pries into other folks’ business.”
“Soldiers patrol along there, you know,” said the farmer, not taking the hint. “You never know when they’ll come along. Just thinking you might want to know that, if you’re running away and don’t want to get caught.”
Rigg changed his estimation of the man at once. “Thank you for the warning.”
“Why do you think a man moves to this part of the wallfold?” said the farmer, grinning. “Run off with a rich man’s wife, you got to get off to a far place where you’ll never meet the old cuckold by chance. Close to the Wall, but not too close. I know what it is to run. So does my wife.”
Rigg looked at the half-toothless woman and the five children who huddled around her and thought: Is she happy with the bargain that she made? He could see that she had once been pretty.
They paid the man for the provisions-paid exactly what he asked, with no bargaining, since they were buying silence as well, if it could be bought, or at least thanking him for his attempt at good counsel.
There was no road now, and as they moved out across country, up hill and down dale, Rigg kept thinking about the farmer’s wife until he finally spoke up. “Why would she give up a life of comfort for what she has here?”
“She didn’t know it would be like this,” said Umbo, “and then it was too late.”
“She knew how the world works,” said Olivenko. “Her beauty would fade, her rich husband would replace her with someone younger.”
“She loved the man,” said Loaf. “Probably loved him before she ever married the rich man-bet her parents talked her into that. Bad advice, and she decided she’d been wrong to take it. That’s the whole story, I think.”
Rigg looked at Param. Param smiled a little and said, “She wanted his babies, and not the other man’s.”
The others laughed.
“Is it that simple?” asked Rigg.
“It may not be the story she told herself,” said Param, “but it is that simple. That’s what Mother said.”
Ah yes. Mother. “Is that the reason she gave for marrying Father Knosso?” asked Rigg.
“She was talking about other women,” said Param. “Other women marry for that reason.”
“And her reason?”
“For the good of the royal line,” said Param.
“In other words,” said Loaf, “she wanted to have his babies.”
They all had a good laugh at that.
They came to the Wall four days after leaving the farm instead of two, but that was no surprise, they’d been angling southeast, not east. They found the Wall, not with their eyes, but with their minds.
“You notice how we’ve turned south?” asked Loaf.
“Have we?” asked Olivenko.
Rigg and Umbo didn’t need to ask. “I know,” said Umbo. “The horse won’t go to the east at all anymore.”
“They sense it. The aversion,” said Loaf. “The wish not to go that way.”
Param shuddered. “I didn’t realize that that feeling was the Wall.”
“You just think of going that way, and it makes you a bit tetchy, right?” said Loaf.
“It would be like volunteering for a nightmare,” said Param.
“Very good,” said Loaf.
Olivenko handed the reins of the horse he’d been leading to Rigg. Then he strode out going due east, up a rise of ground. Soon he disappeared on the other side.
“He’ll be back,” said Loaf.
Sure enough, Olivenko reappeared farther south, walking resolutely, until he finally heard them calling him and saw them waving. He seemed genuinely astonished to see them and ran to them. “How did you do that?” he demanded. “How did you get ahead of me like that?”
They laughed, and Loaf explained. “It’s the Wall. It steers you clear. You just kept walking, fast and hard, right? Thought you could bull your way through. But the Wall bends you. Every step you shift direction a little more, bending farther, and then you’re heading away from the Wall. Thinking you’re still heading for it.”
“You didn’t move?” Only then did Olivenko seem to notice how the horses were pretty much where they had been when he left. “You just stood here waiting?”
“So the Wall tricks you into staying away?” asked Param.
“No,” said Loaf. “It fills you with terror and grief. Your brain can’t stand the idea of bearing it, not for a moment, and so you trick yourself into staying away.”
“I wanted to know what it felt like,” said Olivenko. “I didn’t really think I could get through.”
“You have to pick a landmark on the other side. And by ‘pick’ it, I mean write down what the landmark is and keep glancing down at the writing so you can remember it. You pick the landmark and you walk straight toward it, never taking your eyes off it for long. Then you’ll get close enough to really feel it.”
“I want to do it, then,” said Olivenko. “So I’ll know.”
“You’ve never had a nightmare? Never woken up in a cold sweat, or crying?”
Olivenko shrugged a little. “You’re saying I already know?”
“I’m saying you don’t want to know. Because the closer you get, the more your mind starts coming up with reasons to be as terrified and devastated as you feel. You start hallucinating monsters or mutilations, or your family tortured or dead. And what you remember afterward, for the rest of your life, it’s the things your brain showed you to explain the grief and horror that you felt.”
“Then I wonder how anybody ever understood that it was the Wall, and not a haunted place,” said Olivenko, the scholar in him coming to the fore.
“Didn’t you experience the Wall when you went with Father Knosso?” asked Rigg.
Olivenko shook his head. “Your father made us stay well back. Still, I was near enough to see that the Wall is marked out with buoys. Has been for a thousand years. For fear of boats getting lost. You have a wind in the wrong direction, and sailors can get too close. They go mad. Everyone always knew a boat could get through the Wall-it was your father’s idea to make himself unconscious during the passage.”
“Wasn’t he afraid of dreaming? Nightmares as he crossed?”
“Drugged and dreamless sleep,” said Olivenko. “And we don’t know that it worked. He was never able to tell us.”
“Let’s keep moving,” said Loaf. “Unless you want to try again, Olivenko.”
“No,” said Olivenko. “Time enough for the evils of the Wall when we meet the place where we cross together.” He looked at Rigg. “What are we looking for?”
“A smooth place. Stony, no trees, but not so steep there’d be avalanches or landslides. Father and I saw it atop Upsheer Cliff. The whole area used to be a huge lake, the Stashi Falls pouring right over the lip of the cliffs. But then the water cut its way deeper and deeper, and the lake drained lower and lower, until now it’s just a wide place in the river, and it leaps out far below the rim of the cliffs, and falls through a deep canyon that didn’t exist twelve thousand years ago.”
“You saw the past?” asked Param. “The lake?”
“I saw the paths of the people,” said Rigg. “Where they walked. Where the bridges were. Where they swam. Paths in the middle of the air, where once there was land, before it eroded away. None of us can fly. We have to pick a place that hasn’t eroded much, a place where the path we have to follow isn’t in midair. And where there isn’t a lot for animals to eat, so we won’t be faced with a predator that thinks we look like easy pickings. A place that was the same twelve thousand years ago as it is today.”
“Oh, is that all?” asked Loaf.
“Why?” said Rigg. “You know such a place?”
“I only worked the west Wall,” said Loaf, “and you know I was being ironic.”
“There were animals here, before humans came,” said Rigg. “Not small, like ebbecks and rutters and weebears. Some of them were huge. Some of them were huge predators. I’ve been looking for them as we walked here near the Wall. Most of the really old ones are nothing like any animal I’ve seen. The old paths are so faint, so worn-out, and they had nothing to do with any animals I was tracking for their fur, so I never really studied them till now. They’re different. From a different place.”
“A different planet, you mean,” said Umbo.
“That’s what I mean, yes,” said Rigg.
“What planet?” asked Param.
