The Wall | Page 6

King, then."
"No. He walks the Wall because he doesn't wish to see his father's feet
of the clay."
******
It had been a month, now. A month of searing heat and the ceaseless
monotony of days spent camped out in the shade, with little to occupy
the minds of the guard save the perpetual cycle of gaming and the
downing of liberal quantities of libation. Occasionally a fight would
break out and the men would gather about the two combatants and
cheer them on. But such confrontations seldom required the
intervention of the officers, because they usually ended a few blows
after they had started Indeed, there was little energy for much more
than this; and nobody wanted to risk six months wages because of some
meaningless dispute.
Tavarius had seen it all time and time before. And like the Wall and the
desert, he'd grown rather tired of it. He could well understand the few
who reached a point where they could bear it no more. On every tour
there was at least one such individual. Men who would go racing to the
Wall and try to scale the unscalable. Some would fall to their deaths;
others would fall upon their swords.
But in all his years of service, Tavarius had never seen anything like
Sartas.
"It's inhuman," Karn growled, eyes flashing with indignation. He stood
outside their tent in the early morning hours, shielding his eyes with an
upraised had as he looked towards the Wall. "A month he's been there.
He's like an infernal machine. Back and forth. Back and forth. Never

faltering, even in the worst of the sun. He's driving me to drink, I tell
you."
"It wouldn't take much to do that," said Tavarius.
Karn ignored this remark and said, "Just look at him. It ain't human."
"I wager there's never been his like before," Tavarius agreed. "The
King would be proud of that one."
Karn grunted noisily. "He's as mad as those idiots who try to climb the
bloody thing," he stated.
"Or perhaps just dedicated."
"Is there a difference?"
"We forget our youth, my friend. Once we, too, were dedicated enough
to stand long hours on that Wall."
"But never so long as this!" Karn exclaimed. "We soon enough saw the
truth and came to our senses. But him--" He sniffed disapprovingly.
"That doesn't make for insanity. Perhaps just for a man with deeper
convictions than we ever had."
"Such convictions will as like get him killed," Karn muttered. "He
takes his food and water from line and bucket, despite our constant
entreaties that he come down. He hasn't spoken to a soul since the last
of the new recruits came down. The last save himself, that is."
Tavarius drew a breath, let it out in a long sigh. "If he won't come down,
then perhaps it behooves one of us to go up there and talk to him."
"Any volunteers?" Karn chortled. "There's not likely a man in this
camp who cares what happens to him, Tav. 'Cepting maybe you."
Tavarius shrugged. "Then it must be me," he said, forcing a grin.

******
Because there'd never been a desire to give potential assailants an easy
route over the Wall to Cysterian lands, there had never been any stairs
made to the ledge. In the same manner that food and water were hoisted
by rope and pulley to the ledge far above the desert plain, Tavarius was
hauled upwards to his meeting with Sartas. And although it was a trip
he'd made many times in his life, he found himself somewhat
apprehensive this time as the thick line ran through the block with
much creaking and squeaking, and the smooth wall slipped by in fits
and starts as the men below hauled the rope in, hand over hand.
At length he reached the wood derrick that leaned out from the ledge
and swung himself inwards, alighting with practiced ease on the stone.
He was a good kilometer from where Sartas maintained his vigil, so he
started off at an easy pace, not especially eager for this encounter. As
he walked he kept going over in his mind the things he would say, but
he knew that once he was there he'd probably forget them all.
He found Sartas seated near a fire, nursing a cup of hot cha as he stared
resolutely out across the desert. The sun was low in the west, so the
shadows of everything down on the plain were long and thin daggers of
black pointed towards the heart of the east. The scattered clouds flamed
with color near the sun, but were a steely gray on the opposite horizon.
In the spaces between them a few stars shone, the harbingers of the
thousands that would later fill the