At Praisegod’s chapel-residence Malenfant was kept waiting, standing before Praisegod’s empty desk bound hand and foot, for maybe an hour.
Finally Praisegod walked in, slowly, contemplative, his Ham boy at his side. Praisegod didn’t look at Malenfant. He sat at his desk, and a Ham girl brought in a tray of chopped fish set on slabs of hard, dark bread, with a bowl of what looked like mustard and a wooden goblet of wine. Praisegod ate a little of the fish, dipping it in the mustard, and then he passed the rest to the Ham boy, who sat on the floor and ate ravenously.
Praisegod’s manner seemed distracted to Malenfant, almost confused. He said rapidly, “I have been forced to punish Sir McCann. You see why — you witnessed his blasphemous disrespect. His soul is hard, set in a mould of iniquity. But you — you are different. You seek the woman you love; you are moved by a chivalrous zeal. In you I see a soul that could be turned to higher goals.”
“Don’t count on it,” Malenfant said.
Praisegod’s eyes narrowed. “You should not presume on God’s grace.”
“This place has nothing to do with God,” Malenfant said evenly, staring hard at Praisegod. “You play with human lives, but you don’t even see that much, do you? Praisegod, this place — this Moon — is an artefact. Not made by God. Humans. Men, Praisegod. Men as different from you or me as we are different from the Elves, maybe, but men nevertheless. They are moving this whole damn Moon from one reality strand to the next, from Earth to Earth. And everything you see here, the mixing up of uncounted possibilities, is because of that moving. Because of people. Do you get it? God has nothing to do with it.”
Praisegod closed his eyes. “This is a time of confusion. Of change… I think you may yet serve my purpose, and therefore God’s. But I must shape you, like clay on the wheel. But there is much bile in you that must be driven out.” He nodded to Sprigge. “A hundred stripes to start with.”
Malenfant was dragged out of the room. “You’re a savage, Praisegod. And you run a jerkwater dump. If this is some holy crusade, why do you allow your men to run a forced brothel?”
But Praisegod wasn’t listening. He had turned to his Ham boy, and stroked his misshapen head.
Malenfant was taken to a room further down the dismal corridor.
He found himself stretched out over an open wooden frame, set at forty-five degrees above the horizontal. His feet were bound to the base of the frame. Sprigge wrapped rope around his wrists and pulled Malenfant’s arms above his head until his joints ached.
Sprigge looked Malenfant in the eye. “I have to make it hard,” he said. “It’ll be the worse for me if I spare you.”
“Just do your job,” Malenfant said sourly.
“I know Praisegod well enough. That fat Englishman just riled him. He thinks you might be useful to him. But you must play a canny game. If you go badly with him, he’ll ill use you, Malenfant. I’ve seen that before too. He has a lot of devices more clever than my old whip, I’ll tell you. He has gadgets that crush your thumbs or fingers until they are as flat as a gutted fish. Or he will put a leg-clamp on you, a thing he’ll use on recalcitrant Runner folk, and every day we have to turn it a little tighter, until the bones are crushed and the very marrow is leaking into your boots.”
Malenfant tried to lift his head. “I don’t have any boots.”
“Boots will be provided.”
A joke? He could dimly make out Sprigge’s face, and it bore an expression of something like compassion — compassion, under a layer of dirt and weathered scars and tangled beard, the mask of a hard life. “Why do you follow him, Sprigge? He’s a madman.”
Sprigge tested the bonds and stepped back. “Sometimes the lads go off into the bush. They think life is easier there, that they can have their pick of the bush women, not like the bleeding whores they keep here. Well, the bush folk kill them, if the animals or the bugs don’t first. As simple as that. Without Praisegod we’d all be prey, see. He organizes us, Sir Malenfant. We’re housed and we’re fed and nobody harms us. And now that he’s taken up with the Daemons well, he has big ideas. You have to admire a man for that.”
Malenfant thought, What the hell is a Daemon? He felt his jacket being pulled off his back. The air was damp and cold.
“Now, a hundred stripes is a feeler. Sir Malenfant. I know how you’ll bear it. But you’ll live; remember that.” He stepped away, into the dark.
Malenfant heard running footsteps.
And then he heard the lash of the whip, an instant before the pain shot through his nervous system. It was like a burn, a sudden, savage burn. He felt blood trickling over his sides and falling to the floor, and he understood why the frame under him had to be open.
More of Sprigge’s “stripes” rained down, and the pain cascaded. There seemed to be no cut-off in Malenfant’s head, each stroke seemingly doubling the agony that went before, a strange calculus of suffering.
He didn’t try to keep from crying out.
Maybe he lost consciousness before the hundred were done.
At last he was hit by a rush of water — it felt ice-cold — and then more pain reached him, sinking into every gash on his back, like cold fire.
Sprigge appeared before him. “The salty back,” he said, cutting Malenfant’s wrists free. “It’ll help you heal.”
Malenfant fell to the floor, which stank of his own blood, like the iron scent of the crimson dust of this rusted Red Moon.
A heavy form moved around him in the dark. He cowered, expecting more punishment.
But there was a hand on his brow, water at his lips. He could smell the dense scent of a Ham — perhaps it was Julia. The Ham helped him lie flat on his belly, with his ripped jacket under his face. His back was bathed — the wounds stung with every drop — and then something soft and light was laid over his back, leaves that rustled.
The square window in the ceiling above showed diffuse grey-blue. It was evening, or very early morning.
He was left alone after that, and he slept, falling into a deeper slumber.
When he woke again that square of sky was bright blue. By its light he saw that the leaves on his back were from a banana tree. His pain seemed soothed.
“…Malenfant. Malenfant, are you there?”
The voice was just a whisper, coming from the direction of the door.
Malenfant got his hands under his chest, pushed himself up to a crawling position. He felt the leaves fall away from his back. His bare chest was sticky with his own dried blood, and with every move he felt scabs crack, wounds ache.
He crawled to the wall by the door, kneeling there in the mud and blood.
“McCann?”
“Malenfant! By God it’s good to hear the voice of a civilized man. Have they hurt you?”
Malenfant grimaced. “A ‘feeler,’ Sprigge called it.”
“It could get worse, Malenfant.”
“I know that.”
McCann’s voice sounded odd — thick, indistinct, as if he were talking around something in his mouth. Flogging, branding, tongue-boring, Malenfant recalled. The penalty for blasphemy.
“What have they done to you, Hugh?”
“My punishment was enthusiastically delivered,” McCann lisped.
“One must admire their godly zeal… And the beatings are not the half of it. Malenfant, he has me labouring in the fields: pulling ploughs, along with the Runner slaves. It is not the physical trial — I can barely add an ounce to the mighty power of my Runner companions — but the indignity, you see. Praisegod has made me one with the sub-men, and his brutish serfs mock me as I toil.”
“You can stand a little mockery.”
“Would that were true! Praisegod understands how to hurt beyond the crude infliction of blows and cuts and burns; and the shame of this casting-down has hurt me grievously — and he knows it. But his punishment will not last long, Malenfant. I am not so young nor as fit as I was; soon, I think, I will evade Praisegod’s monstrous clutches once and for all… But it need not be so for you. Malenfant, I think Praisegod has some sympathy for you — or purpose, at least. Tell him whatever it is you think he wants to hear. That way you will be spared his wrath.”
Malenfant said softly, “You were the one who said you could do business with him.”
“Do as I say, not as I do,” McCann hissed. “It is my faith, Malenfant, my faith. Praisegod arouses in me a righteous rage which I cannot contain, whatever the cost to myself. But he is an intelligent man, a cunning man. I suspect his grasp of his ugly crew here was slipping. I have heard the men mutter. They tell fortunes, you know, with cowry shells — much handled, shining like old ivory… Superstition! A fatal flaw for a regime whose legitimacy comes entirely from religion. He was on his uppers, Malenfant, until quite recently. But now his inchoate ambitions have found a new clarity, a plausibility. He has found new allies: these Daemons, whoever or whatever they are. He has suddenly become a much more credible, and dangerous, figure… If I had half a brain I would stay in his fold.
“But you are different, Malenfant. Without faith — a paradoxically enviable condition! — you have no moral foundation to inhibit you; you must lie and cheat and steal; you must kowtow to Praisegod; you must do everything you can, everything you must, to survive.”
“I’ll try,” Malenfant gasped.
“Will you, my friend? Will you truly? There is a darkness in you, Malenfant. I saw it from the beginning. You may choose, without knowing it, to use Praisegod as the final instrument of your own destruction.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You must look into your heart, Malenfant. Think about the logic of your life… The day advances. Soon I will be called to my work in the fields, and I must sleep if I can.”
“Take care of yourself, Hugh.”
“Yes… God be with you, my friend.”
That night Malenfant called McCann’s name. The only reply was a kind of gasping, inarticulate, and a moist slithering.
The night after that Malenfant called for McCann, over and over, but there was no reply.
Emma Stoney:
She had first become aware of Joshua as an absence. There was a spare place at the hearths of Ruth and others, portions of meat left set aside by the hunters. It was a pattern she had noticed before when somebody had recently died; the Hams clearly remembered their dead, and they made these subtle tributes of absence — halfway to a ritual, she supposed.
Then, one day, Joshua came back.
Within a couple of days it was clear Joshua was not like the other Hams.
He was perhaps twenty-five years old, as much as she was any judge of the ages of these people. His body bore the marks of savage heatings, and his tongue seemed to be damaged, making his speech even more impenetrable than the rest.
