On (GollanczF.) Read online

  Also by Adam Roberts in Gollancz:

  SALT

  STONE

  POLYSTOM

  ON

  Adam Roberts

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Adam Roberts 2001

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane

  London, WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2010 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 10035 0

  This ebook produced by Jouve, France

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.adamroberts.com

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  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

  How fearful

  And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!

  The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

  Show scarce so gross as beetles; half-way down

  Hangs one who gathers samphire, dreadful trade!

  Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

  The fishermen that walk upon the beach

  Appear like mice, and yond tall anchoring bark

  Diminish’d to her cock, her cock a buoy

  Almost too small for sight. The murmuring surge,

  That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,

  Cannot be heard so high.

  King Lear, 4:6

  The soul, like fire, abhors what it consumes.

  Derek Walcott, Another Life

  1

  Prince

  1

  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.

  But then, on the day of his eighth birthday, things changed. The goat went over the edge; a sixth of the family’s wealth. His pahe might be the Prince of the village, but a Prince without money would starve as quickly as the meanest beggar. Tighe didn’t quite understand it, but it seemed that his pas were involved in a network of promises and exchanges, of debts and double-debts with other people in the village, and that the whole thing depended upon goatgoods. On milk, on promises of flax and meat. Losing a sixth of the family wealth tipped this delicate web towards collapse. Pahe tried to explain it to him in his alcove, whilst the sounds of pashe’s sobbing shuddered louder, softer and louder again in the main space.

  ‘We promised a salted haunch and fourteen months milk to old Hammerhe at the Dogeal end of the village for the work he did sealing off the cold store.’ Tighe shook his head. His pahe had dug out the cold store with his own hands. He had watched him do it, had even helped him carry away the dirt in grass-weave buckets down the ledges to the allotments on the lower reach of the village.

  ‘But yo-you d-dug it yourself,’ he stuttered. His own eyes were sore. He had been crying. Not, he thought, for the goat, because what did he care for a stupid goat? But because his pashe was crying so hard; and because Carashe was in disgrace now and he wouldn’t see her again for a very long time. And because … well, just because.

  ‘I dug it out,’ said his pahe in his soft, slow voice, ‘but we needed to get it sealed. That meant plastics and that meant old Hammerhe. And plastics don’t come cheap, so that was a whole haunch. And we promised the hide to your Grandhe Jaffiahe, which is why he’s been so good to us recently. If you ask me …’ and pahe’s soft voice became softer again, soft as a flow of water, and Tighe sucked back his sobbing so as to be able to hear his father’s deep, melodious voice,‘… if you ask me, we should simply call the debt to Jaffiahe off – in the name
of family. But your pashe won’t hear of that. You know she and your Grandhe don’t get on. You know how they fight. It’s been that way since she was a girl. But that puts us in difficulties because if she would only go and speak to him then a lot of this difficulty would go away.’ He was whispering very low, now, bending his head towards his son so that the words didn’t go astray. ‘Don’t tell your pashe I said so, though.’

  That night Tighe lay in his alcove. He could hear his pas talking in a low, burbling stream of words. He couldn’t hear the words themselves, just the mellow burr they made in the air. Like music. Every now and again his pashe’s voice would warble and rise, would transmute into a reedy wail; then it would be shepherded by pahe’s soothing grumble until it was calmed and dropped away again. It took Tighe a long time to get to sleep. He kept twisting and wriggling in his alcove. Outside the dusk gale roared. He fell asleep, but woke up again in the dark. Everything was still; no sounds from his pas’ bed through the wall; no nightwind, which must have meant it was deep in the night. Tighe put both his hands between his thighs and pressed his legs close together, for the comfort of the gesture. Eventually he fell asleep again and this time he dreamed. The goat was in the dream, but it was as bald as a baby, pink hide catching the sun with its occasional stubbly white hairs. It danced and danced and Tighe pressed his arms around its neck. There was some sense of familiarity about it all, as if the intense particularity of the pressure of skin against skin reminded him of something. But the goat was right on the edge of the world now, and with a horrible lurch in his stomach Tighe knew it was going over the edge. And he knew that he could not let go of the goat, and that he