#On the Chair of Prescribed Observance
"The Chair does not remember its occupants. It remembers how long they stayed." — Annotation in the Register of Incumbency, Bureau of Rites, hand unattributed
The Liturgist-Primus of the Bureau of Rites holds the Chair of Prescribed Observance. The Chair has custody of the Charter of Prescribed Observance, ratified in A.S. 58 under the seal of Augustinus, and of the eleven volumes and thirty-seven annexes of the Codex Liturgiae. It answers for every genuflection, fast, bell-silence and consecrated chain link in the Dominion. Many men have sat in it. One of them, Aldric the Unbending, sat in it for thirty-one years, which is longer than anyone else the Register names.
The Bureau speaks of those thirty-one years with the only warmth it has ever shown anybody. It speaks of the man with none. I have searched the Register of Incumbency, the Bureau of Records' clerical rolls and the ordination lists of three dioceses, and I can tell the reader very little. The Bureau has not given me Aldric's birthplace, his family name, the years in which his tenure opened and closed, or the name of the man who handed him the Chair. The Dominion holds more Aldrics than it holds bell-towers, and the Bureau of Records has already confused several of them with ours. I decline to add to the confusion.
The Bureau does not count these gaps as losses. A Liturgist-Primus who leaves a biography behind has been caught spending time on something other than the rite. By this standard Aldric is the most exemplary servant the Bureau has had. What we have of him is a number, an epithet and a desk.
#On the Unbending
The epithet comes from the Bureau and not from his enemies, which tells the reader all he needs to know about how the Bureau understands praise.
In the Strasbourg Cloister, to be unbending is a technical condition. The unbending Liturgist-Primus grants no frontier exception, however sensible, and no dispensation for grief, however fresh. He allows no casual phrasing at the altar and no shortcut in the field, and he never answers yes to a request that begins with the word temporarily. The Charter had set this doctrine before Aldric ever held a quill. At the ratification in A.S. 58, Kratz proposed a clause allowing "liturgical flexibility in frontier conditions" and was told that the Creator's preferences about the angle of a censer did not change at the border. Aldric inherited that refusal the way a sacristan inherits the altar plate. He polished it for three decades and lent it to nobody.
The Bureau has given me no decree bearing his name, and I will not invent one. I can record what the junior clerks of Rites say. When one of them finds an especially merciless correction in the margin of an old Codex annex, such as a mourning period lengthened by one bell, a widow's petition returned for a misplaced comma, or a field chaplain's shortened Vespers struck through twice in red, he murmurs "Aldric" and goes on copying. By this method close to half the Bureau's cruelest marginalia have come to rest on one dead man. That is more convenient than admitting the Bureau wrote them all itself, in the Bureau's own hand, as it still does every morning.
An earlier edition of this Codex attributed the A.S. 167 relocation of the Feast of Saint Verena to Liturgist-Primus Aldric the Unbending.
The Register does not name the Liturgist-Primus who moved Saint Verena's feast forward two days, cost the Bureau of Tithes eight thousand Crowns and delivered the Bureau of War's spring offensive to an empty depot. Cloister folklore gives the act to Aldric because it is the kind of thing he would have done. The Bureau of Tithes gives it to whoever is cheapest to blame. This office gives it to nobody, which is the Bureau of Rites' own favored method, and I am told it is correct.
A related superstition surrounds the two-finger and three-finger dispute. Clerks insist that the Liturgist-Primus who settled it with a split ruling (three fingers in the cathedral, two in the field, and a three-hundred-page manual of exceptions) cannot have been Aldric, because Aldric never produced a compromise in his life. This is an argument from character. The Bureau despises such arguments unless they flatter it, and this one flatters it.
#On the Desk
The Bureau's account runs as follows, and I give it without improvement because it permits none.
Aldric was at his desk in the Strasbourg Cloister, in a windowless chamber lit on the prescribed candle-schedule. The desk, chair and crucifix stood in their fixed arrangement, and the Codex Liturgiae was within reach of his left hand. A Sub-Prior of Form came to his threshold at the appointed hour to deliver a written query. The Register does not record the subject of the query. He found the Liturgist-Primus dead in his chair.
The quill was still moving.
The Bureau's position, then and now, is that Aldric was finishing a sentence. His hand went on writing after his heart had stopped, and the sentence was grammatically perfect by the time it stilled. I am told that the clauses agreed and the subordinate structure was sound. The final mark of punctuation, whatever it was, sat where the Codex requires it. The Bureau has not released the sentence itself. It asks the faithful to take its correctness on faith, which is exactly what it asks of them in every other matter.
The Bureau of Medicine was consulted as a courtesy it has not been extended since. It suggested that the movement was a known spasm of the recently dead, the kind that closes a fist or pulls a lip back from the teeth. Rites replied that a spasm does not observe the subjunctive. Medicine had no answer, having no jurisdiction over the subjunctive. The two Bureaus have since spent fourteen years arguing over the Famine Pits, and I suspect the grudge began at that desk.
The reader should understand what the Bureau has chosen to venerate. Other orders of the Synod keep saints who healed lepers, held gates or walked into the Wound singing. The Bureau of Rites has one miracle of its own, and it is a correctly finished sentence. There were no visions and no incorruptible flesh. Nothing in the account suggests the body smelled of roses or lilies, and I asked. The miracle is that a man's grammar outlasted his pulse, and the Bureau could not want a better one. It has always taught that form holds when everything else fails, and in Aldric it found a man in whom everything else failed while the form held.
#On the Incumbent and the Precedent
Corvin Marche has now held the Chair for nineteen years. He has memorized every rite in the Codex Liturgiae, including the fourteen suppressed after the Schism of Avignon. He does not correspond, and he has no window. By any measure the Bureau recognizes, he is the most precise living man in the Dominion.
He is still twelve years short.
The Bureau does not say so aloud. It never has to. Marche's tenure is listed in every register with Aldric's thirty-one years beside it, as a ledger keeps a running balance beside a debt. Marche reveres his predecessor in the one way Rites reveres anything, which is by leaving it unchanged. His chamber has not been redecorated since A.S. 72. The Bureau will neither confirm nor deny that the desk he works at is the desk where Aldric's hand stilled. I can confirm that it has a chair, that the chair has been sat in, and that Marche never leans back in it.
#On the Present Use of a Dead Man
In A.S. 201 Aldric does more work for the Bureau than most of its living clerks.
His name comes out whenever someone petitions for an exception. The chaplain on the Sagittal Line who asks to shorten Compline while the guns are firing gets Aldric in his reply. So do the parish that wants its mourning bell-silence reduced at harvest, and the Bureau of Festivals when it proposes moving a vigil to suit a procession route. So does the Bureau of Bells when it asks, as it does every decade, whether the Lenten peal really must be struck at an hour when half the Dominion is asleep. The reply cites the relevant article of the Charter, then the relevant volume of the Codex. It ends with a formula the Sub-Priors have used so often that it has worn smooth: The precedent of Liturgist-Primus Aldric admits no such accommodation.
No petitioner has ever managed to answer it. One cannot cross-examine a precedent, and a dead man cannot be shown to have bent. The Bureau holds that every deviation opens a crack through which the Great Deceiver may enter. Aldric left no crack in thirty-one years, not even at the moment of his death. The Bureau's doctrine requires the dead man more than it requires any of the living.
I have seen his name used as a verdict and as a rebuke, and I have seen it close an argument before the argument was fairly opened. I have never once heard it spoken with affection, and I think that is the tribute he would have accepted. The Bureau keeps his tenure in its register, his punctuation in its seal and his refusals in every margin of the Codex that nobody else will own. They buried the rest of him, according to the Bureau of Records, in a manner fully consistent with the Consecration Protocols. The Bureau of Rites has not told me whether the body was buried with the quill still in its hand, though it has not denied it either.