his shoulder. He dropped to his face in a fury. The Forwards had struck again. It was useless to try and pursue them down the corridors; he would be impaled as soon as he came up to them.
Immediately, impotent rage boiled up in Brandyholm. It was spiced with fear, fear of what the Lieutenant would say when he learnt the tribe had lost another female to the enemy, but Brandyholm let it wash through him almost with pleasure. He thrashed on the ground, kicking and tearing at the earth, his face distorted.
At last this state of mindlessness left him. Weak and abandoned, he lay in a shallow ditch he had worked round him. As he breathed less rapidly, his face regained its normal pallor. Idly, he rubbed at the hard ridges under him; their existence dawning on him, he knelt up and studied them. Regularly spaced ledges of metal … no reason existed to doubt that they ran from top to bottom of the great incline of Sternstairs, covered by the needly humus formed of countless dead ponic leaves.
‘More fuel for the ship theory,’ he muttered, sullenly kicking the soil level again; little he cared one way or the other for the ship theory. Shouldering his dazer, he turned back to Quarters to make his humiliating report. The ponic seeds clicked like beads as he roughly parted their slender stems and barged his way home.
Once Brandyholm was past the barricades, it was only a short while before he stood in front of the aged Lieutenant. The latter, guard-flanked, concealed his eyes carefully beneath bushy white eyebrows.
‘Expansion to your ego, sir,’ Brandyholm said humbly.
‘At your expense,’ came the stock response, and then Lieutenant Greene asked sternly, ‘Why are you back in Quarters at this time, hunter?’
Brandyholm explained how his woman had been taken. As he listened, the Lieutenant’s nostrils filled with mucus, his mouth slowly elongated and overflowed with saliva until his chin glistened. At the same time, his eyes widened and his frame began to shake violently. Through his fear, Brandyholm had to admit it was a splendid, daunting performance.
Its climax came when the Lieutenant fell to the floor and lay limp. Two guards, faces twitching, stood protectively over his body.
‘He’ll kill himself doing that, one day soon,’ Brandyholm thought, but it gave him little reassurance for the present.
At length the Lieutenant climbed slowly to his feet, his rage dispersed, and said as he brushed his clothes down, ‘This woman, Gwenny Tod – did she not bear you a child?’
‘Many periods ago, sir. It was a girl child and died of crying soon after it was born. She is little use as a child-bearer.’
‘She is another woman lost to the Forwards,’ said Lieutenant Greene sharply. ‘We have not so many people here that we can afford to give them away, fertile or not.’
‘I didn’t give – ’
‘You should have been more alert. You should have known they were trailing. Six lashes before sleep!’
The sentence was duly administered under the angry eyes of most of the Greene tribe. Back paining, but mind greatly eased by its degradation, Brandyholm slouched back to his room. There, Carappa the Priest awaited him, sitting patiently on his haunches with his big belly dangling. He rarely called at this late hour, and Brandyholm stood stiffly before him, waiting for him to speak first.
‘Expansion to your ego, son.’
‘At your expense, father.’
‘And turmoil in my id,’ capped the priest piously, making the customary genuflection of rage, without however troubling to rise.
Brandyholm sat down on his bunk and cautiously removed the shirt from his bloody back. It took him a long time. When it was off, he flung it on the floor and spat at it, missing. He said nothing.
‘Your sentence was an unfair one?’ the priest asked.
‘Eminently,’ Brandyholm said with surly satisfaction. ‘Crooner received twice as many strokes yesterday for a much more trivial matter – working too slowly in the gardens.’
‘Crooner is always slow,’ said the priest absently.
The other made no reply. Outside his room, the bright expanse of Quarters was deserted; it was sleep, all but the guards were in bed. And beyond the barricades, beyond the ponic tangle, Gwenny was in bed … somebody else’s bed.
Carappa came over to him, leaning heavily against the bunk.
‘You are bitter, son?’
‘Very bitter, father. I feel I would like to kill somebody.’
‘You shall. You shall. It is good you should feel so. Never grow resigned, my son; that way is death for us all.’
Brandyholm glanced in the priest’s direction, and saw with horror that Carappa’s eyes were seeking his. The strongest tabu in their society was directed against one man looking another straight in the eyes; honest and well-intentioned men gave each other only side glances. A priest especially should have observed this rule. He shrank back on the bed when Carappa gripped his shoulder.
‘Do you ever feel like running amok, Tom?’
Brandyholm’s heart beat uncomfortably at the question. Several of the best and most savage men of Quarters had run amok, bursting through the village with their dazers burning, and afterwards living like solitary man-eaters in the unexplored areas of ponic tangle, afraid to return and face their punishment. He knew it was a manly, even an admirable thing to do; but it was not a priest’s business to incite it. A priest should unite, not disrupt his village, by bringing the frustration in men’s minds to the surface, where it could flow freely without curdling into neurosis.
‘Look at me, Tom. Answer me.’
‘Why are you speaking to me like this?’ he asked, with his face to the wall.
‘I want to know what you are made of.’
You know what the litany teaches us, father. We are the sons of cowards and our days are passed in fear.’
‘You believe that, Tom?’
‘Naturally. It is the Teaching.’
‘Then would you follow me where I led you – even out of Quarters, into Dead Ways?’
He was silent, wondering, thinking not with his brain but with the uneasy corpuscles of his blood.
‘That would require courage,’ he replied at last.
The priest slapped his great thighs and yawned enthusiastically. ‘No, Tom, you lie, true to the liars that begot you. We should be fleeing from Quarters – escaping, evading the responsibilities of grown men in society. It would be a back-to-nature act, a fruitless attempt to return to the ancestral womb. It would be the very depth and abysm of cowardice to leave here. Now will you come with me?’
Some meaning beyond the words lit a spark in Brandyholm. Had there not always been a lurking something he could not name, something from which he cried to escape? He raised himself on one elbow.
‘Just us two?’
‘No!
