The Blue Hawk

by Peter Dickinson

  Beyond them Tron could now see the gleam of O’s rays on serried lance-tips. A trumpet blew. The lances lowered out of sight and a cloud of dust surged along the clifftop. Tron saw the people at the cliff edge reel sideways, as if in a wind. The charge was halted, but another trumpet sounded, and there were more lances glittering above rocks, and the pounding of hooves, and the crash of the charge striking home, and once more the trapped Mohirrim were forced sideways along the top of the ravine. Now Tron could see the foremost lancers and the blue warriors struggling on the cliff edge, a jammed mass of men and horses, not ten yards from the bridge. One more charge like that, and the Mohirrim would be cut off from their escape route. The shouts above him rose to screams, then died to sudden silence as a man who had already crossed the bridge ran back almost to the far side, slashed through the top rope, and then, without taking any handhold, the main support ropes. He must have already cut the stay ropes, out of Tron’s line of sight, for the bridge swayed wildly to and fro as he hacked at the gap between two wagon platforms, first cutting one side almost through, then turning to slash at the other with all his strength. The second rope parted. The bridge seemed to twitch, flinging the warrior clear, just before the first rope snapped where he had cut it. He was still falling as the bridge flopped back out of sight. Tron heard a shout from above his head, followed by a rhythmic chant as the warriors, safe this side of the ravine, began to haul up the wagon platforms they needed to continue their flight.

  Tron turned his eyes to watch the end of the battle. Directly opposite him, framed in an oval of leaves, a fair-haired orange woman stood on the very edge of the cliff with a four-year-old boy in her arms. The slant rays of O flashed from her gold necklaces and the dust storm of the battle rose like a thundercloud behind her. Calmly as a priest performing a common ritual, she kissed the child on his forehead and tossed him over the cliff. He fell without a whimper. She picked up a baby from the ground beside her, kissed it also, took a pace back, then sprang out into the gulf. Her hair began to stream up behind her as she fell out of Tron’s sight. A little to one side a half-grown girl put her hands over her eyes and leaped more awkwardly.

  Gulping, Tron turned his head away and saw Talatatalatatehalatena peering goggle-eyed between the leaves.

  “Ngdie! Ngdie!” whispered the hunter in an appalled voice.

  Tron closed his eyes and watched no more. He was not outside this. Each leaping woman, each child tossed toward the flood-scoured boulders, falling and still trusting as it fell, died not only in the ravine but also in the dark cave of his soul. Long before the battle was over he heard fresh shouts above his head, the squeak of axles and the dwindling rumble of hooves. The Mohirrim who had reached safety could leave, but Tron was forced to stay. It was as though he were needed, somehow, to complete the ritual.

  Up on the opposite cliff the noises diminished more slowly. Not one warrior of the Mohirrim surrendered. Those too wounded to fight were killed by their comrades. The woman leaped as their men died.

  Dusk filled the ravine. Tron listened to the sound of the soldiers moving away, calling as if to tell each other that they at least were still alive. His whole instinct was to stay where he was, to let time pass among the vines while the appalling vision faded. He heard the click and scrape of Odah’s crutches.

  “My brother,” came the calm, sweet voice. “I must perform the ritual for these dead. Will you help me?”

  Tron felt his way hesitantly out into the open, looking deliberately away from the place where the blue and orange bodies lay among the boulders. Soon they would all be in the darkest shadows of the ravine. That would be better.

  “For the Mohirrim? A ritual?” he said.

  “For them. For you. For me. For all who die.”

  “I will help, if you think it’s right.”

  “Good. Will you do the answers?”

  Tron nodded. Odah led the way to a flat rock in the middle of the ravine. Tron settled his hawk, hooded, onto a smaller boulder, helped Odah up to stand on the rock he had chosen, and took his place beside him looking southwest into the gold leavings of O’s departure. The two hunters stared at them, made little mutters of disapproval, and drifted away like shadows down the ravine.

  Odah raised his arms and began. Tron answered. Their voices intertwined, lacing again into the echoes from the cliffs.

  Behind them a man heard the sound. His blue-dyed body had been lying between two boulders, with both legs broken, while he waited to go to the place which he called Kwal-Vannor, where warriors who have never wept nor flinched spend their days in loot and slaughter and their evenings in feasting and their nights in the arms of faithful wives. He had been content to wait for death, but at the sound of human voices he raised his head and saw two Paharrim standing among the rocks, making an obscenity close to the dead bodies of the mothers of heroes. He still had two good arrows in his belt, and his bow lay a little way off, unbroken. With great care, completely oblivious of the tearing pain in his legs, he began to drag his body through the boulders.

  Odah chanted:

  “Let the old man take to Aa

  The gift of wisdom

  Let the warrior take to Aa

  The gift of courage

  Let the woman take to Aa

  The gift of comfort

  Let the child take to Aa

  The small gifts of childhood.”

  Tron answered:

  “These they received from the Gods

  These they return.”

  Both chanted together:

  “These they will find twice over

  In the houses of happiness

  That Aa has prepared for them

  Beyond the dark archway.”

  As the last notes went twining away together Tron raised his arms and gazed toward the huge stars that were quickly being born in the black-purple sky. Behind and a little below him, the wounded archer tensed his back against a rock, with his useless legs sprawled anyhow beneath him. He saw the two Paharrim silhouetted against the last bars of daylight in the west, a good target, though the distance was difficult to judge. Take the boy first, because the cripple will be slow to move away. The archer drew back the string and aimed along the shaft. Alone, defeated, dying, he still did the deed he was made for.

  Tron staggered. The fire seared along his spine from the small of his back. The stars went out.

  “Lord Gdu!” he screamed.

  He did not feel the shock of his own fall among the boulders.

  XVII

  In the darkness, falling.

  A small child, tossed from the clifftop, helpless, falling and trusting.

  A pool whose surface glistens blacker than darkness. Swim? I cannot swim. Spreading arms like a swimmer, into the pool. But that glinting surface covers more darkness too thin to carry down-dragging limbs, leaden with exhaustion.

  In the darkness falling, falling and trusting.

  A cliff of harsh rock. Stay still! Large as a gauntlet the marigold scorpion creeps from a cranny, tail tensed and pulsing. Tro-ho-ho-ho-hoonn, nearer, nearer along the ravine the whooping call of the jackal that can never die. Gripped hard, the scorpion is carved jade in the palm, twisting inward and upward to swing the rock open, a place of hiding while the jackal passes.

  A slit of pure black. One blind pace. Another. Hands wavering ahead touch the loosely cloying flutter of cobwebs, touch cloth, touch robes, touch black-gloved fingers, reaching, groping. There’s a niche two steps to your left. No. Only rough rock. A handhold, a cranny, a ledge. There is no path for me there, my brothers. Climbing. The cobwebs are creepers. Below, black-gloved fingers grope onward, cheated. Heavily up the unending stairs. The falls are silent, the canyon empty, Alaan speaks no more.

  A knee and an elbow drag up the body to lie exhausted on cold, flat stone, stone vaguely lit, stone level and stretching between vast pillars, a peopled cavern, the Cave of Aa.

  Ranked between pillars, each in his place the priests stand watching a different entrance
, so a boy can creep unseen, unbreathing, to his proper place in the foremost rank before the dark altar.

  On the cupped slab one crippled body, gold-robed, twisted. Its eyesockets are empty. The clay that covers the lips of the singer has dried into cracks.

  Odah, my father!

  The whisper echoes in the cave of whispers, grows and becomes a cry, a full chant. Black cowls turn all with one movement.

  I am Goat!

  On the end of the cord where the Goat-Stone should hang, only the bleached skull of a hare.

  The body of Odah smokes on the altar. The smoke swirls, gathers, draws in on itself and becomes a hovering darkness.

  Tron, says the woman, speaking from darkness, How shall I judge you? Before I go, how shall I judge you? You lied to the Gods, you murdered the King, you spilt your sweetwater, you robbed the King’s coffin. Who gave you the right?

  (One name. One known word. Gone from the tongue. Gone from the mind. Gone from the world.)

  Nearer hovers the darkness. Nearer. The Cave is empty. Only the Gods, stone-faced, tunnel-eyed, watch uncaring. The darkness knows all places of hiding.

  (One name. One lost word. Gone from the world. Gone beyond distance.)

  Cupped in a crevice where two flagstones meet a slate-blue feather, sharp as a jewel.

  Blue feather. Blue Hawk.

  Lord of the falcons

  Lord of healing

  “Gdu! Save me!”

  The whisper echoes in the cave of whispers, grows and becomes a cry, a summons, a full-chanted hymn.

  Tiny with distance, sharp as a jewel, a boy, blue-robed, lying among water-worn rocks. A feathered arrow-shaft juts from the center of a seeping circle of blood. Reluctance and weariness and something else unnamable. The rush of coming, the hawk’s plunge to the lure.

  The darkness dwindles, puzzled among the echoes. A touch on the feather and it floats away, down, down into a ravine of harsh light as the crevice widens, light that is pain in the shadowed cavern.

  Leaping after the feather, falling into light, falling and trusting.

  Angry scrub-desert, thorned, rock-pillared, and the King striding through it. A pace to greet him, but he stalks by unfrowning, unsmiling, his brown, fierce eyes looking straight ahead and the jewel fallen from the gold circlet that binds his forehead.

  A flat, bare plain, salt to the white horizon. Buried in salt a chariot wheel. The hawk on the wrist hooded in iron, and tied to the gauntlet with twenty thongs. The wheel is free. It begins to turn, to race through the plain. It bursts asunder like a storm-stripped flower. The spokes fly upward, grow, change, and become the flying statues of all the Gods. Huge, they darken the desert noon. They dwindle, dwindle, vanish in distance.

  Now out of distance one God returns with the plunge of a hawk. Enormous, He settles on the empty whiteness, a crannied pillar, cool shade beside Him. Shade, dark shade, a hovering darkness. Out of the darkness, blue starlings, screaming. Blue horsemen, blue priests, blue ghosts in a circle, closing, closing. Two hoods, two curved beaks, two sets of fumbling fingers tugging at drenched knots. Ah, now, in the instant chosen and given, a sweep of one arm flings up the hawk to ride in the enormous freedom of air, seen there, poised as the blue cloud blots out the sky.

  To float in a pool of light. Clutch at a spiky tussock, drag twisted body onto scouring gravel, stand heavy and bent. A scrape and a click as crutches swing that body through known paths among rustling thickets. Not far now to the nibbled pastures, and beer brewing in Curil’s hut, and the reek of fresh-woven blankets, and the long roar of the falls, and O’s answer building itself in the fire of His going.

  XVIII

  Tron shifted a numb arm. Instantly fire flowed from a point near his spine all down his right leg. He lay deathly still, while the sweat of pain sprang out over his body, and waited until the fire withdrew itself into its dully throbbing center. Only then did he dare to open his eyes.

  He was lying on his side in a sort of tunnel of pale blue—no—under a long canopy of blue cloth with the sides let down. The hummocked shape only three feet away was a man lying under a coarse brown blanket. There seemed to be another man lying beyond him, and possibly more beyond that. Out of sight someone gave a long, fluttering groan. Tron’s own blanket was of the fine Kalakal weave and pattern, and could well have been the one given him by the ghost’s daughter-in-law.

  He couldn’t move his head without waking the fire again, and his body seemed to be strapped to the bed to prevent him from tossing about, so he shut his eyes again and lay still, listening. The canopy was full of little mutters and stirrings, and once or twice more the same groan of barely endured pain. From farther away came the occasional bleat of sheep, and from farther still, quite loud but so constant that the ears forgot to notice it, the ceaseless boom of the falls. So he was indeed back at Kalakal. He didn’t remember crossing the ravine. The last thing he remembered was using Odah’s crutches to hobble back … no, that had been part of the dream, surely. But the dream had been so real, so clear. Though it had been full of things he didn’t understand, it still seemed as true as anything else in his life, as true as the moment when he had first lifted the hawk onto his wrist in the House of O and Aa, as true as the pain in his back.

  For a long while he lay quiet, thinking his way through it, piecing the brilliant images into a meaning he could grasp. He didn’t notice the stir of movement in the tent until a steady hand took him by the wrist and felt for his pulse. When he opened his eyes he saw the blue robe of a priest of Gdu six inches from his face. Pain warned him not to flinch.

  “Awake, then?” said the priest. “Don’t try to move. How’s the back?

  “It hurts. But it’s not too bad if I lie still.”

  “Ugh. You’ve got to expect that. It’s mending, so I’ve taken you off poppy-cake. You don’t want to stay on that longer than you have to. I expect the Gods have sent you some pretty odd dreams, hey?”

  “Yes. How long …”

  “You’ve been six days in my care. For the first two I thought you were going to Aa, but then you began to mend. You won’t be walking for a couple of months, mind you. All right? If you think you can’t stand it I’ll put you back on poppy-cake for a bit longer, but you’re better without it.”

  “Yes. I know. Thank you, my brother, my father.”

  The priest grunted and moved away. Tron noticed that when he talked to the other patients he did so in the proper half-chant, and not in the brusque conversational tones he had used when talking between priests. It was strange that he didn’t yet know that they were now living in an altered world, where none of that mattered any more. Strange, strange. And I have been in the Cave of Aa, and returned alive, as no man has done since Saba. Strange, strange.

  The days passed with a slow, appalling pace. Men were carried out, half-healed to convalesce in other tents, or dead to be buried. More men were brought in, savagely wounded, to lie and groan and mutter. Tron shut his mind to all this, lying perfectly still through the creeping hours, summoning into himself the great invisible healing force that lay over the meadows. The pain steadily lessened.

  On the fourth day he heard ceremonial horns sounding, and the clink of harness and the thud of horse-hooves. Young priests of Gdu lifted the four beds nearest him and carried them elsewhere; in their place an ornate tapestry was raised to screen him, so that he lay gazing at a brilliant scene of Gdu flying above a plain where a group of nobles rode hawking. Then the tapestries parted and the King came in laughing.

  He looked very tired. His face was drawn and crusted here and there with a mixture of sweat and dust, but the air around him seemed to tingle with his excitement and happiness. He stretched his arms down in a gesture that would have become a hug of joy in their meeting if Tron had not been wounded; life and warmth seemed to flow from his fingertips.

  “Ah, Tron,” he whispered, squatting onto a little stool beside the mattress, “I came as soon as I could—I’ve been riding since dawn. They told me three day
s ago that you’d woken—we’ve had a messenger ride each day from Kalakal with news of you—but we had to deal with another swarm of Mohirrim first.”

  “What’s happening, Majesty?”

  “Too early to say. They won’t go on coming like this, a few hundred at a time. So far we’ve rounded most of them up—d’you know we’ve not taken a single prisoner, man, woman, or child?—but some of this last lot got back through the pass. So fairly soon I think we’ll have a real horde to cope with. We’ll manage provided we can keep them up on the tableland, because we know the ravine crossings and the watering places. If I get it right we won’t have to do much real fighting. Thirst will do our work for us. But after that … Tron, what happened in the pass on the night of Her Most Brightness?”

  “We performed a ritual and the Gods left.”

  “Left? You mean … that’s not what I wanted. I need to know whether I can take an army through the Pass Gebindrath without coming under the curse of that kind woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all? Yes, just like that? Listen, Tron, you’ve no idea what an army’s like for rumors. The priests of Sinu who had carried your litter came back from the pass with the news that their One was dead, but that he had said that the curse was lifted. Then we got news that you were wounded and likely to die, and that the crippled priest of O …”

  “He has died also.”

  “How did you know? I gave orders that you were not to be told.”

  “I saw his body in the Cave of Aa.”

  In the mid-rush of explanation the King stopped short, like a racing horse hauled back onto its haunches. His face wore its closed, armored look while he stared at Tron unblinking. At last he sighed.