Kingdoms of the Wall (15 page)

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 beside. 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.