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‘You’re just in time,’ said Tighe, his chest burning with excitement. He tried to turn round, but she pushed his shoulder. The crowd was close around them and there wasn’t much space. Tighe had to content himself with reaching behind himself and letting his knuckles trace the side of Wittershe’s hip.

‘There’s your Grandhe,’ she said, putting her mouth close to his ear. When she leaned forward to talk, her body pressed against Tighe’s left shoulderblade, her warm breath tickled the side of his head. His wick was hard as stone with just that fleeting contact. ‘There’s your Grandhe,’ she said, ‘weeping over his woman.’

It took a moment for Tighe to realise what she was saying. ‘What do you mean?’

But Grandhe’s voice came bellowing out and the crowd hushed. Wittershe’s hand found Tighe’s and her fingers curled into his.

‘God sits on top of the wall,’ he called forth, in clear tones. ‘God sees everything from there. What God wants, God gets. He wanted the soul of our dear friend Konstakhe.’ And he broke off. There was no expression readable on his face. The crowd was becoming more excited, jostling back and forth, motion passing through the gathered bodies like wind through the grass. Grandhe’s expression was unreadable.

‘God placed us on the wall as witnesses,’ he said. A few people in the crowd moaned or murmured. Somebody put his hand into the air and then others did the same. ‘Konstakhe was a good man. He was a good man,’ Grandhe was saying, but his voice was becoming submerged in the increasing hum of the crowd.

‘He’ll be flying up,’ shouted Grandhe, his voice loud suddenly. The congregation hummed like the wind, and somebody towards the back took up the shout. ‘Upward! Upward!’ Tighe felt his heart jerk, twist inside him. Everything shifted, seemed to pull closer. Bodies, red faces. Everyone calling out, faces stretching to open the mouth wide. Up! Up! He was joining in the shouting without even realising it. Up he had to go; he had been a good man. Grandhe was shouting, his words barely audible over the storm of shouting.

‘Upwards! Upwards!’

Grandhe kept talking, and with a sort of impalpable eddy the jostling crowd stilled. The shouting died and the Funeral Speech became more audible.

‘… of the Divine, his spirit. With the flames that struggle upwards, with the smoke that tumbles into the sky, with the hot air rising, his spirit. His body shall relinquish it and only the downward dust shall remain. And dust shall feed the earth and the earth will bring forth flowers in the dirt. Flowers, my friends,’ said Grandhe, lifting his arms in a theatrical gesture, and smiling. ‘Flowers know their nature is from the Divine! They struggle upwards, struggle like green flames, though tethered to the ledge. They struggle in the direction that he has gone!’ A murmur spread quickly through the mourners; Grandhe beaming, casting his glance amongst these people. For the briefest moment his eyes lighted on Tighe.

Tighe’s heart leapt up again, but for a different reason. The unholy thought had occurred to him just how ugly Grandhe’s face was. Broad brown nose like a piece of goat-dung; semi-coloured face, blotched with a disfiguring paleness in a spilt pattern, like milk unwiped away. He joined in, heartily, to cover his own evil thinking.

‘Upwards! Upwards!’

Grandhe ducked down and Tighe couldn’t see him past the crush of people. But moments later boulders of smoke hurtled upwards and a shower of flames stretched after them. How did they get bodies to burn so quickly and with such ferocity? Tighe didn’t know.

Wittershe was at his back, pressing herself against him. ‘I could hardly hear,’ she said, leaning close to his ear. ‘Did he say anything shocking? Did he admit to anything with Konstakhe?’

Tighe breathed sharply, sucking in a laugh. It was the tart delight of being close to Wittershe, of her saying the unsayable. He half turned and leaned a little forward, so as to bring his mouth close to the side of her head. ‘How do they get flesh to burn so fierce?’ he hissed in her ear.

She snorted with laughter, stretched up so that her lips were close to his ear. ‘They douse the body. They dig a pit and douse it with this stuff, leave it all night. But only if the dead is a virtuous dead. My pahe told me.’

‘Your pahe doesn’t know anything past monkeys,’ said Tighe, drunk with the delight of speaking the unspeakable. But the cheering had got louder and Wittershe probably didn’t hear. Which was doubtless for the best since Wittershe was close to her pahe.

‘Stand there,’ said Wittershe. ‘I want to climb up on your back and have a look at the body burning.’ He turned to face the front again and her tiny body was scrambling up his back, pulling herself up with her hands over his shoulders. She reached as high as she could go, her belly pressing into the back of his head. She was holding his shoulder to steady herself. His bruises ached a little where she put pressure on them, but he didn’t mind that, not really. He reached up with his own right hand out, pressing the small of her back to steady her. The goat-hair cloth she was wearing scratched his neck, but his head, neck, back could feel the sliding of her naked belly. It was so close, pressed so close against him. His heart swam, his wick strengthening and standing. With his free hand he jostled it, so that it wouldn’t bulge his pants. ‘Can you see it?’ he called. ‘Can you see it?’

It wasn’t comfortable and it obstructed his own view of the scene, poor though that had been. He could just about make out the shimmy of the flame-tops over the people ahead of him. Everybody had shuffled forward as the burning began and closed together, almost as if they wanted to soak up the warmth. He tried to look up, to see if the old man’s spirit was visible as it bounced up free through the air, looking like – he didn’t know what. Dancing on the flame-tops, perhaps, or climbing each strand of yellow flame like a spirit creeper. But he couldn’t see anything other than the backs of people’s heads and at the top of his vision only a mess of broken smoke. Wittershe was leaning forward, her head and her hair stopping him seeing properly upwards. Tighe got a sudden perspective of a folded chin, of nostrils and sight up the nostrils. It was weird. But the press of her flesh against him, the sagging curve of goat-hair cloth that was only a thin veil hiding her small breasts, was more present in him. His wick was straining now, so stiff it even hurt a little.

Then she was climbing down and the crowd was breaking up. The cheering had died and was now only a muttering as people filed down the ledge, or else climbed the footholds to the ledge above. ‘Did you see?’ Tighe asked her. ‘Did you see him burning?’

She nodded. ‘I couldn’t see his face, though. I wanted to see his face, but all there was was a kind of black shape all covered in fire. It was a man-shape, but it didn’t have anything, you know,
personal
about it.’ She sounded disappointed. ‘Let’s go and look at the ashes.’ She pressed forward.

He followed her through the crowd, almost breathless. The excitement of it was all concentrated in his wick. All that death and holiness, all the yelling
and cheering at Grandhe’s speaking; the intense anticipation that he might see old Konstakhe’s rising spirit was one with the anticipation that he would be able to take hold of Wittershe and press himself upon her. That he would be able to push her down to the turf and put himself on top of her. It was all packed into his wick, all crammed into that funny little tube of flesh. Tighe had watched goats and the way their wicks hung flaccid most of their lives, except when the mating fever was on them when they became hard as rock. And then afterwards they would be placid, their thoughts far from sex.

Sometimes Tighe felt as if he were living in a continual mating fever.

He pushed himself through the crowd and tumbled against Wittershe again, pressing himself against her a little more forcefully than he needed. The rasp of cloth, the distant, slippery sense of flesh underneath it. Wittershe didn’t seem to mind; didn’t seem to notice. She was peering down at the still-hot ashes, gleaming with dots of red.

‘That used to be Konstakhe,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘Old Konstakhe. That used to be him.’

‘That used to be my Grandhe’s closest friend,’ said Tighe, and Wittershe sniggered, hiding her mouth with her hand. Tighe grinned to return her grin, but in fact the thought unsettled him. A human being was now only a pattern of ashes on the ground. The glow paled from red to black. Somebody was standing next to the remains of the pyre with a bucket, ready for the ashes to cool to take them to one of the gardens. Grandhe had vanished. Tighe looked around; the crowd was dispersing. So little distance between these walking, breathing people and this little pile of black sand.

‘You should piss on it,’ said Wittershe, putting her hand on Tighe’s arm.

‘
You
should,’ countered Tighe.

‘I can’t, I’m a girl. But you could quickly piss on it. Put the fire down.’ She sniggered again and suddenly she was darting over the shelf. Tighe lurched, took a step after her, but stopped. She was gone.

Things changed. It was hard to pin it down. For Tighe it was all somehow clouded with his infatuation with Wittershe, which took up more and more of his thoughts. But it seemed difficult to deny that some sort of change began with the loss of the goat on his eighth birthday. For weeks pahe was not around, and pashe was in an even more precarious mood than normal. Pahe was working all the hours, trying to make good some of the debts that the loss of the goat had brought upon them. He told Tighe that he couldn’t spend time doing the work around the house that needed doing and then he paused. ‘I could do that,’ said Tighe, prompted by the sad expression on his pahe’s face. ‘I’ll do the work around the house.’

His pahe almost smiled. ‘You are my son,’ he said. ‘You are Princeling and one day you’ll make a fine Prince.’

He spent an hour showing Tighe the basic repairs that the dawn gale made necessary on the outside, patching the dawn-door and so on. It seemed clear enough, but left to himself Tighe found it hard to get right. He couldn’t seem to concentrate. His pahe was gone and in the main space his pashe was lying on the floor and sobbing noisily, intrusively. It was hard to concentrate. Normally Tighe would have gone out and roamed the ledges and the crags; but his pahe had left him in charge of the house and another layer of mud needed to be applied to the outside of the dawn-door – it needed to be done in the morning so it could dry in the midday sunshine. So Tighe bit his teeth together and smeared the mud over the front of the dawn-door, making quite a mess of it. But always there was the
ah-ah-ah
of his pashe crying in the main space.

He sat back on his haunches and listened to the noise. Difficult to know what to do. Then the sobbing changed to a single rising wail,
ullahhh
, and the noise slid like a needle into his head. He made a few more swipes with the spatula, but the noise was too much. Tentatively he made his way back to the main space, putting his head round the door. ‘Pashe?’

Only her huddled shape on the floor, bulging and shaking with the effort of crying. She was sobbing again now.

He stood in the door, scratching his head. Then he tiptoed over
towards her, and crouched down beside her. ‘Pashe, what is it? What is the matter?’

The sobbing stopped and Tighe’s heart jumped, not knowing whether violence was about to spring up from the floor. Pashe lurched and sat up and Tighe couldn’t prevent the reflex that jerked him backwards. But his pashe’s face was so blurred with crying, her eyes so red and desolate-looking, that he paused. ‘Oh my boy-boy,’ she moaned and grabbed his neck in an awkward embrace. ‘You’re the only man in my life. You are my life! You are why we do all this, all this struggle, when it would be so easy to give up, to give over, to fall away.’

And she sobbed and cried on to his shoulder and Tighe did not know what to do, so he just held her and tried to make a comforting hum with his mouth. And, as the moment stretched out, there was an almost warm feeling in his belly. That he and his pashe could enjoy this intimacy; that she could depend upon him. Or maybe it was only that the terror of his pashe was reduced to this bundle, this series of hot desperate breaths against his neck. It was a sort of power; but at the same time he felt awkward because of its incongruity. The moment swelled and then passed, faded. Pashe gently pulled herself back, away from him, wiping her face on the sleeve of her shirt. Tighe sat looking at the floor. The intimacy had evaporated and now there was only the awkwardness.

He went back to the dawn-door and made some desultory passes over the front of it with the spatula. Then he threw the equipment down and lurched outside and along the ledge. The sky was brass coloured, scratched like old plastic with some streaky clouds running vertically. A fresh breeze, the last remnants of the dawn gale, was pushing up and rustling Tighe’s hair. He made his way along the ledges and down the public ladder to the main-street shelf. There were a few loiterers hanging about the shelf, hoping for work; thin men and women in raggedy clothes. That was a sign that things were changing; even Tighe knew as much. There would usually be three or four people squatting with their backs to the wall hoping for any sort of chore or job that would earn them their food. But here were more than a dozen people, some faces that Tighe recognised, some completely new to him.

He went up to Akathe’s booth to talk to him about it. ‘All the traders are talking about it,’ the clockmaker told him, with an eyepiece clenched between eyebrow and bulging cheek. ‘Bad times coming. If you know how to sense it you can feel it, like the stirring of the air before the dawn gale.’

‘I saw more than a
dozen
people waiting on market shelf hoping for work – think of it! There were several new faces there.’

‘They came along this ledge late yesterday,’ said Akathe, ‘trying to beg
work directly from the traders – as if that was the way it works! They really don’t understand the way it works.’ He shook his head sagely.

‘Who are they?’

Akathe shrugged. ‘From Smelt, I think. They’ve made their way upwall to Heartshelf and then to us.’