that. I had listened to them babbling in the street, and I was beginning to understand the truth about Returned Ones: most of them, perhaps all, lose their minds on their journeys, and they come back empty and incapable of thought. That they come back at all is a miracle. But it is folly to expect them to be able to say anything sensible about where they have been or what they have seen, and that is why each new group of Pilgrims goes forth with so little firm knowledge of what lies in wait for them.
None of that mattered to me. I was committed to my path, come what may. I intended to succeed where the others all had failed.
But I confess I did try, despite everything, to question the man Kaitu about what he had seen and done. This was three days after his return, and he had not yet taken up permanent living in the roundhouse, but still could be seen wandering around in the streets. I found him there, near the wineshop of Batu Mait, and took him by the elbow and led him inside for a couple of bowls of young golden wine. He seemed pleased at that. He laughed, he winked, he nudged my elbow. And when he had finished his second bowl I leaned close to him and whispered, keeping my voice low so that old Batu Mait would not become aware of the sin I was committing, "Tell me, Kaitu. What did you see up there? What was it like?"
Kaitu caught me by the wrist in a splayhanded grip, three fingers above and three below the way Traiben sometimes did, and shook my arm so hard that I spilled my wine. "Gods!" he cried. "Trees! Air! Fire!"
"Yes, I know, but—"
"Fire! Air! Trees! Gods!" And then, in a soft cozening voice, "Buy me more wine and I'll tell you the rest." His eyes were shining crazily.
I bought him more wine. But nothing else he said was of any more use than what I had heard before.
Afterward I told Traiben what I had done. He chided me for it. "The Returned Ones are sacred," he said. "They should be allowed to go their own way unmolested."
"Yes, I know. But I wanted to find out what it was like for him on the Wall."
"You'll have to wait and see, then."
* * *
We were growing older, entering the final few years of our second ten, coming toward the midpoint of our lives, the twentieth year, when Pilgrimages commence. We were old enough to be sealed now, old enough to be making children instead of simply mating for pleasure. But for me the Pilgrimage was everything. The Pilgrimage, and the mysteries of the Kingdoms of the Wall.
The tenth of Orgulet came round again, and another Winnowing was held. There were only eighteen hundred of us left now—still a substantial multitude, but less than half of those who had begun the quest. We stood in lines of twelve dozen in the Field of Pilgrims and the Masters passed among us, tapping as they had done before. This time I had no fear. I had done well in every test, I had mastered every skill: it would be insanity to dismiss me from the Pilgrimage. Indeed, the Master passed me by, and Traiben as well. But two hundred of us were tapped that day, and no reason given.
I felt sad for them. They had shown neither cowardice nor weakness of body nor wavering of purpose; and yet they had been tapped, all the same. They had suffered in the foothills as I had suffered, clambering up ropes and clawing bare rock, and yet they had been tapped. Well, I felt sad for them but not very sad. Two hundred more were gone, and I was two hundred places closer to selection for the Forty.
The third year of our training was the worst: it was like swimming in a sea of fire. All the impurities were being burned out of us. We became gaunt and scarred and tough, and every muscle of our bodies ached all the time.
We would rise at dawn and climb the hideous greenstone hills on the eastern edge of the Wall between Ashten and Glay, cutting ourselves in a thousand places as we dragged ourselves across the crumbling ridges. We caught small animals with our hands and ate them raw. We dug for roots and gnawed
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