So we saw great airy beings twice as tall as the tallest of us, who wrapped themselves in wings of vast spread but never attempted to use them. We saw others that walked in sheets of white flame, and some that moved in globes of darkness, and those that seemed like flowing cascades of water. We saw men who looked like trees and women who looked like swords. We saw frail filmy things that drifted like wisps on the wind. We saw giant boulders with eyes, and mouths that smiled knowingly as we went by. And I remembered now the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel, which we had had to read when we were youngsters training for our Pilgrimage, and which I had thought was all fable and fairy-tale; but no, that was wrong, I saw now. Maylat Gakkerel, whoever he might have been, had seen these Kingdoms and had returned from them with enough of his sanity intact to set down an account of them, and however fevered and impenetrable and unreal that difficult book may have seemed to us, it was no work of fancy but a sober chronicle of the upper reaches of Kosa Saag.
It was here that I began to lose the members of my Forty.
There was no way I could prevent it. Those who had resisted the horrors below did not have the strength to turn their backs on the beauties and strangenesses up here. They slipped away as though they were fading into the mist. Even if I had chained us all together wrist to wrist, they would have found some way to go; for the temptation of these Kingdoms was immense.
Tull the Clown was the first to depart. That was no real surprise, for she had defected once already before; and although she had come back that time she still bore the taint of the Sembitol about her, and a permanent melancholy where once she had been all life and buoyancy. She went in the night, soon after the Irtiman’s death, and Thissa said later that she could feel her dancing on the wind. Poor Tull, I certainly prayed that she was.
But then Seppil the Carpenter disappeared, and Ijo the Scholar, and our other Scholar too, little Bilair. They went on different days and in different Kingdoms. I caused searches to be made for each of them, though only in a perfunctory way, for I suppose I was beginning to undergo a transformation of sorts myself, and I no longer was as concerned to lose my companions as I once had been. Let them go, something within me whispered. Let them find their own destinies up here, if the Summit is not what they truly seek. Most who attempt the quest are fated to fail it, and so be it. So be it.
Thrance sidled up to me and grinned his diabolical grin, and said, “So that’s what it’s like, when you reach the top of the Wall? You simply float away and join the Kingdoms? If that’s the case, why did we bother to climb so high? We could have saved ourselves the effort and stayed down below, and let ourselves be transformed by the Kavnalla.”
“I wish you had,” I told him.
“Ah, so unkind, Poilar, so very unkind! What harm have I ever done you? Didn’t I guide you through some difficult places?”
I made a shooing gesture at him, as though he were a stinging palibozo hovering about my head.
“Go, Thrance. Turn yourself into air, or water, or a pillar of fire. Let me be.”
He grinned again, twice as fierce as before. “Ah, no, no, no, Poilar! I’ll stay by your side to the top! We are allies in this, you and I. We are colleagues of the trail.” Then he laughed and said, “But it’ll be only the two of us by the time we reach the Summit. The others will all long be gone.”
“Let me be, Thrance,” I told him a second time. “Or by all the gods I’ll hurl you down the mountainside.”
“See if it isn’t so,” he said. “You’ll lose them all as we go up.”
And that night Ais the Musician went from us, and Dorn the Clown; and two days afterward, in a Kingdom whose ruler lived in a glistening limestone mansion cut deep into the mountain, a place of great colonnades and porticos and torch-lit chambers and passages and halls and an immense throne room fit for a god, we lost Jekka the Healer, which was a grievous loss indeed. When I counted up in the morning, there were only twenty-seven of us left, out of our Forty, and Thrance the twenty-eighth. This time I made no attempt at sending out searchers. It seemed a hopeless thing to do. I wondered whether Thrance might not have been right, that all the others would go, leaving only him and me at the end. Indeed I wondered whether I myself would be among the Transformed before this was over. For my resolve had weakened more than once along the way up; and if it weakened again here, it would be the end of my quest. I knew I must fight that; but would I be able to win? And so in perplexity I led the remainder of my people onward, along an ever-narrowing trail, toward the cloud-shrouded realm above.
21
Though we were dwindling swiftly now, the core of my Forty still remained to me—the ones I loved best, Traiben and Galli and Thissa and Jaif and of course Hendy. Kilarion stayed with us, and Kath, and Naxa, the Healers Maiti and Kreod did not leave, nor Grycindil, nor Marsiel.
We went higher. The air grew colder and colder, and it was so thin we had to make our chests expand like balloons to draw any sustenance from it. When we glanced back we found ourselves looking down at the tips of the surrounding peaks, far below us. It was like making our way up the side of a needle that pierced the sky. The roof of cloud that hid the Summit from our sight seemed almost to be pressing against my shoulders now, though in fact it was still far ahead.
Scardil left us, and Pren, and Ghibbilau. I regretted those losses but I did nothing to reclaim them. Then Ijo the Scholar came back, looking somewhat changed from what he had been, but he would not say where he had been or what had befallen him. On the day of his return we lost Chaliza and Thuiman, and in a Kingdom where gusts of pale flame spurted from the ground we lost two more: Noomai the Metalworker and then Jaif the Singer, whom I had not expected to leave. That was hard, losing Jaif. We had never been close friends but we had been good allies. In the days just afterward Hendy said that she felt his presence still with us, hovering in the air: she could hear his song, she said. Perhaps so. But I could not.
Then one night the sky throbbed with bands of pink light from dusk to dawn, as happens sometimes rarely when Marilemma rises at twilight and remains overhead all during the hours of darkness. That is usually an omen. And the next day we went on into a place where I found myself confronted with a great and wonderful strangeness, which went beyond anything I had experienced thus far in my entire ascent.
This was a small Kingdom set into a stony ridge that was like a bowl with a high sharp rim, on an outlying breast of the mountain. Gray wisps of old snow surrounded its rock-girt border, for at these heights we were in cold territory indeed, with hard winds and frequent gales of sleet. I suppose we could have gone past this Kingdom without entering it, since it lay a little distance off the main road; but we were weary from the day’s bleak oppressive march through this chilly country, and now I saw dark storm-clouds gathering. It seemed a good idea to seek shelter for the night, though it was still only a little past midday.
Kath and Kilarion were the first two to go over the rim, and I heard whistles of surprise from them. When I came up over it myself I saw why. We were looking down into a lush peaceful garden where the air was soft and warm and heavy, as though we had been returned in a moment’s twinkling to our village at the base of the Wall. We heard the singing of birds and we smelled the fragrance of a thousand kinds of flowers, and in the distance rose a giant grove of thick-trunked gollacundra trees heavy with purple fruit amidst their brilliant sheaves of dangling golden foliage. This, in the cold and snowy upper reaches of Kosa Saag! And moving about in it were graceful and elegant people with strands of gold about their breasts and garments of woven scarlet at their loins, who seemed without exception to be in the finest flush of youth and beauty. Truly it was as if we had come stumbling into the home of the gods.