“You’d rather stay a mortal?”
“Yes. I’m a mortal because the gods mean me to be a mortal.”
“You ought to give more thought to these matters,” Traiben said. “Your mind marches in a circle. And your feet will too, if you’re not careful.”
I shook my head. “Sometimes I think you may be crazy, Traiben.”
“Sometimes I wish you were crazier,” he said.
The number of remaining candidates dropped and dropped. We were down to a hundred, ninety, eighty, seventy. It was a strange time for those of us who remained. We were all fiercely pledged to the Pilgrimage: anyone who might weaken and drop out had already done so, and anyone clumsy or careless enough to be killed or injured in the course of the training was long gone from our midst. We who had lasted this long meant to stay the course. A powerful kind of comradeship had developed among us. But there were still too many of us; and so we eyed our dearly loved comrades with unashamed ferocity, privately thinking, May the gods blight you tomorrow, may your soul drain out of your body like a trickle of cold water, may you fall from the cliff and shatter both your legs, may your courage desert you entirely. Anything, so long as you cease to stand in my way. And then we would smile, because everyone knew that everyone else was thinking the same things about him that he was thinking about them.
Seventy was a critical number: it brought on the Final Winnowing, the Silent Winnowing, when the actual Forty would be chosen. So once again we stood in the field, just a handful of us where more than four thousand had been three years earlier, and the Masters moved among us. The curious thing about this last Winnowing was that there was no tap: thirty were to be eliminated, but they would not be told. That is why this was called the Silent Winnowing. We were to be left in the dark another six months, not knowing whether we had been dismissed or not, but still undergoing all the trials and hardships of the training.
“Why do you think it’s done this way?” I asked Traiben.
And he said, “Because there’s always the chance that some of the chosen Forty will die during the final months of the training, and then they can be replaced from among the Thirty. But the replacements, if they should be needed, won’t ever know that they were replacements: everyone who goes up on the Wall must think that he was one of the elect.”
“So you and I might be among the Thirty ourselves, then?”
“We are of the Forty,” said Traiben calmly. “Our task now is simply to survive until the Closing of the Doors.”
Indeed he was right. The day of reckoning came, the tenth of Slit, which is exactly half a year prior to the day of the start of the new year’s Pilgrimage. And at dawn of that day the Masters came to us where we slept and woke some of us, including Traiben and me, and took us to Pilgrim Lodge, and thereby we knew that we had been chosen. I felt none of the ecstatic joy that my boyhood self would have expected, only a mild flicker of satisfaction. I had worked too long and too hard for this to be capable of reacting with any great emotion now. One phase of my life had ended, the next was beginning, that was all. Once those great wickerwork doors had closed behind us, we would not go out into the sunlight again nor see any living person other than ourselves until the tenth of Elgamoir, when we would begin our ascent.
I was not surprised to see that Kilarion the Builder had been chosen. He was the biggest of us by far, and the strongest: a little slow-witted except when it came to his own trade, but a good man to have with you in a difficult spot. The selection of Jaif the Singer pleased me also, for he was calm-natured, steadfast, and reliable. But why had the Masters given us sly, slippery little Kath, of the House of Advocates? Kath was good at talking, yes, but what use would a glib tongue be on the slopes of the Wall? Or someone as hot-blooded and impulsive as Stapp of Judges, in such a dangerous environment? Naxa the Scribe too: why had they picked him? He was clever, nearly as clever as Traiben, but he was pedantic and obnoxious and there was no one who liked him. And then there were a few others—Thuiman of the Metalworkers, Dorn of the House of Clowns, Narril the Butcher—who were decent enough sorts but of no particular distinction or merit, and they would not have been among my first choices if I had been a Master. And Muurmut of the Vintners, a tall, stubborn, red-faced man, tough-willed and full of strong opinions but often wrong-headed and rash—would he be any asset to a group such as ours? But Traiben’s words of years before still burned in my mind. We Pilgrims were not necessarily the finest that the village had to offer. Some of us might have been sent to the Wall simply to get rid of us. I might be one of those myself, for all I knew.
During our time in Pilgrim Lodge we twenty men were kept apart, as always, from the twenty women in the adjoining chamber. That was hard, going so long without mating: since my fourteenth year I hadn’t known more than a few days of abstinence, and here we were condemned to half a year of it. But the years of training had so annealed my soul that I was able to handle even that.
At first we had no idea who our female counterparts in the other chamber might be. But then Kath found a speaking-hole that linked one chamber to the other, high up on the wall in the dark storeroom in the rear of the lodge, and by standing three-men high, Kilarion with Jaif on his shoulders and Kath on Jaif’s, we were able to make contact with the women on the other side. Thus I learned that my robust old friend Galli was among the Forty, and delicate narrow-eyed Thissa, she whose skill was for witchcraft, and the remote and moody woman called Hendy, who fascinated me because in childhood she had been stolen away to our neighbor village of Tipkeyn and had not returned to us until her fourteenth year. And the sweet Tenilda of the Musicians, and Stum of the Carpenters, and Min the Scribe, all of them old friends of mine, and some others, like Grycindil the Weaver and Marsiel the Grower, whom I did not know at all.
We waited out our time. It was like being in prison. We did some things of which it would not be proper for me to speak, for only those who are about to be Pilgrims may know of them. But most of the time we were idle. That is the nature of the time in Pilgrim Lodge. Mainly it is a time of waiting. We had exercise rungs in Pilgrim Lodge, and used them constantly. To amuse ourselves in the long dull hours we speculated on the nature of the meals that came through the slots in the doors twice a day, but it was always the same, gruel and beans and grilled meat. There was never any wine with it, nor gaith-leaves to chew.
We sang. We paced like caged beasts. We grew restless and listless. “It’s the final test,” Traiben explained. “If any of us snaps during this period of confinement, someone from the Thirty will be brought in to replace him. It’s the last chance to see whether we are worthy of making the climb.”
“But anyone brought in now would have to know that he’s a replacement,” I objected. “So he’d be a second-class Pilgrim, wouldn’t he?”
“I think it rarely happens that anyone is brought in,” said Traiben.
And in fact we held our own, and even went from strength to strength, as the final weeks of our time in Pilgrim Lodge ticked away. Impatient as I was to begin my Pilgrimage, I remember attaining at the same time a kind of cool serenity that carried me easily through the last days, and if you ask me how one can be impatient and serene at the same time I can give you no real answer, except to say that perhaps only one who is a member of the Forty is capable of such a thing. I even lost track of the days, toward the end. So did we all, all but Naxa, who was marking out the time in some private Scribelike way of his, and who announced at last, “This is the ninth day of Elgamoir.” “The eighth, I make it to be,” said Traiben mildly. “Well, then, so even the brilliant Traiben can be wrong once in a while,” said Naxa in triumph. “For I tell you by the beard of Kreshe that this is the ninth, and tomorrow we will be on Kosa Saag.”