by Hegira (lit)
Only the woman in the seat opposite. She smiled.
Twenty-three
Hours passed in the darkened cell. Kiril, Bar-Woten and Barthel lay on their cots, waiting. Kiril heard Bar-Woten snore. He squeezed his eyes shut, taking refuge in the even deeper darkness. He tried to remember Mediweva. Somehow, he found his way there, and his body relaxed.
Barthel was wide awake. He reached under his shirt and felt for the sharp strip he had pried loose on the train.
His mother moved in the dark, glowing, her true mouth and the mouth in her throat urging him on silently. He hardly understood who or what he was any more. All his world had been shattered, and yet he felt stupid that he had been surprised. The Bey - the Ibisian who had been his master for all his adult life - was after all a murderer and a pillager of Khem, his homeland.
Bar-Woten had said startling things under the influence of the demon's needles. Fifteen years of travel together had not revealed such things. Bar-Woten's drugged ramblings had raised the past to hideous life, bringing back the phantom of his mother - long lost in his thoughts, part of a warm, frightening blankness - haunting Barthel with all the mem-ories and suspicions he had always known would be best left forgotten, dropped like plum stones in a pond.
Bar-Woten stirred in the dark and murmured.
You are no longer Barthel, servant to the Ibisian who killed me, the ghost told her son. You are Amma bin Akka, and you are free. Prove you are free.
Barthel stood over the Bey, the Ibisian. He lifted the sharp strip, tears filling his eyes and streaming down his cheeks. He thought, I have served you, worshipped you, followed you across land and sea. I have loved you. Why must I be the one to kill you?
He beseeched the ghost, but she would not relent.
You belong with us, she said. Your sisters are with us. We kept them from the conqueror's hands, as we would have kept you. All of our family, together. Carried in the Bey's strong arms, rushed from a house full of corpses, Barthel had caught a glimpse of his sisters, their throats cut, lying on their pallet in the two-room mastaba-house, blood dark red in the dusty sunlight from the smoke-hole in the straw roof. Barthel had been little more than a baby; the drugs had opened his earliest memories now, and they were eating him alive. Before the Bey had come to pick him up, he had heard his sisters' shrieks, his father's prayers to Allah, his mother's weeping. Had seen the dull flash of the sheep-knife lifted above the mud-brick partition.
With a strangled shout, Barthel drove the makeshift blade down toward the Ibisian.
Kiril heard a shout and the tearing of fabric. He sat up half awake and grunted a question.
Bar-Woten felt the resistance of flesh and the warmth of spilling blood but by then it was too late. He had reacted with the automatism of a scorpion's tail, had rolled from the point's arc and, not thinking who might be attacking, had thrown up the bedclothes, entangling the assailant. Drops of moisture - Barthel's tears - stung against his cheek. The shadow struck again and again, shrieking and kicking like an enraged child. Knowing with twenty years of combat experience where the weapon was, even in the dark, Bar-Woten grabbed the hand and turned the point inward, driving it home with a kick of his foot against the shattered wrist. The attacker had no chance and perhaps he had known that. With a quiet gasp he went down and whether there had been blood first, or the resistance of the flesh, the snap of bone or the tearing of cloth, there was no knowing. For Bar-Woten, still half-asleep, it was all muddled.
A light came on. Two guards stood sleepy-eyed in the cell's open doorway.
Bar-Woten looked down on his servant from where he lay on the cot. Barthel, tangled in bed-clothes, writhed on the floor, saliva and tears shining on his face and chin. He stared at Bar-Woten.
"Bey!" he said, his voice like a lamb's bleat. Bar-Woten got down on his knees beside the boy and hugged him, his one good eye still dry, but closed.
"They would have killed you," he whispered in Ibisian. Barthel had pulled the point from his stomach and was trying ineffectually to shove it through the Ibisian's thick sailor's coat. Bar-Woten did not block the stabs; they didn't even draw blood. "I was mad from the carnage, and they were slaughtering infants. I could not stand by. I did not know they were your parents."
The guards raised their rifles.
"No!" Kiril shouted. He leaped from his cot and stood before the two. Bar-Woten glanced up at his back, face impassive and white in the sudden glare.
One guard stepped forward and knocked Kiril aside, reaching down to remove the strip of metal from Barthel's grasp. He raised the butt of his rifle to drive back Bar-Woten, but the thin cloaked shadow of the demon hissed in the doorway. The guard stepped aside abruptly, as if stung, bloody point held up as evidence and excuse.
"You should never have left home, Bey," Barthel said, his voice soft and quiet.
"Your pilgrim is still alive, Guest Excellency," the guard said, pointing to Kiril. "By our quick action."
Barthel's face wrinkled in final pain and ail the remaining tension left his body, Bar-Woten did not move until the guards pried the corpse from his arms.
Twenty-four
Two of the thin, cloaked demons walked behind Kiril and Bar-Woten. On all sides, armed guards formed walls as the procession moved through a high-walled canyon of steel, glass and concrete. Hundreds of thousands of people watched from tiers of seats on each side of the boulevard. Paper streamers sizzled through the air and confetti fell in thick clouds, getting into their clothes, itching. Kiril vaguely heard the carnival cheers and the cries of "Pilgrim! Pilgrim! Find your way!"
Amplifiers mounted on light standards along the boulevard echoed a tinny refrain:
"Find your own way, make love to the Wall,
Be the clown who will learn,
The fool who might return..."
Kiril couldn't make out the rest. It was a mummer's farce, and he was the central caricature, an unspectacular man accompanied by a silent soldier, both of them having come tens of thousands of kilometers to be paraded up this street of the sophisticated English-speakers, met with ridicule and ceremony, sent to the Wall like belled goats.
The demons were taking no chances. Both Bar-Woten and Kiril were accompanying them to the Wall. Kiril was the likely candidate, but who could completely riddle fairy tales, especially those of another species?
Kiril hated them all fiercely. He saw in the English-speakers all the concentrated disease and decay of the Second-born, their science and knowledge contributing little or nothing to remedy their lack of dignity and respect for their fellows.
Kiril hated himself, as well. He had survived. But the incomprehensible violence that had ended Barthel's journey hung like a dead weight around his shoulders. He fell behind Bar-Woten and the guards pushed him on.
The third demon was staying behind as part of an agree-ment with the English-speakers. The two accompanying them would climb the eight kilometer slope of the Wall with the pilgrim, whichever he might be.
The boulevard ended at the Wall. Kiril and Bar-Woten were given packs of food and climbing equipment. The demons were equipped with steel cylinders and cloth-wrapped parcels. The noise of the crowd subsided behind them.
"This is not by our design, human," one of the demons told Kiril as they started to climb. "We have a journey, also. We all reach our destinations."
Kiril nodded, not facing the silvery mask. A thousand pilgrims had climbed the wall before them, the English-speaker's history books said. The last had been a year ago, before the arrival of the thin ones in their rocket. A fool's parade.
"Why don't they just kill pilgrims and be done with it?" he asked the demon.
"They do not dare. Some pilgrims come from among their own people; they cannot deny the Wall or those who come to it. And sometimes, their pilgrims return."
"Return?"
The demon was silent for a moment. The second demon stopped climbing and pointed its blank silvery mask at Kiril. A thin whining sound came from under the cloak.
&nb
sp; "There have been no pilgrims from this land for ten years," the first continued. "The migrations began only twenty years ago. But we have learned. At other places and along other points of the wall, the streams of pilgrims have increased a thousand-fold. Some cities have been inundated since the fall of the Spire. They are all driven by one thing, that which we drew from your own memory - the loss of a mate. There have been females as well as males."
"Why?"
The enigmatic mask was silent again.
"Don't you know?"
"We do not know," the second demon admitted. "They migrate to appease - " again the whine - "a fairy tale. Most die on the journey. Most are already dust or mud. You have survived."
"I've had help," Kiril said, glancing at Bar-Woten. The Ibisian climbed steadily, silently beside him. "I owe my life many times over to him."
Eight kilometers up the Wall, the English-speakers had told them, a line of circular entrances awaited. The entrances had been surveyed many times in the past; separated by two kilometers, each consisted of a hole ten meters across and fifty meters deep, ending at a blank barrier. If Kiril or Bar-Woten were worthy, the barrier would open. If not, they would probably die trying to descend the slope, too demora-lized to be cautious. Either way, the English-speakers would never see them alive again.
Clouds bathed them in cold, neutral wafts of moisture.
As they climbed, Kiril learned from the demons that Obelisks were falling every thirty thousand kilometers, with enormous destruction of landscape and life, the nearest being the Obelisk in Weggismarche. Those who returned to the ravaged land were now able to view most of the Obelisk texts. Soon, most of the inhabitants of Hegira would know - or be forced to know - the history and accomplishments of the First-born.
They would have to accept the truth of what they were - whatever that might be.
Bar-Woten listened. At one point, he stripped away his black patch and cast it down the slope. The sunken, wrinkled pit of his second eye cast the rest of his face out of proportion, giving him a calm, yet leering aspect. The man's silence frightened Kiril more than the demons. What is he thinking? What actually happened to Barthel?
Kiril tried to concentrate on the climb, on his aching thighs and calves and arms, on his neck stiff from the cold and from peering ahead, up the slope of the Wall. This is the last crawl of the migrating worm, he thought. God's gaze was not intense light, as he had been told by the Franciscans, but cold dank clouds and tears.
For the Wall wept. Its condensation ran in tiny rivulets to the land, gathering to form rivers. The water made the footing slippery, as if they walked up a slope of wet glass - but there was always the traction of the engraved words.
The thin ones climbed steadily, tirelessly, with a wobbling gait, arms reaching out to steady themselves, their cloaked and wrapped bird-legs pumping.
"Why did you come here?" Kiril asked once as they rested. Bar-Woten, two meters higher up the slope, inclined his head to hear their answer.
"We are not sure you can understand," one replied. "We wished to know what happened to us. Long ago, all was bliss and paradise, and we grew. We were all part of -" It whined sharply - "a reach. A peak of achievement and understanding. Then, it was all lost, and we had to start from the beginning, in the pain and disaster of youth. It is not precisely the same with you."
"But not so different," Kiril said.
"Perhaps."
"Are the English-speakers going to help you try another way back, if you can't pass through the barrier?" he asked. He motioned to the fog-hidden city below.
"We exchanged knowledge."
That didn't answer his question, but he hadn't really expected an answer. "You don't know what they'll do with your knowledge."
"Yes, we do," one cloaked figure hissed. Bar-Woten glanced at Kiril, but still kept his counsel.
Four kilometers. He hooked his sleeping pouch onto the words with a net of tiny grapples. The thin ones had their own apparatus, slinging themselves in wide straps connected to similar grapples. They replenished something in their suits from the steel cylinders.
Kiril did not sleep well.
With green morning, they fought they way through clouds thick as ghostly foliage. Five kilometers. Six.
"There is the entrance," the figure in black said. They automatically increased their pace, though Kiril was exhaus-ted. Bar-Woten again led the way, silent as ever.
They rested at seven kilometers. The clouds drew together above them and obscured the hole again.
The next day, they stood on the lip of the entrance and stared down the shadowy length of the hole in the Wall.
"There is no barrier," a demon said, hissing faintly behind the words.
The tunnel led deep into the Wall, dark for the first hundred yards, then filled with a dry, faint gray luminosity.
"You have made it, Pilgrim," the other demon said.
Kiril and Bar-Woten tossed aside their climbing tools.
Kiril squatted near the edge to examine the tunnel more closely.
"Do you think I could go in?" Bar-Woten asked. It was the first thing he had said since they began their climb; his voice was soft and low. He leaned over to rub the tunnel's surface with his left palm.
"I don't know," Kiril said. "I hope so. We've all come a long way."
Bar-Woten nodded.
"We would like you to proceed," a demon said behind them. "We will follow."
Kiril got to his feet, slinging the almost-empty pack over his shoulder. There was very little food left; the English-speakers had not been generous. Glancing at Bar-Woten, he began walking down the tunnel. Bar-Woten followed, and behind him, the two thin ones.
Kiril kept his eyes forward. After ten minutes, no barrier presented itself. He looked over his shoulder and saw the Ibisian, and at least fifty yards behind him, the demons, who seemed to be moving through gelatin. The tunnel's entrance was a distant point of white. Bar-Woten nodded at him, smiling faint encouragement. Kiril looked ahead again, then back, and stopped, his breath taking a hitch.
A few yards behind Bar-Woten, the tunnel had sealed itself. The thin ones were nowhere to be seen. "We're alone," he said.
Bar-Woten shivered slightly. "Do we qualify?"
Kiril shook his head slowly. "I don't know any more about this than you do."
"You don't feel anything?"
Kiril sighed. "Nothing."
The Ibisian lifted his arm and pointed down the length of the tunnel. "All we can do is walk, then."
They walked for hours, then paused to rest and eat, and
Kiril lay down in a half-curl to sleep. Bar-Woten sat beside him, knees drawn up under his resting elbows, flicking a strip of cloth from one hand, then drawing it up and rolling it, flicking it again, drawing and rolling...
Kiril awakened and watched him. "What do you think we'll find?"
"The Land Where Night Is a River," Bar-Woten said without hesitation.
"But what is that?"
"I'm not sure I care any more," the Ibisian said.
Kiril turned away, shaking his head. "He tried to kill you. Why?"
"When the English-speakers drugged us for the demons to listen... I think I spoke of Khem, and he must have remembered. He saw very little."
"What happened?"
"It isn't important," Bar-Woten said.
"He was like your son."
Bar-Woten gave Kiril a glance of both agony and barely-contained rage. His lips drew tight and his one eye glittered with tears. The sunken caul of his other eye was also wet. Then the rage seemed to evaporate.
Kiril watched the Ibisian silently crying, both appalled and fascinated. "He deserved to be here with us," he said after a while. "But millions have died already. Whichever god made this happen is a careless god."
Bar-Woten stood abruptly and walked past Kiril down the tunnel.
"Right," Kiril said.
Before the next sleep, they walked ten or eleven kilome-ters - or as much as fifteen. There was no accura
te way of telling distance or time. Still the tunnel was featureless. Kiril felt a touch of fear and the walls seemed to shrink around him. He paused, dizzy and nauseated, and lowered his head. "Wait," he said. Bar-Woten turned to look at his companion. The tunnel was empty.
Kiril kneeled until he had recovered, and then got to his feet. Bar-Woten was gone. Thinking the Ibisian had gone far ahead of him, Kiril began to run, calling out his name, but the tunnel ended abruptly only a few hundred meters ahead.
