods,” he said in his angry-sounding voice. “I have always been impatient when my brothers spoke, as you did this morning, of feeling the presence of the Gods, or of a God speaking in their hearts, or such things. Never once have They spoken to me. But now I have heard Them in my old age, speaking through you, Odah, my brother, my father.”

  It seemed to Tron perfectly proper that the One of Sinu should use the formula by which the boys in the Temple were supposed to address priests confirmed in the service of a God, though he was a Major Priest and Odah only the priest of two shepherd hamlets, forgotten in the hills.

  “My brothers,” said Odah in a voice that was almost a whisper, “Aa showed me two more things: first, that the coming night of Her Most Brightness is the night on which the ritual be performed, and that no guards, priests, or other dangers must make us turn aside or wait; and second, that we shall know that what we do we do with Her goodwill, because close by the place where we must perform the ritual we shall find waiting for us a terrible sign.”

  XV

  They had picked themselves up out of the shade and were trudging wearily back toward the road when the leading hunter suddenly flung himself to the ground and lay as still as a dead man. Everybody stopped and waited. Tron saw that the fallen man held one ear to the ground, as if listening to the heartbeat of the world. Then he rose frowning to his knees.

  “Mans!” he said. “Mans ncome!”

  He made his finger-signs to show a multitude, then pattered his hands on the earth in the exact rhythm of hoofbeats. The other hunters peered anxiously round. One of them pointed at a large patch of scrub and they all raced toward it. It seemed an impenetrable thicket, but working like demons they hacked a path toward its center and made a small clearing into which the priests dragged the dismantled litters. Two of the hunters were already sweeping away their tracks, and now Tron could hear a distant bass mutter, like the far boom of the falls at Kalakal. Once inside the clearing he found that the central bushes mostly lacked lower branches and that it was possible to worm his way outward under their cover. The hunters dragged the bushes they had cut back into the path and the clearing. The whole party lay there in silence, still as a hare crouched beneath the hovering wings of a hawk.

  Tron had lost any sense of direction. The hoofbeats seemed to fill the desert air, coming from all round him. He could not think who or what the approaching horsemen might be—all the cavalry of the Kingdom were with the King’s army, now making its slow way to reach the road farther north. The marks he had earlier seen on the road had been of human feet, not hooves. He was just deciding that the Falathi must have given up hope of their messengers and sent a party of horsemen over the Pass of Gebindrath to seek help, when through a small opening among the twigs he saw a man.

  Two hundred yards away the rider reined his horse to a halt and gazed back over his shoulder. He was naked, except for a short leather kilt. His scalp had been shaved smooth on both sides, leaving a bristling hedge of hair down the middle, like the cropped mane of a horse. His skin was dyed bright blue all over. He rode without a saddle or stirrups, but his horse, despite the heat, seemed carefully groomed. It was taller and gaunter than the ponies of the Kingdom. The man rode with a lance across his thighs and a short bow slung from his back. He carried a small oval shield, black leather decorated with brass studs, on his left arm. He was so lean that all his ribs showed, but his arms were well muscled.

  He shouted an order, and a huge gray dog loped into sight, a creature with scooped flanks, deep chest and long yellow-fanged muzzle. The dog’s head turned toward Tron. It lowered its muzzle, sniffed the ground, and with half-raised hackles began to work along a trail of scent—human scent. Until this moment Tron had seen and done everything as if in a slow dream. His real world was the coming ritual. Now, suddenly, just as a dream becomes nightmare, ordinary fear broke through. This dog was to the hunter what the hawk was to Tron: a companion, an extra limb, a finder of prey. The prey, now, was Tron.

  All the time the drumming hooves came nearer. The patch of thicket would burn like a torch. Tron’s mind slid to the hawk, hooded and tied to a litter pole; that at least could fly free, if he moved fast enough when the flames began to crackle.…

  The blue-dyed rider yelled harshly at th
e dog, which instantly turned and trotted back to its master. Another rider swept up and shouted to the first, who snatched his lance from his thighs, waved it above his head, and with an answering shout cantered on. Almost at once the whole cavalcade came by, moving in a cloud of dust stirred up by their own march. There were horsemen on the skirts of the cloud, many of them with similar dogs; in the middle of the obscure and swirling mass moved about forty light wicker wagons, two-wheeled, each pulled by a pair of horses and driven by a fair-haired woman. These women wore many-stranded necklaces and huge earrings, but were otherwise as naked as their men; their skin was not dyed, but tattooed in curling patterns, and where the skin was unmarked it was of a clear, coppery orange color. They held themselves with the poise of queens and looked as wild and dangerous as the men.

  After the troop had passed—about two hundred riders, Tron thought—the priests and hunters lay still until the hoofbeats could be no longer heard, even along the far-sounding veins of the earth. At last they crept out of hiding and looked about them.

  “What were they?” said one of the litter-bearers. “Were they men?”

  “I think they are called the Mohirrim,” said Tron. “It was because of them that the Princes of Falathi sent to the King for help.”

  “And now they have found the pass and mended the broken road,” said the One of Sinu. “My brothers, see how the Gods have taken care for the Kingdom, that the King had already called his army together when they came. Think of the Kingdom, basking in peace, unready. If it had happened like that …”

  “We must send the news of them to the King,” said one of the litter-bearers. Being a priest of Sinu, he had been trained to think of such things.

  “They were traveling faster than any of us could,” said another.

  “Our place is in the hills,” snapped the One of Sinu. “Let them be their own news.”