by Adam Roberts
There was silence. Eventually Tighe spoke again. ‘Ati?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you hear the voice?’
‘What voice? Now? There’s no voice but yours.’
‘When the silver calabash flew through the sky,’ said Tighe, shivering at the memory, ‘I heard a voice. A loud voice.’
‘There was the noise of battle,’ said Ati indistinctly.
‘It sounded as if it was calling my name.’
Ati snorted. ‘I heard a great rumble, but it was explosions from the war I think.’
There was silence again. Tighe heard rustling noises in the Meshwood around them, but they settled to silence again. ‘Ati?’ he said. ‘Ati? What do you think is through the Great Door that the Otre guard?’
But Ati was asleep.
3
They were all woken by the dawn gale and lay huddled together until the air cleared and the purer light of the morning began filtering up through the branches. Ravielre and Pelis got up and went off together to search through the Meshwood for more food. Ati grinned stupidly at Tighe when they had gone. ‘They go off to be lovers, I think,’ he said and made gulping noises in his throat to express his ridicule.
Tighe felt aches all over his body and his legs were particularly stiff, but the fiercer pain in his groin had damped down a little. He made his way awkwardly over to Mulvaine. ‘Ati,’ he said, ‘bring me some leaves with dew on them.’
Together they squeezed the leaves so that the fluid dribbled over Mulvaine’s mouth. His lips were alarmingly swollen and as black as nighttime. His eyelids had bulged out as well, puffed to jammed globes of skin; a green crust had formed at the join and in the corners. The sweat on Mulvaine’s brow felt slimy and cold. His head was pushed back a little way because there were lumpy swellings in his throat, at the junction of jawbone, ear and neck. Tighe tried prying apart his black lips to let the water dribble in, but they were glued together somehow.
‘He is ill,’ said Ati, making a sour face.
Tighe shuffled down to look at Mulvaine’s wounded leg. The blood had stopped flowing and was now as black and sticky as tar. A crust was forming over the top of this jam-like mass, but it was thin and scattered with cracks and lines. The holes left by the thorns seemed to have dried up.
His breast was still rising and falling, but only a very little.
After an hour or so Ravielre and Pelis returned empty-handed; they came scurrying through the foliage. ‘Where is the food?’ complained Ati, throwing his hands in the air in mock anger.
‘We saw a claw-caterpil, I think,’ gasped Pelis. ‘We ran and scrambled up here, but that was what we saw.’
‘No!’ cried Ati.
‘I do not know,’ said Ravielre, hurriedly, ‘that it was a claw-caterpil. I saw something, but it was small – no bigger than the worm we ate yesterday.’
‘But it was coloured differently,’ insisted Pelis. ‘I know it was a claw-caterpil. We must leave – we must go back up.’
‘No,’ said Tighe. It came out quavery, so he restated it more firmly, ‘No. We cannot carry Mulvaine up. We will wait until he is better.’
‘What?’ said Ati severely, turning on Tighe. ‘He will die.’
‘He will be better in a day or two days,’ said Tighe. ‘When he is better we can help him climb back up.’
‘But the claw-caterpils!’
‘I think we are too far upwall for claw-caterpils,’ said Tighe. ‘Remember what Waldea said? They were in the Meshwood, but downwall a long way. That is why the Popes led us through the wood so high up.’
‘The Popes,’ snorted Pelis.
Ati turned on her. ‘Do not mock the Popes!’ he squealed. ‘Do not!’
They squabbled amongst themselves for a long time and Tighe gave up trying to intervene, closing his eyes and retreating into a meditative state. The pain in his groin was definitely starting to ease a little, provided he didn’t jar it at all. When the bickering had died down, he opened his eyes again. ‘We will stay with Mulvaine. Ravielre and Pelis, you must go again and look for food. You can go upwall to look, if you are bothered by the thought of claw-caterpils. Ati, you and I must go again to the spring we found yesterday and bring some water back for Mulvaine.’
Returning with a mouthful of water, Tighe tried to prise apart Mulvaine’s lips. He had to dig his fingers into the unconscious boy’s mouth until he felt teeth, and then tear the flesh apart. As he did so dark brown blood started seeping out of the corners and tracing lines down the cheeks. It looked disgusting. It took a considerable effort of will on Tighe’s part to force his own mouth down to touch the scabby, discoloured, bleeding lips of Mulvaine. He released his amount of water and pulled back to check whether Mulvaine was swallowing it, but it was very hard to tell. ‘You, Ati, now. Your turn,’ he said, but Ati swallowed his own water himself and made loud noises of disgust. ‘His lips are unclean, revolting,’ he said. ‘You say he will wake up – he can drink for himself when he wakes up.’
Tighe could not think of a proper way to express his exasperation.
An hour passed in sullen silence between them before Ravielre and Pelis returned. Ravielre had a couple of stringy, finger-length worms clutched in his left hand and was carrying the lapis-lazuli shell of a fist-sized beetle under his arm. He held the beetle out to them, shell down, and its myriad eyelash-like legs all around the rim wriggled and twitched. Pelis had an array of smaller insects tucked in the fold of her shirt.
The problem with small insects is that the eater must discard most of the beast – shell, legs – and is left with only a tiny morsel. The four of them picked their way through the array of food, but the feast lasted only minutes and left each of them feeling unsatisfied and still empty. The blue-shelled beetle was too foul-tasting to eat, although Ravielre, more hungry (he declared) than the others, tried for longer with this. The worms were good, but there were few enough of them.
Afterwards they sat listlessly and chattered amongst themselves, Ravielre and Pelis in one another’s arms quite openly. ‘Shall we really go home?’ asked Pelis.
‘We shall all go home,’ said Tighe, his head humming with the thrill of what he was saying. ‘Every one of us. Including Mulvaine, I promise it.’
‘You will come to my home then,’ said Pelis, reaching up and running her knuckles gently under Ravielre’s chin. ‘You will come and meet my mother and her consort, and my grandmother also. How they will admire you!’
But Ravielre said nothing to this. With a small start, Tighe realised that his eyes were full of tears. As one, the others realised that he was mourning Bel.
There was an awkward silence. Ravielre said nothing, only turned away, putting his face towards the wall.
The mood had deflated.
Later all four of them went out searching for more food. Tighe had recovered enough to be more agile in the hunt, hopping from branch to branch. He came back with a fist full of ants and an enormously long worm, as long as two men’s height, but thinner than the smallest finger. This was wriggly and difficult, so he tore off the head; it remained wriggly so he tore off the tail. Even then it was difficult to hold, twisting and shuggling, so he tied it around his waist like a rope or a tether and made his way back to Mulvaine’s sleeping body.
The others returned with similar pickings, except for Pelis, who had captured another of the fat grey worms. They all ate fully, laughing and chattering, until they felt their bellies bulge with food.
That night Tighe slept well for the first time he could remember in a long time. There were no strange dreams, no pains woke him; only the cold pressed itself on his consciousness, so that he was aware of being half awake, half asleep, and not comfortable in the dark before the dawn gale. When the dawn gale started, Tighe pressed himself closer against Ati. He felt a strange sense of comfort; that he was close against the warm body of Ati, that the anger and tumult of the dawn winds were out there, out past the forest. That he was safe.
The winds were particul
arly wet this morning and he felt the moisture pricking against his body. He unhooked a hand from its position around Ati’s body and ran his palm over his own side and leg, over his forehead, scooping up some of the moisture and pressing the wet skin against his lips. It felt cool, refreshing. The thought of Mulvaine’s blackened puffed lips occurred to him, but he consoled himself by thinking that the dawn gale was probably blowing moisture against Mulvaine’s sleeping lips, perhaps filling his belly with water. Precious water; the thought of it was almost like drinking.
He lay, his eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the dawn gale receding, until the larger roar vanished and he could hear the shuddering of all the leaves, the sucking and rustling noises of branches trembling, droplets falling and settling. It was a pleasant, musical sound.
Tighe opened his eyes. The sounds were amazingly suggestive. It was strange to think that something as simple as water settling and leaves rustling could sound so human. It was like a baby suckling at breast. It made Tighe think of life in the village; he remembered when a girl called Intershe had given birth to her baby, she used to feed it on the market shelf and it had made a sound like that. Or goats at teat, snuffling and slurping. He thought of his pashe. He had a vivid picture of her face in his mind; her smiling at him, warm and loving.
Grandhe Jaffiahe had killed her. Pushed her off the world. Tighe felt misery tangle in his stomach. He had forgotten that fact; it had simply fallen out of his mind. He had squeezed the memories away like milking a goat. And the old refrain returned to him; the littleness of it all. After all he had seen, the great battle clash between two empires, war that shook the whole wall – the stakes so enormous. The idea that Grandhe would murder his own daughter just to claim a few goats, just to consolidate his own position as head of the village! It was absurd, petty. It was tiny-minded. And this in turn recalled Tighe to his sense of things. Perhaps that was nothing more than appropriate because the whole towering expanse of the worldwall was nothing more than a miniature, an experiment by a limited god.
These thoughts soured Tighe’s mood. He disengaged his embrace from Ati and sat upright, concentrating as he did so on the pain in his groin. But that seemed more or less to have gone away.
He rubbed his eyes and looked over towards Mulvaine.
The origin of the sucking, gobbling noise became apparent.
A beast – evidently a claw-caterpil, although it was much smaller than Waldea’s descriptions had led Tighe to expect – was grazing on Mulvaine’s leg. It had chewed its way through the knee completely, so that the lower part of the leg was now detached from Mulvaine’s body and dangled below him held up only by the material of his trousers. The claw-caterpil was now munching its way up Mulvaine’s thigh, grazing on Mulvaine’s flesh as its tiny counterpart might do upon a leaf.
‘No!’ screamed Tighe. ‘No!’
He jumped up and leapt towards it.
The claw-caterpil was grey-green, as thick around the waist as Tighe himself, although stood on end it would not have been quite as tall. Its segmented back was bristling with thick pale-brown hairs and shorter blacker hairs sprouted from between the plates. At the side fleshier skin was pulsing and heaving as the beast sucked in the flesh its black twitching jaws were breaking off from the exposed surface of Mulvaine’s leg. The sucking was interspersed with a crunching noise as bone was ground down and sucked up.
Tighe grabbed a branch and tugged violently, pulling several times before it broke free. Then he launched forward and started beating the claw-caterpil. The foliage softened the blow and it was hard to bring it down with any force. The claw-caterpil ignored Tighe’s assault as if nothing were happening.
The others were up now, crying and calling out in horror. Tighe felt some part of his mind go very clear. He ripped the leaf-bearing thinner branches from the body of his meshwood club, tearing frantically. In moments it was nothing more than a naked spar of wood.
He stepped up to the enormous insect and began striking it hard across its bony plated back. For the first time the claw-caterpil stopped what it was doing; the hideous slurping noises ceased and the thing curled its head round to fix Tighe with a stone-like glare. Its eyes were two clusters of tiny balls, like millions of tiny black insect eggs fixed to the sides of its head. Beneath these eyes its mouth parts, messy with threads of flesh and smeared with blood, worked open and shut.
Momentarily Tighe experienced a spike of fear, like a moment of clarity in the middle of a temper tantrum. The monstrosity of the creature was fearsome. It regarded him with an appalling purity of expression. Tighe felt an almost irrepressible urge to drop his stick and run, as far and as fast as he could. This was unbearable, the gaze of the monster was unbearable. But his arms were acting almost without the control of his mind.
They used the stick as a form of lever, digging it underneath the softer belly of the claw-caterpil and hoiking it up with all the strength in Tighe’s muscles. The claw-caterpil reacted with terrifying speed, curling round and snapping with its jaws; but the motion of the branch was already pushing it away and the jaw parts clicked shut on nothing. Then it was in the air, twisting and curling upon itself as it fell.
There was a crash and a rattle of leaves and the monster vanished down-wall amongst the branches of the Meshwood.
Tighe was gasping; there were tears in his eyes, he realised; tears thick on his cheek. He had to sit down on the trunk because his legs were wobbling so violently with the shock. His heart was hammering.
The others were all about him. ‘Tighe!’ Ati was saying, over and over. ‘Tighe! Tighe!’
‘I knew I saw one,’ wailed Pelis. ‘I knew they’re here.’
Tighe’s breathing was settling a little, although the tears were still coming out of his eyes. He wiped them away with trembling fingers and climbed to his feet, leaning on Ati until he was properly upright.
‘What shall we do?’ asked Ravielre. ‘What shall we do?’
Tighe went over to the body of Mulvaine. He looked grotesque, less and less recognisable. His face was distorted so utterly that he no longer looked like Mulvaine. He barely even resembled a human being. His cheeks and mouth were massed up and the skin was cracked and broken; there were boils of some kind clustered around his tight-shut eyes. His hair was a messy tangle. The missing leg looked less deforming, in a strange way, because of the way he was lying, which gave the impression that he had tucked it underneath himself.
Tighe leant over him. Astonishingly he was still breathing, his chest still rising shallowly.
‘He is still alive!’ Tighe announced. ‘He is still alive!’
They all gathered round. ‘The wound – his leg,’ said Ravielre. ‘It is not bleeding. How can it not be bleeding?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Tighe.
Pelis kept looking about her, expecting more of the claw-caterpils to come sliding out of the leaves. ‘We can’t stay,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Tighe. ‘That is right.’
‘How horrible it was!’ said Ati, wrapping both his arms about his head to hide himself from the Universe. ‘How horrible! That God would make such monsters!’
‘The worldwall is cluttered with marvels,’ said Tighe drily. ‘Mulvaine is still alive. We must carry him upwall.’
There was a chorus of moans. ‘No, no,’ said Ravielre. ‘He is too ill. He is dead already.’
‘Not dead,’ said Tighe. He felt a powerful intensity in him now, after the initial panic had settled. The incident had cleared his head. There is something purgative about fear – after the event, at any rate.
‘We cannot carry him!’
‘He is half-devoured!’
‘He will attract more of the claw-caterpils,’ said Pelis.
‘We will carry him,’ said Tighe. ‘This we will do.’
‘He only has one leg,’ said Ati, whining.
‘Then he will weigh less to carry,’ said Tighe sharply. ‘Come, Ati, you and I will start. We will carry him between us. When we are ti
red, you and you, Ravielre and Pelis, will carry him.’
4
They made slow progress going up.
Mulvaine, who had slept through the experience of being half eaten alive by a claw-caterpil, started moaning and shifting as soon as they moved his body. He tried to turn over, muttering. Tighe examined the wound at the end of his thigh; it was covered in some sticky saliva-like substance, which was presumably what prevented it from bleeding out. Perhaps the monsters especially relished blood, Tighe thought; their spit kept their victims from bleeding dry. Tighe then – although it made his stomach turn over – plucked the severed bottom of Mulvaine’s leg from the cradle made by the material of his trousers. He held it in both hands: a naked human leg, bloody at one end. There was a strange smell to it, not merely the blood, but a fiercely pungent and foetid smell at the wound. The skin near the top looked green and was starting to decompose, although the foot looked so exactly like a human foot, down to the horny toenails and the tiny hairs growing out of the tops of the toes, that it was somehow deeply saddening. Tighe took it by the ankle and hurled it as far as he could, hearing it rattle through the leaves in the distance.
They carried Mulvaine up and along to the spring, where they all drank. It took them most of the morning and they twitched or cried out in terror at every rustle in the blanket of leaves.
At the spring Tighe had the idea of laying Mulvaine under the flow of water, so that it washed down over his swollen face. Tighe reached into the splashing to lever apart his lips to make sure water was going into his mouth, and with a lurch Mulvaine started coughing. So they pulled him out of the line of water and he shuddered and thrashed back and forward.
They sat him up with his back against the wall. He mumbled something, but the words were lost amongst the sloppiness and mess of his lips. Then he fell asleep again and they could not rouse him.
‘Should we wash his wound?’ suggested Pelis. ‘In the spring, perhaps?’
Tighe considered: ‘I think the claw-caterpil spit keeps the blood from coming out,’ he said. ‘I think we should not disturb it.’