The Blue Hawk (6 page)

The King's voice was harsh with frustrated energies; even if he had kept it quiet and steady his mere presence would have fretted the Blue Hawk. As it was it took Tron some time to coax the bird onto his gauntlet and slip its hood into place; and then it didn't settle into its normal stillness but fidgeted with its talons and made half-movements with its wings as though longing, blind though it was, to soar away from his wrist.

“My hawk will never fly in the Temple,” he said slowly. “Not in front of all the people. Even one stranger …”

“Yes,” said the King. “I thought of that some time ago. I was bothered about whether I oughtn't to tell you. Perhaps I would have. But I have to fight with what weapons I've got, you see. What will they do when you fail?”

“Send me to Aa.”

“Hm. Yes. The One of Gdu must know it can't be done, surely.”

“Yes—but he was so angry, I think he'd prefer me to fail. I must run away.”

“Not easy. Every village has its priest. Every face is known, because every man is bound to one village. There are no vagabonds in my country … if I could get you to the far south, to Kalavin's house near the Jaws of Alaan. His father … hm …”

When the King thought, his face became unreadable. During the hunt he had lived, as it were, entirely on the surface of his being, taking all his pleasure in the minute of action. Now he seemed to turn inward and explore his own depths. Tron waited until he laughed and returned to the moment.

“I've an idea,” he said. “Tell you later, when I've worked it out. Mustn't waste good hawking time. My turn now.”

He led the way southwest at a steady march, far too fast for serious hawking. Once he put up a hare but was slow in loosing his hawk, which turned out to fly in a quite different style from the Blue Hawk. It hunted level, and very fast, but the hare escaped it by a sudden break to the right; the hawk's pace carried it far too wide on the turn, and by the time it was ready to pick up the line the hare was still, a rock with the other rocks. At a cry from the King the hawk lolled back to his wrist without a lure, as though it were used to missing its prey.

“She's lazy with hares,” said the King. “I'd like you to see her after kingfowl someday. My method is brisker than yours, at least, and a lot more dangerous. When we spot a covey we simply ride them down. They rise and rise again, but if we go hard enough we get among them. We yell and tootle our horns to keep them on the move, too. It's rough riding, half a dozen of us, hawk on one wrist, horn in the other hand, reins loose on the pony's neck—you've got to have a pony who knows the game and can pick its own line, but it's up to you to keep him going flat out, come rough come smooth. I've seen plenty of bones broken, including some necks, but the risk of that is part of the fun. And yet … it's only a game compared to your way. Your way is the real thing. You use as little as you need, but use it to the utmost. If ever I fight a war, it will be like that.”

He gave up all pretense at hunting and walked beside Tron, asking questions about the life of priests.

“Where will you sleep tonight?” he asked suddenly.

“At the Temple of Tan.”

“Whew! I told you that priests were braver than us in some ways. We don't go near it. It's not just that it's priest-ground, but … you know, I'm a servant of the Gods, just as much as you. But I don't think the Gods are altogether what the priests say they are … at least, I'm certain that the priests try to use the Gods, in the same way that they try to use you and me.… Now, here. I wanted to show you this.”

For the last half mile they had been striding through thorny scrub land, hopeless for hawking, so it was startling to come out into an open place from which it was possible to see for a hundred miles. The King had led Tron to the southern edge of the rock plateau. O was halfway down the sky to their right and His slant beams lit the enormous tract of land that the river had smoothed out in her passage toward the Jaws of Alaan. They stood not two hundred feet above the plain, but in that dry air eyesight seemed to reach on forever. Far to the left in a gray and yellow line lay the beginnings of the dunes of the true desert. Even farther to the south Tron could see a line of blueness bluer than the sky and separated from it by a faint, erratic, glistening thread that was the snow that lay all year long upon the impassable Peaks of Alaan. To the west the plain was dimmer, veiled in sun glare. The river flashed like steel where it rounded the Temple of Tan at the point of the plateau, then became a black snake wriggling endlessly toward the mountains.

“Look there,” said the King. “What do you make of that?”

He pointed almost at the foot of the ridge on which they stood, then gestured along to the left. The plateau didn't immediately give way to the silted plain. Instead a lower line of hills came curving out of the southeast and almost joined the main mass, leaving only a tongue of flatland half a mile wide. As it reached eastward this tongue widened into a broad, empty plain of extraordinary whiteness over which ran a series of strange lines, almost like veins, branching into lesser lines or sometimes widening into regular-shaped flats. It was hard to see from above whether the lines or flats were above or below the main level. They did not look natural, and certainly the earth rampart that blocked the narrowest part of the tongue seemed man-made.

“What is it?” said Tron. “Why is it so white?”

“The white is salt, priest. In my great-grandfather's time that was a fertile valley. Those lines are water channels. It was good earth and grew huge crops. Then the yield diminished. We deepened the channels. The soil turned sour. Cakes of salt began to form on the surface. It was the King's land, so armies of peasants were gathered to carry the salt away. More water was poured on the land, but the soil died. My grandfather built that rampart so that a high flood couldn't reach into the valley and carry the salt out to other fields.”

“Perhaps the Gods …”

“If the Gods were angry with my fathers, who served them well, then they're angry with the whole kingdom. The same thing is beginning to happen everywhere, always on the best land. We can dig new channels to cultivate poorer land, but that is no answer. We've been building up a sickness in the soil, too slowly for a man to see in one lifetime. But soon it'll be too late and the soil will die, except for two narrow strips along the river-banks where Tan brings down fresh silt each year. So we must change the way we farm.”

“Change?”

The King laughed at Tron's astonished tone.

“That's the priest in you. All knowledge is in the hymns. The hymns never change. Only the priests know the hymns. Who teaches the herdsman's son the management of cattle? His father? No, the priest of Sodala. Who teaches the noble's son to fly a hawk? An austringer? No, a priest of Gdu—though, mark you, old Tandal, who taught me, was a lord of his art and fun to hunt with too, not like this One you've got now. Huh! Think, Tron. Must I live in comfort and do nothing but hawk and feast and practice warfare while my kingdom is dying, dying because nothing can change, dying because every year the One of Tan measures the flood level and from that moment the hymns decree exactly how much water must be lifted by how many turns of each wheel into which channels, and what seeds are to be sown in every yard of my land? Are you surprised that I enjoy hunting? Gdaal knows where the hare crouches, but the One of Gdaal doesn't!”

Tron stared in dismay at the glaring valley.

“Is it because of the salt that we left the Temple of Tan?” he asked.

“It was empty long before my great-grandfather's time. My guess is that the priests withdrew into the desert partly to increase their mystery and partly so that they could not see with their own eyes what they were doing to the fields. But you, Tron—you've tamed a Blue Hawk, so you've changed the hymns. Will you help me change more?”

“I … I owe you my life four times, but I … I am a priest.”

“I released you from those Obligations. Besides, I owe you one back. I shall find a reason to sleep in another room, one with plain walls. That's nothing. But because of the bread we've broken … Listen, Tron. Do you know how you came to the Temple?”

Tron shook his head.

“I guessed they wouldn't tell you. You were the thirty-third child born in some village since the last priest was taken. If you'd been a girl you'd have been sacrificed, still wet with the birth-fluid, to the God of your village—Gdaal, I should think in your case—a lot of those desert hunters have your dark skin, and you seem to have the knack of stalking, and there's one or two other things you can't have learned from the hymns … never mind. You were a boy baby, so they let you live. Your mother suckled you for a year, then the priest paid your father five bronzes and sent you away to the Temple. Your father paid the priest five bronzes to make beer for a village feast, so the money came back to the priests.”

“I didn't know.”

“That's what I thought. I've heard that sometimes a mother will mark her boy—cut off the top joint of his little toe or something like that—so that she can tell him if ever she meets him. But the priests of that kind woman, who look after the babies in their first years, inspect them when they are brought to the Temple and give to Her any who've been marked. They do everything they can to separate the priests from the people … somewhere, Tron, you have a village, and brothers and sisters, and a mother who fed you at the roundness of her brown breast.”

“And a father who sold me.”

“What else could he do? Kalavin's elder brother is now a priest, and he was the firstborn son of the General of the Southern Levies. Only the priests know which priest he is. His father doesn't. But Tron, you and he … in spite of everything they can do, you are still part of my people. Has your blood changed, which your mother gave you?”

“Perhaps, Majesty. The Gods …”

“The Gods are powerful, but They left you the step of a hunter. Tron, you've spent twelve years in the Temple and three months in the desert. What will you feel when you go back to the Temple?”

Tron stood silent, gazing at the unreachable snow line of Alaan. Never to walk alone again, with a hawk on his gauntlet, every sense sharp, and a whole long day before him!

“It's hard for you,” said the King. “That's another thing. Your whole training is mapped out so that you never have to make a single decision for yourself. Everything is laid down. That's why, in the end, priests are bound to make bad rulers—they've never learned to decide.”

“Majesty, you talk as though they did not serve the Gods, as if all they were interested in was keeping themselves in power. But they do, they do.”

“Oh, yes, they do. A lot of people serve me, in my place and in my kingdom, but not all of them serve me well. Will you serve me, Tron?”

Tron hesitated. He didn't know what to say or do, or what he wanted, or how to fend off the onslaught of the King's appeal.

“I can serve only my Lord Gdu,” he muttered.

He wanted to turn away but the King's eyes held his, eyes like his murdered father's, a look of defeat, fierce and sad. Nobody had ever trusted Tron before. They had given him orders and known he would obey, but that was not trust. Nobody had befriended him; he had companions living with him under the same rules of fear, but that was not friendship. Now the King offered him trust and friendship but …

He wrenched his eyes away and stared at the glaring valley. Out of its whiteness a shape seemed to swim, a hawk, a Blue Hawk, his own hawk, sick and bedraggled as when he'd first seen it. He had broken the ritual to take it out of the House of O and Aa. Now it came to him again as a sign.

“I'll try to help you,” he said. “I cannot serve you, but I'll try to help you.”

“Good,” said the King, unsmiling. “In fact, better. I saw your face change, Tron. What did you see?”

“He sent me a sign,” said Tron with a vague gesture at the salt-flats below.

The King nodded, accepting it as a fact.

“I come here often,” he said. “Whenever I feel I can't fight them anymore. That place is a sign to me. It isn't only that the fields are dying, Tron. That's true, but the Kingdom is sick in a quite different way. It's sick like a caged hawk. We've been cramped into these plains for too long, between Alaan and the marshes and the desert. D'you know, in my Obligations there are a dozen trade routes that I'm supposed to keep open, and they're all closed. There are wells in the desert too that I ought to guard, but I can't because whoever drinks their water falls sick and dies. When I look at those dead fields it seems to me that we must either burst out of this trap or die. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I think so. The Temple's like that, in a way. You don't realize it while you're inside it, but now I've learned to be free.… What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing yet. But … is the Temple of Tan built at all like the Great Temple?”

“Well, there's no Palace, and there doesn't seem to be a Room of Days and Years. But other bits are exactly like.”

“So there might be hidden doors and passages in it? Will you look? I'll come there at noon in three days' time. We haven't got very long. The embalmers finished my father's body nine days ago. It's less than twenty before the flood begins and he must go on his journey.… Listen! that's Kalavin's horn! I'd like you out of sight before they come, in case one of them recognized you. Then they'll think I took you off alone so that I could kill you and bury you somewhere back there. Hurry! Noon in three days' time!”

Trained to obedience, Tron moved quietly away down the ridge, crouching until he was hidden by a belt of sprawling cacti.
Killed me? Buried me?
He began to reason it through. A King is suddenly confronted with a boy who helped to murder his father and is now a threat to himself and his whole dynasty. What does he do? Seems friendly, breaks bread as a sign of trust, finds a reason to go alone with the boy into a tract of wilderness, and there, unwitnessed, the murder is avenged, the threat broken, and the boy vanishes. This King, though—perhaps he had considered it, and then had taken the greater risk of offering trust and friendship—not just for the sake of having a spy among the enemy, but because it was his nature to be direct and open, wherever he dared. He had the soul of the hawk in him.