“Ready?” he said.
He slammed his climbing-hook into the rock, pulled himself upward on it, and began to walk up the sheer stony face.
When the slack in the rope that linked us was almost gone, I followed him. I had climbed many a rock wall in my training years, though never one like this, but I told myself that it only was a question of addressing each moment of the climb in its turn, rather than thinking about the totality of what needed to be done. Kilarion moved swiftly and deftly above me, cutting back and forth along the rock to find the best handholds. As he had guessed, the stone was riven with cracks, and there were spurs and even some narrow ledges on it too which had been invisible from below. I grabbed for the spurs; I wedged my hand or sometimes my whole arm into the cracks; I used my climbing-hook and my sucker-pads to pull me past the smooth sections. And I rose quickly and efficiently, readily keeping pace with Kilarion as he went upward.
The essence of climbing a rock like this is remembering to let your legs do the work. The arms are agile and versatile but they soon grow weary if they are called upon to carry much of your weight. That was why Kilarion had looked dubiously at my twisted foot. Since he was going first, it would be up to me to hold us both in place if he were to fall; and he must have been wondering how much strength that bad foot of mine might actually have.
I would show him. I had lived with that foot, and the lame leg to which it belonged, for two tens of years. It had taken me this far up Kosa Saag. It would take me up this rock face too, and all the way up the rest of the mountain.
Cunningly I wedged my toes into crevices as I reached for the handholds above. I kept myself well supported until I was ready to scramble to the next level. The bad leg was no poorer at this game than the other one: I had to insert it at a different angle, that was all.
The first minutes were easy ones. Then things grew a little more difficult, and I found that I had to lunge at some of the handholds, leaping up to them and leaving myself unsupported for a moment as I made the reach. Once a handhold crumbled like rotten wood at the touch of my hand and broke away; but I was braced by my feet when that happened.
My breath was loud in my ears; my heart pounded. Perhaps I felt afraid, a little. But Kilarion moved inexorably onward above me and I would not let him think that I couldn’t keep up. As I had been trained to do, I plotted my course several moves in advance, constantly working out sequences, calculating, I will go here after I have reached there, and then I will go here.
There was one troublesome moment when I made the stupid mistake of glancing back over my shoulder to see how high I had risen. I found myself looking down into a gorge that seemed as deep as the Wall was high. My stomach lurched and my heart contracted as though it had been squeezed, and my left leg began to twitch violently, jabbing rhythmically into the air.
Kilarion felt my jouncing motions rising up the rope to him.
“Are you dancing, Poilar?” he asked.
That was all it took, that one lighthearted question. I laughed and the terror drained out of me. I turned my concentration back to the rock.
You must concentrate in the most intense way. You must see nothing but the tiny crevices and glittering little crystal outcrops just in front of your nose. I went up, up, up. Now I was spreadeagled to my limits, inching along a pair of parallel ridges that were set precisely two Poilar-leg lengths apart to form a kind of chimney. Now I hung suspended from a horn of crystal no longer than my inner thumb. Now my cheek was flat against the rock and my feet groped for purchase in empty air. My arms ached and my tongue felt oddly swollen.
Then, suddenly, there was a hand dangling in my face and I heard Kilarion’s ringing laughter as he reached for my wrist, caught it, and pulled me up across a rough rocky cornice onto a place where I could roll over and lie flat.
“You see?” he said. “There was nothing to it!”
We were on top. The climb had taken forever, or else only a moment. I was not sure which. The only certain thing was that we had accomplished it. There had been times along the way, I realized now, when I had been sure we would perish. But now, as I lay laughing and gasping on a horizontal surface, it seemed to me that Kilarion was right, that there really had been nothing to the climb at all.
After a time I stood up. We had reached a broad plateau, so deep and wide that I thought at first that we had reached the Summit itself, the very top of Kosa Saag, for everything seemed flat in all directions. Then my eyes focused on the distance and I saw how wrong I was: for I could see now, so far away to the southwest that it was almost at the limits of my vision, the next stage of the Wall rising above the floor of the plateau.
It was a numbing sight. What I saw out there was a great shining mass of pale red stone, shrouded at the base by a swirl of misty morning air and disappearing overhead in thick clouds. It tapered upward to infinity in a series of diminishing stages. It was like one mountain rising upon another. The whole Wall must be like that, I realized: not a mountain but a mountain range, immense at the base, narrowing gradually as you went higher. No wonder we couldn’t see the Wall’s upper reaches from our valley: they lay hidden from our view within the natural fortress formed by the lower levels. I came now to understand that in truth we had only begun our ascent. By reaching this plateau we had simply completed the first phase of the first phase. We had merely traversed the outer rim of the foothills of the tremendous thing that is Kosa Saag. My heart sank as I began to comprehend that our climb thus far had been only a prologue. Ahead of us still lay this vast mocking pink staircase outlined against a dark, ominously violet sky.
I turned away from it. We could deal with that awesome immensity later. Sufficient unto the day is the travail thereof, says the First Climber; and He is right in that, as He is in all other things.
“Well?” Kilarion asked. “Do you think the others can get themselves up here?”
I glanced back over the edge of the rock face we had just ascended. The trail at the base of the vertical cliff was incredibly far below us; at this distance it seemed no wider than a thread. It was hard to believe that Kilarion and I had scrambled up such a height of inhospitable stone. But we had. We had. And except for a couple of troublesome moments it had been a simple steady haul, or so it seemed to me in retrospect. The climb could have been worse, I told myself. It could have been very much worse.
“Of course,” I said. “There’s not one of them who couldn’t manage it.”
“Good!” Kilarion clapped me on the back and grinned. “Now we go down and tell them, eh? Unless you want to wait here, and I go down and tell them. Eh?”
“You wait here, if you like,” I said. “They’ll need to hear it from me.”
“We both go down, then.”