“That is a mystery,” said Traiben. “But one thing I know: Winnowings are meant not to punish but to reward.”
I stared at him, baffled. “What does that mean?”
“That some of us are deemed too good to be sent to the mountain.”
“I still don’t understand.”
Traiben sighed, that terrible patient sigh of his. “Look,” he said. “We send forth our Forty every year knowing that most of them are going to die on the Wall, and that those few who eventually do come back are going to be changed the way Returned Ones always are, and will simply skulk around meditating and praying forever afterward, having as little to do with the rest of us as possible. It’s a gamble that we always lose. We send them up there to learn something useful from the gods, and for one reason or another they don’t succeed. Nobody who makes the Pilgrimage is ever again going to play an important role in the life of the village. Hardly anyone has since the First Climber Himself. Agreed?”
“Of course.” We had been through all this before.
He said, “If we give our forty finest to the mountain each year, what will become of the village? Who’ll lead us? Who’ll inspire us with new ideas? We’ll lose our most talented people, year after year. We’ll breed their abilities out of the race until we’re nothing but a tribe of dullards and weaklings—And therefore certain candidates have to be held back. They have to be saved to meet the future needs of the village.”
I thought I saw where he was heading now, and I didn’t like it.
“Undertaking the Pilgrimage is the most important deed any of us can do,” I said. “The Pilgrims are our greatest heroes. Even if they don’t manage to learn the things that you think they’re supposed to be learning up there. By sending them up the Wall, we pay our debt to the gods, as He Who Climbed taught us that we must, and so we insure their continued blessing.” You can see that I was quoting catechism again.
“Exactly,” Traiben said. “Pilgrims are heroes, no doubt of that. But they are sacrifices, also.”
I stared. I had never seen it that way.
He said, “And so the Masters choose people like you, who are strong and determined, or people like me, who are clever and resourceful. That’s what heroes are like. But you and I are troublesome in other ways. We may be heroes, yes, but we’re too odd and too prickly to make good leaders down here, you and I. Can you imagine yourself as the head of the House? Or me? And so we can be sacrificed. We can be spared for the Pilgrimage. Whereas Baligan obviously will head his House some day. And Moklinn has a perfect body: it mustn’t be wasted on the Wall.”
“Thrance had a perfect body too,” I said. “But he was chosen.”
“And has failed to return, isn’t that so? Thrance was selfish and proud. Perhaps the Masters thought the village was well rid of him.”
“I see,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure that I did.
I was shaken by what Traiben had said. In just a few minutes he had once again turned my world upside down. I had been so very pleased that I had managed to last through the First Winnowing. I wondered now: Was my surviving the Winnowing really something to be proud of, or was it merely the sign of how willing the village was to dispense with me?
But just as quickly I recovered my equilibrium. Becoming head of my House had never been part of my plan. To make the Pilgrimage was. I had passed the first of my many tests: that was all that really mattered.
And so my candidacy began.
The early days of it saw a surprisingly gradual onset of the demanding discipline of the selection process. We were divided into forty groups of about a hundred each—Traiben and I landed in different groups—and from then on we moved as a group from one House to the next for our instruction and our examinations. But at first everything was deceptively easy.
We were asked at the beginning to write short essays on why we wanted to be Pilgrims. I remember mine almost to the word:
“1. Because I believe that undertaking the Pilgrimage is the finest thing anyone could possibly do. It is our duty to go to the gods above and worship them and learn from them the things they have to teach us. Of all the traditions of our people, it is the holiest and noblest, and I have always wanted to be obedient to our great traditions.
“2. Because my father was a Pilgrim in his time and I think and hope that he may still be dwelling in one of the Kingdoms of Kosa Saag. I have not seen him since I was a small child and it is my great dream to encounter him once again when I climb the Wall.
“3. Because I have spent my whole life looking up at Kosa Saag and marveling at its greatness, and now I want to test my strength against the mountain and see if I am equal to what it will ask of me.”
It was a good essay. At least, it got me through the Second Winnowing. Ninety of us were dismissed at that Winnowing. Whether it was for writing poor essays or for some other reason, I have no idea; but I suspect the essays really were of no great significance in the process. It was the task of the Masters to find some reason or other for discarding all but forty of us in the course of the four years, and they could use almost any pretext at all—or none—for dropping us from the roster.
Then there was religious instruction. We read the Book of the First Climber, though of course we had read it a thousand times already, and we discussed the story of His life, His conflict with the elders and His being cast out of the village and His decision to climb the Wall, which at that time was not permitted, and the things that He learned during His Pilgrimage on its heights. And also we were drilled in the names and visages of the gods and all their special attributes, as if we could expect to meet them along the mountain path and must therefore be sure to recognize them and greet them with the proper greeting. So we sat in the little hut of instruction as though we were small children while someone from the House of Holies held up one sacred portrait after another, and we shouted out the names: “Kreshe! Thig! Sandu Sando! Selemoy!” It felt strange to be back in school, since, as is true of almost everyone else, my formal education had ended with my first ten of years. But for all we knew we would meet Thig and Selemoy and Sandu Sando on the slopes of the Wall; and so we listened to the old stories all over again—how Kreshe had made the World and set it afloat on the Great Sea and how Thig the Shaper had reached into the still molten rock of the new-made World and pulled the Wall out of it, stretching it high in order to make a place for us to live that would be close to the stars, and how after the sin of our First Fathers we had been hurled down from the Summit into the lowlands by Sandu Sando the Avenger and forbidden to return until we were worthy, and all the rest of the tales of our childhood.
In those first days we had to go to other classes where we were taught the nature of the Wall. The most remarkable thing about these classes was how little seemed to be known about Kosa Saag, for all the thousands of years that we had been sending our Pilgrims up its face.
Our teachers, of course, had never been very far up the Wall themselves: just the usual excursions to the permitted holiday zones just above the village, and no farther. There was nothing very surprising about that, I suppose. Our teachers had never been Pilgrims. Only the Returned Ones had any firsthand knowledge of the extraordinary place where we were going to go, but you wouldn’t really expect Returned Ones to do anything so obvious and straightforward and useful as to come into our classrooms and give us lectures on what they had experienced. That is not their way. I had hoped that they would make an exception to their rule of lofty and mystical withdrawal from all daily matters for the sake of helping us understand what was in store for us, but they did not do it. The Returned Ones shared nothing with us, nothing at all. And so our teachers, who were just the usual babbling drudges from the House of Scholars, served us up a foggy thirdhand mix of rumor, legend, and guesswork which was just about as close to useless as anything could be.