Kingdoms of the Wall (6 page)

"2. Because my father was a Pilgrim in his time and I think and hope that he may still be dwelling in one of the Kingdoms of Kosa Saag. I have not seen him since I was a small child and it is my great dream to encounter him once again when I climb the Wall.

"3. Because I have spent my whole life looking up at Kosa Saag and marveling at its greatness, and now I want to test my strength against the mountain and see if I am equal to what it will ask of me."

It was a good essay. At least, it got me through the Second Winnowing. Ninety of us were dismissed at that Winnowing. Whether it was for writing poor essays or for some other reason, I have no idea; but I suspect the essays really were of no great significance in the process. It was the task of the Masters to find some reason or other for discarding all but forty of us in the course of the four years, and they could use almost any pretext at all—or none—for dropping us from the roster.

Then there was religious instruction. We read the Book of the First Climber, though of course we had read it a thousand times already, and we discussed the story of His life, His conflict with the elders and His being cast out of the village and His decision to climb the Wall, which at that time was not permitted, and the things that He learned during His Pilgrimage on its heights. And also we were drilled in the names and visages of the gods and all their special attributes, as if we could expect to meet them along the mountain path and must therefore be sure to recognize them and greet them with the proper greeting. So we sat in the little hut of instruction as though we were small children while someone from the House of Holies held up one sacred portrait after another, and we shouted out the names: "Kreshe! Thig! Sandu Sando! Selemoy!" It felt strange to be back in school, since, as is true of almost everyone else, my formal education had ended with my first ten of years. But for all we knew we
would
meet Thig and Selemoy and Sandu Sando on the slopes of the Wall; and so we listened to the old stories all over again—how Kreshe had made the World and set it afloat on the Great Sea and how Thig the Shaper had reached into the still molten rock of the new-made World and pulled the Wall out of it, stretching it high in order to make a place for us to live that would be close to the stars, and how after the sin of our First Fathers we had been hurled down from the Summit into the lowlands by Sandu Sando the Avenger and forbidden to return until we were worthy, and all the rest of the tales of our childhood.

In those first days we had to go to other classes where we were taught the nature of the Wall. The most remarkable thing about these classes was how little seemed to be known about Kosa Saag, for all the thousands of years that we had been sending our Pilgrims up its face.

Our teachers, of course, had never been very far up the Wall themselves: just the usual excursions to the permitted holiday zones just above the village, and no farther. There was nothing very surprising about that, I suppose. Our teachers had never been Pilgrims. Only the Returned Ones had any first-hand knowledge of the extraordinary place where we were going to go, but you wouldn't really expect Returned Ones to do anything so obvious and straightforward and useful as to come into our classrooms and give us lectures on what they had experienced. That is not their way. I had hoped that they would make an exception to their rule of lofty and mystical withdrawal from all daily matters for the sake of helping us understand what was in store for us, but they did not do it. The Returned Ones shared nothing with us, nothing at all. And so our teachers, who were just the usual babbling drudges from the House of Scholars, served us up a foggy third-hand mix of rumor, legend, and guesswork which was just about as close to useless as anything could be.

They taught us that the Wall is a place where the power of the gods is so great that change comes freely and amazingly to those who live their lives upon it, and all is magic and mystery and strangeness beyond our comprehension. And they warned us of the danger of encountering change-fire as we climbed. The very stones of the Wall, they said, give off a secret heat that will kindle into raging conflagration the flame of transformation that always burns quietly and gently within us, and turn climbers into monsters if they are willing to let it happen.

Everything was fluid up there, they said. Nothing was fixed, nothing was as we understood things to be. It was all because of that strange fire that lay within the rocks, which no one could see but which was easy enough to feel. "The Wall is said to be a place where reality bends," our teachers told us solemnly. How were we supposed to interpret that? They couldn't say. "On the Wall," they declared, "the sky sometimes is below and the ground is above." Well, yes, and what were we to make of that? They spoke of monsters, demons, and demigods who waited for us above the cloud-line in the innumerable Kingdoms of the Wall. They warned us of lakes of fire and trees of metal. They talked of dead people who walked with their feet turned back to front and their eyes staring like hot coals out of the backs of their heads. They let us read the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel, which was supposed to be the three-thousand-year-old testimony of the only Returned One who had ever said anything at all about what he had encountered while climbing Kosa Saag, other than the First Climber Himself. But unlike the Book of the First Climber, which is stark and simple in its narrative of His visit to the abode of the gods and its account of the things they taught Him while He was there, the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel was all ornate parable and poetry, a welter of fanciful detail written in a cryptic style so remote from any kind of modern speech that it had to be embedded in footnotes and commentary a dozen times as long as the Secret Book itself. Very few of us could get through more than a dozen pages of it. All I remember was a kind of feverish haze of murky description that made no sense, a magical fairy-tale of heights that turned into abysses, of raindrops that became knives, of rocks that danced and sang, of demons who furiously hurled their limbs one by one at climbing Pilgrims until there was nothing left of them but bouncing skulls, of wise men who offered counsel along the way but spoke all their words in backwards language. The whole of the Secret Book might just as well have been written in backwards language for all the help it gave me.

I decided that the classes were simply part of the Winnowing. They were intended to terrify us by making us see that nobody who lived in the lowland villages really had the slightest knowledge of what awaited those who journeyed on the Wall. The things we were learning struck me as being mere fables that could be of no possible practical use, and therefore after a few weeks I stopped paying attention to them. Others, believing that their lives would depend on how well they mastered this mass of foolishness, took copious notes and in a little while, as the contradictions and mysteries piled up, they began to go around with dazed, bewildered expressions on their faces.

About a dozen members of my group resigned their candidacies during this period. Most of the dedicated note-takers were among them. I was convinced that they had filled their minds with so much nonsense about the Wall that they became too frightened to continue.

We had other classes that were far more valuable: I mean our classes in survival, where we were taught the techniques of mountain-climbing, and of coping with the special conditions that were believed to exist in the higher reaches of the Wall, and tricks of hunting and foraging that would come in handy once we had exhausted the food we had carried up from the village in our packs. Here too the instructors were forced to rely on a lot of myth and supposition, on account of the taboo against the Returned Ones' revealing their experiences on the Wall. But there is no taboo against climbing the lower reaches of the Wall, at least as far as the Hithiat milepost, and so we were allowed to get some small taste of what might be waiting for us.

I had been as high as Hithiat already, of course. Everyone has: we all sneak up the Wall when we are young. Most of us stay up there only a few hours, but the boldest will risk remaining overnight. That was what I had done when I was fourteen. Galli went with me then. She and I had just become lovers, and we enjoyed daring each other to do all sorts of outrageous things: we slipped into the place where the sacred things were kept and handled some of them, we stole a bottle of dream-wine from the Wallclan treasury, we went swimming in the Pool of the Housemothers one moonless night. And then I said, "I want to climb the Wall. Do you?"

She laughed. "Kreshe! You think I'm afraid of that?"

Galli was big and hearty, as strong as any man, with a loud deep voice and a laugh that could be heard three Houses away. We set out early one morning, getting past the gate-guards with the usual line about going to make a sacrifice at Roshten Shrine, and then of course as we approached Roshten we darted into the thick jungle behind it and went scrambling up the back way on the forest road that parallels the main one. It was a clear day and by the time we reached the Glay milepost we were astounded at how much of the village we could see below us, and when we got to Hespen we stopped a long while at the parapet, struck silent by wonder. Everything lay spread out below us in miniature. It was like a toy model of the village. I felt as if I could reach out with my hand and gather it all up in a single swoop. We could see the House of the Wall right below us with the scarlet szambar tree at its center, looking no bigger than a matchstick, and the House of Holies next to it, and Singers on the other side, and then any number of other Houses, Healers and Carpenters and Musicians and Clowns and Butchers, spreading away and away and away to east and west like little dark circles in the green of the forest, until finally the Houses came to their end and there was only green, with perhaps the barest hint on the horizon of the foreign villages that lie beyond the boundaries of our own.

We went on that day, Galli and I, to Hithiat milepost, where the road got very rough and we began to lose our nerve. Here the face of the Wall was soft and pitted, and pebbles kept tumbling down from above us with little slithering sounds. Sometimes larger rocks fell; a few huge boulders too, which hit uncomfortably close to us and went bounding away. The boulders made us very uneasy. It was getting dark, besides. And everyone knew that it was crazy to go beyond Hithiat. I was aware that Galli feared hardly anything, and she knew that I was like that too, and so it occurred to me that one of us might try to bluff the other into going beyond Hithiat, and that if we began to talk about it we probably would actually do it, since neither of us had the courage to confess any sort of fear or weakness to the other. But that was not what happened. We had that much common sense, at least. Instead we went off the gravelly road into a flat mossy place, where we watched Ekmelios set and then ate the little bit of meat and cheese and wine that we had carried with us. After that we took off our clothes and sang the Change-songs to each other and brought ourselves out of neuter, and I lay down on top of Galli's great firm resilient body as though it were a bed; and she embraced me and took me inside her, and we ran through some very wonderful Changes indeed.

"Do you feel the change-fires?" she asked me.

"No. Do you?"

"I don't think they're very strong, this close to the village. But it frightens me, to think that we could be turned into monsters on the Wall."

"Even when we go higher up, we won't be transformed unless we want to be," I said. "The change-fires don't take control of you against your will. The only ones who are transformed are those who don't have the strength to remain themselves."

"How do you know that?" Galli asked. "I never heard anything about that."

"I know," I said solemnly. But the truth was I was only guessing.

Darkness came. We were too frightened to sleep. So we sat side by side waiting for dawn and wondering about the screeching sounds that drifted down to us from the pinnacles we could not see, for everyone knows the dire tales of the Wall-hawks that are bigger than a man and carry Pilgrims off in their beaks. But the Wall-hawks, if that was what they were, let us be, and at dawn we returned to the village. Nobody minded that we had been gone. Galli's father was a drunkard, and as for mine, of course, he had vanished on the Wall long before. The gentle Urillin, my mother's brother who had had charge of me since I was a boy, never could stand to punish me for anything. So nothing was said about our absence. And that was the great adventure that Galli and I had in the highlands.

But the training classes that took us up the Wall now were much harder work than my outing with Galli. Instead of following the main road or one of the back roads we had to hack our way through the foothill forests, scrambling over colossal rocks and the gnarled roots of trees, and sometimes go straight up bare cliff faces, using all our skill with our ropes and our sucker-pads to keep from falling and being smashed. And there was no meat and cheese and no wine and certainly no making the Changes when we came out finally at Hithiat milestone. We undertook at least one climb a week, and it was brutal, exhausting stuff. We came back bruised and bloody. I worried about Traiben, since he was in another group and I couldn't be close at hand to help him through. But he managed. Sometimes I met him after hours and gave him special coaching, showing him ways of carrying himself through the difficult places, of wedging his feet into cracks or looking for horns of rock to grab while shifting his position. The climbs were not only strenuous, they were dangerous too: on our fifth climb a boy named Steill, from the House of Leather-makers, became lost in the woods and we searched for him half the night before we found him at last, lying broken in the moonlight at the bottom of a deep ravine with his brains spilling out of his head. He must have walked off the edge at dusk without knowing what he was doing, though someone whispered that a shambler had come upon him and pushed him over the edge. We all trembled at that: for the shambler is said to be as big as a roundhouse, but makes no sound in the forest and leaves no footprint. Be that as it may, Steill was dead, the first of our number to die in candidacy. But not the last.