Kingdoms of the Wall

14

Every moon was in the sky that night. In all that brightness anyone might have had trouble sleeping; but it was not the brightness that kept me awake. That little talk with Muurmut had left me utterly sleepless, my mind boiling over with turbulent thoughts. I lay tossing for what felt like hours, wondering if I had destroyed myself as a leader by my willingness to make the conciliatory gesture that I had offered Muurmut, which some might see as cowardice, or, at best, unsteadiness of purpose.

No, I kept telling myself. A leader can only gain by showing generosity of spirit. And it was wiser to neutralize and disarm Muurmut with kindness than to allow his rage to fester any longer in his heart.

But none of these fine philosophical thoughts helped me to get to sleep. I lay like a clamped fist, unable to let go. Finally I could lie there no longer. My eyes were aching and my face felt feverish. I slipped out of my bedroll and went down to the stream to splash water in my face.

The others, scattered here and there around the fire, were all asleep, all but Kilarion and Maiti, who were on sentry shift. They looked half-asleep themselves. As I went past them they nodded drowsily toward me. I envied them their drowsiness.

I looked across the stream and saw Hendy camped by herself, as she usually did. I had spoken to her more than once about the risks of keeping herself apart from the rest, but she did as she pleased all the same and finally I had ceased to trouble her about it.

She was awake and alert, sitting up in her bedroll with her chin propped on her hand, watching me. Her eyes were sparkling by the light of the many moons. I remembered how beautiful Hendy had looked, suddenly, while she had been urging a reconciliation with Muurmut upon me a few hours before, and how sweet the fragrance of her shoulders had been. I stared at her and waited, hoping against all hope that she would beckon to me. But of course she merely returned my gaze without responding. Then I remembered how in my anger I had asked her if she were making the Changes with Muurmut, simply because she had come to me to plead on his behalf; and I felt shame run through me like a bolt of lightning from head to toe.

I had to make amends for that bit of coarseness. Though I had had no invitation from her, I waded across the stream to her side of it. Halfway across I stumbled on a slippery rock and fell headlong, and for a moment I crouched there in the chilly flow, cursing my clumsiness, but laughing also. At such times laughter is best. But this had not been an amusing night for me and it seemed to be getting worse as it went along.

I picked myself up and went to her, and stood above her, dripping. She looked up at me and a flutter of some quick emotion—fear? Or something more complex?—showed on her face for a moment.

I said, “Well, I spoke with Muurmut as you asked.”

“Yes. I know.”

“I offered him an apology. He wasn’t particularly graceful about accepting it. I may not have been all that graceful in the way I offered it. But we made peace, after a fashion.”

“Good.”

“And tomorrow I’ll invite him into councils.”

“Yes. Good.”

She said no more than that. I stood there, waiting for something else. I felt more like a boy of thirteen than I did like the man of twenty years that I was, with half my life already behind me.

“May I sit next to you?” I asked finally.

Perhaps she smiled, a little. “If you want to. You’re all wet. Are you cold?”

“Not really.”

“I saw you fall as you were crossing the stream.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was looking at you instead of at the stream bed. That’s a stupid way to cross a stream, I suppose. But I was more interested just then in looking at you.”

She said nothing. Her eyes were unreadable.

I knelt beside her and said, “You know that I didn’t mean it, don’t you, when I asked you before if you were making the Changes with Muurmut?”

“I understood what you were saying, yes.”

“It was because I was surprised that you were taking the trouble to speak up for Muurmut, when you had hardly ever involved yourself in disputes of any sort before. And you came to me right after Grycindil, who is making the Changes with him. So I felt outnumbered. And in my anger—”

“I told you that I understood what you were saying. There’s no need to keep explaining it and explaining it. You’ll only muddle things up again.” Hendy put her hand on my wrist. It tightened on me with surprising strength. “I can’t bear to see you shivering like this. Come in here with me.” And she held the flap of her bedroll open.

“Do you mean that?” I asked. “I’ll get everything all wet.”

“Oh, you are stupid, aren’t you?”

For the second time in five minutes I laughed at my own foolishness, and scrambled in beside her. She moved to the right-hand side of the bedroll to make room for me; there was open space between us. For the moment I made no move toward closing it. I sensed a war going on in Hendy between her innate mistrust of other people and the desire finally to let herself go, to open herself to another person and allow herself to be embraced. Thissa too had been like that. But Thissa was a santha-nilla, cut off from all those around her by the powers of her witchcraft: she could never be anything more than a visitor in the lives of others. Hendy, I suspected, was struggling to put an end to the aloofness that imprisoned her; and the struggle must not have been a simple one for her. But she had decided that now was the moment for ending it. I was amazed and grateful that she would choose me for that. She could have whatever she wanted of me, whether it be an hour’s quiet talk or a gentle embrace or even the Changes itself. I told myself that I would be as patient and as gentle as I knew how to be. I had done all the clumsy things I meant to do for this night.

She said, lying back and speaking upward into the darkness, “You aren’t really stupid, Poilar. You were trying to be kind, I know.”

That is not the sort of thing to which one can reply. So I lay there quietly beside her.

“And you knew all along that there was nothing between Muurmut and me, that there never could be.”

“Yes. That much I knew. Truly.”

“I would never choose someone like Muurmut for a lover. He reminds me too much of the men of Tipkeyn who stole me from our village when I was a girl” She paused for a little while. Then she said, “I haven’t ever chosen anyone for a lover, Poilar.”

I looked at her in astonishment. “You’ve never made the Changes, not ever?”

“That was not what I said,” she replied, and I felt foolish all over again. “But I’ve never chosen anyone. To choose means to express one’s own free will.”

I pondered that for a moment. Then my face grew hot with confusion.

“You mean that when you were living in Tipkeyn—without your consent—they attempted to—”

“Yes. Don’t ask me about it. Please.”

I couldn’t stop myself. “But how could they?” I said. “It’s impossible to force the Changes. How can it be done, if the woman doesn’t initiate them in herself?” I faltered and fell silent. What did I know about such things? There were evils in the world beyond my dreaming, and unquestionably some of them had touched Hendy—and again, yet again, I was being stupid.

I found myself unable to look at her, unwilling to let my eyes intrude on her shame. So I turned so that I was lying with my face upward, looking into the moonlit sky, as she was.

“I was ten years old,” she said softly. “I was in a strange village and I was frightened. They gave me wine, very strong wine. Then I wasn’t so frightened. And they began to touch me. They told me what I had to do, and when I balked, they gave me more wine. After a time I didn’t know where I was or who I was or what I was doing.”

“No,” I said. It was monstrous. “No one would treat even an animal like that!” Out of embarrassment for her I was still looking upward instead of at her, and as she had done I spoke to the sky, so that we were like two disembodied spirits holding a conversation.

She said, “I was in a strange village. They felt no ties of kinship to me. I had no House. To them all I was was an animal. A female animal, something to be used.” Abruptly there was a frightening edge on her voice. “So they used me. After a time they didn’t bother with the wine. I fought them, I bit them, I kicked them, but it didn’t do any good.”

“This happened more than once?”

“I was in Tipkeyn for four years.”

“Gods! No!”

“Then I escaped. I walked off into the forest, one day when there was a storm and the whole sky was full of lightning and they were all so terrified that they ran and hid. But one of them saw me anyway, and came after me and said he’d kill me if I didn’t come back with him. He had a knife. I smiled at him in the way that they had taught me to do. Put down your knife, I said, and let us make the Changes right here and now, for the storm is ending and I desire you very greatly. So he did. And I took the knife and cut his throat with it. Three women of our village found me wandering in the outer fields, some time later—a few days, a week, a month, I don’t know. I was half crazy from hunger and exhaustion. They brought me home. No one recognized me in my family, because I was a grown woman now and I had been a child when I was stolen. No one wanted me, because of what had happened to me in Tipkeyn. That was the first thing they asked me—did they force you?—and I said yes, yes, they did, many times. Perhaps I should have lied, but how could I hide a thing like that? So they would have cast me out again. But the heads of the Houses came to see me, and your kinsman Meribail was there and he said, ‘What shall we do with her?’ and then the head of my own House said—”

“Which House is that?” I asked. I realized that I had never known.

“Holies,” she said.

“Holies? But—”

“Yes. The Pilgrimage is forbidden to us. But the head of my House said, ‘We should ask the girl what she wants,’ and I said, ‘To be a Pilgrim.’ Because I didn’t belong in our village any more, and I’d kill myself before I went back to Tipkeyn, and where else was there to go but the Wall? My Pilgrimage had already begun, the day the men of Tipkeyn stole me, and everyone knew it. And so it was arranged. My name was stricken from the list of the House of Holies and it was agreed with the Masters of the House of the Wall that I would be among the Pilgrims of my year-group. I would be allowed to go up on Kosa Saag and lose myself there. So when they held the Winnowings, I was always passed over, because the Masters knew that I had been chosen in advance to be a Pilgrim. And so here I am.”

“Gods,” I muttered, over and over again. “Gods, gods, gods!”

In a curious remote voice, thin and light as the sound of an air-flute, she said, “Why am I telling you all this?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either. I had to tell someone, I suppose.” I was aware of movement beside me, and I looked around to see that she had turned toward me and that the space between us was now no more than a finger’s breadth. She said in that same distant voice, “What I want is to go to the gods at the Summit and be purified by them. I want them to transform me. I want them to turn me into someone else. Or even something else, I don’t care. I don’t want to be who I am any longer. The memories that I carry around are too heavy for me, Poilar. I want to be rid of them.”

“You will have your wish. The gods are waiting for us up there, Hendy, that much I know. And I know also that they’ll make everything right for you when we reach them.”

“You think so? You really do?” She was so eager.

“No,” I said. Like a cracked bell is how I sounded as I uttered the word. But my glib lie had turned sour in my mouth. What did I know of what was waiting for us at the Summit? And Hendy was no child; how could I let myself console her with some sort of sweet fable? I shook my head. “No, in truth I don’t think so, not really, Hendy. I have no idea at all what’s in store for us up there on top. But I hope the gods are there, and that they are gentle gods, and that they’ll take your pain from you. I pray that they will, Hendy.”

“You are very kind. And honest.”

Again there was silence for a time.

She said then, “I often wonder what it is like to choose a lover for the Changes, as others do. To turn to someone and say, ‘You, I like you, come down here beside me, let us make pleasure for each other.’ It seems so simple. But I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it.”

“Because of Tipkeyn.”

“Because of Tipkeyn, yes.”

I looked at her. The flap of the bedroll was turned partway back and by the light of the five moons I could see that she had begun to slide into the female form, that her breasts had appeared and that her skin was glistening with the fine coating of perspiration that meant the Change was going on lower down. That was ordinarily all the invitation any man would need. But if I took it that way and embraced her now, unasked, would she be choosing? Perhaps she was unable to help herself, and was drifting automatically into Changes simply because the two of us were lying close together like this. Perhaps she was desperately fighting it within, frantically trying to force herself back to the neuter state.

My own maleness had emerged and it was all I could do to control myself. But I compelled myself to wait.

The timeless moment of my hesitation went on and on, and nothing happened. We remained as we were, side by side, close but not touching.

At last she broke the tense silence. “You don’t want me,” she said. “Because of Tipkeyn.”

“Why would that matter?”

“They soiled me. They covered me with their filth. They made me into something dirty.”

“They used only your body, Hendy. Your body, not you. You were still you, when they were done with your body. The body can be soiled but not the spirit within.”

She was unconvinced. “If you wanted me, you’d reach toward me. But you haven’t done it.”

“I haven’t been asked. I won’t, without being asked.”

“Is that true?”

“You told me that you had never chosen. I’m trying to let you do it.”

“My body is choosing,” she said. “My body and me both.” She put her hands under her breasts and pushed them upward, toward me. “What do you think these are? Where do you think they came from, and why? Oh, Poilar—Poilar—”

It was enough. I put my hands over hers, and we both cupped her breasts for a moment, and then her hands drew away. My lips grazed against the side of her cheek, and down into the hollow along her throat.

“I’m afraid,” she said in a very small voice.

“Don’t be.”

“But I don’t know how to do it the right way. All I know is how to lie here and be used.”

“You only think you don’t know. Do what feels good, and whatever it is will be right.”

My hand slid down her belly to the warm place between her thighs. She was ready.

“I’m afraid, Poilar,” she said again.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No—no—”

“What are you afraid of, then?”

“That it won’t—go well—for you—”

“Forget about me. Let it go well for you.”

Then she did a very strange thing, which was to slide down in the bedroll and put her hand to my crooked leg, timidly at first, then more boldly, stroking the ankle with the gentlest of touches. No one had ever done that before, and it amazed me. I nearly pulled away from her. But then I realized what she was telling me with that touch, which was, I think, that she accepted my deformity as I was accepting hers, mine being one of the body and hers being something within, something of the spirit. It was a way of declaring love. So I let her stroke my ankle for another moment or two more, and then, gently, I drew her up toward me again so that we were face to face, and I smiled at her and nodded in the darkness. Her eyes were bright. I saw fear in them and eagerness also.

“Poilar?”

“Yes?”

“Poi—lar—”

“Yes. Yes.”

For a moment I thought of the men of Tipkeyn standing in a circle around her, filling her with wine and laughing as she got drunk. Angrily I shoved them from my mind. They must not be in my mind if they were ever to be expelled from hers.

I covered her with my body.

“Poilar,” she said softly.

“Yes.”

“Poilar. Poilar. Poilar.”

We bathed afterward in the stream. She was quiet, calm, apparently happy. When you make the Changes, it lifts you up out of the prison of your solitary flesh, and carries you toward the gods; and for a little while you feel that you are one with them, though you must all too soon return. I hoped it had been that way with Hendy. I asked her nothing about what she had experienced or how she might feel now, though, not so much because I was afraid of getting a displeasing answer as that I wanted simply to let the moment exist for itself, without examination, without analysis and introspectiveness. She knew what she had felt. I knew what I had. Let that be sufficient to each of us, I told myself.

Everyone seemed to know, the next day, what had taken place between Hendy and me. It was as if they had all been standing lined up along the stream in the night, watching us. There were little smiles, quizzical glances, knowing looks. Certainly Hendy and I had given them no clue by our daytime behavior: she said barely a thing to me all day, marching along in the back of the group as she customarily did, scarcely even looking at me when we halted and the whole group was together. She knew and I knew and to us that was enough. But the others knew also. Well, there are very few secrets in a band of Pilgrims. I doubted very much that we had been spied upon; I suspected rather that there was an aura around Hendy and me, a glow of the kind that people give off when they have deliberately kept their distance from each other for a long while and then have allowed themselves to come together. Such a thing shows. It always shows. There is an intensity in the air that can’t be hidden, a radiance, and all attempts at hiding it only make it glow all the more brightly.

I wondered what some of the other women with whom I had made the Changes during our journey might be thinking. There must always be those who tell themselves that there is something special about making the Changes with a leader. They cherish it as a mark of his favor, for whatever that may be worth. Would there be resentment at my beginning a new mating, one which promised to be other than casual? I hoped not; but if there was, then so be it. I owed none of them anything. There had been no sealing with any of them; there never could be. On the Pilgrimage you meet, you are attracted, you do the Changes, you drift apart. Perhaps you come together again for a while and do it all again. That was how it had been for me with Galli, with Stum, with Marsiel, with Min, with Thissa. There are no sealings there. There are no obligations. If I had mated with Galli once, and with Thissa afterward, and with this one and with that one, and now I was with Hendy, so be it. It is how things are. I might seal with Hendy some day, when we were no longer on the Wall. I might not. Who could say? Who knew if we would ever leave the Wall? We were on the Wall now, and that was the essential thing. Our lives were suspended while we climbed. And we might climb forever.

I said to Muurmut that day, as I had promised myself to do, “My plan is to seek a way up between those two peaks. It seems to me that that line of trees in the cleft between them indicates a watercourse, and we might be able to follow along it. What do you think?” And I pointed at random toward a distant pair of the jagged red cliffs that surrounded us, two of which happened to have a dense streak of green running down the steep slope that was their meeting-place. Wild grezbors could not have climbed that slope. Nor could we, not without wings to lift us to its top.

“Well,” Muurmut said, and I knew at once from his hesitation that he had no more idea of the proper way to go than I did. “You may be right, Poilar. But I tell you, I know a little sky-magic, and I’ve cast a spell that gives me an entirely different slant on things.”

The thought of stolid beefy-faced Muurmut the Vintner practicing sky-magic, or any other sort of magic, almost made me laugh out loud. Casting spells is the prerogative of the House of Witches, of course, and no one else. But I was making an effort to be conciliatory, as was he in his way also, I suppose. So instead of snorting derisively I simply said, “Ah, and which route would you suggest, then?”

He was taken aback. I don’t think he had expected me to ask him point blank that way, right there and then.

“That one,” he said after a moment, nodding toward the east, halfway around the bowl of peaks from the direction I had just proposed. He was plainly stabbing in the dark, just as I had done. “Do you see that short-shouldered mountain over there, with the look of a saddle to it, and the trail of cloud above it like a spear? If we mount that saddle we can ride right up into the sky.”

“You think?”

“So the spell that I cast said, very definitely.”

“Then that is the way we’ll go,” I told him, and he looked at me thunderstruck. But what did I have to lose? If Muurmut’s way proved to be the right one, then we were free of this grassy valley at last and would be able to continue our ascent, which in truth was the only thing that really mattered. And if his sky-magic proved to be the nonsense that I suspected it to be, well, at least no one could say thereafter that I was willfully depriving us of the benefits of Muurmut’s sage advice for the sake of enhancing my own glory.

So I called the whole group together and proclaimed the word. “We are changing our route,” I said. “Muurmut’s sky-magic tells us that the saddle-shaped mountain is the one we must climb. So we will attempt it; and all credit be to Muurmut if it turns out that his spells have opened the way for us.” And I gestured to him as though he was the very fount of wisdom; and he smiled and nodded and waved like one who has just been chosen to be the head of his House. But his face grew even more red than usual, and I knew that he had seen through my cleverness, and hated me all the more for it. Well, so be it. He had wanted to lead. Now I was giving him his chance.