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‘Where are we going?’ asked Tighe, emboldened. It hardly seemed to matter any more; if he was going to die then he would die, and cowering and being frightened would not avert the destiny.

The Manmonger pulled back his lips to show off all his teeth all the way to the roots. ‘You are bold,’ he said, ‘bold. Perhaps I eat you next and that way I digest your boldness into me.’ He laughed.

‘Where are we going?’ persevered Tighe.

‘East,’ said the Manmonger.

‘To your home?’

‘My home is with the Goddess the Sun,’ said the Manmonger, as he busied himself packing up his belongings and tying up his clothes.

‘You are not Otre, I think,’ said Tighe.

‘And you are not Imperial,’ returned the Manmonger, ‘though you speak the language. We come from all different portions and levels of the wall, but we all return to the One.’ He turned to the sky and made a complicated
obeisance to the sun. ‘Now,’ he said, returning to his commodities and untying their hands, ‘there, you are free. It is time to march I think.’

The going was much easier with free hands. That day they marched in line along a series of mostly untrodden ledges, few of them overhung at all. Some were so virgin that their slope had not even been levelled, and they angled sharply away at forty or fifty degrees, which made them dangerous to traverse. The Manmonger himself crossed these spaces easily enough, but the two girls, miserable, hungry and scared, whimpered and clung together.

‘Don’t do that!’ chided the Manmonger. ‘If one of you falls then you take the other with you! You Imperial types are so stupid. Why should I lose both of you at once?’

‘Leave them be!’ snapped Tighe. ‘They are scared. You have scared them. Can you not see they are scared?’

The Manmonger, smiling broadly, stepped up to Tighe. ‘The day when I find your spirit entertaining,’ he said, ‘and the day when I find it irritating are often the same day.’ He reached up and grabbed Tighe’s hair in a sudden, snake-strike movement, holding the head steady, and then he pressed a grimy finger against Tighe’s eye. With a heart-trilling moment of fear Tighe felt certain that the Manmonger was going to gouge the eye out altogether. It all happened too rapidly for him to struggle; but with a twist of the finger the dirty nail wormed its way into Tighe’s eyelid and then with a focus of pain the whole finger’s end went under and pulled the lid away from the eye.

The girls gasped. ‘Now,’ said the Manmonger, straining Tighe’s eyelid painfully away from his eye. ‘I could snap this out with a flick of my finger. You want? Then you’d have no eyelid, and your eye would quickly go blind in the excess of light. The sun would drink your eyesight as a sacrifice. You want that? I could do it with both eyelids, perhaps?’

Tighe could feel the grains of grit on the Manmonger’s finger grinding minutely against the inside of his eyelid; he had instinctively shut the other lid, but light flooded in through the pain of his other eye.

‘Then,’ he said, gasping, ‘I would be a less valuable commodity to you.’

The Manmonger pulled his finger down and out and Tighe’s eyelid snapped back into place. He clapped both his hands to his sore eye. ‘You are a freak anyway,’ the Manmonger said, ‘with your black skin. A freakish eye would only add to your resale value. Come on, all of you,’ and he led them over the sharply sloping ledge.

Even more fearful, the girls hurried after him. Tighe, clutching his eye, peered with his other one and stumbled along at the rear.

The day wore on. They made their way from crag to ledge and in the afternoon along some more thoroughly worn ledges and into a small village. The people there peered out at the Manmonger and his commodities from their doorways. He greeted them as he passed along their central shelf, but none of them seemed interested in buying people.

They left the village and an enormous spur running directly up and down the wall came closer and closer. They passed through another village and settled themselves down on the central shelf in time for the dusk gale. The Manmonger ate and drank, and then sat silently by himself as the winds roared. But Tighe could see now that the dusk gale was much less violent here than it was back in his own village. They barely had to clutch at the grass under them; and half-way through it Tighe saw a door in the village open and an old woman make her way along the shelf to a second door.

After it had died down and the Manmonger was tying the knots that bound their hands together, Tighe spoke up again. His eye still stung. ‘The further east we go,’ he said, ‘the less violent is the dusk gale.’

‘Observant,’ said the Manmonger.

‘Is there a place, far enough east,’ Tighe asked, casting his eyes meekly down so as not to anger the man, ‘where there is no dusk or dawn gale?’

‘It lessens the further east we go,’ said the Manmonger. ‘And it gets stronger the further west. That’s curious, isn’t it?’ But he wouldn’t say any more, and shortly he was asleep.

In the morning he used the red-haired girl again, and then he left the three of them tied up and went from door to door in the village. Eventually he returned with a red-faced elderly man. This man’s skin was flushed like a baby and even his old-man wrinkles had the just-pressed look of the very young; but his nose was a bulbous mass of age tumour and his white hair was close cut against his knobbly head like turf. He wheezed as he walked.

This old man and the Manmonger had a lengthy conversation in a language Tighe could not understand, accompanied by hand gestures and elaborate noddings and duckings of the head. After an interminable amount of this posturing and arguing the two of them retreated in through one of the doors, and the Manmonger re-emerged carrying a small leather sack. It chinked as he carried it.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at the red-haired girl. ‘You belong to him now. He wanted you,’ he added, grinning, indicating the dark-haired girl, ‘but I said I hadn’t tried you yet myself, so I wasn’t about to give you up yet.’

The red-haired girl was sobbing now, her head down. The Manmonger took her and loosened her bonds, with a surprising tenderness, and led her unresisting to the doorway of the old man.

‘There are no more sales here, I think,’ he said when he came back out, ‘but beyond that spur of worldwall’, he said, indicating the mass that obscured the eastward journey, ‘is a great city and we’ll find buyers for you yet.’

The Manmonger took his two remaining commodities out of the village to the east and along a series of well-trodden overhung ledges. The spur grew and grew until it bulged enormously out in front of them and filled most of the eastern portion of the sky.

They paused in the afternoon and everybody chewed grass. Tighe felt ravenously hungry, but it seemed unlikely that the Manmonger was going to give them any proper food. When he thought of the succulent, tasty-smelling strips of boy-meat that the Manmonger occasionally popped into his mouth, he felt a sick mixture of disgust and desire. He started calculating how long it would be before he starved to thinness, thinking of the itinerants he had seen in the village in his youth. Death could not be much further away. There was even something comforting in that thought.

The Manmonger himself sat cross-legged with his back to them, chanting something to the sun in a strange voice. It occurred to Tighe to rush at him and try to push him off the world, but something stopped him.

They stayed the night and in the morning they started eastward again. They finally reached the spur by eighty in the morning, arriving at an enormous and strangely hooped gateway that led inside the bulge of worldwall.

Beside the gateway was a house and as the Manmonger and his charges approached a middle-aged man emerged from the doorway. The Man-monger greeted him as if he were an old friend, and they embraced and talked for a long time. There were several posts set into the ledge just outside the gateway and the Manmonger tied Tighe and the dark-haired girl to this before going inside the gatekeeper’s house.

Tighe peered along the ledge, through the gate. It was a tunnel through the spur, but so long that he could not see light at the far end. A damp, unpleasant exhalation wafted out of the space. I suppose he will take us through there,’ said Tighe to the girl. She looked at him with unfocused eyes. ‘Do you speak Imperial?’ he asked. ‘Are you not of the Empire?’ Nothing. ‘Perhaps you are Otre?’ Still nothing. Tighe shook his head,
speaking aloud in his village tongue, ‘It is difficult for me to understand such a one as you, I’m afraid.’

Eventually the Manmonger returned with the gatekeeper. They both smelt of liquor and the Manmonger’s grin was more intense than it had been before. ‘He wanted you,’ he said as he untied the dark-haired girl. ‘His wife wasn’t happy about it because there could be no confusion as to
why
he wanted you, let’s be honest. He wanted you as the toll price for going through his tunnel. I told him – toll price for a
hundred
journeys through his stinking tunnel! But he was insistent. There’s something about your looks, my pretty, that appeal to the people this far east.’ The dark-haired girl was free now and the Manmonger turned his attention to Tighe. He was still talking to the unresponsive girl. ‘He said that if I paid him with you, my pretty, then I’d have free toll for the rest of my life. Imagine! I was tempted, I’ll not pretend, but I haven’t tried you yet myself, have I? I can’t let him have you before myself, can I?’

With both his commodities free, he hauled them up and waved a final goodbye to the surly-looking gatekeeper. ‘I had to placate him with several of the trinkets I earned in the village,’ he said sourly. ‘And I hope that you’re worth it, my pretty. I hope that, at any rate.’

He marched them to the mouth of the tunnel.

‘Now,’ he announced to them both. ‘I don’t like this tunnel. It is hidden from my mistress, the Sun. I cannot pray to her, I cannot feel the heat of her pleasure on my skin. So I do not like to stay in the tunnel. We shall hurry through, you and you and I, and we shall emerge into the sunlight on the other side. Do you understand?’

They stared at him.

‘Do you?’ he barked.

‘Yes,’ said Tighe. ‘I do not like this tunnel either. It smells funny.’

‘It does that,’ said the Manmonger. ‘And worse than that. But there is no other way around this spur of worldwall, so through we must go. Jog all the way – do not let up. There are fleas the size of your fist in here. And rats; did you ever see a rat? I have seen rats as big as a man, and they are nasty, nasty. Come along!’

He turned to the sun one last time, closing his eyes to let the late-morning rays bathe his face. Then, with a shove, he hurried his two objects into the mouth of the tunnel.

The ground underneath was soggy and Tighe with his bad foot found running particularly difficult. The light behind them faded and soon they were in darkness. It smelt of decay, although it was not entirely black. As soon as the pale light from the gateway behind them faded a spot of light appeared before them. They hurried on, Tighe’s stomach clenching with a
stitch of hunger and exhaustion; but he had no more desire to stay in this dank place than had the Manmonger.

As they struggled on the dot of light swelled and expanded. An ashy light brought the shapes of the tunnel out of the gloom; strange contortions of rock, an enormous bulge of manrock to the right that was freakishly shaped like a giant brick, like a house excavated out from the side of the wall, complete with puckered indentations down its side that even resembled tiny doorways.

They hurried on until the shape of light had grown large enough for them to jog through it and out into the sunlight again. At the far end was a short shelf, on which a number of people were sitting. The Manmonger and his two commodities collapsed on the grass here and lay, panting and gasping, until they had their breath back.

As soon as he was able, the Manmonger settled himself down to perform his religious duties before his goddess, the Sun, now high in the sky. He did not even bother to tie up his two commodities. Tighe, sitting upon the grass as the pain in his chest and stomach receded a little, looked around him. There was no gatekeeper’s house this side of the tunnel; presumably people paid at the far end. Tighe wondered about what happened to those who, entering the tunnel from this side, did not have enough for a full fare; were they sent back along the tunnel?

The other people on the shelf were all dressed in striped dresses that fell from a tight neck collar down to the ankles; their heads were wrapped in scarves and Tighe could not even be sure whether they were male or female. There were perhaps a dozen of them, sitting together with their backs against the wall. They observed the Manmonger and his possessions with impossible-to-read expressions for a while and soon enough they all stood up together and filed into the tunnel.

The Manmonger was left alone with his commodities.

‘This shelf,’ he said, ‘is too close to that terrible tunnel. Come, we shall walk a little way.’

He led them along and up through a series of short interlinked crags, each one less well trodden than the one before, climbing and climbing until they came to a semi-circular platform covered in tall grass. Here he hammered in a peg and settled himself down. The sun had almost settled over the top of the wall and the light was dimming, but there seemed almost no motion of the air around them. Had they reached the place where the dusk gale was no more?

‘Now,’ said the Manmonger, fiddling in his pack. ‘If I don’t give you food you will die – as you, my black-skinned possession, have pointed out several times. So I traded some of my trinkets for grass-bread and ratmeat from the gatekeeper and you two will eat. Only do not eat too much, or
your stomachs will rebel. Here,’ he handed out some small portions of bread and two or three knuckle-sized pieces of meat.

Tighe was too ravenous to think of anything else. He gobbled the food down straight away and felt his stomach clench and stab with pain. He felt extremely thirsty. ‘Drink?’ he asked. But the Manmonger only laughed.

‘You’ll have to wait until the dew tomorrow,’ he said.