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‘What is el-daimon?’ said Tighe, horrified. Their eyes!

‘It is an enemy of God, a devil.’

‘A devil.’

‘Yes, but a woman devil. A woman devil and the Otre worship her. She tell them to put out the eyes of all boy-children of their enemies, to cut off their penis. They take two boy-children, and they cut off the two penis. Then they kill one boy-child, making sing-song prayers to the she demon, the el-daimon.’ Ati was rubbing his hands with the joy of telling this story, and leering at Tighe. ‘They kill the one boy-child and push his dead-body off the world. Then they take the two penis’ – and Ati wriggled his two little fingers in illustration – ‘and they put them in the eyes of the other boy-child.’

Tighe breathed out a long, horrified sigh. ‘In the eyes?’

‘In the eye caves. The eye houses, where the eyes were. In my language we say
gnazh
.’

‘Eye sockets,’ said Tighe.

‘Yes,’ said Ati eagerly. ‘They put the penis in the
gnazh
, so that the end of each penis sits there like eyes. At the end of penis there is little hole, you know? Little circle. Those are the pupils.’

‘Pupils,’ said Tighe.

‘And the end of penis is like eye. And each woman in Otre is given a boy as slave. They tie tether through the neck, you know,’ and Ati pulled the skin away over his adam’s-apple to demonstrate, ‘and they walk them around all day.’

‘Horrible!’

‘And if they capture us in war, they do this to us. Only with men, sometimes, they cut off balls – you know? – and do the same in the
gnazh
.’

‘Is this true?’ asked Tighe, wide-eyed.

‘Entirely the truth,’ said Ati, leaning back looking satisfied. ‘It is a holy war and we bring the Empire to these barbarians, these women devils.’

‘We fight their army?’

Ati blew out a long exhalation, expressive of his contempt. ‘They have small army. We fight them past the Meshwood.’

‘They have only women in the army?’

‘What?’

‘No men in the army?’

‘Well,’ said Ati. ‘No, the army is men, I think.’

‘But they have no eyes!’

Ati coughed. ‘Some men have the eyes,’ he said. ‘Many men have eyes, perhaps. But they are evil people and we will destroy them!’

‘Evil people,’ repeated Tighe.

‘Yes. East of here is the Meshwood.’

‘What is that?’

‘That is great wood, not trees but – we say
ash
.’ He made a gesture with both hands, all the fingers splayed and drawn together as a claw. ‘It stretches for many miles over the face of the worldwall. The Otre live on the other side. We march there, through the Meshwood, and fight the Otre.’

The following morning, as the platon worked through its ritualised exercise movements, Waldea came and stood before them all. This was unusual and the platon’s movements broke up in uncertainty.

‘Children!’ barked Waldea. He was holding something behind his back.

The kite-boy standing behind Tighe reached forward and pinched through Tighe’s clothing, grabbing a piece of the skin at the base of the spine and yanking it. Tighe couldn’t help yelping and immediately reddened and clamped his mouth shut. Waldea’s gaze settled on him for a moment and then passed on.

‘Today you will fly to the Pause.’

There was an absolute stillness. Tighe had never heard the phrase before, although he recognised the word as meaning a gap in time, a moment of waiting. He had never heard it used as a noun before, never so ponderously, and he wondered what it was. But Waldea was holding up a curiously shaped box that he had been keeping behind his back.

‘These are my sight invigorators,’ he announced. ‘You know them. Through these I can see you, even though you are all the way out at the Pause. Through these I can see every one of you.’

He waved the peculiar shape, black and tattered, in the air. Tighe’s eyes followed it, hypnotised.

‘Fly out to the Pause, you grubs, you grass-blades!’ Waldea declaimed. ‘You are warriors! Go to war against your fears! Some of you know it, many do not, but you must all be skilled at navigating at the Pause. It is strange air, out there, and you must be used to it. The sky goes strange there, so you must take care. But you will fly!’

They started towards their kites, and Waldea called to them to stop again. ‘Have a care, all of you,’ he cried. He seemed unusually agitated, as if
scared of something. Tighe felt a thrum in his belly, a fear at this new task. What was the Pause, exactly?

‘Go on then,’ yelled Waldea, his anxiety turning to anger.

And so the kite-boys and kite-girls, uncharacteristically silent, collected their kites and strapped themselves in. Tighe found himself next to Mulvaine.

‘We are warriors,’ he said to the lanky boy.

Mulvaine looked at him. ‘What did you say, sky-boy?’

‘We go to make war with the Otre,’ said Tighe.

Mulvaine looked at him. ‘You’re a strange one, sky-boy. All the wall knows that.’

‘They are a women nation,’ said Tighe. ‘They have evil women there.’

Mulvaine coughed and yanked a leather strap to tighten it. ‘Where did you hear that, you disease bag?’

‘I heard that they cut off the penis of the men.’

Mulvaine spat. ‘That’s not what I heard. I heard they make their father and mothers eat themselves. They cut off first a leg, or something, and cook it and leave the fathers and mothers in a prison with nothing else to eat.’

Tighe’s eyes were saucers. ‘Fathers and
mothers
too?’

‘Sure.’

‘But the mothers are the Princes in that land!’

‘The what?’

‘The Popes in that land – the Popes there are the mothers, the women.’

Mulvaine spat again. ‘Never heard that. But I
did
hear they lock up their parents, and cut away their legs and arms. Then they cook the meat and leave the mothers and fathers in a prison, like I said. They’ve nothing else to eat! They have to eat themselves or die! It’s muove, really muove, it’s bad.’

They were at the ledge now. Tighe’s stomach was fizzing with the anticipation of going over the edge of the world again and his head was flickering with images of the atrocities committed by the Otre. Cutting off penises! Forcing their parents to consume themselves! Horrible!

‘Mulvaine,’ he called over. ‘What is the Pause?’

‘You’ll find out,’ said Mulvaine grimly.

And they stepped off the world.

There was the usual rush of agonising euphoria as Tighe fell away and as the invisible muscle of the wind flexed and lifted him into the air. The rushing sound of the wind filled his ears, and the updraught was unusually choppy and vibrated his kite. His vision was blurred by the shaking, but he swam round and saw the ledge below him. Then he circled again and saw his fellow kite-boys and kite-girls flying briskly away from the wall.

He swung in and followed, allowing the updraught to give him height and then angling to sweep down and along. Soon he had caught up with the
main flock of the platon and he concentrated on keeping a good distance from the kite nearest him and on flying on, away from the wall.

At one point he circled up and round and saw how far away from the worldwall they had flown. He could no longer make out the platon ledge or the spur amongst the patchwork scattering of shapes; squares and wedges, semicircles and lines, grey and brown and green. He strained his eyes and thought that a tiny row of dots might be the calabashes moored along from the ledge, but he couldn’t be certain. The pattern revealed how plain the wall was above the military camp – a speckled, striated stretch of blank grey, a natural upper boundary to the growth of the Empire. A desert. Unless the Empire expanded to the west, or the east, and found another way upwards, a series of angled and connected ledges and pathways that led round this block, Tighe could not see how they would hope to go any further upwall. They might go up in calabashes, but they could surely not raise up a whole people in calabashes – supplies, food, building materials.

With a twist in his chest, he realised that this same desert stood between himself and home. But then (his heart pattered with hope) he could ride his kite away – fly up and up on an endless updraught until he arrived back at the village.

The air was colder around him now. It felt strange and unnerving to be flying so far from the body of the wall. Looking ahead, Tighe saw that the platon was in front of him.

He swirled around in the air and climbed to get the acceleration to rejoin the platon; and he pondered. Go home – but to what? To Grandhe? To beatings and being cheated of his birthright? To a village where people starved, where most of his best friends had left because they were too poor to stay? Most of all – to a place where his pahe and his pashe were not. What was there for him? Only Wittershe. Only beautiful Wittershe, with her elegant face and her body. But she was probably married to somebody else by now – lost to him for ever.

This pathway of thought was leading him to a dead end, to the internal plunge of misery and despair. He wriggled in his harness and manoeuvred back into formation with the platon. He needed not to think about those thoughts. That was what he needed.

And up ahead things were happening to distract him from his pain. The lead kites suddenly flipped back, turning with impossible speed and dropping rapidly away. Tighe’s head tingled all through with anticipation.

They were at the Pause.

One by one the kites reached an invisible barrier, flipped back and dropped away. All of Tighe’s childish wonderings about the nature of the universe came back to him. He remembered sitting on the ledge back in his village and staring at the sky. Remembered wondering if the sky was
another wall, a purer, ethereal wall; a wall of light and air perhaps, raised by the same God who had put brick on brick and clothed it with earth and life and made the worldwall. Another wall to hold in the air, so that it didn’t all bleed away, so that God’s people could breathe, could live in the space between the walls.

Was he now at the place? Was this what the Pause was – the approach to the pure blue wall of the sky? The air was as cold as ice.

Tighe came up at the rear and angled up to quell his speed. If this was a great blue wall, then he didn’t want simply to crash into it. He tried turning a little to the side, wondering if he could fly past it and observe the nature of its surface. But he could see nothing; it seemed only as if the sky went on for ever here – there weren’t even clouds to stain the view, and the bright, yellow, hot sun sat solidly over to the right.

Then, abruptly, he was upside down and his stomach lurched. He couldn’t see what had happened, how he had flipped over; he seemed to be in the same position in the harness. But then he felt himself – impossibly – slipping
backwards
through the air and he was tumbling and falling and his eyes were dazzled by a tumbling strobe as the sun span round and round his head, and the distant wall lurched up and round and over and came back at him from underneath.

For a second he was stunned; then he strained with his body and pulled with his arms and righted his kite, swerving it into a sweeping dive that pulled round and up. He circled, caught an updraught and made up some of the height he had lost.

He looked around; his fellow kite-girls and kite-boys were round and about, speckling the sky, no longer in formation. He swung by one of them, wanting to reach out and ask questions –
what happened
? – but there was no way his voice could reach across the screaming of the rushing air. Then he pulled up again and had a clear view of another kite heading fast away from the wall. Once again it flew so far and then seemed to be grabbed by an invisible hand, spun round and thrust back.

Tighe found that he wasn’t scared; once he was up and flying he felt peculiarly safe – it was difficult to explain. Standing on the extremity of the ledge, with solid earth under his feet, the prospect of the fall gripped at his guts and he was terrified. But once that initial tumble off the world was out of the way everything began to assume the logic of a dream. Only the centrifugal wrenching in his gut, only the chill of the wind rushing past him, told him that his experience was physical at all. Otherwise it was a magical, floating hallucination.

He turned his kite back in the direction of the Pause and braced himself. For a moment there was nothing but his own onward rushing; then with a sudden
whoosh
of air the yank of gravity changed. He was no longer flying
on, but somehow, impossibly, flying
up
. For a fraction of time his whole perspective changed; he was on his back looking up at nothing but sky. Then the kite shimmied and fell away, tumbling back, jerking through fifty degrees and falling again.

He struggled to control the spinning kite, hauling his body so hard that he started sweating, even in the chill of the cold rushing air. It took a little longer, but he got the kite under control eventually. When he got his bearings he could see none of his platon, so he flew wallward for a while until he found a strong updraught and rode it spiralling helix-like. After a little while a number of kites came into view.

Soon enough he rose further and gave himself a vantage point from which he could see several kites tackling the Pause. They flew at it, slowed and reversed, fell away. One kite – Tighe couldn’t see who piloted it – built up an enormous slope of speed and hurtled through the Pause. The kite continued for a good long way and then turned on its side, as if it were about to nosedive down and away. But, somehow, it didn’t; instead it hung for a moment in that impossible posture, and then another moment. Then it slid backwards, as if being yanked in slow motion, inching along and being slowly pulled back towards the wall, towards Tighe.

Tighe circled closer to the kite, and watched as it approached, angled wrongly, as if drawn in by an invisible rope. Then, suddenly, it was falling properly, dropping precipitously away. Tighe started a spiralling descent to try and follow, but the kite soon disappeared from sight.

After a few more passes at the Pause, the platon slowly reassembled and then turned the points of their kites and started back towards the wall. The sun had risen higher and the updraughts were getting more erratic, so the platon formation became scattered and ragged as it came closer to the wall as individuals had to fly further apart to seek out updraughts. Eventually they were close enough to see where they were; and to discover that they were a mile or so westward of the platon ledge. The lead kite pulled round and flew east, and Tighe fell in at the rear of the train.