Robert Silverberg - Kingdoms of the Wall

A haze of shock and bewilderment swept across my mind as that thought came to me, and for a moment or two I lost all awareness of who I was or why I was here. I knew only that I was guilty of the most monstrous of crimes and must be fittingly punished; and the gods were coming toward me to accept my atonement and mete out my retribution.

I waited gladly for them. I readied myself to kneel before them. Despite everything I knew of them, I would kneel.

But then they were only a few paces from me, and I stared at their coarse faces and drooling lips and looked straight into their dull empty eyes and I knew beyond all question that what the she-Irtiman had told us was true, that these were no gods, but only the fallen children of gods, the dreadful hollow nightmare semblances of gods. I owed these creatures no obeisance and certainly not my death; and this place where they dwelled was far from holy, whatever I may have believed at the beginning of my Pilgrimage. It had been holy once, perhaps, but certainly holy no longer. So I had nothing for which to atone.

I saw what I had to do now. But I hesitated a moment. In that moment Hendy came up from somewhere and moved toward me.

I turned to her, and she saw in my face the thing that I was going to do. And she nodded.

“Yes, Poilar! Go on! Yes! Do it!”

Yes, she had said. Do it. It was all I needed.

I felt a moment’s surge of pity for them, these sad shambling things that were the relics of the great ones who had taught us the ways of civilization. But the pity melted in an instant into loathing and contempt. They were abominations. They were monstrosities. They disgraced this place by their very presence here. I rushed forward then, and plunged furiously into their midst. And seized one and held him aloft as though he had no weight at all while he babbled and dribbled and snuffled, until after a moment I flung him away from me, out into the void. Then I took each of the others, one by one while they milled about me in consternation, and likewise I hurled them over the edge of the cliff, down into the abyss, down the side of the Wall to follow Thrance into death. And stood in silence by the edge, breathing hard, looking at nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing. Nothing. After a time Hendy touched me, very gently. I was grateful to her for that.

And that was how my Pilgrimage ended, with the slaughter at my own hands of the gods that I had come here to worship.

By now the two suns had risen, both of them at once from opposite sides of the sky, and by the mingling pink light I saw my comrades running toward Hendy and me, Kilarion and Galli in the lead, and then Talbol and Kath, and behind them all the others, Grycindil and Narril and Naxa and the rest. They had seen me slay the “gods”; and as they gathered around me I told them what had occurred between me and Thrance.

Then we saw the rest of the “gods” emerging from their caves and coming toward us across the plain. They were fewer than we had imagined, no more than fifteen or twenty of them, and some females and children. Why they came to us at that moment I could not say: whether it was to slay us or to worship us, it was impossible to tell. Their dim eyes and slack faces told us nothing. We fell upon them as they neared us and carried them to the edge and pushed them over, every last one of them, just as once long ago we had killed the winged gods of the Melted Ones when we were on the lower plateau. Now we were killing our own. The Summit needed purification. It had once been a holy place and then it had been befouled; and until our coming, no one had had the courage or the wit or the strength to do what needed to be done. But we did. They screamed and whimpered and fluttered about in fright, helpless before our wrath.

We destroyed them all; and when we were done with it, we went into their caves to be certain that none were lurking in there. The squalor and sheer evil filth that we found in those caves is something that I will not even attempt to describe. Two more of them were hiding beneath the dirt, the last of all their kind, blubbering and trembling. Without hesitation we dragged them forth and hurried them to the brink. And so in the violence of bloodshed the reign of the gods atop Kosa Saag came to its end at last.

Now that it was done we could barely speak.

We stood close together, shivering in the bitter air, dazed by the events that had just taken place. We knew that what had happened here had been a necessary thing, that we had purged not only our own souls but those of all our race, and that we had freed the Irtimen settlers of the World also from the curse that had overtaken them. But nevertheless it was a heavy thing to have done so much killing, and we were stunned by the impact of it and hardly knew what to think or say.

It was at this moment that the three Irtimen emerged once again from their ship.

They stepped down the ladder and stood close together just before it, standing uneasily, with their little weapon-tubes in their hands as though they half expected us to attack them with the same berserk fury as we had the others. But we had no reason to do that, and in any case all fury was gone from us now.

I went forward, weary and dazed as I was, and knelt on the ground before them. By twos and threes my companions joined me, until we were all of us kneeling, with our heads bowed.

Then the Irtiman with the golden hair raised her speaking-box and said, speaking simply and quietly as though she too had been drained of strength by what had taken place here, “We have no further business on this world, and we will be leaving it now. You must all move back, to the far side of the plateau, and stay there until we are gone. Do you understand what I say? Fire will come from our ship; and you will be harmed if you are close to it.”

I told her that we understood.

She said then in a softer voice that she wished us well, and hoped that we would grow in understanding and wisdom all the rest of our days. And she told us that we need never fear the intrusion of Irtimen into our world ever again.

That was all. They went back into their ship, and we withdrew to the far side of the plateau.

For a long time nothing happened; and then we saw dust rising around the ship, and moments later a pillar of fire burst into life beneath it, and lifted it upward. The little gleaming ship stood as if motionless before us an instant or two on its fiery tail. Then it was gone. It vanished from our sight as though it had never been.

I said, “These were the true gods. And now they have left us.”

With that, and with no other word being spoken, we began to make ready for our descent from the Summit.

Before we left we dug a grave for Thissa and built a cairn over it. She will always lie in honor at the roof of the World. We built a cairn in memory of Thrance also, since whatever his sins may have been he was nevertheless a Pilgrim and a man of our village and that was his due. Then we stood together in a tight circle for a long time, close against one another, needing each other’s comfort; for this was the end of our Pilgrimage and the end of all Pilgrimages, and we knew that we had achieved something mighty, though we were not yet sure what it was. I heard weeping nearby me, from Maiti first, then Grycindil, then Naxa and Kath; and then I was weeping too, and Traiben, and Galli. We all wept, we survivors, we remaining ones. I had never felt such love for anyone as I felt for these people now, with whom I had gone through so much. We had formed something new on this long journey: we had become a House unto ourselves. Everyone understood that, and so no one spoke of it. We did not even dare look at one another, the moment was so solemn: we stared at the ground, we drew breath deep into our lungs, we held each other’s hands tightly and let the weeping pour forth until there was no weeping left in us. At last we looked up, after that, and our eyes were shining and our faces were aflame with the new understanding, which we all felt even though we could not have put it into words.