The Wall
by Therese Arkenberg
Raishya was fourteen when she decided to see what was at the center of the Wall. It started with a dare--not to her, but to her brother. Taden was down on the Ground between two walls, playing in the brambles with the other boys his age. They were playing tag, and Evin was losing, and maybe that was why he decided to make the dare.“Betcha you won’t go all the way to Center,” he said, quite suddenly. He often said things suddenly, and often with no real reason; it startled the other children when he did and that didn’t earn him a lot of friends.
But a dare was a dare, whoever made it. “I’ll go to Center,” Taden said, drawing himself up proudly, “if you’ll go Outside.”
“By smoke ’n fire,” one of the boys gasped. While Center was cloaked with an air of mystery, Outside held more concrete dangers. Outside was where the men came from every month with the supplies that weren’t available on the Wall: grain and feed and cloth and meat that didn’t come from birds caught on the rooftops. People could raise goats and gardens on the Ground between walls, but they had no space for fields to grow wheat or cotton. And the iron they used to build and repair and defend the Wall came from Outside, too, but also what they defended against: foreign men who would not be turned away at the Gate House. Men who might want to kidnap a kid from the Wall, to see if they could somehow use him to get to Center.
But on the other hand…
“I’ll go Outside,” Evin settled, “If you go and tell me what’s in Center.”
Taden blanched. “I…I…”
He was caught between two walls, for sure. From her perch on the wall above, Raishya snickered. Taden was a coward, really. She used to play with him when they were little, since there were no other girls her age on the Wall, but he was too slow and cautious to have any fun with, so she stayed on her own now. Maybe Evin and the others would give up on him too one day.
“Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll tell you what’s in Center.” Taden turned and began scaling the wall, shoving his fingers into chinks in the crumbling mortar. He hauled himself up beside Raishya.
“I’ll go to Center for you,” she said.
He jumped. “Sneak!”
“Sure I am. But I’ll go to Center for you.”
“What?”
“Do I have to say it again?”
“But…why?”
She shrugged. “I’ll go and I’ll tell you what I see, and then you can tell Evin and pretend you were brave and went for yourself. Then Evin’ll have to go Outside, and people’ll think you’re okay and I won’t have to be a coward’s sister anymore.”
“You still won’t have any friends,” he snarled.
“Do you want me to go to Center for you or not?”
“Fine.” He looked over the roofs and towers of the Wall. Towards Center. “You can go.”
Raishya smiled.
She waited until her parents had fallen asleep. Taden, she knew, was still up, watching her across the tiny tower room that was the family’s apartment, checking to be sure she would go, probably. Stupid boy. Didn’t he know that girls don’t go back on their promises?
At least, Raishya didn’t.
She waited a few minutes more before getting up from the couch. Her father stirred in his sleep but didn’t rise. Taden’s eyes creaked open to slits, then slammed shut. Raishya didn’t laugh, but she wanted to.
The door was squeaky, so she climbed through the window instead. It was a little hard, especially the part when she inched around the tower to where she could get her feet on the wall, but at least nobody noticed her. And now she had proven she could be brave. Probably nobody else on the Wall could climb around a tower as high as her family’s in the middle of the night.
The stone of a hundred walls shone in the moonlight like a lapping sea, stretching to every horizon. Here and there the spike of a tower pointed up at a star or simply into the dark sky. Each wall and many a tower was a patchwork: fine masonry there, mortared rubble right beside it, repairs and additions, improvements and defacements, from all the hundreds of years of the Wall’s history. The plots of Ground were covered with brambles, vines, or overgrown grass: wider spots held goat pens or gardens, nearly impossible to see in the shadows. The blue-roofed welltowers stood with their doors open, empty. Same with the red-peaked privies. Nobody would see Raishya.
Narrow bridges crossed between walls. Few of them had rails, and in the darkness Raishya walked carefully in case she slipped and fell fifteen feet to the ground. The going was really bad where two walls were not the same height and the bridge between them sloped up or down. A mist was rolling in, too, making the stone slick.
Light still blazed from a few of the towers, families finishing supper or watchmen’s wives waiting for them to return from the outmost wall and Gate House. A privy door slammed, and Raishya hid at a well until a sleepy man in a nightshirt stumbled back home. Then she crept out and continued her journey.
Centerward. As she went farther and farther in, fewer towers were light, and more of the walls and bridges were falling into disrepair. People liked living closer to Outside, where they could get fresh supplies quicker, and Raishya suspected that they also didn’t like being very close to whatever the Wall was there to guard. Nobody was supposed to go to Center, not even watchmen and certainly not adventurers, from Outside or anywhere else. But then, that was why kids dared their not-so-favorite friends to go there and tell what they saw. Unfortunately, the tales told of Center weren’t always the same, leading some to believe that the kids who told them were lying.
Not Raishya. She really would go in and really would see what the Wall was guarding and really would tell everyone about it. She would be brave.
And suddenly the Wall stopped. It started up again, close enough to almost believe that it was just a wider Ground-gap than normal, but after that point the walls kept getting longer and, looking to either side, Raishya could see them curve around the space…
Center.
She moved cautiously to the edge of the final wall and looked down. There were low rails along the inside rim, made of the same stone as the four towers spaced evenly around Center. All of them were unlit, missing roof tiles, empty, abandoned. Raishya must be the first person here in decades, unless another Center-going kid really had been telling the truth. There was only one way to find out. She peered down.
Center wasn’t that impressive. Mist was gathering in it, but all Raishya could see beyond that was green. Grass and brambles grew there, same as anywhere else, and she saw the branches of a vine growing up the rail inches from her hands. She end down and pulled at it; it stayed stuck. It seemed Nature had provided her a ladder.
Raishya climbed carefully down the vine and dropped onto soft grass at the end of it. Center was empty except for the growing things, quiet except for Raishya’s breathing, still except for the swirling mist.
Why was the mist swirling? There was no breeze down here; the leaves on the brambles and seedy grass were motionless. But the fog moved, around and around the base of the walls like the shadow of a vortex.
Raishya looked around, the smell of damp grass and stone in her nostrils. Brambles. Mist. Grass. Crumbling stone walls. So this was Center. This was what the Wall was meant to protect, what no one was meant to see. She thought it would be more, somehow.
Maybe she’d make Taden come down here after all. Make him see it himself, show him there was nothing to be afraid of. She reached for the vine and was about to haul herself up when something moved.
Something rasped, like claws against stone. Her heart nearly stopped until she saw that it was only a bush in the corner of her eye, thrashing wildly against the wall as if something has sprung from it.
Something…
But she saw nothing.
The wind moaned over the walls above her. Without releasing the vine, Raishya slowly turned her head to look around. “Hello?” she ventured. “Is anyone there?”
Rustling. She turned towards it just in time to see the final bobs of another bush lashed by invisible movement. “Guess so,” she whispered.
She had to climb. Get out. She began to, straining her arms as she moved her foot to one of the branches. Then another. Up again. One more branch. The vine was slippery with condensed mist; she nearly fell. Another bush rustled. She grabbed the vine higher up and began to pull herself towards the wall’s top…
The vine thrashed, bucking, throwing her off. She hit the damp ground hard.
The mist swirled. The grass rustled with the force of a wind that wasn’t supposed to exist, the heads of the stalks pointing towards her…
The people on the Wall closest to the center awoke to a child’s screams.
They found her the next morning on the threshold of one of the old abandoned towers. The door was locked, as it had been for years, and there was no sign that she had tried to force her way in. But she scrabbled back when they neared her, like a small, terrified creature. She was carried home in the arms of one of her father’s friends. She didn’t seem to recognize him.
She slept into the afternoon. When she awoke, her eyes were bright and alert, her voice when she said ‘Good morning’ was clear, and her parents felt a breath of relief that she had made it through her nocturnal adventure unscathed. But men from the Gate House had come in while she was sleeping, to remind them in no uncertain terms that no one was allowed to go to Center. They were to make that clear to her. They decided to wait until, poor child, she had gotten some more rest.
Taden sat at the table with her as she gulped down a bowl of broth that evening. He waited nervously as their parents paused to check on them, and waited a few moments after they climbed the stairs—they wanted to talk together in privacy on top of the watchtower—to be sure they were gone.
“Raishya?”
She spooned more broth in her mouth but didn’t answer.
“Raish? You went to Center?”
She didn’t speak, but slowly, she nodded.
“What…what did you see there?”
“Walls.”
Taden screamed. It wasn’t his sister’s voice that answered: it was something other, nasty, deep as the night and cold and damp as mist, moving in her throat like a death rattle.
“So…many…walls.” She looked at him suddenly, clasping her arms as if she felt a chill. “Who…are…you?”
“I’m Taden. Y-your brother.”
“Who…am…I?”
“Raishya! You’re Raishya!”
“Why…are…there…so…many…walls?”
“I don’t know!”
“To…keep…me…in…to keep…me in…to keep me…in…to keep me in…” The voice repeated in Raishya’s mouth, babbling as she rocked back and forth. “To keep…me in…to keep…me in…” For a moment, her own voice was back, shrill, repeating the words in terror. “To keep me in! The walls! Take them down! Let me out!”
“Go!” Taden jumped to his feet and pointed at the door, frightened and sad and angry all at once. “You’re out! You’re free! Go!”
There was silence. Raishya, blankly staring at the wall with glazed eyes, did not answer.
Therese is a student living in Wisconsin. When she isn't writing, she can be found biking the trails in her area, reading a book from the library (where she also works), or futily trying to organize her desk and her collection of stuffed animals. Her work has been published in Byzarium ezine, Kaleidotrope magazine, and has been accepted for a future edition of Raven Electrick webzine.