by Adam Roberts
Wittershe was out in moments, smiling to see him. She smiled at him. Tighe felt tears at the back of his eyes, but struggled to keep them back. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to take this salt to the monkeys. Come with me?’
Tighe followed her.
They made their way along a narrow pathway, Tighe looking wallward to avoid the drop. Then they were amongst the crumbling rack of grassy crags that housed Witterhe’s monkeys. A few decaying pegs were driven into the wall, but no monkeys were actually attached to them. Witterhe had been keeping monkeys so long they were almost habituated to the place. The hairy, child-sized bodies clustered round Wittershe as she broke off pieces of salt and passed them out. Black, clutching fingers. Chattering and shrieking, with occasional sideswipes and bared teeth.
‘Sorry news about your pas,’ said Wittershe, raising her voice above the clamour.
Tighe didn’t say anything. He found a crag wider than the rest and pressed his back against the wall. When Wittershe had finished feeding the apes she came over and sat next to him.
‘Difficult time for you,’ she said.
‘I suppose.’
Her fingers touched his shoulder and even through the depression of his spirits, even with the deadness in his heart, his wick responded, straightening a little in his pants.
‘There’s talk in the village,’ Wittershe said. ‘They say you should be the Prince now, with your pas’ wealth, that your Grandhe has no right.’
Tighe looked at her. There was an eager expression in her eyes. Through the fog of his mood, Tighe recognised the look. If he were Prince, then he would be an adult, a single man with five goats and his own house. That would be some catch for a monkeymonger’s daughter.
‘I suppose,’ he said.
Wittershe sat back, so that her eyes glittered in the sunlight. ‘I know your Grandhe is close with the Doge, but there ought to be a way. If you pushed it there might be a way. Claim the goats. Claim them – why not? Think, Tighe, six goats!’
‘Five,’ he said, in a small voice.
Then she was leaning on him, her breath on his neck. ‘It’s yours, you know. You need to be the Prince, to act as the Prince would. You need to take it.’
‘I suppose so,’ he said again. He felt an enormous weariness in his body, a terrible sense that there was nobody for him, nobody on any place of the wall. He was not a person, he was only the legal channel for an inheritance. And yet, despite this profound sadness, his wick was hard and upstanding. It was betraying his mood.
‘I’ve always liked you, you know,’ Wittershe was saying. Her voice sounded distant, despite the fact that the words were spoken directly into Tighe’s ear. He was staring straight ahead. The blue sky. Was there really another wall, a pure smooth wall, in the far blue distance? Was that what made the air blue?
‘You do know that, don’t you?’ she said.
Tighe turned his head a little and Wittershe pushed a kiss against his lips. Then she giggled. All around them monkeys were settling back into their crags, muttering to themselves, fumbling at one another’s pelts for fleas, plucking stems of grass, slapping the tops of their heads with the palms of their long, narrow hands. Tighe felt his heart pummelling inside his chest.
‘Better not let my pahe see me doing that,’ Wittershe said. She glanced at him, almost coy.
On an impulse, Tighe jerked his head forward and snatched a kiss from her. His wick was so stiff now it actually hurt. He reached up with his hand and grasped her shoulder, then let the hand slide down the clay-like softness of her right breast. She was still smiling, but she briskly removed Tighe’s hand. He tried to dart forward and kiss her again, but she pulled her head back.
‘Wait,’ she said.
She reached forward and pushed Tighe back, her two hands flat against his two shoulders, until his back touched the wall again. ‘Some of the boys like this trick,’ she said, in a low voice, and laughed again. Even as she was reaching for his belly, Tighe felt the words scrape awkwardly in his mind. Some boys? Which boys? A chasm of the possibilities of jealousy opened up. Which boys did Wittershe mean? Who did she spend her time with? Which boys did she practise this on?
But sensation drowned out contemplation. Wittershe had, with a slight edge of unpractised awkwardness, placed both hands on his stomach and then slid them under the band of his trousers. His wick was straining up towards them. She had to lean a little forward to get purchase, bringing her profile directly in front of Tighe’s face. There was a distracted smile on her lips. With her left hand she ringed the base of his wick, and with her right hand she grasped the head of it. Tighe shuddered. Then she began roughly rubbing it up and down. The suddenness of the gesture, and the friction of dry skin on skin, made him cry out. She stopped, looked at him, her smile cupping down a little.
‘What?’
‘Hurts,’ he said.
She paused, withdrew her hand, spat into the palm, and replaced it. Then she started rubbing again, a little more smoothly with the lubrication. The pressure was instantly there, just below his bladder; similar to the pressure felt when he needed to piss, but also different. It grew, building swiftly towards something hard and definite. Tighe dropped his gaze. The motion of the arm, back and forward in a small arc as her hand moved up and down, imparted a little jiggle to her torso. Underneath the rough weave of her shirt Tighe could see the wobble of her breasts. With a breathtaking jolt he came, his wick hurling up a glob of himself, then a second smaller one, and then nothing. Wittershe had stopped. There was a broad smile on her face.
‘There,’ she said, ‘what do you think?’
Tighe was staring at her, open-eyed.
‘Lost for words?’ she teased, extracting her hands and wiping them on the grass by her side. Monkeys chattered all around.
He started to say something, stopped as if blocked. Then with a heave, as if the words were leaving him by a similar mechanism to the way his seed had just exited, he said, ‘I love you.’
Wittershe’s smile shrank and then broadened. Tighe felt immediately stupid, as if he had over-extended himself.
‘I’d better get back inside,’ she said, ‘or my pahe is going to get angry with me.’ She leapt to her feet with monkeyish rapidity and scattered along the crag, jumping to make the ledge outside their house and ducking inside the door.
For a moment Tighe was in a kind of daze. He put his hand on his belly, felt the snotty stickiness of his own stuff where Wittershe had massaged it out. He brought out a glob between finger and thumb and examined it. It was the colour of nothing. The colour of sky.
Then the sunlight swelled; clouds parted and the glory of light squeezed Tighe’s eyes shut. His heart was beating. The image of his pashe came into his head. Why did he think of that? She always seemed angry when he remembered her; the skin of her face darkened with the anger. He seemed only able to think of his pashe angry. Then, suddenly, blocks of hollow misery burst up inside of him. His pas were dead. His pashe was dead. It was his fault, somehow; somehow he was to blame. His pashe had fallen off the earth. How had it happened? He saw a picture of her, features contorted with the rage that rendered her so close to fear. Fear and anger the same. Then the image was replaced with another and this was somehow much more terrible; his pashe simply stepping over the lip of things with a blank expression on her face, a nothingness. Going over as empty-minded as the goat they had lost. Anger and emptiness the same. A hollowness seeking out the enormous void of the air; to fall for ever, to fall into the fiery lap of God.
Away to the left, some monkey bickered shriekingly with another; and then, as swiftly as it started, the commotion died away.
Tighe was crying now and still he didn’t really understand what he was crying for. He balled his fists into his eye sockets, but the grief wouldn’t be contained. He could sense sobs trembling in his ribcage. Some distant apprehension of shame told him that he didn’t want Old Witterhe, or worse Wittershe herself, to see him in this state. His eyes bleary and his breathing
shallow he struggled up and lumbered over to the Witterhe ladder. There was motion behind him; monkeys. Or Witterhe coming out of the house. Panicked, Tighe scrambled up the steps of the ladder.
He was making odd little whooming sounds by the time he got up to main-street shelf, a combination of distress and being out of breath. Careless of who saw him, he stumbled and wove over to the wall with tears tumbling from his eyes. Amongst the itinerants he collapsed, tucked his knees up and wept into his own lap, doubled over himself.
10
Tears eventually fall away and the eyes are left dry. Tighe reached a less hysterical state, a wider ledge of calm. For a while he simply sat, the comfort of the wall at his back, and stared out at the sky. The sun had climbed and shadows were concentrated on the ground. People came and went on the shelf. He saw his Grandhe come out of his house and scurry over the ground, punting himself onwards with his staff.
Tighe sat. He looked around at the itinerants. They were sitting, knees up, elbows perched on top of the bony kneecaps, simply staring into space. Many of them were now so thin that it looked as though their bones were struggling to burst through their skin, just as their bodies had burst through the sun-wearied rags of their clothes. Everything about them, Tighe saw, was slow. The man squatting next to him would turn his head like a figure in a dream, the face turning with the inexorable slowness of the sun rising through the sky. His eyes were milky with hunger, his skin was speckled with mauve dots. Even his breathing came with enormous effort, as if the air were scaling the ridged wall of his ribcage with difficulty. He would stare at Tighe as if he were as perfectly remote and as perfectly featureless as the sky itself, and then he would turn his head slowly back to face front again.
‘You’re dying,’ said Tighe. Saying the words added detachment to his perception of the man.
He breathed out; a sigh in answer.
‘How long since you last ate?’
He breathed in again. ‘Months,’ he said. His voice sounded strong, for all the stretched feebleness of his body. ‘I been eating grass,’ he said, the words coming slowly but distinctly, ‘but it don’t support your strength.’
‘So you’re waiting for work.’
Another exhalation, more like a laugh. ‘Nobody going to employ me now. Am too weak.’ Tighe looked at his arm; the elbow was like a seedpod in a slender black stem. ‘Once every few days somebody calls up,’ he said, and paused to get his breath. ‘Calls up one of the stronger ones. From the group over there.’ The slightest inclination of his head. ‘They get a bit of food and join the group again.’
‘Why do you just wait around here to die?’ said Tighe, suddenly. ‘Why not just walk over the edge of the world and end it quickly? If I was like you I’d just walk over the edge of the world. That’s what I’d do. Why don’t you?’
The man rotated his head a second time, patiently. When he was meeting Tighe’s intense gaze, he said, ‘Sin.’
‘What?’
He turned his head back and said nothing.
‘What does it matter if it is a sin?’ said Tighe. ‘You’ll be dead either way in a few days.’ Saying that gave him heart. It was cruel, but the world was cruel.
After a long pause the man said, ‘I get to watch the world go by.’ Then after a pause, ‘I get to watch you.’
‘Do you know who I am?’ said Tighe. Then, more urgently, the idea occurring to him for the first time, ‘Do you know my pas? Did you ever see my pas?’
But the man was breathing out. ‘Don’t know you. Seen you. You live with that old man.’ Tighe followed his gaze to see his Grandhe storming back over the main-street shelf. He looked angry.
‘I’d say’, said the man, ‘he’s looking for you. He’s been back and forth.’
‘But why,’ said Tighe, his impotence and his rage focusing in a moment of sharp, painful intensity, ‘why do you give up like this? How can you just sit here and give up?’
The man didn’t turn his head; didn’t say anything. There were tears in Tighe’s eyes again. It was all so pointless. It all fell into death in the end. People clung to the precarious wall of life, but eventually their grips loosened with exhaustion and they fell away into nothingness.
A shadow fell over Tighe. ‘What are you doing here?’ demanded Grandhe in a high-pitched voice that threatened greater rage later on, in a less public place. ‘Sitting with the itinerants?’
Tighe’s face was wet now. Crying. He couldn’t help it. He looked up to his Grandhe standing over him, the old man’s face darkened with the shadow, the sun firing his halo of hair with light.
‘My pas are both dead,’ he said.
‘Have my enemies been talking to you?’ demanded Grandhe. Tighe realised he was still thinking of the inheritance.
‘I’ll never see them again,’ said Tighe in a loud voice; or that was the sentence on his lips, but on the second word Grandhe’s staff struck sharply under his chin. His mouth clacked shut and there was a sharp pain right on the end of Tighe’s tongue.
‘You want to sit with the itinerants do you?’ Grandhe said in a voice of stifled fury. ‘You want to beg low work to fill your belly? We’ll see – we’ll see how you like real work, you thankless wastrel.’
Tighe, startled into silence, tasted blood in his mouth. His tongue was stinging unpleasantly. Grandhe leant forward and dragged him up by the collar of his shirt. ‘I’ve wasted the morning looking for you,’ he barked. ‘You will come with me.’
Tighe was led back to Grandhe’s house, where the dawn-door closed to unleash a torrent of furious denunciation, accompanied with whacks from Grandhe’s stick. Tighe felt himself – actually felt himself – retreat from humanness. The words the old man spoke mussed into incoherence in his head, a stream of sharply inflected noises without specific sense. Grandhe’s face lost definition in the shadow of the main space. Nothing but a conglomeration of shadow spouting the music of anger. Tighe’s jaw hung slack. Only the blows reached him, punctuating his blankness with spikes of pain, making him yelp like a monkey and try to draw away.
After a while Grandhe seemed to grow tired and Tighe crawled away to a corner, where he could lie curled in a ball. He was crying again, although there was no sense, no content in the bawling. It was all a nothing.
He stopped because he was hungry. Feeling sheepish, as if he were betraying his role, he scrabbled a loafs end of grass-bread and went back to his corner to gnaw it.
He ran his fingers over his head, feeling the scalp between his hairs. The old strips and bumps were there, the scar tissue. They stretched a fair way over the curve of his head; it must have been a serious sort of wound when he was younger. He didn’t remember the wound, but his pahe had told him about it. Hit his head and broke open the skin. Now there was just the corrugation of the old scar tissue. Either his head was very hot or his fingers were very cold. His heart felt chilled, as if clutched by the hand. The lines where Grandhe’s stick had touched his torso blurred sensation with heat. Moving his shoulder hurt him.
When Grandhe came through again, Tighe was not able to meet his gaze, and so he stared at the matting on the floor. There was a gruffness in the old man’s manner, which came as close to apology as he ever did. ‘Now’, he said, ‘I can only hope that you have learned your lesson. It is for your good. God punishes with greater fury than a weakling such as I can muster. You should learn that lesson early before you have to face the wrath of God Himself.’
‘God lives at the bottom of the wall,’ said Tighe. He had no idea why he spoke.
Grandhe stopped, swallowed, decided to ignore the words. ‘Now, I have spoken to Tohomhe. He is a good friend of the village, a good friend of mine. You will work for him.’
‘Yes, Grandhe.’
For some reason, these two sullenly uttered words pricked Grandhe’s anger more than the heresy of the preceding sentence. His voice rose. ‘You should thank me – you’ve no more wit than a goat. If I hadn’t taken you in you would have starved on that ledge like those God-abandoned
itinerants you have been so friendly to.’
‘Yes, Grandhe.’
‘How you were bred from my line I do not know. You’ve no more wit than a boy-boy though you’re nearly a man. You’ll never have the savvy to be the Prince. You’re some changeling, I think me.’ He stormed out.
Later that night, after Grandhe and Tighe had eaten a small, silent evening meal, the old man seemed to be in a more conversational mood.
‘Times are hard in the village now,’ he said, picking the shells off beetles and chewing them. His two deputies sat with him, each with their own bag of snacks. Tighe watched them hungrily.
‘Times are hard now’, said Grandhe Jaffiahe, ‘and people leave the village. But times will not be hard for ever. The human world is mutable, like the changes of day and night, like the eddies of a wind. They fail, they recover. And when times get better, then we will be in a better position. We will be above circumstance, and we can rule the Princedom better, just better.’ It was as if he was talking to Tighe, but in fact Tighe could see that he was not. His words were promising nothing to him. Grandhe was talking to himself.
The two deputy preachers said nothing. Grandhe’s deputies rarely spoke.
11
The next morning Tighe made his way to Tohomhe’s place soon after the dawn winds had died down. In a village where the majority of people were perfectly competent at weaving their own grass matting and rough clothes, a grass-weaver could only make a living by specialising. Tohomhe made fancy-wear, treating the stems in various ways to make them soft and dyeing them to create multi-coloured cloths. These had been bought mostly by the richer inhabitants of the village. He was unambiguous when Tighe scratched at his door.
‘I have no work for you, though,’ he said, almost straight away. ‘I said I’d take you on as a favour to your Grandhe. He thinks you should learn a trade and you’re plenty old enough. But people don’t buy fancy cloth at a time like this, so I’ve no call for another pair of hands to help me weave. I don’t need you and I certainly won’t feed you.’