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was drunk with the enormity of the universe. The game of God, tossing the sun over the wall of the world. In his twitching half-sleep, Tighe’s memories blurred, his atomised vomit scattering over the edge of the world and the filigree tips of the doves’ wings folding and unfolding, the two things blending together.
    Doves. Even at their moment of most intense effort, with the wings jerking and flitting, their bodies struggling into the air with the epiphany of panic – even at that moment, the expression on the faces of the doves was calm. Nothing could touch the seraphic blankness of those birds. Coasting in flight, settling on the ledge, roosting, bursting spectacularly into the air again; everything was the same to the dark eyes of the birds. The beak-smile of their narrow face.
    Tighe turned again. Something was itching deep inside his mind. He turned again. Neither side was comfortable to sleep on. He wished for a third side. Turned again.
    He had to sleep. It was stupid. In a few hours the dawn gale would begin sounding, and after that he would have to get up. It was Old Witterhe’s stupid pipe-smoke; it had irritated his mind, had rubbed it raw. Now it wouldn’t settle.
    He wondered if, outside, the doves were still flying; or if they had found themselves another roost. Old Witterhe would still be angry with him in the morning, but it was better that the birds fly in the starlight than that they get their necks corkscrewed and their bodies hung up dead in his smoky old den.
    Then Tighe was on his back and thinking of the stars. The nailpoint precision of the stars. Were the stars windows lit in the night-time of that other colossal wall? Was that where the gods lived? Free from the acid tang and muscular ache of bodies; pure spirits; pure as the placid flight of doves.
    Then, with sleep in his eyes, and light filling the room outside his alcove, his pashe was shaking him awake, and it was morning.

5
    He expected to feel awful, but after washing himself and taking his morning goatmilk, Tighe actually felt purged. ‘You look tired,’ his pashe told him, but he didn’t feel it. There was, behind the tenderness of the ache that still haunted his throat (he
hated
being sick, it was the worst of feelings) – there was, behind that, still the enormous feeling of pure light, of having been initiated into mysteries known only to the few. It cradled in his chest; he wanted to tell his pashe, but she would not have understood. In that respect, and even at his early age, Tighe recognised her as Grandhe’s daughter.
    Then Tighe thought of Grandhe Jaffiahe. Of how outraged he would be if he knew what Tighe had learned. Of how heretical this truth was, the knowledge of this cosmic war.
    And then – a coincidence that seemed to chime with Tighe’s new sense of insight into the universe – Grandhe Jaffiahe came to the door. But Grandhe never visited! There was a quarrel between Grandhe and pashe. There was always one quarrel or another between the two of them. Tighe had realised that the particular disagreement was not important, but was only the form taken by some more fundamental clash. Pahe would sometimes make faces at Tighe, as if trying to look at his own eyebrows, and the whole thing was a joke. Except that it could never exactly be a joke when Grandhe was so important in the village. So Tighe was scrubbing the inside of his goatskin with stalkgrass, getting the last of the milk out (so it wouldn’t go bad and stink the place out) and eating the soaked grass, when Grandhe shouted outside the door. It was as if he had been thinking about Grandhe and had summoned him. But the figure at the door was no wraith.
    ‘Daughter!’ Grandhe called. ‘I am coming to your house. Daughter!’
    Pahe always shrunk in on himself a little when Grandhe Jaffiahe was around; and Pashe, opposite in everything, always bristled outward a little. But they invited Grandhe in and he sat at the bar with them, and even took a little milk.