On by Adam Roberts Read Free Book Online

village to watch the ceremony. He was a great man. He was a
good
man. We must burn him and send his soul up the wall with the smoke. God is waiting for his soul. God sits atop the wall and sees everything.’
    And he was gone, sweeping enormously out of the room.
    For a while Tighe simply sat, watching the looks his pahe and pashe were exchanging. Then pashe shook her head and got up from the bar.
    As he helped pahe give the house its brief morning tidy, Tighe said, ‘Grandhe was very close to Konstakhe, wasn’t he?’
    Pahe gave him a quick look, but then said, ‘Well, yes, very close friends, they were that. Known one another for many years. More years than you’ve been alive.’
    But Tighe found himself thinking: at what moment in the night did Old Konstakhe actually die? Had it been when Tighe had been with Old Witterhe? Or afterwards? The rush of doves’ wings in the starlight; Tighe vomiting up his stomach, like the cold glitter of a soul leaving a body. The whole thing made his head feel strange.
    Afterwards Tighe walked through the village. Down on main-street shelf a couple of Grandhe’s junior preachers were building the pyre, roughly weaving together plates of the high bamboo that grew on the most poorly watered crags and was therefore brittle and flammable. Tighe stood and watched them for a while. People passed and re-passed, and a few stopped to watch the process. The priests bent the flimsy boards of bamboo toshapes, and boxed a funereal shape. More grass and bamboo were laid around the edge. Onlookers watched for a while and then moved on.
    Tighe went up a public ladder and along the series of shorter ledges to the up-and-to-the-right of the village. Here there were a number of mechanical shops; a friend from boy-boyhood, Akathe, was working in the clockmongers. Though no older than Tighe, his family was not as elevated and Akathe spent most of his days in the outside alcove beside the shop entrance, working with various clockwork devices in the daylight.
    ‘Did you hear?’ Tighe said, sauntering up to him. ‘Konstakhe died in the night.’
    ‘Everybody has heard that,’ said Akathe. He didn’t detach his attention from the little clock he was working on. It was a plastic device, cogwheels worn and grooved with use. Akathe prodded it with a needle-thin spatula, working clockworker’s mud into the workings. He had a little plate of the stuff at his elbow.
    Tighe sat himself on the grass before Akathe. ‘Shall you go to the ceremony?’
    ‘If I get this finished.’ He looked up, but kept one eye shut in the clockworker’s squint. ‘Yesterday somebody traded power-book parts with my pashe. We got a regular pile of the parts now.’
    ‘Which parts?’ Tighe asked, although these sort of clockwork details meant nothing to him.
    ‘Well, there’s a sort of membrane that pashe thinks was the screen. We also have the teeth of the thing, pulled teeth each marked with a symbol. Even I could recognise some of them – an R, an A, something that is either a C or an S.’
    ‘That’s good,’ said Tighe, but without enthusiasm. ‘So will you go?’
    Akathe sniffed, and looked again at the clock. ‘Don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. This is an odd plastic, this one. The mud won’t seem to set and when it does it comes away in lumps. Something about this plastic that resists the glue of it.’
    ‘You don’t go much to religious ceremonies,’ said Tighe.
    ‘Don’t have all that much time, really.’ He was prodding at the clock’s innards again.
    ‘I was thinking, you know,’ said Tighe, snapping off a blade of grass and twirling it in the sunshine. A striking purple-and-red beetle was twitching its way through the stalks at his feet, climbing some until they bent and tipped him over, weaving through others. ‘Thinking about God, you know.’
    ‘God,’ said Akathe, without inflection.
    ‘You know how we’re taught he sits on top of the wall,’ said Tighe. ‘Sees the universe.’
    ‘You