On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Was he now at the place? Was this what the Pause was – the approach to the pure blue wall of the sky? The air was as cold as ice.

  Tighe came up at the rear and angled up to quell his speed. If this was a great blue wall, then he didn’t want simply to crash into it. He tried turning a little to the side, wondering if he could fly past it and observe the nature of its surface. But he could see nothing; it seemed only as if the sky went on for ever here – there weren’t even clouds to stain the view, and the bright, yellow, hot sun sat solidly over to the right.

  Then, abruptly, he was upside down and his stomach lurched. He couldn’t see what had happened, how he had flipped over; he seemed to be in the same position in the harness. But then he felt himself – impossibly – slipping backwards through the air and he was tumbling and falling and his eyes were dazzled by a tumbling strobe as the sun span round and round his head, and the distant wall lurched up and round and over and came back at him from underneath.

  For a second he was stunned; then he strained with his body and pulled with his arms and righted his kite, swerving it into a sweeping dive that pulled round and up. He circled, caught an updraught and made up some of the height he had lost.

  He looked around; his fellow kite-girls and kite-boys were round and about, speckling the sky, no longer in formation. He swung by one of them, wanting to reach out and ask questions – what happened? – but there was no way his voice could reach across the screaming of the rushing air. Then he pulled up again and had a clear view of another kite heading fast away from the wall. Once again it flew so far and then seemed to be grabbed by an invisible hand, spun round and thrust back.

  Tighe found that he wasn’t scared; once he was up and flying he felt peculiarly safe – it was difficult to explain. Standing on the extremity of the ledge, with solid earth under his feet, the prospect of the fall gripped at his guts and he was terrified. But once that initial tumble off the world was out of the way everything began to assume the logic of a dream. Only the centrifugal wrenching in his gut, only the chill of the wind rushing past him, told him that his experience was physical at all. Otherwise it was a magical, floating hallucination.

  He turned his kite back in the direction of the Pause and braced himself. For a moment there was nothing but his own onward rushing; then with a sudden whoosh of air the yank of gravity changed. He was no longer flying on, but somehow, impossibly, flying up. For a fraction of time his whole perspective changed; he was on his back looking up at nothing but sky. Then the kite shimmied and fell away, tumbling back, jerking through fifty degrees and falling again.

  He struggled to control the spinning kite, hauling his body so hard that he started sweating, even in the chill of the cold rushing air. It took a little longer, but he got the kite under control eventually. When he got his bearings he could see none of his platon, so he flew wallward for a while until he found a strong updraught and rode it spiralling helix-like. After a little while a number of kites came into view.

  Soon enough he rose further and gave himself a vantage point from which he could see several kites tackling the Pause. They flew at it, slowed and reversed, fell away. One kite – Tighe couldn’t see who piloted it – built up an enormous slope of speed and hurtled through the Pause. The kite continued for a good long way and then turned on its side, as if it were about to nosedive down and away. But, somehow, it didn’t; instead it hung for a moment in that impossible posture, and then another moment. Then it slid backwards, as if being yanked in slow motion, inching along and being slowly pulled back towards the wall, towards Tighe.

  Tighe circled closer to the kite, and watched as it approached, angled wrongly, as if drawn in by an invisible rope. Then, suddenly, it was falling properly, dropping precipitously away. Tighe started a spiralling descent to try and follow, but the kite soon disappeared from sight.

  After a few more passes at the Pause, the platon slowly reassembled and then turned the points of their kites and started back towards the wall. The sun had risen higher and the updraughts were getting more erratic, so the platon formation became scattered and ragged as it came closer to the wall as individuals had to fly further apart to seek out updraughts. Eventually they were close enough to see where they were; and to discover that they were a mile or so westward of the platon ledge. The lead kite pulled round and flew east, and Tighe fell in at the rear of the train.

  The wall they flew past was pocked and touched with singleton ledges and odd cave mouths, far from any access. It was much more grown over than the desert above the military base that Tighe had noticed on the way out, but was still inaccessible; a broken and debatable land. At one point he thought he saw smoke coming out of one of the cave mouths, which suggested habitation, but the wall around the cave hole was smooth and bare and access clearly impossible, so he assumed he had been mistaken.

  Eventually the lead kite dipped down and the rest followed. They were back at the platon ledge, swooping past the spur of wall and getting glimpses of the military camp, the calabashes still hanging impossibly, the thronging shelf. Then swinging back in, ducking down and rising up at the last minute to kill off as much speed as possible – then legs running as they hit the earth of the ledge, and Tighe hauling himself back to try and stop himself from running flat into the wall.

  He clambered out of his kite panting, and looked around. He was still trembling with the sense of having seen something incredible.

  ‘Children!’ boomed Waldea, stalking over towards them from the brink of the ledge where he had been watching with his sight invigorators, ‘one of you is missing.’

  It was Bel, one of the kite-girls. Everybody else was accounted for.

  ‘Master!’ announced Mulvaine, ‘I saw Bel fly deep into the Pause. It almost looked as if she might break through – but then she was pushed back out and then she fell fast away.’

  Waldea swore; drummed his feet on the floor.

  He made the whole platon assemble on the ledge in the far-risen sunshine, to wait for Bel’s return. I will lose no more of you on training!’ Waldea ranted. ‘This is bad, bad.’

  The kite-boys and girls were subdued by this uncharacteristic mood. When Waldea turned to go back to the edge of the world and look out, several tucked their heads together and whispered.

  ‘Bel’s too fat now to fly kites,’ Ati hissed to Tighe, as they sat in rows on the ledge looking out at the sky. Waldea was pacing up and down in front of them, putting his sight invigorators to his eyes to check if Bel’s kite was in view.

  Tighe nodded. He pictured Bel: as stringy by body shape as all the rest of the kite-boys and kite-girls, but longer in the bone than most, taller, and now at the age where her breasts were showing. She had large breasts, and her hips were spreading; a disadvantage for kite pilots.

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  Ati shrugged, watching Waldea to slip his whispered comments in at moments when he could be sure the Master’s attention was distracted. ‘Two months ago a good flier, named Pegivre, he mistaked the landing. He collided with the wall, with the lip of the ledge.’ Ati whistled very softly. ‘He almost fall all the way down, if some of us had not grabbed him with our hands and fingers and pulled him up. But he was all broken, all his bones broken, and blood coming out of his nose and mouth. He was carried to the field hospital but …’ Ati punctuated his account with a sucking noise, a sheesh. ‘Died, he died. The Master was very unhappy, angry. And half-year ago, when we were training in the Imperial City …’

  But Waldea was stalking back in their direction and Ati shut up abruptly.

  *

  They all sat there until the sun was disappearing over the top of the wall and the light was growing grey. A few of the kite-boys were fidgeting, when Waldea’s eye was not on them; flapping their hands, pinching their neighbours, or drawing up gobbets of earth and shaping them into crude phalluses or balls.

  ‘He’ll have to give us the supper I think,’ Ati hissed to Tighe. ‘My stomach is hungry.’ />
  ‘Mine too,’ said Tighe.

  ‘There!’ howled Waldea. It sounded so exactly like a howl of rage that all the kite-boys twitched in fear. But it was exultation. ‘There! There she comes!’

  And finally, halting, spiralling and climbing with agonising slowness from every drop in altitude, came a kite. It grew larger and larger and finally arrived at the ledge. Bel’s face came into view; whiter than white, pinched and exhausted. Without a word from Waldea the whole platon got to their feet and rushed to help her, to gather her in.

  That evening’s meal was a far jollier affair than usual. Even Waldea seemed happy. He swigged some drink or other from a tiny plastic bottle, disappearing from time to time to replenish his supply. Bel told her tale several times, embellishing it more with each retelling; how she had spiralled miles downwall after emerging from the Pause (or tens of miles, or hundreds of miles), until she was able to regain control of the kite. She might even have passed out, she wasn’t sure – or she was sure, she had passed out – or she had slept and dreamt a wonderful dream. Anyway when she finally regained control she was completely lost. She knew she had fallen a long way so she spent a long time, an hour, more, circling up on what updraughts she could find, which grew feebler and fewer as the day went on. She didn’t recognise anything and she began to panic – not a single feature on the wall. She had cried, prayed, swung east and west, crawled up on thinning updraughts and wasted her gains in long downward slides trying to find a landmark. Eventually she flew in from the east over a part of the upwall portion of the Imperial City itself. Yes, she had been so far downwall, and further too (far enough to see the bottom, maybe, somebody said, and everybody laughed). From there she knew the way, but the updraughts were so feeble by that stage in the day that she had spent several hours gaining the mile or so of upward wall to come back to the ledge.

  Still, she had made it back; and she was so tired that she fell asleep whilst they were still outside on the ledge, still putting away the supper bowls. So Waldea himself carried her in and wrapped her in a blanket. ‘Time for bed now,’ he announced.

  He was readying himself for bed too. Usually he left them alone for a while, going for an evening stroll said some, but not this night. Accordingly it looked as though there would not be the usual dormitory conversations. But then a messenger came and called him away. Waldea pulled on his leggings and hurried away, and everybody chattered about what this could mean.

  Tighe inched over towards Ati. ‘What is it, Ati?’ he asked. ‘The Pause – what is the Pause?’

  Ati laughed. ‘You saw today. That’s what it is. You fly out far enough, to go out and out and then – suddenly – you reach the Pause. The air go funny there, I think.’

  ‘God put it there,’ said Tighe.

  Ati made the holy gesture with his thumb over his chest, which he often did when God was mentioned. ‘But that say nothing’, he declared, ‘because God made everything.’

  ‘I think’, said Tighe, ‘that the sky is another wall. If we fly far enough we fly to the sky wall, but God put the Pause there to stop us from crashing into it.’

  Ati pondered this for a while. ‘You have barbarian ideas,’ he decided. ‘You a kite-boy now. You believe what we believe. We believe that one day we fly through the Pause. If we get enough speed, maybe – like Bel’, he nodded his chin in the direction of the sleeping form three bodies down, ‘only more, then we push through the Pause.’

  ‘And what on the other side?’ Tighe asked.

  ‘Who knows?’ said Ati.

  Waldea was away a long time. Half an hour passed. People ran out of things to say. The dormitory went quiet.

  Tighe dozed, woke with a fuzzy arm that had got bent back under his head. He shook it loose and rubbed it to bring life back to its numbness. Then shifted position. He dropped off to sleep again. He was woken once more by Waldea coming back through the door and stomping over the dormitory floor before settling himself down. Tighe lay quietly, listening to the grunts and struggles of the big man wrapping himself up in his sleeping blanket. Then everything was silent.

  Tighe dozed again and then woke with a lurch, with that same sickening falling sensation that used to wake him up back in the village. He was sweating. There was some crazy dislocated dream in his memory (fading as he thought about it) of himself and Wittershe, of stretching himself upon Wittershe in the act of lovemaking, only to realise that they were both falling – to realise that Wittershe was, in the mad way of dreams, actually a kite, a human kite. He had been scared, he remembered, because Wittershe had not handled as his kite handled and he was convinced that they were both falling to their deaths. But she had smiled and urged him on with the lovemaking, and he had thought to himself … what had the thought been? The dream slid away, lost coherence in his memory.

  For a while he lay still, until the sweat on his body cooled and dried. It was quiet in the dormitory, the silence punctuated only by the breathing of the boys and girls. One set of breathing was out of synchronisation. Tighe turned to follow the sound, and saw shadowy, supine movement. He stared for a while before realising what was happening: there was somebody wrapped up with Bel in her blanket. One of the kite-boys, but Tighe couldn’t see who, had crept over and got into her blanket, and now the two of them were lovemaking, their faces pressed closely together, each mouth trying to stifle the moans of the other. Tighe’s heart hammered and his wick stiffened. But it was the audacity of it that most impressed him. What if they woke Waldea? He would beat them severely; he could shout out, ‘Disgusting! Disgusting!’ and make an example of them. They were taking such a risk.

  Making himself as still as he could to avoid startling them Tighe lay and listened to the rustles of the blanket, the occasional muted breaths and gasps that came from the pair. Then they were still and after a while the boy disentangled himself from Bel’s blanket and crept, in slow stages, away to the far side of the dormitory where his own blanket was.

  9

  At breakfast the following morning Tighe waited for a moment when he and Ati could talk without being overheard, and said, ‘I saw something last night, in the dormitory.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I woke up and saw Bel’s blanket, and inside it Bel, and inside it also somebody else.’

  Ati snorted and grinned. ‘Oh I know,’ he said, nodding vigorously. ‘I know this, this is talked about. It is Ravielre. Everybody knows.’

  ‘Everybody knows?’

  ‘They in love.’ He bent his head and giggled. ‘Such dangerous! They creep together and fuck-fuck, but if Waldea find them he will beat them both good and hard. Dangerous!’

  ‘I never see it before,’ grinned Tighe, bowing his head as well, so that he and Ati’s eyes were on the same level. I never saw them do it before.’

  Ati nodded, and reached out to grasp Tighe’s hand. I know. But before they only fuck when it is Bel’s monthly.’

  ‘What is that word, monthly?’

  ‘Every woman has that. Always the same time and the blood comes out instead of piss. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘Happens every month,’ nodded Tighe, using his own word. He knew about that.

  ‘Monsh?’ asked Ati.

  ‘You are stupid downwaller,’ said Tighe, tapping briskly on the side of Ati’s head. Their foreheads were leaning together now, skin pressing against skin. Somehow it felt good, it felt comforting, the closeness of it. ‘Is not monsh. Say month.’

  ‘Mofe.’

  ‘Month.’

  ‘Man-the.’

  ‘No – month.’

  ‘You are barbarian,’ said Ati pinching him. ‘It does not matter, I think. You know that in a month, that every month, a woman pisses blood instead of piss. Ravielre and Bel would sometimes fuck at this time.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Tighe, horrified at the thought of this. Was that really how women were?

  ‘You know nothing in your barbarian land,’ sniggered Ati. ‘It is impossible to build a baby inside a woman at this time.
You can fuck-fuck all you want at this time. Obvious, Bel does not want to be fat with child. If she is fat with child she is too fat to fly the kite.’

  But Tighe had stuffed his fingers into his mouth in horror at the mental picture of Bel having her monthly bleed and Ravielre putting his wick in amongst all that blood.

  ‘It is not her monthly now though,’ said Ati, leaning back.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  Ati shrugged. ‘I don’t think she cares any more about babies. Maybe she hungry for a baby. She is too big to fly kites properly anyway. Why should she care about her weight any longer?’

  After breakfast the platon went through its exercises as normal. But after this Waldea lined them all up and made his announcement.

  ‘My children! We are going to war!’

  Rumours to this effect, prompted by Waldea’s unusually prolonged time outside the dormitory the previous night, had been circulating all morning. Waldea’s statement acted as the release to a frantic burst of cheering and jumping up and down. The Master waited, head down, with a smile (or what looked like a smile – it was difficult to tell because his features were so distorted) on his face. Eventually he raised his arms, and the cheering died down.

  ‘This is why we have trained, my children,’ he announced. ‘This is the purpose of it all – to serve the Empire, to defeat the Otre. To capture the great door they guard! This platon of kite-boys and kite-girls is most important in the war effort, never forget that! I have been hard with you, but only to make you the best, to make you the best for the good of the Empire!’

  He paused, looked at the floor for a while. There was absolute silence. Presently he spoke again in a quieter voice.

  ‘Tomorrow the Pope of War will ascend the worldwall from the Imperial City,’ he said. ‘The Pope in person! He has said that he wishes to meet the noble kite platon, on which so much of the aerial strength of the Imperial army depends.’