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‘Them jewels is ours now,’ said the old man, leering. ‘You can take the cripple in exchange, he’s no use to us.’

‘But leave the girl,’ said the other old man, leeringly. ‘We can use the girl.’

Tighe sucked in his breath. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘The master’s death frees the slave.’

‘Nonsense!’ snarled one old man.

‘Nonsense!’ said the other.

‘What’s his is ours now. We’re his heirs.’

‘He made us his heirs!’

‘Then fetch a magistrate, I’d advise,’ said Tighe, feeling himself gather
inside. ‘I dispute it. I think he died without heirs and I’m claiming his slave. You can have his other stuff. Come now, slave,’ he said to Mulvaine.

‘You can’t do that!’ screeched the first old man.

‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

‘You speak Otre with a
western
accent,’ said the first. ‘You’re a westerner – a dirty westerner. You have no rights here!’

But Tighe walked calmly out through the door, leading Mulvaine and his own slave as he went.

He took Mulvaine down to the lower ledges of the city and bought him some food. Mulvaine ate with gusto.

‘You’re a wealthy man now, Tighe,’ he said, his eyes hesitating upwards and then tumbling back down in his habit of meekness.

‘I thought you were dead, with the others,’ said Tighe, slapping him on the shoulder.

‘The others?’

Tighe coughed. ‘Ati,’ he said. ‘Pelis. Ravielre. You remember them?’

Mulvaine was staring at the ledge in front of him. ‘I assumed’, he said, ‘that the whole platon had been destroyed. I don’t remember very much. I remember running along the ledge with you, Master.’

‘Don’t call me master,’ said Tighe, with a strange twinge inside him. ‘It doesn’t feel right, somehow.’

Mulvaine blushed. ‘No,’ he said, meekly.

‘It’s all right,’ Tighe said.

‘I remember running,’ Mulvaine said shortly. ‘Then the pain in my leg – I was shot. But I don’t remember anything else until I was awake in an Otre fort. My leg was bandaged, missing, and that’s how I’ve been. They put me in a pen with other commodities, but nobody would buy me. I was lucky to find my master, I truly was. He was recovering himself and he fastened on me.’ A tear crawled down the planes of Mulvaine’s face. ‘And now he’s dead. Dead!’

‘Don’t start crying now,’ said Tighe, with distaste. But it was too late; Mulvaine was sobbing, and rubbing his eyes.

‘Why do slaves feel they must cry as much as they do?’ fretted Tighe.

‘Anyway,’ said Mulvaine sniffing hard through his nose, ‘you must have a story, I think, Master. Tighe, I mean. Master Tighe. Oh, the old days! They seem so far away!’

He was shaking his head, looking at the floor.

‘Well,’ said Tighe, settling himself down and staring out at the sky. It was shortly after ninety and the sun was bright, a white hole burnt through the perfect blue. ‘I’ve had some adventures, Mulvaine,’ he said. ‘I can tell you that. I was a slave, too, just as you have been. But I escaped.’ He rubbed his
right eye. Since he had started drinking the fortified water for which the City of the East was so famous, he had started experiencing headaches that nibbled at the back of his eyeballs. He was getting streaks of white blankness over his vision, too: sometimes when he opened his eyes he couldn’t see anything but a milky haze until his eyes settled and things came back into view.

‘Escaped!’ said Mulvaine, in a small voice. He was looking nervously around. ‘Runaway slaves are thrown off the wall,’ he whispered. ‘Everybody in the city knows me. I’ve been here a year. I couldn’t escape.’

‘Well,’ said Tighe. ‘I was – shall we say – taken by somebody else. Just as you have been taken, freed, by me.’ He smiled at Mulvaine, but the other’s glance was still downwards. He rubbed his stump through his clothing.

‘Ah, Mulvaine,’ Tighe said, ‘I have travelled further than you could imagine. I have travelled to the end of the world – to the East Pole. I have visited the ice caves there and battled with magicians and monsters. I have flown through the air, swum through the breath of God. When I return to the world of men and women, as I have done, it is hard to feel bound by the smallness of these customs.’ He wrinkled up his eyes. His vision was not as sharp as it once had been.

‘The East Pole?’ said Mulvaine, looking up briefly. ‘I have heard of it. It is not, then, a sort of myth?’

‘No,’ said Tighe, rubbing his eyes again. ‘It is as real a part of the wall as the ledges on which this city is built. The wall is not as we thought it was. I remember, Mulvaine, when we were still in the platon. One day you said to me: you said, is it that the wall is big, or that we are small?’

‘Did I say such a thing?’ mused Mulvaine. ‘It seems a very long time ago, Master.’

Tighe wrinkled his face. ‘Don’t call me so,’ he snapped. Then he made himself regain his composure. ‘Well, there was a kind of truth in that, but it was not as I thought it. I saw us as small and God as big. But now I have travelled and I know who built the wall. I have met with the mangod and he is, they are, as small as you, as small as me. It seems that God and man are exactly the same scale, exactly the same size. It seems that God is a part of our family, a part of our village, that he and she live as a single person among us. It seems that he is as overawed by the size of the universe as are we: that he is as likely to bicker with his Lover as we are. I had used to think that God was beyond change; but I have discovered on my travels that it is not so; that God is in love with change. Perhaps that is why he is in thrall to this world, to this worldwall. Change is a potent thing, like liquor perhaps, and has drawn us in.’

‘What a lot you have learned, Master Tighe,’ said Mulvaine, with an undertone of sarcasm. But he was still looking at the floor.

Tighe stood up and walked back and forth a little to stretch his legs. ‘We come from a mighty people, Mulvaine,’ he said. ‘Our people achieved many things. And we will achieve great things again. This I have been promised. So I have pledged to return to my village. You will come with me.’

‘It is hard for me to walk, Master,’ said Mulvaine, in a miserable voice. ‘I have only one leg and my crutch chafes under my armpit.’

Tighe didn’t hear him; or if he heard him, he didn’t really listen to his words. ‘I shall return as Prince to my village,’ he said. ‘It is my right. If my Grandhe still governs, then I shall confront him with the truth. With what I now know about the worldwall itself.’

Tighe spent the rest of the day trying to dispose of his female slave. It was harder than he thought it would be; few people were interested in so sickly a creature. She cried every time Tighe took her to a new doorway, a new potential buyer, and she cried when the buyer abused her as diseased and a weakling. ‘You are difficult,’ chided Tighe, ‘you cry at the thought I will sell you, and you cry at the thought that I won’t be able to sell you. Are you sure that you do not wish to come with us?’

‘I do not wish to leave the city, Master,’ she whined.

‘Well, Mulvaine and I will travel west. We will see wonders – do you not wish to see wonders?’

She shook her head miserably.

Eventually Tighe found a baker who was prepared to take her. ‘She’s small enough to climb inside my oven and clean out the corners,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay you in bread.’ Tighe cursed inwardly to think that he had wasted two valuable jewels on so hopeless a purchase, but it couldn’t be helped.

He returned to collect Mulvaine and share some of this new bread. He had left him on the central shelf watching the never-ending play. ‘Let’s go now, Mulvaine,’ he said.

‘In a moment, Master,’ said Mulvaine. Tighe had given up rebuking him for calling him ‘Master’; there seemed little point. ‘This actor is staggering and about to fall, I think.’

Tighe pushed through to get a better view. Mulvaine, as a slave, had not dared do so; but he was tall enough to see over the crowd. Tighe squeezed through and saw the actor enter into a lengthy monologue. He was dressed in bright red fabric, but he was plainly exhausted: his face was yellow with fatigue, and his hands trembled like vibrating machines of some kind. He croaked his lines rather than spoke them. Two young actors, eager and fidgety, waited on the outskirts of the stage space, to race one another and claim the role of the failing actor.

He pulled himself up, his voice dry and cracked. ‘I am to take on the clothing of death himself,’ he warbled. ‘I am to take on the clothing of ending itself. He span round in a slow, ritualised arc and ended with his
arm outstretched. The tremor of his hand was painful to see. He was pointing at one of his fellow actors. ‘I am to clothe myself as death,’ he said again. ‘I am to clothe myself as ending. I am to clothe myself as death. I am to clothe myself as ending.’

‘The world is tall,’ said the other actor. This had been her only line for the last half-hour. Tighe knew this because somebody in the crowd next to him said so, loudly and crossly. ‘Over and over!’ this audience member said.

‘Hish!’ said somebody else.

‘The world is tall,’ said the other actor. She was dressed in green cloth.

‘As the sun rises,’ said the first actor, breathlessly. He pointed at the shelf. ‘As it rises and goes over the wall.’ He pointed upwards. But this gesture was the final straw. His leg wobbled comically and then he simply fell straight down in a heap. The other two actors were hurrying on, fighting amongst themselves to take the position centre-stage and kicking the prone figure of the previous actor in their eagerness to clear him away.

‘As the sun rises,’ shouted the first actor.

‘As it rises and goes over the wall,’ yelled the other, and raised his arm, bringing it sharply down in a blow to the other’s face.

Tighe turned away, and pushed his way out of the crowd again. ‘Come along now, Mulvaine,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the old actor pass out.’

‘Master,’ whined Mulvaine, bobbing his head to get the best view. ‘Can’t we stay half an hour more! It’s the sunrise speech! It’s a famous speech.’

‘No,’ snapped Tighe, his temper fraying. ‘We must go now.’

Mulvaine hobbled along behind him in a sullen mood, but Tighe felt lighthearted to be leaving the city. Sharp needle pains came and went in his eyes and he had developed the suspicious feeling that these new headaches were somehow brought on by his being in the city itself. ‘They’ll go when I leave the city,’ he told himself.

They climbed to a higher ledge that led west.

‘Stop!’ called somebody, from behind. Tighe and Mulvaine turned together. One of the old men from the same space as Mulvaine’s old master was standing there, his walking stick horizontal, pointing straight at Tighe.

The old man had hired a young ruffian to reclaim Mulvaine. This thug was tall and his arms were fat with muscle. As he stepped along the ledge, the old man called after him. ‘Take his jewels too!’ he quavered. ‘He’s got jewels.’

The thug confronted Tighe. Tighe pulled out his gun. The thug looked at it.

‘Is that real?’ he asked, in a surprisingly mellow voice.

‘Yes,’ said Tighe and aimed a shot at the ledge. The gun struggled and fired, and a gout of dust flew up.

The thug took a step back and then turned and marched straight past the old man.

By evening Tighe and Mulvaine were out of the city and moving west. Most of the traffic on the ledge was going in the other direction, drawn into the city.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Mulvaine, as the two of them settled into a nook in the wall to sit out the dusk gale.

‘We’re going to my village, Mulvaine,’ said Tighe. ‘Going home.’

Mulvaine didn’t say anything. After a while he said, ‘My skin has been rubbed raw by walking so far, Master. My skin under my arm.’ He said this in a pitiful, small voice.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Tighe. ‘The dusk gale is so mild this far east,’ he added. ‘Do you remember how harsh the dusk gale used to be, back in the Empire?’

But Mulvaine was not to be drawn by nostalgia.

The next morning Mulvaine shared out rations from his pack and the two of them started marching west. The air was clear and the strong rays of the sun from below illuminated the wall before them with streaks of beauty. The sunlight was hurting Tighe’s eyes, but he tried not to think about that. Soon enough his eyes would get better; his eyesight would become less misty and the pain would stop. Soon enough they would pass through the Meshwood and find their way up to his village.

The path led out along a stubby spur of worldwall. At its furthest point Tighe looked back. The distant outline and haze of the city was still visible, just. Tighe breathed deeply and waved languidly. Mulvaine waited, poised on his crutch, looking at the floor and panting. For a moment Tighe pondered his time in the city; but the sense of freedom was so exquisite it made his hair prickle and stand on end. Freedom, and the path home.

After this short pause, he and Mulvaine walked on. Rounding the spur and starting down the far side.

The Wizard was there, waiting, as if he had been waiting all this time. His eyes were red lamps. He was wearing a black plastic cloak that flapped and curled around his leather skin.

‘Tighe,’ he said in his squeaky voice, but with an edge of malice. ‘My Lover has been at you, tampered with my machines, and I’ve found it hard to track you. Hard! And I’ve had my own worries, my own battles to fight.’

‘Wizard!’ said Tighe. The manliness, the swagger and the self-belief – all of it fell away, like sheets and great flakes of ice falling off the end of the
world. He was a boy again, a young boy in front of his Grandhe. ‘Wizard!’ Sweat started on his face.

‘My sweet young Tighe,’ said the Wizard, a tone of menace in his voice, ‘I’ve been so looking forward to seeing you again.’

1.1. The Worldwall.
Gravity, which operates in the universe as a whole at 90° to a body of mass (such as a planet), has on this particular world been twisted by Hawking’s over-efficient experiments. Instead of operating perpendicular to the flat of ground, gravity is operating parallel to it, in a spherical standing-wave vortex extending from the notional centre-point of the planet to a circular plane less than a kilometre beyond the surface of the globe. This vortex draws energy through superstring elasticity from surrounding space-time and has currently lasted some 430 standard years.