Kingdoms of the Wall (18 page)

All the doubt that had infected me in this dismal place was burned out of me in that moment of starfire. The ecstasy of the Pilgrimage possessed me fully once more, and when I awakened, what seemed like moments later, morning had come and the light of both suns was hammering joyously, white over scarlet, against the slopes of the distant Wall. I would have climbed it in a bound, if it had been closer. I knew I would never waver in my faith again. Nor did I, except for a little while just before our Pilgrimage's end; though whether I came down from the Wall with the same faith in which I ascended it is something for you to measure and judge when you have heard all my story.

But my vision of the night healed me of my dark uncertainties. And I could see in the eyes of all the others that morning that once again those around me had shared my dream, even Muurmut, who hated me and would gladly have overthrown me. They looked at me just then as though I were no mortal being, but someone who was at home among the gods of Heaven.

Even so, there was no end to the grumbling. When we resumed our march a few hours later, I found myself walking in a group with Galli and Gazin and Ghibbilau the Grower and Naxa the Scribe; and we had not gone a hundred paces before Naxa began speaking as he had the night before, the same doleful stuff about how the Wall seemed to be getting farther away from us every day, instead of closer. "What I am reminded of," he said, "is the tale of Kesper the Scholar, who angered the gods by declaring that he intended to become as wise as they are. So they caused it to happen that for each book Kesper read, he would forget two others. It is the same with us, I think: for each step we take, the mountain moves two paces back, and so—"

Without pausing an instant for thought, I turned on him and knocked him sprawling in the dust.

He crouched there, trembling, amazed, looking up at me like a wounded beast. A little trickle of blood dribbled across his face where my blow had split his skin.

I pointed past him, back toward the rim of the great rift.

"Go," I said. "Now. That way."

"Poilar?"

"We don't need whiners and complainers among us. They have no value." I prodded him with the tip of my cudgel. "Get out of my sight, Naxa. Get going right now. Down the Wall, back to the village. The downhill route ought to be easier for you than the way up was."

He stared at me.

"Go on, Go!" I raised my cudgel.

"But I'll die, Poilar. I'll lose my way and die. You know I will. You're deliberately sending me to my death."

"Others have found their way down alone, isn't that so? You can too. And you'll enjoy being back home in the nice warm village. You'll live in the roundhouse with the other Returned Ones. You'll wander around town and do whatever you please, anything at all no matter how outrageous, and no one will dare say a word against you." I glanced around. "Are there any others here who want to go back with Naxa? He says that he's afraid of going down the Wall alone. You can keep him company on the way."

They were all staring at me with frozen faces. No one said a word.

"Anyone at all? Speak up, now! This is your chance. The return party sets out right now." They were silent. "Nobody? All right. So be it. He goes alone, then. Get moving, Naxa. We're wasting time here."

"For the love of Kreshe, Poilar!"

I shook my cudgel at him. Naxa scrambled back beyond its reach, just a few steps away from me, and paused there as if still not believing I was serious. I started toward him and he moved away from me again. I watched him as he went slinking off toward the east, pausing now and again to look back over his shoulder at me. After a time he disappeared behind a rise in the ground and I could see him no longer.

"All right," I said. "Let's go."

"Well done," Muurmut said. "How brave you are, Poilar, striking down the terrifying Scribe. And what a wise leader, to cast a chosen Pilgrim out of the Pilgrimage."

"I thank you for your praise," I said to him, and turned away.

I put Naxa out of my mind. We marched on.

Many hours later we stopped to rest and have our meager midday meal. I was sitting on a rock gnawing a bit of ancient dried meat when Thissa and Grycindil and Hendy came to me and stood before me, shifting uncertainly about as though they had something they needed to say but feared to tell me.

"Well?" I asked finally, since they did not seem to want to begin.

Very softly, trembling a little, Thissa said, "Poilar, we've come to ask you to pardon Naxa."

I laughed. "Naxa's gone. Naxa's forgotten. He doesn't exist any more. Don't talk to me about Naxa."

But Thissa said, "That was not a good thing you did, driving him away from us. I think it will anger the gods. I feel the air hot with their displeasure."

"If the gods are annoyed with me, then let them tell me so, and I'll do penance," I said to her. "Naxa was a drain on our spirits. We're better off without him. Ask Kath. Ask Jaif. Ask anyone. No one liked him. No one wanted him."

Hendy stepped forward then and said, in that cool strange voice of hers that I had so rarely heard, "Poilar, I know what it is to be cast out from one's own kind, to be alone the way Naxa is alone now. I feel his pain. I ask you to forgive him."

That startled me and troubled me a little, that Hendy should be pleading Naxa's cause; for I still desired Hendy, who had kept so aloof from everyone throughout our Pilgrimage, and it was odd and somehow disagreeable that she would speak out for Naxa when she had shown such indifference to me and to everyone else. It roused a kind of jealousy in me that she should do that. But there was something touching about it also, the two outcasts drawn together this way, Hendy and Naxa.

I said to her, more gently than I had replied to Thissa, "Even if I wanted to, there's nothing I can do. Naxa's a whole morning's march behind us now. Wherever he may be, we can't take the time to go back and look for him. He's on his own. He'll have to manage by himself, and there's no help for that."

"Oh, he's not all that far away," said Grycindil, laughing.

"What?"

She grinned mischievously. "He's been slinking along behind us all morning, trying not to let you notice him. Hendy and I saw him a little while ago. He's hiding right in there, behind those hills."

"
What?
" I cried again. Enraged, I grabbed up my cudgel. "Where is he? Where?"

But Grycindil put her hand to the cudgel and kept me from going after him. Which was wise, because if I had had Naxa before me at that moment it would have been the end of his life.

She said, "Naxa's a fool. You heard me tell him so yesterday. But even fools have a right to live. If you drive him away, he'll surely die in this wasteland. And he is one of us, Poilar. Do you want the death of a Pilgrim on your soul? For surely the gods will hold his death to your account when we reach the Summit."

"Who knows how the minds of the gods work?" I asked her. I was still shaking with rage. "If Naxa has any sense, he'll keep away from me. I don't ever want to see his face again. Tell him that for me."

"Have a little mercy, Poilar," Grycindil said.

"Let me be."

"Poilar, we beg you—" said Hendy softly.

That weakened me a little. Yet I turned my back on her.

"Let me be," I said again.

"I'll put a spell on him," Thissa said, "to keep him from uttering foolishness from now on."

"No. No. No. No. I want no more of him."

The fury that Naxa had aroused in me was slow to leave me. But in the end they swayed me, Thissa by her visionary force, and Hendy by her compassion for the outcast, and Grycindil by her willingness to forgive a man who had grossly offended her only the day before. I gave my word and off they went to fetch him, and soon afterward Naxa came trailing into camp, hanging his head with shame and fear. There was no complaining out of him from that time onward.

11

The plateau did not grow more lovable, nor was there any pleasure to be had in traversing it. But I set a quick pace and everyone followed, and we moved onward across its tiresome wastes toward our goal.

For the most part time was suspended for me in that time, and I experienced none of the impatience or despair that had brought me earlier to so dark a place. I wanted only to be going upward again; I would let nothing get in the way of that. Sometimes I felt a twinge of renewed restlessness, and then I took to scanning the horizon for signs that we were actually making progress: looking to see if certain prominent hillocks or ridges or sinkholes that lay before us were changing their position in relation to the great distant mountain mass that was the next level of the Wall, for example, as we marched. And of course they were. We were advancing steadily, however it might seem to us that we were not. The plateau was bigger even than we had thought it was, but beyond question we were getting across it. The mountain that rested upon it loomed over us, now. No longer was it just a pale red glow on the horizon.

And there were signs now of new things ahead.

Thissa felt them first. "This place is inhabited," she said suddenly, in a steep dry place of many stony buttresses, higher than any of the surrounding land.

"Where? By whom?"

"I don't know. I feel presences." She hesitated a moment. Then she pointed toward a place far down below us, fairly close, so it seemed, to the base of the mountain. A river of black water flowed in from the east there and mingled in a raw rocky chasm with a swift river of white water coming in from the west to become a single turbulent waterway. "There," she said. "Right over there, by the two rivers."

"What sort of presences?" I asked. "Dangerous ones?"

"I can't tell. Perhaps."

"We should go around them," Jaif said. "We'd do well not to get mixed up with anyone here."

But it was too late. Our arrival had not gone undetected. We had entered all unknowing into the first of the Kingdoms of the Wall, and those who inhabited it were already aware that we were moving across their territory. It would not be long before they caused us grief.

* * *

There were flying demons in the sky that night. None of us had ever seen such creatures before. Gazin the Juggler said that they were wind-sprites, which I had always thought of as mere things of myth and fable. But the Wall is a place where all myth and fable is made real. Still, I know that Gazin was mistaken. These were no sprites, but demons.

We were camped in a windswept declivity surrounded by vile bushes that had red thorns, bright and gleaming with a sinister phosphorescence. It was a dismal, dreadful place, but there was a spring of fresh cool water at its center, and we had no alternative but to camp where the water was.

For much of the evening we saw great birds circling above us, dim black shapes coursing slowly through the dark sky. We took them to be birds, at any rate. But then moons began to appear above the horizon, first gleaming Sentibos and little Malibos soon afterward, and by their sharp cold light we discovered that the flying creatures were not birds at all, but rather some kind of baleful winged beast.

They had bodies not very different in kind from ours, but very frail and small, like a child's, soft and flabby, with flimsy arms and dwarfish legs. Such beings would have seemed feeble and pitiful if they had been confined to life at ground level. But those sad little bodies hung suspended from huge hairy wings of enormous spread and great power that carried them in a kind of tireless gliding way unhurriedly through the air. It was then that Gazin the Juggler told us that these creatures were wind-sprites, and of course the wind-sprite dance is the special property of the Juggler House, so he might reasonably have known how they were supposed to look.

Gazin must have been wrong, though. He was simply trying to assert his own importance, as Jugglers will do; but he had never seen a wind-sprite, for such creatures were known only in ancient times. I had always understood the wind-sprites of the old tales to be delicate and elfin things, and these were hardly that. Though their bodies were so little, they were as shaggy as beasts, covered with thick rank grayish-blue fur which gave them a foul, malevolent look. The deliberate motion of their great wings was ominous and disagreeable. When they swooped down over us close enough for us to have a clear view of their faces, we saw that they were astonishingly ugly, with flat black noses and nostrils that were gaping holes and eyes like green fire, and tall ears tipped with tufts of thick hair. They had four great yellow teeth, two above and two below, that jutted far beyond their lips and went across each other like curving daggers. The feeble hands ended in savage talons. Could there have been any creature less sprite-like and more hideous? They circled above us for hours, far into the night, never once attempting to land. One passed almost within reach of me, and I smelled the sour smell of its wings and heard it hissing to itself in a low malevolent voice.

As these wind-sprites, or demons, or whatever they were, soared over us again and again, they screamed at us—harsh, raucous cries. After a time it seemed to me that the rhythm of their shrieks was much like speech: that they were saying something to us—shrieking it at us, rather—using words, actual words, but in a language I could not understand. It was like a language one might hear in a dream, although in dreams one can sometimes understand unknown languages, and I could not make a syllable's worth of sense of what these flying monstrosities were trying to tell us. But their tone was malign. It had the sound of a spell. Worse: the sound of a curse.