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There were sentries posted in a small military eyrie at the crossing place from outside to inside, and they made Tighe and the rest of the boys wait until Waldea came up from the rear. As soon as he arrived they started bickering with him, waving their arms and shouting.

‘We’ve had
hundreds
through in the last few days,’ the guards – three of them – were saying. The enormity of this number had clearly struck them because they kept repeating it. ‘Hundreds – hundreds. Why should you get treated any differently?’

‘I have my orders direct from the War Pope,’ Waldea kept saying. I have a grandbul in my pack.’ He retrieved the paper and flapped it in front of their faces. ‘We’re to bivuoac near the outskirts of the Meshwood tonight.’

‘We have orders too,’ said one guard.

‘Move everybody through deeper into the wood. The path’s clear enough,’ said a second.

‘There’ve been
hundreds
up along it,’ said the third. ‘It ought to be clearly beaten through by now.’

‘Ah, I should think so,’ said the first.

‘We’re a
kite
squadron,’ shouted Waldea. ‘Do you see what my boys and girls are carrying on their shoulders? We’re no good in the middle of the fucking Meshwood.’

‘Oh,’ said one of the guards, as if sorrowful. ‘Hardly a need to swear, I think.’

‘My orders are to wait by the outskirts until we get further instructions. You can’t deny my orders – here’s the grandbul.’

‘Maybe they meant the outskirts of the wood downwall a way,’ said the second guard.

‘We have
our
orders, you know,’ said the first.

As they quarrelled Tighe unshouldered his crossbeam and peered up the path. It was like being indoors, in that it was murky and felt covered. But there was a strange smell. Tighe tried to picture what a
land-lobster
looked like. He couldn’t help but shudder.

One of the other boys slapped Tighe on the back of his head. ‘You look like you’ve never seen a forest before.’

‘I never have,’ he said. ‘At least, never so many trees in one place. I’ve seen trees before, of course.’

Ati mimicked his voice. ‘Oh, I’ve seen
trees
before,’ he said. There was a general laughter, but it was strained. Tighe realised how nervous they all were.

Waldea and the guards were still bickering. With an army so large, clearly, it was hard to keep everybody in harmony. ‘How far,’ Tighe asked the boys behind him, gesturing with his right arm at the wood they had just entered, ‘how far does it go?’

The kite-girls, a dozen or so of them, kept themselves together as a group. Once the bivouac was set up, a few of the more courageous kite-boys sauntered over to them and tried to talk to them: but it happened under the eye of Waldea and the girls made no sort of response, so they eventually gave up. ‘My father,’ said Ati, to Tighe, as they settled themselves into their pouches to sleep, ‘my father is a carpenter. You know what that is?’

Tighe shook his head; the wood was unfamiliar.

‘It means he worked with wood. This,’ and Ati slapped the stem of meshwood that the pouches were tied to with the flat of his palm, ‘this is poor wood. You’d think it would be possible to build with it, but no.’ He reached down and took hold of one of the smaller limbs of it. It bowed, curved round. ‘No, too spongy, too soft.’ He released it and the branch thrashed back, wobbled eventually settling.

‘Listen, kite-children,’ called Waldea, ‘we have the shelter of the wood now, but we’re near the edge, so we’ll still feel the evening gale. Untie your
kite-bundles, and then tie them to a branch. Have a care with that! Then you all must all use your belts to strap yourselves to a trunk of a meshwood tree until the wind dies, and then I’ll call to a couple to take watch.’

They unbuckled their blankets and unfolded them, talking in short, nervous sentences. The thought of spending the dusk outside was frightening. The proper place to be during dusk, when the winds screamed and bustled up and down the wall, was safely inside.

‘I’m frightened,’ hushed Tighe to Ati.

Ati nodded sharply, focusing his attention on tying his belt tightly so that his torso was strapped to a trunk.

Tighe tried to tie himself to a trunk next to Ati, but the wood was so spongy that the belt cut into it. Tighe yanked and the squishy stuff inside tore and pulled apart. He needed an older, drier trunk. Anxiously, because everybody else was strapped in now, he clambered up the steps provided by the trees, stepping past his fellow kite-pilots. Eventually he found an unoccupied stiff, dry trunk. It was next to Mulvaine.

He busied himself with tying himself down and then settled himself. When his breathing had calmed a little, he looked round, and caught Mulvaine’s eye.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘You Barbarian turd,’ said Mulvaine, without malice.

There was silence. The branches and strands of Meshwood were rustling; the dusk gale was starting up. Tighe chattered to distract himself from his terror.

‘Ati’s father was
carpenter
,’ he said. ‘My father was a Prince. What was your father?’

Mulvaine glowered at him through the thickening light. ‘You Barbarian turd,’ he said again, but there was no passion in his words. ‘You’re deformed. Your foot is so ugly. No girl would ever fuck with you.’ But this was all said in a desultory manner and Mulvaine lost interest in it soon enough. ‘What was that you were saying?’ he asked. ‘My father.’

‘My pahe, my father, was a Prince. That is like a Pope, for a village, you know.’

Mulvaine breathed contemptuously through his nostrils. ‘Small village nobody. I come from the Imperial City itself. My father was a philosopher.’

‘A what?’

‘A philosopher. A priest of God and a thinker.’

‘Oh.’

The wind was getting up and the conversation died. Tighe braced himself, but it was not as terrible as he thought. There was a thrashing sound from below, and soon the trunks were swaying and jiggling; but
somehow the roaring of the wind sounded less intimidating out in the open. Tighe wondered how that could be.

After half an hour or so the winds died, and pretty soon it was quiet and calm. It was now pitch black. Tighe wondered what to do. He could hear Mulvaine moving in the darkness near to him. There was a vague apprehension of shadow.

‘What are you doing?’ he hissed.

‘Unbuckling myself, what do you think, you idiot,’ replied Mulvaine. I want my supper. You think I’m marching all that way and then not eating anything?’

Tighe’s own stomach was shrunken with fear and anticipation. But he was, he realised, hungry too.

A little below and away to the right there was a spark that flared into a flame. As Tighe fumbled with his own belt he watched the orange light swell. Somebody had lit a fire. Mulvaine was already climbing down towards it.

Waldea had pulled out branches to clear a sort of chimney up through the Meshwood and was now burning the wood as a bonfire. Tighe marvelled at the wastage – even if it wasn’t proper wood, it still seemed extraordinary to burn wood rather than dung. But as the night got chillier he was glad of the heat. The kite-pilots huddled as close to the spitting bonfire as they could.

Waldea made spits of sticks and speared morsels of meat on the end of each of them. Groups of boys and girls cooked themselves supper and then climbed, monkey-like, to seats amongst the meshwood branches to eat. Soon enough everybody had eaten.

After a space of staring silently into the fire, Waldea said, ‘I’m going to sleep now, my children. Be sure you all strap yourselves in tightly before you go to sleep, or the dawn gale may pluck you out of the heart of the Meshwood. I do not say to you, go to sleep immediately. I know how excited you must be in your hearts. Only, do not stay awake too long – it will be a tiring day tomorrow.’

‘Will we go to war tomorrow, Master?’ asked Mulvaine, his voice quavery.

‘Tomorrow will be a day of glory, my children!’ declared Waldea.

He wrapped himself in his blanket and strapped himself to a broad meshwood trunk. One or two of the kite-pilots did the same; but Tighe was too excited to think of sleeping just yet.

The fire was starting to burn down, but it was still fierce enough.

‘War,’ said somebody. ‘Think of it!’

‘The Otre are a terrible people,’ said Mulvaine. He was sitting closest to the fire, poking a stick of platán wood into it and drawing it out to stare at the tamed fire at its end.

‘I heard’, said Tighe, ‘that the Otre cut off the legs and the arms of their pas – of their mothers and fathers, and make them
eat their own arms and legs
?’

He looked around, hoping for a horrified reaction from the small group of kite-boys and kite-girls around him. But none of them looked impressed at this information.

‘Well,’ said Mulvaine, ‘
this
is what I heard.’ He looked about him, as if he were about to impart a profound secret and wanted to make sure that nobody else would overhear. The Meshwood was a tangle of shadows in every direction. Tighe didn’t like to look at it. He concentrated his gaze on the fire. Flame wriggling upwards like branches.

‘What did you hear?’ asked Sluvre.

‘I heard that when we fight them tomorrow, we had best make sure we are not captured by them. Do you know why?’

‘Why? Why?’

‘Because of what they do to their prisoners of war. And do you want to know what they do with their prisoners of war?’

‘What? What?’

Mulvaine leant closer towards the fire, and spoke in a lower voice. ‘They tie you up, in the outskirts of the Meshwood. A place like this perhaps.’

‘Do the claw-caterpils get you, maybe?’ asked Bel, breathless.

‘Worse than that,’ intoned Mulvaine.

This was met with cries of disbelief. Worse than the claw-caterpils? Impossible!

‘They strip you naked,’ said Mulvaine, drawing out each word with a drawling emphasis. ‘Then they tie you down straddling a branch of this platán. Do you see this little bud here?’ He flicked a tiny nubbin, no bigger than a fingernail, growing out of the platán trunk in front of him.

Everybody leaned in to look at the bud.

‘What is it?’ asked somebody.

‘It’s a bud,’ said Mulvaine. ‘A new branch will grow out of it. So they strip you naked and tie you so that your bumhole is exactly over one of these buds.’ There were shouts of disbelief, but Mulvaine raised his voice. ‘It’s true, I heard this from one of the sapper regiment people, and he said they found some Imperial soldiers who had been captured and treated this way. They tie you over the bud and the branch grows up through your bumhole and up your bum! Yes it does!’

There were squeals, shouts of denial, laughter.

‘They feed you a little and they put a wet rag in your mouth morning and
evening so you don’t die,’ Mulvaine continued, speaking even louder to be heard over the tumult. ‘And over a week the platán trunk grows up inside you. And over two weeks it grows bigger, and bigger. And eventually it grows and
stabs
your insides.’ He pounded his fist against the broad trunk beneath him as he said this. ‘It
stabs
your insides until you die.’

Everybody was silent now. Nobody doubted that this horrific treatment was standard Otre business.

‘This man from the sapper regiment,’ said Mulvaine, dropping his voice, confident now in his command of his audience, ‘he said they found one of the Imperial guides, and he was dead, but a branch of platán was growing
out of his mouthl
With leaves and everything!’

Tighe was troubled by difficult dreams that night. In the morning he could not be sure of them, except that they had been unsettling and unpleasant; populated with frightening hybrid people whose limbs sprouted platán leaves, whose wicks were as thick and broad as platán trunks; people who had Mulvaine’s eyes and intended to torture Tighe. Tighe had a vague recollection of struggling through the tangle of branches and leaves of the Meshwood with pursuers at his back.

But it was dawn, and the light was coming through the leaves, and a camp potgirl was bringing breakfast slung around her neck.

They did not see battle the next day, nor for several days afterwards. When the sun had heated the air and started it rising, Waldea took three kite-pilots to the entrance to the Meshwood and sent them flying out away from the wall. They scouted and returned and reported that there was no sign of anything, except the Meshwood reaching away into the east.

‘Are there any crosswinds east?’ Waldea wanted to know. ‘How far might a kite fly east today?’

But the crosswinds were patchy and treacherous. The last thing a pilot wanted was to be caught out in the sky, blown so that there was nowhere except Meshwood to land – trying to land in the midst of the spiky, curly branches and trunks would be suicide.

So instead Waldea ordered the kite-pilots to shoulder their kite-spars and belt their bundles around their waists. ‘You must march through the Meshwood!’ he declared. This was not as easy a matter as marching along clear ledgeway. ‘At some places’, he told them, ‘you must pass your kites through carefully and then follow. Have a care for your kites at all times!’

To begin with the path was clear enough, boot-marks still visible in the dust from the strides of riflemen and soldiers who had passed before. But after an hour or so the path dissipated and the line broke up. Each individual kite-boy and kite-girl had to make his or her way as they found best, stepping from trunk to trunk, sometimes finding little paths along truncated crags and craglets, sometimes passing along what seemed to be sheer wall, stepping on wobbly trunks. To Tighe’s right the blue sky was visible, though scored over with the arcs of dozens of trunks and branches. At one point he lost track of the rest of his platon and became scared; but on calling out in a high-pitched voice he was answered with several yells and he realised that his comrades were all around him.

By now they had left the ledge far behind and were all picking their way along branch and trunk. The complex patterning of shadows across trunks shifted its design as the day went on. The pools of shade that lay everywhere about in the morning thinned as the sun rose to shine directly in through the tangle. The shadows resolved themselves into a tracery of wickerwork
that was beautiful to look at – or so Tighe might have thought if he hadn’t been wholly occupied with finding secure footholds whilst hefting his kite over his shoulders.