On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘What’s the laughter?’ asked Ravielre.

  Mulvaine gave a sudden shout and trembled violently. All the laughter stopped. Tighe, Ati and Pelis gathered round his sweating figure. He was not awake; his eyes were wrinkled tightly shut and his fists were squeezed hard, but he was moving, jerking from side to side. The night before the four kite-pilots had wedged him into a cradle that was half-formed by a series of smaller branches but now he was shaking so hard it looked as though he might dislodge himself from that.

  ‘He’ll fall,’ said Pelis.

  Tighe took hold of Mulvaine’s shoulders. The force of his trembling transmitted itself through Tighe’s joints up his arms, and made his teeth knock together. ‘Mulvaine! Wake you! Mulvaine!’ He gestured to Ati with his chin, ‘Take his legs, his legs.’ Ati grasped each ankle and the two of them pressed Mulvaine down.

  He woke at this, from the pressure on his wounded leg, screaming. His arms flapped, and his mouth opened more widely than looked possible. ‘Ahh! Ahh!’

  Ati let go of his legs.

  ‘Mulvaine,’ shouted Tighe. ‘Mulvaine. Hello, in the name of the Popes! Wake up!’

  Mulvaine’s eyes spun like pebbles flicked by fingers, his pupils arcing round. They fastened on Tighe, and he said, ‘Thirsty.’ Then he closed his eyes and was still.

  There was a pause. ‘Mulvaine?’ said Tighe.

  Mulvaine’s breathing was very slight, his chest hardly moving at all. ‘Thirsty,’ he said again.

  Tighe grabbed a handful of leaves and pressed them against Mulvaine’s mouth. Their moisture, carried up and deposited upon them by the dawn gale, was drying off, but there was enough to wet Mulvaine’s lips. He groaned as Tighe removed the wad of leaves. ‘More.’

  ‘Shall we take you to a spring?’ Tighe asked, leaning close to Mulvaine’s head. ‘A spring?’

  ‘Spring,’ groaned Mulvaine.

  ‘Then you can drink all you want. Ati and Ravielre, take him gently. Is there a spring?’ Tighe aimed the question at Ati, who had been around exploring earlier that morning. Ati shrugged. He had a panicked look in his eye; Pelis had the same look. Mulvaine’s injuries were alarming.

  Tighe looked from face to face. ‘He will be well again,’ he said, insistently, ‘if we move him to a spring so that he can drink. Drink and food.’

  But it was no easy matter shifting Mulvaine’s trembling, sweating and complaining body through the tangle of the Meshwood. Tighe put his arms under the injured boy’s shoulders, Ati and Ravielre grasped him each side of his torso. But if anybody touched his injured leg he screamed and writhed, and he could barely be held in one position let alone moved if he did that. So his legs trailed behind, which meant that when the three carriers made the precarious step from one trunk of meshwood tree to another, his legs flopped and banged and he screamed even more.

  Tighe told Pelis to go on ahead and seek out a spring. She made her way westward, straight through the tangle of branches and soon vanished. When she re-emerged it was with a glum expression on her face. ‘I can find no spring. Maybe we should go down?’

  Ati groaned. ‘Not down, that is where Waldea said the claw-caterpils live.’ Tighe nodded.

  ‘Perhaps upwards?’ Pelis suggested. ‘There might be a spring upwall from us?’

  Tighe shook his head. ‘We cannot carry Mulvaine upwall. It is impossible. Look again.’

  Pelis hurried away. Tighe hauled again and they moved Mulvaine’s whimpering body on to another trunk. There was a short ledge, a little overhung and shadow-filled, which made it easier to carry him along. Mushrooms grew in the crevices of this space. ‘Should we eat them?’ Tighe wondered aloud.

  ‘Perhaps they are poison,’ said Ati. ‘Do you know poison mushrooms from healthy ones?’

  ‘I am hungry,’ was all that Ravielre replied.

  ‘It would be foolish to poison ourselves,’ said Tighe, uncertainly. But he was hungry too, his stomach clutching in his belly with little stabs of pain.

  At the far end of the little overgrown crag was a long step to a broad meshwood tree trunk. Tighe took a breath and reached out with one foot; he could only just span the distance. He was straddling the gap. ‘When I speak,’ he said, straining through his teeth, ‘push with me, and I will complete the step.’

  ‘What?’ asked Ravielre.

  ‘Now!’ said Tighe and lurched to try and haul Mulvaine over on to the trunk. Something high in his groin twanged and pain shot down his leg and up his spine. He howled and his grip on Mulvaine’s body loosened. He was still spreadeagled, straddling crag and trunk with his legs wide apart, but the posture was now causing him the most extraordinary pain. He fumbled, felt Mulvaine slide from him, scrabbled to regain his hold. His bad foot went over. He stumbled, letting go Mulvaine altogether and reaching out blindly with both arms.

  He struck the trunk and grasped instinctively. Behind him he heard shouts, and crashing sound, but his own eyes were shut. He clung to the trunk, his burning legs dangling free. For a long moment he hung there, clutching desperately and then he started pulling himself upright. His chest and belly rasped up over the curve of the trunk, and he swung himself round to lie face down panting.

  His groin spat and bubbled with pain, pulses of agony that tremored down his thighs and up his abdomen. He had done himself some injury. For a lengthy moment all he could do was lie and be taken by the agony. Then, with a nauseous feeling at the pit of his throat, he turned to see what had happened to Mulvaine.

  Ati and Ravielre were standing on the crag, a little over an arm’s length away from Tighe. There was an expression of horror on their faces.

  ‘We dropped him,’ said Ati, in a weird, high-toned voice. ‘He swung down when you let go,’ said Ravielre. ‘His legs came up.’

  ‘He was bloody,’ said Ati. ‘He slipped.’

  ‘Pelis!’ called Tighe, through the trees. ‘Pelis! Come here!’

  When Pelis made her way back up to their position, Tighe was sitting upright rubbing at his groin with both hands to try and reduce the fierce aching pain. Ati had begun climbing down to see what had happened to Mulvaine.

  ‘Mulvaine fell,’ said Tighe, by way of explanation to Pelis’s horrified expression. He couldn’t bring himself to say, We dropped Mulvaine. That sounded so appallingly clumsy. The pain in his groin was distracting him. Rubbing it seemed to be reducing it a little.

  Pelis leaned over to look down, and Tighe lay down with his face over the side of the meshwood tree trunk. There was no sign of Mulvaine, and no indication of where he might have gone – no chimney of broken leaves. Ravielre was sitting with his hands pressed against his face, a posture of abandonment.

  After a short while they heard Ati’s voice calling up out of the darkness. ‘He is here! Come down!’ Pelis and Ravielre immediately started clambering down from trunk to branch. Tighe, getting gingerly to his feet, discovered that the pain in his abdomen was a vague burning unless he strained or put pressure on his pelvis joint, when it screamed and stabbed out. Climbing down was almost impossible. He tried sitting down again and lowering himself over the side, but it was slow and uncomfortable, and because he couldn’t see where he was putting his feet it was also dangerous. He didn’t want to fall.

  ‘Ati!’ he called down. ‘Pelis! I am injured!’

  ‘Come down,’ called Pelis, vanishing beneath him.

  Tighe thought of responding, but thought again. It was probably better not to admit to the pain. He was a warrior, he had fought in the war. He closed his mouth and ran a forefinger along the line of his lips symbolically to seal them. Then he reached down with a leg, grunting at the pain, and lowered himself.

  2

  It took him a long time, perhaps an hour, to make his way down to where the others were. Mulvaine had fallen through a series of bushier, younger meshwood trees whose springy branches had cushioned his fall; and had come to rest in the canopy of a grand old meshwood growth. He was face down, his arms hanging limply, but Ati confirmed that he was still breat
hing.

  The shock of the fall, however, had started his leg bleeding again; in fact bleeding more severely than it had been before. He was completely unconscious. Blood dropped in threads and globs from his bad leg spattering regularly through the leaves beneath, oozing out in pulses. Tighe pale with pain and effort, sat and recovered his breath, whilst Ati crouched close to him.

  ‘Ravielre and I tried to move him from the branches,’ he was saying excitedly, ‘but the branches have some manner of thorn there and he is stuck on the thorns.’

  ‘Thorns?’ gasped Tighe.

  ‘Thorns – so high,’ said Ati, illustrating the dimensions of the thorns with his little finger by clutching the second joint and holding the finger up. ‘They are not many, perhaps six to each branch, but Mulvaine is stuck on some of them.’

  Tighe winced at the thought. ‘We must lift him from above.’ He pulled himself upright and he, Ravielre and Ati positioned themselves on foothold branches around the supine figure of Mulvaine. The dripping of his blood on the leaves below marked time.

  ‘He will die, I think,’ said Ati.

  ‘Don’t say so,’ said Tighe, making a sour face because the pain in his groin flared and twisted. ‘Take hold and lift up – all, all. Ravielre?’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Ravielre sullenly.

  ‘After we have settled Mulvaine,’ Tighe chided, ‘then we find food.’ His own stomach squeaked with hunger, but the pain in his pelvis was greater. ‘After we have settled Mulvaine we will find insects. But not before!’

  ‘How can you scold us? You dropped him,’ Ravielre observed sharply.

  ‘Lift him!’ barked Tighe feeling his temper corrode. ‘Lift him up!’

  The three of them heaved and tugged, but Mulvaine’s body seemed stuck fast. It shifted minutely, and released a gout of blood from the shot leg that splashed through the leaves like a long piss. Tighe was sweating with the effort and the pain.

  ‘Again!’ he ordered. ‘Again!’

  They heaved and Mulvaine rose slightly, sagging in the middle. ‘Take his legs,’ Tighe ordered Ravielre. ‘Lift him.’

  Mulvaine was too far gone to make any complaint as they manhandled his leg. Slowly they raised his body up and pulled it to one side. Ravielre’s pale face was dark with the effort. ‘There!’ gasped Tighe. ‘Over there.’ They staggered, but managed to transport Mulvaine over to where the trunks of meshwood sprouted from the wall. There was a point of intersection where one fat trunk split into two and they lowered Mulvaine on to this truncated platform. ‘Turn him over,’ said Tighe, panting, settling back and clutching at his groin. ‘Turn him over.’

  Ati and Ravielre did as they were told.

  When Tighe had recovered his breath and the pain in his groin had died a little, he shifted over to Mulvaine’s body. His chest was still inflating and deflating, if only a little; and his eyelids pulsed with the movement of the eyeballs underneath. But there was a piece of twig sticking out of the wounded kneecap, and his clothing was pierced and bloody in three places; two on the thighs, one in the stomach, where he had fallen on the thorns. A lengthy scratch, dry but fiercely red, ran from his chin over his lips up the side of his nose and up his forehead. Tighe pulled the twig that was sticking out of Mulvaine’s wounded knee; it caught, but with a more vigorous tug it came free. The blood started flowing again.

  ‘He’s so white,’ said Pelis, peering at him. ‘So pale.’

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ said Tighe, uncertainly. ‘When he wakes he will feel better.’

  ‘He will be weak.’

  ‘Weak but better.’

  ‘Should we tether him somehow?’ said Ati. ‘What about when the dusk gale comes?’

  ‘We are deep enough in the wood to be protected I think’ said Tighe. ‘We must find food.’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Ravielre in a pained voice.

  ‘He thirsty too,’ said Tighe, gesturing at the unconscious body. ‘We cannot carry him to a spring. We must find a spring and bring water back to him. We look for a spring and for water.’

  *

  The shadows were thickening in the Meshwood as the four of them roamed through the trunks. Tighe could only move slowly and awkwardly but Ati, Pelis and especially Ravielre hopped from trunk to branch with an air of hungry desperation. ‘Find some insect and bring it back,’ Tighe told them. ‘Find some spring and call out.’

  Ati found a spring and they all made their way over to him. The water was gushing from a cleft in the wall and running over a moss-smothered trunk of wood. After the four of them had drunk their fill, Tighe instructed them to cup their hands and carry the water back to Mulvaine. ‘He thirsty,’ he pointed out. ‘We must help him.’

  But carrying the water in their hands was not easy. It dribbled through the seam where the two palms were pushed together, or slopped over as the carrier hopped from trunk to trunk. It was doubly difficult negotiating the branches without having a hand to steady oneself. By the time the four of them arrived back at Mulvaine they had little left but wet palms; and they pressed these against Mulvaine’s dried and blistering lips.

  ‘He will die,’ said Ati mournfully.

  Tighe felt terrible. The pain in his pelvis was making him sick in his stomach. He settled himself with his back to the wall and spoke in a quavery voice. ‘Go back to the spring, you three,’ he said. ‘Fill your mouths, not your hands. Fill your mouths, but do not swallow. Bring the water back and Mulvaine will drink that way.’

  They went off immediately. Tighe sucked in deep breaths, tried to focus his attention away from his pain. The throbbing died down and he found his eyelids slipping down. A terrible weariness. Slipping down, falling into sleep like falling off the world.

  Rustling in the leaves meant that Pelis had returned; Ati and Ravielre came quickly behind her. Tighe’s eyes were sticky; it was hard opening them fully. He waved his hand in the direction of Mulvaine’s body and one by one they leant over his face and kissed the water into him.

  ‘It is no good,’ fretted Ati after he had loosed his mouthful. ‘It dribbles away over his cheeks. Not in his stomach.’

  ‘It is better,’ said Tighe. ‘Better.’

  Ravielre and Pelis went out by themselves looking for food. Tighe fell asleep straight away, so although they were gone over an hour it seemed to him that they returned immediately. They carried between them one of the grey worm-beasts that Tighe had noticed on coming through the Meshwood with the platon. Its head had been pulled off and purple-grey chunks of meat extruded.

  ‘We should cook it,’ said Ati. ‘We should start a fire.’

  ‘Do you know how to start a fire?’ asked Ravielre.

  ‘Mulvaine knows,’ said Pelis. Everybody looked at Mulvaine. He was trembling slightly in his sleep; his lips were looking black and puffed.

  ‘We can eat food raw,’ said Tighe.

  ‘We will be cold again tonight’ said Ati. ‘Without our blankets. A fire would help.’

  ‘First we eat’ said Tighe, his mouth watering with hunger. ‘After, we can think about fire.’

  The Meshwood worm was a little under an arm’s length and as thick as a man’s wrist. A series of finger-thick tendon-like threads reached from top to bottom at regular intervals, like the pieces of some antique plastic machine; and there were some stringy organs too tough to chew. But the bulk of the thing was dark blue meat that started to grey quickly when exposed to the air. Tighe chewed this meat desperately; it tasted bad, inky and stale, but it was at least food.

  When the four of them had picked the worm’s body clean, Pelis wondered aloud whether they should feed Mulvaine. They all looked at the shallowly breathing body. ‘If he did not drink,’ said Ati, ‘how can he eat?’

  It was getting very dark now and for half an hour or so Ravielre and Ati tried to make fire. Without Waldea’s tinder-box it was no easy task. Ravielre claimed once to have seen soldiers make fire by squeezing leaves together between flat palms very quickly and for a while all four of them tried th
is; but the leaves only turned to mulch and stained the palms green. ‘Perhaps they used dried leaves,’ Ravielre conceded.

  Then the dusk gale started up. They all huddled together, clustering around Mulvaine’s body, whilst the forest thrashed and howled around them. Eventually the wind settled and it was tar-black.

  Ravielre and Pelis clung together and fell asleep. Ati came and clasped Tighe, although the pair of them had some difficulty in finding a comfortable position when every fidget caused Tighe to grunt with pain. But they settled eventually.

  Tighe could not sleep. The evening meal sat unpleasantly in his stomach and his pelvis was throbbing. ‘Ati?’ he said.

  Ati breathed out; the warmth of his breath touched Tighe’s neck. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Back on the shelf- the battle.’

  A long pause in the darkness. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was that calabash? That silver calabash that floated through the air?’

  Ati mumbled something, nuzzled Tighe’s neck. Then he spoke more distinctly. ‘I do not know. The worldwall is cluttered with wonders.’

  ‘I think it was a war calabash of the Otre’ said Tighe. He had been considering this. ‘Instead of the soft leathers of the Imperial calabashes with their wooden cradles they have constructed machine with metal belly, so that it resists rifle fire. It is a terrible weapon.’

  ‘Terrible,’ agreed Ati, non-specifically.

  ‘With such a weapon, maybe the Otre will defeat the whole Empire.’

  Ati stiffened a little in Tighe’s embrace. ‘Never!’ he said. ‘They will be unable. The army will …’, and he tailed off. ‘I do not know,’ he said vaguely. ‘Perhaps the Pope has led the army into the Meshwood. Perhaps they will ambush the Otre when they attempt to come through the Meshwood.’