#On His Station
Corporal H. Mace takes up six sentences of the Ledger. Bishops have been given more space and are remembered less.
The file gives only the initial. I have not expanded it, and neither has the Bureau of Records. Records may well know the name and decline to print it, for its usual reason: a full name brings correspondence. His rank is corporal. The caption under the charcoal plate in the Kargath file calls him corporal-registrar, so someone trusted him with a pencil as well as a rifle. The file does not say what he registered, for which office, or since when. I will not paint a career into that gap.
The file does give these facts. His village lies west of Strasbourg, and it is not named. In the fourth watch of A.S. 197, which is 1907 by the old reckoning, he stood on the eastern perimeter of Bastion-Constantinople. That fortress is the southern anchor of the Sagittal Line, and it faces the marsh where Kargath's dominion begins. Something came out of that marsh and spoke to him in his mother's voice. He fired. Then he gave a deposition, and that deposition is the reason for this entry.
#On the Fourth Watch
The account in the Hollow-Walker file places the encounter outside Ravelin Mercy.
A Hollow-Walker came to the wire. From every external mark it was a Thracian woman of middle years. I give that description exactly as it was entered. It describes a shape and proves nothing about who the shape had been. It addressed the corporal in the idiom of his mother's village. That speech belongs to the country west of Strasbourg, at the far end of the Church's territory from the Bosphorus.
DEPOSITION — CORPORAL H. MACE, FOURTH WATCH, A.S. 197 “She said my childhood name. Nobody here knows it. I did not tell it to the lads. I did not tell it to the chaplain. She said it with my mother's bad tooth whistle. Then she asked whether I had eaten. Then she asked whether I would let her eat. Then I fired.”
I have read a great many depositions. Most of them were improved by a clerk before they reached me, and the improvement shows: subordinate clauses, a reference to Providence, an officer's name placed where the officer would like to see it. This one escaped the clerk. Every sentence carries one fact, and the last four begin with the same plain word, the way a man lays out cartridges on a cloth.
Take its claims in order, and keep each one where it belongs.
The childhood name: the corporal says nobody at Constantinople knew it, and that he told it to neither his comrades nor the chaplain. That is his testimony, and I enter it as his. The Bureau of Doctrine would like me to add that a name can be overheard, written in a letter home, or spoken in sleep in a barracks of forty men. Doctrine may add that in its own hand. The Ledger records what the witness swore.
The whistle: a dialect can be learned from a grammar, and the Bureau of Records owns grammars salvaged from monasteries nobody has prayed in for a century. I know of no grammar that records the whistle of one woman's broken tooth. The detail is too small to have been invented and too precise to be comfortable. It does not prove the creature was his mother. It does not prove his mother is dead. It proves that something at the wire had his mother's whistle, and how it came by it is not recorded anywhere I can read.
The two questions: the creature asked whether he had eaten before it asked whether it might eat. That is the order of a kitchen table, where the boy is asked about his supper before anyone mentions hers. Kargath's servants have either learned these courtesies or kept them. The file does not say which, and I won't guess in ink.
Then he fired. The deposition gives no number of rounds, no point of impact and no fall. It ends at the trigger, and so does my account.
#On the Missing Figure
His testimony became the charcoal plate in the Kargath file. The plate shows three emaciated figures coming through the dark toward the trench, one with an arm raised, while Synod soldiers watch. It is a good plate, and it is wrong.
There were four. The fourth was already inside the wire, under a ration tarp, eating flour through the sackcloth and crying because flour is dry.
Kargath file, plate caption: “Hollow-Walkers approaching the eastern perimeter of Bastion-Constantinople, fourth watch,” rendered with three figures.
Four Hollow-Walkers were present at the A.S. 197 encounter. Three approached the perimeter. The fourth was already inside the defended line, beneath a ration tarp. The plate is retained, the count is amended, and no fault attaches to the witness. His deposition concerns the one that spoke.
An artist working from testimony draws where the witness was looking. The corporal was looking at a woman-shaped thing that knew his name, so the artist drew the approach and left out the tarp. Records was satisfied with the result for some time, because three figures make a better composition and a breach of the ration store makes a worse report.
I prefer the fourth. The other three were bait, and the fourth was the hunger. It had crossed the wire while the line watched the pleading, and it was not attacking anyone. It was weeping over dry flour. Remember that the next time a committee calls these creatures mere vessels.
The caption keeps one request from the corporal: that it be noted one of them spoke to him in his mother's dialect. Of everything that happened that night, that is the single thing he asked the record to carry. The plate carries it, and the count it gets wrong.
#On Speech and Range
Read beside the field doctrine, the Mace deposition is a textbook case. That is a cold thing to say about a man's mother, and I say it because the textbook was written in blood like his.
The Hollow-Walkers keep their speech. The Bureau has recorded pleas in a dozen tongues and in dialects that died before the Sundering. Their memories work as bait: a name, a hymn, a grandmother's phrase for a child late to supper. In A.S. 184 Sergeant Lajos Kett heard that last phrase in old Hungarian, held out bread on the end of his bayonet, and lost two fingers and most of a forearm. The standing order against answering in dialect comes from Kett's arm.
Mace did not answer. As far as the file shows, he did not approach, offer bread or reach over the wire. He heard his own name in his mother's whistle and kept his distance. The protocol asks for distance, silence, the legs, the torso, and the jaw broken before recovery. His deposition shows the first two and then the shot. Whatever else the Bureau of War required of that night was not written in his hand, and I will not write it in mine.
The Bureau's ruling, entered after the Fourteenth Doctrinal Congress set out the consumption taxon in A.S. 147, holds that a Hollow-Walker keeps partial memory without stable personhood. The ruling is fifty years older than the corporal's watch, and it does not explain his watch. It says the creature remembered something. It does not say whose memory it was, how it got there, or whether anyone in that shape was still asking. Doctrine wrote partial in one column and without in the other, and went to dinner.
I will say what the Ledger allows. The Great Deceiver's servants were human once, or close enough that the difference consoles nobody, and their hunger has rearranged them from the gut outward. Choice is not erased in the human soul by any decree I have seen sealed. Redemption, if it is present in such a thing, belongs to the Creator and not to a corporal at the wire with a rifle. The corporal's business was the range, and he kept it.
Whatever addressed him also asked a question. Whether I would let her eat. Hunger that asks permission is still hunger. But it asked.
#On the Surviving Record
These things survive. The six-sentence deposition. The plate, drawn from his testimony and corrected by one figure. A caption carrying the corporal's single request. A designation, Ravelin Mercy, that the fortress plan does not recognize.
These things do not survive, or were never written. What the initial stands for. His regiment. What his registrar's duties were. How many times he fired, and whether he hit anything. What became of the four. Whether the Bureau of Mercy shrove the remains or the Bureau of Purity burned them first. His health after that watch, and his posting since. The year is now A.S. 201, four years after the encounter, and the file does not say whether he is alive.
The entry on the Gorged quotes a Corporal-Registrar Mace, with no initial and no date. He describes a Gorged's cry as “a man who has eaten a banquet and been told the banquet was his mother.” That entry says his depositions turn up throughout the Kargath files. It may be the same man, since the title matches, and the mother in his image is hard to miss. I note the attribution and go no further. A matching title is a cross-reference, and I will not build a career on it.