Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online Page B

power of the gods is so great that change comes freely and amazingly to those who live their lives upon it, and all is magic and mystery and strangeness beyond our comprehension. And they warned us of the danger of encountering change-fire as we climbed. The very stones of the Wall, they said, give off a secret heat that will kindle into raging conflagration the flame of transformation that always burns quietly and gently within us, and turn climbers into monsters if they are willing to let it happen.
    Everything was fluid up there, they said. Nothing was fixed, nothing was as we understood things to be. It was all because of that strange fire that lay within the rocks, which no one could see but which was easy enough to feel. "The Wall is said to be a place where reality bends," our teachers told us solemnly. How were we supposed to interpret that? They couldn't say. "On the Wall," they declared, "the sky sometimes is below and the ground is above." Well, yes, and what were we to make of that? They spoke of monsters, demons, and demigods who waited for us above the cloud-line in the innumerable Kingdoms of the Wall. They warned us of lakes of fire and trees of metal. They talked of dead people who walked with their feet turned back to front and their eyes staring like hot coals out of the backs of their heads. They let us read the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel, which was supposed to be the three-thousand-year-old testimony of the only Returned One who had ever said anything at all about what he had encountered while climbing Kosa Saag, other than the First Climber Himself. But unlike the Book of the First Climber, which is stark and simple in its narrative of His visit to the abode of the gods and its account of the things they taught Him while He was there, the Secret Book of Maylat Gakkerel was all ornate parable and poetry, a welter of fanciful detail written in a cryptic style so remote from any kind of modern speech that it had to be embedded in footnotes and commentary a dozen times as long as the Secret Book itself. Very few of us could get through more than a dozen pages of it. All I remember was a kind of feverish haze of murky description that made no sense, a magical fairy-tale of heights that turned into abysses, of raindrops that became knives, of rocks that danced and sang, of demons who furiously hurled their limbs one by one at climbing Pilgrims until there was nothing left of them but bouncing skulls, of wise men who offered counsel along the way but spoke all their words in backwards language. The whole of the Secret Book might just as well have been written in backwards language for all the help it gave me.
    I decided that the classes were simply part of the Winnowing. They were intended to terrify us by making us see that nobody who lived in the lowland villages really had the slightest knowledge of what awaited those who journeyed on the Wall. The things we were learning struck me as being mere fables that could be of no possible practical use, and therefore after a few weeks I stopped paying attention to them. Others, believing that their lives would depend on how well they mastered this mass of foolishness, took copious notes and in a little while, as the contradictions and mysteries piled up, they began to go around with dazed, bewildered expressions on their faces.
    About a dozen members of my group resigned their candidacies during this period. Most of the dedicated note-takers were among them. I was convinced that they had filled their minds with so much nonsense about the Wall that they became too frightened to continue.
    We had other classes that were far more valuable: I mean our classes in survival, where we were taught the techniques of mountain-climbing, and of coping with the special conditions that were believed to exist in the higher reaches of the Wall, and tricks of hunting and foraging that would come in handy once we had exhausted the food we had carried up from the village in our