said Hatch, 'you could always marry me.'
This was a very great-hearted and self-sacrificing gesture, for Hatch did not by any means want to marry his sister. She knew him well, very well indeed, and he was a true Frangoni male in that he was ever uneasy in the presence of any female who knew too much about him. The Frangoni consider it best to bed with strangers, for to bed with someone is to be emotionally vulnerable, and a stranger is more likely to be ignorant of one's weak points. Consequently, amongst the Frangoni a brother will rarely marry his sister except under the compulsion of a compelling duty.
Penelope squeezed the tears out of her eyes, mastered her sobs, then said:
'You? You're offering to marry me?'
'Yes,' said Hatch, already regretting the offer, but putting a good face on it. 'It might stall Polk for a month or two.'
'Stall Polk!' said Penelope, sorrow turning to outrage. 'I should marry you for that? You! Marry you!?'
'Why, yes,' said Hatch, starting to feel offended. 'Why shouldn't you marry me?'
Asodo Hatch did not consider himself thin-skinned.
Nevertheless, when a man invites a woman to marry him, he is apt to be disconcerted if her reaction is one of baleful fury, and Hatch, being in many ways a very average and conventional man, was so disconcerted.
'Marry you?' screamed Penelope. 'You with your wife in drugs and dying? You with your fancy whore on the top of the hill?'
'The Lady Iro Murasaki,' said Hatch coldly, 'is not a whore.'
'She's a whore! A whore, a bitching whore! But I'm no whore, I'm smarter than her, I know you through and through, I'm your sister, I won't be fooled or whored!'
With that, Penelope hurled the wet sponge at Hatch, or tried to. But she underestimated the difficulty of hurling something whilst fully clothed and recumbent in a wooden bathtub half full of water. She banged her elbow painfully – and howled.
Hatch looked down on the woestruck woman with dismay.
Howling broke to sobbing, and in her sobbing Penelope choked out a heartbroken accusation.
'You killed him to rape. To rape me. That's why. You wanted me, wanted me, that's why you killed him. Rapist!'
The situation was painfully difficult, particularly as Hatch felt duty-bound to question his own heart. Had he truly cut down Darius Flute simply so he could take possession of his own sister?
Hatch decided the claim was fatuous. He had absolutely no desire for his sister, even though she bore upon her nose the ceremonial blue and green tattoos which denote a woman who has killed and castrated a would-be rapist. Several ethnologists have written that Frangoni males are inevitably aroused by the implicit challenge posed by such tattoos, but Hatch was not aroused at all.
Even though he knew those tattoos to be true to their boast, he found them distinctly unproductive of desire – an unpleasant reminder of a squalid episode which he would much sooner forget.
'I don't want you,' said Hatch. 'I never have. I never will.'
'Never!' said Penelope.
And, unable to bear such a brutal rejection of her womanly charms, she started to howl again.
Hatch was glad to hear someone at the door, which gave him an excuse to escape from the bathroom, back to the crowded lacquerwork luxury of the outer room. But on venturing to that outer room he was somewhat dismayed to find that the interloper was his elder brother, Oboro Bakendra Hatch. The black-bearded Oboro Bakendra was three years his senior, and was a fanatical priest of the Great God Mokaragash. Relations between the brothers had deteriorated markedly since Oboro Bakendra had joined the priesthood three years earlier, on quitting the Combat College.
On joining the priesthood, Oboro Bakendra had demanded that Hatch cut short his studies in the Combat College and join likewise. Hatch had protested his devotion to the Silver Emperor, the great Plandruk Qinplaqus, whose obedient slave he was.
Whereupon Oboro Bakendra had obtained from the great Qinplaqus a dispensation permitting Hatch to quit his military studies in favor of a religious career if he so chose.
Upon which Hatch had been forced to acknowledge to himself that any career in the service of the Great God Mokaragash would be intolerable if it took place in the shadow of his elder brother Oboro Bakendra, who had inherited the stubbornness, the overbearing arrogance and the explosive anger of their father Lamjuk Dakoto Hatch.
Hatch's decision to remain in the Combat College had led to something of a breach between the two brothers.
As far as Oboro Bakendra was concerned, his younger brother Asodo was polluting himself by his intimate relations with Outsiders. Asodo Hatch was working with the unclean, he was eating with the unclean, and it was an open secret that he was even sleeping with one of the unclean in the manner of lust. Oboro Bakendra had continued to insist that Hatch should abort his Combat College training, and had become more and more insistent as it started to become obvious that Hatch had a good chance of landing a permanent position in that College.
'Hatch!' said Oboro Bakendra, as Hatch emerged from the bathroom and entered upon the outer room.
'I was just leaving,' said Hatch. 'Penelope is all yours.
She's in the bath.'
From the bathroom there came a crash, followed by a scream of female rage. Penelope had started throwing things. As a small girl, she had once knocked out her grandfather with a watermelon, and her temper had not mellowed since.
'It's not her I'm looking for,' said Oboro Bakendra. 'It's you!'
Oboro Bakendra had come to discipline his younger brother, and he had not come alone. Hatch was conspicuously large, and one of the problems of being a big man is that anyone minded to pick a quarrel with you is going to be forewarned of the need for adequate preparations.
The strength of Oboro Bakendra's preparations became clear as others came crowding into House Jodorunda behind him – his sidekicks and backkicks, a group of like-minded fanatics all armed with sticks. These were not snake-breaking sticks or rods for the chastisement of dogs. Rather, they were knurled and knubbly hardwood clubs built for the breaking of men – or the battery of elephants. And Hatch knew at once that he was in trouble. Nexus battle doctrine holds that one can fight six, but not if the six have each been trained to fight six – and no adult Frangoni male was innocent of the means of slaughter. Hatch started to think he might be better off back in the bathroom with Penelope.
'Well, gentlemen,' said Hatch. 'What can I do for you?'
'Gentlemen, gentlemen,' said Oboro Bakendra. 'Flattery, is it? The Age of Flattery is an age long gone, brother mine. This is an Age of Righteousness, an age of punishing wrath.'
Hatch was alarmed by the underlying note of womanly hysteria in his brother's histrionics. Oboro Bakendra was winding himself up through rhetoric, which vice, amongst the Frangoni, has ever been one of the preludes to war. Oboro Bakendra's sidekicks and backkicks were sweaty, tight-knuckled, over-focused, fastbreathing. And suddenly Hatch was afraid, afraid of the wood and the iron, the tight-wound sinews and the bunched muscle-backed bone. Vividly he felt – He fought his imagination but he felt – He felt for a moment his teeth snapped back, his jaw clipped to a gurgling crackle as bones in their breakage – 'Answer me!'
Oboro Bakendra was shouting, and Hatch in his fear had lost the thread of Oboro Bakendra's rhetoric.
Hatch was so badly frightened that his reaction was anger. He felt the emotions of muscle tightening his focus, gearing him up for battle or breakage, for beserker destruction in the Frangoni battle-mode.
'Answer you,' said Hatch, in defiance. Then he caught himself abruptly, and then said – forcing his voice to be soft, to be tender, to be cadenced as a woman's comforting is cadenced – 'Answer you? Why, brother mine, you're the one with the answers.
You're older, hence wiser. You have the answers. I need but hear them, for to hear – my brother, to hear is necessarily to obey.'
'What speaks?' said Oboro Bakendra, his anger not one whit diminished. 'Hatch speaks, or fear speaks?'
This was an accusation of cowardice. Hatch was incensed. He shook with a shuddering fury. He had been born and bred to be strong, valorous, war-glorious and victorious in courage. He had been to war and had proved his blood a hundred times over. But now, now in the shadows of a debt-ridden house, his pride was being smirched, his
