Read Online The Blue Hawk by Peter Dickinson - Free Book Online Page B

pattern for a while, and though he would have liked to continue that freedom, he still knew that his own happiness was nothing compared to the continuing life of the Temple. He had promised to help the King, and the King was fighting to break the power of the priests, but until this moment he had not understood how little might be left when the fight was over. If it should end like this!
    â€œLord Gdu,” he whispered. “How can I choose? Send me a sign.”
    Leaning on the bar that ran along the bottom of the rack he stared out of a window to where the vast flatness of the irrigated plain lay shimmering under the noon of O. Out there, invisible, were peasant villages—but now he saw one, a circle of huts each with its pointed reed roof like the helmet of a Temple Guard. The huts seemed to float toward him. There was the Headman’s eldest daughter feeding the communal fire with dried cow-dung, as was her right and duty according to the hymns. There was a green-robed priest performing a prayer-dance before Tan’s square mud shrine. There were the men talking over their priest-brewed beer, and the women hoeing between the half-grown beans. And now he could hear the steady, heavy knock of the village water-lift as it raised its allowed gallons into the irrigation ditches. The vision came and went as if half-veiled by the heat haze. Now the women were bending between the stunted bean-plants, picking up irregular scales of gleaming white stuff and throwing them into baskets. The village men fell silent as two priests glided out from behind the shrine, one in green and the other black-robed, black-cowled, black-gloved. The priests paced slowly toward the hut where a woman lay in labor, about to give birth to the thirty-third child in the village since last the Gods demanded their due.…
    The vision was broken by a sigh. Tron took a moment to realize that it had come from his own lips.
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” said the King gently.
    â€œThe fields are dying. The people are sick.”
    â€œYes, I told you. That’s one of the things you and I are going to change.”
    â€œBut if it ends like this!” said Tron, turning with a gesture that swept the abandoned room.
    â€œI don’t understand about this,” said the King. “The Room of Days and Years is a priests’ mystery. Kings aren’t shown it or told about it.”
    â€œI’ve seen the one at the Great Temple,” said Tron. “It was all in careful order. And later the Keeper of the Rods told us that if he made one mistake in how he moved the rods, that mistake would repeat itself again and again, and each time it would cause other mistakes, which would repeat themselves too, and cause more mistakes, until he couldn’t tell from the rack whether Aa was full-faced or veiled, and whether it was flood-time or harvest-time.”
    He picked up a white rod banded with one black ring and one brown.
    â€œLook,” he said. “I don’t know what this means—up at the Great Temple they paint a black ring onto the rod of the day on which a King dies. Perhaps the One of Sodala died that day in another year. It probably told a lot more, in itself and combined with the rods around it. The Keeper of the Rods could have read it then. Now it says nothing.”
    The King leaned across the rack and blew the dust off the medallion of Aa, but when he realized what it was he drew sharply back and cupped his hands to make the good luck sign.
    â€œYes, I see,” he said. “And that’s what happened here? You’d think they’d have sent up to the Great Temple, when things started to go wrong, and copied the position of the rods up there. In fact the Wise must have meant there to be two racks, so that one could check the other.… That’s it! Look Tron—there were always two racks, for that reason. But when this one began to get disordered the priests at the Great Temple