by Adam Roberts
This person ran down the gentle slope of the device and hopped over on to the ledge. He hurried up to stand next to Tighe.
He was a strange individual; almost as short as Tighe himself and much smaller than the Manmonger. His head was bald and his skin was very dark brown. He was much darker than Ati had been, although not as deeply coloured as Tighe himself, but the strangest thing was that his skin had something uncanny, even unpleasant about it. It creased in a fatter way than normal skin at his neck and it moved far less over his face than ordinary skin would. It appeared to be more of a mask and of a strange, inhuman consistency. The man’s face was wrinkle-free, although there were patches of vague discoloration at the corners of his mouth and eyes. His nose had a shrunken, mummified look to it. Only his eyes looked fully human; lively, brown eyes that darted back and forth, checking Tighe over.
Although there was this odd, inhuman look to him, Tighe had the strangest sense that he had met this short, dummy-like individual before. There was something familiar about him.
The Manmonger hurried up to Tighe and the newcomer and stopped, uncertain what to do. ‘You have come!’
The man looked over at him briefly and then turned his gaze back to Tighe. ‘Evidently,’ he said. His voice was queerly high-pitched, almost like a child’s.
‘How should I call you? You have come from the Sun!’
‘The sun?’ repeated the man, not removing his stare from Tighe. ‘No, just the sky. Just out of the sky. Here!’ He reached out and grabbed Tighe’s chin between two fingers; his skin felt very peculiar against Tighe’s own, leathery and dry. The man moved Tighe’s head to the left, to the right.
‘Should I call you Master?’ asked the Manmonger. ‘Should I call you Wizard?’
‘Wizard,’ repeated the man, in a distracted voice. It was not clear whether he was answering the Manmonger, or just echoing him without thinking, but the Manmonger assumed the first.
‘Wizard! You are so brown! Your skin!’
The newcomer looked over at the Manmonger again. ‘Eh?’
‘You are an emissary from the Sun, O Wizard! Your skin is brown because it has been burnt brown by Her magnificence! Burnt brown and leathery by the Sun!’
The Wizard grinned briefly, his face creasing into thick, unnatural-looking lines. When he stopped grinning the lines vanished. ‘What are you saying?’
‘You have come with a message for me?’ panted the Manmonger.
‘You? No, no. No!’ This last word was almost a shout, almost a laugh. ‘Not you, but this boy. I have come for this boy.’
The Manmonger looked nonplussed. ‘I don’t understand.’
The Wizard turned his attention back to Tighe, reaching out with his oddly wizened-looking hands and grabbing Tighe’s arm. ‘Under-eating, I think,’ he said. ‘Hungry, are you boy?’
‘The boy?’ asked the Manmonger. The expression on his face shifted as he reappraised the situation. ‘You come in a curious craft, Mister the Wizard.’
‘Curious,’ repeated the Wizard, apparently caught up in the business of scrutinising Tighe closely.
‘You are a man, though,’ said the Manmonger, scratching his own head. ‘A man like any other, perhaps. Your skin is strange.’
‘Strange,’ agreed the Wizard, absently.
‘Still,’ said the Manmonger with sudden decision, ‘if you are interested in the boy, he is for sale. Do you hear, you strange fellow? The boy is for sale.’
The Wizard stepped back and regarded the Manmonger. ‘For sale?’
‘That’s right. He’s a curious example, I know; his skin is darker than any I’ve seen. Darker even than yours, although perhaps you and he are kin, given the darkness of your own.’ The Manmonger smiled broadly and showed off both his empty hands, a salesman’s gesture. ‘If you’re interested we can agree a price, I think. But I had high hopes for a very high price in the City of the East – they’ll pay a good price there for curiosities like this one with his dark skin.’
‘You know the City of the East?’ asked the Wizard.
“I’ve traded there for ten years or more,’ said the Manmonger. ‘What don’t I know about the City of the East?’
‘Then you should know’, said the Wizard, rummaging through one of the pockets in his coat, ‘that they have enough curiosities there already. You’d get a poor price for an underfed boy such as this.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the Manmonger. ‘But you’re interested, I can tell, and that’ll drive the price up. If you don’t offer me enough, well perhaps I’ll take him there anyway and try my luck.’ He rubbed his face and reverted momentarily to his former astonishment. ‘Such an entrance! I really thought you were from the Sun, my Goddess!’
‘No, no,’ said the Wizard, still rummaging through his pockets.
‘Well,’ said the Manmonger, ‘that’s a fancy craft you fly about in. I’ve seen calabashes west of the Meshwood, but I’ve never seen one of that design. I dare say you have strange and electronic things aboard and perhaps we could trade one of those for this boy.’
‘This boy!’ said the Wizard, in his reedy voice. ‘Tighe!’
Tighe was startled out of silence. ‘You know my name?’
‘What I propose’, said the Manmonger, ‘is you offer me something and I tell you whether that’s an acceptable price for the boy. What do you say?’
‘This,’ said the Wizard, bringing out a handful of fluff from his pocket. ‘This.’
The Manmonger took a step forward. ‘A joke? That looks like fluff.’
‘Fluff,’ said the Wizard. ‘Yes. Come, Tighe, come and see.’
‘How do you know my name?’ asked Tighe, stepping forward despite himself. ‘How do you – what is that?’
The Wizard held out his left hand flat; on its palm was a small pile of fluffy threads. With his forefinger and thumb of his leathery right hand he picked a single thread up and held it in the light.
‘What is that?’
It looked like a piece of dandelion seed. Tighe peered closer. There was a peppercorn-tiny silver speck, and out from it came two or three, maybe four, gossamer threads, each of which ended in a tiny black knot. The threads could only be seen because they glinted in the sun.
‘You intend to buy the boy with that?’ asked the Manmonger, incredulous.
‘Buy? Yes, yes. Do you see? Do you see, Tighe?’ The Wizard let go of the tiny piece of mock-dandelion fluff. Instead of drifting to the ground, it hung in space. Tighe’s mouth dropped open. It was the most tiny, most delicate thing he had ever seen.
‘Why doesn’t it fall?’ Tighe asked.
The Manmonger took a step forward, creasing his brow. ‘What is that?’
‘It’s in the kernel,’ said the Wizard. ‘That tiny thing in the midst, where the threads are anchored – do you see? That’s the trick of it. The same principle by which my craft floats through the air. Clever, clever. Look!’
Slowly the tiny thing was starting to rotate in space. The dangling threads flopped up and over, and then, as the spinning kernel gathered speed, they began to be stretched out by the torque. Soon the thing was a cartwheel, or miniature windmill; its various threads were pulled taut by the rotation.
‘How does it do that?’ asked the Manmonger.
‘Now,’ said the Wizard, ‘Tighe. Do you see?’
Tighe looked up into the eyes of the Wizard, the deeply human, moist brown eyes in the heart of the odd, mask-like face. With a sense of the dream deepening, intensifying, he realised why this strange leather-skinned individual had seemed so familiar to him. His voice, his intonation, was like a warbly, high-pitched version of Grandhe Jaffiahe’s. Even his weird, mask-like face had something of the smack of his Grandhe.
‘You seem to me’, said Tighe, in a near-whisper, lapsing into his native village tongue, ‘like my Grandhe alive again.’
The Wizard smiled, exactly as if he understood. ‘Now,’ he replied, speaking the village tongue fluently, ‘you must watch this part very closely.’
‘The threads are what we call monofilament,’ said the stranger who so unsettlingly resembled Tighe’s Grandhe, still speaking Tighe’s native tongue, although the last word was not one Tighe understood. ‘They are amongst the toughest of things on the worldwall. The kernel in the middle is a pollenmachine, for although it is small it is complex and advanced. Now – watch!’
The Manmonger, completely beguiled by the floating thing, watched its shimmering light-flickering approach, held up a finger as it floated towards him. He reached as if to touch it. The spinning blob simply sheared through his upheld finger – as if the spinning dandelion fluff had been made of the hardest stuff, of rock or diamond; and as if the Manmonger’s finger had been made of the most evanescent material. There was a fluttering sound and the end of the Manmonger’s finger was no more. The floating device simply powered through the flesh.
It happened so quickly that the Manmonger did not even have time to cry out. He was still holding out his hand, still upraising his finger, except that the end of the finger was not there. Blood pulsed from the end, like ink from a pen.
The twirling monofilament device floated on, not rapidly but evidently not to be pushed aside. The look of astonishment on the Manmonger’s face was almost comical. The blurry bubble was in front of his chest and then with another short-lived burr it was gone, carving through the shirt. A perfectly circular hole had opened up in the Manmonger’s chest. Almost at once it filled with blood; pink, frothing blood poured out of the hole. The astonished Manmonger opened his mouth and an amount of bubbling blood came out. He toppled forward, and lay face down, twitching.
Behind him the spinning monofilament device was still floating through the air, heading now towards the wall. Tighe looked down at the body of the Manmonger, and then at the Wizard, and then at the Wizard’s floating device.
It approached the wall. Tighe felt a surge of fear. ‘What will it do?’ he asked the Wizard. ‘Will it eat right through the wall, like it ate through the Manmonger? Will it go through to the other side?’
‘Dear me no,’ said the Wizard, carefully replacing the rest of his handful of fluff back in his pocket. ‘It’ll lose its energy quickly enough in hard stuff like the rock of the wall. Don’t worry. It’ll bury itself in, perhaps an inch. But it’s not a magic thing, it’s only a machine; it obeys the same laws of energy conservation and entropy as everything else. Now!’ He looked around him.
The Manmonger was stretched face down on the ledge, motionless. The Wizard walked over him as if he had been nothing but a mat and retrieved his pack. He spent a moment going through it, but quickly became bored. ‘There’s some food,’ he said. ‘What meat is this?’
Tighe was staring at the dead body at his feet. He pulled his gaze up. ‘Some of the meat is goat’s meat,’ he said, his mouth watering as he spoke the words. His stomach clenched again and reminded him how hungry he was. ‘Some of it is – is human.’
The leather man wrinkled his strange face and dropped the food. ‘That meat is too strong’, he said, ‘even for me. There’s grass-bread here though, which I think I’ll take. Come, Tighe,’ he said, ‘are you hungry?’
‘I am hungry,’ said Tighe. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘Know lots about you,’ said the Wizard, ‘but come aboard my machine and I will give you some food and drink. And answer your questions. I have been looking for you, Tighe.’
‘Looking for me?’
The Wizard was hurrying away from him now. With practised ease he hopped from the ledge on to the roof of his craft. Tighe followed, sparing a single glance back for the stretched-out body of the Manmonger. There was a momentary sense of panic at the prospect of stepping off the worldwall, like his old kite-flying fear, but he was carried along by the much stronger sense that all this was a sort of dream, a nothing. He hopped from the worldwall on to the top of the Wizard’s floating machine, his feet slipping a little on the polished metal. It felt warm. The Wizard beckoned him over and grasped his hand as they stood on the exact top of the craft. The touch of his dry, leather fingers was strangely upsetting.
Just as he had arrived, although in reverse, the Wizard and Tighe descended through the roof of the machine. The world rose up, and then they were in blackness and the roof irised shut over their heads.
They were in a room, furnished like no room Tighe had ever seen before. The Wizard led him down a ladder and they entered a second room, directly beneath the first. And in the corner of this room there was a human being, crouched down, clutching her knees. With a jolt, that was only partly cushioned by the sense that he was still experiencing some sort of trancelike dream, Tighe realised that this person was his pashe.
4
The Wizard and the Ice
1
Inside the Wizard’s craft were two spaces, each the size of a large room, one on top of the other. The top room was green; its walls well wadded with fabric, each bolt of the dark-rich material pinned in its middle with a fabric knot that was hard like a pebble, which gathered the curves and folds of the surrounding material to a point. There were dozens of these points, constellating over the wall. The fabric itself was a deep green. Set against the wall of the room in the midst of all this opulence was a bed – or, rather, a strange cross between an elongated chair with a padded backboard and a bed. The bed-chair was of a giant size: half a dozen people could have sat on it in comfort and three could have lain on its spongy fabric base to sleep.
The Wizard and Tighe descended from the roof and through this room on a small platform. The gap in the ceiling closed over their heads and they came to stand on the floor.
The floor beneath this chair, or bed, was of metal studded with a hundred knobs, like silver pimples in a grey skin. A small sink, just the size for a man to stand in and as deep as Tighe was tall, was fixed to one wall. There were other devices fixed to various places on the circular all-round wall and on the side opposite the bed was a space in the floor, through which a ladder led down to the lower room. But most marvellous of all was the brightness of candle fixed in a plastic cup-shape hanging off-centre from the ceiling. It threw a powerful yellow light into every crevice of the room.
The downstairs room was crowded with sculpture in metal and plastic, a fortune’s worth, although the shapes and figures meant little to Tighe. After the Wizard had taken Tighe down to this lower room, he settled himself into a skinny metal chair in front of a number of netscreens. Tighe’s pashe sat in the corner.
For a while Tighe simply stood and stared at her. The leather-skinned Wizard looked over at him. ‘Why not say hello?’ he offered in his squeaky voice, speaking Tighe’s native tongue.
‘Pashe?’ offered Tighe. His heart was pulsing hugely. He could hear the sound of his blood rushing through his head.
His pashe sat silently, staring past Tighe’s head.
It made no sense to Tighe; he tried again, leaning forward a little. His head was a swirl of thoughts. He was about to cry; about to fall. About to laugh.
On an impulse, Tighe scrambled back up the ladder to the upper room, to look again at the giant chair, or bed – to prod it, to sit on it, to jump up and down on it. None of it was real. The worldwall was a tiny model, a vicious god’s small-scale experiment, populated with real-size insects and rats and miniature people. It was all insane. But his pashe was alive! Down the ladder again. The Wizard sat in his cradle fiddling with controls and Tighe’s pashe still squatted in the corner.
‘Pashe? What is this place? Are you all right? Pashe, I thought you were dead.’ Tighe was crying now, but his pashe still wasn’t looking at him. She cradled her knees and looked directly at the wall opposite her. It was as if Tighe did not exist.
He went over to the Wizard. ‘She won’t look at me,’ he said, plaintively, his eyes wet.
‘No?’ squeaked the Wizard. ‘Perhaps she’ll speak later.’ The room gave a fluid lurch and Tighe staggered on his feet. He hurried over to his pashe again and squatted next to her. Tentatively, half expecting a rebuke, he lowered his head until it was resting on her shoulder and put an arm round her neck. She tolerated his embrace, but she didn’t say anything to indicate that she recognised him or even knew he was there.
For a while Tighe simply stayed in that rather awkward position. His tears stopped coming. Soon enough he started to feel uncomfortable and he withdrew his arm and stood up again.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ he called over to the Wizard.
‘Wrong?’ repeated the Wizard. ‘Nothing, nothing.’
Tighe mooned about the room. The circular wall of this lower room, in contrast to the upper one, was hung with a blood-coloured fabric. The cloth was like nothing Tighe had seen before. It was covered in tiny soft bristles, thousands of them per hand’s width. Tighe became fascinated by them. Thousands of tiny little soft red hairs, all poking out of a red cloth backdrop. ‘What is this cloth, Wizard?’ he asked. ‘I have never seen anything like it.’
‘Not easy to clean,’ said the Wizard. ‘But harder wearing than you’d think; each tiny strand is micro-coated. But not easy to clean. There’s a device in one of the cupboards.’
‘Wizard,’ said Tighe, meekly, ‘it is magic, I think.’
The Wizard laughed. ‘I wish, sweet boy,’ he said, in his strangely high-pitched voice, ‘that you wouldn’t, truly, act the primitive so crudely. What cliché!’ And he laughed again.
Tighe came over and could see that the Wizard was absorbed in his screens. He hunched, wandered over to his pashe again, and squatted down, touching her leg. ‘Pashe,’ he said, ‘are you well?’ When she said nothing in reply, he said, ‘When you were gone I was so sad. I missed you so much.’ He could feel the tears coming again.