Kingdoms of the Wall (17 page)

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.

10

I could not tell you how long we spent in crossing that broad plateau. Many weeks, it must have been: but each day melted into the next and we kept no count. It was a rough, barren, scrubby place, sunbaked and stark and not nearly so flat as it had appeared from its edge, with dips and ridges and valleys and chasms to bedevil us every day. Even where it was level, the land was rocky and difficult to traverse. The vegetation was coarse and, for the most part, useless to us: woody, stringy, thorny, all but leafless, offering little but bitter roots and dry tasteless fruit. The only animals we saw were small gray furry creatures, ugly and scrawny and lopsided, which scuttered before us as we marched. They were too quick for us to catch nor would they come near the traps we set, but it was just as well: we would not have had much nourishment from them, I think, nor any pleasure. The occasional shallow streams we found were sparsely inhabited also, though by patient hours of fishing we came up with netfuls of bony silvery wrigglers out of which we made meals of a sort.

From the second day of the crossing, or maybe it was the third, I felt myself beginning to hate the plateau. I had never felt such hatred in my life as the hatred I felt for that plateau. It was a wasteland that gave us no upwardness, and the upwardness was all I desired. Yet it had to be crossed. So in its way it was part of the upwardness, a necessity of the route; but I hated it all the same. There was no grandeur here. The great peaks of the rift were behind us, hidden from our view by tricks of the land; and the great peak that was Kosa Saag, the peak of peaks, lay impossibly far in front of us across the plateau; and so I hated it, because it must be crossed.

We marched from dawn to dusk, day upon day upon day, and the mountain seemed to remain at the same distance all the time. I said as much one afternoon when I had grown very weary.

"The same distance? No, worse, it moves backward as we approach," said Naxa dourly. "We'll never reach it even if we march for a thousand years."

And voices came from behind us, grumbling and muttering to much the same purpose. Muurmut's, of course, was prominent among them.

"What do you say, Poilar?" Naxa asked me. His voice was like an auger, drilling into my soul. "Should we give up the climb and build ourselves a village here? For surely we gain nothing by going forward and I doubt very much that we could ever find our way back."

I made no reply. Already I regretted having spoken in the first place, and it would be folly to let myself be drawn into a debate on whether we should abandon our Pilgrimage.

Grycindil the Weaver, who had grown very sharp-tongued on the plateau, turned to Naxa and said, "Be quiet, will you? Who needs your gloom, you foolish Scribe?"

"I need my gloom!" Naxa cried. "It keeps me warm by night. And I think you need something from me, Grycindil, to keep
you
warm." He nudged her arm and pushed his face close to hers, grinning evilly. "What about it, Weaver-girl? Shall you and I weave a few Changes tonight?"

"Fool," answered Grycindil. And she poured out such a stream of abuse that I thought the air would burn.

"You are both of you fools," said Galli, but in a good-humored way. "In this thin air you should save your breath for some better use."

Kath, who was walking beside me, said in a low voice, "Do you know, Poilar, I wouldn't mind drowning Naxa at the next stream, if only so that I would never have to hear that whining voice of his again."

"A good idea. If only we could."

"But I confess it troubles me also that the mountain grows no closer."

"It grows closer with every step we take," I replied sharply. I was getting angry now. Perhaps I had doubts of my own that were causing a soreness in my soul. Naxa was only a nuisance but Muurmut had the capacity to make real trouble, and I knew that very shortly he would, if this kind of talk continued. I had to cut it off. "It only
seems
to stay at the same distance, is what I told Naxa. And we're in no hurry, are we, Kath? If we spend all the rest of our lives on this Pilgrimage, what harm is there in that?"

He looked at me for a long moment, as though that was a new thought to him. Then he nodded, and we went onward without speaking again. The grumblers behind us ceased their chatter, after a time.

* * *

But there had been poison in Naxa's words, and all that day it seeped deeper into my soul. That night when we camped I sank into such a dark brooding and despondency that I scarcely knew myself. All I could think was, This plateau has no end, this plateau has no end, we will spend all the years of our lives attempting to cross it. And I thought, Naxa is right. Better to turn back, and build a new village for ourselves somewhere on the lower slopes, than to expend ourselves in this interminable and futile quest.

The urge to make an end to this Pilgrimage came on me in wave after wave. Naxa was right. Muurmut was right. All the faint-hearted ones were right. Why struggle like this, in hope of finding gods who might not even exist? We had thrown away our lives in this foolish Pilgrimage. Our only choices now were the disgrace of an early return to the village and the death that waited for us in this wilderness.

Such thinking was terrible blasphemy. At another time I would have fought it away. But this night it was too much for me; it overwhelmed me; I could not help but yield to its power and temptation; and in yielding I felt my soul beginning to freeze, I felt my spirit becoming encased in ice.

This was all strange to me, this embracing of defeat and despair. It was the dreariness of the plateau that did it to me, that and Naxa's insidious poisonous words. While the others sprawled about the campfire that night singing village songs and laughing at the antics of Gazin the Juggler and Dorn and Tull, our two lively Clowns, I went off by myself and sat bleakly in the saddle of a gray rock encrusted with dry moss, and stared empty-eyed at the miserable distances that still confronted us. Two moons were aloft, the cheerless Karibos and Theinibos, and by the harsh light that comes from their pockmarked faces I saw only sorrow and grief in this withered eroded landscape. I think it was the worst hour of my life, the hour that I sat there watching spiny-backed night-beasts scampering across that desolate waste; and by the end of it I was ready to strike camp and slink back down the side of the Wall that very evening. For me the Pilgrimage was at an end then and there. It had lost all meaning. It had ceased utterly to make sense. What Was the good of it? What was the good of anything? There was nothing to gain in this place but pain, and then more pain; and the gods, in their eyrie far above, were looking down at our struggles and laughing.

The enterprise to which we had shaped our lives seemed pointless to me in that dark moment. I found myself wishing that I had lost my footing on Kilarion's cliff and gone plunging to a swift doom, rather than having lived to come to this place of interminable toil.

Then suddenly Traiben stood before me.

"Poilar?"

"Let me be, Traiben."

"Why do you sit here like this?"

"To enjoy the lovely moonlight," I said bitterly.

"And what are you thinking as you sit here in the lovely moonlight, Poilar?"

"Nothing. I'm thinking nothing at all."

"Tell me," Traiben said.

"Nothing. Nothing. Nothing."

"I know what you're thinking, Poilar."

"Then you tell me," I said, though I feared that he truly did, and if that was so I was far from eager to hear it from him.

He bent down a little way, so that his great saucer eyes were on a line with mine, and I saw something in those eyes—a force, a ferocity, a fury—that I had never seen there before. Surely there was a Power in him.

"You're thinking of the village," he said.

"No. I never think of the village."

"Of the village, yes. Of our House. Of Turimel the Holy. You're lying on a couch with Turimel in our House and you and she are making the Changes together."

"At this moment Turimel is happily lying with Jecopon the Singer, to whom she was sealed five years ago. I never think of Turimel." I turned away from that fierce unwavering gaze of his. "Why are you bothering me like this, Traiben?"

He caught me by the chin and pulled my head around.

"Look at me!"

"Traiben—"

"Do you want to go home, Poilar? Is that it?"

"This plateau makes me sick."

"Yes. It makes all of us sick. Do you want to go home?"

"No. Of course not. What are you saying?"

"We made a vow, you and I, when we were twelve."

"Yes, I know," I said, with no strength at all in my voice. "How could I forget." I adopted a high mimicking tone. "We will climb to the Summit, and meet the gods, and see all the wonders and learn all the mysteries. And then return to the village. That was what we swore."

"Yes, and I for one mean to keep my oath," said Traiben, still glaring at me as though I were the sworn enemy of his House.

"As do I."

"Do you? Do you?"

He took me by the shoulders and shook me so hard that I thought my shape would begin to shift.

I let him shake me. I said nothing, I did nothing.

"Poilar, Poilar, Poilar, what's wrong with you tonight? Tell me. Tell me!"

"The plateau. The moonlight. The distances."

"And so you want to turn back. Oh, how happy Muurmut will be, when he finds out that the great leader Poilar is broken like this! The Summit means nothing to you any more. The gods. Our vow. The only thing you desire is to give up and go back."

"Oh, not so," I said, without much conviction. "Not so at all."

He shook his head. "What I say is true, but you won't admit it even to me."

"Have you become a Witch, Traiben, that you can read my mind so easily?"

"I could always read you, Poilar. There's no need to pretend with me. You want to turn back. Is that not true?"

His eyes were blazing. To my amazement I realized that I was afraid of him, just then.

I could make no answer.

He said, after a long while, speaking now in a cold and quiet tone, "Well, let me tell you only this, Poilar: I mean to keep my oath whatever you may do. If I'm the only one of us who wants to go on, then so be it. I'll go on. And when you get back to the village, a year or two from now, or three or four, and they ask you where Traiben is, you can say that he has gone to the Summit, that he's up there right now, discussing philosophy with the gods." He stood back and held out his hand, fingers outstretched in the farewell sign. "I'll miss you, Poilar. I'll never have another friend like you."

Angrily I slapped the hand down to his side.

It seemed to me that he was patronizing me. I couldn't stand that, not from him. "This is foolishness, Traiben. You know that I'll be at the Summit with you, when you get there."

I snapped the words out at him. I meant them to be full of conviction. But the conviction wasn't there, and Traiben knew that as well as L

"Ah, but will you?" he asked. "Will you, Poilar?"

And he walked away and left me there not knowing whether I was lying to myself or not.

* * *

I sat alone in bewilderment for another hour or more; and then, when everyone else had gone to sleep except those who were on watch, I returned to the camp and slipped into my bedroll. That night I had the star-dream again, the one that I had been having since I was a boy, but it had never been as intense as this before, not even on that first night when the entire village had dreamed it with me. I stood alone, poised on a black jagged mountaintop where icy winds blew. All about me was the god-light, the devil- light, the light that comes out of the end of time and goes streaming toward the beginning. I flexed my legs, I bent and leaped and went soaring toward Heaven, toward the radiant country where the gods abide. And the stars, alive and vibrating and warmer than any fire could ever be, opened to me and embraced me and took me among themselves, and I felt rivers of god-wisdom rushing into my soul.