On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Tighe worked and worked in the frame until his every joint ached and there were blisters on his back. At night, in the dormitory with all the others, there would be an hour when Waldea left the platon alone and everybody would whisper excitedly amongst themselves. For days Tighe was too timid to join in, but soon enough he was being asked direct questions. The voices came from all directions.

  ‘Where you from, sky-boy?’

  ‘Why is your skin that colour?’

  ‘Did you fall from the sky – really?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tighe.

  ‘Ooh! Ooh!’

  ‘Fallen from the sky!’

  ‘What was it like?’ asked one of the kite-girls, a tangled-haired individual called Mani. Tighe recognised her voice from the chatter in the darkness at night.

  ‘I don’t remember very,’ said Tighe. ‘I fell for a long time.’

  ‘Listen to his accent,’ hissed somebody on the other side of the room. ‘How stupid.’

  Ati blurted out, ‘I spoke to him a long time. He is stupid, he don’t know nothing, he speaks funny.’

  ‘You speak funny yourself, downwaller,’ shushed somebody.

  ‘You rederen off a calabash,’ said somebody else.

  ‘What’s rederen?’ asked Tighe, trying to be bolder.

  There were muffled shrieks of laughter, mockery. ‘Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘Rederen is boing boing,’ said somebody else.

  Soon everybody had joined in. Boing boing boing. They were all laughing so hard the volume level was getting higher and higher. Then the door was open and the Master was coming back through. The laughter dissipated immediately.

  ‘Sleep now,’ he said.

  The kite-girls, five of them, tended to keep themselves to themselves; when they weren’t exercising or practising they would sit together and play variations of the same game over and over – slapping their palms together and slapping one another’s palms in complicated patterns whilst chanting something. Tighe couldn’t catch the words.

  The dozen kite-boys were more boisterous, or at least they were when Waldea wasn’t looking. They bickered and fought amongst themselves, threw pebbles at one another (as well as at Tighe), taunted each other. Only the presence of Waldea brought any discipline to their group.

  One morning as Tighe was extricating himself from his blanket ready for the morning food, one of the boys leapt upon him, pulled down his leggings in an instant and gave his wick a sharp, painful tug. The humiliation of it as much as the pain – although the pain was very real – made Tighe collapse in a bundle with tears in his eyes. Around him the air was filled with hilarity, whooping and mocking. Then it all fell silent. Waldea must have come back in.

  ‘What are you doing Tig-he, on the floor?’ Tighe could tell, from the proximity of his voice, that he was standing over him. ‘Why are your leggings down? It’s disgusting, disgusting.’

  Tighe hauled himself up, his eyes messy with tears. ‘A boy pushed the leggings down,’ he said. ‘He hurt my penis. It was Mulvaine, I think.’

  Waldea slapped him on the side of his head; not hard, but not soft either. ‘Don’t tell me so! Don’t be a putavre! You are in the army, you look after yourself or not at all.’

  But Tighe couldn’t acquire the knack of looking after himself. He found himself crying most nights, silently to himself when he was wrapped up in his blanket. The other kite-boys took a particular pleasure in making him cry. But the strange thing was that, some days, the other kite-boys would be touchingly kind to him. He didn’t understand it. Usually it was when Ati became the butt of sharp comments and practical jokes. One morning, when Waldea stepped out and the platon was supposed to be folding up their blankets and getting ready for breakfast, three boys jumped Ati. They pushed him down, for all his yelling, and squashed something on to his face, trying to get it into his mouth. ‘Eat! Eat!’ they called. Everybody gathered round, eager, excited: even the girls. Mulvaine put his arm round Tighe’s shoulder, ‘You see how we all hate the downwaller?’ he said, smilingly. With a lurch in his stomach, Tighe realised that Ati’s face was smeared now with shit; that somebody must have pushed out a turd in the night, and now they were trying to make Ati eat it. ‘Shits falls downwall!’ somebody crooned. ‘Nice piece of breakfast for you,’ called somebody else. Everybody was chattering, laughing. Ati struggled, grunting through clenched teeth. Tighe felt sick, sick from the thought of it and sick at the cruelty, but he also felt excited. It was thrilling in a strange way. He was laughing, just like the others; grinning, waving at the tangled mass of boys. He felt guilty at laughing, but he did it anyway.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Everybody was back at their mattresses, folding their blankets, smoothing down their hair and clothes. You could see which boys had been grappling with Ati, because they were wiping their hands on the floor and on their own leggings. Ati himself stood in the middle of the room in the half-light, his face darkened with shit. His whole body spoke misery, his slumped shoulders, his gash of a mouth.

  ‘Ati,’ bellowed Waldea, who had come back in, ‘what is it with you? Do you want me to beat you?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Master,’ replied Ati. With another lurch in his belly, Tighe realised that the downwaller was close to tears.

  ‘Everybody outside,’ ordered Waldea. ‘You all carry stones.’ He looked at Ati. ‘Disgusting! Disgusting! We’ll make sure Ati here remembers to keep clean.’

  And so they all went outside and carried stones. Some of the boys were grinning, squinting in the morning light, but Tighe wasn’t. When Ati finally emerged to join in the exercises his face was clean of shit, but there was a large bruise, shit-coloured, on his cheek.

  Tighe worked and worked in the frame until it became second nature, and the blisters on his back had broken and healed back over as tougher skin. Then one morning, as the other kite-boys and kite-girls assembled and fitted themselves into their kites ready for another practice, Waldea grabbed Tighe by the shoulder. ‘Today you’ll fly,’ he said.

  It was as simple as that.

  He was given his kite, the real kite: a wooden cross with other wooden spars, the shape of a teardrop, as tall as Tighe himself and half as tall again. The material covering the frame was a kind of leather, but a leather thinner, more flexible and tougher than any hide he had seen before.

  Every kite-boy and kite-girl assembled their kites before flying them; slotted crossbar into mainbar, fed the smaller spars through, stretched the leather over the frame and pinned it into place. Tighe had done this before many times and now he did it again. Every member of the platon was sitting cross-legged on the ledge assembling his or her kite. Tighe went through the motions.

  When assembled the kites were leant against the wall, to catch the sunlight to dry and stretch taut. Whilst this happened the platon went through a series of precise movements with their arms and legs. To loosen their limbs, get their muscles ready. It was these exercises that Tighe had seen when he first came round the spar.

  Then he joined the line with the other kite-boys and kite-girls, gathering up his kite and moving to the edge of the ledge. Waldea stood behind him. It was all right. He tried not to think about what he was going to do. And then, there he was: standing on the very edge of the world and about to step off it. His stomach shrunk fiercely, his heart was squeezing and pulsing. He couldn’t co-ordinate his limbs properly.

  With a horrible sense of realisation he knew that he couldn’t go through with this part of it. He just couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He stiffened, strained back; but Waldea’s hand on his shoulder was rock. ‘Into the harness, omen-boy,’ said Waldea. His voice was thorny, pricking. Tighe slid his arms through the harness, felt the kite settle against his back; but his skin was numb, sweating. He couldn’t do it.

  Couldn’t.

  To his right Tighe could see Ati. The downwaller was fiddling with his chest, tracing a complex pattern with one of his thumbs. He caught Tighe’s eye.

  ‘A
lways bless myself before I go out,’ he said, speaking loudly so that his words would carry over the shush of the rising wind. His cheek was flushed red, his pupils pin-sharp.

  ‘No,’ said Tighe, in a small voice. Then, louder: ‘No, I can’t.’

  But Ati wasn’t listening to him any more. Waldea was tying a cord to Ati’s kite. He brought it over to Tighe’s and fixed it. ‘This cord’, he said, ‘links you with Ati’s kite. He will guide you. Follow him, learn how to fly in the air, watch him and follow him.’

  ‘No,’ said Tighe. It was unbearable. The world shrank, span outwards. His vision was hollowing out. The wind seemed to have bored into his head, filling his inner ear. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll feel different when you’re up,’ said Waldea, his mouth very close to Tighe’s ear. Oddly, he didn’t seem angry at Tighe’s reluctance.

  To Tighe’s right kites were tumbling from the wall, falling into the void. The kite to the left of Ati’s was hauled into the air by the wind, a figure strapped underneath. It wavered in the air, then ducked down out of sight. It was too much for Tighe to bear.

  Tighe felt it all rushing inside him, an overwhelming upward push in his body as if his guts were hollow and possessed by the upward gushing air. Then his gullet convulsed and he was vomiting.

  ‘Puking?’ screeched Waldea in his weirdly high-pitched voice. ‘Disgusting! Disgusting! Away with you.’ But he didn’t push Tighe away; instead he grabbed the crossbeam of his kite and pulled him down, tipping him at an angle, letting the stream dribble from the boy’s lips to the dirt at the lip of the ledge.

  Tighe closed his eyes, the misery of vomiting distracting his attention from the drop in front of him. He heard somebody several arms away down the ledge make exaggerated noises of disgust. Nearer at hand he heard Ati yelling over the rising air, ‘Ready to go, I’m ready, I’m ready.’

  Tighe’s insides felt wrenched and there was a scorching trail from his stomach up his throat, but he felt himself manhandled, pushed and hauled upright again by a cursing Waldea. He opened his mouth to apologise to the Master, but only a moan came out. He still had his eyes shut. The kite straps pressed hard against his shoulder, a deep tug inside him that repeated the clench of the vomiting, and the sound of the wind took on a deeper timbre.

  He opened his eyes. He was up, in the air.

  Against the background of the gushing noise of the wind was a reedy wail. It was, he realised, his own voice, howling punily. The wind turned, caught him, lurched him to the left.

  His feet were dangling over nothingness. All the way down to –

  Look up.

  The worldwall was there. It reached up for ever and down for ever with an awesome solidity. For an instant Tighe’s fears dissolved; the hideous taste in his mouth, the hollow twist in his gut, were shrunken to nothing before the sheer spread of the wall itself. He was far enough out in the air to see the range of it, the slight curve of it away to the left and to the right. The trick of perspective as the eye was drawn upwards, all the way up until the wall itself was lost in haze.

  There was a tug on his line and his kite jerked, veered away, pulling him through a half-turn. His vision of the wall slipped to the side, to be replaced by an expansive blue wash with tiny shredded clouds. He saw the line leading away from his kite and Ati’s kite in the distance pulling the rope taut.

  Tighe’s stomach spasmed again at the yaw of the drop beneath him. The kite strained and creaked at his back and he dipped and swooped down.

  He wondered if he were still afraid. He wished he could have some water for his bitter-tasting, burnt tongue. The savour of vomit was still in his mouth, on his teeth, on his lips.

  A runnel of sobs came and went, shaking his chest. But here he was. Flying. The kite trembled in the wind, shook noisily behind him as a larger gust took it. Flying. He reached out and grabbed the pull harness, as he’d been taught to do on the frame. With a yank the kite struggled to turn in the roar of the wind. Even above the noise of the air Tighe could hear the leather rope connecting his to Ati’s kite creak as it strained. Almost without thinking about it he hauled the other way. The kite flexed, the edges of its wings dipping in, and with a juddery grace it swerved to the left. The line slackened and wind braided and twanged it.

  Ati’s kite was a fair distance away, growing slowly as Tighe steered his kite towards him. Then, so suddenly that Tighe yelled out in fright, it was right there, huge, close enough to touch. Tighe caught one super-vivid image of Ati’s face, mouth open, eyes creased in the effort of yelling – fear – anger – and then Tighe was past him, flying through clear air.

  He had passed a hand’s width from collision.

  Sluggishly Tighe pulled his weight out of the harness’s left side and the swoop came to an end in an ungainly turn. For a moment Tighe was upside-down and his stomach lurched again. Then he was rightways again, gasping. The air washed hugely past him. The skin of his kite twitched as if alive.

  Ati reappeared before him, controlling his kite with fierce little jerks of his body to keep it facing Tighe. He was yelling, but there was no way his voice could carry in the enormity of the wind’s crashing. Tighe stared, dumbfounded, at the anger of the boy’s expression.

  The wind rattled them, separating them.

  Tighe fought the buffeting, trying to bring the kite he rode under control. The frame, rooted as it was to the shelf, had been nothing like the real thing. Besides, he could see that Waldea was hurrying him through the training before they went to war.

  He pulled on his harness again and the kite lifted him and swept him round. Setting back into a hovering flight was the tricky thing. His mind alert now, he realised that he would need that sort of control if he ever wanted to land the thing.

  There was a sharp, agonising switch against his left leg: the rope was flapping loose, whipping frantically in the breezy air. Belatedly Tighe understood that Ati, angered at the dangerous proximity of Tighe’s pass had freed himself from the tether. The slack line curled and snapped, poising itself, snake-like, as if to strike. With clumsy movement Tighe unhooked his end of the tether from the underside of the kite, just by his shoulder. The rope slipped from the bar, coiling through the air as it fell away.

  Tighe looked around. The exhilaration of what he was doing was starting to penetrate him. He pulled to the left, then to the right. The whole worldwall, the massy solidity of everything, danced and jogged before him. Away to the left, to the right. He wriggled in the harness the way he had been told to do in the frame back on land: only here, in this new element, the balance of his body and the broad stretch of kite existed in a new relationship. Lean it forward into the push of the wind from below and it hovered and wobbled; lean back and the breeze lifted him up. Angle it far enough and the flat plane of the kite relinquished the hold of air and fell, cut through the air knife-like as he hurtled down. But this fall could be slowed and curved away from with the pressure of his arms or the angling of his body.

  The other kites were circling now, drifting downwards in spirals for all the world like birds. Tighe concentrated and started coming down. His mouth was very dry, his eyes were stinging. His legs were so cold he could not really feel his feet. It was not easy to bring the kite under control.

  He could understand now some of the snatches of talk he had overheard in barracks. Away from the face of the wall itself the winds were cleaner: not free from all crosswinds, but easier to ride. But near the wall the winds became chopped up and bitty, and the kites tended to vibrate and thrum noisily. It was hard even to see properly because the vibration jarred the eyeballs.

  Tighe swept away and curled back. He could see, fairly distant now, kites landing back on the ledge: it was over to the right and a little below him. Suddenly, trembling at the prospect of landing without crashing fatally into the face of the world, Tighe tugged himself back in that direction. He tried to coax the kite into a gentle descent, but a bucking strong breeze knocked him wallwards and a blank stone patch of sheer ver
tical world sprang up towards him with sickening speed. Terrified, Tighe threw all his weight away skywards and the kite arced round and swung out.

  He was scared now and panting. Giving the wall a much wider berth, he tried to swing down to the platon’s ledge. But he ended up circling pointlessly in the air. Looking around he could see no other kites. He was alone in the sky; everybody else had landed. He tried another pass, but the terrific rattling of the kite’s fabric seemed to convey itself directly into his bones. Terror took root in him. The bitter taste in his mouth intensified.

  The ledge swept past and then the spur that separated the platon’s base from the main shelf. The calabashes loomed into view and Tighe swerved up and round to leave them behind. He twisted in the harness as he repassed the spur, brought the kite round and tumbled through the sky, picking up speed, falling again. Sudden flash vision of his pashe, her face buckled with anger. And the air howling at him.

  With a reflex, by which he surprised himself at a deep level, the kite veered up and all the speed bled away in the sharp ascent. He lowered and toppled forward where the hard dirt of the ledge came banging up against the soles of his feet.

  Some of the other kite-boys and kite-girls were there, arms out, to grab at the tips of his wings as his body went limp, his knees scraping the dirt. It took him several long breaths to realise that he was back on the wall. Home. Firmness under foot.

  With this understanding came an elation, soaring in the middle of his chest. He wriggled out of his harness, clambered out from the structure of the kite. Waldea would be happy with him. He had flown; he had landed. There was a bright light in his stomach.

  Waldea was lumbering towards him, head down. He arrived right in front of Tighe and flashed his fist out. The sideways blow, glancing, caught Tighe unawares. His head jerked to the side as a star of pain burst in the side of his temples.

  ‘You threw that rope away,’ Waldea was yelling. ‘I stood here and watched you. Do you know how much tether rope costs?’