The Keepers of the People

PRATER

Jepson's word for a man who talks about politics, and a term of contempt with no modern equivalent of the same force. To prate is to chatter emptily; a prater in this book is specifically someone who has acquired an opinion about how he is governed. The word occurs only three times and each time it is doing structural work. "Let our doings become common talk, and every prater will prate against us, till in the years to come the people will fall away, and we shall have to slay them in thousands" (II.iv) — this is the whole argument for the secrecy of the Princes, and note that its form is a prophecy of mercy: silence now buys fewer deaths later. "A prater had been working mischief among them; and they were filled with new thoughts" (II.vi) is the epitaph of a village that was destroyed. And "Every year there are more praters among them, those who lose life to grasp at shadows" (II.xi) is offered, in the council of war, as a reason for letting the Russians into the country rather than holding the pass against them. The prognosis had been given five chapters earlier: "they are beginning to prate instead of do their work. They will be inventing an alphabet soon" (II.vi).

Praters, literacy and unhappiness are one phenomenon in this book, and the word is the joint at which they are connected.

MUTE

The mutes are servants, soldiers, craftsmen, secretaries and officers of state who have been made permanently unable to speak. The reader should be clear that they are not born so: they are the children of Varandals, chosen in infancy and mutilated, and the people count it an honour that their children should be taken. The practice has an Ottoman pedigree — the dilsiz of the Topkapı court, who could neither hear a state secret nor carry one, and who were also the palace executioners — and Jepson knows it, since his mutes turn up in that office too (see the bearers of the bowstring, in the notes to II.xiv).