Kingdoms of the Wall (45 page)

"Enough, Thrance," I said.

"What's the matter, Poilar? Can't you face a little reality?"

But my despair had returned blacker and deeper even than before, and it had numbed me in my heart and in my mind so that I could make no answer to him.

Kilarion, seeing I was silent, rose again and went to Thrance and stood above him. "If you weren't such a coward," he said. "I'd teach you a little about reality. But Galli's right. I shouldn't soil my hands on you."

"No, you shouldn't," Thrance said. "If you touch me, I might just change you into something that looks exactly like me. I can do that, you know. But you wouldn't like to look like me, eh, Kilarion? Or would you? Would you?"

I went over to Thrance and moved between him and Kilarion, pushing Kilarion back a little way, and said to Thrance, "Listen to me. If you speak another word now, it'll be your last. Is that clear?" Thrance bowed again, almost as deeply and just as contemptuously as he had bowed to Kilarion, and looked up into my face and said with his lips alone, not his voice,
No offense, Poilar! No offense!

I turned my back on him.

To the others I said, "Let's start setting up our camp."

"Camp?" Naxa asked. "Are we staying here?"

"At least for tonight," I replied.

"Why? What for?"

I gave him no answer. I had no answer. I was utterly bewildered, a leader without a plan. My mind was empty; my soul was empty. The whole purpose of my life had collapsed away from me. If what the Irtimen had said were true—and how could I deny it?—there were no gods; the Summit was inhabited by monsters; the Pilgrimage to which I had devoted half my life had been a hollow meaningless endeavor. I would have wept, but they were all watching me; and I think in any case this air that was hardly air at all had taken the capacity to weep away from me. I did not know what to do. I did not know what to think. Thrance, jeering mocker that he was, had spoken the truth: we were face to face with reality now—not a reality that we had expected to find, and it was a hard one to confront.

But I was still leader. I could continue to lead, even if I had no idea why, or toward what end. And possibly I would yet come to find—as even within the depths of my despair some small part of me still fiercely believed—that there are gods here somewhere, that the Summit was indeed the holy place we had thought it to be.

"We'll sleep over here," I said, indicating a little declivity that was sheltered somewhat from the raking Summit winds by a low outcropping of crumbled rock. I set Thissa to work casting a spell of protection. I sent Galli and Grycindil off to search for such firewood as this forlorn place might yield, and Naxa and Malti to hunt out a spring or pond of fresh water. Kilarion, Narril, and Talbol I appointed as the first patrol, to march up and down in a wide circle along the open zone beyond the Irtiman starship and keep watch for any stirrings among the "gods." For so I thought of them still, those beast-like things—the degenerate children of the gods, perhaps, but gods of a sort all the same.

Traiben said, "Do you have any work for me just now? Because if you don't, I'd like to do a little scouting on my own."

"What kind of scouting? Where?"

He nodded toward the ruined ship of the ancient Irtimen.

"I want to see what's inside it," he said. "Whether there are Irtiman things there—holy things remaining from the old days, things the Irtimen might have fashioned back in the time when they still really were gods—" And I saw a gleam in Traiben's eyes that I knew only too well: the gleam that was the outward manifestation of that hunger of his to learn, to know, to poke his nose into every mystery the World had to offer.

It occurred to me that if ever we returned to the village—though whether we ultimately would or not, I could not say; I still had no plan, no sense of anything beyond the needs of the moment—we might indeed want to bring with us some tangible sacred object, something that had felt the touch of the gods, the true gods who had lived on this mountaintop in the days before their decline had begun. But it dismayed me to think of Traiben going into that tumbled mass of rusting girders and twisted metal sheeting by himself as night was beginning to descend. Who knew what skulking "gods" he might encounter in the darkness? I would not let him have permission to go. He begged and pleaded, but I refused to yield. It was madness, I said, for him to risk his life over there. Tomorrow, I told him, a larger group of us might investigate it, if it seemed safe then to make the attempt.

Dusk was coming on. The dark sky grew darker. The stars came forth, and a single icy moon. The Irtiman starship cast a long sharp shadow that reached almost to my feet. I stood by myself, staring somberly across the plain at the place where the miserable creatures whom we had hoped would be our gods were hidden.

Hendy came up to me. Transformed as she was, she towered over me by a head and a half, though she seemed as filmy as a ghost. Fleshless as she was now, she must be freezing in this bitter cold; but she showed no sign of discomfort. She put her hand lightly on my arm.

"So now we know everything," she said.

"Yes. Yes, I suppose we do. Or enough, at any rate."

"Will you kill yourself, Poilar?"

I looked at her, amazed. "Why would I do that?"

"Because we have the answer now, and the answer is a very dark one. Either there are no gods and never were, or the gods are here and have undergone a terrible fall, which is even a sadder thing. So either way there is no hope."

"Is that what you think?" I asked her, and I remembered her vision of eternal death imprisoned in a box precisely large enough to contain her body, and not a bit larger. She had spent much of her life dwelling in some cheerless frostbound realm of the soul very different from the one I had inhabited. "Why do you say that? There's always hope, Hendy, so long as we're alive and breathing."

"Hope of what? That Kreshe and Thig and Sandu Sando will appear, despite everything, and lift us up to their bosoms? That we will see the Land of Doubles in the sky? That life will be good and kind and comforting?"

"Life is what we make it," I said. "The Land of Doubles is somebody's fine fable, I suppose. And Kreshe and Thig and Sandu Sando and all the rest certainly exist, somewhere else, perhaps, far beyond our range of vision. It was only a story, that they lived at the Summit, invented by those who had no idea of the truth. A fable and nothing more. Why should gods who are capable of building worlds live in a disagreeable rocky place like this when they have all of Heaven to choose from?"

"The First Climber said they were here. The First Climber whom we revere."

"He lived a long time ago. Stories become distorted over a long span of time. What He found up here were wise beings from another world, who offered useful knowledge. Was it His fault that we decided that they were gods?"

"No," she said. "I suppose not. They
were
gods, in a way, I suppose. At least we can think of them that way. But as you say, it was all a long time ago." She seemed to disappear into her own bleak thoughts for a moment. Then she gave me a close look. "Well, what will we do now, Poilar?"

"I don't know. Go back to the village, I suppose."

"Do you want to?"

"I'm not sure. Do you?"

She shook her head. She seemed more wraith-like than ever, as remote from me as the stars and just as unreachable, though she was standing right beside me. I felt as though I could almost see through her.

"I have no place in the village," Hendy said. "When I was stolen away from it, I lost my place in it forever. After I came back I always felt like a stranger there."

"So you would settle in one of the Kingdoms, then?"

"Perhaps. Would you?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure of anything anymore, Hendy."

"The Kingdom where your father's father rules, for instance? You liked it there. You could return to it. We both could."

I shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not."

"Or some Kingdom lower down, one that we didn't pass through on the way up. Some pretty place, not too strange. Nothing like the Kavnalla, or the Kvuz."

"Or we could found one of our own," I said, more to hear the sound of my voice than for any other reason, for I still had nothing like a plan, no plan at all. "There's plenty of room on Kosa Saag for new Kingdoms."

"Would you?" she asked me, and there was almost a note of eagerness in her tone.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know anything, Hendy."

I felt utterly drained, a hollow husk. This day's revelations had cut the heart from me. No wonder Hendy had wondered if I was going to kill myself. I would not do that, no. But so far as what I
was
going to do now, I had no idea of that whatever.

25

Of course Traiben went to the ancient ship that night anyway, once it was too dark for anyone to see him slipping away. I might have expected that of him. Kilarion was on sentry duty in that part of the plain, and somehow Traiben got past him unnoticed, and went sprinting off into the darkness.

The first I knew of it came when I heard voices somewhere nearby me, a muffled cry, the sound of a scuffle, a yelp of pain. "Let
go
of me, you idiot!" someone said. Traiben's voice.

I opened an eye. I was lying by myself, neither sound asleep nor fully awake, near the outer edge of our group, huddled down miserably in my bedroll trying to fend off the cold. There was no woman with me. Since Hendy's transformation she and I had neither slept in the same place nor made Changes together, nor had I been with anyone else.

Focusing my awareness as quickly as I could, I looked up and saw, outlined by moonlight against the dark, Traiben wriggling in the grasp of someone much larger who had caught him around the neck in the crook of his arm. Talbol, I realized. He was the sentry on duty in this section of the sleeping-area.

In a sharp whisper I said, "What's going on? What are you two doing?"

"Make him let go of me," Traiben cried, in a strangled voice.

"Quiet! You'll wake the whole camp!"

I trotted over to them and slapped Taibol's forearm to get him to let go. Traiben backed away a few steps, glaring sullenly.

Talbol looked just as sullen. "He comes creeping into camp in the middle of the night without saying a word. How am I supposed to know he isn't one of those apes coming to attack us?"

"Do I look like an ape?" Traiben demanded.

"I wouldn't want to say what you—" Talbol began.

I waved him into silence and sent him off to resume his patrol of the perimeter. Traiben rubbed his throat with his hand. I was angry and amused all at once, but more angry than amused.

"Well?" I asked, after a moment.

"I went there."

"Yes. Against my direct order. How absolutely amazing, Traiben."

"I had to see it."

"Yes. Of course. Well?"

Instead of answering he thrust something toward me, a dark shapeless thing that he had been holding in his left hand. "Here. Look. It's a god-thing. The ship is full of stuff like this, Poilar!"

I took it from him. It was a corroded metal plaque, maybe three fingers long and four fingers wide. I held it up into the faint moonlight cast by Tibios and was able to make out, just barely, some sort of inscription on it in lettering unlike anything I had ever seen.

"It's Irtiman writing," Traiben said. "I found it lying half buried on the floor of the ship."

"Do you know what it says?"

"How would I know that? I can't read Irtiman writing. But look, look, Poilar, there's a whole treasure-house of god-things in there. Of course everything's broken and rusted and useless, but you just have to glance inside to know how ancient they are. The original Irtimen must have used those things! The ones whom we worship as Kreshe and Thig and—"

"Stop saying that," I told him irritably. "The Irtimen were teachers, not gods. The gods are beings of a higher plane than Irtimen
or
us."

"Whatever you like," said Traiben, with a shrug. "Will you come with me in the morning, so we can explore the ship together, Poilar?"

"Perhaps."

"We'd all better go. The Irtimen might make a little trouble. The ones from the caves, I mean. I saw a couple of them lurking around the ship while I was there. It's a kind of shrine for them, I think. They've got a sort of altar on the far side, with twigs and painted stones piled up around it, and when I went around to look at it I saw that they were burning little wisps of dead grass and chanting something."

I stared at him in astonishment. "You walked right into their midst? They could have killed you!"

"I don't think so. They're more afraid of us right now than we are of them, I suspect. They must have had some bad experiences with Pilgrims in the past. When they saw me they sprang up and ran off right away. So I went into the ship, and when I came out there weren't any of them in sight. But eventually they're going to figure out that we aren't much of a threat to them, and then—"

"Poilar?" a new voice said.