could be turned into monsters on the Wall."
"Even when we go higher up, we won't be transformed unless we want to be," I said. "The change-fires don't take control of you against your will. The only ones who are transformed are those who don't have the strength to remain themselves."
"How do you know that?" Galli asked. "I never heard anything about that."
"I know," I said solemnly. But the truth was I was only guessing.
Darkness came. We were too frightened to sleep. So we sat side by side waiting for dawn and wondering about the screeching sounds that drifted down to us from the pinnacles we could not see, for everyone knows the dire tales of the Wall-hawks that are bigger than a man and carry Pilgrims off in their beaks. But the Wall-hawks, if that was what they were, let us be, and at dawn we returned to the village. Nobody minded that we had been gone. Galli's father was a drunkard, and as for mine, of course, he had vanished on the Wall long before. The gentle Urillin, my mother's brother who had had charge of me since I was a boy, never could stand to punish me for anything. So nothing was said about our absence. And that was the great adventure that Galli and I had in the highlands.
But the training classes that took us up the Wall now were much harder work than my outing with Galli. Instead of following the main road or one of the back roads we had to hack our way through the foothill forests, scrambling over colossal rocks and the gnarled roots of trees, and sometimes go straight up bare cliff faces, using all our skill with our ropes and our sucker-pads to keep from falling and being smashed. And there was no meat and cheese and no wine and certainly no making the Changes when we came out finally at Hithiat milestone. We undertook at least one climb a week, and it was brutal, exhausting stuff. We came back bruised and bloody. I worried about Traiben, since he was in another group and I couldn't be close at hand to help him through. But he managed. Sometimes I met him after hours and gave him special coaching, showing him ways of carrying himself through the difficult places, of wedging his feet into cracks or looking for horns of rock to grab while shifting his position. The climbs were not only strenuous, they were dangerous too: on our fifth climb a boy named Steill, from the House of Leather-makers, became lost in the woods and we searched for him half the night before we found him at last, lying broken in the moonlight at the bottom of a deep ravine with his brains spilling out of his head. He must have walked off the edge at dusk without knowing what he was doing, though someone whispered that a shambler had come upon him and pushed him over the edge. We all trembled at that: for the shambler is said to be as big as a roundhouse, but makes no sound in the forest and leaves no footprint. Be that as it may, Steill was dead, the first of our number to die in candidacy. But not the last.
4
Again it was the twelfth of Elgamoir, and another Forty set out on their journey up the Wall. I watched them go with new respect, for I was in the second year of my training now and I knew what they had gone through in order to reach this point.
That year also two new Returned Ones arrived in the village. That was always a memorable moment, since it happened so infrequently. One was called Kaitu, and he had been on the mountain nine years. The other was a woman named Bril, who had gone up six years before. I saw them when they came stumbling down into the plaza together, dirty and ragged, with that look of glory in their eyes that all the Returned Ones have. Children ran up to them to touch them for luck. Old women sobbed in the street. Someone from Holies was summoned, and led them to the roundhouse where Returned Ones live. Later I heard tell that Bril had reached halfway up the Wall, and that Kaitu had succeeded in going nearly to the Summit, but I wondered how much substance there was to any of
"Even when we go higher up, we won't be transformed unless we want to be," I said. "The change-fires don't take control of you against your will. The only ones who are transformed are those who don't have the strength to remain themselves."
"How do you know that?" Galli asked. "I never heard anything about that."
"I know," I said solemnly. But the truth was I was only guessing.
Darkness came. We were too frightened to sleep. So we sat side by side waiting for dawn and wondering about the screeching sounds that drifted down to us from the pinnacles we could not see, for everyone knows the dire tales of the Wall-hawks that are bigger than a man and carry Pilgrims off in their beaks. But the Wall-hawks, if that was what they were, let us be, and at dawn we returned to the village. Nobody minded that we had been gone. Galli's father was a drunkard, and as for mine, of course, he had vanished on the Wall long before. The gentle Urillin, my mother's brother who had had charge of me since I was a boy, never could stand to punish me for anything. So nothing was said about our absence. And that was the great adventure that Galli and I had in the highlands.
But the training classes that took us up the Wall now were much harder work than my outing with Galli. Instead of following the main road or one of the back roads we had to hack our way through the foothill forests, scrambling over colossal rocks and the gnarled roots of trees, and sometimes go straight up bare cliff faces, using all our skill with our ropes and our sucker-pads to keep from falling and being smashed. And there was no meat and cheese and no wine and certainly no making the Changes when we came out finally at Hithiat milestone. We undertook at least one climb a week, and it was brutal, exhausting stuff. We came back bruised and bloody. I worried about Traiben, since he was in another group and I couldn't be close at hand to help him through. But he managed. Sometimes I met him after hours and gave him special coaching, showing him ways of carrying himself through the difficult places, of wedging his feet into cracks or looking for horns of rock to grab while shifting his position. The climbs were not only strenuous, they were dangerous too: on our fifth climb a boy named Steill, from the House of Leather-makers, became lost in the woods and we searched for him half the night before we found him at last, lying broken in the moonlight at the bottom of a deep ravine with his brains spilling out of his head. He must have walked off the edge at dusk without knowing what he was doing, though someone whispered that a shambler had come upon him and pushed him over the edge. We all trembled at that: for the shambler is said to be as big as a roundhouse, but makes no sound in the forest and leaves no footprint. Be that as it may, Steill was dead, the first of our number to die in candidacy. But not the last.
4
Again it was the twelfth of Elgamoir, and another Forty set out on their journey up the Wall. I watched them go with new respect, for I was in the second year of my training now and I knew what they had gone through in order to reach this point.
That year also two new Returned Ones arrived in the village. That was always a memorable moment, since it happened so infrequently. One was called Kaitu, and he had been on the mountain nine years. The other was a woman named Bril, who had gone up six years before. I saw them when they came stumbling down into the plaza together, dirty and ragged, with that look of glory in their eyes that all the Returned Ones have. Children ran up to them to touch them for luck. Old women sobbed in the street. Someone from Holies was summoned, and led them to the roundhouse where Returned Ones live. Later I heard tell that Bril had reached halfway up the Wall, and that Kaitu had succeeded in going nearly to the Summit, but I wondered how much substance there was to any of
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