Free The Blue Hawk by Peter Dickinson Page B

different eyes. It was as though time had loosed its hold on this little orb of matter, so that everything in it would endure for ever. The slate feathers and the white became untarnishable metal; the clear, fierce eye was a topaz; the ball of blood at the joint of the dove’s closed beak was a ruby. Tron knew that a God was using his human eyes to look at these things.
    The instant itself was timeless. The priests at the gate probably didn’t notice his hesitation before he moved in and whistled the hawk to his gauntlet. He slipped the hood on, then cut the dove’s leg free at the joint. The hawk was tearing at this morsel as he carried it back to the gate.
    The One of Gdu looked sulky still. The Mouth of Silence was saying, “There is a suitable passage in the Hymn of the Birth of Sinu, I think. After the fight with Ktimmu O speaks thus …”
    The One of Gdu had been barely listening. Though his head was attentively bowed, he had stared at boy and hawk with bright-eyed fury.
    Now, in the swaying litter, Tron worked out meanings. The One of Gdu had come hoping for failure, and had done his best to see that it happened, but Gdu had turned the dove back toward the Temple and the hawk had made its kill. So the failure would take place in front of King and people, with great loss of prestige to the priesthood of Gdu. That was certain. Both the One of Gdu and Tron knew that the Blue Hawk, trained to the presence of a single quiet-footed boy, would revert to wildness if they tried to fly it before three thousand priests, nobles, and people in the humming crush of the Great Temple Courtyard.
    The Mouth of Silence, meanwhile, was considering how the priests could justify this change in the Ritual. If they were to use the flight of the Blue Hawk to break the King’s dynasty, they must be able to prove that they had not done this for their own purposes, but because it was something they could not avoid, something they were ordered to do by the unquestionable hymns.
    Both those things were clear. But what was the meaning of the vision? Tron was sure that Gdu had sent him another sign, but he couldn’t yet read it. Was it a warning that the King (the Blue Hawk) would after all destroy the Temple (the dove)? A promise that what Tron and the King had begun would come to its wished-for end? There was no telling. The hawk gaped on its pole, distressed by the airless heat. Faintly through the muffling curtains Tron heard the wavelike pulse of the Farewell to O, sung from the Tower by the choir of gold-robed priests. This sound had marked the rapid fading of daylight since he could remember, with a mixture of comfort and dread—dread at the approach of Aa, comfort at the protection of the Rituals. Now all comfort was gone from it. Succeed or fail, he guessed that the Major Priests would have no further use for him once the Live King had been shown to the people. The Temple would be his tomb.
    Only the King had a plan. Just as the hawk seemed to have lost the dove that morning, so Tron felt he had lost all contact with the King. But Gdu had turned the dove back.
    Once again he drank sweetwater. He and the hawk were alone in a small, north-facing room. It was already too dark for him to look for spyholes without being seen to do so. The King and his plans seemed far away—in fact he was not sure that the King would even know about his return to the Temple. So for the moment it seemed safest to act in everything as though he were the priests’ obedient tool.
    The water was sweeter than he’d remembered, or perhaps they’d mixed it stronger for him. He carried his bowl of offering to the sill with the drug already dragging at his mind. As he whispered his night hymn he found himself thinking, I shall not leave here alive. It would be better if I died. He did not remember lying on his mattress. Next instant, it seemed, he was waking to the old clear note of welcome from the Tower as the rim of