With some care he selected a broad-trunked tree. He sat down beneath it. He reached into his trousers to scratch his testicles, and emitted a long, luxurious fart. Then he raised the bamboo to his lips. To Joshua’s astonishment, a foamy liquid gushed from the bamboo into the man’s mouth. “Up your arse, Praisegod Michael.” He raised the flask, and drank again. Soon he began to wail. “There is a lady, sweet and kind…”

Mary clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. The Zealot was squealing like a sickly child.

Joshua was fascinated by the bamboo flask, by the way the murky liquid poured out into the man’s mouth and down his bearded chin.

The Zealot finished off the contents of his flask. He settled further back against his tree trunk, tucking his arms into his sleeves. He had a broad-rimmed hat on his head, and as he reclined it tipped down over his eyes, hiding his face. His mouth popped open, and soon rattling snores issued from it.

Joshua and Mary crept forward until they stood over the sleeping Zealot. Joshua bent to pick up the bamboo. He tipped it upside down. A little foamy fluid dripped onto his palm. He licked it curiously. The taste was sour, but seemed to fill his head with sharpness.

He inspected the bamboo more closely. Its end had been stopped by a plug of wood, and a loop of leather attached another plug that, with some experimentation, Joshua managed to fit into the open end of the tube, sealing it. Joshua’s people carried their water in their hands, or sometimes plaited leaves or hollowed-out fruit. Though they would have been capable of it, it had never occurred to them to make anything like the Zealot’s bamboo flask.

Mary, meanwhile, was crouching over the Zealot. She was studying his clothing. Joshua saw that it had been cut from finely treated skin. The skin had been heavily modified, with whorls and zigzag lines and crosses scratched into it and coloured with some white mineral. The edges of the various pieces of skin had been punctured. Then a length of vegetable twine had been pushed through the puncture holes, to hold the bits of skin together. Mary picked at the seams and hems with her blunt fingers; she had never seen anything like it.

Joshua found the patterns on the skins deeply disturbing. He had seen their like before, on other Zealot artefacts. To Joshua the patterns made by the markings were at the limit of his awareness, neither there nor not there, flickering like ghosts between the rooms of his mind.

Now Mary’s searching fingers found something dangling around the man’s neck on a piece of thread. It was a bit of bone, that was all, but it had been shaped, more finely than Abel’s best tools.

Joshua studied the bone. Suddenly a man surged out of the carving: his face contorted, his hands outstretched, and his chest ripped open to reveal his heart.

Joshua screamed. He grabbed the bit of bone and yanked it so the thread around the Skinny’s neck broke, and he hurled it away into the forest.

The Skinny woke with a gulping snore. He sat up abruptly, and his hat fell off his head. Seeing the two hulking Hams, he raised his hands to the sky and began to yell. “Oh, Heaven help me! By God’s wounds, help me!”

Mary looked up into the sky, trying to see who he was speaking to. But of course there was nobody there. The Skinny-folk were immersed in madness: they would talk to the sky, the trees, the patterns on their clothes or ornaments, as if those things were people, but they were not.

So Mary sat on the Zealot’s chest, crushing him to the ground; he gasped under her weight. “Stop talkin” sky! Stop!” The bearded Zealot howled. She slapped him across the face. The Zealot’s head was jerked sideways, and he instantly became limp. Mary backed away. “Dead?”

Joshua, reluctantly, bent closer. The Zealot had fouled himself, perhaps when Mary had leapt on him; a thin slime of filthy piss trickled from his trouser legs. But his chest rose and fell steadily. “No” dead.”

Mary, her eyes wide under her lowering brow ridges, said, “Kill?”

Joshua grimaced. “Bad meat. Leave for th” bears.”

“Yes,” Mary said doubtfully. “Leave for th” bears.”

They wiped their hands clean of the Zealot’s filth on handfuls of leaves. Then they turned and pushed on, heading steadily north.

After a time, Joshua stepped cautiously into a clearing.

The trees here were battered and twisted. When he looked to the west, he saw how they had been smashed down and broken back to make a great gully through the forest.

And to the east, at the tip of this gully, was the seed from the sky.

He gazed at the blocky shape at the end of the huge trench, excitement warring with apprehension. It was a mound of black and white, half-concealed by smashed foliage. It was surrounded by bits of blue skin — or not skin; a bit of it fluttered against his leg, a membrane finer than any skin he had ever seen.

It was so strange he could barely even make it out.

Mary, nervous, had stayed back in the fringe of the forest.

“Ware,” she said. “Zealots.”

Joshua knew it was true. He could smell the smoke of their hearths, their burned meat. They were now very close to the Zealots” camp.

But the lure of the sky seed was irresistible. He began to work his way around the edge of the clearing, stepping over fallen tree trunks, shoving aside smashed branches, ready to duck back into the forest’s green shadows.

The sky seed was big, bigger than any animal, perhaps as big as the hut where the people lived. He saw that the thing had fallen here after crashing through the trees, almost reaching the point where the forest gave out at the edge of the cliff itself.

But that was all the sense he could make of it.

He had no words to describe it, no experience against which to map it. Even the touch of it was unfamiliar: glossy black or white, the patches separated by clear straight lines, the soft surface neither hot nor cold, neither skin nor stone nor wood. It was difficult for him even to see the thing. He would study some part of it — like the small neat puncture-holes on one part of its hide, surrounded by scorch-marks — but then his gaze would slide away from the strangeness, seeking some point of familiarity and finding none.

“Back,” Mary hissed to Joshua.

He made out the telltale signs that Skinny-folk had been here: the narrow footmarks in the raw dirt, the remains of the burnt rolls of leaves they liked to carry in their mouths. The Zealots had indeed been here too, inspecting the sky seed, just as he was.

But, despite the imminence of danger, he could not abandon this sky seed. It repelled him — yet it attracted him, like the carving on a Skinny-folk spear. Drawn close, driven away, he hovered.

He came to a sudden decision.

He bent and applied his shoulder to the blunt rear of the sky seed. It was lighter than it looked, and it ground forward through the dirt. But soon he was coming up against the resistance of the last battered trees at the cliff’s edge.

“Joshua!” Mary hissed.

“Help push.” And he applied himself again.

She tried to make him give up his self-appointed task, wheedling and plucking at his skins. But when she saw he wouldn’t come away, she joined him at the back of the sky seed. She was not yet fully grown, but her strength was already immense, enough to drive the sky seed forward, crunching through the spindly cliff-edge trees.

With a screeching scrape, the sky seed pitched over the raw rock lip of the cliff and lurched out of sight. After a last tortured groan, silence fell.

Manekatopokanemahedo:

“Soon, something will appear in the sky,” Babo said. “A satellite, like those of the outer planets. Earth will have a Moon, for the first time in its history.”

Manekato scratched her head. “How? By some gravitational deflection?”