We reached it in late afternoon and by common unspoken decision halted to consider the thing that was next to be done.
It was time to choose a leader. We all knew that. They had told us in the training sessions that we were to elect a leader as soon as we were beyond Hithiat, because without one we would be a serpent with many heads, each yearning to go in the direction it preferred and no two agreeing.
There was an uneasy moment, just as there had been at the time of the Sacrifice of the Bond, when no one was quite sure of how to go about doing what was necessary to do. I remembered how Muurmut had seized the moment and made himself its master, and I was not going to let him do that again here.
“Well,” I said. “My House is the House of the Wall. This is the place of my House. I’ve waited all my life to reach this place. Stay with me and I’ll take you to the Summit.”
“Are you nominating yourself, Crookleg?” Muurmut asked, so I knew right away there would be trouble with him.
I nodded.
“Seconded,” said Traiben.
“You’re of his House,” said Muurmut. “You can’t second him.”
“Seconded, then,” said Jaif the Singer.
“Seconded,” said Galli, who was of the Vintners, Muurmut’s own House.
Everyone was silent a moment.
Then Stapp of Judges said, “If Poilar can nominate himself, so can I.” He looked around. “Who seconds me?” Someone snickered. “Who seconds me?” Stapp said again, and his face began to go puffy and hot with anger.
“Why don’t you second yourself too, Stapp?” Kath said.
“Why don’t you be quiet?”
“Who are you telling to be —”
“You,” Stapp said. Kath raised his arm, not necessarily in a menacing way, and an instant later Stapp came jumping forward, ready to fight. Galli caught him by the middle and pulled him back to his place in the circle.
“The Bond,” Thissa whispered. “Remember the Bond!” She looked pained by the threat of violence among us.
“Does anyone second Stapp?” I asked.
But no one did. Stapp turned away and stared at the Wall above us. I waited.
Thuiman of the Metalworkers said, “Muurmut.”
“You nominate Muurmut?”
“Yes.”
I had expected that. “Seconds?”
Seppil the Carpenter and Talbol the Leathermaker seconded him. I had expected that too. They were very thick, those three.
“Muurmut is nominated,” I said. You will notice how I had already taken charge, here in the time before the choosing. I meant nothing evil by it. It is my way, to lead; someone has to, even when no leader has been appointed. “Are there any other nominations?” There were none. “Then we vote,” I said. “Those who are for Poilar, walk to this side. Those who are for Muurmut, over there.”
Muurmut gave me a sour look and said, “Shouldn’t we set forth our qualifications before the voting, Poilar?”
“I suppose we should. What are yours, Muurmut?”
“Two straight legs, for one thing.”
It was cheap of him, and I would have struck him down then and there except that I knew I could turn this to better advantage by holding my temper. So I simply smiled, not a warm smile. But Seppil the Carpenter guffawed as though he had never heard anyone say anything funnier. Talbol the Leathermaker, who was not the sort to stoop to such stuff, managed a sickly little grunt as his best show of solidarity with Muurmut.
“Yes, very pretty legs,” I said, for Muurmut’s legs were thick and hairy. “If a leader must think with his legs, then yours are surely superior to mine.”
“A leader must climb with his legs.”
“Mine have taken me this far,” I said. “What else do you have to recommend your candidacy?”
“I know how to command,” said Muurmut. “I give orders which others are willing to follow, because they are the correct orders.”
“Yes. You say, ‘Put the grapes in this tub,’ and you say, ‘Crush them in such-and-such a fashion,’ and you say, ‘Now put the juice in the casks and let it turn into wine.’ Those are very fine orders, so far as they go. But how do they fit you to command a Pilgrimage? The way you mock my leg, which is as it is through no fault of mine, doesn’t indicate much understanding of someone you have sworn in blood to love, does it, Muurmut? And if a leader is deficient in understanding, what kind of leader is he?”
Muurmut was glaring at me as though he would gladly have heaved me from the mountain.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said what I did about the leg. But how will it be for you in the dangerous places, Poilar? When you’re climbing, will you also be able to think clearly about the things a leader must think about, when every step you take is hampered by your infirmity? When the change-fires begin to assail us, will you be strong enough to defend us against them?”
“I have no infirmity,” I said. “All I have is a crooked leg.” I would with great pleasure have kicked him with it too, but I restrained myself. “As for the change-fires, we don’t as yet know whether they’re real or myth. But if they’re real, why, then, each of us must do his own defending, and those who are too weak to resist their temptations will fall by the wayside and turn into monsters, and the rest of us will go onward toward the gods. That is the Way, as I understand it. Do you have any other qualifications to put forth on behalf of your election, Muurmut?”
“We should hear yours, I think”
Quietly I said, glancing from one to another of my fellow Pilgrims, “The gods have chosen me to bring you to the Summit. You all know that. In a single night every one of you dreamed the dream that I dreamed, in which I was designated. You know that I can lead, and that I can think clearly, and that I am strong enough to climb. I will bring you to the Summit if only you follow me. Those are my qualifications. Enough of this talk: I call for the vote.”
“Seconded,” said Jaif.
“Seconded again,” said Thissa softly.
And so we voted. Muurmut and Seppil and Talbol stood to one side, and all the others moved across the circle to me, three or four of them very quickly, then another few after a little hesitation, and then, in a general rush, everyone who was left. Even Thuiman, who had nominated Muurmut, deserted him. So it was done. Muurmut made no effort to disguise his fury. I thought for a moment he would attack me in his rage, and I was ready for him. I would hook my crooked leg behind his good one and throw him to the ground, and seize him by the feet and spin him around and press his face into the stony ground until he submitted to me.
But none of that was necessary. He had better sense than to lift his hand against me in front of the others, and in any case he could see the one-sidedness of the vote. So he came over grudgingly to offer me his hand afterward with the rest. His smile was false and his mien was sullen, though, and I knew that he would let no opportunity pass to displace me, if he could.
“Very well,” I said. “I thank you for your support, all of you. And now we must talk of what lies ahead.” I looked around. “Who among us has been beyond Hithiat?” I asked.
I heard nervous laughter. We had all come this far during our training, and most of us had gone up the Wall on our own once or twice out of sheer mischief, perhaps as high as Denbail, even to Hithiat. But no one goes beyond Hithiat if he has any sense. Still, I thought it was a useful thing to ask, though I expected no reply.
To my surprise Kilarion put up his hand and said, “I have. I’ve been to Varhad to see the ghosts.”
All eyes turned to him. The big man smiled, enjoying the attention his boast had earned him. Then someone laughed again, and others took it up, and Kilarion’s face darkened like the sky before a storm. The moment was suddenly very tense.
“Go on,” I said. “We’re all waiting to hear.”
“I went to Varhad. I saw the ghosts and did the Changes with one. Anyone doesn’t believe me, he can fight me,” Kilarion said, drawing himself up even taller. And he clenched his fists and stared
from side to side.
“No one doubts you, Kilarion,” I said. “But tell us when it was that all this happened.”
“When I was a boy, with my father. Every boy in my clan comes up here with his father when he turns twelve. Axeclan is my clan.” He was still glowering. “You think I’m lying, do you? Wait and see what’s in store for you up ahead.”
“That’s what we want you to tell us,” I said. “You know and we don’t.”
“Well,” he said, suddenly ill at ease and uncertain of himself. “There are ghosts. And white rocks. And the trees are — well, they’re ugly.” He paused. He was groping for words. “It’s a bad place. Everything moves around. There’s a smell in the air.”
“What kind of smell?” I asked. “What do you mean, everything moves around?”
“A bad smell. And things — move. I don’t know. They just move.”
Poor thickbrained Kilarion! I looked over at Traiben and saw him fighting to smother laughter. I shot him an angry glance. Patiently I asked Kilarion again what Varhad was like, and he replied just as fuzzily as before. “A bad place,” he muttered. “A very bad place.” And that was all we got from him. So whatever he might have learned up there would be of no use to us. The little that he told us was enough to make us decide to make camp at the level of Hithiat on our first evening, though, and wait until morning before going on into the unknown reaches of the Wall above us.
Thus it was that I found myself back at that mossy field where Galli and I had enjoyed each other long ago. But there were no Changes played that night, despite all the pent-up desire that had accumulated in us in our half a year in Pilgrim Lodge. Sometimes desire can build to a point where there is no easy way to express it, and that was how it was for all of us that first night. We had been apart so long that it seemed too great a thing to break the abstinence so soon. And so the twenty men camped to one side of the field, and the twenty women on the other. We might just as well have been in our separate halves of Pilgrim Lodge.
I think none of us slept well that night. From higher on the mountain came sharp hooting cries that trailed off into terrible screeches, and sometimes the ground rumbled beneath us as if Kosa Saag meant to hurl us with a single casual shrug into the distant valley. A mist as cold as death slipped down from somewhere and wrapped itself over us as we lay. I wondered if it was the change-fire, rising up out of the ground to tempt me into taking on some strange new form. But I looked down at myself and I was still who I had been, so I knew that we had nothing to fear yet from that direction. And I slipped into a light doze.
In the middle of the night, though, I awakened and suddenly felt the thirst of the damned take hold of me, and I rose and walked to the little stream that ran through the middle of our moss-patch. When I knelt to drink, I saw my face reflected in the water by moonlight, all twisted and distorted, which frightened me, and I saw something else too, a glitter in the stream-bed, as of red eyes looking up at me. It seemed to me they were the eyes of Streltsa who had bitten me at Denbail milepost, and they were weeping blood. Quickly I jumped back and whispered a whole string of prayers to every god I could remember, one after another.
Then I looked across through the mists and I saw the strange woman Hendy up and walking about amidst the sleeping women. For a moment desire stirred in my loins, and I thought how good it would be to go to her and sing the song of mating to her and pull her down in the moss with me. But Hendy was a stranger to me, nor had anyone I knew ever spoken of mating with her either, and this hardly seemed a fit time to approach her for such a thing. I had already been bitten once this day. We stared at each other in the mist, and Hendy’s face was like stone. After a time I turned away and went back to my bedroll, and lay face up on it without moving. The mist opened and the stars appeared. I trembled beneath their light and put my hands over my manhood to protect it. Though the stars are gods, not all of them are benevolent ones. They say that the light of some stars does good magic, but the light of other stars is poison, and I had no idea which stars might be above me that night. I longed for morning to come. It was a thousand years in coming.
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6
ABOVE HITHIAT LIE THEghost-realms, where — so we had been taught — certain Houses of our village had dwelled long ago, until they angered the gods in some fashion and were forced to abandon their homes. During our training our teachers had told us a little of what had happened then, how the part of the mountain where these ancient folk lived had become less and less hospitable each year and the people who lived there had had to relinquish their settlements little by little as conditions worsened, moving steadily to lower zones until no one dwelled on the mountain at all any longer and our race was entirely confined to life in its lowland valley. But we were not prepared for the deathly look of the place, or the strangeness of it — any of us but Kilarion, and I think even he had forgotten how frightful a place it was.
The road here was broken and dangerous. At least it was a road, though; later on we would have no such luxury. But the paving-stones were split and broken and lifted at angles so that in some areas it would have been better to have none at all, and more than once we crossed a region where swift streams had cut deep gullies away under the path so that the paving-stones were balanced over emptiness and seemed ready to crack beneath our feet and drop us into an abyss. We fastened prongs to ropes and threw them across to the far side to anchor them in the earth, and crossed with care, clinging to the ropes. Some of us were shivering with fright at every step. But the fragile roadway somehow held together.
The air was changing too. We had expected it to get cooler as we went higher, but in this zone it was oddly hot and moist and dank, more so than on the hottest lowland day. No rain fell, but billowing bursts of wet steam issued noisily from vents in the flank of the mountain. The steam had a sour, sulphurous smell that utterly pervaded the atmosphere, just as Kilarion had warned. Everything was rotten and mildewed here. Pale spores floated in the air. Things grew on things. Dense beards of white mossy fungus coated the whole landscape. We went lurching through it, for there was no avoiding it, and it tangled itself around our legs and hands and made us choke and sneeze. The trees were wrapped in thick sheets of this stuff that trembled in the wind so that the trees themselves seemed to be shaking. They looked like the ghosts of trees. The rocks too were fouled with this deathly moss. Their surfaces quivered like live things, or like dead things that could not hold still. I thought I understood now what Kilarion had meant when he said, “Everything moves around.”
The Wall itself seemed to be rotting. When you touched it with your fingertip it crumbled, that was how soft the stone was. There were caves everywhere, some of them very deep — dark mysterious holes leading into the heart of the great mountain. We looked into them but of course could see nothing and did not choose to investigate.
There was a constant fall of little pebbles, and sometimes larger things, that had rubbed loose from the higher regions. Now and again we would hear a great rattling and thudding from above and chunks of rock bigger than our heads would come bounding down. Some fell very close indeed to us. The crumbling went on all the time, a steady loss of substance, so that I began to imagine that Kosa Saag must have been ten times as big a million years ago as it was now, and that in another million years it would have crumbled away into something no bigger than a stick.
An hour or so above Hithiat we encountered the first ghosts.
We were no longer walking along a narrow strip on the edge of the mountain but now were on a flat, broad outcropping that was almost like a plateau, though a slight sense of strain told us that we were continuing to climb with every step. Finally we came to Varhad milestone, the last of the series. It was weathered and worn, no more than a splinter of black rock with a few barely legible letters visible on its moss-encrusted surface.
At this level the air was thicker and more moist than ever and its smell was abominable. In the rocky, foggy meadows on our le
ft-hand side we discovered the ruins of the abandoned settlements. The ancient inhabitants of this region had lived in narrow tapering huts made of long slabs of pink stone set into the ground on an inward lean and covered above with thatching. The thatching had long since rotted away, all but a few bleached strands, and the jagged stone slabs were festooned with shrouds of the white fungus. There were groups of these tottering houses, ten or fifteen in each little group, clustered every few hundred paces apart. They were frightening to behold: decayed, dismal, forlorn. The ruined houses looked like funeral monuments. Truly we had entered a village of the dead.
“This is where the ghosts are,” Kilarion told us.
But we saw no ghosts anywhere about, and Kilarion grew red-faced and insistent when Naxa the Scribe and Kath the Advocate jeered at him as a tale-teller. His shape began to flutter as his rage mounted; his face became round and meaty and his neck shrank into his shoulders. The dispute got hotter and hotter until suddenly Kilarion gathered little Kath up under his arm like a bundle of dirty clothes and rushed with him toward the brink of the cliff, as though intending to hurl him over. Kath squalled like a beast being dragged to slaughter. We all shouted in alarm but none of us was in a position to stop him except Galli. As Kilarion went lurching past her, Galli caught him by his free arm and swung him around with all her considerable strength, so that he lost his grip on Kath and went slamming into one of the ruined huts that stood nearby. He hit it so hard that the cluster of stone slabs fell apart and went toppling over.
Half a dozen strange pallid creatures had been hiding in the hut. They sprang up now, terrified, and began to caper about in wild circles, flapping their arms like birds. I suppose they were hoping to be able to fly away from us. But all they had were arms, not wings.