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The day was getting warmer and the morning scatters of cloud were dispersing.

Tighe pulled himself back in and lay on his back. The wall stretched above him, impossibly high, enormously tall, vanishing into blue haze. How high was it? Toweringly high.

Insignificant crags puttered out into nothing above, into the smooth face of the wall, on which nothing grew but a few hardy strands of grass. Directly above Cragcouthie there was nothing; just one of those stretches of almost perfectly flat wall. Meat was somewhere up there, but away several thousand yards to the left. There was passage between the two villages, of course; crags that wound and connected zigzag, linked sometimes by stairways dug through the wall itself. And right and down was Heartshelf (not a shelf, in fact, but a motley collection of ledges, barely even enough to keep goats on). Heartshelf made its living mostly as an intermediary because it was on the only direct pathway between Smelt away downwall and Cragcouthie, Meat and the rest. At Smelt they dug ore out of the wall and fixed it up as metal. There were smelters in Cragcouthie too, of course, but ore was harder to come by up here. So metal was traded downwall and it went through Heartshelf, which took a percentage.

Up beyond Meat were some other villages, and it was said that the wall became more wrinkled in that direction, more prolific with crags and ledges, easier to find a living on. But Tighe thought the stretch directly above him now was the best; the flatness of it, the
purity
of it. The wall blued away into the distance, where it got hazy and vanished in a blur. If only his eyes were good enough and the day uncloudy, Tighe thought, maybe I could see all the way to the top of the wall.
All the way to the top of the wall
. The words gave him exquisite little chills on his scalp and neck. But there was a haze in the mid-morning air that muddled vision after a few thousand yards. Away to the Left big bustling clouds were nudging up against the wall, like great animals nosing some huge breast. Perhaps that was what happened to the far-off walltop, Tighe thought to himself, barely voicing the words. Perhaps it was transformed into clouds.
Clouds. Transformed
. Words could distil such intensity. Words were as high as the wall.

There was a noise at his feet and Tighe looked to see a monkey. He launched a kick at the brute, but it danced out of his way with a screech. Scrambling to his feet, Tighe chased the thing, but it swung upwards on handfuls of stiffgrass and was gone where there was no crag for Tighe to follow.

Laughing, Tighe settled down with his back against the wall again. He munched on some more stalkgrass and stared out at the sky. The colours changed the further up the sky he looked, from the flusher tongue-colours of the lower sky, where the sun was, to the darker, more plastic-blue tints of the upper, but Tighe could not mark the place where the one set of colour shifted into the other. What gave the sky colour? Was it just the sun? But the air was invisible (he flapped his hand in front of his face) so there couldn’t
he
any colour.

The sun must be shining on something to make the colour.

With a jolt, as if the idea were so charged it sparked jerkily in his mind, Tighe wondered if what he was seeing was
another
wall – one so distant that he could see no details on it at all, and yet one so huge that it filled the sky from horizon to horizon, from Right to Left. The thought possessed him with wonder.

Another wall?

Inside Tighe’s head there was a peculiar sensation of dislocation. Senses swimming. It felt as if there was simultaneous shrinkage, a freezing down, and a sudden expansion, an outrushing of something from the point at the centre of his skull. Another wall. The idea grabbed hold of his mind.

And perhaps people living on it. People like him? Or maybe quite unlike him. He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine what
his
wall would look like from that impossible vantage point. What colour would it be? Blonds and greens from the grasses; browns and blacks from the exposed dirt. Maybe stretches of grey from the exposed rock and concrete. He tried to push his brain out, to swoop outwards on impossible wings, to see the worldwall from even further away. What would the mash of colours end up as? But he could only imagine it dirty and stained-looking, an ugly patchwork of blobs and dabs. That wasn’t how the sky looked. He opened his eyes again and tried to map precisely the grain of what he was looking at.

Maybe it was a completely different sort of wall; maybe it wasn’t made of rock and dirt and vegetation, as his wall was. Instead it could have been built by God wholly out of grey plastic, say (why not? God could do anything). Or even metal. The thought of it! A wall as big as the worldwall itself, but a wall smooth and pure and perfect, every surface glittering metal that sent back the sunlight touched with blue. And metal people living on it; people as glossy and smooth as chrome, who melted together in lovemaking. Smooth shiny skin on skin; blurring together in sex.
Tighe’s wick stirred, but he was too sleepy to do much about it. Instead he dozed.

He woke with a horrible start, with the certainty in his belly that he was falling. He hated that sensation. It was happening more frequently than before. The world would tilt and he would have the certainty in his clenching stomach that he had been rolled off the world and was falling. It always woke him and he always woke up desperately clutching at the ground beneath him. It took him a long time to calm himself down.

He sat up straighter, pressed his back against the comforting bulk of the wall. Looking out at the sky again, the balance of colour had shifted. If it were another wall, then was there another wall behind it? And another behind that? Wall after wall, like the pages of a book, with just enough space in between to allow the sun to thread its way through, lighting one side then the other.

It was an unwieldy vision, but there was something about it that Tighe liked.

Like the pages in a book. His pahe had two books. Some people in the village had more than a dozen. They called it wealth, but Tighe’s pashe was always contemptuous of that. She would say, ‘Can you eat books?’

Tighe scratched prickles away from the back of his head. Everything was touched by the aftertaste of his daydream now, that dreadful sensation of tumbling into nothingness. It was frightening to consider that he had lived through eight full years, all through his childhood and into his adolescence, and for every minute of that time he had never been further than a few yards from the edge of the world.

It was all so precarious. That was it, yes. Some bitter truth at the core of living, precariousness. Maybe even the goat, even something as dim as the goat, was granted a glimmering epiphany as it stumbled over the edge of things – an understanding of the delicate balance of things. Life is a balancing act and death a sort of falling. He thought of the goat, falling. He thought of his pashe, living on the emotional edge of things, always tipping. He thought of the ancient hierarchy of the Princedom, of the villages together: Prince and Priest and Doge in balance, ruling the law and the religion and the trade, and all the people in their place underneath the ruling order as his pahe had explained it to him. Life involved so many things fitting together: take any one of them away and the structure started to topple.

Was there a brick (he thought) somewhere at the very base of the wall itself that could be picked out, a single brick that could lead to the collapse of the whole worldwall itself? The whole thousand-league structure tumbling down? The thought brought an edge of panic to his mind and he tried to block it out. Concentrate on something else.

Look at the birds flying rings in the air.

Look at the sheen of the clouds running striations up the cool blue of the sky behind.

Look at the dismal brightness of the sun, hot and yellow.

From Tighe’s house the village was largely a series of stepped ledges, each one a little further west and further downwall from the one before, that led away from the main-street shelf.

Boy-boys would play in the smaller crags at the edge of the village. Games came and went. When Tighe had been a boy-boy, the craze had been to weave kite-planes out of stalkgrass and throw them over the edge. Sometimes these constructions would merely dip away and be lost, but from time to time the breeze would catch them and spin them through the clear air, and the boy-boys would whoop and halloo. But Tighe was a boy now, a Princeling, with a boy’s sensitivity not to be mistaken for a boy-boy, so he no longer loitered about this playground. On the day after his birthday he wandered down there, bored, and saw four boy-boys playing a new game, which involved running up and down the crag squealing and trying to catch one another. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t bear it; it was so blind to the appalling reality of the drop. How could they be so blithe? If they were to stumble, to fall the wrong way, they could vanish over the edge of the world and fall
for ever
.

He made his way down to Old Witterhe’s house; a dingy narrow dugout down a rickety private ladder from the market shelf. Wittershe had once told Tighe that her pahe couldn’t widen the house; its space was hemmed by rock on the one hand and manrock on the other. Outside was a tumbly stretch of broken wall too near vertical to make a useful space for humans. Old Witterhe kept monkeys here.

Wittershe’s pashe had been young when she married Witterhe and had died giving birth to their one daughter. The thought of it gave Tighe a clench in his gut – to have your pashe
die
! – but Wittershe was blase about it. She had no memories, she felt no loss. In a way, her situation was more grounded, less precarious, than Tighe’s. She had no pashe to lose.

And Wittershe had a pretty face, with lips as broad as fingers and shiny eyes. Her skin was a little paler than was conventionally considered handsome, a sort of timber-coloured light brown; but it was at least smooth, without the pocks that marked some other girls’ complexions.

Tighe knew his pashe disapproved of his playing with Wittershe, but he didn’t know why. He knew also that his Grandhe particularly disapproved of Old Witterhe, who held some strange opinions concerning God and the wall. Heresies, really, to give them their proper name. But the old man’s daughter, Wittershe, was the person in the village nearest to Tighe’s age; she was seven years and fourteen months old. Nor was she a girl any more, not really. She didn’t have the bulging body of Carashe, but her figure defined several slow arcs, a line Tighe would trace with his eye from neck to small of back, from chest over belly to leg.

Old Witterhe was smoking a thorn-pipe and squatting in the door of his house. His monkeys were placidly picking insects from the tuft grass; a few of them were chewing the grass itself. The sun was making Witterhe hide his eyes in wrinkles.

‘Who’s that?’ he asked, holding his hand like a ledge-flat over his eyes. ‘Boy Tighe? Sorry to hear about your goat, boy. Sorry to hear about that. ‘Course,’ he dropped his hand, ‘I lost a monkey yesterday, but nobody considers that much of a tragedy.’

‘Sorry to hear about your monkey,’ said Tighe automatically, in a monotone. ‘Is Wittershe about?’

Old Witterhe poked into the bulb of his pipe with his little finger; like all pipe-smokers, he grew his fingernails long for this purpose. ‘They’re bringing down some wood from Press, I hear. She’s up on main-street shelf to see what manner of price they’ll want for it. I could do with building a ledge-flat outside my door.’ He pointed with the spire of his pipe. ‘There’s been some crumbling away at the crag edge there. It’s not a good crag, in all. A bit of wood to strengthen it, and maybe build a little overhang, would make my life.’

Tighe thought,
If the traders from Press really have some wood then they won’t be trading it for a few monkey carcasses
. But he didn’t say anything so rude. Instead, he stepped back a little away from the edge, feeling the comforting press of the wall at his back. Crumbling crag-lips made him nervous.

‘I’ll climb back up and see if I can find her then,’ he said.

‘Reckon I should start charging a toll on that ladder of mine,’ said Old Witterhe. ‘You seem to use it enough. Still, it’s good to see you getting some air. You spend too much time in your pas’ house, burrowed away in there like a mole. You’re not a mole, you know, little Princeling. You’re a boy.’

But Tighe was already scrambling back up the ladder.

Up on main-street shelf a crowd was gathered around the traders from Press. The Doge was there, with her retinue. In the middle of the knot of
people Tighe could just make out the tall figure of one of the wood traders, his precious package strapped close to his back. Wittershe was there too, but she was making no serious attempt to engage the wood traders in any dialogue. There were too many wealthier villagers with more to offer. Tighe approached her.

‘Hello,’ he called. ‘Wittershe.’

She noted him with a sly smile, utterly distinctive to her. ‘Well well, is it the little Princeling?’

‘I spoke to your pahe,’ he told her, coming up close.

She tossed her head, the short black hair flipping. ‘My pahe sent me up here to trade monkey for wood,’ she said, ‘but there’s no trading here for such poor exchange.’

‘Are you free then?’ Tighe asked.

‘Why?’ Wittershe giggled. ‘You want us to go play? Like boy-boy and girl-girl?’ Tighe flushed and Wittershe giggled again. ‘I can’t do that now, little Princeling. But why don’t you come down our ladder this evening? I have chores until the end of the day, but when the sun goes over the top of the wall we might do things.’

‘Yes,’ said Tighe, too eagerly. ‘Yes, I’ll come.’

She leant towards him to kiss him on the bridge of his nose, and he got the fleetingest scent of her, the odour of her skin, of maringrass and cheap chandler’s soap, and then she was moving away from him.

Tighe felt a ridiculous joy in his heart, but almost at once the sweet emotion fell away. His Grandhe grabbed him by his shoulders, scaring him, and shouted into his ear. ‘Young Tighe!’ he bellowed. ‘My grandchild!’