He kicked, and each spasm of movement took him further than the last. His hands were still pinned hard to his sides, but he thought, Maybe if I keep going down, the hole will get wider, maybe wide enough for me to turn myself round, and if I do that, I can use my hands to claw my way back up the hole. No reason to believe it would turn out that way, but the hole was so improbable anyway that the unlikelihood of a wide spot didn't seem to matter, because none of the rules seemed to apply any more. A wide spot was no more improbable than a bottomless hole at the back of a boar's nest. He kicked very hard, and shot unstoppably forward, as if sliding on ice.

The slide ended when his head and shoulders ran into something hard. There was a long moment that consisted of nothing but pain, followed by the crushing weight of understanding. The way ahead was blocked. No wide spot, and he couldn't go forward or back.

Ironically, he could breathe quite freely, and the air was better here. He kept still and held his breath, and felt air moving against his face. He knew that meant something, but for a very long time he couldn't figure out what it was. Then it hit him like a punch in the mouth. Air was moving up the hole, so the hole must be open at both ends. It came out somewhere, and if it did, so could he. So could he, if it wasn't for the fact that the way was blocked.

He hadn't expected anger, and when it came it shocked him at first. But it felt warm and it made him feel strong. He scrabbled with his toes and found a ledge or a stone or something he could push against. All that got him was a jet of pain in his neck. He pushed again, not with muscles but sheer affronted rage (because it wasn't fair fair that the hole should be open but blocked by one stupid obstruction), and something shifted; he was pushing his nose against a hard thing. He'd have laughed if he could. His last effort had moved him a few inches, and the only thing wedging him stuck was his stupid nose. that the hole should be open but blocked by one stupid obstruction), and something shifted; he was pushing his nose against a hard thing. He'd have laughed if he could. His last effort had moved him a few inches, and the only thing wedging him stuck was his stupid nose.

Well, he thought. No choice in the matter, really.

There was a foothold. He found it, settled his foot firmly against it, took the decision and kicked. He heard his nose break, felt the pain (there was, curiously, a tiny interval between the sound and the feeling) and applied more pressure with his thigh and knee muscles. He moved suddenly, as things do when they're stuck and suddenly dislodged. He felt something sharp scooping skin and meat off the point of his shoulder, and then he was past that too. The next kick moved him freely, two more, and he was sliding again, gathering speed, moving fast enough for the friction to shred his clothes and burn his skin. He stopped with a jolt that hurt so much it didn't hurt at all. He opened his eyes, and saw light.

For some time it was simply too bright, and he wondered if it had burned his eyes out. But gradually it dimmed, and he could make out a dark frame to it, which he deduced must be the mouth of the hole. It was quite close-ten feet, say. He tried to breathe and realised his nose wasn't working, so he drank air through his mouth. It tasted of blood.

It took him a while and a lot of scrabbling to find a foothold firm enough to move him forward, and that was only inches. The sides of the hole were maddeningly smooth here, and his toes skidded off. But the hole was just a little bit wider and by squirming and twisting, like a drill in its slot, he managed to work himself onto his back. The roof of the hole was a little bit rougher, and he found a foothold that took him his own length closer to the light, at which point there was room for his arms to move. He laughed. He'd almost forgotten what they were for.

He twisted back onto his stomach, dug his fingernails into the sides of the hole-they were quite soft, and he remembered it would be chalk-and dragged himself into the furnace of white light. He was almost through when he realised that he'd been missing something.

The hole was pure white light, not green or brown. And there was a context, which he'd completely forgotten about.

The boar's nest had been close to the edge of the cliff. The hole at the back of the nest had taken him a long way down and-since it had turned out to be a sort of a chute, not a sheer drop-an unknown but material distance sideways, in other words, towards the cliff face. Therefore the white hole in front of him had to be a window in the cliff, and he had no idea how high up above the ground it might be.

Not to worry, he told himself (and if it was a lie he really didn't care). He edged forward until his head popped out into open air. He looked down. Directly below, he could see gra.s.s, with a tiny fringe of white chalk at the bottom edge of his field of vision. At a guess, about ten feet, fifteen at the most.

He wasn't conscious of making a decision. He heard himself say, "Oh well," out loud, and kicked hard.

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Furio hissed, "She's a girl girl."

He realised that he'd spoken too loudly, and everybody was looking at him.

"Yes," his aunt said crisply, "isn't she? Furio, meet your cousin Teucer."

His uncle was trying not to laugh. His aunt was pointedly not looking at him, the way she didn't look at beggars, or dogs mating in the street. Aspero and Lugano, the hired men, had somehow contrived to vanish inside themselves. They stood perfectly still, waiting for something to happen. And his cousin Teucer, newly arrived from Home, smiled at him.

"h.e.l.lo," she said.

Furio made some kind of vague noise. It sounded like a grunting pig, but it was the very best he could do. "This is your uncle Marzo," his aunt was saying; Uncle grinned like a shark. "I'll show you your room," she went on, putting a hand on the small of the girl's back and shunting her towards the door.

When they'd gone, there was a moment of perfect stillness, such as there must have been at the very beginning of the world. Then Aspero and Lugano melted away, and Furio turned on his uncle like a boar facing the hounds.

"Teucer's not a girl's name," he growled. "Someone should've told me."

His uncle shrugged. "Sorry," he said. "I a.s.sumed your aunt had told you, and presumably she thought I'd told you. Anyway..."

"She must think I'm a-"

"And she wouldn't be far wrong," Uncle interrupted. "Would she?"

Furio made his words fail me gesture, a cross between scything hay and swatting a low fly. "I'm going upstairs," he said.

"Like h.e.l.l you are," Uncle replied kindly. "You're going to stay right here and mind the store while your aunt and I make our guest feel at home."

Furio looked at him. Uncle was known to be unreliable where pretty girls half his age were concerned. But he laughed. "Don't worry," he said. "Your aunt'd kill me. Mind the store."

Alone with the stock, Furio tried as hard as he could to think of something else, but he couldn't. He kept hearing his own voice, over and over again, and each time he heard it, it killed a small part of his soul. Three words, three syllables, and his life was effectively over. Then, like someone testing a sore tooth with the tip of his tongue, he thought about the smile. It had been-he took a moment to compose his mind; this called for scientific a.n.a.lysis-it had been like one of those puzzles, where someone cuts up a picture into random shapes, and you've got to fit them back together again. The smile had been the moment when the picture emerges from the jumble. As soon as he saw it, things had started to make sense, for the first time in a long time. But that was after after he'd said the three little words. he'd said the three little words.

It was an anomaly, an equation that refused to balance, and it was making his head hurt. He pulled open a drawer and started to count the four-inch nails.

There were 107 of the four-inch, ninety-six of the five-inch, forty-eight of the six-inch round and 128 of the six-inch square tapered. He was about to embark on the four-inch square tapered when he heard boots in the porch. He looked up, and a man walked into the shop backwards.

The man was Rubrio Lucullo, a vague sort of man who appeared occasionally to buy wire and nails. He was walking backwards because he was carrying what looked like a dead body, his arms crooked under the corpse's armpits. Carrying the feet was another man, familiar face, name forgotten or never ascertained. The corpse was a hideous thing, smeared all over with blood and chalk dust.

"Clear the table," Rubrio snapped. "Quick."

Furio didn't move. "Mister Lucullo?"

"Clear the f.u.c.king table."

Furio jumped off his stool, darted round the counter and stopped in front of the long, low table on which Uncle displayed his selection of quality fabrics. He hesitated for a split second, because the stock was worth money, then dragged the rolls of cloth onto the floor. With a grunt, Rubrio and the other man hauled the corpse onto the table, straightened up and winced.

"Where's your uncle?" Rubrio said.

Furio heard him, but the words seemed to bounce off. The body on the table was Gignomai.

Rubrio repeated his question. Furio looked at him.

"Is he dead?" he asked quietly.

But Rubrio shook his head. "Get your uncle," he said. "Don't just stand there. Get your uncle Get your uncle."

The message sank in, eventually. Furio backed away a step or two, twisted round, hit his knee on the edge of the counter, and crashed through the back-room door. Uncle, he thought, upstairs. He ran up the stairs as if they were on fire, and met his uncle on the landing.

"What's all the racket?" Uncle asked.

"There's been-" He realised he didn't know how to finish the sentence. "Emergency," he said. "Man hurt. Please?"

It was one of Uncle's good times. The bad times were when he was greedy or cruel, or when he made a nuisance of himself with girls. The good times were when something terrible happened and Uncle kept his head and knew exactly what to do. That was when Furio forgave him for the other stuff.

"He's all right," Uncle said, after a long few seconds when Furio couldn't breathe. "Furio, run and get Simica. If we're lucky, he'll be home."

But Simica, who'd been first mate on a salt-beef freighter and whose head contained most of the colony's medical knowledge, wasn't home. His door was locked (he was a very mistrustful man) and his horse wasn't in the stable. Furio groaned out loud and ran back to the store. When he got there, the porch was already crowded: men from the mill and the forge and the lumber yard, several women, a few children, one sitting on the floor trying to see between people's legs. For a moment, Furio was too polite to barge through. Then he shouted, "Excuse me, please," and charged like a boar.

Uncle was peeling a strip of tattered cloth away from Gignomai's shoulder. Aunt was standing next to him, holding a bowl in one hand and a pad of rag in the other. Uncle turned his head as Furio burst in, and smiled at him.

"He'll be fine," he said. "His nose is broken and he's got some pretty nasty cuts and sc.r.a.pes, and he's had a bash on the head. Simica not there?"

Furio didn't reply. He knew he couldn't just stay put indefinitely, but he couldn't bring himself to come any closer. "What happened?" he said.

Uncle shrugged. "Rubrio and Scleria here found him," he said, "down by the river. Saw it was the youngest met'Oc boy, so they fetched him here. For some reason," Uncle added, with a very slight frown. "You got any idea? He's your friend."

Furio shook his head. But the white chalk dust meant something, he knew that. Chalk could only mean the west cliff of the Tabletop: the sheer drop, from their world into ours, which n.o.body could possibly survive.

"My guess is, he fell off the cliff," Uncle said, teasing a shred of cloth out of the ploughed-field mess of blood and dirt. "In which case, he's the luckiest man alive. Must be a hundred and twenty feet."

Furio crossed the room and sat down on a crate, as far from the low table as he could get. He had an entire world to reinterpret, and he found it hard to believe that he was the same person who'd been in despair over saying something stupid only a few hours earlier. Very briefly he toyed with the idea that it was a punishment, but he dismissed it as far-fetched and hysterical. Instead, he experimented with placing other bodies on the low table: Uncle, Aunt, Lugano. The conclusion he was forced to troubled him.

"Are you all right?"

He looked up, and saw his new cousin looking down at him. She looked solemn and sympathetic, and she didn't affect him at all.

"Fine," he said. "Thanks."

"That man's your friend, isn't he?"

Furio nodded. "Gignomai," he said. "Yes. I've known him since we were kids."

She sat down beside him, perching like a bird on a thin branch. "Uncle Marzo says he's knocked out but he should be all right," she said, and he wondered why he hadn't noticed her there before. Probably because she was short, and Aunt had been standing in front of her. "My father was a surgeon," she said.

For the second time that day she had his undivided attention. "Do you know about...?"

She nodded. "I grew up with strangers bleeding on the kitchen table," she said. "It's all right, your uncle knows what he's doing. I watched him. He's rolled back the eyelid to see if one pupil's bigger than the other-that's a bad sign-but there wasn't anything like that. Setting the broken nose shouldn't be too much of a problem, it's not broken in a bad place. Probably just as well to do it while he's still asleep, though. It hurts like h.e.l.l."

She spoke calmly, as if about ordinary things, and he couldn't help wondering what she'd seen over the years in her house where they ate dinner on a table where people were cut open and sewn back together. One thing he could be sure about. She wasn't just a pretty girl any more. He wasn't sure if this was a good or a bad thing, but he postponed the a.n.a.lysis and the decision.

He remembered something. "Your father," he said. "You said he was-" was-"

"He died," she replied. "He caught something from a patient, and it wasn't written up in any of his books. Mother said he died of pique because he couldn't identify what was wrong." She shrugged; her shoulders were thin and sharply defined. "Mother died too, not long afterwards. I think it was consumption. So my uncle sent for me to come here."

He looked at her. "What do you make of it?"

"I don't know," she replied. "We lived in Colichamard-that's a biggish city on the coast. But we always spent the summers on my mother's cousin's farm, so I'm used to the country."

"It's very quiet here," he heard himself say. "You may find it's a bit too quiet, after the city."

She smiled. "Maybe," she said. "I don't think so. Back home, women don't leave the house much. Not our sort, anyhow. And I a.s.sume the inside of one house is pretty much like another. Actually," she added, "this one's bigger. I hadn't realised I'd have a room all to myself."

The thought that anything here could be better than Home wasn't one he'd had to contend with before. "One thing we've got here," he said, "is plenty of s.p.a.ce. That's about all we've got here, though. Loads of s.p.a.ce but not enough people to fill it."

There was movement at the table. They were lifting Gignomai, carrying him upstairs. He was awkward to handle, like a large piece of furniture. "He'll be all right," she said.

He stayed where he was. "G.o.d only knows what happened to him."

She frowned. "Is it true he's one of the met'Oc?"

"That's right. Youngest son. You've heard of them?"

"I heard them talking about the met'Oc on the ship. I thought they were all traitors and criminals."

When Gignomai woke up he was lying on a bed, which made him think nothing had happened. But the ceiling was different.

He tried to move, and everything hurt.

There was someone sitting next to him, a stranger, a young woman, looking at him.

"It's all right," she said.

From time to time there had been accidents on the farm, so he knew perfectly well that if someone says "It's all right," there must be something horribly wrong. He tried to breathe in and couldn't.

"Breathe through your mouth."

"Hm?"

"Your nose is broken," the girl said, and he remembered. He'd broken it deliberately, to get past the blockage. Had he really done that? "And you've got a broken rib and a nasty gash on your right shoulder. Are you feeling dizzy or sick?"

He could only see half of her, at the very edge of his vision, so he turned his head a little. "Who the h.e.l.l are you?" he said.

She smiled at him. Quite nice-looking. "I'm Teucer," she said. "I'm Furio's cousin."

"He hasn't got a-"

"From Home. I arrived yesterday."

Too much information and not enough, at the same time. He remembered something extremely important. "The sword," he said.

"Sorry?"

"My sword," he repeated, and he could feel fear gushing up inside him, like filling a pitcher from a spring. "I had a sword with me. And a pillowcase."

She frowned, just a little bit. He knew what she was thinking.

"Really," he said. "It's not the bash on the head talking. I had a sword, and a pillowcase with all my stuff in it."

She didn't say anything, and he thought, No, that's right, I must've dropped them when I dived into the boar's nest. Which means...

"What are you doing?"

"Getting out of bed. What does it look like?"

"Don't be stupid."

He looked at her, then gave up. "You don't understand," he said. "I've got to go back and get it, before my brother finds it."

"A sword," she said, dismissing all swords everywhere as beneath contempt. "Listen, you've got mild concussion. If you lie still, you'll be fine. If you get up and try rushing around, you'll do yourself serious harm. Do you understand?"

She was quite possibly the most annoying person he'd ever met in his life. "Yes, fine," he snapped. "I think I'd like to go to sleep now."

She didn't move. "Good idea."

He closed his eyes, counted to 150, and opened them again. She was still there.