On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Then her momentum spun her round a little and she grunted, trying to regain her footing. Tighe could see that she held a stone in her hand, one of the large flat pebbles from the ledge outside. His brain, working with an odd exactness, wondered if she had gone outside to fetch it whilst Grandhe waited in the main space for him to come home; or if she had chosen it on a previous occasion, had prepared it for the next time anger took grip of her. But she had taken a step to brace herself and was swinging her arm back. Tighe’s thinking stopped, jarred, frozen. This time pashe’s motion was accompanied by a scratchy cry, pashe’s mouth open, and Tighe had just enough wit to hold himself still until something solid clobbered the side of his temple with the sharp compression of impact and he flipped to the side and down.

  On the floor. He lay static, like a doll, aware only vaguely of his pashe standing over him panting. Some sort of pummelling should, by rights, have followed, but instead pashe simply stood there. Eventually she moved away. Tighe lay still, even calm, with his eyes open and looking at the join of wall and floor. There was nothing, then the hurting started. Like a distant grumbling that grew louder in seconds, a headache caught and swelled at the place where he had been hit. He put up a hand; wetness.

  Trying to get to his feet proved more difficult than usual. He tripped and sprawled, struggled up again and then skittered left and right instead of straight on. Like a newborn goat trying out its legs for the first time. Somehow he managed to make it to his alcove and to collapse on the matting in there.

  But his head started thumping with pain as soon as he lowered it, so he struggled up and sat with his back against the partition. He could hear his pashe moving around in the space outside. He wanted a drink, but was not about to leave his alcove whilst she was there.

  Something tickled the side of his head. He put his fingers up to his temple and felt the wetness dribbling. He felt dissociated from the wound, from the heat and the sharp fall of blood. Except for the thumping of his pain, which was very real.

  He did not exactly sleep, but his consciousness went woozy and everything shrank away except for the pain. It went dark. Only a small patch of matting was visible to him. He tried to put up his hand, but the nerves refused to convey instructions down his arm. He started sliding over, toppling, and was unable to stop himself falling all the way over. When his head slapped the matting he felt a surge of pain.

  For a time he lay like that, a great dark upon him, and in his head, behind the pain, the strange sensation of falling. Then somebody was helping him up, words were trying to pierce the pain, and his pahe was mopping at the side of his head with something. Tighe could barely even focus on the familiar features. The well-scored lines that ran from nostrils’ outside edge to the corners of his mouth. The little crag of his chin. Hundreds of dots of black hair, shaved that morning, speckling the cheeks and around the mouth.

  His pahe wrapped his head in something and gave him some water, together with some willowgrass stalks to chew. With those the pain receded a little and Tighe was able to lie down and sleep. He awoke with a very dry mouth and was able – however unsteadily – to make his way to the family sink and douse his head. That made him feel a little better.

  His pahe was at his back, putting a scuffed hand on his shoulder. ‘You doing better?’ he asked, in his soft voice.

  ‘Better,’ agreed Tighe.

  His pahe looked into his eyes carefully, like a doctor might. Then he smiled, or pressed his lips as close to a smile as they went. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  He did not ask, How did you hurt your head? There was no need. For one moment, fleetingly, Tighe felt the bond between pahe and boy solidly, the unspoken affiliation. He said, ‘Maybe I’ll take some fresh air.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said his pahe.

  So Tighe wobbled to the front and through the dawn-door and just sat himself down outside. It was late in the day now. He had been in his alcove for most of the day. Sunlight came straight down, split by high clouds into luminous shafts and spears that stood vividly against the darkening brown-mauve of the sky behind. Birds wheeled and flopped, swooping near the wall and pulling away from it into the enormous air. Looking for roosts, finding places away from the dangerous habitations of man. Tighe let his eyes go slack watching the patterns they made.

  With a rush in the air and a sudden whirr of wings, a pigeon landed on the turf a few yards from Tighe. He reached out towards it, but it leapt into the air, kicked out with its extraordinary wings and was away.

  8

  Matters worsened in the village. Akathe and his pahe packed up the clockwork booth. Akathe’s pahe said he knew somebody in Meat, thought he could find a little work there. They paid the Doge the toll for her ladder. Tighe saw the two of them off. ‘When will you be back?’ he asked.

  ‘If it goes well, who knows?’ said Akathe, shouldering his pack. ‘If it goes badly, we may be back inside the week, begging off all our friends for food to stop us starving.’ He laughed at this and Tighe laughed too, but there was a desperation behind the fun and behind the too-hard hugs they gave one another.

  The market shelf was now always busy with people loitering and hoping for work. Some of their faces were starting to look very drawn indeed. These were people who had eaten nothing but stalkgrass for weeks. When Tighe would wander up to his usual crags, up to where the goats were pastured, he was never alone any more. There was always a group of people, with sucked-in faces and rips in their clothes, pulling up stalkgrass and munching at it with a frightening desperation. Sometimes they would call to him for work; or for money, food. But he avoided these encounters, turned and scurried back down the dog-leg to make his way down.

  For about a week he avoided going to Witterhe’s. Then he met the old monkeymonger on the market shelf. ‘Well, my boy,’ he called over to him. ‘Haven’t seen you in quite a while, quite a while. My girl, she’s been asking about you.’

  And despite himself Tighe was drawn in. ‘She has?’

  ‘Sure she has.’

  Tighe grinned. ‘Well, I was thinking of going down this afternoon. I’ve got to buy a candle now, but I could come by this afternoon.’

  ‘Evening’s better,’ said Old Witterhe. He spat, the saliva coming out dark with whatever it was he was chewing. ‘She’s off in the Rightward crags gathering some vegetation for now, some apefeed. Come in the evening. What you do to your head, boy?’

  ‘Knocked it on the door,’ Tighe said, automatically. The thought of seeing Wittershe again had filled his stomach with light and excitement. It was an uneasy feeling, too; a knowing transgression. His pashe would be furious if she knew, his Grandhe also. But his Grandhe need never know. His pashe need never know.

  Most of the traders on traders’ ledge were closed, but his pashe had told him to get a candle, so Tighe went to the chandler. Even hungry people needed light at night and the chandler – a woman called Anshe – had had a long relationship with Tighe’s family. Candles were made mostly out of wax secretions scraped from the leaves of a number of plants, but a degree of goat fat was an important ingredient in the mix to stiffen the finished product. Pashe had told him that Anshe would hand over a candle, part of some complicated arrangement of debt and counter-debt, and Tighe had agreed eagerly to collect it. Anshe was leaning over the bar of her dawn-door, smoking, when he arrived.

  ‘Well met and hello,’ said Tighe, a little shy. ‘I have come for a candle. My pashe says you and she have an arrangement?’

  ‘I’ll fetch the one I made,’ she said. ‘I made it for your pashe a few days ago. I’ve been expecting you.’

  She went inside and returned with the candle all wrapped up in grass-weave, handing it over with a smile. Tighe smiled back.

  He loitered on the way home, and found a crevice in a not too busy ledge to sit in and stare out at the paling midday sky and the bone-coloured clouds. He toyed with the candle. It was so heavy; like stone. Yet he could press his thumbnail into its pliancy. How could it have the weight of stone and no
t the hardness of stone? That was an interesting question. Wax must be made out of different stuff from stone. Two different sorts of matter. He pondered for a while, trying to reckon up how many different sorts of matter there must be. Air and water, for example; then brittle and solid and pliant. But it was too tiring. The sun was warm against his face. He slowly cleaned out one of his nostrils with his little finger.

  A monkey skittered along the ledge, running with legs and draping forearms. It was gone before Tighe could notice if it was collared, or to whom it might belong.

  There were ants in the grass, following a line through the blades. Tighe tried to think himself down to their level; imagine the grass stalks as enormous pillars, imagine the specks of dirt as boulders. How did they see the Universe? As a flat plane created by some man-sized Ant God; planted with great trunks of grass to test them? He got on his knees and peered closely. The ants were black and red, the colours striped down their plastic-looking carapaces. Each of them waved filament arms from their head. Tongues? Eyes on stalks?

  Grandhe had once said that Tighe wondered about the wrong things. Spent too long asking questions that had no answer instead of learning about God and being silent. Tighe sighed. Time to go home. He picked the candle up and brushed ants from the parcel.

  He trotted along paths worn to dust by many feet, paths that were worn into his mind too. They were so familiar he felt he could shut his eyes and make his way along them blind. But he didn’t shut his eyes. There was still the threat of the edge, the yaw and tumble promised to everybody. It still made his stomach ache and fist inside him. He still chose the path that went closest to the comforting bulk of the wall itself.

  Down the dog-leg, along main-street shelf. He was so familiar a wanderer through the village that several of the itinerants waved to him. But he hurried on, to the end of the shelf, up the public ladder, zigzagging up the briefer ledges and out along the ledge where his house was.

  The walk had made him hot and the cool of the hall was pleasant. Out of the sun his eyes were murked briefly, but adjusted to the dimness. He called out, ‘Pashe, I have the candle,’ and went through to the main space.

  There was nobody there.

  That was odd; pashe rarely left the house these days. Tighe went through to the storeroom at the back, empty except for the salted remains of a few goat-joints stacked against the wall. Then he came back and helped himself to some food from the store. The candle, still packaged, was sitting on the bar shelf. On a whim, Tighe unpacked it. Anshe had streaked it with a spiral pattern of red dye. That was a nice touch; she could just have given them a plain candle to settle the debt, but she had put the extra effort into patterning it.

  Tighe wondered where his pashe was. Something about her absence bothered him. He tried to picture where she might be, but no image came. That bothered him. He shut his eyes and tried to call up an image of his pashe at all. It was the oddest thing. He tried to build up the picture, eyes, nose, mouth, but the image kept slipping out of his mind. Wittershe. Other women from around the village. Anyone but his pashe. The effort made his head throb at the scraped temple and suddenly there came a striking visual image of his pashe straining with the effort to bring her fist round. Her face was darkened with rage; the lips pulled back, the face in the rictus of anger.

  Tighe banished the picture hurriedly.

  He had to find his pashe. Where could she be? It was only a small village; it shouldn’t be too hard to find her. He felt a sudden burning urgency.

  Where was his pashe?

  He finished the grass-bread and took a swig of water from the sink. Then he went out through the door and made his way back along the ledge. He assumed his pahe was still working on the house on top ledge.

  The route up there was complicated and involved switching back on several levels. It took him past some of the wealthiest houses in the village, large doorways opening on to spacious ledges, almost all of whom made their fortune with goats – with herds of tens, twenties of goats. Many of these houses even employed a doorkeeper, a raggedy man or woman who squatted in front of the dawn-doors and shooed passers-by away. Tighe watched several beggars approach one particularly splendid door like persistent flies, be waved away by the shouting doorkeeper (who had armed himself with a stick) and scatter to several places near the lip of the ledge; but then gather themselves and approach again. Tighe, passing, marvelled at their persistence. How could they think that there was any chance at begging from somebody’s doorway? Desperation indeed.

  The turf at top ledge was patterned, scythed regularly by a specially employed gardener and then pressed by boards into diamond patterns. It felt sacrilegious somehow even to walk upon it. Certainly the doorman at Old Musshe’s doorway was giving him a very hostile look.

  ‘Get away,’ he barked. ‘This is not a ledge for boy-boys to play on.’

  ‘I’m no boy-boy, I’m a boy, near enough a man,’ returned Tighe, bridling. He was the Princeling for the whole Princedom and better than any doorman. ‘I’ve come looking for my pahe and he’s the Prince, you know, and you’d do best if you let me in to have a word with him.’

  ‘Your pahe,’ said the doorman. Tighe had sometimes seen the man on market shelf, but didn’t know his name.

  ‘He’s working on Old Musshe’s house, I know.’

  ‘I know him, I know Old Tighe,’ said the doorman. ‘He’s been working here for a week or so.’

  ‘Well, he’s working right now. I’m thinking he came today with my pashe, maybe she’s helping him.’

  The doorman laughed briefly, then coughed, then spat. ‘Your pashe is not here,’ he said firmly, ‘and neither is your pahe. My mistress is pretty angry with him. She’s doing him a favour, you know. She’s been kind and he repays her by not turning up for work.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The doorman scratched at a gum with one fingernail. ‘You’re not smart for a Princeling,’ he sneered.

  ‘My pahe didn’t turn up for work today?’

  ‘Deaf, are you? That’s what I said. You want that I should shout?’

  Tighe scurried away.

  He was getting anxious now. It made no sense that pahe would miss work. That was not how pahe was. Tighe worked his way round the tight dog-legs of ledges and down the ladder to the main-street shelf. A woman he knew, Becshe, was carrying a pallet of new-baked grass-bread and some morsels of insect meat around the restive crowd of itinerants. Few had money and what little they did have they were saving for the toll of the Doge’s ladder to get up to Meat and find some proper work. Grim, drawn faces shook left and right; No thank you, a few closed their eyes and turned themselves right around to face the wall, as if to deny the very existence of the food. But every now and again one of the itinerants would be unable to contain him- or herself, would give in to their hunger and give away their precious money for the passing satisfaction; a full belly for an hour, the taste on the tongue.

  Tighe touched Becshe’s arm. ‘Well well, Becshe,’ he said. ‘Have you been here all through the day?’

  ‘Since the air settled after dawn.’

  ‘You have seen my pahe pass through here? With my pashe on his arm, perhaps?’

  Becshe gave him a strange look. ‘Lovely food,’ she said in a loud voice. ‘Work better on a full belly, you know it, gentlemen, gentlewomen.’ Then in a quieter tone she added, ‘I’ll tell you boy-boy, I’ve not seen your pashe out of the house for months. Not since you lost that goat over the edge.’

  ‘But you saw my pahe passing this morning? He would have been on the way to work?’

  ‘I see him most days,’ said Becshe, ‘but he didn’t come through this day. And the very thought of your pashe coming down along the main-street shelf is improbable, I think.’

  ‘You could have missed him.’

  Becshe hawked and spat. ‘More than my business is worth to miss the passage of people,’ she said. ‘He didn’t come through.’

  Tighe was off, running. He was not sure wher
e he was running to. If pahe had not come through the main-street shelf, he must still be somewhere on the Leftward ledges; but that was a small enough ground, and there was no reason for him to stay there. Up the Leftward ladder and along to the goat pen. A man with one hand missing, Rothroche, was tending the pen. He hurried out of the cave mouth when he saw Tighe.

  ‘You think your family can just leave the goats for me to look after?’ he shouted.

  ‘Have you seen my pahe today?’ squealed Tighe, dancing out of the way of Rothroche’s stretching arm. ‘Have you seen my pashe?’

  ‘Deleshe came by this morning,’ snarled Rothroche. Deleshe was tending the goats now, after the disgrace of Carashe. ‘It was the usual arrangement; she came and we both waited for your pahe to come by. But he didn’t. I couldn’t hand the goats over to that girl without your pahe being there – what if something had happened? So she had to go off and try to find him, but she said the house was empty. So the goats have stayed here all day and I’m sick of them. This is a goat pen, not a pasture. They’ve nothing to eat in here and they are messing the pen. They keep bleating. I’m not supposed to have to wait around all day – I have other work to go to.’ This last was probably a lie; Rothroche was lucky to have this one job, given his deformity – he probably spent his days sleeping in the sun. Tighe felt anxiety inside him, sharp and tart. He suddenly felt young and small, not the eight-year-old near man. Something was very wrong. Pahe always came by to check the goats of a morning and to pass them over to the herder for the day. The family’s wealth depended on the goats. It was inconceivable that they would be ignored.

  ‘Where is my pahe?’ Tighe blurted.