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up at the foundry?’
    Poldarn hesitated. There’d been a lot more to it than that, of course, but he was damned if he was going to tell anybody about it, even if the beer was starting to taste almost palatable. ‘That’s right,’ he said.
    Basano’s face crumpled into a thoughtful scowl. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but surely there’s some thing you’ve been able to figure out. Like, your accent, the way you talk. That ought to place you pretty well. I mean, round here they can tell which village you were born in just from the way you fart.’
    â€˜Not in my case,’ Poldarn said. ‘At least, nobody I’ve met so far’s recognised my accent and said, “Ah, you’re from such and such a place.” Actually, I don’t even know how many languages I can speak. It’s half a dozen at least, maybe more.’
    â€˜Bloody hell,’ Basano said, clearly impressed.
    Poldarn shook his head. The hut wobbled a little. ‘Oh, it’s not like it’s anything clever,’ he said. ‘Don’t even know I’m doing it half the time. Sometimes I’ll be talking to someone and they’ll start looking at me all funny, and it’s because I’ve suddenly switched to a different language without realising it. I just hear my own voice in my head, you see.’
    â€˜Oh. And what about when other people talk to you?’
    â€˜Same thing. I just hear what they’re saying, not the words they use. I think—’ He checked himself. He’d been about to say that it could be something to do with his people back home on the islands in the western sea being natural telepaths; but if he said that, Basano would only stare at him even more fiercely, since nobody in the Empire knew that the western islands existed, let alone that their inhabitants were the merciless, invincible raiders who’d burned so many cities and done so much damage over the years. Saying something that’d identify him with them probably wasn’t a good idea. ‘I think I must be from the capital or something, where there’s people from all over the Empire. You’d probably pick up several languages if you lived somewhere like that, maybe even get so used to switching from one to the other without thinking that you wouldn’t notice.’
    â€˜Or maybe you were in the army,’ Basano said. ‘Been posted all over the place, learned a bit of this and that every place you’ve spent time in. I knew a man once, he’d been in the services, and he could do that. Knew twenty-six different words for beer.’
    â€˜Useful,’ Poldarn said with a grin, whereupon Basano passed the jug. Nothing would ever make him like the stuff, of course, but he was feeling rather dry, he couldn’t help noticing. The heat, or something to do with the hut being built of turf. Something like that, anyhow.
    â€˜Still,’ Basano was saying, ‘must be bloody odd. I mean, the thought that once you had a completely different life, and any minute it could all come back, like a roof falling in. I mean, any second now, maybe you’re going to turn to me and say, “Bloody hell, I just remembered, I used to be a rich merchant,” or “My dad used to run the biggest brewery in Tulice.”’ He shook his head. ‘That’d get to me, the thought that I could be, you know, really stinking rich or a nobleman or something, and yet here you are wasting your life pounding sand in the foundry. All that money just waiting for you to come back home and spend it. Or women, maybe. Or you could be the son and heir of a district magistrate, even.’
    Poldarn looked away. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Or maybe I was something really horrible, like a day labourer in a tannery. Or an escaped convict, maybe, or like you said, I was in the army and I deserted. That’s why I stopped trying to find out, actually, for fear that I