Corporal Haas Mettler

#On His Station

"Do not eat from the Enemy's hand. Do not eat from the Enemy's field. Do not eat." — Martial Code 14-D, Spiritual Contamination (Voluntary), Subsection 3

Haas Mettler held the rank of corporal and served at Kestrel-7, a post on the perimeter of the Blightmarsh. On the day that brought him into this Codex he was on a routine boundary check. Corporals walk the boundary so that the boundary has a record of being walked. It is a decent office. Most of the men who hold it pass out of the Ledger without ever having entered it.

Mettler entered it in A.S. 196, the year he was burned under Martial Code 14-D for violating Standing Order 119-F. I attended the burning. Keep that in mind for everything that follows. For the orchard I depend on another man's report. For the diagnosis I depend on a Bureau's instrument. At the pyre I depend on my own eyes. The Bureau of Doctrine has certified my eyes many times, and they have never once been asked to testify against it.

#On the Three Apples

"The belly fills. The body starves. The hunger doubles." — Bureau of Medicine, Field Diagnostic Summary, A.S. 134

During the check the patrol came upon a Field. The Bureau of War's pictorial record places it beyond a treeline, and it places it nowhere more exact. The Abundance Fields have never been courteous enough to stay where they were last drawn. This one has not been identified. I will not give it a registry number to make the paragraph tidier.

Mettler ate three apples.

What follows comes from his commanding officer's report. I give it in the officer's sequence, because the sequence is the evidence. Mettler wept while he ate. At first he wept from pleasure. Then he wept because the pleasure was not diminishing. Each bite satisfied him more than the last, and the satisfaction kept accelerating toward something that had ceased to be satisfaction but could not yet be recognised as its opposite. The officer did not record whether Mettler said anything. He recorded the weeping, and he recorded that its cause changed partway through.

By the time the patrol restrained him, nothing of the apples was left. He had eaten the cores. He had eaten the stems. He had eaten a quantity of soil.

The report does not say why he took the first bite, and I will not supply a reason. Boundary men are hungry men. The ration is the ration, and the Doctrine of Enough teaches that it suffices. Something tends the Fields (Doctrine files it under the Harvest), and whatever it is, it grows them to be found by exactly such men. Whether Mettler reached for the fruit from appetite, curiosity, fatigue or some quieter despair is a matter for a confessional that was never convened.

#On the Finding of Medicine

The Bureau of Medicine's field kit registered his hunger as "catastrophic" within the hour. That word is the whole of the reading. I hold no figure beneath it. A reader who wants a number may apply to Medicine and grow old waiting.

The kit's verdict contradicts the stomach. Mettler had eaten three apples and a measure of earth, so by any farrier's reckoning his belly was occupied. The produce of the Fields is real. In A.S. 178 the Bureau of Alchemical Standards confirmed that Field grain carries more protein per measure than any strain in the Synod's registry, and an assayer can weigh the nourishment it gives. The damage lies elsewhere. The belly fills, then reports itself emptier than before. The fed body begins to draw on its own reserves. The hunger keeps its own count, and every mouthful offered to quiet it raises the count. This is Kargath's arithmetic, and Corporal Mettler learned all of it within one hour of a boundary check.

Medicine entered the reading. No treatment and no period of observation appear beside it in anything that has reached my desk.

#On the Sentence

When Mettler violated Standing Order 119-F, it had stood for thirty-three years. Bastion-Constantinople's Eastern Command issued it in A.S. 163. It forbids Synod personnel to approach, harvest, sample or consume produce from unregistered agricultural sources within ten miles of the Blightmarsh boundary. Mettler approached, harvested and consumed. The clerks would say his sampling was subsumed in the rest.

The Order carries no penalty of its own. It hands the offender to Martial Code 14-D, which names the offence Spiritual Contamination, Voluntary, and prescribes the pyre.

I have spent a career on adjectives, and I give Voluntary its due, because it is the word that makes the sentence possible. A contamination suffered is a wound, and wounds are nursed. A contamination chosen is a crime, and crimes may be burned. The Code fixes the choice at the first bite. It declines to ask how much choice remained by the third apple, or by the soil. The Bureau of War calls this a mercy to the court. It is certainly a mercy to the court's calendar.

The Code then governs the ashes. They are weighed, sealed in a Bureau reliquary canister and buried no less than nine feet deep. Doctrine insists on the depth. War insists on the burning. I insist on the weighing, as I have recorded elsewhere, and I hold to it.

#On the Pyre

I attended, and I stood where the Bureaus' representatives stand. Through the trees, the Field was visible from the place of execution. Someone had judged that proximity instructive. I cannot say for whom.

Corporal Mettler was still hungry when they lit the pyre. I set that down on my own authority, and it is the only particular in this dossier for which I am my own authority. In its woodcut of the occasion, the Bureau of War shows his mouth still working. The engraver did not exaggerate.

The Bureau of Medicine sent a representative to observe, and that representative entered one observation that matters. The flames consumed Mettler faster than the baseline model predicts for a body of his mass. That is Medicine's sentence, and I have copied it without improvement.

The interpretation is mine, and I sign it separately. Something inside Corporal Mettler was consuming him alongside the fire, and had been since the first apple. Medicine proposed no mechanism. Doctrine proposed none either. I propose none. Whatever was at work had been at work for some hours before the fire began, and the burn rate is the only measure of it that anyone took.

#On His Place in the Record

The Bureau of War files him under Standing Order 119-F, violation 31. That is the designation, and I take it as one. It does not mean he was the thirty-first man burned, and I will not let it be read that way.

By A.S. 201 the Order had been violated forty-three times. Thirty-one of those violations ended in immediate execution. Nine ended in quarantine and then execution. In three, the violator disappeared into the Fields before he could be apprehended. Those are later sums, counted five years after Mettler's pyre. In A.S. 196 he was one man and one entry, and no court weighed him against a total.

In A.S. 199 the Order received its fourth revision, which classifies smell as contact. Under it, chaplains are to begin the Litany of Sufficiency as soon as a Field is sighted:

"Enough is given. More is theft. The ration is mercy. The surplus is the Maw."

The revision came three years too late to concern him. He was not condemned for what he smelled. He was condemned for what he ate, under the plain text of A.S. 163, and nothing written afterward reaches back to make his offence larger or his court wiser.

Kargath teaches with food, and the Synod teaches with rations, and Corporal Mettler sat both examinations within a single day. Since A.S. 196 the Marsh has advanced westward at the rate the Bureau of War asks me every year to phrase differently, and the Fields go before it. The Field he found was never identified. Nobody has reported it gone.

Mettler is filed with War under his designation, with Medicine under one word, and with Doctrine under my signature as witness. In all three files he is hungry.