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his head on his knees, looking down at the grass before his feet. A dozen or so pale mushrooms seemed to be growing on the grass in front of him; but he looked again and saw that they were the bodies of sleeping doves, roosting on the crag. Their heads curled down, their bodies had a weirdly insubstantial appearance. Balloon bodies. Foam bodies. Bulging patches of a ghostly paleness.
    ‘Doves,’ he said.
    ‘I know,’ said Wittershe, in a whisper. ‘Don’t speak loud or they’ll vanish. Pahe likes to snare them, but they don’t often roost on our crag. You stay here and keep an eye on them and I’ll slip back through and tell him. He has a net.’
    And the pressure was lifted from his neck. Tighe looked around, but Wittershe was gone. The air was soft, falling only gently. Why did the air seem to blow around so much at dusk, but only draw gently downwards at night? Why was dawn always accompanied by a fearful gale? God firing his blazing cannonball, making war on evil. Tighe felt the rightness of Witterhe’s cosmology. God setting the great rock alight at dawn and that was the growing of the light way down at the base of the wall; and then God hurled it, from His muscled arm, and the air boiled and howled. That was the morning gale. If it could cause such fierce storms on launching, then what must it be like crashing down on the dark side of the wall?
    As if in sympathy, Tighe felt his own insides lurching. Nameless evil. Awall netted with smoke, hideous shapes moving. Tighe’s throat clenched and he toppled forward vomiting noisily, a spattering stream. And the doves, cooing as if to reassure him, broke into the night sky in a flutter of starlit wings, pale and ghostly as grey smoke, feathering the stars themselves.
    Old Witterhe was furious when he came out to find the doves gone. ‘There’s good eating on one of those birds,’ he said. ‘They’re valuable. My girl said there were six.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Tighe groaned. ‘I couldn’t help it.’
    ‘And you’ve thrown your puke all over the lip of our ledge,’ raged Witterhe. ‘My girl’ll have to clean that tomorrow. That’s disgusting, that is foul. Did you puke and scare the birds away?’
    Tighe tried to say something, but the words clogged in the burnt dryness of his throat.
    ‘You puked and scared the doves away,’ yelled Witterhe, really angry now. ‘Is that the most stupid thing ever? I think it is!’
    Tighe felt too awful to argue. He begged some water, in a croaky voice, but Witterhe stumped back into his house shutting the dawn-door behind him. Tighe’s throat felt scraped and raw, his stomach teetered on the edge of convulsing again – although he was certain that there was nothing more inside his belly to vomit out. And he was ashamed to have Wittershe see him like this. He tried to gather himself, but she came over and took his hands. Slowly, he climbed the ladder with Wittershe’s help and stumbled along the main-street shelf, with the deep blackness of the night apparently swaying and shifting towards him. The journey was patchy. One moment he was trying to say something to Wittershe, to express something, but the words were crumbling in his croaky throat. The next thing, without a sense of continuity of time, he was at the dawn-door of his pas’ house fumbling through the webbing to get the latch pulled over. Then, he was at the family sink, slurping messily. His head felt funny. Mostly he was tired; but later, in his alcove, lying on his back, he couldn’t sleep. He turned on his side, and turned to his other side, but did not seem able to push himself away into the bliss of unconsciousness. Left side, right side, squirming back to his left side.
    Visions arrowed through his head. Old Witterhe’s creased face. The doves, sitting motionless on the ledge. The drawing-out massive blackness of the night, open to everything, ready to swallow anything that fell off the world. A mouth that refused no morsel. It was as if Tighe