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Tighe tried to answer, but was panting too hard.

‘You are not a good kite-boy,’ said Waldea, settling himself more comfortably on the ledge. ‘You tug too hard at the controls and you cannot anticipate the billows of the air. But you can fly and as such you will be useful to the Empire. Do not throw yourself away over the edge of things!’

‘No,’ breathed Tighe. ‘No, Master.’

‘Come,’ said Waldea. I know your foot is poorly formed now. I will carry your kite and together we will jog to the bolt hole.’

Without the burden of his kite Tighe made much swifter progress, although he was wary of straying too near the edge of the world and jogged cumbrously with the wall itself at his left. Waldea himself, though a large man, ran with a slow flowing grace, the kite seeming shrunken against his bulky frame.

They passed along a broad ledge that sloped slightly upwards, open doorways like unfilled eye sockets to their left. But soon enough this remnant village passed behind them and they moved along uncultivated ledges, some of which were little more than crags. The passage of the army had rubbed away all the grass to dust, but Tighe could see that until
recently these ways had been rarely trodden by humankind. From time to time the work of sappers was in evidence, planks of wood shoring up the crumbly outwall portions of especially narrow walkways. Tighe gasped to see such extravagance – presumably the sappers would follow up behind the march and gather up the precious wood.

Even with the augmentation, Tighe found these narrower ledges uncomfortable to move along. His heart tripped and rolled in irregular beats. All his instincts told him to slow down, to hang on to the wall at his left, to proceed slowly, cautiously, if at all. But Waldea was jogging fluidly on, and Tighe knew better than to deny him. So he swallowed the bile that rose in his gullet and pushed on too. Not looking to his right, that was the important thing. Not casting his glance into the abyss at his right.

They rounded another spar and Waldea slowed up. They had reached a broader ledge and Tighe could see a scattering of blue-frocked soldiers patrolling. At the far end was a peculiar blue-and-red blob being manhandled by a team of people working with long sticks. It was so far distant that Tighe could not at first make sense of it. Then he realised what was going on: the air had been taken out of the belly of the Pope’s calabash and its floppy enormous skin was being piled and folded.

Waldea’s stone-heavy hand was on Tighe’s shoulder. Tn here, little Tighe,’ he said, handing him back his kite. ‘This is the bolt hole. Do not tell the others that I carried your kite for you.’

‘No, Master,’ said Tighe.

‘I must have authority, you see.’

‘Yes, Master,’ said Tighe, incredulous that anything could undermine Waldea’s authority, which seemed to him as godlike as the Pope’s himself.

‘The others would mock you, Tig-he, and think less of me. Never tell them.’

‘No, Master.’

And then – miraculously, because Tighe had never seen it happen before – Waldea smiled. The scars on his face wriggled and crinkled like an animated painting of white fire, and his teeth flashed in the high sun. ‘You and I share a secret now, boy,’ he said.

Tighe stared up at him, goggle-eyed.

‘Perhaps I will tell you some of my secrets when the battle is over, boy,’ Waldea said, leaning over him. ‘You and I are more alike than are the others. You and I are both from outside and both are wounded in the body. And I know some things, my boy!’ he said, his voice grumbling with what sounded like a chuckle of laughter. I know some things about this war, my boy! I know the stories told in the Officers’ Mess about the real reason for the Pope’s marvellous action.’

‘Master?’ asked Tighe.

‘Into the bolt hole for now,’ said Waldea, standing straighter and his usual stern expression reclaiming his face. ‘Into the bolt hole with the other kite-boys, the other kite-girls. The sun has almost gone over the wall.’

The bolt hole was a naturally formed cave, dusty floored but with hard rock for walls and ceiling. Grass-wax torches were pinned to the back wall, giving out a puckering light. The kites were stacked along the far wall and Tighe added his to the rack.

It was crowded inside. The kite-boys and kite-girls shared this bolt hole with a number of other platons from the papal army. There were no riflemen or regular soldiers – they were billeted in a more spacious cavern further along the ledge, it seemed – but there was a knot of sappers talking amongst themselves in one corner, and the kitchen staff with all their potboys and potgirls took up a lot of space. The kitchen workers were serving food out of a clay cauldron at the back, and Tighe grabbed a packet of something wrapped in grass-leaves and wove his way through the mess of people until he found Ati.

‘You took your own slow time coming here,’ said Ati, licking his fingers. He had finished his rations.

‘My foot,’ said Tighe. ‘Bad foot.’ He was still startled by Waldea’s sudden intimacy with him, on the ledge outside.

Somebody slammed the door shut and wedged it tight.

A little later everybody fell silent and listened to the dusk gale outside. The wind seemed almost to be singing, a mournful and savage opera of howls and grinds. Somehow the noise was more spooky than usual.

Tighe untied his blanket from his back and unfolded it. ‘Ati,’ he said, as he wrapped himself up.

‘Yes, my barbarian?’ replied Ati, in a sleepy voice. He was already swaddled up, ready for sleep.

‘Do you think of things?’ Tighe asked.

‘What?’

‘Do you think of the worldwall?’

‘You have turd for a brain,’ said Ati, shuffling to make himself more comfortable.

‘It’s a strange place for people to live. Why did God build the wall?’

‘God has reasons,’ mumbled Ati.

The next day the army got moving much earlier. The sappers were up and moving around long before the usual time of the kite-pilots. They woke Tighe up with their laughter and he lay listening to their bustle. There was a gripping feeling in his stomach that was not pleasant. Would they go to war today?

The kitchen staff were up next, dragging their rumbling cauldrons over the dusty floor through the supine figures to the doorway. ‘Kite-pilots!’ barked Waldea suddenly. ‘Up early today! Food and then straight away we march for the Meshwood.’

As they ate, Ati came and huddled close against Tighe. ‘Today we’ll see the Meshwood,’ he said.

‘Have you seen it?’

Ati grimaced. ‘No, but I have heard stories. Claw-caterpils, terrible things. Like dragons.’

‘What are
dragons
?’

‘Like snakes, big snakes.’

‘Oh,’ said Tighe, nodding and looking serious. Then, ‘What are
snakes
?’

Ati gasped in exasperation. ‘They are huge, the claw-caterpils, with long bodies as long as a ledge. They are thin and long, like ropes, only bigger. And all along their bodies they have claws, like razh – yes?’ Ati tapped at his fingernails with the fingernails of his other hand. ‘Razh, yes?’

‘Fingernails,’ said Tighe.

‘Yes, but much thicker and like a cat’s claw. And there are dozens of these all along the length of the body.’ Ati gave a little cry, giving up his attempt at description. ‘They will eat you! Cut your body with their claw and their jaws.’

Tighe shuddered. ‘They live in the Meshwood?’

‘In the depths of it.’

Tighe shook his head sorrowfully. I do not understand’, he said, ‘why we must go through the Meshwood.’

‘The Otre are on the far side.’

‘But why must we march with the army? Can we not fly with our kites?’

At this Ati laughed hard. ‘You are especially ignorant for a kite-boy,’ he said. ‘You are a turd for a brain. The winds do not flow that way, not along the wall. We cannot fly east – up, down, wallwards, awaywall, yes. But east, west, is hard to fly. Unpredictable.’ He laughed again. ‘A kite-pilot must know these things!’

Tighe blushed and bowed his head; and then, with a sudden access of energy, he bundled into Ati and pushed him to the ground. The two of them wrestled together, laughing, until one of the other kite-boys, Chemler, slapped them on the back to break them up.

They marched out in line a little later that morning. Waldea strode along at the back.

To begin with the line was straight and marched purposefully in order. Tighe walked ahead of Ati and behind Ravielre. But after an hour or two the discipline began to erode. The ledges they trod were broad and people began hurrying forward to chat to people ahead of them, or stopped to pick things off the ledge. They passed a single doorway, as empty as all the others on the march path, and several kite-boys scurried inside. Tighe waited by the opening; there was something evil-smelling about the opening that he didn’t like.

‘Come out of there!’ bellowed Waldea from behind. ‘Keep the line! Kite-pilots, keep discipline!’

They marched all through the day as the sun rose on their right. Tighe’s bad foot pulsed with pain. Ravielre chattered incessantly in the morning; and then, when the sun crept over the fifty, he fell silent. He began picking pebbles out of the dust and throwing them as far as he could out into space.

‘You should stop that,’ said Tighe. ‘You might hit kite, or calabash.’

‘There’s no kites flying, idiot-boy,’ Ravielre snapped. ‘You are stupid.’ Then he grumbled to himself, and burst out with, ‘When we go to war they’ll be throwing more than stones at us. Fucking barbarian.’ He tossed the next few stones over his shoulder at Tighe, but because he wasn’t aiming they flew wide. Then he fell silent again.

Eventually, as the sun climbed higher and higher, the train of boys and girls came within sight of the Meshwood.

It was enormous. At first it was only a dark blur in the distance; then, as they came closer, it resolved itself into a vast excrescence, reaching upwall and downwall as far as could be seen. It bulged out from the face of the wall hundreds of yards in some places, a rippling mass like the surface of troubled water in a sink at which somebody washes, ripples frozen in time and enlarged to enormous proportions. It was also a colour that Tighe had
never seen before; a green so dark as to be almost blue-black, a much heavier shade than the green of grass.

As they came closer still the shape seemed to billow out into the sky. And then it superseded the sky altogether.

Tighe was overcome by the shape, the darkness that bulged from the worldwall. He was exhausted by the march; hungry and sore, and this shape seemed to give material expression to his own unease. By the way the other kite-boys stalled and meandered, the way they hung their heads, he could see they were also unnerved by the shape. But Ravielre seemed to straighten himself, to push out his legs like a goat stretching in the morning. Tighe understood the forced quality of the jollity, but valued it none the less. The fact of it was more important than its artificiality. He responded to it, as did the others.

Ravielre turned abruptly and poked his fingers sharply at the back of Ati’s head. ‘You’re touched.’ Ati started laughing. ‘You’re touched,’ said Ravielre, prodding somebody else. ‘You too. You.’ He came up to Tighe. ‘Hey, I know a question we never asked you in camp,’ he said. ‘You ever had a woman?’

‘Yes,’ said Tighe immediately. But his stomach clenched at the question. The kite-boys shrieked, pranced up and down. Several were running cumbrously about now, shouldering their kite-spars or carrying them under one arm, playing the game of tag, reaching out to touch their fellows, ducking to avoid the touch. From further back along the path came a booming order from Waldea, ‘Keep order, keep the path.’

‘You’re tagged.’

‘Kite-boys, keep the path!’ Waldea boomed.

The boys settled down and fell back into a more regular rhythm of step. Tighe marched on, shifting the weight of his crossbeam over his shoulder. Where the skinny bones of his shoulder blades chafed on the wood it was starting to hurt badly. Up ahead the dark mass, like a titanic outcrop of hair, utterly eliminated the line of the worldwall. Behind him Ati was gabbling in a low voice, the tone too quiet and the language too unfamiliar for Tighe to guess what was being said. The titters of the kite-boys behind him gave him some idea, though.

‘What is that?’ he asked, casting the question generally into the air. ‘What is that up ahead?’ He knew the answer, but there was something frightening about the way none of the kite-pilots were talking about it.

The chatter of the kite-boys stopped at this, and the mood fell. Nobody answered him.

Tighe tried concentrating on the ledge ahead of him. The ground was narrower here and had been built outwards by the sappers with unevenly planed boards. They bent and sang under Tighe’s feet. He wondered how
many others had marched across this man-made ledge since the sappers had laid it down. He wondered how stable it was. His stomach clenched again and he shuffled over towards the wall, making sure to plant his left foot on God’s good earth.

There was a sharp prod in the back of his head, so hard and unexpected Tighe cried out. ‘Barbarian,’ said Ati, his voice close to Tighe’s ear. ‘You’re so stupid. You’re so know-nothing.’ There was real malice in the voice; not personal animus, Tighe realised, but the fear of the shape ahead infecting Ati’s mood.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tighe.

‘Sorry is a
stupid
thing to say,’ snapped Ati. And then, almost immediately, ‘That there, ahead, is the Meshwood. Where the monsters live.’

‘Sorry,’ said Tighe again.

‘We’d better get there before sunset too,’ said Ati, ‘or the big winds at sunset will just
push
us off the world.’

They made it to the outskirts of the Meshwood by sunset. As the sun disappeared over the top of the wall, they filed off the open ledge. The path led straight into a tangle of branches and shadows. Tighe’s first impression was of broad, thick tree trunks, although unlike trees these trunks were twisted and curled. Platán wood, not regular timber.

The border was sharply distinguished: from open path and grass, with a dusty pathway worn by the passage of the army, the lead kite-boy led them all under the ribcage curve of a series of meshwood tree trunks and they were in a darker place.