On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  He realised early on that these people were not wearing face paint as he had thought. No, their skin was that colour naturally; an ash whiteness that looked like a religious mask. Tighe had been startled and a little scared when the chief medical attendant had been leaning over him one morning checking his legs and Tighe had realised that the peculiar ashen colour was not painted over but went right down to his pores, to the scalp between his hairs, to his hands and feet.

  The headdress was not a headdress either, but an enormous mass of tangled hair. Their hair was different from normal, strange; thicker, somehow, each strand frizzed out so that the whole made limbs of mosslike excrescence rather than the normal threads. This hair covered their heads and sprouted up and over, falling in ropy strands over their shoulders. They all wore the same clothes, too: deep blue tunics that went down to their knees and black leggings to their bare white feet.

  These people were strange enough to seem barely human, and Tighe – with nothing else to do but weave fancies out of his brain – sometimes wondered if he had indeed fallen all the way to the foot of the wall and discovered it populated by devils. Or animals. Or some other alien beings. Perhaps, he thought, he was dead: but he banished that idea because he was so clearly still alive, with living hungers and thirsts, living pains in his legs. He could be on the bottom of the wall, but he felt sure he should have been killed by the fall.

  The fall. It had a weird, dream-like quality for him now. It had clearly never happened. Or he had fallen fifty arms, maybe, and hurt his feet on landing, that was all – except there were no villages fifty arms downwall of Cragcouthie, he knew that. There were no villages a thousand arms downwall, or ten thousand. Directly below the village was a long stretch of flat worldwall that nobody could traverse.

  But he was clearly in some village. How to make sense of it?

  One of the medical attendants had a higher ranking than the other three. That was obvious from watching them together. The ranking medic was a little shorter, but the two men and one woman deferred to him. From watching and listening carefully to their babbling, Tighe heard them use the word Vievre. He never used it himself. It was presumably a name, or a rank.

  The next time the man came over to check on him, Tighe spoke the word, ‘Vievre.’ The man’s strange, ashen face broke in a broad smile.

  ‘Aouee,’ he replied. ‘Vievre.’ And then he gabbled a stream of distorted words and strange sounds that lost Tighe.

  One time when he had still been a boy-boy a traveller had come up from Press carrying perspex jewellery and pipes to trade in the village. He had done well and had stayed several days, and Tighe – bored as usual, wandering about as usual – had had several conversations with him. He had, Tighe remembered, spoken with a peculiar intonation. ‘You speak funnily,’ the young Tighe had told him and he had laughed and explained that he had learned correct speech only late in his life, and before that had spoken some completely different speech. This had been a revelation to the young Tighe.

  That there were more languages than one! The intimacy with which his words had related to the things he talked about seemed diminished by the news. ‘Say something in your other speech,’ Tighe had asked. ‘Say what?’ asked the trader. ‘I don’t care what.’ And the man had rattled into a stream of nonsense. For weeks after that Tighe had experimented with his own nonsense words, telling his pahe that he was inventing a new language. But the gibberish he had come up with had sounded oddly unsatisfying to his own ears and he had given up his game soon enough.

  Now the game was his whole world. As the pain slowly withdrew from his foot, he was able to concentrate more closely on the things being said between the orderlies. But names – or maybe they were ranks – were all he could deduce.

  One day a whole parade of people came into the low space, and all to see Tighe. There must have been more than a dozen, all cramming into the space, some so tall they had to stoop. All were as ashen faced as the medical attendants, and all had similar black (or brown) hair in great tangled clumps – indeed, some of them had jewellery, plastic and other precious things woven into their hair. They were wearing similar dark blue uniforms, although some of their uniforms were more splendid than others, with yellow thread woven through the cloth of the sleeves.

  They crowded about his mattress and stared down at him, gabbling loudly in their barbarous tongue, pointing and (it seemed) laughing. Tighe, bewildered by the sudden commotion, quickly became scared.

  He flinched back as one of them bent over and started prodding him. They laughed at this. Great booming laughs from bone-coloured faces and tangled masses of hair trembling in time to the shaking of their heads.

  Then, as swiftly as they had arrived, the delegation departed, pausing by the door to converse a little with ‘Vievre’. Then all was quiet and Vievre was by Tighe’s side examining him again.

  There were bruises all down Tighe’s left side, yellowing now, and his leg was blotched all over with bruising. He prodded the bruised skin. There were some scars too, but they seemed to be healing up.

  The language spoken by these strange pale people percolated into Tighe’s consciousness somehow. He found words stepping up from the general babble. Poltete meant soup (or perhaps it meant liquid?). Homb meant person, or maybe man. Vievre was a name, the chief medical attendant. He was a large man, tall and broad, with a face of alarming whiteness and a great mass of tangled hair that made him seem even taller. Tighe repeated the foreign words with which he began the morning conversations back at him for several days – to delighted smiles – before he realised what the words themselves must mean. Nee for new, and or for day.

  ‘Good new day, patient,’ Vievre would say. ‘Are you feeling well?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tighe. ‘Yes.’

  The big breakthrough came with learning the form of questions. How do you say? What is that? Tell me …

  ‘How do you say?’ Tighe would begin, and then touch his foot.

  ‘Ah, the foot,’ Vievre would say in his strange tongue.

  ‘How do you say?’ and touching the leg.

  ‘Leg, yes. You anaprehal trop good, yes.’ Trop meant very, Tighe thought. He thought so, at any rate.

  How do you say stomach, arm, hand, face, head, hair?

  ‘Hair,’ said Vievre, chuckling. ‘Your hair is very malpuea, meshalamme dela troppa.’

  How do you say – and Tighe made gestures with his hands to indicate size, pulling his hands in different directions, puffing up his cheeks.

  ‘What? What?’ Vievre asked. ‘You mean – empheu? No, no, you mean granda.’ That was big; the word was almost like Tighe’s familiar ‘grand’, so it was easier to remember.

  ‘Big hair,’ said Tighe, pointing at Vievre’s enormous coiffure. ‘Big hair!’

  Vievre laughed now, pulled at his own locks, leaning down and pulling Tighe’s much thinner hair.

  Tighe tried starting conversations with the other medical attendants, but they uniformly ignored him. They would not so much as meet his eye. Tighe didn’t understand this. Were they angry with him? Or were they too menial to think about holding a conversation with somebody like him?

  Some days Vievre was not in the mood for the language-learning game. He would stomp about, shouting at his subordinates. With nothing else to occupy him, Tighe was bored almost all the time, and he waited with exaggerated anticipation for Vievre to come through, to give him something else to talk about, something new to learn. But he learnt rapidly not to bother Vievre if he was in the wrong sort of mood.

  Vievre explained to him that the people who had crowded around Tighe had been part of an army. A great army! After the visitation by this group of military personnel, various individuals would sometimes put their head through the door of the ward and say something to Vievre or some of the nurses about Tighe. From time to time Tighe would catch these words: ‘Is that him then? The sebstynapul boy?’ Sometimes the words would be so rapid or unfamiliar, or the individual’s accent so strange, that Tig
he would catch nothing at all.

  Vievre’s attitude to these occasional visitors was strange. Sometimes he would shoo them away, even running from the far side of the ward to the door yelling. Other times, though, he would beam and smile and invite the individual in. ‘This is Bellievra,’ he would say. ‘This is Prier-Vallio. Masters, say good-new-day to Master Tig-he.’ Tighe had tried correcting Vievre’s pronunciation of his name many times, but he always put too much and the wrong kind of emphasis on the ‘h’.

  ‘Master Tig-he,’ the stranger would say, nodding.

  ‘Good new day,’ Tighe would say, politely. The stranger would grin, pat his head, look him up and down, ask some questions of Vievre.

  ‘And so it seems I am a celebrity,’ Tighe said to Vievre one day after such a visit, using the word from his own language. But it proved too difficult to explain the concept with only his halting command of the new language.

  He learnt the words for hungry, in pain, bored, heart, lung, breath, up, down, difficult, broken, mattress, piss, shit. He learnt the different shapes of a word in motion: he learnt to fall, I fall, you fall, I fell, they fell.

  ‘You fell!’ chuckled Vievre, but there was a look of something close to awe in his eyes. ‘Certainly. You fell.’

  One morning, with a strange hopeful sensation in his belly, Tighe laboured through halting explanations and questions until he arrived at the word for pas. ‘My parents,’ he said. ‘They fell, my parents.’

  Vievre nodded at this news, uncertainly.

  ‘They fell, I fell,’ said Tighe. ‘Here? Are they here?’

  ‘Your parents?’ Vievre looked unsettled. ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes. Like me, skin,’ pulling at his own skin to underline the point, ‘skin like me. They fell – here, perhaps. I fell here, they fell here perhaps. Are they here?’

  ‘Skin like you – there are people with shuart skin, like you, in our glorious Empire. Our Holy Popes regnielle over many people.’

  ‘My parents,’ said Tighe, again, his heart fluttering now. If he fell off the wall and survived – in this strange, new place – then perhaps his pas had done the same. Perhaps his pahe and pashe were still alive, perhaps they were still alive in this place. ‘Are they here?’

  ‘Your parents are not here, Tig-he the boy. I’m sorry.’

  Tighe paused, let this sentence sink in. ‘Not here.’

  ‘Not here. I’m sorry.’

  ‘They fell. I fell. I fell to here – they fell to here?’

  ‘They are not here, your parents, Tig-he. I’m sorry.’

  He wasn’t surprised. It was clear that his survival had been something extraordinary. He learnt the words for lucky, for blessing and God (which was the same as Sky Father – a strange concept for Tighe to digest). He began to understand why so many individuals crept into the ward to look at him.

  He had fallen into the midst of an army preparing for war. Soldiers – dozens, so many that Tighe forgot who had been to see him and who had not, too many new faces to remember – visited a boy fallen from the sky. A boy fallen from upwall and survived! He was a byword for luck.

  Soldiers are always interested in luck.

  One day Vievre decided that it was time for Tighe to try standing up. He and one of his assistants took the weight under Tighe’s armpits and pulled him vertical. His senses swam as the blood drained from his head. ‘Now,’ suggested Vievre.

  Tighe put weight gingerly on his good foot. It tingled unpleasantly, unused to the load, but it seemed all right. Then he tried shifting a little weight on to his other leg, and the joints sang with pain. ‘Oh, oh,’ he cried. ‘Oh, oh.’

  Vievre and the other hauled him around in a little circle about the mattress, with each assisted step causing twangs of pain from Tighe’s knee joint. After no more than a minute Tighe was slicked with sweat, and the two medics lowered him gingerly back on to the mattress.

  2

  The food was excellent, though. Varied and tasty. Vievre brought him a bowl of broth in which Tighe was certain – once again! – that there was some meat. He ate hungrily. He was healthier, fatter, now than he had ever been.

  Tighe noticed that there was something yellow in Vievre’s tangled hair. It was the length of a little finger, but much narrower. Tighe noticed it early on in his stay, but at the beginning had too little of the language, and then was too shy, to ask about it. One morning he summoned up the courage.

  Sarre. ‘That,’ he said, pointing. Saico. ‘What?’

  ‘You mean this, this little ossionetta, lai dela mam. It is’, said Vievre, fingering the object, twirling it deeper into his hair, ‘the dela of the Empire, of the army. Do you understand it? This sayno speaks of my dela.’

  ‘Dela?’ asked Tighe. He was running his finger around the clay bowl as he spoke, scraping up the last of the gravy of his meal.

  ‘Sayno speaks of dela, it is a thing that – I don’t know. Culoe, narre deliparta mash puentilio. Every man and woman in the army, do you understand it? Every jentolle man and woman in the army is in the army, in a place. Yes? Yes? From so high, to so un-high, from the Holy Father down to bottom, to sevarre boys and camp girls. Yes? All have their dela.’

  ‘Rank,’ said Tighe.

  ‘In your language, yes. It is a strange and ugly sound, your language. But that is right. So, the sayno speaks of rank.’ Vievre smiled. ‘This, my sayno, says that I am under-prelette, but that is a luche rank, not fighting.’

  ‘Luche?’ asked Tighe.

  Vievre sighed noisily, waving his hands in an exaggerated gesture. ‘It is ballio to jentolle speaking, your questions don’t end. I do not have the tempievre, do you understand it?’ He turned to go and then turned back with another sigh. ‘Luche is making bodies well at war, not killing or outanutelle. Do you understand it?’

  Tighe nodded and said nothing. He had deduced that Vievre was in the army from his uniform, and he had clearly been spending his time returning Tighe to health, so if he had thought about it he could probably have worked out what luche meant by himself.

  The language was coming a little more easily each day. Some days Vievre was full of laughter and good spirits, and Tighe felt emboldened to ask after the meanings of more of his words. Some of these stayed in his memory, occasionally he forgot some, but in general it seemed to him that he forgot fewer than he might have expected. Other days Vievre was in a worse mood, swearing and slapping with the palm of his hand. Jentolle meant ‘fucking’, as Vievre once vividly mimed in response to a question from Tighe.

  The word ossionetta for the thing in Vievre’s hair came from a word that meant bone. At first Tighe thought it meant ‘finger’ because that was what Vievre used to demonstrate the word. Tighe even used the word in conversation with that meaning and Vievre did not object. But later on Vievre was explaining how the ossionetta in Tighe’s knee had been cracked but not broken (which Vievre demonstrated by cracking and then breaking apart a piece of bread) and he realised the true meaning of the word.

  Each member of the army had a bone to indicate rank, it seemed; the bigger the bone the higher the rank. It was often tied into the hair to make sure of not losing it, but some officers, it seemed, had them woven on to their uniforms, or even pierced through their cheeks. Their cheeks? Tighe asked, horrified, patting his own cheek to make sure he had the right part of the body with the word. Yes, said Vievre, nodding seriously. Through there.

  This rank-bone was, despite its name, not actually a bone. It was in fact made of some hard substance. In the light Tighe could see that it was the colour of urine, and when he touched it it felt warm, heavy, like some very high-quality polished plastic. He could even see the tiny scratches where the polishing had taken place.

  ‘Not plastic, said Vievre. ‘It’s metal. Prise it is called. We have stores of it in Vale Ounlempre, where I was given this.’ He tapped the rank-bone with his fingernail. ‘It was lou-paral a Cardinelle herself who gave me this, at a military cue doffo ourelle. When I was raised up from ordinary med
ical-soldier to under-prelette.’ He smiled. ‘There was a large crowd. Many hundreds. All sal-darra and happy to watch the army of the Empire come up the world to fight the enemy.’

  Vale Ounlempre, as Tighe understood it, meant simply ‘City of the Empire’. It seemed to be, from Vievre’s reports, a city of enormous proportions – scores of shelves, hundreds of ledges ‘broad enough to walk ten abreast’, many thousands of crags and smaller eyries. Thousands of people living there: thousands. It seemed incredible to Tighe, but when he expressed polite amazement Vievre was adamant. Imperial City was the greatest city in the world, he insisted. The centre of the Empire, home to the Three Popes, the most valepul city on the world.

  Valepul was a word presumably related to vale, city, but Tighe couldn’t figure out exactly what it meant. ‘The most cityish city’ didn’t make much sense to him.

  The Imperial City, it seemed, was some distance downwall. It was clear, also, because so much of Vievre’s conversation related to this fact, that the Three Popes had sent an enormous army – thousands, said Vievre, flashing the numbers with his fingers to build up to the enormity of the number – thousands on top of thousands of soldiers – upwall to defeat a mighty enemy.

  Tighe found thousands a very hard concept to accept. Could there be that many people on the whole of the world?

  Thousands, Vievre insisted. A mighty army. That was why Vievre himself was here, with his three luchombes, his three nurses (homb meant man, but one of the medical assistants was a woman), and his medical equipment. He was to be ready for after the battle, when many injured would come in. But before the battle there were few soldiers who needed any medicine or care. Vievre was bored, that was the truth. And then you fell!

  ‘Yes,’ said Tighe, his stomach tightening. ‘I fell.’

  Why hadn’t Tighe died as a result of his fall? Tighe thought of the ways of phrasing this question for Vievre.

  Died was not a linguistic problem. One day two soldiers carried in a third so bloody his uniform looked black and wet instead of the usual blue. He had fallen, too, from the sky, it seemed. He was flatar.