He imagined he heard Emma’s mocking voice.
You can’t do it, can you? You never were too good at politics, were you, Malenfant? — even in NASA — any place where the ancient primate strategies of knowing when to fight and when to groom, when to dominate and when to submit, were essential. Ah, but this is about more than politics, isn’t it, Malenfant? Are you growing a conscience? You, who lied his way to Washington and back to get his BDB off the ground, who used up people and spat them out on the way to achieving what you wanted? Now you stand here on this jungle Moon and you can’t swallow a few preachy platitudes to save your own worthless hide?…
Or, he thought, maybe McCann was right about me. So was my mother-in-law, come to that. Maybe all I ever wanted to do was crash and burn.
Praisegod’s foot was tapping out its nervous drumbeat. The Ham boy, seeming to sense the tension between the two men, slid off the desk and crawled behind Praisegod’s chair.
Malenfant took a breath. He said, “Why are you really so dead set against the hominids?” He glanced at the Neandertal boy; one eye and a thatch of ragged dark hair protruded from behind the chair leg. “Does this boy warm your bed, Praisegod Michael? Is that why you have to destroy him?”
Malenfant saw white all the way around Praisegod’s pupils, and a dribble of blood and snot was leaking from his nose. The man stood before Malenfant, close enough to smell the fishy stink of his breath. He whispered, “This time the whips will fillet the flesh off you, until the men will be flogging your neck and the soles of your feet. And I, I will prevail, in the light of His countenance.”
Malenfant had time for an instant of satisfaction. Got through to you, you bastard. Then he was clubbed to his knees.
Emma Stoney:
She spent days in the cliff-top forest, spying, scouting.
This patch of forest was damp and thin. There were extensive clearings where old trees had fallen to the ground in chaotic tangles of branches. Paths wound among the trees, marked out through rotting leaves, fungus-ridden trunks, brambles and crushed saplings. Many of these paths were made no doubt by animals, or perhaps hominids, the Nutcracker-folk or the Elf-folk. But some of them were, unmistakably, the work of humans; straight, sometimes rutted by wheels.
And the human paths converged on a township, a brooding, massive structure at the heart of the forest. It was the fortress of the Zealots.
The great gate of the compound would open a couple of times a day to let out or admit parties, apparently for hunting and provisioning. The open gates, swinging on massive hinges of rope, revealed a shabby cluster of huts and fire-pits within. The Zealot foragers, always men, always dressed in drab green-stained skins, were armed with pikes and bows and arrows. They stayed alert as they made their way along the paths they had worn between the trees.
The returning parties would call out informal halloos to let those inside know they wanted in. Nobody seemed to feel the need for passwords or other identifiers. But the gate openings were brief, and the forest beyond was always carefully watched by armed men. The foragers would return with sacks full of the forest’s fruits, or with bats or animals, commonly small hogs, or even grain and root vegetables brought in from the hinterland that must stretch beyond the forest.
But they would also bring home Elves, even the occasional Nutcracker, suspended limply from poles, heads lolling. The Zealots had no taboo, it seemed, over consuming the flesh of their apparent near-relatives — which she heard them call, in their thick, strangulated accent, bush meat. The hunters seemed to prize the hands and ears of infant Elves, which they would hack off and wear around their necks as gruesome trophies.
Also, less frequently, they brought home captured Runners. The Runners were always returned alive. The men and boys were evidently beaten into submission, their backs bearing the scars of whips and their faces misshapen from blows; they trudged through the forests with ropes around their necks and wrists, and with their long legs hobbled so they had to shuffle. She supposed the male Runners were brought back to the stockade as slave labour. Their strong, supple bodies and clever hands well qualified them for the role.
Perhaps some of the captured women and girls were used that way too, but Emma suspected they had a darker fate in store. They were returned to the township with bite marks and scratches on their breasts and blood running down their legs. Some of the boys seemed to have been similarly abused. Evidently the hunters took the breaking-in of a new captive as a perk of the job. Emma had no way of knowing how many of these victims had fought too hard, and ended their lives in the forest in uncomprehending misery beneath the grunting bodies of the Zealots.
She was relieved her instinct had always been to keep out of sight of these people. She didn’t quite know what reaction they would have to finding a human woman alone in the forest, but she didn’t feel inclined to take a chance on their charity.
At last her spying paid off. She overheard a group of hunters, as they lazed in the shade of a fig tree, feeding themselves on its plump fruit and talking loosely. Their gossip was of a major expedition — it almost sounded military to take on a new group the Zealots called the Daemons. The Zealots sounded alternately apprehensive and excited about the coming conflict; there was much speculation about the quality of the women among the Daemons.
Emma knew nothing about these Daemons, and couldn’t care less. But if a large number of the township’s able bodies was going to be taken away, she sensed a window of opportunity.
She sat in the cave before Joshua, holding his massive head with both her hands on his filthy cheeks, making him face her. “Hunting Praisegod Michael. Tomorrow. Hunting Praisegod. Do you understand?”
“Hunt Prai’go’,” he said at last, thickly, his damaged tongue protruding. “Tomorr’.”
“Yes. Tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow. All right?”
He gazed back at her, his eyes containing an eerie sharpness that none of his people seemed to share. Perhaps there was madness there — but even so, it was a much more human gaze than any she had encountered since losing Sally and Maxie. But there was absolutely no guile in those eyes, none at all, and no element of calculation or planning.
She released him.
He picked up a rock he had been knapping, and resumed working on it, steady, patient. She sat down in the corner of the cave, her legs drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her knees, watching him. The blue-grey glow of the sky, leaching of light, reflected in his eyes as he worked; often, like most Ham knappers, he didn’t even look at the stone he was working.
Tomorrow, this child-man would have to take part in a concerted assault.
Not for the first time Emma wondered what the hell she was doing here. How have I come so far? I’m an accountant, for God’s sake…
She had spent the days waiting for the Zealots” expedition trying to raise a fighting force from among the Hams. But she had quickly learned that it was impossible to turn these huge, powerful, oddly gentle creatures into anything resembling soldiers — not in a short time, probably not if she kept at it for ever. She had hit at last on the notion of making the assault a hunt, the one activity where the Hams did appear to show something resembling guile.
But even now she didn’t know how many of them she could count on. She, and Joshua, had managed to enthuse a few of the younger men to join the battle. But when she approached them the next day even the most ardent would-be warriors would have forgotten all about the project.
Another problem was that the Hams” only notion of actual combat was hand-to hand: just yesterday she had seen three of the men wrestle an overgrown buck antelope to the ground with their bare hands. It was a strategy that had worked for them so far, evidently, or the cold hand of natural selection would long ago have eliminated them — even if they paid the price in severe injuries and shortened lifespans. But it wasn’t a strategy that would work well in a war, even against the disorganized and weakened rabble she hoped the Zealots would prove to be.