Kingdoms of the Wall

9

We wondered, as we climbed, why we saw no sign of the myriad others who must have come this way before us over the centuries: no campsites, no discarded trash, no lost tools, no burial cairns. After all, our village had sent its Forty up the mountain every year for more years than anyone could reckon, and as I understand it, we are not the only village at the base of the Wall that keeps the custom of Pilgrimage. It seemed to us also that there had been very few choices of route facing us during our ascent: that everyone who had come in earlier years from our village, at least, must of necessity have taken the same path we had, more or less. So where were their traces?

But that was a sign of how innocent of the realities of the Wall we still were. Even now, having been on Kosa Saag for so many weeks and—so we thought—having come to an appreciation of its vastness, we had no serious understanding of its true size. We continued to think of it in terms of the little road that runs up its flank out of our village, which at that level is the only route that a sensible person would follow in going upward: the familiar milestones, Roshten, Ashten, Glay, Hespen, Sennt, and so forth. We imagined that the path we were taking now was the only logical extension of that road, and that everyone who had come before us must have done as we had done. But what we were not taking into account was that our village road is to the Wall as a raindrop is to a mighty river. Beyond Hithiat milestone the village road goes on to Varhad of the ghosts, yes, but there were other ways to ascend beyond Hithiat that we had not bothered to consider, and each of those ways forks outward into a dozen other ways, each of which would lead you back and forth in its own fashion across the face of the Wall and through the twisted and crumpled maze of interior routes, so that it is probably the case that no two parties of Pilgrims have ever taken the same way up Kosa Saag after the first few days of their climb. I should have kept in mind my mother’s brother Urillin’s parting words to me, that the Wall is a world, the Wall is a universe. But I did not arrive at an understanding of that until much later.

It was not to be long now, though, before we would find some sign of those who had undertaken the ascent of Kosa Saag before us.

We had slipped into a steady rhythm of climbing. Rise at dawn, bathe and eat, walk until midday. A meal; some singing; a time to relax; and then on the trail again until nightfall neared and it seemed wise to find a place to camp. We knew that we were gradually gaining elevation as we went, but this part of the climb seemed almost static, so gentle was the advance. It lulled us into a false sense of ease. Even Muurmut, who throughout the climb had been quick to dissent with any decision of mine that troubled him, was quiet. Most days the weather was fair, cooler than we were accustomed to but not at all unpleasant. Some days there was rain, occasionally even cold sleet; but we endured it.

Occasionally at night we heard the roaring of demons or monsters from the desolate hills above us. It was fearsome stuff, but we told ourselves that their roaring might be the worst part of them and they might well flee at our approach. Even the awareness that we now had exhausted all the food we had carried with us from the village did not trouble us. We foraged for our provender along the way, each of us taking a turn at sampling the strange berries and roots we found as Traiben had done that early time in the grove of the breast-fruit trees. Once in a while someone became ill for a few hours that way, and so we learned which things not to eat; but in general we ate well. The hunting was good and there was fresh meat to roast every evening.

Some couples formed but didn’t last. I mated with sweet pretty Tenilda the Musician a few times, with Stum, and once with Min, who did whatever her friend Stum did, and with Marsiel the Grower. I would have mated with Thissa again also, but she was ever shy and uneasy, and I knew better than to approach her. But I looked longingly after her. And then there was the dark, quiet woman called Hendy, she who had been stolen and kept in the village of Tipkeyn from her tenth year to her fourteenth and so was like a stranger to us all. I desired her greatly and I knew I was not the only one. I spoke with her a few times, but it was like speaking with water, like speaking with the wind. Hendy went her own way, saying little to anyone, making her own camp at a distance from ours, and though I was tempted now and then to venture over to her in the darkness and see if she would receive me, I had a good idea of what the reception was likely to be.

Galli, who long ago had been my lover and now was my friend, saw what I was doing. “You should leave both those women alone, Poilar,” she said to me one afternoon as we trudged along an unchallenging trail.

“Which women?” I said.

“Thissa. Hendy.”

“Ah. You’ve been watching me?”

“With half an eye. I need no more than that. Sleep with Stum, if you like. Sleep with Tenilda. Not those two.”

“Those two are the only ones who truly interest me, Galli.”

She laughed. “Even I interested you once.”

“Once,” I said. “Yes.”

“But I’m too fat for you now? You prefer your women more slender, I think.”

She sounded amiable and playful, but she was serious behind the sportiveness.

“I thought you were beautiful when we were young. I think so now. I’ll spend tonight with you, if you like, Galli. You are ever a dear companion.”

“A companion, yes. I take your meaning.” She shrugged. She was not easily wounded in these matters. “As you wish. But if you want a mate, stay away from those two. No good will come of your bothering them. Thissa’s frail and too easily harmed, and she’s a Witch besides. Hendy is so very strange. Choose Stum, Poilar. She’s a good woman. Strong, like me.”

“Too simple, though. And too much the friend of Min. I think you take my meaning. Friendship between women is a good thing but it makes a man uneasy when his mind is on the Changes and her mind is with her friend.”

“Then Tenilda. Beauty and intelligence there, and a good heart besides.”

“Please,” I said. “Enough of your help, Galli!”

I did indeed spend that night with her, for in truth I had never lost my fondness for her, even if the strong desire had long since abated. It was like spending the night with a favorite cousin, or even a sister. Galli and I lay together and laughed and told stories of old times and finally we made the Changes, in an easy, halfhearted way, and she fell quickly asleep beside me, snoring. Her great warm bulk nearby was comforting. But her words kept me awake. Thissa frail and too easily harmed, Hendy so very strange. Was that what attracted me to them? Was Galli right that I should put them from my mind?

Just as we were beginning to think once again that the climb would be as simple as this all the way to the Summit, we came to a place where all trails seemed to end and there was no way to proceed. This had happened to us before, and we had found some means of getting around the obstacle. But this time it seemed as though we were blocked wherever we turned.

We had been following a northerly track around the eastern face of the Wall. The wind, coming briskly out of the north, was strong in our faces, and the air was clear and fresh as young wine, and far below we could see the dull silver line of what must have been some gigantic river, seemingly no thicker than a hair to us as it wound its way through a distant blue valley. We moved with a swift step, singing joyously as we marched. In late afternoon we found our path swinging sharply toward the west, and then abruptly came the great surprise, for we discovered ourselves looking into a gigantic rift that sliced deep into the heart of Kosa Saag. It was many leagues wide—how many, I could not say—from south to north, and seemed to plunge on westward to the limits of our vision, as though the Wall were actually two pieces from here on up, cut in half by this immense sundering that we now confronted.

We halted, astonished by the splendor and magnitude of what we beheld. Wherever we looked we saw new peaks, a host of them, pink stone strongly ribbed with black, an army of peaks of great size and majesty high above us on both sides of the rift. Lightning flashed atop those peaks. Feathery strands of cloud, like veils of the sky, blew straight southward from their tips, quivering as if whipped by a terrible gale.

I had never seen such beauty. There was a wondrous music in it that filled my soul so full that I had to struggle for breath. What a grand sight it was! It was so grand that it terrified me. It seemed as if the sky were breaking open up there, and strange light was shining through a window that opened out of the future. I felt sure that it must be the light of other days I saw, time running backward, events from beyond the end of the world shining toward the beginning. There were gods walking around up there. I heard their rumbling footsteps. I wondered if the First Climber had come this way in His pioneering ascent, whether He had looked upon this sight which now so dazzled me. He must have, I thought. He must. And had been inspired by the grandeur of it to continue His upward journey to the abode of the gods. As was I. As was I.

I stood staring, lost in awe.

Naxa came up alongside me and said, “It is the land of the Doubles that we see. Or rather, we see its light, for there is no way we can see the land of the Doubles itself.”

“The Doubles?”

“Our other selves, perfect and invulnerable. They live in the Double World, which hangs downward in the sky and touches the upper reaches of the Wall. It is all written in the Book of the Double World.”

“That’s not a book that I know,” I said. “You must tell me more about it some day.”

“Yes,” Naxa said, and smiled his annoying little smile; and I knew I would never hear a thing about the Double World from him again. But I would learn of it somehow from another source, I vowed.

I couldn’t take my eyes from those lofty peaks. None of us could. Wherever we looked, great stony spires whirled toward Heaven. A hundred craggy pyramids of tumbled rock jutted into the sky on all sides of us. Some seemed kindled into pink flame by the light of setting Ekmelios. Some, which must have been capped by snow, blazed such a fierce white that we could hardly bear to look at them for long. Bright rainbows leaped from gorge to gorge. Below us, looping saddles of rock descended dizzily into a dark chasm that seemed to have no floor. We saw the tops of gigantic black trees, far below, trees which must have been fifty times a tall man’s height.

As we stood lost in all this magnificence, Dorn the Clown came to my side and said quietly to me, “Poilar, our path ends a hundred paces in front of us.”

“This is no moment for joking, Dorn.”

“And I offer you no jokes. The path drops off into utter nothingness. I’ve just been to see. There’s no way forward from here at all.”

It was the truth. Our little cliffside trail ran a short way into the rift, narrowing as it went, and simply disappeared not very far ahead. I followed it to its end and finally found myself standing in a place scarcely wider than my own feet, clinging to the mountain’s rough skin and peering awestruck into windy emptiness. There was nothing whatever in front of me but the open air of the great rift. To one side of me was the Wall, to the other was the air. Only one direction remained, and that was behind me, the path by which we had just come. We were trapped in this stony pocket. We had wasted many days: weeks, even. It seemed to me we had no choice but to retrace our way, returning along the gentle, deceptive grade we had been following until we discovered some line of approach that would allow us to resume the ascent.

“No,” said Kilarion. “We’ll go up the Wall.”

“What?” I said. “Straight up?”

Everyone was laughing at poor stolid Kilarion.

“Straight up,” he said. “It can be done. I know that it can. There’s a place a little way behind us where the face is cracked and knobby. That’ll provide us with handholds. The gods have already given us sucker-pads. Between the one and the other, we’ll be able to make it.”

I turned and looked back. What I saw was a bare sheet of vertical stone that rose so high it made my neck ache to look up at it. In the afternoon shadows I made out what might have been a few spurs of rock protruding from it, far above.

“No one can climb that, Kilarion.”

“I can. You can. We all can. It’s not as high as it looks. I’ll go up and show you. And then we’ll all go up. Otherwise we might have to turn back as far as the place where Stapp died before we find another way through. I’d rather walk up the side of this mountain than see Stapp’s grave again.”

Kilarion had shown us already that he was good at finding trails, that in fact he had some natural gift for divining the ways to conquer Kosa Saag. Perhaps he was right again. But it was getting too late in the day to make this attempt, even assuming it could be done at all. I said, “We’ll go back until we find a place to camp, and stay there for the night. In the morning you and I will try this wall, Kilarion.”

“I know we can make it.”

“You know that you can make it. I want to see if the rest of us can.”

And so we doubled back through the deepening shadows to locate a campsite. In our exhilaration that day none of us had noticed the way the trail was pinching in; retracing it now, I thought for a time we would have to go all the way back to last night’s campsite to find a place wide enough to be safe for sleeping, and that would mean many hours of risky hiking in the dark. But we did not have to do that. Another campsite that we hadn’t troubled to take note of when we were coming the other way lay only an hour back from trail’s end, next to a tiny trickle of fresh water. The site was small but adequate, and we huddled in there as best we could, listening to the wind whistling above us.

In the morning Kilarion and I set out together to attempt the climb.

We both carried our full packs. The test would have been meaningless otherwise. Kilarion chose the place where we would ascend, walking back and forth along the trail for nearly an hour before deciding on it.

“Here,” he said at last.

I looked up. The Wall here seemed smooth and utterly vertical.

“There’s water oozing here,” said Kilarion. “See? There will be cracks in the rock.” We unpacked our climbing-ropes and hitched them about our waists. Then we turned away from each other to transform our left hands for the climb. Like most men I am uneasy about performing any sort of shapechanging in front of a stranger of my own sex, and it seemed that Kilarion was the same way. When we faced each other again we had brought forth our sucker-pads. I saw Kilarion’s eye dart questioningly toward my lame leg, as though he was wondering why I had not changed that too while I was at it. But he didn’t say it. I gave him a flinty glance by way of telling him that there was nothing I could do about that leg, and that in any case it was no handicap to me And I reached around behind me into the pack, where I kept the little idol of Sandu Sando that Streltsa had forced upon me on the day of Departure, and rubbed it twice for luck along its holy place.

“Ready?” he said.

He slammed his climbing-hook into the rock, pulled himself upward on it, and began to walk up the sheer stony face.

When the slack in the rope that linked us was almost gone, I followed him. I had climbed many a rock wall in my training years, though never one like this, but I told myself that it only was a question of addressing each moment of the climb in its turn, rather than thinking about the totality of what needed to be done. Kilarion moved swiftly and deftly above me, cutting back and forth along the rock to find the best handholds. As he had guessed, the stone was riven with cracks, and there were spurs and even some narrow ledges on it too which had been invisible from below. I grabbed for the spurs; I wedged my hand or sometimes my whole arm into the cracks; I used my climbing-hook and my sucker-pads to pull me past the smooth sections. And I rose quickly and efficiently, readily keeping pace with Kilarion as he went upward.

The essence of climbing a rock like this is remembering to let your legs do the work. The arms are agile and versatile but they soon grow weary if they are called upon to carry much of your weight. That was why Kilarion had looked dubiously at my twisted foot. Since he was going first, it would be up to me to hold us both in place if he were to fall; and he must have been wondering how much strength that bad foot of mine might actually have.

I would show him. I had lived with that foot, and the lame leg to which it belonged, for two tens of years. It had taken me this far up Kosa Saag. It would take me up this rock face too, and all the way up the rest of the mountain.

Cunningly I wedged my toes into crevices as I reached for the handholds above. I kept myself well supported until I was ready to scramble to the next level. The bad leg was no poorer at this game than the other one: I had to insert it at a different angle, that was all.

The first minutes were easy ones. Then things grew a little more difficult, and I found that I had to lunge at some of the handholds, leaping up to them and leaving myself unsupported for a moment as I made the reach. Once a handhold crumbled like rotten wood at the touch of my hand and broke away; but I was braced by my feet when that happened.

My breath was loud in my ears; my heart pounded. Perhaps I felt afraid, a little. But Kilarion moved inexorably onward above me and I would not let him think that I couldn’t keep up. As I had been trained to do, I plotted my course several moves in advance, constantly working out sequences, calculating, I will go here after I have reached there, and then I will go here.

There was one troublesome moment when I made the stupid mistake of glancing back over my shoulder to see how high I had risen. I found myself looking down into a gorge that seemed as deep as the Wall was high. My stomach lurched and my heart contracted as though it had been squeezed, and my left leg began to twitch violently, jabbing rhythmically into the air.

Kilarion felt my jouncing motions rising up the rope to him.

“Are you dancing, Poilar?” he asked.

That was all it took, that one lighthearted question. I laughed and the terror drained out of me. I turned my concentration back to the rock.

You must concentrate in the most intense way. You must see nothing but the tiny crevices and glittering little crystal outcrops just in front of your nose. I went up, up, up. Now I was spreadeagled to my limits, inching along a pair of parallel ridges that were set precisely two Poilar-leg lengths apart to form a kind of chimney. Now I hung suspended from a horn of crystal no longer than my inner thumb. Now my cheek was flat against the rock and my feet groped for purchase in empty air. My arms ached and my tongue felt oddly swollen.

Then, suddenly, there was a hand dangling in my face and I heard Kilarion’s ringing laughter as he reached for my wrist, caught it, and pulled me up across a rough rocky cornice onto a place where I could roll over and lie flat.

“You see?” he said. “There was nothing to it!”

We were on top. The climb had taken forever, or else only a moment. I was not sure which. The only certain thing was that we had accomplished it. There had been times along the way, I realized now, when I had been sure we would perish. But now, as I lay laughing and gasping on a horizontal surface, it seemed to me that Kilarion was right, that there really had been nothing to the climb at all.

After a time I stood up. We had reached a broad plateau, so deep and wide that I thought at first that we had reached the Summit itself, the very top of Kosa Saag, for everything seemed flat in all directions. Then my eyes focused on the distance and I saw how wrong I was: for I could see now, so far away to the southwest that it was almost at the limits of my vision, the next stage of the Wall rising above the floor of the plateau.

It was a numbing sight. What I saw out there was a great shining mass of pale red stone, shrouded at the base by a swirl of misty morning air and disappearing overhead in thick clouds. It tapered upward to infinity in a series of diminishing stages. It was like one mountain rising upon another. The whole Wall must be like that, I realized: not a mountain but a mountain range, immense at the base, narrowing gradually as you went higher. No wonder we couldn’t see the Wall’s upper reaches from our valley: they lay hidden from our view within the natural fortress formed by the lower levels. I came now to understand that in truth we had only begun our ascent. By reaching this plateau we had simply completed the first phase of the first phase. We had merely traversed the outer rim of the foothills of the tremendous thing that is Kosa Saag. My heart sank as I began to comprehend that our climb thus far had been only a prologue. Ahead of us still lay this vast mocking pink staircase outlined against a dark, ominously violet sky.

I turned away from it. We could deal with that awesome immensity later. Sufficient unto the day is the travail thereof, says the First Climber; and He is right in that, as He is in all other things.

“Well?” Kilarion asked. “Do you think the others can get themselves up here?”

I glanced back over the edge of the rock face we had just ascended. The trail at the base of the vertical cliff was incredibly far below us; at this distance it seemed no wider than a thread. It was hard to believe that Kilarion and I had scrambled up such a height of inhospitable stone. But we had. We had. And except for a couple of troublesome moments it had been a simple steady haul, or so it seemed to me in retrospect. The climb could have been worse, I told myself. It could have been very much worse.

“Of course,” I said. “There’s not one of them who couldn’t manage it.”

“Good!” Kilarion clapped me on the back and grinned. “Now we go down and tell them, eh? Unless you want to wait here, and I go down and tell them. Eh?”

“You wait here, if you like,” I said. “They’ll need to hear it from me.”

“We both go down, then.”

“All right. We both go down.”

We descended boldly, even rashly, quickly swinging ourselves from ledge to ledge with our ropes, hardly pausing to secure our holds before we were off again. The mountain air does that to you, that and the exhilaration of knowing that you have conquered fear and attained your goal. I suppose in our exuberance we might well have levered ourselves right off the face of the cliff into the abyss beyond the trail ledge. But we did not; and quickly we were down again and trotting back to camp with the news of what we had achieved.

Muurmut said at once, “That way is impossible. I saw it myself last night. It goes straight up. Nobody could climb it.”

“Kilarion and I have just climbed it.”

“You say that you have, anyway.”

I looked at him, wanting to kill. “You think that I’m lying?”

Kilarion said impatiently, “Don’t be a fool, Muurmut. Of course we climbed it. Why would we lie about that? Climbing it isn’t as hard as it looks.”

Muurmut shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no. I say that it’s impossible and that if we try it we’ll die. You’re stronger than any two of us, Kilarion. And you, Poilar, you can climb anything with your tongue alone. But will Thissa be able to climb it? Or Hendy? Or that darling little Traiben of yours?”

Clever of him to pick the three who mattered most to me. But I said sharply, “We’ll all be able to climb it.”

“I say no. I say it’s too dangerous.”

I hated him for inspiring doubt in us when what we needed now was sublime self-confidence. “What are you suggesting, then, Muurmut? That we sprout wings and fly ourselves to the top?”

“I’m suggesting that we retrace our steps until we find a safer way.”

“There is no safer way. This is our only choice. Short of simply creeping back to the village like cowards, that is, and I don’t choose to do that.”

He gave me a scowling look. “If we all die on this rock-climb of yours, Poilar, how will that get us to the Summit?”

This was opposition purely for the sake of opposition, and we both knew it. There were no paths to follow but this one. I wanted to strike him and break him; but I kept calm and said indifferently, “As you wish, Muurmut. Stay right here and live forever. The rest of us will continue the climb and take our chances on dying.”

“Will they?” he asked.

“Let them decide,” I said.

So we had what amounted to a second election. I asked who would come with Kilarion and me up the face of the rock, and immediately Traiben and Galli and Stum and Jaif and about half a dozen others raised their hands—the usual dependable ones. I could see doubt on the faces of Muurmut’s henchmen Seppil and Talbol, and on Naxa’s face also, and on a few of the women’s. More than a few, in fact, and some of the other men. For a moment I thought the vote would run against me, which would end my leadership of the climb. Some of the waverers, the most timid ones, edged toward Muurmut as though they intended to remain behind with him. But then Thissa put her hand up high and that seemed to be a turning point. By twos and threes the rest hastened to vote for the climb. In the end Seppil and Talbol were the only ones remaining in Muurmut’s camp, and they looked at him in confusion.

“Shall we say farewell to the three of you now?” I asked.

Muurmut spat. “We climb under protest. You risk our lives needlessly, Poilar.”

“Then I risk my own as well,” I said. “For the second time this day.” I turned away from him and went to Thissa, whose decision had swung the vote. “Thank you,” I said.

The quickest flicker of a smile crossed her face. “You are welcome, Poilar.”

“What a pain Muurmut is. I’d like to throw him over the edge.”

She stepped back, gaping at me in shock. I could see that she had taken me seriously.

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t mean that literally.”

“If you killed him it would be the end of everything for us.”

“I won’t kill him unless he forces me to,” I said. “But I wouldn’t weep for very long if he happened to have some terrible accident.”

“Poilar!” She seemed sick with horror.

Perhaps Galli was right. Thissa was terribly frail.

For the general ascent we divided ourselves into ten groups, all of them groups of four except for one, which consisted only of Kilarion, Thissa, and Grycindil, because Stapp’s death at the lake of pitch had left us with an unequal number. My own group was Traiben, Kreod, and Galli. Mainly we roped ourselves with the men going first and last and the women in between, for most men are stronger than most women and we knew it would be best to have a man below to hold the group if anyone fell. But in my group I took care to have Traiben climb just below me and Galli to have the important bottom spot, for Traiben was weak and Galli was as strong as any man among us but Kilarion. I let Muurmut go up with his friends Seppil and Talbol and Thuiman, even though they were all strong men and would better have been used to bolster some of the women. But I thought, if any of them should fall, let them all fall together, and good riddance.

Once again Kilarion led the way. He was very much more cautious in the climb now with Thissa and Grycindil than he had been with me, and I understood that on our earlier climb he had been deliberately challenging me to keep up the pace. When his group had gone far enough up the cliff so that Grycindil had begun her climb, I started up alongside them, keeping a little to the left to avoid any pebbles that might be scraped loose from climbers above me. Ghibbilau the Grower took the next group up, with Tenilda and Hendy and Gazin. After them went Naxa, Ment the Sweeper, Min, and Stum, and then Bress the Carpenter, Hilth of the Builders, Ijo the Scholar, Scardil the Butcher. And so we all went, group after group. Now and then I heard brittle nervous laughter from below me; but I knew better this time than to look back and see how they were doing.

Midway up, Traiben found himself in difficulties.

“I can’t reach the next hold, Poilar!”

“Twist your hips. Angle your body upward.”

“I’ve done it. I still can’t reach.”

Cautiously I glanced toward him, focusing my vision so that I saw Traiben and only Traiben, nothing below him. He was awkwardly wedged into a barely manageable foothold a few paces to the side of the route I had been taking, and he was straining desperately to get a grip on a jagged knob of red rock that was well beyond his grasp.

“I’ll go a little higher,” I told him. “When the rope goes taut, it’ll pull you closer to it.”

I forced myself upward. Lines of fire were running across my chest and back now from the effort of this second climb of the morning. But I pulled myself as far as I could go without making Traiben’s weight an impossible burden on me that would rip me loose and send me plunging past him. Galli, far down the rock, saw what I was doing and called up to me that she had a good grip, that she would anchor me while I pulled. But I doubted that even she could hold us all if I fell, bringing Traiben down with me.

“I can’t reach it,” Traiben muttered. He spoke as if every word cost him a great price.

“Change!” Thissa called, from somewhere far above us. I looked up and saw her peering down at us over the cornice of the plateau. She was feverishly making witchery-signs at us, thrusting both thumbs of each hand at us like little horns. “Can you? Make your arm longer, Traiben! Make it stretch!”

Of course. Make it stretch. Why else were we given shapechanging by the gods?

“Do it,” I said.

But controlling your Changes is not such a simple thing when you are in terror of your life. I watched as Traiben, trembling below me, struggled to adjust the proportions of his frame, shifting his shoulders about, loosening the bones of his back and arms to achieve the greater reach. I would have gone to him to stretch him myself, if I could. But I had to hold us in our place. His fumbling went on and on, until my own arms began to tire and I wondered how long I could stay where I was. Then I heard an odd little giggle come from him and when I glanced at him again I saw him weirdly distorted, with his left arm far longer than the right and his whole body bent into a tortured curve. But he had hold of the knob he needed. He hauled himself up; the slack returned to the rope; I pressed myself against the rock until I was limp, and let my lungs fill gladly with air.

After that the rest was almost easy. For the second time that morning I came to the top of that wall of rock. I pulled Traiben over the cornice, and Kreod, and then came Galli on her own, looking as unwearied as if she had been out for a stroll.

One by one the other groups followed, until we were reunited on the plateau. I saw everyone blinking and looking about in wonder, astounded by the size of this great flat place that Kilarion had brought us to.

“Where do we go now?” Fesild asked. “Where’s the Wall?”

“There,” I said, and pointed to that remote rosy bulk in the southwest, dimly visible behind its screen of wispy white clouds and congested haze.

The others began to gasp. I think they had mistaken the pink gleam of it on the horizon for the sky; but now the comprehension was breaking upon them, as earlier it had broken upon me, that we were looking at last upon the true Wall—the Wall of the many Kingdoms of which the fables told, the Wall within the Wall, the immense hidden core of the mountain sheltered here in these interior folds and gorges, that great thing which still remained for us to conquer.

“So far away?” she murmured, for the plateau was vast and anyone’s soul would quail at the distance we had to travel across it in order to resume our climb. The magnitude of the climb that awaited us afterward took another moment to register itself upon her soul. Then she said, very softly: “And so high!”

We all were silent in the face of that colossal sun-shafted thing that lay before us. Such pride as we felt in having scaled the rock face below us shriveled to dust in the contemplation of what still must be done.