Kingdoms of the Wall

16

They were all staring—at me, at him, at him again. They wanted to see how I would handle him. And I knew from the brightness of their eyes and the eager look of expectation on their faces that in some magical way this repellent stranger had charmed them, had won them to him in the short while I had been gone. There was something dark and frightening and fierce about him that drew them to him. The fascination of darkness can be irresistible.

My skin crept, as though it sensed a storm heavy with lightning rushing toward us. If this in truth was Thrance, and not some demon wearing his name, then he had been deeply damaged indeed. But despite that damage I could see that there was great strength in him even now, though perhaps it was strength of some kind other than the strength he had had before. It might even be that he was strong because of the damage he had suffered. Which made him unpredictable, and therefore dangerous.

For a moment we eyed each other like two wrestlers preparing to begin a match. Looking into those lightless mismatched eyes of his was like peering into an abyss.

I knew that unless I acted without hesitation, he would move somehow to seek the advantage. So I took his dry scaly hand in mine and gripped it firmly, and said very formally, “Poilar is my name, son of Gabrian, son of Drok. I am the leader of this Forty, which comes from Jespodar bound on Pilgrimage. What is it that you want among us?”

“Why,” he replied, speaking in a drawl as though he had found something humorous in what I had said or in the way I had said it, “I think I remember you. Poilar, yes. A little skinny crookleg child, forever scuttling around doing as much mischief as he possibly could, am I right? And now you lead a band of Pilgrims! What changes time will bring, eh?”

I heard the nervous laughter of my companions. They weren’t accustomed to hearing me mocked. But I kept myself in check and held my eyes on his.

“I am that Poilar, yes. And are you really Thrance?”

“I said that was my name. Why would you doubt me?”

“I remember Thrance. I saw him come out of the Pilgrim Lodge and go running up the street. He gave off light, like a sun. He was as beautiful as a god.”

“Whereas I’m not?”

“You look nothing like him. Not in the slightest regard.”

“Well, then, if that’s the case I must be very ugly now. Apparently I’ve undergone some disagreeable changes since coming to this mountain country. If I’m no longer as good to look upon as I once was, I beg you to forgive me for offending your eyes, my friend. Forgive me, all of you.” And in a courtly way he made a little ironic bow to the others, which brought uneasy smiles to their faces. “But I am Thrance, son of Timar, former Pilgrim of Jespodar, all the same.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

“If I’m not Thrance, then who am I, pray tell?”

“How would I know? You could be anyone. Or anything. A demon. A ghost. A god in disguise.”

He gave me that death’s-head grin of his. “Yes,” he said. “I could be. Sandu Sando, perhaps, or Selemoy of the suns. But in fact I am Thrance. The son of Timar the Carpenter, who was the son of Diunedis.”

“Any demon could spout Thrance’s lineage at me,” I told him. “But that wouldn’t make the demon Thrance.”

The stranger looked amused, or perhaps he was merely growing bored with my obstinacy. “Against arguments of that kind no one could ever convince anyone of anything, isn’t that so? I could name my forefathers for ten generations, or all the twenty Houses of the Village, or the other members of my Forty, or anything else you might ask, and you would still say that the demon has picked it out of Thrance’s mind for the sake of deceiving you. Very well, then. Believe what you want. It makes no difference to me. But I tell you I am Thrance.”

I looked toward Kath and said, “Where did this man come from?”

“He simply appeared among us,” Kath said. “As if he had risen right out of the ground.”

“A demon would do that,” I said, with a glance toward the stranger.

“Be that as it may,” said Kath. “One minute we were here by ourselves waiting for you to return and the next he was with us. ‘I am Thrance of Jespodar,’ he said. ‘Have any of you heard of Jespodar, here?’ And when we told him that we were Pilgrims from that very village he began to laugh like a wild man, and to leap up and down and dance about. Then suddenly he grew very stern and somber, and he caught me by the wrist with one hand and Galli by the other, and he said, ‘Who remembers Thrance, then? If you are truly of Jespodar, you would remember Thrance.’ And Galli said, ‘We were only children when you left, if you are Thrance. So we wouldn’t remember you clearly.’ He laughed at that and pulled her close to him and kissed her, and bit her cheek so that it stung, and said, ‘You’ll remember me now.’ Then she asked him about her older brother, who had been in the same Forty as Thrance, and he knew the brother’s name, all right, though he said he had no idea what had become of him, which made Galli start to cry; and then he asked for wine. I said we had none to give him. He got very angry at that, and said again that he was Thrance of Jespodar. To which Muurmut replied, ‘Thrance or no Thrance, we have no wine to give you.’ And then—”

“Enough,” I said. The stranger had wandered off during Kath’s recitation and was standing with Tenilda and Grycindil and a few of the other women. “He is much altered from the Thrance I remember, if in fact this is Thrance. Did he speak at all of what had happened to him?”

“No.”

I was unable to get from my mind that recollected image of the heroic Thrance in all his godlike beauty, nor could I easily reconcile it with the sight of that gaunt and hideously altered creature over there. But for his great height and the breadth of his shoulders there was scarcely anything about this ruined wreck of a man that might sustain his claim of being Thrance. And, although I have never been one to frighten easily, I felt a twinge of something close to fear now as I watched him among the women. There seemed to be madness in him, and some strange fury barely held in check. If he was Thrance, and had spent all these years on the Wall, he might be of some use as a guide to us in this new territory we had entered, or he might not; but almost certainly he was going to be troublesome. I found myself wishing most profoundly he had never appeared in our midst.

He was coming toward me again now, with his arm thrust through Tenilda’s. That sweet Musician looked as though she would gladly have been back on the plateau again rather than so close to this malformed creature that called itself Thrance.

He leaned close to me and said, “They claim you have no wine, Poilar. Is this so?”

“The wine is long since gone, yes.”

“But you must have some.” He winked. It was a cold dead-eyed wink, with little charm or playfulness to it. “Hidden away, for your own use, eh? Come, my friend. Share your wine with me, before we set out from this place to begin our climb together. For old Thrance’s sake. A toast to our success.”

“We have no wine,” I said.

“Of course you do. I know that you have. Do you realize how long it’s been since I’ve had anything decent to drink? Or how I’ve suffered, all alone here on this mountain, Poilar? So get out the wine, and let’s drink.” There was a flat tone in his voice that robbed his words of urgency. I knew he was simply testing me, trying to see how much power he could exert over me. Very likely he had no desire for wine at all. He winked again, a false one as before, and nudged me in what was meant to be a sly conspiratorial way, but lacked conviction. “Just the two of us, you and I. We are brothers of the crooked leg, aren’t we? Look—look—mine’s even worse than yours!”

“The Thrance I remember had straight legs,” I said. “And there is no wine.”

“You still won’t believe that I am who I say I am.”

“I have nothing to go by except your word.”

“I have nothing to go by except your word, when you tell me you have no wine.”

“There is no wine.”

“And I am Thrance.”

“Then you are a Thrance transformed beyond all recognition,” I said.

“Well, so I am. But Kosa Saag is a place where transformations happen. You must always keep that in mind, my friend. And now, about that wine—”

“I’ll say it once more,” I told him, “and then not again. There is no wine.”

He gave me a skeptical look, as though he believed that if he only pressed me hard enough I would bring forth a flask from some secret cache. But there was no secret cache, and I looked at him in such a stony way that he saw that I either would not or, more likely, could not give him any.

“Well, then,” he said. “If you say so, it must be true. There is no wine. We are agreed on that. And I am Thrance. We are agreed on that, also. Eh? Good. Good. What shall we talk about next?”

But i had had enough of dueling with this man before all the others. I pointed toward an open place across the way, where we could be alone, and suggested we continue our conversation in private. He thought about that a moment and nodded, and we went limping off together, two crooklegs side by side, to sit by ourselves and talk. As he had said, that leg of his was far more of a deformity than mine. His limp was so bad that he walked in a twisted, lurching way, stepping halfway around himself to move forward, and I had to take something off my pace to accommodate him.

We found a fallen spire of rock nearby that we could use as a bench and sat down facing each other. I hesitated a little, arranging my thoughts, but he waited for me to begin. Perhaps he was developing some measure of respect for me.

“All right,” I said at last. “Why have you come here? What is it you want with us?”

His eyes brightened. For the first time there was true life in them, and not mere willed force. “I want to join your Forty. I want to climb with you to the Summit.”

“How would that be possible?”

“Why, what difficulty is there? You take me in; I march with you and share your toil; we go to the top together.”

“But a Forty is a Forty. We are pledged to one another by special vows, as you must surely know. There’s no way we can admit a stranger to our group.”

“Of course there is. You simply do it. ‘Here, Thrance, come join us,’ is what you say. ‘Be one of us,’ is what you say. That’s all there is to it. We are beyond the point where vows have meaning. Vows are for children; in this place your lives are at stake. I can be very useful to you. I know a great deal about the Kingdoms that lie ahead. Whereas you know nothing at all.”

“Perhaps so. But nevertheless—”

“Listen, Poilar, I’ll be your guide. You can have the benefit of my knowledge. It wasn’t won easily, but it’s yours for the asking. I’ll take you around the obstacles. I’ll keep you off false trails. I’ll steer you clear of the dangers. Why should you have to suffer as I did?”

There was some logic to that. But nothing in our training suggested any precedent for recruiting new members to our group during the climb. It seemed almost a blasphemy. And the thought of having this dark turbulent stranger marching amongst us from this moment onward was far from pleasing to me.

“You have your own Forty,” I said to him. “Why are you still here, after so many years on the Wall? Why aren’t you climbing with them, far beyond this level?”

“Oh, no,” he replied. “I have no one at all.” There was nothing left of his group, the Forty that I had seen set out so bravely the year when I was twelve.

Thrance told me that at the outset of their climb they had chosen him by unanimous acclamation to be their leader; but—so I gathered from certain things he said—he had been a difficult leader, erratic and violent and rash, and soon some of them had begun to creep away from him, one by one, two by two, disappearing in the night. Others, though taking no issue with Thrance’s leadership, had succumbed to the byways of the Wall, vanishing into this Kingdom or that and failing to come back. In the end he was left by himself. All these years he had wandered this level of the Wall and those adjacent to it, neither ascending nor descending any great distance, but mainly staying here, drifting in circles, aimlessly roaming this unforgiving land of broken red rock. A kind of madness had come to veil his mind. For long spells of time he forgot who he had been, or what he had hoped to be. Sometimes he caught sight of other bands of Pilgrims passing by, later ones along the path, but he shrank away from them like the wild animal he had become. He lived on roots and nuts, and whatever small beasts he was able to trap. He slept in the open, at all seasons of the year. The great strength that had made him such a master athlete had stood him in good stead. His endurance was enormous; but he passed his days in a long hazy dream. Occasionally the thought of resuming his Pilgrimage would occur to him, or else of going down into our village again and taking up lodging in the roundhouse of the Returned Ones. But he did neither. This dry barren zone of the Wall had become his home. It had become his world. He had virtually forgotten why he was on the mountain at all. But now, he said, seeing us coming up the saddle from the meadowlands below, it had come back to him: the purpose was to climb, to get to the top. That was all it was for him, apparently: just to get to the top. He said nothing of gods or the acquisition of wisdom or the fulfillment of ancient oaths. The urge to reach the Summit was reborn in him simply for its own sake. He had had enough of this level of the Wall, and it was time for him to move onward. But he realized that it was impossible for him to get very far on his own. And so now he was offering himself to us—a new member of our Forty, tempered by experience, familiar with many of the perils that awaited us. If we wanted him, he would earn his keep by helping us to avoid the pitfalls ahead. But if we chose otherwise, he wished us well, and would wait for the next year’s band of Pilgrims to arrive.

He fell silent, and waited almost indifferently for me to speak.

I remarked after a moment, “In all this lengthy narrative you’ve told me nothing of how these changes in your appearance came about. Or where, or why.”

“Is it such a mystery? You must surely know that Kosa Saag is a place where the unwary are at great risk of undergoing transformation. And the wary as well, sometimes.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. Below us, in the First Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Melted Ones, I saw how it can happen. Is that where—”

“No, not there,” he said scornfully. A shadow crossed his twisted face. “It was higher up. I passed the First Kingdom without any difficulty. Who would want to live in that miserable land, and worship blood-drinking demons? I’m no Melted One, Poilar. They’re hardly better than beasts, as you must already have observed. No, no, I am of the Transformed. And of my own free will, for the advantage I thought it would bring me.”

It seemed a very subtle difference to me: Melted, Transformed, what did it matter which word you used? Either way, it was a horror, a mutilation, when you gave yourself up to the change-fire. But I let the question pass.

“Will you speak of it?” I asked.

“It was in the Kingdom of the Kavnalla that this transformation happened to me. This partial transformation, I should say. For the job went unfinished, which is why I look the way I do.”

“The Kavnalla?” That name meant nothing to me.

“The Kavnalla, yes. You’ll be finding out about the Kavnalla soon enough, my friend. You’ll have your chance to greet the Kavnalla in person, and listen to its song. And unless you take great care, you’ll find yourself tempted to offer yourself up to it as I did, and so to join the legions of the Transformed.”

I thought of the silent voice that Traiben and I had heard on the trail that morning, that seductive murmuring in our minds, urging us forward. Had that been Thrance’s Kavnalla? Very likely it was. But we had turned away from that coaxing voice without difficulty.

“I doubt that very much,” I told him. “I’m not so easily seduced.”

“Ah, is that the case, Poilar? Is it really?” He smiled. He had a way of making me feel like a child with that condescending smile of his. “Well, perhaps. You do seem a little unusual. But many are lured by the Kavnalla, make no mistake of that. I was one of them.”

“Tell me about it.”

“All in good time, when we stand at the gate of its Kingdom. What I’ll tell you now is what you already suspect, which was that my transformation was the greatest error of my life. I thought I could play the Kavnalla’s game and win. Indeed I believed that I could make myself a King on this mountain. When I realized that I was wrong, I managed to get away—not many succeed at that, boy, not many at all—but not before I had been turned into what you see before you, which is a shapechanging from which there is no return.” His eyes drilled into mine. I had not failed to notice that patronizing “boy” of his, but I chose to let that pass also. “The Kavnalla sings a very tempting song,” he said. “I learned too late how to close my ears to it.”

“Is it far from here, this Kavnalla?” I asked.

“Its domain is the very next Kingdom. You could be there in no time at all.” Then that had been the Kavnalla’s voice we had heard. “And before you know what’s happening,” Thrance said, “your people will be lining up and offering themselves up for transformation, if you don’t take care. That was where I lost the greater part of my Forty, in the Kingdom of the Kavnalla. And as you see, I came close to losing myself as well. Many’s the Pilgrimage that has come to grief in the Kingdom where the Kavnalla reigns. The change-fire is very strong there: it boils from the ground, it rises up and conquers everything that will not fight back.”

“In that case, we’ll go some other way,” I replied at once. “There are more routes than one to the top.”

“No. No, you have no choice but to go this way. Believe me. I know. I’ve traveled all these roads again and again, boy. If what you want is to reach the Summit, this is the only path, and it passes through the Kingdom of the Kavnalla. And the Sembitol beyond it, and then the Kingdom of the Kvuz.”

Sembitol—Kvuz—those names were only noises to me. And I realized once more that they had taught us nothing, in the village. Nothing.

“How can I be sure that there’s no safer route?” I asked him.

“Because I’ve been everywhere and seen everything, and I know which way you must go.”

“And what if you’re lying? What if you’ve come to us as an agent of the Kavnalla, who has sent you to win our trust and lead us right into its hands?”

At that he blazed up in anger; and for the first time he seemed to drop all masks and reveal the true man beneath, anguished, furious, tormented. He spat and threw up his arms and got to his feet, and went stomping away in that lurching crooklegged walk of his, which made my own seem like a dance-step, and when he swung around to face me again his eyes were glinting with rage. “What a fool you are, boy! What folly all your niggling little suspicions are! Well, if you think I’m a spy, then go up there without me! Stroll into the Kavnalla’s cave, kiss it on the cheek, whisper to it that Thrance sends his love! See what becomes of you then! See what wondrous transformations overwhelm you when the change-fire rises up! Or—no, no, take some other route entirely, if you’d rather avoid the land of the Kavnalla. Go up that slope to the east, where the boiling lake is waiting for you. Go up to the west, into the land of the darkness-drinkers. Do whatever you want, boy. Do whatever you want!” He laughed bitterly. “An agent of the Kavnalla? Yes! Yes, of course that’s what I am! How shrewd of you to find me out! Do you see how beautiful the Kavnalla has made me? And out of gratitude, I mean to deliver all of your people to it, so that you can be made beautiful too!” With a contemptuous wave of his misshapen hand he said, “Do whatever you want, boy,” and turned his back on me.

After a long while I said, very quietly, “What do you want with us, Thrance?”

“You’ve already asked me that. And had your answer.”

“To climb the mountain with us? That’s all?”

“Nothing more than that. I’ve been wandering here at this level more years than I can remember. I’ve lived in my own company so long that the sound of my own breathing is disgusting to my ears. I want to move on. I can’t tell you why, but I do. Take me with you and I’ll share with you what I know about the Kingdoms that lie ahead. Or leave me behind and make it on your own, if you can, and I will take my own route, and so be it. I don’t care. Do you understand that? I’m beyond all caring, boy!” And he shook his head. “An agent of the Kavnalla, he says!”

“It will have to be put to a vote,” I told him.

The debate was a hard and heated one. Thrance lurked at the edge of the cliff, out of earshot and scarcely even glancing toward us, while we fought it out. At first we were nearly equally divided. Naxa and Muurmut and Seppil and Kath spoke out most vigorously against letting Thrance join us, and Marsiel and Traiben and Tull and Bress the Carpenter were for him, and the rest seemed to swing back and forth according to the arguments of whichever among us had been the most recent speaker. Muurmut, the strongest voice of the opposition, said that Thrance was a madman and a demon who would create turmoil among us and distract us from our task. Traiben, who in his quiet way led the other side, conceded the possibility that Thrance was mad, but pointed out that unlike any of us he had seen the country beyond this level of the Wall and it behooved us to make use of any information he might provide about those regions that were unknown to us.

During all this I played the role of a mere moderator, calling on the others but voicing no view of my own. This was in part because my mind was uncertain: to a considerable extent I inclined toward Muurmut’s point of view, though I saw some wisdom in Traiben’s, and it was so odd for me to be favoring any argument of Muurmut’s over one of Traiben’s that I did not know what to say. Also I had consulted Thissa before the outset of the meeting, and she had said, perplexed, that her witchcraft was of no use here: she found Thrance so strange and frightening that she had great difficulty reading his soul. That in itself was an argument for banning him from our midst, but Thissa didn’t raise it in the debate.

I called for a preliminary vote, not binding but just an indication of feelings, and it was eight to eight, with more than half the group abstaining.

Then Grycindil, who had been silent, spoke up and said, “We’d be fools not to take him with us. As Traiben says, he knows things that we need to learn. And how much harm can one man do against so many of us?”

“Yes,” said Galli, another who had taken no part up till now. “If he makes trouble, we can always kill him, can’t we?”

There was general laughter. But I saw that the voices of these two strong and strong-minded women had done much to shift the balance. Muurmut saw it too; he scowled and paced, and glared at Grycindil, who after all was Muurmut’s lover now and nonetheless had spoken out for Thrance.

Then Hendy looked toward me and said, “What do you think, Poilar? You’ve said nothing. Shouldn’t you be sharing your ideas with us?”

A few people gasped. It was bold of her to have challenged me that way, especially since they all knew that Hendy and I had lately become lovers. I was annoyed that she had forced my hand, and glanced at her in irritation; but I saw her eyes shining with love for me. She had meant me no harm. She was simply looking to me as our leader, urging me to fulfill my responsibilities to the group.

Every eye was on me. Slowly I said, groping my way through the confusion of my thoughts, “I agree with Muurmut that he may be troublesome. I agree with Traiben that he may be useful. Balancing one against the other, I take into account what Galli says, that if he creates problems for us, we always have the option of getting rid of him. Therefore I vote for taking him in.”

“And I,” said Grycindil. “And I,” said Galli and Maiti and some others who had abstained before. I had swayed them all. Hands were going up all around the group. Muurmut growled and went stalking dourly away, taking his followers Seppil and Talbol with him; but of the others every vote went for Thrance, except that of Thissa, who held both her hands palm outward as if to say that she could not decide. So it was done. I went across to Thrance, who sat looking out the other way, across the great dark gulf of the lands that lay below us.

“The vote ran for you,” I told him. “You are one of us now.”

He seemed not to be greatly moved by that news.

“Am I?” he said. “Well, then. So I am.”