Kingdoms of the Wall

6

Above hithiat lie the ghost-realms, where—so we had been taught—certain Houses of our village had dwelled long ago, until they angered the gods in some fashion and were forced to abandon their homes. During our training our teachers had told us a little of what had happened then, how the part of the mountain where these ancient folk lived had become less and less hospitable each year and the people who lived there had had to relinquish their settlements little by little as conditions worsened, moving steadily to lower zones until no one dwelled on the mountain at all any longer and our race was entirely confined to life in its lowland valley. But we were not prepared for the deathly look of the place, or the strangeness of it—any of us but Kilarion, and I think even he had forgotten how frightful a place it was.

The road here was broken and dangerous. At least it was a road, though; later on we would have no such luxury. But the paving-stones were split and broken and lifted at angles so that in some areas it would have been better to have none at all, and more than once we crossed a region where swift streams had cut deep gullies away under the path so that the paving-stones were balanced over emptiness and seemed ready to crack beneath our feet and drop us into an abyss. We fastened prongs to ropes and threw them across to the far side to anchor them in the earth, and crossed with care, clinging to the ropes. Some of us were shivering with fright at every step. But the fragile roadway somehow held together.

The air was changing too. We had expected it to get cooler as we went higher, but in this zone it was oddly hot and moist and dank, more so than on the hottest lowland day. No rain fell, but billowing bursts of wet steam issued noisily from vents in the flank of the mountain. The steam had a sour, sulphurous smell that utterly pervaded the atmosphere, just as Kilarion had warned. Everything was rotten and mildewed here. Pale spores floated in the air. Things grew on things. Dense beards of white mossy fungus coated the whole landscape. We went lurching through it, for there was no avoiding it, and it tangled itself around our legs and hands and made us choke and sneeze. The trees were wrapped in thick sheets of this stuff that trembled in the wind so that the trees themselves seemed to be shaking. They looked like the ghosts of trees. The rocks too were fouled with this deathly moss. Their surfaces quivered like live things, or like dead things that could not hold still. I thought I understood now what Kilarion had meant when he said, “Everything moves around.”

The Wall itself seemed to be rotting. When you touched it with your fingertip it crumbled, that was how soft the stone was. There were caves everywhere, some of them very deep—dark mysterious holes leading into the heart of the great mountain. We looked into them but of course could see nothing and did not choose to investigate.

There was a constant fall of little pebbles, and sometimes larger things, that had rubbed loose from the higher regions. Now and again we would hear a great rattling and thudding from above and chunks of rock bigger than our heads would come bounding down. Some fell very close indeed to us. The crumbling went on all the time, a steady loss of substance, so that I began to imagine that Kosa Saag must have been ten times as big a million years ago as it was now, and that in another million years it would have crumbled away into something no bigger than a stick.

An hour or so above Hithiat we encountered the first ghosts.

We were no longer walking along a narrow strip on the edge of the mountain but now were on a flat, broad outcropping that was almost like a plateau, though a slight sense of strain told us that we were continuing to climb with every step. Finally we came to Varhad milestone, the last of the series. It was weathered and worn, no more than a splinter of black rock with a few barely legible letters visible on its moss-encrusted surface.

At this level the air was thicker and more moist than ever and its smell was abominable. In the rocky, foggy meadows on our left-hand side we discovered the ruins of the abandoned settlements. The ancient inhabitants of this region had lived in narrow tapering huts made of long slabs of pink stone set into the ground on an inward lean and covered above with thatching. The thatching had long since rotted away, all but a few bleached strands, and the jagged stone slabs were festooned with shrouds of the white fungus. There were groups of these tottering houses, ten or fifteen in each little group, clustered every few hundred paces apart. They were frightening to behold: decayed, dismal, forlorn. The ruined houses looked like funeral monuments. Truly we had entered a village of the dead.

“This is where the ghosts are,” Kilarion told us.

But we saw no ghosts anywhere about, and Kilarion grew red-faced and insistent when Naxa the Scribe and Kath the Advocate jeered at him as a tale-teller. His shape began to flutter as his rage mounted; his face became round and meaty and his neck shrank into his shoulders. The dispute got hotter and hotter until suddenly Kilarion gathered little Kath up under his arm like a bundle of dirty clothes and rushed with him toward the brink of the cliff, as though intending to hurl him over. Kath squalled like a beast being dragged to slaughter. We all shouted in alarm but none of us was in a position to stop him except Galli. As Kilarion went lurching past her, Galli caught him by his free arm and swung him around with all her considerable strength, so that he lost his grip on Kath and went slamming into one of the ruined huts that stood nearby. He hit it so hard that the cluster of stone slabs fell apart and went toppling over.

Half a dozen strange pallid creatures had been hiding in the hut. They sprang up now, terrified, and began to caper about in wild circles, flapping their arms like birds. I suppose they were hoping to be able to fly away from us. But all they had were arms, not wings.

“Those are the ghosts!” someone screamed. “The ghosts! The ghosts!”

I had never seen such horrid sights. They had the shape of men, but were very long and thin, more like walking skeletons than live people, and they were covered from head to foot with strands of the white fungus that infested this entire zone. It had woven itself into their hair, it ran along their limbs like a garment, bunches of it jutted from their mouths and ears and nostrils. With every movement they made they released clouds of spores, which caused us to back away in fright, fearing that we would breathe them in and be contaminated by the terrible stuff that sprouted from them.

But these folk evidently wanted no more to do with us than we with them. It took them some few moments to overcome their terror, and then they turned and scampered up into some hillocks beyond their huts, leaving a thinning residue of spores in the air behind them. We covered our faces with our hands, scarcely daring to draw a breath.

“You see?” Kilarion said, after a time, when it seemed safe to put down our hands and move along. “Did I lie to you? This place is full of ghosts. They are the spirits of the old villagers that this white mossy stuff has conjured up.”

“And you say you made the Changes with one of them?” Kath asked in a stinging tone. He had recovered now from his fright, and red blotches of anger glowed in his cheeks. “Were you so lustful when you were a boy, Kilarion, that you would do the Changes with something like that?”

“She was only partly a ghost,” said Kilarion, looking aggrieved. “She was young and very beautiful, and there was just a little of the white stuff on her.”

“A beautiful ghost!” Kath said scathingly, and we all laughed.

Kilarion grew red again. He glared at Kath and I got myself ready to interfere in case he was having any thoughts of making a second try at throwing Kath over the edge of the cliff. But Tenilda the Musician said something soft to him that soothed him and he growled and turned aside.

I could see that Kilarion, like Muurmut, might be a problem. He was slow of thought but easy to anger, a bad combination, and enormously strong besides. We would have to handle him with some care.

The ghosts we had frightened were watching us from a distance, peeping out from behind the mossy hillocks. But they ducked down shyly whenever they saw us looking at them. We continued on.

There were other clusters of ruined huts ahead. All of them were tightly wrapped in the shroud-fungus. Everything here was. A more dismal landscape would be hard to imagine: white, silky, bleak. The trees, small and crooked and practically leafless, were almost entirely swathed. Patches of old dead fungus lay everywhere underfoot, forming a sort of white crust that crunched as we stepped on it. Even the Wall, which here lay far to our left, had a whitish glint as though the fungus had taken possession of great sections of it also.

Now and again we would see more ghosts flitting about on the hillsides. The elongated wraithlike beings were too timid ever to come near us, but ran back and forth on the slopes, trailing long streamers of their fungus-shrouds behind them.

To Traiben I said, “What are these ghosts, do you think? Pilgrims, are they? Who never went any further up the mountain, but became infested with this white fungus and had to remain down here where it lives?”

He shrugged. “That could be. But I suspect otherwise. What I think is that this region never was abandoned by the ancient settlers, despite the things our teachers told us.”

“You mean what we’re encountering are the descendants of the very people who built these huts long ago?”

“So I believe, yes. This was probably good farming land once. Then the shroud-stuff came and ruined it. But instead of fleeing, these people stayed. There must be a low level of change-fire here, that has worked a transformation on them of a sort, and now the fungus is a part of them. Perhaps it helps to keep them alive. There doesn’t seem much to eat in this zone.”

With a shudder I said, “And will it become a part of us the same way?”

“Very likely not, or there’d be no Returned Ones. Every Pilgrim who goes up the Wall and comes down again must pass through this district. But they don’t bear the infestation.” He gave me a somber grin. “Still, I think we would do well to wrap wet cloths over our faces to keep the spores away. And we should make our camp for the night in some happier place.”

“Yes,” I said. “That seems wise to me too.”

We hurried on through this blighted land of ghosts with our heads down and our faces covered.

Ghosts followed us all the way, keeping well back from us. Some of them seemed more bold than the others, dancing up to us and whirling so that their shrouds swept out airily behind them, but we threw rocks at them to prevent them from coming close. After what we had seen and what Traiben had said, we all dreaded the fungus. It was all around us, impossible to avoid. I wondered if I had already taken it into my lungs. Perhaps it was hatching right now in some moist dark cavern of my body, seizing possession of my interior and soon to issue forth from my mouth and my nostrils. The thought sickened me and I went to the side of the road and violently heaved up everything that was in my stomach, praying that I might be heaving up any spores that were within me also.

Kilarion was proven a truth-teller once more before we left the ghost-land; for we even saw a ghost as beautiful as the one he had claimed he had made the Changes with, that time when he came up here with his father when he was a boy.

She appeared on a rocky ledge just above us and stood singing and crooning at us in an eerie, quavering voice. Like all her kind she was slender and very long-limbed, but just a faint coating of fungus covered her breasts and loins, and none was visible around her face. What little she had on her body gave her a sleek, satiny sheen and made her look soft to the touch, altogether appealing. Her eyes were golden and had a slight slant to them, and her features had a strange purity. A beautiful creature indeed, this ghost. She said something to us in soft, furry tones that we could not understand, and beckoned as if inviting us to come up and dance with her.

I saw Kilarion trembling. The muscles of his huge body bunched and heaved and cords stood out along his throat. He looked to her and there was a desperate expression in his eyes.

Perhaps this was the very ghost he had embraced here long ago. No doubt she still had some magic over his soul even now.

I kicked sharply at his leg to get his attention and pointed up ahead when he gave me an angry glance.

“Keep moving, Kilarion,” I said.

“Who are you to tell me what to do?”

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life living in this place?”

He muttered something under his breath. But he understood what I was saying, and walked on, eyes averted.

After a time I looked back. The ghost-witch, for surely a witch of some kind was what she was, was still beckoning sinuously to us. But now, with the light coming from behind her, I was able to see the faint pale cloud of spores rising about her lovely head. She went on gesturing to us until we could no longer see her.

We marched grimly through that land of hot dank mists and quivering fungus shrouds and evil sulphurous stinks for hour after hour as the day waned. There seemed to be no end to it. But at last, toward nightfall, we emerged into a region where the air was clear and sweet and the rocks were free of fungus and the trees once more had leaves, and we gave thanks to Kreshe the Savior for our escape.