I saw Kilarion trembling. The muscles of his huge body bunched and heaved and cords stood out along his throat. He looked to her and there was a desperate expression in his eyes.
Perhaps this was the very ghost he had embraced here long ago. No doubt she still had some magic over his soul even now.
I kicked sharply at his leg to get his attention and pointed up ahead when he gave me an angry glance.
“Keep moving, Kilarion,” I said.
“Who are you to tell me what to do?”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life living in this place?”
He muttered something under his breath. But he understood what I was saying, and walked on, eyes averted.
After a time I looked back. The ghost-witch, for surely a witch of some kind was what she was, was still beckoning sinuously to us. But now, with the light coming from behind her, I was able to see the faint pale cloud of spores rising about her lovely head. She went on gesturing to us until we could no longer see her.
We marched grimly through that land of hot dank mists and quivering fungus shrouds and evil sulphurous stinks for hour after hour as the day waned. There seemed to be no end to it. But at last, toward nightfall, we emerged into a region where the air was clear and sweet and the rocks were free of fungus and the trees once more had leaves, and we gave thanks to Kreshe the Savior for our escape.
7
Now we were above the highest milestone whose name anyone still knew, entering territory that was completely unknown to any of us.
There was a sort of path here, but it was narrow and vague and erratic, and it seemed best, in the gathering darkness, not to try to go on this late in the day. So we made camp for our second night on the Wall. My mind was full of thoughts of the land of ghosts, of its sinister spores, its beckoning witches.
But then I put such thoughts aside. One does not get up the Wall by thinking of what is behind one, any more than by fretting about what lies ahead. You must live in the moment as you climb, or you will fail utterly.
We had camped in a kind of little earthen pocket in a sheer, steep gorge right on the lip of the Wall, which Kilarion had found by scrambling on ahead of the rest of us. The bare rock face of Kosa Saag rose almost vertically in a series of sharp parapets just in back of us, disappearing into the dimness overhead. We saw hairy gnomish faces peering down from out of those parapets, bright-eyed rock-apes of some sort, who jeered at us and tossed handfuls of pebbles at us. We ignored them.
On the other side of us lay a vastness of open air, with the lights of some distant village, not our own, sparkling like glitterflies far out in the black valley below. A little stony rim no higher than our knees provided a kind of natural barrier just at the edge of our campsite; beyond it was a straight drop into a pit of immeasurable darkness. There was a swift stream running across the corner of the gorge. A few strange trees grew beside it. They had spiral trunks, twisted like a screw, and stiff, angular upturned leaves; and from their boughs dangled a great many heavy fruits, a reddish blue in color. They were long and full like breasts that held milk, and were marked even by small protrusions like nipples at their lower ends. Little tufts of grass grew there also, purplish, with a knife-blade sharpness to them; otherwise the gorge was barren.
Thuiman, Kilarion, and Galli found some bits of dry wood along the canyon wall and built a sputtering fire. The rest of us unpacked our bedrolls and laid out our places for the night. We were all famished, for no one had wanted to pause for a midday meal in the land of ghosts. So we brought out cheese and dried meat, and some jugs of wine. I saw Marsiel of the House of Growers eyeing the breast-fruits on a tree overhanging our campsite with some interest and called out to her, “What do you think? Are they safe to eat?”
“Who knows? I’ve never seen anything like them.”
She pulled one off, hefted it, squeezed it, finally slit its glossy skin with the nail of her forefinger. A reddish juice oozed from the break. She shrugged. Tossing it from one hand to the other, she looked around at the rest of us.
“Does anybody here want to taste it?”
We all stared, not knowing what to do.
They had warned us in our training that we would be able to carry with us only enough food to last us for the first few weeks of the climb, and then after that we would have to live on whatever we might find. And the things we found were not likely to be familiar to us. Well, we were resigned to the necessity of eating unknown things sooner or later. But how could we tell what was edible and what was poisonous?
Traiben said, “Give it here, Marsiel. I’ll try a bite.”
“No,” I said at once. “Wait. Don’t do it, Traiben.”
“Somebody has to,” he said. “Do you want to?”
“Well—”
“Then I will.”
“Are you afraid, Poilar?” Muurmut called. “Why? What are you afraid of? It’s only a piece of fruit!” And he laughed. But I noticed that he made no offer to take it from Traiben and try it himself.
It was a dilemma. Of course I had no wish to see my closest friend eat poison and fall down dead before my eyes. But I was afraid to bite into the fruit myself. So were we all; we wanted to live. That was only normal caution. But Traiben was right: someone had to taste it. If I was unwilling to do it, then he would. There is a line between caution and downright fear, and I had crossed it just then. I could not remember ever having been so cowardly in anything before.
Sick with shame, I watched as Traiben pulled the fruit apart where Marsiel had broken its skin. He scooped out a small mound of orange pulp and swallowed it without hesitation.
“Sweet,” he said. “Good. Very good ”
He took a second mouthful, and a third, and nodded to show his pleasure.
“Let me have some,” Kilarion said.
“And me,” said Thuiman.
“No, wait, all of you!” I shouted. “How can you know so soon that the fruit is safe? Suppose it has a poison in it that takes an hour to act, or two? We have to see what happens to Traiben. If he’s still well in the morning, then we can all have some.”
There was some grumbling. But generally everyone agreed that what I had said was wise.
I went over to Traiben afterward and said quietly, “That was crazy, what you did. What if you had curled up and died right on the spot?”
“Then I’d be dead. But I’m not, am I? And now we can be pretty sure that that fruit is good to eat. Which will be useful to know if we encounter a lot of it higher up.”
“But you could have died,” I said.
He gave me one of his patient all-enduring looks, as though I were some cranky child who needed to be seen through an attack of the colic.
“And if Chaliza had tasted the fruit in my place and she had died, or Thissa, or Jaif? Would that have been any better?”
“For you it would.”
“For me, yes. But we are a group, Poilar. We are a Forty. And we all have to take turns tasting strange things when we find them, whatever the risks, or we’ll surely starve in the upper reaches of the Wall. Do you understand why I did what I did? I have had my turn now. I’ve done my duty and I think that I’ll survive it, and perhaps it’ll be a long while before I need to risk myself again, for which I’m profoundly glad. But if I had refused the risk, how could I have expected others to take it for me? We need to think of the survival of the Forty, Poilar, and not only our own.”
I felt doubly shamed now. I cringed within for the dishonor of it.
“How stupid of me not to see it,” I said. “We are all one. We owe our lives each to the other.”