‘And you call this living?’ He shook his head. ‘I do not blame you. I would have agreed with you once. You are young, you have experienced mostly kindness and generosity so far. You cannot quite believe what is happening to you, so you choose to put all that to one side and cling on to the idea that everything will be all right in the end.’

Dalip pressed his hands to his face and blinked back the tears.

‘It will be.’

‘I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen men, and boys not much younger than you, believe until the very last second that everything will be all right in the end. They died with a look of astonishment on their faces, that the world had somehow tricked them into thinking that people were good and kind and fair, only to reveal that underneath, we are all brutes, savages and murderers.’ Stanislav pulled up his legs and hugged his knees. ‘We are prisoners, not of any state that has rules that mean we must be fed and clothed and well-treated, but of people who own us like property, to do with as they wish. Do we cooperate with such people? Only if we want to lose our souls as well as our lives.’

‘But useful slaves—’

‘Are still slaves! Pigface is still a slave. The wolfman is still a slave. Perhaps they want to be slaves, good slaves. I do not, and you should not either. It is not a condition that anyone should become comfortable with.’ He got up, and stood in front of Dalip. ‘What is it that you want? Do you want to fight? Is that it? To show you are a man? To kill and kill again because that is what men do?’

‘No, I don’t want to fight. But they’re going to make me fight anyway, so I may as well not die at the first attempt.’

‘You know of the Christian martyrs, yes? The ones that the emperors put into the arena with the wild animals? They did not fight, but prayed as they died.’

‘I’m not a Christian.’

Stanislav took a step closer, and pressed his extended forefinger into Dalip’s chest. ‘What is it that you want? What do you really want?’

‘I want them to let me go. I want to make them let me go. I want to make them give me back my turban, my kangha, my kara, my kirpan. I want to make them glad to see the back of me. I can’t do any of that if I’m dead.’

‘That is true,’ he conceded. ‘Will you fight to make them let you go?’

‘Yes.’ Dalip looked away, then back. ‘I think so.’

‘You have to more than think. You have to know. And you have to fight them, every second of every day until you are either free or dead. Can you do that?’

‘Yes. Yes I can.’