Robert Silverberg - Kingdoms of the Wall

I decided that the classes were simply part of the Winnowing. They were intended to terrify us by making us see that nobody who lived in the lowland villages really had the slightest knowledge of what awaited those who journeyed on the Wall. The things we were learning struck me as being mere fables that could be of no possible practical use, and therefore after a few weeks I stopped paying attention to them. Others, believing that their lives would depend on how well they mastered this mass of foolishness, took copious notes and in a little while, as the contradictions and mysteries piled up, they began to go around with dazed, bewildered expressions on their faces.

About a dozen members of my group resigned their candidacies during this period. Most of the dedicated note-takers were among them. I was convinced that they had filled their minds with so much nonsense about the Wall that they became too frightened to continue.

We had other classes that were far more valuable: I mean our classes in survival, where we were taught the techniques of mountain-climbing, and of coping with the special conditions that were believed to exist in the higher reaches of the Wall, and tricks of hunting and foraging that would come in handy once we had exhausted the food we had carried up from the village in our packs. Here too the instructors were forced to rely on a lot of myth and supposition, on account of the taboo against the Returned Ones’ revealing their experiences on the Wall. But there is no taboo against climbing the lower reaches of the Wall, at least as far as the Hithiat milepost, and so we were allowed to get some small taste of what might be waiting for us.

I had been as high as Hithiat already, of course. Everyone has: we all sneak up the Wall when we are young. Most of us stay up there only a few hours, but the boldest will risk remaining overnight. That was what I had done when I was fourteen. Galli went with me then. She and I had just become lovers, and we enjoyed daring each other to do all sorts of outrageous things: we slipped into the place where the sacred things were kept and handled some of them, we stole a bottle of dream-wine from the Wallclan treasury, we went swimming in the Pool of the Housemothers one moonless night. And then I said, “I want to climb the Wall. Do you?”

She laughed. “Kreshe! You think I’m afraid of that?”

Galli was big and hearty, as strong as any man, with a loud deep voice and a laugh that could be heard three Houses away. We set out early one morning, getting past the gate-guards with the usual line about going to make a sacrifice at Roshten Shrine, and then of course as we approached Roshten we darted into the thick jungle behind it and went scrambling up the back way on the forest road that parallels the main one. It was a clear day and by the time we reached the Glay milepost we were astounded at how much of the village we could see below us, and when we got to Hespen we stopped a long while at the parapet, struck silent by wonder. Everything lay spread out below us in miniature. It was like a toy model of the village. I felt as if I could reach out with my hand and gather it all up in a single swoop. We could see the House of the Wall right below us with the scarlet szambar tree at its center, looking no bigger than a matchstick, and the House of Holies next to it, and Singers on the other side, and then any number of other Houses, Healers and Carpenters and Musicians and Clowns and Butchers, spreading away and away and away to east and west like little dark circles in the green of the forest, until finally the Houses came to their end and there was only green, with perhaps the barest hint on the horizon of the foreign villages that lie beyond the boundaries of our own.

We went on that day, Galli and I, to Hithiat milepost, where the road got very rough and we began to lose our nerve. Here the face of the Wall was soft and pitted, and pebbles kept tumbling down from above us with little slithering sounds. Sometimes larger rocks fell; a few huge boulders too, which hit uncomfortably close to us and went bounding away. The boulders made us very uneasy. It was getting dark, besides. And everyone knew that it was crazy to go beyond Hithiat. I was aware that Galli feared hardly anything, and she knew that I was like that too, and so it occurred to me that one of us might try to bluff the other into going beyond Hithiat, and that if we began to talk about it we probably would actually do it, since neither of us had the courage to confess any sort of fear or weakness to the other. But that was not what happened. We had that much common sense, at least. Instead we went off the gravelly road into a flat mossy place, where we watched Ekmelios set and then ate the little bit of meat and cheese and wine that we had carried with us. After that we took off our clothes and sang the Change-songs to each other and brought ourselves out of neuter, and I lay down on top of Galli’s great firm resilient body as though it were a bed; and she embraced me and took me inside her, and we ran through some very wonderful Changes indeed.

“Do you feel the change-fires?” she asked me.

“No. Do you?”

“I don’t think they’re very strong, this close to the village. But it frightens me, to think that we could be turned into monsters on the Wall.”

“Even when we go higher up, we won’t be transformed unless we want to be,” I said. “The change-fires don’t take control of you against your will. The only ones who are transformed are those who don’t have the strength to remain themselves.”

“How do you know that?” Galli asked. “I never heard anything about that.”

“I know,” I said solemnly. But the truth was I was only guessing.

Darkness came. We were too frightened to sleep. So we sat side by side waiting for dawn and wondering about the screeching sounds that drifted down to us from the pinnacles we could not see, for everyone knows the dire tales of the Wall-hawks that are bigger than a man and carry Pilgrims off in their beaks. But the Wall-hawks, if that was what they were, let us be, and at dawn we returned to the village. Nobody minded that we had been gone. Galli’s father was a drunkard, and as for mine, of course, he had vanished on the Wall long before. The gentle Urillin, my mother’s brother who had had charge of me since I was a boy, never could stand to punish me for anything. So nothing was said about our absence. And that was the great adventure that Galli and I had in the highlands.

But the training classes that took us up the Wall now were much harder work than my outing with Galli. Instead of following the main road or one of the back roads we had to hack our way through the foothill forests, scrambling over colossal rocks and the gnarled roots of trees, and sometimes go straight up bare cliff faces, using all our skill with our ropes and our sucker-pads to keep from falling and being smashed. And there was no meat and cheese and no wine and certainly no making the Changes when we came out finally at Hithiat milestone. We undertook at least one climb a week, and it was brutal, exhausting stuff. We came back bruised and bloody. I worried about Traiben, since he was in another group and I couldn’t be close at hand to help him through. But he managed. Sometimes I met him after hours and gave him special coaching, showing him ways of carrying himself through the difficult places, of wedging his feet into cracks or looking for horns of rock to grab while shifting his position. The climbs were not only strenuous, they were dangerous too: on our fifth climb a boy named Steill, from the House of Leather-makers, became lost in the woods and we searched for him half the night before we found him at last, lying broken in the moonlight at the bottom of a deep ravine with his brains spilling out of his head. He must have walked off the edge at dusk without knowing what he was doing, though someone whispered that a shambler had come upon him and pushed him over the edge. We all trembled at that: for the shambler is said to be as big as a roundhouse, but makes no sound in the forest and leaves no footprint. Be that as it may, Steill was dead, the first of our number to die in candidacy. But not the last.