Then it ended, as suddenly as it had begun. One of the hawks gave the command to retreat — it was unmistakable, a clear harsh honking cry that reverberated off the side of the Wall like the sound of a gallimond played in its highest register — and all of them took off at once in a great clatter of bare thrashing wings, screaming to the stars as they went. One snatched up a chain of sausages that we had left unfinished by the fireside at suppertime, and flew away with it. We saw the whole host of them for a moment outlined against the moonlit sky, and then they were gone, all but the one Kilarion had trampled, which lay dead near Marsiel’s bedroll. She kicked it aside with a little cry of disgust, and Thuiman scooped it up on the end of a stick and tossed it over the rim of the gorge. In the silence, the sound of our rough breathing was loud as thunder. We were all stunned by the suddenness and fury of the attack, though it had been so brief: the Wall had given us only the merest hint of the torments it could offer, as if to put us on notice of the sufferings ahead.
“Is anyone hurt?” I asked.
Nearly all of us were, to some degree or other. Fesild of the Vintners was the worst. She had taken a long cut across her cheek that ran close to her eye, and another, very deep, on her left shoulder. Her face was all blood and her left arm was jerking as though it wanted to leap free of her body. Kreod, one of the three Healers among us, went to deal with her. Kilarion had been badly cut too, but he laughed his wounds off. Talbol had a slash the length of his arm, Gazin the Juggler a bright-red set of crossmarks on his back, Grycindil a torn hand, and so on. The binding of wounds went on almost until morning. I myself had been bruised more than a little by wings but I had shed no blood.
Traiben counted us, and reported after a time that we were all accounted for. None of us had been carried off by the hawks: our only loss in that regard had been the chain of sausages. So the tales of how Wall-hawks would snatch unwary Pilgrims from the trail and devour them in their eyries were only fanciful myths, as I had always suspected. The hawks were simply not big enough to do such a thing. But they were troublesome birds all the same, and I knew we would have more grief from them higher up.
As the red light of rising Marilemma came into the sky, Kilarion squatted down beside me where I sat kneading my bruises and said in a quiet voice quite different from his usual one, “It was stupid of me to throw that rock, wasn’t it, Poilar?”
“Yes. It was. I remember telling you something of that sort when you did it.”
“But I saw the hawk hanging in the air and I hated it. I wanted to kill it, because it was so ugly.”
“If you want to kill every ugly thing you see, Kilarion, it’s a wonder you’ve allowed yourself to live so long. Or have you never seen yourself in a mirror?”
“Don’t mock me,” he said. His voice was still soft. “I told you, I think it was a stupid thing to do. I should have listened to you.”
“Yes. You should.”
“You always seem to be able to see what will happen before it happens. You knew that if I hit the hawk with the rock, it would come back with others of its kind and attack us.”
“I suspected it might, yes.”
“And earlier you made me keep moving, when I might have stopped and done the Changes with that ghost. You were right that time too: the ghost would have taken me. I would have become a ghost myself, if I had gone with her. But I was too stupid to see that for myself.” He was staring bleakly at the ground, pushing pebbles around with his finger. I had never seen him so dejected. This was a different Kilarion: reflective, brooding.
I smiled and said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Kilarion. Just try to think things through a little before you act, all right? You keep out of a lot of trouble if you get into the habit of doing that.”
But still he stared down and pushed pebbles. Sadly he said, “You know, when we were picked, I was sure that I would be the leader of our Forty. I’m the strongest. I have great endurance and I know how to build things. But I’m not clever enough to lead, am I? The leadership has to go to someone like you. Traiben’s even cleverer than you — he’s cleverer than anyone — but he’s not a leader. Neither is Muurmut, though he thinks he is. But you are, Poilar. From now on I’ll follow whatever you tell me to do. And if you see me about to do something dumb, just say very quietly in my ear,Wall-hawks, Kilarion. Orghosts. To remind me. Will you do that for me, Poilar?”
“If that’s what you want, of course.”
He looked up at me. His eyes seemed almost worshipful. It was embarrassing. I grinned and slapped him on the thigh and told him what an asset he was to us all. But secretly I was relieved. A stupid man who admits that he’s stupid is far less of a danger to his comrades than one who doesn’t. Perhaps Kilarion would be less of a problem than I had feared a little earlier. At the very least I would hold some ascendance over him for a while, until his stupidity came bursting through once again.
WE WASHED OURSELVES INthe cold little stream and had a morning meal of cold puffbread and moonmilk. It was necessary to help some of those who had been worst injured by the hawks. Since Traiben had not died during the night, nor so much as complained of feeling unwell, we ate some of the breast-fruits too — they were cool and sweet and tender — and stowed as many of them as we thought we could carry in our packs. Then we made ready to leave the gorge.
Getting out was harder than going in had been: the little ravine turned very narrow at its upper end and after another hundred paces unexpectedly terminated in a naked shield of rock that rose absolutely vertically as far as we could see. Kilarion, who had not gone all the way to this point when he had found the gorge for us the night before, was livid with chagrin. It was plain to him now that there was no road up; and he hopped about, stamping the ground and spitting in fury, like one who has been stung by a swarm of palibozos. “Wait,” he said. “You all wait here.” And off he ran back toward the entrance to our gorge, dropping his pack as he went.
We saw him minutes later, looking down and beckoning from one of the narrow parapets from which the rock-apes had jeered at us at twilight. He had found a path. We swung about and went the way he had gone, and he met us at the trailhead, which was an uninviting tumble of boulders that looked as though it led downward, not up. What impulse had led him to try it? It could not have been less promising. But it was the right way to go; and Kilarion glowed with satisfaction as he showed us how to circle a jagged little chimney-formation that marked the real start of the trail. He looked to me for approval, as if to say, See? See? I’m good for something after all! I nodded to him. He had his merit, yes.
The rock-apes reappeared in midmorning, scampering along a row of finely eroded pink parapets not far above our line of march. They would hold to some needlelike outcropping of rock with one hand and swing far out to chatter derisively at us or pelt us with stones, or even their own bright-yellow dung. One such missile struck Kilarion on his shoulder, which was already sore from the talons of the Wall-hawks. He made an angry rumbling sound and snatched up a jagged rock, and made as if to hurl it at his assailant. Then he must have thought better of it; for he paused in mid-throw, and glanced toward me with a foolish grin, as though asking me for permission.
I smiled and nodded and he threw, but the stone missed. The ape laughed wildly and showered him with bits of gravel. Kilarion hissed and cursed and threw another rock, as ineffectually as before. After a time the apes lost interest in us and we saw no more of them that morning.
There was nothing like a road anymore, or any sort of regular path. We had to find our own trail as we climbed. Sometimes we had to haul ourselves up over rugged cliffs that were like staircases for giants, made up of blocks of stone twice the height of a man, which had to be managed with rope and grappling-hooks. Sometimes we moved across a sharp rubble of broken rock where an entire ledge had collapsed into talus. I saw Traiben gasping and struggling as we made our way up this treacherous rocky fan, and once he fell, and I paused beside him and held him up until he had caught his breath, and
walked with my arm around his shoulders until he was able to go on again by himself.
But for the most part the mountain at this elevation was easier to ascend than we had expected, since what had looked from below like a vertical wall of stone turned out in fact to be a series of broad rocky slabs, each sloping upward, to be sure, but not as steeply as we had thought from a distance. In aggregate the angle was a sharp one; taken one by one each slab could be crossed by mere steady plodding.
Not that I want you to think that any of it was easy. Where there was a track we could follow without using ropes, it was of crumbled rock, soft and gravelly the way much of Kosa Saag’s surface is, so that we constantly slipped and slid and risked twisted ankles. We labored under heavy packs and the sun was very strong. The hot blaze of white Ekmelios dazzled our eyes and burned our faces and necks and turned the rock slabs we were crossing into blinding mirrors. We baked in the heat, instead of stewing and simmering in it as one does when one lives in the lowlands. We were used to that other kind of heat, close as a damp blanket about us all the time, and we missed it sorely. There was no warm thick haze up here to screen us from the fury of the white sun, no gentle moist mists. The sultry humid world of our village was very far away now.
Not only was the air much more clear at this level, it seemed less nourishing too: dry, thin, piercing, disagreeable stuff. We had to breathe twice as deeply as we were accustomed to in order to fill our chests, which made our heads ache and our throats and nostrils feel chafed and raw. Our bodies made adjustments to the thinner air as we climbed: I could feel little alterations going on within me, breathing-passages expanding, lungs belling out, blood traveling more swiftly in my vessels. After a time I knew that I was adapting successfully, or successfully enough, at least, to this new environment. But I had never realized before what a rich, intoxicating substance our lowland air was. It was like strong wine, compared with this harsh mountain air.
On the other hand, the water in this high country was far purer and more pleasing than village water. It had a magical clarity and sparkle, and it was always cold and fresh. But there was very little of it. Streams and springs were few and far between on these slopes. Whenever we found one we dropped our packs and knelt and drank greedily, and then we would fill our storage jars, for who knew how long it would be before the next fresh water?
We were cut off now from all view of our home territory. Below us everything was buried under thick white fog. It was as if a great swath of white fur lay upon our familiar valley. Now and again it would break a little, giving us a glimpse of greenness, but there was nothing there that we could recognize. So there was no longer any down for us, only up, up, up, up.
Kosa Saag was our entire world: our universe. We had begun to discover that the great mountain that we called the Wall was actually not one mountain but many, a sea of mountains, each one rising on the backs of those around it the way high waves rise in the midst of stormy waters. We had no idea where the summit was. Sometimes it seemed that we had already attained the highest peak, for we saw clear sky above it, but we were always wrong, because when we got to the top of that one we would find that there were new summits rising beyond it. One peak led to another, and another, and another. When we looked up we saw only an infinite perplexing complexity of pink rock: spires, parapets, shields, gorges. It seemed to go on all the way to Heaven. There was no summit. There was only the endless mountain above us, forever sloping away out of sight above us while we crossed its interminable lower reaches like a file of patient ants.
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8
FROM THE START OFour climb we had been ascending the outer rim of the Wall, making our way through the gulleys and pathways and outcroppings that jutted from its great face. So it was easy for me to choose each day’s route: it stretched before us like a narrow continuing highway winding along the face of the Wall and there was no question about the best way to go, for there was only one. But we were unable now to proceed any further in that fashion, because we had arrived at a place where an impassable overhanging barrier of unscalable rock rose straight up in front of us to a height that was beyond the limit of our vision. We studied it a long while and there was not one of us who saw any way that we could master it. No route seemed to lead around to the side of it and to climb it was unthinkable.
So we followed the only route that was possible to take, which sent us turning eastward, into an interior valley of Kosa Saag. There we camped for a little while in a sort of forest, cool and shadowy, on this inner arm of the Wall. I say “a sort of forest” because the plants that grew in that place, though they were as tall as trees, were not anything at all like any tree of the lowland we had ever seen. They had no woody structure, but were more like giant blades of grass, or, rather, like bunches of grass stuck together, for each trunk seemed to be made up of a dozen or more thin, narrow shafts sprouting from a single base. Sticking out all along their sharp-angled sides, in place of leaves, were scores of wedge-shaped shoots that looked like hatchet-heads.
When you touched one of these trees, it made your hand tingle. If you held on very long after the tingling started, your skin began to burn.
There were small green birds of an unfamiliar kind in these trees, perching by twos and threes on the edges of the hatchetheads. Their bodies were round and plump, with tiny comical scarlet legs barely visible beneath their bellies, and their wings were short and so weak that it was all they could do to flutter from one hatchethead to another. It would be hard to conceive of birds that were more unlike the terrible Wall-hawks. And yet these clownish little birds were not to be taken so lightly, for their eyes were very fierce, strange white orbs that burned like miniature suns in their foreheads. There was bitter hatred in those eyes, and deep menace. Indeed, when Gazin the Juggler stood beneath one of those trees and called out laughingly to the birds above him, because their roundness and fatness amused him so, they responded with a downpouring of sticky spittle that brought howls of pain from him, and sent him rushing across the forest floor to plunge into the stream that ran through its middle.
The water of that stream was red as blood, very curious to behold. I feared for Gazin. But he sprang up out of it unharmed by that strange-colored water, rubbing at his arms and chest where the bird-spittle had struck him. There were welts and blisters all over him. We kept away from those trees thereafter.
Because I felt uneasy in this alien place, I asked Thissa of the Witch House to cast a spell for our safety before we settled in for the night. Camping on the Wall’s edge, we had spent our nights in narrow, secluded places, easily defended, but in this relatively flat terrain we were at the mercy of any wandering denizen of the Wall’s interior districts.
She said, “I want something of Gazin’s, for he was the first one injured here.”
Gazin gave her one of his juggling-balls. Thissa drew something magical on it with the tip of her finger and buried it in a soft place in the ground beside the stream, and lay down to press her cheek against it Then, still lying that way, she recited the spell for the safety of travelers. That is a long and very costly spell, which draws much energy from the Witch who utters it, because it is earth-magic and she must send some piece of her soul into the soul of the spirit of the place where it is recited. As she spoke it I saw her amber eyes lose their brightness and her slender body go slack with fatigue. But she gave unstintingly of herself to ensure our safety here.
I knew the spell would be a good one. I had had faith in Thissa’s powers ever since that dark time in the third year of my training as a candidate, when I had begun to fear I would not be chosen for the Pilgrimage, and had gone to Thissa in her charm-seller’s shop to ask her to cast a spell for my success. Surely the charm that she gave me then must have played a powerful role in my being selected. It was comforting to know that we had a Witch of her capability among us.
We pitched our bedrolls in an open place, far from the hatchethead trees and their unpleasant little birds. St
um and Narril were posted as the first guards in case Wall-hawks or rock-apes or other troublemakers should arrive in the night, and I appointed Min the Scribe and Aminteer the Weaver as the second shift on watch.
The stars were unusually bright in the clear cool air that prevailed here, and had a hard sheen. Someone began calling off their names: there is Ysod, that one is Selinune, that is Myaul. From Naxa the Scribe came a chilly little laugh. “Stars of ill omen,” he said. “Ysod is the star that crushes other stars and devours them. Myaul ate her own worlds. The light of Selinune is light that screams.”
“Save your wisdom for some other time, Naxa,” came a woman’s voice, perhaps Fesild’s or Grycindil’s. “Don’t frighten us with your filthy tales while we’re trying to fall asleep.”