Grace Rations

On Grace Rations: a tract on how the armies of the Church are issued their small share of mercy. It was surveyed in the present year, A.S. 201, from issue ledgers, arrears notices and the complaints of quartermasters. It is set down by one who has signed for Heaven more often than he has received it.

#On the Allotment

At a frontier depot the issue counter holds two open ledgers. One records cartridges. The other records Grace Rations. No quartermaster has ever been hanged for confusing them. The Bureau would first have to decide which crime came first, and the committee has not yet met.

Grace Rations are the Church's allotment of miraculous assistance to its soldiers. Units receive them and clerks tally them. The Bureau of War moves them up the Line alongside the powder and the tinned meat. The comparison with ammunition is my own, set down in the Dialectic of Power, and I have never had cause to withdraw it. A rifle without cartridges is a club. A company without its allotment is a congregation in a ditch.

The counting exists because grace is scarce. Heaven's vault is thin. Miracles are rare and dear, and they are paid for in flesh, so the Synod fights chiefly with foundries, rail and engines of incense and iron. The little grace it has must go where it will count. It goes to a trench before a night assault, to a fever ward, or to a dying man who wants his absolution written down before the stretcher arrives. Each of these is a decision, and each decision has its column.

#On Bell-Hours, Shares and Slips

The ration comes in three parts. A sergeant who confuses them will be corrected by a clerk who has never seen a trench.

The bell-hour chit is a claim on sanctified ringing. The bell-hour is a measured quantity. Behind the Line it is sold to factories and convoy masters as readily as it is issued at the front. The chit records that a portion of that ringing has been assigned to this company. It does not ring and it does not glow, and paper that glows is a matter for Purity. My Dialectic records a soldier granted three bell-hours for courage. That was one award. Quartermasters have quoted it as a rate ever since, which shames them and gives me the mild pleasure of being quoted.

The saint-share is an allotment of grace held in a saint's name. In the parishes it is earned by service at the altar and repaid in indulgence credit, and the ash-credit trade has built a market on it. At the front the commonest is a share in the ash of Saint Isidore to ward off fever. The man who holds one holds an entitlement. Whether he also holds a pinch of saint is a separate question, and I shall come to it.

The indulgence slip records an absolution recognised within the Ledger. It states what was confessed and what was lawfully remitted, and it promises nothing more. It is the only ration a man may still hold after he has stopped breathing. It is also the one his widow is most likely to ask about.

All three instruments travel in one pouch, and they cannot be exchanged for one another. No clerk will give you bell-hours for your slip or a share for your hours. Some men have asked. Their names are kept in a different ledger.

#On Issue and Suspension

No single office owns a Grace Ration. Each owns one corner of it. The Bureau of Rites rules on which rites may be performed and by whom. The Bureau of Bells accounts for the ringing and marks off what is spent. The Bureau of Relics keeps custody of the Isidorean materials. The Bureau of Tithes decides whether you have paid. The Bureau of Records writes all of it down, and so outlives everyone else.

The soldier sees none of this. He sees a chaplain with a warrant, a clerk with a book and a pouch that is either full or empty.

If you fail to pay your tithe, your allotment is suspended. The consequences are plain: no light in the trench, no absolution in the Ledger, no pinch of ash against fever. Suspension falls on the account in arrears. It does not strip a whole company of protection. A company with enough men in arrears learns by the third night of rain how little that difference helps.

I once watched a private hold out his hand at the counter, the cuff of his wool sleeve black with trench water. The clerk ran a finger down the column, found the mark and closed the book. The private did not argue. He already had a cough.

#On the Expenditure of Grace

Here novices make their most expensive mistake. They believe that once the ration is paid for, the miracle is paid for too. The ration settles the account's claim. It settles nothing with the body.

Every miracle takes its price from the faithful who call on it. On the lowest rungs the price is hunger and fatigue. A march is lengthened today with hunger borrowed from tomorrow. A peal fills a parapet with courage, and every man who hears it tastes iron and is tired to the marrow. Sleep wears thin. Higher up the price is memory: a name forgotten in exchange for an hour of light. Higher still it is years of life. Those rungs belong to processions and cathedral choirs. No allotment I have countersigned climbs that far, and I would distrust any clerk who said his did.

Debts also pile up underneath. Skipped fasts, late tithes and vows only half kept all add to the same deficit, and that deficit is devotional debt. The Bureau of Rites records its symptoms with clinical care. Food loses its taste, so that bread turns to ash on the tongue. Phantom bells ring at night to a melody nobody can name. Joy turns brittle, and laughter snaps like glass in the throat. A company that spends its allotment freely and repays it slowly goes grey at supper.

Doctrine holds that the expenditure is voluntary and that Creation is preserved by it. I record both assurances, in Doctrine's name. Sorcery, Doctrine adds, charges the world in place of the man. The man is presumably expected to be grateful for his choice of creditor.

#On Isidorean Shares

The fever-ward share draws its authority from Kalnik Ridge in A.S. 48. There Brother Tomislav raised the Reliquary of Saint Isidore against Maldrake's vanguard. Seventeen relics ignited. The vanguard recoiled, and a later reckoning put the emission at forty-three minutes. Tomislav was found as warm white ash, still holding the reliquary. Men with better seats than mine still argue over his death and his canonisation. I leave them to it.

Much came down from the ridge: the Bell, the ridge-glass, the ash bowls of the Toledo Cinder Trials, and the small sealed papers kept in trench chapels. Those packets claim to be close to Isidorean ash. "Close" is a generous word. The Bureau of Relics controls the attribution. It has published no chain of custody running from the ash that knelt on the ridge to every packet in every pouch, and I will not invent one.

The audit of Isidorean share Lot 7-C is reproduced in my dossier on the saint. It lists pumice, chapel soot, trace calcium and an unexplained warmth. The lot was handed out before anyone filed an objection. Its casualty correlation remains under the black bar, and the lot was blessed afterwards. In the margin the auditor wrote that they lived anyway. I do not know why they lived. Neither does the auditor, and he had the packet.

#On Forged Mercy and Present Use

Wherever grace is rationed, someone forges it. A counterfeit chit once circulated at Bastion-Constantinople promising indulgence for "five sins, any type." Hundreds queued for it. The forger's tongue was nailed to a church door, and the chits went on circulating. A soldier told that his allotment is suspended will buy mercy wherever it is sold.

The paper offered something no lawful slip offers. A real slip records a confession and a lawful remission. A slip for five unnamed sins is a list with nothing on it. The men in that queue knew how to read a column. They wanted the column more than the reading.

Counterfeit Isidorean packets cause more trouble, because some of them appear to work. Forward posts report unlicensed shares that kept a section free of fever, and others that glow faintly as Wrath's storms gather. Purity burns these together with the worthless packets and the plague-carrying ones. Whether a packet works, where it came from and whether it is certified are three separate questions. Three separate buildings answer them, and they rarely share a corridor. I do not propose to say where the warmth comes from.

The enemy reads our ledgers as closely as we do. Raid a grace depot and you starve an army of miracles. Falsify a bell-ledger and a parish falls without a shot. A depot clerk is a sentry whose rifle is his ink.

This survey stands in A.S. 201. The ledgers show allotments scarce, audits frequent and suspensions routine. The cartridge book and the grace book still lie side by side on the counter. The same officer signs both, and he is sometimes short of the second.