The Blue Hawk

by Peter Dickinson

  “Go in there and wait, boy.”

  Being Goat, Tron could perhaps even now have turned away, refusing to cross the threshold of the trap. But at this moment the full, cold flood of fear washed over him. I have killed the King. I have stolen his soul. The Keeper knows he must die. He told Amun to mark his death on tomorrow’s rod. And now I am being shown these secrets, as if they know I shall not have to keep them long. In a chill daze he walked forward and was only aware of having done so when the slab swung shut behind him, making a faint, deep boom as the stone lips closed.

  The sound cut through the daze. He stood for an instant, shaking the fear away like a dog shaking water from its fur, then whispered, “Lord Gdu, You spoke in my heart. If I did what You asked there is nothing to make me afraid.” With careful calm he settled the hawk on the back of a thronelike ebony chair and refastened its leg thongs. It closed its eyes and seemed to sleep, perhaps mistaking the dimness of the room for night. Tron looked around him.

  This new place was not the prison cell he’d expected, but a large room, its walls smothered with carvings. Several more of the ebony chairs stood round a long black table. The light came mainly from a shaft in the roof, but one of the longer walls was also mottled with patches of what could only be daylight. These turned out to come from four odd-shaped openings, slanting downward and allowing Tron to see different sections of the Inner Courtyard. He was puzzled, because from the Courtyard itself the wall seemed to contain nothing but the enormous statues of the Gods, on either side of the Gate of Saba, which was opened only for the funerals of Kings and beyond which lay the Palace. But here was this hidden room, with its secret doors and spyholes, a granite trap.

  There was a cupboard containing bread and a water jug, plates and a pile of coarse napkins. Tron took one of these and bandaged it carefully round his wrist, not to protect himself but to give the hawk something firmer to grip on. When he went to pick the bird up, it opened its eyes and struck with a sort of halfhearted ferocity at his hand. He didn’t flinch, but stayed quite still while it swayed itself upright and stood with half-shut eyes. The eyes, in fact, seemed a little less dull.

  In a soft voice Tron crooned the refrain of the long little hymn that describes the training of hawks:

  “By days of watch,

  By days of care,

  By days of patience,

  The hawk becomes the eye of the man, far-seeing,

  The hawk becomes the arm of the man, far-striking.”

  He sang the familiar words a dozen times before moving with deft firmness to pick the hawk up by the legs, settle it onto the napkin and grip the leg thong in his left hand. It seemed to have sunk back, after its momentary stirring, into its strange daze. He gentled the staring feathers between its shoulder blades, then, without knowing why, froze and slowly turned.

  The One of Aa was in the room, watching him. A pivoted slab of stone stood open in the other wall.

  Tron bowed very low and stayed with bent head. The black robes stirred and rustled and swung out of his line of vision. He heard a rattle, then saw one of the pallid hands place a coarse bronze knife on the table. So now I go to Aa, he thought, dreamy with the stiff trance of fear. It is a table of sacrifice. But then beside the knife appeared a plate and cup, a loaf of ordinary priest-bread and a slab of pale cheese. When the One of Aa sat down to eat, his head came in sight. With a careless movement he threw back his cowl.

  There was one part of Tron’s life over which the rituals had never ruled, his dreams and nightmares. He had sometimes dreamed of meeting the One of Aa, uncowled, and of seeing a face sallow and bloodless and older than the longest-lived of men. But now … true, his face was as pale as his hands, with a beard trimmed so close to the skin that it was little more than a mat of stubble. His lips were full, and red with life, his nose snub, his eyes bright and quick. He nodded to Tron and settled to munching as hungrily and untidily as a peasant resting from the waterwheel. Naturally he had fasted for twenty-four hours before the sacrifice.

  The Keeper of the Rods returned, fetched food, and started to eat. A little later three more Major Priests came in through the opposite door. The One of O and the Mouth of Silence went to the cupboard, but the One of Gdu strode up to Tron and stared down at him, hot-eyed. Tron had never faced his Master alone. He felt his whole soul try to flinch backward from this anger, but his training held him still.

  “What do you think you are?” snapped the One of Gdu.

  “Lord,” whispered Tron, “I am Goat. Last night …”

  “Goat!” shouted the One of Gdu, and in his fury and contempt snatched at the white medallion on Tron’s chest.

  The shout and the sudden movement broke the hawk’s daze. Instinctively it struck out at the darting hand, a movement far faster than a man’s. With another shout, of pain this time, the One of Gdu flinched back with blood streaming from the two-branched vein that runs above the back of the wrist. He raised the hand to suck it, but it never reached his lips. The blood trickled down his forearm to his elbow while he stood staring, not at Tron but at the hawk. The glare in his eyes faded and the bunched muscles of his cheeks subsided. He licked his lips, afraid. Gdu had answered him.

  “Come and eat, brother,” said the flat but slightly amused voice of the Keeper. “Boy, fetch bread for your Master.”

  When the One of Gdu was seated and sullenly chewing, Tron took the bird to the far side of the room and began once more to try to soothe its terrified but jaded wildness. The presence of the Major Priests made it restless. Twice it cast droppings and once eased its wings, almost as if thinking of flight. At last, as the Priests finished eating, it dropped its head and began to preen feebly at its breast feathers. Tron was sure now that the guard had been right, and that it had been drugged to keep it quiet during the ritual. It was the wildest of wild creatures, untamable. Quite soon the drug would wear off and it would return to that state.

  “Child,” said a dry voice, “tell us now why you did what you did.”

  It took Tron a moment to grasp that it was the One of O who had spoken, so different was his tone from the drumlike bass that led the hymns.

  “Lord,” answered Tron, “Gdu spoke in my heart.”

  “Yes?”

  “I had seen signs, Lord. In the night I saw a great Gdu—it was not a dream, Lords! I lay on my own mattress and heard the breathing of the boys on either side. I lay thus while the shadow of Aa—She was high—moved from one edge of the window slits to the other. Then I heard a noise in the dormitory, a movement at the southern end where there is no door. I was afraid. In the dormitories, Lords, there is a tall thin window slit opposite each mattress.…”

  “We have been boys,” said the Keeper.

  Tron hesitated, baffled by the thought. The Priests watched him in silence, without expression. Then, even in the middle of this new fear he grasped back at last night’s fear, and the picture came clear in his mind.

  “Aa shone on the slits,” he said. “The farthest slits were thin silver lines, but they widened as they came nearer my mattress. I saw something move across the far lines, too tall for a boy. Then I saw it was too tall for a man. Then, when it was a few slits away I could see its head. Lords, it was Gdu.”

  He could not tell from their expressions whether they believed him.

  “I saw His beak, Lords. I saw the jewels of His crest. They glittered in Aa’s light. He walked like a man, but He was a head taller. More, I think. He made no noise. He passed all down the dormitory, pausing once. He did not come back.”

  “You said signs,” said the One of O after a short silence.

  “Had you drunk your sweetwater at nightfall?” interrupted the One of Gdu.

  “Lord, that was a sign. The bowl had cracked in my hands as I raised it to drink, and the sweetwater spilled. I … I … I was afraid. I said nothing, but fitted the two halves together and put them on the sill of my window slit, according to the ritual. This morning, when I stood at the window for the Hymn of O, I found a
feather in the bowl, lying across the crack.…”

  “Did none of the other boys find a sign?” snapped the One of Gdu. He sounded as though he were once more working himself up into a full gale of rage against the boy who had ruined his special ritual.

  “Yes, Lord. Diran found two red beans in his bowl. That’s a common sign. It means the Gods are pleased with Diran. He sang a hymn of thanks, but I said nothing. I didn’t know what my sign meant. Here is the feather.”

  With his free hand he took it from his pouch and showed it to them on his palm. It looked drab and bedraggled compared with the pure arc of silvery white he had found on the cracked clay. The One of Gdu snorted.

  “And at breakfast, Lords, I was chosen for Goat. I have never been chosen before. When we went to the House of O and Aa I was sure that the Gods would speak to me. I’d always said to myself that when I was Goat I would turn cartwheels down between the minor Priests, but now … We sang the Great Hymn. The hawk was straight in front of me. I could see it was sick. I waited. Then I heard us singing this—

  In the least feather of the hawk the King’s soul,

  In a feather the soul of a man.

  And then Gdu spoke in my heart, saying that He had come in the night and left me the feather in a broken bowl as a sign that I should break the ritual, because it was not proper that the soul of a sick hawk should renew the King’s soul, and that I had been chosen for Goat to do this. He spoke in my heart, Lords. That is why I did … what I did.”

  He looked along the line of priests. The Keeper of the Rods seemed bored, as though he had expected a more interesting story. The One of Aa was smiling and nodding. The One of O kept all expression out of his magnificently imperious face. The Mouth of Silence, who had also thrown back his cowl, looked troubled. (He was a much older man, bald and with a close-shorn gray beard. His skin was yellow and wrinkled, his eyes dull and sunken. If he had been anyone else than Aa’s servant, one would have said that Aa must soon take him.) The One of Gdu could no longer master his anger.

  “That’s nothing but a feather from one of the doves, blown in by the night breeze. A sign, uh? We cannot have the rituals turned to nonsense every time a boy wakes in the night and sees what he shouldn’t. He broke his bowl before he was Goat—he can be punished for that. It is clear that the Gods do not love him. Let Aa take him.”

  He spoke loudly and harshly enough to disturb the hawk again. It roused from its trance, turned its lean head, opened its beak and hissed soundlessly at him. Once more his expression changed as he shrank back into the cave of doubt and awe, like a snail withdrawing from menace.

  “Lords,” said Tron, “we must speak in low voices. The servant of Gdu is fretted by sudden noise.”

  “It is not often that a boy says ‘must’ to the Major Priests,” said the Keeper of the Rods.

  The One of Aa laughed soundlessly.

  “I do not like to see the rituals broken,” the Keeper went on. “We live by rules—not just the priests, but King and nobles and peasants too. Listen. I move my rods along the Rack of Days according to rules invented by the Wise. I move the symbols of O and Aa and the planets by other rules, also invented by the Wise. Thus I know the exact hour in any season at which a particular star will rise. I know the death days of priests and kings, and the times and heights of the floods, back through thirty generations of men. I know in which year and day Aa will fight with O in broad daylight, or a darker shadow fight with Aa by night. The Keeper before me foretold the great comet. It took me half a lifetime to learn the rules from him, and will take another half lifetime to teach them to my successor. Now, during those years I have not only learnt but thought, and I have seen that if I miss one small motion prescribed by the rules, that error will do more than repeat and repeat itself year by year. It will cause other errors, which will also repeat themselves and also cause further errors, so that in a very few years the Rack of Days would lose all meaning. We would be holding the flood feast at the time when Tan was weakest and calling for the harvest tax at seedtime. This I know as well as you know your Great Hymns. And I also know that it is the same with the hymns and the rituals. You think a little change here and there will do no harm? I tell you that if anything can be changed, everything can. Very soon men would be trying to change the Gods. And who would rule in the kingdom then, do you think?”

  “But Goat,” said the Mouth of Silence. “There has always been Goat.”

  “I have wondered,” said the Keeper. “That medal the boy wears is not like any other ritual object in the Temple. What else is white, of a polished stone hard enough to stand a thousand years of knocks from irresponsible boys?”

  “It is right that it should be different. Wait. Hear me.”

  Though his function was to speak for the One of Aa and interpret his sign-language, speaking seemed to hurt the Mouth of Silence. His voice was suited to a servant of Aa, grating and slow. He gathered his strength while the others waited.

  “The boy is Goat,” he said. “It is not the medal, it is the boy. You have seen how the hawk answered our brother, twice. The servant of Gdu knows. He allows himself to be touched and carried because the boy is Goat. I too would fight to preserve the least of the rituals. But Goat is a ritual himself. The Wise decreed him. Listen, you are saying to yourselves that the boy broke his bowl by accident and did not drink his sweetwater and that everything follows from that. He did not sleep, because he had not drunk the sweetwater drug. Therefore he woke and saw our brother visit the dormitory to bless the boy Diran, wearing the mask of Gdu. Chance sent the feather to his bowl. Chance set him opposite the hawk in the House of O and Aa. Chance caused our brother to move and speak so that the hawk should seem to answer him. I am older than you all by thirty floods. I say that there is no such thing as chance. It is all the working of the Gods. I say that the Wise decreed that every day a Goat should be chosen by a stone baked into one of the boys’ loaves just for this—so that there should be room in our stiff rituals for the Gods to act, when They so choose.”

  By the end his voice was a difficult whisper, but the Major Priests heard him with respect. Only the One of Aa sat easy, rubbing his bristly chin and seeming to take pleasure from the rasping movement in the same way that a dog takes pleasure in having its hackles teased. When the speech finished he fluttered his hands across the table in dancelike gestures.

  “He asks if he should take the King,” said the Mouth of Silence.

  “Of course,” said the One of O. “His soul was not renewed.”

  “He can die in his sleep,” said the One of Gdu. “I will mix the powders. Has he shifted his bed? Who has been watching?”

  The pale hands danced through a different message.

  “He says the bed is where it was,” said the Mouth of Silence. “He asks if he should take the boy too. He proposes a knife sacrifice on the Tower, this midnight. He will not need powders for the boy.”

  “I should think not!” snapped the One of Gdu. “Powders are scarce as emeralds! Huh!”

  His anger, twice frustrated, was still looking for a. way to release itself. The One of Aa shrugged and smiled at Tron, but his eye was speculative, as if measuring the body for the Dark Altar.

  “My brothers,” said the One of O, “it is not a matter of how Aa shall take the boy, but whether She shall take him.”

  The One of Aa shrugged again, but his smile was a sulky pout now.

  “We can’t have him joining the other boys as if nothing had happened,” said the Keeper. “Think what the next Goat might try!”

  “Think what the nobles will say if he’s not punished!” said the One of Gdu. “They’ll spread it about that we put him up to it to get rid of the King! So …”

  He hesitated, his eye on the hawk.

  “Renewals have failed before,” said the Keeper. “Tomorrow’s rod is full of the deaths of Kings.”

  “He is Goat,” said the Mouth of Silence. “If we send him to Aa, we shall ourselves have broken a ritual, and it will see
m that we did so merely to silence a witness.”

  “You are all making strong points,” said the One of O. “But I think you are not trusting the Gods enough. Let us tell the truth, and as far as we can let us follow where the Gods seem to lead. The truth is that the Gods spoke in the boy’s heart, telling him to remove the hawk because it was unfitting that the Renewal should be completed; we do not know why. But let us attempt to question the Gods further, and discover why. We have a sign. The Blue Hawk cannot be tamed, but it sits at ease on the boy’s wrist.”

  “It is drugged,” said the One of Gdu.

  “Not so drugged that it could not answer you, my brother. I say we have a sign. I take it to mean that the Gods will permit this boy to tame this hawk.”

  “It cannot be done!” said the One of Gdu. “The hymn says …”

  “Just so,” said the One of O. “He must train the hawk in secret. If he fails the failure must not be known. If he succeeds, that must also not be known until we are ready. The King dies tonight, but it is a hundred days or more—is it not, Brother Keeper?— before Tan begins to rise in flood. At the height of the flood the dead King will travel on Her breast to the land of Alaan, and only then can the live King be shown to the people. Suppose on that day, at that showing, the Blue Hawk were to fly, and kill one of our Temple doves, and return tame to its master …”

  It was as though the Major Priests perceived, one after the other, the answer to a question that had been troubling them. No one said a word, but their eyes seemed to change as they gave small nods of agreement. The One of Aa stretched as he gave his voiceless laugh, and the frown left the forehead of the Mouth of Silence, leaving his old face smooth and saintly.