Kingdoms of the Wall

25

Of course Traiben went to the ancient ship that night anyway, once it was too dark for anyone to see him slipping away. I might have expected that of him. Kilarion was on sentry duty in that part of the plain, and somehow Traiben got past him unnoticed, and went sprinting off into the darkness.

The first I knew of it came when I heard voices somewhere nearby me, a muffled cry, the sound of a scuffle, a yelp of pain. “Let go of me, you idiot!” someone said Traiben’s voice.

I opened an eye. I was lying by myself, neither sound asleep nor fully awake, near the outer edge of our group, huddled down miserably in my bedroll trying to fend off the cold. There was no woman with me. Since Hendy’s transformation, she and I had neither slept in the same place nor made Changes together, nor had I been with anyone else.

Focusing my awareness as quickly as I could, I looked up and saw, outlined by moonlight against the dark, Traiben wriggling in the grasp of someone much larger who had caught him around the neck in the crook of his arm. Talbol, I realized. He was the sentry on duty in this section of the sleeping-area.

In a sharp whisper I said, “What’s going on? What are you two doing?”

“Make him let go of me,” Traiben cried, in a strangled voice.

“Quiet! You’ll wake the whole camp!”

I trotted over to them and slapped Talbol’s forearm to get him to let go. Traiben backed away a few steps, glaring sullenly.

Talbol looked just as sullen. “He comes creeping into camp in the middle of the night without saying a word. How am I supposed to know he isn’t one of those apes coming to attack us?”

“Do I look like an ape?” Traiben demanded.

“I wouldn’t want to say what you—” Talbol began.

I waved him into silence and sent him off to resume his patrol of the perimeter. Traiben rubbed his throat with his hand. I was angry and amused all at once, but more angry than amused.

“Well?” I asked, after a moment.

“I went there.”

“Yes. Against my direct order. How absolutely amazing, Traiben.”

“I had to see it.”

“Yes. Of course. Well?”

Instead of answering he thrust something toward me, a dark shapeless thing that he had been holding in his left hand. “Here. Look. It’s a god-thing. The ship is full of stuff like this, Poilar!”

I took it from him. It was a corroded metal plaque, maybe three fingers long and four fingers wide. I held it up into the faint moonlight cast by Tibios and was able to make out, just barely, some sort of inscription on it in lettering unlike anything I had ever seen.

“It’s Irtiman writing,” Traiben said. “I found it lying half buried on the floor of the ship.”

“Do you know what it says?”

“How would I know that? I can’t read Irtiman writing. But look, look, Poilar, there’s a whole treasure-house of god-things in there. Of course everything’s broken and rusted and useless, but you just have to glance inside to know how ancient they are. The original Irtimen must have used those things! The ones whom we worship as Kreshe and Thig and—”

“Stop saying that,” I told him irritably. “The Irtimen were teachers, not gods. The gods are beings of a higher plane than Irtimen or us.”

“Whatever you like,” said Traiben, with a shrug. “Will you come with me in the morning, so we can explore the ship together, Poilar?”

“Perhaps.”

“We’d all better go. The Irtimen might make a little trouble. The ones from the caves, I mean. I saw a couple of them lurking around the ship while I was there. It’s a kind of shrine for them, I think. They’ve got a sort of altar on the far side, with twigs and painted stones piled up around it, and when I went around to look at it I saw that they were burning little wisps of dead grass and chanting something.”

I stared at him in astonishment. “You walked right into their midst? They could have killed you!”

“I don’t think so. They’re more afraid of us right now than we are of them, I suspect. They must have had some bad experiences with Pilgrims in the past. When they saw me they sprang up and ran off right away. So I went into the ship, and when I came out there weren’t any of them in sight. But eventually they’re going to figure out that we aren’t much of a threat to them, and then—”

“Poilar?” a new voice said.

I looked around. It was Thissa. Even by the dim moonlight I saw fear glistening in her eyes. Her nostrils were quivering as though she could smell danger on the air.

“What is it?” I asked her.

She looked uncertainly at Traiben. “I need to tell you something,” she said to me.

“Go on.”

“But he—”

“You can speak in front of Traiben. You know that I trust him, Thissa.—This isn’t some matter concerning him, is it?”

“No. No.” She came closer and held out something in her hand, a small gleaming amulet. “Touch it,” Thissa said. Traiben murmured with interest and bent low to examine it. In annoyance I pushed him aside and put the tip of my finger to the little carved jewel. Its surface felt warm.

“What is this thing?” I asked.

“It is a santha-nilla thing,” she said. “It belonged to my mother, and her mother before her. When there is treachery nearby it begins to glow.”

Traiben said, “You mean it’s actually some sort of thought-sensitive device, which is able to detect—”

“Not now, Traiben,” I told him impatiently. To Thissa I said, “What sort of treachery? By whom?” I had learned long ago to take Thissa’s premonitions seriously. Pointing toward the starship of the Irtimen, I said, “Them?”

“I don’t think so. One of us, I think. But I’m not sure I feel betrayal in the air, Poilar. That’s all I know.”

“Is there a spell you could cast that would tell you more, do you think?”

“I could try.”

“Go, then. See what you can learn.”

She went away. I sat perplexed beside my bedroll, unable to sleep, beleaguered by complexities far beyond my powers of understanding. Traiben stayed with me for a while, trying to offer comfort, companionship, explanation. He meant well, but he was full of contradictory incomprehensible ideas that made my head ache, and I drew little comfort from his companionship just now; so after a time I sent him away.

Hendy came to me, then. She too was finding sleep impossible this night.

She knelt beside me and put her hand—her strange altered hand, fleshless and dry and cool, a skeleton’s hand—into mine. I held it, though I was afraid to squeeze it too tightly. I was glad to have her near me, but my mind was awhirl with the revelations of the Summit and there was nothing I could say to her. I was lost in confusions.

“We should leave here when the sun comes up,” she said. “There’s nothing but grief for us in this place, Poilar.”

“Perhaps so,” I answered. I was barely aware of what she had said.

“And I feel even more grief coming toward us.”

Without looking at her, I said, in a toneless incurious voice, “Do you? Thissa said the same thing. Have you transformed yourself into a santha-nilla, Hendy?”

“I’ve always had a little of the power,” she said. “Just a little.”

“Have you?” I said, still with no great show of interest.

“And it’s become stronger since my transforming.”

“Thissa says there’ll be treachery.”

“Yes. I think so too.”

“From which direction?”

“I feel it everywhere around us,” Hendy said.

This was leading nowhere. I dropped into a dark silence and wished I could sleep. But this was not a place where sleep was easy. We sat without speaking, side by side in the dimness of the one-moon night, and the hours slipped by. Perhaps I slept a little while without knowing that it was happening: certainly I had no sharp sense of the passage of time, but I became aware eventually that it was much later in the night, close indeed to morning. The stars had shifted position and a second moon had risen—Malibos, I think, bright as new metal against the eastern horizon and sending shafts of cold light across the Summit.

Suddenly Hendy grabbed my wrist. “Poilar! Poilar, are you awake?”

“Of course I am.”

“Look there, then!”

“What? Where?” I blinked and shook my head. My mind seemed wrapped in cobwebs, and half dead of frost.

Hendy pointed. I followed the line of her pointing arm.

A figure stood sharply outlined in the icy light of Malibos high atop a rock midway out in the plain. It was Thissa. Her left arm was upraised and both her thumbs were outstretched in the stabbing gesture of accusation.

“I see the traitor!” she cried, in a high ringing voice that must have carried from one side of the Summit to the other. “Do you see him? Do you all see him?” And she stabbed her hand into the air three times, very fiercely, aiming it in the direction of the ancient ruined starship. “Do you see him? Do you see him? Do you see him?”

I saw no one, nothing.

Then out of the grayness of the distance came a twisted distorted form that limped toward her at a furious pace: a man with a monstrous elongated crooked leg, who nonetheless was running so quickly that he seemed almost to be flying. Thrance, of course. He leaped up on the rock beside Thissa with the kind of agility that I remembered from the Thrance of old, the master athlete of my childhood. Three swift bounds and he was beside her. I heard her cry his name in a ringing tone of denunciation. Thrance said something in return, low and muffled and threatening. Once again Thissa cried out his name. And he raised his cudgel to her and struck her such a blow as would have broken a tree in half. I heard the sound of it, and saw her crumple and fall.

I stood rigid for a moment, frozen in my place, unable to move. There was a dead hush on the Summit, with only the rushing sound of the wind sweeping against my ears.

Then I was on my feet and running.

Thrance fled before me like a hawk through the sky; but I followed him like lightning itself. Across the plain I sped, around the rock where Thissa’s bloodied fallen body lay, past the slender starship of the three Irtimen. Thrance was racing toward the older starship, the gaunt dark ruin at the far side of the Summit. I thought I saw shaggy figures lurking about it, the skulking forms of the bestial “gods” of this place. Was he going toward them? What alliance had Thrance concocted with them in the night?

There was a terrible roaring sound all around me. I realized, after a time, that it was coming from my own throat.

Thrance was nearly at the ruined starship now, and the “gods” seemed to be welcoming him to it. It struck me that he must have been to them earlier that evening, and had secretly arranged with them to lead them down upon us and kill us as we slept.

But I was closing the gap quickly between him and me; for, swift as Thrance was, I was running with the fury of the Avenger in my soul and my feet scarcely troubled to touch the ground. Unexpectedly Thrance turned to the left just as he was approaching the wrecked ship, and sprinted around the vessel to its far side. I followed him there, and saw more of the “gods” gathered there, by a place of stacked twigs and painted stones that must have been the altar that the debased Irtimen had constructed. Thrance ran right through the midst of it, scattering “gods” on every side, and up a craggy staircase of rock just beyond.

That was a great mistake on his part, for there was nothing on the other side of that rocky pile but the abyss. He had trapped himself.

He ran up right to the top, where he must surely have been able to look down into the realm of fog and realize that there was only a great emptiness below him. There he halted; and turned; and looked toward me, waiting for me to come to him.

“Thrance,” I muttered. “Thrance, you bastard!”

He was smiling.

To the end, nothing mattered to him. Or maybe one thing did: perhaps he had come up here with us because he had wanted his death to find him in this most sacred of places. Well, I would give it to him. I jumped up alongside him and he was ready for me, balanced and braced like the wrestler he was, and he grinned right into my face. Then we seized each other in a grip from which only one could emerge alive.

He was strong. He always had been, an athlete of athletes; and I felt the power of him still, the old Thrance within this twisted hideous thing, the Thrance who had excelled in every game, who had hurled the javelin farther than anyone in memory, who had vaulted the tall hurdles as though he had wings. And for a moment I was the wide-eyed boy of long ago who in such awe had watched the great hero at his games. That moment of remembering weakened me; and Thrance was able to twist me and turn me so that I was leaning outward and my face was turned into the abyss and I saw the white fog below me glistening in the moonlight. It seemed to me that I could almost make out the great clefts and spires of the distant slopes beneath the fog. Smiling still, he forced me backward—backward—

But I had not forgotten the sight of Thrance striking down the slender delicate Thissa atop that rock; and the thought of that vile crime brought back my strength. I planted myself firmly, wedging my good foot tightly into a crevice in the rock and pressing the crooked one against an upraised slab behind me, so that Thrance was unable to push me further toward the edge. We were stalemated for a time, gripping each other, neither capable of budging the other.

Then I began to turn him.

I swung him around and with both my arms around his hips lifted him so that his normal leg was off the ground and only the deformed, grotesquely extended one was still in contact with it. As I held him above me he looked down at me, grinning even now, defying me to do my worst. Shifting my grip so that my arms were around his chest, I pulled him up higher.

He still had his longer leg dug into a crack in the rock to anchor him. I kicked at it with my good foot, putting all the force I had into it, and knocked it free. Then, pivoting off my crooked leg, I threw him from the mountain. A single sound came from him as I lifted him and flung him, but whether he was laughing or crying out in rage or fear, I could not say. He seemed to hover in midair an instant or two, his eyes staring right into mine, and it seemed to me that he looked more amused than afraid, and then I saw him begin to fall. Down he dropped like a falling star, plummeting through the fog. A kind of brightness sprang up about him, so that I could see him descending the first journey of the way, striking the rock face here and there, two or three times or more, and rebounding from it. Then the layers of fog closed around him and I lost sight of him for good as he fell through the misty depths far below. I imagined him falling all day, from dawn to noon to eve, dropping down the entire height of the Wall, bursting into flames as he dropped, until at last the final cinder of him came to rest at its base, at Roshten milepost, at the boundary of our village itself. And I crouched there by the edge of the Wall’s highest point, looking out over it as though I could see Thrance falling, falling, falling all the way.

At length I rose and looked around, breathless, half dazed, astounded by what I had done.

Three or four of the stumbling animal things that I still somehow thought of as “gods” were visible nearby in the rising light of dawn. They were coming slowly toward me, though it was impossible for me to make out their purpose, whether it was to do harm to me or simply to see what sort of creature I was.

And as I stood there looking at them, at those whom I had hoped were my gods, I knew that I had profaned the holiest of all places, that I had committed an act of murder at the Summit itself. No matter that Thrance had merited death for his crime against Thissa: it had not been my right to impose it on him.

A haze of shock and bewilderment swept across my mind as that thought came to me, and for a moment or two I lost all awareness of who I was or why I was here. I knew only that I was guilty of the most monstrous of crimes and must be fittingly punished; and the gods were coming toward me to accept my atonement and mete out my retribution.

I waited gladly for them. I readied myself to kneel before them. Despite everything I knew of them, I would kneel.

But then they were only a few paces from me, and I stared at their coarse faces and drooling lips and looked straight into their dull empty eyes and I knew beyond all question that what the she-Irtiman had told us was true, that these were no gods, but only the fallen children of gods, the dreadful hollow nightmare semblances of gods. I owed these creatures no obeisance and certainly not my death; and this place where they dwelled was far from holy, whatever I may have believed at the beginning of my Pilgrimage. It had been holy once, perhaps, but certainly holy no longer. So I had nothing for which to atone.

I saw what I had to do now. But I hesitated a moment. In that moment Hendy came up from somewhere and moved toward me.

I turned to her, and she saw in my face the thing that I was going to do. And she nodded.

“Yes, Poilar! Go on! Yes! Do it!”

Yes, she had said. Do it. It was all I needed.

I felt a moment’s surge of pity for them, these sad shambling things that were the relics of the great ones who had taught us the ways of civilization. But the pity melted in an instant into loathing and contempt. They were abominations. They were monstrosities. They disgraced this place by their very presence here. I rushed forward then, and plunged furiously into their midst. And seized one and held him aloft as though he had no weight at all while he babbled and dribbled and snuffled, until after a moment I flung him away from me, out into the void. Then I took each of the others, one by one while they milled about me in consternation, and likewise I hurled them over the edge of the cliff, down into the abyss, down the side of the Wall to follow Thrance into death. And stood in silence by the edge, breathing hard, looking at nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing. Nothing. After a time Hendy touched me, very gently. I was grateful to her for that.

And that was how my Pilgrimage ended, with the slaughter at my own hands of the gods that I had come here to worship.

By now the two suns had risen, both of them at once from opposite sides of the sky, and by the mingling pink light I saw my comrades running toward Hendy and me, Kilarion and Galli in the lead, and then Talbol and Kath, and behind them all the others, Grycindil and Narril and Naxa and the rest. They had seen me slay the “gods”; and as they gathered around me I told them what had occurred between me and Thrance.

Then we saw the rest of the “gods” emerging from their caves and coming toward us across the plain. They were fewer than we had imagined, no more than fifteen or twenty of them, and some females and children. Why they came to us at that moment I could not say: whether it was to slay us or to worship us, it was impossible to tell. Their dim eyes and slack faces told us nothing. We fell upon them as they neared us and carried them to the edge and pushed them over, every last one of them, just as once long ago we had killed the winged gods of the Melted Ones when we were on the lower plateau. Now we were killing our own. The Summit needed purification. It had once been a holy place and then it had been befouled; and until our coming, no one had had the courage or the wit or the strength to do what needed to be done. But we did. They screamed and whimpered and fluttered about in fright, helpless before our wrath.

We destroyed them all; and when we were done with it, we went into their caves to be certain that none were lurking in there. The squalor and sheer evil filth that we found in those caves is something that I will not even attempt to describe. Two more of them were hiding beneath the dirt, the last of all their kind, blubbering and trembling. Without hesitation we dragged them forth and hurried them to the brink. And so in the violence of bloodshed the reign of the gods atop Kosa Saag came to its end at last.

Now that it was done we could barely speak.

We stood close together, shivering in the bitter air, dazed by the events that had just taken place. We knew that what had happened here had been a necessary thing, that we had purged not only our own souls but those of all our race, and that we had freed the Irtimen settlers of the World also from the curse that had overtaken them. But nevertheless it was a heavy thing to have done so much killing, and we were stunned by the impact of it and hardly knew what to think or say.

It was at this moment that the three Irtimen emerged once again from their ship.

They stepped down the ladder and stood close together just before it, standing uneasily, with their little weapon-tubes in their hands as though they half expected us to attack them with the same berserk fury as we had the others. But we had no reason to do that, and in any case all fury was gone from us now.

I went forward, weary and dazed as I was, and knelt on the ground before them. By twos and threes my companions joined me, until we were all of us kneeling, with our heads bowed.

Then the Irtiman with the golden hair raised her speaking-box and said, speaking simply and quietly as though she too had been drained of strength by what had taken place here, “We have no further business on this world, and we will be leaving it now. You must all move back, to the far side of the plateau, and stay there until we are gone. Do you understand what I say? Fire will come from our ship; and you will be harmed if you are close to it.”

I told her that we understood.

She said then in a softer voice that she wished us well, and hoped that we would grow in understanding and wisdom all the rest of our days. And she told us that we need never fear the intrusion of Irtimen into our world ever again.

That was all. They went back into their ship, and we withdrew to the far side of the plateau.

For a long time nothing happened; and then we saw dust rising around the ship, and moments later a pillar of fire burst into life beneath it, and lifted it upward. The little gleaming ship stood as if motionless before us an instant or two on its fiery tail. Then it was gone. It vanished from our sight as though it had never been.

I said, “These were the true gods. And now they have left us.”

With that, and with no other word being spoken, we began to make ready for our descent from the Summit.

Before we left we dug a grave for Thissa and built a cairn over it. She will always lie in honor at the roof of the World. We built a cairn in memory of Thrance also, since whatever his sins may have been he was nevertheless a Pilgrim and a man of our village and that was his due. Then we stood together in a tight circle for a long time, close against one another, needing each other’s comfort; for this was the end of our Pilgrimage and the end of all Pilgrimages, and we knew that we had achieved something mighty, though we were not yet sure what it was. I heard weeping nearby me, from Maiti first, then Grycindil, then Naxa and Kath; and then I was weeping too, and Traiben, and Galli. We all wept, we survivors, we remaining ones. I had never felt such love for anyone as I felt for these people now, with whom I had gone through so much. We had formed something new on this long journey: we had become a House unto ourselves. Everyone understood that, and so no one spoke of it. We did not even dare look at one another, the moment was so solemn: we stared at the ground, we drew breath deep into our lungs, we held each other’s hands tightly and let the weeping pour forth until there was no weeping left in us. At last we looked up, after that, and our eyes were shining and our faces were aflame with the new understanding, which we all felt even though we could not have put it into words.

We assembled then such belongings as remained with us after all this time and in silence we went down the way we came, putting the Summit behind us, descending into the chill depths of the fog zone and through the realm of wind and storms to the Kingdoms beyond, and so onward and downward, onward and downward, toward the place from which we began. Hendy walked beside me. She walks beside me now.

What befell us on the journey down is of no importance, and I will pass over it here. What matters only is that we ascended Kosa Saag, enduring all hardships to attain its Summit, and saw at that Summit the things that we saw, and learned what we learned there, and came home with the knowledge. Which I have set down in this book for you all to ponder and learn.

The gods are gone. We are alone.

And we know now that the changes that befall our people upon the Wall are not god-changes; for those whom we had thought were gods were changed just as so many Pilgrims have been. What causes the transformations on the Wall, so I now believe, is not the presence of the gods at the Summit sending down the radiance of their power, but rather the inherent nature of the air up there, and the powerful light of the sun, and also the force that wells up out of the rocks and plays across our flesh, the heat of change-fire that kindles and inflames our natural shapechanging faculties and makes them all the more potent. I know that this is heresy, but yet that is what the Irtiman told us and that is what I have come to believe, and so be it. At one time there were superior beings on the mountain, yes—gods indeed, perhaps, or close enough to it—but it was not they who worked the magics of the Wall upon the climbers.

And the Kingdoms? What are they?

They are the resting places of those who have failed to learn the lesson of the Wall. Some who climb Kosa Saag die along the way in making the attempt, and some few succeed but lose their minds in trying; most, though, simply fail. Those are the ones who have created the Kingdoms as halfway places for themselves, between the jungle and the clouds, for there is no going home for them, and no going upward either.

There is nothing to reproach in that. You have to be something of a madman to want to fight your way to the Summit—as is Traiben, as is Hendy, as was Thrance in his way. As am I. Most people are simpler and easier people than we are, and they fall away from the quest. The Kingdoms are for them. We who are meant to have the knowledge of the Summit are the only ones who will persevere that long and that far.

And now I have returned, and I have brought the knowledge of the Summit with me, and I share it with you now, as I go among you with the marks of the mountain on my flesh and you look upon me with wonder and fear.

What I have to tell you is this, and nothing but this.

The lesson of the Wall is that we cannot continue to hope for comfort and instruction from the dwellers atop it. It is time to lay that fable aside. Those whom we took to be our gods are no longer there to help us along the path of our lives. Without expectation of their aid, then, we ourselves must discover the new things that need to be discovered, and we must put those new things to work assisting us to discover even more. It was given to me, and those who returned with me, to bring this lesson home to you, where no one else had done so; but I have the blood of the First Climber in my veins, and perhaps His spirit guided me as I led my Forty to the Summit.

What we need to do is to break a path through to the fountain from which wisdom flows. It will be our task to build wagons to carry us between villages, and then sky-wagons, and then star-wagons that will take us into the Heavens; and then we will meet the gods again. But this time it will be as equals.

These things are not impossible. The Irtimen achieved them. They were little more than rock-apes, once, long ago, and they made themselves into gods. So can we.

So can we.

We can be as gods: that is the truth that Poilar Crookleg offers you. For there are no other gods within our reach; and if we do not make ourselves gods, then we must live our lives in the absence of gods, which is a terrible thing. That is the wisdom that Poilar Crookleg has brought down for you from the Summit of Kosa Saag, out of all his sufferings. This is his book, which tells of all that happened to him and his comrades there, and what they saw, and what they discovered. These are the things I experienced, this is what I learned, this is what I must teach you for the sake of your souls. It is knowledge that was not easily won; but I offer it all freely to you, and, if only you will accept it, it will set you free. Listen, then. Listen and remember.