In truth he had wondered about the wisdom of his own harsh decree right in the moment of uttering it. Biterulve didn’t need to know that. The words had simply escaped from his lips in his first red instant of fury when he saw that fallen block, so beautifully hewn and now cracked beyond repair, and those six bloody legs jutting out pathetically from beneath it.

But decrees once spoken may not be revoked. A king must be merciful and just, Salaman knew, but sometimes a king finds himself being unthinkingly cruel, for that is sometimes kingship’s nature. And when he is cruel he must take care not to let himself be seen second-guessing his own cruelty, or the people will think he is that worst of all tyrants, a capricious one. The very injustice of that hastily uttered sentence had made it impossible for him to call it back. Thus had blood atoned for blood in the building of Salaman’s great black wall. If the people were troubled by it, they kept their discontent to themselves.

“Come,” Salaman said. “Let’s go up on top.”

At eighteen equidistant points around the perimeter, handsome stone staircases rising along the inner face gave access to the narrow brick footpath that ran along the wall’s summit. When he had first had them built, some of Salaman’s sons and counselors had found those staircases paradoxical and even perverse. “Father, we should never have built them,” said Chham, with all the gravity that he affected as the eldest of the princes. “They’ll make it all the easier for the hjjks to descend into the city if they scale the wall.”

And Athimin, Chham’s full brother, the king’s only other son by his earliest mate Weiawala, chimed in, “We ought to rip them out. They scare me, father. Chham’s right. They make us too vulnerable.”

“The hjjks will never scale the wall,” Salaman had retorted. “But we need the stairs ourselves, so we can get troops up there in a hurry if anyone ever does try to come over.”

The princes dropped the issue then. They knew better than to tangle with their father in any sort of dispute. He had ruled the city with a sure and capable hand throughout their entire lives, but in his later years he had grown increasingly irascible and stark of soul. Everyone, even Salaman himself, understood that the wall was not a topic suited for reasonable discussion. The king had no interest in being reasonable where the Great Wall was concerned. His concern was in making it so high that the question of its being scaled would be beyond all consideration.

In his dawn perambulations he chose a different staircase every day, and invariably descended via the second staircase to the left of the one he had ascended, so that it took him six days to complete the full circuit of the rampart. It was a ritual from which he never deviated, winter or summer, rain or heat. It seemed to him that the safety of the city depended on it.

Biterulve went skipping up to the summit. Salaman followed at a more stately pace. At the top he stamped his feet against the solid brick of the footpath, which lay above the huge black stones like a tough layer of skin above a mighty musculature.

Salaman laughed. “Do you feel the strength of it, boy, beneath your legs? There’s a wall for you! There’s a wall to be proud of!”

He slipped his arm over the boy’s shoulders and stared out into the misty lands beyond the city’s bounds.

Yissou lay in a pleasant fertile vale. Dense forests and high ridges flanked it to the east and north, gentler hills rose to the south, and there was harsh broken country in the westlands leading off toward the distant sea.

The huge crater which the city itself occupied lay at the center of a broad shadow thickly carpeted with grasses, both the green and the red. It was perfectly circular, and surrounded by a high, sharply delineated rim. Salaman believed, though he had never been able to prove it, that the crater had been created by the force of a death-star’s impact, plummeting into the breast of the Earth during the early dark days of the Long Winter.

The crater’s rim, lofty as it was, offered little protection against invaders. And so the Great Wall of Yissou had been under continuous construction for the past thirty-five years.

Salaman had begun it in the sixth year of the city, the third of his own reign after the death of the turbulent dark-souled Harruel, Yissou’s first king. During his long span of power he had seen the wall rise to a height of fifteen courses in most places, forming a gigantic fortification that completely encircled the city along the line of the crater’s rim.

In Yissou’s earliest days a simple wooden palisade had guarded that perimeter, not very effectively. But Salaman, who had been only a young warrior then but already was dreaming of succeeding Harruel as king, had vowed to replace it one day by an unconquerable wall of stone. And so he had.

If only it were high enough! But how high was high enough?

There had been no hjjk attacks thus far during his reign, for all his fears. They wandered through the outlying countryside, yes. Now and then some small band of them, ten or twenty of them straying for some unfathomable hjjk reason out of their outpost at Vengiboneeza, might approach the city. But they came no closer than the edge of visibility — nothing more than black-and-yellow specks, seemingly no larger than the ants who were their distant kin. Then they would turn and swing back toward the north, having satisfied whatever urge it was that had brought them this way in the first place. There is never any understanding hjjks, Salaman thought.

So what the hjjks called Queen-peace prevailed, year upon year. But Queen-peace might be no more than a trap, a lie, a hallucination, an accident of the moment. The hjjks could end it whenever they chose. War might come at any time. Sooner or later it certainly would.

How could he convince himself that a wall fifteen courses high was high enough? In his mind’s eye he saw invading hjjks building longer ladders, and longer ones yet, topping his wall no matter how high he built it, even if it reached through the roof of the sky.

“We will take it higher, I think,” Salaman often would say, with a sweeping gesture of both his hands. “Another three courses, or perhaps four.”

And the builders and masons would sigh; for as Salaman’s rampart continued to rise, all the battlements and parapets and guardhouses and watchtowers that existed presently along the highest level had to be ripped away to make room for the new rows of stone blocks, and rebuilt afterward, and then ripped away once more as Salaman’s insatiable hungers led him to demand yet another course or two, and so on and so on.

But they were used it. The wall was Salaman’s obsession, his cherished plaything, his monument. It would continue growing ever higher, everyone knew, so long as he was king. They wouldn’t have known what to do or say, if Salaman were to tell them some afternoon, “The wall is finished now. We are safe against any conceivable enemy. Go to your homes, all of you, and take up some new employment tomorrow.”

Small chance of that. The wall would never be finished.

The king stamped his feet again. He imagined the wall sending down deep massive roots and anchoring itself in the depths of the Earth. He laughed. To Biterulve he said, “Boy, do you know what I have done here? I’ve built a wall that will stand a million years. A million million, even. The world will grow old, and enter into a time of greatness someday beside which the Great World will seem like nothing at all, and people will say then, seeing the wall, ‘That wall is Salaman’s, who was king at Yissou when the world was young.’”

Biterulve said, with a sly look coming over his face, “And is the world young now, father? I thought it was very old, that we live in the latter days.”

“So we do. But to those who come after us, these will seem like early times.”