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said Tighe.
    ‘You want to know how the worldwall is, I think.’
    Tighe kept stealing glances at young Wittershe. Her hair. Her mouth when it smiled. It was murky and very close inside this part of Old Witterhe’s house; a single grass-torch gave off smouldering light that threw swollen shadows on the wall.
    The smoke from the thorn-pipe was sparking tears in Tighe’s eyes. He kept grinding the heel of his hand into his eye-sockets, but that only made them redder and more sore. Old Witterhe kept stroking the top of Wittershe’s head, smoothing her hair.
    ‘Now your Grandhe,’ the old man said, raspingly, ‘your Grandhe.’ He stopped, a look of concentration came over his eyes and he coughed suddenly, loudly. That seemed to clear his voice. ‘Now your Grandhe,’ he went on, more fluently, ‘he says that God built the wall, but if you ask him
why
he just says that
whys
are for God and not for man.’
    Tighe tried to clear his throat, but the smoke was going right into his lungs. Wittershe didn’t seem to mind it; but she was used to it, he supposed. He nodded.
    ‘Now I don’t see why we can’t look at questions like
why
, you understand,’ said Witterhe. ‘Why did God build the wall?’
    ‘The other day I thought’, said Tighe, ‘that maybe there was another wall.A perfectly blank wall, away in the distance. I thought maybe that was why the sky was blue.’
    But Witterhe wasn’t listening. ‘Now when
I
build a wall, it is for a particular reason. I build a wall to keep something out, or to keep something in. That is what a wall is
for
, do you see? So we have to ask the same question. What does God want to keep in? Or out?’
    He glared at Tighe, as if expecting an answer. But apart from the
frisson
of knowing that he was listening to heresy, that his Grandhe would fly into one of his cold rages if he heard these words, he had little interest in what Witterhe was saying.
    ‘God lives on top of the wall,’ said Tighe. ‘He has the best view up there. Maybe that’s why he built it, to give himself the view. Maybe he built the wall to sit on.’
    Witterhe coughed, then cackled. ‘No, no, that’s not it. Let me ask you about the sun.’
    ‘The sun.’
    ‘The sun goes up. That goes direct against the law of gravity. So how does it happen?’
    Tighe pondered. ‘I never thought of it,’ he said.
    ‘You did
not
, no indeed,’ said Witterhe. ‘Nobody thinks of these things because they seem so plain and straightforward. But we still need to explain ourselves. You know what the sun is?’
    Tighe wasn’t sure what the question meant.
    ‘The sun is a hot-hot ball of stone. It’s rock, like the wall, but it’s heated up. That’s why we feel its heat and its light. So I ask you again: how does this enormous flaming ball of stone rise
upwards
against the pull of gravity?’
    ‘You’re teasing him, pahe,’ said Wittershe and smiled at Tighe.
    ‘Oh no, oh no,’ said her pahe. ‘He’s a bright boy, our little Princeling, I’m trying to bring out the thinking in him. It needs to be practised, thinking, or it withers away. When he gets to be Prince himself, he’ll need wisdom like this. So how does the hot,
heavy
stone rise up against gravity?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Tighe.
    ‘If
you
wanted a stone to go up,’ said Witterhe, ‘what would you do? You’d
throw
it up. What else?’
    ‘I’d throw it up,’ conceded Tighe.
    ‘And why do you think God is different? Now don’t tell your Grandhe, or he’ll have the village band together and denounce me as a heretic. But isn’t it plain, isn’t it
logic
that this is what happens? Every night God heats a giant ball of stone, one of the pebbles from God’s beach. He heats it up till it shines with heat, and then come morning he
hurls
it upwards. That’s what we see, rising through the day, God’s missile. And every day we watchit, without thinking about it; it goes up and over the top of the wall. So that must be where God is throwing it.