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Ati’s kite was a fair distance away, growing slowly as Tighe steered his kite towards him. Then, so suddenly that Tighe yelled out in fright, it was right there, huge, close enough to touch. Tighe caught one super-vivid image of Ati’s face, mouth open, eyes creased in the effort of yelling – fear – anger – and then Tighe was past him, flying through clear air.

He had passed a hand’s width from collision.

Sluggishly Tighe pulled his weight out of the harness’s left side and the swoop came to an end in an ungainly turn. For a moment Tighe was upside-down and his stomach lurched again. Then he was rightways again, gasping. The air washed hugely past him. The skin of his kite twitched as if alive.

Ati reappeared before him, controlling his kite with fierce little jerks of his body to keep it facing Tighe. He was yelling, but there was no way his voice could carry in the enormity of the wind’s crashing. Tighe stared, dumbfounded, at the anger of the boy’s expression.

The wind rattled them, separating them.

Tighe fought the buffeting, trying to bring the kite he rode under control. The frame, rooted as it was to the shelf, had been nothing like the real thing. Besides, he could see that Waldea was hurrying him through the training before they went to war.

He pulled on his harness again and the kite lifted him and swept him round. Setting back into a hovering flight was the tricky thing. His mind alert now, he realised that he would need that sort of control if he ever wanted to land the thing.

There was a sharp, agonising switch against his left leg: the rope was flapping loose, whipping frantically in the breezy air. Belatedly Tighe understood that Ati, angered at the dangerous proximity of Tighe’s pass
had freed himself from the tether. The slack line curled and snapped, poising itself, snake-like, as if to strike. With clumsy movement Tighe unhooked his end of the tether from the underside of the kite, just by his shoulder. The rope slipped from the bar, coiling through the air as it fell away.

Tighe looked around. The exhilaration of what he was doing was starting to penetrate him. He pulled to the left, then to the right. The whole worldwall, the massy solidity of everything, danced and jogged before him. Away to the left, to the right. He wriggled in the harness the way he had been told to do in the frame back on land: only here, in this new element, the balance of his body and the broad stretch of kite existed in a new relationship. Lean it forward into the push of the wind from below and it hovered and wobbled; lean back and the breeze lifted him up. Angle it far enough and the flat plane of the kite relinquished the hold of air and fell, cut through the air knife-like as he hurtled down. But this fall could be slowed and curved away from with the pressure of his arms or the angling of his body.

The other kites were circling now, drifting downwards in spirals for all the world like birds. Tighe concentrated and started coming down. His mouth was very dry, his eyes were stinging. His legs were so cold he could not really feel his feet. It was not easy to bring the kite under control.

He could understand now some of the snatches of talk he had overheard in barracks. Away from the face of the wall itself the winds were cleaner: not free from all crosswinds, but easier to ride. But near the wall the winds became chopped up and bitty, and the kites tended to vibrate and thrum noisily. It was hard even to see properly because the vibration jarred the eyeballs.

Tighe swept away and curled back. He could see, fairly distant now, kites landing back on the ledge: it was over to the right and a little below him. Suddenly, trembling at the prospect of landing without crashing fatally into the face of the world, Tighe tugged himself back in that direction. He tried to coax the kite into a gentle descent, but a bucking strong breeze knocked him wallwards and a blank stone patch of sheer vertical world sprang up towards him with sickening speed. Terrified, Tighe threw all his weight away skywards and the kite arced round and swung out.

He was scared now and panting. Giving the wall a much wider berth, he tried to swing down to the platon’s ledge. But he ended up circling pointlessly in the air. Looking around he could see no other kites. He was alone in the sky; everybody else had landed. He tried another pass, but the terrific rattling of the kite’s fabric seemed to convey itself directly into his bones. Terror took root in him. The bitter taste in his mouth intensified.

The ledge swept past and then the spur that separated the platon’s base from the main shelf. The calabashes loomed into view and Tighe swerved up and round to leave them behind. He twisted in the harness as he repassed the spur, brought the kite round and tumbled through the sky, picking up speed, falling again. Sudden flash vision of his pashe, her face buckled with anger. And the air howling at him.

With a reflex, by which he surprised himself at a deep level, the kite veered up and all the speed bled away in the sharp ascent. He lowered and toppled forward where the hard dirt of the ledge came banging up against the soles of his feet.

Some of the other kite-boys and kite-girls were there, arms out, to grab at the tips of his wings as his body went limp, his knees scraping the dirt. It took him several long breaths to realise that he was back on the wall. Home. Firmness under foot.

With this understanding came an elation, soaring in the middle of his chest. He wriggled out of his harness, clambered out from the structure of the kite. Waldea would be happy with him. He had flown; he had landed. There was a bright light in his stomach.

Waldea was lumbering towards him, head down. He arrived right in front of Tighe and flashed his fist out. The sideways blow, glancing, caught Tighe unawares. His head jerked to the side as a star of pain burst in the side of his temples.

‘You threw that rope away,’ Waldea was yelling. ‘I stood here and
watched
you. Do you know how much tether rope
costs
?’

The second blow, being less unexpected, hurt Tighe less. He caught a sense of Waldea’s arm coming up and let himself go looser. Then, with the impact, he rolled to the left, tumbling over, sprawling in the earth. He landed softly. But despite the throb of pain at the side of his head Tighe felt the grit of the ledge underneath him with a rush of satisfaction. Flown, landed.

Waldea’s rage burnt itself out straight away and he hunkered down to check the boy. ‘OK? I get no pleasure hitting you,’ he said.

‘Fine, Master,’ said Tighe.

Waldea helped him up. ‘Hit a man once,’ he said, uncharacteristically communicative. ‘Blinded him in one eye. Don’t make me strike you again. Can’t fly a kite with only one eye.’

‘No, Master,’ said Tighe. He was on his feet now. His head didn’t hurt so bad really.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Waldea laughed, a single burst of noise. ‘Looked like
combat
, God fuck it,’ he said, ‘like you were
trying
to bomb boy Ati out of the sky.’ Then he turned on his heel and marched away.

Tighe put his hand to the side of his head, but there was no blood. Then he looked around. The other kite-boys and kite-girls had disassembled their kites and taken the packages back into the dormitory, so, with fumbling hands, Tighe did that. He felt strange, his head still stinging. He felt alone, uncertain what to do next. Then, angling his head back to look up, he understood that he felt euphoric.

Alive!

Somehow the sky seemed brighter, more soaked in light, than it had done before. The colours of the wall itself had intensified, the browns were richer, the greys more pure, the green more lively.

That evening in the dormitory Ati was stand-offish. Tighe tried to gauge the mood as he wrapped himself up in his blanket.

‘Sorry’, he said in a soft voice, ‘that I nearly strike you.’

Ati mumbled something, looking in another direction.

‘In the sky,’ Tighe added.

‘Fuck,’ said Ati. For a while he was silent. Tighe waited on a fuller reply and then gave up, turned on his side and tried to compose himself for sleep. Then Ati’s voice came back, peevish.

‘You don’t
do
that, could have killed,’ he said. ‘Killed the two of us, you, me. Fuck. Still,’ he added, his voice warming a little. ‘That was then. No demerat in thinking of the past all the time.’

Silence.

‘I guess’, Ati said, eventually, ‘I figured you might fly better, you being the sky-boy and everything, but you flew badly, you flew like shit. Turd on a kite.’ He hissed with repressed laughter. Suddenly, without expecting himself to, Tighe started laughing as well, pressing his lips together with his fingers to try and stop the sound coming out. Waldea would be coming back into the room any moment now. Shouldn’t make any noise. But it was so funny – Tighe falling through the sky like a stone.

‘You supposed to be the
sky-boy
,’ said Ati, laughter eroding the sentence as he said it until it ended in a series of gasps.

‘Sky-boy,’ repeated Tighe.

‘You good omen? You
shit
omen.’

‘Yes!’

‘You supposed to flown down here to us,’ said Ati, his body trembling with the giggles. I don’t think so.’

‘I fell,’ said Tighe.

The door opened and Waldea was back in the space. ‘Quiet now,’ he boomed.

The following day at breakfast Ati came and sat next to Tighe. They didn’t say anything to one another, but it was the first morning when Tighe did not eat alone.

Tighe flew again the following day and the day after that, and the third day as well. Each time he felt the terrors thrum through his whole body as he stood on the edge of the world. He told himself not to look down, but he could barely help himself. His eyesight would drop as if it were subject to the same laws of gravity as physical objects. And there was the world, at his feet, plummeting away for ever until the strong block of hard stone dissolved into the mist of clouds and everything diminished and became blue with the distance. Just looking down like that would make his ribs clench together like fingers in a fist, make his heart pop and rattle, would dry his mouth and make all the hairs on his head tingle and stand apart.

But, each time, he had stepped over the edge into the push of the rising midday air and the kite at his back had filled and soared. And every time
that
happened, Tighe had wept – actually wept – with the euphoria of it.

The more he knew Ati, the more he realised that the downwaller’s command of the Imperial language was not as good as he had at first thought. What he had interpreted as smooth expression was actually haphazard in its syntax. But Ati himself, for all his strangeness – his strange look and smell, his peculiar manner and attitudes – began to seem homely to Tighe. Familiar, close.

On the morning of one particularly bright day, as Tighe joined the rest of the platon for the stretching exercises and tyshe movements, he had summoned his courage and addressed Waldea directly. ‘Master?’ he had said, his voice more quavery than he would have liked. ‘Master?’

‘Tig-he,’ grunted Waldea. He was fixing a broken spar from one of the kites with daubs of glue from an antique plastic pot.

‘I want to go, some days,’ he said. ‘To the field hospital.’

Waldea didn’t say anything, his whole ruined faced concentrated on the broken kite. When he had finished glueing and splinting the spar, he said, ‘You sick?’

‘No, Master.’

‘Broken bones?’

‘No, Master.’

‘That’s what the field hospital is for.’

‘The man there is Vievre, Master. He healed me after my fall. He a father to me, I love him.’

Waldea looked up at this, his sky-grey eyes settling, unblinking, on Tighe’s gaze. ‘You love him,’ he repeated, in a colourless voice.

‘He a father to me, I love him,’ Tighe repeated, uncertainly. I love him a father.’

‘No, Tig-he,’ said Waldea, clambering to his feet. ‘You cannot go. There is no time in our day when we can spare the time for you to wander away.’ He slapped his own oval belly with the flats of both hands. I am your father now and you must love
me
. You must love me, or I will have to beat you again.’ Then, for some arcane reason that Tighe could not fathom, he started laughing and strode away.

One evening, as the two of them sat apart from the rest of the kite-boys and kite-girls eating the evening meal, Tighe asked Ati, ‘Ati, this war?’

Ati was always wholly absorbed in his eating until he had finished every fragment of food. He said nothing until he had run his forefinger round the inside of the bowl and licked it. Then he said, ‘What you say, barbarian?’

‘This war.’

‘What about this war?’

‘Who do we war?’

‘Don’t say
we war
,’ said Ati, smirking. He loved being able to correct Tighe’s language usage; it made him feel better about his own often halting command of the Imperial tongue. ‘Say
we fight
.’

‘Who do we fight? In this fight?’

‘Who do we fight in this
war
?’ said Ati. ‘You are a barbarian if you do not know who do we fight!’

Tighe put his bowl to his face and ran his tongue round the inside. His tongue was long, but he couldn’t quite reach into the very middle. Ati leaned over and knocked the bowl with his knuckles so that it jarred against the bridge of Tighe’s nose.

‘Shiteater!’ squealed Tighe, dropping the bowl and reaching over to slap Ati on the forehead. Ati was laughing now and Tighe grinning, but they both looked round nervously to see if Waldea was watching them.

‘So?’ repeated Tighe. ‘Who do we fight?’

‘You
are
barbarian! – everybody knows who we fight.’

‘I am a Prince,’ snorted Tighe. ‘You shiteater.’

‘I apologies, you
preens
,’ said Ati, making a grinning obedience with his head.

‘Tell me!’

Ati’s grin dropped away. ‘We are at a holy war,’ he said, with sudden seriousness. ‘We fight a holy fight. All three Popes have written. To the east alongwall from here is a mighty nation of darkness. They are called the Otre.’

‘The Otre,’ said Tighe, solemnly.

‘They are evil. They pull out the eyes of all boy-children, because they worship an el-daimon.’