by Adam Roberts
He stopped in front of Ati, a few boys away from Tighe. Looking sideways at him, Tighe could see that his blue uniform was made out of some odd form of plastic, a matt blue material that creased and squeaked as the Pope moved. It was a shift that fell like a woman’s dress from the shoulders to the knees, and the papal legs underneath were dressed in ordinary blue leggings. But the prongs on his blue uniform were not hairs, Tighe could now see, but were rather extrusions of the material of the cloth, poking out like thready fingers and jiggling as the Pope moved. They were spaced all over the blue material. If this uniform was made of plastic, it was of a kind of plastic that Tighe had never seen before.
‘This’, the Cardinelle was saying, indicating Ati by pointing with the knuckles of his right hand, ‘is the boy who fell from the sky, your warness.’
‘I have heard about your story!’ declared the Pope, nodding his head at Ati. ‘A remarkable story.’
Tighe twitched his face round to look more clearly. He could see Waldea at the end of the line straining, ready to take a step forward, but holding himself back. There was a furious expression on his face.
‘Answer the Pope, boy,’ said the Cardinelle.
Ati’s eyes were bulging. He spoke, as if forcing the words out, ‘Pope Effie.’ There was a fractured pause, and he added, ‘yes.’
‘You are fairly dark on the skin,’ said the Pope. ‘Not as dark as some I have seen.’
‘Yes, Pope Effie,’ said Ati, in a strangled tone.
‘I have heard it said that the higher up the wall one moves, the darker, because the skin is burnt more by the sun as it goes over the wall. I suppose the people who live on the very top of the wall must be as black as the blackest plastics!’
Ati made another strangled noise that might have been a yes.
‘But then again,’ said the Pope, still nodding his strange white head pleasantly as if he were chatting in the most relaxed of environments, ‘there are people downwall who are almost as dark of skin as you are, my brave kite-boy, so perhaps the theory is wrong. Still, you will bring us luck!’
‘Your war-ness,’ said Cardinelle Elanne, touching the Pope’s shoulder to take his attention. ‘Perhaps, the arsenal now?’
‘Yes, yes, Cardinelle, a moment. This boy has a remarkable story to tell.’ He smiled warmly at Ati. ‘So you fell from upwall?’
Ati did not take his eyes from the Pope. He looked, Tighe could see, terrified. ‘Yes, Pope Effie.’
‘How strange! I hear you bounced off one of our half-flated calabashes. That’s stranger! And what did it feel like, to fall such a great distance?’
Ati stared, even wider-eyed. But the Pope seemed to have lost interest in the exchange anyway. He turned to face the Cardinelle, saying ‘This boy will be a good omen for the campaign.’ And then the Pope and the Cardinelle and the small retinue were striding away, towards the back of the shelf. Tighe caught Ati’s eye, smiled at him. But Ati was sweating so hard it was dripping from his chin.
The Pope and his retinue disappeared inside a doorway at the back of the shelf and did not reappear for a long time. Waldea made one quick sally up and down the line of his kite-pilots, hissing at everybody to keep still, to keep order. Eventually the Pope re-emerged, and chatting – it seemed – amiably with the Cardinelle, stalked back over the shelf along the pier before disappearing back inside the calabash’s cradle.
Almost immediately there was a great cry, an aahh-ee!, from somewhere away to the east of the shelf. The march-caller was summoning the men. Aahh in a deep voice, ee! rising rapidly to a shriek. ‘Kite-pilots,’ hollered Waldea over the sudden tumult of thousands of human beings bustling and moving away. ‘Stand where you are! Kite-pilots stay!’
But all around them the strict, rectangular forms of the army were disintegrating, men hurrying away from lines and squares and streaming eastwards along the shelf. The noise of so many feet running along the shelf made a thunder and rumble that was like a great wind.
The kite-pilot line broke too and the kite-boys and kite-girls huddled into an excited knot around Ati. What did he say? What was it like? What was it like to look into the eyes of the Pope himself? I thought he looked ugly, said somebody. There were cries and howls at this little heresy. Well? Go on – well? What was he like? But Ati only stood in the middle, looking dumbfounded, and then Waldea was pushing the little huddle of boys and girls along through the throngs of people to the back of the shelf.
The scene cleared of people rapidly. Tighe strained his neck to get a better view of the flow of people as they streamed off the eastward parts of the shelf on to the ledges that led away towards the enemy. The voice of the march caller could still be heard clearly, even though he was out of sight. Aahh-ee!
‘Kite-pilots,’ declared Waldea, ‘we wait until the main army has marched, and then we follow.’ He glared at Ati, as if holding him responsible for the papal mix-up.
11
The yelp of the march-caller faded away and the shelf emptied itself of almost all the people. A few older individuals stood patiently in doorways or leaning against the wall at the back of the shelf, watching the streams of humanity leave.
The papal calabash rose slowly until its cradle dangled twenty feet over the ledge.
When there was space, a group of a dozen or more stocky individuals hurried along the pier and fitted ropes to the wall of the calabash. They scampered back to the shelf, spooling the ropes out behind them. Then they took up positions, tautening their cables, leaning forward with the ropes over their shoulders. With a grunt, they all began to pull and the calabash juddered. Three further men hurried forward with long poles, to stop the cradle from swinging in and dragging against the wall.
They got into their labour swiftly, hauling eastwards and dragging the papal calabash behind them. Within half an hour they were out of sight around the spar of wall at the eastern reach of the shelf.
Two calabashes remained.
‘What happens to the calabashes at dusk, at dawn?’ Tighe asked.
Mulvaine, who happened to be near-by, sneered at him. ‘Don’t you know anything at all, sky-boy?’
‘But they’re so light – look how easily they pulled away! When the big winds come, at dusk, at dawn, they must be torn and blown.’
There was general laughter at his ignorance.
Tuvette, one of the kite-girls, took pity on him. ‘They pull them on to the shelf and take the air out of them,’ she said, in a confidential tone. ‘It is only hot air, you know, in the belly of them. Then they are strapped to the shelf. Those ones’, she pointed, ‘will be carried along the ledge. Only the Pope is important enough to be carried alongwalls in a calabash, you know.’
‘My children!’ announced Waldea. ‘Now that the muscles of the army, its men and rifles, have made their way, we may make ours.’
Everybody fell silent.
‘We have to reach the forced-march bolt hole by the time the sun goes over the wall,’ Waldea announced. ‘We will be travelling along open ledge – some of the ways have been prepared by sappers and that means fragile walkways. You will take care, children.’ He wheeled on one foot and marched back down the line. ‘You’ll be walking along exposed ledge, so if we are still on the ledge by the time of the dusk winds, some of us will be lost. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Master!’ as one voice.
‘Shoulder your kite-spars, and bundles! Along this shelf and for a mile or so eastward – that is good way, a strong way. Because we met with the Pope himself we are late – the time is seventy, maybe seventy-five. So we must run the first stage of our journey – run.’
Tighe found the running hardest of all of them. He had built up his arm muscles, but had done little with his legs. Almost straight away his left foot began to burn. His stride was heavily lopsided and with each impact his left leg twinged and stung and his left foot complained. Trying to balance the frame and bundle of his kite over his right shoulder was difficult; with each uneven stride it juddered to the left a
nd smacked painfully against his neck. He halted and shifted the bundle over to his left shoulder, but then it threatened repeatedly to fall off altogether, and his already loping stride was complicated by on-the-hoof attempts to compensate by twisting his torso.
He quickly fell behind the main group. The wall east of the camp was irregular, marked with prominent vertical spars of differing sizes around which the ledge wound its way. The main group would disappear round one of these headlands and Tighe would be alone. Limping and stumbling, sweating, with tears of frustration in his eyes, a fretful fear grew in his heart that he would be left behind. That the sun would go over the wall and the dusk winds would get up, and he would be exposed on the ledge all alone – that he would be blown away, blown off the world.
He struggled on, but he was crying now, sobbing hard, which made his whole body tremble and made it even more difficult to run. Halting along. He passed deserted doorways, occasional habitations spread along the reach of the ledge. He paused, dumping his kite on the ground, sucking breaths so huge they hurt his lungs, at a place where the ledge widened. Old stumps of bamboo rooted in the earth marked out a place where an animal enclosure had once existed. There must have been a village along the ledge here, or the beginnings of one. But the grass inside the worn-out post marks was long now, past grazing length. It was a waste. A good few goats could have been kept going in that space.
His brain, hammering and hurting, started to focus a little more precisely. If the worst came to the worst, and he were trapped out on the ledge as the dusk winds started, perhaps he could find a refuge in one of these deserted houses?
He stood straight, trying to ignore the throbbing of his bad foot. Then he hoisted his kite and started lumbering forward.
Around the next bend of the ledge-way he ran straight into Waldea – almost collided with him outright.
‘Deserters are thrown off the wall!’ he bellowed. ‘Thrown naked off the world.’
‘Yes, Master!’ gasped Tighe.
‘Tig-he, run faster!’
‘Yes, Master,’ said Tighe. And he genuinely tried to put on a spurt of speed, hurrying forward. But his left ankle seemed to liquefy and he tumbled down, sprawling in the dirt of the ledge and almost dropping his kite over the world.
In his panic he threw himself forward, snatched at the end of the kite and skidded in dust towards the edge of the world. His stomach clenched hard. But he stopped short of falling off the worldwall and wriggled round in a panic. The relief at still feeling solid ledge underneath him was so intense it was a taste in his mouth. He lay for a moment, his grip fierce on the spar of his kite. He was shivering. To his left he became aware of the crouching shape of Waldea.
‘Little Tig-he,’ he said, his voice gentle, ‘to fall from the world one time and to survive is a great fortune. To fall again will surely be to die.’
Tighe tried to answer, but was panting too hard.
‘You are not a good kite-boy,’ said Waldea, settling himself more comfortably on the ledge. ‘You tug too hard at the controls and you cannot anticipate the billows of the air. But you can fly and as such you will be useful to the Empire. Do not throw yourself away over the edge of things!’
‘No,’ breathed Tighe. ‘No, Master.’
‘Come,’ said Waldea. I know your foot is poorly formed now. I will carry your kite and together we will jog to the bolt hole.’
Without the burden of his kite Tighe made much swifter progress, although he was wary of straying too near the edge of the world and jogged cumbrously with the wall itself at his left. Waldea himself, though a large man, ran with a slow flowing grace, the kite seeming shrunken against his bulky frame.
They passed along a broad ledge that sloped slightly upwards, open doorways like unfilled eye sockets to their left. But soon enough this remnant village passed behind them and they moved along uncultivated ledges, some of which were little more than crags. The passage of the army had rubbed away all the grass to dust, but Tighe could see that until recently these ways had been rarely trodden by humankind. From time to time the work of sappers was in evidence, planks of wood shoring up the crumbly outwall portions of especially narrow walkways. Tighe gasped to see such extravagance – presumably the sappers would follow up behind the march and gather up the precious wood.
Even with the augmentation, Tighe found these narrower ledges uncomfortable to move along. His heart tripped and rolled in irregular beats. All his instincts told him to slow down, to hang on to the wall at his left, to proceed slowly, cautiously, if at all. But Waldea was jogging fluidly on, and Tighe knew better than to deny him. So he swallowed the bile that rose in his gullet and pushed on too. Not looking to his right, that was the important thing. Not casting his glance into the abyss at his right.
They rounded another spar and Waldea slowed up. They had reached a broader ledge and Tighe could see a scattering of blue-frocked soldiers patrolling. At the far end was a peculiar blue-and-red blob being manhandled by a team of people working with long sticks. It was so far distant that Tighe could not at first make sense of it. Then he realised what was going on: the air had been taken out of the belly of the Pope’s calabash and its floppy enormous skin was being piled and folded.
Waldea’s stone-heavy hand was on Tighe’s shoulder. Tn here, little Tighe,’ he said, handing him back his kite. ‘This is the bolt hole. Do not tell the others that I carried your kite for you.’
‘No, Master,’ said Tighe.
‘I must have authority, you see.’
‘Yes, Master,’ said Tighe, incredulous that anything could undermine Waldea’s authority, which seemed to him as godlike as the Pope’s himself.
‘The others would mock you, Tig-he, and think less of me. Never tell them.’
‘No, Master.’
And then – miraculously, because Tighe had never seen it happen before – Waldea smiled. The scars on his face wriggled and crinkled like an animated painting of white fire, and his teeth flashed in the high sun. ‘You and I share a secret now, boy,’ he said.
Tighe stared up at him, goggle-eyed.
‘Perhaps I will tell you some of my secrets when the battle is over, boy,’ Waldea said, leaning over him. ‘You and I are more alike than are the others. You and I are both from outside and both are wounded in the body. And I know some things, my boy!’ he said, his voice grumbling with what sounded like a chuckle of laughter. I know some things about this war, my boy! I know the stories told in the Officers’ Mess about the real reason for the Pope’s marvellous action.’
‘Master?’ asked Tighe.
‘Into the bolt hole for now,’ said Waldea, standing straighter and his usual stern expression reclaiming his face. ‘Into the bolt hole with the other kite-boys, the other kite-girls. The sun has almost gone over the wall.’
The bolt hole was a naturally formed cave, dusty floored but with hard rock for walls and ceiling. Grass-wax torches were pinned to the back wall, giving out a puckering light. The kites were stacked along the far wall and Tighe added his to the rack.
It was crowded inside. The kite-boys and kite-girls shared this bolt hole with a number of other platons from the papal army. There were no riflemen or regular soldiers – they were billeted in a more spacious cavern further along the ledge, it seemed – but there was a knot of sappers talking amongst themselves in one corner, and the kitchen staff with all their potboys and potgirls took up a lot of space. The kitchen workers were serving food out of a clay cauldron at the back, and Tighe grabbed a packet of something wrapped in grass-leaves and wove his way through the mess of people until he found Ati.
‘You took your own slow time coming here,’ said Ati, licking his fingers. He had finished his rations.
‘My foot,’ said Tighe. ‘Bad foot.’ He was still startled by Waldea’s sudden intimacy with him, on the ledge outside.
Somebody slammed the door shut and wedged it tight.
A little later everybody fell silent and listened to the dusk gale outside. The wind
seemed almost to be singing, a mournful and savage opera of howls and grinds. Somehow the noise was more spooky than usual.
Tighe untied his blanket from his back and unfolded it. ‘Ati,’ he said, as he wrapped himself up.
‘Yes, my barbarian?’ replied Ati, in a sleepy voice. He was already swaddled up, ready for sleep.
‘Do you think of things?’ Tighe asked.
‘What?’
‘Do you think of the worldwall?’
‘You have turd for a brain,’ said Ati, shuffling to make himself more comfortable.
‘It’s a strange place for people to live. Why did God build the wall?’
‘God has reasons,’ mumbled Ati.
12
The next day the army got moving much earlier. The sappers were up and moving around long before the usual time of the kite-pilots. They woke Tighe up with their laughter and he lay listening to their bustle. There was a gripping feeling in his stomach that was not pleasant. Would they go to war today?
The kitchen staff were up next, dragging their rumbling cauldrons over the dusty floor through the supine figures to the doorway. ‘Kite-pilots!’ barked Waldea suddenly. ‘Up early today! Food and then straight away we march for the Meshwood.’
As they ate, Ati came and huddled close against Tighe. ‘Today we’ll see the Meshwood,’ he said.
‘Have you seen it?’
Ati grimaced. ‘No, but I have heard stories. Claw-caterpils, terrible things. Like dragons.’
‘What are dragons?’
‘Like snakes, big snakes.’
‘Oh,’ said Tighe, nodding and looking serious. Then, ‘What are snakes?’
Ati gasped in exasperation. ‘They are huge, the claw-caterpils, with long bodies as long as a ledge. They are thin and long, like ropes, only bigger. And all along their bodies they have claws, like razh – yes?’ Ati tapped at his fingernails with the fingernails of his other hand. ‘Razh, yes?’