Kingdoms of the Wall

Robert Silverberg

FOR URSULA K. LE GUIN

And yet all the time, below the fear and the irritation, one was aware of a curious lightness and freedom... one was happy all the same; one had crossed the boundary into country really strange; surely one had gone deep this time.

— Graham Greene
 

Journey Without Maps

INTRODUCTION

By

Robert Silverberg

In 1952, when I was in my freshman year at Columbia and frantically dividing my time between the immense stacks of required reading that I had to study for my degree and the science-fiction and fantasy reading that I deemed necessary for my future professional needs (yes, even then!) I encountered the newly published reissue of E.R. Eddison's almost legendary novel
The Worm Ouroboros
. The original edition, published in 1926, was at that time fabulously rare (I found one years later, and treasure it still), but the book's reputation as one of the classics of fantasy was a glowing one, and when the house of E.P. Dutton put out the new edition, a photographic reproduction of the original with all its glorious illustrations, I somehow scraped up the necessary $5 – an enormous sum then—and pounced on it.

It lived up to all the advance word. I found it a stunning experience, and I re-read it every decade or so and it has lost none of its splendor in the successive re-readings. One thing that struck me at the outset was a phrase in the introduction to the book that the Irish novelist James Stephens had provided: "The reader will not easily forget...the mountain Koshtra Pivrarcha, that had to be climbed, and was climbed—as dizzying a feat as literature can tell of."

The mountain that had to be climbed
. What did Stephens mean by that? In his introduction he quoted Eddison's description of Koshtra Pivrarcha: "So huge was he that even here at six miles distance the eye might not at a glance behold him, but must sweep back and forth as over a broad landscape, from the ponderous roots of the mountain, where they sprang black and sheer from the glacier up the vast face, where buttress was piled upon buttress, and tower upon tower, in a blinding radiance of ice-hung precipice and snow-hung gully, to the lone heights where, like spears smenacing high heaven, the white teeth of the summit-ridge cleft the sky." What dire necessity could have compelled the protagonists of
The Worm Ouroboros
to climb such a mountain? I read on and on, and eventually found out; and James Stephens' phrase,
The mountain that had to be climbed
, has remained with me, as vivid and powerful as ever, as has that image out of Eddison of gigantic Koshtra Pivrarcha, for nearly sixty years now.

A time would come, I believed, when I would write my own novel about a mountain that had to be climbed. And eventually I did – in 1991, when I was under contract to Bantam Books for five new novels, of which this was the third, after
The Face of the Waters
and
Hot Sky at Midnight
. I spent the spring of that year sketching out notes for it, building the plot around the idea of a colossal mountain that, like Eddison’s,
had to be climbed
, and began writing it in early summer. In mid-August I delivered the book to my Bantam editor, Lou Aronica, who sent me two pages of closely reasoned comment five or six weeks later. His criticisms were, I thought, well taken, but for the moment I couldn't do anything about them, for, as I replied on September 30, "My fine old computer crashed last week and as you see here I'm limited to typewriter for the time being. I still have access to the documents on the computer, including
Kingdoms
, but nothing can be done about printing things out—and so I have trapped in the computer all my business records, all stories and novels of the past nine years, the text of an unfinished novella, etc." (Computers were not as compatible with each other then as they later became, and so I couldn't simply buy a new machine and use my backups of the old material on it: everything had to be rescued and converted first, a complicated process.) "Meanwhile," I told Aronica, "I'm stuck. I can scroll through
Kingdoms
, but any revisions I make will have to be typed manually, which is better than carving them on stone tablets, but not much."

In the course of time I got a new computer, finished the unfinished novella I had mentioned above—getting that done was a whole saga in itself—took some time off at the end of the year because it was finally occurring to me that I was working too hard and about to get sick, and, finally, sent Aronica a long letter on January 22 about his proposed revisions, telling him explicitly what I thought
Kingdoms of the Wall
was about. ("The climb is a kind of path through temptation: as the Pilgrims pass through the various Kingdoms, buffeted as they are by the mutagenic forces, it is all too easy for the weakest of them to drop away, abandoning the Pilgrimage and joining one of the myriad Kingdoms of failed climbers. The Wall has the form of Dante's Purgatorio: those who have taken up residence on it will stay there indefinitely, neither damned nor saved, though some of the Kingdoms certainly seem quite hellish. Whoever gets sidetracked into one of them is lost forever to the tribe, a wasted Pilgrim. Poilar is resolved not to let this happen to him."

We argued back and forth all February. Aronica conceded some of my points, held firm on others. I began to see that the book had problems that really did need to be fixed: as Aronica put it, "I sense a certain lack of energy or emotional force behind its technical excellence. It's simply not as emotionally engaging as it could be." Well, it seemed emotionally engaging enough to me, but I was the last person in the world to be able to judge its effect on other readers. This time I sat down with gritted teeth and did an extensive rewrite, which I sent to New York on April 24, 1992, telling Aronica that I doubted that I had changed the book as much as he wanted me to, but I had changed it plenty, and this was about as far as I could go with rewriting it. He agreed and sent the manuscript on into production, and Bantam finally published it in March, 1993, behind a glorious cover painting by Chris Hopkins that showed my protagonist Poilar standing at the sunlit summit of
the mountain that had to be climbed
.

By way of homage to E.R. Eddison's great novel I borrowed a few descriptive adjectives from
The Worm Ouroboros
and scattered them through the middle chapters of my book, as the giant mountain Kosa Saag, my version of Koshtra Pivrarcha, begins to come into view. There is a second act of homage to an early favorite book of mine as well, Walter de la Mare's
The Three Mulla-Mulgars
, in Chapter 18 of
Kingdoms
. De la Mare's lovely fantasy, which I first encountered when I was about twelve, involves, among much else, an arduous mountain-climbing scene in which the travelers encounter a tribe of monkey-men coming the other way, linked tail to tail in a long chain, on a narrow path above a deep chasm. The power of that scene has never ceased to exert its force on my imagination; and I could not resist inserting my own version of it in
Kingdoms
. Since hardly anyone is familiar with
The Three Mulla-Mulgars
nowadays, no one ever commented on the resemblance; but I confess it freely now, with renewed admiration for one of the great books of my childhood.
 

The style of
Kingdoms of the Wall
is nothing like that of Eddison's deliberately archaic, thunderously resonant
The Worm Ouroboros
, nor does it have much in common with the delicately poetic prose of The Three Mulla-Mulgars. But those two novels lay in the back of my mind as, in the summer of 1992, I wrote
Kingdoms of the Wall
, and I see the book now as my tribute to two master novelists who helped to shape my imagination when I was very young.

 
—Robert Silverberg

 
April, 2011

1

This is the book of Poilar Crookleg, I who have been to the roof of the World at the top of the Wall and have felt the terrible fire of revelation there. I have seen the strange and bewildering gods that dwell there, I have grappled with them and returned rich with the knowledge of the mysteries of life and of death. These are the things I experienced, this is what I learned, this is what I must teach you for the sake of your souls. Listen and remember.

If you are of my village, then you know who I am. But I want the story I am about to relate to be heard and understood far beyond our own village, and so I will tell you that my father was Gabrian son of Drok, my House is the House of the Wall, and my clan within that House is Wallclan. So I come from a noble line.

I never knew my father when I was growing up, because he set forth on the Pilgrimage when I was only a small boy and never returned. So there was only a hole in my spirit where others have fathers to guide them. All that he left me with to carry me through childhood and boyhood was the memory of a tall man with bright eyes and strong arms, sweeping me up and tossing me high overhead and laughing in a deep, rich voice as he caught me. It may not be a trustworthy memory. It may have been some other man entirely who lifted me and tossed me like that; or maybe it never happened at all. But for many years that was all I had of my father: bright eyes, strong arms, a ringing peal of laughter.

My father's father had gone to the Wall also in his time. That is the tradition of my family. We are folk of restless soul, Pilgrims by nature. We always have been. The Pilgrimage is the high custom of our people, of course, the great defining event of one's life: either you become a Pilgrim or you do not, and either way it leaves its mark upon you forever. And we are of the Pilgrim sort. We claim descent from the First Climber; we take it for granted that we will be Pilgrims ourselves when we come of age, and will go up into the fearsome heights where one's body and one's soul are placed at dread risk of transformation by the forces that dwell there.

Like my father, my father's father failed to return from his god-quest in the realms above.

As for me, I never gave the Pilgrimage a thought when I was young. I looked upon the Pilgrimage then as something that concerned older folk, people in the second half of their second ten of years. It was always certain to me that when my time came I would be a candidate for the Pilgrimage, that I would be chosen, that I would undertake it successfully. Taking the Pilgrimage for granted in that way allowed me not to think about it at all. That way I was able to make it unreal.

I suppose I could pretend to you that I was a child of destiny, marked from my earliest years for supreme achievement, and that holy lightnings crackled about my brow and people made sacred signs when they passed me in the street. But in fact I was an ordinary sort of boy, except for my crooked leg. No lightnings crackled about me. No gleam of sanctity blazed on my face. Something like that came later, yes, much later, after I had had my star-dream; but when I was young I was no one unusual, a boy among boys. When I was growing up I wasn't at all the sort to go about thinking heavy thoughts about the Pilgrimage, or the Wall and its Kingdoms, or the gods who lived at its Summit, or any other such profundities. Traiben, my dearest friend, was the one who was haunted by high questions of ultimate destinies and utmost purposes, of ends and means, of essences and appearances, not I. It was Traiben, Traiben the Wise, Traiben the Thinker, who thought deeply about such things and eventually led me to think about them too.