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.

No Hams lived alone. But Joshua lived alone, in his cave beyond the communal space around the hut. Hams did not go naked — but Joshua did, wearing not so much as a scrap of skin to cover his filth-encrusted genitals. Hams cut their hair and, crudely, shaved their beards with stone knives. Joshua did not, and his hair was a mane of black streaked with grey, his beard long but rather comically wispy under that huge jaw. Hams joined in the activities of the community, making tools, gathering and preparing food, repairing clothes and the hut. Joshua did none of this.

Hams did not make markings, or symbols of any kind — in fact they showed loathing of such things. Joshua covered the walls of his cave with markings made by stone scrapers and bits of bone. They might have been faces; he sketched rough ovals and rectangles, criss-crossed by interior lines — noses, mouths? over and over. The marks were crude scratches, as if made by a small child — but still, they were more than she had ever observed any other Ham to make.

The other Hams tolerated him. In fact, since he did no gathering or hunting, by providing him with food they were keeping him alive, as she had seen other groups sustain badly injured, sickly or elderly individuals. Perhaps they thought he was ill, beyond his body’s slowly healing wounds.

Certainly, by the standards of his kind, he was surely insane. Studying this Ham hermit from afar, Emma concluded that whatever his story, she had best avoid him.

But when Joshua spotted her, the matter was taken out of her hands.

She was walking up the beach from the sea. Her catch of fish had been good that day, and she had used a scrap of blue “chute cloth from her pack to carry it all.

Joshua was sitting outside his cave, muttering to himself. When he saw her blue cloth, he got to his feet, hooted loudly, and came running.

Other Hams, close to the hut, watched dully.

Joshua capered before her, muttering, his accent thicker than any she had heard before. He was gaunt, and his back was still red with half-healed welts. But he might have been three times her weight.

Emma reached for the stone knife she kept tucked in her belt. “Keep back, now.”

He grabbed the blue cloth, spilling the fish on the sand. He sniffed the cloth with his giant, snot-crusted nostrils, and wiped it over his face. “This,” he shouted. “This!”

She frowned. “What is it? What are you trying to tell me?”

“Th” door in the sky,” he said. “Th” door in Heaven. Th” wings of th” seed.” His voice was horribly indistinct — and when he opened his mouth to yell these things at her, she saw a great notch had been cut out of his tongue.

She should get out of here, flee to the sanctuary of the hut, get away from his deranged grasp. But she stayed. For no other Ham had used phrases like “the door in the sky’.