Kingdoms of the Wall (7 page)

4

Again it was the twelfth of Elgamoir, and another Forty set out on their journey up the Wall. I watched them go with new respect, for I was in the second year of my training now and I knew what they had gone through in order to reach this point.

That year also two new Returned Ones arrived in the village. That was always a memorable moment, since it happened so infrequently. One was called Kaitu, and he had been on the mountain nine years. The other was a woman named Bril, who had gone up six years before. I saw them when they came stumbling down into the plaza together, dirty and ragged, with that look of glory in their eyes that all the Returned Ones have. Children ran up to them to touch them for luck. Old women sobbed in the street. Someone from Holies was summoned, and led them to the roundhouse where Returned Ones live. Later I heard tell that Bril had reached halfway up the Wall, and that Kaitu had succeeded in going nearly to the Summit, but I wondered how much substance there was to any of that. I had listened to them babbling in the street, and I was beginning to understand the truth about Returned Ones: most of them, perhaps all, lose their minds on their journeys, and they come back empty and incapable of thought. That they come back at all is a miracle. But it is folly to expect them to be able to say anything sensible about where they have been or what they have seen, and that is why each new group of Pilgrims goes forth with so little firm knowledge of what lies in wait for them.

None of that mattered to me. I was committed to my path, come what may. I intended to succeed where the others all had failed.

But I confess I did try, despite everything, to question the man Kaitu about what he had seen and done. This was three days after his return, and he had not yet taken up permanent living in the roundhouse, but still could be seen wandering around in the streets. I found him there, near the wineshop of Batu Mait, and took him by the elbow and led him inside for a couple of bowls of young golden wine. He seemed pleased at that. He laughed, he winked, he nudged my elbow. And when he had finished his second bowl I leaned close to him and whispered, keeping my voice low so that old Batu Mait would not become aware of the sin I was committing, "Tell me, Kaitu. What did you see up there? What was it like?"

Kaitu caught me by the wrist in a splayhanded grip, three fingers above and three below the way Traiben sometimes did, and shook my arm so hard that I spilled my wine. "Gods!" he cried. "Trees! Air! Fire!"

"Yes, I know, but—"

"Fire! Air! Trees! Gods!" And then, in a soft cozening voice, "Buy me more wine and I'll tell you the rest." His eyes were shining crazily.

I bought him more wine. But nothing else he said was of any more use than what I had heard before.

Afterward I told Traiben what I had done. He chided me for it. "The Returned Ones are sacred," he said. "They should be allowed to go their own way unmolested."

"Yes, I know. But I wanted to find out what it was like for him on the Wall."

"You'll have to wait and see, then."

* * *

We were growing older, entering the final few years of our second ten, coming toward the midpoint of our lives, the twentieth year, when Pilgrimages commence. We were old enough to be sealed now, old enough to be making children instead of simply mating for pleasure. But for me the Pilgrimage was everything. The Pilgrimage, and the mysteries of the Kingdoms of the Wall.

The tenth of Orgulet came round again, and another Winnowing was held. There were only eighteen hundred of us left now—still a substantial multitude, but less than half of those who had begun the quest. We stood in lines of twelve dozen in the Field of Pilgrims and the Masters passed among us, tapping as they had done before. This time I had no fear. I had done well in every test, I had mastered every skill: it would be insanity to dismiss me from the Pilgrimage. Indeed, the Master passed me by, and Traiben as well. But two hundred of us were tapped that day, and no reason given.

I felt sad for them. They had shown neither cowardice nor weakness of body nor wavering of purpose; and yet they had been tapped, all the same. They had suffered in the foothills as I had suffered, clambering up ropes and clawing bare rock, and yet they had been tapped. Well, I felt sad for them but not
very
sad. Two hundred more were gone, and I was two hundred places closer to selection for the Forty.

The third year of our training was the worst: it was like swimming in a sea of fire. All the impurities were being burned out of us. We became gaunt and scarred and tough, and every muscle of our bodies ached all the time.

We would rise at dawn and climb the hideous greenstone hills on the eastern edge of the Wall between Ashten and Glay, cutting ourselves in a thousand places as we dragged ourselves across the crumbling ridges. We caught small animals with our hands and ate them raw. We dug for roots and gnawed them, dirt and all. We threw rocks at birds to bring them down, and got nothing to eat that day if we failed to hit our marks. We crawled in mud and shivered in stinging rain. We fought duels with gnarled cudgels, so that we might learn how to defend ourselves against the beasts and phantoms that were said to inhabit the mountain. When we became too filthy to stand our own stink we bathed in rivers so icy they burned the skin, and lay awake all night on miserable outcroppings of jagged stone, pretending they were beds of soft leaves.

Many of us died. We fell from exposed outcroppings; we were caught in turbulent streams and were swept away; we chose the wrong berries to eat in the wilderness, and perished in agony, bellies bloated, vomiting black bile. I witnessed at least five or six of the deaths myself. Two were boys I had known all my life.

Others could no longer bear the strain, and withdrew from the training. Every day our teachers told us, "There is no shame in withdrawing," and anyone who believed that gladly accepted the chance. By the beginning of our fourth year there were only four hundred left. This time the tenth of Orgulet saw no new Winnowing: it would have been too cruel to dismiss any of us at this point. We were doing our own Winnowing now, our numbers reduced daily by weariness or illness or fear or simple bad luck.

Once again my self-confidence wavered. I went through a difficult time when I was certain that I was going to fail. My doubts grew so strong that finally I went to the shop of Thissa the Witch and bought myself a charm for success. Thissa was a candidate for selection herself, and everyone thought she stood a good chance. My hope was that she would have some private desire to see me chosen as one of the men of her Forty, and so would give me a good spell.

But Thissa was cool to me at first. She moved about her shop in a busy way, moving things from one counter to another as though she had no time for me. "I am busy with a curse now that has to be ready by nightfall," she said. And she looked away.

I was persistent, though. "Please, Thissa. Please. Otherwise the Masters may tap me at the next Winnowing."

I stroked her hand and nuzzled against her shoulder. She was wearing a thin light robe, bordered all around with mystic signs worked in golden thread, that showed the outlines of her shoulders and hips. I told her how much I admired her slender supple body, how beautiful her amber eyes were. We had done a few matings by this time, Thissa and I, though she was always distant and reluctant with me, and there had been a strangeness about her embrace, a kind of tingling feeling that she gave off, that had left me puzzled and uneasy, rather than properly satisfied, each time. But despite all that she was beautiful in her delicate way, and I told her so.

She told me to spare her the flattery, as she had told me all too many times before; but nevertheless she seemed to soften a little. And in the end I prevailed after much coaxing, and she cast the spell for me, which involved mixing her urine with mine and sprinkling it outside Pilgrim Lodge while saying certain special words. I knew it was a good spell. And indeed it was. Nor would she take any money from me for it.

After that my mood turned optimistic again. Everything was going the right way for me. I had never felt happier or more vigorous in my life. My crooked leg meant nothing in these trials: it was no handicap at all, for I had strength instead of grace, and agility instead of speed, and confidence enough for three. Traiben too was still among us, and I was no longer surprised at that, for he had toughened amazingly in these years and no one could call him a weakling now, though it still seemed to me that he was frail and easily wearied. The flame that burned within him saw him onward. We both of us knew that we would survive and prevail until the end.

But as always Traiben had his strange moments. One day he said to me quite abruptly, "Tell me, Poilar, do you think life has any real purpose?"

As always when he asked questions of that sort some lines of the catechism leaped readily to my mind. "Our purpose is to go to the gods at the Summit and pay our homage to them, as the First Climber taught us to do," I said. "And learn useful things from them, as He did, and bring them back to enrich our nation."

"But what
point
is there in doing that?"

The catechism offered me no clues about that. Puzzled, I said, "Why, so we can lead better lives!"

"And what point is there in
that
?"

He was starting to anger me now. I shoved him with my open hand. "Stop this," I said. "You sound like a child who keeps on asking, 'Why,' 'Why,' when things are explained to him. What point indeed? We want to lead better lives because that's better than leading worse ones."

"Yes. Yes, of course."

"Why do you waste your breath with meaningless issues like these, Traiben?"

He was silent for a time. Then he said, "Nothing has any meaning, Poilar. Not if you look at it closely. We say, 'This is good,' or 'This is bad,' or 'The gods will thus and so,' but how do we know? Why is one thing good and another thing bad? Because we say so? Because the gods say so? How do we know that they do? Nobody whom I know has ever heard them speak."

"Enough, Traiben!"

But when these moods possessed him there was no stopping him. He would endlessly pursue some strange line of inquiry that would never have occurred to anyone else, until he reached a conclusion that seemed to bear no relation to any question he had been asking.

He said now, "Even though nothing has any meaning, I believe we should seek for meaning all the same. Do you agree?"

I sighed. "Yes, Traiben."

"And so we must climb the Wall, because we think that the gods will it, and because we hope to gain knowledge from them that will better our lives."

"Yes. Of course. You belabor the obvious."

His eyes were aglow. "But now I've come to see that there's a third reason for going up. Which is to attempt to discover what kind of creatures the gods may be. How they are different from us, and where their superiority lies."

"And what good will that do?"

"So that we can become gods ourselves."

"You want to be a god, Traiben?"

"Why not? Are you content to be what you are?"

"Yes. Very much so," I said.

"And what are you, then? What are we?"

"We are the creatures whom the gods created to do their will. The sacred books tell us so. We were meant to be mortals and they were meant to be gods. That's good enough for me. Why isn't it good enough for you?"

"It isn't because it isn't. The day I say, 'This is good enough for me,' is the day I begin to die, Poilar. I want to know what I am. After that I want to know what I'm capable of becoming. And then I want to become it. I want to keep reaching higher all the time."

I thought of my star-dream, and how as I lay in its throes I would toss and turn and reach my hands toward Heaven. And I thought that I understood something of what Traiben was saying; for, after all, did I not burn with a hunger to climb that mountain to its loftiest point, and stand before the holy beings who inhabited its crest, and give myself up to their will so that I might become something greater than I had been?

But then I shook my head. He had gone too far. "No, Traiben. I think it's wild nonsense to talk about mortals becoming gods. And in any case I don't want to be one myself."

"You'd rather stay a mortal?"

"Yes. I'm a mortal because the gods mean me to be a mortal."

"You ought to give more thought to these matters," Traiben said. "Your mind marches in a circle. And your feet will too, if you're not careful."

I shook my head. "Sometimes I think you may be crazy, Traiben."

"Sometimes I wish you were crazier," he said.

* * *

The number of remaining candidates dropped and dropped. We were down to a hundred, ninety, eighty, seventy. It was a strange time for those of us who remained. We were all fiercely pledged to the Pilgrimage: anyone who might weaken and drop out had already done so, and anyone clumsy or careless enough to be killed or injured in the course of the training was long gone from our midst. We who had lasted this long meant to stay the course. A powerful kind of comradeship had developed among us. But there were still too many of us; and so we eyed our dearly loved comrades with unashamed ferocity, privately thinking,
May the gods blight you tomorrow, may your soul drain out of your body like a trickle of cold water, may you fall from the cliff and shatter both your legs, may your courage desert you entirely. Anything, so long as you cease to stand in my way.
And then we would smile, because everyone knew that everyone else was thinking the same things about him that he was thinking about them.