A great soft clod of greasy mud caught Stapp of the House of Judges in the face. It stunned him for a moment: I saw him coughing and gagging as he peeled it away from his eyes and lips and nostrils. Hardly was he able to breathe again but they hit him with a second one, even softer and looser, which splattered all over his face and chest.
That seemed to drive him berserk. Stapp was ever a man of quick temper. I saw him snorting and spitting mud. Then he yelled wildly and pulled out his cudgel and rushed madly forward, laying about him to right and left. Taken aback by his frantic onslaught, the rock-apes retreated a little way. Stapp pursued them, swinging his cudgel with lunatic zeal, as they edged back toward the pitchy lake. I called to him to come back, that he was moving too far away from us, but there was never any getting Stapp to listen to reason when his anger was upon him.
Then Kilarion started to run toward him. I thought at first that he too wanted to join the fray, that in his simple fashion he envied Stapp his fun; but no, this time Kilarion meant only to rescue him from his own folly. I heard him calling out to Stapp, “Get back, get back, the beasts will kill you.” Kilarion ripped one of the little waxy-looking trees from the ground as he ran and swung it like a broom, sweeping the apes out of his path as though they were bits of trash. One after another they went soaring through the air as they were struck, and dropped in dazed heaps many paces away.
But for Stapp, Kilarion’s help came too late. One moment he stood by the edge of the lake, cudgeling apes in hot fury; and in the next, an ape had leaped upon his shoulders from the side and drawn its sharp talons across Stapp’s throat, so that a gout of dark blood came leaping out; and another moment more and he was falling backward, backward, twisting as he fell. He landed face downward on the black pitchy surface of the lake and sank slowly into it while his blood bubbled up about him.
“Stapp!” Kilarion screamed, kicking apes aside so fiercely that one of them perished with every kick. He held the little tree that he carried out toward the fallen Stapp. “Grab the tree, Stapp! Grab it!”
Stapp did not move. His life’s blood had gone surging out of him in no more than an instant or two and he lay dead in the thick tar. Kilarion, at the lake’s border, slowly pounded the crown of the tree against the ground in dull rage and bellowed in anger and frustration.
It wasn’t easy to take Stapp from the lake. The pitch held him in a gluey grasp, and we did not dare set foot in it, so we had to pull him out with grappling hooks. Maiti the Healer and Min the Scribe put together some words out of their memories to say for him, drawing the text from the Book of Death, and Jaif sang the dirge while Tenilda played the dirge tune on her pipe. As for the special words that one must say when a member of the House of Judges dies, we couldn’t remember them well, for there were no other Judges among us, but we did our best to say something. Then we buried him under a high cairn of boulders and moved on.
“Well,” Kath said, “he was too hot-headed to have been a good Judge anyway.”
When I looked back, several of the little yellow-and-green marshlights were dancing atop Stapp’s cairn.
Now we moved outward toward the front edge of the Wall again, for on that side there was a kind of natural ramp which promised to take us upward, whereas inland the mountain’s core rose in a single gleaming breathtaking thrust that struck our hearts with terror. For many days we wound our way along this outer ramp. It rose steeply but not unmanageably in some places, held level in others, and in some actually began to descend, giving us the disheartening thought that all we had accomplished in these days of struggle had been to discover a path leading down the far side of Kosa Saag that would take us to some unfriendly village of that unknown territory. But then we began to climb again, still keeping to the outer face of the Wall.
Strange winged creatures rode the air currents high up in the great abyss that lay just beside our line of march. Not Wall-hawks, no; these had feathered wings. They seemed to be of colossal size, bigger than Wall-hawks: as big as roundhouses, for all we could tell. But we weren’t sure. They were too far above us to judge. In the open space above us there was no way to establish scale. We saw them outlined against the brightness of the sky as they sailed on the lofty winds. Abruptly one would plummet like a falling stone, catching itself in midfall, rising again as if scanning for prey, finally darting inward to pick some hapless creature off the face of the Wall in one of the zones of the upper levels. It was a frightening thing to see, though they never came down as far as the level where we were marching now. Would we encounter them higher up? Would they swoop on us as we saw them swooping on other prey now? That was a dismaying thought, that there would be no safe harbor up there, that the Wall would test us and test us and test us, and would break us if it could. We might do better to turn again and head toward the interior of the Wall, I thought, toward some sheltered plateau where those deadly birds would not venture. But we had to go where it was possible to go, and for the time being the interior folds and gorges of the Wall were inaccessible to us and we were compelled to follow these outer trails.
As we ascended I could see more and more of the World. It was far bigger than I had ever imagined, rolling outward to the horizon for league upon league beyond all counting. Wherever there was a break in the white clouds below, I was able to make out a host of rivers and hills and meadows, and more rivers and hills and meadows beyond those, and long green stretches of forest with dark smudges within them that I supposed were villages, so far away that very likely no one from any of the villages that cluster at the base of the Wall has ever been to them. Perhaps I was looking at the city where the King lives, for all I knew. I tried to imagine him in his palace, writing decrees that would go forth to provinces that were so far away that the new decrees would be obsolete and meaningless by the time word reached them that such-and-such a law had gone into effect.
At the very edge of the World, I saw the sharp gray line of the horizon where the sky came down and touched the forest. What a strange place that must be, I thought, where your feet were on the ground and your head was in the sky!
Was it possible to get there some day and find out what it was like? I stood in wonder, trying to comprehend how long it might take, traveling on foot, to reach that place where the sky met the land.
“You would never reach it,” said Traiben, “not even if you marched for a thousand thousand lifetimes.”
“And why is that, can you tell me? It looks far, yes, but not as far as all that.”
Traiben laughed. “You would march forever.”
“Explain yourself,” I said, starting to grow irritated with him now.
“The World has no end,” said Traiben. “You can walk around it forever and ever and the horizon will always lie ahead of you as you walk toward it.”
“No. How can that be? When you walk somewhere, sooner or later you get where you’re going.”
“Think, Poilar. Think. Imagine yourself walking around a huge round ball. A ball has no end.”
“But the World does,” I said, with a surly edge to my voice. Traiben could be maddening when he insisted on making you think. Thinking was play for him, but it was work for most of the rest of us.
“The World is like a ball. See, see, where it curves away from us in the distance?”
I stared. “I don’t see.”
“Look harder.”
“You are a great pain sometimes, Traiben.”