The Texts Of Festival by Mick Farren Read Free Book Online Page B

punishment; a small fat man was being cut down from a post that had been erected by the base of the wall. To one side, armed retainers guarded four prisoners who were roped together at the neck. Nearer the post a group of merchants, one wearing the fur trimmed silk robes of a justice, stood and watched. A huge retainer with a long whip stood stripped to the waist and waiting for his next victim. The guards holding back the crowd of spectators allowed two to come through and help the fat man away. Another prisoner was dragged forward, this time a young woman. The guards secured her hands in the leather straps fixed high on the post and then slit the back of her dress so it fell around her hips. The merchant in justice robes read something, inaudible to Joe, from a paper. The retainer flicked his whip, as though testing it. As the first blow fell and the girl screamed, Joe turned away and walked off in the direction from which he had come.
    Humanity was a long way from the founders’ conception of a non-authoritarian society.
    Frankie Lee stood in the crowd and watched as Claudette got ten. It was always really bad, what with the crowd, the nobles shouting and laughing on the wall. Frankie winced as another blow fell and Claudette’s body twisted and squirmed, tugging against the sweat-stained bands that held her wrists. The crowd always had itself a time when the retainers pulled in a woman, gawping at her hanging from the black polished post, stripped to the waist.
    Another blow fell, and Claudette screamed and writhed against the post as the whip left another red weal across the brown skin of her back. Frankie gave thanks for the bystanders who had sworn that he had killed the country boy in self defence. If they hadn’t come across he’d be strapped to the post himself, and it wouldn’t be only ten he’d be getting. It was too bad about Claudette; she was a fool to try stealing purses from merchants who were still sober.
    The last blow fell; Claudette shuddered and sagged against the post. Her head was sunk between her shoulders and her long dark hair hid her face. Frankie Lee pushed through the crowd. The least he could do was to help her back to the Last Chance.
    Isaac Feinberg was crouched over his bench in the sound shack to one side of the Stage. He squinted into the interior of the stripped-down amplifier and probed with a screwdriver. Each year more of the equipment disintegrated, and in the not-too-distant future it would no longer be possible to put out any sound from the Stage at all. He hoped he would be already dead by then; he didn’t want to be the one to tell the high lord that there would be no more text ceremonies. In the meantime, he would go on trying to patch up the ancient circuitry, pay foragers to hunt down spares, and try to build substitutes for the simpler parts. He knew, though, that it was a losing fight.
    The whole thing was ridiculous anyway. At the time Festival had been founded, the dark years of chaos after the disaster, any weird idea had seemed viable to the tiny percentage who had missed death or mindless idiocy. When Homer, the original lord, had led his troop of survivors out of the drowning ruins of ’Ndunn, the idea of founding a festival modelled on the old legendary Events and the hope that in it, men and women could rediscover the old ways and the best of the old spirit was, to the shattered survivors, no more absurd than many of the other survival schemes that had sprung up after the disaster.
    Most of those schemes had failed while Festival had, for some reason, flourished and grown to become a bustling city. As the years had passed, the ideas that Homer had used to encourage his people were taken more and more literally. The celebrations that had taken place in Homer’s time had become stylised rituals, the music they had brought from the ruins as a means of enjoyment had gradually been adopted as the divine basis of society. The songs had become the texts, the final