The Wall | Page 2

his mouth a moment before finally clamping square, yellowed teeth about it and pulling it free with a jerk.
"It wasn't the sun," Sartas retorted petulantly.
Tavarius shrugged, then wiped a trail of juice from his chin with the back of one hand and said, "Be careful, lad." He waggled the blade of his knife back and forth in the young man's direction, frowning with intense sagacity. "You'd be wise to consider spending less time out there in the heat of day, tramping back and forth as though you were guarding the King's own jewels. All that sweating and panting. And for what?" He snorted and shook his head. "Such devotion may well be admirable in some quarters, boy, but you'll curry no favor here with that sort of attitude."
"But it's why we're here!" Sartas protested.
There was laughter again from the company of guards, and muted chatter that didn't carry as far as the flame.
"We're here at the King's pleasure," said Tavarius, making no attempt to disguise his contempt. He grunted and made a face. "We're here for that and because the citizens of Cysteria don't believe themselves safe from a myth. They imagine barbarian hordes waiting on the other side of yon wall, just waiting to pour across were we not here to ensure that such a thing doesn't occur." He leaned back on his haunches, rested his elbows on his knees and stared listlessly into the fire. "In truth," he concluded, "we're nothing more than a sop to the unreasoned fears of an ignorant people."
Sartas frowned and regarded the old guard with some bafflement. "You talk as though you don't believe," he said.
"Believe what?" Tavarius demanded scornfully. "That what we do here has any meaning?" He gestured broadly, theatrically, a certain degree of anger and impatience in the sweep of his arm. "What meaning is there to marching six days across the dry and choking dust of the desert to walk the ramparts of a wall whose purpose scholars have debated for centuries?" he continued. "What purpose is there in spending six months out here, in the middle of nowhere, away from our families, from the warm beds of our wives and the laughing faces of our children because our king chooses to subscribe to myth and legend?"
"My father was a guard on the Wall," said Sartas with much hubris, as though that somehow spoke to all these issues raised.
But Tavarius merely nodded and said, "As was mine. As were the fathers of all who are accorded the 'honor' of being guardians of the Wall. You wouldn't be here if your father hadn't once walked the wall."
"Then you don't think it an honor?" said Sartas.
"Once," the old guard lamented, "I dreamed with boyish exuberance of the day when I would take my place as one of the guardians of the Wall, when I would serve as my father had served, and as his father before him. In the cities they revere the guardians of the Wall, and think it a great sacrifice that men would risk themselves as first line in the defense of the realm. And once, when I was young, I took pride in their admiration. I thought I deserved it. I thought I had earned it. But one can only stomach so much undeserved praise, until, like milk soured by the summer storm, it begins to have a bitter, unpalatable taste."
"My father was never ashamed of what he did," Sartas proclaimed loftily.
"Perhaps not," Tavarius agreed. "But he'd be rare among those who have walked this wall if he hadn't felt some dissatisfaction for having wasted a good part of his life waiting for ghosts to arise and threaten the great lands of Cysteria."
"Your notions are all well and good," said Sartas, "but surely they ignore the fact of the Wall itself. If there's no threat, Tavarius, then what purpose has the Wall? Surely it wasn't built simply to exist."
"And can you say that it wasn't?" the old man challenged. "Perhaps, indeed, it was. But if there was a purpose, then it's long forgotten; and it might well be other than what myth and legend have assigned it."
"Clearly it's here to protect us," Sartas said with conviction; but Tavarius merely stared across the open flames at him and slowly shook his head.
"Clearly, eh? There's nothing clear about it, boy. In time you'll become disabused of such fancy," the old guard assured him. "The Wall is here as might be a mountain or a river. Who are we, that we might so arrogantly presume to understand the intentions of its builders? Perhaps they intended nothing more than to separate the here from the there."
"That's ridiculous!"
"Is it now? And what purpose has the moon, which in its cycles vanishes from the sky to leave darkness cut only by the flames