On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Then she was climbing down and the crowd was breaking up. The cheering had died and was now only a muttering as people filed down the ledge, or else climbed the footholds to the ledge above. ‘Did you see?’ Tighe asked her. ‘Did you see him burning?’

  She nodded. ‘I couldn’t see his face, though. I wanted to see his face, but all there was was a kind of black shape all covered in fire. It was a man-shape, but it didn’t have anything, you know, personal about it.’ She sounded disappointed. ‘Let’s go and look at the ashes.’ She pressed forward.

  He followed her through the crowd, almost breathless. The excitement of it was all concentrated in his wick. All that death and holiness, all the yelling and cheering at Grandhe’s speaking; the intense anticipation that he might see old Konstakhe’s rising spirit was one with the anticipation that he would be able to take hold of Wittershe and press himself upon her. That he would be able to push her down to the turf and put himself on top of her. It was all packed into his wick, all crammed into that funny little tube of flesh. Tighe had watched goats and the way their wicks hung flaccid most of their lives, except when the mating fever was on them when they became hard as rock. And then afterwards they would be placid, their thoughts far from sex.

  Sometimes Tighe felt as if he were living in a continual mating fever.

  He pushed himself through the crowd and tumbled against Wittershe again, pressing himself against her a little more forcefully than he needed. The rasp of cloth, the distant, slippery sense of flesh underneath it. Wittershe didn’t seem to mind; didn’t seem to notice. She was peering down at the still-hot ashes, gleaming with dots of red.

  ‘That used to be Konstakhe,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘Old Konstakhe. That used to be him.’

  ‘That used to be my Grandhe’s closest friend,’ said Tighe, and Wittershe sniggered, hiding her mouth with her hand. Tighe grinned to return her grin, but in fact the thought unsettled him. A human being was now only a pattern of ashes on the ground. The glow paled from red to black. Somebody was standing next to the remains of the pyre with a bucket, ready for the ashes to cool to take them to one of the gardens. Grandhe had vanished. Tighe looked around; the crowd was dispersing. So little distance between these walking, breathing people and this little pile of black sand.

  ‘You should piss on it,’ said Wittershe, putting her hand on Tighe’s arm.

  ‘You should,’ countered Tighe.

  ‘I can’t, I’m a girl. But you could quickly piss on it. Put the fire down.’ She sniggered again and suddenly she was darting over the shelf. Tighe lurched, took a step after her, but stopped. She was gone.

  7

  Things changed. It was hard to pin it down. For Tighe it was all somehow clouded with his infatuation with Wittershe, which took up more and more of his thoughts. But it seemed difficult to deny that some sort of change began with the loss of the goat on his eighth birthday. For weeks pahe was not around, and pashe was in an even more precarious mood than normal. Pahe was working all the hours, trying to make good some of the debts that the loss of the goat had brought upon them. He told Tighe that he couldn’t spend time doing the work around the house that needed doing and then he paused. ‘I could do that,’ said Tighe, prompted by the sad expression on his pahe’s face. ‘I’ll do the work around the house.’

  His pahe almost smiled. ‘You are my son,’ he said. ‘You are Princeling and one day you’ll make a fine Prince.’

  He spent an hour showing Tighe the basic repairs that the dawn gale made necessary on the outside, patching the dawn-door and so on. It seemed clear enough, but left to himself Tighe found it hard to get right. He couldn’t seem to concentrate. His pahe was gone and in the main space his pashe was lying on the floor and sobbing noisily, intrusively. It was hard to concentrate. Normally Tighe would have gone out and roamed the ledges and the crags; but his pahe had left him in charge of the house and another layer of mud needed to be applied to the outside of the dawn-door – it needed to be done in the morning so it could dry in the midday sunshine. So Tighe bit his teeth together and smeared the mud over the front of the dawn-door, making quite a mess of it. But always there was the ah-ah-ah of his pashe crying in the main space.

  He sat back on his haunches and listened to the noise. Difficult to know what to do. Then the sobbing changed to a single rising wail, ullahhh, and the noise slid like a needle into his head. He made a few more swipes with the spatula, but the noise was too much. Tentatively he made his way back to the main space, putting his head round the door. ‘Pashe?’

  Only her huddled shape on the floor, bulging and shaking with the effort of crying. She was sobbing again now.

  He stood in the door, scratching his head. Then he tiptoed over towards her, and crouched down beside her. ‘Pashe, what is it? What is the matter?’

  The sobbing stopped and Tighe’s heart jumped, not knowing whether violence was about to spring up from the floor. Pashe lurched and sat up and Tighe couldn’t prevent the reflex that jerked him backwards. But his pashe’s face was so blurred with crying, her eyes so red and desolate-looking, that he paused. ‘Oh my boy-boy,’ she moaned and grabbed his neck in an awkward embrace. ‘You’re the only man in my life. You are my life! You are why we do all this, all this struggle, when it would be so easy to give up, to give over, to fall away.’

  And she sobbed and cried on to his shoulder and Tighe did not know what to do, so he just held her and tried to make a comforting hum with his mouth. And, as the moment stretched out, there was an almost warm feeling in his belly. That he and his pashe could enjoy this intimacy; that she could depend upon him. Or maybe it was only that the terror of his pashe was reduced to this bundle, this series of hot desperate breaths against his neck. It was a sort of power; but at the same time he felt awkward because of its incongruity. The moment swelled and then passed, faded. Pashe gently pulled herself back, away from him, wiping her face on the sleeve of her shirt. Tighe sat looking at the floor. The intimacy had evaporated and now there was only the awkwardness.

  He went back to the dawn-door and made some desultory passes over the front of it with the spatula. Then he threw the equipment down and lurched outside and along the ledge. The sky was brass coloured, scratched like old plastic with some streaky clouds running vertically. A fresh breeze, the last remnants of the dawn gale, was pushing up and rustling Tighe’s hair. He made his way along the ledges and down the public ladder to the main-street shelf. There were a few loiterers hanging about the shelf, hoping for work; thin men and women in raggedy clothes. That was a sign that things were changing; even Tighe knew as much. There would usually be three or four people squatting with their backs to the wall hoping for any sort of chore or job that would earn them their food. But here were more than a dozen people, some faces that Tighe recognised, some completely new to him.

  He went up to Akathe’s booth to talk to him about it. ‘All the traders are talking about it,’ the clockmaker told him, with an eyepiece clenched between eyebrow and bulging cheek. ‘Bad times coming. If you know how to sense it you can feel it, like the stirring of the air before the dawn gale.’

  ‘I saw more than a dozen people waiting on market shelf hoping for work – think of it! There were several new faces there.’

  ‘They came along this ledge late yesterday,’ said Akathe, ‘trying to beg work directly from the traders – as if that was the way it works! They really don’t understand the way it works.’ He shook his head sagely.

  ‘Who are they?’

  Akathe shrugged. ‘From Smelt, I think. They’ve made their way upwall to Heartshelf and then to us.’

  ‘Why come to us?’

  ‘Who knows. I suppose work is thin in Smelt, and in Heartshelf as well. So they come here because this is where the Doge lives. And the Priest and the Prince too,’ he grinned and made a little mock-obeisance with his head in Tighe’s direction, ‘but it’s mostly the thought of the Doge living here that brings them. But there’s no work here. Mostly we have animal
tending and this is too valuable to trust itinerants with. The rest of us serve the goatmongers. They’ll get no work with us.’

  ‘So what will they do?’

  ‘Hang about the ledges getting thin,’ said Akathe. ‘How do I know? They can go jump into the sky for all I care.’ He fiddled with something and then plucked the eyepiece from his face. It made a faint popping noise. ‘Now that they know there’s no work here I guess they’re just trying to raise enough money to pay for the toll ladder up to Meat. That’s the biggest town in this part of the wall, so they’re more likely to find something up there.’

  ‘But if they can’t get work they won’t be able to buy food, let alone pay for the toll ladder.’

  Akathe shrugged again. ‘I dare say, if they get too close to actual starvation, the Doge will let them pass and climb her ladder, if only to stop them messing up the market shelf with their dying. Or maybe she’ll let them die so we can burn them and put their ashes to fertilise our gardens.’ He grinned as he said this, but Tighe shuddered, wondering if he were half-serious.

  Tighe wandered back down to the shelf and watched the newcomers for a bit. A bone-worker passed and recruited one of the loiterers; presumably she had some stripping and rendering she needed doing, hard smelly work that an itinerant could manage. But the bone-worker (a short, hunch-shouldered woman called Dalshe) of course hired one of the village’s known tramps. It went without saying that she was going to give the work to somebody she knew. The faces of the newcomers rose as she approached; they forced smiles, stood a little straighter. But as she left their faces tumbled again and they slouched or sat gracelessly back on the ground.

  Bored, Tighe climbed down to Old Witterhe’s, but the dawn-door was shut and nobody answered his calls. He climbed back up and made his way back to Akathe’s booth.

  ‘You again? You’re not here to buy anything, are you, you wastrel Princeling. You’re just here to loiter, like the spoilt boy-boy you are.’ Akathe grinned. ‘If your grace don’t mind me saying, you’re worse than an itinerant.’

  ‘It’s sad,’ said Tighe, watching those newcomers. They’re going to be hungry tonight.’

  ‘I wouldn’t waste your energies on worrying about them,’ said Akathe. ‘I’d worry about your own kind first. There are people from the village who will be hungry tonight, and I worry about that. Your own Princedom, think of it that way. Because that could be me in a few weeks.’ He sighed, and clambered out of the booth to stretch his legs on the ledge. ‘People don’t buy clocks or clockwork when times get hard. My pahe is worried.’

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ said Tighe unconvincingly.

  ‘As if you know anything about it! You’ll be all right. People always need goats.’

  ‘But we lost that goat,’ said Tighe, eager not to be outstripped in the misery game. ‘Don’t forget that.’

  ‘No,’ said Akathe, sucking his lower lip. ‘I suppose that’s true. I heard your pahe was working on old Musshe’s house up on top ledge. He may be Prince, but he has to work like anybody else. Labouring up there on top ledge.’ Nobody knew why it was called top ledge; it was not the highest ledge in the village. But old Musshe had the ledge to herself, so perhaps it reflected her status in the village. ‘He owed her some goathair from the beast you lost, I heard, and some candles indirectly. So now he’s singlehandedly digging her a new room. Must be back-breaking. It’s itinerant work, too, so I don’t suppose it’s paying off the whole of the debt.’

  Tighe had not heard that his pahe was involved in anything so demeaning. It was a shock. Part of him wanted to hear more detail, but the stronger impulse was to deny that his pahe was in any trouble at all. He decided to change the subject.

  ‘What’s happened in the village, then?’ he asked. ‘Why has it come down like this? It was fine only weeks ago.’

  Akathe didn’t answer this straight away. He was staring out at the sky, tracing the paths of birds circling on the last of the warm upwinds. Black dots like pieces of the night sky torn off and blown about in the fresh sunlight. Eventually he said, ‘Who knows how it works? A village is like a large clockwork machine. A hundred parts need to work all together for it to function. Who knows why it goes wrong? Everything seems to be like last year, only there are more people begging work on the market shelf, only there are fewer people buying the traders’ goods. Suddenly everybody is hungry and nobody can afford anything.’ He spat.

  After a while Akathe said, ‘My pahe says the world is running down. Maybe this is just the front of it. Maybe things will only get worse indeed.’

  Tighe felt his stomach shrinking; there was a sensation in his sinuses, almost as if he were smelling something burning, some sharp potent odour. But he knew he wasn’t smelling anything. It was a sort of intensity, focused in the middle of his head. Everything was running down. The end was coming.

  ‘Let me tell you,’ said Akathe. ‘I work with clocks. Clocks divide the day into ten hours. But sometimes I have seen old clockfaces, and they divide the day into twelve sections. Do you know why?’

  Tighe said, ‘No.’

  ‘The world is changing. I think so. I think the day once had enough space for twelve hours; I think it was a golden age. Now there is space only for ten. Days were longer in the great old days. There used to be twelve tithes in a year too, not the ten we have these days.’ He spat again, shook his left leg, then his right.

  ‘They used to have twelve of everything,’ said Tighe, remembering his schooling. ‘Twelve months, twelve fingers, twelve toes. Twelve tribes, twelve degrees of separation.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We have twenty months. That’s longer, though.’

  ‘They came from a different world,’ said Akathe. ‘They were a different people.’

  ‘Maybe they did come from a different world before they found the wall,’ agreed Tighe. ‘But we have followed on from them.’

  But Akathe was bored with this conversation. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘back to work.’

  Tighe left him feeling weirdly elated. The world was running down, like an antique clockwork. He started marching smartly along the traders’ ledge until, he didn’t know why, he was running, sprinting all the way along. Then clambering down the dog-leg and dashing over the main-street shelf. His heart was filled with a desperate sort of joy. He was running as hard as he could, really pounding the ledge with his feet and digging his elbows into the air, past the astonished looks of the people on the shelf, running as if he could burn himself up with the speed. And then, abruptly he was at the end of the shelf and he pulled himself up in a few jarring strides. There was no space to run any further.

  Back home Grandhe was paying a second house call: unheard of previously. He was sitting in the chair in the main space, with pashe standing near. Tighe came in with a fresh expression, a little sweaty from his dash, but grinning. One look at the two faces of pashe and Grandhe took his mood away, though.

  ‘Hello, Grandhe,’ he said. ‘Hello, pashe.’

  ‘My boy-boy,’ said Grandhe, sonorously. Tighe remembered the tear that had gathered on the underlip of the old man’s eye; the swell of the beady water, the way it had paused on the very edge, and then the way it had abandoned itself and fallen streaking down his wrinkled cheek.

  ‘Grandhe,’ said Tighe.

  ‘Listen to your Grandhe,’ said pashe sharply.

  ‘What I have to say will not take long,’ said Grandhe, climbing to his feet. ‘I saw you at the ceremony, boy.’

  ‘Yes Grandhe.’

  ‘I saw you were with that girl-girl. The girl-girl of Old Witterhe. He is a dangerous man and a heretic. I do not want you to associate with him or his daughter. My enemies will make much of it.’

  ‘Do you understand?’ said pashe, shrilly. There was something alarming in her face. Tighe shrank back.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Ye-yes. I understand.’

  There was a heartbeat’s silence.

  ‘You are a Princeling of this Princedom,’ said Grandhe. ‘
You have a place in the order of things and this girl is beneath you.’ Grandhe paused and looked so intently at Tighe that he felt as if he were being stared through. Then he said, ‘Well, well enough.’ He stalked awkwardly to the door, his knees creaky with age. ‘That is well enough.’

  ‘Show your Grandhe out,’ hissed pashe, and Tighe, as if slapped, lurched away and shepherded the old Priest through the dawn-door. Then he stood in the hall and tried to summon the courage to go back into the main space. His pashe was waiting for him, he knew. He felt the desperate desire to duck out the door, just to run; but there was nowhere to go. It made more sense to get this out of the way now. He turned and shuffled back into the house.

  ‘So,’ said his pashe. ‘Do you understand what has happened there?’

  She was holding something behind her back. Tighe wanted to see what it was. He said, ‘No,’ in a sulky voice.

  ‘You know, don’t you, that we owe a debt to your Grandhe? You know that the loss of our goat has put us in a very difficult position. He comes round now to make me feel my humiliation. He knows I have to agree with him because he has the debt’

  She paused, as if expecting Tighe to say something, but he didn’t know what to say. He stared at his feet.

  Pashe took a step towards him. Her fury was very real now, very sharp; it possessed her features. ‘You associate yourself with that girl-girl and you give him more power to humiliate me. Do you understand? Do you –’ but she broke off and swung round with her right arm. Tighe flinched back. He didn’t mean to, he knew it was better to take the first blow and simply go down, but he couldn’t help himself. Something whistled past his nose and his pashe’s face was frozen for an instant in a curl of pure rage.