Kingdoms of the Wall Read online

  “I know,” I said solemnly. But the truth was I was only guessing.

  Darkness came. We were too frightened to sleep. So we sat side by side waiting for dawn and wondering about the screeching sounds that drifted down to us from the pinnacles we could not see, for everyone knows the dire tales of the Wall-hawks that are bigger than a man and carry Pilgrims off in their beaks. But the Wall-hawks, if that was what they were, let us be, and at dawn we returned to the village. Nobody minded that we had been gone. Galli’s father was a drunkard, and as for mine, of course, he had vanished on the Wall long before. The gentle Urillin, my mother’s brother who had had charge of me since I was a boy, never could stand to punish me for anything. So nothing was said about our absence. And that was the great adventure that Galli and I had in the highlands.

  But the training classes that took us up the Wall now were much harder work than my outing with Galli. Instead of following the main road or one of the back roads we had to hack our way through the foothill forests, scrambling over colossal rocks and the gnarled roots of trees, and sometimes go straight up bare cliff faces, using all our skill with our ropes and our sucker-pads to keep from falling and being smashed. And there was no meat and cheese and no wine and certainly no making the Changes when we came out finally at Hithiat milestone. We undertook at least one climb a week, and it was brutal, exhausting stuff. We came back bruised and bloody. I worried about Traiben, since he was in another group and I couldn’t be close at hand to help him through. But he managed. Sometimes I met him after hours and gave him special coaching, showing him ways of carrying himself through the difficult places, of wedging his feet into cracks or looking for horns of rock to grab while shifting his position. The climbs were not only strenuous, they were dangerous too: on our fifth climb a boy named Steill, from the House of Leather-makers, became lost in the woods and we searched for him half the night before we found him at last, lying broken in the moonlight at the bottom of a deep ravine with his brains spilling out of his head. He must have walked off the edge at dusk without knowing what he was doing, though someone whispered that a shambler had come upon him and pushed him over the edge. We all trembled at that: for the shambler is said to be as big as a roundhouse, but makes no sound in the forest and leaves no footprint. Be that as it may, Steill was dead, the first of our number to die in candidacy. But not the last.

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  4

  AGAIN IT WAS THEtwelfth of Elgamoir, and another Forty set out on their journey up the Wall. I watched them go with new respect, for I was in the second year of my training now and I knew what they had gone through in order to reach this point.

  That year also two new Returned Ones arrived in the village. That was always a memorable moment, since it happened so infrequently. One was called Kaitu, and he had been on the mountain nine years. The other was a woman named Bril, who had gone up six years before. I saw them when they came stumbling down into the plaza together, dirty and ragged, with that look of glory in their eyes that all the Returned Ones have. Children ran up to them to touch them for luck. Old women sobbed in the street. Someone from Holies was summoned, and led them to the roundhouse where Returned Ones live. Later I heard tell that Bril had reached halfway up the Wall, and that Kaitu had succeeded in going nearly to the Summit, but I wondered how much substance there was to any of that. I had listened to them babbling in the street, and I was beginning to understand the truth about Returned Ones: most of them, perhaps all, lose their minds on their journeys, and they come back empty and incapable of thought. That they come back at all is a miracle. But it is folly to expect them to be able to say anything sensible about where they have been or what they have seen, and that is why each new group of Pilgrims goes forth with so little firm knowledge of what lies in wait for them.

  None of that mattered to me. I was committed to my path, come what may. I intended to succeed where the others all had failed.

  But I confess I did try, despite everything, to question the man Kaitu about what he had seen and done. This was three days after his return, and he had not yet taken up permanent living in the roundhouse, but still could be seen wandering around in the streets. I found him there, near the wineshop of Batu Mait, and took him by the elbow and led him inside for a couple of bowls of young golden wine. He seemed pleased at that. He laughed, he winked, he nudged my elbow. And when he had finished his second bowl I leaned close to him and whispered, keeping my voice low so that old Batu Mait would not become aware of the sin I was committing, “Tell me, Kaitu. What did you see up there? What was it like?”

  Kaitu caught me by the wrist in a splay-handed grip, three fingers above and three below, the way Traiben sometimes did, and shook my arm so hard that I spilled my wine. “Gods!” he cried. “Trees! Air! Fire!”

  “Yes, I know, but —”

  “Fire! Air! Trees! Gods!” And then, in a soft cozening voice, “Buy me more wine and I’ll tell you the rest.” His eyes were shining crazily.

  I bought him more wine. But nothing else he said was of any more use than what I had heard before.

  Afterward I told Traiben what I had done. He chided me for it. “The Returned Ones are sacred,” he said. “They should be allowed to go their own way unmolested.”

  “Yes, I know. But I wanted to find out what it was like for him on the Wall.”

  “You’ll have to wait and see, then.”

  WE WERE GROWING OLDER, entering the final few years of our second ten, coming toward the midpoint of our lives, the twentieth year, when Pilgrimages commence We were old enough to be sealed now, old enough to be making children instead of simply mating for pleasure. But for me the Pilgrimage was everything. The Pilgrimage, and the mysteries of the Kingdoms of the Wall.

  The tenth of Orgulet came round again, and another Winnowing was held. There were only eighteen hundred of us left now — still a substantial multitude, but less than half of those who had begun the quest. We stood in lines of twelve dozen in the Field of Pilgrims and the Masters passed among us, tapping as they had done before. This time I had no fear. I had done well in every test, I had mastered every skill: it would be insanity to dismiss me from the Pilgrimage. Indeed, the Master passed me by, and Traiben as well. But two hundred of us were tapped that day, and no reason given.

  I felt sad for them. They had shown neither cowardice nor weakness of body nor wavering of purpose; and yet they had been tapped, all the same. They had suffered in the foothills as I had suffered, clambering up ropes and clawing bare rock, and yet they had been tapped. Well, I felt sad for them but notvery sad. Two hundred more were gone, and I was two hundred places closer to selection for the Forty.

  The third year of our training was the worst: it was like swimming in a sea of fire. All the impurities were being burned out of us. We became gaunt and scarred and tough, and every muscle of our bodies ached all the time.

  We would rise at dawn and climb the hideous greenstone hills on the eastern edge of the Wall between Ashten and Glay, cutting ourselves in a thousand places as we dragged ourselves across the crumbling ridges. We caught small animals with our hands and ate them raw. We dug for roots and gnawed them, dirt and all. We threw rocks at birds to bring them down, and got nothing to eat that day if we failed to hit our marks. We crawled in mud and shivered in stinging rain. We fought duels with gnarled cudgels, so that we might learn how to defend ourselves against the beasts and phantoms that were said to inhabit the mountain. When we became too filthy to stand our own stink we bathed in rivers so icy they burned the skin, and lay awake all night on miserable outcroppings of jagged stone, pretending they were beds of soft leaves.

  Many of us died. We fell from exposed outcroppings; we were caught in turbulent streams and were swept away; we chose the wrong berries to eat in the wilderness, and perished in agony, bellies bloated, vomiting black bile. I witnessed at least five or six of the deaths myself. Two were boys I had known all my life.

  Others could no longer bear the strain,
and withdrew from the training. Every day our teachers told us, “There is no shame in withdrawing,” and anyone who believed that gladly accepted the chance. By the beginning of our fourth year there were only four hundred left. This time the tenth of Orgulet saw no new Winnowing: it would have been too cruel to dismiss any of us at this point. We were doing our own Winnowing now, our numbers reduced daily by weariness or illness or fear or simple bad luck.

  Once again my self-confidence wavered. I went through a difficult time when I was certain that I was going to fail. My doubts grew so strong that finally I went to the shop of Thissa the Witch and bought myself a charm for success. Thissa was a candidate for selection herself, and everyone thought she stood a good chance. My hope was that she would have some private desire to see me chosen as one of the men of her Forty, and so would give me a good spell.

  But Thissa was cool to me at first. She moved about her shop in a busy way, moving things from one counter to another as though she had no time for me. “I am busy with a curse now that has to be ready by nightfall,” she said. And she looked away.

  I was persistent, though. “Please, Thissa. Please. Otherwise the Masters may tap me at the next Winnowing.”

  I stroked her hand and nuzzled against her shoulder. She was wearing a thin light robe, bordered all around with mystic signs worked in golden thread, which showed the outlines of her shoulders and hips. I told her how much I admired her slender supple body, how beautiful her amber eyes were. We had done a few matings by this time, Thissa and I, though she was always distant and reluctant with me, and there had been a strangeness about her embrace, a kind of tingling feeling that she gave off, that had left me puzzled and uneasy, rather than properly satisfied, each time. But despite all that she was beautiful in her delicate way, and I told her so.

  She told me to spare her the flattery, as she had told me all too many times before; but nevertheless she seemed to soften a little. And in the end I prevailed after much coaxing, and she cast the spell for me, which involved mixing her urine with mine and sprinkling it outside Pilgrim Lodge while saying certain special words. I knew it was a good spell. And indeed it was. Nor would she take any money from me for it.

  After that my mood turned optimistic again. Everything was going the right way for me. I had never felt happier or more vigorous in my life. My crooked leg meant nothing in these trials: it was no handicap at all, for I had strength instead of grace, and agility instead of speed, and confidence enough for three. Traiben too was still among us, and I was no longer surprised at that, for he had toughened amazingly in these years and no one could call him a weakling now, though it still seemed to me that he was frail and easily wearied. The flame that burned within him saw him onward. We both of us knew that we would survive and prevail until the end.

  But as always Traiben had his strange moments. One day he said to me quite abruptly, “Tell me, Poilar, do you think life has any real purpose?”

  As always when he asked questions of that sort some lines of the catechism leaped readily to my mind. “Our purpose is to go to the gods at the Summit and pay our homage to them, as the First Climber taught us to do,” I said. “And learn useful things from them, as He did, and bring them back to enrich our nation.”

  “But whatpoint is there in doing that?”

  The catechism offered me no clues about that. Puzzled, I said, “Why, so we can lead better lives!”

  “And what point is there inthat ?”

  He was starting to anger me now. I shoved him with my open hand. “Stop this,” I said. “You sound like a child who keeps on asking, ‘Why? Why?’ when things are explained to him. What point indeed? We want to lead better lives because that’s better than leading worse ones.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Why do you waste your breath with meaningless issues like these, Traiben?”

  He was silent for a time. Then he said, “Nothing has any meaning, Poilar. Not if you look at it closely. We say, ‘This is good,’ or ‘This is bad,’ or ‘The gods will thus and so,’ but how do we know? Why is one thing good and another thing bad? Because we say so? Because the gods say so? How do we know that they do? Nobody whom I know has ever heard them speak.”

  “Enough, Traiben!”

  But when these moods possessed him there was no stopping him. He would endlessly pursue some strange line of inquiry that would never have occurred to anyone else, until he reached a conclusion that seemed to bear no relation to any question he had been asking.

  He said now, “Even though nothing has any meaning, I believe we should seek for meaning all the same. Do you agree?”

  I sighed. “Yes, Traiben.”

  “And so we must climb the Wall, because we think that the gods will it, and because we hope to gain knowledge from them that will better our lives.”

  “Yes. Of course. You belabor the obvious.”

  His eyes were aglow. “But now I’ve come to see that there’s a third reason for going up. Which is to attempt to discover what kind of creatures the gods may be. How they are different from us, and where their superiority lies.”

  “And what good will that do?”

  “So that we can become gods ourselves.”

  “You want to be a god, Traiben?”

  “Why not? Are you content to be what you are?”

  “Yes. Very much so,” I said.

  “And what are you, then? What arewe ?”

  “We are the creatures whom the gods created to do their will. The sacred books tell us so. We were meant to be mortals and they were meant to be gods. That’s good enough for me. Why isn’t it good enough for you?”

  “It isn’t because it isn’t. The day I say, ‘This is good enough for me,’ is the day I begin to die, Poilar. I want to know what I am. After that I want to know what I’m capable of becoming. And then I want to become it. I want to keep reaching higher all the time.”

  I thought of my star-dream, and how as I lay in its throes I would toss and turn and reach my hands toward Heaven. And I thought that I understood something of what Traiben was saying; for, after all, did I not burn with a hunger to climb that mountain to its loftiest point, and stand before the holy beings who inhabited its crest, and give myself up to their will so that I might become something greater than I had been?

  But then I shook my head. He had gone too far. “No, Traiben. I think it’s wild nonsense to talk about mortals becoming gods. And in any case I don’t want to be one myself.”

  “You’d rather stay a mortal?”

  “Yes. I’m a mortal because the gods mean me to be a mortal.”

  “You ought to give more thought to these matters,” Traiben said. “Your mind marches in a circle. And your feet will too, if you’re not careful.”

  I shook my head. “Sometimes I think you may be crazy, Traiben.”

  “Sometimes I wish you were crazier,” he said.

  THE NUMBER OF REMAININGcandidates dropped and dropped. We were down to a hundred, ninety, eighty, seventy. It was a strange time for those of us who remained. We were all fiercely pledged to the Pilgrimage: anyone who might weaken and drop out had already done so, and anyone clumsy or careless enough to be killed or injured in the course of the training was long gone from our midst. We who had lasted this long meant to stay the course. A powerful kind of comradeship had developed among us. But there were still too many of us; and so we eyed our dearly loved comrades with unashamed ferocity, privately thinking,May the gods blight you tomorrow, may your soul drain out of your body like a trickle of cold water, may you fall from the cliff and shatter both your legs, may your courage desert you entirely. Anything, so long as you cease to stand in my way. And then we would smile, because everyone knew that everyone else was thinking the same things about him that he was thinking about them.

  Seventy was a critical number: it brought on the Final Winnowing, the Silent Winnowing, when the actual Forty would be chosen. So once again we stood in the field, just a handful of us where more than four
thousand had been three years earlier, and the Masters moved among us. The curious thing about this last Winnowing was that there was no tap: thirty were to be eliminated, but they would not be told. That is why this was called the Silent Winnowing. We were to be left in the dark another six months, not knowing whether we had been dismissed or not, but still undergoing all the trials and hardships of the training.

  “Why do you think it’s done this way?” I asked Traiben.

  And he said, “Because there’s always the chance that some of the chosen Forty will die during the final months of the training, and then they can be replaced from among the Thirty. But the replacements, if they should be needed, won’t ever know that they were replacements: everyone who goes up on the Wall must think that he was one of the elect.”

  “So you and I might be among the Thirty ourselves, then?”

  “We are of the Forty,” said Traiben calmly. “Our task now is simply to survive until the Closing of the Doors.”

  Indeed he was right. The day of reckoning came, the tenth of Slit, which is exactly half a year prior to the day of the start of the new year’s Pilgrimage. And at dawn of that day the Masters came to us where we slept and woke some of us, including Traiben and me, and took us to Pilgrim Lodge, and thereby we knew that we had been chosen. I felt none of the ecstatic joy that my boyhood self would have expected, only a mild flicker of satisfaction. I had worked too long and too hard for this to be capable of reacting with any great emotion now. One phase of my life had ended, the next was beginning, that was all. Once those great wickerwork doors had closed behind us, we would not go out into the sunlight again nor see any living person other than ourselves until the tenth of Elgamoir, when we would begin our ascent.

  I was not surprised to see that Kilarion the Builder had been chosen. He was the biggest of us by far, and the strongest: a little slow-witted except when it came to his own trade, but a good man to have with you in a difficult spot. The selection of Jaif the Singer pleased me also, for he was calm-natured, steadfast, and reliable. But why had the Masters given us sly, slippery little Kath, of the House of Advocates? Kath was good at talking, yes, but what use would a glib tongue be on the slopes of the Wall? Or someone as hot-blooded and impulsive as Stapp of Judges, in such a dangerous environment? Naxa the Scribe too: why had they picked him? He was clever, nearly as clever as Traiben, but he was pedantic and obnoxious and there was no one who liked him. And then there were a few others — Thuiman of the Metalworkers, Dorn of the House of Clowns, Narril the Butcher — who were decent enough sorts but of no particular distinction or merit, and they would not have been among my first choices if I had been a Master. And Muurmut of the Vintners, a tall, stubborn, red-faced man, tough-willed and full of strong opinions but often wrong-headed and rash — would he be any asset to a group such as ours? But Traiben’s words of years before still burned in my mind. We Pilgrims were not necessarily the finest that the village had to offer. Some of us might have been sent to the Wall simply to get rid of us. I might be one of those myself, for all I knew.