He stopped, looking down at the floor and frowning. "Well, I mustn't stretch the comparison too far. I'm not a general or a statesman, so I'm not an empire-doctor- only a people's doctor. But nonetheless, I'm going to risk telling you something which may seem like impudence. If you'll-er-allow me to imagine for a moment that the empire is a human body, then the place where its illness shows most clearly is Belishba. Not Chalcon, but Belishba."
He seemed now to be waiting to see whether the High Baron or anyone else would interrupt him, but none did. After a few moments he looked up at Kembri, who merely nodded.
"I wonder," he went on almost gropingly, "that's to say-I'm not sure-whether you already know-all of you
what the one thing is which makes people ill more than anything else. You'll tell me the gods inflict illness for their own best reasons, and you're quite right; so they do. They visit illness on people who for one reason or another are thwarting or crossing their divine purposes. I expect you think I mean you, Lord General, but I don't. Not in the least."
By this time he had caught the interest of everyone in the room, and there was silence as he refilled his goblet, took a few sips and cleared his throat.
"What I've learned, after years of experience of sick people, is that the one thing that makes them most likely to get ill-that holds the door open, you might say, for illness to come in-is hopeless frustration. The gods want people, don't they, to be human beings-to work and play and eat and mate and love and hate and all the rest of it? What's called living a natural life. They'll struggle for that. That's to say, when they haven't got what they want they'll struggle for it, because it's the will of the gods that they should. That struggle's healthy-quite often they thrive on it. But when they can't struggle-when struggle's not possible, so that they have to resign themselves and to give in, do without wives or children or money or cows or whatever it is-then they often get ill and in some cases they may even become deranged in one way or another. In other words the chief single cause of illness, in my experience, is hopelessness.
"People will go to almost any lengths to avoid hopelessness, and that's not really surprising, since the gods are telling them to-inwardly, I mean-and threatening them with illness or madness if they won't. I don't know whether you know this, but slaves get ill more than anybody else-much more than free people, even poor ones. The gods make them ill for not being what they want human beings to be; for existing for other people's benefit and not for their own. I'm not talking about slaves like bed-girls, who sometimes quite enjoy it and usually have the hope of buying themselves free. I'm talking about working slaves all over the empire. Their frustration's not so much a question of not getting paid. Quite a lot of free peasants hardly use money, come to that; in Suba it's almost unknown. No, their difficulty is that they're not free to come and go, not free to get married, to leave work or a master they don't like and so on. And that's where Belishba comes in.
"The governor here said just now that Belishba's a ploughman's province. So it is; but also, Lord General, as I'm sure you know, it's the principal province where wealthy Leopards work estates with slave labor. The slave quotas taken from local villages are high, too, and there are two slave-farms where children are being bred for slavery. The gods are continually telling these people in their hearts that if they accept that they have no hope of living naturally they'll become either ill or mad. So of course a lot of them have tried to prevent that by desperate measures. You've got a province full of desperadoes there, terrorizing villages. But Belishba's no more than the biggest abscess. The poison's all through your empire to some extent, I'm afraid."
He stopped, bending his head forward, scratching the back of his scrawny neck and screwing up his face as he did so. The effect was grotesque, but no one laughed. At last he said, "I think that's what this man Erketlis has in mind, really. Abolishing slavery-he doesn't think it's going to make anyone more prosperous. But it
"Isn't it more likely," interposed Durakkon, "that he's just a small baron who's suddenly seen a chance to become powerful and has hit on this idea as a way of gaining support?"
"I wonder, my lord," answered Nasada, "whether you'd forgive me if I leave you for a minute or two?" He smiled wryly at Durakkon. "Old men have to pass water rather more often, I'm afraid." As he stood up Donnered handed him his stick and Eud-Ecachlon opened the door for him.
