On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Boy-boys would play in the smaller crags at the edge of the village. Games came and went. When Tighe had been a boy-boy, the craze had been to weave kite-planes out of stalkgrass and throw them over the edge. Sometimes these constructions would merely dip away and be lost, but from time to time the breeze would catch them and spin them through the clear air, and the boy-boys would whoop and halloo. But Tighe was a boy now, a Princeling, with a boy’s sensitivity not to be mistaken for a boy-boy, so he no longer loitered about this playground. On the day after his birthday he wandered down there, bored, and saw four boy-boys playing a new game, which involved running up and down the crag squealing and trying to catch one another. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t bear it; it was so blind to the appalling reality of the drop. How could they be so blithe? If they were to stumble, to fall the wrong way, they could vanish over the edge of the world and fall for ever.

  He made his way down to Old Witterhe’s house; a dingy narrow dugout down a rickety private ladder from the market shelf. Wittershe had once told Tighe that her pahe couldn’t widen the house; its space was hemmed by rock on the one hand and manrock on the other. Outside was a tumbly stretch of broken wall too near vertical to make a useful space for humans. Old Witterhe kept monkeys here.

  Wittershe’s pashe had been young when she married Witterhe and had died giving birth to their one daughter. The thought of it gave Tighe a clench in his gut – to have your pashe die! – but Wittershe was blase about it. She had no memories, she felt no loss. In a way, her situation was more grounded, less precarious, than Tighe’s. She had no pashe to lose.

  And Wittershe had a pretty face, with lips as broad as fingers and shiny eyes. Her skin was a little paler than was conventionally considered handsome, a sort of timber-coloured light brown; but it was at least smooth, without the pocks that marked some other girls’ complexions.

  Tighe knew his pashe disapproved of his playing with Wittershe, but he didn’t know why. He knew also that his Grandhe particularly disapproved of Old Witterhe, who held some strange opinions concerning God and the wall. Heresies, really, to give them their proper name. But the old man’s daughter, Wittershe, was the person in the village nearest to Tighe’s age; she was seven years and fourteen months old. Nor was she a girl any more, not really. She didn’t have the bulging body of Carashe, but her figure defined several slow arcs, a line Tighe would trace with his eye from neck to small of back, from chest over belly to leg.

  Old Witterhe was smoking a thorn-pipe and squatting in the door of his house. His monkeys were placidly picking insects from the tuft grass; a few of them were chewing the grass itself. The sun was making Witterhe hide his eyes in wrinkles.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, holding his hand like a ledge-flat over his eyes. ‘Boy Tighe? Sorry to hear about your goat, boy. Sorry to hear about that. ‘Course,’ he dropped his hand, ‘I lost a monkey yesterday, but nobody considers that much of a tragedy.’

  ‘Sorry to hear about your monkey,’ said Tighe automatically, in a monotone. ‘Is Wittershe about?’

  Old Witterhe poked into the bulb of his pipe with his little finger; like all pipe-smokers, he grew his fingernails long for this purpose. ‘They’re bringing down some wood from Press, I hear. She’s up on main-street shelf to see what manner of price they’ll want for it. I could do with building a ledge-flat outside my door.’ He pointed with the spire of his pipe. ‘There’s been some crumbling away at the crag edge there. It’s not a good crag, in all. A bit of wood to strengthen it, and maybe build a little overhang, would make my life.’

  Tighe thought, If the traders from Press really have some wood then they won’t be trading it for a few monkey carcasses. But he didn’t say anything so rude. Instead, he stepped back a little away from the edge, feeling the comforting press of the wall at his back. Crumbling crag-lips made him nervous.

  ‘I’ll climb back up and see if I can find her then,’ he said.

  ‘Reckon I should start charging a toll on that ladder of mine,’ said Old Witterhe. ‘You seem to use it enough. Still, it’s good to see you getting some air. You spend too much time in your pas’ house, burrowed away in there like a mole. You’re not a mole, you know, little Princeling. You’re a boy.’

  But Tighe was already scrambling back up the ladder.

  Up on main-street shelf a crowd was gathered around the traders from Press. The Doge was there, with her retinue. In the middle of the knot of people Tighe could just make out the tall figure of one of the wood traders, his precious package strapped close to his back. Wittershe was there too, but she was making no serious attempt to engage the wood traders in any dialogue. There were too many wealthier villagers with more to offer. Tighe approached her.

  ‘Hello,’ he called. ‘Wittershe.’

  She noted him with a sly smile, utterly distinctive to her. ‘Well well, is it the little Princeling?’

  ‘I spoke to your pahe,’ he told her, coming up close.

  She tossed her head, the short black hair flipping. ‘My pahe sent me up here to trade monkey for wood,’ she said, ‘but there’s no trading here for such poor exchange.’

  ‘Are you free then?’ Tighe asked.

  ‘Why?’ Wittershe giggled. ‘You want us to go play? Like boy-boy and girl-girl?’ Tighe flushed and Wittershe giggled again. ‘I can’t do that now, little Princeling. But why don’t you come down our ladder this evening? I have chores until the end of the day, but when the sun goes over the top of the wall we might do things.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tighe, too eagerly. ‘Yes, I’ll come.’

  She leant towards him to kiss him on the bridge of his nose, and he got the fleetingest scent of her, the odour of her skin, of maringrass and cheap chandler’s soap, and then she was moving away from him.

  Tighe felt a ridiculous joy in his heart, but almost at once the sweet emotion fell away. His Grandhe grabbed him by his shoulders, scaring him, and shouted into his ear. ‘Young Tighe!’ he bellowed. ‘My grandchild!’

  ‘Grandhe,’ squealed Tighe, squirming round to evade his Grandhe’s grip. There was the old man, leaning close to him, his ancient face as wrinkled and ledgy as the face of the worldwall itself.

  ‘What are you scheming at here, boy-boy?’ shouted Grandhe. A few of the people who had gathered on the main-street shelf to join in the trading haggle turned to see why the chief Priest of the whole Princedom was shouting. Tighe dropped his shoulders and slunk about in front of his Grandhe.

  ‘Nothing, Grandhe.’

  ‘Nothing? Nothing! It doesn’t dignify the office of Prince’, he bellowed, ‘for the heir – and the grandchild of the Priest as well – to spend all day skulking about doing nothing.’

  ‘I’ll be off and find something to occupy myself then, Grandhe.’

  ‘You should be working!’

  ‘Yes, Grandhe, I’ll just be away and find some work now.’

  But his Grandhe’s hand bolted out and caught Tighe’s hair, yanking it painfully. Tighe stumbled and almost fell. The old man was speaking in a much lower tone now. ‘And I like it very little, he was saying, ‘that you converse with that girl, Old Witterhe’s sluttish girl. Hear me?’

  ‘Yes Grandhe!’ The tender hairs near the base of his hairline felt as if they were being torn out.

  ‘Hear me?’

  ‘Yes Grandhe!’

  ‘You’ll do better, he said, with an emphatic tug of the hair, ‘to shun the company of that girl.’ And he let go of the hair, and stalked away. Tighe took hurried steps backward, and saw the old Priest fold into a company of his deputies, and the whole crowd of them moving away over main-street shelf.

  4

  His Grandhe’s words made a deep impression upon Tighe, but come the end of the day and the disappearance of the sun over the top of the wall, he could only think of Wittershe: the pretty constellation of her features; her smell; the lines of her figure. He slunk down the ladder to Old Witterhe’s house with a guilty look up and down the main-street shelf.

  She
met him outside her pahe’s house, and brought him in. Old Witterhe was there, smoking his thorn-pipe vigorously, and offering grass-bread and a monkey bone to chew on, pulling out bits of marrow. They passed the bone round and Witterhe talked. His daughter sat at his feet. ‘You’re a boy who likes to ask questions,’ the old man said.

  ‘I am that,’ said Tighe.

  ‘You want to know how the worldwall is, I think.’

  Tighe kept stealing glances at young Wittershe. Her hair. Her mouth when it smiled. It was murky and very close inside this part of Old Witterhe’s house; a single grass-torch gave off smouldering light that threw swollen shadows on the wall.

  The smoke from the thorn-pipe was sparking tears in Tighe’s eyes. He kept grinding the heel of his hand into his eye-sockets, but that only made them redder and more sore. Old Witterhe kept stroking the top of Wittershe’s head, smoothing her hair.

  ‘Now your Grandhe,’ the old man said, raspingly, ‘your Grandhe.’ He stopped, a look of concentration came over his eyes and he coughed suddenly, loudly. That seemed to clear his voice. ‘Now your Grandhe,’ he went on, more fluently, ‘he says that God built the wall, but if you ask him why he just says that whys are for God and not for man.’

  Tighe tried to clear his throat, but the smoke was going right into his lungs. Wittershe didn’t seem to mind it; but she was used to it, he supposed. He nodded.

  ‘Now I don’t see why we can’t look at questions like why, you understand,’ said Witterhe. ‘Why did God build the wall?’

  ‘The other day I thought’, said Tighe, ‘that maybe there was another wall. A perfectly blank wall, away in the distance. I thought maybe that was why the sky was blue.’

  But Witterhe wasn’t listening. ‘Now when I build a wall, it is for a particular reason. I build a wall to keep something out, or to keep something in. That is what a wall is for, do you see? So we have to ask the same question. What does God want to keep in? Or out?’

  He glared at Tighe, as if expecting an answer. But apart from the frisson of knowing that he was listening to heresy, that his Grandhe would fly into one of his cold rages if he heard these words, he had little interest in what Witterhe was saying.

  ‘God lives on top of the wall,’ said Tighe. ‘He has the best view up there. Maybe that’s why he built it, to give himself the view. Maybe he built the wall to sit on.’

  Witterhe coughed, then cackled. ‘No, no, that’s not it. Let me ask you about the sun.’

  ‘The sun.’

  ‘The sun goes up. That goes direct against the law of gravity. So how does it happen?’

  Tighe pondered. ‘I never thought of it,’ he said.

  ‘You did not, no indeed,’ said Witterhe. ‘Nobody thinks of these things because they seem so plain and straightforward. But we still need to explain ourselves. You know what the sun is?’

  Tighe wasn’t sure what the question meant.

  ‘The sun is a hot-hot ball of stone. It’s rock, like the wall, but it’s heated up. That’s why we feel its heat and its light. So I ask you again: how does this enormous flaming ball of stone rise upwards against the pull of gravity?’

  ‘You’re teasing him, pahe,’ said Wittershe and smiled at Tighe.

  ‘Oh no, oh no,’ said her pahe. ‘He’s a bright boy, our little Princeling, I’m trying to bring out the thinking in him. It needs to be practised, thinking, or it withers away. When he gets to be Prince himself, he’ll need wisdom like this. So how does the hot, heavy stone rise up against gravity?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tighe.

  ‘If you wanted a stone to go up,’ said Witterhe, ‘what would you do? You’d throw it up. What else?’

  ‘I’d throw it up,’ conceded Tighe.

  ‘And why do you think God is different? Now don’t tell your Grandhe, or he’ll have the village band together and denounce me as a heretic. But isn’t it plain, isn’t it logic that this is what happens? Every night God heats a giant ball of stone, one of the pebbles from God’s beach. He heats it up till it shines with heat, and then come morning he hurls it upwards. That’s what we see, rising through the day, God’s missile. And every day we watch it, without thinking about it; it goes up and over the top of the wall. So that must be where God is throwing it. He is tossing flaming missiles over the wall.’

  Puff on the pipe, and another. More thick brown smoke clouded the lamp.

  ‘There’s a war, that’s what there is,’ Witterhe announced grandly. ‘We cling to this wall we live on like monkeys and the war is fought right over our heads. That’s why God built the wall. He built it to keep something, some things, away from Him. Something evil lives on the other side of the wall and God has declared war upon it. Every day he bombards it and he will continue doing so until he has destroyed it.’

  And, dozy with smoke, Tighe’s imagination flared. He could see the dark abyss on the far side of the wall and sense some nameless evil seething at the base. And then, every night when he lay in his alcove asleep, when he thought the universe was peaceful and at rest, on the other side of the wall divine catastrophe was raining down. Every night another blazing fireball would come screaming down, spitting sparks a thousand yards wide. The smoke wound around Old Witterhe and around Wittershe’s clever, narrow face, with its baffling smile. Some dark, smoky abyss on the other side of the wall. Creatures sliding, plotting their evil. And then, every night, the howling apocalypse of divine wrath.

  ‘What sort of creatures, though?’ Tighe asked, his voice changed more to awe. ‘Why is God so angry with them?’

  ‘Well,’ said Witterhe, stretching a little, ‘that’s a little difficult to say, isn’t it. Now, I know somebody, here in the village. He’s a good man, works with artefacts and old machines. Maybe I’ll introduce you to him. Now, he has a theory.’

  Witterhe stopped, gauging the effect of his storytelling.

  ‘This is what he reckons,’ he went on. ‘He thinks that there is Good and Evil in the universe. That, in some worlds, this Good and this Evil get mixed up. It happens with us on the wall, we can’t deny it. Good, yes. Evil, yes. In the same person, often. On our level, which is a small enough level, that’s the way. But in the world which God inhabits, maybe it is different. Maybe God built the wall precisely to separate out Good and Evil. Ever think of that?’

  Witterhe sucked his pipe again. The air was fragrant and clotted with smoke. Tighe was starting to see blobs of light, deep blue and purple patches that flickered at the edges of vision. His chest heaved, but no matter how hard he breathed he didn’t seem to be able to draw enough air into his chest.

  ‘But we are God’s favoured because we live on the face of the wall that looks out over Good. We see the sun rise. But what of the people who live on the crags on the other side of the wall, eh? What drear and miserable lives do they lead? Living in the stench of evil, living in the dark and then running into their burrows to hide their heads as the wrath of God flames roaring down the sky.’

  ‘Think I need some fresh air,’ mumbled Tighe. He stood up, but his feet seemed unsteady. The narrow walls of Witterhe’s house seemed to be drawing together. The lamp swung slowly about and Wittershe’s face came into view. ‘It’s the smoke,’ Tighe heard her say, ‘he’s not used to it.’

  ‘Take him out,’ came Witterhe’s voice, somehow removed from things. ‘Fill his lungs with fresh air.’

  The nameless evil. Tongue of smoke. Something down there, something roiling around, but he couldn’t see his feet. Through the door, leaning on somebody and stumbling – and then, like cold water, the wash of night air. The smoke coalesced into blackness and only the pricks of light in the huge blackness.

  Tighe tried to focus on the stars. His head resonated with a swift headache pain that passed away as soon as it struck. Then he knew where he was: sitting on the turf outside Witterhe’s house, Wittershe sitting beside him with her arm hanging about his neck like a stole. To his right, the muttering of the apes in the darkness. An occasional shriek of appalling-so
unding outrage. Tighe rested his head on his knees, looking down at the grass before his feet. A dozen or so pale mushrooms seemed to be growing on the grass in front of him; but he looked again and saw that they were the bodies of sleeping doves, roosting on the crag. Their heads curled down, their bodies had a weirdly insubstantial appearance. Balloon bodies. Foam bodies. Bulging patches of a ghostly paleness.

  ‘Doves,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said Wittershe, in a whisper. ‘Don’t speak loud or they’ll vanish. Pahe likes to snare them, but they don’t often roost on our crag. You stay here and keep an eye on them and I’ll slip back through and tell him. He has a net.’

  And the pressure was lifted from his neck. Tighe looked around, but Wittershe was gone. The air was soft, falling only gently. Why did the air seem to blow around so much at dusk, but only draw gently downwards at night? Why was dawn always accompanied by a fearful gale? God firing his blazing cannonball, making war on evil. Tighe felt the rightness of Witterhe’s cosmology. God setting the great rock alight at dawn and that was the growing of the light way down at the base of the wall; and then God hurled it, from His muscled arm, and the air boiled and howled. That was the morning gale. If it could cause such fierce storms on launching, then what must it be like crashing down on the dark side of the wall?

  As if in sympathy, Tighe felt his own insides lurching. Nameless evil. A wall netted with smoke, hideous shapes moving. Tighe’s throat clenched and he toppled forward vomiting noisily, a spattering stream. And the doves, cooing as if to reassure him, broke into the night sky in a flutter of starlit wings, pale and ghostly as grey smoke, feathering the stars themselves.

  Old Witterhe was furious when he came out to find the doves gone. ‘There’s good eating on one of those birds,’ he said. ‘They’re valuable. My girl said there were six.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tighe groaned. ‘I couldn’t help it.’