by Adam Roberts
‘What happened to you?’ Ati was calling to him. Bullets keened and shushed through the air. The cries of soldiers and screams of pain were again loud in Tighe’s ears. He heard and comprehended Ati’s question, and it was in his mind to answer it, if he had the words in Imperial language; to say that he had been frozen, half drawn out of the reality of the battle, taken away. That he had been on the verge of being able to understand the worldwall itself, its scale, its mystery. Why God had built it and – no, that was not it; to understand who God was, and what it would mean to meet Him. On the edge of a revelation, like standing on the edge of the world ready to jump.
Tighe looked around himself slowly. It all seemed less real than it had been before his episode, or whatever it was. The yelling, the hurrying, the bullets firing past. He put the palm of his hand against his forehead and smoothed it slowly over the top of his head and round to the back. There was something not right. Dreamlike.
‘There!’ Ati was yelling. ‘There!’ He was pointing down the stair, out at something in the sky.
Tighe followed the arm. The dreamlike purity of his senses buoyed him through comprehending what he saw.
It was a calabash, smaller than the Imperial calabashes, entirely silver and of an odd shape and construction. It was not a sphere, but rather an elongated cylinder tucked in at the waist, and it appeared to be made out of metal rather than woven leather. This was impossible; it was impossible to believe that metal could float, or that it could be beaten thin enough to contain the hot air. At the base of the strange calabash was no basket, but instead an insect-like confusion of legs and pincers.
The silver calabash floated a few hundred arms’ lengths from the wall, wobbling a little. Tighe glanced back up at the shelf; none of the battling troops seemed to have noticed it, which added to Tighe’s sense of being contained within a dream of his own. A series of loud crashes sounded from above. There was a groan, which Tighe assumed to be from a dying soldier. But the groan resolved itself, musically, into a single pitch that kept an unnaturally steady level and volume.
‘That noise!’ Tighe cried out.
The sound grew in intensity, shrieked and then was still. The blast of it left Tighe with a humming in his ears. Then it started again, a low grumble that resolved itself and began climbing the scale of pitches.
‘What machine –?’ howled Ati, tears dribbling from his eyes, his arm outstretched and pointing at the silver calabash. It was lifting itself slowly through the air, upwards and diagonally.
A thunderous voice boomed out of the sky.
‘Tighe!’ called the voice. It caught Tighe completely off guard because the mysterious, elemental speaker pronounced the name in the old style of Tighe’s village, not with the consonantal tripping mispronunciation of Imperial speakers. He was so unused to hearing himself called by that name, pronounced in that way, that he almost didn’t realise what the word signified. Then the thunderous voice spoke again.
‘Tighe!’
As he realised the personal specificity of this act of naming out of the sky, Tighe also realised how precariously related to reality all these events were. A tiny wall, no bigger than three arms’ lengths high; ants running along all its miniature ledges thinking they were men. It was none of it real. His heart was hammering. Lights were flickering at the corner of his eyes again, as they had done before when he had found himself frozen and had felt his consciousness start to pulse and withdraw from things. He decided he did not like that experience.
He started drawing air in through his nostrils, filling his lungs, like somebody preparing to shout at the top of his voice. For the third time the enormous voice named him.
‘Tighe!’
‘Come,’ exhaled Tighe, speaking to the four kite-pilots on the stairway. There was the slightest internal sense of a thread being snapped and he was standing up.
‘Master,’ shouted Ati, in confusion. ‘Down …’
‘No,’ yelled Tighe, leaning forward and snatching at Ati’s hair with his fingers’ ends. ‘Up. Come. Come.’ And he bolted up the last few steps on to the shelf.
The elements of the picture did not quite coalesce in his head. He saw the pathway ahead of him, the broad shelf bounded on the right by the wall (along which blue-coats stood, or lay motionless) and on the left by nothing but the sky. He saw the faces of soldiers, some distracted by this sudden apparition, glowering or staring astonished at him. He saw the little bulges, like instantaneous mushrooms that faded as soon as they flowered, as the bullets flicked into the ground at his feet. ‘Come,’ he said, uncertain and uncaring whether the others could hear him. ‘Come. God is testing us.’
He started walking along the shelf.
Almost at once he was passed by Mulvaine and Ati, who were running with their heads down, weaving from side to side. Ravielre and Pelis followed, almost bent double, Ravielre with his hands folded over the back of his head. It was almost comical.
‘God is testing us!’ Tighe called to them as they rushed by, but with a laugh he realised that he was speaking his village tongue, and that they would not be able to understand. He was drunk with the strangeness and the intensity of the occasion. Running, ducking, weaving, all seemed like attempts to cheat the test. The only thing to do was to walk calmly, straight, to dare the experimenter God to harm him.
A soldier, close against the wall, was screaming something at Tighe and ran forward. His left arm cradled his rifle and his right hand was outstretched, to grab Tighe. Tighe smiled at him. The soldier went down on one knee, in comical mockery of an obeisance. His chest was hollow. A large hole there. Ends of ribs poked out, like twigs. He toppled forward, face falling hard against the ledge.
Tighe started running. He was not sure why he started running, except that the dream had suddenly taken on an unpleasant quality. He had the sense, nightmarishly, of being followed, of being chased. Of being pursued by something monstrous.
An enormous hand, God’s hand, reaching down to pluck this one ant from the wall. Would the others even see God’s hand? Would it be an invisible force to them, the fingers gently pinching Tighe’s torso nothing more than a focusing of winds, or the magical levitation of a calabash? Maybe he would fly up in the air and the soldiers would put down their weapons in amazement at his transportation.
Tighe was not running well; his bad foot hindered smooth sprinting. He loped a little way down the shelf and his good foot struck something other than smooth ledge, a spongy hillock of something. Tighe threw a leg out to stop himself falling, but his bad foot could not keep him upright. His ankle bent over and he slid down to his knees.
He was panting. He looked back to see what he had tripped over. Mulvaine was lying face down on the shelf.
Still weirdly dissociated from his experiences, Tighe first thought the kite-boy was dead. He pulled himself upright and limped over to the fallen body. Mulvaine was whimpering. Tighe dropped to his haunches.
‘Mulvaine?’
‘Oh, it hurts,’ Mulvaine was saying. ‘It hurts.’
‘You have shot?’
‘It hurts,’ howled Mulvaine, twisting over and clutching at his shin. The leg of his right trouser was dark with wetness.
‘Your knee? Your knee have shot?’
A clutch of Imperial soldiers hurried past. Tighe flicked a glance up the shelf. There was a huddle of blue tunics up ahead.
‘Come,’ he said to Mulvaine. ‘Get up.’ He slid his hand under the wounded boy’s shoulder and tried to lever him upright.
‘But it hurts, it hurts,’ said Mulvaine.
‘So’, said Tighe, ‘we must be up.’ He pulled with all his might and Mulvaine’s body came off the floor. Mulvaine put out a hand to support himself, and then slowly pushed himself into the sitting position.
‘I cannot walk,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘My leg.’
‘Come,’ said Tighe, trying to inject his voice with an urgency he did not feel. He put his arm under Mulvaine’s armpit and round his back, and pushed u
p with his legs. Slowly the two rose to a standing position, Mulvaine leaning heavily on Tighe.
The two of them began limping down the shelf, westward, in the direction of the Meshwood. Mulvaine was limping more markedly than Tighe.
19
They made slow progress along the shelf. Mulvaine repeated over and over, ‘It hurts, it hurts,’ in time to the steps, as if he was speaking some form of mantra. At one stage he said ‘No, no, put me down, put me down,’ and Tighe was compelled to lower him to the ground. It was a relief not to have the weight of him pulling down his shoulder.
As Mulvaine sobbed and clutched his leg, with his back against the wall, Tighe peered up the shelf. They were out of the range of the rifle fire now, but he could see up ahead how the dust kicks of bullet impacts peppered the shelf, and how most of the blue-coated soldiers in view were horizontal and dead rather than upright and fighting.
‘Come,’ he said to Mulvaine.
‘Leave me here,’ said Mulvaine, petulant and agonised at the same time. ‘My leg, my leg. Leave me here.’
‘If I leave you here,’ said Tighe, ‘the Otre will take you when they come along. You want that the Otre take you?’
Mulvaine looked up into Tighe’s eyes; his pale Imperial eyes as strange as gemstones. His face was whiter than before, so pale it looked like a particular sort of plastic that Tighe had once seen when he was a boy; so white that it was almost transparent.
‘Come,’ said Tighe.
‘All right,’ said Mulvaine through his closed teeth. ‘All right.’ He held out his arm for Tighe to help him up and Tighe had to lean backwards away from the wall to apply enough force to raise the larger boy from his sitting position.
They resumed their slow stumble along the shelf. Soldiers hurried past them in ones and twos, rushing eastward along the shelf to join the fighting. Then first one and then several soldiers hurried past them in the other direction, rushing away from the battle towards the shelter of the Mesh-wood.
‘They’, said Tighe, taking a breath after every syllable because of the effort of carrying Mulvaine, ‘leave. War. Lost.’
‘Don’t say it, you – you barbarian,’ said Mulvaine in an agony of physical suffering and mental anguish. ‘We’ll – we’ll rally, push through, they’ll – they’ll beat back the Otre.’
Tighe didn’t say anything. They were coming to the far end of the shelf now and there was a ledge that sloped away down. Ati was waiting there, crouched close against the wall with his arms tightly crossed. He leapt up when he saw Tighe and Mulvaine approach.
‘What happened? What happened?’
‘Mulvaine,’ said Tighe, gasping. ‘Hurt.’
‘My leg, my leg,’ moaned Mulvaine. ‘Shot through the knee, I think. It hurts, it hurts.’
Ati pushed up against Mulvaine on the other side from Tighe and helped to carry his weight. ‘The others are near, Tighe,’ he said. ‘They are close to the entrance to the Meshwood. We will find shelter there, won’t we Tighe?’
‘We will find shelter there,’ said Tighe.
The three of them limped on. The noise of battle was distant behind them now. Meshwood loomed ahead: the sun was high in the sky and it carved shadows out of the irregular surface of the wood that made it look more extreme in relief patterning. The leaves were darker in the late daylight, and as the three of them made their way along the ledge they could see the entrance to the tangle of meshwood trunks. It stared at them, a black oval like the socket of a skull.
Pelis and Ravielre came running up the ledge towards them. ‘The guard eyrie is deserted,’ shouted Ravielre.
‘We saw six soldiers run along the ledge and go into the Meshwood,’ said Pelis.
‘The war is lost,’ said Tighe. ‘We have lost.’
‘It hurts, it hurts,’ moaned Mulvaine in time with his steps.
‘We must hide ourselves in the Meshwood,’ said Pelis, firmly, ‘or the Otre will capture us.’
This thought silenced all five of them. They knew what was likely to happen if they allowed themselves to be captured by the Otre.
‘Come,’ said Tighe. ‘Help me with Mulvaine.’
He passed the weight of Mulvaine’s sagging body on to the shoulder of Ravielre and staggered before them, down the ledge towards the Meshwood.
The guard eyrie was empty, as Ravielre had said. There was a part of Tighe, an older part, that responded to the wealth the eyrie represented: all that wood! But more pressing was the need to get off the ledge, to get out of the way of the oncoming Otre army.
Once they were in the shade of the Meshwood they paused, leaning Mulvaine against a trunk. He was no longer chanting, ‘It hurts, it hurts,’ with every step. He appeared to be on the edge of drifting off to sleep, or losing consciousness.
‘The Otre,’ said Tighe. ‘They will come this way. We cannot stay on this path.’
Mulvaine’s eyes were closed now, his breathing was shallow. But the eyes of Ati, Pelis and Ravielre were all focused tightly on Tighe.
‘What shall we do?’ asked Pelis.
‘We cannot climb up,’ said Tighe, gesturing with his right arm at the canopy of interwoven Meshwood trunks over their heads. ‘Mulvaine is too ill. We must drop down – find some quiet place and be still. The Otre will pass us by.’
He locked gaze with each of the three of them in turn to underline his words. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘we must help Mulvaine down through these trunks.’ Ati took one arm and Ravielre the other, and together they started the laborious process of lowering the now unresponsive body of Mulvaine from trunk to trunk, away from the overgrown ledge and into a more hidden place. ‘God is testing us,’ Tighe said to them in both his native tongue and in the Imperial language.
3
Through the Door
1
Through the Door, creaking wide on its enormous hinges. Stepping up to the face of God, an enormous face, large as the world. Carved like a gargoyle visage in the side of the wall, massive, marmoreal, except that a great rumbling low breath escaped from between its lips, that its eyelids closed and opened like the passing of day and night.
The silver calabash: strange apparition, more dream than reality. Floating through space.
Somebody’s face: his pahe’s, except that the face was that of an Imperial soldier and that the face disappeared in a splutter of bloody droplets.
Tiny droplets marking Tighe’s skin. Dew from the Meshwood leaves.
Tighe woke with a shiver. Mulvaine was there, next to him, breathing shallowly. Pelis was pushing handfuls of leaves into her mouth, sucking off the moisture. Ravielre was grunting.
Tighe’s stomach was hurting. He was hungry and he had wedged himself in the coign of a double-stemmed meshwood trunk to avoid being blown off the world by the dawn gale – none of them had their belts or their blankets. When he lifted his shirt to look at his stomach he saw bruises, like patches of shadow, running round the lower part of his torso. He had evidently been wedged in too tightly.
‘We have no food,’ said Ati, dropping down from above. ‘I thought we might fetch some insects, but there are no insects here.’
‘We must have food,’ said Pelis, wiping her mouth.
Tighe reached for some leaves from the branches at the end of his trunk and crammed them into his mouth. The moisture soothed the inside of his mouth. He bit, tentatively, into the leaves themselves, but the flavour was savagely bitter and he spat the leaves out.
Mulvaine moaned.
‘Tighe,’ said Ati, swinging down and settling on his haunches on Tighe’s branch, ‘what shall we do?’
‘What shall we do?’ repeated Pelis.
Tighe looked from face to face. He did not know what to do. Ravielre looked worn, as well as distracted; as if the brute fact of Bel’s death – a fact only days old – was ageing him, minute by minute. His eyes were sunk in his skull, resting on a grey ledge of skin, overhung with eyebrows. Pelis had scratches on her pale face and her large hair was tangled and matted. Everybody
looked exhausted. Only Ati had anything of the bounce, the elasticity of spirit, of the platon from weeks ago.
Tighe’s mind was hurrying with memories of the previous day; the tumult of battle, the strange apparition of the silver calabash. Something, with a voice that sounded like God, had called his name; Tighe, Tighe. None of it felt real. Nothing felt real.
He took a deep breath. He had to say something. ‘First we find food,’ he said.
Ati and Pelis looked intently at him.
‘We look for food and find it. Do you have flasks? For water?’
They both shook their heads.
‘Well, we must travel from spring to spring. Or find spring and stay. Find food.’ He gestured over at Mulvaine. ‘He must become well and then we can travel through the Meshwood to the west. Yes? We can go home.’
‘Home,’ said Ati, dubiously.
‘Pelis. Your home?’
‘The Imperial City,’ said Pelis. ‘Ravielre comes from there too.’
‘Then you can go there. Ati, your home is downwall?’
Ati nodded.
‘Then you can go there. I will go back and speak with the Pope,’ said Tighe, his head fuzzing with the excitement of the thought, a sense that was something like sudden inflation at the prospect of his resolution. He would go to the Imperial City, would call upon the Cardinelle who had visited him when he was back in the hospital; would call upon one of the Popes themselves, and would persuade them to take him up the wall in a calabash. He would go back to the village, a hero, with his adventures to relate.
‘Speak with the Popes?’ said Ati dubiously. A grin ran across his face. ‘You are mad barbarian! Why would the Popes speak to you?’
Tighe stiffened. ‘They will speak to me.’
‘The War Pope thought I was the boy who fell from upwall!’ said Ati. He started laughing. Pelis was chuckling too. The noise woke Ravielre, who groaned and rolled over.
‘Stop,’ said Tighe, although the laughter was affecting him. He tried for a stern voice, ‘Stop this!’, but his mouth was widening into a smile against his will. He struggled to shrink his lips to a severe purse, but then he was laughing and reaching forward to slap Ati on the side of his head. Ati was laughing so hard now he could barely evade Tighe’s blows.