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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

– was over the edge of the world. The whole worldwall arced, and tilted, and slewed round and then he could see nothing but sky. His limbs convulsed, and he was suddenly alone, no goat, with the rushing of clouds past his head

and he woke with a sweaty start. The morning gale was blowing, loud as thunder outside the house. Tighe’s hands were digging into the grass-weave mat of his bed. His face was cold with old sweat. His heart was thundering.

He tumbled out of the alcove and staggered to the family sink. He drank deeply and then (looking around, because his pashe got furious if she saw him doing this) ducked his head into the water. His pas were still asleep. The house was gloomy with dawn and absolutely still with a kind of
unnatural vacancy. Only the battering of the gale against the dawn-door disturbed the lifelessness.

There was nowhere to go whilst the morning gale blustered outside, so Tighe went back to his alcove and lay down. For a while he dozed and then his pashe was at the door of the alcove.

He couldn’t help himself; he jerked on his bed, jittery with the jolt of sudden fear. But she didn’t yell, she didn’t strike him, she only said, ‘My sweet boy-boy,’ and came in to hug him.

There was a swift unloosening of feelings inside him. His eyes even prickled with moisture. ‘Pashe!’ he said, returning the hug.

‘You know I love you very much indeed, my little boy-boy,’ she was saying, her voice woven through with tenderness. And she was crying a little bit and hugging him so hard it pressed his breath out of his chest.

‘I’m not a boy-boy any more, you know, pashe,’ he said, his voice warm and breaking. ‘I’m a proper boy now.’

‘Oh I know,’ she said, holding him back at arm’s length to have a good look at him, her eyes dawn-red with crying. ‘In another year you’ll not even be a boy, you’ll be a man. But you’ll always be my little boy-boy in my heart.’

And – as miraculously as the sun appearing from nowhere on a cold day – everything was all right. After the broken, bruising mood in the house the day before, this morning was golden. He was eight now, grown up, and that was what was important about his birthday, more even than the gift-giving. His pas and he took their breakfast milk; and when the morning gale had died away they all three went out on to the ledge and started downways towards the village.

But that was his pashe. Everything balanced, teeter-totter. Some days she would be wonderful; some days she would scream at you and flail out, trying to hit you with a stick, or whatever came to hand. It was as if his pahe lived in the deeps of the house, solid as the groined roof and the flattened, mat-covered earthen floor of the cold store; but his pashe lived forever on the very lip of the ledge, precariously balanced, forever poised to fall.

But then, his pashe had visions. He knew this was the case although it was rarely mentioned; and perhaps it explained the precariousness of her mood. She would wake in the night screaming – really screaming. This would happen once a month, as regular as regular, through all twenty months of the year. Each time the yelling from his pas’ room would startle Tighe from his sleep. He would sit straight up so hard it made his spine ache, and there was the noise –
ach! ach!
– shouting, or sobbing, crumpled and muffled by the walls between him and them. And his pahe, the Prince, cooing and soothing her.

Life continued with its usual rhythms after Tighe’s eighth birthday, despite the loss of the goat. The remaining animals still had to be pastured, of course, even if Carashe could no longer be trusted with the task. They were still hungry. Their wild-orb eyes held no knowledge that their fellow had fallen to his death. They cared nothing for that. Their minds were as rooted as the grass they ate; food, food, and then (in season) mating. There was a solidity in that, too, Tighe supposed.

‘We can’t have Carashe any more,’ his pahe said to him, on the ledge outside. It was the day after his birthday. ‘Best not even mention her name again, in front of your pashe, you know.’ They both looked at pashe, forty arms away. She was leading the five goats out of the village pen, where all the animals spent the night. She was still smiling her tearful smile, still luminous with her joy at being alive in the morning.

‘But anyway,’ said pahe, cupping his hand on Tighe’s shoulder, ‘you’re a boy now – eight! – near enough a man. You can herd the goats yourself, with your pahe to help you the first few times.’

Tighe’s breast swelled with joy. ‘I’ll look after them,’ he said.

But in the end Tighe didn’t herd the goats. His pashe, her mood wobbling a little, said no. It was obvious that she didn’t want to risk losing any more of the animals and it was obvious, though unspoken, that she did not trust Tighe to take care of the goats. It wasn’t what she said: she said that it was below the dignity of a Princeling and the grandson of the Priest, but Tighe realised that that wasn’t the true reason. He was, he knew, almost wholly inexperienced with tending goats; but the rejection hurt him none the less. Of course, it was not to be argued with. Pashe waited with the goats by the mouth of the pen until another goatmonger came to collect her animals. Then they chatted for a few minutes, pashe striking some bargain whereby their animals would join the larger herd for a day or two until a new herder could be arranged.

After that, his pas went down to the village to start the elaborate negotiations that followed on from losing a goat, and Tighe had nothing to do. He was the Princeling of the village, he never had anything to do. He could have sought out his friends, but he wasn’t in the mood. So he loitered outside the pen, watching people come and go. He offered to help the stallmen set up their food booth, in the hope of some free food in payment, but they shooed him away. Then he thought about going down to the village and seeking out Carashe, telling her that he personally had no hard feelings about the lost goat. But that was a stupid idea, a non-starter. And so, instead, he went off to be by himself in the sunshine.

He made his way along the main-street shelf where most of the market traders set up pitches, jostling through the growing crowd; then, with a duck into the church and out the back, squeezing through the narrow cupboardways and along a dim alley, before scrabbling up a bamboo ladder set into the wall (a public ladder, of course – he had no money to pay for private passage), and out again into the sunshine. The ledges up here were shorter and narrower, more thoroughly overhung, and the houses correspondingly more primitive. Two grassy ledges slanted up zigzag from one another, and then he was into the newest part of the village – mostly people from Meat, a village several thousand yards above and to the Right. Tighe had never been to Meat, but he knew from report that it was a large place, founded on a great broad platform that jutted out from the worldwall. He knew it was a place rich with all sorts of meat. Some of the poorer people from there had migrated downwall to Cragcouthie in the hope of a better living, but as Tighe walked along the muddy stretches outside their houses he wondered if their life was any better downwall than it had been higher up. The shelf seemed so miserable. A switchback and then a few grassy crags, barely more than crevices. Then another row of new houses, dug out of the wall barely a year before. Many still had raw dirt walls in their
vestibules and some of them didn’t even seem to have dawn-doors; which made Tighe wonder how they managed when the dawn winds got up every morning.

Then he was past the last houses and up on to the higher crags. Nobody lived here and even the goatherds didn’t bother to bring their charges this far. These crags were too small, and their grass too meagre, to provide grazing; so Tighe was able to settle himself with his back against the wall and be alone. The wall stretched above him for a thousand leagues, and below him for a thousand leagues, for all that he knew. And yet he was inches away from the edge of the world.

He stared out into the sky. Birds swooped and curled in the air. Several popped down on to the ledge in front of him to see if he had any food, but they lost interest and waddled off the world again, falling into space and swinging up on their magical wings.

An insect landed on his cheek and tickled; he slapped it with the flat of his palm.

He pulled up fistfuls of stalkgrass and started chewing on it. Stalkgrass never filled you up, but it was better than nothing. You could always tell people who had nothing but stalkgrass to eat because they got thin in a particular way. Their faces became sucked out, dented with starvation. You could last for a long time eating nothing but stalkgrass, but eventually you’d waste away and die. It was a mystery how the goats managed because they grew fat on nothing but the grass. And, following from that, Tighe found himself wondering again about the lost goat from the day before. Scampering near the edge and, then, suddenly – gone. He crawled on his knees the four or five yards to the lip of the crag, covering the last yard on his belly. Finally, inching himself, he put his head over the edge of the world.

There was still that horrible griping in his stomach and the prickles all over his scalp. But there was something beautiful, too. He was lying on his belly looking down, back down the way he had come. The crags were layered narrowly on to one another so he saw the pathways of the newest parts of the village directly beneath him. Their ledge-lips, pressed close together by perspective, gave a vivid sense of depth. Below him somebody, a woman, came out of one of the houses and stood for a moment, lighting up a thorn-pipe. She hunched to get the flame to take and then stood up. Her head, from above, was as round as a pebble, furred with the bristles of her cropped hair. Then she walked off and Tighe lost sight of her.

Wisps of smoke, from cooking fires and curing benches, spiralled out and curled into nothingness from lower down. Sucking in his breath and trying not to concentrate on the thundering of his heart, Tighe pulled himself a little further out over the ledge. The perspective shifted a little and
the outside edge of the main-street shelf came into view. Below that was nothing for a hundred yards, just flat wall, too steep to build on. Tighe knew the layout of the village so closely he did not have to think about it; the shelves leading away right and down from market shelf, the warren of smaller ledges spread in an arc, the dugouts leading back into the wall. The sun was rising, well past the lower limit of sight, and as Tighe angled his head higher he had to shade his eyes. Where did the sun come from every morning? How did it climb its way upwards, from the base of the wall to the top?