On by Adam Roberts Page A

not you of course, but real people. People like your pahe and
me
.’ She was trembling now, shivering with the rage as it built up inside her. Her other hand came up and clutched sharply at the fist. ‘I wonder how I could have raised a boy-boy as
selfish
as you. It’s mockery, it is mockery, mocking your Grandhe when he came here with
tears in his eyes
,’ and with that she lurched forward and swung out with both her linked fists. Tighe knew better than to dodge. The blow caught him at the side of his head and he dropped himself down. It was better to go down. He curled up, wrapping his head in his arms and bringing his knees to his shoulders. It wasn’t that it hurt him physically – he was too large for that now – but there was something horribly penetrating about her anger, emotionally penetrating, and that made it gruelling. He didn’t understand it and yet he did understand it. Deep down it made sense and the sense it made had a kind of perfection because deep down he was bad and his pashe could see that.
    She had taken up one of the wall paddles, a yard-long slightly curved and polished piece of wood that pahe used to work patterns into the drying mud of the wall. It was wood and therefore valuable, but pashe was using it feverishly, slapping and smacking his whole body. In some distant part of his brain, Tighe wondered whether she would break it and what they would do then. He didn’t want the paddle to break because it was expensive. Butalso, some logical part of his mind deep inside his head decided, because if it broke then he would have to explain to his pahe how it had broken. And that would mean including pahe in this ritual of pain. Which was not something Tighe wanted. Impact burned on his hip, chest, head, stomach-side. And then, suddenly, it was over.
    When he looked up, tentatively, his pashe was sitting, panting a little, with her back to the wall of the open space and her legs out straight in front of her. Sheepishly, as if complicit in some unmentionable game, she caught his eye. He unwound himself and got unsteadily to his feet, and during the whole time of this manoeuvre they never broke eye contact. It was a kind of bond between them, a horrible intimacy. But he knew he brought it on himself. So he bowed his head, and shuffled out through the door and out on to the ledge again.

6
    After he had wandered about the village for a bit in the sunshine the beating receded into the distance. It became a memory, and memory (he told himself) made little distinction between yesterday and ten years since. Thinking about it like that helped. As if it had not happened, not quite. Or, perhaps, as if it had happened to someone else.
    There was the sun, there were the faces of the people passing, that was enough. He sat and stared out at the sky for a while: his whole theory of there being another wall, a pure, clean blue-grey wall in the hazy distance – was that a kind of heresy too? He wondered what his Grandhe would say if he broached it to him. He squeezed his eyelids together, trying to bring the distant artefact into some more detailed resolution, trying to trick optics with the pressure on his eyeballs.
    He touched his bruises slightly, with his fingers’ ends, through his clothes. One more feature on the landscape of his body.
    He drew in three long, slow breaths. He actually felt better.
    After a while he made his way back along. On market shelf the crowd was starting to gather. It was about to happen. Both the junior preachers were standing by the pyre now, something stiffer in their posture. Tighe watched shop alcoves in the side of the wall shut up, their owners scurrying in knots of two and three and accumulating on the broad shelf. People were coming up the main stair at the far end of the street one by one, each head growing into a body with legs and feet, and each person emerging to be followed by a new head. The sun was cooled by a strong breeze from below; an afternoon breeze rising as