On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘And you’ve thrown your puke all over the lip of our ledge,’ raged Witterhe. ‘My girl’ll have to clean that tomorrow. That’s disgusting, that is foul. Did you puke and scare the birds away?’

  Tighe tried to say something, but the words clogged in the burnt dryness of his throat.

  ‘You puked and scared the doves away,’ yelled Witterhe, really angry now. ‘Is that the most stupid thing ever? I think it is!’

  Tighe felt too awful to argue. He begged some water, in a croaky voice, but Witterhe stumped back into his house shutting the dawn-door behind him. Tighe’s throat felt scraped and raw, his stomach teetered on the edge of convulsing again – although he was certain that there was nothing more inside his belly to vomit out. And he was ashamed to have Wittershe see him like this. He tried to gather himself, but she came over and took his hands. Slowly, he climbed the ladder with Wittershe’s help and stumbled along the main-street shelf, with the deep blackness of the night apparently swaying and shifting towards him. The journey was patchy. One moment he was trying to say something to Wittershe, to express something, but the words were crumbling in his croaky throat. The next thing, without a sense of continuity of time, he was at the dawn-door of his pas’ house fumbling through the webbing to get the latch pulled over. Then, he was at the family sink, slurping messily. His head felt funny. Mostly he was tired; but later, in his alcove, lying on his back, he couldn’t sleep. He turned on his side, and turned to his other side, but did not seem able to push himself away into the bliss of unconsciousness. Left side, right side, squirming back to his left side.

  Visions arrowed through his head. Old Witterhe’s creased face. The doves, sitting motionless on the ledge. The drawing-out massive blackness of the night, open to everything, ready to swallow anything that fell off the world. A mouth that refused no morsel. It was as if Tighe was drunk with the enormity of the universe. The game of God, tossing the sun over the wall of the world. In his twitching half-sleep, Tighe’s memories blurred, his atomised vomit scattering over the edge of the world and the filigree tips of the doves’ wings folding and unfolding, the two things blending together.

  Doves. Even at their moment of most intense effort, with the wings jerking and flitting, their bodies struggling into the air with the epiphany of panic – even at that moment, the expression on the faces of the doves was calm. Nothing could touch the seraphic blankness of those birds. Coasting in flight, settling on the ledge, roosting, bursting spectacularly into the air again; everything was the same to the dark eyes of the birds. The beak-smile of their narrow face.

  Tighe turned again. Something was itching deep inside his mind. He turned again. Neither side was comfortable to sleep on. He wished for a third side. Turned again.

  He had to sleep. It was stupid. In a few hours the dawn gale would begin sounding, and after that he would have to get up. It was Old Witterhe’s stupid pipe-smoke; it had irritated his mind, had rubbed it raw. Now it wouldn’t settle.

  He wondered if, outside, the doves were still flying; or if they had found themselves another roost. Old Witterhe would still be angry with him in the morning, but it was better that the birds fly in the starlight than that they get their necks corkscrewed and their bodies hung up dead in his smoky old den.

  Then Tighe was on his back and thinking of the stars. The nailpoint precision of the stars. Were the stars windows lit in the night-time of that other colossal wall? Was that where the gods lived? Free from the acid tang and muscular ache of bodies; pure spirits; pure as the placid flight of doves.

  Then, with sleep in his eyes, and light filling the room outside his alcove, his pashe was shaking him awake, and it was morning.

  5

  He expected to feel awful, but after washing himself and taking his morning goatmilk, Tighe actually felt purged. ‘You look tired,’ his pashe told him, but he didn’t feel it. There was, behind the tenderness of the ache that still haunted his throat (he hated being sick, it was the worst of feelings) – there was, behind that, still the enormous feeling of pure light, of having been initiated into mysteries known only to the few. It cradled in his chest; he wanted to tell his pashe, but she would not have understood. In that respect, and even at his early age, Tighe recognised her as Grandhe’s daughter.

  Then Tighe thought of Grandhe Jaffiahe. Of how outraged he would be if he knew what Tighe had learned. Of how heretical this truth was, the knowledge of this cosmic war.

  And then – a coincidence that seemed to chime with Tighe’s new sense of insight into the universe – Grandhe Jaffiahe came to the door. But Grandhe never visited! There was a quarrel between Grandhe and pashe. There was always one quarrel or another between the two of them. Tighe had realised that the particular disagreement was not important, but was only the form taken by some more fundamental clash. Pahe would sometimes make faces at Tighe, as if trying to look at his own eyebrows, and the whole thing was a joke. Except that it could never exactly be a joke when Grandhe was so important in the village. So Tighe was scrubbing the inside of his goatskin with stalkgrass, getting the last of the milk out (so it wouldn’t go bad and stink the place out) and eating the soaked grass, when Grandhe shouted outside the door. It was as if he had been thinking about Grandhe and had summoned him. But the figure at the door was no wraith.

  ‘Daughter!’ Grandhe called. ‘I am coming to your house. Daughter!’

  Pahe always shrunk in on himself a little when Grandhe Jaffiahe was around; and Pashe, opposite in everything, always bristled outward a little. But they invited Grandhe in and he sat at the bar with them, and even took a little milk. Tighe couldn’t help staring at the old man, snatching looks. His face was so weirdly deformed. This is what happened if you lived into old age; the cheeks became cluttered with wrinkles, the nose spread and became pitted with tiny dots, the hair blotched white and started coming away from the head in patches at the top and back. Yet the very fact that so few people survived to any great age gave Grandhe a distinctiveness that fed into his habitual gravity. He slurped his milk noisily and then lowered the skin, a white line painted on his dark upper lip. He was looking straight at Tighe.

  ‘You are my only grandchild, boy,’ he said, sonorously.

  Tighe nodded, unsure. Grandhe had a way of making even the simplest statement sound charged with terrible significance. Was this just an observation, or was it leading into something profound?

  ‘My enemies,’ said Grandhe and stopped. The three of them, Pashe, pahe and Tighe waited. Grandhe often began sentences with the words ‘my enemies’. He looked, slowly and seemingly with an effort at penetration, into the faces of Tighe and pashe in turn. ‘My enemies say that my grandchild frequents the house of the known heretic, of the dangerous man. This is damaging to me.’

  Tighe’s heart bucked. His thoughts went back to the night before. He had been to Witterhe’s house a few times, but last night was the first time anything that might be styled heresy had been spoken to him. And surely news about last night had not gone round the village already?

  ‘You’, said Grandhe again, lowering his gaze on Tighe once more, ‘are my only grandchild.’

  Tighe nodded again, but he could feel his face flushing. His heart was moving rapidly. But Grandhe said nothing more and a silence settled in the room. Grandhe Jaffiahe slurped up the rest of the milk, and wiped the eyebrow-thin line of white from his lip. Then he cleared his throat.

  ‘Daughter,’ he said, without looking at pashe, ‘you have lost a goat.’

  ‘I have, pahe,’ she replied in a soft voice.

  ‘I am sorry for your loss.’

  There was a quiet period. Tighe could see that his pahe could barely control an expression of astonishment from possessing his face. Pashe was unreadable.

  ‘Daughter,’ said Grandhe, ‘some of that goat was mine.’

  ‘That is true, pahe.’

  ‘At a time like this,’ said Grandhe, making a swoopy gesture with his right hand, ‘there is no need to press such debts.’
/>   Even pashe was surprised by this; her face showed it. But she struggled. ‘Why thank you, pahe,’ she said.

  Grandhe sniffed, dropped the hand to his side. Tighe stole another look. There was a rheum in his eyes that looked very like tears. His cheek quivered once, like the twitch that will sometimes pass over the face of a goat when bothered by flies. The motion dislodged some of the moisture from his eye and a bead of water slid downwards over his seamed cheek. Tighe had never seen Grandhe like this.

  ‘When God built the wall …’ he declaimed, suddenly loud as if beginning one of his sermons; but he broke off. There was a moment of silence.

  ‘Konstakhe is dead,’ he said, more softly. ‘He died in the night. God took him in the night.’

  Nobody said anything for a while. Then pahe offered, ‘What terrible news,’ in a tentative voice.

  ‘Death comes to us all,’ boomed Grandhe suddenly. ‘That is God’s way. That is why he has placed us on the wall, to remind us at all times of the precariousness of life, of the immediacy of death.’ But his preacher’s passion faded from the words as he spoke them and the sentence ended in little more than a whisper. Another tear trembled on the ledge of his underlid and then tumbled down his cheek. ‘He was a friend,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said pashe and reached out with her hand. But the touch seemed to spur Grandhe back into his manner. He stood up, abruptly, and spoke noisily. ‘We’ll be burning him today, of course, and it would be good for the whole village to watch the ceremony. He was a great man. He was a good man. We must burn him and send his soul up the wall with the smoke. God is waiting for his soul. God sits atop the wall and sees everything.’

  And he was gone, sweeping enormously out of the room.

  For a while Tighe simply sat, watching the looks his pahe and pashe were exchanging. Then pashe shook her head and got up from the bar.

  As he helped pahe give the house its brief morning tidy, Tighe said, ‘Grandhe was very close to Konstakhe, wasn’t he?’

  Pahe gave him a quick look, but then said, ‘Well, yes, very close friends, they were that. Known one another for many years. More years than you’ve been alive.’

  But Tighe found himself thinking: at what moment in the night did Old Konstakhe actually die? Had it been when Tighe had been with Old Witterhe? Or afterwards? The rush of doves’ wings in the starlight; Tighe vomiting up his stomach, like the cold glitter of a soul leaving a body. The whole thing made his head feel strange.

  Afterwards Tighe walked through the village. Down on main-street shelf a couple of Grandhe’s junior preachers were building the pyre, roughly weaving together plates of the high bamboo that grew on the most poorly watered crags and was therefore brittle and flammable. Tighe stood and watched them for a while. People passed and re-passed, and a few stopped to watch the process. The priests bent the flimsy boards of bamboo to shapes, and boxed a funereal shape. More grass and bamboo were laid around the edge. Onlookers watched for a while and then moved on.

  Tighe went up a public ladder and along the series of shorter ledges to the up-and-to-the-right of the village. Here there were a number of mechanical shops; a friend from boy-boyhood, Akathe, was working in the clockmongers. Though no older than Tighe, his family was not as elevated and Akathe spent most of his days in the outside alcove beside the shop entrance, working with various clockwork devices in the daylight.

  ‘Did you hear?’ Tighe said, sauntering up to him. ‘Konstakhe died in the night.’

  ‘Everybody has heard that,’ said Akathe. He didn’t detach his attention from the little clock he was working on. It was a plastic device, cogwheels worn and grooved with use. Akathe prodded it with a needle-thin spatula, working clockworker’s mud into the workings. He had a little plate of the stuff at his elbow.

  Tighe sat himself on the grass before Akathe. ‘Shall you go to the ceremony?’

  ‘If I get this finished.’ He looked up, but kept one eye shut in the clockworker’s squint. ‘Yesterday somebody traded power-book parts with my pashe. We got a regular pile of the parts now.’

  ‘Which parts?’ Tighe asked, although these sort of clockwork details meant nothing to him.

  ‘Well, there’s a sort of membrane that pashe thinks was the screen. We also have the teeth of the thing, pulled teeth each marked with a symbol. Even I could recognise some of them – an R, an A, something that is either a C or an S.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Tighe, but without enthusiasm. ‘So will you go?’

  Akathe sniffed, and looked again at the clock. ‘Don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. This is an odd plastic, this one. The mud won’t seem to set and when it does it comes away in lumps. Something about this plastic that resists the glue of it.’

  ‘You don’t go much to religious ceremonies,’ said Tighe.

  ‘Don’t have all that much time, really.’ He was prodding at the clock’s innards again.

  ‘I was thinking, you know,’ said Tighe, snapping off a blade of grass and twirling it in the sunshine. A striking purple-and-red beetle was twitching its way through the stalks at his feet, climbing some until they bent and tipped him over, weaving through others. ‘Thinking about God, you know.’

  ‘God,’ said Akathe, without inflection.

  ‘You know how we’re taught he sits on top of the wall,’ said Tighe. ‘Sees the universe.’

  ‘You should really ask your Grandhe this kind of stuff,’ said Akathe.

  ‘But you know about that.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Does it sound, uh, right, to you?’

  ‘Don’t really think much about it.’

  ‘It’s just that I heard some other stories, and they made me think. What if God doesn’t sit on top of the world? What if God lives at the bottom of the wall – what if he built the wall to keep somebody out? To keep something out?’

  Akathe stopped and gave Tighe a serious look. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I had heard that you were chasing after the girl, the Wittershe girl. And everybody knows that her pahe is a mad old boy-boy.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tighe, staring intently at the strand of grass in his hand, ‘I was just wondering.’

  ‘You’d be careful, that would be best,’ said Akathe. ‘Old Witterhe is a dangerous sort to be around. I say if my Grandhe were the Priest I’d be specially careful who I spoke to. And I’d be specially careful who I let know about strange cosmic notions.’ He shook his head, and sniffed again. ‘You think that Wittershe girl is worth anything at all? You’re a Princeling, after all. She’s beneath you. Your pas own half a dozen goats, you know.’

  ‘We lost a goat,’ said Tighe.

  ‘Well, I heard that, but that’s not the point. You still come from an important family. You can do better than a monkeymonger’s daughter. You’ll be Prince of the village one day, and you can do better. She’s beneath you. That’s what my pashe reckons, at any rate, and I suppose she knows.’

  ‘Wittershe is all right,’ said Tighe.

  ‘Sure, but there are better, that’s all. And be wary of listening to heresy, Tighe. Just because your Grandhe is the preacher won’t protect you, I think. You know the way he is, better than any.’

  ‘Grandhe came by the house today.’

  Akathe didn’t say anything.

  ‘He came by and he was actually crying. He is upset by the death of his friend, by the death of Konstakhe, he really is.’

  Akathe was working at the watch again. ‘My pashe has some things to say about that too,’ he muttered, darkly.

  ‘What?’ said Tighe, genuinely surprised.

  But Akathe wouldn’t say any more.

  Tighe wandered back through the village. The sun was hot today and he took off his shirt. Life in the village went on. Death made no dent in it. Tighe thought of the tear trembling on the underside of his Grandhe’s eye. He had never seen the old man cry before. One person’s death could put such a wound in a single mind, and yet the village carried on without there being a visible gap in the weave of life.


  He climbed down to Old Witterhe’s ledge and found Wittershe cutting pelt from the monkeys. She held one captive creature firmly with her thighs and scraped his hair off with a razor. The beast screeched and muttered, but Wittershe kept a tight grip. The shaved hair was going into a cloth sac, to be used as stuffing. When Tighe said hello she scowled at him.

  ‘I had to clean your vomit off the ledge this morning, you foulness,’ she said, sourly.

  ‘I couldn’t help myself,’ said Tighe. ‘It was the thickness of your pahe’s smoke. What is that, anyway, that smoke? What does he put in his pipe?’

  ‘Something too strong for a boy-boy like you,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ said Tighe, a little stung. ‘I’m sorry about the vomit, but, you know. I was thinking about all the stuff your pahe said last night.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’ve heard it?’

  ‘I know what the truth is,’ she said, scraping her razor down the leg of the squirming monkey. He looked comical, piebald, with one side pink and naked and the other still furred black. ‘And I know that your Grandhe would like to push my pahe off the wall for heresy.’

  ‘It’s not my fault that he’s my Grandhe,’ said Tighe, defensive. ‘I don’t think it sounded like heresy. I think it sounded right.’

  Wittershe stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘I’d be careful of saying that too much about the village,’ she said. ‘Your old Grandhe wouldn’t hold back at throwing you off if he smelt heresy.’ But there was a smile flexing her lips.

  ‘Nobody gets thrown off the world for heresy, not really,’ said Tighe, feeling the mood relax. ‘That’s just grand talk.’

  ‘There was a man my pahe knew in Meat,’ said Wittershe, starting to scrape again. ‘He spoke some heresy and he got thrown off. Or he was chased off. Before I was born.’

  Before I was born was an impossibly enormous length of time to Tighe. He came over to where Wittershe was sitting and reached out. Her neck was stretched over the ape she was dealing with. There was a little nobble of bone at the exact point of the nape. Tighe let his hand rest gently on that place. His heart sped up with the proximity, with the touch of her flesh.