On

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Cover

Title

Copyright

Also by Adam Roberts

1 Prince

2 Kite-boy

3 Through the Door

4 The Wizard and the Ice

5 The Godman

Appendix
Notes on the World of On

Acknowledgements

On Tighe’s eighth birthday one of the family goats fell off the world. This was a serious matter.

The news of this loss, of losing so valuable a thing as a goat, went all round the village. Of course, it completely eclipsed Tighe’s birthday. Tighe’s pas were struck down by the news, his pahe reacting in what was a typical manner for him, sitting gloomily in the shadows of the house; and his pashe reacting typically for
her
, shouting her anger. Tighe was only glad, as his pashe raged, kicking chunks out of the house-wall in her fury, that he was not yet old enough to be given the task of tending the goats, or he could have been responsible and then he would have been on the receiving end of the rage. It was a girl called Carashe, who had been paid to tend the winter flock for the moment, until he was old enough to take on the job. A couple of months earlier Tighe had gone up (to see how it was done because a Prince’s son ought to know about these things) and watched Carashe tending the animals as they grazed the higher ledges. There was no doubt that goats were the stupidest things ever put on the wall. It was a puzzle why God had created them. They looked sideways at you with their lunatic eyes, grinding their mouths never-endingly; and then you’d try to come over to them to tug their hair or pet them or something – and they’d leap to the side, or scatter away like midges evading a swatting hand. They’d leap with no thought to where the edge might be. It was as if their pearl-small brains had not registered that God had put them on the worldwall in the first place.

‘It’s because they’re animals,’ Wittershe had told him. ‘They have
no
brains.’

But that didn’t make sense because there were lots of animals on the wall that never lurched about with such a suicidally myopic sense of where they were. The monkeys never did that, for instance.

Tighe preferred the monkeys, in fact. He knew (if only because he had been told so) that goats had a higher status than monkeys; that it was appropriate for the Prince’s family to own goats and that everybody in the village looked down on an old monkeymonger like Wittershe’s pahe. But
monkeys looked nicer, nearly human. And they acted smart and Tighe liked that.

‘I guess I’ve always wondered why goats are better than monkeys,’ he had said a few weeks before his birthday. It had been a bad moment. Pashe was sitting in her chair, reading through her tattered edition of the Sayings. ‘Pashe, why is it that goats are better than monkeys?’ His question sent her flying into a rage. Sometimes it took the slightest thing to send her exploding with her anger. Even as a little boy Tighe could sense that she was a woman stuffed so full of anger that the merest rip in her outward skein of mood would cause it to come bursting out. She didn’t get up this time (which was good, he knew, because it meant she wouldn’t actually smack him), but she sat there screaming. ‘This boy will drive us all over the ledge, will he
never
stop with his questions? Will he smash my head
apart With
all his questions? On and on and on …’

Tighe’s pahe, who had been mending the dawn-door with some mud-patched grass-weave, heard the raised voice and came through. Tighe, sitting in his alcove frozen with sudden fear, saw him come in. Recognised the delicate, graceful pad of his walk; the way he lowered his head and hunched up his shoulders, placatory. It was a delicate dance, but one that Tighe had seen so often he thought it ordinary. Surely everybody’s family was like this. Pahe would try and calm pashe, would say things in a smooth low voice, would start to stroke her sides. If her anger settled a little, he would stroke her head and maybe kiss her. If it didn’t, then she might well start hitting him, or pulling at his hair, and then Tighe would watch his pahe bend double, bring his elbows up to defend his head, and his own heart would shrink within him. But on this occasion it didn’t take much to calm pashe down.

‘It’s that boy,’ she said loudly. ‘He will drive me to madness. He will drive me over the edge.’

‘I think’, said pahe, sucking at his words and letting them out slowly, ‘that maybe the boy had better come and help me mend the dawn-door.’

Pahe had taken him by the hand and led him out of his alcove and out into the vestibule. But, of course, pahe had no need of his help mending the dawn-door. So, instead, Tighe sat and watched his father work, plaiting the grass-stems together and smoothing plastermud over the mat with a spatula. His pahe was a handsome man; he was certain of it. His skin was smooth, as richly brown as the mud he worked with, his features regular. His eyes were pale, the irises violet like a flame in daylight. His straight black hair was neat. Tighe admired his pahe.

‘What had you said’, pahe was asking, ‘to get your pashe so riled?’

The question burned in his head now. He wished he’d never asked it. He wished he’d never thought it. He hated the way he couldn’t sit still, couldn’t
think
still, the way his pashe did. She could sit and be absolutely motionless for hour after hour. But he fidgeted and wriggled, and kept thinking of questions. But his pahe had asked, and so he said, ‘I was only wondering why goats are better than monkeys.’

And, of course, his pahe was not angry. It was, he said in his quiet, slow way, a good question. It was a thoughtful question.

‘It’s only’, Tighe went on, ‘that monkeys look so much more like human beings, don’t they? They
look
like human beings. And Grandhe always says that we are humans, and that we are closer to God. He says that God looks like us.’

‘I think’, said pahe, pausing between every word to stroke mud on to the wattle, ‘that he said
we
look like
God
.’

Tighe stopped. Wasn’t that what he had just said?

‘Goats are better than monkeys’, said pahe after a pause, ‘because we get more from goats. We get milk, for one thing, which we don’t get from monkeys. And the meat is better eating. And monkey hair is bad for weaving, it’s too short and it frays. And monkeys are difficult to keep. Tether them and they pine and grow thin, but let them run free and they scramble all over the wall and you lose half of them.’ He was fitting the panel over the broken panel in the dawn-door, fastening it with palm-nails which he pushed sharply into the fabric of the door with smooth movements of his forearm. ‘Goats like to stick together,’ he said. ‘They like to stick with the herd.’

Tighe scratched at his scalp. There was a long scar on his scalp, from an old injury; he had cut his head when he was too young to remember and sometimes now the line of the scar itched a bit.

Tighe thought of his pahe’s words later, on his eighth birthday. One of their six goats had evidently decided he didn’t want to stick with the herd. He had danced, skittering and trilling his legs, right over the grass tufts of an upper ledge and over into nothingness.

Months before, Carashe, the goatherd they had hired, had been sitting with him on a tuft and together they had chewed stalkgrass and looked out at the sky. His days were idle because he was the son of the Prince; so he was mostly bored and loitered around. But because he was the son of the Prince of the Village, the villagers gave him their time, talked to him, humoured him. Carashe did the same.

‘You need to keep an eye on the goats,’ she had told him. But she didn’t act out the caution her words suggested. In fact she had a thoroughly blase attitude to her charges. She would sometimes look round to see where the goats had got to, but they were quietly munching and seemed at peace. ‘Keep an eye, and make sure that none of them go over the edge.’

Carashe was nine and no longer a girl. She had been a woman for the best
part of a year now. Tighe could remember when her front had been flat as a board; now she was as ledged and creviced as the wall itself, her breasts standing out from her ribs, her belly folding out over her lap as she sat on the tuft. Tighe found his wick stiffening as he watched the way the fabric of her tunic creased and smiled with her shifting about. Carashe had a man friend down at the middle of the village and everybody knew that. Tighe had no illusions. He knew she looked at him and saw only a boy, for all that he was a Princeling. But he liked spending time with her, being with her; he liked sitting on the higher ledge, nobody else around but the goats with their straining bulging eyes, listening to her talk about how to tend the animals.

‘Why not just tether them together?’ he asked.

She shook her head and sucked a little more on a piece of grass. ‘They need to roam about, to find the sweetest grass. They won’t get fat unless they get at the succulent tips. Besides, six is too many goats to tether. They get cross with one another and fight and butt. They’ll end up tearing up the tether post, or chewing through the leather straps.’

Tighe nodded and watched the goats again. One was cropping vigorously, stepping towards the edge of the world. It seemed blithely unconcerned. Tighe felt his stomach tighten in sympathy. He hated going to the rim of a ledge; he hated the raw yank of the endless drop, the way the downward distance somehow pulled and distorted the inside of his head. There was something truly terrible about that looking down. It sucked at his heart, some magnetic yaw towards destruction. Looking up, and seeing the wall stretch upwards and upwards over you into the haze was also disconcerting, but it wasn’t as heart-tickling as down.

Down was a terrible thing.

Yet the goat was unconcerned. It leaned its tool-shaped head right over the lip of the ledge and yanked up some of the spikegrass growing over the void. Then it shifted round and started grazing back towards the wall.

When their time was up, Carashe had pushed with her legs and hopped off the tuft. Then she had looped each of the goats in turn, draping the O of their tethers easily around their necks. They barely noticed even this, but carried on munching the grass. As Carashe led them towards the slope down to the lower ledges of the village, Tighe stood up too. He watched as her now adult body rolled easily from foot to foot. Tighe fell in behind, hypnotised by the pull of cloth across her seat. He expected nothing. He was only a boy and barely even that (his pashe still called him boy-boy from time to time). Carashe was a woman, with a man interested in her from the middle of the village. But the whisper was that the man was nobody special, only a technical sort of man, a machine-mending man. Tighe knew himself to be better than that; because he was a Princeling, because his father was
the Prince. It had dawned on him recently that being a Prince didn’t mean a great deal, not compared to the splendour of his Grandhe’s house (but then his Grandhe was a Priest); or the Doge’s house (but then the Doge looked after all the trade, so you would expect her to be wealthy). But Tighe’s pahe was still the Prince, and the Prince was notionally the boss of the whole village – of the whole Princedom. Besides Tighe’s family wasn’t poor. After all, they owned many goats – not the largest herd in the village, admittedly, but six whole goats and the carcasses of three more salted and hanging in the storeroom dug out at the back of the house. So he watched the beautiful roll and pull of Carashe’s body with a certain hopefulness. Surely there would be more of a chance next year, if only his manhood would come on (and eight was about the right age for that to happen), if only he could grow some hair from his face like the monkeys and bulk up his wick a little so that it took on a man’s thickness. And it only took that for his imagination to start pressing his own body close against Carashe, to imagine what it would be to put his hands underneath the fabric of her clothes.