On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Everybody was silent now. Nobody doubted that this horrific treatment was standard Otre business.

  ‘This man from the sapper regiment,’ said Mulvaine, dropping his voice, confident now in his command of his audience, ‘he said they found one of the Imperial guides, and he was dead, but a branch of platán was growing out of his mouthl With leaves and everything!’

  Tighe was troubled by difficult dreams that night. In the morning he could not be sure of them, except that they had been unsettling and unpleasant; populated with frightening hybrid people whose limbs sprouted platán leaves, whose wicks were as thick and broad as platán trunks; people who had Mulvaine’s eyes and intended to torture Tighe. Tighe had a vague recollection of struggling through the tangle of branches and leaves of the Meshwood with pursuers at his back.

  But it was dawn, and the light was coming through the leaves, and a camp potgirl was bringing breakfast slung around her neck.

  13

  They did not see battle the next day, nor for several days afterwards. When the sun had heated the air and started it rising, Waldea took three kite-pilots to the entrance to the Meshwood and sent them flying out away from the wall. They scouted and returned and reported that there was no sign of anything, except the Meshwood reaching away into the east.

  ‘Are there any crosswinds east?’ Waldea wanted to know. ‘How far might a kite fly east today?’

  But the crosswinds were patchy and treacherous. The last thing a pilot wanted was to be caught out in the sky, blown so that there was nowhere except Meshwood to land – trying to land in the midst of the spiky, curly branches and trunks would be suicide.

  So instead Waldea ordered the kite-pilots to shoulder their kite-spars and belt their bundles around their waists. ‘You must march through the Meshwood!’ he declared. This was not as easy a matter as marching along clear ledgeway. ‘At some places’, he told them, ‘you must pass your kites through carefully and then follow. Have a care for your kites at all times!’

  To begin with the path was clear enough, boot-marks still visible in the dust from the strides of riflemen and soldiers who had passed before. But after an hour or so the path dissipated and the line broke up. Each individual kite-boy and kite-girl had to make his or her way as they found best, stepping from trunk to trunk, sometimes finding little paths along truncated crags and craglets, sometimes passing along what seemed to be sheer wall, stepping on wobbly trunks. To Tighe’s right the blue sky was visible, though scored over with the arcs of dozens of trunks and branches. At one point he lost track of the rest of his platon and became scared; but on calling out in a high-pitched voice he was answered with several yells and he realised that his comrades were all around him.

  By now they had left the ledge far behind and were all picking their way along branch and trunk. The complex patterning of shadows across trunks shifted its design as the day went on. The pools of shade that lay everywhere about in the morning thinned as the sun rose to shine directly in through the tangle. The shadows resolved themselves into a tracery of wickerwork that was beautiful to look at – or so Tighe might have thought if he hadn’t been wholly occupied with finding secure footholds whilst hefting his kite over his shoulders.

  At some time around midday, or fifty as (he rebuked himself silently) he had to get used to saying, the sun started spotlighting through the branches, blinking into the corner of his eye. The shadows diluted and the detail inside the forest became more apparent.

  Tighe paused. The way ahead was not clear and his blistered shoulder blades were complaining. He unshouldered his kite and propped it on the runt-end ledge he was standing against so that the spar rested against a trunk of meshwood.

  He stretched. All around him the forest rustled. He thought it was the wind, but as he looked more closely he saw something slithering through the leaves up ahead. He was momentarily frightened, but the thing could hardly be the claw-caterpil Ati had described. It was the thickness of a wrist and the length of an outstretched arm. Coloured shadow-grey, it had wound its way around a trunk of meshwood and was eating one of the leaves. Every now and again it would pulse its body forward and start on another leaf, flowing along on a row of legs so numerous and so tiny as to look like a fringe of cloth. Two teeth poked out from its head, which it used to gather the leaf into its belly-button-like mouth. It seemed to lack eyes.

  Now that he had paused and was able to look around him, Tighe could see that the Meshwood was full of life. Normal-sized insects bustled along the branches or through the yellow grass of such crags as there were: beetles, grass-lice, meat-fleas, teardroppers, fireslugs, vivid blue- and green-coloured hoppers with ornately puckered carapaces. There were knucklebone-sized ledge-flies, much larger than he had seen before, which drew invisible curlicues lazily through the air. But there were also insects the size of cats or monkeys: Tighe looked below and saw two beetles, as big and knobbed as human feet, which were banging heads together along a trunk. A strange silvery flying bug, looking like a toy fashioned from plastic, flapped cumbrously upwards, landing on a trunk to rest, then pulsing a hat-like section of its back up and down rapidly to flutter up again. Peering into the distance, Tighe thought he could see something the size of a small goat, although greatly elongated, pushing noisily through the branches and leaves.

  The awareness of so much wildlife all around him unnerved Tighe; partly the fact of it and partly the thought that he had been blundering through the wood for half a day without noticing it. He had been completely absorbed in himself. He reached over to shoulder his kite-spar again and press on eastwards when there was a tremendous crash away to the west and a little way up.

  Somebody was crying out noisily; Tighe recognised Chemler’s voice.

  Leaving his kite where it was, Tighe scrambled up from stem to stem. He found Chemler easily enough, draped over a branch. He was having difficulty breathing.

  Tighe helped him up to a sitting position, with his back against the wall. ‘Are you well?’ Tighe asked.

  ‘Better,’ said Chemler, gasping. ‘Got winded. Fell a bit.’ He pointed upwards and Tighe saw a ragged chimney of broken twigs. Leaves were still fluttering down and several branches were wobbling gently.

  ‘You fell?’

  Chemler nodded. ‘Not far. Not easy to fall far in this wood, I’m’, he breathed in, ‘pleased to say.’

  ‘What about your kite?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Chemler. ‘I dropped it. But I think it’s still up there.’

  When he got his breath back, Chemler climbed up the way he had fallen. Tighe went with him. They found the kite-spar easily, wedged in a V of branches.

  ‘Mine is down there,’ said Tighe. Chemler nodded, hefted his kite and started east again. Tighe made his way back down and retrieved his own kite.

  He moved on, more conscious now of the variety of wildlife around him. Bugs of all scales slithered and rustled all around him. Once, as he was reaching for a handhold on a stem of meshwood, something slippery touched his hand. He yanked it away with a yelp, and looked up to see another of the grey worm creatures with the myriad legs nosing along the branch. He felt certain it was harmless, but none the less he chose another branch.

  On another occasion he saw a monkey. It was so unlike any monkey he had ever seen before that at first he took it for a man in an orange jacket – bright orange fur over its torso and black legs, with two tails and a frond of long hair cresting its head. It swung easily up branches as handholds and came to within ten arms’ lengths of him. It had quick black eyes and it gave Tighe a cool up-down appraisal, before swinging further up. Tighe passed it cautiously and looked back up at it when he was further along. The monkey had lost interest in him and had instead captured one of the fat grey worms and was biting chunks out of the thing’s back.

  A little later in the day Tighe heard a scream, but could not be sure if it was human or animal.

  Still later, he heard the unmistakable voice of Waldea, bellowing through the woods. ‘To m
e, kite-pilots! To me!’

  Tighe started upwards.

  Waldea kept calling out and Tighe picked a way upwards along trunks of meshwood like steps following his voice.

  The platon gathered. Mani was crying, her hand bloody. Something had bitten her, she said. Something in the wood. She hadn’t seen what it was and she had thrashed out with her hand when bitten – she thought she had dislodged it, but she hadn’t heard it fall. Waldea examined the wound and cleaned it with leaves and some water from his own canteen. Then he wrapped it in cloth and told her not to fuss.

  When everybody had arrived and was accounted for, Waldea tore twigs and branches from a tall space over a particularly large meshwood trunk. These he gathered in a bundle, tied with a spare belt to a trunk. Then he ordered everybody to strap himself or herself to a trunk as they had done the previous day. They settled there, more exhausted by the day’s march than they had been by the ledge-walking of the day before. Deep in the wood now, the dusk gale hardly made itself felt at all, and Tighe was eager to unstrap himself as soon as he could, almost before the gale was over.

  Waldea built a fire in the dark and the platon huddled round it, quieter than before. Several people pressed Mani to show her hand, but she kept it wrapped in cloth and clutched close to her body.

  They all ate in silence, cowed by the strange environment. Even Mulvaine, usually cocky, was quiet.

  ‘It was probably a land-lobster that bit you, Mani,’ said Waldea eventually. He spoke with a dark voice. ‘My children, you must be wary of all such things as live in this wood.’

  It was remarkable, thought Tighe, how Waldea’s manner had changed towards them since the order had come to march to war. He was less distant; it was more as if he were a comrade than a leader.

  ‘Master,’ he asked, a little quaveringly.

  ‘Yes, Tig-he?’

  ‘Were you ever in this wood before?’

  ‘I was, my children. I have been through and through this wood before, and I know its terrors. The worst of them are far below us, thank God and the planning of our Pope. But when I was here before I encountered all of them. Worse than any land-lobster.’

  He stopped speaking, and the firelight made curious shapes over the scars of his face. Every kite-pilot’s gaze was on him.

  ‘Master?’ said Tighe again, meaning to ask how Waldea had come to be in the Meshwood. But he started speaking again without the prompt.

  ‘My children, you are young. You know little of the history of our glorious empire. But we have been here before. In my day, I was as tiny as any of you and I too flew a kite. And in my youth I was part of a mighty army, almost as mighty as this one is. We marched eastwards a league or two downwall from where we are; we marched to conquer the heretics of Otre. Those were glorious days, my children! Glorious days!’

  The kite-pilots were silent: spellbound. Never before had Waldea been so forthcoming. He seemed to withdraw from his narrative for a while, staring into the fire, his face curiously distorted. But he resumed it without prompting.

  ‘We had a hard march. Downwall from here the wood is plagued with terrible beasts. Beasts with jaws so big and teeth so metallic they’d bite clean through your arm – devour your head in a single snap. Terrible insects, enormous. We lost many on our march and fought harder against these creatures than we ever did against the enemy. But the Popes knew that the Otre had to be defeated. Because the Otre hide a secret in the heart of their evil world.’

  He paused again, and Tighe wondered if he was going to share this secret with them all. He was reminded of the gnomic conversation they had had the day Waldea had carried his kite for him.

  Suddenly Waldea spoke, ‘Do you know this secret, children?’

  There was a synchronised tremble as every kite-boy and kite-girl shook their heads together.

  ‘Children, this is what our world is about. There is a Door in the wall!’

  Waldea widened his eyes and stared about him, gauging the impact of this news on his young audience. Nobody said anything. The fire grumbled and cracked.

  ‘A Door, do you see?’ Waldea said. ‘A Door in the worldwall – and it exists in the heart of the kingdom of the Otre. They have laid impious hands upon it and we are sending an army to recover it. To reclaim it for the Popes, the Empire and for God!’

  ‘What, Master,’ said Ravielre, nervously. ‘What is through this door?’

  Waldea shook his head. ‘It is a holy Door. God built the wall and lives on the other side of it. This Door will lead us through to Him.’

  ‘I was taught’, said somebody else, ‘that God lives on top of the wall, from there he can see all eternity.’

  ‘No,’ said Tighe, urgently, ‘no, God lives at the bottom of the wall.’

  There was general scoffing at this idea.

  ‘Why do the Otre not step through their Door?’ asked Mulvaine. ‘Why do they not go to meet with God?’

  ‘It is a holy Door,’ repeated Waldea. ‘The Otre are an impious people and cannot open it. God would not permit something so wrong. But our Popes will open it when we have captured it. We will meet God face to face. We will see the paradise on the other side of the wall.’

  ‘No!’ piped Tighe. ‘We must not open the Door!’

  Everybody looked at him.

  ‘And why not, little Tig-he?’ asked Waldea, with a trace in his voice of his old sternness.

  ‘I was taught in my village by … by a wise man,’ said Tighe, feeling nervous that the eyes of the whole platon were on him. ‘I was taught that God lives at the bottom of the wall. That God is at war with creatures on the far side of the wall – that is why every day he heats a great rock until it shines with heat and throws it over the wall. He wars with the creatures on the far side of the wall.’ He was surprised at his own fluency in this foreign language, but he felt an urgent need to convince the others of his insight. ‘We must not open this Door in the wall, or these creatures will come in. They are very terrible, God builds the wall to …’ he wanted to say to separate us out from them, but he couldn’t think of the words.

  ‘Idiot barbarian,’ said Mulvaine. ‘God sits on the top of the wall, everybody knows that.’ He looked nervously at Waldea. ‘Except, Master, that perhaps God lives on the far side of the wall.’

  Waldea did not seem to be in a mood to be angry. ‘Ours is a holy war,’ he said. ‘The Popes themselves will decide what is to be done when we have defeated the Otre and captured the great Door.’

  ‘Master?’ asked Bel. ‘What happened in the last campaign?’

  ‘My child?’

  ‘You said you were part of an army years ago. You came through the Meshwood?’

  Waldea lowered his gaze, staring intently at the fire, and squeezed his brows together into a scar-lined crease.

  ‘We came through the Meshwood,’ he said, ‘but it cost many lives. There are monsters downwall that turn your blood to liquid shit, no matter how brave you think you are; monsters that fret the heart and seize up the legs. I have seen brave men squeal and run like children before them. They fell upon our army, with their blank, myriad eyes and their hungerless, never-ending jaws. Grotesque they are, armoured with plates as tough as the enamel of teeth all along their backs, and each of their many legs is as sharp as a knife blade. Some are as long as two tall men laid end to end, and as fat around their hairy, pulsing bellies as a man’s waist. Their faces are the worst; foully deformed imitations of a face, with slimy mouth parts and bristling bulging cheeks, and stone eyes like evil jewels, all faceted. They cut through arms and legs with their jawbones as easily as I pull down a branch from this tree. They might seize a man by the neck and kiss him mouth to mouth, devouring his lips and tongue; and when he would fall they would feed out of his face as out of a bowl. They moved like a tether falling through air, swiftly and undulating and with a silence which was the worst thing of all. We would march fully armed. Sometimes there would be the sound of a rifle discharging and we would stop and listen, and if we heard n
othing else we would thank God that another abomination had been dispatched. But sometimes there would be the sound of a rifle discharging and a cry, a terrible cry, as uncontrolled as a baby’s scream, and we would know that somebody else had been taken.’

  He fell silent again, musing over the fire. He seemed unconscious of the fact that he was running a forefinger over his scars.

  ‘By the time we reached the far side of the Meshwood, we were only a third of the army we were when we came in. But we rallied ourselves and I went out in my kite, and reported to the generals and the War Pope, and we took the holy war to the Otre. Bravely we fought, bravely my children! As bravely as we shall fight again, as we come through. But we were too few and the war was not ours that day. We were forced to flee back through the Meshwood, and then the carnage was worse because we had less discipline and many of us were wounded. The claw-caterpils can smell blood from a long way off and they came in hundreds, swarming over the meshwood trunks from all sides. How few of us emerged on the Empire side of the wood! How few!’

  He turned to Mani. ‘The land-lobsters are poor things by comparison!’

  There was a silence. Eventually Mulvaine spoke what they had all been thinking. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I’m scared.’

  Waldea – deliberately or otherwise – misunderstood the statement. ‘Defeat is a frightening thing for any warrior to contemplate,’ he said, ‘and it is right that you are scared, because that will give you the fire you need to win. To win! And as for the claw-caterpils,’ he added, as if in afterthought, ‘they are all to be found in the wood a long way downwall from here, my children. The Popes have planned this campaign carefully and this portion of the wood was explored carefully. There may be some land-lobsters to give you the odd nip with their pincers, but you will not encounter a claw-caterpil.’