Only one of the guards ever talked with him. This was the old man who took the second of the night watches, from midnight to dawn. His name was Coronetes. He confided to Yama that he did not mind the night watch. He was old, his wife had died, and he did not sleep much.
“You, young man, sleep very soundly,” Coronetes said. “It is a gift of the young. Old men do not need to sleep because soon they will be dead, never to wake again until they wake into the world at the end of time created by the will of the Preservers.”
Yama smiled at this conceit and replied with one of his own. “Then it will be no sleep at all, because in the interval you will not exist, and so no time will pass. As it says in the first sura of the Puranas, ‘Before the Universe there was no time, for nothing changed.’ “
“You are a devout man.”
“I would not say that.”
“I suppose you must have done something bad, to be here. But you are often reading in the Puranas.”
“Do they watch me, then?” Yama had not thought of that. He had believed that the cell was as private as the inside of his head.
Coronetes nodded vigorously. “By the same pipe through which the light falls. I thought you would have known that. But I do not think they watch now. They sleep.”
Like most of the common people of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, Coronetes was slightly built. His coarse hair was black, despite his age, and worn in a stout, greased pigtail that fell halfway down his back. Although he was, as he liked to say, as scrawny as a plucked chicken, he was still a strong man; muscles knotted his skinny arms as if walnuts had been stuffed under his brown skin. He had volunteered for the army at the beginning of the war. He had fought in the Marsh of the Lost Waters, and still suffered from fluxion of the lungs.
“There are sandflies that enter the mouth or nose of a sleeping man,” he explained, “and creep into the throat to lay eggs. The larvae get into the lungs and every now and then one turns into a fly and I must cough it out. But I am luckier than many of my comrades. The diseases of the midpoint of the world and the wild creatures of the marshes and the forests accounted for most of them, not the fighting. It is for that reason that the heretics are brothers to the gar, panther and sandfly.”
Coronetes had been so weakened by fluxion and fevers that his wife had not recognized him when he had returned from the war. He had become a clerk, like his father before him, and still wore a clerk’s white shirt, for he had been a clerk longer than he had been a soldier, and had risen to become the head of his section. He was fiercely loyal to his Department and feared no one, but he was lonely in his old age. He had no children, and had outlived most of his friends while still a young man.
“We will rule the world,” Coronetes said, “because no one else will take up the burden. That is why you will confess to the Committee for Public Safety, and that is why you will enlist in our cause. It is the only cause worth fighting for, young man.”
Coronetes and Yama sat on the bed in the cell, lit by a stick of cold green light Coronetes had set on the fold-down shelf. None of the guards had fireflies. Indeed, no machines came near Yama except those on the far side of the thick glass wall of the testing room.
Yama said, “I was brought up in the care of a senior member of the Department. He believed that service to the ideal of the Preservers was the beginning and end of the duty of every Department.”
“The Aedile of Aeolis? He has the luxury of living in a place where his rule is undisputed. That kind of view is considered old-fashioned. It was old-fashioned even when I was a child, and that was a long time ago. Now my grandfather, he was a soldier, too. That was before the war against the heretics. He fought three campaigns within the Palace against departments who tried to usurp our functions and our territory. He knew where his duty lay. You were lucky to be brought up where you were, but now you are in the real world.”
“This cell.”
“It is no different from my cell.”
“Except you will stop me if I try and walk out.”
Coronetes smiled. His mouth was as wide and lipless as a frog’s. He had lost most of his teeth, and those that remained were brown and worn down to the gumline. He said, “Well, that is true. I would do my best. I would kill you if I had to, but I hope it will not be necessary.”
“So do I.”
In fact, Yama never once thought of escaping when Coronetes came to visit him in his cell. It would be dishonorable, for whatever else Coronetes might be and whatever motives he might have, he presented himself as Yama’s friend.
“Tell me about the war,” Yama would say, when he found himself disagreeing with one of Coronetes’ praise songs to the great heart and forthright purpose of the Department of Indigenous Affairs.
Coronetes had many stories of the war, of long marches from one part of the marshes to another, of engagements where nothing could be seen of the enemy but the distant flashes of their weapons, of days and days when nothing at all happened, and Coronetes’ company lay in the sun and swapped stories. Most of the war was either marching or waiting, he said. He had only been in two real battles, one which had lasted a hundred days, fought to capture a hill later abandoned, and one in a town where the citizens had begun to change and no one knew who was fighting whom.
“It is what the heretics do,” Coronetes said. “They force the change in a bloodline, and with change comes war. The war is not one war, but many, for we must fight for each unchanged bloodline, to make sure they do not fall under the spell of the heretics when they are most vulnerable. If we did only what we wanted, we would be like animals, or worse than animals, because animals are only themselves, and cannot help what they are. The Prefect, he had a more dangerous job, moving amongst the unchanged just like the heretic inciters. That is where the war is really fought, if you want my opinion. The heretics are powerful enemies because they are powerful at persuading the unchanged to see things their way. Our Committee is dedicated to destroying the heretics, but even so it uses some of their techniques to ensure loyalty within the Department.”
The Committee for Public Safety had transformed the Department of Indigenous Affairs, turning a musty cabal of legal clerks and semi-autocrats into an aggressive hive of radicals that claimed to be fighting for all the souls of Confluence. The Committee held that everyone was equal, and the least clerk felt that he was as important in the struggle as the most senior general. Coronetes sometimes talked for hours, his eyes gleaming with pride, about the merits of the organization of the Department, of the wonders it had achieved and the paradise it would bring once it had defeated the heretics and united Confluence.
Yama preferred to hear about the war. The patrols that looped through a country of tall grasses without ever engaging the enemy, the camps amongst the buttress roots of trees of the virgin forest of the great marshes, the geometry of advances and retreats. He learned the jargon of the common soldiers, the rudimentary sign language they used when the enemy was close by. More than ever, he yearned to join the army as a cateran or an officer of the light lance, to flee downriver and lose himself in the war.
Yama supposed that these visits might be a part of his interrogation, but if so it did not matter. He looked forward to the time when, late at night, there would be a scratching at the door and he would call out and ask the old man to enter. Although Yama was the prisoner and Coronetes his guard, they both sustained the fiction that Yama was the host, and Coronetes the visitor. Coronetes always waited for Yama’s invitation before unlocking the door, and neither commented on the fact that he locked it again once he was inside. That Yama politely forbore to argue against Coronetes’ transparent propaganda was part of this fiction—that, and his suspicion that anything he said against the Department of Indigenous Affairs or the Committee for Public Safety would be used against him. Yama was always disappointed on those nights when Coronetes’ inquiring scratch failed to come, and had almost become used to the unvarying pattern of his days of captivity when the ambush changed everything.