On by Adam Roberts Page B

were ants in the grass, following a line through the blades. Tighe tried to think himself down to their level; imagine the grass stalks as enormous pillars, imagine the specks of dirt as boulders. How did they see the Universe? As a flat plane created by some man-sized Ant God; planted with great trunks of grass to test them? He got on his knees and peered closely. The ants were black and red, the colours striped down their plastic-looking carapaces. Each of them waved filament arms from their head. Tongues? Eyes on stalks?
    Grandhe had once said that Tighe wondered about the wrong things. Spent too long asking questions that had no answer instead of learningabout God and being silent. Tighe sighed. Time to go home. He picked the candle up and brushed ants from the parcel.
    He trotted along paths worn to dust by many feet, paths that were worn into his mind too. They were so familiar he felt he could shut his eyes and make his way along them blind. But he didn’t shut his eyes. There was still the threat of the edge, the yaw and tumble promised to everybody. It still made his stomach ache and fist inside him. He still chose the path that went closest to the comforting bulk of the wall itself.
    Down the dog-leg, along main-street shelf. He was so familiar a wanderer through the village that several of the itinerants waved to him. But he hurried on, to the end of the shelf, up the public ladder, zigzagging up the briefer ledges and out along the ledge where his house was.
    The walk had made him hot and the cool of the hall was pleasant. Out of the sun his eyes were murked briefly, but adjusted to the dimness. He called out, ‘Pashe, I have the candle,’ and went through to the main space.
    There was nobody there.
    That was odd; pashe rarely left the house these days. Tighe went through to the storeroom at the back, empty except for the salted remains of a few goat-joints stacked against the wall. Then he came back and helped himself to some food from the store. The candle, still packaged, was sitting on the bar shelf. On a whim, Tighe unpacked it. Anshe had streaked it with a spiral pattern of red dye. That was a nice touch; she could just have given them a plain candle to settle the debt, but she had put the extra effort into patterning it.
    Tighe wondered where his pashe was. Something about her absence bothered him. He tried to picture where she might be, but no image came. That bothered him. He shut his eyes and tried to call up an image of his pashe at all. It was the oddest thing. He tried to build up the picture, eyes, nose, mouth, but the image kept slipping out of his mind. Wittershe. Other women from around the village. Anyone but his pashe. The effort made his head throb at the scraped temple and suddenly there came a striking visual image of his pashe straining with the effort to bring her fist round. Her face was darkened with rage; the lips pulled back, the face in the rictus of anger.
    Tighe banished the picture hurriedly.
    He had to find his pashe. Where could she be? It was only a small village; it shouldn’t be too hard to find her. He felt a sudden burning urgency.
    Where
was
his pashe?
    He finished the grass-bread and took a swig of water from the sink. Then he went out through the door and made his way back along the ledge. He assumed his pahe was still working on the house on top ledge.
    The route up there was complicated and involved switching back on several levels. It took him past some of the wealthiest houses in the village,large doorways opening on to spacious ledges, almost all of whom made their fortune with goats – with herds of tens, twenties of goats. Many of these houses even employed a doorkeeper, a raggedy man or woman who squatted in front of the dawn-doors and shooed passers-by away. Tighe watched several beggars approach one particularly splendid door like persistent flies, be waved away by the shouting doorkeeper (who had armed himself with a stick) and scatter to several places near