Stripping the girl as act of power (metaphor)
The magistrate’s nightly ritual of stripping the girl works as a metaphor for the broader act of raping and plundering that has been done to her and her people by the Empire. As the magistrate takes the nomad girl’s clothes off on a nightly basis, he enacts a process that has already been done to her in which everything is taken from her and she stands before him, naked and entirely vulnerable. With the girl in this position, the magistrate has the power to do anything to her. His choice to wash her, rather than torture her, is the choice of a man who wants to wash away his own guilt or association. The act of stripping however remains an act of power and in this way, the stripped girl represent the vulnerability of the nomad in the hands of the Empire. The metaphor leads into further symbolic signifiers as the magistrate washes her then repeatedly falls into heavy sleep. The nightly cycle of stripping-washing-sleeping symbolizes a broader structure of relations between man with power and powerless woman and the man’s burden of conscience.
Hunting/failing to shoot the buck as judiciary impotence (metaphor)
The magistrate is by title, a judge. Within a jurisdiction of law, a judge holds significant power to decide the fate of other humans. In the second chapter, after Joll has tortured his prisoners and during the time when the magistrate is keeping the girl, there’s the scene in which the magistrate goes hunting and gets the buck in his sights. But he fails to shoot the buck. The buck sees him and calmly leaves. The magistrate returns home and is troubled by the event. He can’t understand why he let the buck get away. He could have shot if he chose. Coming after Joll has tortured many prisoners, this scene has profound metaphoric resonance. It reflects the magistrate’s impotence, his failure to speak out against injustice, and to enact his will toward what he judges right and wrong.
The magistrate’s blindness as denial of responsibility (metaphor)
The nomad girl’s eyes were burned by her torturers, but she insists that she can see. When the magistrate looks at her after learning the details of what happened to her, he’s unable to see beyond the scars and wounds and maiming caused by Joll, by the Empire with which he identifies, and by association, himself. The magistrate fixates on the girl’s ugliness. He decides that she’s ugly, though he still searches for a memory of what she looked like before Joll took her into the torture chamber. He’s unable to see her as anything other than damaged. He can’t see beauty in her as she is now. He’s blinded by her blindness—blinded that is, by the violence of his people. He can’t look at the cause directly, the ugliness that is essentially not hers, but his own. In this way, blindness works as a metaphor for his inability to face his connection to her damage. Blindness is the essence of his own act of denial.
The magistrate's sexual appetites as an imperial force (simile)
"Sometimes my sex seemed to me like another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach. Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked. Simply because you were born without legs? Would it make any difference if you were rooted in a cat or a dog instead of me?"
The magistrate's likening of his penis to an autonomous creature is not merely a funny comparison. It presents a telling analysis of the nature of his sexuality. At the time of this meditation on his animal-like phallus, the magistrate is deeply troubled by the fact that he feels no sexual attraction to the nomad girl, and yet he still has a sexual appetite—seeking to fulfill it with the traditionally attractive "birdlike" girl at the inn. His desire remains blocked, however, when he faces the scarred nomad girl. This upsets him deeply. In the prescribed way that the imperial forces pursue a singular mission, the magistrate's sexuality is similarly a force unto itself that doesn't answer to his judgement. In the way that the agents of the Empire are beholden to its blind will, he too has no choice but to serve and obey a more powerful will.
The nomad woman's broken ankles as crippling of her people (metaphor)
Though the Empire does not succeed in its overt campaign to dominate the nomads, it is successful in damaging these people. The crippling of the nomad woman represents the crippling of her people. This damage is described in the magistrate's various ruminations on what the people were like and what they will become. When we see the woman hobbling on her broken ankles with the support of her canes, we are reminded of the gradual destruction of the indigenous nomads of the land.
