Kingdoms of the Wall Read online

What was the criterion? Casting Ellitt aside I could understand, for her mind was like a child’s, and she would perish quickly on the Wall. But why tap splendid Moklinn? Why tap Baligan, whose soul was as pure as a mountain stream? So it went, the tap falling upon some obvious choices for culling and on some of the finest young people of the village. I watched the tapped ones drift away, looking stunned. And I waited in a chill of fright as the Master who was tapping in our line made his unhurried way down the rank toward me. He was Bertoll, my mother’s oldest brother. All the Masters were men of my own family: it could not be helped, I was a member of Wallclan. And so they all knew of my obsession with the Wall. Unwisely, rashly, boyishly, I had told everyone again and again that I meant to see the Summit. They had merely smiled. Had I angered them with my boastfulness? Had they decided to teach me a lesson?

  I died a thousand deaths in those few minutes. I wished a million million times that I had been born into any other House, that I had been a Carpenter, a Musician, even a Sweeper, so that none of the Masters would have known what was in my soul. Now Bertoll was going to tap me, purely to cut me down for my brashness. I knew he would. I was certain of it. And I vowed then and there that if he did I would kill him and then myself, before the moons rose that evening.

  I stood still as stone, eyes rigid, staring forward.

  Bertoll passed me by without even looking at me, and went on down the row.

  Tears of relief ran down my cheeks. All my fearful sweaty imaginings had been for nought. But then I thought: What of Traiben? I had been so concerned with my own fate that I hadn’t bothered to think about him. I swung around and glanced behind me, down the line next to mine, just in time to see that line’s Master go past little scrawny Traiben as though he hadn’t been there at all and reach out to tap a great sturdy boy behind him.

  “It makes no sense,” I said to him when the Winnowing was over. A hundred and eighty had been tapped; the rest of us were free to continue our candidacies. “My leg is crooked, and I irritate people because I seem so sure of myself. You can’t run a hundred paces without getting dizzy and you scare people because you’re so shrewd. Yet they let you and me pass, and tap someone like Moklinn, who’s better fitted for climbing the Wall than any three of us. Or Baligan, the kindest, most thoughtful person I know. What standards do they use?”

  “That is a mystery,” said Traiben. “But one thing I know: Winnowings are meant not to punish but to reward.”

  I stared at him, baffled. “What does that mean?”

  “That some of us are deemed too good to be sent to the mountain.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  Traiben sighed, that terrible patient sigh of his. “Look,” he said. “We send forth our Forty every year knowing that most of them are going to die on the Wall, and that those few who eventually do come back are going to be changed the way Returned Ones always are, and will simply skulk around meditating and praying forever afterward, having as little to do with the rest of us as possible. It’s a gamble that we always lose. We send them up there to learn something useful from the gods, and for one reason or another they don’t succeed. Nobody who makes the Pilgrimage is ever again going to play an important role in the life of the village. Hardly anyone has since the First Climber Himself. Agreed?”

  “Of course.” We had been through all this before.

  He said, “If we give our forty finest to the mountain each year, what will become of the village? Who’ll lead us? Who’ll inspire us with new ideas? We’ll lose our most talented people, year after year. We’ll breed their abilities out of the race until we’re nothing but a tribe of dullards and weaklings — And therefore certain candidates have to be held back. They have to be saved to meet the future needs of the village.”

  I thought I saw where he was heading now, and I didn’t like it.

  “Undertaking the Pilgrimage is the most important deed any of us can do,” I said. “The Pilgrims are our greatest heroes. Even if they don’t manage to learn the things that you think they’re supposed to be learning up there. By sending them up the Wall, we pay our debt to the gods, as He Who Climbed taught us that we must, and so we insure their continued blessing.” You can see that I was quoting catechism again.

  “Exactly,” Traiben said. “Pilgrims are heroes, no doubt of that. But they are sacrifices, also.”

  I stared. I had never seen it that way.

  He said, “And so the Masters choose people like you, who are strong and determined, or people like me, who are clever and resourceful. That’s what heroes are like. But you and I are troublesome in other ways. We may be heroes, yes, but we’re too odd and too prickly to make good leaders down here, you and I. Can you imagine yourself as the head of the House? Or me? And so we can be sacrificed. We can be spared for the Pilgrimage. Whereas Baligan obviously will head his House some day. And Moklinn has a perfect body: it mustn’t be wasted on the Wall.”

  “Thrance had a perfect body too,” I said. “But he was chosen.”

  “And has failed to return, isn’t that so? Thrance was selfish and proud. Perhaps the Masters thought the village was well rid of him.”

  “I see,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure that I did.

  I was shaken by what Traiben had said. In just a few minutes he had once again turned my world upside down. I had been so very pleased that I had managed to last through the First Winnowing. I wondered now: Was my surviving the Winnowing really something to be proud of, or was it merely the sign of how willing the village was to dispense with me?

  But just as quickly I recovered my equilibrium. Becoming head of my House had never been part of my plan. To make the Pilgrimage was. I had passed the first of my many tests: that was all that really mattered.

  AND SO MY CANDIDACYbegan.

  The early days of it saw a surprisingly gradual onset of the demanding discipline of the selection process. We were divided into forty groups of about a hundred each — Traiben and I landed in different groups — and from then on we moved as a group from one House to the next for our instruction and our examinations. But at first everything was deceptively easy.

  We were asked at the beginning to write short essays on why we wanted to be Pilgrims. I remember mine almost to the word:

  “1. Because I believe that undertaking the Pilgrimage is the finest thing anyone could possibly do. It is our duty to go to the gods above and worship them and learn from them the things they have to teach us. Of all the traditions of our people, it is the holiest and noblest, and I have always wanted to be obedient to our great traditions.

  “2. Because my father was a Pilgrim in his time and I think and hope that he may still be dwelling in one of the Kingdoms of Kosa Saag. I have not seen him since I was a small child and it is my great dream to encounter him once again when I climb the Wall.

  “3. Because I have spent my whole life looking up at Kosa Saag and marveling at its greatness, and now I want to test my strength against the mountain and see if I am equal to what it will ask of me.”

  It was a good essay. At least, it got me through the Second Winnowing. Ninety of us were dismissed at that Winnowing. Whether it was for writing poor essays or for some other reason, I have no idea; but I suspect the essays really were of no great significance in the process. It was the task of the Masters to find some reason or other for discarding all but forty of us in the course of the four years, and they could use almost any pretext at all — or none — for dropping us from the roster.

  Then there was religious instruction. We read the Book of the First Climber, though of course we had read it a thousand times already, and we discussed the story of His life, His conflict with the elders and His being cast out of the village and His decision to climb the Wall, which at that time was not permitted, and the things that He learned during His Pilgrimage on its heights. And also we were drilled in the names and visages of the gods and all their special attributes, as if we could expect to meet them along the mountain path and must therefore b
e sure to recognize them and greet them with the proper greeting. So we sat in the little hut of instruction as though we were small children while someone from the House of Holies held up one sacred portrait after another, and we shouted out the names: “Kreshe! Thig! Sandu Sando! Selemoy!” It felt strange to be back in school, since, as is true of almost everyone else, my formal education had ended with my first ten of years. But for all we knew wewould meet Thig and Selemoy and Sandu Sando on the slopes of the Wall; and so we listened to the old stories all over again — how Kreshe had made the World and set it afloat on the Great Sea and how Thig the Shaper had reached into the still molten rock of the new-made World and pulled the Wall out of it, stretching it high in order to make a place for us to live that would be close to the stars, and how after the sin of our First Fathers we had been hurled down from the Summit into the lowlands by Sandu Sando the Avenger and forbidden to return until we were worthy, and all the rest of the tales of our childhood.

  In those first days we had to go to other classes where we were taught the nature of the Wall. The most remarkable thing about these classes was how little seemed to be known about Kosa Saag, for all the thousands of years that we had been sending our Pilgrims up its face.

  Our teachers, of course, had never been very far up the Wall themselves: just the usual excursions to the permitted holiday zones just above the village, and no farther. There was nothing very surprising about that, I suppose. Our teachers had never been Pilgrims. Only the Returned Ones had any firsthand knowledge of the extraordinary place where we were going to go, but you wouldn’t really expect Returned Ones to do anything so obvious and straightforward and useful as to come into our classrooms and give us lectures on what they had experienced. That is not their way. I had hoped that they would make an exception to their rule of lofty and mystical withdrawal from all daily matters for the sake of helping us understand what was in store for us, but they did not do it. The Returned Ones shared nothing with us, nothing at all. And so our teachers, who were just the usual babbling drudges from the House of Scholars, served us up a foggy thirdhand mix of rumor, legend, and guesswork which was just about as close to useless as anything could be.

  They taught us that the Wall is a place where the power of the gods is so great that change comes freely and amazingly to those who live their lives upon it, and all is magic and mystery and strangeness beyond our comprehension. And they warned us of the danger of encountering change-fire as we climbed. The very stones of the Wall, they said, give off a secret heat that will kindle into raging conflagration the flame of transformation that always burns quietly and gently within us, and turn climbers into monsters if they are willing to let it happen.

  Everything was fluid up there, they said. Nothing was fixed, nothing was as we understood things to be. It was all because of that strange fire that lay within the rocks, which no one could see but which was easy enough to feel. “The Wall is said to be a place where reality bends,” our teachers told us solemnly. How were we supposed to interpret that? They couldn’t say. “On the Wall,” they declared, “the sky sometimes is below and the ground is above.” Well, yes, and what were we to make of that? They spoke of monsters, demons, and demigods who waited for us above the cloud-line in the innumerable Kingdoms of the Wall. They warned us of lakes of fire and trees of metal. They talked of dead people who walked with their feet turned back to front and their eyes staring like hot coals out of the backs of their heads. They let us read the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel, which was supposed to be the three-thousand-year-old testimony of the only Returned One who had ever said anything at all about what he had encountered while climbing Kosa Saag, other than the First Climber Himself. But unlike the Book of the First Climber, which is stark and simple in its narrative of His visit to the abode of the gods and its account of the things they taught Him while He was there, the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel was all ornate parable and poetry, a welter of fanciful detail written in a cryptic style so remote from any kind of modern speech that it had to be embedded in footnotes and commentary a dozen times as long as the Secret Book itself. Very few of us could get through more than a dozen pages of it. All I remember was a kind of feverish haze of murky description that made no sense, a magical fairytale of heights that turned into abysses, of raindrops that became knives, of rocks that danced and sang, of demons who furiously hurled their limbs one by one at climbing Pilgrims until there was nothing left of them but bouncing skulls, of wise men who offered counsel along the way but spoke all their words in backwards language. The whole of the Secret Book might just as well have been written in backwards language for all the help it gave me.

  I decided that the classes were simply part of the Winnowing. They were intended to terrify us by making us see that nobody who lived in the lowland villages really had the slightest knowledge of what awaited those who journeyed on the Wall. The things we were learning struck me as being mere fables that could be of no possible practical use, and therefore after a few weeks I stopped paying attention to them. Others, believing that their lives would depend on how well they mastered this mass of foolishness, took copious notes and in a little while, as the contradictions and mysteries piled up, they began to go around with dazed, bewildered expressions on their faces.

  About a dozen members of my group resigned their candidacies during this period. Most of the dedicated note-takers were among them. I was convinced that they had filled their minds with so much nonsense about the Wall that they became too frightened to continue.

  We had other classes that were far more valuable: I mean our classes in survival, where we were taught the techniques of mountain-climbing, and of coping with the special conditions that were believed to exist in the higher reaches of the Wall, and tricks of hunting and foraging that would come in handy once we had exhausted the food we had carried up from the village in our packs. Here too the instructors were forced to rely on a lot of myth and supposition, on account of the taboo against the Returned Ones’ revealing their experiences on the Wall. But there is no taboo against climbing the lower reaches of the Wall, at least as far as the Hithiat milepost, and so we were allowed to get some small taste of what might be waiting for us.

  I had been as high as Hithiat already, of course. Everyone has: we all sneak up the Wall when we are young. Most of us stay up there only a few hours, but the boldest will risk remaining overnight. That was what I had done when I was fourteen. Galli went with me then. She and I had just become lovers, and we enjoyed daring each other to do all sorts of outrageous things: we slipped into the place where the sacred things were kept and handled some of them, we stole a bottle of dream-wine from the Wallclan treasury, we went swimming in the Pool of the Housemothers one moonless night. And then I said, “I want to climb the Wall. Do you?”

  She laughed. “Kreshe! You think I’m afraid of that?”

  Galli was big and hearty, as strong as any man, with a loud deep voice and a laugh that could be heard three Houses away. We set out early one morning, getting past the gate-guards with the usual line about going to make a sacrifice at Roshten Shrine, and then of course as we approached Roshten we darted into the thick jungle behind it and went scrambling up the back way on the forest road that parallels the main one. It was a clear day and by the time we reached the Glay milepost we were astounded at how much of the village we could see below us, and when we got to Hespen we stopped a long while at the parapet, struck silent by wonder. Everything lay spread out below us in miniature. It was like a toy model of the village. I felt as if I could reach out with my hand and gather it all up in a single swoop. We could see the House of the Wall right below us with the scarlet szambar tree at its center, looking no bigger than a matchstick, and the House of Holies next to it, and Singers on the other side, and then any number of other Houses, Healers and Carpenters and Musicians and Clowns and Butchers, spreading away and away and away to east and west like little dark circles in the green of the forest, until finally the Houses came to their end a
nd there was only green, with perhaps the barest hint on the horizon of the foreign villages that lie beyond the boundaries of our own.

  We went on that day, Galli and I, to Hithiat milepost, where the road got very rough and we began to lose our nerve. Here the face of the Wall was soft and pitted, and pebbles kept tumbling down from above us with little slithering sounds. Sometimes larger rocks fell; a few huge boulders too, which hit uncomfortably close to us and went bounding away. The boulders made us very uneasy. It was getting dark, besides. And everyone knew that it was crazy to go beyond Hithiat. I was aware that Galli feared hardly anything, and she knew that I was like that too, and so it occurred to me that one of us might try to bluff the other into going beyond Hithiat, and that if we began to talk about it we probably would actually do it, since neither of us had the courage to confess any sort of fear or weakness to the other. But that was not what happened. We had that much common sense, at least. Instead we went off the gravelly road into a flat mossy place, where we watched Ekmelios set and then ate the little bit of meat and cheese and wine that we had carried with us. After that we took off our clothes and sang the Change-songs to each other and brought ourselves out of neuter, and I lay down on top of Galli’s great firm resilient body as though it were a bed; and she embraced me and took me inside her, and we ran through some very wonderful Changes indeed.

  “Do you feel the change-fires?” she asked me.

  “No. Do you?”

  “I don’t think they’re very strong, this close to the village. But it frightens me, to think that we could be turned into monsters on the Wall.”

  “Even when we go higher up, we won’t be transformed unless we want to be,” I said. “The change-fires don’t take control of you against your will. The only ones who are transformed are those who don’t have the strength to remain themselves.”

  “How do you know that?” Galli asked. “I never heard anything about that.”