by Adam Roberts
‘Speak Tanaha?’
Tighe shook his head again.
‘You only speak Imperial?’ screeched this figure, waving his hands in disgust. ‘What use that?’
‘I also speak my native tongue, the language of my village,’ said Tighe levelly, in his own tongue. The stranger shook his head and went on.
Another hour or more and two soldiers arrived, armed with sharpened metal pokers which they waved over their heads to intimidate the prisoners. ‘You all march now,’ they said. Their Imperial was not very good either.
The shorter of these two tied tethers to tethers, linking each of the seven into a chain of people. Then, one at the front and one at the back, they led the captured Imperials out of the fort and east along the ledge.
It was late in the day by the time they left the fort and Tighe was so hungry and thirsty that he barely registered his surroundings. The sun was high and the sky bright. They trudged along a sequence of connected ledges, very little overhung. By the time of the dulling of the sky they had reached a pen, of the sort used for animals. It was already crammed with people, most sitting on the ground looking down with heavy and miserable heads.
‘Here!’ barked the guards. ‘In.’
There was a gate, complete with a small guardhouse. As each of the prisoners passed this station, one of the guards pressed a block against their necks. Tighe could see that they were being printed with some coloured device.
Inside, they were tied to a post, at which a dozen others were also tethered. There were several of these posts poking up in the compound.
‘Here you come,’ said one of the prisoners already present, with a weary sigh. ‘More of you.’
9
When the dusk gale started up, the guards vanished inside their guardhouse, but the many prisoners clustered together about their poles. There was something frantic about this struggling knot of bodies; many of the prisoners were whimpering with fear.
Tighe found himself crushed between a fat man and a skinny, sharp-elbowed woman. He could hear the ferocious dusk winds rise in volume and could feel the air twisting and tugging at his clothes. It was fearful. He was sobbing, quietly, to himself. Others were howling. It was the wrath of God, hoping to pull them off the wall with the power of His breath.
The dusk gale howled, raged and finally died down. When the air stilled, the knot of people loosened and Tighe was able to separate himself out, to lie down.
He slept poorly because the crush of people was such that he was frequently jostled and shoved. When the pre-dawn winds started up, people started shifting uneasily and a general moan of misery rose from the assembled people. Tighe was caught up in the crush again and again was shielded from the brunt of the winds by the others who were around him.
The winds eventually died away and the crowds of people disentangled themselves with something approaching a collective sigh.
Tighe licked the moisture left by the morning wind off his free arm.
After an hour or so guards went amongst the people and distributed food: small portions of grass-bread with insects and larger ones of plain stalkgrass. Tighe ate in silence.
Later still the guards returned with the first of a series of strangers. This was a tall, bulky man dressed in fluffy patches of cloth that adhered to sections of his body by some inner traction: around his loins, his chest, his knees and elbows. They looked as insubstantial as clouds, but the pink material rustled heavily as he moved amongst the crowds.
‘Who’s that?’ Tighe asked, of the person sitting next to him.
‘A manmonger,’ his companion replied.
‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said the other, wearily. ‘You don’t know what a manmonger is?’
‘No.’
‘Watch and you’ll see,’ was the reply. The other person lay down and curled up in a ball, rubbing at the chafed skin around wrist and ankle where the tether had left a mark. After a while he spoke again. ‘A manmonger buys and sells people. Didn’t you know that?’
‘No,’ said Tighe, catching his breath. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Your accent is strange,’ said the other, but he said nothing more and soon seemed to be asleep.
Tighe watched the manmonger go amongst the crowds of people, picking out a dozen or so. Then he retreated inside the guardhouse with one of the Otre soldiers. When they both emerged they were grinning and the manmonger untethered eight individuals, retying them after his own fashion and leading them away.
After this, people came amongst the individuals regularly. One, a man with unusually long legs and unusually short arms, a slightly freakish combination, paused for a while beside Tighe.
‘I like your skin,’ he said, paddling his stumpy fingers over Tighe’s forearm. Tighe, uncertain what to do, sat motionless. ‘You’d make an interesting commodity.’
The guard, standing beside this manmonger, looked bored. He said something in Otre to the figure, who wrinkled his face in displeasure and looked back. There was a brief exchange and the manmonger stood up.
‘Do you speak Otre?’ he asked.
Tighe shook his head.
‘It’s so stupid. None of these commodities speak Otre. That’ll lower the price.’ The manmonger turned and bickered with the guard for a while, and then moved on.
Later that day another manmonger came by. The guard made a great show of pointing out Tighe from the mass of individuals and ran his hand over his own face several times. Tighe guessed he was referring to his skin colour.
The Manmonger squatted down to examine Tighe more closely. He was a slender man of indeterminate age; there was a starburst of fine lines from the corner of each eye and his neck looked older than the rest of him. His skin was pale brown and looked sunburnt and extremely dry. When he spoke, his voice sounded dry too, as if all moisture had been dried out of him by the sun.
‘How old?’ he said softly.
‘Eight,’ said Tighe.
The Manmonger shook his head. ‘Older,’ he said. He felt the meat of Tighe’s forearms for thickness, and peered into his eyes. Then he stood up and started into a lengthy discussion with the guard.
Tighe watched, feeling disengaged from events. There seemed to be some disagreement. The guard kept gesturing behind him at the guardhouse, perhaps suggesting that they should go inside to negotiate terms. But the Manmonger merely shook his head, letting his lank hair flop, and folded his arms. He unfolded them several times to point to one or other commodity in the pen, but each time he refolded. After ten or fifteen minutes of this incomprehensible chatter, the Manmonger put out a hand and touched the guard’s elbow, stopping him in full flow. He turned his head to look at Tighe.
‘You speak Otre?’ he asked, in his dry-leaves voice.
‘No,’ said Tighe faintly.
This precipitated another lengthy discussion between the two men. The Manmonger would shake his head gently from side to side and the guard became more and more agitated.
Suddenly, abruptly, the talking stopped. The Manmonger was down at Tighe’s side, unlatching the complex knot of the tether at his ankle. With pressure under his arm, he pulled Tighe upright and then pulled his free arm behind him. It felt good to have the pressure relieved from his sore ankle, but the Manmonger almost straight away tied Tighe’s left wrist to his right one behind his back. He tied the tether tightly and then ran the spare length of tether up to Tighe’s neck, fixing the rope around and under his chin. It meant that he couldn’t pull down with his hands too far without choking himself.
The Manmonger was carrying a leather satchel and reached inside to pull out a number of small objects, handing these over to the guard. Then he led Tighe away, towards the gateway and the guard house.
He tied Tighe to the gateway post next to a red-haired girl and a scrawny-looking boy with a tiny, circular nose. Both were tied the same way as Tighe, hands behind their back and the tether running up and around their necks. The red-haired girl was staring into space. Tighe
offered a tentative hello, but she ignored it. The young boy was sniffing loudly; there were boils on his skin and his pebble nose was dribbling snot. Tighe said hello to him; but he seemed so caught up in the misery of his illness that he didn’t reply.
Soon enough the Manmonger returned to them with another commodity: a dark-haired girl with a wide dark mouth and narrow features, tethered the same way. The pebble-nosed boy with the sores was sneezing intermittently. The Manmonger stood back from his purchases and examined them with a passionless eye.
The boy stopped sneezing. There was a moment of quiet.
‘You belong to me now,’ he said in queerly accented Imperial. ‘I take you east, trade you for goats maybe. You give me trouble, I give you pain. Maybe death. You understand?’
Nobody said anything by way of reply. This seemed to suit the Manmonger, who pulled Tighe forward and started marching eastward along the ledge.
They walked for the rest of the day and at the dusk gale they pushed altogether into a crevice in the wall. After the wind died down, the Manmonger took some food from his sack and ate it. He offered nothing to the four commodities.
The following day he marched them quickly along eastward-leading ledges and crags. To begin with the ways were busy with other people: grey-suited Otre soldiers, other manmongers leading short or long trains of commodities, ordinary people passing to and fro. By ninety or so, however, they had passed on to grassier, less-travelled ledges. The day went on and the Manmonger and his four commodities were soon alone.
That night they slept on an open ledge, albeit one quite heavily overhung. The Manmonger drove four short stakes of wood into the turf and tied the commodities to them. When the dusk gale came, Tighe hung on to this post desperately. But the winds did not seem as severe as he remembered from his childhood.
Soon there was the starlit dark and a perfect quiet, broken only by the sniffing of the sick boy. Tighe, achingly hungry, was so tired after his day’s marching that he fell quickly asleep.
10
The following morning, the Manmonger untied the four of them from the posts, pulling the stumps of wood from the ledge and stowing them in his sack. Without a word he started them marching again.
Nobody said anything. The only sound was the incessant noise of the pebble-nosed boy sniffing and coughing. He had to stop when a particularly severe coughing fit took him and this slowed the progress of the four of them.
Nobody said a word. With each delay the Manmonger would come and stare at the sick boy.
Tighe was still limping. The Manmonger stopped at midday and drove one of his stumps into the ledge. Then he looped all the leather leads from the commodities’ necks round one another and tied them all to the single stump. When he had finished, he sighed and sat down on the lip of the ledge, chewing stalkgrass and staring out at the sun. Its white circle was hazy, blurred by a shifting bulk of cloud. Further out from the wall the wind was falling so hard that the circle of the sun appeared to deform in the twisting airwaves, to shudder and give little spurts of dancing.
The four commodities sat together. Tighe rubbed his hands against one another. Tethered behind his back, his wrists burned. His calves ached with the constant tramping up and down along the ledges and crags. His mouth was uncomfortable, his lips dotted with chips of dryness. If the Manmonger would unbind his hands, he could chew some of the stalkgrass and moisten himself a little. Maybe that and some food. If the Manmonger had any food for them. It was hard watching him eat his own food, the neat strips of dried goat and small portions of grass-bread in his knapsack. But he would presumably feed them soon. He had to look after them, surely, his commodities – they’d hardly be worth anything at his destination thin and ill with hunger. Tighe looked at the others, but they all had their eyes cast down on the ground. The dark-haired girl was rocking backwards and forwards a little. The pebble-nosed boy was sniffing loudly. The sores around his nose were bulging and more were appearing around his mouth. His smell was urgently bad.
‘I’m thirsty,’ Tighe said, suddenly, not even looking at the Man-monger.
The silence seemed to intensify. Tighe felt his heart speed. I’ve done nothing wrong, he told himself. Surely the Manmonger didn’t want his commodities to degrade? Surely he didn’t want them to degrade by the time they reached the point of sale?
Look at the man. Meet his gaze.
Fighting himself, Tighe turned his head. The Manmonger was looking directly at him. His blank eyes were motionless, focused on Tighe.
‘And the Sun?’ he said, in a rasping voice.
Tighe didn’t know what to say. His stomach was clenching horribly. There was some powerful emotion roiling inside him, though he kept his face straight. With the shock of recognition he realised he was terrified. He had been too scared to realise he was scared. The last week, or however long it had been since the Meshwood, had been a damped-down, numb time. He had forgotten he had the ability to feel. But he was feeling now; feeling scared. He continued looking directly at the Manmonger.
‘You think She cares? She is strong. She is strength.’ He turned back and pulled out another handful of stalkgrass. Tighe couldn’t take his eyes from the Manmonger’s back. His own heart was jerking enormously in his chest. He was breathing hard. ‘The winds drink up our water,’ the Manmonger was saying, his voice more difficult to follow now he was facing away from them. ‘They are male, the winds, and so they are weak, and they get thirsty and they lick up the water that lies on the crevice. And they get hungry so they pull people from the ledges. But She is greater than that. She will drink up the whole world as fire soon enough.’
There was a silence. Tighe rubbed his hands against one another again behind his back, trying to calm himself. Breathe deeply. Breathe. Again, breathe. The Manmonger said something else, but a sudden buffet of wind took the words. When the noise faded, he was chanting, apparently reciting something. ‘The Sun was the first of all things. She floated from ledge to ledge. But the rudeness of the winds, tugging at her clothing, pulling her skin free from her perfect body, drove her away.’
He stopped and there was only the sniffing of the sick pebble-nosed boy.
The Manmonger got to his feet so slowly that his knees clicked. The noise reminded Tighe of Grandhe Jaffiahe; his old joints had pocked and cracked with every motion. The Manmonger was standing over him. ‘Still, at least you asked. Some courage there.’ He sighed, looking down at his commodities.
‘I was only thinking,’ said Tighe, his voice popping a little with the fear of speaking, ‘that we’d make more valuable commodities if cared for a little.’
Silence.
‘Valuable,’ said the Manmonger after a while, as if testing the concept out.
‘I’m hungry,’ said one of the girls, the one with the red hair, in a tiny voice. Her Imperial was heavily accented.
Tighe cleared his throat, ready to say something else, emboldened a little; but, behind him, the sick boy sneezed enormously, and something wet struck the back of Tighe’s neck. He shuddered and cried out in disgust. The red-haired girl was chuckling and the sick boy’s sniffs increased in depth and frequency.
The Manmonger came over to the group of commodities in little steps, a strange expression on his face. A strand of stalk-grass projected from his mouth. With a little dextrous fiddling he unloosed the sick boy’s tether and dragged him out from the group. The boy came willingly, a miserable but musical note in the back of his throat. The Manmonger pushed him down and then squatted in front of him. ‘So what’s the matter with you, then?’ he asked, his dry voice like an old man’s.
The sick boy sniffed, and wriggled his hands behind his back. He tried to wipe his dribbling nose against his own shoulder.
The Manmonger pulled up another blade of stalkgrass and used it to prod a little at the sores on the boy’s face. There was something almost tender in the way he did this. Then he caught his own leather sleeve up with his thumb and front finger, and used the resulting stretch of leather to wipe
the boy’s nose for him.
‘He’ll get better,’ said Tighe, on a sudden rushing impulse. ‘By the time we get to where you’re going, he’ll be in a good condition to sell. Maybe only a little drink and perhaps some food.’
The Manmonger seemed to be ignoring him, staring hard into the sick boy’s face. ‘Food,’ he repeated, softly. Tighe did think he ought to say something like ‘Yes’, to agree with him to keep his mood good, or at least keep the conversation going. But something in the Manmonger’s manner put him off.
All four of the commodities were staring at the Manmonger.
Tighe was suddenly very certain that the Manmonger was going to hit the sick boy; to beat him for being sick. There was an ever-present hint of violence to come in the softness of the man’s voice. That was it, Tighe realised. The promise of violence, like the winds being held back just before dusk, ready to come roaring out and pull things from the ledge. Tighe realised he was holding his breath, waiting for it to happen. A voice inside his head was scolding him for having spoken out at all.
Then, with a release of the tension inside him, Tighe saw that the Manmonger was untying the thong from around the boy’s neck. With careful fingers he picked open the knot and then opened the noose and slipped it up over the kid’s head. A puckered line of red marked the boy’s white skin where the thong had been.
The sick boy was staring up at the Manmonger’s face as he did this. His eyes were wide with hope.
The Manmonger slapped the boy’s legs, pushing them together, and retied the tether around his two ankles. It occurred to Tighe to wonder how the sick boy was supposed to walk, with his feet tied together. Wouldn’t it be better to tie only one ankle?
Without getting up, the Manmonger reached over and retrieved his pack from the lip of the ledge. He unhooked it and picked out another stump, which he forced into the turf in front of him. Then he tied the sick boy’s tether to this new stump. He reached again for the pack and this time brought out a knife. For a moment Tighe didn’t register what this artefact was. Thought it was a flask, perhaps something medicinal. There was the edge of misunderstanding about the whole sequence of events. The Manmonger was settling back on to the floor in front of the boy. Tighe didn’t have time to be shocked, couldn’t quite process what was happening. The Manmonger sank his fingers into the mass of the sick boy’s hair and angled the head back. With a swift flick he pushed the end of the knife through the stretched neck, a little above the adam’s apple. Almost as part of the same movement, the Manmonger shifted his sitting weight back and kicked out with both his feet. Scattering blood in a glittering arc, the sick boy’s body lurched to the side and over the edge. The tether whickered and tautened suddenly, heaving at the stump.