The Blue Hawk (15 page)

A head turned. A voice spoke. The mutter instantly became silence. Then five men were on their feet rushing at Tron with spears held high. Their faces were contorted, as if they were yelling war cries, but they swept forward in total silence, daytime ghosts.

Another part of a priest's training is to learn not to flinch from an expected blow, not to let an eyelid quiver, a muscle flick. Those painful lessons kept Tron still. He forced his lungs to breathe slowly and shallowly so that all his body should seem motionless as a statue.

Five feet away from him the tumbling rush halted. Spears drew back for throwing, but wavered. Tron stared straight forward, not into any one pair of bulging eyes, seeing the men in the blur of his peripheral vision, where their contorted faces looked like those of demons. Thus they all stayed for five heartbeats. The group convulsed as a man strode through them from behind, shoving the others to left and right.

He was old, his hair and tight-curled beard yellow-white. The fold of flesh above his left collarbone had been pierced and a bird's thighbone pushed through as an ornament. His eyes, which were level with Tron's chin, were bloodshot. The huge, flabby bulge of his chest and stomach was painted with stripes of white and gray mud. He carried a black club decorated with shells.

Once through the crowd, he stood looking at Tron's soiled blue tunic, at his face, and then at the hawk on his wrist. The others jostled to see what would happen. The old man's knees bent. He put his club on the ground beside him, then folded himself over his immense stomach until he could beat his grizzled forehead on the path in front of Tron's feet.

Tron raised his right hand and sang the hunter's blessing:

“Gdaal send the bird to your net,

Gdaal lead the buck to your bow,

Gdaal mark the trail of the hare,

Gdaal bring you safe to your camp.”

As he stopped the chant the men clicked their spearheads together and made a light, continuous rattling that echoed off the far cliff. The old man rose to his feet, smiling with enormous pleasure. Tron bowed sedately, keeping his face stiff as a mask.

“Agdaal mbring,” said the old man, dragging the words out of some strange pocket of memory. Gaining confidence, he pointed at the hawk.

“Agoods,” he said. “Mbird agoods. Agoods.”

“Yes,” said Tron clearly. “The bird is good. It is Gdu's bird.”

“Agdu, Agdu mbird,” agreed the old man, grinning. He swept an arm around to gesture at the cave.

“Agdaal us agod,” he said, miming the drawing of the bow and puckering his lips to the arrow's hiss.

“You are Gdaal's people,” said Tron. This must be so, though they clearly had no sort of kinship with the hunters of the Kingdom.

“Who is that man?” he asked, pointing at the figure beyond the fire. The men moved aside from his gesture as though lightning might suddenly flash from his fingertip; their movement let him see that the man was bound by leather thongs to the boulder against which he lay. The old chief frowned and pouted.

“Mbads,” he said. “Man mbads. Man ngdie, uh?”

He looked consoled by this final notion.

Still keeping his face masklike, Tron glided between the hunters at his ghostly pace. As they moved aside for him he heard them whispering, but the words were not those of the language of the Kingdom. The babies on the floor stopped their tug-of-war to stare at him. The women put their hands over their eyes and turned away. Tron paid no attention to any of them as he settled the hawk on the boulder, then knelt and felt for the man's pulse, moving all the time with the slow rhythm of a dance. At his touch the man opened his eyes and muttered. It took him some seconds even to notice Tron, but when he did so he frowned, shook his head as if trying to clear it, and gasped, “Durr Kaing? Durr Kaing?”

He said the words several times, varying the sound as though he wasn't sure that he was pronouncing it right. Tron suddenly made sense of the two syllables.

“The King?” he said.

The man nodded, ran a swollen tongue across dry lips and gazed with bright-eyed eagerness into Tron's face. Then his glance slid away and his expression changed to despair as he saw the watching hunters. Tron rose and turned to them.

“Give the man water,” he said, cutting each word clear of the next. “Untie the man. The man goes to the King.”

The hunters hesitated. The old chief frowned.

“Water,” said Tron, pointing at a brimming half-gourd by the cave wall. “Do I say to Gdaal that you are bad men?”

He spoke the last sentence in full chant, all on a single note which echoed around the cave. The chief smiled ingratiatingly and said something to one of the women, who uncovered her face, picked up the gourd and carried it to the prisoner's lips. One of the younger men undid the thongs. The prisoner seemed not to realize that his limbs were free at first, but when he did he pushed away the gourd and tried to rise. He had got no farther than a half-crouch when his legs gave way and he collapsed on the floor. The women laughed, a tinkling, happy sound.

The man rolled himself onto his knees and crawled painfully across the cave to a leather saddlebag that was propped against the cave wall. The chief frowned and muttered until Tron held up an arm for silence. With shaking hands the man undid the straps of the bag and pulled out of the side pocket a flat, rectangular red brick, which he studied for a while before crawling back and handing it to Tron.

A picture of the Great Temple, unmistakable, was cut into the clay. Beside it was a figure of a King, wearing the Hawk Crown. Below this were several ranks of meaningless little shapes made by pressing a sharp triangular object into the clay. On the other side of the tablet was a strange arrangement of lines, which at first seemed almost accidental, but suddenly, without altering their position, became a picture of the Kingdom, seen from above, with Tan running down the center to the Peaks of Alaan at the bottom. Tron nodded and returned the tablet, but the man, his strength now clearly seeping back, staggered to his feet and thrust the tablet under Tron's face. Pointing with one finger to the triangular marks, he said, “Bah ahnshent tretty ahn bah durr Rehd Shpear ah carl durr Kaing tuh ayerd oos.”

The third time he said it a few words stuck out of the jumble of sound.

“The King. The Red Spear?” said Tron.

The man pointed. Leaning against the cave wall by the saddlebag was an object like a long but feeble bow, with two strings wound round with red ribbon and at the top end a bunch of scarlet feathers from which a fine bronze spike protruded. The man began to say the sounds again. At last they made sense.

“By ancient treaty and by the Red Spear I call the King to aid us.”

When Tron repeated the words the man nodded eagerly and made as if to stagger out of the cave, but suddenly remembered his spear and gear and turned to pick them up. The hunters cried out angrily. In a flash Tron saw what had been happening. Once when O had been wandering in a wild place disguised as a man, He had been captured by ghosts, who had tied Him to a tree and waited for Him to die so that they could take His possessions without the guilt of killing Him, because they didn't want so strong a ghost stalking that place as their enemy. O, of course, had not died, and the ghosts had grown so thin with waiting that they turned into centipedes, and then O had burned His bonds and returned to His heaven. Just so the hunters had been waiting for their prisoner to die, so that they could take his belongings without his returning to haunt them. Now they were afraid that they would get nothing after all their trouble.

Tron tried to make the stranger understand by signs that he must pay some kind of a ransom, and even undid the saddlebag himself, took out a soft leather belt with a gold clasp, put it into the stranger's hands and pushed him toward the chief. The stranger looked furious for a minute, then shrugged and undid the black belt he was wearing. He passed this, dagger and all, to the chief, who laughed aloud and buckled it round his stomach. The fat bulged grossly over the leather.

With solemn dignity the stranger undressed down to a pale linen shift; another of the hunters got his leather jacket with its bronze shoulder plates, another his brilliantly patterned shirt, and so on. The babies even returned the piece of purple cloth so that he could give it back to them. Then, still as solemnly as if he were taking a part in a ritual, the man dressed in the clothes from the saddlebag. They were strange gear to take into the wilds—curl-toed gold slippers, green pantaloons, a long yellow robe of incredibly fine weave, a jeweled belt, a soft blue cap with a ruby in it, and last of all a gold chest-medal the size of a man's spread palm. When he put out his hand and grasped the Red Spear, the hunters sighed and drew back. Once more the chief bowed to the ground and knocked his head on the floor. When he rose he seemed deathly afraid, and fumbled with the buckle of his stolen belt as if eager to give it back; but the stranger pushed out his hand, palm foremost, as a sign that the chief must keep the gift.

Suddenly the chief laughed and the tension broke. In no time Tron found himself sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cave beside the chief amid the clamor and guzzling of a hunter's feast. The stranger, whose name seemed to be Onu Ovalaku, sat on the chief's other side and accepted with dignified little bows the tidbits of roast lizard which the chief kept offering him. The hunters seemed to know somehow that Tron would not eat meat, and one of the women sat just behind him, cracking sweet little nuts for him between two stones. The men danced and boasted in their many-syllabled language, the women sang wailing songs, and the children ran hither and thither, treating the bodies of the seated adults as boulders to clamber over or play hide-and-seek among.

The pillar of smoke was gold with O's going, though O's answer was hidden behind the ridge, when Tron helped Onu Ovalaku up the last stretch of path, through the thorn barrier, and into the pastures. As they trudged up the slope, Onu Ovalaku, who seemed now a little delirious, kept saying anxiously, “Durr Kaing? Durr Kaing?”

“Yes,” said Tron again and again. “We will go tomorrow.”

He himself was very tired with the weight of Onu Ovalaku's arm around his shoulders, and now he was overwhelmed by a great flood of sadness at the idea of leaving Kalakal. He loved these gold pastures, and the freedom, and the sense of being part of a contented community, and he was appalled and frightened at the idea of returning into the Kingdom. There was no need for that, surely. Curil could take Onu Ovalaku to the house of Kalavin's father, who would know his Obligations and send the ambassador on to the King. What part had Tron to play in any of this? Hadn't he done all that the Gods could require?

No, said Gdu in his heart. No. Go.

XI

Between the hills and the desert, between the realm of the Gods and the Kingdom of Men. Scenes from that journey.

The twinkly shade of a sparse grove of eucalyptus. At its far edge Curil and Onu Ovalaku halt, outlined against the hammering glare of O. Tron, leg-weary and footsore from the endless and undifferentiated track across the hills, stops a few feet behind them, to take full advantage of the spice-smelling shade and to keep the Blue Hawk clear of the fret of their presence, which it seems to sense even through its hood.

But when Curil points ahead and Onu Ovalaku claps him lightly on the shoulder to show pleasure, Tron strolls forward to join them and finds that they have come to the edge of the plateau.

Four miles ahead and several hundred feet below them, Tan drives toward the east; beyond Her the brown hills shoulder up, like the ridged backs of gigantic cattle, but over to the left and incredibly blue and green after the barren upland, a vast flatness stretches away. Onu Ovalaku lets out his breath in a slow gasp and for want of language makes an absurd gesture with his arms as though he could hold all that vastness in his embrace.

“Durr Kaingland?” he says.

“Yes,” says Tron somberly, “that's the Kingdom.”

Night. Firelight. Onu Ovalaku cross-legged on the earth by the fire, wearing the livery of an upper servant in the household of Kalavin's father, the General of the Southern Levies. The General on a stool beside him. The light casts masklike shadows on their contrasting faces, Onn Ovalaku's round, smooth, solemn and eager, the General's arrogant and impatient. Tron is still puzzled by the General. The old man seems so ready to break into a furious outburst at the slightest deviation from accepted behavior—a tiny mistake in dress or speech or even food can throw him into a passion—and yet at the same time he is prepared to break all rules and rituals, however important, in order to fulfill his Obligation to convey Onu Ovalaku and the Red Spear safe to the King. Now he cranes forward to watch while once more his guest attempts to explain his mission.

Onu Ovalaku smooths out a patch of mingled ash and dust, dampens it and smooths it again. Deftly on this surface he draws pictures with the point of his dagger—horsemen, naked, with great dogs leaping beside them.

“Mohirrim,” he says drily.

He adds a group of armored men fighting against the horsemen.

“Falathi,” he says, then repeats the word, tapping himself on the chest.

He wipes the picture out and draws again. This time the naked horsemen are burning a house. One of them has speared a woman, and a dog is leaping at a child. Onu Ovalaku destroys that picture and draws another and another, and another. Each time there are the same horsemen and dogs, fighting, killing, destroying; and each time he draws them he says the same word, “Mohirrim.”

Tron, dizzy from the first day's jolting chariot ride, half-hypnotized by the tranced monotony of the passing plain, the waterways and the banked fields and the placid villages, endlessly repeated, sits a little back from the other two, understanding that the country beyond the peaks has been attacked by a horde of savage horsemen and that Onu Ovalaku has come to ask for help, but not much caring. This is the King's affair, and the General's and Onu Ovalaku's.