Akiko and the Great Wall of Trudd Read online

  Suddenly Throck turned until he was almost facing us and took a few quick steps in our direction. A horrified gasp escaped from me, and it felt as if my heart was about to stop beating altogether. I watched, paralyzed, as Throck slowly looked left and right.

  His face was wide and white as marble, his eyes small and pale. His mouth was concealed by a black metallic cup with several gray tubes attached to it. Each tube led to a different canister attached to his chest. He was just about the scariest-looking man I’d ever seen.

  Once or twice he seemed to be looking in our direction and I was sure he’d spotted us. But then he’d continue looking left and right as if he hadn’t seen us at all. He turned and looked at the sign one more time. Then he walked off the road and into the tall grasses, eventually disappearing into an area of overgrown, weedy shrubs. As he walked farther and farther away, I felt my body relax. My heartbeat slowed back down to normal speed, and it was a lot easier to breathe.

  “I’ll be darned,” Spuckler said, raising himself to a squatting position, “if that wasn’t th’ feller Queen Pwip was warnin’ us about.”

  “See?” Mr. Beeba replied. “She was telling the truth!”

  “Well, if that was Throck,” Spuckler said, jumping to his feet, “then I’m a-goin’ after him!”

  “No, Spuckler!” I said, grabbing hold of his arm. “Absolutely not. That man is very dangerous. I don’t know how I know it,” I added, staring Spuckler right in the face, “but I know it.”

  Spuckler looked at me with squinty eyes and a big frown. He could have kept going. It wasn’t as if a little girl holding on to his arm was going to stop him. But he just stayed where he was.

  “Akiko’s right,” Mr. Beeba said, stepping forward. “We have no quarrel with this fellow. Let him go about his business. If we’re lucky, this will be the last we see of him.”

  I looked at Poog, hoping for some sign that this really was the last we’d see of Throck. Poog just stared back at me with a blank expression.

  Suddenly there was a slamming noise, like a car door being shut, followed by the sound of a powerful engine firing up. The noise came from the shrubs where Throck had disappeared a moment before. The ground began to shake, and then, in the blink of an eye, a small spaceship rose out of the grasses and shot up into the sky. It moved so fast that I couldn’t get a good look at it. Spuckler shielded his eyes with his hands as he watched the ship vanish into the clouds.

  “That’s right, Throck,” Spuckler said. “Git on outta here.”

  After we felt reasonably sure that Throck was gone for good, we all stood up and walked down the hill to look at the sign. It read:

  WARNING: THIS ROAD LEADS TO THE REALM OF ALIA RELLAPOR. TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXPELLED BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY. THIS MEANS YOU.

  “Oh dear,” Mr. Beeba mumbled, examining the dark, scraggly letters with the utmost care. “Oh dear oh dear oh dear!”

  “Hey now, come on, people,” Spuckler said in exasperation. “It’s just a sign, for cryin’ out loud. This ain’t nothin’ to get worked up about.”

  Poog’s warbly gurgling voice filled the air. He continued for a second or two, then stopped abruptly. Mr. Beeba began translating almost immediately.

  “Poog agrees with Spuckler,” he announced, sounding as he if were surprised that anyone in his right mind would ever do such a thing. “This is indeed just a sign, and we should by no means allow ourselves to be constrained by its directives.”

  “Well, thank ya, Poog!” Spuckler said with a big toothy grin. “I knew the two of us’d see eye to eye on somethin’ eventually.”

  Poog smiled warmly. Mr. Beeba grimaced.

  We stepped around the sign and continued walking down the road. I felt much better, but there was still a little knot down in my stomach, a feeling that the danger wasn’t completely gone. Still, it was a great relief to know that Throck had left, at least for the time being.

  I tried my best to put Throck out of my mind, but it was no use. I kept wondering who he was. Was he Alia Rellapor’s assistant? What was it about him that made me feel so sick and scared? And was there some sort of connection between Poog and Throck? I had a weird feeling that Poog had seen Throck before, and that he knew all kinds of stuff about him.

  The road took us up and over a number of hills, and bit by bit the land began to lose a little of its wildness. The grass became shorter, and there were fewer and fewer weedy-looking shrubs. Eventually we were surrounded by beautiful rolling green hills.

  “Good heavens!” I heard Mr. Beeba say. “Don’t tell me that’s the Great Wall of Trudd!” He was pointing beyond the hills to a thin gray line on the horizon. It was so far away that it was hard to be sure it wasn’t just a long band of gray clouds in the distance.

  “Wow!” I said, shading my eyes. “It looks pretty big.”

  “Big?” said Mr. Beeba. “It’s enormous! It must be hundreds of miles long!” He looked as if he was making a mental calculation based on the distance and length of the hazy gray line.

  “Come on, gang,” Spuckler said, urging us onward. “We better pick up the pace if we’re gonna get there before the sun goes down.”

  Spuckler was right. The wall was still many miles away, and if we walked too slowly it would be dark by the time we got there.

  So we continued down the road as fast as we could, taking breaks every half hour or so. Each time we got to the top of a hill, we got a clearer view of the Great Wall of Trudd, and each time, it appeared even bigger than before. We all became so intent on moving quickly that we almost stopped talking to one another. For at least a couple of hours there was nothing but the sounds of me and Mr. Beeba panting, Gax’s wheels squeaking, and Spuckler whistling some strange, almost tuneless melody. Finally, as the late-afternoon sun covered the land with a warm yellow glow, we crossed one final hill and descended a long, graceful slope that led to the base of the wall.

  It was huge. Huger than huge. It must have been about two hundred feet tall, maybe even taller. I have no idea how wide it was, since it went off in either direction as far as the eye could see, eventually disappearing over the hills into the haze. One thing’s for sure: There was no way we’d be able to walk around the thing.

  It reminded me of the Great Wall of China, except it was really different in a lot of ways. I mean, I remember seeing a picture of the Great Wall of China in my history book at Middleton Elementary, and I’d say the Great Wall of Trudd was twenty or thirty times higher. (Not that there’s anything wrong with the Great Wall of China. They just could have made it a lot taller, that’s all.)

  We all stood there in the middle of the slope, staring at the wall with our mouths open wide. It was built entirely out of roughly cut gray pieces of stone: gigantic boulder-sized ones at the bottom and smaller, flatter ones at the top. There were towers and windows built into it, as if it was a castle and a wall at the same time. Way up at the very top there were rickety old poles with enormous weather-beaten flags waving from them. I half expected to see little soldiers up there marching back and forth, keeping watch over who knows what kind of enemy. But there was also an old, ghost-towny feeling about the place, and it was pretty obvious that no one had actually lived there for years and years.

  “Look at all the windows,” I said. “Do you think people used to live inside this thing?”

  “Evidently so,” Mr. Beeba replied, sounding as if he was about to come up with an elaborate theory on the subject. “Their whole society must have revolved around the maintenance of this wall.”

  It was pretty spooky to think of thousands of people spending their entire lives inside this wall. I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to them all.

  “Well, if they made windows,” Spuckler said, rubbing his jaw with one hand, “they must’ve made doors, too.”

  “Good thinking, Spuckler,” Mr. Beeba replied. “If we can find a door, maybe we can locate some sort of passageway from one side to the other.”

  So we walked down the hill until we g
ot closer to the base of the wall and started looking for a door. Spuckler pressed a button on Gax’s body, causing a binocularlike device to pop out from inside him with a loud squeak. Gax positioned the device in front of his eye sockets and began surveying the wall from left to right.

  In the meantime Mr. Beeba paced back and forth, mumbling to himself as if he was making a series of very difficult calculations. Poog also seemed to be thinking about something, but he had a distant look in his eyes, as if he was focusing on something else, something many miles away.

  “I’VE FOUND A DOOR, SIR,” Gax announced after a minute or two of searching. “IT’S APPROXIMATELY 547 YARDS DUE EAST.”

  “Good work, Gax,” Spuckler said, patting him on the helmet like a proud dog owner. “C’mon, gang. Let’s go check it out!”

  So we followed Gax through the overgrown grass and piles of unused stone until we came to a large gray doorway. It was a very grand double-doored entrance, with a large, wide staircase leading up to it. But for some reason it was covered from top to bottom with large boards that had been firmly nailed into place, making it look like an old abandoned house or something.

  “Bad luck,” Mr. Beeba said. “We’ll have to keep looking for another entrance.”

  “Oh no we won’t,” Spuckler declared as he ran up the steps and began tugging violently on one of the boards with both hands. “Your problem, Beeba . . . rrrgh . . . is ya give up on things . . . nnngh . . . too easily!”

  KRRRAK!

  Off came one of the boards, and Spuckler casually tossed it aside, nails and all.

  “Um, Spuckler,” I said cautiously, “do you need any help?” I wasn’t so sure my little arms would make much of a difference, but I thought I should at least try.

  “Naw, ’Kiko,” Spuckler answered with a loud grunt. “I ’preciate . . . arrrgh . . . ya askin’, though!”

  GRRAAK! BRRROTT! KRRRUK!

  One by one Spuckler tore the planks away, throwing them over his shoulder without even bothering to see where they’d land. The more wood he pulled off, the more the door seemed to be bulging outward, as if something was pressing up against it from the inside. It occurred to me that maybe these doors hadn’t been boarded up to keep people from getting in, but rather to keep something inside from getting out.

  “Spuckler!” Mr. Beeba called out, ducking his head to avoid a piece of wood Spuckler had just sent whizzing through the air. “Stop for a moment, will you? I think there’s a very good reason these doors have been boarded shut!”

  It was too late, though. The doors began to creak and groan, and the last few planks started to crack and pop off by themselves. Spuckler finally got an idea of what was about to happen and slowly started backing away.

  “Stand back, everybody!” he shouted. By that time, though, Mr. Beeba and I had already stepped back at least twenty feet or so. Even Gax had wheeled himself away several yards, and Poog was floating a safe distance up in the air. Spuckler leaped out of the way just in time.

  BRRRRRRRRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!

  All at once the doors flew open and out came an avalanche of stone and sand. Mr. Beeba, Gax, and I continued backing away as wave after wave of the gravelly gray rocks poured out of the doorway, over the steps, and onto the grass. If Spuckler had waited any longer he would have been buried alive!

  A minute or two later the last of the rocks came tumbling out, and all that was left was a huge cloud of white dust hanging in the air. Only a tiny sliver of space remained between the top of the doorway and the mountain of stones that had just poured out of it.

  “Well, I’ll be gol-darned!” Spuckler exclaimed, scratching his head with one hand. “They went and filled the thing with rocks!”

  “They did nothing of the sort, Spuckler,” Mr. Beeba stated authoritatively. “This wall is simply so old it’s disintegrating from within.”

  All at once I had an image of what it must be like inside the wall, with every ceiling and floor ready to cave in at the slightest footstep.

  “Well, in that case,” I said, adopting my best leaderlike tone of voice, “I don’t want anyone going in there. It’s way too dangerous.” There was a moment of silence as we all looked at one another, trying to think of what the next step would be.

  Finally Spuckler cleared his throat and spoke.

  “The way I see it, there’s only one way we’re gonna get past this thing,” he said, shielding his eyes from the sun with one hand as he looked up at the very top of the wall, “and that’s by climbin’ over it.”

  Spuckler took charge of the climbing plans, with Mr. Beeba as the self-appointed naysayer. I sat down and rested on the grass while the two of them bickered about how best to scale the wall. Finally they came up with a plan they could both agree on. Sort of.

  “First thing we gotta do is tie ourselves together,” Spuckler said, pulling a large quantity of rope from a compartment inside Gax and tying one end of it around his own waist. He then tied the middle of the rope around my waist and handed the other end to Mr. Beeba, who tied it around himself as best he could.

  “This way if one of us falls, the other two can pull ’im back up,” Spuckler explained in a tone of voice that was probably supposed to reassure us.

  “Sounds like a recipe for disaster, if you ask me,” Mr. Beeba moaned.

  “You prefer goin’ it alone, Beebs?” Spuckler barked, squinting angrily.

  “Er . . . maybe I need to tie this knot a little bit tighter,” Mr. Beeba whimpered, busying himself with the rope.

  Meanwhile, Gax had produced three suction-cupped legs, which allowed him to scale the wall almost effortlessly. He scampered up and down the wall for practice, making a series of little popping sounds as he did.

  “Wow, Gax,” I said. “You’re better at going up walls than any of us!”

  “IT’S NOTHING SPECIAL, MA’AM,” Gax replied modestly. “MOST ROBOTS OF MY GENERATION ARE CAPABLE OF WALL CLIMBING. THESE SUCTION CUPS WERE INSTALLED AT THE FACTORY, AS A MATTER OF FACT.”

  I tried for a moment to imagine the factory where Gax had been built. It must have been a pretty interesting place.

  “Now, there’s just one rule b’fore we start,” Spuckler said, staring first at me, then at Mr. Beeba. “Don’t look down. It’ll make ya dizzy.”

  The two of us nodded and tugged nervously at the rope, checking it once more.

  Finally it was time to start climbing. Spuckler took the lead, I went next, and Mr. Beeba was underneath me at the bottom end of the rope. Gax followed Mr. Beeba, and Poog just sort of floated alongside us, two or three feet from the wall.

  Before long we were almost thirty feet from the ground. Then forty. Then fifty. The stones were cut very roughly, so there were plenty of little ledges to hold on to. At certain points it was no harder than climbing a steep flight of stairs. At other times it was a lot trickier than that. There was one spot where most of the wall was covered with a damp, greenish yellow moss, and every time I thought I had a solid footing my shoes would suddenly slide off to one side, leaving me clinging by my fingertips.

  Spuckler definitely could have climbed a lot faster if he hadn’t been tied to me and Mr. Beeba. As it was, he forced himself to go very slowly. He also called down little warnings to us as we went along, like “It gets a little steep up here, ’Kiko!” and “Watch out for the loose rocks over here on the right, Beebs.”

  The higher we went, the stronger the wind became. Every once in a while a powerful gust would whistle past and I’d find myself digging my fingernails into the wall with all my might. My skin was becoming all goose-pimply and I started to get a weird, queasy feeling in my stomach.

  “Come on now,” I said to myself. “You can do this. Don’t be a baby.”

  I tried not to look down, but I couldn’t help myself. I really wanted to see how high up we were. Once I snuck a quick glance down and was amazed to see how far away the ground looked. I could see the doorway with all the rocks piled in front of it, but now it looked really tiny, like the
entrance to a toy castle.

  It reminded me of the time my parents took me to the top of this supertall building in Chicago where I could look out the windows and see all the tiny little people and taxicabs and stuff hundreds and hundreds of feet below me. Only now I didn’t have a big, thick piece of glass to look through.

  When we reached a spot seventy or eighty feet from the ground, Spuckler practically ordered me to stop looking down.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, ’Kiko: Ya gotta keep your eyes on the wall in front of ya,” he said in a very stern voice. “It’s the only way t’ keep yourself from gettin’ dizzy.”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Beeba added, for once agreeing with Spuckler, “if you keep looking down you’re going to get a nasty case of vertigo. Trust me, Akiko. I’m highly susceptible to dizzy spells myself!”

  I knew they were right. I promised myself to stay focused on the climbing.

  By this time we were nearly a hundred feet up in the air. Sweat was dripping down my forehead and getting in my eyes. I probably should have asked Spuckler and Mr. Beeba to stop so that I could take a rest, but I didn’t want them to think I was some kind of weakling or something. So I just kept going, reaching up to one stone and then another, pulling myself up again and again until my whole body ached.

  A minute or two later I accidentally cut my arm on a sharp piece of rock sticking out from the wall.

  “Oww!”

  It was a pretty bad cut. I stared with surprise as bright red blood began to run down my forearm.

  “You okay, ’Kiko?” Spuckler asked, turning his face toward me to see what had happened. For some reason I turned my arm away so that he wouldn’t be able to see the blood. I guess I just didn’t want him to worry about me too much.

  “Are you hurt?” Mr. Beeba asked, looking up from where he was a few feet below me.