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‘For what?’ replied Vievre, without looking at him.

‘You are good, I think. You are father, I think. To me. My pashe, my mother, she good, but she break me sometime.’ Tighe slapped the mattress with the flat of his right hand to illustrate what he was trying to say. ‘She go ill every month, she’ – he slapped again – ‘every month.’ The tears were coming out now more freely. He wasn’t even sure why he was saying this. ‘You are good to me,’ he said, finally and then sucked in his lips to stop sobs from emerging.

Vievre still wasn’t looking at him. ‘Don’t cry. You have wounds on your head and body, I donerete – I saw them, when you were first here. Under your hair particularly. Deep old scar on the back of the head. Some said you were a soldier and they were soldier’s wounds.’

‘I had that as child,’ said Tighe. ‘I not remember when.’

Vievre looked up suddenly. His own eyes were bright. ‘It happens sometimes. Your mother, I think. I am sorry to hear of your mother breaking you, to hear of your family. But she loved you, I think.’

‘She loved me,’ said Tighe, trying to breathe more calmly.

‘Family is like army, family is like war sometimes. Sometimes people get hurt in the war. You know this?’

‘She was’, said Tighe, but didn’t know the word for
unstable
, the word for
precarious
, and he couldn’t think of a roundabout way of expressing it, so he said, ‘she fell off the world.’

‘So you told me,’ said Vievre, more briskly. ‘Anyway, good, I shall cut off the cast with this coutno here. It looks sharp, but it will not cut your skin.’ He smiled. ‘So?’

Tighe nodded.

Vievre sawed at the outer part of the dried mud-cake, and then pulled fraying chunks of the stuff off with his fingers. Then he cut more carefully closer to the foot itself. Tighe was aware of a lessening of pressure, a vague sensation difficult to assign specifically to his foot, but happening somewhere down his leg. Finally Vievre put the spatula down and pulled the cast apart in different directions. It came away in a miniature puff of mud-dust and there was his foot, wrapped in a flimsy show of dirty fabric. ‘There!’ said Vievre.

‘Good,’ said Tighe.

Vievre cut easily through the cloth and together they peered at the foot. It looked a little misshapen, the toes all warped in the same direction, the top of the foot hunched and bulbous. There was a prominent lump on the side that wasn’t supposed to be there – Tighe put his other foot alongside for comparison. But otherwise it was his foot, as he remembered it.

‘I will wash it now,’ said Vievre. He packed up the spatula and went over to the ward sink, filling a bowl with water.

He came over and settled himself down again, starting to stroke the foot with a cloth soaked and wrung through. Tighe felt the chill of the water and the strangely sensual action of the cloth over his tingling skin.

‘Having a person to wash your feet!’ Vievre exclaimed, still not meeting Tighe’s eyes. ‘Only the Popes themselves have such pleasure, such luxesse.’

Anxious now for conversation that would lead him away from the painfully personal subject on which they had just touched, Tighe asked, ‘Master Vievre, you say
Pope
. What is Pope? Is it a Prince?’

‘What do you mean by
preense
?’

Tighe thought for a little about the best way to answer this question with his limited language. Finally he said, ‘If society is a body, then, the Prince is the head. Prince and Priest and Doge are the three heads.’ He thought of adding that his pahe – his
father
– had been Prince of his village, but for some reason he decided it was wiser to keep that information to himself.

Vievre shook his head gently, wringing the cloth again over the bowl of water. ‘Your words are ugly words in your language, I think. But Pope is moncher, true. They are head of the body, of the Empire. You have three, we have three.

‘The Prince is head,’ said Tighe. ‘Priest is head for God. Doge is for’, but he did not know the word for trade so he trailed off.

Vievre seemed to grow larger as he spoke, to breathe in more deeply and hold his shoulders back. He said, ‘The Empire is in the hands of the mighty Three Popes. A Law Pope, a Pope Espitpul and a War Pope. But the Empire is a large land, it stretches many many miles up and down the worldwall, many many miles east and west. Where we are most at war, that is where the War Pope is mostly – and now he is here, he is Law, Espivre and War in one person.’

‘Espivre,’ asked Tighe. ‘That word. It means God?’

‘It is here,’ said Vievre, tapping his head with his free hand. ‘In here.’ He gestured towards his chest. ‘That is Espivre.’

‘Soul,’ said Tighe.

Vievre shrugged with his eyebrows, and went back to washing Tighe’s foot. ‘The Soul Pope is in the Imperial City now,’ he said. ‘There she is at the heart. The Law Pope, he is many miles downwall. That is land we eparven last year and the last year before.’

‘Eparven?’

Vievre stood now, carrying the bowl back to the sink and emptying it. ‘We took in war. It is Empire now. It has a large need of law and the Law Pope is there.’ He turned. ‘And now your foot is clean and you are ready to meet Cardinelle Elanne.’

Tighe was starting to intuit some sense of the structure and hierarchy of the Imperial Army. Under the Pope, it seemed that the Cardinelles had the most power. Beneath that were Caponelles and Prelettes, and other junior officers. So many ranks, so many levels of command, spoke of an army more enormous than Tighe could easily imagine. Thousands, Vievre said. Thousands.

Cardinelle Elanne came early in the next day. He was a small man, much smaller than Tighe expected, but there was a fat
prise
bone tied around his neck with a leather strap. His hair was woven together into thick strands like crude cloth and tied at the back. His skin was wrinkled and he was clearly old, but he wore no beard. Looking at him, Tighe realised that he had seen no beards at all since waking in this ward.

‘I am pleased to meet you, Sayonar Tig-he,’ said the Cardinelle. He was attended by two blue-uniformed soldiers, who waited several steps behind. One of these was carrying a small case; at a signal from the Cardinelle she opened the thing, pulling legs from the underside to create a small stool. It seemed to be made of wood, except that Tighe could hardly believe a material so valuable would be used in the construction of something as menial as a stool.

The Cardinelle positioned the stool and sat down. ‘You fell from the sky,’ he said slowly, speaking each word carefully. ‘It is a miracle that you are alive at all.’

‘I know this,’ said Tighe.

‘We sent scouts up in a calabash. There is no settlement directly up the wall for many miles. How long did you fall for?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tighe.

The Cardinelle seemed to think that Tighe had failed to understand his words. ‘What I mean by that question’, he said, more slowly, ‘is what period of time? How long did your fall last you?’

‘I understand your question, Master Cardinelle,’ said Tighe, meekly. ‘But I do not know the time. I do not remember.’

The Cardinelle was staring at him with an unsettling, unblinking stare. ‘It must have been a long time, I think.’

‘A long time.’

‘Were you ventien at all? East? West?’

Tighe blushed. I do not know these words.’

‘
East
,’ said Vievre, ‘leftward – west, rightward. Were you
ventien
leftward or rightward as you fell?’

‘I do not know this word, Master Cardinelle,’ said Tighe, in a small voice.

‘Ventien,’ repeated Elanne briskly. He blew through pursed lips, then blew on his hand and mimed it being pushed back by the current of air.

‘Ventien,’ said Tighe, understanding.
Blown
.

‘Yes. Were you blown at all by the wind as you fell? Perhaps you derit-nabur from some land far to the east or west above us. We do not know.’

‘I do not know. The wind blown me up a little, sometimes the falling felt less – less falling,’ said Tighe.

Cardinelle Elanne puffed noisily. ‘The wind
blew
,’ he corrected. ‘But anyway. Are you from a large land? Your people – they have an army?’

‘A village,’ said Tighe.

‘What word is this?’

‘A small land,’ said Tighe.

‘And your army?’

‘We have no army.’

This was so astonishing to the Cardinelle that he made Tighe repeat it twice. ‘But what happens when you are at war?’ he pressed.

Tighe thought how to phrase himself. ‘Once, when I am boy,’ he started, ‘there were’, but he couldn’t think of the word for
bandits
, ‘bad men, women, they come to take goats and things. Then two, three villages gather men and women together, and they fight the bad men, women. Then they dead, thrown away off world, and men, women are able to go to work again.’

Elanne became increasingly impatient during the course of Tighe’s halting explanation, and started waving his hand as if he would wave away the whole narrative. He said something very rapidly, out of which Tighe only caught the words ‘small’ and ‘story-telling’, then he paused and said, ‘Your doctor. He says you are better.’

‘Much better.’ In fact Tighe had started the morning with another half-supported walk about the ward, his first with his cast off. It hurt in a jagged sort of way when he put too much pressure on his left foot, but otherwise it was not bad.

‘Good. Abliou, get up. Get up now and show me how you walk with your mended foot.’

Vievre, who had been hovering in the background throughout the interview, started forward to help Tighe up off the mattress, but the Cardinelle held out his arm and Vievre stopped in his paces. It was clear that Elanne expected Tighe to get up himself.

Tighe sat up and pulled his left foot underneath him. Pushing with his hands against the floor and straining with his right leg, he lurched up a little way, collapsed back on to the mattress, and tried again. On his third attempt he wobbled unsteadily to his feet, lurched forward and had to hop
several times to avoid falling over. The Cardinelle did not move from his stool, only moving his head to follow Tighe’s progress with an unblinking gaze.

Once Tighe got going it wasn’t so hard. He was able to hobble, brushing his left foot against the floor and then falling back on to the right with each lopsided step. He made a painstaking circuit and came back to the mattress.

The Cardinelle nodded, once, as Tighe stood resting his poor foot on top of the good one. ‘You can walk.’

‘Not good,’ said Tighe.

‘Good enough. Flatar hardly need their legs anyway. You are talked about all through the army, little boy. It is a good omen that you fell on us as we embrolal here and it is a very good omen for the sky army. Everyone agrees, so you will become flatar. You will train quickly, I’m afraid to say, but that is dioparad manifolle of things. But your flatar platon will treasure you as a good omen.’

He stood up briskly. One of the Cardinelle’s soldiers collected the stool on which he had been sitting and folded it back up. The Cardinelle made a single jerking gesture with his head, bending it forward and back again. He turned and made the same gesture to Vievre, who virtually fell forward upon the floor to bow low in return.

He marched to the door. ‘Prelette Vievre,’ he announced. ‘You have worked well at bringing health to this omen-boy. He will bring luck in the campaign. Say your goodbyes to him tonight.’

Much later that day, with what amounted almost to tenderness, Vievre took Tighe through his last language lesson, and explained as much as he could about the army. ‘It will be different tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They will train you in your platon.’

‘What is platon?’

‘A part of the army. Larger than the smallest part. You will have brothers, sisters there.’

‘But no father!’ Tighe declared. He found that he was crying. It was stupid to cry, but there you are.

Vievre’s own eyes were bulging with moisture. ‘Your platon chief will be father,’ he said. ‘You will fly again – they choose you for the flatar because you are small, thin. Flatar need to be small because the flat cannot carry much weight. But they choose you also because you have flown – flown here like a little bird. Fallen here.’

‘No father!’ repeated Tighe. ‘None like you!’

Vievre gave himself over at this point and started crying as well. ‘My purepul little bird,’ he said, putting his arms around Tighe’s neck. ‘To lose you!’

‘I will come here’, said Tighe, ‘many times to say good new day to you, Vievre.’

‘Only if you are ill, I think,’ said Vievre. ‘Only that would be allowed. But never mind! Never mind! You will have a new family. You will have training. You will fly.’

He sat in silence for a long while.

The two of them ate together, sharing an evening meal. As the day moved to its close the light through the open door bulked, darkened. The patch of light cast by the sun through the doorway shrank away faster than a snail could crawl, as if it wanted to leave the ward, until eventually it was gone altogether. Vievre stood up in the dusk and lit one of the wall candles before pulling a door shut. For a while they sat in silence as the dusk winds grew and thrummed on the far side. Eventually Vievre spoke.

‘I will tell you this, my little bird,’ he said. I had a son and a daughter.’

‘You had a son and a daughter,’ repeated Tighe.

‘When my daughter was navien, my son became – you will not know the word. We have a word to describe it, othalpul. Angry, unhappy with the girl. That the girl was there. He had been the only one, now he was the second – oldest, yes, but my daughter was more balienette. This made him angry. Do you follow?’

‘I think so,’ said Tighe, although in truth he didn’t really understand what it was Vievre was telling him.

‘He was a boy, only a boy. Then one day he pushed his sister off the world. He was only a boy, you see, and I think in his head’, and Vievre tapped his own head to force the point, ‘he only thought: she will be gone and I will be first again in the family. I think he had no thought to kill her, you see. He was only a boy.’

Tighe said nothing. Vievre sighed.