On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Gone, over the edge of the wall.

  It still didn’t quite register. Tighe couldn’t quite grasp it. Some extreme remedy, folk medicine, somehow. Something. But the shine of midday sun through the red rag of falling blood refused to fit.

  The dark-haired girl was sobbing, swift, stifled bursts of air. The red-haired girl was staring at the floor. Tighe wasn’t sure she had even seen. But no, of course she had seen. They had all been watching the sequence of events with minute attention.

  Tighe realised his own eyes were wet. Why? His breath seemed to be coming in slow draws.

  The Manmonger went back over to his seat on the lip of the ledge. His knife, blood still on it, sat on the grass. The sick boy’s blood made a mark like a dark slug trail to the edge. Presently the Manmonger got to his feet and began gathering some snatches of stalkgrass. He went further along the ledge and climbed up a little to pull down a withered old ledge-bush. Three pairs of eyes followed his every movement. He came back with the kindling and the woody tendrils of the bush and lit a small fire, chiming sparks from a flint until the old grass caught, feeding the little fire and eventually making a smouldering heap of stalks. Then, still watched by everybody, he hauled the sick boy’s body back up to the ledge and laid it down on the grass.

  The clothes were mostly vegetable cloth, rotten, and were ripped away easily. The Manmonger examined them, checking if anything was salvageable, but it was junk, so it went on the fire. Then he crouched over the nude corpse, peering minutely at the skin – checking it, Tighe realised with a lurch, for sores. But, apart from the face, the skin seemed clear.

  The sun was high in the sky now and the ledge was filling with shadow. Tighe was shivering, but not, he thought, from the cold. He watched, blinking rarely, as the Manmonger butchered the boy as deftly as he might a goat. He turned the body over, where strands of grass were sticking to its white back and narrow buttocks. Then he cut briskly through the spine at the back of the neck and sawed round to the front. With a heaving cut the head was free. The Manmonger picked it up and looked more closely at it, peering at the sores. They had lost of lot of their raging colour when the body had been drained of blood, but they were still obvious and disfiguring. The Manmonger seemed to be considering if there were anything that could be redeemed from the head, but it didn’t take long for him to make up his mind and he tossed the ball carelessly over the edge.

  Tighe wasn’t looking at the Manmonger now; he was mesmerised by the headless body lying on the ledge. The bony body of the boy, with shoulder blades poking up like rocks and the bumpy line of the spine drawing the eye up towards the neck; only there was no head, nothing to complete the picture. There was something monstrous here. The Manmonger was retrieving something from his pack. A smaller sack, also made of leather, that unpeeled and opened up into a flat piece of skin. Inside was a pile of grey powder that Tighe only belatedly realised was precious salt; bought from the pans of the canyon ledges away to the west.

  Then the Manmonger was back at the body, cutting away first the right arm and skinning it expertly; then the left, then the legs, the buttocks, the small of the back and the top of the torso. He turned the dismembered body that remained over and carved some more from the belly. Finally he cut free some of the ribs and poked his knife end amongst the viscera. Blood was leeching out all over the grass. He had worked quickly. Had it been a goat, Tighe would have spent several hours salvaging good meat from the carcass before giving the rest as fodder for village pigs. But the Manmonger seemed easily satisfied, and he kicked the remainder over the edge in a desultory fashion.

  He cut prime pieces from the arms and legs and wrapped the fillets in the salt bag, stowing it back in his pack. Then he fed the fire with some of the bush twigs, so that it chuckled and threw up flames. He picked up the bones and dumped them on the fire to cook up the marrow. Then he took some of the lesser cuts and packed them in mud to stop them singeing. By the time he put them on the fire they were shapeless lumps of brown.

  The smell of cooking meat made Tighe’s hungry stomach inside him twist. He felt sick.

  Soon enough the Manmonger was pulling out bones with a stick and cracking them open with his knife. He scooped out the bubbling marrow and ate it still hot, slapping his lips together noisily and panting with satisfaction. Then he chewed a mouthful of grass, presumably for the moisture. He pulled the mud balls out of the fire with a stick and cracked them open with his knife. The meat inside smoked, and the smell was so like freshly cooked goat – that sweet luxury – that Tighe’s mouth watered. More than watered: saliva dribbled down his chin. He hated himself for that.

  The Manmonger seemed to be in a better mood now. That made some sort of sense. He had been eating nothing more than a few strips of salted goat’s meat and some pieces of grass-bread. He was a thin man, stretched, used to meagre rations. Here was a sudden, luscious feast of tasty meat and fat. He sat cross-legged and devoured one portion of meat from the mud, absorbed wholly in the meal. By the end he was grinning. Then he picked out a piece of meat on the end of his knife, and got to his feet. It was the red-haired girl he went to, holding the little piece of cooked flesh in front of him.

  He sat down in front of her, only holding the morsel in front of her mouth. She stared at him, not with horror or fascination but with a kind of dumb blankness; but she did not open her lips. After a while he laughed, a deep growly sound. ‘Not hungry yet, not there yet,’ speaking almost to himself and he popped the meat into his own mouth. ‘Give it a couple of days, give it a week, you’ll be different. You’ll watch me feasting like an Emperor every night and you’ll start to thinking why should I go without?’ He got up again and returned to the fire.

  For a long time he simply sat, finishing off his meal. Then, as the shadow crept down the wall, he lay down with his knife still in his hand and fell asleep.

  His three remaining commodities stared at him. Nobody moved; nobody tried to free themselves from their tethers, although it would have been easy enough to do. It was (the thought rose in Tighe’s head) as if he had fastened them with a more than material tether.

  The Manmonger twitched in his dreams.

  After a period, some hours, he woke suddenly and lurched upwards with his eyes wide. It took a moment for him to orient himself. The fire had burnt itself out. He held his knife out in front of him. Then he rubbed his face with his clear hand and breathed noisily in and out through his nose.

  He prodded the fire with his foot to check that there was no more heat in it, and then he went and sat on the lip of the ledge one more time. His head was back now, as if (Tighe thought) in sleep; but, no, he was only looking up after the swift rising sun. There was a pink tint to the white-blue of the sky that Tighe could see, which must mean that it was nearly time for the sun to go over the wall.

  Then, without saying anything, the Manmonger got to his feet and paced over to his commodities. He still had his knife in his right hand, but he put it into a pocket of his leather jacket as he unfastened the tether of (Tighe’s heart pummelled, he couldn’t immediately see which one) the red-haired girl (despite himself, Tighe felt a rush of relief). She was rigid as a wooden woman, but he yanked her and pulled her away from the group.

  The sick boy’s free tether was lying on the ground and the Manmonger hooked it around her ankle (only one ankle, Tighe noticed), and tied her to the other stump. Then he retrieved his knife and simply pushed her to the ground, himself on top of her. With his knife he reached down to cut through the cheap cloth of her trousers before pressing the blade against her neck. Tighe couldn’t see clearly what was going on. He could see that the red-haired girl was lying completely motionless, her left leg trembling slightly. Her pink flesh was visible now through the rips in her trousers and Tighe could see the tremor that passed up and down it. But otherwise she held herself completely still as the Manmonger loosened his own trousers with his free hand. Then his form was juddering over hers, a weird pulsing motion as if he were seized by convulsions
. It didn’t last long and then he seemed to be asleep again, lying directly on top of her, his knife still at her neck.

  Tighe watched; the motionlessness of the scene seemed more terrible than the action. His own wick betrayed him. He shuddered. He tried to fix his eyes on the colour of the sky, trying to trace with his eyes the subtle gradations of colour. He rubbed his hands against one another behind his back, as much as he was able. But his eye was caught by movement; the Manmonger’s body was in jerky motion again, heaving and bouncing. On, on, stop. Then he was adjusting himself and climbing off her.

  Later, during the dusk gale, the three commodities were forced to huddle together with the Manmonger, pressing in against the back of the wall to avoid being blown off. Tighe was so revolted by the stench of the Manmonger’s skin that he hardly noticed how feeble the dusk gale was. But as it drained to nothing he did feel surprised; it seemed to him that the gale had somehow got stuck in a preliminary phase, as if it had not developed its proper ferocity.

  The Manmonger removed himself from his charges, checked their tethers in the darkness, and curled himself up in his blanket.

  It was not that night, but rather the following day, that Tighe realised – with a sickening sense of belatedness that made the realisation more painful to him – that the Manmonger had never intended to sell them as commodities at a near-by village. He could sell the three of them and maybe have enough for one goat; but why would he want to eat one goat when he could feast on all of them and eat three times as much? Tighe realised that, from his own point of view, this was a special time for him, a time to indulge himself, a sort of holiday.

  In the morning the Manmonger took out one of his pieces of human flesh and ate it, wiping a rag over the dewy grass and chomping on it to relieve his morning thirst. There were no rags for the others. Taking his cue from the other two commodities, Tighe fell to the floor and licked the wet grass. For a while his thirst was satisfied, but that only made his hunger more acute.

  The Manmonger sat grinning at them. ‘Hungry?’ he asked them in Imperial. ‘Hungry?’

  The three of them sat and stared at him. Tighe had a sudden flash of Ati, of Ati’s head twisted round through a terrible angle. It forced a spurt of anger up through his chest and he coughed. ‘You’ll devour us all,’ he said. ‘You are evil man.’ Twist his neck, the way Ati’s neck had been twisted!

  ‘I am reputable Manmonger,’ the grinning man said. ‘Evil? I have a full belly. That is the difference. There is no good and evil, there are only full bellies and empty ones. We have a long march today.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Tighe, emboldened. It hardly seemed to matter any more; if he was going to die then he would die, and cowering and being frightened would not avert the destiny.

  The Manmonger pulled back his lips to show off all his teeth all the way to the roots. ‘You are bold,’ he said, ‘bold. Perhaps I eat you next and that way I digest your boldness into me.’ He laughed.

  ‘Where are we going?’ persevered Tighe.

  ‘East,’ said the Manmonger.

  ‘To your home?’

  ‘My home is with the Goddess the Sun,’ said the Manmonger, as he busied himself packing up his belongings and tying up his clothes.

  ‘You are not Otre, I think,’ said Tighe.

  ‘And you are not Imperial,’ returned the Manmonger, ‘though you speak the language. We come from all different portions and levels of the wall, but we all return to the One.’ He turned to the sky and made a complicated obeisance to the sun. ‘Now,’ he said, returning to his commodities and untying their hands, ‘there, you are free. It is time to march I think.’

  The going was much easier with free hands. That day they marched in line along a series of mostly untrodden ledges, few of them overhung at all. Some were so virgin that their slope had not even been levelled, and they angled sharply away at forty or fifty degrees, which made them dangerous to traverse. The Manmonger himself crossed these spaces easily enough, but the two girls, miserable, hungry and scared, whimpered and clung together.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ chided the Manmonger. ‘If one of you falls then you take the other with you! You Imperial types are so stupid. Why should I lose both of you at once?’

  ‘Leave them be!’ snapped Tighe. ‘They are scared. You have scared them. Can you not see they are scared?’

  The Manmonger, smiling broadly, stepped up to Tighe. ‘The day when I find your spirit entertaining,’ he said, ‘and the day when I find it irritating are often the same day.’ He reached up and grabbed Tighe’s hair in a sudden, snake-strike movement, holding the head steady, and then he pressed a grimy finger against Tighe’s eye. With a heart-trilling moment of fear Tighe felt certain that the Manmonger was going to gouge the eye out altogether. It all happened too rapidly for him to struggle; but with a twist of the finger the dirty nail wormed its way into Tighe’s eyelid and then with a focus of pain the whole finger’s end went under and pulled the lid away from the eye.

  The girls gasped. ‘Now,’ said the Manmonger, straining Tighe’s eyelid painfully away from his eye. ‘I could snap this out with a flick of my finger. You want? Then you’d have no eyelid, and your eye would quickly go blind in the excess of light. The sun would drink your eyesight as a sacrifice. You want that? I could do it with both eyelids, perhaps?’

  Tighe could feel the grains of grit on the Manmonger’s finger grinding minutely against the inside of his eyelid; he had instinctively shut the other lid, but light flooded in through the pain of his other eye.

  ‘Then,’ he said, gasping, ‘I would be a less valuable commodity to you.’

  The Manmonger pulled his finger down and out and Tighe’s eyelid snapped back into place. He clapped both his hands to his sore eye. ‘You are a freak anyway,’ the Manmonger said, ‘with your black skin. A freakish eye would only add to your resale value. Come on, all of you,’ and he led them over the sharply sloping ledge.

  Even more fearful, the girls hurried after him. Tighe, clutching his eye, peered with his other one and stumbled along at the rear.

  *

  The day wore on. They made their way from crag to ledge and in the afternoon along some more thoroughly worn ledges and into a small village. The people there peered out at the Manmonger and his commodities from their doorways. He greeted them as he passed along their central shelf, but none of them seemed interested in buying people.

  They left the village and an enormous spur running directly up and down the wall came closer and closer. They passed through another village and settled themselves down on the central shelf in time for the dusk gale. The Manmonger ate and drank, and then sat silently by himself as the winds roared. But Tighe could see now that the dusk gale was much less violent here than it was back in his own village. They barely had to clutch at the grass under them; and half-way through it Tighe saw a door in the village open and an old woman make her way along the shelf to a second door.

  After it had died down and the Manmonger was tying the knots that bound their hands together, Tighe spoke up again. His eye still stung. ‘The further east we go,’ he said, ‘the less violent is the dusk gale.’

  ‘Observant,’ said the Manmonger.

  ‘Is there a place, far enough east,’ Tighe asked, casting his eyes meekly down so as not to anger the man, ‘where there is no dusk or dawn gale?’

  ‘It lessens the further east we go,’ said the Manmonger. ‘And it gets stronger the further west. That’s curious, isn’t it?’ But he wouldn’t say any more, and shortly he was asleep.

  In the morning he used the red-haired girl again, and then he left the three of them tied up and went from door to door in the village. Eventually he returned with a red-faced elderly man. This man’s skin was flushed like a baby and even his old-man wrinkles had the just-pressed look of the very young; but his nose was a bulbous mass of age tumour and his white hair was close cut against his knobbly head like turf. He wheezed as he walked.

  This old man and the Manm
onger had a lengthy conversation in a language Tighe could not understand, accompanied by hand gestures and elaborate noddings and duckings of the head. After an interminable amount of this posturing and arguing the two of them retreated in through one of the doors, and the Manmonger re-emerged carrying a small leather sack. It chinked as he carried it.

  ‘You,’ he said, pointing at the red-haired girl. ‘You belong to him now. He wanted you,’ he added, grinning, indicating the dark-haired girl, ‘but I said I hadn’t tried you yet myself, so I wasn’t about to give you up yet.’

  The red-haired girl was sobbing now, her head down. The Manmonger took her and loosened her bonds, with a surprising tenderness, and led her unresisting to the doorway of the old man.

  ‘There are no more sales here, I think,’ he said when he came back out, ‘but beyond that spur of worldwall’, he said, indicating the mass that obscured the eastward journey, ‘is a great city and we’ll find buyers for you yet.’

  11

  The Manmonger took his two remaining commodities out of the village to the east and along a series of well-trodden overhung ledges. The spur grew and grew until it bulged enormously out in front of them and filled most of the eastern portion of the sky.