In his hand he held some small device, a box with the bright sheen of metal. He lifted it and at once words came to us out of the box. But the accent was thick and odd and all but impossible to understand. At first I failed to realize even that the stranger was speaking in our language. But then he touched something on the top of his little box and repeated his words, and this time, curiously, they were somewhat easier to comprehend.
What he said to us, quietly, almost feebly, was: “Please — friends — I mean you no harm, friends —”
I stared and said nothing. There was a strangeness beyond strangeness about this being. And the voice of the box was like a voice that spoke from the tomb.
“Can you understand me?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Good,” he said. “And are you planning to climb this cliff?”
“Yes,” I told him. I saw no harm in that.
“Well, then. If you do, I ask you to take me up it with you. Can you do that? There are friends waiting for me at the top and I’m not able to manage the climb by myself.”
I looked at my companions, and they looked back at me. We were all at a loss to know what kind of creature this strange travel-worn being might be; for though he was something like us in superficial form, having two arms and two legs and a head and an upright stance, the differences seemed almost as great as the similarities, or perhaps even greater.
This was a very strange one, I thought, even for a Transformed. Unless he was not a Transformed at all but something else, a god or a demon or something that has come forth out of someone’s dream and made itself real. But in that case, why did he look so tired? Was it possible for a supernatural being to get tired? Or was his appearance of great weariness and frailty only some form of deception that he was playing on us?
He held one hand toward me. As if imploring me — begging me. “If you would be so kind,” he said. And again he said, “My friends are waiting for me. But I can’t — I’m not able —”
“What are you?” I asked, and made some of the sacred signs at him. “If you are a demon or a god, I conjure you in the name of everything holy to speak the truth. Tell me: Are you a demon? A god?”
“No,” he said, and his face curled to one side in an expression that might have been a smile. “No demon. Not a god, either. I’m an Earthman.”
That word was meaningless to me. I glanced puzzledly at Traiben, but he shook his head.
“An Irtiman?” I said.
“An Irtiman, yes.”
“Is that some kind of Transformed One?”
“No.”
“Nor any sort of demon, nor a god? You swear?”
“Not a demon, absolutely not. I swear it. And if I were a god, I wouldn’t need any help getting back up the mountain, would I?”
“True,” I said, though of course gods can always lie, if they so choose. But I preferred not to think that. “And these friends of yours that are waiting for you above?” I asked him. “They are Irtimen also?”
“Yes. People like me. Of my kind. There are four of us altogether.”
“All Irtimen.”
“Yes.”
“And what may Irtimen be?” I asked.
“We came here from — well, from a place very far away.”
Indeed it must be, I thought: very far away and very different. I tried to imagine a whole village full of people who looked like this. Wondered about their Houses, their rites, their customs.
“How far away?” I asked.
“Very far,” he said. “We come here as visitors. As explorers.”
“Ah. Explorers. From a place very far away.” I nodded as though I understood. I thought I did, almost. These Irtimen must be one of the unknown peoples who are said to live on the other side of the Wall, beyond even the lands subject to the King, in the remote regions where no one of our village has ever gone. That was why this being looked so strange, I thought. But I was wrong about that. He came from much farther away even than the far side of the Wall: farther than any of us could conceive.
He said, “The highlands were all that we really intended to explore, just the uppermost zone of the mountain. But then I decided to go part way down, in order to find out a little of what conditions were like down below, and now I can’t get back up to the top, because this cliff here is too much for me. And my friends tell me that they’re not able to come down and help me. Having problems of their own, they say. Not possible just now for them to offer assistance.” He paused a little, as though the effort of so much talking was a great strain for him and he needed to catch his breath. “You’re Pilgrims, aren’t you? Coming up from the lowlands?”
“Yes. That is what we are.” Then I hesitated, for I was almost afraid to ask the next question that had come into my mind. “You say that you’ve been to the top?” I said, after a moment. “The Summit, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“And have you seen the gods, then? With your own eyes?”
Now it was the stranger’s turn to hesitate, which made me wonder. For a time I heard no sound other than that of his hoarse wheezing breath. But then he said very quietly, “Yes. Yes, I’ve seen the gods.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
“At the Summit, in their palace?”
“At the Summit, yes,” the Irtiman said.
“He’s lying,” said Thrance sharply, a harsh voice out of nowhere. He had come hobbling up alongside us while we spoke and I had not seen him arrive.
I signaled to him angrily to be silent.
“What are they like, the gods at the Summit?” I asked the Irtiman. I leaned forward eagerly to him. “Tell me. Tell me what they’re like.”
The Irtiman grew restless and uneasy. He paced about to and fro, he scratched with the toe of his boot in the sand, he shifted his little speaking-box from one hand to the other. Then he looked at me with those strange deep-set eyes of his and said, “You’ll need to go and discover that for yourselves.”
“You see?” Thrance cried. “He knows nothing! Nothing!”
But the Irtiman said, calmly speaking over Thrance’s outburst, “If you are Pilgrims, then you have to experience the great truths yourselves, or your Pilgrimage will be without meaning. You must already know that, having come this far. What good is it to you if I tell you what the gods are like? You might just as well have stayed in your village and read a book.”
I nodded slowly. “This is so.”
“Good. Then let’s not talk of the gods down here. Do you agree? Finish your Pilgrimage, my friends. Go onward to the Summit. You’ll find out what the gods are when you get to the top and stand in their presence at last.”
“Yes,” I said, for I knew that what he was telling me was right. “We must finish our Pilgrimage. To the Summit — to the home of the gods —”
“And you’ll take me with you, then?” the Irtiman asked.
Once more I was slow to reply. His unexpected request baffled me. Take him with us? Why should I? What was this Irtiman to me? He had no place in our Forty. He wasn’t even of our kind. We have an obligation to help our own kind, yes, but it does not extend to those of other villages and surely not to those of an alien race. And this Irtiman looked half dead, or more than half; he would be so much helpless baggage on the way up. It would be challenge enough just getting our own weakest Pilgrims up this cliff, Bilair and Ijo and Chaliza and ones like that.
And there was Thrance pressing up against my side like a dark angel, hissing at me the very things that were already in my own mind: “Leave him! Leave him! He has no strength; he’ll only be a burden. And he means nothing to us, nothing at all!”
I think it was that poisonous hiss of Thrance’s and the hateful glare in his eyes that turned me in the Irtiman’s favor. That and a sense that if I left this weary creature here he would not be likely to survive for long, for he was almost at the end of his strength. His death would be on my conscience, then. And who was Thrance to tell me what I should do, he who was n
ot even a member of our Forty himself? He too had asked us to take him in, and we had; how could he now deny the same kindness to another? I looked quickly about the group, at Traiben, at Galli, at Jaif: people of good will, whose souls were clean, whose spirits were free of the venom that had corrupted Thrance. And I saw nothing on their faces but assent.
“Yes,” I told the Irtiman. “We’ll take you. Yes.” Sometimes you must make a gesture of this sort out of pure charity’s sake, with no regard to whether there is wisdom in it. Thrance, who had small understanding of such things, grunted and turned away, muttering. I glowered at his broad twisted back in contempt and anger. But then it seemed to me that I felt some pity for him mingled with my contempt.
BEFORE WE BEGAN TOclimb I took out the tiny image of Sandu Sando the Avenger which I had had unwillingly from the madwoman Streltsa at Denbail milepost, and which I had carried with me all this way in my pack. It seemed like a thousand tens of years ago that she had given it to me as we were leaving the uppermost precincts of the village, and I had rarely thought of it since. But I wanted the special protection of the gods now in the ordeal that lay just ahead, and although the Avenger is perhaps not the appropriate one to invoke for such a reason, the little idol was the only thing of that sort that I had with me. So I looped a bit of cord between its legs and anchored it over its little erect penis and fastened it around my neck. Also I asked Thissa to cast a climbing-spell for us, and ordered everyone down to kneel and pray. Even Thrance knelt, though I would not want to guess what sort of prayer went through his mind, or to whom. Only the Irtiman stood to one side, not kneeling; but I thought I saw his lips moving silently. And then we commenced our ascent.
It was a long time since we had faced any such climb of this kind, on a bare rock face, and though our long march through tier after tier of Kosa Saag had hardened us beyond all measure it had also taken some measure of resilience from our muscles. And as I have said we were without most of our ropes and climbing-hooks and other such gear.
So we would have to rely on shrewdness as we climbed, and of course agility, and luck, and beyond all else the kindness of the gods. We would need to calculate every move we made on this unforgiving rock with unusual care: the angle at which we leaned to meet the tilted stone slabs, the way we balanced the backward push of one foot against the forward stride of the other as we climbed, the shifting of our weight in every step, the placement of our fingers in the little crevices on which our lives depended. To deal with the Irtiman required special measures that we had to devise on the spot: with some of our remaining rope we fashioned a kind of sling, and I took one end of it around my waist and sturdy uncomplaining Kilarion took the other, with the Irtiman lashed to its center. This meant that Kilarion and I would have to climb in close parallel tracks, however different the rock formations we each might encounter; but I saw no other way. Kilarion would have carried the Irtiman on his back if I had asked him, but I would not do that. The presence of the Irtiman among us was my doing, and therefore I must share in the risk and effort involved in transporting him to the top.
We gave what remaining rope we had to the least proficient climbers among us, who were mainly women, though Naxa was a poor climber also and so was Traiben. Naxa was glad of the help, but Traiben refused to let himself be roped, I suppose because he was weary of all the favors of this kind I had done for him along the way, or abashed by them; and in fact he was one of the first to spring up onto the rock wall, setting out with such defiant haste that I feared more than usually for him.
Yet once we were climbing we all moved with wondrous precision and excellence, so that we might almost have been so many ants, walking untroubledly straight up the stone face as though we were on a horizontal surface. Of course it was not as simple as that. But in many places the grade, though steep, was nevertheless well within the range of our abilities, and we could go forward quickly at only a slight lean, steadying ourselves with our hands on the ledge above. Where the rock was slick we found ways of holding on. And when I came to a place where the only way ahead for me was through a narrow chimney where I would have to brace myself against one side with my feet and against the other with my back, Kilarion was able to wait for me and even to ease me upward with the rope that linked us, which took some of the pressure off my crooked foot.
So we all steadily made our way. From time to time I risked a quick glance toward the others, and saw them advancing strongly, Galli here with Bilair roped to her, and Traiben there well beyond me, and Jekka and Maiti climbing side by side, and Grycindil, and Fesild, and Naxa, and Dorn. We were scattered all across the face of the cliff. Far off to my left was Thrance by himself, pivoting and twisting and wriggling up the rock like some crawling thing of the forest floor that must double itself up into a loop with every movement it makes; and when our eyes met he grinned at me fiercely, as if to say,You hope I’ll fall, don’t you, but there’s no chance of it, boy, no chance whatever! But he was wrong about what I felt. I wished him no harm.
Then I turned my gaze away from the others and lost myself totally in the effort of my own ascent. I paid no heed to anything except the need to find the next handhold, and the next, and the next.
But as I continued to climb, a terrible thought came over me, which was that the ascent had been easier than expected only because we were being beguiled to our destruction by some treachery of the governing spirits of the Wall once we were high up above the drylands; and I had a sudden vision of the mountain angrily shaking as soon as we were a little higher, throwing us off like fleas, all my bondfellows falling to their deaths, those I most loved, Traiben, Galli, Hendy, Jaif. All of them, one by one flung out into the void and tumbling into oblivion.
For an instant or two I trembled with fear and nearly lost my own grip. It was only the brooding fantasy of a bad moment, though. The Wall has no reason to want to slay us so casually; it wants only to test us, and eliminate those who are weak or unworthy, and send the best of us onward to the end of our Pilgrimage. So we would not perish here. And indeed I looked and my companions were still all about me clinging to the face of the cliff, working their way steadily upward.
So I grew calm again, for a little while. But my soul must have been disturbed in some fashion that day. Perhaps it was Streltsa’s Avenger amulet working some dark magic in me. For now a different strangeness came over me and it began to seem to me that I had done all this before: not just that I had climbed other rock faces much like this, but that I had climbedthis one, that I had climbed it many times before, that I would climb it many times again, that I was doomed to spend the rest of eternity climbing this same rock again and again. When I reached the top of it I would find myself at the bottom, and have to begin again. And I felt hot bitter tears running down my face, realizing as I did that for me there was no way back and no way forward, but only this endless rock unrolling beneath me like a scroll that extends itself farther at one end even as it is rolled up at the other. I would live on this rock and I would die on it, and I would be born again, and still I would be climbing, and there would be no end to the climb.
Thus in despair and anguish and, I suppose, a kind of madness, I clambered up and up, with hot dry crosswinds raking me as I went. Then suddenly there was nothing more above me. I had fallen into such a mechanical rhythm of climbing that I could not at first understand where I was and what was happening; I groped for the next handhold, and found none, and brought my right foot a little higher on the rock and reached again, and again there was nothing. It was like falling into a dream within a dream. There was a roaring in my ears and my brain was spinning in my skull. I heard Kilarion’s voice from very far away, and it seemed that he was laughing as he spoke, but the words were indistinct, like sounds heard under water.
I realized then that I must be at the top of the cliff, that there was no place further to go except up and over; and I pulled myself across the edge of the rock face. As I did I scraped the side of my neck against some sharp place and the string tha
t held my little amulet broke, and the amulet fell away quickly, bouncing from rock to rock and vanishing below. I felt a quick pang at the loss of it after having brought it this far; but I was already in the midst of the final levering gesture that brought me to the flat place on top, and I had to think only of what was before me, not behind.
I scrambled up and over. Kilarion, just to my right, came up at the same moment and we brought the Irtiman in his rope sling over with us.
I took a couple of steps forward, shaky-legged, as one often is after such a climb, and it was an instant or two before my eyes cleared and I could focus on my new surroundings. Then what came into view stunned me and astounded me to the roof of my soul; for there were mountains on all sides, a tremendous host of them, a ring of peaks of every shape and size stretching off as far as I could see. Often before I had felt as if this thing that was Kosa Saag was one chain of mountains piled on another on another, world without end, rising infinitely into the sky, and that we must proceed eternally from level to level, coming always into some new realm when we had left the last behind; and once again that was how it seemed to me now, at least at first glance.
But then I saw that this time one mountain stood clearly above the others in the center of the ring, a great jagged king of a mountain. Its upper reaches were streaked with rivers of white snow that glittered brilliantly in the sunlight and its very tip was shrouded in dense clouds so that it could not be seen at all, and I began to tremble as I looked toward those dazzling heights; for I knew beyond doubt that this was the final peak, the mountain of mountains, the true and only Summit of Kosa Saag.
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20
WHEN WE CAME UPover the rim of the cliff into this sublime and ultimate realm the one thing that we all wanted was only to rest awhile, every one of us. We could look up and see the abode of the gods almost within reach, yes, or so it seemed to us then; but there was not one of us who had the strength or the determination to venture onward immediately, not even Traiben, whose boundless curiosity seemed at last to be overmeasured by fatigue. We had spent ourselves freely, too freely, perhaps, in the crossing of the land of the Kvuz and the conquest of that bare rock face, and now we had to recollect our energies and renew our will before pushing onward toward whatever the next challenge was that might lie ahead.