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 color. 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.'
At that he became a trifle angry. 'Believe me, young man, I've lived in the old days and I've lived now, and I know a lot better than you which was the best.'
