On Plymouth Rock, Bowman said, they knew who was who, and he passed the bota in firelight. They prayed on the shores of the Atlantic crashing, Praise God, Saul said, passing the bota back, for keeping your Chosen Ones Safe across those devilish Icy Waters. Have Mercy on We the Humble. Give us Plenty and Goodness for our Devotion, and He did, Bowman said, plowed His great arm across the land for them, gave them blankets and smallpox and muskets for the heathens, who dropped dead and made way. Convenient and instructive. These pilgrims bowed heads in rough-hewn pews while heathens danced in forest clearings. Who won? Who was given the bountiful rivers? Sweet shores, fish, saltpeter? Follow the punished to wisdom.

They knew who was who on the shores of Africa, Bowman said, as the wooden holds of ships were filled, five hundred in cargo, men, women, children, stacked spoon-fashion below, aimed across the waves to the West Indies. When one of the cargo transgressed, escaped his chains through some devilment, proceeded to slit a good seaman’s throat, he was tossed overboard, the loss explained to investors later: another arrogant angel leaving his station. Just as Lucifer had once done, Saul said, to his Father saying, “I will ascend above the high clouds; I will make myself Most High.”

The gods have always used lightning bolts, Bowman said. Plagues and floods have always awaited the arrogant, crossers of red seas and blue mountains that should not have been crossed. Locusts ate Pharaoh’s land. He’s been warned about the Burning Bush, Bowman said, but Saul held a hand up and corrected him. The Burning Bush was Abraham, before Egyptian captivity, before ten plagues.

“Avalanches then,” Bowman said and continued. “They wiped out palaces.”

Saul raised the bota. “Yes, they did.”

Volcanoes, Bowman went on, incinerate golden cities, as whores scamper to high ground with cheap bundles. Geysers. Swamps. Hurricanes.

“Yes.”

They’ll be turned to stone for too much beauty, for looking the mayor’s wife in the eye.

“It’s for our own good,” Saul said. “We’re faulty goods, ever unable to resist peeking inside forbidden boxes or yielding to the blandishments of serpents bearing fruit.”

On the ship, Bowman said, 499 were marched up to the deck in ankle-cuffed tandem to see the daylight, for a lesson in right and wrong as the transgressor sang songs to sharks. The wake boiled red proof. The crews burned their ship on occasion, took to lifeboats, bobbed, awaited another slaver or whaler, and as the screams burned and the ship went down, they repeated the words of the Burning Bush—

I AM WHO I AM, Saul said, rising from an old dry log to piss in a bush.