I gestured to Kilarion. “Bring it here!” I called.
He nodded and scooped the Irtiman’s body up, perching it across his shoulder so that it dangled downward, and carried it toward me. I told him what to do and he set it down on the ground facing the little metal house of the Irtimen, propping its back against a rock in such a way that it was looking up at them.
“Irtimen!” I cried. “There is your friend! I found him wandering far down below, and we brought him with us for you, and we cared for him until he died! And kept him with us even after that! There he is! We have brought you your friend!”
I waited. What else could I do, but wait?
The faces disappeared from the windows of the metal house. But nothing else happened. It was a moment that seemed to stretch forever. I heard my people murmuring behind me. Perhaps they thought I had gone out of my mind. I was beginning to wonder myself whether I had.
But I waited. I waited.
Then a kind of door began sliding open on the metal house. A hatch, rather, in its side. A ladder appeared. It occurred to me that this must not really be a house, but rather the ship in which the Irtimen had traveled between the worlds. And the other house, the ancient ruined one, must be the one in which the settlers had come from Earth to our world thousands of years ago.
I saw a foot on the topmost rung of the ladder. An Irtiman was coming down.
He was very slender, with long flowing hair that looked like gold, and he carried a speaking-box under his arm like the one that our Irtiman had carried. Or under her arm, I should say, for this Irtiman wore only a light simple garment despite the biting cold, and I saw what surely were the swellings of two breasts beneath it. So this Irtiman was a she, in the sexual form. Had I interrupted a mating? No, no, more probably she wore that form all the time. How strange that seemed to me, that these people’s bodies should always be ready for mating like that! More than anything else it said to me that these Irtimen, who resembled us outwardly in so many trifling ways, were indeed alien creatures, creatures of some other creation.
The female Irtiman stepped forward until she was no more than a dozen paces from me. She glanced at the dead Irtiman on the ground, and although I had no real way of comprehending the meaning of an Irtiman’s facial expressions it seemed clear to me that the look on her face was one of displeasure, distaste, even disgust I think I saw some fear there also.
She said, “Did you kill him?”
Her voice, coming to me out of the language-box, was lighter than the other Irtiman’s had been, a high clear tone.
“No,” I said indignantly. “We are not murderers. I told you we found him wandering on the mountainside, and we cared for him. But he was very weary and before long he died. And I decided to bring him to you, because he seemed so badly to want to return to you, and I thought you would want to have him back.”
“You knew that we were here?”
“He said you were.”
“Ah.” She nodded, and I had no doubt of what that gesture meant. Then she turned and beckoned behind her, and another Irtiman came from the ship, and the third one after that. The second one looked male, with a heavy body and a broad dark face, and the third had breasts like the first and flowing hair that was amazingly long and of a startling scarlet color. Both of them had little tubes of metal in their hands. I noticed that the other one, the golden-haired one that had come out first, had a tube of the same sort fastened to her hip. I suppose they were weapons, these tubes. But the golden-haired one gestured to the other two and they put their tubes into little hip-cases like hers.
All three stood facing me. Insofar as I was able to read the meaning of their movements, it seemed to me that they were wary and uneasy. Well, they had good reason to be afraid of us. But they had come out of their ship; that was a sign of trust. One of them—it was the scarlet-haired one—went over to the dead one and knelt and stared into his face for a moment, and then she touched his cheek gently with her hand. She said something to the others, but she was not carrying a speaking-box, so of course I was unable to understand.
“Are you Pilgrims?” the male Irtiman said.
“Yes. There were forty of us when we left Jespodar, and these are all who remain.” I moistened my lips and took a deep breath. “If you know what Pilgrims are, then you must know that we have come here seeking our gods.”
“Yes. We know that.”
“Well, then, is this the Summit? Are the gods to be found on it?”
He looked down at the speaking-box a moment, and ran his hands along its sides as though he needed something to do with them just then. At length he said, somewhat warily, “This is the Summit, yes.”
“And the gods?” My throat was so dry I could barely get the question out.
“Yes, the gods.” A quick tense nod. “This is the place where your gods live.”
I could have wept at those words. My heart surged up in my breast with joy. The darkness of my despair dropped away from me. The gods! The gods, the gods, the gods at last! I looked toward Traiben in triumph, as if to say, See? See? As if to say, I knew all along that the gods must be here; for the Summit is a holy place.
“Where are they?” I asked, trembling.
And the Irtiman pointed, as Traiben had done, to the crevices of the far wall, where the savage Irtimen had run off to hide.
“There,” he said.
It was the most difficult hour of my life. It was like that for us all.
We sat in a circle on the pebbly ground in front of the little metal ship of the Irtimen that had come to rest on that cold flat place at the top of the World, and they told us the bitter truth about our gods.
The dead Irtiman had tried to hint at it, but he could not bring himself to reveal it directly. My father’s father had spoken of it too—the horror at the Summit—but would not tell me what it was. Traiben, of course, had understood it the moment we had attained the Summit. He had dreamed long ago that it was like this here: I remembered now his telling me that. And as for me, I had tried to reject it at every turn, obvious though it may have been. But this time there was no denying the validity of it even for me; for I was at the Summit and I could see with my own eyes what was here and what was not, and the things the Irtimen had to tell us now fell upon me with inexorable unanswerable force.
These were the things I learned from the Irtiman of the Summit at that dark hour. This is what I must share with you for the sake of your souls. Listen and believe, listen and remember.
They said—it was the golden-haired one who did most of the talking, the one who had come out first—that the race of Irtimen was a race that had journeyed everywhere in the Heavens, that traveled between the stars more easily than we went between one village and another. There were many worlds in the Heavens, some beautiful and pleasant, some not. And whatever world they found that had good air and water and things that Irtimen could eat, there they would plant a settlement of their own kind, unless that world was already peopled with its own people and had no room for them.
So it was that they had come to our world, which we call the World; and part of it was fit for Irtiman life and part was not, so they settled only in the part that suited them, here in the heights of Kosa Saag. That was long ago, hundreds of tens of years, more years than I could easily comprehend.
They could not comfortably go into the lowlands, because of the heat and the thick heavy air. And no one from the lowland villages ever came up here, because of the rigors of the journey and the increasing chill and thinness of the air in the higher levels, and because we had no need to venture into such remote difficult places when we had all the richness of the valleys to sustain us. We stayed in our own territory; and indeed we made it unlawful to climb to these heights, saying that Sandu Sando the Avenger had cast us down from them and we were never to return. And so all unknowing we shared the World with the people who had come across the Heavens from Earth; or if we knew anything of the beings who dwelled atop the Wall, we thought of them as gods, or demons, or some such awesome things.