Kingdoms of the Wall

10

I could not tell you how long we spent in crossing that broad plateau. Many weeks, it must have been: but each day melted into the next and we kept no count. It was a rough, barren, scrubby place, sun-baked and stark and not nearly so flat as it had appeared from its edge, with dips and ridges and valleys and chasms to bedevil us every day. Even where it was level, the land was rocky and difficult to traverse. The vegetation was coarse and, for the most part, useless to us: woody, stringy, thorny, all but leafless, offering little but bitter roots and dry tasteless fruit. The only animals we saw were small gray furry creatures, ugly and scrawny and lopsided, which scuttered before us as we marched. They were too quick for us to catch nor would they come near the traps we set, but it was just as well: we would not have had much nourishment from them, I think, nor any pleasure. The occasional shallow streams we found were sparsely inhabited also, though by patient hours of fishing we came up with netfuls of bony silvery wrigglers out of which we made meals of a sort.

From the second day of the crossing, or maybe it was the third, I felt myself beginning to hate the plateau. I had never felt such hatred in my life as the hatred I felt for that plateau. It was a wasteland that gave us no upwardness, and the upwardness was all I desired. Yet it had to be crossed. So in its way it was part of the upwardness, a necessity of the route; but I hated it all the same. There was no grandeur here. The great peaks of the rift were behind us, hidden from our view by tricks of the land; and the great peak that was Kosa Saag, the peak of peaks, lay impossibly far in front of us across the plateau; and so I hated it, because it must be crossed.

We marched from dawn to dusk, day upon day upon day, and the mountain seemed to remain at the same distance all the time. I said as much one afternoon when I had grown very weary.

“The same distance? No, worse, it moves backward as we approach,” said Naxa dourly. “We’ll never reach it even if we march for a thousand years.”

And voices came from behind us, grumbling and muttering to much the same purpose. Muurmut’s, of course, was prominent among them.

“What do you say, Poilar?” Naxa asked me. His voice was like an auger, drilling into my soul. “Should we give up the climb and build ourselves a village here? For surely we gain nothing by going forward and I doubt very much that we could ever find our way back.”

I made no reply. Already I regretted having spoken in the first place, and it would be folly to let myself be drawn into a debate on whether we should abandon our Pilgrimage.

Grycindil the Weaver, who had grown very sharp-tongued on the plateau, turned to Naxa and said, “Be quiet, will you? Who needs your gloom, you foolish Scribe?”

“I need my gloom!” Naxa cried. “It keeps me warm by night. And I think you need something from me, Grycindil, to keep you warm.” He nudged her arm and pushed his face close to hers, grinning evilly. “What about it, Weaver-girl? Shall you and I weave a few Changes tonight?”

“Fool,” answered Grycindil. And she poured out such a stream of abuse that I thought the air would burn.

“You are both of you fools,” said Galli, but in a good-humored way. “In this thin air you should save your breath for some better use.”

Kath, who was walking beside me, said in a low voice, “Do you know, Poilar, I wouldn’t mind drowning Naxa at the next stream, if only so that I would never have to hear that whining voice of his again.”

“A good idea. If only we could.”

“But I confess it troubles me also that the mountain grows no closer.”

“It grows closer with every step we take,” I replied sharply. I was getting angry now. Perhaps I had doubts of my own that were causing a soreness in my soul. Naxa was only a nuisance but Muurmut had the capacity to make real trouble, and I knew that very shortly he would, if this kind of talk continued. I had to cut it off. “It only seems to stay at the same distance, is what I told Naxa. And we’re in no hurry, are we, Kath? If we spend all the rest of our lives on this Pilgrimage, what harm is there in that?”

He looked at me for a long moment, as though that was a new thought to him. Then he nodded, and we went onward without speaking again. The grumblers behind us ceased their chatter, after a time.

But there had been poison in Naxa’s words, and all that day it seeped deeper into my soul. That night when we camped I sank into such a dark brooding and despondency that I scarcely knew myself. All I could think was, This plateau has no end, this plateau has no end, we will spend all the years of our lives attempting to cross it. And I thought, Naxa is right. Better to turn back, and build a new village for ourselves somewhere on the lower slopes, than to expend ourselves in this interminable and futile quest.

The urge to make an end to this Pilgrimage came on me in wave after wave. Naxa was right. Muurmut was right. All the faint-hearted ones were right. Why struggle like this, in hope of finding gods who might not even exist? We had thrown away our lives in this foolish Pilgrimage. Our only choices now were the disgrace of an early return to the village and the death that waited for us in this wilderness.

Such thinking was terrible blasphemy. At another time I would have fought it away. But this night it was too much for me; it overwhelmed me; I could not help but yield to its power and temptation; and in yielding I felt my soul beginning to freeze, I felt my spirit becoming encased in ice.

This was all strange to me, this embracing of defeat and despair. It was the dreariness of the plateau that did it to me, that and Naxa’s insidious poisonous words. While the others sprawled about the campfire that night singing village songs and laughing at the antics of Gazin the Juggler and Dorn and Tull, our two lively Clowns, I went off by myself and sat bleakly in the saddle of a gray rock encrusted with dry moss, and stared empty-eyed at the miserable distances that still confronted us. Two moons were aloft, the cheerless Karibos and Theinibos, and by the harsh light that comes from their pockmarked faces I saw only sorrow and grief in this withered eroded landscape. I think it was the worst hour of my life, the hour that I sat there watching spiny-backed night-beasts scampering across that desolate waste; and by the end of it I was ready to strike camp and slink back down the side of the Wall that very evening. For me the Pilgrimage was at an end then and there. It had lost all meaning. It had ceased utterly to make sense. What was the good of it? What was the good of anything? There was nothing to gain in this place but pain, and then more pain; and the gods, in their eyrie far above, were looking down at our struggles and laughing.

The enterprise to which we had shaped our lives seemed pointless to me in that dark moment. I found myself wishing that I had lost my footing on Kilarion’s cliff and gone plunging to a swift doom, rather than having lived to come to this place of interminable toil.

Then suddenly Traiben stood before me.

“Poilar?”

“Let me be, Traiben.”

“Why do you sit here like this?”

“To enjoy the lovely moonlight,” I said bitterly.

“And what are you thinking as you sit here in the lovely moonlight, Poilar?”

“Nothing. I’m thinking nothing at all.”

“Tell me,” Traiben said.

“Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Poilar.”

“Then you tell me,” I said, though I feared that he truly did, and if that was so I was far from eager to hear it from him.

He bent down a little way, so that his great saucer eyes were on a line with mine, and I saw something in those eyes—a force, a ferocity, a fury—that I had never seen there before. Surely there was a Power in him.

“You’re thinking of the village,” he said.

“No. I never think of the village.”

“Of the village, yes. Of our House. Of Turimel the Holy. You’re lying on a couch with Turimel in our House and you and she are making the Changes together.”

“At this moment Turimel is happily lying with Jecopon the Singer, to whom she was sealed five years ago. I never think of Turimel.” I turned away from that fierce unwavering gaze of his. “Why are you bothering me like this, Traiben?”

He caught me by the chin and pulled my head around.

“Look at me!”

“Traiben—”

“Do you want to go home, Poilar? Is that it?”

“This plateau makes me sick.”

“Yes. It makes all of us sick. Do you want to go home?”

“No. Of course not. What are you saying?”

“We made a vow, you and I, when we were twelve.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, with no strength at all in my voice. “How could I forget.” I adopted a high mimicking tone. “We will climb to the Summit, and meet the gods, and see all the wonders and learn all the mysteries. And then return to the village. That was what we swore.”

“Yes, and I for one mean to keep my oath,” said Traiben, still glaring at me as though I were the sworn enemy of his House.

“As do I.”

“Do you? Do you?”

He took me by the shoulders and shook me so hard that I thought my shape would begin to shift.

I let him shake me. I said nothing, I did nothing.

“Poilar, Poilar, Poilar, what’s wrong with you tonight? Tell me. Tell me!”

“The plateau. The moonlight. The distances.”

“And so you want to turn back. Oh, how happy Muurmut will be, when he finds out that the great leader Poilar is broken like this! The Summit means nothing to you any more. The gods. Our vow. The only thing you desire is to give up and go back.”

“Oh, not so,” I said, without much conviction. “Not so at all.”

He shook his head. “What I say is true, but you won’t admit it even to me.”

“Have you become a Witch, Traiben, that you can read my mind so easily?”

“I could always read you, Poilar. There’s no need to pretend with me. You want to turn back. Is that not true?”

His eyes were blazing. To my amazement I realized that I was afraid of him, just then.

I could make no answer.

He said, after a long while, speaking now in a cold and quiet tone, “Well, let me tell you only this, Poilar: I mean to keep my oath whatever you may do. If I’m the only one of us who wants to go on, then so be it. I’ll go on. And when you get back to the village, a year or two from now, or three or four, and they ask you where Traiben is, you can say that he has gone to the Summit, that he’s up there right now, discussing philosophy with the gods.” He stood back and held out his hand, fingers outstretched in the farewell sign. “I’ll miss you, Poilar. I’ll never have another friend like you.”

Angrily I slapped the hand down to his side.

It seemed to me that he was patronizing me. I couldn’t stand that, not from him. “This is foolishness, Traiben. You know that I’ll be at the Summit with you, when you get there.”

I snapped the words out at him. I meant them to be full of conviction. But the conviction wasn’t there, and Traiben knew that as well as I.

“Ah, but will you?” he asked. “Will you, Poilar?”

And he walked away and left me there not knowing whether I was lying to myself or not.

I sat alone in bewilderment for another hour or more; and then, when everyone else had gone to sleep except those who were on watch, I returned to the camp and slipped into my bedroll. That night I had the star-dream again, the one that I had been having since I was a boy, but it had never been as intense as this before, not even on that first night when the entire village had dreamed it with me. I stood alone, poised on a black jagged mountaintop where icy winds blew. All about me was the god-light, the devil-light, the light that comes out of the end of time and goes streaming toward the beginning. I flexed my legs, I bent and leaped and went soaring toward Heaven, toward the radiant country where the gods abide. And the stars, alive and vibrating and warmer than any fire could ever be, opened to me and embraced me and took me among themselves, and I felt rivers of god-wisdom rushing into my soul.

All the doubt that had infected me in this dismal place was burned out of me in that moment of starfire. The ecstasy of the Pilgrimage possessed me fully once more, and when I awakened, what seemed like moments later, morning had come and the light of both suns was hammering joyously, white over scarlet, against the slopes of the distant Wall. I would have climbed it in a bound, if it had been closer. I knew I would never waver in my faith again. Nor did I, except for a little while just before our Pilgrimage’s end; though whether I came down from the Wall with the same faith in which I ascended it is something for you to measure and judge when you have heard all my story.

But my vision of the night healed me of my dark uncertainties. And I could see in the eyes of all the others that morning that once again those around me had shared my dream, even Muurmut, who hated me and would gladly have overthrown me. They looked at me just then as though I were no mortal being, but someone who was at home among the gods of Heaven.

Even so, there was no end to the grumbling. When we resumed our march a few hours later, I found myself walking in a group with Galli and Gazin and Ghibbilau the Grower and Naxa the Scribe; and we had not gone a hundred paces before Naxa began speaking as he had the night before, the same doleful stuff about how the Wall seemed to be getting farther away from us every day, instead of closer. “What I am reminded of,” he said, “is the tale of Kesper the Scholar, who angered the gods by declaring that he intended to become as wise as they are. So they caused it to happen that for each book Kesper read, he would forget two others. It is the same with us, I think: for each step we take, the mountain moves two paces back, and so—”

Without pausing an instant for thought, I turned on him and knocked him sprawling in the dust.

He crouched there, trembling, amazed, looking up at me like a wounded beast. A little trickle of blood dribbled across his face where my blow had split his skin.

I pointed past him, back toward the rim of the great rift.

“Go,” I said. “Now. That way.”

“Poilar?”

“We don’t need whiners and complainers among us. They have no value.” I prodded him with the tip of my cudgel. “Get out of my sight, Naxa. Get going right now. Down the Wall, back to the village. The downhill route ought to be easier for you than the way up was.”

He stared at me.

“Go on. Go!” I raised my cudgel.

“But I’ll die, Poilar. I’ll lose my way and die. You know I will. You’re deliberately sending me to my death.”

“Others have found their way down alone, isn’t that so? You can too. And you’ll enjoy being back home in the nice warm village. You’ll live in the roundhouse with the other Returned Ones. You’ll wander around town and do whatever you please, anything at all no matter how outrageous, and no one will dare say a word against you.” I glanced around. “Are there any others here who want to go back with Naxa? He says that he’s afraid of going down the Wall alone. You can keep him company on the way.”

They were all staring at me with frozen faces. No one said a word.

“Anyone at all? Speak up, now! This is your chance. The return party sets out right now.” They were silent. “Nobody? All right. So be it. He goes alone, then. Get moving, Naxa. We’re wasting time here.”

“For the love of Kreshe, Poilar!”

I shook my cudgel at him. Naxa scrambled back beyond its reach, just a few steps away from me, and paused there as if still not believing I was serious. I started toward him and he moved away from me again. I watched him as he went slinking off toward the east, pausing now and again to look back over his shoulder at me. After a time he disappeared behind a rise in the ground and I could see him no longer.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Well done,” Muurmut said. “How brave you are, Poilar, striking down the terrifying Scribe. And what a wise leader, to cast a chosen Pilgrim out of the Pilgrimage.”

“I thank you for your praise,” I said to him, and turned away.

I put Naxa out of my mind. We marched on.

Many hours later we stopped to rest and have our meager midday meal. I was sitting on a rock gnawing a bit of ancient dried meat when Thissa and Grycindil and Hendy came to me and stood before me, shifting uncertainly about as though they had something they needed to say but feared to tell me.

“Well?” I asked finally, since they did not seem to want to begin.

Very softly, trembling a little, Thissa said, “Poilar, we’ve come to ask you to pardon Naxa.”

I laughed. “Naxa’s gone. Naxa’s forgotten. He doesn’t exist any more. Don’t talk to me about Naxa.”

But Thissa said, “That was not a good thing you did, driving him away from us. I think it will anger the gods. I feel the air hot with their displeasure.”

“If the gods are annoyed with me, then let them tell me so, and I’ll do penance,” I said to her. “Naxa was a drain on our spirits. We’re better off without him. Ask Kath. Ask Jaif. Ask anyone. No one liked him. No one wanted him.”

Hendy stepped forward then and said, in that cool strange voice of hers that I had so rarely heard, “Poilar, I know what it is to be cast out from one’s own kind, to be alone the way Naxa is alone now. I feel his pain. I ask you to forgive him.”

That startled me and troubled me a little, that Hendy should be pleading Naxa’s cause; for I still desired Hendy, who had kept so aloof from everyone throughout our Pilgrimage, and it was odd and somehow disagreeable that she would speak out for Naxa when she had shown such indifference to me and to everyone else. It roused a kind of jealousy in me that she should do that. But there was something touching about it also, the two outcasts drawn together this way, Hendy and Naxa.

I said to her, more gently than I had replied to Thissa, “Even if I wanted to, there’s nothing I can do. Naxa’s a whole morning’s march behind us now. Wherever he may be, we can’t take the time to go back and look for him. He’s on his own. He’ll have to manage by himself, and there’s no help for that.”

“Oh, he’s not all that far away,” said Grycindil, laughing.

“What?”

She grinned mischievously. “He’s been slinking along behind us all morning, trying not to let you notice him. Hendy and I saw him a little while ago. He’s hiding right in there, behind those hills.”

“What?” I cried again. Enraged, I grabbed up my cudgel. “Where is he? Where?”

But Grycindil put her hand to the cudgel and kept me from going after him. Which was wise, because if I had had Naxa before me at that moment it would have been the end of his life.

She said, “Naxa’s a fool. You heard me tell him so yesterday. But even fools have a right to live. If you drive him away, he’ll surely die in this wasteland. And he is one of us, Poilar. Do you want the death of a Pilgrim on your soul? For surely the gods will hold his death to your account when we reach the Summit.”

“Who knows how the minds of the gods work?” I asked her. I was still shaking with rage. “If Naxa has any sense, he’ll keep away from me. I don’t ever want to see his face again. Tell him that for me.”

“Have a little mercy, Poilar,” Grycindil said.

“Let me be.”

“Poilar, we beg you—” said Hendy softly.

That weakened me a little. Yet I turned my back on her.

“Let me be,” I said again.

“I’ll put a spell on him,” Thissa said, “to keep him from uttering foolishness from now on.”

“No. No. No. No. I want no more of him.”

The fury that Naxa had aroused in me was slow to leave me. But in the end they swayed me, Thissa by her visionary force, and Hendy by her compassion for the outcast, and Grycindil by her willingness to forgive a man who had grossly offended her only the day before. I gave my word and off they went to fetch him, and soon afterward Naxa came trailing into camp, hanging his head with shame and fear. There was no complaining out of him from that time onward.