Kingdoms of the Wall

20

When we came up over the rim of the cliff into this sublime and ultimate realm the one thing that we all wanted was only to rest awhile, every one of us. We could look up and see the abode of the gods almost within reach, yes, or so it seemed to us then; but there was not one of us who had the strength or the determination to venture onward immediately, not even Traiben, whose boundless curiosity seemed at last to be overmeasured by fatigue. We had spent ourselves freely, too freely, perhaps, in the crossing of the land of the Kvuz and the conquest of that bare rock face, and now we had to recollect our energies and renew our will before pushing onward toward whatever the next challenge was that might lie ahead.

On this innermost plateau that was the pedestal for the highest of the peaks of Kosa Saag, we had entered into a vast enclosed place of forests and rivers and streams and valleys. It was like a secret world atop the Wall. The air was even thinner here, but we knew well by now how to adjust our bodies to cope with that, and for all its thinness it was sweet and cool and fresh; and there was thick blue grass everywhere underfoot, and the great cloud-tipped mountain rose above us in stupendous majesty and beauty. We found ourselves a pleasant site beside a swift stream and made our camp there, thinking to stay a day or two, or perhaps three, before pushing onward. But we stayed longer than that: how much longer, I could not say, for one day flowed serenely into the next and time slipped past without our realizing it. A great deal of time, I suspect.

This was an easy place, though, and we had not had many of those during our journey up the Wall. Here was a place where we could strip and bathe and cleanse ourselves, and drink cool water, and pluck succulent fruits from trees whose names we would never know. And so we did, for day after day after day. It was as if we were enchanted. Perhaps we were. No one spoke of moving onward: as I have said, not even Traiben. Indeed Traiben and I avoided each other’s eyes much of the time, for neither of us had forgotten that as boys we had vowed to rise through Kingdom after Kingdom until we had attained the Summit, and if that was what we had sworn to do, why were we still here? Many a time I saw one of the others looking at me worriedly, as if fearing that at any moment I would pick up cudgels and flails and drive everyone back to the upward task with all my old zeal. But the inner fire that had carried me this far was banked for the moment. I was in as much need of rest as any of the others, and they had no reason to fear any renewal of discipline just yet from me. I had loosened my grasp on them; I let the idle days go by.

Only the Irtiman showed any eagerness to resume the climb. He came to me and said, “Poilar, I owe you my life,” and I nodded uneasily at that, for he was pale and even thinner than before and it seemed to me that he had hardly any life left in him. Then he said, with a touch of anxiety in his tone, “Will we be staying in this valley much longer, do you think?”

I indicated the long shadow of the great mountain, falling far across the land. “We’ll stay here until we’re fresh again,” I told him. “We’re going to need all the strength we can muster for what lies ahead.”

“No doubt we will. But as the time passes, you see—”

The voice out of the speaking-box trailed off. He stared at me sadly.

I knew what was troubling him. He had suffered greatly in his solitary wanderings and such little strength as he still had left was fading: he saw the end coming and wanted to die at the Summit among his friends. Our long delay here must have been maddening to him. Well, I understood his need; but we had needs of our own. The long unrelenting skyward march had drained us deeply. We were none of us young; we were in our third ten of years and even the strongest of us felt the burden of this climb. And the most daunting ascent of all still stood before us. We were not yet ready to attempt it.

The Irtiman was aware of that, and he knew also that he had no claim on us. So he put his impatience aside. For my part I promised him that I would bring him to his fellow Irtimen at the Summit, no matter what: and that was a promise which I was to keep, although in a strange way indeed.

We talked for a while afterwards. I asked him about his village, where it was situated in relation to the Wall and whether it had the same sort of Houses that ours did, Musicians and Advocates and Carpenters and all the rest, and if they acknowledged themselves to be subjects to the King. He was silent a long time when I had asked these things, and drew so deep into himself that I feared for him. Then he said, “I told you that I came from a very distant place.”

“Yes.”

“And so it is I was born on a world beyond the sky.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. “A world beyond the sky,” I said in wonder, dully repeating his words like a simpleton because I had so much difficulty comprehending them. “Then you are a god?”

“Not at all. Mortal, Poilar, very much so.”

“Yet you say you come from one of the worlds of Heaven?”

“A world called Earth, yes.”

I thought of my star-dream of long ago, when I had danced at the Summit and looked upward toward those worlds from the Summit, and saw the cold fire of them, and felt the potent god-life of them pouring down upon me.

“Those who live in Heaven are gods,” I said. “Their homes are the stars, and the stars are fire. Who can live in fire except a god?”

He smiled patiently and said, in that sad, sad, weary voice that came slowly out of his little speaking-box, “Yes, the stars are fire, Poilar. But many of them have worlds much like this world close by them, the way your world is close by its star Ekmelios. And those worlds are solid and cool like your world, with oceans and mountains and plains, and people can live upon them. Or upon some of them, anyhow.”

“Ekmelios is a sun, not a star. It’s much bigger than any star, and brighter, and hotter. And there’s Marilemma, also: we have two suns, you know.”

“And both are stars. Suns are stars. Ekmelios is close at hand, and Marilemma is a little further away; and still further, far out in the heavens, are other stars, millions of them, more than you could ever count. Each one is a sun, bright and hot. They seem to you to be little points of light only because they’re so far away. But if you were closer to one of them you’d realize that it’s a ball of fire very much like Ekmelios and Marilemma. And most of them have worlds moving around them the way your world moves around Ekmelios and Marilemma.”

All this was difficult for me to follow, but he let it sink in for a moment or two, and as I revolved it in my mind it began to make a kind of sense to me. Still, I wished that Traiben were beside me now to hear this, for I knew he would understand it much more completely.

The Irtiman said, “My world has a yellow sun. I could try to show it to you in the night sky, but it’s not very big and so it’s very hard to find. It’s so far away that the light that comes from my world’s sun takes an entire lifetime, and even more, to reach your world.”

“Then you must be a god!” I cried, feeling proud of myself for so quickly seeing the flaw in the logic. “For if it takes more than a lifetime to get from your world to mine, then how could any mortal hope to live long enough to make the journey?”

“He couldn’t,” said the Irtiman. “Not me, not you, not any of us. But we have a special way of traveling, which takes us from here to here without having to pass through every point between. And so the trip from Earth to here requires only a year or two instead of a lifetime and a half. But for that I could never have hoped to come here.”

I was lost. What did he mean, a special way of traveling? Magic of some sort, I supposed. A spell that brought them flashing across the sky in a twinkling. Well, then, what else could they be but gods? No one other than a god could work such a miraculous magic. But if they were gods the question arose again: How was it possible for a god to become weary unto death, as this Irtiman surely was? And I realized that I did not understand at all.

He told me more, much more, things which I understood even less.

For he said, as we sat together on a moist bank of blue grass beside a cool swift-flowing stream under the mighty fortress that was the last and highest pinnacle of Kosa Saag, that he and his three friends were not the first Irtimen to have traveled from his world to ours, that others had come long ago, many of them, traveling in a great ship—had come here, in fact, to found a village of their own on our world; and they had settled on the high slopes of Kosa Saag, because the air of the lowlands was too hot and dense for their lungs and it would choke them to breathe it.

He said they were still up there at the Summit, those long-ago voyagers who came from the world called Earth; or rather their descendants were, to be more accurate. They had a village there, a settlement of some sort. It puzzled me to hear this, because it was hard for me to see why the gods would tolerate having travelers from another world living amongst them at the Summit, that holiest of places—and why did we ourselves know nothing about the continued presence of these strangers atop the Wall? Nothing I had ever heard had hinted at such a thing.

So I could comprehend little or none of this. I said, “And the gods, then? The Creator, the Shaper, the Avenger? Do they still dwell at the Summit too? And did you see them there?”

The Irtiman was silent a long while. His eyes closed, and his breathing became very slow, and then I could hardly detect it at all, so that once more I began to wonder whether he might have died. But at last he said, “I was there only a little while, you understand.”

“You didn’t see them, then?”

“No. I didn’t see them. Not the Creator, not the Shaper. Not the Avenger.”

“But they must be there!”

“Perhaps that’s so,” he said, in a very remote voice.

“Perhaps?” His tone of doubt made me so angry that I could easily have struck him. But of course I did not. This stranger was weak from exhaustion, he was gravely ill, he had already entered into the sickness unto death. His mind might be deranged by fever. He was speaking madness. It would be a sin to lift my hand against anyone in his condition.

So I put aside my wrath. “But surely the gods are to be found at the Summit!”

He shrugged. “For your sake I hope so, Poilar. All I can say is that I saw no gods while I was there. If there are gods at all, it may be that they live in a place beyond the range of our vision.”

“ If there are gods?” I cried. “If?”

Once more I saw a red haze before my eyes. I had to fight back my anger all over again. It was a killing anger; but this Irtiman was doomed already. I could not allow myself to do him harm, no matter what.

He saw me struggling with myself and said to me mildly, “I meant no sacrilege. I can only tell you that so far as the gods of Heaven are concerned, I have no more knowledge of their whereabouts than you do. On my world as on yours, men have searched for them since the beginning of time, and some, I think, have found them, but most have not.” The voice from the machine came to me now as if across an immense distance. “I wish you well, Poilar. I hope you find what you are seeking.” And then he said that he was too tired to speak of these things with me any longer. I could see that that was so. Simply to draw breath was becoming a great chore for him. His lips were quivering with fatigue and his eyes had a deathly glassy sheen.

I went to Traiben afterward and told him everything that the Irtiman had said, as well as I could, praying that I wasn’t garbling any of it. Traiben listened in silence, nodding to himself and now and then sketching a little diagram in the soft earth. From time to time he would ask me to repeat something. But he didn’t sound particularly confused or troubled or upset. That strange mind of his, that was so much like a sponge, seemed to be taking it all in easily and happily. “Very interesting,” was all he said, when I was done. “Very, very, very interesting.”

“But what does it mean?” I asked him.

“It means what it means,” he said, and grinned a mischievous Traiben-grin at me.

“That a settlement of Irtimen lives among our gods?”

“That the gods may be Irtimen, for all we know,” said Traiben.

I shook my head at that in bewilderment and amazement.

“How can you say such a thing, Traiben? Even to admit the possibility of it is blasphemy!”

“He’s been to the Summit. We haven’t. He saw no gods, only Irtimen.”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“We need to go up there and see for ourselves, don’t we?” he said. “Don’t we, Poilar?”

The things the Irtiman had said had reawakened my desire to attain the Summit, so that I might show him the gods he had failed to find: that and Traiben’s renewed eagerness to finish the climb, for he was aflame now with all his old curiosity. So I gave the order to break camp and resume the climb within the hour.

Maiti the Healer came to me as we were filling our water-jars and said, “Poilar, your Irtiman is very weak.”

“I know that,” I told her.

“We can’t possibly bring him with us. He’s not strong enough to walk. He has difficulty taking food. It’s obvious that he can’t last much longer.”

“What are you saying, Maiti? Is he going to die today?”

“Not today, no. But soon. A few days, a week at most, perhaps. There’s no way we can heal him. He’s too feeble; and in any case we don’t understand the way his body is put together. If you really want to set out up the mountain this afternoon, Poilar, we should leave some food with him and go on without him. Or else stay here another few days to see him out, and give him a decent burial before we move on.”

“No,” I said. “We’ve stayed here too long already. We leave today. And I’ve promised him that I’ll take him up to the Summit and deliver him to his Irtimen friends. If we have to carry him all the way, we will.”

She shrugged and went away. A little later I visited him. He was in a bad way, looking even worse than he had before, much worse. His skin was like paper now and fine beads of sweat were standing out on his brow. He seemed to be trembling from head to toe. His eyes would not focus and he kept looking past me, as though I were standing behind myself. But he told me how glad he was that we were going onward at last, and thanked me again very warmly for all I had done for him. He hoped that he would last long enough, he said, to be reunited with his companions at the Summit. That was the only thing he wanted now, to see them again before he died.

We adapted the sling with which we had hauled him up the cliff face into a hammocklike litter that two strong people could carry between them. Thissa cast a spell of sky-magic that might let him hold his spirit in his body a little longer, and Jekka and Maiti, after a long conference, offered him a potion of certain herbs they had gathered nearby, which they said could perhaps do some good and in any event were unlikely to make matters any worse for him. It must have been bitter stuff, for he made ghastly grimaces as he drank it down; but he said he felt better afterward, and possibly that was so.

A path of gentle slope that seemed as if it would lead us onto the flank of the mountain lay before us; and once more we took up our climb. It reminded us of the very beginning of our Pilgrimage, for this was like leaving the village all over again; quickly the pleasant wooded valley where we had camped in ease for these days or weeks, and which had begun to seem almost as familiar as home to us, dropped away behind us, and we began to wind up and up a mountain trail into a cool, rocky country of which we knew nothing at all. And above us once again rose a colossal mass of stone that came close to filling the sky, just as in the first days of our climb. Back then, though, in our innocence, we had had no way of knowing that what we called the Wall was only the merest foothill of Kosa Saag; and now we understood that this tremendous overhanging peak on whose lowest outcroppings we trod was in truth the last of our challenges and the goal of all our striving.

What lay ahead for us on the flanks of this mountain, we soon would discover, was a richly populated land. For in the new realm which we were entering we were to find that one Kingdom tumbled upon the next in enormous profusion; and I can scarcely tell you of them all, so many and various were they. On this innermost and loftiest peak, all those whose Pilgrimages had carried them this far had stayed and settled and bred and multiplied. We soon were seeing their Kingdoms on every side, here just below the abode of those whom we took to be our gods. Each of the many Kingdoms of the Wall, it seemed to me, embodies some lesson for the Pilgrims who pass through them: certainly that was true of the Kingdoms of the Kavnalla, the Sembitol, and the Kvuz. But in the higher reaches of the Wall the Kingdoms are so numerous that one could spend ten lifetimes seeking to learn such lessons as they offer, and still not have encompassed a fraction of the whole.

Many a strange fate waited for us in those Kingdoms before those few of us who survived would stumble up the last few paces to the Summit.

But our Irtiman was not one of those who did.

The end arrived for him just as we were crossing into one of the populated territories of the mountain; for I was ahead of the column of marchers, studying the smoke of settlements not far ahead of us on the path, when Kath the Advocate jogged up alongside me and said, “You had better come.”

He was lying against Galli’s bosom, shivering convulsively. Jekka and Maiti crouched beside him, and Thissa was murmuring spells not far away, with Traiben watching dourly from a distance. But it was obvious that neither Galli’s comforting presence nor the potions of the Healers nor Thissa’s witchcraft would be of any use now. Life was leaving the Irtiman so swiftly that you could almost see his soul issuing forth above him like rising steam. And as I went to his side his eyes rolled up in his head and he made a little whimpering sound.

I bent forward over him.

“Irtiman? Irtiman, can you hear me?”

I wanted to ask him this final time, as he stood on the threshold of eternity, whether he had been telling me the truth about the dwellers on the Summit when he had said that he had seen only Irtimen there and had not found the gods. But there was no possibility of asking him any such thing now. The little box through which he spoke to us had rolled from his hand and lay uselessly in the grass. He could not have understood me, nor I him, even if he had still been conscious.

“Irtiman!”

He jerked back in one last quiver and was still, with his arm upraised and his fingers spread out toward the sky, toward the Summit, where his companions were. I looked at that outspread hand, those upthrust fingers, there were five of them, as I had thought, a thumb at one side but none at the other, nor any sign that there ever had been one there, and four others that were arranged in the usual way of fingers. I took that strange alien hand in mine and held it a moment, and then I lowered it to his breast and folded the other one across it, and closed his eyes.

Traiben said to me, as I turned away, “I tried to talk to him a little while ago about the gods and the Irtimen, to find out more of what he had seen and what he knew. I saw that it was our only chance. But he was already far gone, and unable to speak.”

I had to smile at that. Traiben was ever my other and cleverer self, thinking of the same things I did, but always sooner. This time, though, even Traiben had been too slow.

Kilarion came up to me and said, “I’ll dig a grave for him. The ground here shouldn’t be too hard. And there are plenty of rocks for a cairn.”

“No,” I told him. “No grave, no cairn.” An idea had come to me in that moment; a mad one, perhaps, engendered by the thin air of that lofty place I looked around. “Where’s Talbol? Get me the Leathermaker. And Narril the Butcher. And Grycindil too—a Weaver, yes.”

They came to me and I told them what I wanted done. They stared at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, and maybe I had; but I said that I had promised to deliver the Irtiman to his friends who dwelled above, and I would keep that pledge regardless. So they drew the Irtiman’s body aside and went to work on it. Narril emptied it of its organs—I saw Traiben peering at them in wonder—and Talbol did whatever it is that Leathermakers do to cure a skin, using such herbs as he could find by the roadside, and finally Grycindil filled the empty body with aromatic preserving herbs that Talbol found for her, and strips of cloth and such light filling things, and sewed up the incisions that Narril had made. The whole thing took three or four days, during which time we camped where we were, keeping out of sight of the habitants of the Kingdom just above us. When it was done, the Irtiman lay as though sleeping in the hammock we had made for him; but he weighed practically nothing when we lifted him, and we carried him along without difficulty. Since he had been an Irtiman and it was plain even to the slowest among us that an Irtiman was a kind of being entirely different from ourselves, I heard no objections to what I had done; for who could say what the burial customs of Irtimen might be? Certainly we were under no obligation to bury one in the same way as we would one of our own, with a cairn and all. So we took him along with us on our march toward the Summit, and in time we grew quite accustomed to having him still with us, even though he was dead.

The road—and a road was what it was, as distinct and well maintained as the one on which we had begun our journey up from Jespodar village—spiraled up and up around the outside of the mountain, and every few days there was a different Kingdom. The people of some of these Kingdoms came out to stare at us, and others took scarcely any notice of us as we went by; but in no instance were we interfered with. In these high realms of Kosa Saag Pilgrims evidently were allowed to go onward as they pleased.

The inhabitants of the high Kingdoms had once been Pilgrims themselves, of course; or at least their ancestors had. But you would not know it from the look of them. All these multitudes of people who had created a new world for themselves far above the world that was our world were failed climbers, who had given up the holy quest, just as the creatures writhing in the Kavnalla’s cave had been, or the insect-beings of the Sembitol—all of them members of the legion of the Transformed, as varied and strange in form as the beings that populate our dreams.

But there was a difference up here. The folk of the high Kingdoms had pushed the limits of our ability to change our shapes beyond anything we had ever imagined, and they had done it willingly and knowingly. These were no victims of change-fire, I think. They were of another kind from the Melted Ones, those pitiful things that had been deformed and made hideous by the heat of an irresistible force outside themselves, nor were they like the hapless slithering servants of the Kavnalla, or the insectlike creatures who stalked the narrow trails of the Sembitol, or the hateful ground-crawling people of the Kvuz, all of whom had lost themselves to the potent rays that come from the mountain’s core. No, it seemed to me that these folk must have altered themselves from within, apparently of their own free choice, here in these high Kingdoms. And in this shimmering mountain air they had drawn on inner resources to unleash the whole range of possibilities that the shapechanging power affords, and then had extended that range.

So we saw great airy beings twice as tall as the tallest of us, who wrapped themselves in wings of vast spread but never attempted to use them. We saw others that walked in sheets of white flame, and some that moved in globes of darkness, and those that seemed like flowing cascades of water. We saw men who looked like trees and women who looked like swords. We saw frail filmy things that drifted like wisps on the wind. We saw giant boulders with eyes, and mouths that smiled knowingly as we went by. And I remembered now the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel, which we had had to read when we were youngsters training for our Pilgrimage, and which I had thought was all fable and fairy-tale; but no, that was wrong, I saw now. Maylat Gakkerel, whoever he might have been, had seen these Kingdoms and had returned from them with enough of his sanity intact to set down an account of them, and however fevered and impenetrable and unreal that difficult book may have seemed to us, it was no work of fancy but a sober chronicle of the upper reaches of Kosa Saag.

It was here that I began to lose the members of my Forty.

There was no way I could prevent it. Those who had resisted the horrors below did not have the strength to turn their backs on the beauties and strangenesses up here. They slipped away as though they were fading into the mist. Even if I had chained us all together wrist to wrist, they would have found some way to go; for the temptation of these Kingdoms was immense.

Tull the Clown was the first to depart. That was no real surprise, for she had defected once already before; and although she had come back that time she still bore the taint of the Sembitol about her, and a permanent melancholy where once she had been all life and buoyancy. She went in the night, soon after the Irtiman’s death, and Thissa said later that she could feel her dancing on the wind. Poor Tull, I certainly prayed that she was.

But then Seppil the Carpenter disappeared, and Ijo the Scholar, and our other Scholar too, little Bilair. They went on different days and in different Kingdoms. I caused searches to be made for each of them, though only in a perfunctory way, for I suppose I was beginning to undergo a transformation of sorts myself, and I no longer was as concerned to lose my companions as I once had been. Let them go, something within me whispered. Let them find their own destinies up here, if the Summit is not what they truly seek. Most who attempt the quest are fated to fail it, and so be it. So be it.

Thrance sidled up to me and grinned his diabolical grin, and said, “So that’s what it’s like, when you reach the top of the Wall? You simply float away and join the Kingdoms? If that’s the case, why did we bother to climb so high? We could have saved ourselves the effort and stayed down below, and let ourselves be transformed by the Kavnalla.”

“I wish you had,” I told him.

“Ah, so unkind, Poilar, so very unkind! What harm have I ever done you? Didn’t I guide you through some difficult places?”

I made a shooing gesture at him, as though he were a stinging palibozo hovering about my head.

“Go, Thrance. Turn yourself into air, or water, or a pillar of fire. Let me be.”

He grinned again, twice as fierce as before. “Ah, no, no, no, Poilar! I’ll stay by your side to the top! We are allies in this, you and I. We are colleagues of the trail.” Then he laughed and said, “But it’ll be only the two of us by the time we reach the Summit. The others will all long be gone.”

“Let me be, Thrance,” I told him a second time. “Or by all the gods I’ll hurl you down the mountainside.”

“See if it isn’t so,” he said. “You’ll lose them all as we go up.”

And that night Ais the Musician went from us, and Dorn the Clown; and two days afterward, in a Kingdom whose ruler lived in a glistening limestone mansion cut deep into the mountain, a place of great colonnades and porticos and torch-lit chambers and passages and halls and an immense throne room fit for a god, we lost Jekka the Healer, which was a grievous loss indeed. When I counted up in the morning, there were only twenty-seven of us left, out of our Forty, and Thrance the twenty-eighth. This time I made no attempt at sending out searchers. It seemed a hopeless thing to do. I wondered whether Thrance might not have been right, that all the others would go, leaving only him and me at the end. Indeed I wondered whether I myself would be among the Transformed before this was over. For my resolve had weakened more than once along the way up; and if it weakened again here, it would be the end of my quest. I knew I must fight that; but would I be able to win? And so in perplexity I led the remainder of my people onward, along an ever-narrowing trail, toward the cloud-shrouded realm above.