Kingdoms of the Wall Read Online Free PDF Page B

see?" And it became more certain to me than ever, not that I had ever had any doubt, that I was destined to be a Pilgrim and accomplish great things.
    From that day on scarcely an hour of my life passed without my giving thought to the time when I would make my ascent to the Summit. Each year on the twelfth day of Elgamoir I watched the new Forty emerge from the Pilgrim Lodge and make their way up the side of Kosa Saag until that terrible and wonderful moment when they could no longer be seen, and the only thought in my mind was that another year had gone by, and I was one year closer to the time when I would take that road myself.
     
    * * *
     
    But I would not have you believe that the climb I would someday make was the only thing on my mind in those years, however dedicated I might have been in my soul to the great adventure that lay ahead. I thought of the Pilgrimage often; I dreamed of it frequently, and of the mysteries that waited for me atop the Wall; but I still had to get on with the business of growing up.
    I had my first mating, for one thing, when I turned thirteen. Her name was Lilim, and as is usual she was a woman of my mother's family, about twenty-five years old. Her face was round and rosy, her breasts were full and comforting. The lines of age were evident on her face but she seemed very beautiful to me. My mother must have told her that I was ready. At a gathering of our family she came over to me and sang the little song that a woman sings when she is choosing a man, arid though I was very startled at first, and even a little frightened, I recovered quickly and sang the song that a man is supposed to make in reply.
    So Lilim taught me the Changes and led me down the river of delight, and I will always think kind thoughts of her. She showed me how to bring my full maleness forth, and I reveled in the size and stiffness of it. Then in wonder I touched her body as the hot, swollen female parts emerged. She drew me to her then, and led me into that place of moisture and smoothness of which I had only dreamed up till that moment, and it was even more wonderful than I had imagined it to be. For the time that our bodies were entwined—it was only minutes, but it felt like forever—it seemed to me that I had become someone other than myself. But that is what making the Changes means: we step away from the boundaries of our daily selves and enter the new, shared self that is you-and-the-other together.
    When it was over and we had returned to our familiar neuter forms we lay in each other's arms and talked, and she asked me if I meant to be a Pilgrim, and I said yes, yes, I did. "So that is what the dream meant," she said, and I knew which dream she was speaking of. She herself was a failed candidate, she told me, but her lover Gortain had been chosen for the Forty in their year. He had gone up the Wall and, like most Pilgrims, had never been heard of again. "If you see him there when you go up," Lilim said to me, "carry my love to him, for I have never forgotten him."
    I promised her that I would, and said I would bring Gortain's love back to her when I returned, if I found him on the Wall. And she laughed at that, amused by my cockiness. But she laughed gently, because this was my first mating.
    I had many other matings after that, more than most boys my age, more than was reasonable to expect. The act lost its novelty for me but never its wonder or power. When I went up into Changes I felt that I was going among the gods, that I was becoming like a god myself. And I hated to return from the place where Changes took me; but of course there is no staying there once the high moment is past.
    I remember the names of all but a few of my partners: Sambaral, Bys, Galli, Saiget, Mesheloun, and another Sambaral were among the first ones. I would have mated with Thissa too, of the House of Witches, whose strange elusive beauty appealed to me greatly, but she was shy and coy and I had to wait another two years for