by Adam Roberts
‘Once upon a time! There lived a man! He hollowed out himself, renewed his organs with new organs, made machine enhancements of cerebral material, recreated ancient technology! He was the godman! He was the godman! This is where people find themselves, beneath the godman! Once upon a time the world was different. Now it is as we know it. It will be different again. Who survives the difference? Who survives the change? Who creates change? The godman! Who controls change? The godman! Who creates change? The godman!’
*
Then there was nothing; everything black except for a tinny, semi-musical humming. Far, far away Tighe thought he could make out a distant echo, like the echo he had heard when he was clinging to the ice, a minute tinkling sound that repeated death! death! death! as a metallic whisper.
Then nothing at all.
2
When Tighe woke again he was lying on a crag, with grass tickling his face. He sat up, disoriented. The sun was bright below him, throwing shadows off the lip of the crag. Everything was crisp, bright.
He touched the back of his head. There was a scab of blood there, a large one that covered a patch of shaved scalp. He scratched at it with his fingers, bringing away rusty flakes of dried blood under his fingernails.
He was still dressed in the Wizard’s suit. Untying it he pulled it down over his shoulders. His old clothes, stained and a little tattered, were underneath. He pulled up the fabric of his shirt and examined his belly. There was a band of bruising, and two parallel lines of crusty scabbing. That had been where the metal tendril had gripped him.
How clumsy they had been!
Tighe settled himself with his back against the wall, pulled up a handful of stalkgrass and chewed it. He thought back over his experience. Much of it made no sense to him, but beyond that he had the intimation that the meeting with the three versions of his Grandhe had not taken place in a real sense. Together they were greater magicians than the Wizard. They had created some magic realm, partly in his own head, perhaps, and had talked to him there. Some of the things they had said had not really taken the form of words; maybe nothing he had said had taken that form. But the understanding had shaped itself in his head.
He dozed for a while and woke refreshed. His belly was empty, with an echoey ache of hunger fading in and out in his torso. He stuffed some more stalkgrass into his mouth and combed through the turf for a bit looking for insects. All he could find were tiny spiders, grey-bodied, that moved with extreme slowness despite their tiny proportions. He tried eating a few, but they tasted too sharply bitter to be palatable.
He made his way down from this crag with some difficulty, stepping from mini-crag to singleton, sometimes using nothing more than clumps of grass as foot- or hand-holds. Eventually, however, he reached a more substantial ledge and started walking westward along this. All the time he found himself meditating on what had happened to him. The things his Grandhes had said, speaking directly into his brain via the plastic tube. The things the Wizard had said.
The ledge shrivelled until it was barely two feet’s width across; Tighe had to proceed carefully. After a while it started broadening out and Tighe marched briskly along, lolloping over his bad foot and striding purposefully with his good.
He passed an overhung alcove on the ledge, inside which a feather-worker was pulling flights off a dead bird and tying them into a chain to hang round her neck. At the back of the alcove a narrow doorway could just be seen. Tighe had seen few birds in the sky. He tried engaging this woman in conversation, but she did not speak Imperial and regarded him with some suspicion. She was muffled up in many layers and Tighe realised that the air all around was cold. His suit kept him so warm he had assumed the climate was mild.
He walked on. By the time of dusk, he was still on open ledge; but the dusk gale was light, the winds tugging gently at him almost horizontal. He slept on an empty stomach.
The next day he walked further west and passed through a number of farms, eventually coming to a village. He had decided on the way that it was foolish to speak Imperial. For all he knew he would be taken again and sold as a slave if he was identified as being from the Empire. At the outskirts of the village he encountered a man and a woman attempting to use spars of twisted platán wood to construct a shelter for their chickens. Tighe squatted on the ground watching them. When they called him over, their breath pouring like steam from their mouths, he grinned and acted as a simple-minded boy. Each of their phrases brought forth a grin and mannered gestures with his hands. He stood and helped the couple with the work, holding the spars and weaving the narrower twigs into a fretwork. By late afternoon the work was finished and the woman of the couple went off to begin fetching up the chickens.
The man sat and gabbled at Tighe and Tighe grinned and nodded, understanding not a single word. But when the woman returned, with two handfuls of shrieking wriggling chickens tied together at the feet, hung upside down, she also brought a loaf of grass-bread. The couple shared the food with Tighe, and he grinned and nodded and made child-like noises.
After eating, he helped the woman bring along the remainder of the chickens from inside their house. She chattered happily to him and he grinned and nodded.
That night he slept outside the couple’s house and in the morning he shadowed the man as he went about his business in the village. At every job Tighe contributed something and was rewarded with pieces of bread, or a few morsels of dried and peppered earthworm.
Tighe stayed with this couple a week or so, sleeping outside their door. It was enough time to learn only the rudiments of their language; a task made harder by the fact that at no stage did Tighe let on that he was starting to comprehend them. It seemed that they were recently married; that the woman’s mother was the village matriarch, and had given them two dozen chickens as a wedding gift. Most of what the couple said passed Tighe by; but he gathered that they were puzzled by his dark skin and wondered why an idiot boy possessed so fine an antique coat. They intuited that it gave him protection against the cold – for how else could he sleep so comfortably outside the door through the cold nights?
Tighe helped the woman harvest grass seed to feed the chickens; cleaned the pens for them; sat and watched as the woman wove chicken feathers into a tightly worked shirt. He met several people in the village, who humoured him as if he had been a baby. After a week, the woman’s mother came to visit: the village matriarch. Straight away the two women, mother and daughter, were arguing loudly. Tighe could only pick out occasional words, but he had the sense that the focus of the disagreement was the newlyweds’ indulgence towards the strange voiceless boy who had wandered in from east. Don’t trust him! He’ll slit your throat in the night! The daughter complained in a pure tone, the old woman bickered away in a broken, deep-throated one.
Tighe decided it was time to move on. It pained him to do it because he realised it would vindicate the old woman’s suspicion and hurt the younger woman who had been so kind to him, but he stole two of the chickens in the middle of the night. He broke their necks to stop them squawking and betraying him, and then he fled through the cold along dark ledges. By the dawn he was far west.
He stuffed one of the chickens into the capacious pocket at the front of his suit, along with the gun – which he was pleased to see had not been taken away from him by the Wizard’s Lover. It made him look like a pot-belly, a pregnant woman. The other chicken he plucked, after the fashion he had observed in the couple’s house, tying the feathers together with the beak and some of the smaller bones into a grass-weave parcel. This he carried under his arm. The meat he cooked all at once, building a fire with dried grass and lighting it with struck flints, as the couple had taught him to do. He ate the cooked chicken meat over the next few days.
It was impossibly delicious.
He travelled for a further week, passing through villages at night in case word of his theft had somehow travelled before him, until he judged that he was far enough away from his crime. Then he traded the feathers at a long, n
arrow village spread out along a heavily overhung ledge that barely saw sunlight, for some bread and a length of plastic twine. He plucked the second chicken and offered the feathers at the next village along. By now the meat of this bird was so game it was beginning to smell, and although he cooked and ate it, the flavour was too dense to please him.
He walked on. His bad foot was healing slowly, after a fashion, into a twisted sort of shape that hurt less and less to walk on.
Further west he found work at a farm which raised huge butterflies from maggots. It was situated on a broad, semi-circular meadow positioned at the end of a village shelf; the woman who ran it employed five young men to do the work. To begin with Tighe pretended to be from downwall and to the east, and grunted the few words he understood. After a week or so, though, he had picked up enough of this language – it was a variant of Otre – to get by.
The farm fed the maggots with old and rotting meat; gathering this meat was a lengthy business. At least two of the men were away from the farm at all times, ranging in a circle of six or seven villages upwall, west and downwall from the farm. They traded bits and pieces for meat no longer fit to be eaten; and sometimes came across carcasses of birds and other vermin on out-of-the-way crags.
The maggots, puppy-sized bags of pulsing flesh, fed avidly. The more they ate, the bigger they got; and when they metamorphosed into butterflies, the larger the wingspan. This was the crucial thing; because the verdant green and happiness-blue colourings of the wings were what the farm traded. Some wings were traded whole, others were scraped to harvest the jewel-bright scales that made up the patterns, each the size of a little-finger nail. The best butterflies had wingspans as broad as a man’s height; most were smaller than this and correspondingly less splendid. Some of these were made into clothes and ornaments, others were plastered into church walls as decoration. The farm did good business. Tighe worked collecting the offal or did jobs about the farm itself. The woman owner, a short, froggish pale-skinned easterner, took a liking to him. She questioned him in detail about his origins and Tighe made up some things and inserted others that were based on the truth. He told her a story that included some truth about the Wizard’s craft, explaining that this was the origin of his marvellous suit that kept him warm or cool depending on what he needed. She didn’t seem surprised; the wall, after all, was cluttered with wonders, as everybody knew.
The woman, called Basch, decided to take Tighe to her bed. This was, the other farm-workers assured him, a great sign of favour. Basch’s favouritism shifted amongst her employees from month to month, and they advised Tighe to make the most of it whilst he could. Tighe decided to go along with this development and took to sleeping in Basch’s bed with her every night.
His first night with Basch was a nerve-racking affair, since Tighe had never been with a woman before. But he didn’t confess this fact and allowed himself to be guided by her impatient hands – this was, as it happened, her preferred technique in bed. He was almost too nervous to enjoy it and when he came inside her she was cross. ‘I don’t want children,’ she would say, slapping him on his back as he lay over her. ‘You pull yourself out of me before you do that.’ They started again within minutes and this time Tighe did just that. She was much more pleased.
Tighe’s days oriented themselves around this new night-time routine. Basch did not become pregnant.
After a couple of months of this, Basch’s eye shifted to another worker, an arch-nosed, lanky easterner called Pnex. Tighe returned to the general shed where the workers slept and endured a certain amount of mockery.
During his time at the farm he thought often of the Wizard and of the Wizard’s Lover. If the Wizard had been able to track him because of the machinery inside his head, could he not find him again? After all, he had tracked him once, using only the remnants of the machinery that his pashe had not removed. But as week folded into week and the months began to pass, he began to wonder whether the Wizard’s Lover had not removed the last traces of the machinery from his brain. His scab had healed and the hair had grown back over the scar. He could still feel the rubble of healed skin through the hair at the back of his head. When he was Basch’s lover she had run her hand through his hair and asked after this circular scar. He had told her that he had been poked in the head with a military pike, but he felt that she didn’t believe him.
The year swung slowly around; the frost of winter gave way to a chilly spring. Tighe debated with himself. He thought about waiting the full twenty months until the year had passed right round its cycle; but eventually he became eager to move on.
He said goodbye to Basch and his fellow farm-workers, and took a parting gift of cake-bread and a small bag full of scraped-off butterfly scales to trade. Then he stepped out one morning and, limping less than he had used to, made his way westwards again.
3
For most of the rest of that year, through the spring and into the summer, Tighe made his way westward. He went from village to village, finding work where he could, going hungry where he couldn’t. He traded everything except his hand-sized gun, with its five remaining bullets, which he kept hidden, and his suit – although he had many offers for this latter.
One time he was ambushed by a gang of women, all dressed in many layers of wool. They jumped from a higher crag to the ledge along which he was passing and started striking him with poles, whooping and yelling. Tighe was knocked down and his face was bloodied before he was able to fish out his gun. Firing the pistol frightened them away, but it hurt him to breathe for a fortnight or more after this.
He stayed in one village for a month, pretending to be a doctor. He had no medical knowledge, but his command of the language was now good enough to enable him to spin out plausible stories. A child died of fever he had promised he could cure and the villagers chased him westways out of the village with shouts and threats.
He found a farm that kept goats; here he possessed real knowledge and did not need to pretend. He worked there for a fortnight before moving on.
Soon he began hearing stories about the City of the East, also called Bact, and, by some, Devildom. Tighe finally arrived there as the grasses on the wall started assuming the singed colours of autumn. He passed through a brief tunnel, and entered the city.
The City of the East was built over a dozen layers of ledge and shelf, and its myriad rooms dug into the wall were mostly connected by tunnels and in-ground staircases. A broad central shelf was home to a continual pageant and dramatic performance; as soon as one troop of actors dropped, exhausted, another would take up the play exactly where it had been left. There was shame in relinquishing the play and some of the actors played so hard and for so long that they were virtual corpses by the end, dropping down from sheer fatigue. New actors would not, by tradition, step into the arena until the previous actor had stopped speaking; but as soon as a gap opened up, actors would rush to the middle and gabble at the lines, or sing snatches of song, whilst they cleared the space of the bodies of their forerunners.
Crowds watching the play were not large, but they were continuous; as some of the audience left, new people would drift up to watch. The play was a lengthy, complex version of the history of the world, full of diversionary narratives and highly stylised, repetitive speeches. For some observers, watching the play was a religious ritual. For others it was a more conventional sort of entertainment.
At the back of this shelf were several ranks of prophets and doomsayers, whose hectoring tales of apocalypse filled the air and conflicted with the musical declamations of the actors. Occasionally quarrels would break out between actors and prophets, and the audiences would enjoy these fist fights as much, or more, than the ritual drama or religious speechifying.
The city was rich in springs; water flowed so copiously from a number of slant-lying pipes and holes in the wall that it wasn’t possible to dam it up and charge money for it. This was one reason for the city’s enormous population: water was free. It dribbled out of standing pipes by pub
lic ledges.
Tighe tried to find work amongst the maze of shops and hostels that occupied the lower ledges and shelves, but the city was crowded and work was difficult to find. He traded his suit, finally, for a bag of precious jewels, some electronic components and a sack of biscuits. He kept the gun, uneasy and thrilled by the ceaseless activity of the City and uncertain when he might need it.
His plan was to make his way back west, past the Meshwood. Partly this was an end in itself: he wanted to find out what had happened with the war, whether the Empire still stood or whether the Otre had conquered it all. But apart from that, it was an attempt to make his way homeward, back to the village. It ought to be possible, he thought, to find a way upwards; to buy passage in a calabash, for instance; or to work his way around. If he put his mind to it, it ought to be possible to find his home again.
He was nearly eleven: the age at which a child becomes an adult. One evening he pushed his way through a crowd in a narrow defile in the wall and bought some fortified water in a clay jar. The defile was crammed with people drinking this liquor, and singing and playing palm-on-palm games for money. Tighe laughed and joked with the people he met, but the crush of the crowd meant little to him.
He took his fortified water away and found a residential ledge where he could sit in peace. Slowly he drained the rest of the jar, feeling the petrol taste of the liquor on his tongue and the roof of his mouth, letting it fuzz his mind. He was greatly changed by his experiences. He thought often of the Wizard and of his Lover, who so resembled his Grandhe. Sometimes he tried to piece together the narrative, the ways in which the Wizard had manipulated his village, his family. It was complicated, and there were a number of different narratives that could explain it.