On by Adam Roberts Page B

pas’ Princedom, even his pas’ wealth; but he stopped himself. Grandhe would have raged. The staff would have come down hard on Tighe’s back for such a comment. And it was not even as if he particularly cared. He didn’t care much about being Prince. What good was it? He didn’t even care that Grandhe had stolen his family goats. He really didn’t know what to do with goats, how to tend them or how to trade them.
    ‘You don’t ever go down to that heretic’s monkey palace?’ Grandhe asked in a menacing tone.
    ‘No, Grandhe.’
    ‘Good. I would
not
want to hear from people that you’d been down there. That would be fuel to my enemies indeed. You are my charge now, boy-boy, and I intend to look after you properly. Your pashe was too mincing about it, too soft.’
    ‘Yes Grandhe.’
    ‘I’ll not be soft if I hear you’ve been about that poisonous heretic’
    And, truly, he hadn’t visited Old Witterhe. It was gone a fortnight since his pas had disappeared and he had not so much as thought about going down the ladder. Instead, he filled his thoughts with a dream Wittershe, as he curled on the floor in his Grandhe’s house. He pressed his thighs close together with his hand between them, curled under the grass-weave rug and stretched his muscles very gently. The pressure on the end of his wick brought it stiff and hard as plastic; and he would close his eyes and imagine Wittershe, the thought of her skin, of her nakedness under the rough weave of her skirt, of her smile. And usually on the smile his wick would surrender up its load, and the sunlight would blare in his soul, and he’d shudder to a stop with a sticky mess starting to glue the hairs on his stomach.
    One evening he was curled in the corner, overhearing a conversation his Grandhe was having with his two deputies. They were planning to slaughter a goat and have a feast. Tighe was astonished, repulsed. If the richest family in the village were celebrating an important wedding, they might – conceivably – slaughter an animal just for the eating. But for a man such as Grandhe, at a time such as the present (his daughter and his marriage-son probably dead, their souls lost over the edge of the world) it was incomprehensible. From what Tighe could hear most of the conversation was about finding a way of avoiding the opprobrium of the village. The Doge was mentioned several times.
    Eventually, a little stupefied by the smoke from three pipes, Tighe drifted off to sleep. And in the morning he found he could not get up. It all seemed so pointless. His pas were dead. Gone for ever. Why should he bother? The inside of his head felt stricken, consumed with drought. He turned over and lay in a painful motionlessness.
    Grandhe discovered him in this state at lunchtime and roused him with several sharp blows of his staff. Whimpering like a monkey, Tighe struggled up and ran zigzag, dodging the blows, out of the door. Grandhe’s voice followed him. ‘We’ll find some work for you soon.’
    Tighe blinked in the sunlight, and wandered across main-street shelf. The crowd of itinerants was greater than ever, dull dead faces staring out at nothing, squatting on the ground or sitting with their backs to the wall. Tighe fought the urge to yell at them.
My pashe has gone. She is gone for ever
. There was an itch in the centre of his skull. His mouth was dry. His path wobbled and at one stage brought him towards the lip of the shelf. The thought was even in his head,
If I fall, I fall
. This was closely followed by
I hope I fall, I hope I die
. Maybe he would fall all the way to the God Grandhe denied lived at the base of the wall. But the actual proximity of the edge of the world was a different matter: his gut lurched and without conscious control his feet steered him back away from the great fall.
    He was hungry. Lying on the floor all morning had meant skipping breakfast. His stomach felt like a clenched fist. But he had no money and he was not about to go back