Kingdoms of the Wall (2 page)

But until that time came the only things that mattered to me were the usual things of boyhood, hunting and swimming and running and fighting and laughing and girls. I was good at all those things except running, because of my crooked leg, which no shapechanging has ever been able to heal. But I was strong and healthy otherwise, and I never permitted the leg to interfere with my life in any way whatever. I have always lived as though both my legs were as straight and swift as yours. When you have a flaw of the body such as I have there is no other course, not without giving way to feelings of sorrow for yourself, and such feelings poison the soul. So if there was a race, I ran in it. If my playmates went clambering across the rooftops, I clambered right along with them. Whenever someone mocked me for my limp—and there were plenty who did, shouting "Crookleg! Crookleg!" at me as though it were a fine joke—I would beat him until his face was bloody, no matter how big or strong he might be. In time, to show my defiance of their foolish scorn, I came to take Crookleg as my surname, like a badge of honor worn with pride.

If this world were a well-ordered place it would have been Traiben who had had the crooked leg and not me.

Perhaps I ought not to say so cruel a thing about one whom I claim to love. But what I mean is that in this world there are thinkers and doers; doers must have agility and strength of body, and thinkers need agility and strength of mind. I had agility and bodily strength aplenty, but my leg was a handicap all the same. As for Traiben, the thinker, there was no strength in his frail body anyway, so why shouldn't the gods have given him this limp of mine as well, instead of me? One more physical drawback, among so many, would not have made his life any worse, and I would have been better fitted to be the person I was meant to be. But the gods are never so precise in parceling out our gifts.

We were an odd pair: he so small and flimsy and fragile, with no more strength to him than a gossamer, and me so sturdy and unwearying. Traiben looked as though you could break him with a blow, and you could. Whereas I have made it clear throughout all my days that if there is any breaking to be done, I will be the breaker rather than the broken. What drew us together, then? Though we belonged to the same House and the same clan within that House, that in itself would not necessarily have led to friendship between us. No, I think the thing that linked us so tightly, different though we were in so many respects, was the fact that each of us had something about him that set him apart from the others of our clan. In my case it was my leg. In Traiben's, it was his mind, which burned with such fierce brilliance that it was like a sun within his skull.

Traiben it was who first set me on the path that leads to the summit of the Wall, when he and I were twelve years old.

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The name of my village is Jespodar, which the Scribes and Scholars say is a word in the old Gotarza language that once was spoken here, meaning, "Those Who Cling to the Wall." I suppose we do. Our village, which is really not a village at all but a vast conglomeration of villages all tangled together, containing many thousands of people, is said to lie closer to the perimeter of the Wall than any other—right up against its flank, as a matter of fact. It is possible to take a road that runs out of the center of Jespodar that will put you on the Wall itself. If you were to make the great journey around the base of the Wall, you would come to scores of other villages—hundreds, maybe—along its perimeter; but none, so the Scholars tell us, actually abuts the flank of the Wall the way Jespodar does. Or so we are taught in Jespodar, at any rate.

The day of which I want to tell you, that day when my friend Traiben first lit the fire of Pilgrimage in my twelve-year-old mind, was the day of the departure of that year's Pilgrims. You know what great pomp and splendor that involves. The ceremony of the Procession and Departure has not changed since ancient times. The clans of every House that make up our village gather; the sacred things of the tribe are brought forth, the batons and scrolls and talismans; the Book of the Wall is recited, every last verse of it, which requires weeks and weeks of unceasing effort; and finally the forty successful candidates emerge from the Pilgrim Lodge to show themselves before the village and take their leave. It is a profound moment, for we will never see most of them again—everyone understands that—and those who do return will come back transformed beyond all knowing of them. That has ever been the way.

To me in that innocent time it was all just a grand festival, nothing more. For many days, now, people from the outlying districts of the village had been arriving at our House, which lay closer to the Wall than any other in Jespodar: we were the House of the Wall, the House of Houses. Thousands had come, thousands of thousands, so that the whole unthinkable swarm of festival-goers was crammed elbow to elbow all the time, packed so close together that often we found ourselves changing shape involuntarily, just from the heat and congestion of it all, and we had to struggle to get back to the forms that we preferred.

Wherever you looked, our Housegrounds overflowed with mobs of people. They were everywhere and they got into everything: they trampled our lovely powdervines, they crushed and flattened our handsome daggerfernbushes, they stripped the gambellos of all their ripe, heavy blue fruits. It had happened that way every year for more dozens of years than anyone can remember: we expected it and were resigned to it. The longhouses and the roundhouses were filled, the meadows were filled, the sacred groves were filled. Some people even slept in trees. "Have you ever
seen
so many people?" we all kept asking each other, though of course we had, only the year before. But it was the thing to say.

We even had a few of the King's men in town to see the ceremony. They were swaggering thick-bodied men who wore robes of red and green, and they went striding through the crowds as if there was no one in their way. People stepped aside when they passed. I asked my mother's brother Urillin, who had raised me in my father's absence, who they were, and he said, "They are the King's men, boy. They sometimes come here for the Festival, to enjoy themselves at our expense." And he muttered a bitter curse, which surprised me, because Urillin was a mild and quiet man.

I stared at them the way I might have stared at men with two heads, or six arms. I had never seen King's men before; and, in feet, I have never seen them since. Everyone knows that there is a King somewhere on the other side of Kosa Saag who lives in a grand palace in a great city and holds dominion over many villages, ours among them. The King owns the magic that makes everything work, and so I suppose we are dependent on him. But he is so very far away and his decrees have so little direct bearing on our everyday life that he might just as well live on some other planet. We dutifully pay our tribute but otherwise we have no dealings with him or the government he heads. He is only a phantom to us. I scarcely thought about him from one end of the year to the other. But the sight of these men of his service, who had come such a great distance to attend our Festival, reminded me how huge the world is, and how little I knew about any of it except our own village lying in the shadow of the Wall; and so the King's men awakened awe in me as they went strutting by.

The days passed in rising frenzy and excitement. The moment of the Procession and Departure was approaching.

The chosen Pilgrims, naturally, were kept out of sight: no one had seen them for months and certainly nobody was allowed to see them now, at this time of times. They remained hidden away in Pilgrim Lodge, the twenty men in one room and the twenty women in the other, while food was shoveled to them through slots in the doors.

But the rest of us enjoyed constant revelry. All day and all night there was dancing and singing and drunkenness. Of course there was plenty of work to do too. Then as now, each House had its special responsibility. The House of Carpenters set up the viewing-stands, the House of Musicians played songs of jubilation from dawn to the moon-hours, the House of Holies stood in the plaza and chanted prayers at the top of its lungs, the House of Singers began to recite the innumerable verses of the Book of the Wall outside Pilgrim Lodge in continuous relays without break, and the House of Vintners put up its booths and opened casks as fast as we could drain them, which was very fast indeed. The House of Clowns went among us in yellow robes miming and making faces and gaily pummeling people; the House of Weavers brought forth the heavy golden carpets that must line the road to the Wall at this time; the House of Sweepers toiled to clean away the hideous mess that the multitudes of other festival-goers were creating. The only ones who had no duties were youngsters like Traiben and me. But we understood that the adults did their work gladly, for this was meant to be a time of universal celebration in the village.

We who belonged to the House of the Wall, naturally, had the task of coordinating all the activities of the other Houses. That is a frightful burden, but for us it is also a source of great pride. Meribail, my father's father's brother's son, was the head of our House then, and I think he went without sleep a dozen nights running as the day of the Procession drew near.

And then it was Departure-day itself: as always, the twelfth day of Elgamoir. The morning was steamy-warm, with steady rainfall. Every leaf of every tree glistened like a knifeblade. The ground was soft as sponge beneath our feet.

No one could ever say that smothering warmth and pelting rain are any novelties to us in our lowland home. Then as now, we lived all the year round in the kind of heat that stews one's flesh, and we loved it. But even so this was unusual warmth, unusual rain. The air was like a bog: that morning we felt as though we were breathing water. We were all of us decked out in our fine Procession clothes too, the blue leather leggings and scarlet ribbons and droopy-topped yellow caps that people wear at such times, children and elders alike. But we were wet to the skin, what with the constant rain and our own dripping sweat. I remember how hard I had to fight to hold my shape, so great was the heat, so sticky was the air. My arms kept melting and writhing, my shoulders would swing around at strange angles to my torso, and I would have to clench my teeth and force everything back into place. Traiben beside me was fluttering also from form to form, although however much he changed he somehow was always the same flimsy, hollow-chested, big-eyed Traiben with the pipestem legs and the scrawny neck.

As the hour of the Procession arrived there came a miracle. Just as the Singers reached the last words of the final verse of the Book of the Wall—the verse that is known as the Summit—the rain abruptly relented, the thick gray soupy mists thinned and vanished, the heavy shield of the sky became transparent. A cool swift wind began to blow from the north. Everything became wonderfully clear and radiant. The bright hot light of blue-white Ekmelios appeared and shone down dazzlingly upon us like a fiery jewel in the forehead of the sky. It was a double-sun day, even: that day we were able also to see the enormous remote sphere of red Marflemma, the sun that gives no warmth. We could see everything.
Everything.

"Kosa Saag!" we all cried in one voice, gesturing with tremendous excitement. "Kosa Saag!"

Yes. The Wall was coming into view in all its immensity. It had, of course, been hidden by the murkiness of the morning air, but now it appeared above us, climbing and climbing and climbing. It pierced the sky and disappeared into the immeasurable heights. People fell trembling to their knees and began to weep and pray, stricken as they were by fear and humility at the sight of that gigantic mountain suddenly revealing itself.

Certainly Kosa Saag is always a mighty sight, even when the usual low-hanging clouds hide most of it from view and just the squat reddish base can be seen. But that morning it exceeded itself in awesomeness. It had never seemed so huge to me before. That day I imagined that I could see all the way to the home of the gods. Its endless slope went up and up, a colossal pink thing of unimaginable height and length and breadth lying upon the land like some enormous slumbering beast. I stared in wonder at its great intricate bulk, its pocked and pitted surface, its million spires and pinnacles, its uncountable caverns and crevices, its multitude of subsidiary peaks, its myriad turrets and parapets, its hundreds of spiny ridges and incomprehensible twisting trails leading to unknown lofty realms. And it seemed to me, even then, that in that moment of revelation I could feel the power of the mighty forces that dwell there beating down on me, the invisible fires that emanate from every stone face of the mountain, every rock, every grain of soil—the forces that seize so many of those who venture into those heights, transforming the weak and the unwary into things that can no longer be reckoned as human.

Because our clan within the House of the Wall was Wallclan, from which the heads of our House are always elected, Traiben and I had a privileged position for the Procession. We were seated in the main viewing stand just opposite the stone roundhouse of the Returned Ones, which is just adjacent to Pilgrim Lodge, from which the chosen Forty would soon emerge. So we were at the very center of things. That was truly dizzying, to know that such a great multitude was arrayed around the central point that was us, spreading outward and outward to the borders of the village and far beyond, all the teeming thousands and thousands of people of all the clans of every House of our village, the highborn and the lowly, the wise ones and the fools, the strong and the weak, packed elbow to elbow in the grassy streets under the shadow of the great mountain that is Kosa Saag.

* * *