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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.”
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.”
“So Master Palaemon used to say.”
As I had hoped it would, that restored him to the principal topic of his thought. “There’s only three ways a man can be a slave,” he said. “Though for a woman it’s different, what with marriage and the like.
“If a man’s brought—him being a slave—into the Commonwealth from foreign parts, a slave he remains, and the master that brought him here can sell him if he wants. That’s one. Prisoners of war—like this Ascian here—are the slaves of the Autarch, the Master of Masters and the Slave of Slaves. The Autarch can sell them if he wants to. Often he does, and because most of these Ascians aren’t much use except for tedious work, you often find them rowing on the upper rivers. That’s two.
“Number three is that a man can sell himself into somebody’s service, because a free man is the master of his own body—he’s his own slave already, as it were.”
“Slaves,” I remarked, “are seldom beaten by torturers.
What need of it, when they can be beaten by their own masters?”
“I wasn’t a slave then. That’s part of what I wanted to ask Journeyman Palaemon about. I was just a young fellow that bad been caught stealing. Journeyman Palaemon came in to talk to me on the morning I was going to get my whipping. I, thought it was a kindly thing for him to do, although it was then that he told me he was from the guild of torturers.”
“We always prepare a client, if we can,” I said.
“He told me not to try to keep from yelling—it doesn’t hurt quite so bad, is what he told me, if you yell out just as the whip comes down. He promised me there wouldn’t be any hitting more than the number the judge said, so I could count them if I wanted to, and that way I’d know when it was about over. And he said he wouldn’t hit harder than he had to, to cut the skin, and he wouldn’t break any bones.” I nodded.
“I asked him then if he’d do me a favour, and he said he would if he could. I wanted for him to come back afterward and talk to me again, and he said he would try to when I was a little recovered. Then a caloyer came in to read the prayer.
“They tied me to a post, with my hands over my head and the indictment tacked up above my hands.
Probably you’ve done it yourself many times.”
“Often enough,” I told him.
“I doubt the way they did me was any different. I’ve got the scars of it still, but they’ve faded, just like you say. I’ve seen many a man with worse ones. The jailers, they dragged me back to my cell as the custom is, but I think I could have walked. It didn’t hurt as much as losing an arm or a leg. Here I’ve helped the surgeons take off a good many.”
“Were you thin in those days?” I asked him.
“Very thin. I think you could have counted every rib I had.”
“That was much to your advantage, then. The lash cuts deep in a fat man’s back, and he bleeds like a pig. People say the traders aren’t punished enough for short weighing and the like, but those who speak so don’t know how they suffer when they are.”
Wi
“No. I’ve heard of similar things many times.”
“He told me he’d done something against his guild. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but because of it he was exiled for a while. He told me how he felt about it and how lonesome he was. He said he’d tried to feel better by thinking how other people lived, by knowing they had no more guild than he did. But he could only feel sorry for them, and pretty soon he felt sorry for himself too. He told me that if I wanted to be happy, and not go through this kind of thing again, to find some sort of brotherhood for myself and join.”
“Yes?” I asked.
“And I decided to do what he’s said. When I was let out, I spoke to the masters of a lot of guilds, picking and choosing them at first, then talking to any I thought might take me, like the butchers and the candlemakers. None of them would take on an apprentice as old as I was, or somebody that didn’t have the fee, or somebody with a bad character—they looked at my back, you see, and decided I was a troublemaker.
“I thought about signing on a ship or joining the army, and since then I’ve often wished I’d gone ahead with one or the other, although maybe if I had I’d wish now I hadn’t, or maybe not be living to wish at all. Then I got the notion of joining some religious order, I don’t know why. I talked to a bunch of them, and two offered to take me, even when I told them I didn’t have any money and showed them my back. But the more I heard about the way they were supposed to live in there, the less I felt like I could do it. I had been drunk a lot, and I liked the girls, and I didn’t really want to change.