But why—where—
And then I remembered something. I heard Hendy’s voice of long ago, speaking out of the depths of my mind, telling me:
What I want is to go to the gods at the Summit and be purified by them. I want them to transform me. I don’t want to be who I am any longer. The memories that I carry around are too heavy for me, Poilar. I want to be rid of them.
Yes, that was it. The motive I had ascribed to her for running away was too trivial. Not out of a simple thing like jealousy had she gone, no, but out of the wish at long last to cast away the burden of her past, to step into the fire of the gods and come forth clean, new, purified—
I saw no chance that Hendy would be able to reach the Summit by herself, though. She must be lost in the fog and snow, desperately wandering through forbidding wastelands, searching hopelessly for the one trail that led to the top.
My first impulse was to give the order for us to leave this place and set out at once toward the Summit, so that we could find her. But I saw how impossible that was. For me to have delayed our departure for so long, and then suddenly to reverse myself and return to the upward road simply because my lover had run away? They would all laugh. It would be the end of my leadership of the group.
No. What I had to do was go after her by myself, up toward the Well or beyond it, find her wherever she was, even to the edge of the zone of the Summit itself, and bring her back. That too presented difficulties, though. The road was a mystery to me as much as it was to Hendy. I might survive my solitary upward journey, or I might not. I would be risking my life for purely personal reasons—jeopardizing the entire Pilgrimage—
And they would point out that I had let Ais go, and Jekka, and Jaif, and a whole host of others, with no attempt at searching for them. How, then, could I show any sort of special concern for Hendy? I should be as casual about her departure as I had been about the others, instead of running in panic to find her.
I was stymied. I did nothing at all, except to stare hour upon hour toward the upward path, and search hopelessly for some workable plan.
Then Hendy came back of her own accord, while I was still hesitating and stumbling and leading myself down blind trails.
It was on the third day of her absence. I had not slept all the while, nor had I allowed Alamir to come near me. I scarcely ate or spoke with others. As I stood looking toward the road that ran up the rim of the Kingdom I saw a pale figure appear high on the trail, like a dream-ghost, bathed in Ekmelios’s harsh white light. Slowly it descended, and I realized after a time that it was Hendy.
But it was a Hendy very much altered.
I went to her. Her hair was white and her skin was the color of death. She was very much taller now, tremendously elongated and thin as a skeleton, and her flesh, such as it was, was almost transparent. I was able to see the pulsing of her blood. So frail was this new Hendy that I could have put my finger through her with an easy thrust. There was no depth to her—no substance, virtually. She seemed terribly vulnerable, a woman without defenses.
“Hendy!” I said, suddenly uncertain.
“I am Hendy, yes,” she said. And I saw Hendy’s dark unmistakable eyes shining out of the gaunt pallid transformed face of this skeletal stranger.
“Where have you been? What have you done to yourself?”
She pointed toward the Summit.
I looked at her with narrowed eyes. “All the way up?”
“Only to the next Kingdom,” she said. I could barely hear her words.
“Ah. And what sort of Kingdom is that?”
“A place where no one speaks.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. “Transformed Ones, all of them?”
“Yes.”
“Who have lost the power of speech?”
“Who have renounced it,” she said. “They have been to the Summit and returned, and there they live, in a realm of total silence. They showed me the route that leads the rest of the way to the top, pointing with their fingers and not saying a word. I think they showed me the way to the Well, also.”
“And they showed you how to turn yourself into this.”
“No one showed me. It happened, that was all.”
“Ah,” I said, as though I understood. But I understood nothing. “Ah. Yes. It happened.”
“I felt myself changing. I let it happen.”
She seemed to be speaking to me from a land beyond death.
“Hendy,” I said. “Hendy, Hendy—”
I wanted to reach for her and take her into my arms. But I was afraid.
We stood face to face for a while, saying nothing, as though we both were citizens of that Kingdom that has taken a vow of silence. Her eyes were steady on mine.
I said finally, “Why did you go, Hendy?”
She hesitated a moment. Then she replied, “Because we were staying here to no purpose, and the Summit is what we came here for.”
“Did Alamir have anything to do with—”
“No,” she said, in a way that left no doubt. “Not a thing.”
“Ah,” I said yet again. “It was the Summit, then. But yet you didn’t go to it when you had the chance.”
“I discovered the road that goes there.”
“And turned back? Why?”
“I came back for you, Poilar.”
Her words went to my heart. I might have fallen down before her, but she held out her hands. I took them. They were cold as snow, brittle as sticks.
She had undergone a purification of a sort, yes. That was what this new form of hers meant. But some wounded part of the old Hendy still had not been burned away. Her Pilgrimage had farther to go yet.
“We must finish this,” she said.
“Yes. We have to.”
“But can you leave here?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Will you, though? This Kingdom is like a trap.”
“I had to stay here for a time, Hendy. I wasn’t ready to move on beyond this place.”
“And are you now?”
“Yes,” I said.
I issued the order and we assembled our things—our few remaining supplies, our scanty supply of food, our patched and tattered packs—and took our leave. My father’s father emerged onto the portico of his palace and watched us gravely in silence as we went. Some of his people came out also to watch us go. I saw no sign of Alamir.
Galli and I carried the body of the Irtiman. In this high country it was showing no sign of decay. His eyes were closed and his face was calm: he seemed only to be asleep.
Hendy walked beside me at the head of the column.
Her movements were steady and deliberate, with great strength and forcefulness about them. That frailty I had imagined in her at first was only an illusion. There was a kind of supremacy in her bearing that everyone accepted. Her changed appearance set her apart from the rest of us just as completely as Thrance’s did; but whereas Thrance’s grotesque, contorted form made him appear repellent and dark, Hendy now seemed ennobled and austere and majestic. I was beginning to see a sort of beauty in her strange new form, even.
She said, “There is the upward road.”
It was a narrow white track rising into a steep gorge with high walls of black stone. Almost at once it took us beyond the soft air and lazy warmth of my father’s father’s Kingdom. How they achieved that enchantment there is something that I never learned, and I suppose I never will. We were outside its sphere of potency now, back amidst the ice and bitter wind of these extreme uplands. But we adjusted our bodies, as we had done so many times before, and were able, after a fashion, to cope with the steadily increasing adversities of our surroundings.
I looked back once. Behind me I saw only a formless jumble wrapped in azure haze. We had come so far that I had lost all sense of the terrain we had covered. Somewhere back there was the meadow of the blue grass, and below it the rocky face of the cliff that set a boundary to the Kingdom of the Kvuz, and still further back were the precipitous crags of the Sembitol and the squalid cave of the Kavnalla; and then, far, far below the plateau of the Melted Ones and all the rest, down and down and down, the rock that Kilarion and I had climbed, and the place where the Wall-hawks had attacked us, and Varhad, the domain of the ghosts who went about sheathed in fungus. With Hithiat milepost beyond that, and Denbail and Sennt and Hespen, Glay and Ashten and Roshten, and our own village of Jespodar at the very bottom, so far away that it might just as well be on some other star. My life there now seemed only a dream. It was almost impossible for me to believe that for two full tens of years I had dwelled in a flat busy crowded place down there where the trees glistened with moisture and the air was like a steaming bath. The Wall was my only life now, and had been for so long that all that had gone before it had become unreal. Everything we had passed along the way to this place was fading now into that same unreality. Nothing had any solid existence now except the white path beneath my feet and the gorge of glossy black stone that surrounded me, and the roof of thick dark clouds overhead, as dense and forbidding as a slab of iron.