Robert Silverberg - Kingdoms of the Wall

“At least for tonight,” I replied.

“Why? What for?”

I gave him no answer. I had no answer. I was utterly bewildered, a leader without a plan. My mind was empty, my soul was empty. The whole purpose of my life had collapsed away from me. If what the Irtimen had said were true—and how could I deny it?—there were no gods, the Summit was inhabited by monsters, the Pilgrimage to which I had devoted half my life had been a hollow meaningless endeavor. I would have wept, but they were all watching me; and I think in any case this air that was hardly air at all had taken the capacity to weep away from me. I did not know what to do. I did not know what to think. Thrance, jeering mocker that he was, had spoken the truth: we were face to face with reality now—not a reality that we had expected to find, and it was a hard one to confront.

But I was still leader. I could continue to lead, even if I had no idea why, or toward what end. And possibly I would yet come to find—as even within the depths of my despair some small part of me still fiercely believed—that there are gods here somewhere, that the Summit was indeed the holy place we had thought it to be.

“We’ll sleep over here,” I said, indicating a little declivity that was sheltered somewhat from the raking Summit winds by a low outcropping of crumbled rock. I set Thissa to work casting a spell of protection. I sent Galli and Grycindil off to search for such firewood as this forlorn place might yield, and Naxa and Maiti to hunt out a spring or pond of fresh water. Kilarion, Narril, and Talbol I appointed as the first patrol, to march up and down in a wide circle along the open zone beyond the Irtiman starship and keep watch for any stirrings among the “gods.” For so I thought of them still, those beastlike things—the degenerate children of the gods, perhaps, but gods of a sort all the same.

Traiben said, “Do you have any work for me just now? Because if you don’t, I’d like to do a little scouting on my own.”

“What kind of scouting? Where?”

He nodded toward the ruined ship of the ancient Irtimen.

“I want to see what’s inside it,” he said. “Whether there are Irtiman things there—holy things remaining from the old days, things the Irtimen might have fashioned back in the time when they still really were gods—” And I saw a gleam in Traiben’s eyes that I knew only too well: the gleam that was the outward manifestation of that hunger of his to learn, to know, to poke his nose into every mystery the World had to offer.

It occurred to me that if ever we returned to the village—though whether we ultimately would or not, I could not say; I still had no plan, no sense of anything beyond the needs of the moment—we might indeed want to bring with us some tangible sacred object, something that had felt the touch of the gods, the true gods who had lived on this mountaintop in the days before their decline had begun. But it dismayed me to think of Traiben going into that tumbled mass of rusting girders and twisted metal sheeting by himself as night was beginning to descend. Who knew what skulking “gods” he might encounter in the darkness? I would not let him have permission to go. He begged and pleaded, but I refused to yield. It was madness, I said, for him to risk his life over there. Tomorrow, I told him, a larger group of us might investigate it, if it seemed safe then to make the attempt.

Dusk was coming on. The dark sky grew darker. The stars came forth, and a single icy moon. The Irtiman starship cast a long sharp shadow that reached almost to my feet. I stood by myself, staring somberly across the plain at the place where the miserable creatures whom we had hoped would be our gods were hidden.

Hendy came up to me. Transformed as she was, she towered over me by a head and a half, though she seemed as filmy as a ghost. Fleshless as she was now, she must be freezing in this bitter cold; but she showed no sign of discomfort. She put her hand lightly on my arm.

“So now we know everything,” she said.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose we do. Or enough, at any rate.”

“Will you kill yourself, Poilar?”

I looked at her, amazed. “Why would I do that?”

“Because we have the answer now, and the answer is a very dark one. Either there are no gods and never were, or the gods are here and have undergone a terrible fall, which is even a sadder thing. So either way there is no hope.”

“Is that what you think?” I asked her, and I remembered her vision of eternal death imprisoned in a box precisely large enough to contain her body, and not a bit larger. She had spent much of her life dwelling in some cheerless frost-bound realm of the soul very different from the one I had inhabited. “Why do you say that? There’s always hope, Hendy, so long as we’re alive and breathing.”

“Hope of what? That Kreshe and Thig and Sandu Sando will appear, despite everything, and lift us up to their bosoms? That we will see the Land of Doubles in the sky? That life will be good and kind and comforting?”

“Life is what we make it,” I said. “The Land of Doubles is somebody’s fine fable, I suppose. And Kreshe and Thig and Sandu Sando and all the rest certainly exist, somewhere else, perhaps, far beyond our range of vision. It was only a story, that they lived at the Summit, invented by those who had no idea of the truth. A fable and nothing more. Why should gods who are capable of building worlds live in a disagreeable rocky place like this when they have all of Heaven to choose from?”

“The First Climber said they were here. The First Climber whom we revere.”

“He lived a long time ago. Stories become distorted over a long span of time. What He found up here were wise beings from another world, who offered useful knowledge. Was it His fault that we decided that they were gods?”

“No,” she said. “I suppose not. They were gods, in a way, I suppose. At least we can think of them that way. But as you say, it was all a long time ago.” She seemed to disappear into her own bleak thoughts for a moment. Then she gave me a close look “Well, what will we do now, Poilar?”

“I don’t know. Go back to the village, I suppose.”

“Do you want to?”

“I’m not sure. Do you?”

She shook her head. She seemed more wraithlike than ever, as remote from me as the stars and just as unreachable, though she was standing right beside me. I felt as though I could almost see through her.

“I have no place in the village,” Hendy said. “When I was stolen away from it, I lost my place in it forever. After I came back I always felt like a stranger there.”

“So you would settle in one of the Kingdoms, then?”

“Perhaps. Would you?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure of anything anymore, Hendy.”

“The Kingdom where your father’s father rules, for instance? You liked it there. You could return to it. We both could.”

I shrugged “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Or some Kingdom lower down, one that we didn’t pass through on the way up. Some pretty place, not too strange. Nothing like the Kavnalla, or the Kvuz.”

“Or we could found one of our own,” I said, more to hear the sound of my voice than for any other reason, for I still had nothing like a plan, no plan at all. “There’s plenty of room on Kosa Saag for new Kingdoms.”

“Would you?” she asked me, and there was almost a note of eagerness in her tone.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything, Hendy.”

I felt utterly drained, a hollow husk. This day’s revelations had cut the heart from me. No wonder Hendy had wondered if I was going to kill myself. I would not do that, no. But so far as what I was going to do now, I had no idea of that whatever.