On by Adam Roberts Page B

the day warmed. The sun was above them now, throwing shadows and spreading darkness into doorways and cubbyholes.
    Tighe pushed through the crowd looking for Wittershe. For some reason he couldn’t quite pinpoint, the thought of her
neck
was very strong in his imagination. It was so beautiful: the brown tone of her skin; the tiny black filaments of hair that were just about visible on it, the arc of the bone under skin. A wave of intense yearning passed through Tighe and he wanted to touch Wittershe. But he couldn’t find her in the crowd.
    The crowd had now reached a certain size, and was gelling as a mass of people. Tighe, always nervous in groups when too near the edge, elbowed his way through and pressed his flank against the wall itself. He had an oblique view of the pyre as the two junior preachers moved off and made their way into the chapel behind. Tighe had been friendly with one of the juniors when they had both been boy-boys; but now he took his apprenticeship to preaching seriously. Tighe hadn’t spoken to him from summer to summer, a whole half-year.
    A hum started in the midst of the crowd and Tighe raised himself. They were bringing out the body; wrapped in a grass-weave shroud, slung between the two juniors. And there was Grandhe, hands folded together as he paced the ground out to the pyre. The crowd was excited now, with mutters rippling back and across. The juniors were sliding the body into the inside of the pyre.
    There was a touch at his shoulder: Wittershe.
    ‘My pahe don’t know I’m here,’ she said into his ear, breathy from just having climbed up. ‘I mayn’t be able to stay for the whole ceremony.’
    ‘You’re just in time,’ said Tighe, his chest burning with excitement. He tried to turn round, but she pushed his shoulder. The crowd was close around them and there wasn’t much space. Tighe had to content himself with reaching behind himself and letting his knuckles trace the side of Wittershe’s hip.
    ‘There’s your Grandhe,’ she said, putting her mouth close to his ear. When she leaned forward to talk, her body pressed against Tighe’s left shoulderblade, her warm breath tickled the side of his head. His wick was hard as stone with just that fleeting contact. ‘There’s your Grandhe,’ she said, ‘weeping over his woman.’
    It took a moment for Tighe to realise what she was saying. ‘What do you mean?’
    But Grandhe’s voice came bellowing out and the crowd hushed. Wittershe’s hand found Tighe’s and her fingers curled into his.
    ‘God sits on top of the wall,’ he called forth, in clear tones. ‘God sees everything from there. What God wants, God gets. He wanted the soul of our dear friend Konstakhe.’ And he broke off. There was no expression readable on his face. The crowd was becoming more excited, jostling back and forth, motion passing through the gathered bodies like wind through the grass. Grandhe’s expression was unreadable.
    ‘God placed us on the wall as witnesses,’ he said. A few people in the crowd moaned or murmured. Somebody put his hand into the air and then others did the same. ‘Konstakhe was a good man. He was a good man,’ Grandhe was saying, but his voice was becoming submerged in the increasing hum of the crowd.
    ‘He’ll be flying up,’ shouted Grandhe, his voice loud suddenly. The congregation hummed like the wind, and somebody towards the back took up the shout. ‘Upward! Upward!’ Tighe felt his heart jerk, twist inside him. Everything shifted, seemed to pull closer. Bodies, red faces. Everyone calling out, faces stretching to open the mouth wide. Up! Up! He was joining in the shouting without even realising it. Up he had to go; he had been a good man. Grandhe was shouting, his words barely audible over the storm of shouting.
    ‘Upwards! Upwards!’
    Grandhe kept talking, and with a sort of impalpable eddy the jostling crowd stilled. The shouting died and the Funeral Speech became more audible.
    ‘… of the Divine, his