'She calls herself Penelope,' said Lupus.
'Penelope, then,' said Hatch, conceding the point readily in the fullness of his relief. 'You want her? Very well! Take her!
But I warn you, she's killed and castrated one already. A camel driver, she was thirteen, and underneath Yon Yo – '
'I know the story,' said Lupus, cutting short the flow of Hatch's relief. 'Don't worry, I can handle her. But. But there's a problem.'
'What?' said Hatch suspiciously.
'My father. He doesn't like the idea.'
'You – you've talked this out with your father already?'
'I've told him, yes,' said Lupus. 'I've told him I want to marry your sister, and he – '
'Marry her!' said Hatch in amazement.
'Why, yes, yes,' said Lupus, impatiently. 'When one loves a woman, when one – '
'Love!' said Hatch, in further amazement.
The idea of the rat-sized Lupus being in love with the mass, bulk and obstinance of the heroically-proportioned Penelope was so ludicrous that Hatch burst out into frank and open laughter. He could not help himself.
'You mock my passions?' said Oliver in anger.
'Mock?' said Hatch, struggling to control himself. 'No. But – but – my sister? You? In love?'
'What else did you think?' said Lupus.
'Oh,' said Hatch, grinning in the dark, 'I thought you might want her as a slave, you know, to take to bed and ravish. But – well – marriage?'
'It's what I want,' said Lupus fiercely.
'Yet your father opposes it.'
'Yes.'
'But he'd let you have Penelope as a slave?' said Hatch.
'I would presume so,' said Lupus.
'Then take her thus,' said Hatch. 'She's legally burdened with debts she can't pay, so you can buy up her debts and have her tomorrow.'
'That's not what I want!' said Lupus vehemently. 'You – you want to see your sister a slave?'
Something had made young Lupus Lon Oliver extremely angry, but Hatch could not for the life of him fathom out the cause of the Ebrell Islander's rage. They were a very passionate people, these Ebrell Islanders, and sometimes quite unreasonable in their emotional outbursts.
'Why,' said Hatch, 'I want, well, I want what any man would want for his sister. To see her kept in one bed and made pregnant.
I'm sure you could bed her and bring her to child, though you might lose a testicle or two in the process. Well then, if that's what you want, go to it! If she's your slave she's your responsibility, and I've troubles enough of my own without trying to maintain that woman in discipline.'
'You – you – how can you say these things?' said Lupus.
'You're of the Nexus, you've trained, you – there's no slaves in the Nexus.'
'Not as such,' said Hatch agreeably. 'But this is not the Nexus. Cultural relativity applies. I'm sure your father will be happy enough for you to have my sister as your slave. Come on, let's ask him.'
With that, Hatch set out for the Brick.
'But,' said Lupus, standing fast in the dark, 'I've already asked Penelope to marry me.'
Hatch stopped short.
'You what!?' said Hatch, turning. 'You've asked her what!?'
'I've asked her to marry me. She said she would.'
'When was this?'
'A month ago.'
'But – but when – but how – this is…!'
Hatch, unable to find words for his astoundment, quite staggered into silence.
'I have asked Penelope to marry me,' said Lupus, with the clear-voiced heroism of a young man drugged and deluded by the flux of his own hormones. 'I have asked her. She says she will.
But my father denies the match. Persuade my father to our party and you can have your scorpions, and more.'
'If this was the Nexus,' said Hatch, 'would you let your father stand between you and the woman of your wish? The law permits you to marry as you wish. So, if the woman be willing – why, what then stands between you and the consummation of your folly? If this was the Nexus, you'd be married already!'
'As you have observed already,' said Lupus, 'this is not the Nexus. If I deny my father then I am drummed out of the Free Corps, I'm – I'm dead to my people.'
'But you're in love,' said Hatch. 'So dare such a death.'
'If I have to, I will,' said Lupus. 'But if I become instructor, then – then – I think my father will allow me what I want, yes, when I'm winner, when I've won.'
'Then give me some three hundred scorpions and you'll have your victory by Dog Day's dawn,' said Hatch.
'But,' said Lupus, 'But I've no gold, not a bit. My pay gets tithed by the Brick, of course, and I've, ah | | '
'You,' said Hatch, intuiting the probable course of Lupus's relationship with Penelope, 'have in the past year or so made substantial donations to a certain Edgerley Eden, an Evolutionist of Hepko Cholo.'
'It is so,' said Lupus, acknowledging the folly to which Penelope had persuaded him. 'So – so I have no gold, and even if I'd saved I'd never have had three hundred, that's a lot of money, my father can raise it but not me, not when my father's against me. No Ebrell Islander would think it wise – '
'All right, all right,' said Hatch, who did not want to stand there all night listening to Lupus detail out his financial plight. 'Let's head for the Brick and talk to your father.'
So the two men covered the last hundred paces to the Brick.
Exterior lanterns lit the door of the Brick, which was flanked by weathered jawbones which had once belonged to a whale.
In the freshness of their death, those jawbones had been white, but now, like the lanterns, they were red with dust. As for the Brick, that had been red to start with, since its squarebuilt blockwork had been erected using bricks deliberately chosen for their likeness to the sanguinary tint of an Ebrell Islander's fireskin. The guards who stood at the doors of the Brick carried the harpoons which Ebrell Islanders traditionally used to slaughter those improbable sea monsters known as whales. For though the Brick was ostensibly a monument to the ideals of the Nexus, in point of fact it was also a monument to the superiority complex of the Ebrell Islanders.
In Dalar ken Halvar, the Ebrell Islanders were renowned for that superiority complex. They claimed to be a master race – stronger, fiercer, harder and more courageous than other men. it was the commonest boast of the Ebrell Islanders that they could out-drink, out-fight and out-endeavor any three or four men of any other race put together; and, if the accounts of ethnologists were to be believed, on their native islands the Ebrell Islanders devoted much of their spare time to feasts at which they endeavored to both celebrate and prove their inbuilt superiority.
The Ebrell Islanders of the Brick thought of the Frangoni as a decidedly inferior people – the unfortunate resemblance of the Frangoni to some of the Wild Tribes featured in the entertainments of the Eye of Delusions was in part responsible for this attitude – and Hatch was conscious of entering into enemy territory as he stepped between the harpoon-carrying guards and entered the lantern-lit Brick.
The Frangoni warrior found himself expected, and was shortly admitted into the presence of Manfred Gan Oliver, father of Lupus Lon Oliver, master of the Brick and head of the Free Corps.
Asodo Hatch and Manfred Gan Oliver met together in the privacy of Gan Oliver's office, which was tricked out in a crude imitation of the bureaucratic style of the Nexus. There was a Nexus-style desk of fine-grained wood, and there were Nexus-style chairs on either side of the desk, one for Hatch and one for Gan Oliver. Hung on one wall was the certificate which vouched for Gan Oliver's graduation to the status of Startrooper.
There were however a number of things which marked this room as the preserve of an Ebrell Islander, for by the light of oil lanterns Hatch saw two black-bladed harpoons posed as trophies on the wall opposite Gan Oliver's
