On

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Horrible,’ agreed Ati.

  But Tighe, despite himself and with a vague feeling of being somehow cheated, felt himself falling asleep straight away. That sensation of dropping into something; then nothing.

  The following day they breakfasted, gathered themselves and struck out east again. Waldea’s words the previous night worked a particular sort of effect upon them, however; instead of ranging through the wood, they picked their way carefully as a crowd. That meant that progress was much slower than the previous day, kite-pilots clogged on a small crag waiting to step, one at a time, on to a convenient trunk and file forward. But Tighe was glad to have the companionship of his fellows.

  Waldea loitered at the back and seemed withdrawn. Occasionally Tighe glanced back over his shoulder at the Master and wondered if he regretted his confidences of the night before. It had been so unlike him. Because progress was often held up, Waldea took to sitting down on an available perch and staring out into the tangle of branches and shadow, as if reading a special significance in the murk.

  At one point in the afternoon Mani started shrieking up ahead. Tighe pushed forward, and saw her being comforted by one kite-boy, whilst another thrashed out with a stick at something amongst the leaves below. With a flash, like a flame in the shadows, a bright red creature two hand spans long scurried away and down. Tighe caught only the briefest glimpse of it: like an animated red plastic shoe with great horns at the front, except that the horns ended in pincers that snickered alarmingly, clicking open and shut.

  ‘Is that land-lobster?’ he asked.

  ‘Move along,’ called out Waldea from behind.

  That evening they made another fire after the dusk gale. Conversation was thinner. Everybody was tired. ‘How much longer in the Meshwood, Master?’ asked Mulvaine.

  ‘Tomorrow, my children,’ said Waldea. ‘Tomorrow I believe we will emerge the far side.’

  ‘At least we saw no claw-caterpils today,’ said Tighe.

  ‘There are no claw-caterpils this high up the wall,’ said Waldea sternly. ‘God would not permit evil to come so high up the wall. This is why our Popes have led us this way through. It is their wisdom.’

  It occurred to Tighe to ask why, if the Popes were so wise, they had led the youthful Waldea and that whole doomed army through the midst of the claw-caterpils all those years before. But such a question would not be advisable.

  ‘Why’, asked Ati, out of nowhere, ‘would God create something so terrible as claw-caterpil?’

  A murmur went round the camp.

  ‘God’, said Waldea, raising his voice to an intimidating volume, ‘has His reasons. You should not ask such a question!’

  But the curious thing was that this act of vocal authority did not work the way it once would have done. Back when Tighe had first joined the platon, Waldea had needed only to raise his voice to intimidate them all. Now the murmuring went on unheeded.

  ‘Why did God’, Mulvaine put in, ‘give the control of the Door in the wall to the Otre – to the evil Otre?’

  ‘Yes,’ said somebody else. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why would God do something so terrible?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better’, Mulvaine pursued, ‘for God to blow the Otre off the wall with the breath of his nose? Then we would not have to fight them.’

  ‘Children!’ bellowed Waldea. ‘Be quiet now!’

  ‘What if God is not on our side at all?’ asked Bel, in a quiet voice. ‘What if God is on the side of the Otre? Then what chance will we have?’

  Waldea yelled again, his voice now so strained as to be almost a shriek. ‘Sacrilege!’ he called. ‘Be quiet, now!’

  Everybody looked at him. With a start Tighe realised that he was crying, that actual tears were pipetting from his eyes and weaving amongst the alleyways made by the scars on his face. More than his raised voice, this fact shocked the platon into silence.

  For a terrible, embarrassing moment, nobody said anything. Waldea sniffed noisily, scraped the back of his hand over his eyes. He mumbled, ‘Do not say these things, my children.’ Tighe felt the most acute sort of awkwardness, a passionate wish that this moment would pass. He opened his mouth to say something, but couldn’t force a word out. Didn’t know what to say.

  Waldea stood up abruptly and turned his back on the platon. The kite-boys and kite-girls started chattering amongst themselves in low tones. For several minutes the Master simply stood there, his back to the group. Then he turned back and sat down again.

  The following day they marched again. They saw several more of the land-lobsters, scarlet and swift, scrabbling along branches from all directions. They were easily scared away; thrashing out with a twig would usually frighten them off, although one of the kite-girls, Pelis, inadvertently put her hand on top of one of them. The beast snipped deeply through the end of her little finger, half-way down the nail. There was a lot of blood, but Pelis – to her credit amongst the platon – shed no tears. Waldea silently wadded the end of the wound with cloth and wrapped it around until the blood stopped soaking through. Then they marched on. The delay cost them no more than an hour.

  They found a dribbling spring not long before dusk and all refilled their flasks.

  That evening they camped again in the Meshwood. Once the dusk gale had died down, Waldea lit another fire. Almost at once a blizzard of enormous moths came swirling up out of the branches. Tighe, and several others, were so startled as to cry out, but it quickly became apparent that these insects were no threat. They were larger than any moths Tighe had ever seen before; fat furry bodies like mice with great cloth-like wings each of which was twice the area of a man’s hand. Dozens poured through the gaps in the leaves to swirl about the fire.

  ‘Moths!’ called Waldea. ‘There’s good eating on a moth this size. We’ll feast well now, my children!’

  There was no need to catch the creatures. They fluttered themselves into the fire until their wings caught like paper and they spiralled into the flames. Squealing with delight, several boys picked twigs from the branches and plucked the smouldering bodies from the fire. Tighe got one and bit into it; the meat tasted inky, slightly sour, but he gobbled it down anyway.

  After the fire died down and they were all strapped to trunks, Ati said, ‘The gugzh here are so large. The insects I mean.’

  ‘I never saw insects so big before,’ agreed Tighe.

  ‘Why would God make such ugly things?’

  Tighe dropped his voice a little. ‘I think I know. Ask yourself, why God build the wall?’

  ‘Why did God build the wall?’

  ‘Exactly. Is to keep out. There are evil things on the far side of the wall. Man-eating, evil things.’

  ‘Like claw-caterpils?’

  Tighe whistled softly. ‘Maybe like, maybe much bigger. If there is Door in the land of the Otre, maybe some came through and came to the Meshwood. That is why they are here I think. If we win the Door, win the war, then we must shut it! Shut it!’

  The next day was colder than usual and several kite-pilots wore their blankets over their shoulders rather than fold them and strap them to their backs. Tighe tried this, but found it hard to balance the kite-spar.

  As the day went on the crags and ledges became fuller; there was less need to pick a pathway from trunk to trunk, and the platon moved faster. The branches were thinning; more sky was visible to the right. With a tremendous lightening in his heart, Tighe understood that they were coming towards the far side of the Meshwood at last.

  At about seventy-five the platon ran into a guard of riflemen. There were six of them, sitting on two trunks and eating what looked like grubs. Each of them had their long metal tubes – or were they made out of plastic? – strapped across their backs: their rifles. They did not react when the kite-pilots emerged.

  ‘Weren’t you alarmed that we might have been enemy?’ asked Mulvaine, cocky and excited to be so close to a rifle.

  ‘We heard you blundering through the Meshwood from a long way away,’ said on
e of the riflemen gruffly. ‘You were no Otres.’

  Ravielre tried to reach up and touch the end of one of the rifles, but had his hand knocked away by its owner. ‘Keep off there, boy,’ said this rifleman.

  Waldea arrived from the rear. ‘Comrades,’ he called, ‘how far to the edge of the wood?’

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ said one of the riflemen, spitting out the carapace of whatever he was eating.

  Their estimate was exactly right. Twenty minutes later the platon arrived at a guard eyrie built into the very edge of the Meshwood.

  As Waldea negotiated with the guards there and then went off to report to a superior officer, the kite-boys and kite-girls gambolled along the ledge and threw stones at one another. Their spirits were high. Before them stretched a landscape of open wall, its contours throwing long arcing shadows downwall in the high sun.

  They became bored with their game eventually and settled themselves in small groups, squatting on a crag a little above the ledge that was being used as the main thoroughfare. A few people, including Ravielre and Bel, went back a little way into the wood.

  Tighe sat with Ati for a while, picking blades of grass and chewing them absently. Ati declared that he wanted something more substantial and went back to the outskirts of the Meshwood to find some grubs to munch. Tighe was hungry too, but he was too entranced by the vista of open worldwall to leave it.

  The sun rose higher and faded redder, throwing deeper-hued shadows sharply downwards. Blue-coated soldiers and various army individuals passed back and along the ledge.

  Mulvaine came up and sat next to Tighe, saying nothing. For a while they simply sat together. The size of the worldwall, the sheer scale of God’s construction, awed Tighe, as it had used to do when he had been a mere child in his own village.

  ‘It’s so big!’ he said, to Mulvaine.

  The older boy spat, turned to him. ‘What?’

  ‘The worldwall,’ said Tighe. ‘It’s so big. So big! The majesty of God, that he would build something so big.’

  Mulvaine grinned, and then said something that struck very deeply into Tighe’s mind; something that later haunted his thoughts. The seed of some great branch of platán that would grow over his consciousness; the key to the mystery of the worldwall itself. He said, ‘Is it big?’

  Tighe didn’t, at first, grasp the penetration of Mulvaine’s observation. ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t say what like that you barbarian turd for a brain. I’m senior to you in this platon! Show respect.’

  ‘What was it you said, Mulvaine? Not big?’

  ‘I ask: is it big?’

  Tighe shrugged. ‘don’t understand. Is it big? Look at it. Doesn’t it look big?’ The worldwall reached away to the east, like the broad forehead of God himself. The grass on this side of the Meshwood had a purple shade to it, and as the wind tickled the ledges and the wall, this blueness shimmered over the surface. It reached so far east that the detail became hazed by distance. It reached so far down that Tighe could not see the bottom. It was so tall that it took all day for the sun to climb the height of it. Not big? ‘What do you mean, Mulvaine?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean, is it big?’

  ‘Is it big?’ Mulvaine repeated. ‘Or is it that we are small?’

  14

  It was a revelation to Tighe; not an instant one, but one that grew within him over the next day. The revelation that there might be – that there was – a mystery attached to the worldwall. And the curious thing about this revelation was that it chimed deeply with Tighe’s sense of his own childish life. He had always known, he realised, that there was some sort of mystery to the world into which he had been born. It was only that he had not known that he had known this. It had been something like an instinct, a feeling of intensity in his breast when he had looked out over the sky, or lain on his back to look up along the height of the wall.

  He spoke with Ati the next day, ‘Do you know what Mulvaine said to me yesterday?’

  Ati made a grunting noise. ‘That thug? I dismiss him.’

  ‘His pahe was a philosopher, you know.’

  ‘His?’

  ‘His father. His father was a philosopher.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He said to me, Is it that the worldwall is big, or is it that we are small?’

  Ati looked blank. ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Do you not think about it? Why has God build the worldwall?’

  ‘Why has God builded the worldwall, is the proper saying.’

  ‘All right – why has God builded the worldwall? But why?’

  Ati shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Why should I know?’

  ‘But the insects – in the Meshwood. You said yourself they were very big.’

  ‘They were big.’

  ‘And what if they were not big – but we were small?’

  Ati barked with laughter, hurried up to Tighe and tried to grab his ears. Tighe wriggled to escape and soon the two were rolling and wrestling together, laughing. But afterwards, and that night when Waldea took the platon back a little way into the wood to strap themselves to trunks during the dusk gale, Tighe found the idea had seized his mind with unusual force. What if the tree trunks around him were not trees but blades of grass? What if he himself were an insect and only he had not realised the fact? Would not a ledge covered in grass look like the Meshwood to a low-worm crawling through it; and would not a low-worm have the dimensions of a claw-caterpil to a human being tiny enough?

  One thing above all seemed to him to seal the argument. If he were God, he thought, would he build the worldwall on so enormous a scale? Or would he build it convenient to himself and shrink his people to fit?

  Sudden lurching shifts of scale inside Tighe’s head made him feel almost dizzy. A religious vertigo.

  The following morning the platon was woken by distant rumbling sounds, as if the sky were crumpling and collapsing far away. It was shortly after the dawn gale.

  ‘Kite-pilots!’ called Waldea. ‘Awake! Unshackle yourselves!’

  In the confusion of bustle, Tighe dropped his belt; but fortunately it only fell to the branches of the trunk below and he was able to retrieve it easily. There was a fizzing excitement in the air; everybody knew what the distant thunderous sound meant. War.

  At last, war! Tighe thought.

  It was almost too exciting.

  Waldea led the kite-pilots out of the wood and along the ledge. The guards in their eyrie were the only soldiers to be seen. Otherwise the ledges were deserted. In a matter of minutes, however, the platon worked their way round a spar and ran into a knot of soldiers. Riflemen, bomb-hurlers and sappers were crowded into a short, deep ledgeway.

  ‘Cardinelle Elanne!’ called Waldea. ‘I have my orders from the Cardinelle! Where is he? I must report.’

  But nobody took any notice. The bangs and booms in the air sounded closer now. Waldea pushed on, leading the gaggle of kite-pilots behind him. They were simultaneously intimidated and excited by the scale of the hurly-burly around them.

  Up a sloping ledge and along a ragged crag made broader by the sappers, pushing past soldiers of all sorts, they arrived eventually at a broader space: overhung, not long enough to be a shelf, but with a series of dug-out spaces in the wall at the back. Two tall wedges of dirt testified to the recent nature of the excavation.

  Waldea told the kite-pilots to wait close by the wall and stay out of mischief whilst he himself went off to find Cardinelle Elanne or some superior officer. Tighe was disturbed at the haphazard nature of the military command. He felt somehow that the process should be smoother, more natural.

  The kite-pilots milled around, wound-up and agitated, chattering amongst themselves. Ravielre and Bel were now quite open about their romance; holding hands and talking quietly with one another.

  With a cry to clear the path, a couple of soldiers hurried by carrying a blanket between them in which was slung something heavy. They passed through one of the dugout doorways, and Tighe realised with a start that the thing bei
ng carried in the blanket was a human body.

  He went to the doorway and peered in, hoping to see Vievre, the old doctor. But it was murky indoors and whatever was happening inside was hectic, generating a great deal of noise and fuss. Tighe decided not to investigate further.

  After about an hour Waldea returned and wordlessly led the kite-pilots away from the mini-shelf. They filed down some crudely carved stairs and on to another ledge, this one open, at the end of which was a much smaller dugout doorway. ‘This is our camp for now,’ Waldea announced.

  The door was so small that the kite-spars and bundles had to be passed through first, with the kite-pilots following behind. Inside the earth was moist with the smell of recently dug soil. The wetness of the walls suggested that there were streams near-by, and Waldea sent Chemler off to investigate so that they could refill their flasks.

  Mulvaine was told to tie up a grass torch and wedge it into the earth at the back of the dugout. By the time he had finished, and Waldea had lit the thing, Chemler was back. ‘There are several trickles along the ledge,’ he announced.

  ‘My children,’ announced Waldea, waving them all into a semi-circle before him with a sweep of his arm. ‘Battle has begun! Already we are attacking the evil of Otre at their heart.’

  Nobody said anything.

  ‘Soon we shall be called – the generals, the Cardinelle, the Pope himself, have need of us. We are to fly and gather valuable information for the higher command. Soon they will call on us!’

  Nobody came for an hour and the kite-pilots became restless. Waldea stalked out of the dugout, bending low to fit through the tiny door. He returned. Nothing happened.

  Several kite-pilots napped, curled on the floor. Others went out on to the ledge to see what they could see, but it was no vantage point.

  Waldea returned, clearly annoyed. The sun went over the wall and the dusk gale began. There was no door for the dugout hole, so the kite-pilots huddled together at the far end of the hollowed space. The wind sucked the torch out, sang and shrieked, threw clods of earth through the door and tugged eagerly at clothes and hair. But it died down eventually.