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‘I had to clean your vomit off the ledge this morning, you foulness,’ she said, sourly.

‘I couldn’t help myself,’ said Tighe. ‘It was the thickness of your pahe’s smoke. What is that, anyway, that smoke? What does he put in his pipe?’

‘Something too strong for a boy-boy like you,’ she said.

‘Don’t say that,’ said Tighe, a little stung. ‘I’m sorry about the vomit, but, you know. I was thinking about all the stuff your pahe said last night.’

‘So?’

‘You’ve heard it?’

‘I know what the truth is,’ she said, scraping her razor down the leg of the squirming monkey. He looked comical, piebald, with one side pink and naked and the other still furred black. ‘And I know that your Grandhe would like to push my pahe off the wall for heresy.’

‘It’s not my fault that he’s my Grandhe,’ said Tighe, defensive. ‘I don’t think it sounded like heresy. I think it sounded right.’

Wittershe stopped what she was doing and looked at him. ‘I’d be careful of saying that too much about the village,’ she said. ‘Your old Grandhe wouldn’t hold back at throwing
you
off if he smelt heresy.’ But there was a smile flexing her lips.

‘Nobody gets thrown off the world for heresy, not really,’ said Tighe, feeling the mood relax. ‘That’s just grand talk.’

‘There was a man my pahe knew in Meat,’ said Wittershe, starting to scrape again. ‘He spoke some heresy and he got thrown off. Or he was chased off. Before I was born.’

Before I was born
was an impossibly enormous length of time to Tighe. He came over to where Wittershe was sitting and reached out. Her neck was stretched over the ape she was dealing with. There was a little nobble of bone at the exact point of the nape. Tighe let his hand rest gently on that place. His heart sped up with the proximity, with the touch of her flesh.

‘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.

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.’