The Summit-dwellers appeared amazed to see this unexpected phalanx rushing toward them. They were thrown into confusion. Halting their onslaught at once, they stood still, looking toward one another and uttering high-pitched chattering cries of alarm; and then they turned and ran, scampering like rock-apes across the flat open space. In no time at all they vanished on the far side of the ruined structure, disappearing into invisible lairs set in crevices of the bordering rocks.
We stared at each other in surprise and relief, and then we began to laugh. It had been so easy, driving them off! Who would have thought they would turn and flee at the first sign of resistance? I called out my thanks to Thrance for his quick wit and my congratulations to all for their courage.
Traiben stood silent beside me, his face stricken with horror.
“What is it?” I asked him. “Are you hurt?”
He shook his head. Then he pointed off into the distance, toward the rocks where the Summit-dwellers had taken refuge. His hand was trembling.
“Kreshe and Thig, man! What is it?”
“The gods,” Traiben said, in a voice that sounded more dead than alive. “There they are, Poilar. Kreshe and Thig, Sandu Sando and Selemoy. There. There. We’ve just seen them. Those are our gods, Poilar! The creatures of the Summit!”
My head ran in circles. What monstrous madness was this that Traiben was spouting? I felt an abyss opening beneath my feet. Those beasts the gods? What was he saying? What was he saying? I was bewildered at first and then I was furious, and I came close to striking Traiben for his blasphemy. Even at this moment, here on the bleak and rocky Summit of Kosa Saag, I still felt an abiding certainty that Kreshe and Thig and Selemoy and the rest, Sandu Sando and Nir-i-Sellin and the others of that golden band, must be waiting for us somewhere nearby in their gleaming palace, the one I had seen in my vision that night as I lay under the stars beside Hendy. But I held my hand, out of love for him, and struggled to understand what he was trying to say.
“Do you remember,” he asked me, “what the dead Irtiman said? About the ship that came from the world called Earth, and landed here at the top of Kosa Saag, and the settlement that was founded here?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course I do.”
“What can these animals be,” Traiben said, “if not the fallen remnants of that Irtiman settlement of long ago?”
I considered that. And realized that something of what Traiben had said must be true. These debased creatures looked nothing much like Irtimen, and yet in form they were much more like the Irtiman we had found than they were like us. There was a similarity of outline, at least. The Irtiman had been nowhere near as disagreeable in appearance as these creatures, but his proportions indeed had been very much like theirs, the long arms, the short legs, the odd set of the head against the shoulders. And there was one other thing in common, for he had never entered a neuter form that I had ever noticed, but had always remained male, as the males of this tribe seemed also to do.
So these capering animals were more likely the Irtiman’s kin than ours, the pitiful hideous descendants, I supposed, of those Irtimen who had come to the Summit to found a village long ago. Yes, I thought: they must surely be Irtimen of some sort. But that did not make them gods. Wild decadent Irtimen, that was all they were, who had slipped into barbarism during the thousands of years of their settlement here.
I said as much to Traiben.
“And where are the gods, then?” he asked me, in a hard sharp-edged tone that seemed not like his voice at all. “Where, Poilar? Where are they? We are at the Summit—is there any doubt of that? But I don’t see the shining palaces. I don’t see the golden courtyards. I don’t see the feasting-hall of Kreshe. The First Climber said, He found gods here when He finally reached this place. Well, where are they?” He waved his hand once again toward the rockbound lairs of the savage Irtimen. “Where are they, Poilar?”
24
To Traiben’s questions I had no answers. His words struck at me like hammers, and I stood there and accepted the blows, but my heart cried out from the pain and there was a moment when I thought I would rather hurl myself from the mountain than have to listen to any more of what he was saying. For something perverse within me said to me that Traiben was right, as he so often was, that there were no gods atop this mountain or else that these creatures were our gods, or the children of our gods, and some terrible mistake had been made and perpetuated across the thousands of years of the Pilgrimage.
I could not face the possibility that that was so. Not only was it blasphemy: it was an absurdity besides, the negation of everything I believed. To have come this far, and suffered so much, for nothing? It could not be. The mere thought of it sent a black wind roaring through my soul.
But I could not refute Traiben’s arguments, either. For where were the palaces I had dreamed of beholding up here? Where, indeed, were the gods? We could see virtually from one side of the Summit to the other. And all that we had found here were two metal houses—one house small and gleaming with a few frightened faces peering out from it, faces that did not seem to be the faces of gods, and the other one large and old and rotting—and a band of strange naked creatures capering and shrieking and hurling missiles with wild uncertain aim.
It was an awful moment. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to tell them what to do. They had not heard what Traiben had said, nor did any of them know a thing of what the dead Irtiman had told me in his final hours about the Summit and the gods. But here we were at the Summit, and what was to happen now? What could I say, how could I explain? This was the culmination of our Pilgrimage. Was this all there was, these two metal houses, these strange shrieking creatures? Were we now supposed to turn around and slink back down through all the myriad Kingdoms to the half-forgotten village at the bottom of the Wall that we had set out from so long ago, and take up life in the roundhouse of the Returned Ones, and maintain a silence about all that we had seen at the Summit, as those who had returned before us had done?
The taste of ashes was in my mouth. I had never known such despair. I could not hide, I could not flee, I could not offer any explanations. But perhaps this shining metal house held the answers I wanted, or some part of them.
On legs that felt like slabs of wood I stumbled forward, with no plan in my mind, until I found myself standing beneath the little gleaming house on metal struts. The faces still were peering from the small windows.
This close, I recognized them plainly for what they were. Not the faces of gods, whatever the faces of gods might be like—no, almost certainly not gods.
They were the faces of Irtimen. The three friends of our Irtiman, to whom he had been so eager to return before he died.
Well, I had promised to bring him to them. And I had.
“Irtimen!” I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted with all my strength. It seemed to me that the wind was blowing away my words; I could scarcely hear my voice myself. But I persevered. “Irtimen! Irtimen! Listen to me! I am Poilar Crookleg of Jespodar village, and I have something for you!”
Silence. A terrible stillness on the plateau.
“Irtimen, do you hear me? Use those little boxes of yours that let you speak our language!”
But how could they hear me, locked up inside that metal house of theirs?
I turned and looked back. Kilarion and Talbol had carried the preserved body of the Irtiman the last leg of the journey to the Summit. Now it lay like a child’s discarded doll at the edge of the plateau, where we had come up into this place.