“You can’t believe that’s true.”
McCann said stiffly, “I would sooner believe it than join those poor Runner gentlemen behind their plough.”
They passed a small farmhouse, just a rough sod hut. In a yard of red mud, children were playing — they looked like human children, a boy and a girl. They gazed at the approaching party, then ran into the hut. A man emerged from the hut, stripped to the waist, bare-headed. He looked apprehensive.
From his Runner mount, Sprigge nodded to him. “No tithes to collect today, George.”
“Aye, Master Sprigge.” The man George nodded back, cordially enough, but his eyes were wary, fixed on Sprigge as if he were a predator.
They moved on, following the river as it worked its way towards the Beltway forest. As the land became less arid, the cultivation spread away from the river bank. Soon Malenfant was surrounded by fields, toiling hominids, an occasional human. It might have been a scene from some vision of the old west, or maybe the European Middle Ages, if not for the humanoid forms of the beasts of burden here, the unmistakably Neandertal features of their supervisors, and the unremitting crimson glower of the land itself.
But this was a genuine colony, he thought, a growing community, for all its ugliness — unlike the dying, etiolated English camp.
Rain began to fall. The rough path by the river bank soon turned to mud, and the party trudged on in miserable silence. Malenfant tucked his head closer to Julia’s chest. With remarkable kindness she leaned over him and sheltered him from the rain with her own bare back, and Malenfant could not find the strength to protest.
Again he dozed.
When he woke, he was dumped on his feet. They had reached the Zealot fortress, it seemed.
They were in a clearing, surrounded by dense wood; Malenfant hadn’t even noticed they had come back to the forest. Ditches, ramparts, gates and drawbridges stretched all the way around the township. Sharpened stakes were stuck in the sides of the ramparts, so that the compound bristled, like some great hedgehog of wood and mud.
A big gate was opened. They were pushed inside.
The encampment was a place of rambling muddy paths and ugly, low-tech buildings placed haphazardly. There was one central building that looked more sturdily built, mud brick on a wooden frame, like a chapel. Aside from that, the huts were so rough they seemed to have grown out of the debris that littered the muddy ground. They were built of stripped saplings and wattles, and laid over with palm fronds. Everything showed signs of much use and recycling; here was half of what looked like a dugout canoe, for example, serving as a chicken-coop.
There were no straight lines anywhere, no squares or rectangles, no hard edges; everything was sloppy, all the lines blurred. It was as if the first arrivals here had just marked out trails where they wandered and put up their wattle-and daub huts where they felt like. There was none of the regularity and discipline of the British compound:
Malenfant sensed McCann’s impatience at this disorderliness.
Malenfant’s arms were untied. He could barely move them because of cramp, and he could feel where the cord had cut into his wrists.
With McCann, he was pushed into a dark, stinking sod hut. He couldn’t see what had become of Julia. The hut was dark, the floor was just mud, uneven. A door of saplings bound together by liana twine blocked the door.
Malenfant limped to a dark corner and slumped there. The floor was greasy and black; when he lifted his hand a great slick sheen came away with it. The whole place stank like a toilet.
Termite passageways, like the stems of some dead plant, curled up the walls and disappeared into the wooden beams and the thatch. A gecko clambered across the ceiling, incurious.
He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since being hit over the head by the Zealots. He felt as if he had been systematically pummelled, all over his body, with a baseball bat. And here he was in some quasi-medieval prison block, lying in filth. The world he had come from — of NASA and Houston and Washington, of computers and phones and cars and planes — seemed utterly unreal, evanescent as the shining surface of a bubble, a dream.
What a mess, he thought.
McCann was waxing enthusiastic. “I see the pattern, Malenfant. The Hams and Runners surely do not have the wit to be rebellious or to long for escape; unlike human slaves it is unlikely they can conceive of freedom. Besides, if you get them young enough, you can quite easily break their spirits, as with a young horse. If each man controls, say, ten of the Ham bosses, and then each Ham in turn controls ten Runners, you have a formidable army of workers. And at the top of it you have this fellow Praisegod Michael of whom Sprigge has spoken, who creams off the tithes. It is like a vast, spreading, self-sustaining—”
“Prison camp,” Malenfant said sourly.
“Oh, much more than that, Malenfant. Think how carefully the strata of this little society are defined. You have the humans, with of course their own ranks and order. Beneath them you have your Hams, who in turn lord it over the Runners. And since in this case each lower rank is clearly the intellectual inferior of that above, you have a social order that reflects the natural order. It is a hierarchy as stable as a cathedral.”
Malenfant growled, “I thought you despised the Zealots. You wouldn’t tell me a damn word about them.”
“I think I am beginning to see I have underestimated them, Malenfant. Oh, this is a place of repellent squalor, of blood and mud. It is cruel, Malenfant. I don’t deny it. But those subject to the greatest cruelty, as far as I can see, are those least capable of perceiving it. And as a social arrangement it is intricate and marvellous. One must admire efficiency when one finds it, whatever one’s moral qualms.”
He sounded brittle, almost feverish, Malenfant thought dully. This bizarre mood of his, this fan-worship of the Zealots, could probably evaporate as fast as it had come.
The hell with it. Malenfant closed his eyes.
But still, he saw Emma’s face in his mind’s eye, bright and clear, as if she stood before him. He probed a pocket on his sleeve. The spyglass lens still nestled there, hard and round under his fingers, comforting.
McCann went to a window — just a hole in the wall, unglazed. He called, “We need water and food. And tell him, Sprigge! Tell your Praisegod Michael we are Englishmen! It will go worse for you if you fail!”
McCann shook him awake. “We have an invitation to dinner, Malenfant! How jolly exciting.”
A sullen Zealot had brought them a wooden pail of water. They both inspected this suspiciously; they were ferociously thirsty, but in the dim light diffusing from the window, the water looked cloudy.
McCann shrugged. “Needs must.” He plunged his hands into the water and scooped up mouthfuls, which he gulped down.
Malenfant followed suit. The water tasted sour, but it had no odour.
When they were done they used the rest of the water to wash themselves. Malenfant cleaned dried blood and grit out of wounds on his bare feet, wrists and neck.
McCann used the water to slick down his hair. He even produced a tie from one jacket pocket and knotted it around his neck. “Impression is everything,” he said to Malenfant. “Outer form. Get that right and the rest follows. Eh?”
The door was pushed open, its leather hinges creaking. Sprigge walked in, looking as dusty as when they had all walked in from the plains. “You have your wish, gentlemen.” He raised his fist. “But any defiance or dissimulation and you’ll know my wrath.”
McCann and Malenfant nodded silently.
They were led out of the hut, into a broad compound. It was raining, and the evening was drawing in. The ground was just red dirt, hard-packed by the passage of human feet. But it was heavily rain-soaked, and Malenfant felt the mud seep between his naked toes.