“Irtiman!”
He jerked back in one last quiver and was still, with his arm upraised and his fingers spread out toward the sky, toward the Summit, where his companions were. I looked at that outspread hand, those upthrust fingers, there were five of them, as I had thought, a thumb at one side but none at the other, nor any sign that there ever had been one there, and four others that were arranged in the usual way of fingers. I took that strange alien hand in mine and held it a moment, and then I lowered it to his breast and folded the other one across it, and closed his eyes.
Traiben said to me, as I turned away, “I tried to talk to him a little while ago about the gods and the Irtimen, to find out more of what he had seen and what he knew. I saw that it was our only chance. But he was already far gone, and unable to speak.”
I had to smile at that. Traiben was ever my other and cleverer self, thinking of the same things I did, but always sooner. This time, though, even Traiben had been too slow.
Kilarion came up to me and said, “I’ll dig a grave for him. The ground here shouldn’t be too hard. And there are plenty of rocks for a cairn.”
“No,” I told him. “No grave, no cairn.” An idea had come to me in that moment; a mad one, perhaps, engendered by the thin air of that lofty place I looked around. “Where’s Talbol? Get me the Leathermaker. And Narril the Butcher. And Grycindil too — a Weaver, yes.”
They came to me and I told them what I wanted done. They stared at me as if I had taken leave of my senses, and maybe I had; but I said that I had promised to deliver the Irtiman to his friends who dwelled above, and I would keep that pledge regardless. So they drew the Irtiman’s body aside and went to work on it. Narril emptied it of its organs — I saw Traiben peering at them in wonder — and Talbol did whatever it is that Leathermakers do to cure a skin, using such herbs as he could find by the roadside, and finally Grycindil filled the empty body with aromatic preserving herbs that Talbol found for her, and strips of cloth and such light filling things, and sewed up the incisions that Narril had made. The whole thing took three or four days, during which time we camped where we were, keeping out of sight of the habitants of the Kingdom just above us. When it was done, the Irtiman lay as though sleeping in the hammock we had made for him; but he weighed practically nothing when we lifted him, and we carried him along without difficulty. Since he had been an Irtiman and it was plain even to the slowest among us that an Irtiman was a kind of being entirely different from ourselves, I heard no objections to what I had done; for who could say what the burial customs of Irtimen might be? Certainly we were under no obligation to bury one in the same way as we would one of our own, with a cairn and all. So we took him along with us on our march toward the Summit, and in time we grew quite accustomed to having him still with us, even though he was dead.
THE ROAD — ANDA road was what it was, as distinct and well maintained as the one on which we had begun our journey up from Jespodar village — spiraled up and up around the outside of the mountain, and every few days there was a different Kingdom. The people of some of these Kingdoms came out to stare at us, and others took scarcely any notice of us as we went by; but in no instance were we interfered with. In these high realms of Kosa Saag Pilgrims evidently were allowed to go onward as they pleased.
The inhabitants of the high Kingdoms had once been Pilgrims themselves, of course; or at least their ancestors had. But you would not know it from the look of them. All these multitudes of people who had created a new world for themselves far above the world that was our world were failed climbers, who had given up the holy quest, just as the creatures writhing in the Kavnalla’s cave had been, or the insect-beings of the Sembitol — all of them members of the legion of the Transformed, as varied and strange in form as the beings that populate our dreams.
But there was a difference up here. The folk of the high Kingdoms had pushed the limits of our ability to change our shapes beyond anything we had ever imagined, and they had done it willingly and knowingly. These were no victims of change-fire, I think. They were of another kind from the Melted Ones, those pitiful things that had been deformed and made hideous by the heat of an irresistible force outside themselves, nor were they like the hapless slithering servants of the Kavnalla, or the insectlike creatures who stalked the narrow trails of the Sembitol, or the hateful ground-crawling people of the Kvuz, all of whom had lost themselves to the potent rays that come from the mountain’s core. No, it seemed to me that these folk must have altered themselves from within, apparently of their own free choice, here in these high Kingdoms. And in this shimmering mountain air they had drawn on inner resources to unleash the whole range of possibilities that the shapechanging power affords, and then had extended that range.
So we saw great airy beings twice as tall as the tallest of us, who wrapped themselves in wings of vast spread but never attempted to use them. We saw others that walked in sheets of white flame, and some that moved in globes of darkness, and those that seemed like flowing cascades of water. We saw men who looked like trees and women who looked like swords. We saw frail filmy things that drifted like wisps on the wind. We saw giant boulders with eyes, and mouths that smiled knowingly as we went by. And I remembered now the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel, which we had had to read when we were youngsters training for our Pilgrimage, and which I had thought was all fable and fairy-tale; but no, that was wrong, I saw now. Maylat Gakkerel, whoever he might have been, had seen these Kingdoms and had returned from them with enough of his sanity intact to set down an account of them, and however fevered and impenetrable and unreal that difficult book may have seemed to us, it was no work of fancy but a sober chronicle of the upper reaches of Kosa Saag.
It was here that I began to lose the members of my Forty.
There was no way I could prevent it. Those who had resisted the horrors below did not have the strength to turn their backs on the beauties and strangenesses up here. They slipped away as though they were fading into the mist. Even if I had chained us all together wrist to wrist, they would have found some way to go; for the temptation of these Kingdoms was immense.
Tull the Clown was the first to depart. That was no real surprise, for she had defected once already before; and although she had come back that time she still bore the taint of the Sembitol about her, and a permanent melancholy where once she had been all life and buoyancy. She went in the night, soon after the Irtiman’s death, and Thissa said later that she could feel her dancing on the wind. Poor Tull, I certainly prayed that she was.
But then Seppil the Carpenter disappeared, and Ijo the Scholar, and our other Scholar too, little Bilair. They went on different days and in different Kingdoms. I caused searches to be made for each of them, though only in a perfunctory way, for I suppose I was beginning to undergo a transformation of sorts myself, and I no longer was as concerned to lose my companions as I once had been. Let them go, something within me whispered. Let them find their own destinies up here, if the Summit is not what they truly seek. Most who attempt the quest are fated to fail it, and so be it. So be it.
Thrance sidled up to me and grinned his diabolical grin, and said, “So that’s what it’s like, when you reach the top of the Wall? You simply float away and join the Kingdoms? If that’s the case, why did we bother to climb so high? We could have saved ourselves the effort and stayed down below, and let ourselves be transformed by the Kavnalla.”
“I wish you had,” I told him.
“Ah, so unkind, Poilar, so very unkind! What harm have I ever done you? Didn’t I guide you through some difficult places?”
I made a shooing gesture at him, as though he were a stinging palibozo hovering about my head.
“Go, Thrance. Turn yourself into air, or water, or a pillar of fire. Let me be.”
He grinned again, twice as fierce as before. “Ah, no, no, no, Poilar! I’ll stay by your side to the top! We are allies in this, you and I. We are colleagues of the trail.” Then he laughed and said, “But it’ll be only the two of
us by the time we reach the Summit. The others will all long be gone.”
“Let me be, Thrance,” I told him a second time. “Or by all the gods I’ll hurl you down the mountainside.”
“See if it isn’t so,” he said. “You’ll lose them all as we go up.”
And that night Ais the Musician went from us, and Dorn the Clown; and two days afterward, in a Kingdom whose ruler lived in a glistening limestone mansion cut deep into the mountain, a place of great colonnades and porticos and torch-lit chambers and passages and halls and an immense throne room fit for a god, we lost Jekka the Healer, which was a grievous loss indeed. When I counted up in the morning, there were only twenty-seven of us left, out of our Forty, and Thrance the twenty-eighth. This time I made no attempt at sending out searchers. It seemed a hopeless thing to do. I wondered whether Thrance might not have been right, that all the others would go, leaving only him and me at the end. Indeed I wondered whether I myself would be among the Transformed before this was over. For my resolve had weakened more than once along the way up; and if it weakened again here, it would be the end of my quest. I knew I must fight that; but would I be able to win? And so in perplexity I led the remainder of my people onward, along an ever-narrowing trail, toward the cloud-shrouded realm above.
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21
THOUGH WE WERE DWINDLINGswiftly now, the core of my Forty still remained to me — the ones I loved best, Traiben and Galli and Thissa and Jaif and of course Hendy. Kilarion stayed with us, and Kath, and Naxa, the Healers Maiti and Kreod did not leave, nor Grycindil, nor Marsiel.
We went higher. The air grew colder and colder, and it was so thin we had to make our chests expand like balloons to draw any sustenance from it. When we glanced back we found ourselves looking down at the tips of the surrounding peaks, far below us. It was like making our way up the side of a needle that pierced the sky. The roof of cloud that hid the Summit from our sight seemed almost to be pressing against my shoulders now, though in fact it was still far ahead.
Scardil left us, and Pren, and Ghibbilau. I regretted those losses but I did nothing to reclaim them. Then Ijo the Scholar came back, looking somewhat changed from what he had been, but he would not say where he had been or what had befallen him. On the day of his return we lost Chaliza and Thuiman, and in a Kingdom where gusts of pale flame spurted from the ground we lost two more: Noomai the Metalworker and then Jaif the Singer, whom I had not expected to leave. That was hard, losing Jaif. We had never been close friends but we had been good allies. In the days just afterward Hendy said that she felt his presence still with us, hovering in the air: she could hear his song, she said. Perhaps so. But I could not.
Then one night the sky throbbed with bands of pink light from dusk to dawn, as happens sometimes rarely when Marilemma rises at twilight and remains overhead all during the hours of darkness. That is usually an omen. And the next day we went on into a place where I found myself confronted with a great and wonderful strangeness, which went beyond anything I had experienced thus far in my entire ascent.
This was a small Kingdom set into a stony ridge that was like a bowl with a high sharp rim, on an outlying breast of the mountain. Gray wisps of old snow surrounded its rock-girt border, for at these heights we were in cold territory indeed, with hard winds and frequent gales of sleet. I suppose we could have gone past this Kingdom without entering it, since it lay a little distance off the main road; but we were weary from the day’s bleak oppressive march through this chilly country, and now I saw dark storm-clouds gathering. It seemed a good idea to seek shelter for the night, though it was still only a little past midday.
Kath and Kilarion were the first two to go over the rim, and I heard whistles of surprise from them. When I came up over it myself I saw why. We were looking down into a lush peaceful garden where the air was soft and warm and heavy, as though we had been returned in a moment’s twinkling to our village at the base of the Wall. We heard the singing of birds and we smelled the fragrance of a thousand kinds of flowers, and in the distance rose a giant grove of thick-trunked gollacundra trees heavy with purple fruit amidst their brilliant sheaves of dangling golden foliage. This, in the cold and snowy upper reaches of Kosa Saag! And moving about in it were graceful and elegant people with strands of gold about their breasts and garments of woven scarlet at their loins, who seemed without exception to be in the finest flush of youth and beauty. Truly it was as if we had come stumbling into the home of the gods.
I stood dazed and awed atop the rocky ridge, with ice and chill behind me and this dazzling paradise glowing before me. Thissa said softly to me, “Careful, Poilar. Everything you see here is illusion and magic.” And Hendy, at my other side, nodded and added her own words of caution.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will take care.”
But Kath and Kilarion were already moving down the inner slope of the bordering rim into this Kingdom of ease and plenitude, and Marsiel also, and Maiti, and Grycindil, and Thrance. They walked like those who walk in sleep. So the decision was taken from my hands, and I followed them on down, passing from a realm of snow to one of flowers and birdsong. The people of this Kingdom turned and looked up at us gravely as we approached, but showed neither alarm nor displeasure, as though it was the most usual thing in the world for some band of ragged frostbitten wanderers to come straggling down into their land.
“Come,” they said to us. “You must go before our King.”
They were all perfect, every one: sleek and beautiful and glistening with strength and vitality, and no one, seemingly, more than eighteen or twenty years old. There was no flaw to be seen on them, no sign of blemish or defect or disfigurement. They seemed all to have come from a single mold, for only their faces differentiated them one from another, and otherwise they all had the same long-limbed slender-bodied perfection of form. I had never seen such people as these; and as I looked at them I felt bitter shame for my own lack of perfection, the angry chilblains on my skin and the dust and dirt of the journey in my hair and on my clothing and the scars of the long climb everywhere on my body, and above all my leg, my leg, my twisted loathsome crippled leg, for which I had never felt a moment’s embarrassment before but which now seemed to me a blazing mark of dishonor and sin.
They conveyed us to their King, whose royal seat was a crystal dome at the very center of this Kingdom. He stood on its portico, arms folded, awaiting us calmly: as flawless as any of his subjects, and as young, a boy-king, a magnificent youthful prince, serene and potent, wonderfully arrayed in gold and scarlet, with a high tiara of bright metal set with glittering gems.
As we drew near him Hendy suddenly gasped, and she dug her fingers deep into the flesh of my arm as though in fear.
“What is it?” I said.
“His face, Poilar.”
I looked. There seemed something familiar about it. But what? “He could be your brother!” Hendy cried.
Was it so? I looked again in growing confusion. Yes, yes, there was something about the shape of his nose, the set of his eyes, the way he drew his lips back in a smile of welcome. A certain resemblance, yes, an odd superficial similarity of expression and even of appearance —
A coincidence, only. That was what I told myself.
“I have no brother,” I said to her. “I’ve never had one.”
Thissa, behind me, was whispering Witch-words.
The young King of this magical land regarded us placidly, benevolently. “Welcome, Pilgrims. Who is your leader?”
“I am,” I said. My voice was thick and husky. I came limping forward, inordinately conscious of my crooked leg in this place of perfection. “We are from Jespodar village, and my name is Poilar, son of Gabrian, son of Drok, of Wallclan of the House of the Wall.”
“Ah,” he said, and gave me one of the strangest smiles I have ever seen. “Then you are surely welcome here.” He took a step or two toward me, holding out his hand for me to take it. “I am Drok of Jespodar,” he said. “Of Wallclan
of the House of the Wall.”
OF COURSE I REFUSEDto believe it at first. It was too much to accept, that I should meet my father’s father here beneath the shadow of the Summit of Kosa Saag in this transformed guise. Thissa had said it rightly, all was illusion and magic here, and this must surely be some deception, the King of this place slyly borrowing my own features so that he could pretend that he and I were kin, as a kind of mocking game.
But he took us within his royal home, where the floors were soft with thick rugs and the crystal walls were hung with crimson draperies and the air was heavy with sweet perfume, and his people bathed us and fed us and gave us sharp new wine to drink. If all of that was illusion and magic, well, it was skillful magic and pleasing illusion, and afterward we felt rested and comforted, illusion or not. Indeed we had not known such comfort since the day we left our village. It was almost enough to make one weep.
Then the King came to me and sat with me and spoke with me of Jespodar, while I stared intently at his face, clearly seeing mine now in his. He mentioned many names, few of which I knew, but when he uttered those of Thispar and Gamilalar, I told him that they were still alive, that the gods had granted them double life, and he seemed genuinely astonished and delighted at that, for he said that he had known them when he was young. That was an odd phrase for him to use —when he was young — for he seemed much younger than me at this moment, a youth, a stripling. But I sensed the great age of him all the same, behind that unlined face. I told him that in our company was the son of the son of the son of Thispar Double-Lifer, Traiben by name, and he nodded and a far-away look came into his eyes, as if he was thinking of the passage of so many years.
He spoke then of our clan and family, and he knew the names. He asked of his brother Ragin, and I said he was dead, but that Ragin’s son Meribail was the head of our House. He seemed pleased at that. “Meribail, yes. I remember him. A good boy, Meribail. I saw the promise in him even then.” He asked me of his sister, next, and of his sister’s children, and of his own two daughters and their children, and again he knew all the names, so that I became more and more certain I was in the presence of my father’s father. There was always the possibility, I realized, that this was all some enchantment and he a demon, and that he was drawing these names from my own mind and passing them back to me by way of laying claim falsely to kinship with me. But once you begin believing such things, there’s no end to what you are free to doubt: it was easier for me to think that this was indeed my father’s father, alive on Kosa Saag after so many years, wearing this youthful body by virtue of the transformations he had undergone.