On by Adam Roberts Page A

Grandhe, but a few of them still braved it. Times were hard and people desperate. These hangings on the door were some of the hardest moments for Tighe.
    ‘Come along,’ somebody outside would yell. ‘Your girl is still alive, somewhere, and so her debts are still alive!’ But hearing somebody say this shadowed the opposite in Tighe’s imagination, made it hard to blot out the thought of his pas dead.
    Dead. Fallen to God at the bottom of the world.
    For Grandhe, Tighe thought to himself, it ought to have been harder. If his girl and his girl’s husband had truly fallen off the world, then their souls were forfeit; the village could not burn the bodies and release their spirits in the smoke to ascend to heaven. But Grandhe seemed unbothered. He went about the village and went about his business. He was accumulating wealth, he said, for the glory of God.
    People were intimidated by Grandhe and Tighe knew why. Tighe flinched whenever Grandhe so much as looked at him. He would wield his wooden staff like a young man and catch Tighe expertly about the body or face with the end of it. One time he beat Tighe so hard he was certain his cheekbone was broken: it throbbed and ached for hours, although eventually the pain dispersed.
    Tighe tried to keep out of his way, not to bring himself to Grandhe’s attention at all. But he missed his pas, and sometimes that feeling overcame him. Once he said, ‘Maybe my pas slipped up the Doge’s ladder.’
    Grandhe glared at him, smoking his grassweed pipe. ‘Eh?’
    ‘Maybe they disguised themselves and went up to Meat. Or maybe the Doge had an arrangement with them …’
    Grandhe had to lean forward to reach his staff. ‘Have my enemies been talking with you? The Doge is a friend of mine, longstanding,’ he said, getting creakily to his feet. ‘You say that the Doge would lie to me?’ And he brought the staff cracking on to Tighe’s left shoulder.
    If Grandhe stayed home during the day, as he sometimes did, then Tighe slipped out and roamed the village in his old fashion. In the early days he would go from crag to crag, ledge to ledge, combing the village thoroughly as if hoping to chance upon his pas laughing together, coming out ofsomebody’s house, or sitting arm in arm in the sun. He would work from the lower ledges up to the higher, or work downwall the other way.
    From time to time he would go back to his old house. The dawn-door was broken, presumably by itinerants, and it was clear that somebody had gone through the whole house looking for food or valuables to sell. But Grandhe had removed all the valuables and there was no food. The first time Tighe went back to the house he thought, at some level, that it might be more comforting than the hostility in the air at Grandhe’s. He had curled up in his alcove, the same space he had slept in since he was a boy-boy, and tried to lose consciousness. And he had drifted away, only to have a series of gut-lurching nightmares. Falling. His pashe’s face, stretched in an agony of rage, furious with him. Dismembered parts of their bodies scattered from ledge to crag.
    ‘You wander about the village like an itinerant,’ his Grandhe barked at him one night. There was less food, and it was less tasty, at his Grandhe’s than had been the case at home. Tighe still got his goatmilk, and Grandhe baked a form of grass-bread, although without the seeds and with fewer tasty insects embedded in it than his pashe had done. Tighe was sitting legs folded on the floor chewing on an underbaked piece of this bread as his Grandhe said this.
    ‘Do you hear?’ Grandhe had repeated, louder. ‘You wander about the village exactly like an itinerant.’
    ‘Yes, Grandhe.’
    ‘It must stop. We’ll find work for you. You’re old enough to work. You’ve lived a sheltered life. Well, soon you’ll have to stop being a boy and start to be a man, work for your living.’
    Tighe almost asked if that would mean that, as a man, he would inherit his