Kingdoms of the Wall

24

To Traiben’s questions I had no answers. His words struck at me like hammers, and I stood there and accepted the blows, but my heart cried out from the pain and there was a moment when I thought I would rather hurl myself from the mountain than have to listen to any more of what he was saying. For something perverse within me said to me that Traiben was right, as he so often was, that there were no gods atop this mountain or else that these creatures were our gods, or the children of our gods, and some terrible mistake had been made and perpetuated across the thousands of years of the Pilgrimage.

I could not face the possibility that that was so. Not only was it blasphemy: it was an absurdity besides, the negation of everything I believed. To have come this far, and suffered so much, for nothing? It could not be. The mere thought of it sent a black wind roaring through my soul.

But I could not refute Traiben’s arguments, either. For where were the palaces I had dreamed of beholding up here? Where, indeed, were the gods? We could see virtually from one side of the Summit to the other. And all that we had found here were two metal houses—one house small and gleaming with a few frightened faces peering out from it, faces that did not seem to be the faces of gods, and the other one large and old and rotting—and a band of strange naked creatures capering and shrieking and hurling missiles with wild uncertain aim.

It was an awful moment. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to tell them what to do. They had not heard what Traiben had said, nor did any of them know a thing of what the dead Irtiman had told me in his final hours about the Summit and the gods. But here we were at the Summit, and what was to happen now? What could I say, how could I explain? This was the culmination of our Pilgrimage. Was this all there was, these two metal houses, these strange shrieking creatures? Were we now supposed to turn around and slink back down through all the myriad Kingdoms to the half-forgotten village at the bottom of the Wall that we had set out from so long ago, and take up life in the roundhouse of the Returned Ones, and maintain a silence about all that we had seen at the Summit, as those who had returned before us had done?

The taste of ashes was in my mouth. I had never known such despair. I could not hide, I could not flee, I could not offer any explanations. But perhaps this shining metal house held the answers I wanted, or some part of them.

On legs that felt like slabs of wood I stumbled forward, with no plan in my mind, until I found myself standing beneath the little gleaming house on metal struts. The faces still were peering from the small windows.

This close, I recognized them plainly for what they were. Not the faces of gods, whatever the faces of gods might be like—no, almost certainly not gods.

They were the faces of Irtimen. The three friends of our Irtiman, to whom he had been so eager to return before he died.

Well, I had promised to bring him to them. And I had.

“Irtimen!” I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted with all my strength. It seemed to me that the wind was blowing away my words; I could scarcely hear my voice myself. But I persevered. “Irtimen! Irtimen! Listen to me! I am Poilar Crookleg of Jespodar village, and I have something for you!”

Silence. A terrible stillness on the plateau.

“Irtimen, do you hear me? Use those little boxes of yours that let you speak our language!”

But how could they hear me, locked up inside that metal house of theirs?

I turned and looked back. Kilarion and Talbol had carried the preserved body of the Irtiman the last leg of the journey to the Summit. Now it lay like a child’s discarded doll at the edge of the plateau, where we had come up into this place.

I gestured to Kilarion. “Bring it here!” I called.

He nodded and scooped the Irtiman’s body up, perching it across his shoulder so that it dangled downward, and carried it toward me. I told him what to do and he set it down on the ground facing the little metal house of the Irtimen, propping its back against a rock in such a way that it was looking up at them.

“Irtimen!” I cried. “There is your friend! I found him wandering far down below, and we brought him with us for you, and we cared for him until he died! And kept him with us even after that! There he is! We have brought you your friend!”

I waited. What else could I do, but wait?

The faces disappeared from the windows of the metal house. But nothing else happened. It was a moment that seemed to stretch forever. I heard my people murmuring behind me. Perhaps they thought I had gone out of my mind. I was beginning to wonder myself whether I had.

But I waited. I waited.

Then a kind of door began sliding open on the metal house. A hatch, rather, in its side. A ladder appeared. It occurred to me that this must not really be a house, but rather the ship in which the Irtimen had traveled between the worlds. And the other house, the ancient ruined one, must be the one in which the settlers had come from Earth to our world thousands of years ago.

I saw a foot on the topmost rung of the ladder. An Irtiman was coming down.

He was very slender, with long flowing hair that looked like gold, and he carried a speaking-box under his arm like the one that our Irtiman had carried. Or under her arm, I should say, for this Irtiman wore only a light simple garment despite the biting cold, and I saw what surely were the swellings of two breasts beneath it. So this Irtiman was a she, in the sexual form. Had I interrupted a mating? No, no, more probably she wore that form all the time. How strange that seemed to me, that these people’s bodies should always be ready for mating like that! More than anything else it said to me that these Irtimen, who resembled us outwardly in so many trifling ways, were indeed alien creatures, creatures of some other creation.

The female Irtiman stepped forward until she was no more than a dozen paces from me. She glanced at the dead Irtiman on the ground, and although I had no real way of comprehending the meaning of an Irtiman’s facial expressions it seemed clear to me that the look on her face was one of displeasure, distaste, even disgust I think I saw some fear there also.

She said, “Did you kill him?”

Her voice, coming to me out of the language-box, was lighter than the other Irtiman’s had been, a high clear tone.

“No,” I said indignantly. “We are not murderers. I told you we found him wandering on the mountainside, and we cared for him. But he was very weary and before long he died. And I decided to bring him to you, because he seemed so badly to want to return to you, and I thought you would want to have him back.”

“You knew that we were here?”

“He said you were.”

“Ah.” She nodded, and I had no doubt of what that gesture meant. Then she turned and beckoned behind her, and another Irtiman came from the ship, and the third one after that. The second one looked male, with a heavy body and a broad dark face, and the third had breasts like the first and flowing hair that was amazingly long and of a startling scarlet color. Both of them had little tubes of metal in their hands. I noticed that the other one, the golden-haired one that had come out first, had a tube of the same sort fastened to her hip. I suppose they were weapons, these tubes. But the golden-haired one gestured to the other two and they put their tubes into little hip-cases like hers.

All three stood facing me. Insofar as I was able to read the meaning of their movements, it seemed to me that they were wary and uneasy. Well, they had good reason to be afraid of us. But they had come out of their ship; that was a sign of trust. One of them—it was the scarlet-haired one—went over to the dead one and knelt and stared into his face for a moment, and then she touched his cheek gently with her hand. She said something to the others, but she was not carrying a speaking-box, so of course I was unable to understand.

“Are you Pilgrims?” the male Irtiman said.

“Yes. There were forty of us when we left Jespodar, and these are all who remain.” I moistened my lips and took a deep breath. “If you know what Pilgrims are, then you must know that we have come here seeking our gods.”

“Yes. We know that.”

“Well, then, is this the Summit? Are the gods to be found on it?”

He looked down at the speaking-box a moment, and ran his hands along its sides as though he needed something to do with them just then. At length he said, somewhat warily, “This is the Summit, yes.”

“And the gods?” My throat was so dry I could barely get the question out.

“Yes, the gods.” A quick tense nod. “This is the place where your gods live.”

I could have wept at those words. My heart surged up in my breast with joy. The darkness of my despair dropped away from me. The gods! The gods, the gods, the gods at last! I looked toward Traiben in triumph, as if to say, See? See? As if to say, I knew all along that the gods must be here; for the Summit is a holy place.

“Where are they?” I asked, trembling.

And the Irtiman pointed, as Traiben had done, to the crevices of the far wall, where the savage Irtimen had run off to hide.

“There,” he said.

It was the most difficult hour of my life. It was like that for us all.

We sat in a circle on the pebbly ground in front of the little metal ship of the Irtimen that had come to rest on that cold flat place at the top of the World, and they told us the bitter truth about our gods.

The dead Irtiman had tried to hint at it, but he could not bring himself to reveal it directly. My father’s father had spoken of it too—the horror at the Summit—but would not tell me what it was. Traiben, of course, had understood it the moment we had attained the Summit. He had dreamed long ago that it was like this here: I remembered now his telling me that. And as for me, I had tried to reject it at every turn, obvious though it may have been. But this time there was no denying the validity of it even for me; for I was at the Summit and I could see with my own eyes what was here and what was not, and the things the Irtimen had to tell us now fell upon me with inexorable unanswerable force.

These were the things I learned from the Irtiman of the Summit at that dark hour. This is what I must share with you for the sake of your souls. Listen and believe, listen and remember.

They said—it was the golden-haired one who did most of the talking, the one who had come out first—that the race of Irtimen was a race that had journeyed everywhere in the Heavens, that traveled between the stars more easily than we went between one village and another. There were many worlds in the Heavens, some beautiful and pleasant, some not. And whatever world they found that had good air and water and things that Irtimen could eat, there they would plant a settlement of their own kind, unless that world was already peopled with its own people and had no room for them.

So it was that they had come to our world, which we call the World; and part of it was fit for Irtiman life and part was not, so they settled only in the part that suited them, here in the heights of Kosa Saag. That was long ago, hundreds of tens of years, more years than I could easily comprehend.

They could not comfortably go into the lowlands, because of the heat and the thick heavy air. And no one from the lowland villages ever came up here, because of the rigors of the journey and the increasing chill and thinness of the air in the higher levels, and because we had no need to venture into such remote difficult places when we had all the richness of the valleys to sustain us. We stayed in our own territory; and indeed we made it unlawful to climb to these heights, saying that Sandu Sando the Avenger had cast us down from them and we were never to return. And so all unknowing we shared the World with the people who had come across the Heavens from Earth; or if we knew anything of the beings who dwelled atop the Wall, we thought of them as gods, or demons, or some such awesome things.

Then the First Climber dared to ascend the Wall—breaking the prohibition against that which existed among our people—and reached the Summit, and encountered the Irtimen. And He was welcomed by them, and taken in, and they spoke with Him and showed Him the wonders of the village they had built up here. And—just as the Book of the First Climber relates—He learned from them the use of fire, and the way to make tools and raise crops and build sturdy buildings, and much else that was useful besides. Which He taught to us when He came down from the Wall, and that was the real beginning of our civilization.

It was the beginning also, the golden-haired Irtiman told us, of the annual Pilgrimage.

For we fell into the custom of sending our best people to the Summit to go before the Irtimen—whom we came to think of as gods, though in truth they were only mortal Irtimen—and pay homage to them, and learn such things from them as we still needed to know, and bring that knowledge back to the lowlands the way the First Climber had done. The journey was a long and difficult one, and only a few who attempted it survived to reach the Summit, for there were many perils along the way, and especially the thing called change-fire that the mountain gives off, which tempts us to alter our bodies beyond recognition; and of those who avoided the dangers of the Wall and did attain the Summit, just the merest handful ever returned. But to make a successful Pilgrimage was a great achievement, and those who managed it attained the highest honors we could bestow. So we contended amongst ourselves for the right to undertake the journey, and whenever any of us attained the Summit they were greeted warmly by the Irtimen, who taught them many valuable things as they had done for the First Climber.

That was a hard thing to swallow, that our beloved gods were mere mortals, strangers from some other world clinging to a precarious hold at the Summit because they were too feeble to go down into the lowlands. And that the First Climber whom we all revered had been so simple as to fall down before those strangers and offer them homage as if they were divine, and to perpetuate the obligation of that homage down through all the generations that followed Him. It was like gulping down lumps of hot metal, to accept those things as fact.

But there was worse, much worse, to come.

Time passed, said the golden-haired Irtiman, and things changed in the village at the Summit. For now she spoke of the thing we call change-fire. There are forces at work on Kosa Saag, said the Irtiman, natural forces, which cause living flesh to ebb and flow into strange new forms, bringing about bodily transformations far more startling than anything we of the lowland villages can achieve. So she confirmed what we had already come to believe, that the transformations on the Wall were brought about by the nature of the Wall itself. It was not magic that had created the Kingdoms and their dwellers, nor any decree of the gods; it was done by the work of physical forces. The prime one, she said, confirming our own belief, was change-fire, that is, a kind of secret light that the rock itself gives off; but she said that that was only one of many factors that brought about bodily change on this mountain. There was also the thinness of the air, which allowed the harsh light of Ekmelios to penetrate the loins of the Irtimen settlers and alter their seed. And also it was the water they drank; and also it was something in the soil. All these qualities of the Wall brought about great change in the course of time for the Irtimen who dwelled at the Summit. They underwent a strong and terrible transformation, these visitors from the stars. “Their minds grew dim,” she said. “Their bodies became deformed. They lost their knowledge. They turned into beasts.”

And she gestured toward the rocky crevices of the far wall, where the snarling shrieking savages who threw the rocks had fled.

“Yes,” Traiben murmured. “Of course.”

I glanced at him. He sat transfixed, fascinated, his great saucer eyes wide and staring. He seemed scarcely to be breathing.

“Can it be so?” I asked him. “Can the gods have turned into—into—”

Traiben waved me irritably into silence, and pointed toward the golden-haired Irtiman, who was speaking again.

“The Pilgrimages continued,” she said, “although now there was nothing for your people to learn from ours. It had become the custom to ascend the mountain, and the custom was so powerful that it could not be halted. But those who reached the Summit—and it was always only a few who made it all the way—were horrified at what they saw. Many of them chose not to return to their villages in the lowlands, because they were unwilling or afraid to reveal the truth. These settled along the slopes of Kosa Saag: this was the beginning of the Kingdoms of the Wall. The change-forces began to affect them as they had affected us. Other Pilgrims did go to their homes again, but they came back stunned into silence or madness by their experience.”

I looked around at my companions. The truth had come rolling in upon them like a boulder. Hendy was weeping; Thissa, very pale, stared off into remote distances; Naxa the Scribe and Ijo the Scholar, sitting side by side, had their mouths gaping open loosely as though they had been struck on the head by clubs. Of the others, some were wide-eyed with indignation and disbelief, some were trembling, some looked numb. Even stolid Kilarion was frowning and muttering and peering into the palms of his outstretched hands as though he hoped to find some sort of consolation in them.

Only Thrance seemed unshaken by what he had heard. He was sprawled out comfortably on the ground as if we were simply gathered around to hear a performance by a Singer or a Musician; and he was grinning. Grinning!

The Irtiman said, “The ship that brought me here, and my friends, landed here not very long ago. We knew that an Earth colony had once been planted on this world, and it is our task to go around from star to star, and visit the colonies that were founded on all the different worlds, and send back reports to Earth on whether they still exist, and what they have achieved. We found the children of the settlers who had come here from Earth, and attempted to make contact with them: but they are as you see them, wild creatures, ignorant, barbaric. And dangerous, though we didn’t realize that at first.”

She told us how the Irtiman we had found below had volunteered to go as far down the mountain as he could, in order to meet with the peoples of the Kingdoms and discover from them what had taken place here since the founding of the Irtiman colony. The others had remained with their ship, hoping to establish relations of some sort with their degenerate and brutish kinsmen. But once the wild Irtimen of the Summit had realized that there were only three of them, they had begun an almost continuous siege, using sticks and stones and crude spears, keeping them penned up in their vessel so that they could not go to the aid of their companion below.

“But you have weapons,” I said. “Why couldn’t you have driven them off? We had no trouble with them at all and we have only cudgels.”

She turned to face me. “Our weapons are lethal ones. If we used them we would have had to kill our own kin; and that was something we would not do.”

Which was a problem I had never considered before: when you only have weapons that kill, and none that merely injure, then it may come to pass that your weapons are of no value at all. And so you must huddle within your ship for safety, though you are almost as powerful as gods and your attackers are little more than beasts.

“When we had arrived at the Summit,” she went on, “we had frightened them away for the moment—perhaps because they thought we were the vanguard of a large army. But we were aware that very likely they would resume the attack before long, now that they saw how few we really were. And soon they will.”

That seemed to be all that she had to say to us. She thanked us for bringing back the body of their colleague; and then she and her two companions went back inside their ship, leaving us bereft and empty on this cold pebbled plain where the palaces of our gods were not to be found.

“There you are,” Thrance said, in the harshest of voices. “There you have it. Gods! What gods? There are no gods up here. There are only these monsters! And we are fools!” And he spat into the air.

“Be quiet,” Kilarion said to him.

Thrance turned to him and laughed, in that way of his that was like the scraping of metal against metal. “Are you upset, Kilarion? Yes, yes, I suppose you are. Who wouldn’t be? To climb all this way and find that your gods are nothing but a pack of dirty debased beasts no better than a bunch of rock-apes?”

“Quiet, Thrance!” Kilarion said again, with real menace in his voice.

I thought that they would fight. But Thrance only meant to goad; there was not even enough honor in him to follow through on his goading. Kilarion rose halfway and seemed about to spring upon him, and Thrance grinned and made a placating bow, practically touching his head to the ground, and said in a high, piping, infuriating voice, mockingly pathetic, “No offense meant, Kilarion! No offense! Don’t hit me! Please don’t hit me, Kilarion!”

“Let him be, Kilarion,” Galli muttered. “He isn’t worth wasting your effort on.”

Kilarion subsided, grumbling and murmuring to himself.

Thrance wasn’t finished, though. He said, “Do you know, once upon a time I was told that it was like this up here? That was when I was in a Kingdom called Mallasillima, on the border of the Lake of Fire. Some people of this Kingdom had been to the top and had seen the gods, so they said, and they told me what they were like. I thought they were lying to me, that they were inventing it all; but then the notion came to me that it might just be the truth, and I decided then and there that I would find some way of coming up here and seeing it myself. And now I have. Now I have seen with my own eyes that the tales that they told me in Mallasillima were true after all. Imagine! No gods! All a myth, all a lie! Nothing here but a bunch of degenerate—”

“Enough, Thrance,” I said.

“What’s the matter, Poilar? Can’t you face a little reality?”

But my despair had returned blacker and deeper even than before, and it had numbed me in my heart and in my mind so that I could make no answer to him.

Kilarion, seeing I was silent, rose again and went to Thrance and stood above him. “If you weren’t such a coward,” he said, “I’d teach you a little about reality. But Galli’s right. I shouldn’t soil my hands on you.”

“No, you shouldn’t,” Thrance said. “If you touch me, I might just change you into something that looks exactly like me. I can do that, you know. But you wouldn’t like to look like me, eh, Kilarion? Or would you? Would you?”

I went over to Thrance and moved between him and Kilarion, pushing Kilarion back a little way, and said to Thrance, “Listen to me. If you speak another word now, it’ll be your last. Is that clear?” Thrance bowed again, almost as deeply and just as contemptuously as he had bowed to Kilarion, and looked up into my face and said with his lips alone, not his voice, No offense, Poilar! No offense!

I turned my back on him.

To the others I said, “Let’s start setting up our camp.”

“Camp?” Naxa asked. “Are we staying here?”

“At least for tonight,” I replied.

“Why? What for?”

I gave him no answer. I had no answer. I was utterly bewildered, a leader without a plan. My mind was empty, my soul was empty. The whole purpose of my life had collapsed away from me. If what the Irtimen had said were true—and how could I deny it?—there were no gods, the Summit was inhabited by monsters, the Pilgrimage to which I had devoted half my life had been a hollow meaningless endeavor. I would have wept, but they were all watching me; and I think in any case this air that was hardly air at all had taken the capacity to weep away from me. I did not know what to do. I did not know what to think. Thrance, jeering mocker that he was, had spoken the truth: we were face to face with reality now—not a reality that we had expected to find, and it was a hard one to confront.

But I was still leader. I could continue to lead, even if I had no idea why, or toward what end. And possibly I would yet come to find—as even within the depths of my despair some small part of me still fiercely believed—that there are gods here somewhere, that the Summit was indeed the holy place we had thought it to be.

“We’ll sleep over here,” I said, indicating a little declivity that was sheltered somewhat from the raking Summit winds by a low outcropping of crumbled rock. I set Thissa to work casting a spell of protection. I sent Galli and Grycindil off to search for such firewood as this forlorn place might yield, and Naxa and Maiti to hunt out a spring or pond of fresh water. Kilarion, Narril, and Talbol I appointed as the first patrol, to march up and down in a wide circle along the open zone beyond the Irtiman starship and keep watch for any stirrings among the “gods.” For so I thought of them still, those beastlike things—the degenerate children of the gods, perhaps, but gods of a sort all the same.

Traiben said, “Do you have any work for me just now? Because if you don’t, I’d like to do a little scouting on my own.”

“What kind of scouting? Where?”

He nodded toward the ruined ship of the ancient Irtimen.

“I want to see what’s inside it,” he said. “Whether there are Irtiman things there—holy things remaining from the old days, things the Irtimen might have fashioned back in the time when they still really were gods—” And I saw a gleam in Traiben’s eyes that I knew only too well: the gleam that was the outward manifestation of that hunger of his to learn, to know, to poke his nose into every mystery the World had to offer.

It occurred to me that if ever we returned to the village—though whether we ultimately would or not, I could not say; I still had no plan, no sense of anything beyond the needs of the moment—we might indeed want to bring with us some tangible sacred object, something that had felt the touch of the gods, the true gods who had lived on this mountaintop in the days before their decline had begun. But it dismayed me to think of Traiben going into that tumbled mass of rusting girders and twisted metal sheeting by himself as night was beginning to descend. Who knew what skulking “gods” he might encounter in the darkness? I would not let him have permission to go. He begged and pleaded, but I refused to yield. It was madness, I said, for him to risk his life over there. Tomorrow, I told him, a larger group of us might investigate it, if it seemed safe then to make the attempt.

Dusk was coming on. The dark sky grew darker. The stars came forth, and a single icy moon. The Irtiman starship cast a long sharp shadow that reached almost to my feet. I stood by myself, staring somberly across the plain at the place where the miserable creatures whom we had hoped would be our gods were hidden.

Hendy came up to me. Transformed as she was, she towered over me by a head and a half, though she seemed as filmy as a ghost. Fleshless as she was now, she must be freezing in this bitter cold; but she showed no sign of discomfort. She put her hand lightly on my arm.

“So now we know everything,” she said.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose we do. Or enough, at any rate.”

“Will you kill yourself, Poilar?”

I looked at her, amazed. “Why would I do that?”

“Because we have the answer now, and the answer is a very dark one. Either there are no gods and never were, or the gods are here and have undergone a terrible fall, which is even a sadder thing. So either way there is no hope.”

“Is that what you think?” I asked her, and I remembered her vision of eternal death imprisoned in a box precisely large enough to contain her body, and not a bit larger. She had spent much of her life dwelling in some cheerless frost-bound realm of the soul very different from the one I had inhabited. “Why do you say that? There’s always hope, Hendy, so long as we’re alive and breathing.”

“Hope of what? That Kreshe and Thig and Sandu Sando will appear, despite everything, and lift us up to their bosoms? That we will see the Land of Doubles in the sky? That life will be good and kind and comforting?”

“Life is what we make it,” I said. “The Land of Doubles is somebody’s fine fable, I suppose. And Kreshe and Thig and Sandu Sando and all the rest certainly exist, somewhere else, perhaps, far beyond our range of vision. It was only a story, that they lived at the Summit, invented by those who had no idea of the truth. A fable and nothing more. Why should gods who are capable of building worlds live in a disagreeable rocky place like this when they have all of Heaven to choose from?”

“The First Climber said they were here. The First Climber whom we revere.”

“He lived a long time ago. Stories become distorted over a long span of time. What He found up here were wise beings from another world, who offered useful knowledge. Was it His fault that we decided that they were gods?”

“No,” she said. “I suppose not. They were gods, in a way, I suppose. At least we can think of them that way. But as you say, it was all a long time ago.” She seemed to disappear into her own bleak thoughts for a moment. Then she gave me a close look “Well, what will we do now, Poilar?”

“I don’t know. Go back to the village, I suppose.”

“Do you want to?”

“I’m not sure. Do you?”

She shook her head. She seemed more wraithlike than ever, as remote from me as the stars and just as unreachable, though she was standing right beside me. I felt as though I could almost see through her.

“I have no place in the village,” Hendy said. “When I was stolen away from it, I lost my place in it forever. After I came back I always felt like a stranger there.”

“So you would settle in one of the Kingdoms, then?”

“Perhaps. Would you?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything anymore, Hendy.”

“The Kingdom where your father’s father rules, for instance? You liked it there. You could return to it. We both could.”

I shrugged “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Or some Kingdom lower down, one that we didn’t pass through on the way up. Some pretty place, not too strange. Nothing like the Kavnalla, or the Kvuz.”

“Or we could found one of our own,” I said, more to hear the sound of my voice than for any other reason, for I still had nothing like a plan, no plan at all. “There’s plenty of room on Kosa Saag for new Kingdoms.”

“Would you?” she asked me, and there was almost a note of eagerness in her tone.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything, Hendy.”

I felt utterly drained, a hollow husk. This day’s revelations had cut the heart from me. No wonder Hendy had wondered if I was going to kill myself. I would not do that, no. But so far as what I was going to do now, I had no idea of that whatever.