by Adam Roberts
– was over the edge of the world. The whole worldwall arced, and tilted, and slewed round and then he could see nothing but sky. His limbs convulsed, and he was suddenly alone, no goat, with the rushing of clouds past his head
and he woke with a sweaty start. The morning gale was blowing, loud as thunder outside the house. Tighe’s hands were digging into the grass-weave mat of his bed. His face was cold with old sweat. His heart was thundering.
He tumbled out of the alcove and staggered to the family sink. He drank deeply and then (looking around, because his pashe got furious if she saw him doing this) ducked his head into the water. His pas were still asleep. The house was gloomy with dawn and absolutely still with a kind of unnatural vacancy. Only the battering of the gale against the dawn-door disturbed the lifelessness.
There was nowhere to go whilst the morning gale blustered outside, so Tighe went back to his alcove and lay down. For a while he dozed and then his pashe was at the door of the alcove.
He couldn’t help himself; he jerked on his bed, jittery with the jolt of sudden fear. But she didn’t yell, she didn’t strike him, she only said, ‘My sweet boy-boy,’ and came in to hug him.
There was a swift unloosening of feelings inside him. His eyes even prickled with moisture. ‘Pashe!’ he said, returning the hug.
‘You know I love you very much indeed, my little boy-boy,’ she was saying, her voice woven through with tenderness. And she was crying a little bit and hugging him so hard it pressed his breath out of his chest.
‘I’m not a boy-boy any more, you know, pashe,’ he said, his voice warm and breaking. ‘I’m a proper boy now.’
‘Oh I know,’ she said, holding him back at arm’s length to have a good look at him, her eyes dawn-red with crying. ‘In another year you’ll not even be a boy, you’ll be a man. But you’ll always be my little boy-boy in my heart.’
And – as miraculously as the sun appearing from nowhere on a cold day – everything was all right. After the broken, bruising mood in the house the day before, this morning was golden. He was eight now, grown up, and that was what was important about his birthday, more even than the gift-giving. His pas and he took their breakfast milk; and when the morning gale had died away they all three went out on to the ledge and started downways towards the village.
2
But that was his pashe. Everything balanced, teeter-totter. Some days she would be wonderful; some days she would scream at you and flail out, trying to hit you with a stick, or whatever came to hand. It was as if his pahe lived in the deeps of the house, solid as the groined roof and the flattened, mat-covered earthen floor of the cold store; but his pashe lived forever on the very lip of the ledge, precariously balanced, forever poised to fall.
But then, his pashe had visions. He knew this was the case although it was rarely mentioned; and perhaps it explained the precariousness of her mood. She would wake in the night screaming – really screaming. This would happen once a month, as regular as regular, through all twenty months of the year. Each time the yelling from his pas’ room would startle Tighe from his sleep. He would sit straight up so hard it made his spine ache, and there was the noise – ach! ach! – shouting, or sobbing, crumpled and muffled by the walls between him and them. And his pahe, the Prince, cooing and soothing her.
Life continued with its usual rhythms after Tighe’s eighth birthday, despite the loss of the goat. The remaining animals still had to be pastured, of course, even if Carashe could no longer be trusted with the task. They were still hungry. Their wild-orb eyes held no knowledge that their fellow had fallen to his death. They cared nothing for that. Their minds were as rooted as the grass they ate; food, food, and then (in season) mating. There was a solidity in that, too, Tighe supposed.
‘We can’t have Carashe any more,’ his pahe said to him, on the ledge outside. It was the day after his birthday. ‘Best not even mention her name again, in front of your pashe, you know.’ They both looked at pashe, forty arms away. She was leading the five goats out of the village pen, where all the animals spent the night. She was still smiling her tearful smile, still luminous with her joy at being alive in the morning.
‘But anyway,’ said pahe, cupping his hand on Tighe’s shoulder, ‘you’re a boy now – eight! – near enough a man. You can herd the goats yourself, with your pahe to help you the first few times.’
Tighe’s breast swelled with joy. ‘I’ll look after them,’ he said.
But in the end Tighe didn’t herd the goats. His pashe, her mood wobbling a little, said no. It was obvious that she didn’t want to risk losing any more of the animals and it was obvious, though unspoken, that she did not trust Tighe to take care of the goats. It wasn’t what she said: she said that it was below the dignity of a Princeling and the grandson of the Priest, but Tighe realised that that wasn’t the true reason. He was, he knew, almost wholly inexperienced with tending goats; but the rejection hurt him none the less. Of course, it was not to be argued with. Pashe waited with the goats by the mouth of the pen until another goatmonger came to collect her animals. Then they chatted for a few minutes, pashe striking some bargain whereby their animals would join the larger herd for a day or two until a new herder could be arranged.
After that, his pas went down to the village to start the elaborate negotiations that followed on from losing a goat, and Tighe had nothing to do. He was the Princeling of the village, he never had anything to do. He could have sought out his friends, but he wasn’t in the mood. So he loitered outside the pen, watching people come and go. He offered to help the stallmen set up their food booth, in the hope of some free food in payment, but they shooed him away. Then he thought about going down to the village and seeking out Carashe, telling her that he personally had no hard feelings about the lost goat. But that was a stupid idea, a non-starter. And so, instead, he went off to be by himself in the sunshine.
He made his way along the main-street shelf where most of the market traders set up pitches, jostling through the growing crowd; then, with a duck into the church and out the back, squeezing through the narrow cupboardways and along a dim alley, before scrabbling up a bamboo ladder set into the wall (a public ladder, of course – he had no money to pay for private passage), and out again into the sunshine. The ledges up here were shorter and narrower, more thoroughly overhung, and the houses correspondingly more primitive. Two grassy ledges slanted up zigzag from one another, and then he was into the newest part of the village – mostly people from Meat, a village several thousand yards above and to the Right. Tighe had never been to Meat, but he knew from report that it was a large place, founded on a great broad platform that jutted out from the worldwall. He knew it was a place rich with all sorts of meat. Some of the poorer people from there had migrated downwall to Cragcouthie in the hope of a better living, but as Tighe walked along the muddy stretches outside their houses he wondered if their life was any better downwall than it had been higher up. The shelf seemed so miserable. A switchback and then a few grassy crags, barely more than crevices. Then another row of new houses, dug out of the wall barely a year before. Many still had raw dirt walls in their vestibules and some of them didn’t even seem to have dawn-doors; which made Tighe wonder how they managed when the dawn winds got up every morning.
Then he was past the last houses and up on to the higher crags. Nobody lived here and even the goatherds didn’t bother to bring their charges this far. These crags were too small, and their grass too meagre, to provide grazing; so Tighe was able to settle himself with his back against the wall and be alone. The wall stretched above him for a thousand leagues, and below him for a thousand leagues, for all that he knew. And yet he was inches away from the edge of the world.
He stared out into the sky. Birds swooped and curled in the air. Several popped down on to the ledge in front of him to see if he had any food, but they lost interest and waddled off the world again, falling into space and swinging up on their magical wings.
An insect landed on his cheek a
nd tickled; he slapped it with the flat of his palm.
He pulled up fistfuls of stalkgrass and started chewing on it. Stalkgrass never filled you up, but it was better than nothing. You could always tell people who had nothing but stalkgrass to eat because they got thin in a particular way. Their faces became sucked out, dented with starvation. You could last for a long time eating nothing but stalkgrass, but eventually you’d waste away and die. It was a mystery how the goats managed because they grew fat on nothing but the grass. And, following from that, Tighe found himself wondering again about the lost goat from the day before. Scampering near the edge and, then, suddenly – gone. He crawled on his knees the four or five yards to the lip of the crag, covering the last yard on his belly. Finally, inching himself, he put his head over the edge of the world.
There was still that horrible griping in his stomach and the prickles all over his scalp. But there was something beautiful, too. He was lying on his belly looking down, back down the way he had come. The crags were layered narrowly on to one another so he saw the pathways of the newest parts of the village directly beneath him. Their ledge-lips, pressed close together by perspective, gave a vivid sense of depth. Below him somebody, a woman, came out of one of the houses and stood for a moment, lighting up a thorn-pipe. She hunched to get the flame to take and then stood up. Her head, from above, was as round as a pebble, furred with the bristles of her cropped hair. Then she walked off and Tighe lost sight of her.
Wisps of smoke, from cooking fires and curing benches, spiralled out and curled into nothingness from lower down. Sucking in his breath and trying not to concentrate on the thundering of his heart, Tighe pulled himself a little further out over the ledge. The perspective shifted a little and the outside edge of the main-street shelf came into view. Below that was nothing for a hundred yards, just flat wall, too steep to build on. Tighe knew the layout of the village so closely he did not have to think about it; the shelves leading away right and down from market shelf, the warren of smaller ledges spread in an arc, the dugouts leading back into the wall. The sun was rising, well past the lower limit of sight, and as Tighe angled his head higher he had to shade his eyes. Where did the sun come from every morning? How did it climb its way upwards, from the base of the wall to the top?
The day was getting warmer and the morning scatters of cloud were dispersing.
Tighe pulled himself back in and lay on his back. The wall stretched above him, impossibly high, enormously tall, vanishing into blue haze. How high was it? Toweringly high.
Insignificant crags puttered out into nothing above, into the smooth face of the wall, on which nothing grew but a few hardy strands of grass. Directly above Cragcouthie there was nothing; just one of those stretches of almost perfectly flat wall. Meat was somewhere up there, but away several thousand yards to the left. There was passage between the two villages, of course; crags that wound and connected zigzag, linked sometimes by stairways dug through the wall itself. And right and down was Heartshelf (not a shelf, in fact, but a motley collection of ledges, barely even enough to keep goats on). Heartshelf made its living mostly as an intermediary because it was on the only direct pathway between Smelt away downwall and Cragcouthie, Meat and the rest. At Smelt they dug ore out of the wall and fixed it up as metal. There were smelters in Cragcouthie too, of course, but ore was harder to come by up here. So metal was traded downwall and it went through Heartshelf, which took a percentage.
Up beyond Meat were some other villages, and it was said that the wall became more wrinkled in that direction, more prolific with crags and ledges, easier to find a living on. But Tighe thought the stretch directly above him now was the best; the flatness of it, the purity of it. The wall blued away into the distance, where it got hazy and vanished in a blur. If only his eyes were good enough and the day uncloudy, Tighe thought, maybe I could see all the way to the top of the wall. All the way to the top of the wall. The words gave him exquisite little chills on his scalp and neck. But there was a haze in the mid-morning air that muddled vision after a few thousand yards. Away to the Left big bustling clouds were nudging up against the wall, like great animals nosing some huge breast. Perhaps that was what happened to the far-off walltop, Tighe thought to himself, barely voicing the words. Perhaps it was transformed into clouds. Clouds. Transformed. Words could distil such intensity. Words were as high as the wall.
There was a noise at his feet and Tighe looked to see a monkey. He launched a kick at the brute, but it danced out of his way with a screech. Scrambling to his feet, Tighe chased the thing, but it swung upwards on handfuls of stiffgrass and was gone where there was no crag for Tighe to follow.
Laughing, Tighe settled down with his back against the wall again. He munched on some more stalkgrass and stared out at the sky. The colours changed the further up the sky he looked, from the flusher tongue-colours of the lower sky, where the sun was, to the darker, more plastic-blue tints of the upper, but Tighe could not mark the place where the one set of colour shifted into the other. What gave the sky colour? Was it just the sun? But the air was invisible (he flapped his hand in front of his face) so there couldn’t he any colour.
The sun must be shining on something to make the colour.
With a jolt, as if the idea were so charged it sparked jerkily in his mind, Tighe wondered if what he was seeing was another wall – one so distant that he could see no details on it at all, and yet one so huge that it filled the sky from horizon to horizon, from Right to Left. The thought possessed him with wonder.
Another wall?
Inside Tighe’s head there was a peculiar sensation of dislocation. Senses swimming. It felt as if there was simultaneous shrinkage, a freezing down, and a sudden expansion, an outrushing of something from the point at the centre of his skull. Another wall. The idea grabbed hold of his mind.
And perhaps people living on it. People like him? Or maybe quite unlike him. He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine what his wall would look like from that impossible vantage point. What colour would it be? Blonds and greens from the grasses; browns and blacks from the exposed dirt. Maybe stretches of grey from the exposed rock and concrete. He tried to push his brain out, to swoop outwards on impossible wings, to see the worldwall from even further away. What would the mash of colours end up as? But he could only imagine it dirty and stained-looking, an ugly patchwork of blobs and dabs. That wasn’t how the sky looked. He opened his eyes again and tried to map precisely the grain of what he was looking at.
Maybe it was a completely different sort of wall; maybe it wasn’t made of rock and dirt and vegetation, as his wall was. Instead it could have been built by God wholly out of grey plastic, say (why not? God could do anything). Or even metal. The thought of it! A wall as big as the worldwall itself, but a wall smooth and pure and perfect, every surface glittering metal that sent back the sunlight touched with blue. And metal people living on it; people as glossy and smooth as chrome, who melted together in lovemaking. Smooth shiny skin on skin; blurring together in sex. Tighe’s wick stirred, but he was too sleepy to do much about it. Instead he dozed.
He woke with a horrible start, with the certainty in his belly that he was falling. He hated that sensation. It was happening more frequently than before. The world would tilt and he would have the certainty in his clenching stomach that he had been rolled off the world and was falling. It always woke him and he always woke up desperately clutching at the ground beneath him. It took him a long time to calm himself down.
He sat up straighter, pressed his back against the comforting bulk of the wall. Looking out at the sky again, the balance of colour had shifted. If it were another wall, then was there another wall behind it? And another behind that? Wall after wall, like the pages of a book, with just enough space in between to allow the sun to thread its way through, lighting one side then the other.
It was an unwieldy vision, but there was something about it that Tighe liked.
Like the pages in a book. His pahe had two books. Some people in
the village had more than a dozen. They called it wealth, but Tighe’s pashe was always contemptuous of that. She would say, ‘Can you eat books?’
Tighe scratched prickles away from the back of his head. Everything was touched by the aftertaste of his daydream now, that dreadful sensation of tumbling into nothingness. It was frightening to consider that he had lived through eight full years, all through his childhood and into his adolescence, and for every minute of that time he had never been further than a few yards from the edge of the world.
It was all so precarious. That was it, yes. Some bitter truth at the core of living, precariousness. Maybe even the goat, even something as dim as the goat, was granted a glimmering epiphany as it stumbled over the edge of things – an understanding of the delicate balance of things. Life is a balancing act and death a sort of falling. He thought of the goat, falling. He thought of his pashe, living on the emotional edge of things, always tipping. He thought of the ancient hierarchy of the Princedom, of the villages together: Prince and Priest and Doge in balance, ruling the law and the religion and the trade, and all the people in their place underneath the ruling order as his pahe had explained it to him. Life involved so many things fitting together: take any one of them away and the structure started to topple.
Was there a brick (he thought) somewhere at the very base of the wall itself that could be picked out, a single brick that could lead to the collapse of the whole worldwall itself? The whole thousand-league structure tumbling down? The thought brought an edge of panic to his mind and he tried to block it out. Concentrate on something else.
Look at the birds flying rings in the air.
Look at the sheen of the clouds running striations up the cool blue of the sky behind.
Look at the dismal brightness of the sun, hot and yellow.
3
From Tighe’s house the village was largely a series of stepped ledges, each one a little further west and further downwall from the one before, that led away from the main-street shelf.