Akiko and the Great Wall of Trudd Read Free Page 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