Kingdoms of the Wall

7

Now we were above the highest milestone whose name anyone still knew, entering territory that was completely unknown to any of us.

There was a sort of path here, but it was narrow and vague and erratic, and it seemed best, in the gathering darkness, not to try to go on this late in the day. So we made camp for our second night on the Wall. My mind was full of thoughts of the land of ghosts, of its sinister spores, its beckoning witches.

But then I put such thoughts aside. One does not get up the Wall by thinking of what is behind one, any more than by fretting about what lies ahead. You must live in the moment as you climb, or you will fail utterly.

We had camped in a kind of little earthen pocket in a sheer, steep gorge right on the lip of the Wall, which Kilarion had found by scrambling on ahead of the rest of us. The bare rock face of Kosa Saag rose almost vertically in a series of sharp parapets just in back of us, disappearing into the dimness overhead. We saw hairy gnomish faces peering down from out of those parapets, bright-eyed rock-apes of some sort, who jeered at us and tossed handfuls of pebbles at us. We ignored them.

On the other side of us lay a vastness of open air, with the lights of some distant village, not our own, sparkling like glitterflies far out in the black valley below. A little stony rim no higher than our knees provided a kind of natural barrier just at the edge of our campsite; beyond it was a straight drop into a pit of immeasurable darkness. There was a swift stream running across the corner of the gorge. A few strange trees grew beside it. They had spiral trunks, twisted like a screw, and stiff, angular upturned leaves; and from their boughs dangled a great many heavy fruits, a reddish blue in color. They were long and full like breasts that held milk, and were marked even by small protrusions like nipples at their lower ends. Little tufts of grass grew there also, purplish, with a knife-blade sharpness to them; otherwise the gorge was barren.

Thuiman, Kilarion, and Galli found some bits of dry wood along the canyon wall and built a sputtering fire. The rest of us unpacked our bedrolls and laid out our places for the night. We were all famished, for no one had wanted to pause for a midday meal in the land of ghosts. So we brought out cheese and dried meat, and some jugs of wine. I saw Marsiel of the House of Growers eyeing the breast-fruits on a tree overhanging our campsite with some interest and called out to her, “What do you think? Are they safe to eat?”

“Who knows? I’ve never seen anything like them.”

She pulled one off, hefted it, squeezed it, finally slit its glossy skin with the nail of her forefinger. A reddish juice oozed from the break. She shrugged. Tossing it from one hand to the other, she looked around at the rest of us.

“Does anybody here want to taste it?”

We all stared, not knowing what to do.

They had warned us in our training that we would be able to carry with us only enough food to last us for the first few weeks of the climb, and then after that we would have to live on whatever we might find. And the things we found were not likely to be familiar to us. Well, we were resigned to the necessity of eating unknown things sooner or later. But how could we tell what was edible and what was poisonous?

Traiben said, “Give it here, Marsiel. I’ll try a bite.”

“No,” I said at once. “Wait. Don’t do it, Traiben.”

“Somebody has to,” he said. “Do you want to?”

“Well—”

“Then I will.”

“Are you afraid, Poilar?” Muurmut called. “Why? What are you afraid of? It’s only a piece of fruit!” And he laughed. But I noticed that he made no offer to take it from Traiben and try it himself.

It was a dilemma. Of course I had no wish to see my closest friend eat poison and fall down dead before my eyes. But I was afraid to bite into the fruit myself. So were we all; we wanted to live. That was only normal caution. But Traiben was right: someone had to taste it. If I was unwilling to do it, then he would. There is a line between caution and downright fear, and I had crossed it just then. I could not remember ever having been so cowardly in anything before.

Sick with shame, I watched as Traiben pulled the fruit apart where Marsiel had broken its skin. He scooped out a small mound of orange pulp and swallowed it without hesitation.

“Sweet,” he said. “Good. Very good ”

He took a second mouthful, and a third, and nodded to show his pleasure.

“Let me have some,” Kilarion said.

“And me,” said Thuiman.

“No, wait, all of you!” I shouted. “How can you know so soon that the fruit is safe? Suppose it has a poison in it that takes an hour to act, or two? We have to see what happens to Traiben. If he’s still well in the morning, then we can all have some.”

There was some grumbling. But generally everyone agreed that what I had said was wise.

I went over to Traiben afterward and said quietly, “That was crazy, what you did. What if you had curled up and died right on the spot?”

“Then I’d be dead. But I’m not, am I? And now we can be pretty sure that that fruit is good to eat. Which will be useful to know if we encounter a lot of it higher up.”

“But you could have died,” I said.

He gave me one of his patient all-enduring looks, as though I were some cranky child who needed to be seen through an attack of the colic.

“And if Chaliza had tasted the fruit in my place and she had died, or Thissa, or Jaif? Would that have been any better?”

“For you it would.”

“For me, yes. But we are a group, Poilar. We are a Forty. And we all have to take turns tasting strange things when we find them, whatever the risks, or we’ll surely starve in the upper reaches of the Wall. Do you understand why I did what I did? I have had my turn now. I’ve done my duty and I think that I’ll survive it, and perhaps it’ll be a long while before I need to risk myself again, for which I’m profoundly glad. But if I had refused the risk, how could I have expected others to take it for me? We need to think of the survival of the Forty, Poilar, and not only our own.”

I felt doubly shamed now. I cringed within for the dishonor of it.

“How stupid of me not to see it,” I said. “We are all one. We owe our lives each to the other.”

“Yes.”

“I wish now I had taken the fruit from you.”

He grinned. “I don’t. You still have your turn as taster ahead of you. I’ve survived mine.”

He seemed smug about that. Which made me angry, after all my concern for him. But he had risked himself to taste the fruit and I had not. He has a right to his smugness, I told myself.

It was night now. A chill came into the air and we thickened our skins against it, and sat huddling close together around the dying fire until there was nothing left but embers. One by one we began to go off to our bedrolls.

“Is that a Wall-hawk?” Tenilda asked suddenly.

We were standing near the rim of the gorge just then. She pointed into the abyss. I followed the line of her arm and saw a creature hovering out there in midair, a good-sized bird of some sort. It moved closer as I looked, coming so near that I could almost reach out and touch it. It seemed to be studying us.

The bird was a repellent-looking thing with a round shaggy body about the size of a child’s, from which two powerful sets of golden talons jutted. Its bright-yellow beak had the shape of a hooked knife, and its eyes were red and huge. Curving wings of skin, longer than a man’s arms, held it aloft, beating fiercely. I saw claw-tipped spikes like little bony fingers protruding from their outer edges. I smelled the musky, acrid odor of its thick black fur and I could feel the cool wind coming from its wings. It did not dart about, but held itself in the same place in the air; save for those strenuous wingbeats, it was utterly motionless, so that one might almost think it was dangling from a cord that descended from the sky.

I had seen Wall-hawks now and then swooping high over the valley, but never one at such close range. I had no doubt, though, that a Wall-hawk was what this ugly creature was. It did not seem big enough to be able to carry off a grown man, as the village fables said, but it looked dangerous all the same, devilish, malevolent. I stood as if frozen, staring at it in weird fascination. And it stared back with evident curiosity. Perhaps it had only come on a scouting mission, not to attack.

“Step aside, Poilar,” said a voice behind me.

It was Kilarion. He had picked up a rock the size of his head and was making ready to throw it at the hovering bird. I heard him humming the death-song.

“No,” I said. “Don’t!”

He ignored me. Shouldering past me to the rim, he swung himself about in a half-circle, pivoting off his left knee, and hurled the rock upward and outward with all his tremendous strength. I would not have believed it was possible to throw so big a rock so far and so hard. It rose on a short arc and caught the Wall-hawk in its belly with a sharp thud. The bird let out a piercing shriek loud enough to have been heard down in the village and fell from sight, plummeting as if dead, a sudden swift descent; but as I leaned over the rim and peered down I thought I saw it make a recovery in the darkness below and go flapping out into the night. I was uncertain of that; but it seemed to me I heard its far-off angry screeching.

“Killed it!” Kilarion said, proudly preening himself and doing a little dance of self-congratulation.

“I’m not so sure,” I said gloomily. “It’ll be back. With others of its kind. You should have left it alone.”

“It’s an evil bird. A filthy, loathsome bird.”

“Even so,” I said. “There was no need for that. Who knows what trouble it will bring?”

Kilarion said something mocking and walked away, very pleased with himself. But I remained uneasy over what he had done, and I called aside Jaif and Galli and Kath and one or two others and suggested that we stand guard through the night, two of us at a time until morning came. It was a good idea. Galli and Kath stood first watch and I lay down to sleep, telling them to call me when my time of duty had come; but hardly had I closed my eyes, or so it seemed, as I felt Galli roughly tugging me awake, and I looked up to see the night astir with fiery red eyes wheeling above us like demons.

There were five or six hawks overhead, perhaps—or ten, or twenty, more likely; who had time to count? The air was thick with them. I saw their eyes; I felt their beating wings; I stared in dismay at their sharp, ravening beaks and talons. We were all up and defending ourselves with cudgels and stones now as they swept and swirled among us, furiously clawing us and biting us and screeching. They were like wild fiends. Kilarion carried one bird on each shoulder—they had singled him out, it seemed, as the one who had thrown the rock—and they struck at him with their talons again and again, flapping their great wings furiously, while he struggled to seize them by their ankles and pull them free of him. I went to his aid, cudgeling a hawk loose. It flew straight up when I hit it, squawking madly and swinging about to come at me, but I held it off with fierce swings of my stick. Kilarion meanwhile had ripped the other bird free of his flesh. I saw him smash it to the ground and bring his heel down on its chest. From far away on the other side of the stream I heard one of our women screaming. And I saw, by glinting moonlight, Traiben with a pile of stones stacked in front of him, snatching them up one by one and calmly hurling them with great accuracy toward any hawk that came near him. I had a glimpse of Hendy standing by herself, her head thrown back and her eyes gleaming strangely as she slowly swung a cudgel from side to side in a wide arc about her, though there were no hawks in her vicinity. Kath, meanwhile, had rekindled our fire, and was handing blazing torches out to several of us, who thrust them upward at the attackers.

Then it ended, as suddenly as it had begun. One of the hawks gave the command to retreat—it was unmistakable, a clear harsh honking cry that reverberated off the side of the Wall like the sound of a gallimond played in its highest register—and all of them took off at once in a great clatter of bare thrashing wings, screaming to the stars as they went. One snatched up a chain of sausages that we had left unfinished by the fireside at suppertime, and flew away with it. We saw the whole host of them for a moment outlined against the moonlit sky, and then they were gone, all but the one Kilarion had trampled, which lay dead near Marsiel’s bedroll. She kicked it aside with a little cry of disgust, and Thuiman scooped it up on the end of a stick and tossed it over the rim of the gorge. In the silence, the sound of our rough breathing was loud as thunder. We were all stunned by the suddenness and fury of the attack, though it had been so brief: the Wall had given us only the merest hint of the torments it could offer, as if to put us on notice of the sufferings ahead.

“Is anyone hurt?” I asked.

Nearly all of us were, to some degree or other. Fesild of the Vintners was the worst. She had taken a long cut across her cheek that ran close to her eye, and another, very deep, on her left shoulder. Her face was all blood and her left arm was jerking as though it wanted to leap free of her body. Kreod, one of the three Healers among us, went to deal with her. Kilarion had been badly cut too, but he laughed his wounds off. Talbol had a slash the length of his arm, Gazin the Juggler a bright-red set of crossmarks on his back, Grycindil a torn hand, and so on. The binding of wounds went on almost until morning. I myself had been bruised more than a little by wings but I had shed no blood.

Traiben counted us, and reported after a time that we were all accounted for. None of us had been carried off by the hawks: our only loss in that regard had been the chain of sausages. So the tales of how Wall-hawks would snatch unwary Pilgrims from the trail and devour them in their eyries were only fanciful myths, as I had always suspected. The hawks were simply not big enough to do such a thing. But they were troublesome birds all the same, and I knew we would have more grief from them higher up.

As the red light of rising Marilemma came into the sky, Kilarion squatted down beside me where I sat kneading my bruises and said in a quiet voice quite different from his usual one, “It was stupid of me to throw that rock, wasn’t it, Poilar?”

“Yes. It was. I remember telling you something of that sort when you did it.”

“But I saw the hawk hanging in the air and I hated it. I wanted to kill it, because it was so ugly.”

“If you want to kill every ugly thing you see, Kilarion, it’s a wonder you’ve allowed yourself to live so long. Or have you never seen yourself in a mirror?”

“Don’t mock me,” he said. His voice was still soft. “I told you, I think it was a stupid thing to do. I should have listened to you.”

“Yes. You should.”

“You always seem to be able to see what will happen before it happens. You knew that if I hit the hawk with the rock, it would come back with others of its kind and attack us.”

“I suspected it might, yes.”

“And earlier you made me keep moving, when I might have stopped and done the Changes with that ghost. You were right that time too: the ghost would have taken me. I would have become a ghost myself, if I had gone with her. But I was too stupid to see that for myself.” He was staring bleakly at the ground, pushing pebbles around with his finger. I had never seen him so dejected. This was a different Kilarion: reflective, brooding.

I smiled and said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Kilarion. Just try to think things through a little before you act, all right? You keep out of a lot of trouble if you get into the habit of doing that.”

But still he stared down and pushed pebbles. Sadly he said, “You know, when we were picked, I was sure that I would be the leader of our Forty. I’m the strongest. I have great endurance and I know how to build things. But I’m not clever enough to lead, am I? The leadership has to go to someone like you. Traiben’s even cleverer than you—he’s cleverer than anyone—but he’s not a leader. Neither is Muurmut, though he thinks he is. But you are, Poilar. From now on I’ll follow whatever you tell me to do. And if you see me about to do something dumb, just say very quietly in my ear, Wall-hawks, Kilarion. Or ghosts. To remind me. Will you do that for me, Poilar?”

“If that’s what you want, of course.”

He looked up at me. His eyes seemed almost worshipful. It was embarrassing. I grinned and slapped him on the thigh and told him what an asset he was to us all. But secretly I was relieved. A stupid man who admits that he’s stupid is far less of a danger to his comrades than one who doesn’t. Perhaps Kilarion would be less of a problem than I had feared a little earlier. At the very least I would hold some ascendance over him for a while, until his stupidity came bursting through once again.

We washed ourselves in the cold little stream and had a morning meal of cold puffbread and moonmilk. It was necessary to help some of those who had been worst injured by the hawks. Since Traiben had not died during the night, nor so much as complained of feeling unwell, we ate some of the breast-fruits too—they were cool and sweet and tender—and stowed as many of them as we thought we could carry in our packs. Then we made ready to leave the gorge.

Getting out was harder than going in had been: the little ravine turned very narrow at its upper end and after another hundred paces unexpectedly terminated in a naked shield of rock that rose absolutely vertically as far as we could see. Kilarion, who had not gone all the way to this point when he had found the gorge for us the night before, was livid with chagrin. It was plain to him now that there was no road up; and he hopped about, stamping the ground and spitting in fury, like one who has been stung by a swarm of palibozos. “Wait,” he said. “You all wait here.” And off he ran back toward the entrance to our gorge, dropping his pack as he went.

We saw him minutes later, looking down and beckoning from one of the narrow parapets from which the rock-apes had jeered at us at twilight. He had found a path. We swung about and went the way he had gone, and he met us at the trailhead, which was an uninviting tumble of boulders that looked as though it led downward, not up. What impulse had led him to try it? It could not have been less promising. But it was the right way to go; and Kilarion glowed with satisfaction as he showed us how to circle a jagged little chimney-formation that marked the real start of the trail. He looked to me for approval, as if to say, See? See? I’m good for something after all! I nodded to him. He had his merit, yes.

The rock-apes reappeared in midmorning, scampering along a row of finely eroded pink parapets not far above our line of march. They would hold to some needlelike outcropping of rock with one hand and swing far out to chatter derisively at us or pelt us with stones, or even their own bright-yellow dung. One such missile struck Kilarion on his shoulder, which was already sore from the talons of the Wall-hawks. He made an angry rumbling sound and snatched up a jagged rock, and made as if to hurl it at his assailant. Then he must have thought better of it; for he paused in mid-throw, and glanced toward me with a foolish grin, as though asking me for permission.

I smiled and nodded and he threw, but the stone missed. The ape laughed wildly and showered him with bits of gravel. Kilarion hissed and cursed and threw another rock, as ineffectually as before. After a time the apes lost interest in us and we saw no more of them that morning.

There was nothing like a road anymore, or any sort of regular path. We had to find our own trail as we climbed. Sometimes we had to haul ourselves up over rugged cliffs that were like staircases for giants, made up of blocks of stone twice the height of a man, which had to be managed with rope and grappling-hooks. Sometimes we moved across a sharp rubble of broken rock where an entire ledge had collapsed into talus. I saw Traiben gasping and struggling as we made our way up this treacherous rocky fan, and once he fell, and I paused beside him and held him up until he had caught his breath, and walked with my arm around his shoulders until he was able to go on again by himself.

But for the most part the mountain at this elevation was easier to ascend than we had expected, since what had looked from below like a vertical wall of stone turned out in fact to be a series of broad rocky slabs, each sloping upward, to be sure, but not as steeply as we had thought from a distance. In aggregate the angle was a sharp one; taken one by one each slab could be crossed by mere steady plodding.

Not that I want you to think that any of it was easy. Where there was a track we could follow without using ropes, it was of crumbled rock, soft and gravelly the way much of Kosa Saag’s surface is, so that we constantly slipped and slid and risked twisted ankles. We labored under heavy packs and the sun was very strong. The hot blaze of white Ekmelios dazzled our eyes and burned our faces and necks and turned the rock slabs we were crossing into blinding mirrors. We baked in the heat, instead of stewing and simmering in it as one does when one lives in the lowlands. We were used to that other kind of heat, close as a damp blanket about us all the time, and we missed it sorely. There was no warm thick haze up here to screen us from the fury of the white sun, no gentle moist mists. The sultry humid world of our village was very far away now.

Not only was the air much more clear at this level, it seemed less nourishing too: dry, thin, piercing, disagreeable stuff. We had to breathe twice as deeply as we were accustomed to in order to fill our chests, which made our heads ache and our throats and nostrils feel chafed and raw. Our bodies made adjustments to the thinner air as we climbed: I could feel little alterations going on within me, breathing-passages expanding, lungs belling out, blood traveling more swiftly in my vessels. After a time I knew that I was adapting successfully, or successfully enough, at least, to this new environment. But I had never realized before what a rich, intoxicating substance our lowland air was. It was like strong wine, compared with this harsh mountain air.

On the other hand, the water in this high country was far purer and more pleasing than village water. It had a magical clarity and sparkle, and it was always cold and fresh. But there was very little of it. Streams and springs were few and far between on these slopes. Whenever we found one we dropped our packs and knelt and drank greedily, and then we would fill our storage jars, for who knew how long it would be before the next fresh water?

We were cut off now from all view of our home territory. Below us everything was buried under thick white fog. It was as if a great swath of white fur lay upon our familiar valley. Now and again it would break a little, giving us a glimpse of greenness, but there was nothing there that we could recognize. So there was no longer any down for us, only up, up, up, up.

Kosa Saag was our entire world: our universe. We had begun to discover that the great mountain that we called the Wall was actually not one mountain but many, a sea of mountains, each one rising on the backs of those around it the way high waves rise in the midst of stormy waters. We had no idea where the summit was. Sometimes it seemed that we had already attained the highest peak, for we saw clear sky above it, but we were always wrong, because when we got to the top of that one we would find that there were new summits rising beyond it. One peak led to another, and another, and another. When we looked up we saw only an infinite perplexing complexity of pink rock: spires, parapets, shields, gorges. It seemed to go on all the way to Heaven. There was no summit. There was only the endless mountain above us, forever sloping away out of sight above us while we crossed its interminable lower reaches like a file of patient ants.