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The man rotated his head a second time, patiently. When he was meeting Tighe’s intense gaze, he said, ‘Sin.’

‘What?’

He turned his head back and said nothing.

‘What does it matter if it is a sin?’ said Tighe. ‘You’ll be dead either way in a few days.’ Saying that gave him heart. It was cruel, but the world was cruel.

After a long pause the man said, ‘I get to watch the world go by.’ Then after a pause, ‘I get to watch you.’

‘Do you know who I am?’ said Tighe. Then, more urgently, the idea occurring to him for the first time, ‘Do you know my pas? Did you ever see my pas?’

But the man was breathing out. ‘Don’t know you. Seen you. You live with that old man.’ Tighe followed his gaze to see his Grandhe storming back over the main-street shelf. He looked angry.

‘I’d say’, said the man, ‘he’s looking for you. He’s been back and forth.’

‘But why,’ said Tighe, his impotence and his rage focusing in a moment of sharp, painful intensity, ‘why do you
give up
like this? How can you just sit here and give up?’

The man didn’t turn his head; didn’t say anything. There were tears in Tighe’s eyes again. It was all so pointless. It all fell into death in the end. People clung to the precarious wall of life, but eventually their grips loosened with exhaustion and they fell away into nothingness.

A shadow fell over Tighe. ‘What are you doing
here
?’ demanded Grandhe in a high-pitched voice that threatened greater rage later on, in a less public place. ‘Sitting with the
itinerants
?’

Tighe’s face was wet now. Crying. He couldn’t help it. He looked up to his Grandhe standing over him, the old man’s face darkened with the shadow, the sun firing his halo of hair with light.

‘My pas are both
dead
,’ he said.

‘Have my enemies been talking to you?’ demanded Grandhe. Tighe realised he was still thinking of the inheritance.

‘I’ll never see them again,’ said Tighe in a loud voice; or that was the sentence on his lips, but on the second word Grandhe’s staff struck sharply under his chin. His mouth clacked shut and there was a sharp pain right on the end of Tighe’s tongue.

‘You want to sit with the
itinerants
do you?’ Grandhe said in a voice of stifled fury. ‘You want to beg low work to fill your belly? We’ll see – we’ll see how you like
real
work, you thankless wastrel.’

Tighe, startled into silence, tasted blood in his mouth. His tongue was stinging unpleasantly. Grandhe leant forward and dragged him up by the collar of his shirt. ‘I’ve wasted the morning looking for you,’ he barked. ‘You will come with me.’

Tighe was led back to Grandhe’s house, where the dawn-door closed to unleash a torrent of furious denunciation, accompanied with whacks from Grandhe’s stick. Tighe felt himself – actually felt himself – retreat from humanness. The words the old man spoke mussed into incoherence in his head, a stream of sharply inflected noises without specific sense. Grandhe’s face lost definition in the shadow of the main space. Nothing but a conglomeration of shadow spouting the music of anger. Tighe’s jaw hung slack. Only the blows reached him, punctuating his blankness with spikes of pain, making him yelp like a monkey and try to draw away.

After a while Grandhe seemed to grow tired and Tighe crawled away to a corner, where he could lie curled in a ball. He was crying again, although there was no sense, no content in the bawling. It was all a nothing.

He stopped because he was hungry. Feeling sheepish, as if he were betraying his role, he scrabbled a loafs end of grass-bread and went back to his corner to gnaw it.

He ran his fingers over his head, feeling the scalp between his hairs. The old strips and bumps were there, the scar tissue. They stretched a fair way over the curve of his head; it must have been a serious sort of wound when he was younger. He didn’t remember the wound, but his pahe had told him about it. Hit his head and broke open the skin. Now there was just the corrugation of the old scar tissue. Either his head was very hot or his fingers were very cold. His heart felt chilled, as if clutched by the hand. The lines where Grandhe’s stick had touched his torso blurred sensation with heat. Moving his shoulder hurt him.

When Grandhe came through again, Tighe was not able to meet his gaze, and so he stared at the matting on the floor. There was a gruffness in the old man’s manner, which came as close to apology as he ever did. ‘Now’, he said, ‘I can only hope that you have learned your lesson. It is for your good. God punishes with greater fury than a weakling such as I can muster. You should learn that lesson early before you have to face the wrath of God Himself.’

‘God lives at the bottom of the wall,’ said Tighe. He had no idea why he spoke.

Grandhe stopped, swallowed, decided to ignore the words. ‘Now, I have spoken to Tohomhe. He is a good friend of the village, a good friend of mine. You will work for him.’

‘Yes, Grandhe.’

For some reason, these two sullenly uttered words pricked Grandhe’s anger more than the heresy of the preceding sentence. His voice rose. ‘You should thank me – you’ve no more wit than a
goat
. If I hadn’t taken you in you would have starved on that ledge like those God-abandoned itinerants you have been so friendly to.’

‘Yes, Grandhe.’

‘How you were bred from my line I do
not
know. You’ve no more wit than a boy-boy though you’re nearly a man. You’ll never have the savvy to be the Prince. You’re some changeling, I think me.’ He stormed out.

Later that night, after Grandhe and Tighe had eaten a small, silent evening meal, the old man seemed to be in a more conversational mood.

‘Times are hard in the village now,’ he said, picking the shells off beetles and chewing them. His two deputies sat with him, each with their own bag of snacks. Tighe watched them hungrily.

‘Times are hard now’, said Grandhe Jaffiahe, ‘and people leave the village. But times will not be hard for ever. The human world is mutable, like the changes of day and night, like the eddies of a wind. They fail, they recover. And when times get better, then we will be in a better position. We will be above circumstance, and we can rule the Princedom better, just better.’ It was as if he was talking to Tighe, but in fact Tighe could see that he was not. His words were promising nothing to him. Grandhe was talking to himself.

The two deputy preachers said nothing. Grandhe’s deputies rarely spoke.

The next morning Tighe made his way to Tohomhe’s place soon after the dawn winds had died down. In a village where the majority of people were perfectly competent at weaving their own grass matting and rough clothes, a grass-weaver could only make a living by specialising. Tohomhe made fancy-wear, treating the stems in various ways to make them soft and dyeing them to create multi-coloured cloths. These had been bought mostly by the richer inhabitants of the village. He was unambiguous when Tighe scratched at his door.

‘I have no work for you, though,’ he said, almost straight away. ‘I said I’d take you on as a favour to your Grandhe. He thinks you should learn a trade and you’re plenty old enough. But people don’t buy fancy cloth at a time like this, so I’ve no call for another pair of hands to help me weave. I don’t need you and I certainly won’t feed you.’

Tighe had nodded, looking at the floor. But Tohomhe was a jovial man, even if his face had been sucked in a little by hunger. He laughed.

‘Don’t look so mournful, boy-boy!’ he shouted. ‘It’s not as if the world ends because I’ve no work for you. When I am weaving, I’ll call you up and you can watch, which is as good as learning. Why, it’s as if your heart was set on this weaving and I’ve crushed it!’

He came over and put his arm around Tighe’s shoulder.

‘But of course,’ he said, ‘it’s not the working. You have lost your pas. That’s a terrible thing. I lost my pas.’

Tighe looked up into the saggy face of the taller man. ‘How?’

‘Years ago, now. My pashe died trying to birth a sister to me, such that the baby and the woman died together. My pahe never really recovered. He slipped off one of the upper ledges gathering weed for weaving. There was a party of people and they saw him. They say he was plucking the longer stems from the edge of the crag – that’s where the longer stems tend to grow, you’ll need to know such things if you’re to be a weaver – and slipped. Simple as that. Just went over.’

Tighe was silent, absorbing this information.

‘It’s never talked of,’ Tighe said in a soft voice, ‘yet it sometimes seems to me that people fall off the world all the time.’

‘Well,’ said Tohomhe, taking his arm away and going over to sit on a tied-up bale of woven cloth in the corner of the room, ‘life is precarious. God has made it that way for us, it’s not our business to query Him, now is it?’ He fished a clay pipe from a baggy pocket at the side of his trousers and lit it with a flint box. ‘But I think you’re right, my boy. People don’t like to talk of it, it reminds them of their closeness to the edge of everything.’

Tighe squatted down on the floor, his thighs resting on his calves and his back against the wall of Tohomhe’s main space. ‘My family lost a goat over the edge.’

‘I heard. People talk more about that. It’s a loss, in money terms, of course it is. But a goat is, well, a goat.’

He puffed in silence.

‘I was sorry to hear of your pas,’ he said, ruminatively.

‘Do you think they fell off the world?’ Tighe asked.

Tohomhe shrugged. ‘They’re not around. Nobody saw them leave the village. And why would they leave the village anyway?’

‘Times are hard now.’

‘Not for a goatmonger. Times can never get that hard for a goatmonger.’ He puffed some more. ‘And your pahe was Prince of the whole village, of the whole Princedom. A Prince shouldn’t leave his people. No, I’m sorry to say it, but I think they went over the edge.’

A lump materialised in some place in Tighe’s chest. He could feel tears trying to come to life in his eyes, but he said, ‘But why? Why would they go over the edge?’

‘Like I said,’ Tohomhe sighed. ‘People do fall.’

‘But both together?’

‘Well,’ conceded the older man. ‘That’s true. Did they go out in the dawn gale? Believe me, I’ve been out at that time, caught in the night somewhere in my travelling days when I was young. Those winds get pretty fierce. They can pull a person clean off the broadest shelf

‘They were still in the house when I left to fetch the candle,’ said Tighe. ‘That wasn’t it.’

‘You went to get a candle?’

‘Late morning and my pashe sent me to collect a candle. And when I came back they were gone.’ Tighe was crying again, little tears squirming from the corners of his eyes.

‘Well,’ said Tohomhe, flushing a little, ‘I’m sorry to say this boy, but they wouldn’t be the first people simply to step off the world because things were hard. They had lost a goat, after all.’

That thought had occurred to Tighe too; but just having it spoken aloud was enough to set him off crying properly. He wailed. Tohomhe was flustered. He put his pipe out, humming, and then came over and embraced Tighe as if he were only a tiny child. Tighe cried; the words from the old man, ‘There there, now now,’ washed over his head.

When the sobs had dried up enough to speak, Tighe said, ‘I know it’s true, but it’s hard. It’s hard.’

‘It is that,’ said Tohomhe, disentangling himself. He seemed extremely flushed.

‘It’s a sin, though, is it not? Just stepping off the world like that. Everybody knows that it is a sin.’

‘Yes,’ said Tohomhe. ‘Well.’

Tighe took several deep breaths. ‘I’m sorry, Master Tohomhe, to come in here bawling like a boy-boy barely weaned.’

‘Not at all,’ said Tohomhe looking away. ‘No, no.’

‘And I’m sorry I can be of no use with your work. You have been kind to me and I would have liked to be of use to you.’ The words sounded pompous in his own ears, but for some reason his crying had been followed by an acute sense of his own dignity. Maybe it was because Tohomhe had taken his grief seriously. He was a Princeling, after all.

‘Well well,’ said Tohomhe, dismissively.

‘I’m also afraid that my Grandhe will beat me if I go back saying there is no work for me here.’

‘Is that it?’ said Tohomhe hurriedly. ‘Well, well. Your Grandhe is a powerful man; a forceful man. There’s no call to tell him that you can’t come. You can come, if you like, and we can talk. Maybe you could bring a little food and we could share it?’

‘Food,’ said Tighe shyly.

‘If your Grandhe could spare it. I have some stuff stored, but I don’t like to eat it too quickly, so I go hungry many days.’

But Tighe had already completed the unconscious transaction in his mind. He would steal Grandhe’s food and give it to this man. It would be a kind of trade. He would transfer from anger to tenderness, from rage to this softness. It made a perfect sense.

‘I’ll do that,’ he said.

The rest of the day passed pleasantly. Tohomhe showed Tighe round his store, unbinding and holding up some of his finest cloths; and Tighe was suitably impressed by the softness and flexibility of the weave. Then Tohomhe led him through to the room he had dug out at the back of the house where a weaving harp was propped against the wall. Its shuttles were plastic and several of its cords were genuine old-cord too, although most of the original cords had broken and had been replaced with gut. Later,
hungry, Tighe crept back to Grandhe’s house and grabbed some bread and one of Grandhe’s special apples, wrinkled and dried since the summer. The feeling of creeping away from the empty house with food hidden under his clothes was intensely exciting. Tighe fairly ran over the market shelf and up to Tohomhe’s place.

That afternoon Tohomhe and Tighe ate and Tohomhe hugged the boy again. Tighe felt a sweet feeling in his belly. Tighe left after the meal and spent the rest of the day roaming the upper pastures, watching the goat-boys and goat-girls with their little herds. He came back late, with the sun already vanishing over the top of the wall. The itinerants on market shelf were starting to huddle together. They spent the night that way, for warmth; and then again for protection against the fierce winds that accompanied dawn. One of their number had died, starved entirely away, and a small pyre had been prepared. Two of the village’s farmers, a fruiterer and a pulse-grower, were arguing over who had the rights to the ashes. It was nearing spring and the rich dirt could bring out an early crop – very valuable indeed in times of hardship.