Kingdoms of the Wall (44 page)

He looked down at the speaking-box a moment, and ran his hands along its sides as though he needed something to do with them just then. At length he said, somewhat warily, "This is the Summit, yes."

"And the gods?" My throat was so dry I could barely get the question out

"Yes, the gods." A quick tense nod. "This is the place where your gods live."

I could have wept at those words. My heart surged up in my breast with joy. The darkness of my despair dropped away from me. The gods! The gods, the gods, the gods at last! I looked toward Traiben in triumph, as if to say,
See? See?
As if to say,
I knew all along that the gods must he here; for the Summit is a holy place.

"Where are they?" I asked, trembling.

And the Irtiman pointed, as Traiben had done, to the crevices of the far wall, where the savage Irtimen had run off to hide.

"There," he said.

* * *

It was the most difficult hour of my life. It was like that for us all.

We sat in a circle on the pebbly ground in front of the little metal ship of the Irtimen that had come to rest on that cold flat place at the top of the World, and they told us the bitter truth about our gods.

The dead Irtiman had tried to hint at it, but he could not bring himself to reveal it directly. My father's father had spoken of it too—the horror at the Summit—but would not tell me what it was. Traiben, of course, had understood it the moment we had attained the Summit. He had dreamed long ago that it was like this here: I remembered now his telling me that. And as for me, I had tried to reject it at every turn, obvious though it may have been. But this time there was no denying the validity of it even for me; for I was at the Summit and I could see with my own eyes what was here and what was not, and the things the Irtimen had to tell us now fell upon me with inexorable unanswerable force.

These were the things I learned from the Irtiman of the Summit at that dark hour. This is what I must share with you for the sake of your souls. Listen and believe; listen and remember.

They said—it was the golden-haired one who did most of the talking, the one who had come out first—that the race of Irtimen was a race that had journeyed everywhere in the Heavens, that traveled between the stars more easily than we went between one village and another. There were many worlds in the Heavens, some beautiful and pleasant, some not. And whatever world they found that had good air and water and things that Irtimen could eat, there they would plant a settlement of their own kind, unless that world was already peopled with its own people and had no room for them.

So it was that they had come to our world, which we call the World; and part of it was fit for Irtiman life and part was not, so they settled only in the part that suited them, here in the heights of Kosa Saag. That was long ago, hundreds of tens of years, more years than I could easily comprehend.

They could not comfortably go into the lowlands, because of the heat and the thick heavy air. And no one from the lowland villages ever came up here, because of the rigors of the journey and the increasing chill and thinness of the air in the higher levels, and because we had no need to venture into such remote difficult places when we had all the richness of the valleys to sustain us. We stayed in our own territory; and indeed we made it unlawful to climb to these heights, saying that Sandu Sando the Avenger had cast us down from them and we were never to return. And so all unknowing we shared the World with the people who had come across the Heavens from Earth; or if we knew anything of the beings who dwelled atop the Wall, we thought of them as gods, or demons, or some such awesome things.

Then the First Climber dared to ascend the Wall—breaking the prohibition against that which existed among our people—and reached the Summit, and encountered the Irtimen. And He was welcomed by them, and taken in, and they spoke with Him and showed Him the wonders of the village they had built up here. And—just as the Book of the First Climber relates—He learned from them the use of fire, and the way to make tools and raise crops and build sturdy buildings, and much else that was useful besides. Which He taught to us when He came down from the Wall, and that was the real beginning of our civilization.

It was the beginning also, the golden-haired Irtiman told us, of the annual Pilgrimage.

For we fell into the custom of sending our best people to the Summit to go before the Irtimen—whom we came to think of as gods, though in truth they were only mortal Irtimen—and pay homage to them, and learn such things from them as we still needed to know, and bring that knowledge back to the lowlands the way the First Climber had done. The journey was a long and difficult one, and only a few who attempted it survived to reach the Summit, for there were many perils along the way, and especially the thing called change-fire that the mountain gives off, which tempts us to alter our bodies beyond recognition; and of those who avoided the dangers of the Wall and did attain the Summit, just the merest handful ever returned. But to make a successful Pilgrimage was a great achievement, and those who managed it attained the highest honors we could bestow. So we contended amongst ourselves for the right to undertake the journey, and whenever any of us attained the Summit they were greeted warmly by the Irtimen, who taught them many valuable things as they had done for the First Climber.

That was a hard thing to swallow, that our beloved gods were mere mortals, strangers from some other world clinging to a precarious hold at the Summit because they were too feeble to go down into the lowlands. And that the First Climber whom we all revered had been so simple as to fall down before those strangers and offer them homage as if they were divine, and to perpetuate the obligation of that homage down through all the generations that followed Him. It was like gulping down lumps of hot metal, to accept those things as fact.

But there was worse, much worse, to come.

Time passed, said the golden-haired Irtiman, and things changed in the village at the Summit. For now she spoke of the thing we call change-fire. There are forces at work on Kosa Saag, said the Irtiman,
natural
forces, which cause living flesh to ebb and flow into strange new forms, bringing about bodily transformations far more startling than anything we of the lowland villages can achieve. So she confirmed what we had already come to believe, that the transformations on the Wall were brought about by the nature of the Wall itself. It was not magic that had created the Kingdoms and their dwellers, nor any decree of the gods; it was done by the work of physical forces. The prime one, she said, confirming our own belief, was change-fire, that is, a kind of secret light that the rock itself gives off; but she said that that was only one of many factors that brought about bodily change on this mountain. There was also the thinness of the air, which allowed the harsh light of Ekmelios to penetrate the loins of the Irtimen settlers and alter their seed. And also it was the water they drank; and also it was something in the soil. All these qualities of the Wall brought about great change in the course of time for the Irtimen who dwelled at the Summit. They underwent a strong and terrible transformation, these visitors from the stars. "Their minds grew dim," she said. "Their bodies became deformed. They lost their knowledge. They turned into beasts."

And she gestured toward the rocky crevices of the far wall, where the snarling shrieking savages who threw the rocks had fled.

"Yes," Traiben murmured. "Of course."

I glanced at him. He sat transfixed, fascinated, his great saucer eyes wide and staring. He seemed scarcely to be breathing.

"Can it be so?" I asked him. "Can the gods have turned into—into—"

Traiben waved me irritably into silence, and pointed toward the golden-haired Irtiman, who was speaking again.

"The Pilgrimages continued," she said, "although now there was nothing for your people to learn from ours. It had become the custom to ascend the mountain, and the custom was so powerful that it could not be halted. But those who reached the Summit—and it was always only a few who made it all the way—were horrified at what they saw. Many of them chose not to return to their villages in the lowlands, because they were unwilling or afraid to reveal the truth. These settled along the slopes of Kosa Saag: this was the beginning of the Kingdoms of the Wall. The change-forces began to affect them as they had affected us. Other Pilgrims did go to their homes again, but they came back stunned into silence or madness by their experience."

I looked around at my companions. The truth had come rolling in upon them like a boulder. Hendy was weeping; Thissa, very pale, stared off into remote distances; Naxa the Scribe and Ijo the Scholar, sitting side by side, had their mouths gaping open loosely as though they had been struck on the head by clubs. Of the others, some were wide-eyed with indignation and disbelief, some were trembling, some looked numb. Even stolid Kilarion was frowning and muttering and peering into the palms of his outstretched hands as though he hoped to find some sort of consolation in them.

Only Thrance seemed unshaken by what he had heard. He was sprawled out comfortably on the ground as if we were simply gathered around to hear a performance by a Singer or a Musician; and he was grinning.
Grinning!

The Irtiman said, "The ship that brought me here, and my friends, landed here not very long ago. We knew that an Earth colony had once been planted on this world, and it is our task to go around from star to star, and visit the colonies that were founded on all the different worlds, and send back reports to Earth on whether they still exist, and what they have achieved. We found the children of the settlers who had come here from Earth, and attempted to make contact with them: but they are as you see them, wild creatures, ignorant, barbaric. And dangerous, though we didn't realize that at first."

She told us how the Irtiman we had found below had volunteered to go as far down the mountain as he could, in order to meet with the peoples of the Kingdoms and discover from them what had taken place here since the founding of the Irtiman colony. The others had remained with their ship, hoping to establish relations of some sort with their degenerate and brutish kinsmen. But once the wild Irtimen of the Summit had realized that there were only three of them, they had begun an almost continuous siege, using sticks and stones and crude spears, keeping them penned up in their vessel so that they could not go to the aid of their companion below.

"But you have weapons," I said. "Why couldn't you have driven them off? We had no trouble with them at all and we have only cudgels."

She turned to face me. "Our weapons are lethal ones. If we used them we would have had to kill our own kin; and that was something we would not do."

Which was a problem I had never considered before: when you only have weapons that kill, and none that merely injure, then it may come to pass that your weapons are of no value at all. And so you must huddle within your ship for safety, though you are almost as powerful as gods and your attackers are little more than beasts.

"When we had arrived at the Summit," she went on, "we had frightened them away for the moment—perhaps because they thought we were the vanguard of a large army. But we were aware that very likely they would resume the attack before long, now that they saw how few we really were. And soon they will."

That seemed to be all that she had to say to us. She thanked us for bringing back the body of their colleague; and then she and her two companions went back inside their ship, leaving us bereft and empty on this cold pebbled plain where the palaces of our gods were not to be found.

* * *

"There you are," Thrance said, in the harshest of voices. "There you have it. Gods! What gods? There are no gods up here. There are only these monsters! And we are fools!" And he spat into the air.

"Be quiet," Kilarion said to him.

Thrance turned to him and laughed, in that way of his that was like the scraping of metal against metal. "Are you upset, Kilarion? Yes, yes, I suppose you are. Who wouldn't be? To climb all this way and find that your gods are nothing but a pack of dirty debased beasts no better than a bunch of rock-apes?"

"Quiet, Thrance!" Kilarion said again, with real menace in his voice.

I thought that they would fight. But Thrance only meant to goad; there was not even enough honor in him to follow through on his goading. Kilarion rose halfway and seemed about to spring upon him, and Thrance grinned and made a placating bow, practically touching his head to the ground, and said in a high, piping, infuriating voice, mockingly pathetic, "No offense meant, Kilarion! No offense! Don't hit me! Please don't hit me, Kilarion!"

"Let him be, Kilarion," Galli muttered. "He isn't worth wasting your effort on."

Kilarion subsided, grumbling and murmuring to himself.

Thrance wasn't finished, though. He said, "Do you know, once upon a time I was told that it was like this up here? That was when I was in a Kingdom called Mallasillima, on the border of the Lake of Fire. Some people of this Kingdom had been to the top and had seen the gods, so they said, and they told me what they were like. I thought they were lying to me, that they were inventing it all; but then the notion came to me that it might just be the truth, and I decided then and there that I would find some way of coming up here and seeing it myself. And now I have. Now I have seen with my own eyes that the tales that they told me in Mallasillima were true after all. Imagine! No gods! All a myth, all a lie! Nothing here but a bunch of degenerate—"