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Tighe passed by, barely noticing. In his head he was starting to plan how he might petition the Doge to have Tohomhe adopt him as legal heir. Maybe Grandhe would be happy to surrender him if he agreed to give away all the goats and the house.

Through the dawn-door there was a candle burning in Grandhe’s main space; a surprising luxury. The old man was sitting in his chair, the staff between his legs. Tighe knew, as he came through the dawn-door, that the night was going to be troubling. The smell of freshly baked bread gave the interior an incongruously homely feel.

‘How was your day of work, my child?’ Grandhe demanded.

‘Gu-good,’ said Tighe, slinking a little towards the wall. ‘It wh-was good.’

‘Don’t
stammer;
snapped Grandhe, twirling his staff. ‘Now, I will speak of how my enemies have persecuted me.’

There was a pause, so Tighe filled it with a tentative ‘Yes, Grandhe?’

‘Theft is an
abomination
before God on the Top of the Wall,’ Grandhe declared in clear tones. ‘Do you understand?’

Tighe nodded, waiting for the blow.

‘Today one of your
friends
– one of those itinerants you have such compassion for – stole into my house, into
my
house, and robbed me of food. They took winter apples and the rest of the loaf

Tighe said nothing, but he thought to himself,
It was only one apple you lying old man
. But he said, ‘Yes,’ in a dull tone.

‘They are nothing. My enemies put one of them up to it. The Doge and I have agreed. Tomorrow they will be sent away from the village. We
have tolerated them too long. They are a sickness in the village. My deputies will attend me tonight and we shall prepare for the morning. They are sick, but they have numbers. You are a strong boy and you will also help.’

‘Yes, Grandhe,’ said Tighe.

The deputies slept that night in Grandhe’s main space and come morning they huddled round the old man. Tighe loitered, but Grandhe shooed him away. ‘You have work to go to now, don’t mope around.’

As he passed the itinerants on market shelf, he stopped, as if there were some way he could warn them. But there was nothing he could do. He tried to pick out the itinerant he had spoken to the other day, but the bony faces all looked much the same.

He made his way up to Tohomhe’s, but the weaver didn’t seem to be in. So he wandered a little, along the higher ledges. The sun was higher and the air was luminous with light.

He slumped down on a ledge, back against the wall, staring straight out at the sky.

Sky, air, light. Birds cooing and falling through the air. A stray piglet, branded with the mark of Lipshe, from one of the richer families higher up the wall, snuffled along the ledge, rifling through the short grass with its snout looking for edibles. The piglet ambled over to him, sniffed at his crossed legs, snuffled at his left foot and then moved on. The thought, as random as a dice throw, came into Tighe’s head to kick the beast off the crag. Let it fall off the world as his pas’ goat had done – as (and this thought brought a choking sensation back into his throat) his own pas had done. Why should Lipshe keep her pig when his own pas had fallen to nothingness? But by the time he had got to his feet the piglet was a dozen arms’ lengths away and the impulse had passed.

There was some commotion from below. A crowd gathered on main-street shelf. Tighe started along the crag and down the slant to the public ladder. By the time he got to main-street shelf it was mostly over.

The crowd was jeering as the beggars were sent away. The more able-bodied of the itinerants were being shoved and spat at as they shuffled their way to the Doge’s stairway. The Doge herself was standing there, waving them on. Clearly she had decided to waive the usual fee, happy to be ridding the village of all strangers. The crowd was unusually animated: gestures and words. Tighe dodged and hid at the back, but stole glances through the shaking shoulders and raised fists at his Grandhe, standing next to the Doge and looking holy and impassive. Two of his deputies were standing half an arm behind him, flanking him.

The itinerants shuffled slowly, exhausted and ashamed, their heads down. But the villagers were finding their own release in abuse.

‘I had to pay to go up that stairway only last month,’ yelled one, ‘and now you go up it for free, you bastard!’

‘Bastard!’

‘We should throw you off the wall, that’s my counsel!’ yelled another.

A third voice, a woman’s, shrieked, ‘You’ve brought ill luck on our village! You’ve brought ill luck on our village!’ This was taken up as a chant. ‘Ill luck! Ill luck!’ A few people plucked out pebbles from the trodden mud of main-street shelf and threw them, without particular conviction, at the retreating line of men and women. Tighe saw a pebble strike one of the itinerants on the back of the head, but the victim barely even flinched.

It did not last long. Soon the crowd lost its focus and milled about. Some people went off, talking animatedly, a few others clustered excitedly about Grandhe and the Doge. Only then did Tighe realise that three of the itinerants had not gone up the ladder with the rest of the group. They were in their old positions, backs to the wall, bone-narrow faces staring out in utter exhaustion.

Grandhe strode over to these three, his deputies a pace behind him. With a gesture, he ordered his men to take the body nearest to the stair. ‘You’ll pollute our village no longer,’ he said to the man in a ringing voice. A few of the remaining villagers standing about cheered.

The itinerant was clearly too exhausted to stand. The deputies lifted him and shoved him towards the Doge’s stair, but he fell straight back to the floor, face down. They picked him up again and tried to force him on, but he sagged like cloth between their hands. It was clear that, unless they carried him physically up every step of the stairway, he wasn’t going anywhere. The two remaining itinerants stared with unearthly, passionless gazes at this action.

With an exasperated expression, Grandhe barked at his deputies, and the two men carried the unresisting stranger back to his place at the wall. They dumped him like a bundle of bamboo sticks in at the coign of wall and shelf. He lay exactly where he fell.

‘Perhaps’, Grandhe declared in a loud voice, standing over him, ‘God will judge you. Perhaps the dawn gale, or the evening winds, will pluck you from the world and rid our Village of your curse.’

He turned and strode away. The last of the villagers went their ways. Tighe stayed in the inset where the public ladder began and watched for a while.

The scene became still as stone. None of the three remaining itinerants moved. Two were sat, backs to the wall, staring ahead. The third lay where he had been dumped.

Tighe himself didn’t sleep well that night. Grandhe kept moving through his house, coming and going. To begin with it woke Tighe up, but Grandhe hissed at him to lie still and return to sleep or he’d feel the sharp force of his staff, so he said nothing. For a while he lay completely still. Grandhe walked through the room and a little while later came back. Tighe drifted off to sleep, and woke again to the hushed sounds of conversation. Grandhe was in the other room with both of his deputies. Tighe thought about getting up and creeping over to try and overhear more clearly what they were saying, but thought better of it. If his Grandhe discovered him it would mean a beating. So instead he tried to listen in from where he was lying. That was hopeless, though: the words warbled and burred, mere music without sense. The men were deliberately talking in low tones. There was the occasional clink of baked clay beakers and Tighe wondered if Grandhe had opened one of his precious bottles of grass gin. Perhaps the men were celebrating something.

Tighe drifted to sleep again and woke with a jolt. He had been dreaming of his pashe, but it was a strange, jumbled dream. It had been his pashe that Grandhe’s deputies had been lugging across the shelf, although she was as thin and scrawny as a vagrant. And, somehow, at the same time, it had been inside his pas’ house, and Grandhe was his own pahe. Then he had looked again at his pashe’s face and, horror, it had been a bird’s face, with a great white beak.

Awake, Tighe shook his head and rubbed at his eyes with both hands. Everything in Grandhe’s house was quiet now. It was perfectly dark.

Tighe was awake for a long time, trying to rid his mind of the savour of the nightmare. He would force himself to think of happier memories, concentrate on good thoughts. It was like trying to rinse away the taste of a poisonous insect from your mouth with water; each rinse and the foul taste would recede, but when you stopped it would reassert itself.

Eventually he slept again and then woke again. Then he woke at the noise of the sunrise gale rattling the dawn-door outside. It was starting to get lighter. He lay for a while listening to the music of wind and rattle, and then
fell asleep again. When he woke properly it was because Grandhe was kicking him, none too gently. ‘Still asleep, slugabed? God loves no sluggard. Up! Up!’

He breakfasted and then cleaned the house, as was his routine now. Some of Grandhe’s deputies arrived at the house shortly after and Tighe was sent to sit in the corner of the main space. He felt, for some reason he could not put a finger on, immensely sad. Sadness filled him.

By contrast, Grandhe Jaffiahe seemed unusually cheerful. He even laughed, briefly and startlingly, at something one of his deputies said. Tighe skulked out of Grandhe’s way for a little under an hour before he was noticed. ‘Will you loiter here all the bright day?’ Grandhe demanded, gesticulating with his stick. ‘Away, my grandchild, and to your work. Go to the weaver’s, and learn a trade that will benefit you.’

Tighe slunk out of the house.

Outside it was a glorious day. The sunshine was bright and sharp, and all the colours of grass and clothing shone brightly. Flints embedded in the worldwall shone like carbuncles, looking as valuable as perspex. The shadow thrown up by the breadth of main-street shelf ended crisply a quarter-way up the Doge’s house, up the two largest monger-shops in the village. People moved back and forth, busy, their top halves in sunshine and their hair gleaming, their bottom halves still in morning shadow. Carashe, looking thin but happy enough and whistling as she moved, was driving a single goat-he with a crumpled horn towards the Doge’s house. Tighe hadn’t seen her in ages. A cluster of villagers was standing outside the Doge’s main door and the Doge was there herself, smoking her clay pipe and nodding at something being said. Tighe put his head back and could see some of the higher ledges, set back in the wall over the main street. A pig’s face peered down over a crag’s edge forty arms up.

Tighe’s mood sank. So much happiness, so much energy, and he felt exhausted and depressed. He knew why, deep down, but did not think about it. He did not want to think about it.

He crossed to the wall and bent, to try and slip past everybody without being noticed. He had no place here. It was impossible for him to go up to Tohomhe’s house. There wouldn’t be any work for him anyway, but the thought of the weaver’s simple jollity was more than he could bear. He wanted to find a dark place and lie down. He wanted to sink into shadow.

He made his way along the wall with small steps towards the public ladder, thinking to go up to the higher crags and ledges and find a peaceful place to be alone. But here was Wittershe, her pretty face smiling its unique smile, a bundled package of fodder grass for her father’s monkeys under her left arm.

‘Hello, my Princeling,’ she said, reaching out and touching his face with her right hand. ‘I should say, my Prince.’

‘Wittershe,’ he said. He felt tears prick through the blankness of his misery. She was so pretty.

‘You haven’t been down our ladder in a while, my Prince,’ she said, in a sultry tone. ‘Did you not have pleasure when you were down before? Are you not anxious for more?’

Tighe tried to speak, but words didn’t come out. How could he explain it to her? His blankness of mood, his hopelessness. She moved closer to him and he could smell her particular smell again. It reached past his misery into the core of his body, started the twinkling sensations of desire bubbling in his belly. ‘Wittershe,’ he said again.

There was something he wanted to tell her, but he didn’t like to think about it. He did not want to think about it. Couldn’t she see?

‘My sweet Tighe,’ she was saying, her breath touching his cheek. ‘I think about you and miss you. Why not come down the ladder? Why not do so now?’

‘The itinerants,’ said Tighe, with a gasp.

‘You say?’

‘The strangers. They were starving.’

‘The Doge sent them all up the stairway yesterday,’ said Wittershe, leaning a little away. ‘Everybody has talked about it. Good riddance – they were a curse upon our village, everybody says.’

‘Three were too weak to go,’ said Tighe, his voice deep with misery.

Wittershe looked quizzically at him. ‘You say?’

‘They were too starved even to stand up – but they are not here this morning.’

‘I suppose they have gone as well,’ said Wittershe, offhand. ‘I have to take this fodder down to my pahe, but then I’m free for a little while. Why not spend the time with me, for an hour?’

There was a spurt of something in Tighe’s breast, breaking the ice a little. ‘No! Wittershe –
can
you not see it? Where did the last of the itinerants go?’

‘They went up the stairway. My pahe was cross that they were given free passage when he and every other villager has to pay a debt to step up the Doge’s stair, but even he thinks it good riddance. They were a curse.’

‘Some of them went up the stair,’ said Tighe, grabbing her arm, eager to make her understand, ‘but there were three too weak to go up the ladder.’

‘Tighe,’ said Wittershe, dropping her bundle to the floor to prise his grip from her arm.

‘Where have those three gone?’

‘Gone away,’ said Wittershe. ‘How does it matter anyway? Up the stairway.’

‘No.’ He pulled her towards him. ‘Don’t you see? Don’t you see what my Grandhe has done?’