After that the rest was almost easy. For the second time that morning I came to the top of that wall of rock. I pulled Traiben over the cornice, and Kreod, and then came Galli on her own, looking as unwearied as if she had been out for a stroll.
One by one the other groups followed, until we were reunited on the plateau. I saw everyone blinking and looking about in wonder, astounded by the size of this great flat place that Kilarion had brought us to.
“Where do we go now?” Fesild asked. “Where’s the Wall?”
“There,” I said, and pointed to that remote rosy bulk in the southwest, dimly visible behind its screen of wispy white clouds and congested haze.
The others began to gasp. I think they had mistaken the pink gleam of it on the horizon for the sky; but now the comprehension was breaking upon them, as earlier it had broken upon me, that we were looking at last upon the true Wall—the Wall of the many Kingdoms of which the fables told, the Wall within the Wall, the immense hidden core of the mountain sheltered here in these interior folds and gorges, that great thing which still remained for us to conquer.
“So far away?” she murmured, for the plateau was vast and anyone’s soul would quail at the distance we had to travel across it in order to resume our climb. The magnitude of the climb that awaited us afterward took another moment to register itself upon her soul. Then she said, very softly: “And so high!”
We all were silent in the face of that colossal sun-shafted thing that lay before us. Such pride as we felt in having scaled the rock face below us shriveled to dust in the contemplation of what still must be done.
10
I could not tell you how long we spent in crossing that broad plateau. Many weeks, it must have been: but each day melted into the next and we kept no count. It was a rough, barren, scrubby place, sun-baked and stark and not nearly so flat as it had appeared from its edge, with dips and ridges and valleys and chasms to bedevil us every day. Even where it was level, the land was rocky and difficult to traverse. The vegetation was coarse and, for the most part, useless to us: woody, stringy, thorny, all but leafless, offering little but bitter roots and dry tasteless fruit. The only animals we saw were small gray furry creatures, ugly and scrawny and lopsided, which scuttered before us as we marched. They were too quick for us to catch nor would they come near the traps we set, but it was just as welclass="underline" we would not have had much nourishment from them, I think, nor any pleasure. The occasional shallow streams we found were sparsely inhabited also, though by patient hours of fishing we came up with netfuls of bony silvery wrigglers out of which we made meals of a sort.
From the second day of the crossing, or maybe it was the third, I felt myself beginning to hate the plateau. I had never felt such hatred in my life as the hatred I felt for that plateau. It was a wasteland that gave us no upwardness, and the upwardness was all I desired. Yet it had to be crossed. So in its way it was part of the upwardness, a necessity of the route; but I hated it all the same. There was no grandeur here. The great peaks of the rift were behind us, hidden from our view by tricks of the land; and the great peak that was Kosa Saag, the peak of peaks, lay impossibly far in front of us across the plateau; and so I hated it, because it must be crossed.
We marched from dawn to dusk, day upon day upon day, and the mountain seemed to remain at the same distance all the time. I said as much one afternoon when I had grown very weary.
“The same distance? No, worse, it moves backward as we approach,” said Naxa dourly. “We’ll never reach it even if we march for a thousand years.”
And voices came from behind us, grumbling and muttering to much the same purpose. Muurmut’s, of course, was prominent among them.
“What do you say, Poilar?” Naxa asked me. His voice was like an auger, drilling into my soul. “Should we give up the climb and build ourselves a village here? For surely we gain nothing by going forward and I doubt very much that we could ever find our way back.”
I made no reply. Already I regretted having spoken in the first place, and it would be folly to let myself be drawn into a debate on whether we should abandon our Pilgrimage.
Grycindil the Weaver, who had grown very sharp-tongued on the plateau, turned to Naxa and said, “Be quiet, will you? Who needs your gloom, you foolish Scribe?”
“I need my gloom!” Naxa cried. “It keeps me warm by night. And I think you need something from me, Grycindil, to keep you warm.” He nudged her arm and pushed his face close to hers, grinning evilly. “What about it, Weaver-girl? Shall you and I weave a few Changes tonight?”
“Fool,” answered Grycindil. And she poured out such a stream of abuse that I thought the air would burn.
“You are both of you fools,” said Galli, but in a good-humored way. “In this thin air you should save your breath for some better use.”
Kath, who was walking beside me, said in a low voice, “Do you know, Poilar, I wouldn’t mind drowning Naxa at the next stream, if only so that I would never have to hear that whining voice of his again.”
“A good idea. If only we could.”
“But I confess it troubles me also that the mountain grows no closer.”
“It grows closer with every step we take,” I replied sharply. I was getting angry now. Perhaps I had doubts of my own that were causing a soreness in my soul. Naxa was only a nuisance but Muurmut had the capacity to make real trouble, and I knew that very shortly he would, if this kind of talk continued. I had to cut it off. “It only seems to stay at the same distance, is what I told Naxa. And we’re in no hurry, are we, Kath? If we spend all the rest of our lives on this Pilgrimage, what harm is there in that?”
He looked at me for a long moment, as though that was a new thought to him. Then he nodded, and we went onward without speaking again. The grumblers behind us ceased their chatter, after a time.
But there had been poison in Naxa’s words, and all that day it seeped deeper into my soul. That night when we camped I sank into such a dark brooding and despondency that I scarcely knew myself. All I could think was, This plateau has no end, this plateau has no end, we will spend all the years of our lives attempting to cross it. And I thought, Naxa is right. Better to turn back, and build a new village for ourselves somewhere on the lower slopes, than to expend ourselves in this interminable and futile quest.
The urge to make an end to this Pilgrimage came on me in wave after wave. Naxa was right. Muurmut was right. All the faint-hearted ones were right. Why struggle like this, in hope of finding gods who might not even exist? We had thrown away our lives in this foolish Pilgrimage. Our only choices now were the disgrace of an early return to the village and the death that waited for us in this wilderness.
Such thinking was terrible blasphemy. At another time I would have fought it away. But this night it was too much for me; it overwhelmed me; I could not help but yield to its power and temptation; and in yielding I felt my soul beginning to freeze, I felt my spirit becoming encased in ice.