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By fifty the sun was level with the ledge and had heated the air enough – so they told Tighe – to produce updraughts. That was the way the world was constructed, they told him. The blaze of the sun heated the air and the heated air went up – seeking God, said Ati, who turned out to be devout, although devout in a religion that Tighe did not recognise. One of the other kite-boys, called Mulvaine, told him that this same principle was behind the operation of the calabashes. Their great sewn sacks were filled with hot air and that hot air strained to move up the wall. Seeking God, said Ati again. Tighe wondered about sharing with the others what he had learned in the village: that God did not sit on top of the wall, but huddled at the bottom, hurling the sun over the battlement. But he didn’t trust any of his fellow kite-boys enough to mention something so heretical – he didn’t know how seriously the Empire took religious orthodoxy. Sometimes they treated him well, but then sometimes they mocked his accent and his skin, pulled at his hair and punched him.

But the hour was fifty and Waldea was hurrying the boys to their kites.

‘Ravielre!’ he would shout. ‘No evening meal for you, you’re too fat – and Bel!… too long in the bone now, you’ve only few months of kite flying left you, you’re getting too big. Nothing to be done, and no use in crying there – some people grow too big to fly the kites. Let’s hope the war comes on and you get a chance to fly in combat.’

The other boys and girls flew their kites every day for practice; but in the beginning, after his first week, Waldea put Tighe into a sort of stationary frame. The frame was made all of wood – more wood than Tighe had ever seen before all in one place, just one more example of the army’s incredible profligacy with wood. It was like four door frames put together to make a wall-less room, and inside a series of leather and ropes draped over the top and fed down to heavy stones. Inside Tighe was strapped as if to a kite, and made to go through various manoeuvres, to control the kite, to angle it and steer it.

‘Tig-he,’ yelled Waldea, working his grotesque face, ‘you’re more the shape. Thin, you see! You’re more the shape for a kite-boy! Those village boys who eat nothing but grass, they don’t get
fat
like you other city boys and girls.’

Tighe worked and worked in the frame until his every joint ached and there were blisters on his back. At night, in the dormitory with all the others, there would be an hour when Waldea left the platon alone and everybody would whisper excitedly amongst themselves. For days Tighe was too timid to join in, but soon enough he was being asked direct questions. The voices came from all directions.

‘Where you from, sky-boy?’

‘Why is your skin that colour?’

‘Did you fall from the sky – really?’

‘Yes,’ said Tighe.

‘Ooh! Ooh!’

‘Fallen from the sky!’

‘What was it like?’ asked one of the kite-girls, a tangled-haired individual called Mani. Tighe recognised her voice from the chatter in the darkness at night.

‘I don’t remember very,’ said Tighe. ‘I fell for a long time.’

‘Listen to his
accent
,’ hissed somebody on the other side of the room. ‘How
stupid
.’

Ati blurted out, ‘I spoke to him a long time. He is stupid, he don’t know nothing, he speaks funny.’

‘You speak funny yourself, downwaller,’ shushed somebody.

‘You rederen off a calabash,’ said somebody else.

‘What’s rederen?’ asked Tighe, trying to be bolder.

There were muffled shrieks of laughter, mockery. ‘Don’t you know
anything
?’

‘Rederen is
boing boing
,’ said somebody else.

Soon everybody had joined in.
Boing boing boing
. They were all laughing so hard the volume level was getting higher and higher. Then the door was open and the Master was coming back through. The laughter dissipated immediately.

‘Sleep now,’ he said.

The kite-girls, five of them, tended to keep themselves to themselves; when they weren’t exercising or practising they would sit together and play variations of the same game over and over – slapping their palms together and slapping one another’s palms in complicated patterns whilst chanting something. Tighe couldn’t catch the words.

The dozen kite-boys were more boisterous, or at least they were when Waldea wasn’t looking. They bickered and fought amongst themselves, threw pebbles at one another (as well as at Tighe), taunted each other. Only the presence of Waldea brought any discipline to their group.

One morning as Tighe was extricating himself from his blanket ready for the morning food, one of the boys leapt upon him, pulled down his leggings in an instant and gave his wick a sharp, painful tug. The humiliation of it as much as the pain – although the pain was very real – made Tighe collapse in a bundle with tears in his eyes. Around him the air was filled with hilarity, whooping and mocking. Then it all fell silent. Waldea must have come back in.

‘What are you doing Tig-he, on the floor?’ Tighe could tell, from the proximity of his voice, that he was standing over him. ‘Why are your leggings down? It’s disgusting, disgusting.’

Tighe hauled himself up, his eyes messy with tears. ‘A boy pushed the leggings down,’ he said. ‘He hurt my penis. It was Mulvaine, I think.’

Waldea slapped him on the side of his head; not hard, but not soft either. ‘Don’t tell me so! Don’t be a putavre! You are in the army, you look after yourself or not at all.’

But Tighe couldn’t acquire the knack of looking after himself. He found himself crying most nights, silently to himself when he was wrapped up in his blanket. The other kite-boys took a particular pleasure in making him cry. But the strange thing was that, some days, the other kite-boys would be touchingly kind to him. He didn’t understand it. Usually it was when Ati became the butt of sharp comments and practical jokes. One morning, when Waldea stepped out and the platon was supposed to be
folding up their blankets and getting ready for breakfast, three boys jumped Ati. They pushed him down, for all his yelling, and squashed something on to his face, trying to get it into his mouth. ‘Eat! Eat!’ they called. Everybody gathered round, eager, excited: even the girls. Mulvaine put his arm round Tighe’s shoulder, ‘You see how we all hate the downwaller?’ he said, smilingly. With a lurch in his stomach, Tighe realised that Ati’s face was smeared now with shit; that somebody must have pushed out a turd in the night, and now they were trying to make Ati eat it. ‘Shits falls downwall!’ somebody crooned. ‘Nice piece of breakfast for you,’ called somebody else. Everybody was chattering, laughing. Ati struggled, grunting through clenched teeth. Tighe felt sick, sick from the thought of it and sick at the cruelty, but he also felt excited. It was thrilling in a strange way. He was laughing, just like the others; grinning, waving at the tangled mass of boys. He felt guilty at laughing, but he did it anyway.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Everybody was back at their mattresses, folding their blankets, smoothing down their hair and clothes. You could see which boys had been grappling with Ati, because they were wiping their hands on the floor and on their own leggings. Ati himself stood in the middle of the room in the half-light, his face darkened with shit. His whole body spoke misery, his slumped shoulders, his gash of a mouth.

‘Ati,’ bellowed Waldea, who had come back in, ‘what is it with you? Do you want me to beat you?’

‘I’m sorry, Master,’ replied Ati. With another lurch in his belly, Tighe realised that the downwaller was close to tears.

‘Everybody outside,’ ordered Waldea. ‘You all carry stones.’ He looked at Ati. ‘Disgusting! Disgusting! We’ll make sure Ati here remembers to keep
clean
.’

And so they all went outside and carried stones. Some of the boys were grinning, squinting in the morning light, but Tighe wasn’t. When Ati finally emerged to join in the exercises his face was clean of shit, but there was a large bruise, shit-coloured, on his cheek.

Tighe worked and worked in the frame until it became second nature, and the blisters on his back had broken and healed back over as tougher skin. Then one morning, as the other kite-boys and kite-girls assembled and fitted themselves into their kites ready for another practice, Waldea grabbed Tighe by the shoulder. ‘Today you’ll fly,’ he said.

It was as simple as that.

He was given his kite, the real kite: a wooden cross with other wooden spars, the shape of a teardrop, as tall as Tighe himself and half as tall again.
The material covering the frame was a kind of leather, but a leather thinner, more flexible and tougher than any hide he had seen before.

Every kite-boy and kite-girl assembled their kites before flying them; slotted crossbar into mainbar, fed the smaller spars through, stretched the leather over the frame and pinned it into place. Tighe had done this before many times and now he did it again. Every member of the platon was sitting cross-legged on the ledge assembling his or her kite. Tighe went through the motions.

When assembled the kites were leant against the wall, to catch the sunlight to dry and stretch taut. Whilst this happened the platon went through a series of precise movements with their arms and legs. To loosen their limbs, get their muscles ready. It was these exercises that Tighe had seen when he first came round the spar.

Then he joined the line with the other kite-boys and kite-girls, gathering up his kite and moving to the edge of the ledge. Waldea stood behind him. It was all right. He tried not to think about what he was going to do. And then, there he was: standing on the very edge of the world and about to step off it. His stomach shrunk fiercely, his heart was squeezing and pulsing. He couldn’t co-ordinate his limbs properly.

With a horrible sense of realisation he knew that he couldn’t go through with this part of it. He just couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He stiffened, strained back; but Waldea’s hand on his shoulder was rock. ‘Into the harness, omen-boy,’ said Waldea. His voice was thorny, pricking. Tighe slid his arms through the harness, felt the kite settle against his back; but his skin was numb, sweating. He couldn’t do it.

Couldn’t.

To his right Tighe could see Ati. The downwaller was fiddling with his chest, tracing a complex pattern with one of his thumbs. He caught Tighe’s eye.

‘Always bless myself before I go out,’ he said, speaking loudly so that his words would carry over the shush of the rising wind. His cheek was flushed red, his pupils pin-sharp.

‘No,’ said Tighe, in a small voice. Then, louder: ‘No, I can’t.’

But Ati wasn’t listening to him any more. Waldea was tying a cord to Ati’s kite. He brought it over to Tighe’s and fixed it. ‘This cord’, he said, ‘links you with Ati’s kite. He will guide you. Follow him, learn how to fly in the air, watch him and follow him.’

‘No,’ said Tighe. It was unbearable. The world shrank, span outwards. His vision was hollowing out. The wind seemed to have bored into his head, filling his inner ear. ‘No,’ he said.

‘You’ll feel different when you’re up,’ said Waldea, his mouth very close to Tighe’s ear. Oddly, he didn’t seem angry at Tighe’s reluctance.

To Tighe’s right kites were tumbling from the wall, falling into the void. The kite to the left of Ati’s was hauled into the air by the wind, a figure strapped underneath. It wavered in the air, then ducked down out of sight. It was too much for Tighe to bear.

Tighe felt it all rushing inside him, an overwhelming upward push in his body as if his guts were hollow and possessed by the upward gushing air. Then his gullet convulsed and he was vomiting.

‘Puking?’ screeched Waldea in his weirdly high-pitched voice. ‘Disgusting! Disgusting! Away with you.’ But he didn’t push Tighe away; instead he grabbed the crossbeam of his kite and pulled him down, tipping him at an angle, letting the stream dribble from the boy’s lips to the dirt at the lip of the ledge.

Tighe closed his eyes, the misery of vomiting distracting his attention from the drop in front of him. He heard somebody several arms away down the ledge make exaggerated noises of disgust. Nearer at hand he heard Ati yelling over the rising air, ‘Ready to go, I’m ready, I’m ready.’

Tighe’s insides felt wrenched and there was a scorching trail from his stomach up his throat, but he felt himself manhandled, pushed and hauled upright again by a cursing Waldea. He opened his mouth to apologise to the Master, but only a moan came out. He still had his eyes shut. The kite straps pressed hard against his shoulder, a deep tug inside him that repeated the clench of the vomiting, and the sound of the wind took on a deeper timbre.

He opened his eyes. He was up, in the air.

Against the background of the gushing noise of the wind was a reedy wail. It was, he realised, his own voice, howling punily. The wind turned, caught him, lurched him to the left.

His feet were dangling over nothingness. All the way down to –

Look up.

The worldwall was there. It reached up for ever and down for ever with an awesome solidity. For an instant Tighe’s fears dissolved; the hideous taste in his mouth, the hollow twist in his gut, were shrunken to nothing before the sheer spread of the wall itself. He was far enough out in the air to see the range of it, the slight curve of it away to the left and to the right. The trick of perspective as the eye was drawn upwards, all the way up until the wall itself was lost in haze.

There was a tug on his line and his kite jerked, veered away, pulling him through a half-turn. His vision of the wall slipped to the side, to be replaced by an expansive blue wash with tiny shredded clouds. He saw the line leading away from his kite and Ati’s kite in the distance pulling the rope taut.

Tighe’s stomach spasmed again at the yaw of the drop beneath him.
The kite strained and creaked at his back and he dipped and swooped down.

He wondered if he were still afraid. He wished he could have some water for his bitter-tasting, burnt tongue. The savour of vomit was still in his mouth, on his teeth, on his lips.

A runnel of sobs came and went, shaking his chest. But here he was. Flying. The kite trembled in the wind, shook noisily behind him as a larger gust took it. Flying. He reached out and grabbed the pull harness, as he’d been taught to do on the frame. With a yank the kite struggled to turn in the roar of the wind. Even above the noise of the air Tighe could hear the leather rope connecting his to Ati’s kite creak as it strained. Almost without thinking about it he hauled the other way. The kite flexed, the edges of its wings dipping in, and with a juddery grace it swerved to the left. The line slackened and wind braided and twanged it.