Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online

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