Kingdoms of the Wall

5

The final rite of our stay in Pilgrim Lodge took place at dawn: the Sacrifice of the Bond. We were all awake and waiting when the slots opened for the last time and a beautiful young grezbor came wriggling through, a sleek pink-hoofed one with dazzling white wool, not your ordinary farm grezbor but one of the prized purebred ones of the temples. After it, on a golden tray, came the silver knife of the Bond.

We knew what we were supposed to do. But in the face of the actual fact we looked uneasily at each other. The grezbor seemed to think it was all a game, and went trotting around from one of us to another, nuzzling against our knees, accepting our caresses. Then Narril picked up the knife and said, “Well, considering that it’s a skill of my House—”

“No,” said Muurmut brusquely. “Not a Butcher, not for this. We need some style here.”

And he took the knife from Narril before Narril realized what was happening, and held it aloft, and waved it solemnly toward this side of the room and that one.

“Bring me the animal,” he said in a deep, dramatic tone.

I gave him a contemptuous look. Muurmut seemed both foolishly pompous and grandly impressive, but rather more pompous than grand. Still, the Sacrifice had to be carried out, and he had taken possession of the rite, and that was all there was to it. Kilarion and Stum grabbed the poor beast and brought it to Muurmut, who stood very tall in the center of the room. Muurmut turned the knife so that it glinted in the light of the window overhead and said in a rich formal voice, “We offer up the life of this creature now as a bond between us, that we should all love one another as we set forth in our high endeavor.” Then he spoke the words of the slaughtering-prayer as any Butcher might have done and made a swift cut with the knife. A line of crimson blossomed from the throat of the grezbor. It was a good clean killing: I give Muurmut credit for that much. I saw Traiben look away; and I heard a quick little gasp of dismay from Hendy.

Then Muurmut held the body forward and we came toward it one by one, and dipped our fingers in the blood and smeared it on our cheeks and forearms as the tradition required, and we swore to love one another in the ordeal ahead. Why must we do this? I wondered. Did they fear we would become enemies on the mountain, without the oath? But we rubbed the blood on each other as though it was really needed. And in time I would come to see that indeed it had been.

“Look,” Jaifsaid. “The doors—”

Yes. They were swinging open now.

I felt nothing, nothing at all, as I came forth from Pilgrim Lodge that morning and stepped forward into the Procession. I had spent too much of my life waiting for this moment; the moment itself had become incomprehensible.

Of course there was plenty of sensation. I remember the blast of hot moist air as I came through the doorway, and the fierce light of Ekmelios jabbing me in the eyes, and the sharp bitter smell of thousands of damp sweaty bodies. I heard the singing and the chanting and the music. I saw the faces of people I knew in the viewing-stand just opposite the roundhouse of the Returned Ones, where Traiben and I had been sitting eight years before on that day when we first vowed that we would achieve the Pilgrimage. But though a million individual details struck my senses and engraved themselves permanently upon my memory, none of it had any meaning. I had been locked up; now I was coming out into town; and I was about to go for a walk.

A walk, yes.

Because I was of the House of the Wall, I was the first one out of the Lodge and I was the one who would lead the group of Pilgrims in the Procession: naturally Wall always goes first, Singers second, then Advocates, Musicians, Scribes, and so on in the prescribed order that was set down thousands of years ago. Traiben, because he was of the Wall also, walked just behind me: he had felt too shy at the last to want to be first. Beside me on the right was the only woman of my House who had been chosen, Chaliza of Moonclan. I had never liked her much and we didn’t look at each other now.

Procession Street in front of me was empty. Everyone else had passed through already, the heads of the Houses and the double-lifers and the Returned Ones and the jugglers and musicians and all the rest. I put one foot in front of the other and set out down the street toward the center of town, toward the plaza with the bright-leaved szambar tree, toward the road to Kosa Saag.

My mind was empty. My spirit was numb. I felt nothing, nothing at all.

The heads of all the Houses were waiting in the plaza, ringing the szambar tree. As tradition required, I went to each one in turn, touching the tips of my hands to theirs and getting little smudges of blood on them: first Meribail, the head of my own House, and then Sten of Singers, Galtin of Advocates, and so on in the proper order. Our kinsmen were there to pay their farewells, also. I embraced my mother, who seemed to be very far away. She spoke vaguely of the day when she had stood by the same scarlet-leaved tree to say good-bye to my father as he was about to set out on the Pilgrimage from which he did not return. Beside her was my mother’s brother, he who had raised me like a father, and all he had to say to me now was, “Remember, Poilar, the Wall is a world. The Wall is a universe.” Well, yes, so it is, Urillin; but I would have preferred some warmer words than those, or at least something more useful.

When we had finished the circuit of the szambar tree and had spoken with all those who waited there to see us off, we were far around to the other side of the plaza, looking toward the mountain road. The golden carpets had been laid, stretching on and on and on like a river of molten metal. The sight of them broke through my trance at last: a shiver went down my middlebone and I thought for a moment I would start to weep. I looked toward Chaliza. Her face was wet with the shining streaks of tear-trails. I smiled at her and nodded toward the mountain.

“Here we go,” I said.

And so we went upward into the land of dreams, into the place of secrets, the mountain of the gods.

Step and step and step and step. You take one, and another, and another and another, and that is how you climb. From all sides we heard cheers of encouragement, shouts of praise, the clangor of jubilant music. The shouts came even from behind us, where the candidates who had not stayed the course humbly walked, as the tradition requires, carrying our baggage. I glanced back once and was amazed to see how many of them there were. Thousands, yes. Eyes gleaming with our reflected glory. Why were they not bitter and envious? Thousands of them, whose candidacies had failed: and we alone, we few, had won the prize that all had sought.

Everyone knows the lower reaches of the road. The ancient white paving-stones are smooth and wide and the palisade lining the road is bright with yellow banners. Taking care to walk only on the golden carpet of honor, we passed through the heart of the town and down into the place where the road descends a little before it turns sharply upward again; and then we were at Roshten Gate, where the guards stood saluting us, and one by one we touched our hands to the Roshten milepost to mark our departure from the village and the real beginning of our ascent. I still led the way, although we no longer held strict formation and Kilarion and Jaif and some of the others came up to walk beside me. Already the air seemed fresher and cooler, though we had hardly begun to climb.

Kosa Saag filled the entire sky in front of us.

You hardly perceive that it is a mountain, once you are on it. It becomes the world. You have no sense of its height. It is simply a wall, the Wall, a wall that stands between you and the unknown regions of the world on the other side. And after a time you cease to think of it as something vertical. It unfolds before you as a long winding road, going on and on and on and generally not rising as steeply before you as you might expect, and you take it one step at a time without thinking of all that lies ahead of you, for you know that if you allow yourself to think of anything more than the next step, and maybe the one after that, you will lose your mind.

We went quickly through the mileposts we all knew: Ashten, Glay, Hespen, Sennt. Certainly every one of us had been up this far at some time or other at holiday times when the Wall is open for the sacred ceremonies in honor of He Who Climbed, and probably we had all come sneaking up here on our own now and then as Galli and I had done. At each milepost marker there was a little prayer to say, since each is sacred to some particular god. But we paused as briefly as we could to get these said, and moved along. As we went up I looked over at Galli, and she grinned at me as if to tell me that she too remembered the time we had come this way together as children, and had made the Changes on the bed of moss back of Hithiat. Thinking of that day now, I remembered the feel of Galli’s breasts in my hands and the wriggling of her tongue in my mouth and I wondered if she would want to play a few Changes with me that night when we camped. For it was half a year since I had had a mating, and in my mood just then I could have done Changes with all twenty of the women of our Pilgrimage without pausing to catch my breath.

But we had more climbing to do, first.

It was all easy and familiar. The Wall road below Hithiat is kept in good repair and the grade is gentle, as mountain roads go; and as I have said we had all been up here many times. We moved along at a good steady clip, joking and laughing, pausing now and then at the lookout points to see the village becoming ever tinier below us. If the laughter was occasionally louder than the jokes seemed to merit, well, so be it: we were excited and eager, and the mountain air, already fresher than the muggy air of the village, exhilarated us. I remember one of the women—Grycindil the Weaver, I think it was, or perhaps it was Stum the Carpenter—coming up alongside me and saying gleefully, “Suppose they lied to us, and the road is this easy all the way to the top! Suppose we’re at the Summit by tomorrow afternoon, Poilar! How fine that would be!”

I had been wondering the same thing myself: Is this all there is to it? Will it be no harder than this, right to the Summit?

“Yes, how fine that would be,” I said to her. And we laughed in that over-hearty manner that we had fallen into to hide our fears. But I knew in my heart that the road would grow more difficult before very long, and that very likely within a few days we would discover that there was no more road at all, only the steep harsh face of the Wall that we would have to scale in utmost hardship. And she, I think, knew it also.

At Denbail milepost came the business of receiving our gear from our carriers. We stood just beyond the edge of the ceremonial carpet and the defeated candidates who had borne our things this far reached forward—for they were forbidden to set foot on the uncarpeted paving-stones of the upper road—and handed our packs across to us. Mine was being carried by a woman of the Jugglers named Streltsa with whom I had mated once or twice in an earlier year. She stood well back from the carpet’s edge and leaned far over to pass it to me, and as I reached for it she laughed and drew it back, so that I had to strain awkwardly toward her to get it. My bad leg failed me and I began to topple, though I righted myself before I fell. While I was still off balance she caught me with her left hand and pulled me toward her and bit me on the side of the neck, hard enough to draw blood.

“For luck!” she cried. Her eyes were wild. She had drugged herself with gaith.

I spat at her. She had forced me to step back onto the carpet, which was anything but lucky. But Streltsa only laughed again and made a kiss at me in midair. I snatched my pack from her and she air-kissed me again. Then she reached down into her bodice and pulled something out and tossed it to me. By reflex I snatched it with a quick grab before it fell.

It was a little carved idol made of white bone: Sandu Sando the Avenger. His eyes were bright-green jewels and he was in full Change, with his penis rising erect out of his thighs like a tiny hatchet. I glared at Streltsa and started to hurl it over the side of the parapet, but then I heard her little cry of shock and fear and I stopped myself before I had thrown it. I saw her trembling. She was gesturing to me: take it, keep it. I nodded, suddenly afraid amidst my anger. Streltsa turned and ran back down the path. Then the anger returned and I would have run after her and flung her down the mountain if I had not been able to gain control of myself in time.

Thissa the Witch had seen the whole thing. She dabbed at the blood on my neck.

“She loves you,” Thissa whispered. “She knows she will never see you again.”

“She will,” I said. “And when I come back, I’ll tie her down naked in the plaza and put her through the Changes with her own filthy little idol.”

Color rose in Thissa’s delicate cheeks. She shook her head in horror and made a quick Witch-sign at me, and took the Avenger from my nerveless hands and tucked him deep into my pack.

“Take care not to lose it,” she said. “It will protect us all. There are many evils ahead of us.” And she kissed me to calm me, for I was shivering with fury and with fright.

It was not a good way to have begun the journey.

Our bearers now were gone, and only we of the Forty remained. The uncarpeted road here was far rougher than it had been just outside town—the paving-stones had been laid down an immensely long time ago and they were cracked and tilted at crazy angles—and I knew from my climb long ago with Galli that it would get rougher yet, very soon. The packs were crushingly heavy; we carried in them enough food to last for weeks and as much camping equipment as we could manage to haul, aware that there would be no way to obtain any as we climbed. Beyond Denbail too, the road doubles back into a fold of the Wall and curves around to a side from which the village is no longer visible, which gave us all a powerful sense of having broken the last tie with our home and gone floating off into the empty sky. But it was at Hithiat milepost that the real strangeness began.

We reached it in late afternoon and by common unspoken decision halted to consider the thing that was next to be done.

It was time to choose a leader. We all knew that. They had told us in the training sessions that we were to elect a leader as soon as we were beyond Hithiat, because without one we would be a serpent with many heads, each yearning to go in the direction it preferred and no two agreeing.

There was an uneasy moment, just as there had been at the time of the Sacrifice of the Bond, when no one was quite sure of how to go about doing what was necessary to do. I remembered how Muurmut had seized the moment and made himself its master, and I was not going to let him do that again here.

“Well,” I said. “My House is the House of the Wall. This is the place of my House. I’ve waited all my life to reach this place. Stay with me and I’ll take you to the Summit.”

“Are you nominating yourself, Crookleg?” Muurmut asked, so I knew right away there would be trouble with him.

I nodded.

“Seconded,” said Traiben.

“You’re of his House,” said Muurmut. “You can’t second him.”

“Seconded, then,” said Jaif the Singer.

“Seconded,” said Galli, who was of the Vintners, Muurmut’s own House.

Everyone was silent a moment.

Then Stapp of Judges said, “If Poilar can nominate himself, so can I.” He looked around. “Who seconds me?” Someone snickered. “Who seconds me?” Stapp said again, and his face began to go puffy and hot with anger.

“Why don’t you second yourself too, Stapp?” Kath said.

“Why don’t you be quiet?”

“Who are you telling to be—”

“You,” Stapp said. Kath raised his arm, not necessarily in a menacing way, and an instant later Stapp came jumping forward, ready to fight. Galli caught him by the middle and pulled him back to his place in the circle.

“The Bond,” Thissa whispered. “Remember the Bond!” She looked pained by the threat of violence among us.

“Does anyone second Stapp?” I asked.

But no one did. Stapp turned away and stared at the Wall above us. I waited.

Thuiman of the Metalworkers said, “Muurmut.”

“You nominate Muurmut?”

“Yes.”

I had expected that. “Seconds?”

Seppil the Carpenter and Talbol the Leathermaker seconded him. I had expected that too. They were very thick, those three.

“Muurmut is nominated,” I said. You will notice how I had already taken charge, here in the time before the choosing. I meant nothing evil by it. It is my way, to lead; someone has to, even when no leader has been appointed. “Are there any other nominations?” There were none. “Then we vote,” I said. “Those who are for Poilar, walk to this side. Those who are for Muurmut, over there.”

Muurmut gave me a sour look and said, “Shouldn’t we set forth our qualifications before the voting, Poilar?”

“I suppose we should. What are yours, Muurmut?”

“Two straight legs, for one thing.”

It was cheap of him, and I would have struck him down then and there except that I knew I could turn this to better advantage by holding my temper. So I simply smiled, not a warm smile. But Seppil the Carpenter guffawed as though he had never heard anyone say anything funnier. Talbol the Leathermaker, who was not the sort to stoop to such stuff, managed a sickly little grunt as his best show of solidarity with Muurmut.

“Yes, very pretty legs,” I said, for Muurmut’s legs were thick and hairy. “If a leader must think with his legs, then yours are surely superior to mine.”

“A leader must climb with his legs.”

“Mine have taken me this far,” I said. “What else do you have to recommend your candidacy?”

“I know how to command,” said Muurmut. “I give orders which others are willing to follow, because they are the correct orders.”

“Yes. You say, ‘Put the grapes in this tub,’ and you say, ‘Crush them in such-and-such a fashion,’ and you say, ‘Now put the juice in the casks and let it turn into wine.’ Those are very fine orders, so far as they go. But how do they fit you to command a Pilgrimage? The way you mock my leg, which is as it is through no fault of mine, doesn’t indicate much understanding of someone you have sworn in blood to love, does it, Muurmut? And if a leader is deficient in understanding, what kind of leader is he?”

Muurmut was glaring at me as though he would gladly have heaved me from the mountain.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said what I did about the leg. But how will it be for you in the dangerous places, Poilar? When you’re climbing, will you also be able to think clearly about the things a leader must think about, when every step you take is hampered by your infirmity? When the change-fires begin to assail us, will you be strong enough to defend us against them?”

“I have no infirmity,” I said. “All I have is a crooked leg.” I would with great pleasure have kicked him with it too, but I restrained myself. “As for the change-fires, we don’t as yet know whether they’re real or myth. But if they’re real, why, then, each of us must do his own defending, and those who are too weak to resist their temptations will fall by the wayside and turn into monsters, and the rest of us will go onward toward the gods. That is the Way, as I understand it. Do you have any other qualifications to put forth on behalf of your election, Muurmut?”

“We should hear yours, I think”

Quietly I said, glancing from one to another of my fellow Pilgrims, “The gods have chosen me to bring you to the Summit. You all know that. In a single night every one of you dreamed the dream that I dreamed, in which I was designated. You know that I can lead, and that I can think clearly, and that I am strong enough to climb. I will bring you to the Summit if only you follow me. Those are my qualifications. Enough of this talk: I call for the vote.”

“Seconded,” said Jaif.

“Seconded again,” said Thissa softly.

And so we voted. Muurmut and Seppil and Talbol stood to one side, and all the others moved across the circle to me, three or four of them very quickly, then another few after a little hesitation, and then, in a general rush, everyone who was left. Even Thuiman, who had nominated Muurmut, deserted him. So it was done. Muurmut made no effort to disguise his fury. I thought for a moment he would attack me in his rage, and I was ready for him. I would hook my crooked leg behind his good one and throw him to the ground, and seize him by the feet and spin him around and press his face into the stony ground until he submitted to me.

But none of that was necessary. He had better sense than to lift his hand against me in front of the others, and in any case he could see the one-sidedness of the vote. So he came over grudgingly to offer me his hand afterward with the rest. His smile was false and his mien was sullen, though, and I knew that he would let no opportunity pass to displace me, if he could.

“Very well,” I said. “I thank you for your support, all of you. And now we must talk of what lies ahead.” I looked around. “Who among us has been beyond Hithiat?” I asked.

I heard nervous laughter. We had all come this far during our training, and most of us had gone up the Wall on our own once or twice out of sheer mischief, perhaps as high as Denbail, even to Hithiat. But no one goes beyond Hithiat if he has any sense. Still, I thought it was a useful thing to ask, though I expected no reply.

To my surprise Kilarion put up his hand and said, “I have. I’ve been to Varhad to see the ghosts.”

All eyes turned to him. The big man smiled, enjoying the attention his boast had earned him. Then someone laughed again, and others took it up, and Kilarion’s face darkened like the sky before a storm. The moment was suddenly very tense.

“Go on,” I said. “We’re all waiting to hear.”

“I went to Varhad. I saw the ghosts and did the Changes with one. Anyone doesn’t believe me, he can fight me,” Kilarion said, drawing himself up even taller. And he clenched his fists and stared from side to side.

“No one doubts you, Kilarion,” I said. “But tell us when it was that all this happened.”

“When I was a boy, with my father. Every boy in my clan comes up here with his father when he turns twelve. Axeclan is my clan.” He was still glowering. “You think I’m lying, do you? Wait and see what’s in store for you up ahead.”

“That’s what we want you to tell us,” I said. “You know and we don’t.”

“Well,” he said, suddenly ill at ease and uncertain of himself. “There are ghosts. And white rocks. And the trees are—well, they’re ugly.” He paused. He was groping for words. “It’s a bad place. Everything moves around. There’s a smell in the air.”

“What kind of smell?” I asked. “What do you mean, everything moves around?”

“A bad smell. And things—move. I don’t know. They just move.”

Poor thickbrained Kilarion! I looked over at Traiben and saw him fighting to smother laughter. I shot him an angry glance. Patiently I asked Kilarion again what Varhad was like, and he replied just as fuzzily as before. “A bad place,” he muttered. “A very bad place.” And that was all we got from him. So whatever he might have learned up there would be of no use to us. The little that he told us was enough to make us decide to make camp at the level of Hithiat on our first evening, though, and wait until morning before going on into the unknown reaches of the Wall above us.

Thus it was that I found myself back at that mossy field where Galli and I had enjoyed each other long ago. But there were no Changes played that night, despite all the pent-up desire that had accumulated in us in our half a year in Pilgrim Lodge. Sometimes desire can build to a point where there is no easy way to express it, and that was how it was for all of us that first night. We had been apart so long that it seemed too great a thing to break the abstinence so soon. And so the twenty men camped to one side of the field, and the twenty women on the other. We might just as well have been in our separate halves of Pilgrim Lodge.

I think none of us slept well that night. From higher on the mountain came sharp hooting cries that trailed off into terrible screeches, and sometimes the ground rumbled beneath us as if Kosa Saag meant to hurl us with a single casual shrug into the distant valley. A mist as cold as death slipped down from somewhere and wrapped itself over us as we lay. I wondered if it was the change-fire, rising up out of the ground to tempt me into taking on some strange new form. But I looked down at myself and I was still who I had been, so I knew that we had nothing to fear yet from that direction. And I slipped into a light doze.

In the middle of the night, though, I awakened and suddenly felt the thirst of the damned take hold of me, and I rose and walked to the little stream that ran through the middle of our moss-patch. When I knelt to drink, I saw my face reflected in the water by moonlight, all twisted and distorted, which frightened me, and I saw something else too, a glitter in the stream-bed, as of red eyes looking up at me. It seemed to me they were the eyes of Streltsa who had bitten me at Denbail milepost, and they were weeping blood. Quickly I jumped back and whispered a whole string of prayers to every god I could remember, one after another.

Then I looked across through the mists and I saw the strange woman Hendy up and walking about amidst the sleeping women. For a moment desire stirred in my loins, and I thought how good it would be to go to her and sing the song of mating to her and pull her down in the moss with me. But Hendy was a stranger to me, nor had anyone I knew ever spoken of mating with her either, and this hardly seemed a fit time to approach her for such a thing. I had already been bitten once this day. We stared at each other in the mist, and Hendy’s face was like stone. After a time I turned away and went back to my bedroll, and lay face up on it without moving. The mist opened and the stars appeared. I trembled beneath their light and put my hands over my manhood to protect it. Though the stars are gods, not all of them are benevolent ones. They say that the light of some stars does good magic, but the light of other stars is poison, and I had no idea which stars might be above me that night. I longed for morning to come. It was a thousand years in coming.