Kingdoms of the Wall (40 page)

And so we stayed in the Kingdom of my father's father for a day or two, three, four, another day beyond that. From time to time I would step outside and see the path rising above me, and the snowy crags, and the roof of cloud that marked the Summit off from the lands just below it, and I knew that we should be on our way. There was our goal; and it was almost within reach. But I gave no order to make ready for departure.

Condemn me as you will. The fact is that some demon within me was encouraging me to remain in this soft place of everlasting life, and I found it difficult to resist. It was a kind of paralysis. I had not formally accepted my father's father's offer; but I was remaining, all the same. I will pause here another few days, I told myself each day. I have to gather my strength for the final assault. What hurry is there? I asked myself. The Summit will wait. The gods can do without me a little longer.

And so the time passed.

"We need to move along," Hendy said to me, after a few days more of idleness.

"Yes. Yes."

"We swore an oath, Poilar," said Traiben some days later.

"Yes," I said. "So we did."

They were all looking at me, watching me, wondering. Some were eager to continue the ascent, some were not, but no one could understand why I held back from issuing the order to resume our march. Even Thrance, skulking crooklegged through the splendors of this Kingdom as though they were nothing but ashes and mud, turned his mocking grinning gaze at me and asked me coolly, "Are you afraid to go on to the Summit, Poilar? Is that it? Or is it just a sudden attack of laziness that keeps you here so long?"

I scowled at him and said nothing.

He said, "It's on account of a woman, perhaps. Eh? One of these sleek little girls with nice golden skin comes crawling into your bed at night, is that it? And you can't bear to leave her." Thrance pushed his piebald face close up against mine and laughed, with great gusts of stinking breath. "She's six tens old, Poilar! She's old enough to be Hendy's mother's mother's mother, and you think she's just a girl!"

"Get away from me," I told him.

"Six tens of years!"

"Away," I said. "Or I'll break you in two."

He laughed again. But he went limping away.

Indeed there was a little truth to this notion of Thrance's, but only a little; for I had in fact had some sport with the glittering women of this Kingdom here and there during this time. I know that I was not the only one who did that. The citizens of my father's father's realm swarmed over us as though we were new toys brought for their amusement, and they were not easy to resist. Very likely all the members of my Forty had lovers while we were in this land, the men and women both. In particular I took a fancy to one called Alamir, who was lithe and quick and had the sparkling sheen of a girl half my age. How old she might be in reality was something I didn't care to consider, though the question did cross my mind unbidden now and again, to my dismay. It was she who had put the notion of founding a Kingdom of
my own into my head, with herself as Queen. And I played with the idea for a few days; but all it was was play.

It was not Alamir, though, who kept me tied to this place, nor laziness. But Thrance had hit upon the truth with his first hypothesis.

It was fear.

I knew now that my father's father had not cast any spells upon me. He had merely made a tempting offer, which the Poilar of an earlier time would have quickly refused out of hand with a shrug and a shake of the head. Even now, weary of the long climb as I was, I still was capable of refusing it.

But my mind would not let go of the tale of my father's strange death upon the heights of the Wall. It brimmed in my memory, and cascaded and overflowed; and the more I considered it, the more powerful was its impact. A thousand times I asked myself: What was it that my father had seen at the Summit, so horrible that he could purge himself of the knowledge of it only by casting himself into the Well of Life?

It was dread of that revelation that held me back, not anything so simple as the fear of dying. Death itself held no terrors for me: it never has. But that I might discover something in the abode of the gods that could drive me to take my own life, as my father and his six companions had done before me—that was what I feared. It paralyzed me utterly; and I found myself unable to share that fear with any of my friends. For a long while I concealed it even from myself, and believed that it was some newfound love of comfort that held me here, or some magic that my father's father had wantonly cast upon my mind. That was not it. That was not it at all.

22

In the end it was Hendy who forced my hand and brought about my departure from this Kingdom of comfort and idleness. She was sworn to the Summit as much as any of us, and it was she who drew me to my senses and restored me to my pledge.

What she did, simply, was to disappear. We had had no defections during all our time in this Kingdom, for why, short of taking up our Pilgrimage again, would any of us have wanted to leave this gentle place? But one morning Hendy was not among us. I asked a few people if they had seen her—Fesild, Kath—but they had nothing to tell me.

Then Traiben said, "She's gone off to be transformed, Poilar."

"What? How do you know?"

"I saw a woman on the far rim of the Kingdom late last night, walking up the path to the outside. The moons were bright, and she looked back once, and even though the distance was so great I could see it was Hendy. I called to her and she said something, but she was too far away for me to hear it; and then she turned and went on her way and I lost sight of her."

"You just let her go like that?"

"What else could I do? She was high up on the trail, at least an hour's march above me. There was no way I could have overtaken her."

I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him savagely, so that his head lolled back and forth and his eyes went very wide and his shape began to flicker.

"So you watched and you let her go? You watched and you let her go?"

"Please—Poilar—Poilar—"

I flung him from me. He struck the ground and sprawled out, and lay there, looking up at me more in astonishment than in anger or pain.

"Oh, Poilar," he said ruefully. "Poilar, Poilar, Poilar!"

He got up—I helped him—and he dusted himself off and checked himself here and there for bruises and cuts. I felt like a fool. After a moment I said, very quietly, "Will you forgive me, Traiben?"

"You've become very odd since we came here, do you know?"

"Yes. Yes, I know." I shut my eyes a moment and took a few deep breaths. In the same quiet tone I said, "You might at least have come to me and told me what was happening."

"It was very late at night. And weren't you with Alamir?"

"What does that have to do with—" I stopped. I was becoming angry again, but I had no one to be angry with except myself. "How can you be sure that she went off to be transformed?"

"Where else would she be going, Poilar?"

"Why, she could have—she might have been—"

"Yes?"

I scowled. What was he trying to suggest?

A thought came to me. It was so inane that I pushed it aside; but it came stubbornly back, and I said, to be rid of it, "Do you think that she might have gone to the Well to make herself look younger?"

"That possibility has crossed my mind," he said.

I hadn't expected him to agree with me so readily. "Why would she? She doesn't look old, Traiben. She looks young and slender and beautiful!"

"Yes," said Traiben. ''Yes, I think she does. But does she think so?"

"She should."

"But does she?"

I turned away, frowning. The more I considered it, the harder it was for me to bring myself to accept this notion I had put forth that Alamir was the cause of Hendy's disappearance. Hendy and I had never discussed it, but she was utterly untroubled, I was sure, by that dalliance; she must certainly have known that it meant nothing, and very likely she had been playing games of a similar sort with some narrow-waisted boy who might have been a hundred years old, though he looked no more than seventeen. Which would have mattered to me not at all.

"No," I said. "The whole idea's ridiculous. She couldn't have felt any need to run off to the Well to make herself look younger. Hendy can't possibly believe that Alamir means a thing to me—that she's anything more than a passing diversion, an amusement of the moment—"

"Ah," he said, "I have no idea what Hendy believes, about Alamir or any other subject." He reached out and took my hands in his. "Poor Poilar. Poor sad Poilar. How sorry I am for you, old friend." But it was hard to hear much sympathy in his voice.

I was lost in bewilderment. Why had she vanished? Where to? I had no answers.

Yet she was gone. That much was clear.

"What will I do?" I asked him.

"Pray that she comes back," Traiben said.

* * *

I was beside myself with chagrin, and frightened besides. What if I had totally misjudged Hendy's feelings toward what had been taking place? What if my involvement with Alamir had not seemed mere trifling sport to her, but a betrayal of our love? And so her jealousy and her sorrow had led her to the Well, perhaps, not to make herself seem more beautiful in my eyes—that seemed needless to me and surely would to her also, mere folly, a shallow unworthy thing to do—but to destroy herself. I had told her the story of how my father had met his death. Had it tempted her? The thought that even now Hendy lay shriveling in the dread waters of the Well of Life sickened me to my core.

No. That was just as unlikely an idea, I told myself, and brought forth all the reassuring arguments. Hendy understood how meaningless Alamir was to me. And she was aware of the depth of my love for her. She had to be. And her own fear of death—that monstrous dream, Hendy in a Hendy-sized box for all eternity—would surely keep her from rushing toward it. In any case no one kills herself for jealousy: no one. That was a contemptible thing to do, and very foolish. Even those who are sealed will sometimes take another lover for a short while, and nothing is said of it; and Hendy and I, of course, had never been sealed.

But why—where—

And then I remembered something. I heard Hendy's voice of long ago, speaking out of the depths of my mind, telling me:

What I want is to go to the gods at the Summit and be purified by them. I want them to transform me. I don't want to be who I am any longer. The memories that I carry around are too heavy for me, Poilar. I want to be rid of them.

Yes, that was it. The motive I had ascribed to her for running away was too trivial. Not out of a simple thing like jealousy had she gone, no, but out of the wish at long last to cast away the burden of her past, to step into the fire of the gods and come forth clean, new, purified—I saw no chance that Hendy would be able to reach the Summit by herself, though. She must be lost in the fog and snow, desperately wandering through forbidding wastelands, searching hopelessly for the one trail that led to the top.

My first impulse was to give the order for us to leave this place and set out at once toward the Summit, so that we could find her. But I saw how impossible that was. For me to have delayed our departure for so long, and then suddenly to reverse myself and return to the upward road simply because my lover had run away? They would all laugh. It would be the end of my leadership of the group.

No. What I had to do was go after her by myself, up toward the Well or beyond it, find her wherever she was, even to the edge of the zone of the Summit itself, and bring her back. That too presented difficulties, though. The road was a mystery to me as much as it was to Hendy. I might survive my solitary upward journey, or I might not. I would be risking my life for purely personal reasons—jeopardizing the entire Pilgrimage—

And they would point out that I had let Ais go, and Jekka and Jaif, and a whole host of others, with no attempt at searching for them. How, then, could I show any sort of special concern for Hendy? I should be as casual about her departure as I had been about the others, instead of running in panic to find her.

I was stymied. I did nothing at all, except to stare hour upon hour toward the upward path, and search hopelessly for some workable plan.

Then Hendy came back of her own accord, while I was still hesitating and stumbling and leading myself down blind trails.

It was on the third day of her absence. I had not slept all the while, nor had I allowed Alamir to come near me. I scarcely ate or spoke with others. As I stood looking toward the road that ran up the rim of the Kingdom I saw a pale figure appear high on the trail, like a dream-ghost, bathed in Ekmelios's harsh white light. Slowly it descended; and I realized after a time that it was Hendy.

But it was a Hendy very much altered.

I went to her. Her hair was white and her skin was the color of death. She was very much taller now, tremendously elongated and thin as a skeleton, and her flesh, such as it was, was almost transparent: I was able to see the pulsing of her blood. So frail was this new Hendy that I could have put my finger through her with an easy thrust. There was no depth to her—no substance, virtually. She seemed terribly vulnerable, a woman without defenses.