Phenyl had placed her feet carefully all the way up from the Habitat Basin into the surrounding hills, choked as they were with towering ferns and wide sweeping black oaks marching up out of the casements like so many twisted souls. Burt had told her about the wild country, its dangers, its joys, at his own great peril—love talk, when love itself was forbidden, could get one recycled in an ill-considered instant.

There was something about the outdoor air, something she had never breathed, that was taking her to sleep, even as her feet ached like they had never ached. Sitting back on a worn stone, larger than her body, that had a depression of polished gray where water collected, she eased herself off under the weird rays of the falling sun.

Her thoughts drifted to Luna, as it rose through the tree tops above, and the wrecked craft of theirs that must be directly to the Northeast from her position. The inhabitants of Syra had been taught about the evil Lunites from birth. They were but one of the many threats to Habitat Syra. There were the feral white races infesting the continent they had ruined. There was the wildlife, distorted by the White Race’s folly. And there were their own problems, the dregs: willfully mutant drones who preyed upon Inhabitants.

Would the Lunites kill her, capture her or aid her now that she was a traitor to her race? Or were they dead, twisted in the wreckage of their invasive craft. Would there be a tool for her to salvage to aid her flight from those who would surely hunt her.

She would never have thought that sleep could claim her in this wild place.

Thirteen-year-old Jay Prescott, ship’s boy to the His Majesty’s Sloop of War, Mars, stood entranced in a dreamlike state for the entire night watch. Next to him, swaying on his broad black feet, was the strange slave-man who had hauled himself octopus-like up out of the sea to slither onto the poop deck. Having received some kind of benediction from this hoodoo priest, Jay was fawned over by the weird little black man with the big almond eyes, bubble head, wide toothy mouth and rat-like chin. The fellow never touched him, but rather caressed him with his curious songs as he pieced himself back together again, the righting of his knee seeming to take half the watch as the joint popped back out and the foot swiveled back to a false position again and again, to the man’s repeated declaration of, “Me oh My, We cry!”

As mind blasting as his midnight companion was, he was a comfort compared to the two figures descending into hell’s inferno with every creak of the tiller’s wheel. Big Hal Thurmond, grenadier of the marine contingent, and Jay’s personal savior against the buggering of old salts Pell Driscoll, Boomy Faulks and the other randy seamen, was himself, buggering Officer of the Watch, Mister Pringle, for going on eternity now.

Poor Mister Pringle was in agony as he seemed to steer the tiller to catch the starboard winds in what little canvas they had out. It was almost as if the dreadful humping of Hal Thurmond—who as a committed bible man was clearly in great pain over his actions by the cast of his features—seemed to direct the Officer’s hands on the tiller, the frame of which he did occasionally bite in his agony and humiliation.

Where was the singing black man by his side?

Having fallen into a bugger-eyed trance, Jay snapped himself awake, to the feeling of the ship, which had been riding at anchor, lurching before the gentle breeze. As he shook himself into full wakefulness the little black imp returned to his side, blowing on his fingertips, the end of one bleeding and splintered. In between fife-like blowing upon his bleeding finger he chanted,

“Me poor nail,

Bujjer boy east

For We sail

Bujjer boy, We feast.”

On into the night they sailed, slowly, never losing sight of the bulky shadow of the mountain isle that had apparently spat out this hoodoo binding slave man to deliver them from the grip of the Yellow Jack.*

They sailed into the deep drink of night, smelling the thick musk of the blood-soaked mountains to larboard.

A thousand dreadful creeks of the buggered tiller later, they pushed into the lengthening gray of the coming day.

Then, as the main sale gave a tug in response to a hoodoo sent wind a clamor of officers and what few men remained able to stand without shitting themselves, assailed him, and broke the black man’s spell.

Lieutenant Parsons, commander of HMS Mars, appeared before him, flanked by two sallow-faced marines, Mister Hitchings, and the two bully salts, Pell Driscoll and Boomy Faulks.

The marines leveled their muskets at the black by Jay’s side, who raised his big hands facing out backwards, as a picture of ugly innocence, protesting in his impish voice, “Oh, good is Me, white-skin man—goody be!”

Driscoll and Faulks pulled the humping form of Hal Thurmond from the deliriously humiliated Mister Pringle, who clung to the wheel crying until Mister Hitchings dragged him away, threw him face first on the deck, kicked him one to the ribs with his hard shoe toe, and then manned the tiller, assuring their commander, “Without men to reef sail best I run her slow ‘fore the wind, Sir.”

Lieutenant Parsons was hovering—according to his eyes—somewhere between despair, rage, and disbelief. Finally giving voice to the strongest chord in his dumbstruck soul, the commander barked at the slave-man, “And what shall I do with you, if not kill you outright, you accursed savage?”

The two old salts were dragging the weeping Hal Thurmond to the main mast below and lashing him to it as he mumbled penance to the Lord.

Mister Hitchings was glaring at the now seemingly whole and healthy slave with flaring anger, only to flinch as if spat upon when the impish man spoke, pointing to the yard of the main mast, “Swing We High, Misser Me. Swing We moon high, do wee wee wee.”

Mister Hitchings did not wait for the still dumbstruck commander to take action, and bawled for the two remaining half-healthy marines, “You heard the accursed wretch boys. Haul him aloft—swing him from the yardarm ‘fore he sets another one of us to do his vile buggering will!”

Jay felt almost as if he were not even there, and felt as well a twinge of pity for the poor black man, who waved his hands toward his face, with its enormous wide eyes gushing bloody tears as he fussed, whimpering, “Oh nigh, fly!”

The red tears rolled over chummy-boned cheeks that should have belonged to a jolly fat woman, not a scrawny black man, to gather in the dimple above the rat like chin, before dripping to the deck. As the marines hauled the little man off his feet by his arms, his hands opened in a beseeching way to the dawn-streaked sky above, revealing in each palm and eye, a human eye set in a meaty socket in the middle of the palm of this bony-handed man. The marines did not see this, nor did Mister Hitchings at the tiller. But Commander Parsons did so see the abominable eye-filled palms, and choked back a gulp of horror even as the liquid voice of the tiny man, now being roped about the wrists beneath a signal block and hauled above, seemed to plead with an unseen ear beyond the visible sky:

“Oh, Me Dear,

Swing We here—

Haul Me high…

Yet We Fly.”

Mister Hitchings was full of not an ounce of compassion, and rumbled irritably as the Commander shivered in his uniform, “Squeal to ye black ‘eart’s content. Queerist heathen I ever heard—aloft with ye!”

He then turned to Pell Driscoll and Boomy Faulks, where they had just tied Hal to the main mast. “Commander Parsons’ sorting Yellow Jack. Give the cat-o’-nine-tails to the wee ship’s boy here—see ‘im a man grown this day.”

To this command, higher and higher swung the pitiful form of the black pygmy, who merely sung from his wide mouth as his big eyes gazed to the heavens, “Oh, wee Me,” over and over again as he swung higher and higher toward the arm of the mast where it reached over the sea toward the larboard, where the miserable man’s mist-clad island leered menacing in the distance.

*Yellow Fever, an acute viral disease that wiped out the European forces dispatched to this location in response to the Haitian slave wars.