The Blue Hawk (2 page)

Not a single pair of eyes flickered toward Tron. They might all have been as blind as the One of Sinu, who stood sightless at the front of the red-robed priests of the War God. Tron glided down the aisle between them to where the glaring rectangle of the Door of O and Aa opened onto the noon-dazzled inner courtyard of the Temple.

Behind him, at some point before he reached the door, the Keeper of the Rods made a sweeping gesture with both arms, the One of Aa mimed the sacrifice of a hawk, and the One of Gdu dipped his forefinger into the basin and drew with invisible blood the symbol of Gdu on the King's forehead. The priests sang on, continuing the ritual of Renewal as though nothing had interrupted and the symbol were plain to see on the brown skin. The nobles muttered in the darkened side aisles. The King stared down the aisle at the bird and child, black and dwindling against the bright doorway. He smiled the thin smile of defeat.

Tron carried the hawk out into the desert noon.

II

The rays of O beat vertically down on the Inner Courtyard. Apart from a yard-wide strip along the bottom of the south wall, the only shade lay under the arch of the passage into the Great Courtyard. A flight of the white temple doves wheeled across the square of sky, their wings making a quick, whimpering beat. If the hawk saw them it gave no sign. It seemed to cower from the light, and almost fell from Tron's wrist. He steadied it as he walked toward the shade of the gateway.

It was strange to be pacing alone over these flagstones. It was strange to be alone at all. It was strange to be Goat, to choose to step this way rather than that. As the Gods withdrew their spirit from him Tron found himself dazed and frightened by what his own limbs and fingers had done. It was not even pleasant to be able to choose.

“Hey! What you got there, then!” said the guard lounging under the gateway. “Going to join the nobility, are you? Hey! That's the Blue Hawk!”

He lunged forward and barred Tron's way. In theory he could be lashed a thousand times for touching even a boy-priest; but the guards tended to repay their awe of the Major Priests by a careful rudeness with the boys, provided there were no witnesses. Tron sensed that the hawk settled a little in the sudden shade, so he halted and tried to soothe it still further by gentling the ruffled neck feathers.

“What's up? Where you taking it? Lord Sinu!”

“Speak more quietly. It's sick.”

“Sick! Drugged, more like!”

“Oh …” Tron hadn't even considered the possibility.

“Who told you to take it? You just took it? So the King's got to die just because you took a fancy to a pretty blue bird? Lord Sinu! They'll flay you alive!”

The tone of the guard's voice dropped and became more formal, as though he could actually see the dark wing of Aa shadowing the King on his throne and the boy under the archway. Tron's own mind was so taken up with the concrete act of rescuing the hawk that there was still no room in it to consider the consequences of the act.

“I am Goat,” he said.

The guard spat.

“Goat! What's Goat for? Goat's chosen to make a piddling little change in the rituals, just so they don't get too stuck in their ways, that's all. You ever seen a Goat do anything like what you've done? No? Well, I have. Thirteen—no, I'm a liar—fourteen floods ago there was this boy who took it into his head to stand up in front of all them priests and sing a hymn to O that he'd made up himself. O he was chosen for, too. They heard him through and they didn't touch him that day. But by the time he passed for priest he was a cripple, so bad they had to carry him up to his village—some potty little place in the hills. What had done that to him? I'll tell you. Punishments! Oh, not for singing his hymn, of course, but day after day for all sorts of other little …”

The guard stopped, stiffened and moved back to his place. Tron waited, listening to the approaching flap of sandals across the flagstones. All but the Major Priests went barefoot. He shivered in the noon heat. If only the hawk would fly away and be done with. When the sandals began to echo under the arch Tron could no longer pretend not to hear them. He turned and bowed, carefully, so as not to unbalance the hawk.

The Keeper of the Rods, having given the signal for the exact hour of noon, could leave the ritual. He was fat for a priest, brown-faced and black-bearded, dressed in a plain white tunic but carrying on the crook of his left arm a scepter with the gold sphere of O at the top and the silver sphere of Aa at the bottom; between the spheres ran a twisting lattice crusted with lapis lazuli to represent the river. Serving no particular God, the Keeper had less stylized manners and movements than those of the other Major Priests, and was thought by the boys to be friendly and kindly. But now he looked at Tron with no expression at all, then turned to the guard.

“You,” he said. “Present yourelf to the Treasurer. Draw your pay. Go to your village. If now or later you say one word about having talked with this boy, Aa will take your children and Sodala blight your cattle. Come with me, boy. Hold that bird so that it cannot be seen from the Courtyard. Walk between me and the wall.”

That in itself would seem strange to any guard watching from the Main Gate, or to the group of boys chosen for Tan, who were jerking their limbs to the cry of the dancemaster over in the northwest corner of the Courtyard. Normally Tron would have followed exactly four paces behind a Major Priest, but now they walked side by side along the inner wall to the Door of the Wise. The noon of O hammered on their scalps and shoulders. The hawk again almost fell from Tron's wrist. Then they were suddenly in the cool and dimness of shaded stone.

Though Tron had lived all his remembered life in the Temple, its minute-by-minute ritual had kept him to definite tracks, so he had never before passed through the dark little Door of the Wise with its strange and indecipherable symbols over the archway. Draggingly he followed the Keeper up a worn flight of shallow steps. In his mind's eye he still saw how the face of the guard had paled and broken into sweat when the Keeper had spoken to him. As Goat Tron had nothing to fear, but still he was afraid.

At the top of the steps the Keeper turned left into a long room, big as an eating hall and filling the width of the south wall of the Courtyard. On its right-hand side rose the familiar statues of the Gods; but on the left, instead of more Gods staring back at them, was a plain wall pierced by big windows below which, along the full length of the room, ran a sloping rack of hundreds of colored rods. As Tron entered the room, one of the Sons of the Wise reversed the sandglass he had been watching, rose, crossed to the rack, muttered a line of some hymn and moved a platelike gold object a few inches along the sloping layer of rods. The symbol of O was embossed deep on the gold.

The Keeper picked out a striped black-and-white rod from beside a blue one.

“Amun!” he called.

A white-haired Son of the Wise rose from a workbench where he had been polishing a bright green rod, banded with gold. His bow to the Keeper was stiff with age, but casual.

“There is no space for another band on tomorrow's rod,” said the Keeper.

“So many Kings have died after Renewal,” grumbled Amun. “I did not know there was to be another one.”

His glance flickered to the hawk on Tron's wrist. A look of understanding came into his eyes.

“What's to be done?” said the Keeper, running the rod between his fingers. Tron saw that all the bands were of different widths.

“Lord,” said Amun, “I will make a thinner rod, copy these old deaths on it, then pass it through a hollow reed on which I can paint this new death—and twenty more, if need be.”

“I knew you would think of something. Follow me, boy.”

The next room was small and square, furnished with a mattress and a stool like any other priest's cell in the Temple. Only the elaborate carvings on the walls made it different. The Keeper closed and bolted the door, then turned as if to pray to the image of Tan that filled the far wall. But what he did was to grasp the stone head of one of the crocodiles that twisted in a decorative pattern all round the Goddess; it moved under his hand, inward and upward, leaving a rectangular slot, into which he reached. Something clicked. He leaned against the wall, and the whole slab on which the Goddess was carved pivoted silently around.

“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.