Kingdoms of the Wall

22

In the end it was Hendy who forced my hand and brought about my departure from this Kingdom of comfort and idleness. She was sworn to the Summit as much as any of us, and it was she who drew me to my senses and restored me to my pledge.

What she did, simply, was to disappear. We had had no defections during all our time in this Kingdom, for why, short of taking up our Pilgrimage again, would any of us have wanted to leave this gentle place? But one morning Hendy was not among us. I asked a few people if they had seen her—Fesild, Kath—but they had nothing to tell me.

Then Traiben said, “She’s gone off to be transformed, Poilar.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I saw a woman on the far rim of the Kingdom late last night, walking up the path to the outside. The moons were bright, and she looked back once, and even though the distance was so great I could see it was Hendy. I called to her and she said something, but she was too far away for me to hear it; and then she turned and went on her way and I lost sight of her.”

“You just let her go like that?”

“What else could I do? She was high up on the trail, at least an hour’s march above me. There was no way I could have overtaken her.”

I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him savagely, so that his head lolled back and forth and his eyes went very wide and his shape began to flicker.

“So you watched and you let her go? You watched and you let her go?”

“Please—Poilar—Poilar—”

I flung him from me. He struck the ground and sprawled out, and lay there, looking up at me more in astonishment than in anger or pain.

“Oh, Poilar,” he said ruefully. “Poilar, Poilar, Poilar!”

He got up—I helped him—and he dusted himself off and checked himself here and there for bruises and cuts. I felt like a fool. After a moment I said, very quietly, “Will you forgive me, Traiben?”

“You’ve become very odd since we came here, do you know?”

“Yes. Yes, I know.” I shut my eyes a moment and took a few deep breaths. In the same quiet tone I said, “You might at least have come to me and told me what was happening.”

“It was very late at night. And weren’t you with Alamir?”

“What does that have to do with—” I stopped. I was becoming angry again, but I had no one to be angry with except myself. “How can you be sure that she went off to be transformed?”

“Where else would she be going, Poilar?”

“Why, she could have—she might have been—”

“Yes?”

I scowled. What was he trying to suggest?

A thought came to me. It was so inane that I pushed it aside; but it came stubbornly back, and I said, to be rid of it, “Do you think that she might have gone to the Well to make herself look younger?”

“That possibility has crossed my mind,” he said.

I hadn’t expected him to agree with me so readily. “Why would she? She doesn’t look old, Traiben. She looks young and slender and beautiful!”

“Yes,” said Traiben. “Yes, I think she does. But does she think so?”

“She should.”

“But does she?”

I turned away, frowning. The more I considered it, the harder it was for me to bring myself to accept this notion I had put forth that Alamir was the cause of Hendy’s disappearance. Hendy and I had never discussed it, but she was utterly untroubled, I was sure, by that dalliance; she must certainly have known that it meant nothing, and very likely she had been playing games of a similar sort with some narrow-waisted boy who might have been a hundred years old, though he looked no more than seventeen. Which would have mattered to me not at all.

“No,” I said. “The whole idea’s ridiculous. She couldn’t have felt any need to run off to the Well to make herself look younger. Hendy can’t possibly believe that Alamir means a thing to me—that she’s anything more than a passing diversion, an amusement of the moment—”

“Ah,” he said, “I have no idea what Hendy believes, about Alamir or any other subject.” He reached out and took my hands in his. “Poor Poilar. Poor sad Poilar. How sorry I am for you, old friend.” But it was hard to hear much sympathy in his voice.

I was lost in bewilderment. Why had she vanished? Where to? I had no answers.

Yet she was gone. That much was clear.

“What will I do?” I asked him.

“Pray that she comes back,” Traiben said.

I was beside myself with chagrin, and frightened besides. What if I had totally misjudged Hendy’s feelings toward what had been taking place? What if my involvement with Alamir had not seemed mere trifling sport to her, but a betrayal of our love? And so her jealousy and her sorrow had led her to the Well, perhaps, not to make herself seem more beautiful in my eyes—that seemed needless to me and surely would to her also, mere folly, a shallow unworthy thing to do—but to destroy herself. I had told her the story of how my father had met his death. Had it tempted her? The thought that even now Hendy lay shriveling in the dread waters of the Well of Life sickened me to my core.

No. That was just as unlikely an idea, I told myself, and brought forth all the reassuring arguments. Hendy understood how meaningless Alamir was to me. And she was aware of the depth of my love for her. She had to be. And her own fear of death—that monstrous dream, Hendy in a Hendy-sized box for all eternity—would surely keep her from rushing toward it. In any case no one kills herself for jealousy: no one. That was a contemptible thing to do, and very foolish. Even those who are sealed will sometimes take another lover for a short while, and nothing is said of it; and Hendy and I, of course, had never been sealed.

But why—where—

And then I remembered something. I heard Hendy’s voice of long ago, speaking out of the depths of my mind, telling me:

What I want is to go to the gods at the Summit and be purified by them. I want them to transform me. I don’t want to be who I am any longer. The memories that I carry around are too heavy for me, Poilar. I want to be rid of them.

Yes, that was it. The motive I had ascribed to her for running away was too trivial. Not out of a simple thing like jealousy had she gone, no, but out of the wish at long last to cast away the burden of her past, to step into the fire of the gods and come forth clean, new, purified—

I saw no chance that Hendy would be able to reach the Summit by herself, though. She must be lost in the fog and snow, desperately wandering through forbidding wastelands, searching hopelessly for the one trail that led to the top.

My first impulse was to give the order for us to leave this place and set out at once toward the Summit, so that we could find her. But I saw how impossible that was. For me to have delayed our departure for so long, and then suddenly to reverse myself and return to the upward road simply because my lover had run away? They would all laugh. It would be the end of my leadership of the group.

No. What I had to do was go after her by myself, up toward the Well or beyond it, find her wherever she was, even to the edge of the zone of the Summit itself, and bring her back. That too presented difficulties, though. The road was a mystery to me as much as it was to Hendy. I might survive my solitary upward journey, or I might not. I would be risking my life for purely personal reasons—jeopardizing the entire Pilgrimage—

And they would point out that I had let Ais go, and Jekka, and Jaif, and a whole host of others, with no attempt at searching for them. How, then, could I show any sort of special concern for Hendy? I should be as casual about her departure as I had been about the others, instead of running in panic to find her.

I was stymied. I did nothing at all, except to stare hour upon hour toward the upward path, and search hopelessly for some workable plan.

Then Hendy came back of her own accord, while I was still hesitating and stumbling and leading myself down blind trails.

It was on the third day of her absence. I had not slept all the while, nor had I allowed Alamir to come near me. I scarcely ate or spoke with others. As I stood looking toward the road that ran up the rim of the Kingdom I saw a pale figure appear high on the trail, like a dream-ghost, bathed in Ekmelios’s harsh white light. Slowly it descended, and I realized after a time that it was Hendy.

But it was a Hendy very much altered.

I went to her. Her hair was white and her skin was the color of death. She was very much taller now, tremendously elongated and thin as a skeleton, and her flesh, such as it was, was almost transparent. I was able to see the pulsing of her blood. So frail was this new Hendy that I could have put my finger through her with an easy thrust. There was no depth to her—no substance, virtually. She seemed terribly vulnerable, a woman without defenses.

“Hendy!” I said, suddenly uncertain.

“I am Hendy, yes,” she said. And I saw Hendy’s dark unmistakable eyes shining out of the gaunt pallid transformed face of this skeletal stranger.

“Where have you been? What have you done to yourself?”

She pointed toward the Summit.

I looked at her with narrowed eyes. “All the way up?”

“Only to the next Kingdom,” she said. I could barely hear her words.

“Ah. And what sort of Kingdom is that?”

“A place where no one speaks.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “Transformed Ones, all of them?”

“Yes.”

“Who have lost the power of speech?”

“Who have renounced it,” she said. “They have been to the Summit and returned, and there they live, in a realm of total silence. They showed me the route that leads the rest of the way to the top, pointing with their fingers and not saying a word. I think they showed me the way to the Well, also.”

“And they showed you how to turn yourself into this.”

“No one showed me. It happened, that was all.”

“Ah,” I said, as though I understood. But I understood nothing. “Ah. Yes. It happened.”

“I felt myself changing. I let it happen.”

She seemed to be speaking to me from a land beyond death.

“Hendy,” I said. “Hendy, Hendy—”

I wanted to reach for her and take her into my arms. But I was afraid.

We stood face to face for a while, saying nothing, as though we both were citizens of that Kingdom that has taken a vow of silence. Her eyes were steady on mine.

I said finally, “Why did you go, Hendy?”

She hesitated a moment. Then she replied, “Because we were staying here to no purpose, and the Summit is what we came here for.”

“Did Alamir have anything to do with—”

“No,” she said, in a way that left no doubt. “Not a thing.”

“Ah,” I said yet again. “It was the Summit, then. But yet you didn’t go to it when you had the chance.”

“I discovered the road that goes there.”

“And turned back? Why?”

“I came back for you, Poilar.”

Her words went to my heart. I might have fallen down before her, but she held out her hands. I took them. They were cold as snow, brittle as sticks.

She had undergone a purification of a sort, yes. That was what this new form of hers meant. But some wounded part of the old Hendy still had not been burned away. Her Pilgrimage had farther to go yet.

“We must finish this,” she said.

“Yes. We have to.”

“But can you leave here?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Will you, though? This Kingdom is like a trap.”

“I had to stay here for a time, Hendy. I wasn’t ready to move on beyond this place.”

“And are you now?”

“Yes,” I said.

I issued the order and we assembled our things—our few remaining supplies, our scanty supply of food, our patched and tattered packs—and took our leave. My father’s father emerged onto the portico of his palace and watched us gravely in silence as we went. Some of his people came out also to watch us go. I saw no sign of Alamir.

Galli and I carried the body of the Irtiman. In this high country it was showing no sign of decay. His eyes were closed and his face was calm: he seemed only to be asleep.

Hendy walked beside me at the head of the column.

Her movements were steady and deliberate, with great strength and forcefulness about them. That frailty I had imagined in her at first was only an illusion. There was a kind of supremacy in her bearing that everyone accepted. Her changed appearance set her apart from the rest of us just as completely as Thrance’s did; but whereas Thrance’s grotesque, contorted form made him appear repellent and dark, Hendy now seemed ennobled and austere and majestic. I was beginning to see a sort of beauty in her strange new form, even.

She said, “There is the upward road.”

It was a narrow white track rising into a steep gorge with high walls of black stone. Almost at once it took us beyond the soft air and lazy warmth of my father’s father’s Kingdom. How they achieved that enchantment there is something that I never learned, and I suppose I never will. We were outside its sphere of potency now, back amidst the ice and bitter wind of these extreme uplands. But we adjusted our bodies, as we had done so many times before, and were able, after a fashion, to cope with the steadily increasing adversities of our surroundings.

I looked back once. Behind me I saw only a formless jumble wrapped in azure haze. We had come so far that I had lost all sense of the terrain we had covered. Somewhere back there was the meadow of the blue grass, and below it the rocky face of the cliff that set a boundary to the Kingdom of the Kvuz, and still further back were the precipitous crags of the Sembitol and the squalid cave of the Kavnalla; and then, far, far below the plateau of the Melted Ones and all the rest, down and down and down, the rock that Kilarion and I had climbed, and the place where the Wall-hawks had attacked us, and Varhad, the domain of the ghosts who went about sheathed in fungus. With Hithiat milepost beyond that, and Denbail and Sennt and Hespen, Glay and Ashten and Roshten, and our own village of Jespodar at the very bottom, so far away that it might just as well be on some other star. My life there now seemed only a dream. It was almost impossible for me to believe that for two full tens of years I had dwelled in a flat busy crowded place down there where the trees glistened with moisture and the air was like a steaming bath. The Wall was my only life now, and had been for so long that all that had gone before it had become unreal. Everything we had passed along the way to this place was fading now into that same unreality. Nothing had any solid existence now except the white path beneath my feet and the gorge of glossy black stone that surrounded me, and the roof of thick dark clouds overhead, as dense and forbidding as a slab of iron.

We came to the Kingdom where they had forsworn the use of words. It was only a small place, a nest of delicate stone spires off the main road. I would have passed it by without seeing it, but Hendy pointed it out, and told me that its people lived in crannies and crevices of the stone. We did not pause to visit them. I had a single glimpse of a few thin, angular people of great height moving about near one of the spires, and then the wind wrapped them in gusts of mist and I saw nothing more.

There was another small Kingdom nearby, where the King was a slave and was carried around constantly in a litter, forbidden to touch his feet to the ground or to do anything to help himself, and another just beyond it that had three kings at once who enjoyed every pleasure, but if one of the three should die the other two would be buried alive in the grave with him. There were other Kingdoms too, but we kept clear of them, for I was weary of these strangenesses. I would not have believed that the Wall had undone so many of our people; but of course we have been sending our Forty onto the mountain for thousands of years, and so have other villages, and few of those who were sent have returned, death took many, and these Kingdoms the rest.

My father had come this way once. As had my father’s father, and many others of my fathers before them.

“This is the way to the Well of Life,” said Hendy.

She indicated a break in the gorge, where a subsidiary trail went spiraling upward around a dark fang of rock that disappeared into the ceiling of impenetrable clouds. I shivered, and not only from the cold which now was biting at me, at us all, with no mercy whatever.

“Must we go that way?” I said, knowing the answer.

“It’s the only path,” said Hendy simply.

The mountain narrowed and narrowed until it seemed to me we must be climbing the very tip of the needle. Icy descending winds tumbling out of the cloud mass above us struck us like fists. We clung together on the trail. I wondered if the buffeting would sweep us to our deaths. Lightning flashed, bleaching all color from this precarious craggy place; but we heard no following rumbles of thunder. We were trespassing on a place which only the hardiest could endure, and the mountain was asking us whether we were equal to the test.

Night came. But there was little difference between night and day for us under a cloud cover so heavy. Marilemma once again remained aglow and lit our way after a fashion, illuminating the far side of the clouds so that a dim tinge of scarlet came through. By that faint red gleam we forced ourselves onward through the hours of darkness. We had passed into some realm beyond sleep, it seemed.

When at last we halted and gathered into a group to catch our breaths and exchange a few words of good cheer, our number seemed wrong. There had been twenty-one of us setting out from my father’s father’s Kingdom, ten men and eleven women, and Thrance the twenty-second; but we seemed less than that now. A quick tally gave me only eighteen.

“Where are the rest?” I asked. “Who’s missing?”

In this sparse air our minds worked but dully. I had to run through our roster several times before we determined the absentees: Dahain the Singer, Fesild the Vintner, Bress the Carpenter. Had they fallen from the trail? Turned back of their own accords under the force of the gale? Been quietly snatched from our midst by silent tentacles reaching out of rocky caverns? No one could say. No one knew. We were nine men and nine women, and Thrance. I had succeeded in bringing less than half my Forty to the verge of the Summit, and I felt shamed by losses so great. And yet, and yet, how many leaders had brought even that many this far?

Going back to look for the three missing ones was out of the question. We waited two hours for them, but there was no sign that they were following us. We went on.

Dawn was coming, now. We could not see Ekmelios’s hot hard white globe through the ceiling of fog but we felt a change in the quality of the dimness. And then we saw a second glow, an unfamiliar orange one, rising on the horizon not far in front of us. A narrow subordinate path branched from our trail, leading off toward the place of the glow.

Hendy said, “We are at the Well, I think.”