On (35 page)

Another bullet gouged into the shelf near Tighe’s face, making an odd popping noise and blowing out a hand-sized pit of dust.

‘We must go down!’ insisted Mulvaine, from below. ‘We must!’

But, Tighe noticed, they did not go down. They were waiting for him to tell them it was the right thing to do. They were waiting for his instruction.

‘We will be captured by the Otre if we go down there. Down there is no other way out.’

Ati was cowering, trying to press himself into the earth of the stairwell. ‘We will die here!’ he warbled.

‘We need to run back along the shelf. Run to the Meshwood.’

‘No, no, no,’ said Mulvaine, slapping his own head with the flats of his hands. ‘No, it is dangerous.’

There was a yell of several voices from above and Tighe looked up. Imperial troops were charging eastward again: eight or nine blue-coats lumbering up the shelf with their rifles lowered. They were only a little way past Tighe’s vantage point when the first Otre bullets hit them. Tighe heard the dull slapping noise, like the wet, clicking noise that is made by bouncing the tongue against the roof of the mouth. Two men stumbled, one turning right around to face the other way as he came down on hands and knees. His eyes were all white; Tighe could see no pupils and blood was blurting
from his mouth. Then the man fell forward, as if kissing the ground with his open lips. The charge faltered and the remaining soldiers turned to run back along the shelf, away from the Otre. Immediately one of them was struck in the head by a bullet: there was a scattering of droplets of blood that drummed down upon the dirt in front of Tighe’s face and upon Tighe’s face itself.

The blood felt warm, a sprinkling of warm points on his cheeks, his forehead.

Tighe was frozen by the ugliness of the sensation. He couldn’t even cry out. The shot man stumbled forward and then stopped. He was still standing. Tighe looked up and saw that his head had been cracked open like a clay jar; there was a chin, a mouth, two wide eyes and a sharp-edged nose that ran all the way up to its bridge, but there was nothing more above that. The head simply stopped in a ragged line. But the soldier did not fall. He stood, swaying a little, his eyes unblinking staring directly west. A bullet hurtled so close to his arm as to rip the cloth of his blue tunic. He simply stood there.

Run, thought Tighe, trying to force the words out of his mouth. Run. ‘Run! Run!’

But the man simply stood, swaying a little bit. Tighe reached up to touch his own face and the stickiness made his stomach lurch, clench. He was trembling. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No!’

‘Tighe,’ called Mulvaine from below. ‘Come on!’

But Tighe’s mind was in some form of spasm. It occurred to him that he might be dooming his companions to death, but he could not move his muscles. The horror of what had happened was too great. There were flashes, bright white light, gathering at the corner of his eyes. His brain was hot, sparkling. He could smell a strange smell, exotic and strange but also frightening; it overlaid the smell of blood and of burnt mushroom powder. His hand was trembling. Sunlight was swelling in the middle of his head.

He was moving his mouth, but no words were coming out.

Everything began to bleach white: the blue uniforms of the soldiers fading, the tones of dirt colour and the pastels of the wall greying. The sounds of battle seemed to recede. He was held by the intensity of the moment.

Flashes pulsed in his brain, whiting out everything in time with his heartbeat. And, precariously, he had a sense of tremendous insight, of powerful meaning in everything. It was a sensation he had known sometimes as a child, but here it was so powerful as almost to overwhelm him. He felt close to understanding everything; to unpicking the mystery of the worldwall itself. Its size, its scale. What would be seen through the Door.

Somebody was slapping him on the small of his back; one of the kite-pilots from below trying to get his attention.

Dreamlike.

And, dreamlike, the shot soldier standing before him swayed, infinitely slowly, but managed to stay, impossibly on his feet.

Then, with a sound that started as nothing and built rapidly to a swoosh, the spell was broken; and the sound was the rushing towards him of an Otre bullet, closer and closer until it,
ploc
, powered into the back of the standing man, directly between his shoulder blades. The force of the impact pushed the soldier forward as if he had been a man of clay and he clattered in the dust.

But the sound, the impact, shook Tighe free of the spell. He twitched, looked round. Below him the faces of the other kite-pilots were looking up at him, terrified. Ati was slapping him on the back, trying to attract his attention.

‘What happened to you?’ Ati was calling to him. Bullets keened and shushed through the air. The cries of soldiers and screams of pain were again loud in Tighe’s ears. He heard and comprehended Ati’s question, and it was in his mind to answer it, if he had the words in Imperial language; to say that he had been frozen, half drawn out of the reality of the battle, taken away. That he had been on the verge of being able to understand the worldwall itself, its scale, its mystery. Why God had built it and – no, that was not it; to understand who God was, and what it would mean to meet Him. On the edge of a revelation, like standing on the edge of the world ready to jump.

Tighe looked around himself slowly. It all seemed less real than it had been before his episode, or whatever it was. The yelling, the hurrying, the bullets firing past. He put the palm of his hand against his forehead and smoothed it slowly over the top of his head and round to the back. There was something not right. Dreamlike.

‘There!’ Ati was yelling. ‘There!’ He was pointing down the stair, out at something in the sky.

Tighe followed the arm. The dreamlike purity of his senses buoyed him through comprehending what he saw.

It was a calabash, smaller than the Imperial calabashes, entirely silver and of an odd shape and construction. It was not a sphere, but rather an elongated cylinder tucked in at the waist, and it appeared to be made out of metal rather than woven leather. This was impossible; it was impossible to believe that metal could float, or that it could be beaten thin enough to contain the hot air. At the base of the strange calabash was no basket, but instead an insect-like confusion of legs and pincers.

The silver calabash floated a few hundred arms’ lengths from the wall,
wobbling a little. Tighe glanced back up at the shelf; none of the battling troops seemed to have noticed it, which added to Tighe’s sense of being contained within a dream of his own. A series of loud crashes sounded from above. There was a groan, which Tighe assumed to be from a dying soldier. But the groan resolved itself, musically, into a single pitch that kept an unnaturally steady level and volume.

‘That noise!’ Tighe cried out.

The sound grew in intensity, shrieked and then was still. The blast of it left Tighe with a humming in his ears. Then it started again, a low grumble that resolved itself and began climbing the scale of pitches.

‘What machine –?’ howled Ati, tears dribbling from his eyes, his arm outstretched and pointing at the silver calabash. It was lifting itself slowly through the air, upwards and diagonally.

A thunderous voice boomed out of the sky.

‘Tighe!’ called the voice. It caught Tighe completely off guard because the mysterious, elemental speaker pronounced the name in the old style of Tighe’s village, not with the consonantal tripping mispronunciation of Imperial speakers. He was so unused to hearing himself called by that name, pronounced in that way, that he almost didn’t realise what the word signified. Then the thunderous voice spoke again.

‘Tighe!’

As he realised the personal specificity of this act of naming out of the sky, Tighe also realised how precariously related to reality all these events were. A tiny wall, no bigger than three arms’ lengths high; ants running along all its miniature ledges thinking they were men. It was none of it real. His heart was hammering. Lights were flickering at the corner of his eyes again, as they had done before when he had found himself frozen and had felt his consciousness start to pulse and withdraw from things. He decided he did not like that experience.

He started drawing air in through his nostrils, filling his lungs, like somebody preparing to shout at the top of his voice. For the third time the enormous voice named him.

‘Tighe!’

‘Come,’ exhaled Tighe, speaking to the four kite-pilots on the stairway. There was the slightest internal sense of a thread being snapped and he was standing up.

‘Master,’ shouted Ati, in confusion. ‘Down …’

‘No,’ yelled Tighe, leaning forward and snatching at Ati’s hair with his fingers’ ends. ‘Up. Come. Come.’ And he bolted up the last few steps on to the shelf.

The elements of the picture did not quite coalesce in his head. He saw the pathway ahead of him, the broad shelf bounded on the right by the wall
(along which blue-coats stood, or lay motionless) and on the left by nothing but the sky. He saw the faces of soldiers, some distracted by this sudden apparition, glowering or staring astonished at him. He saw the little bulges, like instantaneous mushrooms that faded as soon as they flowered, as the bullets flicked into the ground at his feet. ‘Come,’ he said, uncertain and uncaring whether the others could hear him. ‘Come. God is testing us.’

He started walking along the shelf.

Almost at once he was passed by Mulvaine and Ati, who were running with their heads down, weaving from side to side. Ravielre and Pelis followed, almost bent double, Ravielre with his hands folded over the back of his head. It was almost comical.

‘God is testing us!’ Tighe called to them as they rushed by, but with a laugh he realised that he was speaking his village tongue, and that they would not be able to understand. He was drunk with the strangeness and the intensity of the occasion. Running, ducking, weaving, all seemed like attempts to cheat the test. The only thing to do was to walk calmly, straight, to dare the experimenter God to harm him.

A soldier, close against the wall, was screaming something at Tighe and ran forward. His left arm cradled his rifle and his right hand was outstretched, to grab Tighe. Tighe smiled at him. The soldier went down on one knee, in comical mockery of an obeisance. His chest was hollow. A large hole there. Ends of ribs poked out, like twigs. He toppled forward, face falling hard against the ledge.

Tighe started running. He was not sure why he started running, except that the dream had suddenly taken on an unpleasant quality. He had the sense, nightmarishly, of being followed, of being chased. Of being pursued by something monstrous.

An enormous hand, God’s hand, reaching down to pluck this one ant from the wall. Would the others even see God’s hand? Would it be an invisible force to them, the fingers gently pinching Tighe’s torso nothing more than a focusing of winds, or the magical levitation of a calabash? Maybe he would fly up in the air and the soldiers would put down their weapons in amazement at his transportation.

Tighe was not running well; his bad foot hindered smooth sprinting. He loped a little way down the shelf and his good foot struck something other than smooth ledge, a spongy hillock of something. Tighe threw a leg out to stop himself falling, but his bad foot could not keep him upright. His ankle bent over and he slid down to his knees.

He was panting. He looked back to see what he had tripped over. Mulvaine was lying face down on the shelf.

Still weirdly dissociated from his experiences, Tighe first thought the
kite-boy was dead. He pulled himself upright and limped over to the fallen body. Mulvaine was whimpering. Tighe dropped to his haunches.

‘Mulvaine?’

‘Oh, it hurts,’ Mulvaine was saying. ‘It hurts.’

‘You have shot?’

‘It hurts,’ howled Mulvaine, twisting over and clutching at his shin. The leg of his right trouser was dark with wetness.

‘Your knee? Your knee have shot?’

A clutch of Imperial soldiers hurried past. Tighe flicked a glance up the shelf. There was a huddle of blue tunics up ahead.

‘Come,’ he said to Mulvaine. ‘Get up.’ He slid his hand under the wounded boy’s shoulder and tried to lever him upright.

‘But it hurts, it hurts,’ said Mulvaine.

‘So’, said Tighe, ‘we must be up.’ He pulled with all his might and Mulvaine’s body came off the floor. Mulvaine put out a hand to support himself, and then slowly pushed himself into the sitting position.

‘I cannot walk,’ he said, through gritted teeth. ‘My leg.’

‘Come,’ said Tighe, trying to inject his voice with an urgency he did not feel. He put his arm under Mulvaine’s armpit and round his back, and pushed up with his legs. Slowly the two rose to a standing position, Mulvaine leaning heavily on Tighe.

The two of them began limping down the shelf, westward, in the direction of the Meshwood. Mulvaine was limping more markedly than Tighe.

They made slow progress along the shelf. Mulvaine repeated over and over, ‘It hurts, it hurts,’ in time to the steps, as if he was speaking some form of mantra. At one stage he said ‘No, no, put me down, put me down,’ and Tighe was compelled to lower him to the ground. It was a relief not to have the weight of him pulling down his shoulder.

As Mulvaine sobbed and clutched his leg, with his back against the wall, Tighe peered up the shelf. They were out of the range of the rifle fire now, but he could see up ahead how the dust kicks of bullet impacts peppered the shelf, and how most of the blue-coated soldiers in view were horizontal and dead rather than upright and fighting.

‘Come,’ he said to Mulvaine.

‘Leave me here,’ said Mulvaine, petulant and agonised at the same time. ‘My leg, my leg. Leave me here.’

‘If I leave you here,’ said Tighe, ‘the Otre will take you when they come along. You want that the Otre take you?’

Mulvaine looked up into Tighe’s eyes; his pale Imperial eyes as strange as gemstones. His face was whiter than before, so pale it looked like a particular sort of plastic that Tighe had once seen when he was a boy; so white that it was almost transparent.