“What kind of smell?” I asked. “What do you mean, everything moves around?”
“A bad smell. And things—move. I don’t know. They just move.”
Poor thickbrained Kilarion! I looked over at Traiben and saw him fighting to smother laughter. I shot him an angry glance. Patiently I asked Kilarion again what Varhad was like, and he replied just as fuzzily as before. “A bad place,” he muttered. “A very bad place.” And that was all we got from him. So whatever he might have learned up there would be of no use to us. The little that he told us was enough to make us decide to make camp at the level of Hithiat on our first evening, though, and wait until morning before going on into the unknown reaches of the Wall above us.
Thus it was that I found myself back at that mossy field where Galli and I had enjoyed each other long ago. But there were no Changes played that night, despite all the pent-up desire that had accumulated in us in our half a year in Pilgrim Lodge. Sometimes desire can build to a point where there is no easy way to express it, and that was how it was for all of us that first night. We had been apart so long that it seemed too great a thing to break the abstinence so soon. And so the twenty men camped to one side of the field, and the twenty women on the other. We might just as well have been in our separate halves of Pilgrim Lodge.
I think none of us slept well that night. From higher on the mountain came sharp hooting cries that trailed off into terrible screeches, and sometimes the ground rumbled beneath us as if Kosa Saag meant to hurl us with a single casual shrug into the distant valley. A mist as cold as death slipped down from somewhere and wrapped itself over us as we lay. I wondered if it was the change-fire, rising up out of the ground to tempt me into taking on some strange new form. But I looked down at myself and I was still who I had been, so I knew that we had nothing to fear yet from that direction. And I slipped into a light doze.
In the middle of the night, though, I awakened and suddenly felt the thirst of the damned take hold of me, and I rose and walked to the little stream that ran through the middle of our moss-patch. When I knelt to drink, I saw my face reflected in the water by moonlight, all twisted and distorted, which frightened me, and I saw something else too, a glitter in the stream-bed, as of red eyes looking up at me. It seemed to me they were the eyes of Streltsa who had bitten me at Denbail milepost, and they were weeping blood. Quickly I jumped back and whispered a whole string of prayers to every god I could remember, one after another.
Then I looked across through the mists and I saw the strange woman Hendy up and walking about amidst the sleeping women. For a moment desire stirred in my loins, and I thought how good it would be to go to her and sing the song of mating to her and pull her down in the moss with me. But Hendy was a stranger to me, nor had anyone I knew ever spoken of mating with her either, and this hardly seemed a fit time to approach her for such a thing. I had already been bitten once this day. We stared at each other in the mist, and Hendy’s face was like stone. After a time I turned away and went back to my bedroll, and lay face up on it without moving. The mist opened and the stars appeared. I trembled beneath their light and put my hands over my manhood to protect it. Though the stars are gods, not all of them are benevolent ones. They say that the light of some stars does good magic, but the light of other stars is poison, and I had no idea which stars might be above me that night. I longed for morning to come. It was a thousand years in coming.
6
Above hithiat lie the ghost-realms, where—so we had been taught—certain Houses of our village had dwelled long ago, until they angered the gods in some fashion and were forced to abandon their homes. During our training our teachers had told us a little of what had happened then, how the part of the mountain where these ancient folk lived had become less and less hospitable each year and the people who lived there had had to relinquish their settlements little by little as conditions worsened, moving steadily to lower zones until no one dwelled on the mountain at all any longer and our race was entirely confined to life in its lowland valley. But we were not prepared for the deathly look of the place, or the strangeness of it—any of us but Kilarion, and I think even he had forgotten how frightful a place it was.
The road here was broken and dangerous. At least it was a road, though; later on we would have no such luxury. But the paving-stones were split and broken and lifted at angles so that in some areas it would have been better to have none at all, and more than once we crossed a region where swift streams had cut deep gullies away under the path so that the paving-stones were balanced over emptiness and seemed ready to crack beneath our feet and drop us into an abyss. We fastened prongs to ropes and threw them across to the far side to anchor them in the earth, and crossed with care, clinging to the ropes. Some of us were shivering with fright at every step. But the fragile roadway somehow held together.
The air was changing too. We had expected it to get cooler as we went higher, but in this zone it was oddly hot and moist and dank, more so than on the hottest lowland day. No rain fell, but billowing bursts of wet steam issued noisily from vents in the flank of the mountain. The steam had a sour, sulphurous smell that utterly pervaded the atmosphere, just as Kilarion had warned. Everything was rotten and mildewed here. Pale spores floated in the air. Things grew on things. Dense beards of white mossy fungus coated the whole landscape. We went lurching through it, for there was no avoiding it, and it tangled itself around our legs and hands and made us choke and sneeze. The trees were wrapped in thick sheets of this stuff that trembled in the wind so that the trees themselves seemed to be shaking. They looked like the ghosts of trees. The rocks too were fouled with this deathly moss. Their surfaces quivered like live things, or like dead things that could not hold still. I thought I understood now what Kilarion had meant when he said, “Everything moves around.”
The Wall itself seemed to be rotting. When you touched it with your fingertip it crumbled, that was how soft the stone was. There were caves everywhere, some of them very deep—dark mysterious holes leading into the heart of the great mountain. We looked into them but of course could see nothing and did not choose to investigate.
There was a constant fall of little pebbles, and sometimes larger things, that had rubbed loose from the higher regions. Now and again we would hear a great rattling and thudding from above and chunks of rock bigger than our heads would come bounding down. Some fell very close indeed to us. The crumbling went on all the time, a steady loss of substance, so that I began to imagine that Kosa Saag must have been ten times as big a million years ago as it was now, and that in another million years it would have crumbled away into something no bigger than a stick.
An hour or so above Hithiat we encountered the first ghosts.
We were no longer walking along a narrow strip on the edge of the mountain but now were on a flat, broad outcropping that was almost like a plateau, though a slight sense of strain told us that we were continuing to climb with every step. Finally we came to Varhad milestone, the last of the series. It was weathered and worn, no more than a splinter of black rock with a few barely legible letters visible on its moss-encrusted surface.
At this level the air was thicker and more moist than ever and its smell was abominable. In the rocky, foggy meadows on our left-hand side we discovered the ruins of the abandoned settlements. The ancient inhabitants of this region had lived in narrow tapering huts made of long slabs of pink stone set into the ground on an inward lean and covered above with thatching. The thatching had long since rotted away, all but a few bleached strands, and the jagged stone slabs were festooned with shrouds of the white fungus. There were groups of these tottering houses, ten or fifteen in each little group, clustered every few hundred paces apart. They were frightening to behold: decayed, dismal, forlorn. The ruined houses looked like funeral monuments. Truly we had entered a village of the dead.