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From this story, though it was the shortest and the most simple too of all those I have recorded in this book, I feel that I learned several things of some importance. First of all, how much of our speech, which we think freshly minted in our own mouths, consists of set locutions. The Ascian seemed to speak only in sentences he had learned by rote, though until he used each for the first time we had never heard them.

Foila seemed to speak as women commonly do, and if I had been asked whether she employed such tags, I would have said that she did not—but how often one might have predicted the ends of her sentences from their beginnings.

Second, I learned how difficult it is to eliminate the urge for expression. The people of Ascia were reduced to speaking only with their masters’ voice; but they had made of it a new tongue, and I had no doubt, after hearing the Ascian, that by it he could express whatever thought he wished.

And third, I learned once again what a many-sided thing is the telling of any tale. None, surely, could be plainer than the Ascian’s, yet what did it mean? Was it intended to praise the Group of Seventeen?

The mere terror of their name had routed the evildoers. Was it intended to condemn them? They had heard the complaints of the just man, and yet they had done nothing for him beyond giving him their verbal support. There had been no indication they would ever do more.

But I had not learned those things I had most wished to learn as I listened to the Ascian and to Foila.

What had been her motive in agreeing to allow the Ascian to compete? Mere mischief? From her laughing eyes I could easily believe it. Was she perhaps in truth attracted to him? I found that more difficult to credit, but it was surely not impossible. Who has not seen women attracted to men lacking every attractive quality? She had clearly had much to do with Ascians, and he was clearly no ordinary soldier, since he had been taught our language. Did she hope to wring some secret from him?

And what of him? Melito and Hallvard had accused each other of telling tales with an ulterior purpose. Had he done so as well? If he had, it had surely been to tell Foila—and the rest of us too—that he would never give up.

XII. Winnoc

THAT EVENING I had yet another visitor: one of the shaven-headed male slaves. I had been sitting up and attempting to talk with the Ascian, and he seated himself beside me. “Do you remember me, Lictor?” he asked. “My name is Winnoc.”

I shook my head.

“It was I who bathed you and cared for you on the night you arrived,” he told me. “I have been waiting until you were well enough to speak. I would have come last night, but you were deep in talk already with one of our postulants.”

I asked what he wished to speak to me about.

“A moment ago I called you Lictor, and you did not deny it. Are you indeed a lictor? You were dressed as one that night.”

“I have been a lictor,” I said. “Those are the only clothes I own.”

“But you are a lictor no longer?”

I shook my head. “I came north to enter the army.”

“Ah,” he said. For a moment he looked away.

“Surely others do the same.”

“A few, yes. Most join in the south, or are made to join. A few come north like you, because they want some special unit where a friend or relation is already. A soldier’s life ...”

I waited for him to continue.

“It’s a lot like a slave’s, I think. I’ve never been a soldier myself, but I’ve talked to a lot of them.”

“Is your life so miserable? I would have thought the Pelerines kind mistresses. Do they beat you?” He smiled at that and turned until I could see his back.

“You’ve been a lictor. What do you think of my scars?”

In the fading light I could scarcely make them out. I ran my fingers across them. “Only that they are very old and were made with the lash,” I said.

“I got them before I was twenty, and I’m nearly fifty now. A man with black clothes like yours made them. Were you a lictor for long?”

“No, not long.”

“Then you don’t know much of the business?”

“Enough to practice it.”

“And that’s all? The man who whipped me told me he was from the guild of torturers. I thought maybe you might have heard of them.”

“I have.”

“Are they real? Some people have told me they died out a long time ago, but that isn’t what the man who whipped me said.”

I told him, “They still exist, so far as I’m aware. Do you happen to recall the name of the torturer who scourged you?”

“He called himself Journeyman Palaemon—ah, you know him!”

“Yes. He was my teacher for a time. He’s an old man now.”

“He’s still alive, then? Will you ever see him again?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’d like to see him myself. Maybe sometime I will. The Increate, after all, orders all things. You young men, you live wild lives—I know I did, at your age. Do you know yet that he shapes everything we do?”

“Perhaps.”

“Believe me, it’s so, I’ve seen much more than you. Since it is so, it may be that I’ll never see Journeyman Palaemon again, and you’ve been brought here to be my messenger.”

Just at that point, when I expected him to convey to me whatever message he had, he fell silent. The patients who had listened so attentively to the Ascian’s story were talking among themselves now; but somewhere in the stack of soiled dishes the old slave had collected, one shifted its position with a faint clink, and I heard it.

“What do you know of the laws of slavery?” he asked me at last. “I mean, of the ways a man or a woman can become a slave under the law?”

“Very little,” I said. “A certain friend of mine” (I was thinking of the green man) “was called a slave, but he was only an unlucky foreigner who’d been seized by some unscrupulous people. I knew that wasn’t legal.”

He nodded agreement. “Was he dark of skin?”

“You might say that, yes.”

“In the olden times, or so I’ve heard, slavery was by skin colour. The darker a man was, the more a slave they made him. That’s hard to believe, I know; But we used to have a chatelaine in the order who knew a lot about history, and she told me. She was a truthful woman.”

“No doubt it originated because slaves must often toil in the sun,” I observed. “Many of the usages of the past now seem merely capricious to us.”