Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg

It is simply a wall, the Wall, a wall that stands between you and the unknown regions of the world on the other side. And after a time you cease to think of it as something vertical. It unfolds before you as a long winding road, going on and on and on and generally not rising as steeply before you as you might expect, and you take it one step at a time without thinking of all that lies ahead of you, for you know that if you allow yourself to think of anything more than the next step, and maybe the one after that, you will lose your mind.
    We went quickly through the mileposts we all knew: Ashten, Glay, Hespen, Sennt. Certainly every one of us had been up this far at some time or other at holiday times when the Wall is open for the sacred ceremonies in honor of He Who Climbed, and probably we had all come sneaking up here on our own now and then as Galli and I had done. At each milepost marker there was a little prayer to say, since each is sacred to some particular god. But we paused as briefly as we could to get these said, and moved along. As we went up I looked over at Galli, and she grinned at me as if to tell me that she too remembered the time we had come this way together as children, and had made the Changes on the bed of moss back of Hithiat. Thinking of that day now, I remembered the feel of Galli's breasts in my hands and the wriggling of her tongue in my mouth and I wondered if she would want to play a few Changes with me that night when we camped. For it was half a year since I had had a mating, and in my mood just then 1 could have done Changes with all twenty of the women of our Pilgrimage without pausing to catch my breath.
    But we had more climbing to do, first.
    It was all easy and familiar. The Wall road below Hithiat is kept in good repair and the grade is gentle, as mountain roads go; and as I have said we had all been up here many times. We moved along at a good steady clip, joking and laughing, pausing now and then at the lookout points to see the village becoming ever tinier below us. If the laughter was occasionally louder than the jokes seemed to merit, well, so be it: we were excited and eager, and the mountain air, already fresher than the muggy air of the village, exhilarated us. I remember one of the women—Grycindil the Weaver, I think it was, or perhaps it was Stum the Carpenter—coming up alongside me and saying gleefully, "Suppose they lied to us, and the road is this easy all the way to the top! Suppose we're at the Summit by tomorrow afternoon, Poilar! How fine that would be!"
    I had been wondering the same thing myself: Is this all there is to it? Will it be no harder than this, right to the Summit?
    "Yes, how fine that would be," I said to her. And we laughed in that over-hearty manner that we had fallen into to hide our fears. But I knew in my heart that the road would grow more difficult before very long, and that very likely within a few days we would discover that there was no more road at all, only the steep harsh face of the Wall that we would have to scale in utmost hardship. And she, I think, knew it also.
     
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    At Denbail milepost came the business of receiving our gear from our carriers. We stood just beyond the edge of the ceremonial carpet and the defeated candidates who had borne our things this far reached forward—for they were forbidden to set foot on the uncarpeted paving-stones of the upper road—and handed our packs across to us. Mine was being carried by a woman of the Jugglers named Streltsa with whom I had mated once or twice in an earlier year. She stood well back from the carpet's edge and leaned far over to pass it to me, and as I reached for it she laughed and drew it back, so that I had to strain awkwardly toward her to get it. My bad leg failed me and I began to topple, though I righted myself before I fell. While I was still off balance she caught me with her left hand and pulled me toward her and bit me on the side of the neck, hard enough to