“We have to get her,” Kilarion said.
And so we crossed the bridge again, he and I, not for an instant pausing to consider the risks we faced. I have no memory of doing it; but then I was on the far side once more, and Kilarion and I took the altered Tull by the arms and legs, and we brought her across. One convulsion of fear from her would have hurled the three of us into the abyss. But she hung like old rope between us, and he and I moved as though we were a single four-legged entity, and not until we were safe on the other side did we drop down, shaking and shivering like men at the edge of their final illness. Then Kilarion began to laugh, and so did I; and we turned our backs on that terrible bridge for good and all.
The others had settled down a thousand paces ahead in a wooded bowl beneath a dusk-colored mountain so folded and gnarled that it had a look of unthinkable age. We brought Tull to them and our three Healers began their work on her, in the hope of bringing her back to her true form. The rest of us looked away, out of respect for her suffering; but I glanced over, once, and saw Jekka lying with her in his arms, doing the Changes, while Maiti and Kreod held her hands in theirs, and Tull was half like herself again and half the other way. It was so awful a sight that I shut my eyes and tried to blot the image from my mind, but I could not.
It took two hours to return her to herself, and even then she carried a hint of strangeness with her, a slight elongation of the limbs, a faint gray tint in her skin, that I knew she would never lose. Nor did the gaiety that a Clown must have, or at least be able to feign at will, ever come back to her. But I was glad she was back. It did not seem proper to me to ask her why she had chosen to slip away, nor what had made her decide midway through her transformation to return to us; those were Tull’s secrets, no business of ours.
As for Ment, she said, we would never see him again. He was of the Kingdom of the Sembitol now. And I suspected that that was true, so we spent no further time waiting for him.
We rested a little while longer from our bridge crossing and then we went on our way into this new land of tilted and upturned layers of ancient gray rock. We had not traveled more than half an hour along the rough, lizard-infested trail when we came upon Thrance, sitting calmly against a huge boulder beside the road. He nodded to us very pleasantly, and got to his feet and fell in with us without saying a word.
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19
WE HAD ENTERED THEKingdom of the Kvuz, Thrance told us. This was the limit of his previous explorations; and it was, he said, by far the most dismal of the Kingdoms of the Wall. “In what way?” I asked him, thinking of the squalid snuffling of the long-tailed prisoners within the Kavnalla’s cave, and the apparent soullessness of those spidery-limbed gray creatures of the high trails who had given themselves to the Sembitol. Thrance only shrugged and said, “Every man is at war against all other men here. It is the worst of places. See if I’m not right, boy.”
Certainly there was no beauty in this Kingdom. It was a parched and crumpled land, somewhat like that grim plateau we had crossed so long ago, but even more brutal to the eye. We went past a place where small conical mountains belched fire and smoke and foul stinking gases, and had to cross a dark plain that was like a sea of ashes which crunched and clinked with every step we took. Dry lakes and withered streams that were no more than streams of gravel lay everywhere. Every gust of wind lifted clouds of fine dust. Now and then some bleak bubbling seepage came out of the ground, with grim little clumps of doleful shrubbery with knotted trunks and dull black leaves springing up around it. Such living creatures as we saw were pallid scuttering legless things like worms, but long as a man’s arm and covered everywhere with short bristly spines. They would wriggle with surprising swiftness across the sandy soil whenever we came upon them and vanish hastily into underground nests.
It was hard for me to see how any sort of settlement could flourish in this cheerless desert. Indeed I had decided it was a Kingdom without a population and said so to Thrance, who said to me, pointing toward a run of low eroded hummocks just to our left, “Look there, there in those stumpy hills. There is the Kingdom.”
“What Kingdom? Where?”
“Do you see holes, down near the ground? In there, that’s where you’ll find it.”
I narrowed my eyes against the sun-glare and was able to make out some small openings hardly big enough for a man to crawl through, sparsely arrayed along the face of the little hills. They were like the burrows of some reclusive animal. Thrance beckoned, and we went a little closer, so that I saw little groupings of sharp stakes set in the earth in front of each one, a sort of defensive palisade. Eyes shining with suspicion looked out at me from opening after opening.
“Those are their homes,” Thrance said. His voice was edged with contempt. “They huddle in the darkness, one by one, each one crouching in there by himself all day long. No man trusts another. Everyone’s hand is lifted against all others. Each has his own time to come forth and search for food; and if by chance two come out at once, and they happen to cross each other’s path, one will kill the other. For they all believe that the population of the Kingdom is too great to provide everyone with enough to eat, and only by murdering the rest does any of them have a hope of surviving.”
“What are they?” I asked in wonder.
Thrance laughed his harsh laugh. “Transformed Ones. Pilgrims who have lost their way. Thus far they came, and no farther, and here they let the change-fire work its way with them, and they clambered into these holes.” Then his eyes glittered with sudden savage fury. “Do you know what I’d do, boy, if we had time enough? I’d build fires and smoke them out, one at a time, and club them to death as they emerged. It would be the kindest thing. Their lives are a living death.”
All this while we kept up a steady pace. The others of the Forty had noticed the holes now, and the mysterious suspicious eyes peering from them. I saw Galli making pious signs as quickly as she could, and Traiben staring with the deepest curiosity, and Kilarion grinning stupidly and nudging little Kath to look.
Hendy came up to me and clutched my forearm. “Do you see them, Poilar? The eyes?”
I nodded. “They are the people of this Kingdom.”
“In those little holes?”
“Their homes,” I said. “Their palaces.”
“People?” she said. “Living inthere ?” And her fingers tightened on my arm so hard that I winced.
We turned a sudden corner in the trail just then, and came upon a citizen of this Kingdom out of his hole. He — or it — was even more surprised than we were. This must have been its feeding-time, for it had emerged some ten or fifteen paces from its burrow and was making its way toward a moist sump-hole in a declivity some fifty paces farther on. As it saw us it halted, frozen in utter horror, and stared with bulging eyes; and then it bared long yellow fangs and began to make a repetitive chattering sound at us so sharp and piercing that if noises were daggers we would all have been flayed to bits by it.
This inhabitant of the Kingdom of the Kvuz was a loathsome thing, with no trace of humanity about it that I could detect. It sprawled low against the ground like a serpent, but a serpent that had limbs: its legs were tiny shrunken things, but its arms, though short, were thick and obviously muscular, terminating in evil curving talons. Naked and hairless it was, with colorless skin that hung in folds around a gaunt, baggy body, and its face, swollen and contorted with fear and hatred, was all eyes and mouth, with the merest slits for nostrils and no sign of ears.
I could have wept for its ugliness, and its misery, and its terrible transformation: for if Thrance had told us true, this was someone of our own kind, or had been once.
“Vermin! Monster!” Thrance yelled, and snatched up a flat rock to hurl it. But I knocked it from his hand. The creature looked up at me in such amazement that for a moment it ceased its wild chattering cry. Then it grabbed up a rock itself, and flung it my way with a seemingly casual backhand flip. I ducked just in time. The rock flew past
me with enough force to have smashed my skull.
“Do you see?” Thrance asked. “How well it rewards your charity?” He reached for another rock; and this time I think I would have let him throw it. But the creature had pivoted around and was scampering for its burrow with tremendous speed, moving on its belly like one of those legless spiny wrigglers we had seen a little while before. In a moment it was safely out of our reach. We saw it watching us with smoldering eyes from the darkness of its hole, and now and then it uttered a burst of its baleful chattering noise until the last of us had gone by.
At the seepage-place we saw the fresh corpse of another of the same sort, lying to one side and already decomposing. So there had been an encounter here not long before, and a slaying. Nor had it been the only one: little heaps of whitening bones were scattered here and there, turning slowly into powder under the merciless sky. I poked at one of these skeletons. It showed how the transformation had reached down even to the bone; for the legs, though crumpled into mere tiny appendages, had all the proper bony parts.
We helped ourselves to water — brackish stuff, but it was all there was — and moved ourselves along our way.
That was the Kingdom of the Kvuz. We crossed it as quickly as we could, for Thrance had spoken the truth: it was indeed the most dismal of places. Each of the Kingdoms we had passed through, I realized, brought a different kind of transformation to those Pilgrims incapable of fending off its pull. The Kavnalla brought pitiful helplessness and the Sembitol brought barren selflessness and the Kvuz brought bleak and utter isolation of the spirit. I wondered what allure it could have had for those who chose to dwell in it; or what flaw of character it was, rather, that had driven certain Pilgrims to make it their home. I saw, not for the first time, of course, that the Wall was a testing place; but the nature of the test and the essence of the Pilgrim’s response to it was still a mystery to me. I knew only that the Wall offered mysterious temptations amidst all its dread ordeals, and that the weakest links in each Forty thus were stripped away by the differing force of the secret, invisible change-fire that prevailed in this place or that as the ascent went on.
Now and again as we proceeded we saw beady eyes gleaming in a hillside hole, and there were other bodies and crumbling skeletons at every watering-place. Once we caught sight of a battle under way at a great distance, two struggling serpent-men writhing desperately in each other’s grip.
We were so frightened of this Kingdom that we kept close by one another, going elbow to elbow as we marched. I asked Traiben what possible temptation there might be to cause a Pilgrim to defect and take up living in this place; but he only shrugged and answered that these must be ones who had parted with the power of reasoning under the adversities of the climb, and had turned themselves into these rock-dwelling things because they could not bear facing whatever hardships lay ahead. Which did not strike me as a satisfying answer, but it was all that he offered.
I watched my people carefully after that, in case any of them should feel such an urge. But none was so inclined.
IT WAS AN UNKINDcountry in every way. We heard thundercracks and saw the flashes of blue lightning again, which were so strange to have when there was no hint of rain. But it was a bird that caused them, a lightning-bird that flew low above us, hurling fiery bolts from its rump. They left scorching tracks in the land, and Ijo the Scholar had his arm singed by one, though he was not badly hurt. We pelted these pests with rocks and drove them off, though sometimes one made a quick foray past us even so, stitching the ground with its blazing emissions. Then one day a thing that looked like a huge upright stone wheel came rolling toward us; but it was an animal of some sort, sharp-edged, and this was its manner of hunting. It passed so close to Mairi the Healer that I thought she would lose her leg, but she jumped aside just in time. Talbol and Thuiman knocked it over with their cudgels: once it had fallen it had no way of rising again, and we beat it to death.
There were other such creatures, just as unappealing, but we were able to fend them off and we suffered no harm.
As we marched, Thrance amused us with tales of things he had seen in his years of wandering in these heights. He spoke of other crests that were inhabited, this strange Kingdom and that one, and of the false Summit that ended nowhere and had claimed the lives of so many Pilgrims who had wasted months or even years on its futile slopes. He talked of the Drinkers of Stars, who lived on some high headland and drew energy from the sky that allowed them to rove freely through the night like gods, though they had to return to their bodies by dawn or they would perish. He told us of places where mirages became real and where reality turned into mirage, and of the swirling tempests of the highest levels, where the clouds were of fifty colors and gigantic rainbow-hued wind-whales grazed placidly in the sky. And also he told us, as Naxa once had done, of the Land of the Doubles, which hangs inverted above the Summit and is populated by our other selves, who live in a life beyond life and watch us with kindly amusement, chuckling when we make mistakes and suffer harm, for they are perfect beings. “When we get higher,” Thrance said, “we’ll see the tip of the Land of the Doubles pointing downward, almost touching the Summit. And I hear that there are Witches up there who are in touch with the Double World, and who can put us into dreams that allow us to consult our other selves and receive advice from them.”
I asked Thissa about that. But she only shrugged and said that Thrance was speaking of matters about which he knew nothing, that he was spinning fables out of air.
That seemed very likely to me. By Thrance’s own admission he had never gone beyond the Kingdom of the Kvuz; and though he had lived a long while on these high slopes, no doubt hearing many a traveler’s tale, how could we be sure that anything they might have told him, or anything he was telling us, had any basis in reality? I was reminded of the solemn teachings that had been offered us in Jespodar village during our years of training, the stories of the dancing rocks, the demons who pulled their limbs loose and flung them at Pilgrims, the walking dead people with eyes in the backs of their heads. These tales of Thrance’s had to be like those stories which are told credulous young Pilgrims-to-be by the instructors in the village, who speak in ignorance of the very subject that they claim to teach. We had seen many a strange thing on Kosa Saag, but nothing such as we had been warned to expect, at least not yet. For the teachers know nothing; the Wall is a world unto itself and the truth of its nature is made known only to those who go and look for themselves.
The things that Thrance told us may not have been real but they were at least diverting. And diversion was what we badly needed as we made this dreary crossing. We scarcely dared to sleep at night, for fear we would wake to find some crawling denizen of the Kvuz among us, lifting its yellow fangs to strike. Or perhaps the lightning-birds would come in the darkness; or the whirling wheel would roll through our camp. None of these things happened, but they preyed on our minds.
Then at last we began to come to the end of the Kingdom of the Kvuz. But there was little comfort in that, for over the past several days a dark shadow had begun to appear ahead of us, and as we drew near to it we recognized it for what it was: a wide cliff that rose in a single great vertical sweep, a lofty barrier that cruelly terminated these somber plains, confronting us once more with a wall within the Wall. We would surely have to climb it if we meant to continue our Pilgrimage; but it seemed so steep that climbing it was unimaginable.
Well, we had faced such things before; and we were hardened now to the difficulties of our Pilgrimage. Beyond any question we were bound for the top of the Wall and, having come this far, we meant to let nothing stand in our way. But when I asked Thrance if he knew a route that would carry us up this formidable obstacle, he shrugged his familiar shrug, and said with his familiar indifference, “This is as far as I ever managed to go. For all I know there’s no way to climb it at all.”
“But the Summit —”
“Yes,” he said, as though I had uttered some meaningless sound. “The Su
mmit, the Summit, the Summit.” And he walked away from me, laughing to himself.
WHEN WE WERE DIRECTLYunder this challenging cliff we saw to our great relief that as was often the case it had cracks and furrows and crevices and chimneys in it that would probably allow us some way of scaling it. But it was bound to be a fierce struggle for us; and also we had lost most of our ropes and other climbing gear very early on, in the rockslide that nearly had buried us on the slopes above the Kingdom of the Melted Ones.
As I stood with Kilarion and Traiben and Galli and Jaif, staring upward and contemplating the task that faced us, Jaif touched my elbow and told me quietly to turn and look. I swung quickly about.
A curious figure in a hooded robe had emerged from the shadows like some sort of apparition and was coming toward us, moving in a slow, laborious way.
When he came close he pushed back his hood, revealing a face that was like no face I had ever seen. In bodily form too he was very strange, stranger even than Thrance. He was thin and long and stiff-framed, and carried himself oddly, as though his frame were strung on a set of bones that were very little like ours. His legs were too short for his torso, and his shoulders were wrong and his eyes were set too far back in his head, and his nose and ears and lips, though I could recognize them for what they were, were nothing much like ours. Something was wrong about his hands too. From where I stood I wasn’t sure what it was, but I suspected that if I were to count the fingers the number would be unusual, four on each hand or at best only five. They had no sucker-pads on them that I could see. He had pale skin that looked like something that had been dead a long time and his hair was rank and soft, like dark string. His breath came in heavy wheezing gusts. So this must be another of the Transformed, I thought: yet one more of the grotesques with which these Kingdoms of the Wall are so abundantly populated. Automatically I drew back a little in surprise and alarm; but then I checked myself, for I saw how weak and weary the newcomer seemed, as though he had wandered in these parts a long while and was nearing the end of his strength.