by Adam Roberts
Grandhe’s house was at the far end of main-street shelf, not far from the Doge’s house. Tighe had rarely visited it and never in the last year. It would have been alarming enough to be scraping at the door for any reason.
Grandhe’s voice came from inside. Since the death of Konstakhe and the ceremony, he was rarely seen about the village. But his voice sounded strong. ‘If you are going to knock, knock, don’t scratch like a monkey.’
‘Grandhe,’ called Tighe, ‘is pahe with you? Is pashe in there? I have come to speak to them.’
‘What are you saying?’ called back Grandhe. ‘Your pas never come here. God forbid they should ever pay me their respects. What are you saying?’
‘Grandhe,’ called Tighe again. He was surprised that his voice wobbled so; and surprised to realise that he was crying. ‘Grandhe?’
Silence. Then, ‘Come in, boy,’ and Tighe pushed the latch up and tumbled into the smoky darkness of Grandhe’s house.
9
Tighe’s life changed. His first thoughts were that if he had not loitered on the ledge watching the ants, if he had come straight back with the candle, then maybe he could have caught his parents before they disappeared. He had visions of them, packing bags with things in the silence of the house. But this was not right because they had taken nothing with them. Nothing had been removed. Everything in the house was as it had been. But still Tighe clung to the possibility that they were still alive. There was some pressing reason why his pas has needed to go. They had sent him off to fetch the candle and then swiftly, quietly, they had simply gone.
‘Where would they go?’ he asked his Grandhe, in the first few days after the disappearance. In the early days he had shown his grief to Grandhe. It had taken a time before he learned to hide it from him. ‘Would they go to Meat, do you think?’
Grandhe had a staff. It was real wood and Tighe had often seen him carry it. Without thinking much about it, he had assumed it had some religious purpose. Now he discovered it had a new function. Grandhe would whip it around his head and catch some part of Tighe’s torso or head with the end of it. The end was blunt, but the blow jarred with a fierce pain. He did so now.
‘Your pas would never abandon their village,’ he declared, as Tighe whimpered on the floor. Then he marched out.
In a strange way, the disappearance had given the old man a new surge of life. After a month of hiding in his house all day long, Grandhe had suddenly emerged. First, he had claimed the goats – legally the goats were probably Tighe’s. Boys could inherit, if the village thought them mature enough and Tighe was only months away from legal manhood now. But Grandhe had simply swept the goats up: marched up to the goat pen with one of his deputies in tow and announced to old Rothroche that the goats were his. He dismissed the herds-girl pahe had been employing and set one of his deputies to tend the animals.
The next thing he did was to gather many of the possessions that were in the empty house and sell them. With the village as depressed as it was there were few buyers and much of the stuff ended up stacked in Grandhe’s own, smaller house. Tighe heard, from tight-lipped people uncomfortable about gossiping over a preacher, that Grandhe had tried to sell the empty house too; he had been up to top ledge to try and exchange the house for some more goats, to build up the herd. But houses were not in demand. People were moving away from the village, going up the wall to Meat and Press to try and make a living. The population was thinning visibly and several houses stood empty. Only the itinerants, coming up the wall from Smelt and Heartshelf, swelled the numbers and not one of them had the money to buy a house – or they would never have left their original villages.
To begin with, Tighe was simply too stunned to pay much notice to what his Grandhe was doing. He might, he thought, have contested it. Maybe gone to the Doge and asked for a ruling of law. But the Doge and his Grandhe were friends, neighbours, and that would likely lead nowhere. But he didn’t really think about that. Instead he found himself replaying over and over the possible scenarios of his pas. He imagined them slipping away. Yet nobody had seen them go, nobody had seen them pass through market shelf, and the Doge was certain she had received no toll for her ladder up to the path to Meat that morning. So perhaps they had disguised themselves, slipped through the crowds on market shelf and made their way down the crags to Heartshelf; although why would anybody want to go down to a village where, according to the itinerants, people were now dying of too meagre a diet, stalkgrass only? Maybe, Tighe pondered, they were on their way further down. The wall became more sheer further downways, and general wisdom was that eventually all paths, all crags, petered into blank nothing when you went far enough downwall. But there were also traveller’s tales, mutated through repeated retellings, of difficult pathways, of golden chances for the adventurer, far away to the down. Maybe his pas (how unlike them! But maybe …) had been seduced by these stories. Yes, Tighe thought to himself, the loss of the goat had thrown their finances into disarray. The poverty that infected the village had made it impossible to recover their status. Maybe they had gone off questing for a new wealth to the down. Maybe they would return with sacks of salt, metals, plastics, wealth of all kinds. Maybe they would return next week, leading a train of servants all carrying baggage stuffed with treasure, to rejuvenate the village, for his pahe to take his position as Prince with a new magnificence. And Tighe would be crying by this stage of the fantasy because as he built it up higher and higher he knew in his heart how impossible it was. And he was crying, too, for the absence in the heart of his imaginings, the thing he could not permit himself to think. He was crying for the nothing in the middle of his dream, the unspeakable void that cleaved to an image of his pas, like the goat, simply stepping over the edge of the world and into death.
Nobody said anything about that. His Grandhe never mentioned it. It was the truth, but it was unsayable.
There was a meeting, maybe half the entire village of Cragcouthie gathering on main-street shelf. Grandhe Jaffiahe herded him out for that, but left him between his two deputies. ‘Now you’ll be quiet when I address the village, boy,’ he had said to Tighe before coming out. He did this thing, ordering Tighe to stick his tongue out of his mouth and then grabbing it agonizingly between his thumb and finger to compel attention. ‘You’ll be quiet?’ Tighe had mumbled his assent, unable to speak or even nod with his tongue pinched that way. So when they had come out on to the shelf he stood between his Grandhe’s two deputies, who often kicked him about the lower leg, or pinched his bare arms, just to keep him silent.
Grandhe spoke to the crowd. ‘The Princedom needs a Prince,’ he said, ‘few would deny. Yet are we certain that our Prince has departed for ever? These are hard times, people, hard times.’ People were nodding and fragments of Grandhe’s speech went about the group in various mouths. Hard times, true. Princedom needs. Are we certain? ‘I say’, orated Grandhe, raising both his arms, ‘that our Princedom needs a Prince. The boy, my grandchild, will be of adult age by the year’s end and then he can take up the burden of the office – if our Prince has not returned. If he does not return, then let us crown the boy Prince at the year’s end.’ This would be ten months past his coming into adulthood, but Tighe didn’t say anything. The crowd was murmuring approvingly.
‘And until that time’, said Grandhe, dropping his voice and his arms at the same time, ‘I – your Priest, your intermediary between God and the people – will care for the boy. He shall live in my house, my own grandchild.’
Somebody cheered and there was a polite smattering of applause. But a drizzle was starting up, droplets swarming through the air, and people started dispersing and making for shelter. Grandhe’s deputies grabbed Tighe painfully by the tender parts of his arms, up near the armpits, making sure (it seemed to Tighe) to dig their nails in, and practically carried him back to his Grandhe’s house.
His pas’ house was emptied now and shuttered. Tighe slept in the main space of his Grandhe’s house, curled on the uncomfortable floor. By day he
would mope inside, whilst his Grandhe went about the village ordering his affairs as a man of renewed wealth. There was a certain amount of restrained debate in the village about whether debts should be inherited. The people who felt they had a right to parts of the goats, or to the whole carcasses, would sometimes petition Grandhe. But Grandhe called the Doge and the Doge said that the law permitted no such thing. Besides, people were more than a little frightened of Grandhe.
In fact, the law was hazy. If Tighe’s pas were really dead then their debts died with them. But, claimed the creditors, there was no hard proof they were dead. Grandhe had not inherited the wealth, he was merely tending it until they returned, and therefore he was tending the debts as well as the animals. The Doge ruled on law, but that didn’t stop a few people hammering on Grandhe’s door and demanding payment. People were intimidated by Grandhe, but a few of them still braved it. Times were hard and people desperate. These hangings on the door were some of the hardest moments for Tighe.
‘Come along,’ somebody outside would yell. ‘Your girl is still alive, somewhere, and so her debts are still alive!’ But hearing somebody say this shadowed the opposite in Tighe’s imagination, made it hard to blot out the thought of his pas dead.
Dead. Fallen to God at the bottom of the world.
For Grandhe, Tighe thought to himself, it ought to have been harder. If his girl and his girl’s husband had truly fallen off the world, then their souls were forfeit; the village could not burn the bodies and release their spirits in the smoke to ascend to heaven. But Grandhe seemed unbothered. He went about the village and went about his business. He was accumulating wealth, he said, for the glory of God.
People were intimidated by Grandhe and Tighe knew why. Tighe flinched whenever Grandhe so much as looked at him. He would wield his wooden staff like a young man and catch Tighe expertly about the body or face with the end of it. One time he beat Tighe so hard he was certain his cheekbone was broken: it throbbed and ached for hours, although eventually the pain dispersed.
Tighe tried to keep out of his way, not to bring himself to Grandhe’s attention at all. But he missed his pas, and sometimes that feeling overcame him. Once he said, ‘Maybe my pas slipped up the Doge’s ladder.’
Grandhe glared at him, smoking his grassweed pipe. ‘Eh?’
‘Maybe they disguised themselves and went up to Meat. Or maybe the Doge had an arrangement with them …’
Grandhe had to lean forward to reach his staff. ‘Have my enemies been talking with you? The Doge is a friend of mine, longstanding,’ he said, getting creakily to his feet. ‘You say that the Doge would lie to me?’ And he brought the staff cracking on to Tighe’s left shoulder.
If Grandhe stayed home during the day, as he sometimes did, then Tighe slipped out and roamed the village in his old fashion. In the early days he would go from crag to crag, ledge to ledge, combing the village thoroughly as if hoping to chance upon his pas laughing together, coming out of somebody’s house, or sitting arm in arm in the sun. He would work from the lower ledges up to the higher, or work downwall the other way.
From time to time he would go back to his old house. The dawn-door was broken, presumably by itinerants, and it was clear that somebody had gone through the whole house looking for food or valuables to sell. But Grandhe had removed all the valuables and there was no food. The first time Tighe went back to the house he thought, at some level, that it might be more comforting than the hostility in the air at Grandhe’s. He had curled up in his alcove, the same space he had slept in since he was a boy-boy, and tried to lose consciousness. And he had drifted away, only to have a series of gut-lurching nightmares. Falling. His pashe’s face, stretched in an agony of rage, furious with him. Dismembered parts of their bodies scattered from ledge to crag.
‘You wander about the village like an itinerant,’ his Grandhe barked at him one night. There was less food, and it was less tasty, at his Grandhe’s than had been the case at home. Tighe still got his goatmilk, and Grandhe baked a form of grass-bread, although without the seeds and with fewer tasty insects embedded in it than his pashe had done. Tighe was sitting legs folded on the floor chewing on an underbaked piece of this bread as his Grandhe said this.
‘Do you hear?’ Grandhe had repeated, louder. ‘You wander about the village exactly like an itinerant.’
‘Yes, Grandhe.’
‘It must stop. We’ll find work for you. You’re old enough to work. You’ve lived a sheltered life. Well, soon you’ll have to stop being a boy and start to be a man, work for your living.’
Tighe almost asked if that would mean that, as a man, he would inherit his pas’ Princedom, even his pas’ wealth; but he stopped himself. Grandhe would have raged. The staff would have come down hard on Tighe’s back for such a comment. And it was not even as if he particularly cared. He didn’t care much about being Prince. What good was it? He didn’t even care that Grandhe had stolen his family goats. He really didn’t know what to do with goats, how to tend them or how to trade them.
‘You don’t ever go down to that heretic’s monkey palace?’ Grandhe asked in a menacing tone.
‘No, Grandhe.’
‘Good. I would not want to hear from people that you’d been down there. That would be fuel to my enemies indeed. You are my charge now, boy-boy, and I intend to look after you properly. Your pashe was too mincing about it, too soft.’
‘Yes Grandhe.’
‘I’ll not be soft if I hear you’ve been about that poisonous heretic’
And, truly, he hadn’t visited Old Witterhe. It was gone a fortnight since his pas had disappeared and he had not so much as thought about going down the ladder. Instead, he filled his thoughts with a dream Wittershe, as he curled on the floor in his Grandhe’s house. He pressed his thighs close together with his hand between them, curled under the grass-weave rug and stretched his muscles very gently. The pressure on the end of his wick brought it stiff and hard as plastic; and he would close his eyes and imagine Wittershe, the thought of her skin, of her nakedness under the rough weave of her skirt, of her smile. And usually on the smile his wick would surrender up its load, and the sunlight would blare in his soul, and he’d shudder to a stop with a sticky mess starting to glue the hairs on his stomach.
One evening he was curled in the corner, overhearing a conversation his Grandhe was having with his two deputies. They were planning to slaughter a goat and have a feast. Tighe was astonished, repulsed. If the richest family in the village were celebrating an important wedding, they might – conceivably – slaughter an animal just for the eating. But for a man such as Grandhe, at a time such as the present (his daughter and his marriage-son probably dead, their souls lost over the edge of the world) it was incomprehensible. From what Tighe could hear most of the conversation was about finding a way of avoiding the opprobrium of the village. The Doge was mentioned several times.
Eventually, a little stupefied by the smoke from three pipes, Tighe drifted off to sleep. And in the morning he found he could not get up. It all seemed so pointless. His pas were dead. Gone for ever. Why should he bother? The inside of his head felt stricken, consumed with drought. He turned over and lay in a painful motionlessness.
Grandhe discovered him in this state at lunchtime and roused him with several sharp blows of his staff. Whimpering like a monkey, Tighe struggled up and ran zigzag, dodging the blows, out of the door. Grandhe’s voice followed him. ‘We’ll find some work for you soon.’
Tighe blinked in the sunlight, and wandered across main-street shelf. The crowd of itinerants was greater than ever, dull dead faces staring out at nothing, squatting on the ground or sitting with their backs to the wall. Tighe fought the urge to yell at them. My pashe has gone. She is gone for ever. There was an itch in the centre of his skull. His mouth was dry. His path wobbled and at one stage brought him towards the lip of the shelf. The thought was even in his head, If I fall, I fall. This was closely followed by I hope I fall, I hope I die. Maybe he would fall all the way to
the God Grandhe denied lived at the base of the wall. But the actual proximity of the edge of the world was a different matter: his gut lurched and without conscious control his feet steered him back away from the great fall.
He was hungry. Lying on the floor all morning had meant skipping breakfast. His stomach felt like a clenched fist. But he had no money and he was not about to go back to Grandhe’s house to try and find some food. His back was still smarting from the blows. He maundered up and down the shelf, without the desire to go anywhere in particular. Then he sat himself down on the Leftward side of main-street shelf and shielded his eyes from the sun with his palm. Birds flocked, patterns of dots that zipped themselves together and then pulled apart.
A hand on his shoulder.
‘Well, boy, once again.’ It was Old Witterhe.
‘Hello,’ said Tighe, squinting.
Witterhe was carrying a small sack salt. ‘Apes need it as much as we do, salt, you know,’ he said. ‘There was a trader come up today with a backpack of the stuff. Prices are depressed, they are.’
‘I’m hungry,’ said Tighe.
‘Come down,’ said Witterhe. ‘There’ll be something to eat. My girl, she’s been asking after you.’
In a daze, and yet acutely aware of the transgression, Tighe followed Witterhe down the slant and then down the ladder to his ledge. Tighe stood at the bottom, sheepish. ‘I’ll get my girl out here,’ said Witterhe. He turned, stopped, turned back. ‘I was sorry to hear about your pas,’ he added, awkwardly.
