“They have come through the pass,” said Odah sadly. “The curse of Aa is on them.”
The hunters spread out as before. The bearers shouldered the litters. They turned once more toward the peaks. Despite what they had seen, there was no question of their stopping or going back. They were sucked toward the ritual, just as the river in the Jaws of Alaan was sucked toward the roaring falls; hiding from the Mohirrim had been like an eddy in the river, a short delay. Now Aa called them on.
Vultures flapped away as they came to the place where the Mohirrim had made their midday halt; they passed as if it had been unholy, and found a camping place almost among the abrupt foothills, where a torrent from the snows, dry at this season, had cut another ravine. The hunters scuttled into it like cockroaches rushing for shelter under a familiar stone. They found a trickle of water in its bed, but insisted on leading the party half a mile from the road before they camped. Nothing disturbed them all night.
Next morning the road lost its straightness and wound into a steep, close valley formed by two spurs from the main massif, a barren place all of whose soil had been long washed away, leaving only scooped and angular pillars of rock to give the sharp slopes a certain strangeness. The road doubled back up the side of a spur, turned as it reached the ridge, turned again and ran sidelong, with innumerable bends, up an enormous shoulder of mountain until all the fissured plateau could be seen reaching away north, and beyond it, in mottled yellow and faint blue, the desert and the plain.
It was nearly noon by the time they reached this part of the road, but in the cooler air they found that they needed to rest for less than an hour, and soon moved on again. It was all steady marching, the road firm, the gradients smooth and easy; in two places there had been rockfalls, but the descending Mohirrim had cleared a path over the worst of these. O swung to the west. The litter-bearers changed places and changed again, trudging on up that incredible road. Now, once or twice, its builders had needed to carve it out of a sheer wall of cliff with overhanging crags above and a stupendous drop below. Tron saw nothing of all this. He did not taste the coolness of the water he drank at the halts, or feel the ache in his calves or the emptiness in his stomach. He did not hear the low-voiced discussion among the litterbearers about whether the men whose footprints Talatatalatatehalatena had seen on the bridge had met the party of raiding Mohirrim, and what had happened to them. Despite the effort of the climb Tron’s pulse was very slow, and his breath too, like that of a sleeping man. All the energies of his mind and soul and body were being gathered into readiness for that night’s ritual. He needed no willpower to achieve this. The Gods ordained it, and it happened.
O was far down toward His resting when Odah said, “This is the place, my brothers. You others, camp here. The Gods will not touch you, but keep watch against men.”
He levered himself from the litter onto his crutches. The One of Sinu gripped Tron’s shoulder for guidance and the three of them went on up the road at the creeping pace that was the fastest Odah could manage. They did not speak, but once the hawk, which had been motionless all day, opened its beak and gave the shrill scream of a nestling, something that Tron had never heard it do before.
The place where Odah had told the others to wait seemed like any other section of the long climb, with the road slanting on up the precipitous ribs of the mountain, but as they crawled painfully around the curve into the next fold Tron saw that there was no climbing scar of road on the rib beyond, and in a few more minutes he found that their path now drove into a cleft between two of the sail-like peaks, climbing only for a few hundred yards and then vanishing over a crest.
Where the shadow of the farther rib fell across the road Odah halted, turned, and chanted the Farewell to O, though the God still hung clear of the western horizon. The hymn came cold and sad, as though this were the last Farewell and there would never again be any Welcome. Before it was over, the shadow of the cliff swung across them.
The crest proved not to be the top of the pass, and nor was the crest beyond it. But at last, where the slopes on either side swooped down in a line that would have blocked the road if they had not been cut away to let it through, Tron discovered that they were climbing no more. For barely a hundred yards they walked on, awkward with the sudden disappearance of the gradient beneath their feet, and then they were looking down into a boat-shaped valley, some half a mile long and two hundred yards broad.
“This is the place,” said Odah. “She is here.”
They stood, as it were, at the stern of the boat. The bottom of the valley was almost flat and then the cliffs curved in to make the prow, where the road vanished along a ravine. The snow-streaked sides plunged down so steeply that O could only have warmed the place for a few hours at midday. Now, though the peaks above them still glittered with the God’s life-making fire, Aa seemed to have taken hold of the valley before Her hour. It was already as cold as midnight, and the down-drafts off the snow eddied about in sudden shuffling breezes that stirred and stilled without reason. Halfway across the valley, close by the road, was a small cairn, around which lay what seemed to be patches of midnight shadow not cast by any object from any light source but simply there, tatters of night.
“Now we begin,” said Odah quietly.
They had halted when he had spoken before. As they began to move down into the valley, fear rose through Tron’s body and soul like mist rising from a flooded field. For a moment he rejected his part and became mere human, in a human world, longing to speak, to reach for a warm hand, to fondle the plumage of the still bird on his wrist. Perhaps the One of Sinu felt the same, for his grip on Tron’s shoulder tightened savagely. But the discipline of the Temple kept them both steady to the slow, gliding pace they knew so well, though the breath of Aa seemed to float round their shoulders.
Odah’s crutches clicked and scraped, the only sound in that icy bowl. Slowly they crept nearer to the strange patches of shadow and the conical pile of stones in the middle of them. Tron found his eyes drawn to this cairn as though it held a secret that was the key to the strangeness of the whole valley. The stones were all the same size, roundish, pale, mottled, fuzzed with dark moss. No, not stones …
“Do not look, child,” whispered Odah’s voice.
But at that moment Tron had seen a pallid thing glimmer at the edge of one of the black patches, a foot, protruding from a black robe. By the next patch a spread hand clawed into gravel. The bodies were not whole. A flick of vision transformed the stones of the cairn into heads, the severed heads of the slaughtered priests of Aa, piled together into a careful pyramid. At the apex of the pile the sulky face of the One of Aa stared open-eyed across the valley.
So this was the sign that Aa had promised to Odah. The One of Sinu could not see it, and his hard grip on Tron’s shoulder saved him when he swayed and all but fell. For two paces the blind man held him upright and forced him onward. The click of Odah’s crutches did not hesitate. Tron found the rhythm of the priest-pace again and, staring only at the road, marched on across one of the larger patches of black, the cover of a canopy that the priests of Aa had brought with them to shield them from the sight of O. The bodies lay close beside each other, as though they had been killed in the ranks where they stood. That was proper.
As the fog of horror cleared from his soul Tron did not begin to ask or wonder who had killed the priests, or why the cairn had been piled. To him it was simply a sign that Aa had accepted into the ritual, and that he and the other two must therefore accept, just as priests in the Temple accepted the sacrifice of victims. It did not matter whether Aa had caused these deaths, or merely allowed them to happen. What mattered was the ritual.
About fifty yards beyond the last of the sprawled bodies Odah halted, leaned on his crutch, and raised one twisted arm in a gesture of supplication. Tron led the One of Sinu ten paces farther on, then moved to become the third point of a triangle. Close by the place where he must begin his part he found a low rock, onto which he settled the hawk.
A whisper in his heart told him to let the servant of Gdu witness the ritual, so he slid the hood off and weighted the leg thongs down by tying them to a smaller stone. Slowly he turned, dragging himself free from this last familiar creature, and raised both arms to salute the invisible Goddess Whose presence filled the bowl between the hills. Odah started the ritual in a quiet voice that was nearer speaking than chant.
“Mother of night
Mother of birth
Mother of death
To Your dark altar
The Gods have sent
Three gifts.
“Your son of blood
Gives a man in old age
Who has offered to Sinu
A whole life’s service.
The Gods have taken
Above that service
Sight and light
And all that O gives
To the eyes of man.
Accept him.
“Your brother of day
Gives a man in his prime
Who has offered to O
A whole life’s service.
The Gods have taken
Above that service
Ease and strength
And all the Gods give
To the body of man.
Accept him.
“Your son of the air
Sends a man half-grown
Who has offered to Gdu
A whole life’s service.
The Gods have taken
Above that service
Home and love
And all the Gods give
To the heart of man.
Accept him.”
The One of Sinu answered at full chant, his harsh and bloodless voice falling into place beneath the life and warmth of Odah’s. Tron moved without hesitation into the first slow dance of supplication, steps he knew well, in a sequence he had never practiced but which his limbs seemed to perform of their own will, unfaltering. The fire-tinged glitter of the eastern peak dwindled to the summit. In the quick-darkening sky the stars blinked into being. At the tip of the western peak a silver spark grew, became a silver spear-point, a silver sail of moonlit snow as Aa rose at Her Most Bright, though still for a long while hidden from the valley.
The ritual flowed on, inevitable as Her climb up the sky. Tron never needed to pause or wonder what his part next demanded of him, because the logic of every pace and word was so strong that at any given moment there seemed to be only one possible set of steps to move through, one possible phrase to chant. Teamed with a blind man and a cripple, he had to perform all the dances alone, while the other two sang most of the words, but his in itself was something that the ritual allowed for, a part of its completeness, and he wasn’t aware of any unbalance, or indeed of anything but the flow of the ritual and the presence of the Goddess all around him, accepting without sign or comment his worship and his offered soul. The first part of the night was the darkest, when the last of daylight had been absorbed down into the west; then, gradually, as Aa climbed, Her rays lit more and more of the snow peaks, a light that glimmered directionless and shadowless into the depths below, making it possibly for Tron once more to place his footsteps other than by feel and to take his cue from the gestures of his companions.
Now the brightness advanced down the mountainside, seeming to move without hurry but still to come at the pace of a marching army. It reached the last of the snows and swept on across the black rocks, picking out tussock and boulder and the bodies of the murdered priests. The impetus of the ritual slowed, reaching a moment of stillness in which Tron found himself standing back by the rock where he had begun. He waited, motionless as the hawk beside him. Odah and the One of Sinu waited also. The light reached them in a blaze like O’s rising as the rim of Aa floated above the suddenly glittering drifts of the eastern skyline. All three voices rang out to welcome Her with the same throb of gladness as that with which the priests on the tower of the Temple had for centuries greeted O’s daily return.
She floated dispassionate above the snows. But She was here also, filling the valley from brim to brim as water fills a bowl of offering, Herself now part of the ritual. Odah and the One of Sinu answered each other in echoing praise as Tron swept into the central dance. He seemed to himself bodiless, with limbs of air, a creature formed to do this thing alone, as effortlessly as a hawk hovers above its hunting ground. It was a long dance, full of difficult sequences and sudden transitions from swift to slow and back, but when it was over he felt no tiredness in his limbs and continued his part of the ritual without a backward thought of what he had just achieved.
It was in his soul that the strain lay. As the silver hours marched by he began to feel something in the ritual which he had not understood when they had rehearsed it. It was as though he and the other two were between them beginning to lift from the earth an enormous, sluggish weight of spirit, to wake into motion a force that had lain inert through the centuries, to use all the small strength of their three souls to heave it free from the clogging earth, up into a region where its own energies could begin to move it. It was a task that was just within the limit of their strengths, and the power of the ritual lay in the manner in which it concentrated their souls into that one task alone, so that they could perform what they had come to do.
At that moment called the noon of Aa, when a standing man casts no shadow, the last note of the last hymn floated away among the snows and boulders. Tron felt the Goddess withdraw Her presence. He felt the valley become vacant, and She was gone. As though She had been water around him, buoying him up, when She left his limps were suddenly heavy, almost too heavy to lift, and his mouth and stomach longed for food, and every nerve vibrated with weariness. With a sigh he bent to pick up the hawk; it was awake, perhaps to watch the ritual, perhaps merely deceived by Aa’s brightness into thinking this was daytime. Tron was too tired to be careful, and it never entered his head that a hawk might fly in the noon of Aa, but when he untied the leg thongs from the stone, the hawk, instead of hopping to his gauntlet, sprang into the air.
For a moment he saw it start its habitual spiral climb, then he lost it against the black of the sky. He heard its wingbeat whisper in the silence and he picked it up again, curving away in flight along the whiteness of the eastern snow peak. Once more it vanished into sky, this time for an aching minute. Then Odah pointed and there it was, sharp-shaped against the brightness of the other peak, farther off now, skimming round the rim of the bowl.
When it vanished again Tron walked a little further along the road and whistled for it. Because of the pollution of raw meat, he had left the lure and his other hawking gear with the priests on the road, but he didn’t think it would have been able to see a lure anyway, gazing down out of that brightness into the dark below. He whistled several times. Nothing happened.
Suddenly he felt the searing pang of loss, of emptiness, of all the pleasure of life gone with those blue wings. He flung his arms wide and stared up at the icy circle of Aa.
“Mother,” he whispered, “I offered you all. If You take all, that is good.”
Her shape changed. The hawk hung there, hovering, every pinion sharp as metal against the brilliant circle. He whistled once more, softly, and it plunged to his wrist. He gripped the thongs, slipped the hood on, and walked back to his companions.
“The servant of Gdu flew in a wide circle around the valley,” Odah was explaining to his blind companion. “It was as if to assure us that the Goddess has really departed.”
“She is gone,” said Tron.
“Yes,” muttered the One of Sinu like a man in a dream. “Even I felt Her all around us. Ah, but the cold!”
He swayed, and when Tron moved to steady him the hand that gripped his shoulder was frail but icy. Tron realized that though he himself had been moving through most of the ritual, the other two had simply stood through the chilling midnight hours. The One of Sinu sounded very old and sick—unable, even if he had wished, to move any faster than Odah as the three of them crept toward
the mouth of the pass. When they reached the obscene cairn it glittered with specks of faint light where the beams of Aa were reflected from still-open eyes, but Tron felt neither fear nor horror. Nor did his heart vary its pace when, thirty yards farther on, a tall shadow floated out from the rocks beside the road and a shivering voice whispered, “I will come with you, O my brothers.”
“Who’s there?” said the One of Sinu.
“A priest of Aa,” said Odah. “Come with us, my brother. Help the One of Sinu or he will fall.”
In a silence broken only by the click of Odah’s crutches the four of them crept out of the valley.
XVI
In the morning brightness they hurried down the mountain road as fast as the litter-bearers could travel. Now they were afraid with ordinary human fears, of being trapped in that hopeless place by the murderous blue horsemen, coming from either behind or in front. Tron was dizzy and aching, but the priest of Aa who had spoken to them in the valley took his turn at the litter poles. The One of Sinu looked as he had when Tron had first met him, blue-lipped and feverish, though his followers had taken turns to rub his icy limbs all night. Odah had a different sickness; his Welcome to O had come with a leaden, apathetic note, and now his eyes were dull and his face for once showed the pain he had long lived with. He did not speak until after their noon rest, when the priest of Aa was walking beside his litter.
“Tell me your story, my brother. What have you seen, if it can be told?”
The priest of Aa walked with a young man’s stride, and his voice had warmth and life in it.
“It began with the King’s Going to War,” he said. “After that there was said to be a quarrel among the Major Priests, and suddenly Aa, blessed be Her name, took the Mouth of Silence, and a new Mouth was chosen. That was four days after the Going to War. Immediately after the ritual of his choosing he summoned the whole order and told us that with him and the One of Aa twelve twelves of us must travel to the Peaks of Alaan to renew an ancient ritual. So we came, bringing no slaves, carrying our own bread and water. A Son of the Wise guided us across the desert by night, and after three nights we reached a place where the sand ended and a great road began. There he left us. We were seven nights on the journey, marching with great haste. Two of my brothers died, but we made only the short ritual for them.”
The Blue Hawk Page 17