“This is where the ghosts are,” Kilarion told us.
But we saw no ghosts anywhere about, and Kilarion grew red-faced and insistent when Naxa the Scribe and Kath the Advocate jeered at him as a tale-teller. His shape began to flutter as his rage mounted; his face became round and meaty and his neck shrank into his shoulders. The dispute got hotter and hotter until suddenly Kilarion gathered little Kath up under his arm like a bundle of dirty clothes and rushed with him toward the brink of the cliff, as though intending to hurl him over. Kath squalled like a beast being dragged to slaughter. We all shouted in alarm but none of us was in a position to stop him except Galli. As Kilarion went lurching past her, Galli caught him by his free arm and swung him around with all her considerable strength, so that he lost his grip on Kath and went slamming into one of the ruined huts that stood nearby. He hit it so hard that the cluster of stone slabs fell apart and went toppling over.
Half a dozen strange pallid creatures had been hiding in the hut. They sprang up now, terrified, and began to caper about in wild circles, flapping their arms like birds. I suppose they were hoping to be able to fly away from us. But all they had were arms, not wings.
“Those are the ghosts!” someone screamed. “The ghosts! The ghosts!”
I had never seen such horrid sights. They had the shape of men, but were very long and thin, more like walking skeletons than live people, and they were covered from head to foot with strands of the white fungus that infested this entire zone. It had woven itself into their hair, it ran along their limbs like a garment, bunches of it jutted from their mouths and ears and nostrils. With every movement they made they released clouds of spores, which caused us to back away in fright, fearing that we would breathe them in and be contaminated by the terrible stuff that sprouted from them.
But these folk evidently wanted no more to do with us than we with them. It took them some few moments to overcome their terror, and then they turned and scampered up into some hillocks beyond their huts, leaving a thinning residue of spores in the air behind them. We covered our faces with our hands, scarcely daring to draw a breath.
“You see?” Kilarion said, after a time, when it seemed safe to put down our hands and move along. “Did I lie to you? This place is full of ghosts. They are the spirits of the old villagers that this white mossy stuff has conjured up.”
“And you say you made the Changes with one of them?” Kath asked in a stinging tone. He had recovered now from his fright, and red blotches of anger glowed in his cheeks. “Were you so lustful when you were a boy, Kilarion, that you would do the Changes with something like that?”
“She was only partly a ghost,” said Kilarion, looking aggrieved. “She was young and very beautiful, and there was just a little of the white stuff on her.”
“A beautiful ghost!” Kath said scathingly, and we all laughed.
Kilarion grew red again. He glared at Kath and I got myself ready to interfere in case he was having any thoughts of making a second try at throwing Kath over the edge of the cliff. But Tenilda the Musician said something soft to him that soothed him and he growled and turned aside.
I could see that Kilarion, like Muurmut, might be a problem. He was slow of thought but easy to anger, a bad combination, and enormously strong besides. We would have to handle him with some care.
The ghosts we had frightened were watching us from a distance, peeping out from behind the mossy hillocks. But they ducked down shyly whenever they saw us looking at them. We continued on.
There were other clusters of ruined huts ahead. All of them were tightly wrapped in the shroud-fungus. Everything here was. A more dismal landscape would be hard to imagine: white, silky, bleak. The trees, small and crooked and practically leafless, were almost entirely swathed. Patches of old dead fungus lay everywhere underfoot, forming a sort of white crust that crunched as we stepped on it. Even the Wall, which here lay far to our left, had a whitish glint as though the fungus had taken possession of great sections of it also.
Now and again we would see more ghosts flitting about on the hillsides. The elongated wraithlike beings were too timid ever to come near us, but ran back and forth on the slopes, trailing long streamers of their fungus-shrouds behind them.
To Traiben I said, “What are these ghosts, do you think? Pilgrims, are they? Who never went any further up the mountain, but became infested with this white fungus and had to remain down here where it lives?”
He shrugged. “That could be. But I suspect otherwise. What I think is that this region never was abandoned by the ancient settlers, despite the things our teachers told us.”
“You mean what we’re encountering are the descendants of the very people who built these huts long ago?”
“So I believe, yes. This was probably good farming land once. Then the shroud-stuff came and ruined it. But instead of fleeing, these people stayed. There must be a low level of change-fire here, that has worked a transformation on them of a sort, and now the fungus is a part of them. Perhaps it helps to keep them alive. There doesn’t seem much to eat in this zone.”
With a shudder I said, “And will it become a part of us the same way?”
“Very likely not, or there’d be no Returned Ones. Every Pilgrim who goes up the Wall and comes down again must pass through this district. But they don’t bear the infestation.” He gave me a somber grin. “Still, I think we would do well to wrap wet cloths over our faces to keep the spores away. And we should make our camp for the night in some happier place.”
“Yes,” I said. “That seems wise to me too.”
We hurried on through this blighted land of ghosts with our heads down and our faces covered.
Ghosts followed us all the way, keeping well back from us. Some of them seemed more bold than the others, dancing up to us and whirling so that their shrouds swept out airily behind them, but we threw rocks at them to prevent them from coming close. After what we had seen and what Traiben had said, we all dreaded the fungus. It was all around us, impossible to avoid. I wondered if I had already taken it into my lungs. Perhaps it was hatching right now in some moist dark cavern of my body, seizing possession of my interior and soon to issue forth from my mouth and my nostrils. The thought sickened me and I went to the side of the road and violently heaved up everything that was in my stomach, praying that I might be heaving up any spores that were within me also.
Kilarion was proven a truth-teller once more before we left the ghost-land; for we even saw a ghost as beautiful as the one he had claimed he had made the Changes with, that time when he came up here with his father when he was a boy.
She appeared on a rocky ledge just above us and stood singing and crooning at us in an eerie, quavering voice. Like all her kind she was slender and very long-limbed, but just a faint coating of fungus covered her breasts and loins, and none was visible around her face. What little she had on her body gave her a sleek, satiny sheen and made her look soft to the touch, altogether appealing. Her eyes were golden and had a slight slant to them, and her features had a strange purity. A beautiful creature indeed, this ghost. She said something to us in soft, furry tones that we could not understand, and beckoned as if inviting us to come up and dance with her.