Kosa Saag filled the entire sky in front of us.
You hardly perceive that it is a mountain, once you are on it. It becomes the world. You have no sense of its height. It is simply a wall, the Wall, a wall that stands between you and the unknown regions of the world on the other side. And after a time you cease to think of it as something vertical. It unfolds before you as a long winding road, going on and on and on and generally not rising as steeply before you as you might expect, and you take it one step at a time without thinking of all that lies ahead of you, for you know that if you allow yourself to think of anything more than the next step, and maybe the one after that, you will lose your mind.
We went quickly through the mileposts we all knew: Ashten, Glay, Hespen, Sennt. Certainly every one of us had been up this far at some time or other at holiday times when the Wall is open for the sacred ceremonies in honor of He Who Climbed, and probably we had all come sneaking up here on our own now and then as Galli and I had done. At each milepost marker there was a little prayer to say, since each is sacred to some particular god. But we paused as briefly as we could to get these said, and moved along. As we went up I looked over at Galli, and she grinned at me as if to tell me that she too remembered the time we had come this way together as children, and had made the Changes on the bed of moss back of Hithiat. Thinking of that day now, I remembered the feel of Galli’s breasts in my hands and the wriggling of her tongue in my mouth and I wondered if she would want to play a few Changes with me that night when we camped. For it was half a year since I had had a mating, and in my mood just then I could have done Changes with all twenty of the women of our Pilgrimage without pausing to catch my breath.
But we had more climbing to do, first.
It was all easy and familiar. The Wall road below Hithiat is kept in good repair and the grade is gentle, as mountain roads go; and as I have said we had all been up here many times. We moved along at a good steady clip, joking and laughing, pausing now and then at the lookout points to see the village becoming ever tinier below us. If the laughter was occasionally louder than the jokes seemed to merit, well, so be it: we were excited and eager, and the mountain air, already fresher than the muggy air of the village, exhilarated us. I remember one of the women—Grycindil the Weaver, I think it was, or perhaps it was Stum the Carpenter—coming up alongside me and saying gleefully, “Suppose they lied to us, and the road is this easy all the way to the top! Suppose we’re at the Summit by tomorrow afternoon, Poilar! How fine that would be!”
I had been wondering the same thing myself: Is this all there is to it? Will it be no harder than this, right to the Summit?
“Yes, how fine that would be,” I said to her. And we laughed in that over-hearty manner that we had fallen into to hide our fears. But I knew in my heart that the road would grow more difficult before very long, and that very likely within a few days we would discover that there was no more road at all, only the steep harsh face of the Wall that we would have to scale in utmost hardship. And she, I think, knew it also.
At Denbail milepost came the business of receiving our gear from our carriers. We stood just beyond the edge of the ceremonial carpet and the defeated candidates who had borne our things this far reached forward—for they were forbidden to set foot on the uncarpeted paving-stones of the upper road—and handed our packs across to us. Mine was being carried by a woman of the Jugglers named Streltsa with whom I had mated once or twice in an earlier year. She stood well back from the carpet’s edge and leaned far over to pass it to me, and as I reached for it she laughed and drew it back, so that I had to strain awkwardly toward her to get it. My bad leg failed me and I began to topple, though I righted myself before I fell. While I was still off balance she caught me with her left hand and pulled me toward her and bit me on the side of the neck, hard enough to draw blood.
“For luck!” she cried. Her eyes were wild. She had drugged herself with gaith.
I spat at her. She had forced me to step back onto the carpet, which was anything but lucky. But Streltsa only laughed again and made a kiss at me in midair. I snatched my pack from her and she air-kissed me again. Then she reached down into her bodice and pulled something out and tossed it to me. By reflex I snatched it with a quick grab before it fell.
It was a little carved idol made of white bone: Sandu Sando the Avenger. His eyes were bright-green jewels and he was in full Change, with his penis rising erect out of his thighs like a tiny hatchet. I glared at Streltsa and started to hurl it over the side of the parapet, but then I heard her little cry of shock and fear and I stopped myself before I had thrown it. I saw her trembling. She was gesturing to me: take it, keep it. I nodded, suddenly afraid amidst my anger. Streltsa turned and ran back down the path. Then the anger returned and I would have run after her and flung her down the mountain if I had not been able to gain control of myself in time.
Thissa the Witch had seen the whole thing. She dabbed at the blood on my neck.
“She loves you,” Thissa whispered. “She knows she will never see you again.”
“She will,” I said. “And when I come back, I’ll tie her down naked in the plaza and put her through the Changes with her own filthy little idol.”
Color rose in Thissa’s delicate cheeks. She shook her head in horror and made a quick Witch-sign at me, and took the Avenger from my nerveless hands and tucked him deep into my pack.
“Take care not to lose it,” she said. “It will protect us all. There are many evils ahead of us.” And she kissed me to calm me, for I was shivering with fury and with fright.
It was not a good way to have begun the journey.
Our bearers now were gone, and only we of the Forty remained. The uncarpeted road here was far rougher than it had been just outside town—the paving-stones had been laid down an immensely long time ago and they were cracked and tilted at crazy angles—and I knew from my climb long ago with Galli that it would get rougher yet, very soon. The packs were crushingly heavy; we carried in them enough food to last for weeks and as much camping equipment as we could manage to haul, aware that there would be no way to obtain any as we climbed. Beyond Denbail too, the road doubles back into a fold of the Wall and curves around to a side from which the village is no longer visible, which gave us all a powerful sense of having broken the last tie with our home and gone floating off into the empty sky. But it was at Hithiat milepost that the real strangeness began.
We reached it in late afternoon and by common unspoken decision halted to consider the thing that was next to be done.
It was time to choose a leader. We all knew that. They had told us in the training sessions that we were to elect a leader as soon as we were beyond Hithiat, because without one we would be a serpent with many heads, each yearning to go in the direction it preferred and no two agreeing.
There was an uneasy moment, just as there had been at the time of the Sacrifice of the Bond, when no one was quite sure of how to go about doing what was necessary to do. I remembered how Muurmut had seized the moment and made himself its master, and I was not going to let him do that again here.