On (8 page)

‘Why come to us?’

‘Who knows. I suppose work is thin in Smelt, and in Heartshelf as well. So they come here because this is where the Doge lives. And the Priest and the Prince too,’ he grinned and made a little mock-obeisance with his head in Tighe’s direction, ‘but it’s mostly the thought of the Doge living here that brings them. But there’s no work here. Mostly we have animal tending and this is too valuable to trust itinerants with. The rest of us serve the goatmongers. They’ll get no work with us.’

‘So what will they do?’

‘Hang about the ledges getting thin,’ said Akathe. ‘How do I know? They can go jump into the sky for all I care.’ He fiddled with something and then plucked the eyepiece from his face. It made a faint popping noise. ‘Now that they know there’s no work here I guess they’re just trying to raise enough money to pay for the toll ladder up to Meat. That’s the biggest town in this part of the wall, so they’re more likely to find something up there.’

‘But if they can’t get work they won’t be able to buy food, let alone pay for the toll ladder.’

Akathe shrugged again. ‘I dare say, if they get too close to actual starvation, the Doge will let them pass and climb her ladder, if only to stop them messing up the market shelf with their dying. Or maybe she’ll let them die so we can burn them and put their ashes to fertilise our gardens.’ He grinned as he said this, but Tighe shuddered, wondering if he were half-serious.

Tighe wandered back down to the shelf and watched the newcomers for a bit. A bone-worker passed and recruited one of the loiterers; presumably she had some stripping and rendering she needed doing, hard smelly work that an itinerant could manage. But the bone-worker (a short, hunch-shouldered woman called Dalshe) of course hired one of the village’s known tramps. It went without saying that she was going to give the work to somebody she knew. The faces of the newcomers rose as she approached; they forced smiles, stood a little straighter. But as she left their faces tumbled again and they slouched or sat gracelessly back on the ground.

Bored, Tighe climbed down to Old Witterhe’s, but the dawn-door was shut and nobody answered his calls. He climbed back up and made his way back to Akathe’s booth.

‘You again? You’re not here to buy anything, are you, you wastrel
Princeling. You’re just here to loiter, like the spoilt boy-boy you are.’ Akathe grinned. ‘If your grace don’t mind me saying, you’re worse than an itinerant.’

‘It’s sad,’ said Tighe, watching those newcomers. They’re going to be hungry tonight.’

‘I wouldn’t waste your energies on worrying about them,’ said Akathe. ‘I’d worry about your own kind first. There are people from the village who will be hungry tonight, and I worry about that. Your own Princedom, think of it that way. Because that could be me in a few weeks.’ He sighed, and clambered out of the booth to stretch his legs on the ledge. ‘People don’t buy clocks or clockwork when times get hard. My pahe is worried.’

‘You’ll be all right,’ said Tighe unconvincingly.

‘As if you know anything about it!
You’ll
be all right. People always need goats.’

‘But we lost that goat,’ said Tighe, eager not to be outstripped in the misery game. ‘Don’t forget that.’

‘No,’ said Akathe, sucking his lower lip. ‘I suppose that’s true. I heard your pahe was working on old Musshe’s house up on top ledge. He may be Prince, but he has to work like anybody else. Labouring up there on top ledge.’ Nobody knew why it was called top ledge; it was not the highest ledge in the village. But old Musshe had the ledge to herself, so perhaps it reflected her status in the village. ‘He owed her some goathair from the beast you lost, I heard, and some candles indirectly. So now he’s singlehandedly digging her a new room. Must be back-breaking. It’s itinerant work, too, so I don’t suppose it’s paying off the whole of the debt.’

Tighe had not heard that his pahe was involved in anything so demeaning. It was a shock. Part of him wanted to hear more detail, but the stronger impulse was to deny that his pahe was in any trouble at all. He decided to change the subject.

‘What’s happened in the village, then?’ he asked. ‘Why has it come down like this? It was fine only weeks ago.’

Akathe didn’t answer this straight away. He was staring out at the sky, tracing the paths of birds circling on the last of the warm upwinds. Black dots like pieces of the night sky torn off and blown about in the fresh sunlight. Eventually he said, ‘Who knows how it works? A village is like a large clockwork machine. A hundred parts need to work all together for it to function. Who knows why it goes wrong? Everything seems to be like last year, only there are more people begging work on the market shelf, only there are fewer people buying the traders’ goods. Suddenly everybody is hungry and nobody can afford anything.’ He spat.

After a while Akathe said, ‘My pahe says the world is running down. Maybe this is just the front of it. Maybe things will only get worse indeed.’

Tighe felt his stomach shrinking; there was a sensation in his sinuses, almost as if he were smelling something burning, some sharp potent odour. But he knew he wasn’t smelling anything. It was a sort of intensity, focused in the middle of his head. Everything was running down. The end was coming.

‘Let me tell you,’ said Akathe. ‘I work with clocks. Clocks divide the day into ten hours. But sometimes I have seen old clockfaces, and they divide the day into twelve sections. Do you know why?’

Tighe said, ‘No.’

‘The world is changing. I think so. I think the day once had enough space for twelve hours; I think it was a golden age. Now there is space only for ten. Days were longer in the great old days. There used to be twelve tithes in a year too, not the ten we have these days.’ He spat again, shook his left leg, then his right.

‘They used to have twelve of everything,’ said Tighe, remembering his schooling. ‘Twelve months, twelve fingers, twelve toes. Twelve tribes, twelve degrees of separation.’

‘So?’

‘We have twenty months. That’s longer, though.’

‘They came from a different world,’ said Akathe. ‘They were a different people.’

‘Maybe they did come from a different world before they found the wall,’ agreed Tighe. ‘But we have followed on from them.’

But Akathe was bored with this conversation. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘back to work.’

Tighe left him feeling weirdly elated. The world was running down, like an antique clockwork. He started marching smartly along the traders’ ledge until, he didn’t know why, he was running, sprinting all the way along. Then clambering down the dog-leg and dashing over the main-street shelf. His heart was filled with a desperate sort of joy. He was running as hard as he could, really pounding the ledge with his feet and digging his elbows into the air, past the astonished looks of the people on the shelf, running as if he could burn himself up with the speed. And then, abruptly he was at the end of the shelf and he pulled himself up in a few jarring strides. There was no space to run any further.

Back home Grandhe was paying a second house call: unheard of previously. He was sitting in the chair in the main space, with pashe standing near. Tighe came in with a fresh expression, a little sweaty from his dash, but grinning. One look at the two faces of pashe and Grandhe took his mood away, though.

‘Hello, Grandhe,’ he said. ‘Hello, pashe.’

‘My boy-boy,’ said Grandhe, sonorously. Tighe remembered the tear that had gathered on the underlip of the old man’s eye; the swell of the beady water, the way it had paused on the very edge, and then the way it had abandoned itself and fallen streaking down his wrinkled cheek.

‘Grandhe,’ said Tighe.

‘Listen to your Grandhe,’ said pashe sharply.

‘What I have to say will not take long,’ said Grandhe, climbing to his feet. ‘I saw you at the ceremony, boy.’

‘Yes Grandhe.’

‘I saw you were with that girl-girl. The girl-girl of Old Witterhe. He is a dangerous man and a heretic. I do not want you to associate with him or his daughter. My enemies will make much of it.’

‘Do you
understand
?’ said pashe, shrilly. There was something alarming in her face. Tighe shrank back.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Ye-yes. I understand.’

There was a heartbeat’s silence.

‘You are a Princeling of this Princedom,’ said Grandhe. ‘You have a place in the order of things and this girl is beneath you.’ Grandhe paused and looked so intently at Tighe that he felt as if he were being stared through. Then he said, ‘Well, well enough.’ He stalked awkwardly to the door, his knees creaky with age. ‘That is well enough.’

‘Show your Grandhe
out
,’ hissed pashe, and Tighe, as if slapped, lurched away and shepherded the old Priest through the dawn-door. Then he stood in the hall and tried to summon the courage to go back into the main space. His pashe was waiting for him, he knew. He felt the desperate desire to duck out the door, just to run; but there was nowhere to go. It made more sense to get this out of the way now. He turned and shuffled back into the house.

‘So,’ said his pashe. ‘Do you understand what has happened there?’

She was holding something behind her back. Tighe wanted to see what it was. He said, ‘No,’ in a sulky voice.

‘You know,
don’t
you, that we owe a debt to your Grandhe? You know that the loss of our goat has put us in a very difficult position. He comes round now to make me
feel
my humiliation. He knows I have to agree with him because he has the
debt
’

She paused, as if expecting Tighe to say something, but he didn’t know what to say. He stared at his feet.

Pashe took a step towards him. Her fury was very real now, very sharp; it possessed her features. ‘You associate yourself with that girl-girl and you give him more power to humiliate
me
. Do you
understand
? Do you –’ but she broke off and swung round with her right arm. Tighe flinched back. He didn’t mean to, he knew it was better to take the first blow and simply go
down, but he couldn’t help himself. Something whistled past his nose and his pashe’s face was frozen for an instant in a curl of pure rage.

Then her momentum spun her round a little and she grunted, trying to regain her footing. Tighe could see that she held a stone in her hand, one of the large flat pebbles from the ledge outside. His brain, working with an odd exactness, wondered if she had gone outside to fetch it whilst Grandhe waited in the main space for him to come home; or if she had chosen it on a previous occasion, had prepared it for the next time anger took grip of her. But she had taken a step to brace herself and was swinging her arm back. Tighe’s thinking stopped, jarred, frozen. This time pashe’s motion was accompanied by a scratchy cry, pashe’s mouth open, and Tighe had just enough wit to hold himself still until something solid clobbered the side of his temple with the sharp compression of impact and he flipped to the side and down.

On the floor. He lay static, like a doll, aware only vaguely of his pashe standing over him panting. Some sort of pummelling should, by rights, have followed, but instead pashe simply stood there. Eventually she moved away. Tighe lay still, even calm, with his eyes open and looking at the join of wall and floor. There was nothing, then the hurting started. Like a distant grumbling that grew louder in seconds, a headache caught and swelled at the place where he had been hit. He put up a hand; wetness.

Trying to get to his feet proved more difficult than usual. He tripped and sprawled, struggled up again and then skittered left and right instead of straight on. Like a newborn goat trying out its legs for the first time. Somehow he managed to make it to his alcove and to collapse on the matting in there.

But his head started thumping with pain as soon as he lowered it, so he struggled up and sat with his back against the partition. He could hear his pashe moving around in the space outside. He wanted a drink, but was not about to leave his alcove whilst she was there.

Something tickled the side of his head. He put his fingers up to his temple and felt the wetness dribbling. He felt dissociated from the wound, from the heat and the sharp fall of blood. Except for the thumping of his pain, which was very real.

He did not exactly sleep, but his consciousness went woozy and everything shrank away except for the pain. It went dark. Only a small patch of matting was visible to him. He tried to put up his hand, but the nerves refused to convey instructions down his arm. He started sliding over, toppling, and was unable to stop himself falling all the way over. When his head slapped the matting he felt a surge of pain.

For a time he lay like that, a great dark upon him, and in his head, behind the pain, the strange sensation of falling. Then somebody was
helping him up, words were trying to pierce the pain, and his pahe was mopping at the side of his head with something. Tighe could barely even focus on the familiar features. The well-scored lines that ran from nostrils’ outside edge to the corners of his mouth. The little crag of his chin. Hundreds of dots of black hair, shaved that morning, speckling the cheeks and around the mouth.

His pahe wrapped his head in something and gave him some water, together with some willowgrass stalks to chew. With those the pain receded a little and Tighe was able to lie down and sleep. He awoke with a very dry mouth and was able – however unsteadily – to make his way to the family sink and douse his head. That made him feel a little better.

His pahe was at his back, putting a scuffed hand on his shoulder. ‘You doing better?’ he asked, in his soft voice.

‘Better,’ agreed Tighe.

His pahe looked into his eyes carefully, like a doctor might. Then he smiled, or pressed his lips as close to a smile as they went. ‘You’ll be fine.’

He did not ask,
How did you hurt your head
? There was no need. For one moment, fleetingly, Tighe felt the bond between pahe and boy solidly, the unspoken affiliation. He said, ‘Maybe I’ll take some fresh air.’

‘Good idea,’ said his pahe.

So Tighe wobbled to the front and through the dawn-door and just sat himself down outside. It was late in the day now. He had been in his alcove for most of the day. Sunlight came straight down, split by high clouds into luminous shafts and spears that stood vividly against the darkening brown-mauve of the sky behind. Birds wheeled and flopped, swooping near the wall and pulling away from it into the enormous air. Looking for roosts, finding places away from the dangerous habitations of man. Tighe let his eyes go slack watching the patterns they made.