the temptations of self-murder. But today – today Hatch had far too much on his plate to worry unduly about Dog. He sank from sun to shadow, settling himself again by the sugar juice stall.
'The teeth!' said Grim, demanding.
Then Grim gripped by anger – for angered he was, or riled sufficiently to imitate rage – denounced delay by thumping his dog-corpse heartily, much to the discomfiture of its complement of blowflies.
'Ho!' said Lord X'dex. 'A roily stasidion!'
Stasidion? What did that mean? Hatch could make no sense of the word. But then, there was never a profit to be had from riddling the discourse of beggars. Hatch planted Dog Java's knife in the dust by his side. He looked up and down the hot and aching street, but sighted his contact nowhere. Devil of a bitching! Where was Polk?
'A rambunctious stanchion, verily,' agreed Master Zoplin, savoring the words with all the negligent leisure of an immortal god. 'A very treestump in his rage, fearsome as a river gnome or a virgin's waters. But I cannot help him in his rages, for he be a criminal, and I his partner in crime if I pass to him these molars.'
'He needs not the molars,' said Lord X'dex, 'for those be the grinding teeth. He needs him incisors, the biters, the fangs. He must werewolf his dog, aye, butcher it vampire-style, perish its throat and dig out its flowers, eat of its liver and pull out its buttercups, grout out its – '
'Buttercups?' said Zoplin.
'Yes, yes, buttercups, buttercups,' said X'dex. 'You know not the buttercup? It is a flower of the snowlands which grows on the rocks by the sea. It produces in summer a prodigious liquor, the savor of which is a drunkenness unto dragons, in consequence of which the beasts by the bushel are seen toiling in the sea- meadows, laughing and roiling, each drunk as a dwarf.'
'Ah!' said Zoplin. 'He's on about the sea again. There's no hope for him now.'
'Nor hope for you neither, if I have the strangling of you,' said Grim. 'Which I will, be denied me the teeth.'
'The teeth,' said Zoplin, popping them out of his mouth and clacking them vigorously in his hand, 'they be legal teeth, not criminal teeth to be partaking of the eating of a dog illegally killed, with the death of the killer a consequence.'
A little saliva drooled down from the sun-glinting teeth and tricked its way down to the sun-shadowed dust.
'Oh, but this is old dog,' said Grim. 'I didn't kill this dog today, no, nor yesterday neither. This dog I dug up from under its gravestone. This is pedigree dog, this is. This dog died between sheets of silk and of satin, died of a broken heart when it was cheated in love.'
'Cheated?' said Master Zoplin. 'How so?'
'Why,' said Grim, tearing a dog-leg free from the carcase and waving it to emphasize his point, though his two companions were as blind as he was, and so the emphasis was lost on all but Hatch. 'Why, this dog – '
'This corpse of a dog,' said Lord X'dex, threatening a flight of full-blown pedantry, but leaving the threat unfulfilled for the moment.
'This corpse of a dog is a corpse that was dorgi when dog,' said Grim.
'But changed its race on dying?' said Lord X'dex.
'Clearly,' said Grim, 'for in death it became as jokeless as a Frangoni.'
With that, Grim turned his socketed face toward Hatch. Who made no response. The chastisement of beggars was beneath his dignity. These, besides, were beggars of the Yara, the underclass of the brown-skinned people Pang. The Yara did not believe in their own reality, and so had scant fear of punishment.
'Hatch,' said Grim, his Frangoni noninterlocutor remaining responseless. 'Are you there, Hatch?'
Hatch, who was definitely there, wished himself elsewhere.
'Are you deaf as well as blind?' said Zoplin to Grim. 'He's there. He hasn't moved.'
'Thus may have died of vexation and silence,' said Grim. 'Have you died, Hatch? Or are you industriously auditing?'
The Pang were supposed to be quiet and self-effacing, but these beggars owed nothing to that stereotype, for they were bawdy in their outrageous racontage and burly with the bulk of much good eating. Hatch was usually uneasy with people who did not conform to his expectations, but he had known these three for so long that they troubled him scarcely more than his shadow.
Even so, it was less than proper for him to join them in conversation. He had his dignity to think about, and the dignity of a Frangoni warrior is ever one of the more conspicuous parts of his style. Hatch's dignity was conspicuous even though it had to compete with his height, with his hair-knot, his muscle-pumped torso and the grandly great sweep of his purple robes.
But…
'You were talking of a dog,' said Hatch, drawn back into the beggars' dialog despite himself.
The Frangoni prided themselves on their aloofness, but Hatch had lately been so stressed by the multiple pressures of his crisis, and so undeniably and unreachably lonely in that crisis, that he had allowed himself to have more to do with beggars than was properly decent, and was hard put to break the habit.
'A dog, yes,' said Grim. 'A dorgi. The petdog of Manfred Gan Oliver, that's what it was. Gan Oliver himself bred it by bucking a Lashund.'
The implication was that Manfred Gan Oliver was a dog himself, for the ferocious hunter-killers known as dorgis are bred by mating long-legged Lashund hounds with the slaughterweight fighting dogs called thogs. Asodo Hatch had never before realized how like unto a thog was Gan Oliver, but once made the comparison was irresistible. The grim-faced head of the Free Corps was undeniably thoggish in all his major attributes, though it had taken a blind man to see as much.
Hatch was still grinning at the beggar's joke when he saw Gan Oliver's son, Lupus Lon Oliver, stealthing his way down Scuffling Road like a debtor in fear of an ambush by writ-bearing creditors.
'Lupus,' said Hatch, calling out the Ebrell Islander's name so the beggars would be warned of his approach, and choke back any further jokes about thogs.
Lupus Lon Oliver started, with as much of a shock as if he had been touched at night by a hand of bones in a house thought deserted.
'Hatch,' said Lupus, partially recovering himself. 'I – I – have you seen Dog Java?'
'Why, yes,' said Hatch. 'It's been just a snack-snap since he was standing here as large as life. A combast or so.'
A combast was a Nexus ration tube; and, by natural extension of meaning, the approximate time taken to leisure down such a ration.
'What – ah, where – '
'He went down the road,' said Hatch. 'I think he was heading for home. He was upset about something, I don't know what.'
'I see,' said Lupus.
Then the Ebrell Islander cleared his throat and hastened down Scuffling Road, rushing away with all the impetuous velocity of an Evolutionist sprinting for the river in the hope of surviving an imminent transformation from manflesh to fish.
As Lupus left, Hatch remembered Dog's knife. He thought to call Lupus back and ask him to pass on the knife, then thought better of it. Clearly something had badly upset the young Ebrell Islander, and from what he had seen Hatch could only presume that the Lupus and Dog were locked in some deeply emotional dispute. Probably, given their ages, they were disputing about love. Love for a woman? For each other? For a third man desired by both? Hatch, with more than enough problems of his own to worry about, had absolutely no desire to find out, but guessed that it would be unwise to arm young Lupus with murderous steel as the Ebrell Islander went in pursuit of Dog Java.
'There goes Gan Oliver's son,' said Hatch, telling the beggars the air was again free for the exercise of their folly. 'Perhaps he's the dog of whose breeding you spoke of.'
'Why, no,' said Grim. 'For Lupus yet lives, but the dog of my eating is dead. This dog, you see, was a dog bred for love. Gan Oliver in exile, old Manfred, he pined for the love of yon dorgi within, hence bred a dorgi without to send it in to consummate his love by proxy. But the lockway denied dog as it did master, so, being built to love, or to pine in love's despite, the dorgi without did perish, hence my eating. My eating, which I will consummate, be you so good as to pass me the teeth. The teeth, Master Zoplin!'
