The third year of our training was the worst: it was like swimming in a sea of fire. All the impurities were being burned out of us. We became gaunt and scarred and tough, and every muscle of our bodies ached all the time.
We would rise at dawn and climb the hideous greenstone hills on the eastern edge of the Wall between Ashten and Glay, cutting ourselves in a thousand places as we dragged ourselves across the crumbling ridges. We caught small animals with our hands and ate them raw. We dug for roots and gnawed them, dirt and all. We threw rocks at birds to bring them down, and got nothing to eat that day if we failed to hit our marks. We crawled in mud and shivered in stinging rain. We fought duels with gnarled cudgels, so that we might learn how to defend ourselves against the beasts and phantoms that were said to inhabit the mountain. When we became too filthy to stand our own stink we bathed in rivers so icy they burned the skin, and lay awake all night on miserable outcroppings of jagged stone, pretending they were beds of soft leaves.
Many of us died. We fell from exposed outcroppings; we were caught in turbulent streams and were swept away; we chose the wrong berries to eat in the wilderness, and perished in agony, bellies bloated, vomiting black bile. I witnessed at least five or six of the deaths myself. Two were boys I had known all my life.
Others could no longer bear the strain, and withdrew from the training. Every day our teachers told us, “There is no shame in withdrawing,” and anyone who believed that gladly accepted the chance. By the beginning of our fourth year there were only four hundred left. This time the tenth of Orgulet saw no new Winnowing: it would have been too cruel to dismiss any of us at this point. We were doing our own Winnowing now, our numbers reduced daily by weariness or illness or fear or simple bad luck.
Once again my self-confidence wavered. I went through a difficult time when I was certain that I was going to fail. My doubts grew so strong that finally I went to the shop of Thissa the Witch and bought myself a charm for success. Thissa was a candidate for selection herself, and everyone thought she stood a good chance. My hope was that she would have some private desire to see me chosen as one of the men of her Forty, and so would give me a good spell.
But Thissa was cool to me at first. She moved about her shop in a busy way, moving things from one counter to another as though she had no time for me. “I am busy with a curse now that has to be ready by nightfall,” she said. And she looked away.
I was persistent, though. “Please, Thissa. Please. Otherwise the Masters may tap me at the next Winnowing.”
I stroked her hand and nuzzled against her shoulder. She was wearing a thin light robe, bordered all around with mystic signs worked in golden thread, which showed the outlines of her shoulders and hips. I told her how much I admired her slender supple body, how beautiful her amber eyes were. We had done a few matings by this time, Thissa and I, though she was always distant and reluctant with me, and there had been a strangeness about her embrace, a kind of tingling feeling that she gave off, that had left me puzzled and uneasy, rather than properly satisfied, each time. But despite all that she was beautiful in her delicate way, and I told her so.
She told me to spare her the flattery, as she had told me all too many times before; but nevertheless she seemed to soften a little. And in the end I prevailed after much coaxing, and she cast the spell for me, which involved mixing her urine with mine and sprinkling it outside Pilgrim Lodge while saying certain special words. I knew it was a good spell. And indeed it was. Nor would she take any money from me for it.
After that my mood turned optimistic again. Everything was going the right way for me. I had never felt happier or more vigorous in my life. My crooked leg meant nothing in these trials: it was no handicap at all, for I had strength instead of grace, and agility instead of speed, and confidence enough for three. Traiben too was still among us, and I was no longer surprised at that, for he had toughened amazingly in these years and no one could call him a weakling now, though it still seemed to me that he was frail and easily wearied. The flame that burned within him saw him onward. We both of us knew that we would survive and prevail until the end.
But as always Traiben had his strange moments. One day he said to me quite abruptly, “Tell me, Poilar, do you think life has any real purpose?”
As always when he asked questions of that sort some lines of the catechism leaped readily to my mind. “Our purpose is to go to the gods at the Summit and pay our homage to them, as the First Climber taught us to do,” I said. “And learn useful things from them, as He did, and bring them back to enrich our nation.”
“But what point is there in doing that?”
The catechism offered me no clues about that. Puzzled, I said, “Why, so we can lead better lives!”
“And what point is there in that?”
He was starting to anger me now. I shoved him with my open hand. “Stop this,” I said. “You sound like a child who keeps on asking, ‘Why? Why?’ when things are explained to him. What point indeed? We want to lead better lives because that’s better than leading worse ones.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Why do you waste your breath with meaningless issues like these, Traiben?”
He was silent for a time. Then he said, “Nothing has any meaning, Poilar. Not if you look at it closely. We say, ‘This is good,’ or ‘This is bad,’ or ‘The gods will thus and so,’ but how do we know? Why is one thing good and another thing bad? Because we say so? Because the gods say so? How do we know that they do? Nobody whom I know has ever heard them speak.”
“Enough, Traiben!”
But when these moods possessed him there was no stopping him. He would endlessly pursue some strange line of inquiry that would never have occurred to anyone else, until he reached a conclusion that seemed to bear no relation to any question he had been asking.
He said now, “Even though nothing has any meaning, I believe we should seek for meaning all the same. Do you agree?”
I sighed. “Yes, Traiben.”
“And so we must climb the Wall, because we think that the gods will it, and because we hope to gain knowledge from them that will better our lives.”
“Yes. Of course. You belabor the obvious.”
His eyes were aglow. “But now I’ve come to see that there’s a third reason for going up. Which is to attempt to discover what kind of creatures the gods may be. How they are different from us, and where their superiority lies.”
“And what good will that do?”
“So that we can become gods ourselves.”
“You want to be a god, Traiben?”
“Why not? Are you content to be what you are?”
“Yes. Very much so,” I said.
“And what are you, then? What are we?”
“We are the creatures whom the gods created to do their will. The sacred books tell us so. We were meant to be mortals and they were meant to be gods. That’s good enough for me. Why isn’t it good enough for you?”
“It isn’t because it isn’t. The day I say, ‘This is good enough for me,’ is the day I begin to die, Poilar. I want to know what I am. After that I want to know what I’m capable of becoming. And then I want to become it. I want to keep reaching higher all the time.”
I thought of my star-dream, and how as I lay in its throes I would toss and turn and reach my hands toward Heaven. And I thought that I understood something of what Traiben was saying; for, after all, did I not burn with a hunger to climb that mountain to its loftiest point, and stand before the holy beings who inhabited its crest, and give myself up to their will so that I might become something greater than I had been?
But then I shook my head. He had gone too far. “No, Traiben. I think it’s wild nonsense to talk about mortals becoming gods. And in any case I don’t want to be one myself.”