Chapter 3: The Parable

We left the village before dawn. Hul did not look back at the forge or the banner on its wall, and I did not ask whether the not-looking was indifference or the opposite of indifference, because I was learning that some questions are answered better by time than by asking. The banner stayed behind. We carried the fact of it forward, and the fact was heavier than the cloth. I have been thinking about repetition. Not the kind that wears grooves in a road. The kind that wears grooves in a mind. A thing said once is a remark. A thing said twice is a pattern. A thing said ten times is a teaching, and a teaching said a hundred times is a truth, and the truth bears so little resemblance to the original remark that if you placed them side by side you might not recognize them as the same sentence. I watched this happen in the wars. Orders became doctrine. Doctrine became catechism. A general's battlefield improvisation, shouted to a lieutenant in the chaos of a collapsing flank, was remembered and repeated and refined until it became a principle of war that cadets studied in academies built on the ground where the general had stood, and the principle was sound, and it had almost nothing to do with what the general had actually said. The general, if he survived, could not correct the principle. It had outgrown him. It belonged to the institution now, and the institution needed it more than it needed accuracy. I had not yet heard Hul's words come back to him in a shape he did not recognize. I did not know what it would sound like, or what it would cost. The man found them on the road. He was coming from the…