Kingdoms of the Wall (41 page)

"Hendy?" I said, suddenly uncertain.

"I am Hendy, yes," she said. And I saw Hendy's dark unmistakable eyes shining out of the gaunt pallid transformed face of this skeletal stranger.

"Where have you been? What have you done to yourself?"

She pointed toward the Summit.

I looked at her with narrowed eyes. "All the way up?"

"Only to the next Kingdom," she said. I could barely hear her words.

"Ah. And what sort of Kingdom is that?"

"A place where no one speaks."

"Ah," I said, nodding. "Transformed Ones, all of them?"

"Yes."

"Who have lost the power of speech?"

"Who have renounced it," she said. "They have been to the Summit and returned, and there they live, in a realm of total silence. They showed me the route that leads the rest of the way to the top, pointing with their fingers and not saying a word. I think they showed me the way to the Well, also."

"And they showed you how to turn yourself into this."

"No one showed me. It happened, that was all."

"Ah," I said, as though I understood. But I understood nothing. "Ah. Yes. It happened."

"I felt myself changing. I let it happen." She seemed to be speaking to me from a land beyond death.

"Hendy," I said. "Hendy, Hendy—"

I wanted to reach for her and take her into my arms. But I was afraid.

We stood face to face for a while, saying nothing, as though we both were citizens of that Kingdom that has taken a vow of silence. Her eyes were steady on mine.

I said finally, "Why did you go, Hendy?"

She hesitated a moment. Then she replied, "Because we were staying here to no purpose, and the Summit is what we came here for."

"Did Alamir have anything to do with—"

"No," she said, in a way that left no doubt. "Not a thing."

"Ah," I said yet again. "It was the Summit, then. But yet you didn't go to it, when you had the chance."

"I discovered the road that goes there."

"And turned back? Why?"

"I came back for you, Poilar."

Her words went to my heart. I might have fallen down before her, but she held out her hands. I took them. They were cold as snow, brittle as sticks.

She had undergone a purification of a sort, yes. That was what this new form of hers meant. But some wounded part of the old Hendy still had not been burned away. Her Pilgrimage had farther to go yet.

"We must finish this," she said.

"Yes. We have to."

"But can you leave here?"

"Yes. Yes."

"Will you, though? This Kingdom is like a trap."

"I had to stay here for a time, Hendy. I wasn't ready to move on beyond this place."

"And are you now?"

"Yes," I said.

* * *

I issued the order and we assembled our things—our few remaining supplies, our scanty supply of food, our patched and tattered packs—and took our leave. My father's father emerged onto the portico of his palace and watched us gravely in silence as we went. Some of his people came out also to watch us go. I saw no sign of Alamir.

Galli and I carried the body of the Irtiman. In this high country it was showing no sign of decay. His eyes were closed and his face was calm: he seemed only to be asleep.

Hendy walked beside me at the head of the column.

Her movements were steady and deliberate, with great strength and forcefulness about them. That frailty I had imagined in her at first was only an illusion. There was a kind of supremacy in her bearing that everyone accepted. Her changed appearance set her apart from the rest of us just as completely as Thrance's did; but whereas Thrance's grotesque, contorted form made him appear repellent and dark, Hendy now seemed ennobled and austere and majestic. I was beginning to see a sort of beauty in her strange new form, even.

She said, "There is the upward road."

It was a narrow white track rising into a steep gorge with high walls of black stone. Almost at once it took us beyond the soft air and lazy warmth of my father's father's Kingdom. How they achieved that enchantment there is something that I never learned, and I suppose I never will. We were outside its sphere of potency now, back amidst the ice and bitter wind of these extreme uplands. But we adjusted our bodies, as we had done so many times before, and were able, after a fashion, to cope with the steadily increasing adversities of our surroundings.

I looked back once. Behind me I saw only a formless jumble wrapped in azure haze. We had come so far that I had lost all sense of the terrain we had covered. Somewhere back there was the meadow of the blue grass, and below it the rocky face of the cliff that set a boundary to the Kingdom of the Kvuz, and still further back were the precipitous crags of the Sembitol and the squalid cave of the Kavnalla; and then, far, far below the plateau of the Melted Ones and all the rest, down and down and down, the rock that Kilarion and I had climbed, and the place where the Wall-hawks had attacked us, and Varhad, the domain of the ghosts who went about sheathed in fungus. With Hithiat milepost beyond that, and Denbail and Sennt and Hespen, Glay and Ashten and Roshten, and our own village of Jespodar at the very bottom, so far away that it might just as well be on some other star. My life there now seemed only a dream. It was almost impossible for me to believe that for two full tens of years I had dwelled in a flat busy crowded place down there where the trees glistened with moisture and the air was like a steaming bath. The Wall was my only life now, and had been for so long that all that had gone before it had become unreal. Everything we had passed along the way to this place was fading now into that same unreality. Nothing had any solid existence now except the white path beneath my feet and the gorge of glossy black stone that surrounded me, and the roof of thick dark clouds overhead, as dense and forbidding as a slab of iron.

We came to the Kingdom where they had forsworn the use of words. It was only a small place, a nest of delicate stone spires off the main road. I would have passed it by without seeing it, but Hendy pointed it out, and told me that its people lived in crannies and crevices of the stone. We did not pause to visit them. I had a single glimpse of a few thin, angular people of great height moving about near one of the spires, and then the wind wrapped them in gusts of mist and I saw nothing more.

There was another small Kingdom nearby, where the King was a slave and was carried around constantly in a litter, forbidden to touch his feet to the ground or to do anything to help himself, and another just beyond it that had three kings at once who enjoyed every pleasure, but if one of the three should die the other two would be buried alive in the grave with him. There were other Kingdoms too, but we kept clear of them, for I was weary of these strangenesses. I would not have believed that the Wall had undone so many of our people; but of course we have been sending our Forty onto the mountain for thousands of years, and so have other villages, and few of those who were sent have returned; death took many, and these Kingdoms the rest.

My father had come this way once. As had my father's father, and many others of my fathers before them.

"This is the way to the Well of Life," said Hendy.

She indicated a break in the gorge, where a subsidiary trail went spiraling upward around a dark fang of rock that disappeared into the ceiling of impenetrable clouds. I shivered, and not only from the cold which now was biting at me, at us all, with no mercy whatever.

"Must we go that way?" I said, knowing the answer.

"It's the only path," said Hendy simply.

The mountain narrowed and narrowed until it seemed to me we must be climbing the very tip of the needle. Icy descending winds tumbling out of the cloud mass above us struck us like fists. We clung together on the trail. I wondered if the buffeting would sweep us to our deaths. Lightning flashed, bleaching all color from this precarious craggy place; but we heard no following rumbles of thunder. We were trespassing on a place which only the hardiest could endure, and the mountain was asking us whether we were equal to the test.

Night came. But there was little difference between night and day for us under a cloud cover so heavy. Marilemma once again remained aglow and lit our way after a fashion, illuminating the far side of the clouds so that a dim tinge of scarlet came through. By that faint red gleam we forced ourselves onward through the hours of darkness. We had passed into some realm beyond sleep, it seemed.

When at last we halted and gathered into a group to catch our breaths and exchange a few words of good cheer, our number seemed wrong. There had been twenty-one of us setting out from my father's father's Kingdom, ten men and eleven women, and Thrance the twenty-second; but we seemed less than that now. A quick tally gave me only eighteen.

"Where are the rest?" I asked. "Who's missing?"

In this sparse air our minds worked but dully. I had to run through our roster several times before we determined the absentees: Dahain the Singer, Fesild the Vintner, Bress the Carpenter. Had they fallen from the trail? Turned back of their own accords under the force of the gale? Been quietly snatched from our midst by silent tentacles reaching out of rocky caverns? No one could say. No one knew. We were nine men and nine women, and Thrance. I had succeeded in bringing less than half my Forty to the verge of the Summit, and I felt shamed by losses so great. And yet, and yet, how many leaders had brought even that many this far?

Going back to look for the three missing ones was out of the question. We waited two hours for them, but there was no sign that they were following us. We went on.

Dawn was coming, now. We could not see Ekmelios's hot hard white globe through the ceiling of fog but we felt a change in the quality of the dimness. And then we saw a second glow, an unfamiliar orange one, rising on the horizon not far in front of us. A narrow subordinate path branched from our trail, leading off toward the place of the glow.

Hendy said, "We are at the Well, I think."

23

I had imagined a seething pit of hot effervescent waters, bubbling and churning and spuming and giving forth a hiss of fervent power. But no: this was an unexpectedly tranquil place. All that lay before us was a quiet gray oval surrounded by a narrow rim of pale mud. The single indication of anything unusual was the soft orange radiance that rose like a mist from its surface.

Seven small mounds, like little blisters, lay in a straight line along the shore of the Well.

At the sight of them I was overtaken by such fear as I have rarely felt in my life. It was like an earthquake in my soul. I saw in my mind's eye the one image of my father that I possessed, that tall strong man with bright eyes, gaily flinging me aloft and catching me in his arms. Then I looked toward those tiny cairns and wondered which one of them covered his grave, and I shivered with dread. I could hardly bear to look upon this place of his terrible transformation. A chill ran along my legs as though they had been plunged into ice. Behind me I heard whisperings, and I knew what they must be saying.

But I went quickly forward. That is the only way with fear: attack it before it can vanquish you. I knelt beside the seven cairns, and let my hand rest lightly on the one closest to the Well, thinking that it was the first of the group and therefore must be my father's. What did it matter if I was wrong? The moment I touched it a great calmness came over me. He was here somewhere. I knew that I must be near him.

A faint warmth was coming from the cairn. It seemed harmless. I closed my eyes and said a few words without speaking aloud. Then I scooped a few pebbles and some bits of sandy soil from the ground nearby and scattered it over the cairn I took to be my father's, and over the others as well, as an offering. I prayed for his continued peaceful repose. I prayed for peace for myself too as I faced the ordeal ahead.

Rising then, I walked across the muddy rim to the edge of the Well and looked down into it. It was just a pool of gray water, dull-looking, unreflective. This close, the orange radiance that came from it was wispy and indistinct, a mere thin veil.

Involuntarily I made the signs that guard one against magic; and yet I knew that there was no magic here, any more than the change-fire that throbs in the lower reaches of the Wall is a force of magic. No, this was a natural place, I was sure, where some power in the fabric of the region existed that could strip away the passage of the years from one's body. In our snug village we are safe from such powers; but here on the Wall the mighty forces of the universe have full play, and our mutable bodies are subject to their impact in a hundred ways.

I was eerily calm. Here is life, I thought. Here is death. You take your choice: a second or two returns you to youth, a minute kills. That seemed strange to me, and yet I felt little awe or wonder. I wanted neither youthfulness nor death from this place; I wanted only to have done the thing that I had done here at my father's cairn, and move on.

Perhaps I had been too long on Pilgrimage. Awe and wonder, I suspected, were things that I had left behind me somewhere along the trail, I suspected.