“And what will we do then? Milk somebody else’s cow and herd his pigs?” Melito fumed to me.

“Don’t let her talk deceive you—we were volunteers, both of us. I was about to be promoted when I was wounded, and when I’m promoted I’ll be able to support a wife.”

Foila called, “I haven’t promised to marry you!”

Several beds away, someone said loudly, “Take her so she’ll shut up about it!”

At that, the patient in the bed beyond Foila’s sat up. “She will marry me.” He was big, fair skinned, and pale haired, and he spoke with the deliberation characteristic of the icy isles of the south. “I am Hallvard.”

Surprising me, the Ascian prisoner announced, “United, men and women are stronger; but a brave woman desires children, and not husbands.”

Foila said, “They fight even when they’re pregnant—I’ve seen them dead on the battlefield.”

“The roots of the tree are the populace. The leaves fall, but the tree remains.”

I asked Melito and Foila if the Ascian were composing his remarks or quoting some literary source with which I was unfamiliar.

“Just making it up, you mean?” Foila asked. “No. They never do that. Everything they say has to be taken from an approved text. Some of them don’t talk at all. The rest have thousands—1 suppose actually tens or hundreds of thousands of those tags memorized.”

“That’s impossible,” I said.

Melito shrugged. He had managed to prop himself up on one elbow. “They do it, though. At least, that’s what everybody says. Foila knows more about them than I do.”

Foila nodded. “In the light cavalry, we do a lot of scouting, and sometimes we’re sent out specifically to take prisoners. You don’t learn anything from talking to most of them, but just the same the General Staff can tell a good deal from their equipment and physical condition. On the northern continent, where they come from, only the smallest children ever talk the way we do.”

I thought of Master Gurioes conducting the business of our guild. “How could they possibly say something like Take three apprentices and unload that wagon’?”

“They wouldn’t say that at all—just grab people by the shoulder, point to the wagon, and give them a push. If they went to work, fine. If they didn’t, then the leader would quote something about the need for labour to ensure victory, with several witnesses present. If the person he was talking to still wouldn’t work after that, then he would have him killed—probably just by pointing to him and quoting something about the need to eliminate the enemies of the populace.”

The Ascian said, “The cries of the children are the cries of victory. Still, victory must learn wisdom.”

Foila interpreted for him. “That means that although children are needed, what they say is meaningless. Most Ascians would consider us mute even if we learned their tongue, because groups of words that are not approved texts are without meaning for them. If they admitted—even to themselves—that such talk meant something, then it would be possible for them to hear disloyal remarks, and even to make them. That would be extremely dangerous. As long as they only understand and quote approved texts, no one can accuse them.”

I turned my head to look at the Ascian. It was clear that he had been listening attentively, but I could not be certain of what his expression meant beyond that. “Those who write the approved texts,” I told him, “cannot themselves be quoting from approved texts as they write. Therefore even an approved text may contain elements of disloyalty.”

“Correct Thought is the thought of the populace. The populace cannot betray the populace or the Group of Seventeen.”

Foila called, “Don’t insult the populace or the Group of Seventeen. He might try to kill himself.

Sometimes they do.”

“Will he ever be normal?”

“I’ve heard that some of them eventually come to talk more or less the way we do, if that’s what you mean.”

I could think of nothing to say to that, and for some time we were quiet. There are long periods of silence, I found, in such a place, where almost everyone is ill. We knew that we had watch after watch to occupy; that if we did not say what we wished to say that afternoon there would be another opportunity that evening and another again the next morning. Indeed, anyone who talked as healthy people normally doafter a meal, for example—would have been intolerable.

But what had been said had set me thinking of the north, and I found I knew next to nothing about it.

When I had been a boy, scrubbing floors and running errands in the Citadel, the war itself had seemed almost infinitely remote. I knew that most of the matrosses who manned the major batteries had taken part in it, but I knew it just as I knew that the sunlight that fell upon my hand had been to the sun. I would be a torturer, and as a torturer I would have no reason to enter the army and no reason to fear that I would be impressed into it. I never expected to see the war at the gates of Nessus (in fact, those gates themselves were hardly more than legends to me), and I never expected to leave the city, or even to leave that quarter of the city that held the Citadel.