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‘Grandhe,’ squealed Tighe, squirming round to evade his Grandhe’s grip. There was the old man, leaning close to him, his ancient face as wrinkled and ledgy as the face of the worldwall itself.

‘What are you scheming at here, boy-boy?’ shouted Grandhe. A few of the people who had gathered on the main-street shelf to join in the trading haggle turned to see why the chief Priest of the whole Princedom was shouting. Tighe dropped his shoulders and slunk about in front of his Grandhe.

‘Nothing, Grandhe.’

‘Nothing? Nothing! It doesn’t dignify the office of Prince’, he bellowed, ‘for the heir – and the grandchild of the Priest as well – to spend all day skulking about doing nothing.’

‘I’ll be off and find something to occupy myself then, Grandhe.’

‘You should be working!’

‘Yes, Grandhe, I’ll just be away and find some work now.’

But his Grandhe’s hand bolted out and caught Tighe’s hair, yanking it painfully. Tighe stumbled and almost fell. The old man was speaking in a
much lower tone now. ‘And I like it
very little
, he was saying, ‘that you converse with that girl, Old Witterhe’s sluttish girl. Hear me?’

‘Yes Grandhe!’ The tender hairs near the base of his hairline felt as if they were being torn out.

‘
Hear
me?’

‘Yes Grandhe!’

‘You’ll do
better
, he said, with an emphatic tug of the hair, ‘to shun the company of that girl.’ And he let go of the hair, and stalked away. Tighe took hurried steps backward, and saw the old Priest fold into a company of his deputies, and the whole crowd of them moving away over main-street shelf.

His Grandhe’s words made a deep impression upon Tighe, but come the end of the day and the disappearance of the sun over the top of the wall, he could only think of Wittershe: the pretty constellation of her features; her smell; the lines of her figure. He slunk down the ladder to Old Witterhe’s house with a guilty look up and down the main-street shelf.

She met him outside her pahe’s house, and brought him in. Old Witterhe was there, smoking his thorn-pipe vigorously, and offering grass-bread and a monkey bone to chew on, pulling out bits of marrow. They passed the bone round and Witterhe talked. His daughter sat at his feet. ‘You’re a boy who likes to ask questions,’ the old man said.

‘I am that,’ said Tighe.

‘You want to know how the worldwall is, I think.’

Tighe kept stealing glances at young Wittershe. Her hair. Her mouth when it smiled. It was murky and very close inside this part of Old Witterhe’s house; a single grass-torch gave off smouldering light that threw swollen shadows on the wall.

The smoke from the thorn-pipe was sparking tears in Tighe’s eyes. He kept grinding the heel of his hand into his eye-sockets, but that only made them redder and more sore. Old Witterhe kept stroking the top of Wittershe’s head, smoothing her hair.

‘Now your Grandhe,’ the old man said, raspingly, ‘your Grandhe.’ He stopped, a look of concentration came over his eyes and he coughed suddenly, loudly. That seemed to clear his voice. ‘Now your Grandhe,’ he went on, more fluently, ‘he says that God built the wall, but if you ask him
why
he just says that
whys
are for God and not for man.’

Tighe tried to clear his throat, but the smoke was going right into his lungs. Wittershe didn’t seem to mind it; but she was used to it, he supposed. He nodded.

‘Now I don’t see why we can’t look at questions like
why
, you understand,’ said Witterhe. ‘Why did God build the wall?’

‘The other day I thought’, said Tighe, ‘that maybe there was another wall.
A perfectly blank wall, away in the distance. I thought maybe that was why the sky was blue.’

But Witterhe wasn’t listening. ‘Now when
I
build a wall, it is for a particular reason. I build a wall to keep something out, or to keep something in. That is what a wall is
for
, do you see? So we have to ask the same question. What does God want to keep in? Or out?’

He glared at Tighe, as if expecting an answer. But apart from the
frisson
of knowing that he was listening to heresy, that his Grandhe would fly into one of his cold rages if he heard these words, he had little interest in what Witterhe was saying.

‘God lives on top of the wall,’ said Tighe. ‘He has the best view up there. Maybe that’s why he built it, to give himself the view. Maybe he built the wall to sit on.’

Witterhe coughed, then cackled. ‘No, no, that’s not it. Let me ask you about the sun.’

‘The sun.’

‘The sun goes up. That goes direct against the law of gravity. So how does it happen?’

Tighe pondered. ‘I never thought of it,’ he said.

‘You did
not
, no indeed,’ said Witterhe. ‘Nobody thinks of these things because they seem so plain and straightforward. But we still need to explain ourselves. You know what the sun is?’

Tighe wasn’t sure what the question meant.

‘The sun is a hot-hot ball of stone. It’s rock, like the wall, but it’s heated up. That’s why we feel its heat and its light. So I ask you again: how does this enormous flaming ball of stone rise
upwards
against the pull of gravity?’

‘You’re teasing him, pahe,’ said Wittershe and smiled at Tighe.

‘Oh no, oh no,’ said her pahe. ‘He’s a bright boy, our little Princeling, I’m trying to bring out the thinking in him. It needs to be practised, thinking, or it withers away. When he gets to be Prince himself, he’ll need wisdom like this. So how does the hot,
heavy
stone rise up against gravity?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tighe.

‘If
you
wanted a stone to go up,’ said Witterhe, ‘what would you do? You’d
throw
it up. What else?’

‘I’d throw it up,’ conceded Tighe.

‘And why do you think God is different? Now don’t tell your Grandhe, or he’ll have the village band together and denounce me as a heretic. But isn’t it plain, isn’t it
logic
that this is what happens? Every night God heats a giant ball of stone, one of the pebbles from God’s beach. He heats it up till it shines with heat, and then come morning he
hurls
it upwards. That’s what we see, rising through the day, God’s missile. And every day we watch
it, without thinking about it; it goes up and over the top of the wall. So that must be where God is throwing it. He is tossing flaming missiles over the wall.’

Puff on the pipe, and another. More thick brown smoke clouded the lamp.

‘There’s a war, that’s what there is,’ Witterhe announced grandly. ‘We cling to this wall we live on like monkeys and the war is fought right over our heads.
That’s
why God built the wall. He built it to keep something, some things, away from Him. Something evil lives on the other side of the wall and God has declared war upon it. Every day he bombards it and he will continue doing so until he has destroyed it.’

And, dozy with smoke, Tighe’s imagination flared. He could see the dark abyss on the far side of the wall and sense some nameless evil seething at the base. And then, every night when he lay in his alcove asleep, when he thought the universe was peaceful and at rest, on the other side of the wall divine catastrophe was raining down. Every night another blazing fireball would come screaming down, spitting sparks a thousand yards wide. The smoke wound around Old Witterhe and around Wittershe’s clever, narrow face, with its baffling smile. Some dark, smoky abyss on the other side of the wall. Creatures sliding, plotting their evil. And then, every night, the howling apocalypse of divine wrath.

‘What sort of creatures, though?’ Tighe asked, his voice changed more to awe. ‘Why is God so angry with them?’

‘Well,’ said Witterhe, stretching a little, ‘that’s a little difficult to say, isn’t it. Now, I know somebody, here in the village. He’s a good man, works with artefacts and old machines. Maybe I’ll introduce you to him. Now, he has a theory.’

Witterhe stopped, gauging the effect of his storytelling.

‘This is what he reckons,’ he went on. ‘He thinks that there is Good and Evil in the universe. That, in some worlds, this Good and this Evil get mixed up. It happens with us on the wall, we can’t deny it. Good, yes. Evil, yes. In the same person, often. On our level, which is a small enough level, that’s the way. But in the world which God inhabits, maybe it is different. Maybe God built the wall precisely to separate out Good and Evil. Ever think of that?’

Witterhe sucked his pipe again. The air was fragrant and clotted with smoke. Tighe was starting to see blobs of light, deep blue and purple patches that flickered at the edges of vision. His chest heaved, but no matter how hard he breathed he didn’t seem to be able to draw enough air into his chest.

‘But we are God’s favoured because we live on the face of the wall that looks out over Good. We see the sun rise. But what of the people who live
on the crags on the
other
side of the wall, eh? What drear and miserable lives do they lead? Living in the stench of evil, living in the dark and then running into their burrows to hide their heads as the wrath of God flames roaring down the sky.’

‘Think I need some fresh air,’ mumbled Tighe. He stood up, but his feet seemed unsteady. The narrow walls of Witterhe’s house seemed to be drawing together. The lamp swung slowly about and Wittershe’s face came into view. ‘It’s the smoke,’ Tighe heard her say, ‘he’s not used to it.’

‘Take him out,’ came Witterhe’s voice, somehow removed from things. ‘Fill his lungs with fresh air.’

The nameless evil. Tongue of smoke. Something down there, something roiling around, but he couldn’t see his feet. Through the door, leaning on somebody and stumbling – and then, like cold water, the wash of night air. The smoke coalesced into blackness and only the pricks of light in the huge blackness.

Tighe tried to focus on the stars. His head resonated with a swift headache pain that passed away as soon as it struck. Then he knew where he was: sitting on the turf outside Witterhe’s house, Wittershe sitting beside him with her arm hanging about his neck like a stole. To his right, the muttering of the apes in the darkness. An occasional shriek of appalling-sounding outrage. Tighe rested his head on his knees, looking down at the grass before his feet. A dozen or so pale mushrooms seemed to be growing on the grass in front of him; but he looked again and saw that they were the bodies of sleeping doves, roosting on the crag. Their heads curled down, their bodies had a weirdly insubstantial appearance. Balloon bodies. Foam bodies. Bulging patches of a ghostly paleness.

‘Doves,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Wittershe, in a whisper. ‘Don’t speak loud or they’ll vanish. Pahe likes to snare them, but they don’t often roost on our crag. You stay here and keep an eye on them and I’ll slip back through and tell him. He has a net.’

And the pressure was lifted from his neck. Tighe looked around, but Wittershe was gone. The air was soft, falling only gently. Why did the air seem to blow around so much at dusk, but only draw gently downwards at night? Why was dawn always accompanied by a fearful gale? God firing his blazing cannonball, making war on evil. Tighe felt the rightness of Witterhe’s cosmology. God setting the great rock alight at dawn and that was the growing of the light way down at the base of the wall; and then God hurled it, from His muscled arm, and the air boiled and howled. That was the morning gale. If it could cause such fierce storms on launching, then what must it be like crashing down on the dark side of the wall?

As if in sympathy, Tighe felt his own insides lurching. Nameless evil. A
wall netted with smoke, hideous shapes moving. Tighe’s throat clenched and he toppled forward vomiting noisily, a spattering stream. And the doves, cooing as if to reassure him, broke into the night sky in a flutter of starlit wings, pale and ghostly as grey smoke, feathering the stars themselves.

Old Witterhe was furious when he came out to find the doves gone. ‘There’s good eating on one of those birds,’ he said. ‘They’re valuable. My girl said there were six.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Tighe groaned. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘And you’ve thrown your puke all over the lip of our ledge,’ raged Witterhe. ‘My girl’ll have to clean that tomorrow. That’s disgusting, that is foul. Did you puke and scare the birds away?’

Tighe tried to say something, but the words clogged in the burnt dryness of his throat.

‘You puked and scared the doves away,’ yelled Witterhe, really angry now. ‘Is that the most stupid thing ever? I think it is!’

Tighe felt too awful to argue. He begged some water, in a croaky voice, but Witterhe stumped back into his house shutting the dawn-door behind him. Tighe’s throat felt scraped and raw, his stomach teetered on the edge of convulsing again – although he was certain that there was nothing more inside his belly to vomit out. And he was ashamed to have Wittershe see him like this. He tried to gather himself, but she came over and took his hands. Slowly, he climbed the ladder with Wittershe’s help and stumbled along the main-street shelf, with the deep blackness of the night apparently swaying and shifting towards him. The journey was patchy. One moment he was trying to say something to Wittershe, to express something, but the words were crumbling in his croaky throat. The next thing, without a sense of continuity of time, he was at the dawn-door of his pas’ house fumbling through the webbing to get the latch pulled over. Then, he was at the family sink, slurping messily. His head felt funny. Mostly he was tired; but later, in his alcove, lying on his back, he couldn’t sleep. He turned on his side, and turned to his other side, but did not seem able to push himself away into the bliss of unconsciousness. Left side, right side, squirming back to his left side.

Visions arrowed through his head. Old Witterhe’s creased face. The doves, sitting motionless on the ledge. The drawing-out massive blackness of the night, open to everything, ready to swallow anything that fell off the world. A mouth that refused no morsel. It was as if Tighe was drunk with the enormity of the universe. The game of God, tossing the sun over the wall of the world. In his twitching half-sleep, Tighe’s memories blurred, his atomised vomit scattering over the edge of the world and the filigree tips of the doves’ wings folding and unfolding, the two things blending together.