Kingdoms of the Wall

8

From the start of our climb we had been ascending the outer rim of the Wall, making our way through the gulleys and pathways and outcroppings that jutted from its great face. So it was easy for me to choose each day’s route: it stretched before us like a narrow continuing highway winding along the face of the Wall and there was no question about the best way to go, for there was only one. But we were unable now to proceed any further in that fashion, because we had arrived at a place where an impassable overhanging barrier of unscalable rock rose straight up in front of us to a height that was beyond the limit of our vision. We studied it a long while and there was not one of us who saw any way that we could master it. No route seemed to lead around to the side of it and to climb it was unthinkable.

So we followed the only route that was possible to take, which sent us turning eastward, into an interior valley of Kosa Saag. There we camped for a little while in a sort of forest, cool and shadowy, on this inner arm of the Wall. I say “a sort of forest” because the plants that grew in that place, though they were as tall as trees, were not anything at all like any tree of the lowland we had ever seen. They had no woody structure, but were more like giant blades of grass, or, rather, like bunches of grass stuck together, for each trunk seemed to be made up of a dozen or more thin, narrow shafts sprouting from a single base. Sticking out all along their sharp-angled sides, in place of leaves, were scores of wedge-shaped shoots that looked like hatchet-heads.

When you touched one of these trees, it made your hand tingle. If you held on very long after the tingling started, your skin began to burn.

There were small green birds of an unfamiliar kind in these trees, perching by twos and threes on the edges of the hatchetheads. Their bodies were round and plump, with tiny comical scarlet legs barely visible beneath their bellies, and their wings were short and so weak that it was all they could do to flutter from one hatchethead to another. It would be hard to conceive of birds that were more unlike the terrible Wall-hawks. And yet these clownish little birds were not to be taken so lightly, for their eyes were very fierce, strange white orbs that burned like miniature suns in their foreheads. There was bitter hatred in those eyes, and deep menace. Indeed, when Gazin the Juggler stood beneath one of those trees and called out laughingly to the birds above him, because their roundness and fatness amused him so, they responded with a downpouring of sticky spittle that brought howls of pain from him, and sent him rushing across the forest floor to plunge into the stream that ran through its middle.

The water of that stream was red as blood, very curious to behold. I feared for Gazin. But he sprang up out of it unharmed by that strange-colored water, rubbing at his arms and chest where the bird-spittle had struck him. There were welts and blisters all over him. We kept away from those trees thereafter.

Because I felt uneasy in this alien place, I asked Thissa of the Witch House to cast a spell for our safety before we settled in for the night. Camping on the Wall’s edge, we had spent our nights in narrow, secluded places, easily defended, but in this relatively flat terrain we were at the mercy of any wandering denizen of the Wall’s interior districts.

She said, “I want something of Gazin’s, for he was the first one injured here.”

Gazin gave her one of his juggling-balls. Thissa drew something magical on it with the tip of her finger and buried it in a soft place in the ground beside the stream, and lay down to press her cheek against it Then, still lying that way, she recited the spell for the safety of travelers. That is a long and very costly spell, which draws much energy from the Witch who utters it, because it is earth-magic and she must send some piece of her soul into the soul of the spirit of the place where it is recited. As she spoke it I saw her amber eyes lose their brightness and her slender body go slack with fatigue. But she gave unstintingly of herself to ensure our safety here.

I knew the spell would be a good one. I had had faith in Thissa’s powers ever since that dark time in the third year of my training as a candidate, when I had begun to fear I would not be chosen for the Pilgrimage, and had gone to Thissa in her charm-seller’s shop to ask her to cast a spell for my success. Surely the charm that she gave me then must have played a powerful role in my being selected. It was comforting to know that we had a Witch of her capability among us.

We pitched our bedrolls in an open place, far from the hatchethead trees and their unpleasant little birds. Stum and Narril were posted as the first guards in case Wall-hawks or rock-apes or other troublemakers should arrive in the night, and I appointed Min the Scribe and Aminteer the Weaver as the second shift on watch.

The stars were unusually bright in the clear cool air that prevailed here, and had a hard sheen. Someone began calling off their names: there is Ysod, that one is Selinune, that is Myaul. From Naxa the Scribe came a chilly little laugh. “Stars of ill omen,” he said. “Ysod is the star that crushes other stars and devours them. Myaul ate her own worlds. The light of Selinune is light that screams.”

“Save your wisdom for some other time, Naxa,” came a woman’s voice, perhaps Fesild’s or Grycindil’s. “Don’t frighten us with your filthy tales while we’re trying to fall asleep.”

“And there is Hyle among them,” continued Naxa, unperturbed. It was in Naxa’s nature never to let up, when there was knowledge he wanted to share with you. Scribes are worse even than Scholars when it comes to giving lectures; for everyone understands that the Scholar is learned, but the Scribe, who has picked up his knowledge while copying the texts of Scholars, is eager to impress you with what he has absorbed. “Hyle is the worst demon-star of them all,” Naxa said. “Why, I could tell you stories of Hyle—”

“Good night, Naxa.”

“The gods were walking among the stars,” Naxa said, “and they came to Hyle, and Kreshe put out his hand—”

“I’ll put out my hand and break your head,” a new voice said. Kilarion’s, it was. “Shut up and let us sleep, will you?”

This time Naxa relented. There was no more talk of demon-stars out of him that night.

I drifted off to sleep soon afterward. But in a little while I felt someone getting in beside me.

“Hold me, Poilar. I’m freezing. I can’t stop shivering.”

It was Thissa. The traveler-spell had drained her more deeply perhaps than she had expected, and her entire body was trembling. I took her in my arms and almost at once, because I had gone so long without a mating, I began to slip into the Changes. In mating there is comfort, in mating there is unity and harmony, the transcending of self into something higher and deeper, and in a time of dark fear or of great stress we turn naturally to one another and enter the sexual state. It happened without my willing it, without my even wanting it. I felt the familiar stirring at the base of my belly, the shifting of the flesh as my hard maleness emerged from its dormancy.

Thissa felt it too. Softly she said, “Please, not now—I’m so tired, Poilar.”

I understood. She had not come to me for Changes. She had a strange self-sufficiency, that woman: many Witches do. I forced myself back toward the neuter state, but it was difficult for me. My control kept breaking, my body slid again and again toward readiness. But I could tell that Thissa was in the state without breasts just now and I knew that if I touched her between the thighs I would find no aperture waiting for me. She was utterly neuter and intended to stay that way. I had no choice but to respect that. I struggled for control, and attained it, finally. We lay together calmly. Her head was against my chest, her legs were entwined with mine. She sobbed from weariness, but it was a soft, easy sobbing.

She said, after a time, “Someone here will die tomorrow.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“I saw it in the fire.”

I was silent a moment. “Do you know who it will be?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Or how?”

“No,” she said. “The fire was too low, and I was too weary to conjure it up again.”

“We’ve only begun our climb. It’s too soon for deaths.”

“Death comes whenever it pleases. This will be only the first of many.”

I was silent again for a long time. Then I said, “Will it be me, do you think?”

“No. Not you.”

“You’re sure of that, are you?”

“There’s too much life in you, Poilar.”

“Ah.”

“But it will be one of the men.”

“Jaif? Dorn? Talbol?”

She put her hand over my lips. “I told you, I wasn’t able to see. Not clearly. One of the men. Let’s sleep now, Poilar. Just hold me. Hold me. I’m so cold.”

I held her. After a time I felt the tension leave her body as she drifted off into sleep. But I remained wide-awake myself, thinking of the death that was marching toward us even at this moment. Perhaps the gods had chosen Muurmut: I would shed no tears for him. But what if it was Traiben, despite all his hunger to see things and understand them? I would not be able to bear the death of Traiben. Then I thought of this one, and that one, and still another. I lay like that for hours, or so it seemed. Overhead the stars grew even brighter and harder. I feared them: poison-stars, demon-stars, death-stars. Ysod, Myaul, Selinune, Hyle. I felt myself shriveling beneath their furious light.

Then Thissa was awake again.

“Go ahead,” she said, in a soft voice different from the one she had used before. “You can if you want to.”

She had become fully female. Her slim body, which had been nothing but cool smooth skin and fragile bones, was fuller, more womanly now. I felt soft round breasts against my chest. My hand slipped downward and there was an aperture, and it was warm and moist and throbbing.

Why this act of kindness? Thissa was altogether exhausted, and I knew from years gone by that she was not fond of mating even at the best of times. Had she lied to me, and was I the one who would die tomorrow, and this her way of sending me off to my death with a warm tender memory fresh in my mind? That was a somber thought, almost somber enough to discourage me from the mating. Almost. But my desires were stronger than my fear. She opened to me and our bodies joined; and though I could feel that disconcerting strangeness which her body emanated, as I had on earlier occasions when we had been lovers—an odd troubling tingling sensation which came from her in moments like this, somewhat like the throbbing sensation which certain strange fishes give off when you graze against them in the river—she brought me quickly to pleasure, quickly, quickly.

Afterward she said, “You are not the one who will die, Poilar. I’m certain of that.”

Had she read my mind?

No, not even the House of Witches can do that, I told myself. Except for those Witches who are also santha-nillas, and santha-nillas are very few and far between.

I lay awake a little while longer, staring up at Hyle and Selinune. Then one of the moons—I think it was Tibios—came into the sky and its brightness dulled the terrible glare of the stars, for which I was grateful. I closed my eyes and fell into a troubled sleep, and then, I suppose, into a much deeper one: when I awoke we were long into morning and everyone else was up and about. Thissa smiled shyly at me from the other side of the stream. I realized they had not wanted to wake me; and I felt more and more certain that I was the one who had been singled out for death this day, and that all of them knew it, and that was why I had been allowed to sleep. But of course that was not so.

The death—our first death on Kosa Saag—came with great suddenness when it came. That was about midmorning, when we were well up above our campsite of the night before, crossing a narrow plateau that was bordered on one side by what looked like a lake of pitch and on the other by a steep shoulder of the Wall. The day was very warm. Ekmelios blazed right into our faces and there was no hiding from him. In places the ground was cracked open and narrow little columns of yellow-and-green light, something like marshlight, were rising from it. The air in these places had a dark, oily smell. Some of these small lights had broken free of the ground and were wandering about by themselves, easy as ghosts. We kept well away from them.

As we passed through a grove of small waxy-looking trees with thick crowns of glossy white leaves, a band of rock-apes abruptly appeared as if they had risen straight out of the earth, screaming and chattering, and started tormenting us with pebbles, rocks, gobbets of mud, anything that their gnarled little hands could lift and throw.

These apes of the Wall were like cruel caricatures of men, miniature figures no more than knee-high to us, and gnarled and hairy and hideous. Their arms and legs were short and crooked, their noses were flat and huge, their eyes were immense, their feet turned outward and upward like huge hands. Yellow fangs jutted from their mouths. Reddish fur covered their squat little bodies and they had great tufts of it, like beards, around their necks. No wonder they hated us and bedeviled us so: for we were what they would have wanted to be, if the gods had not chosen to make them ugly.

At a distance they were nothing more than nuisances. But here, no more than twenty or thirty paces from us, they were dangerous. Their missiles fell upon us in thick clouds. There was not one of us who was not hit and bruised. The safety-spell that Thissa had cast for us in the forest had no power out here. We shouted at them in our fiercest way, and Narril and Thuiman pulled ropes from their packs and began to crack them like whips to frighten them off. That worked for a time; but then the apes saw how little harm the ropes could do and they returned, noisier and more bothersome than ever.

A great soft clod of greasy mud caught Stapp of the House of Judges in the face. It stunned him for a moment: I saw him coughing and gagging as he peeled it away from his eyes and lips and nostrils. Hardly was he able to breathe again but they hit him with a second one, even softer and looser, which splattered all over his face and chest.

That seemed to drive him berserk. Stapp was ever a man of quick temper. I saw him snorting and spitting mud. Then he yelled wildly and pulled out his cudgel and rushed madly forward, laying about him to right and left. Taken aback by his frantic onslaught, the rock-apes retreated a little way. Stapp pursued them, swinging his cudgel with lunatic zeal, as they edged back toward the pitchy lake. I called to him to come back, that he was moving too far away from us, but there was never any getting Stapp to listen to reason when his anger was upon him.

Then Kilarion started to run toward him. I thought at first that he too wanted to join the fray, that in his simple fashion he envied Stapp his fun; but no, this time Kilarion meant only to rescue him from his own folly. I heard him calling out to Stapp, “Get back, get back, the beasts will kill you.” Kilarion ripped one of the little waxy-looking trees from the ground as he ran and swung it like a broom, sweeping the apes out of his path as though they were bits of trash. One after another they went soaring through the air as they were struck, and dropped in dazed heaps many paces away.

But for Stapp, Kilarion’s help came too late. One moment he stood by the edge of the lake, cudgeling apes in hot fury; and in the next, an ape had leaped upon his shoulders from the side and drawn its sharp talons across Stapp’s throat, so that a gout of dark blood came leaping out; and another moment more and he was falling backward, backward, twisting as he fell. He landed face downward on the black pitchy surface of the lake and sank slowly into it while his blood bubbled up about him.

“Stapp!” Kilarion screamed, kicking apes aside so fiercely that one of them perished with every kick. He held the little tree that he carried out toward the fallen Stapp. “Grab the tree, Stapp! Grab it!”

Stapp did not move. His life’s blood had gone surging out of him in no more than an instant or two and he lay dead in the thick tar. Kilarion, at the lake’s border, slowly pounded the crown of the tree against the ground in dull rage and bellowed in anger and frustration.

It wasn’t easy to take Stapp from the lake. The pitch held him in a gluey grasp, and we did not dare set foot in it, so we had to pull him out with grappling hooks. Maiti the Healer and Min the Scribe put together some words out of their memories to say for him, drawing the text from the Book of Death, and Jaif sang the dirge while Tenilda played the dirge tune on her pipe. As for the special words that one must say when a member of the House of Judges dies, we couldn’t remember them well, for there were no other Judges among us, but we did our best to say something. Then we buried him under a high cairn of boulders and moved on.

“Well,” Kath said, “he was too hot-headed to have been a good Judge anyway.”

When I looked back, several of the little yellow-and-green marshlights were dancing atop Stapp’s cairn.

Now we moved outward toward the front edge of the Wall again, for on that side there was a kind of natural ramp which promised to take us upward, whereas inland the mountain’s core rose in a single gleaming breathtaking thrust that struck our hearts with terror. For many days we wound our way along this outer ramp. It rose steeply but not unmanageably in some places, held level in others, and in some actually began to descend, giving us the disheartening thought that all we had accomplished in these days of struggle had been to discover a path leading down the far side of Kosa Saag that would take us to some unfriendly village of that unknown territory. But then we began to climb again, still keeping to the outer face of the Wall.

Strange winged creatures rode the air currents high up in the great abyss that lay just beside our line of march. Not Wall-hawks, no; these had feathered wings. They seemed to be of colossal size, bigger than Wall-hawks: as big as roundhouses, for all we could tell. But we weren’t sure. They were too far above us to judge. In the open space above us there was no way to establish scale. We saw them outlined against the brightness of the sky as they sailed on the lofty winds. Abruptly one would plummet like a falling stone, catching itself in midfall, rising again as if scanning for prey, finally darting inward to pick some hapless creature off the face of the Wall in one of the zones of the upper levels. It was a frightening thing to see, though they never came down as far as the level where we were marching now. Would we encounter them higher up? Would they swoop on us as we saw them swooping on other prey now? That was a dismaying thought, that there would be no safe harbor up there, that the Wall would test us and test us and test us, and would break us if it could. We might do better to turn again and head toward the interior of the Wall, I thought, toward some sheltered plateau where those deadly birds would not venture. But we had to go where it was possible to go, and for the time being the interior folds and gorges of the Wall were inaccessible to us and we were compelled to follow these outer trails.

As we ascended I could see more and more of the World. It was far bigger than I had ever imagined, rolling outward to the horizon for league upon league beyond all counting. Wherever there was a break in the white clouds below, I was able to make out a host of rivers and hills and meadows, and more rivers and hills and meadows beyond those, and long green stretches of forest with dark smudges within them that I supposed were villages, so far away that very likely no one from any of the villages that cluster at the base of the Wall has ever been to them. Perhaps I was looking at the city where the King lives, for all I knew. I tried to imagine him in his palace, writing decrees that would go forth to provinces that were so far away that the new decrees would be obsolete and meaningless by the time word reached them that such-and-such a law had gone into effect.

At the very edge of the World, I saw the sharp gray line of the horizon where the sky came down and touched the forest. What a strange place that must be, I thought, where your feet were on the ground and your head was in the sky!

Was it possible to get there some day and find out what it was like? I stood in wonder, trying to comprehend how long it might take, traveling on foot, to reach that place where the sky met the land.

“You would never reach it,” said Traiben, “not even if you marched for a thousand thousand lifetimes.”

“And why is that, can you tell me? It looks far, yes, but not as far as all that.”

Traiben laughed. “You would march forever.”

“Explain yourself,” I said, starting to grow irritated with him now.

“The World has no end,” said Traiben. “You can walk around it forever and ever and the horizon will always lie ahead of you as you walk toward it.”

“No. How can that be? When you walk somewhere, sooner or later you get where you’re going.”

“Think, Poilar. Think. Imagine yourself walking around a huge round ball. A ball has no end.”

“But the World does,” I said, with a surly edge to my voice. Traiben could be maddening when he insisted on making you think. Thinking was play for him, but it was work for most of the rest of us.

“The World is like a ball. See, see, where it curves away from us in the distance?”

I stared. “I don’t see.”

“Look harder.”

“You are a great pain sometimes, Traiben.”

“No doubt that I am.”

“And any fool can tell you that the World is flat.”

“Any fool can, yes,” he said. “Certainly that is true. But all the same, saying so doesn’t make it flat.”

I looked toward the horizon. Perhaps the land did curve away a little out there. A little, perhaps. But what Traiben was saying was blasphemy, and it made me uncomfortable. The World is the Boat of Kreshe, floating on the surface of the Great Sea. Boats are longer than they are wide, and not round anywhere. A ball will float on water also, yes. But the World is not a ball. Still, I had to admit to myself that I could see a slight curvature far off near the horizon.

A trick of my vision, I told myself. The floor of the World is as flat as a carpet and it continues in that flatness until one comes to the edge, where the land drops off into the Great Sea. Traiben is too intelligent for his own good, I told myself: sometimes he sees things that are not there and builds strange theories about them, and then he treats you with condescension because you will not agree with him that things are the way he tells you that they are.

I shrugged and we began to talk of other matters. Otherwise I might have been tempted after a time to throw him over the side of the Wall, which is no way to treat your closest friend.