“I’m afraid, Poilar,” she said again.
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No—no—”
“What are you afraid of, then?”
“That it won’t—go well—for you—”
“Forget about me. Let it go well for you.”
Then she did a very strange thing, which was to slide down in the bedroll and put her hand to my crooked leg, timidly at first, then more boldly, stroking the ankle with the gentlest of touches. No one had ever done that before, and it amazed me. I nearly pulled away from her. But then I realized what she was telling me with that touch, which was, I think, that she accepted my deformity as I was accepting hers, mine being one of the body and hers being something within, something of the spirit. It was a way of declaring love. So I let her stroke my ankle for another moment or two more, and then, gently, I drew her up toward me again so that we were face to face, and I smiled at her and nodded in the darkness. Her eyes were bright. I saw fear in them and eagerness also.
“Poilar?”
“Yes?”
“Poi—lar—”
“Yes. Yes.”
For a moment I thought of the men of Tipkeyn standing in a circle around her, filling her with wine and laughing as she got drunk. Angrily I shoved them from my mind. They must not be in my mind if they were ever to be expelled from hers.
I covered her with my body.
“Poilar,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
“Poilar. Poilar. Poilar.”
We bathed afterward in the stream. She was quiet, calm, apparently happy. When you make the Changes, it lifts you up out of the prison of your solitary flesh, and carries you toward the gods; and for a little while you feel that you are one with them, though you must all too soon return. I hoped it had been that way with Hendy. I asked her nothing about what she had experienced or how she might feel now, though, not so much because I was afraid of getting a displeasing answer as that I wanted simply to let the moment exist for itself, without examination, without analysis and introspectiveness. She knew what she had felt. I knew what I had. Let that be sufficient to each of us, I told myself.
Everyone seemed to know, the next day, what had taken place between Hendy and me. It was as if they had all been standing lined up along the stream in the night, watching us. There were little smiles, quizzical glances, knowing looks. Certainly Hendy and I had given them no clue by our daytime behavior: she said barely a thing to me all day, marching along in the back of the group as she customarily did, scarcely even looking at me when we halted and the whole group was together. She knew and I knew and to us that was enough. But the others knew also. Well, there are very few secrets in a band of Pilgrims. I doubted very much that we had been spied upon; I suspected rather that there was an aura around Hendy and me, a glow of the kind that people give off when they have deliberately kept their distance from each other for a long while and then have allowed themselves to come together. Such a thing shows. It always shows. There is an intensity in the air that can’t be hidden, a radiance, and all attempts at hiding it only make it glow all the more brightly.
I wondered what some of the other women with whom I had made the Changes during our journey might be thinking. There must always be those who tell themselves that there is something special about making the Changes with a leader. They cherish it as a mark of his favor, for whatever that may be worth. Would there be resentment at my beginning a new mating, one which promised to be other than casual? I hoped not; but if there was, then so be it. I owed none of them anything. There had been no sealing with any of them; there never could be. On the Pilgrimage you meet, you are attracted, you do the Changes, you drift apart. Perhaps you come together again for a while and do it all again. That was how it had been for me with Galli, with Stum, with Marsiel, with Min, with Thissa. There are no sealings there. There are no obligations. If I had mated with Galli once, and with Thissa afterward, and with this one and with that one, and now I was with Hendy, so be it. It is how things are. I might seal with Hendy some day, when we were no longer on the Wall. I might not. Who could say? Who knew if we would ever leave the Wall? We were on the Wall now, and that was the essential thing. Our lives were suspended while we climbed. And we might climb forever.
I said to Muurmut that day, as I had promised myself to do, “My plan is to seek a way up between those two peaks. It seems to me that that line of trees in the cleft between them indicates a watercourse, and we might be able to follow along it. What do you think?” And I pointed at random toward a distant pair of the jagged red cliffs that surrounded us, two of which happened to have a dense streak of green running down the steep slope that was their meeting-place. Wild grezbors could not have climbed that slope. Nor could we, not without wings to lift us to its top.
“Well,” Muurmut said, and I knew at once from his hesitation that he had no more idea of the proper way to go than I did. “You may be right, Poilar. But I tell you, I know a little sky-magic, and I’ve cast a spell that gives me an entirely different slant on things.”
The thought of stolid beefy-faced Muurmut the Vintner practicing sky-magic, or any other sort of magic, almost made me laugh out loud. Casting spells is the prerogative of the House of Witches, of course, and no one else. But I was making an effort to be conciliatory, as was he in his way also, I suppose. So instead of snorting derisively I simply said, “Ah, and which route would you suggest, then?”
He was taken aback. I don’t think he had expected me to ask him point blank that way, right there and then.
“That one,” he said after a moment, nodding toward the east, halfway around the bowl of peaks from the direction I had just proposed. He was plainly stabbing in the dark, just as I had done. “Do you see that short-shouldered mountain over there, with the look of a saddle to it, and the trail of cloud above it like a spear? If we mount that saddle we can ride right up into the sky.”
“You think?”
“So the spell that I cast said, very definitely.”
“Then that is the way we’ll go,” I told him, and he looked at me thunderstruck. But what did I have to lose? If Muurmut’s way proved to be the right one, then we were free of this grassy valley at last and would be able to continue our ascent, which in truth was the only thing that really mattered. And if his sky-magic proved to be the nonsense that I suspected it to be, well, at least no one could say thereafter that I was willfully depriving us of the benefits of Muurmut’s sage advice for the sake of enhancing my own glory.
So I called the whole group together and proclaimed the word. “We are changing our route,” I said. “Muurmut’s sky-magic tells us that the saddle-shaped mountain is the one we must climb. So we will attempt it; and all credit be to Muurmut if it turns out that his spells have opened the way for us.” And I gestured to him as though he was the very fount of wisdom; and he smiled and nodded and waved like one who has just been chosen to be the head of his House. But his face grew even more red than usual, and I knew that he had seen through my cleverness, and hated me all the more for it. Well, so be it. He had wanted to lead. Now I was giving him his chance.
15
That night we camped in a meadow of saw-edged red grass just below the mountain of Muurmut’s choice, and as I lay half-dreaming beside Hendy a vision came to me of the gods in their great palace at the Summit.
What I saw was this:
I had climbed the last stretch to the top of the mountain alone, through a bitter landscape of ice and whirling snow sharp as knives, and hard winds that bit into my flesh like whips of fire. But now I came stumbling half dead, or more than half, into a wondrous realm of golden light where soft breezes blew and the air was sweet as young wine; and I saw the crystal columns of the palace of the gods, and the gods themselves walking about within it, clad in scarlet robes and wearing high, narrow crowns of gold. There stood Kreshe the Creator, a shining being who was neither male nor female, though I had always thought of him as a man until this moment: from the hands of this great god, which were long and tapering and so beautiful that I wept at the sight, came streams of bright light that rose into the air and arched out to encircle all the World, so that they were like strands of the finest gold that held all things in communion with all other things through their linkage with Kreshe. Nearby, with a beaker of foaming drink in his hand, was a cheerful sunny-faced one, Thig the Shaper, he who had taken the formless world that Kreshe had made and given it its form. Thig was radiant as the sun; but beside him, pouring wine into Thig’s beaker, was dour Sandu Sando the Avenger, darker than a moonless night, with a face like a cluster of swords and hands like daggers, and when he laughed at some joke of Thig’s his voice fell upon the air like a hatchet.