'So,' said Hatch, 'it is your destiny to become a theological college.'
'My overriding priority is to train Startroopers for the Stormforce of the Nexus,' said Senk. 'I must do whatever is necessary to fulfill that objective. So, if I must teach theology as well – why, it is considered fit and proper that Startroopers should know of the Nu-chala-nuth and their language.'
'I will need more from you than that,' said Hatch.
'More?' said Senk. 'Isn't this enough?'
'Not much more,' said Hatch. 'But a little more. The cure of my wife, if cure be possible. I trust you have the woman still.'
'She is safe in the worlds of the Nexus,' said Paraban Senk.
'Her flesh is still seated in a combat bay, but her mind is at ease in a deer-park forest. Penelope has spoken with her.'
'She has?'
'Of course,' said Senk. 'Penelope has been working very hard on your behalf, Hatch. She has made Lupus Lon Oliver concede his will to our truce. I will treat with your wife in this clinic, Hatch, and I will cure her if her cure lies in my compass.'
'Do you think it does?' said Hatch.
'I will discover the truth under surgery,' said Senk.
'There will be others who will have need of surgery,' said Hatch.
'Hatch,' said Senk, 'I am but one, and Dalar ken Halvar alone could flood this clinic with more surgical cases than could be treated inside the surgery.'
'Selected cases,' said Hatch. 'That's all I'll need you to treat. I'm no wizard, yet must secure an empire. Polk the Cash has need of a nose, and Nambasa Berlin likewise. And there will be others.'
'Tell me of these others,' said Senk.
And thus the pair of them opened their negotiations in earnest.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Great God Mokaragash: aka the Greater Lord: aka He Who Sees Without Eyes: the ruling deity of the Frangoni people. He is believed to be immanent in the great idol found in the precincts of Temple Isherzan, the Frangoni temple which stands on the Frangoni rock. At that temple, the Great God Mokaragash is served by Frangoni priests, these priests being ruled by Sesno Felvus, who is the High Priest of the Great God Mokaragash, and who is therefore the ethnarch of the Frangoni people in Dalar ken Halvar.
Red and black, in shadows and blood -
To a grim purposes, sees yet sightless.
Thus it was that Asodo Hatch dueled with a demon inside the minor mountain known as Cap Foz Para Lash, and won a great victory over that demon. Inside of a month, the details of that duel were known to all of Dalar ken Halvar. Asodo Hatch – this is how the story was told, and nobody doubted it – had challenged Paraban Senk to a duel. Senk had accepted the challenge. In an arena generated by the machineries of the illusion tanks, Asodo Hatch had met with Senk, and the pair had fought it out to the red-blood finish, with the rule of the Combat College as the prize.
Also told in Dalar ken Halvar was the story of Hatch's climactic confrontation with the lockway's dorgi. It was told how the dorgi had growled and roared, how it had spat death with its zulzers – death which Hatch in his nimbleness had dodged and ducked – and how at last it had destroyed itself when in its frustration it attempted to use its most powerful weapons to destroy not just Hatch but the entire mountain which trapped and encumbered it.
On the strength of such tales, Asodo Hatch became not just Saint Hatch but Hero Hatch into the bargain, all of which was a great help to him as he attempted to make himself master of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga.
Even with such help, to secure his rule was no easy task. It required the most delicate of negotiations, coupled with a regrettable requirement for (on occasion) direct and ruthless action which need not here be detailed. For the management of an empire is a study in itself, and not to be lightly summed.
Suffice it to say that Asodo Hatch was for a time very busy, yet as the days went by his burdens eased. And so it was that he found the time for nights of peaceful privacy, and spent those nights in Pan Lay, a fine house on the heights of Cap Gargle. The owner of that house was the Lady Iro Murasaki, one of the gray-skinned Janjuladoola people – and Hatch of course did not displace her from her residence when he chose to spend his nights in that residence.
It is doubtlessly true that, in a strictly moral universe, Asodo Hatch would not have ended thus in the arms of the Lady Iro Murasaki. But this is a history of the world of the fact and the flesh, not a gaudy tale of Good versus Evil such as might have been candy flossed to life by the Eye of Delusions. This, then, is not a nicely balanced structure of error and retribution suitable for use as a model to propound the ethical philosophies. It is history, and it is not for history to take upon itself the mission of the moralists.
But if some mission be demanded, if it be said that the mere recounting of events is not a task sufficient in itself – why, then, let this history be taken as an exemplification of the intrinsic complexity of life. If a message be required, why then, let the very complexities of this history be a message in itself.
And if something more still be demanded – a moral, perforce! – why then, let the moral be that life is a dice game played in the shadows with a dog and a ghost.
Consider by the light of that moral the life of Asodo Hatch.
In the time of his testing, Asodo Hatch used means which he did not rightly know were at his disposal to achieve ends which were not strictly of his own choosing. He was swimming, yes, and swimming of his own free will, and in the direction of his choosing – but he was swimming in a river that was in flood, a boiling river of filthy brown water ever churning toward the hot pit of its final embroilment.
And we too in our time may be plunged into such a flood; and therefore should not be too quick to judge, or to say that Hatch should have drunk the river dry, or should have grown wings and flown, or should have conceded himself to the flood by evolving himself into a fish.
Let us then grant him the charity of our mercy.
And if it be objected that Hatch, whether swimming or drowning, had no right to live when so many were dead – why then, know that it takes only a moment's courage to die, whereas it takes a lifetime's courage to live. And Asodo Hatch had the greatest of difficulty in finding that lifetime's courage, for the undeniable truth is that his father had handed him both a sharpened sword and the incentive to use it.
Therefore let us grant to Asodo Hatch at least the honor of his courage.
And if further excuse for his actions be needed, why then, remember only that Hatch was a barbarian monstrous in his purple, a true warrior of one of the Wild Tribes if ever there was one; and, if someone must be blamed for his wrongdoing, then blame the cartoonists of the Nexus, who were surely the providers of his strongest role models. And with blame thus properly assigned in the best of moralizing fashion, it is proper to spare a moment to satisfy the curiosity of the ethnologists, and to detail the manner in which the Frangoni worship of the Great God Mokaragash was reconciled with the rise of Nu-chala-nuth.
Let it be recorded, then, that at the end of the first year of his rule, Asodo Hatch climbed to the Frangoni rock, and that Hatch there made his peace with Sesno Felvus, the High Priest of the Great God Mokaragash. In Temple Isherzan, there was only the priesthood left, and not much of that: for the Frangoni laity had converted as a whole to the worship of the Nu-chala, and hence had joined themselves to that great congregation known as the Nuchala-nuth.
To deprive a Great God of the worship of His people would be considered by many to be an unpardonable crime; but Sesno Felvus pardoned Asodo Hatch, for Sesno Felvus – when forced to the ultimate choice – valued his people more than his god.
Besides, the gods evolve, do they not? State it as a certainty: they do. For it is one of the lessons of history that the gods lack that stability of form which is given to the flesh; and, in proof of this, it is difficult to find so much as a single god which has been stable in its form for as little time as a thousand years. Therefore it might well be
