Roger Taylor - The call of the sword

Hawklan’s suspicious look darkened. Gavor contin-ued.

‘Fell, dear boy. I assure you. Nearly hit me. Gave me quite a start I can tell you. I’m still a little shaky.’

Hawklan bent down and picked up the dead bird. It was exactly like the one that Gavor had chased out of the rocks.

‘Do you recognize it?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Gavor. ‘It’s the little beggar who was watching you. Or its double.’ Then he flapped his wings excitedly.

‘Ah, that’s it,’ he cried. ‘The noise. The noise. I rec-ognize it now.’

‘What noise?’

‘The noise its wings made. That whirring sound. I remember.’ Then, angrily. ‘It’s been following us all the way. I’ve heard it flying about and didn’t realize what it was. Scruffy little beggar.’

Hawklan looked down at the tiny figure in his hand.

‘Well, it’s not following now,’ he said, turning it over. ‘I wonder what killed it? I can’t see any injury. It looks healthy enough.’

‘Apart from being dead,’ chuckled Gavor, before adding, insincerely, ‘Sorry.’

Hawklan held the bird close to his face to examine it more thoroughly. He put his finger gently under its head and lifted it slightly. Abruptly its eyes opened. They were yellow, and they glared malevolently at him. Before he could react, the bird wriggled out of his hand and flew off at great speed.

Gavor rose up as if to follow, but the bird had only flown a little way when it uttered a strange cry and crashed straight down onto an exposed slab of rock standing above the thin snow. At the same time, Gavor cried out and fell to the ground, rolling on to his side in the snow.

So fast did these events happen, that Hawklan was still standing with his palm extended. He looked at the stricken bird and then at Gavor.

‘Gavor, what’s the matter?’ he cried out, kneeling down by his friend.

‘I’m all right,’ said Gavor, struggling to his feet, wings flapping awkwardly and throwing up flecks and sprays of snow.

‘Look, look,’ he said excitedly, thrusting his head out urgently, pointing into the mist. Hawklan turned round and followed his gaze. The morning sun was beginning to colour the mist and for a brief moment he thought he saw two tiny figures fading into the yellow haze. As he blinked to focus in the disorienting mistlight, they were gone. Gavor opened his wings and skimmed off in the same direction.

Hawklan stood up and brushed the snow off his cloak. He walked over to the brown bird lying mo-tionless again on the rock. Picking it up warily, and holding it well away from his face, he gently lifted its eyelid. The eye was pale yellow and quite devoid of life. With gentle fingers he examined the bird carefully. There were no signs of injury, nor equally, any signs of life. And yet somehow it did not feel to be dead. He frowned uneasily.

Gavor appeared out of the mist above and settled on his shoulder.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Not a soul, dear boy. And I’m sure I saw two of them. Little people. Like children.’

‘So did I, Gavor,’ said Hawklan. ‘It was probably the mist swirling. It plays funny tricks on the eyes. There’s no one up here. We’ve met no one since we started, and anyway they’d have come to see what the noise was about by now.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Gavor in a resigned tone. ‘But I’m sure I saw something.’

‘Are you all right now?’ asked Hawklan. ‘What hap-pened? Why did you fall when that bird fell down?’

Gavor put his head on one side. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It was like a noise. A strange noise, a strange singing.’

His voice changed and became very distant.

‘It was a killing song. I’ve read of them on the Great Gate. And I was on the edge of it. It was a killing song for that brown bird, and they had to sing it twice.’

‘Gavor, what in the world are you talking about? And who are "they"?’

Gavor’s eyes lit up in a mixture of alarm and ex-citement.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘Really true.’ He was talking as much to himself as to Hawklan. ‘A killing song. I could tell. But it wasn’t for me. It was for that. It’s the Alphraan. They’re real, and we saw them.’

Hawklan had never heard him gabble on so before.

‘Well I heard nothing,’ he said. ‘And I’ve never heard of an Alphraan, let alone seen one, so perhaps you’d care to tell what you’re talking about.’

Gavor collected himself. ‘The Alphraan, dear boy. The Alphraan. It’s all on the Gate. You must have read it. High up, over on the right hand side. Tiny people who live in caves in the mountains.’ He spread his wings. ‘Miles and miles of caves. They make carvings that sing and they use songs to hide themselves and even to fight with when necessary. We’d better leave. They’re very discerning, they’re not keen on… humans.’

Hawklan looked at his friend sceptically. ‘Gavor, I’ve never seen anything about them on the Gate. And singing carvings are just a village tale. All that’s happened here is that a little bird, which you happen not to like for some reason, has died suddenly. Probably of… ’ He looked skyward for an idea. ‘… exhaustion maybe.’ Then, defensively, as he caught Gavor’s expression, ‘And we saw the mist swirling in the sun and casting shadows, not magical creatures from some old carver’s tale.’

Gavor looked at him with undisguised scorn.

‘Look at it dear boy,’ he said, nodding his shining black head at the body in Hawklan’s hand, and shaking a shower of droplets loose. ‘It’s as fat as a ripe apple. I don’t know how its wings lifted it. That never died of exhaustion. They had to sing their song twice to kill it, that’s how exhausted it was. I heard them. It’s not my fault you’ve got cloth ears. And that was no swirling mist we saw. That was the Alphraan.’

Hawklan grunted dismissively. ‘Very well. If you say so. But I think you’re going fey. It’s probably the altitude. Come on.’

He looked hesitantly at the dead bird. ‘We should find somewhere to leave this. It must return to the earth.’

Gavor jumped down onto Hawklan’s arm and exam-ined the body. He shuddered.

‘Put it in your pack, dear boy. Nothing’s going to eat that. It doesn’t belong to the earth. It’s repellent. I’m surprised you can’t feel it. We must keep it with us until a suitable time for its disposal presents itself. It’ll only do harm if we leave it lying here.’

Hawklan looked intently at his friend, puzzled by this enigmatic speech. He wanted to ask him what he was talking about, but his ears were ringing oddly in the mist-damped silence and he felt impelled to move on quickly.

‘Come on then. Let’s be on our way,’ he said, swing-ing his pack onto his back and dropping the small brown body casually into his pocket. ‘Maybe you’ll recover your wits when we get out of this mist.’ His voice echoed peculiarly and menacingly in his own ears, and for an instant he felt as though he were constrained to a certain path as intangibly and yet as definitely as if he were in the labyrinth guarding the Armoury at Anderras Darion. Beyond the path lay a roaring death, without a doubt.

He shook his head to dismiss the notion, then strode purposefully forward towards the sunlight glowing through the mist.

Hawklan began to notice a change in himself. A broadening, an enlarging of his awareness and knowl-edge. These were the only words he could find to describe the feelings within him, but they were not very adequate. As more of his latent knowledge quietly manifested itself, he felt as though he were emerging from a chrysalis; the world began to look very different, and he knew that he too was different.