Nu-chala-nuth: a fanatic religion which, after an organic rectifier was introduced into human affairs, sparked the Spasm Wars (technically known as the Spasm Riots, since no State of Civil War was ever officially declared by the Nexus Council), and thus precipitated the death of billions.
The Nu is the great lord, ie God. The Nu-chala is the servant of the great lord. The nuth are the worshippers of the servant of the lord – the members of the congregation. Consequently "Nuchala-nuth" may be laboriously rendered as "the congregation which worships the servant of the lord", though a common and far preferable translation is "the Way of Worship".
Nu-chala-nuth is headquartered on Borboth, holiest of planets and home of the Nu-chala. Contrary to the common belief of the ignorant, the language of this planet is not Nu-chala-nuth (for scholarship acknowledges the existence of no language so named) but Motsu Kazuka.
How shall I send to the wind -
How shall I send to the sea -
The bamboo wind of the Elephant Coast -
The fish of the bamboo sea.
If one is of the Frangoni – and Hatch was of the Frangoni – then the Elephant Coast is ever one's home, regardless of where one was born. But five generations previously, the people of the Elephant Coast had met defeat in a perishing war which they were as yet far from forgetting, and the burden of that defeat was that the kings of the south paid tribute to Plandruk Qinplaqus, the mindmastering wizard of Ebber whom they acknowledged as emperor, and some of the Frangoni dwelt yet in servitude in Dalar ken Halvar.
Hatch was born in Dalar ken Halvar, and lived there, and looked set to die there, though dying was not on his mind when he went to Temple Isherzan to seek guidance from the High Priest.
His problem was not death but life.
It was early afternoon on the Day of Five Fishes when Asodo Hatch climbed Cap Uba's southern slopes and entered the precincts of Temple Isherzan. At the gateway known as the Passage of Death he beat his sandals against an iron rail to remove the red dust of the Plain of Jars. He stooped to the Waters of Water, which even in reflection still sustained the purple of his features. He dipped a beaker into the water, shattering his own reflection in the ritual which is known to the Frangoni as p'dala m'thara, and which is designed to remind the pilgrim of the transience of the flesh which so briefly sustains us against the inevitability of our deaths. Hatch drank from the Water of Water, drank from that wisdom; then, with lips wet and unwiped as ritual requires, and with a stray drop of water drippling down his chin, he climbed on up the hillpath, passing first the still-smouldering remains of a funeral pyre, then a temple acolyte who was painting a pyramid of heaped-up skulls with fresh blood.
His father's body should have been burnt here, for this was hallowed ground, and the rightful place for every Frangoni funeral. But the manner of the death of Lamjuk Dakoto Hatch had made such an honorable funeral impossible, for that death had brought shame upon Lamjuk Dakoto, and upon his children, and upon the children of his children. And so he had been burnt by the waters of the Yamoda, burnt like a dead dog, and his ashes had still to find a fitting resting place.
So, when the acolyte raised his eyes and looked at Asodo Hatch, Hatch did not meet his gaze. He tried to shrug off the memories of his father's death.
– Death is death, and can I undo it?
Thus he tried.
But he was only half-successful.
Asodo Hatch was wearing manhood's purple robes, but the acolyte wore red and black, for such were the colors of the Great God Mokaragash. Likewise colored were the temple's totem poles.
Hatch remembered reading that black and red are perennially popular with primitive tribes, since charcoal and ochre are easy to use. He tried to put this thought also out of mind, since the thought was vulgar, and the ground he trod was sacred.
– This is my God.
So thought Hatch. But the thought was faked, and he knew it.
He was trying by an exercise of will to contend against the scepticism bred into him by long years of contact with the Nexus, and he was failing.
– God of my bones. God of my blood. God of my people.
Again the thought was forced and fraudulent. But Hatch matched actions to thought, bowing to the first and greatest of the graven images of the Great God Mokaragash, a huge slab of stone carved in the shape of a slovenly, almost amorphous face.
The only sharply detailed features were the deep-cut shadows of the eye sockets. Mokaragash is He Who Sees Without Eyes, but He sees to a grim purpose, and the blood which stained the eyesockets was fresh.
"Lord," said Hatch, addressing his god.
Amongst the Frangoni, an idol is not a symbolic representation of an entity located Elsewhere. Rather, the deity is presumed to be incarnate in the image. Thus Hatch should have been awed, humble and slightly apprehensive, since he stood in the actual presence of his god. But in truth | | Today he could not deny it.
Today he was seeing Temple Isherzan through the eyes of the Nexus. He could no longer forget the realms of transcosmic science and computerized ethnology simply by exiting from the lockway. The tricks of unlearning, of setting aside knowledge, no longer worked. He stood in the temple as a tourist-stranger from the Nexus, and found himself comparing the temple's people to the jabbering barbarians of the Wild Tribes of the Eye of Delusions.
– I did not choose this.
That much at least was true. Hatch had never wished to be a stranger amongst his own people – but then, choice had not been a part of his birthright. Asodo Hatch had been born into slavery. He was not free to choose his own destiny, for, like every Frangoni male of Dalar ken Halvar, he was bound forever in servitude to Plandruk Qinplaqus, the Silver Emperor who ruled the Empire of Greater Parengarenga.
Since earliest youth, Hatch had been attracted to the realm of Final Things. Given free choice, he would have become a priest: a master of mysteries, a keeper of numinous secrets, an inner associate of the Great God Mokaragash. But free choice had ever been denied to him, and so he had become a soldier in the service of the Silver Emperor, since that was how the lord of Na Sashimoko wished to be served.
At the age of 11, Hatch had sat the requisite aptitude tests, had passed, and had entered into the Combat College, and thus had been thrust amongst people who had no caste. From that day forth, everything he used was unclean, tainted by the sweat of a foreign people. The food he ate was demon-stuff fabricated out of shadow.
It sustained life, yet it too was unclean.
So Hatch in his very childhood had been forced to leave the security of the Frangoni rock to dwell amongst strangers. At puberty he was denied the gold: he entered manhood with his ears as yet unpierced. He drank green milk and ate the meat of whales, while foreign languages pressed upon his ears until he found himself waking from dreams to realize that his very sleep had been phrased in the Commonspeak of the Nexus.
Burdened by such training, it was hard for Hatch to be a Frangoni, even on the Frangoni rock.
Yet – Hatch paused upon the heights, and looked to the east, looked out across the shackwork streets of Actus Dorum, the windings of the Yamoda River, the distant heights of Blogo Zo and the red eternities of the Plain of Jars beyond. He sometimes found that the evergaze distances of the far horizons allowed him to step outside himself, to distance himself from his own condition and thus gain insight into that condition.
Thus it was in this case, for, in the peace of the far horizons, Asodo Hatch was granted a moment of grace, and in that moment he acknowledged to himself a difficult truth. The truth was that, though his cultural laments were not faked or fraudulent, they were nevertheless secondary. He had enlarged them to primacy to hide from himself the full extent of his griping concern for a far more urgent problem – the state of his finances.
– Admit it, Hatch, admit it.
Hatch admitted it as he resumed his upward trudge in the sunsweat heat. He admitted it reluctantly. A grand clash of cultures, a conflict of national destinies – ah, there lay drama!
But that which oppressed him was the squalid greeding and grasping of commercial life, something which should not afflict a hero.
– A hero? You want to be a hero?
Yes. Hatch wanted to be a hero. Like his father. But his father, well, his father…
– My father was a fool.
So thought Hatch, and halted as he thought it, the stones of the Frangoni rock seeming unstable underfoot. He could not, would not, should not, must not think such things. But he had. Thoughts themselves have consequences, and this one could not be canceled into oblivion. It was true. The old man had been a fool. In his folly, he had gone down to grief in full view of the public, dying for, for…
– What did he die for?
– For nothing.
Suddenly it was pleasure, pure pleasure, for Hatch to retreat to thoughts of his finances, to a consideration of the pressures of his debts, and he concentrated on figuring gold and silver in his head as he pressed on toward the lair of the High Priest, striving to shut out all thoughts of his father and his father's fate.
Usually a High Priest in the service of the Great God Mokaragash does not undertake pastoral duties. But Asodo Hatch was a person of no small importance. After all, as a captain of Dalar ken Halvar's Imperial Guard he had the ear of the Silver Emperor himself. So, though his was not one of the Three Questions which any worshipper could put to the ecclesiarch of the Frangoni Rock, Temple Isherzan's sensitivity to political nuance entitled Hatch to ask as he wished.
This was only natural.
"Every religious organization is also and necessarily a political organization. Consequently the hierarchy of any established religion tends to be dominated by individuals whose key skills are political."
So says the Book of Politics.
Hatch remembered that wisdom as he waited on the pleasure of a junior priest. The junior was fool enough to deny knowledge of the visitor's mission, and kept Hatch waiting while certain Tablets of Appointments were laboriously consulted. Hatch had firmly committed the junior's demerits to memory by the time he was at last allowed to step into the presence of the Inner Idol.
In the presence of the Inner Idol stood Sesno Felvus, ethnarch of Dalar ken Halvar's Frangoni, and therefore necessarily High Priest of the Great God Mokaragash. Felvus, heavily burdened with ceremonial robes of red and black, was busy with pestel and mortar, grinding the bones of a dead man for ritual purposes. When at last he finished, he abluted his hands in lustral water, then acknowledged Hatch with a nod.
"Greetings, my lord," said Hatch. "Greetings to the lord who serves the Greater Lord."
Hatch made ritual obeisance; Felvus recited the Five Blessings; then the two retired to Felvus's private quarters.
Though the shutters were open, the generous overhang of the eaves meant that the room was cool and shadowy. Coming in out of the sun, Hatch felt almost cold, and was reminded of the eternal chill of the Combat College.
The High Priest's quarters consisted of a single room only, but this was large, and made to seem enormous by height of ceiling and sparceness of furnishings. Only a single table and three chairs of woven bamboo stood on the bare flagstones of the floor.
Against one wall stood a broom, a water urn, and – this last a product of the Combat College – a rolled up spongefoam sleeping mat. Such were the High Priest's possessions.
On the table was a stoneware dish heaped with cubes of sundried scorpion bread. Sesno Felvus ate a piece, as ritual required. He offered no food to Hatch, for the bread was consecrated to the priesthood's service. Besides, this was "a ritual of setting apart", as the Book of Ethnology has it; it demonstrated and reinforced the gulf between priest and worshipper. Hatch – Hatch was unsettled by the unexpected renewal of the dislocating perspective of ethnology. To his dismay, he found himself again seeing all as a stranger, a visitor, an analyst from the Nexus. He fought to be Frangoni, Frangoni in crutch and fundament, in liver and lungs. But instead he was Hatch of the Combat College. Hatch of the Stormforce. Startrooper Hatch.
Deepspace warrior. Transcosmic citizen.
To such a person – What could an unwashed savage of the Frangoni rock have to offer such a person?
"Sit," said Sesno Felvus, in a way which made it clear he had said as much already. "Sit, Hatch. Is anything wrong? Something's wrong. What is it?"
This was a very difficult question to answer. One does not lie to a High Priest. That would be blasphemy – and, besides, Sesno Felvus was far too acute to swallow an idle deceit. So Hatch had to express his condition in words which would carry the truth yet remain palatable.
"I, ah… the mind plays tricks," said Hatch. "It happens, sometimes. When things go wrong, I… they teach us the Nexus, so sometimes… sometimes it's as if I wasn't of this world, not quite, but rather… I suppose it's a distancing strategy. When things get too hard I… one devalues the present. What is."
"The Combat College is a different world," said Sesno Felvus, as if he knew it well. "I think of the Combat College as a cave.
The cave of the Nexus, where shadows posture as reality. If we accept the very shadows as reality – well, if you live in a cave too long, the very sun must seem a madness. But I don't think you as yet so deeply sunk in strangeness. Or are you? Tell me, Hatch – are we so strange to each other?"
Seated side by side, the two men were marked by superficial similarities – skin likewise purple and robes similarly styled, albeit of different colors. But Hatch – Hatch was tall and strong by the standards of his people, a warrior in the prime of life, washed, deodorized, depilated and very faintly perfumed by the miraculous machineries of the Nexus, whereas Sesno Felvus – In extreme old age, the Frangoni purple of the High Priest's skin was tinged with brown. His eyes had faded from violet to gray. The lean and bony ancient had long, long ago abandoned the golden ear-rings of virile manhood, piercing his earlobes instead with the iron rings which denoted "a man in the service of death", as the ritual phrase has it. The ancient had not bathed for several years, a fact which Hatch – to his shame – found shameful.
It was all too easy to see Sesno Felvus as a tourist from the Nexus might have seen him. As a sample of a type. Barbarian Priest, type A-7, old; subtype B-4, rancid. For a moment, Hatch saw the man exactly thus – which was a measure of his estrangement.
"The heart is a labyrinth," said Sesno Felvus, deducing deep inner conflict's from Hatch's silence. "The best of us get lost in that labyrinth from time to time. Tell me, Hatch – how old are you?"
"Thirty-four," said Hatch.
"Thirty-four!" said Sesno Felvus, as if amazed. "Why, I've lost a year! I thought you were thirty-three, because your sister – well, enough of that. Thirty-four. A good age. Still graced with the last of youth yet mature enough to appreciate its sweetness."
"I don't feel young," said Hatch.
"One doesn't," said Sesno Felvus, betraying slight amusement.
"Yet when you reach my age – oh, but I could talk all day of age if you let me. You're thirty-four. A man."
"For what it's worth," said Hatch.
Though his ears did not bear the gold, it was nevertheless true that he had attained a man's estate. He had been through the rites of passage, winning wisdom and self-knowledge. His confidence was that which comes from danger and hardship met, faced then overcome. Yet – yet sometimes – "Sometimes," said Sesno Felvus, as if picking up Hatch's thoughts, "sometimes manhood is a puzzlement even to the best of us. I've known you since – why, since you were born."
True. Sesno Felvus had been on hand when Hatch was still squirming in his birth-blood. Had initiated him into the outer stages of the worship of the Great God Mokaragash when he was aged but nine. Had married him to the woman of his parents' choice when he was 14. Had blessed his daughters. And had consoled him after his father's death, even though that death had been both sinful and shameful, an unpardonable abomination.
"It is a puzzlement," said Hatch, in that single sentence admitting the intolerable stress he was under.
With this act of admission, Hatch felt – Hatch felt as if a bubble which had been protecting him from the world had suddenly burst. The intolerable months of training, tension, examination, uncertainty, debt, harassment, pain – it was all too much for him.
His mouth opened and closed, and without warning the tears screwed themselves out of his eyes, and he could not see or breathe or speak.
Such emotion made introspective analysis impossible, though analysis would have served only to confirm that such a crisis was the inevitable result of unrelieved pressure and the long denial of all carefree reward.
Hatch wept. Openly, shamelessly. In complete default of all self-control. Sesno Felvus reached out and took his hand. The High Priest's hands were dry, and bon-hard, and firm in the assurance of their comfort, their acceptance. The comfort remained as Hatch's weeping eased, pure pain turned to a deep-felt grief at the mere fact of loss of self-control.
Then, when Hatch had cleansed himself by weeping – his body calm, relaxed and pliable, as if the collapse of self-control had answered some deep-seated biological need, massaging the tensions from his muscles and from the very linkages of his bones – Sesno Felvus began to deal with him in earnest.
Counseled by Sesno Felvus, Hatch talked his way through his problems, step by step. The pressures and uncertainties surrounding his struggle for the instructorship of the Combat College. The illness of his wife, the illness which had come upon her with full force in the last six months, and which seemed certain to kill her. His sister's delinquencies. His pressing requirements for money.
"Asodo," said Sesno Felvus, who had never before called Hatch by his given name. "You have never been happy in the Combat College, have you?"
"No," said Hatch.
"I remember you as a child. Your father came to me for guidance. You were… you had nightmares which woke the house, and when it was time to go back… "
"I remember," said Hatch.
In the early years of his training in the Combat College, in the years when he had still been a boy, there were times when he had fled from its cold and cream-colored corridors. His family had several times been forced to hunt for him in Spara Slank and Childa Go, by the swamps of the Vomlush or in the streets of Bon Tray. He remembered sitting out one night on the red dust flatlands south of Cap Foz Para Lash, the night being lit by Yon Yo, the high and cold and inexplicable beacon which had ever ruled the heights of Dalar ken Halvar's southernmost minor mountain.
The boy Hatch had always been caught in the end, and always after his brief-lived truancies he had been forced to return to the Combat College. Always forced. Always compelled. He had never wanted to go back. The memory of that childhood unpleasantness was still very, very clear.
"So," said Sesno Felvus, "you're not one of those who welcomed your descent into the cave. And now… now you're scheduled to fight for the instructorship. You need to win that fight because you need the money. But… as for the position itself… as for the Combat College | | "
"If I could walk away from it all then I would," said Hatch.
"I'd never regret it. I'm not a – it's a playground. That's all.
That's all it is. It's only the Free Corps which thinks it's – what? A vocation. That's what they think. Stormforce. Startrooper.
Nexus talk and Nexus tongue. A life. But it's a nonsense."
"So you wouldn't regret – "
"What? Whalemeat? Green milk? The Eye of Delusions? I can see the Eye any day, in any case. No. Nothing. I'd have no regrets. If I walked away I'd – but I need the money, I can't walk away from the money. I know the Temple's poor, so I can't, I couldn't – well. You know how it is."
Dalar ken Halvar was not a rich city, even though it was the capital of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga. As for Temple Isherzan, it was not in any sense wealthy. Sesno Felvus did not have the luxury of being able to offer Hatch charity, and both of them knew it.
"Your problem," said Sesno Felvus, "is simple to state, even though it may not be quite so simple to solve. You need money desperately, and so seek to win the instructor's position at the Combat College. If you win, will that be money sufficient?"
"An instructor's pay is generous," said Hatch. "It will serve. If I can win the instructorship."
"So," said Sesno Felvus. "So you have set your heart on winning. Selection is by competition by combat. Is that not so?"
"It is so," acknowledged Hatch.
"A symbolic Season," said Sesno Felvus. "A battle in dream for a prize in the flesh."
"That," said Hatch, "describes the combat well. The Combat College was founded in the flesh of the fact – however, little remains but the dreams. That's why – it's folly, the whole thing.
I want my life in the flesh. If I can have it. The flesh of the world and the fact."
"So you'd like to renounce the Combat College," said Sesno Felvus. "But this is your secret. Nobody else knows it. Everyone rumors that it's your dearest wish to be instructor. I've heard that you're an excellent fighter. If rumor holds truth, then there's only one other seriously in contention for the instructorship. Lon Oliver, isn't it? Is that the young man's name?"
"Yes," said Hatch, registering no surprise at the High Priest's impeccable intelligence.
It was no secret that, with the just-completed competitive theoretical examinations having clarified the standing of those students who were competing for the instructorship, Hatch's only remaining serious rival for the one single instructor position was Lupus Lon Oliver. Who was good. Who was very very good. Who might yet shoot Hatch down in flames. Literally in flames – for they would be dueling not with swords and spears but with singlefighters and MegaCommand Cruisers.
"Now," said Sesno Felvus, "Lon Oliver may win, may lose. But one thing we know of a certainty. Since Lon Oliver is the son of Gan Oliver, he has been driven since childhood by his father's ambition. Lupus Lon Oliver is of the Free Corps, hence thinks like his father. You if you lose will still have a life for yourself.
But if Lon Oliver loses – for him, nothing."
"That is so," said Hatch.
Money aside, Hatch could walk away from the Combat College with no regrets. But Lupus Lon Oliver, like all members of the Free Corps, had made an emotional alliance with the Nexus, and to lose the instructorship would be a tragedy which would break his life.
"So, Asodo," said Sesno Felvus, "isn't it simple? Your friend Lon Oliver wants the job, but all you want is the money. So sell him the job. Let him bribe you. With gold to your credit, you let him defeat you in the instructorship examinations."
"Wah!" said Hatch, taken aback by the elegance of this solution. "But – but where would he get the gold? I'd want it in advance, I couldn't trust him to pay me afterwards."
"Such caution is only wise," said Sesno Felvus. "Of course you'd want cash in advance. You'd need gold sufficient to pay off your debts and a healthy surplus to bank with the Bralsh. But that's no problem. Lon Oliver's father, well – talk to the father if you can't get sense from the son. It matters to both of them intensely. The father's got the Free Corp's resources behind him, so – "
"But they might not do a deal," said Hatch.
"I think refusal unlikely," said Sesno Felvus. "From what I hear, the betting in the Combat College runs even on yourself and Lon Oliver. Only a fool would risk losing the instructorship for a point of pride when it could be bought of a certainty at an easily affordable price. Talk to the son. If he's really such a fool, go to his father. They've got the gold, it's no problem."
"I am in your debt," said Hatch.
Painfully reminded, as he said it, that he was in debt to many people, mostly for cash.
"I am a servant," said Sesno Felvus, with these words withdrawing from familiarity into the distance of ritual, and thus sealing up in secrecy the knowledge of all which had passed between them. "I am a servant not just of the Great God but of the people. As you serve your family, as you serve your people, so it is my pleasure and my privilege to be of service to you."
So spoke Sesno Felvus, and that was when Hatch – succored by a priest of his religion, succored and nourished, comforted and healed – that was when Hatch knew that he was still of the Frangoni, still truly of the Frangoni, regardless of what the Nexus had done to him. The Frangoni rock was his home, his life, his world – the place where he was accepted and protected, where he was valued and honored.
Despite the manner of his father's death.
"There is yet one thing more which I need," said Hatch, affirming his new knowledge to himself by meticulous attention to the rituals of his faith.
"Speak."
"I think that Lupus Lon Oliver will yield to me in accordance with your wisdom, but maybe he will fight. If he does, then I must fight for the instructorship. If I fight and win, then I will need a dispensation to accept the instructorship, for to take that job I needs must take an oath to value the Nexus more than my god."
"Asodo Hatch," said Sesno Felvus, becoming stern and formal, "as High Priest of the Great God Mokaragash in the city of Dalar ken Halvar I give you a dispensation to take such an oath."
Then Hatch thanked the High Priest, said formal words of parting, then went out into the dustlight of the sunheat day.
"Hatch," said Sesno Felvus.
Hatch turned. The High Priest was standing in the doorway.
"What?" said Hatch, forgetting the courtesies and using a mode of colloquial interrogation which he immediately regretted.
"To survive is victory sufficient," said Sesno Felvus.
Then nodded, then withdrew into the shadowspace of his quarters. To survive. To survive? What was the old man talking about? Life? Illusion-tank dueling? The fate of the Frangoni race?
Hatch remembered one of the old sayings from the teachings of Dith-zora-ka-mako:
"Wisdom lies but a hair from the idiot."
In Hatch's estimate, Sesno Felvus had on this occasion failed to manage that hair-fine differentiation between wisdom and… well, not idiocy, not exactly. But platitude. Felvus, Sesno, a platitudinous old Frangoni male | | But still!
Disregarding that lapse into platitudinity, Sesno Felvus had wrought a minor miracle of revelation, and Hatch felt almost lightheaded as he started off down Cap Uba, retracing his steps toward Zambuk Street.
Selling the instructorship outright to Lupus Lon Oliver, allowing his warrior's pride to be bought and sold… the idea was not exactly enrapturing, but… it was a solution! And it was so obvious! Obvious to Sesno Felvus, even though the High Priest was so far removed from the center of immediate crisis. But of course one goes to such a person for advice precisely because such an individual, being free of the turbulence of the moment, is much better placed to consider the options and see the obvious.
But what if Lupus Lon Oliver refused to bribe Asodo Hatch in accordance with Sesno Felvus's suggestion?
What if Lon Oliver refused, and Gan Oliver refused likewise, and Hatch had to fight?
What if Hatch fought and lost? What if he lost and went down in flames, dying in the torn wreckage of a singlefighter? Burning, screaming, falling, down and down, down to the steaming jungles of Cicala or the turbid seas of Yo? What if – "Go-la!"
Hatch stopped, startled. He was still on the temple precincts, no place for anyone to be addressing him in Nexus Ninetongue. So who – A Frangoni?
Yes, it was a Frangoni!
No person of the purple would ever speak anything other than Frangoni upon such sacred soil. Yet here was Son'sholoma Gezira, he who was son of Vara Gezira, and there was no doubt that he had used the Nexus form of address.
Keeping company with Son'sholoma Gezira were half a dozen young men, all of whom looked anxious. They were barefooted, and wore nothing but loincloths, as befitted their station in life.
All belonged to the didimo caste, and the didimo were hewers of wood and drawers of water. There was precious little wood to hew in Dalar ken Halvar, but nevertheless the caste distinctions had not weakened in the generations since the Frangoni who now dwelt in the City of Sun had departed from the Elephant Coast, and it was wrong for one of low caste to open a conversation with one of higher status on such sacred soil.
"May we speak?" said Son'sholoma, still using the Code Seven which served as the Commonspeak of the Nexus.
"Who speaks to me here speaks to me in the tongue proper to the place," said Hatch, phrasing his anger in Frangoni.
Only three years earlier, Hatch and Son'sholoma had been peers in the Combat College, but much had changed since then.
Son'sholoma had disgraced himself, for one thing. Now Hatch spoke roughly, and he spoke in the mode of war, making his anger plain.
Son'sholoma had breached the protocols fitting to Temple Isherzan.
Hatch was all the more angry because his faith in the propriety of the customs of his own people was so weak – and weak at a time when he was trying to draw emotional support from his unity with the traditions of his people.
"Have I offended you?" said Son'sholoma, sounding surprised.
Son'sholoma Gezira was not prepared for Hatch to be so fiercely the Frangoni, because of course Son'sholoma had no knowledge of the truly strenuous combat of cultures which Hatch was manfully endeavoring to resolve in favor of his Frangoni half.
"Your tongue is the offence," said Hatch, with an intolerance which rejected all his Nexus training.
The caste difference he could overlook. After all, when Hatch and Son'sholoma had trained together in the Combat College, they had shared their lives without any regard for caste. But this was not the Combat College. This was Cap Uba, the Frangoni rock, the island of refuge, the place which was theirs and theirs alone in a culture otherwise alien, and nobody should ever compromise the emotional security of that place by speaking there in a foreign tongue.
"I meant no offence, brother," said Son'sholoma.
Hatch stiffened, quite shocked. This time his shock was quite genuine. It owed nothing to Hatch's inner conflicts. Hatch was shocked because Son'sholoma had switched languages, abandoning the Commonspeak of the Nexus to phrase his apology in the Motsu Kazuka of the Nu-chala-nuth. Hatch remembered Beggar Grim speaking that very day of brotherhood, of the Way of the Nu-chala-nuth, and he remembered the beggar's terrifying hope. Hope of being first made Real then made equal, and then – most terrifying of ambitions, this – enriched out of his beggarhood into the full liberties of manhood.
Grim's beggar-babbling had made only a momentary impression on Hatch, but he was shocked rigid to find Son'sholoma Gezira speaking atop the Frangoni rock in Motsu Kazura, the tongue of the Nu-chala-nuth, a religion which should by rights have died out of memory twenty thousand years ago.
"I give you five words," said Hatch, speaking Frangoni, and again speaking very much in the mode of war.
In the Frangoni, to offer someone "five words" was a threat.
The person thus threatened had "five words" in which to explain themselves, with the implication being that dire consequences would follow if the explanation proved inadequate.
"Brother," said Son'sholoma, still speaking the Motsu Kazuka of the Nu-chala-nuth, albeit haltingly. "I want you to me the teaching. You my teacher, the Way."
His atrocious accent, his stumbling grammar, the hesitation of his tongue – all these things told Hatch that Son'sholoma had scarcely the barest rudiments of Motsu Kazuka at his command. But Son'sholoma had learnt enough of that language to ask something utterly appalling.
"I don't understand a word you're saying," said Hatch, in his native Frangoni.
"Then understand me now," said Son'sholoma Gezira, at last consenting to use that same Frangoni tongue. "I and we, me and mine, myself and these with me, we wish you to induct us into the Way of the Nu-chala-nuth."
"Then you and yours need some brain surgery courtesy of a heavy rock," said Hatch.
"This is not a joke," said Son'sholoma. "We're serious."
"Serious?" said Hatch. "You're seriously lunatic! Motsu Kazuka, Nu-chala-nuth – are you mad? What do you want? Our own homegrown version of the Spasm Wars? This is – if I were to exhaust the thesaurus of lunacy, I could hardly find the words of it. As for me – this is my temple, the temple of my people, the temple of yours."
"I meant no offence," said Son'sholoma. "But we did not think you came here to worship."
"What else does one come to a temple for?" said Hatch, rejecting the suggestion that he was in any sense an apostate, an unbeliever, or – perish the thought! – a tourist-stranger beset by ethnological insights. "Why else does one come here? To shit wasps, perhaps? Or bugger rocks with a broomstick? You're mad enough for both, but I'm too sane to waste my time by watching."
Then Hatch left, or tried to.
"Wait," said Son'sholoma, stepping in his way. "You know the Way. You have the knowledge. It is written – it's written that anyone who knows the teachings can propagate the same, regardless of their own belief."
That was true. The religion of the Nu-chala-nuth was strange in the extreme in that it could legitimately be preached even by an unbeliever.
"Where is that written?" said Hatch, who dearly wanted to know who was preaching Nu-chala-nuth in Dalar ken Halvar.
"It is written," said Son'sholoma Gezira, "in your own thesis. That is where it is written."
"My thesis?" said Hatch.
"Yes! The thesis you wrote to gain your degree."
"Wah!" said Hatch.
It was true. It was true. He had written a thesis which had contained an account of such teachings. But he had thought nothing of it at the time. If one writes that some have mastered the art of making the sun explode or of causing the moon to drown itself in a bucket of blood, one does not usually expect such casual reference to the folly of others to lead to disaster in the literal world of the fact and the flesh.
"You know the teachings," said Son'sholoma, pressing home his advantage. "You know and you wrote. You – "
"Since when was simple study rash apostasy? To give an account of war, murder, rape, torture, blasphemy, plague, famine, flood and the demolition of the sun is not to extend a general invitation to the world's madmen to accomplish the fact of the same. Will you stand in my way? Stand, then! I give you five."
Again the threat. This time, Son'sholoma was being offered a count of five in which to abolish himself, or face the immediate and unlimited consequences of his folly.
Since Hatch's anger was unfeigned, and since Hatch was built along lines which suggested an ample capacity for the breaking of rocks and the bending of iron bars, and since Son'sholoma knew appearances in this case to be by no means deceptive, Son'sholoma chose to retreat, signing his fellows to accompany him downhill.
As Son'sholoma Gezira and his half-dozen barefoot accomplices headed off down the hill, Hatch watched them go with some considerable foreboding. There were not so many as a billion people in all of Parengarenga, so the teachings of Nu-chala-nuth could hardly lead to the death of billions. But even so. The Frangoni nation survived in Dalar ken Halvar only because it was socially cohesive, and at the heart of that social cohesion was the worship of the Great God Mokaragash, the tribal god which was theirs and theirs alone. Whether a baleful entity was immanent in the stone of the Inner Idol was beside the point, at least as far as the human realities of the moment were concerned. The alien religion of Nu-chala-nuth could destroy the Frangoni nation, even if it did not spark open revolution in Dalar ken Halvar as a whole.
But Son'sholoma was reckless, and full of thwarted ambition.
If he could establish the religion of the Nu-chala-nuth in Dalar ken Halvar, he might thereby win a measure of power, fame and glory, if only briefly, whereas otherwise – what else was there for him?
"A pity," said Hatch to himself, as he started to follow on after Son'sholoma.
In the Combat College, Son'sholoma Gezira had been a very promising student, gifted with great intelligence; but he had lacked the ability to master himself, and in the end his disciplinary defaults had caused him to be exiled from the Combat College. Now the lockway was forever closed against him.
Therefore, since the Free Corps was equally closed to Frangoni, there was no future for Son'sholoma Gezira in Dalar ken Halvar.
As Hatch descended from Cap Uba and made his way toward his sister's house, he wondered what had made Son'sholoma think it safe to approach him with such a blasphemous proposition. Hatch could only think that his challenge for the instructor's position was being interpreted by some – or by Son'sholoma at least – as a rejection of the Frangoni.
True, there had never yet been a Frangoni combat instructor.
For the last five generations the position had always gone to an Ebrell Islander, while previous to that it had usually been held by one of the Pang.
But even so – "Strange times and dangerous times," said Hatch, wondering if it was Son'sholoma who had been preaching the doctrines of the Nuchala-nuth to the beggars at the lockway, and whether Hatch himself would be put to the necessity of cutting down Son'sholoma before this business was done.