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down the crag squealing and trying to catch one another. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t bear it; it was so blind to the appalling reality of the drop. How could they be so blithe? If they were to stumble, to fall the wrong way, they could vanish over the edge of the world and fall
for ever
.
    He made his way down to Old Witterhe’s house; a dingy narrow dugout down a rickety private ladder from the market shelf. Wittershe had once told Tighe that her pahe couldn’t widen the house; its space was hemmed by rock on the one hand and manrock on the other. Outside was a tumbly stretch of broken wall too near vertical to make a useful space for humans. Old Witterhe kept monkeys here.
    Wittershe’s pashe had been young when she married Witterhe and had died giving birth to their one daughter. The thought of it gave Tighe a clench in his gut – to have your pashe
die
! – but Wittershe was blase about it. She had no memories, she felt no loss. In a way, her situation was more grounded, less precarious, than Tighe’s. She had no pashe to lose.
    And Wittershe had a pretty face, with lips as broad as fingers and shiny eyes. Her skin was a little paler than was conventionally considered handsome, a sort of timber-coloured light brown; but it was at least smooth, without the pocks that marked some other girls’ complexions.
    Tighe knew his pashe disapproved of his playing with Wittershe, but he didn’t know why. He knew also that his Grandhe particularly disapproved of Old Witterhe, who held some strange opinions concerning God and the wall. Heresies, really, to give them their proper name. But the old man’s daughter, Wittershe, was the person in the village nearest to Tighe’s age; she was seven years and fourteen months old. Nor was she a girl any more, not really. She didn’t have the bulging body of Carashe, but her figure defined several slow arcs, a line Tighe would trace with his eye from neck to small of back, from chest over belly to leg.
    Old Witterhe was smoking a thorn-pipe and squatting in the door of his house. His monkeys were placidly picking insects from the tuft grass; a few of them were chewing the grass itself. The sun was making Witterhe hide his eyes in wrinkles.
    ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, holding his hand like a ledge-flat over his eyes. ‘Boy Tighe? Sorry to hear about your goat, boy. Sorry to hear about that. ‘Course,’ he dropped his hand, ‘I lost a monkey yesterday, but nobody considers that much of a tragedy.’
    ‘Sorry to hear about your monkey,’ said Tighe automatically, in a monotone. ‘Is Wittershe about?’
    Old Witterhe poked into the bulb of his pipe with his little finger; like all pipe-smokers, he grew his fingernails long for this purpose. ‘They’re bringing down some wood from Press, I hear. She’s up on main-street shelf to see what manner of price they’ll want for it. I could do with building a ledge-flat outside my door.’ He pointed with the spire of his pipe. ‘There’s been some crumbling away at the crag edge there. It’s not a good crag, in all. A bit of wood to strengthen it, and maybe build a little overhang, would make my life.’
    Tighe thought,
If the traders from Press really have some wood then they won’t be trading it for a few monkey carcasses
. But he didn’t say anything so rude. Instead, he stepped back a little away from the edge, feeling the comforting press of the wall at his back. Crumbling crag-lips made him nervous.
    ‘I’ll climb back up and see if I can find her then,’ he said.
    ‘Reckon I should start charging a toll on that ladder of mine,’ said Old Witterhe. ‘You seem to use it enough. Still, it’s good to see you getting some air. You spend too much time in your pas’ house, burrowed away in there like a mole. You’re not a mole, you know, little Princeling. You’re a boy.’
    But Tighe was already scrambling back up the ladder.
    Up on main-street shelf a crowd was gathered around the traders from Press. The Doge