'I suppose,' said Master Zoplin, at last consenting to pass along the teeth, which Grim promptly snatched, 'I suppose you'll be wanting my tapeworm next.'
'No,' said Grim, slobbing the teeth into place, 'no, but I wouldn't say no to the Eye. Who's got it? Have you?'
'I sold it to Hatch,' said Zoplin. 'He's awfully keen on the Eye is old Hatch.'
'He's waiting with a stuffbag,' said X'dex. 'I can see it from here. He's waiting to sell something.'
'To sell something?' said Grim. 'What's he got to sell? His soul he sold at birth, like his father-Frangoni before him. What you waiting for, Hatch? You don't usually wait, not you.'
'I told you,' said X'dex. 'He's selling.'
'Then what? Pass us the eye, Friend Dex, Friend Dexlord Paspilion.'
'I can't,' said that worthy. 'I'm studying ants.'
'Ants!' said Zoplin. 'I'm the one with the ants. They're half my lunch by weight and ten thousand thirds of it by number.'
With that, toothless Master Zoplin picked up one of the pieces of baked yam from the banana leaf at his side, wiped it on his rags to remove any ants – for he was fastidiously vegetarian – then began to masticate the yampiece with his gums. As he did so, the worthy Lord X'dex Paspilion unscrambled the Eye from his left-hand socket, wiped it on his own rags, then passed it to Grim, who received it with gratitude.
'Ah!' said Grim, popping the Eye into his own left-hand socket, 'now I see him clear enough!'
Whether Grim saw or whether he didn't was a moot point. None of the three beggars had ever allowed Hatch to examine their allegedly precious Eye, so even after more than two decades of acquaintance he had no idea whether the three truly possessed some fabulous device which enabled them to see or whether they had been carrying on a running joke for all these years with a worthless bit of shiny metal.
'What do you see?' said Hatch, challenging.
'A Frangoni born ugly and since grown worse,' said Grim. 'A Frangoni purple in his humors, with further purple drawn about his purpleness. Purple upon him, and with him – chocolate! That's what he's got! Chocolate! A vile and hideous drug if ever there was one.'
In truth, Asodo Hatch did have a consignment of chocolate which he planned to sell for profit. Drug it was indeed, this chocolate being a species of psycho-addictor once very popular in the Nexus.
'You smelt it,' said Hatch. 'You're blind to the sight but you smelt it.'
'Smelt it, did I?' said Grim. 'Then it must be melting.'
Melting!
Hatch reached in alarm for his stuffbag, for the chocolate within was equal in value to a ten-day supply of opium, and opium he needed most urgently to satisfy his wife's inescapable requirements. Of course the chocolate had not melted at all, for he had it in the bitterblock tablet form which is proof against all but the worst of the sun. Grim laughed, either seeing Hatch's alarm or guessing at it.
'A pox on all beggars,' said Hatch.
'A pox indeed,' agreed Grim. 'Oh, pox would be luxury, or at least the getting of it. You'll be getting with luxury shortly, won't you?'
'How so?' said Hatch.
'Why, for you'll soon be instructor. Isn't it? You're fighting for it soon and shortly, isn't it?'
'Maybe,' said Hatch, unwilling to discuss the details of the agon to which he was committed.
'Maybe, maybe,' muttered Grim. 'Are you too poor to be giving a beggar a yes or a no? It's true, isn't it!' Here anger, so sharp that Hatch was startled by it. 'You, you glut on chocolate, six nights of the night, you glut it and squeeze it, but we poor beggars, worms and rats, rats as rags and maggots as comfort. Give me the chocolate!'
'You need no chocolate,' said Hatch, speaking lightly, and trying thus to dismiss the truth of Grim's anger. 'It's not good for you.'
'True, true,' said Grim, softening, slackening, anger dying to humor or its semblance. 'I need no chocolate, need it not, want it not. Why, rather, right now I want boy, not boy to be boy but boy to sell sister. Hey, you-boy, you have me a sister?'
'I have not a sister,' said the boy whom Grim was addressing, a boy whom Hatch had not noticed till that very moment, 'nor you no need for one, for I had your eyes but I ate them.'
This was a dire insult indeed, for they were talking in Pang, in which the word for eyes is logo nuk, a homonym of the word meaning testicles. (Thus eyes plural – the word for an eye singular being chaba jaf, a word which also means egg, and hence has given the Pang the phrase 'to lay eggs on fur', which is used amongst them to denote the act of sexual intercourse). In response to this insult, Beggar Grim said something so obscene that Hatch (fluent in Pang, but not perfect) was hard put to construe the sense of it, though he gathered that the boy was being invited to do something involving a head, a finger, a cat, a river-oyster, some cakes of dung and his mother's brother's wife's daughter-inlaw.
'Boy,' said Hatch, when Grim was done, 'have you news for me?'
Every day Hatch went past the Brick and saw the Free Corps messenger boys torturing dogs or playing knuckle bones in the dust outside the place. Recognizing this urchin as such a boy, he presumed that the noseless moneylender named Polk had sent him with a message as his burden.
'Why news for you, Mister Purple?' said the boy.
Mister Purple? That was less than polite. Indeed, had boy been man, such an insult could easily have precipitated violence.
But the boy was a boy, and a boy who looked fleet of foot, so Hatch saw no way to chastise him except at the risk of serious damage to his own dignity.
'You have a message,' said Hatch. 'Get on with it.'
'Polk's not in the purple mood,' said the small boy. 'But he sends his regards and sends three days for the chocolate.'
'Three days!' said Hatch, aghast.
Polk had promised him ten.
'Three days,' affirmed the boy, 'which you collect from the Brick.'
Worse and worse. Not only was the price diminished, but Hatch was going to be made to go to the Free Corps headquarters to collect that price. Hatch, angered by insult, could not help himself, and before he knew it he was saying it:
'No.'
'No?' said the boy, exaggerating his wide-eyed amazement in an attempt at achieving a comic effect. 'Why, Mister Purple, three days is three times your sister.'
Three times your sister? What did that mean? The grammar was garbled, but the intent to insult was plain. Hatch was too close to his breaking point to appreciate being made a comedy by a boy from the Brick.
'Come here!' said Hatch, rising from the shadows of the sugar juice stall.
He rose so swiftly that his legs almost buckled, for the blood fled his head and he almost fainted. So he was in no state to chase or catch the boy, who was running already. The boy paused at the first rock on which dung-cakes were laid out to dry, grabbed one of those fuel tablets and hurled it in Hatch's direction. It went saucering through the air and blunted itself on a rock, being as yet too soft to brittle-break. Then the boy laughed and went pelting away through the heat of the day, running so fast and free it was as if he inhabited a different weather entirely.
'Polk promised me ten,' said Hatch, still standing, unable to contain his amazement at the cheating unscrupulosity of moneylenders.
'So you reject him at three,' said Beggar Grim. 'So now you can home you and feast on the fruits of rejection. Hatch, he will feed, he will eat, he will glut himself sick on rejections!
Luxury, luxury! Why, and here's my luxury now! Shona, it's Shona.'
Scent alone might have told Beggar Grim that it was Shona coming by, for she habitually drenched herself in Nudik Martyr, a gross proto-perfume too blatant for all but the hardiest of women to wear. There had once been a fad for Nudik Martyr throughout the Nexus, and, though twice a hundred centuries had passed since then, the Combat College had been given no opportunity to update or expunge that quirk of the fashions. Hence Shona, who loved the stuff, smelt as if she had been first lathered in the pulp of a billion over-ripe blossoms and then scraped
