Kingdoms of the Wall

15

That night we camped in a meadow of saw-edged red grass just below the mountain of Muurmut’s choice, and as I lay half-dreaming beside Hendy a vision came to me of the gods in their great palace at the Summit.

What I saw was this:

I had climbed the last stretch to the top of the mountain alone, through a bitter landscape of ice and whirling snow sharp as knives, and hard winds that bit into my flesh like whips of fire. But now I came stumbling half dead, or more than half, into a wondrous realm of golden light where soft breezes blew and the air was sweet as young wine; and I saw the crystal columns of the palace of the gods, and the gods themselves walking about within it, clad in scarlet robes and wearing high, narrow crowns of gold. There stood Kreshe the Creator, a shining being who was neither male nor female, though I had always thought of him as a man until this moment: from the hands of this great god, which were long and tapering and so beautiful that I wept at the sight, came streams of bright light that rose into the air and arched out to encircle all the World, so that they were like strands of the finest gold that held all things in communion with all other things through their linkage with Kreshe. Nearby, with a beaker of foaming drink in his hand, was a cheerful sunny-faced one, Thig the Shaper, he who had taken the formless world that Kreshe had made and given it its form. Thig was radiant as the sun; but beside him, pouring wine into Thig’s beaker, was dour Sandu Sando the Avenger, darker than a moonless night, with a face like a cluster of swords and hands like daggers, and when he laughed at some joke of Thig’s his voice fell upon the air like a hatchet.

I saw two beautiful young lovers making the Changes, and I knew without needing to be told that they were Selemoy who rules the Suns and Nir-i-Sellin the goddess of the Moons, embracing each other so that his light fell upon her, and hers upon him; and not far from them were the Three Babes, fat and naked and happy, with green star-stones in their navels; and also I saw Veega who brings the rain and Lasht who sees that the fruit ripens on the branch and Sept who gives the stars their brightness, and they were all laughing and joking together, like happy members of a House who have come together for a Naming-day, or old friends celebrating some great occasion. There were other gods besides, ones I could not recognize, unknown gods not yet revealed to mankind, but all of them had the bright auras of god-beauty and god-radiance, and there was such perfection in every aspect of them that I wept for sheer joy at the sight of it. For what this vision of mine was telling me was that the World indeed had meaning and purpose, that there really were gods and the gods were good, that all things however dark and terrible converged at that golden Summit above us on Kosa Saag, where wonderful beings lived lives of daily wonder and allowed some reflection of that wonder to descend to the lowest levels of the world and enter into the humble creatures that we are. At one time and another I had doubted all that. But now I felt the presence of the grace of the gods within me, and all my doubts dissolved: how could I do anything else but weep in gratitude and delight?

“Poilar?” Hendy said. “Poilar, what’s the matter? Why are you sobbing?”

I blinked and gaped and for a moment I was unable to speak. Then I said I had been having a vision of the gods, and was weeping out of happiness. At this hour of the night there were no moons in the sky, and I could barely see her face; but I heard her catch her breath as if I had said something wrong, something that had injured her. Which troubled me a little; but my vision was still with me a little, though it was ebbing fast, and I was too full of its splendors to think much of other things. I told her some of the things I had seen, though I could barely begin to describe the magnificence of it. Hendy listened without a word. And then when I had nothing left to tell her she said, “How I envy you, Poilar!”

“Envy me? Why?”

“For having dreams that are so beautiful.”

“Not all of them are.”

“But one like that—I’ve never had one like that, Poilar.” She was trembling, though the night was warm. I slipped my arm about her shoulders. “Often I’m afraid of going to sleep, because my dreams will be so frightening.”

“No, Hendy. No. No.”

I held her. Her pain became my pain; and the joy that my dream had brought me washed away entirely, and I felt only guilt for having brought her to this sorrow by trying to share my joy with her. But I said none of that to her, knowing it would only make her feel worse. Gradually she calmed, and pressed herself close against me, and said very softly, “I’m sorry, Poilar. Tell me more of what you saw.”

“I can’t remember any more of that.”

“But all of it was beautiful and wonderful?”

“Yes.” I would not lie to her.

“Even the Avenger?”

“Even him, yes. Though he had a frightful look, nothing like the look we give him in the images we make. But I knew that even he was beautiful, frightening though he was. For they are all gods together: they all make up one harmony.”

I could have said more about what I had seen, for although the vision had faded, the feelings that it had engendered in my spirit were still bubbling within me. But I was afraid of hurting her again.

After a while she said, aiming her voice not so much at me but into the air, as she often did, “Shall I tell you a dream I once had?”

“If you want to, yes, of course.”

“Yes. Yes.” Hendy paused as though she were summoning her thoughts. Then she said, “This was long ago, while I was still in Tipkeyn. I dreamed that I was dead. And do you know what death was like, Poilar? It was like being in a box exactly the size of my body. And my mind was still aware: I perceived everything, I could think, I could feel, I seemed to be breathing, I was still Hendy. Exactly as though I was alive. But I was in that box and there was no way to get out. And I knew that I would be in it for all time to come, because death never ends. Lying there forever, thinking, thinking, unable to move, unable to scratch myself if I itched, the air always stale and foul, the darkness always pressing down on me like a tight band across my chest. Trapped in that box. Forever. And ever. Thinking. Unable to stop thinking. Remembering, reliving the same things over and over, never anything new, for what new thing can there be when you’re locked up in a box in the dark? Telling myself that I’ll smother when all the air is gone, and then realizing that the air would go and I would still be there, fighting for breath and feeling that I was about to die, but I wouldn’t be able to die, because I was already dead. Screaming, but no one would hear.”

The words were pouring out and her voice was thick with emotion. She was beginning to tremble.

I put my hand on hers. “Wait, Hendy—slow down, catch your breath—”

But there was no stopping her. “Gagging on my own smell. Choking on it. A prickling in my toes, a numbness in my back. But the box was exactly the size I was, so there was no way to move. Not even a finger. I just had to lie there and lie there and lie there. Forever and ever, no escape, not ever, all of eternity to come, nothing ever changing, always Hendy in the box, fighting for every breath. I knew in my dream that is how it would be for me when I died, that it is that way for everybody. That’s what being dead is like. Each of us lying there alone, aware, knowing what has happened to us, the body imprisoned but the mind still aware, and hating it, and having no escape, never, no end to it. Your time in the box is a thousand times as long as your time alive, a million times, it never ends, never—never—never—”

“Hendy!” And I gripped her and held her, and put my mouth over hers to halt the terrible torrent of words, and she shook in my arms like a twig caught at one end between two rocks in a swift-flowing stream. Only when she had stopped shaking did I take my lips from hers.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. Her eyes were not meeting mine. “You must think I’m crazy, saying things like that.”

“No. No. It was only a dream.”

“I’ve had it many times. Dozens. Hundreds of times. It keeps coming back. I’m always afraid to go to sleep because I think I’m going to have it again.”

“Have you had it on Kosa Saag?”

“Twice.”

I looked into the starry darkness of the sky. To have such a dream up here—in the very abode of the gods—what could it mean? I had dreamed of splendors; she dreamed of death that was no death at all, but an infinite torture.

Her dream appalled me. I had never heard anything so frightening, so bleak. Death is nothing I spend much time thinking about; but I had always thought, as most of us do, that death is simply the end of life, a darkness, a silence, the return of our substance to the earth from which it came. Traiben and I had sometimes talked of it when we were young, and we both thought alike on the subject: there is no further awareness, any more than there is further light after a candle has been snuffed. It is an obliteration. One lives one’s four tens of years, or a few tens more if the gods have given one the privilege of double life, and then one is gone, and that is that. But this terrible vision of Hendy’s—this catastrophic fantasy of torment everlasting—it shook me as I have rarely been shaken. I lay awake for hours afterward, fearing that if I slept I would dream Hendy’s dream, and dreading it. In time sleep took me anyway, and I dreamed nothing that I particularly remembered the next day. But when I woke it was not the glory of my own divine vision that remained with me, but rather the nightmare desolation of the thing that Hendy had described.

I climbed like a madman that day, going almost at a sprint up the sloping side of the meadow where it gave way to the barrenness of the red mountain, and then along the face of the rock into the saddle. The others were hard pressed to match my pace and quickly fell behind me. And when I came up into the saddle I saw that on the far side of it it turned upward, so that it provided us with access to the next level of Kosa Saag, which began just beyond us. Muurmut’s sky-magic might have been a fraud and a bluff but it had brought us to the right place. I waited for them to catch up with me, and we halted and broke out the last of the wine that we had brought with us from home, and passed it around, hardly more than a few drops apiece. I called out a toast to Muurmut. Let him bask in his glory. What did that matter to me? We were on our way up again.

“Muurmut!” they all cried. “Muurmut, Muurmut, Muurmut!”

He grinned and smirked like the fool that he was. But we were on our way up. The gods in their crystal-columned palace awaited us at the Summit. Or so I told myself, in the hope that I could drive from my mind that other vision of darkness and terror and eternity spent in a box no bigger than my body.

We emerged into a new realm entirely, a bare craggy land of broken red rock carved into a myriad fantastic forms, with caves and fluted spires and turrets everywhere. The sky was cloudless and a deep intense blue, a strange blue that was bluer than we had ever seen it. Little streams ran in rocky beds. After the sharp and frosty weather we had had below, the air was surprisingly warm and mellow here, but we had long since given up trying to understand the rhythms and climates of Kosa Saag. We knew that we were in another world up here.

The mountain rose before us as if in a series of wide flat steps. It looked as though we need do nothing more than put our feet to the first of those steps, and merely go up and up and up until we were at the top. But I sensed that when we actually reached the first of those great stone shelves we would discover that we were no bigger than so many grains of sand against it, and the climb would be no easy thing.

I ordered a pause for gathering food and water, for it looked like dry hard country ahead. While this was going on I went forward a little distance to reconnoiter, taking Traiben with me for company. But I said little as we walked, and when Traiben spoke to me I answered in the shortest way.

“Your mood is very somber,” he said after a while, “for one who has just taken himself a new lover.”

“Yes,” I said. “So it is.”

“It can be that way sometimes, I suppose. When you attain a long-held desire, and find that the reality can never be equal to the—”

“No,” I said, snapping the word at him. “What do you know about these things? It’s nothing like that!”

“Well,” said Traiben, then. “I am mistaken. I beg your pardon, Poilar.”

And now he was silent, and we walked on that way through a long morning, like two strangers trudging side by side on the same path. Both suns were in the sky. In the thin air of this high country, where there was not a single cloud to shelter us, white Ekmelios burned with great fury and even the distant red sphere of Marilemma seemed to be throwing forth heat upon us. The land began to rise steeply, and as I had suspected the terrain grew more parched the farther we went. And yet I felt a curious emanation coming from the first level of the stepped mountain ahead of us, an odd kind of beckoning, as though a deep sleepy voice were saying. Yes, this is the way, come to me, come to me, come, come.

I said finally, growing troubled by Traiben’s silence and feeling abashed at having spoken to him so harshly, “My mood is dark, I think, because of a dream of Hendy’s, that she told me a few nights back while we were in the valley. The shadow of that dream lies over me even now.”

And I told it to him, just as Hendy had told it to me. When I was done I was shaking with the horror of it all over again; but Traiben only shrugged and said, without much feeling, “The poor woman. What a dark and fantastic notion that is to carry around in one’s head.”

“What if it isn’t just a fantastic notion, though? What if something like that really happens to us when we die?”

He laughed. “After death there is nothing, Poilar. Nothing. ”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

“We talked of this when we were boys, do you remember? Does a candle burn when you put out the flame?”

“We are not candles, Traiben.”

“It’s the same thing. Out we go and that’s the end.”

“And if not?”

He shrugged again. I could see that Hendy’s dream was having no impact on him at all. Or else he was taking great pains to conceal it. Perhaps Hendy was a sore subject with him. It had happened before that he saw some new woman of mine as an impediment to our friendship.

The mountain still seemed to be calling. Come … come … come … What could that be?

But I hesitated to ask Traiben if he felt the same call, for fear that he would think I was suffering from hallucinations. We seemed to be on uneasy terms with each other this day. Our souls were farther apart than I could remember their ever having been.

To lighten things a little I started telling him of my own dream, the happy one of the golden and glittering gods in their wondrous sunlit palace atop the Wall. But Traiben scarcely seemed to be listening. He glanced this way and that, he picked up stones and skipped them into the air, he shaded his eyes and peered off into the distance.

“Am I boring you?” I asked, when I was no more than halfway through.

“It’s a lovely dream, Poilar. Very pretty indeed.”

“But a little on the simple-minded side.”

“No. No. A beautiful vision.”

“Just a vision, yes. And Hendy’s dream is just a nasty fantasy. There’s no reality at all to either of them, is that right?”

“Who can say? We won’t know what death is really like until we die. Nor will we know what the gods are like until we reach the Summit.”

“I prefer to think that the gods are as I saw them in my dream. That perhaps the dream itself was a sending from them, urging us to be steadfast, to stay on the upward trail.”

Traiben gave me a strange look at that. “A sending, you think? Well, maybe so.” After a moment he said, “I would rather believe in your dream than in Hendy’s. But we won’t know until we know. I once had a dream that was just the opposite of yours: did I ever tell you that, Poilar? A blasphemous dream, a really awful dream, a true nightmare. I dreamed that I reached the Summit—and there were the gods, all right, and they were loathsome twisted ghastly things, the most depraved of creatures, such bestial driveling monsters that they would make the Melted Ones look beautiful beside them. And that’s why no Pilgrims who have reached the Summit and returned will ever speak of what they have seen, because they can’t bear to reveal the frightful truth about the gods we worship.” He laughed again, the dry little Traiben-laugh that I knew so well, which was meant to be a casual dismissal of something that in fact was not at all casual to him. Then he said, “Speaking of sendings, have you been feeling anything of that sort while we’ve been walking along just now?”

“A message from the mountain? A pulling—a calling?”

“So you do feel it!”

“And you also.”

“For some time now,” he said. “A voice in my mind, urging me onward.”

“Yes. Exactly so. A voice from the gods, do you think, telling us that we’re on the right path?”

“You have gods on the brain today, Poilar. Who knows what that calling means? Gods—demons—more Melted Ones—another Kingdom ahead—?”

“We should turn back, I think. See whether the others have felt it too. And call a council, and discuss what action we ought to take.”

“Yes,” he said. “A good idea.”

So we hurried along the rocky trail, returning the way we had come. The voice in my mind grew less distinct with every step we took. It was the same for Traiben. By the time we reached the camp we were unable to perceive it at all.

In my absence a stranger had come into the camp, and he was a very strange stranger indeed.

He stood in the midst of the group, and they were all crowding tight around him, as though vying with one another for the closest look. Only Thissa stood to one side, in that brooding way of hers, watching somberly from afar. The stranger rose head and shoulders above nearly everyone: he was taller even than Muurmut and Kilarion. It appeared that he was laughing and joking with them, and that they were hanging on his every word. At first glance it seemed that he had no hair, but then he moved a little and I saw that he had hair only on one side of his head, hair of a very odd sort, white as mountain mist and thick as rope, hanging down in long strands almost to his waist. He was gaunt and hard—virtually fleshless, so you could almost see the outlines of his bones beneath the tight-drawn skin, which was mottled and piebald, black as night in some places and a glaring shiny white in others. His shoulders, though very broad, were oddly wrenched and skewed, as if he had been midway through some change of shape and had become stuck in it; and when I drew near I became aware that he was a crookleg like me, but to a horrifying extreme, for his left leg was far longer than the other one, reaching out at an angle and curving back in like a sickle’s blade. His whole body was gnarled and distorted down its long axis, one hip higher than the other and turned at an odd angle to its mate, which was what caused that leg to jut out the way it did.

When he saw me approaching, he turned to me and grinned. It was meant as a grin, at any rate, but it was cold and cheerless and more like a demon’s grimace than a grin, a two-faced smirk, showing me a mouth of blackened snags, smiling on the one side and scowling on the other. The color of his left eye was different from that of the right, and both his eyes were small and glittering, but glittering in a dull way as though the fire that burned behind them had almost gone out; and the left side of his face was drawn up in a puckered twisted way that reminded me of Min’s, but the thing that had happened to Min seemed like nothing in comparison with this man’s mutilation. Here was surely another who had come in contact somewhere on the Wall with change-fire; but if Min had had a melted look when she came forth from the cave of the Source, this strange lopsided creature looked baked: baked dry, a parched man, baked down to some irreducible minimum.

I could find no words, for a moment.

Then Kath came forward out of the group and said, with something sly in his look, “Do you remember this man, Poilar?”

“Remember? From where?”

“From the village, long ago,” Kath said.

“No.” I peered close, and shook my head. “Not at all.”

The stranger stepped toward me and offered me a hand that was as gnarled and twisted as the rest of him.

“My name is Thrance,” he said. I gasped as though I had been struck a blow in the belly. Thrance? Thrance?

Into my mind at once, with the mention of that name, leaped a dazzling unforgettable image out of my boyhood. I was twelve, and it was the Day of Procession and Departure, and Traiben and I were in the main viewing stand, waiting for the new Pilgrims to emerge from the Lodge. And the great wickerwork doors swung open and the Pilgrims came forth, and there was Thrance, Thrance the magnificent, Thrance the flawless, the athlete of athletes, famous for his feats of strength and valor, that man of shining beauty and perfect body, erupting from the Lodge like a force of nature, pausing only a moment to smile and wave before running off in that famous high bounding stride of his toward the Wall. How splendid he had looked that day, how fine! How like a god! And this was Thrance, now? This? This?