Kingdoms of the Wall (36 page)

For an instant or two I trembled with fear and nearly lost my own grip. It was only the brooding fantasy of a bad moment, though. The Wall has no reason to want to slay us so casually; it wants only to test us, and eliminate those who are weak or unworthy, and send the best of us onward to the end of our Pilgrimage. So we would not perish here. And indeed I looked and my companions were still all about me clinging to the face of the cliff, working their way steadily upward.

So I grew calm again, for a little while. But my soul must have been disturbed in some fashion that day. Perhaps it was Streltsa's Avenger amulet working some dark magic in me. For now a different strangeness came over me and it began to seem to me that I had done all this before: not just that I had climbed other rock faces much like this, but that I had climbed
this
one, that I had climbed it many times before, that I would climb it many times again, that I was doomed to spend the rest of eternity climbing this same rock again and again. When I reached the top of it I would find myself at the bottom, and have to begin again. And I felt hot bitter tears running down my face, realizing as I did that for me there was no way back and no way forward, but only this endless rock unrolling beneath me like a scroll that extends itself farther at one end even as it is rolled up at the other. I would live on this rock and I would die on it, and I would be born again, and still I would be climbing, and there would be no end to the climb. Thus in despair and anguish and, I suppose, a kind of madness, I clambered up and up, with hot dry crosswinds raking me as I went. Then suddenly there was nothing more above me. I had fallen into such a mechanical rhythm of climbing that I could not at first understand where I was and what was happening; I groped for the next handhold, and found none, and brought my right foot a little higher on the rock and reached again, and again there was nothing. It was like falling into a dream within a dream. There was a roaring in my ears and my brain was spinning in my skull. I heard Kilarion's voice from very far away, and it seemed that he was laughing as he spoke, but the words were indistinct, like sounds heard under water.

I realized then that I must be at the top of the cliff, that there was no place further to go except up and over; and I pulled myself across the edge of the rock face. As I did I scraped the side of my neck against some sharp place and the string that held my little amulet broke, and the amulet fell away quickly, bouncing from rock to rock and vanishing below. I felt a quick pang at the loss of it after having brought it this far; but I was already in the midst of the final levering gesture that brought me to the flat place on top, and I had to think only of what was before me, not behind.

I scrambled up and over. Kilarion, just to my right, came up at the same moment and we brought the Irtiman in his rope sling over with us.

I took a couple of steps forward, shaky-legged, as one often is after such a climb, and it was an instant or two before my eyes cleared and I could focus on my new surroundings. Then what came into view stunned me and astounded me to the roof of my soul; for there were mountains on all sides, a tremendous host of them, a ring of peaks of every shape and size stretching off as far as I could see. Often before I had felt as if this thing that was Kosa Saag was one chain of mountains piled on another on another, world without end, rising infinitely into the sky, and that we must proceed eternally from level to level, coming always into some new realm when we had left the last behind; and once again that was how it seemed to me now, at least at first glance.

But then I saw that this time one mountain stood clearly above the others in the center of the ring, a great jagged king of a mountain. Its upper reaches were streaked with rivers of white snow that glittered brilliantly in the sunlight and its very tip was shrouded in dense clouds so that it could not be seen at all, and I began to tremble as I looked toward those dazzling heights; for I knew beyond doubt that this was the final peak, the mountain of mountains, the true and only Summit of Kosa Saag.

20

When we came up over the rim of the cliff into this sublime and ultimate realm the one thing that we all wanted was only to rest awhile, every one of us. We could look up and see the abode of the gods almost within reach, yes, or so it seemed to us then; but there was not one of us who had the strength or the determination to venture onward immediately, not even Traiben, whose boundless curiosity seemed at last to be overmeasured by fatigue. We had spent ourselves freely, too freely, perhaps, in the crossing of the land of the Kvuz and the conquest of that bare rock face, and now we had to recollect our energies and renew our will before pushing onward toward whatever the next challenge was that might lie ahead.

On this innermost plateau that was the pedestal for the highest of the peaks of Kosa Saag we had entered into a vast enclosed place of forests and rivers and streams and valleys. It was like a secret world atop the Wall. The air was even thinner here, but we knew well by now how to adjust our bodies to cope with that, and for all its thinness it was sweet and cool and fresh; and there was thick blue grass everywhere underfoot, and the great cloud-tipped mountain rose above us in stupendous majesty and beauty. We found ourselves a pleasant site beside a swift stream and made our camp there, thinking to stay a day or two, or perhaps three, before pushing onward. But we stayed longer than that: how much longer, I could not say, for one day flowed serenely into the next and time slipped past without our realizing it. A great deal of time, I suspect.

This was an easy place, though, and we had not had many of those during our journey up the Wall. Here was a place where we could strip and bathe and cleanse ourselves, and drink cool water, and pluck succulent fruits from trees whose names we would never know. And so we did, for day after day after day. It was as if we were enchanted. Perhaps we were. No one spoke of moving onward: as I have said, not even Traiben. Indeed Traiben and I avoided each other's eyes much of the time, for neither of us had forgotten that as boys we had vowed to rise through Kingdom after Kingdom until we had attained the Summit, and if that was what we had sworn to do, why were we still here? Many a time I saw one of the others looking at me worriedly, as if fearing that at any moment I would pick up cudgels and flails and drive everyone back to the upward task with all my old zeal. But the inner fire that had carried me this far was banked for the moment. I was in as much need of rest as any of the others, and they had no reason to fear any renewal of discipline just yet from me. I had loosened my grasp on them; I let the idle days go by.

Only the Irtiman showed any eagerness to resume the climb. He came to me and said, "Poilar, I owe you my life," and I nodded uneasily at that, for he was pale and even thinner than before and it seemed to me that he had hardly any life left in him. Then he said, with a touch of anxiety in his tone, "Will we be staying in this valley much longer, do you think?"

I indicated the long shadow of the great mountain, falling far across the land. "We'll stay here until we're fresh again," I told him. "We're going to need all the strength we can muster for what lies ahead."

"No doubt we will. But as the time passes, you see—"

The voice out of the speaking-box trailed off. He stared at me sadly.

I knew what was troubling him. He had suffered greatly in his solitary wanderings and such little strength as he still had left was fading: he saw the end coming and wanted to die at the Summit among his friends. Our long delay here must have been maddening to him. Well, I understood his need; but we had needs of our own. The long unrelenting skyward march had drained us deeply. We were none of us young; we were in our third ten of years and even the strongest of us felt the burden of this climb. And the most daunting ascent of all still stood before us. We were not yet ready to attempt it.

The Irtiman was aware of that; and he knew also that he had no claim on us. So he put his impatience aside. For my part I promised him that I would bring him to his fellow Irtimen at the Summit, no matter what: and that was a promise which I was to keep, although in a strange way indeed.

We talked for a while afterwards. I asked him about his village, where it was situated in relation to the Wall and whether it had the same sort of Houses that ours did, Musicians and Advocates and Carpenters and all the rest, and if they acknowledged themselves to be subjects to the King. He was silent a long time when I had asked these things, and drew so deep into himself that I feared for him. Then he said, "I told you that I came from a very distant place."

"Yes."

"And so it is. I was born on a world beyond the sky."

I didn't know what to make of that. "A world beyond the sky," I said in wonder, dully repeating his words like a simpleton because I had so much difficulty comprehending them. "Then you
are
a god?"

"Not at all. Mortal, Poilar, very much so."

"Yet you say you come from one of the worlds of Heaven?"

"A world called Earth, yes."

I thought of my star-dream of long ago, when I had danced at the Summit and looked upward toward those worlds from the Summit, and saw the cold fire of them, and felt the potent god-life of them pouring down upon me.

"Those who live in Heaven are gods," I said. "Their homes are the stars, and the stars are fire. Who can live in fire except a god?"

He smiled patiently and said, in that sad, sad, weary voice that came slowly out of his little speaking-box, "Yes, the stars are fire, Poilar. But many of them have worlds much like this world close by them, the way your world is close by its star Ekmelios. And those worlds are solid and cool like your world, with oceans and mountains and plains, and people can live upon them. Or upon some of them, anyhow."

"Ekmelios is a sun, not a star. It's much bigger than any star, and brighter, and hotter. And there's Marilemma, also: we have two suns, you know."

"And both are stars. Suns
are
stars. Ekmelios is close at hand, and Marilemma is a little further away; and still further, far out in the heavens, are other stars, millions of them, more than you could ever count. Each one is a sun, bright and hot. They seem to you to be little points of light only because they're so far away. But if you were closer to one of them you'd realize that it's a ball of fire very much like Ekmelios and Marilemma. And most of them have worlds moving around them the way your world moves around Ekmelios and Marilemma."

All this was difficult for me to follow, but he let it sink in for a moment or two, and as I revolved it in my mind it began to make a kind of sense to me. Still, I wished that Traiben were beside me now to hear this, for I knew he would understand it much more completely.

The Irtiman said, "My world has a yellow sun. I could try to show it to you in the night sky, but it's not very big and so it's very hard to find. It's so far away that the light that comes from my world's sun takes an entire lifetime, and even more, to reach your world."

"Then you must be a god!" I cried, feeling proud of myself for so quickly seeing the flaw in the logic. "For if it takes more than a lifetime to get from your world to mine, then how could any mortal hope to live long enough to make the journey?"

"He couldn't," said the Irtiman. "Not me, not you, not any of us. But we have a special way of traveling, which takes us from
here
to
here
without having to pass through every point between. And so the trip from Earth to here requires only a year or two instead of a lifetime and a half. But for that I could never have hoped to come here."

I was lost. What did he mean, a special way of traveling? Magic of some sort, I supposed. A spell that brought them flashing across the sky in a twinkling. Well, then, what else could they be but gods? No one other than a god could work such a miraculous magic. But if they were gods the question arose again: How was it possible for a god to become weary unto death, as this Irtiman surely was? And I realized that I did not understand at all.

He told me more, much more, things which I understood even less.

For he said, as we sat together on a moist bank of blue grass beside a cool swift-flowing stream under the mighty fortress that was the last and highest pinnacle of Kosa Saag, that he and his three friends were not the first Irtimen to have traveled from his world to ours, that others had come long ago, many of them, traveling in a great ship—had come here, in fact, to found a village of their own on our world; and they had settled on the high slopes of Kosa Saag, because the air of the lowlands was too hot and dense for their lungs and it would choke them to breathe it.

He said they were still up there at the Summit, those long-ago voyagers who came from the world called Earth; or rather their descendants were, to be more accurate. They had a village there, a settlement of some sort. It puzzled me to hear this, because it was hard for me to see why the gods would tolerate having travelers from another world living amongst them at the Summit, that holiest of places—and why did we ourselves know nothing about the continued presence of these strangers atop the Wall? Nothing I had ever heard had hinted at such a thing.

So I could comprehend little or none of this. I said, "And the gods, then? The Creator, the Shaper, the Avenger? Do they still dwell at the Summit too? And did you see them there?"

The Irtiman was silent a long while. His eyes closed, and his breathing became very slow, and then I could hardly detect it at all, so that once more I began to wonder whether he might have died. But at last he said, "I was there only a little while, you understand."