Kingdoms of the Wall (12 page)

I had seen Wall-hawks now and then swooping high over the valley, but never one at such close range. I had no doubt, though, that a Wall-hawk was what this ugly creature was. It did not seem big enough to be able to carry off a grown man, as the village fables said; but it looked dangerous all the same, devilish, malevolent. I stood as if frozen, staring at it in weird fascination. And it stared back with evident curiosity. Perhaps it had only come on a scouting mission, not to attack.

"Step aside, Poilar," said a voice behind me.

It was Kilarion. He had picked up a rock the size of his head and was making ready to throw it at the hovering bird. I heard him humming the death-song.

"No," I said. "Don't!"

He ignored me. Shouldering past me to the rim, he swung himself about in a half-circle, pivoting off his left knee, and hurled the rock upward and outward with all his tremendous strength. I would not have believed it was possible to throw so big a rock so far and so hard. It rose on a short arc and caught the Wall-hawk in its belly with a sharp thud. The bird let out a piercing shriek loud enough to have been heard down in the village and fell from sight, plummeting as if dead, a sudden swift descent; but as I leaned over the rim and peered down I thought I saw it make a recovery in the darkness below and go flapping out into the night. I was uncertain of that; but it seemed to me I heard its far-off angry screeching.

"Killed it!" Kilarion said, proudly preening himself and doing a little dance of self-congratulation.

"I'm not so sure," I said gloomily. "It'll be back. With others of its kind. You should have left it alone."

"It's an evil bird. A filthy, loathsome bird."

"Even so," I said. "There was no need for that. Who knows what trouble it will bring?"

Kilarion said something mocking and walked away, very pleased with himself. But I remained uneasy over what he had done, and I called aside Jaif and Galli and Kath and one or two others and suggested that we stand guard through the night, two of us at a time until morning came. It was a good idea. Galli and Kath stood first watch and I lay down to sleep, telling them to call me when my time of duty had come; but hardly had I closed my eyes, or so it seemed, but I felt Galli roughly tugging me awake, and I looked up to see the night astir with fiery red eyes wheeling above us like demons.

There were five or six hawks overhead, perhaps—or ten, or twenty, more likely; who had time to count? The air was thick with them. I saw their eyes; I felt their beating wings; I stared in dismay at their sharp, ravening beaks and talons. We were all up and defending ourselves with cudgels and stones now as they swept and swirled among us, furiously clawing us and biting us and screeching. They were like wild fiends. Kilarion carried one bird on each shoulder—they had singled him out, it seemed, as the one who had thrown the rock—and they struck at him with their talons again and again, flapping their great wings furiously, while he struggled to seize them by their ankles and pull them free of him. I went to his aid, cudgeling a hawk loose. It flew straight up when I hit it, squawking madly and swinging about to come at me, but I held it off with fierce swings of my stick. Kilarion meanwhile had ripped the other bird free of his flesh: I saw him smash it to the ground and bring his heel down on its chest. From far away on the other side of the stream I heard one of our women screaming. And I saw, by glinting moonlight, Traiben with a pile of stones stacked in front of him, snatching them up one by one and calmly hurling them with great accuracy toward any hawk that came near him. I had a glimpse of Hendy standing by herself, her head thrown back and her eyes gleaming strangely as she slowly swung a cudgel from side to side in a wide arc about her, though there were no hawks in her vicinity. Kath, meanwhile, had rekindled our fire, and was handing blazing torches out to several of us, who thrust them upward at the attackers.

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.
Or
ghosts.
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 in the 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 mid-morning, scampering along a row of finely eroded pink parapets not far above our line of march. They would hold to some needle-like 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 any more, 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.