Father Anselm Gries

#On His Station

"Proof that Kargath's hunger outlives the stomach." — Father Anselm Gries, as attributed in the Codex

Father Anselm Gries served as chaplain to the patrol that found the first confirmed community destroyed by the Abundance Fields. It was a farming settlement near the ruins of Pécs, discovered in A.S. 147, which is 1857 CE. That sentence holds very nearly everything the Codex can certify about him. I have weighed each word of it the way an assayer weighs a tithe-coin he suspects of lead.

The files behind this entry do not give his parish, his regiment, his age, or the bishop who ordained him. I will not supply them. The Bureau has a long tradition of giving dead clergymen pious boyhoods and instructive deathbeds, and I have added to it more fluently than I like to admit. Here I abstain.

What he left was testimony. He stood among the dead of that settlement, saw something the Bureau would later name in its own fashion, and wrote it in his field diary. The Codex keeps him for that entry. Men with far better connections have been filed into oblivion by seniority. One accurate sentence from a chaplain has outlasted most of them.

#On the Community Near Pécs

Kargath, Sin-General of Gluttony, rules a country of grey mud and eaten farmland in the former Hungarian lowlands: the Blightmarsh. At its edges his provision-demons, the Harvest, tend the opposite of mud. They raise grain where none was sown and fruit out of season, and the wind smells of bread. The dead soil and the green field belong to one design. The first starves a province honestly. The second offers it supper.

The settlement near Pécs held approximately eighty souls. According to the Harvest file, it lay too far out for regular supply and was too stubborn to be evacuated. Its last tithe report praised an unexpected recovery in yields. An Assessor read that report, wrote a pious exclamation in its margin and asked for seed samples. He then travelled with the patrol that went to collect them. The public copy gives him no name, so I give him none. No conversation between him and the chaplain survives, so I invent none.

I keep the patrol's findings in the order the record gives them.

The root-cellars were full. The tables were set. In the ovens the bread had risen and turned golden. The pantries held preserves that the Bureau of Records calculated as enough for three winters. Clerks with an inventory and a pencil produced that figure, and they were spared the doorways.

The people of the settlement were wasted to the bone.

Their mouths were still working.

The patrol found all of this together. Father Gries is the one who wrote the last item down. Whatever the other men saw, the Codex has the observation from his diary alone, and the Codex is a creature of paper.

#On His Observation

Three statements concern the dead of Pécs, and the reader must keep them in separate drawers.

The first is the diary's. The mouths of the dead were still working. That is an observation. It took eyes, a pencil, and the nerve to keep looking until he was sure. I will not compose further excerpts on his behalf. Whether the diary itself survives, and in whose cabinet, lies outside what this entry can certify.

The second is Father Gries's interpretation, kept in his attributed words: "proof that Kargath's hunger outlives the stomach." That is theology of a blunt field kind. It names an Enemy and accuses him. It holds that the appetite did not end when the body did, and it asks no committee's leave to say so.

The third is the Bureau of Doctrine's classification: "post-mortem caloric reflex."

I admire the classification the way one admires a well-made lock. Post-mortem concedes that the villagers were dead, which nobody disputed. Caloric hands the matter back to food, where a ration office can reach it. Reflex soothes. A reflex is what a knee does under a physician's hammer, and it needs no Enemy, no theology and no chaplain. With three words, the Great Deceiver has been shown out of the room.

A reader in A.S. 201 knows what Father Gries could not. The produce of the Fields is real. In A.S. 178 the Bureau of Alchemical Standards confirmed that Field grain holds more protein per measure than any cultivated strain in the Synod's registry. The Bureau of Medicine has since charted the eater's decline from first satisfaction to what its forms call "progressive caloric void". The belly is full and the body consumes itself, and every meal meant to answer the hunger enlarges it. Those findings came decades after Pécs. In A.S. 147 the official classification held that the Fields' produce was an illusion worked on the tongue.

#On the Vestry

Father Anselm Gries later hanged himself in the vestry at Bastion-Constantinople, the southern anchor of the Sagittal Line, where the fortress meets the Bosphorus.

That is the whole of the sourced fact. The files available to me give no date, no interval since Pécs and no finding as to his reasons. I place the two events in sequence because the sources do. I do not link them as cause and effect, because the sources do not. A Warden of the Sacred Ledger who forges a link between two entries commits the precise sin he is paid to punish.

The reader will draw the line between eighty working mouths and a rope in a vestry. Readers always do. I cannot prevent it, and I will not put my seal to it. What a man thought in his last hour belongs to the Creator, who keeps a more complete register than mine. It belongs to no Bureau I serve.

Nor will I make him a martyr. Martyrdom is a classification too, and the Bureau would use it to file him somewhere comfortable, between a saint's day and a subscription appeal. He was a chaplain who saw the dead chewing and wrote it down. Later he died by his own hand at Bastion-Constantinople. Both are true. Neither improves the other.

#On the Record That Remained

The village near Pécs was the first. A second community was found near Kaposvár in A.S. 159, a third in the Drava lowlands in A.S. 174, and a fourth near the northern edge of the Marsh in A.S. 191. Each followed the same course: prosperity, starvation among full stores, death, and then the mouths. Every later discovery confirmed the chaplain's observation. In my profession, that is the only vindication the dead are offered.

Bastion-Constantinople's Eastern Command issued Standing Order 119-F in A.S. 163, sixteen years after Pécs. It forbids anyone to approach, harvest, sample or eat produce within ten miles of the Blightmarsh boundary. Its fourth revision orders chaplains with a patrol to begin the Litany of Sufficiency as soon as cultivated land comes into view. Its A.S. 199 addendum classifies smell as contact. Chaplains now have orders for that threshold. Father Gries had a diary. I credit him with none of these provisions. No paper in my possession connects his name to the order, and I will not forge one to flatter either of us.

What the Bureau kept deserves an inventory, since an inventory is the one mercy I administer competently. It kept the settlement, which goes unnamed in public copies and has no identified kin. It kept the three winters of preserves, as a calculation. It kept the term post-mortem caloric reflex, which is still in use. In two published entries of this Codex, The Abundance Fields and The Harvest, it kept the chaplain's observation and the sentence attributed to him. In the bestiary file I wrote that the Bureau preserved the classification and lost the man. I stand by it.