Hegira (21 page)

Kiril hated himself, as well. He had survived. But the incomprehensible violence that had ended Barthel's journey hung like a dead weight around his shoulders. He fell behind Bar-Woten and the guards pushed him on.

The third demon was staying behind as part of an agreement with the English-speakers. The two accompanying them would climb the eight kilometer slope of the Wall with the pilgrim, whichever he might be.

The boulevard ended at the Wall. Kiril and Bar-Woten were given packs of food and climbing equipment. The demons were equipped with steel cylinders and cloth-wrapped parcels. The noise of the crowd subsided behind them.

“This is not by our design, human,” one of the demons told Kiril as they started to climb. “We have a journey, also. We all reach our destinations.”

Kiril nodded, not facing the silvery mask. A thousand pilgrims had climbed the wall before them, the English-speaker's history books said. The last had been a year ago, before the arrival of the thin ones in their rocket. A fool's parade.

“Why don't they just kill pilgrims and be done with it?” he asked the demon.

“They do not dare. Some pilgrims come from among their own people; they cannot deny the Wall or those who come to it. And sometimes, their pilgrims return.”

“Return?”

The demon was silent for a moment. The second demon stopped climbing and pointed its blank silvery mask at Kiril. A thin whining sound came from under the cloak.

“There have been no pilgrims from this land for ten years,” the first continued. “The migrations began only twenty years ago. But we have learned. At other places and along other points of the wall, the streams of pilgrims have increased a thousand-fold. Some cities have been inundated since the fall of the Spire. They are all driven by one thing, that which we drew from your own memory — the loss of a mate. There have been females as well as males.”

“Why?”

The enigmatic mask was silent again.

“Don't you know?”

“We do not know,” the second demon admitted. “They migrate to appease — ” again the whine — “a fairy tale. Most die on the journey. Most are already dust or mud. You have survived.”

“I've had help,” Kiril said, glancing at Bar-Woten. The Ibisian climbed steadily, silently beside him. “I owe my life many times over to him.”

Eight kilometers up the Wall, the English-speakers had told them, a line of circular entrances awaited. The entrances had been surveyed many times in the past; separated by two kilometers, each consisted of a hole ten meters across and fifty meters deep, ending at a blank barrier. If Kiril or Bar-Woten were worthy, the barrier would open. If not, they would probably die trying to descend the slope, too demoralized to be cautious. Either way, the English-speakers would never see them alive again.

Clouds bathed them in cold, neutral wafts of moisture.

As they climbed, Kiril learned from the demons that Obelisks were falling every thirty thousand kilometers, with enormous destruction of landscape and life, the nearest being the Obelisk in Weggismarche. Those who returned to the ravaged land were now able to view most of the Obelisk texts. Soon, most of the inhabitants of Hegira would know — or be forced to know — the history and accomplishments of the First-born.

They would have to accept the truth of what they were — whatever that might be.

Bar-Woten listened. At one point, he stripped away his black patch and cast it down the slope. The sunken, wrinkled pit of his second eye cast the rest of his face out of proportion, giving him a calm, yet leering aspect. The man's silence frightened Kiril more than the demons. What is he thinking? What actually happened to Barthel?

Kiril tried to concentrate on the climb, on his aching thighs and calves and arms, on his neck stiff from the cold and from peering ahead, up the slope of the Wall. This is the last crawl of the migrating worm, he thought. God's gaze was not intense light, as he had been told by the Franciscans, but cold dank clouds and tears.

For the Wall wept. Its condensation ran in tiny rivulets to the land, gathering to form rivers. The water made the footing slippery, as if they walked up a slope of wet glass — but there was always the traction of the engraved words.

The thin ones climbed steadily, tirelessly, with a wobbling gait, arms reaching out to steady themselves, their cloaked and wrapped bird-legs pumping.

“Why did you come here?” Kiril asked once as they rested. Bar-Woten, two meters higher up the slope, inclined his head to hear their answer.

“We are not sure you can understand,” one replied. “We wished to know what happened to us. Long ago, all was bliss and paradise, and we grew. We were all part of —” It whined sharply — “a reach. A peak of achievement and understanding. Then, it was all lost, and we had to start from the beginning, in the pain and disaster of youth. It is not precisely the same with you.”

“But not so different,” Kiril said.

“Perhaps.”

“Are the English-speakers going to help you try another way back, if you can't pass through the barrier?” he asked. He motioned to the fog-hidden city below.

“We exchanged knowledge.”

That didn't answer his question, but he hadn't really expected an answer. “You don't know what they'll do with your knowledge.”

“Yes, we do,” one cloaked figure hissed. Bar-Woten glanced at Kiril, but still kept his counsel.

Four kilometers. He hooked his sleeping pouch onto the words with a net of tiny grapples. The thin ones had their own apparatus, slinging themselves in wide straps connected to similar grapples. They replenished something in their suits from the steel cylinders.

Kiril did not sleep well.

With green morning, they fought they way through clouds thick as ghostly foliage. Five kilometers. Six.

“There is the entrance,” the figure in black said. They automatically increased their pace, though Kiril was exhausted. Bar-Woten again led the way, silent as ever.

They rested at seven kilometers. The clouds drew together above them and obscured the hole again.

The next day, they stood on the lip of the entrance and stared down the shadowy length of the hole in the Wall.

“There is no barrier,” a demon said, hissing faintly behind the words.

The tunnel led deep into the Wall, dark for the first hundred yards, then filled with a dry, faint gray luminosity.

“You have made it, Pilgrim,” the other demon said.

Kiril and Bar-Woten tossed aside their climbing tools.

Kiril squatted near the edge to examine the tunnel more closely.

“Do you think I could go in?” Bar-Woten asked. It was the first thing he had said since they began their climb; his voice was soft and low. He leaned over to rub the tunnel's surface with his left palm.

“I don't know,” Kiril said. “I hope so. We've all come a long way.”

Bar-Woten nodded.

“We would like you to proceed,” a demon said behind them. “We will follow.”

Kiril got to his feet, slinging the almost-empty pack over his shoulder. There was very little food left; the English-speakers had not been generous. Glancing at Bar-Woten, he began walking down the tunnel. Bar-Woten followed, and behind him, the two thin ones.

Kiril kept his eyes forward. After ten minutes, no barrier presented itself. He looked over his shoulder and saw the Ibisian, and at least fifty yards behind him, the demons, who seemed to be moving through gelatin. The tunnel's entrance was a distant point of white. Bar-Woten nodded at him, smiling faint encouragement. Kiril looked ahead again, then back, and stopped, his breath taking a hitch.

A few yards behind Bar-Woten, the tunnel had sealed itself. The thin ones were nowhere to be seen. “We're alone,” he said.

Bar-Woten shivered slightly. “Do we qualify?”

Kiril shook his head slowly. “I don't know any more about this than you do.”

“You don't feel anything?”

Kiril sighed. “Nothing.”

The Ibisian lifted his arm and pointed down the length of the tunnel. “All we can do is walk, then.”

They walked for hours, then paused to rest and eat, and

Kiril lay down in a half-curl to sleep. Bar-Woten sat beside him, knees drawn up under his resting elbows, flicking a strip of cloth from one hand, then drawing it up and rolling it, flicking it again, drawing and rolling . . .

Kiril awakened and watched him. “What do you think we'll find?”

“The Land Where Night Is a River,” Bar-Woten said without hesitation.

“But what is that?”

“I'm not sure I care any more,” the Ibisian said.

Kiril turned away, shaking his head. “He tried to kill you. Why?”

“When the English-speakers drugged us for the demons to listen ... I think I spoke of Khem, and he must have remembered. He saw very little.”

“What happened?”

“It isn't important,” Bar-Woten said.

“He was like your son.”

Bar-Woten gave Kiril a glance of both agony and barely-contained rage. His lips drew tight and his one eye glittered with tears. The sunken caul of his other eye was also wet. Then the rage seemed to evaporate.

Kiril watched the Ibisian silently crying, both appalled and fascinated. “He deserved to be here with us,” he said after a while. “But millions have died already. Whichever god made this happen is a careless god.”

Bar-Woten stood abruptly and walked past Kiril down the tunnel.

“Right,” Kiril said.

Before the next sleep, they walked ten or eleven kilometers — or as much as fifteen. There was no accurate way of telling distance or time. Still the tunnel was featureless. Kiril felt a touch of fear and the walls seemed to shrink around him. He paused, dizzy and nauseated, and lowered his head. “Wait,” he said. Bar-Woten turned to look at his companion. The tunnel was empty.

Kiril kneeled until he had recovered, and then got to his feet. Bar-Woten was gone. Thinking the Ibisian had gone far ahead of him, Kiril began to run, calling out his name, but the tunnel ended abruptly only a few hundred meters ahead.

He paced back and forth before the blank barrier, not daring to touch it, afraid this was truly the end and he had been rejected, murmuring automatic prayers, but no longer certain to which god if any they were directed. He thought perhaps the Ibisian had been allowed to pass, and his face flushed with anger and a kind of envy. Finally, furious, he reached out to strike the barrier with his fist. His hand vanished and he stumbled through.

At that moment, Kiril began to understand the power of Hegira. Beyond the insubstantial partition was a clear view of darkness and fire doves. He stood in a transparent hemisphere about ten meters across, the glass or whatever substance it was made of supported by a waist-high wall. The air in the chamber was musty but breathable. There was no sign of Bar-Woten.

He walked to the edge, and realized he must be looking over the top of the Wall at the end of the world. The upper surface of the Wall was a featureless dark plain that stretched in front and to each side to a seemingly flat horizon.

Kiril circled to the opposite side of the dome, around the man-high half-circle through which he had entered, and which must have been a kind of doorway. From that vantage, he looked down through a bluish haze and thick layers of clouds to the surface of his world. Holding up a finger, he wonderingly traced rivers and mountain ranges and the broad delta of the Pale Seas. He could make out the cloud-wrapped line of the fallen Obelisk in Weggismarche and Pallasta, and the upright Obelisks of other lands, thousand of kilometers distant.

He slumped to his knees and lifted his elbows to the edge of the dome, leaning his head in the crook of one arm, too astonished to think, much less worry about what had happened to Bar-Woten. For an hour, he stared at the umbers and greens and grays of continents and the blues and more pronounced greens of oceans; russet, sienna and ochre deserts and grassy plains, tracks of mountains spreading like frost on glass, anvils and fish-skeletons of clouds, puffs of storms and whorls of hurricanes, all stretching to a broad line of blue on the high, immensely broad horizon. And rising over land, sea and sky, the stolid needles with their tops of sheet sunlight, on a level with the Wall and the dome. I am as tall as an Obelisk.

Then the Obelisks' light faded. The land became shadowy and night snugged fit across Hegira. The fire doves gleamed more brightly without daylight's competition from below.

With a contentment he hadn't known since childhood — a recognition of forces higher than himself, in which he must place his trust or simply give up in despair — he put his gear on the floor of the dome and went to sleep beneath the glimmer of the fire doves.

Bar-Woten found his own barrier. He reached out to feel the plug on the tunnel, and when his hand passed through, he closed his eye and stepped forward resolutely, more than half expecting to die.

Kiril awoke from some vague dream and rolled over on his back.

“Good morning,” greeted the man standing over him.

For a moment, with Kiril's vision unfocused, he thought it might be Bar-Woten, but then he tensed and slowly backed up against the hemisphere's waist-high wall. The man carried a pack, and wore clothes similar to his own, but he was not the Ibisian. His face was well-tanned and deeply grooved with sun-and-wind wrinkles. His hair was a backward-swept mop of solid gray. His nose was an oft-broken, crooked ruin, and he had a grin as devious as his nose, but he did not seem unfriendly. In one hand he clutched a round black ball the size of a small apple. Kiril glanced down at his feet and saw the man wore no shoes.

“You've only been here a little while,” the man said. “Need some guidance?” He was speaking Pallastan, not radically different from Teutan, but with an odd inflection.

“I'm sure I do,” Kiril said. “How long have you been here?”

“In the observatory? Just a few minutes. You surprised me, lying here. I've been in the Wall for a year, maybe two. I'm not clear about time any more. You're not from Weggismarche, but you speak the tongue fairly well . . . Have you traveled far?”

Kiril got to his feet. “From a place called Mediweva. Thousands of kilometers. Tens of thousands.”

The man nodded. “I've heard of it. Sailors bring back stories. Or at least, they used to. Is my country still there? Pallasta?”