Kingdoms of the Wall (11 page)

The ghosts we had frightened were watching us from a distance, peeping out from behind the mossy hillocks. But they ducked down shyly whenever they saw us looking at them. We continued on.

* * *

There were other clusters of ruined huts ahead. All of them were tightly wrapped in the shroud-fungus. Everything here was. A more dismal landscape would be hard to imagine: white, silky, bleak. The trees, small and crooked and practically leafless, were almost entirely swathed. Patches of old dead fungus lay everywhere underfoot, forming a sort of white crust that crunched as we stepped on it. Even the Wall, which here lay far to our left, had a whitish glint as though the fungus had taken possession of great sections of it also.

Now and again we would see more ghosts flitting about on the hillsides. The elongated wraithlike beings were too timid ever to come near us, but ran back and forth on the slopes, trailing long streamers of their fungus- shrouds behind them.

To Traiben I said, "What are these ghosts, do you think? Pilgrims, are they? Who never went any further up the mountain, but became infested with this white fungus and had to remain down here where it lives?"

He shrugged. "That could be. But I suspect otherwise. What I think is that this region never was abandoned by the ancient settlers, despite the things our teachers told us."

"You mean what we're encountering are the descendants of the very people who built these huts long ago?"

"So I believe, yes. This was probably good farming land once. Then the shroud-stuff came and ruined it. But instead of fleeing, these people stayed. There must be a low level of change-fire here, that has worked a transformation on them of a sort, and now the fungus is a part of them. Perhaps it helps to keep them alive. There doesn't seem much to eat in this zone."

With a shudder I said, "And will it become a part of us the same way?"

"Very likely not, or there'd be no Returned Ones. Every Pilgrim who goes up the Wall and comes down again must pass through this district. But they don't bear the infestation." He gave me a somber grin. "Still, I think we would do well to wrap wet cloths over our faces to keep the spores away. And we should make our camp for the night in some happier place."

"Yes," I said. "That seems wise to me too."

We hurried on through this blighted land of ghosts with our heads down and our faces covered.

Ghosts followed us all the way, keeping well back from us. Some of them seemed more bold than the others, dancing up to us and whirling so that their shrouds swept out airily behind them, but we threw rocks at them to prevent them from coming close. After what we had seen and what Traiben had said, we all dreaded the fungus. It was all around us, impossible to avoid. I wondered if I had already taken it into my lungs. Perhaps it was hatching right now in some moist dark cavern of my body, seizing possession of my interior and soon to issue forth from my mouth and my nostrils. The thought sickened me and I went to the side of the road and violently heaved up everything that was in my stomach, praying that I might be heaving up any spores that were within me also.

Kilarion was proven a truth-teller once more before we left the ghost-land; for we even saw a ghost as beautiful as the one he had claimed he had made the Changes with, that time when he came up here with his father when he was a boy.

She appeared on a rocky ledge just above us and stood singing and crooning at us in an eerie, quavering voice. Like all her kind she was slender and very long-limbed, but just a faint coating of fungus covered her breasts and loins, and none was visible around her face. What little she had on her body gave her a sleek, satiny sheen and made her look soft to the touch, altogether appealing. Her eyes were golden and had a slight slant to them, and her features had a strange purity. A beautiful creature indeed, this ghost. She said something to us in soft, furry tones that we could not understand, and beckoned as if inviting us to come up and dance with her.

I saw Kilarion trembling. The muscles of his huge body bunched and heaved and cords stood out along his throat. He looked to her and there was a desperate expression in his eyes.

Perhaps this was the very ghost he had embraced here long ago. No doubt she still had some magic over his soul even now.

I kicked sharply at his leg to get his attention and pointed up ahead when he gave me an angry glance.

"Keep moving, Kilarion," I said.

"Who are you to tell me what to do?"

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life living in this place?"

He muttered something under his breath. But he understood what I was saying, and walked on, eyes averted.

After a time I looked back. The ghost-witch, for surely a witch of some kind was what she was, was still beckoning sinuously to us. But now, with the light coming from behind her, I was able to see the faint pale cloud of spores rising about her lovely head. She went on gesturing to us until we could no longer see her.

We marched grimly through that land of hot dank mists and quivering fungus shrouds and evil sulphurous stinks for hour after hour as the day waned. There seemed to be no end to it. But at last, toward nightfall, we emerged into a region where the air was clear and sweet and the rocks were free of fungus and the trees once more had leaves, and we gave thanks to Kreshe the Savior for our escape.

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 knifeblade 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 mid-air, 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.