The other man nodded. That was one of the fundamental distinctions of the modern world, the gap between those whose ancestors had come through the great famines by eating men, and those who hadn't. Perhaps it was a trifle hypocritical; taking away other men's food killed them just as much as eating the flesh from their bones directly. A prejudice didn't have to be rational, of course; even today, after a century of recivilizing missions, natives of Britain were looked on a little askance by the descendants of the Exodus.
The Russians were different. Like many of the tribes of Europe, the Muscovite refugees in Central Asia had made virtue of necessity, and developed a religion of abominations that continued cannibalism as ritual long after it ceased to be necessity. De Vascogne supposed that back in the terrible years of universal death it had even seemed reasonable that Satan was loose in a world seized from a defeated God.
But most groups who'd taken that route were bone-through-the-nose savages, beyond the Stone Age only insofar as they pounded pre-Fall metal into crude knives rather than chipping them from flint. Poetic justice, in a way; when men hunted each other to eat for a generation or two, it destroyed even the memory and concept of trust— and mutual trust was what let human beings live at a level beyond skulking miser?'. Perhaps the Russians who'd set up around Samarkand were a special case, because they hadn't eaten each other—they'd survived by culling their Asian subjects, until the great cold relaxed its grip. They still did, for ceremony's sake, and to maintain the terror of their rule.
