This was all strange to me, this embracing of defeat and despair. It was the dreariness of the plateau that did it to me, that and Naxa’s insidious poisonous words. While the others sprawled about the campfire that night singing village songs and laughing at the antics of Gazin the Juggler and Dorn and Tull, our two lively Clowns, I went off by myself and sat bleakly in the saddle of a gray rock encrusted with dry moss, and stared empty-eyed at the miserable distances that still confronted us. Two moons were aloft, the cheerless Karibos and Theinibos, and by the harsh light that comes from their pockmarked faces I saw only sorrow and grief in this withered eroded landscape. I think it was the worst hour of my life, the hour that I sat there watching spiny-backed night-beasts scampering across that desolate waste; and by the end of it I was ready to strike camp and slink back down the side of the Wall that very evening. For me the Pilgrimage was at an end then and there. It had lost all meaning. It had ceased utterly to make sense. What was the good of it? What was the good of anything? There was nothing to gain in this place but pain, and then more pain; and the gods, in their eyrie far above, were looking down at our struggles and laughing.
The enterprise to which we had shaped our lives seemed pointless to me in that dark moment. I found myself wishing that I had lost my footing on Kilarion’s cliff and gone plunging to a swift doom, rather than having lived to come to this place of interminable toil.
Then suddenly Traiben stood before me.
“Poilar?”
“Let me be, Traiben.”
“Why do you sit here like this?”
“To enjoy the lovely moonlight,” I said bitterly.
“And what are you thinking as you sit here in the lovely moonlight, Poilar?”
“Nothing. I’m thinking nothing at all.”
“Tell me,” Traiben said.
“Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Poilar.”
“Then you tell me,” I said, though I feared that he truly did, and if that was so I was far from eager to hear it from him.
He bent down a little way, so that his great saucer eyes were on a line with mine, and I saw something in those eyes—a force, a ferocity, a fury—that I had never seen there before. Surely there was a Power in him.
“You’re thinking of the village,” he said.
“No. I never think of the village.”
“Of the village, yes. Of our House. Of Turimel the Holy. You’re lying on a couch with Turimel in our House and you and she are making the Changes together.”
“At this moment Turimel is happily lying with Jecopon the Singer, to whom she was sealed five years ago. I never think of Turimel.” I turned away from that fierce unwavering gaze of his. “Why are you bothering me like this, Traiben?”
He caught me by the chin and pulled my head around.
“Look at me!”
“Traiben—”
“Do you want to go home, Poilar? Is that it?”
“This plateau makes me sick.”
“Yes. It makes all of us sick. Do you want to go home?”
“No. Of course not. What are you saying?”
“We made a vow, you and I, when we were twelve.”
“Yes, I know,” I said, with no strength at all in my voice. “How could I forget.” I adopted a high mimicking tone. “We will climb to the Summit, and meet the gods, and see all the wonders and learn all the mysteries. And then return to the village. That was what we swore.”
“Yes, and I for one mean to keep my oath,” said Traiben, still glaring at me as though I were the sworn enemy of his House.
“As do I.”
“Do you? Do you?”
He took me by the shoulders and shook me so hard that I thought my shape would begin to shift.
I let him shake me. I said nothing, I did nothing.
“Poilar, Poilar, Poilar, what’s wrong with you tonight? Tell me. Tell me!”
“The plateau. The moonlight. The distances.”
“And so you want to turn back. Oh, how happy Muurmut will be, when he finds out that the great leader Poilar is broken like this! The Summit means nothing to you any more. The gods. Our vow. The only thing you desire is to give up and go back.”
“Oh, not so,” I said, without much conviction. “Not so at all.”
He shook his head. “What I say is true, but you won’t admit it even to me.”
“Have you become a Witch, Traiben, that you can read my mind so easily?”
“I could always read you, Poilar. There’s no need to pretend with me. You want to turn back. Is that not true?”
His eyes were blazing. To my amazement I realized that I was afraid of him, just then.
I could make no answer.
He said, after a long while, speaking now in a cold and quiet tone, “Well, let me tell you only this, Poilar: I mean to keep my oath whatever you may do. If I’m the only one of us who wants to go on, then so be it. I’ll go on. And when you get back to the village, a year or two from now, or three or four, and they ask you where Traiben is, you can say that he has gone to the Summit, that he’s up there right now, discussing philosophy with the gods.” He stood back and held out his hand, fingers outstretched in the farewell sign. “I’ll miss you, Poilar. I’ll never have another friend like you.”
Angrily I slapped the hand down to his side.
It seemed to me that he was patronizing me. I couldn’t stand that, not from him. “This is foolishness, Traiben. You know that I’ll be at the Summit with you, when you get there.”
I snapped the words out at him. I meant them to be full of conviction. But the conviction wasn’t there, and Traiben knew that as well as I.
“Ah, but will you?” he asked. “Will you, Poilar?”
And he walked away and left me there not knowing whether I was lying to myself or not.
I sat alone in bewilderment for another hour or more; and then, when everyone else had gone to sleep except those who were on watch, I returned to the camp and slipped into my bedroll. That night I had the star-dream again, the one that I had been having since I was a boy, but it had never been as intense as this before, not even on that first night when the entire village had dreamed it with me. I stood alone, poised on a black jagged mountaintop where icy winds blew. All about me was the god-light, the devil-light, the light that comes out of the end of time and goes streaming toward the beginning. I flexed my legs, I bent and leaped and went soaring toward Heaven, toward the radiant country where the gods abide. And the stars, alive and vibrating and warmer than any fire could ever be, opened to me and embraced me and took me among themselves, and I felt rivers of god-wisdom rushing into my soul.
All the doubt that had infected me in this dismal place was burned out of me in that moment of starfire. The ecstasy of the Pilgrimage possessed me fully once more, and when I awakened, what seemed like moments later, morning had come and the light of both suns was hammering joyously, white over scarlet, against the slopes of the distant Wall. I would have climbed it in a bound, if it had been closer. I knew I would never waver in my faith again. Nor did I, except for a little while just before our Pilgrimage’s end; though whether I came down from the Wall with the same faith in which I ascended it is something for you to measure and judge when you have heard all my story.
But my vision of the night healed me of my dark uncertainties. And I could see in the eyes of all the others that morning that once again those around me had shared my dream, even Muurmut, who hated me and would gladly have overthrown me. They looked at me just then as though I were no mortal being, but someone who was at home among the gods of Heaven.
Even so, there was no end to the grumbling. When we resumed our march a few hours later, I found myself walking in a group with Galli and Gazin and Ghibbilau the Grower and Naxa the Scribe; and we had not gone a hundred paces before Naxa began speaking as he had the night before, the same doleful stuff about how the Wall seemed to be getting farther away from us every day, instead of closer. “What I am reminded of,” he said, “is the tale of Kesper the Scholar, who angered the gods by declaring that he intended to become as wise as they are. So they caused it to happen that for each book Kesper read, he would forget two others. It is the same with us, I think: for each step we take, the mountain moves two paces back, and so—”