A Border Telling | An old soldier who kept the Mute Wall for thirty years says the names on the wall go by themselves

(This is a transcript of the spoken account of one retired Wallwarden of the Mute March. Nothing in it has been confirmed; take it for what it is worth.)

Not many men will talk about this. The Wallwardens have their rules, and what happens on the wall does not travel south; it was only after he had left the service that this old soldier's tongue loosened. The man taking it down wrote what he said, and left the pauses in.

The Mute Wall is 100 metres high, laid up of black basalt, and it runs from the Eastern Sea to the Western Sea. By day, it is a wall and nothing else.

At night it is different. Stand up on a watchtower and look at the face of it, and there are characters on it, giving off a very dim blue light, like a constellation. The old men said those are the names of every lawful king.

I went up onto the wall at sixteen. You are not allowed to sleep your first night; I stood at the merlon until daylight, and looked at those characters the whole time.

I kept the wall 30 years. All those years I watched those characters — one after another, going by themselves. Not weathering, not chiselled off by anyone. One day you walk your round and a name that was there yesterday is gone, and that block of stone is clean, with nothing on it at all.

The man taking it down asked how he knew it had been there yesterday. He said there is a duty on the wall that is not written into standing orders.

It is called the name-round. The night watch walks his own stretch and runs his eye up along it, and where something has newly gone empty he writes it down: which tower, east side or west, how many steps up from the ground. I kept that ledger 30 years.

There are two ways they go. The kind with a sound gives one very thin sharp crack first, and there is still time to get over there and look.

The silent kind gives you no chance. I met with it once. Noon, good sun, I looked up, and the lower half of a character had gone empty. I stood a long while in front of that stone, counting what was left of the upper half. Two strokes.

The man taking it down asked whether he had ever gone after the things at the foot of the wall. He did not answer, and started talking about oil.

The oil has to be hot and must not boil. Boiled too long it goes down as nothing but white smoke and will not coat the face of the wall. That cannot be written into standing orders; an old soldier teaches you hand to hand.

There is one more thing that is not written down either: at night, do not call names at the foot of the wall.

Pressed on why not, he only said that a rule is a rule.

Once a name goes, that stretch of wall goes soft. At night there are things down at the foot of it calling, circling and howling, one bringing on the next. We light the fire-oil, we work the stone-dropper. But you know perfectly well that the wall will hold off what is outside it, and will not hold off the wall shedding its own characters.

My watch lost a man once. Three long and two short. I put his family name into my little ledger. In the south they record the king's name; in the north we record our own.

The old soldier let one more line drop, and when he was asked what it meant he would not say more:

One name fewer on the wall, one man fewer in the south. Not dead. Never having been there at all.

The capital, of course, believes none of it. How is a wall to shed its own characters, and how is a man to have "never been there" because a name has gone. It sounds like the raving of a border soldier who has stood out there too long and frozen his wits.

At the end of the interview he said the old men used to tell it that the wall is divided into 12 stretches, one stretch for one dynasty; he had counted, and 4 of them have lost half.

Keep it in mind anyway. Some day you may go through the old family register at home and find a name missing that you distinctly remember and everyone else says never existed — then think again about whether this old soldier, who kept the wall for 30 years, was really mad.