On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Now,’ said Wittershe, ‘you’d best stop that. I have work to do.’

  Tighe danced back, skittering. His heart was full of light. The softness of her skin on his fingers’ ends. ‘You hear about Old Konstakhe dying in the night?’

  Wittershe looked up sharply. ‘What’s that? Old Konstakhe dead?’

  ‘There’s the ceremony today, the burning. To send his soul up to God, they say. My Grandhe came round today crying because of the death.’

  ‘Well,’ said Wittershe. ‘That’s something. A burning today.’

  ‘I never saw my Grandhe cry before,’ said Tighe. He pushed himself against the wall and rolled slowly, pressing front and then back and then front against the warmth of the soil. Particles of dirt stuck to his skin.

  ‘Well,’ said Wittershe, with a sly look. ‘You know what they said about your Grandhe and that man.’

  ‘No,’ said Tighe. ‘What was that?’

  ‘So you never heard?’

  Tighe was genuinely puzzled. ‘No.’

  ‘What an innocent you are!’ Wittershe laughed briefly, and then turned back to the monkey. ‘Can it really be that you never heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’ Tighe brushed the dirt from his chest. His shirt was tied like a fat belt about his hips. There was more of a breeze now, falling from above and coaxing goosebumps from his arms. He unravelled his shirt and wriggled back into it.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Wittershe, with a strange smile on her face. ‘You’ll be at the ceremony?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Tighe. He had nothing to do, so of course he would go. ‘Will you go?’

  ‘Well, I’m supposed to shave all these monkeys, but I guess I could spare a little while.’

  ‘Seriously, Wittershe,’ said Tighe, coming over to her again. ‘What is it that I never heard about my Grandhe? What won’t you say to me?’

  ‘I’ll tell you at the burning,’ she said with the same minx-smile on her face.

  ‘But what is it?’

  ‘I’ll tell you at the burning,’ she repeated. ‘Only, your Grandhe and Konstakhe were more than friends. That’s all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But Wittershe wasn’t to be drawn, and eventually Tighe climbed back up the ladder and roamed around the village again. The pyre was ready now, on the market shelf; one of the junior preachers stood solidly beside it. Tighe loitered a little more.

  Soon, though, the sun was up to the level of the village and the shadows shrank right to the back of the wall. It was time for some lunch. Tighe made his way back Left through the village to his pas’ house. As he arrived back at the door the air was very still and the sun’s heat was undisturbed. He was sweating a little as he fingered the latch of the dawn-door aside and stepped into the cool of the hallway.

  His pashe was home, lying in the dark of the bedroom. When she heard Tighe moving around in the main space she stirred and came out of her room. For a while she was silent, only watching whilst Tighe cut up some sprouted grass-bread and smeared it with watery cheese. Her silent audience began to make Tighe nervous. She was usually in a weird mood after any encounter with Grandhe, but if she were going to explode at him she would probably have done so by now. He wiped the spatula and put it away and then came over and gave his pashe a kiss. She turned her cheek as he walked over with a strange something in her expression, but she accepted the kiss.

  A little unsettled, Tighe took up the bread and cheese and ate it in large mouthfuls. He wanted to say something, to draw pashe out of her motionless silent watching, but he didn’t know what to say. He looked around, hoping his pahe was somewhere in the house, but he clearly wasn’t.

  ‘I went by market shelf,’ he said, at last, his words sounding clumsy and loud after the quiet. ‘They’ve built the pyre.’ Silence. He finished the bread and wiped his hands on his shirt. ‘It looks handsomely done.’

  A fluttery smile had come to her lips. His heart lurched. What did that mean?

  ‘You’re a good boy-boy,’ she said, in a distant voice. The smile was a full smile now and she held out one hand towards him. Feeling more than a little sheepish. Tighe went towards her and was received into a desultory one-armed hug. Then he broke away and slouched about the room as he spoke.

  ‘It was strange to see Grandhe so upset,’ he said. ‘I don’t recall ever having seen him so upset by anything.’

  Pashe was leaning against the wall by the doorway into her bedroom. ‘You know your Grandhe,’ she said. There was a floaty, disconcerting edge to her voice. Tighe found himself getting wound up inside, like one of Akathe’s clockwork devices.

  ‘I guess. I remember another ceremony of burning, I must have been three, not yet three. I remember that, though, and Grandhe seemed almost pleased to be able to do it. I remember all his preaching.’ He stopped speaking and stopped his slouching. Pashe was following him with her eyes without turning her head.

  ‘I don’t recall ever having seen Grandhe so upset by anything,’ Tighe said again. ‘I guess he and Konstakhe had been pretty close friends, had they?’

  The merest contraction of her eyelids, but pashe didn’t say anything.

  ‘It must be terrible to lose somebody you’re really close to.’ Tighe’s own voice sounded strange in his head. It was the silence. But he couldn’t stop talking. ‘I heard in the village that there was some story about Grandhe and Konstakhe, but I never heard that before.’ As soon as he had said it, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. He stopped, his heart faster, wondering if he had spoken the spell that would summon up the angry pashe. Poised. But she hadn’t moved, her expression hadn’t changed, except perhaps for the faintest tightening around her nostrils. Tighe was breathing shallowly.

  ‘Anyway, I guess I’ll go along to the ceremony and hear Grandhe preaching,’ he said, hurriedly. ‘Will you go there? Will pahe be there?’

  Pashe’s hand went up to her mouth, her fingers’ ends touching her upper lip. ‘Will I go?’ she said. She was standing straight now. ‘Will I go to the ceremony? Will your pahe? Do you know where your pahe is? Do you know where he is?’

  Heat was building in her words. Tighe felt sickness in his own belly. He had got her angry after all and now there was nothing he could do except stand there and watch whilst her rage built itself and built itself until it exploded. His eyes and mouth were equally open, frozen, a horrified look. ‘Do you know where your pahe is? Shall I tell you? Whilst you maunder around the village like a goat lost on a crag, your pahe has been working on the higher ledges. Have you forgotten already that we lost a goat days ago – a whole goat? Is that how selfish you have become? Don’t you know what that means, in terms of the extra work your pahe and I have to do now?’ Her voice was loud now, her hand clenching to a fist before her face with each emphasis. But Tighe could only stand there and watch. ‘Do you assume everybody is as idle and worthless as you are? Is that what you assume? People have work to do – not you, not you of course, but real people. People like your pahe and me.’ She was trembling now, shivering with the rage as it built up inside her. Her other hand came up and clutched sharply at the fist. ‘I wonder how I could have raised a boy-boy as selfish as you. It’s mockery, it is mockery, mocking your Grandhe when he came here with tears in his eyes,’ and with that she lurched forward and swung out with both her linked fists. Tighe knew better than to dodge. The blow caught him at the side of his head and he dropped himself down. It was better to go down. He curled up, wrapping his head in his arms and bringing his knees to his shoulders. It wasn’t that it hurt him physically – he was too large for that now – but there was something horribly penetrating about her anger, emotionally penetrating, and that made it gruelling. He didn’t understand it and yet he did understand it. Deep down it made sense and the sense it made had a kind of perfection because deep down he was bad and his pashe could see that.

  She had taken up one of the wall paddles, a yard-long slightly curved and polished piece of wood that pahe used to work patterns into the drying
mud of the wall. It was wood and therefore valuable, but pashe was using it feverishly, slapping and smacking his whole body. In some distant part of his brain, Tighe wondered whether she would break it and what they would do then. He didn’t want the paddle to break because it was expensive. But also, some logical part of his mind deep inside his head decided, because if it broke then he would have to explain to his pahe how it had broken. And that would mean including pahe in this ritual of pain. Which was not something Tighe wanted. Impact burned on his hip, chest, head, stomach-side. And then, suddenly, it was over.

  When he looked up, tentatively, his pashe was sitting, panting a little, with her back to the wall of the open space and her legs out straight in front of her. Sheepishly, as if complicit in some unmentionable game, she caught his eye. He unwound himself and got unsteadily to his feet, and during the whole time of this manoeuvre they never broke eye contact. It was a kind of bond between them, a horrible intimacy. But he knew he brought it on himself. So he bowed his head, and shuffled out through the door and out on to the ledge again.

  6

  After he had wandered about the village for a bit in the sunshine the beating receded into the distance. It became a memory, and memory (he told himself) made little distinction between yesterday and ten years since. Thinking about it like that helped. As if it had not happened, not quite. Or, perhaps, as if it had happened to someone else.

  There was the sun, there were the faces of the people passing, that was enough. He sat and stared out at the sky for a while: his whole theory of there being another wall, a pure, clean blue-grey wall in the hazy distance – was that a kind of heresy too? He wondered what his Grandhe would say if he broached it to him. He squeezed his eyelids together, trying to bring the distant artefact into some more detailed resolution, trying to trick optics with the pressure on his eyeballs.

  He touched his bruises slightly, with his fingers’ ends, through his clothes. One more feature on the landscape of his body.

  He drew in three long, slow breaths. He actually felt better.

  After a while he made his way back along. On market shelf the crowd was starting to gather. It was about to happen. Both the junior preachers were standing by the pyre now, something stiffer in their posture. Tighe watched shop alcoves in the side of the wall shut up, their owners scurrying in knots of two and three and accumulating on the broad shelf. People were coming up the main stair at the far end of the street one by one, each head growing into a body with legs and feet, and each person emerging to be followed by a new head. The sun was cooled by a strong breeze from below; an afternoon breeze rising as the day warmed. The sun was above them now, throwing shadows and spreading darkness into doorways and cubbyholes.

  Tighe pushed through the crowd looking for Wittershe. For some reason he couldn’t quite pinpoint, the thought of her neck was very strong in his imagination. It was so beautiful: the brown tone of her skin; the tiny black filaments of hair that were just about visible on it, the arc of the bone under skin. A wave of intense yearning passed through Tighe and he wanted to touch Wittershe. But he couldn’t find her in the crowd.

  The crowd had now reached a certain size, and was gelling as a mass of people. Tighe, always nervous in groups when too near the edge, elbowed his way through and pressed his flank against the wall itself. He had an oblique view of the pyre as the two junior preachers moved off and made their way into the chapel behind. Tighe had been friendly with one of the juniors when they had both been boy-boys; but now he took his apprenticeship to preaching seriously. Tighe hadn’t spoken to him from summer to summer, a whole half-year.

  A hum started in the midst of the crowd and Tighe raised himself. They were bringing out the body; wrapped in a grass-weave shroud, slung between the two juniors. And there was Grandhe, hands folded together as he paced the ground out to the pyre. The crowd was excited now, with mutters rippling back and across. The juniors were sliding the body into the inside of the pyre.

  There was a touch at his shoulder: Wittershe.

  ‘My pahe don’t know I’m here,’ she said into his ear, breathy from just having climbed up. ‘I mayn’t be able to stay for the whole ceremony.’

  ‘You’re just in time,’ said Tighe, his chest burning with excitement. He tried to turn round, but she pushed his shoulder. The crowd was close around them and there wasn’t much space. Tighe had to content himself with reaching behind himself and letting his knuckles trace the side of Wittershe’s hip.

  ‘There’s your Grandhe,’ she said, putting her mouth close to his ear. When she leaned forward to talk, her body pressed against Tighe’s left shoulderblade, her warm breath tickled the side of his head. His wick was hard as stone with just that fleeting contact. ‘There’s your Grandhe,’ she said, ‘weeping over his woman.’

  It took a moment for Tighe to realise what she was saying. ‘What do you mean?’

  But Grandhe’s voice came bellowing out and the crowd hushed. Wittershe’s hand found Tighe’s and her fingers curled into his.

  ‘God sits on top of the wall,’ he called forth, in clear tones. ‘God sees everything from there. What God wants, God gets. He wanted the soul of our dear friend Konstakhe.’ And he broke off. There was no expression readable on his face. The crowd was becoming more excited, jostling back and forth, motion passing through the gathered bodies like wind through the grass. Grandhe’s expression was unreadable.

  ‘God placed us on the wall as witnesses,’ he said. A few people in the crowd moaned or murmured. Somebody put his hand into the air and then others did the same. ‘Konstakhe was a good man. He was a good man,’ Grandhe was saying, but his voice was becoming submerged in the increasing hum of the crowd.

  ‘He’ll be flying up,’ shouted Grandhe, his voice loud suddenly. The congregation hummed like the wind, and somebody towards the back took up the shout. ‘Upward! Upward!’ Tighe felt his heart jerk, twist inside him. Everything shifted, seemed to pull closer. Bodies, red faces. Everyone calling out, faces stretching to open the mouth wide. Up! Up! He was joining in the shouting without even realising it. Up he had to go; he had been a good man. Grandhe was shouting, his words barely audible over the storm of shouting.

  ‘Upwards! Upwards!’

  Grandhe kept talking, and with a sort of impalpable eddy the jostling crowd stilled. The shouting died and the Funeral Speech became more audible.

  ‘… of the Divine, his spirit. With the flames that struggle upwards, with the smoke that tumbles into the sky, with the hot air rising, his spirit. His body shall relinquish it and only the downward dust shall remain. And dust shall feed the earth and the earth will bring forth flowers in the dirt. Flowers, my friends,’ said Grandhe, lifting his arms in a theatrical gesture, and smiling. ‘Flowers know their nature is from the Divine! They struggle upwards, struggle like green flames, though tethered to the ledge. They struggle in the direction that he has gone!’ A murmur spread quickly through the mourners; Grandhe beaming, casting his glance amongst these people. For the briefest moment his eyes lighted on Tighe.

  Tighe’s heart leapt up again, but for a different reason. The unholy thought had occurred to him just how ugly Grandhe’s face was. Broad brown nose like a piece of goat-dung; semi-coloured face, blotched with a disfiguring paleness in a spilt pattern, like milk unwiped away. He joined in, heartily, to cover his own evil thinking.

  ‘Upwards! Upwards!’

  Grandhe ducked down and Tighe couldn’t see him past the crush of people. But moments later boulders of smoke hurtled upwards and a shower of flames stretched after them. How did they get bodies to burn so quickly and with such ferocity? Tighe didn’t know.

  Wittershe was at his back, pressing herself against him. ‘I could hardly hear,’ she said, leaning close to his ear. ‘Did he say anything shocking? Did he admit to anything with Konstakhe?’

  Tighe breathed sharply, sucking in a laugh. It was the tart delight of being close to Wittershe, of her saying the unsayable. He half turned and leaned a little forwar
d, so as to bring his mouth close to the side of her head. ‘How do they get flesh to burn so fierce?’ he hissed in her ear.

  She snorted with laughter, stretched up so that her lips were close to his ear. ‘They douse the body. They dig a pit and douse it with this stuff, leave it all night. But only if the dead is a virtuous dead. My pahe told me.’

  ‘Your pahe doesn’t know anything past monkeys,’ said Tighe, drunk with the delight of speaking the unspeakable. But the cheering had got louder and Wittershe probably didn’t hear. Which was doubtless for the best since Wittershe was close to her pahe.

  ‘Stand there,’ said Wittershe. ‘I want to climb up on your back and have a look at the body burning.’ He turned to face the front again and her tiny body was scrambling up his back, pulling herself up with her hands over his shoulders. She reached as high as she could go, her belly pressing into the back of his head. She was holding his shoulder to steady herself. His bruises ached a little where she put pressure on them, but he didn’t mind that, not really. He reached up with his own right hand out, pressing the small of her back to steady her. The goat-hair cloth she was wearing scratched his neck, but his head, neck, back could feel the sliding of her naked belly. It was so close, pressed so close against him. His heart swam, his wick strengthening and standing. With his free hand he jostled it, so that it wouldn’t bulge his pants. ‘Can you see it?’ he called. ‘Can you see it?’

  It wasn’t comfortable and it obstructed his own view of the scene, poor though that had been. He could just about make out the shimmy of the flame-tops over the people ahead of him. Everybody had shuffled forward as the burning began and closed together, almost as if they wanted to soak up the warmth. He tried to look up, to see if the old man’s spirit was visible as it bounced up free through the air, looking like – he didn’t know what. Dancing on the flame-tops, perhaps, or climbing each strand of yellow flame like a spirit creeper. But he couldn’t see anything other than the backs of people’s heads and at the top of his vision only a mess of broken smoke. Wittershe was leaning forward, her head and her hair stopping him seeing properly upwards. Tighe got a sudden perspective of a folded chin, of nostrils and sight up the nostrils. It was weird. But the press of her flesh against him, the sagging curve of goat-hair cloth that was only a thin veil hiding her small breasts, was more present in him. His wick was straining now, so stiff it even hurt a little.