Orelia

#On the Apprentice and the Name

"All glass confesses." — Saying of the polishing trade, current in the Maskwright Lanes

Orelia cuts glass at the bench of Glassman Dimo in the Maskwright Lanes of Thessaloniki, and sings while doing it. Those few facts are everything the Synod's paper will certify about this person. I have read the paper. What follows is the bench, the trade, the conduct of a Bureau, and my opinion. A careful reader will tell them apart by the quality of the prose.

The Lanes call the apprentice "Saint." The quotation marks are mine and they carry weight. No tribunal has sat on the matter, no miracle has been entered for witness or dispute, and the liturgical calendar keeps no day for any Orelia of Thessaloniki. Equally, nobody has troubled to forbid the word. In a city that charges three separate fees to let a fishing smack under a chain, the title is free. A harbor district gives out honorifics the way a quartermaster gives out mud. Thessaloniki rations stamps, not names.

Dimo is the better-documented party, which is to say Dimo has scars. His burns record a dozen kiln accidents and one Purity raid he declines to discuss. He builds trench-masks, and his workshop serves the two economies that every glazier in the Lanes serves, one that is permitted and one that is not. How Orelia came to that bench, the Ledger does not say. I have seen no indenture, no guardianship, no kinship and no bill of sale. Apprentice is the Lanes' word. I adopt it because it is the only one with a witness behind it.

#On the Cutting Bench

The Lanes smell of hot sand, metal filings and ash, and the lamp oil that some fitters call oil-hymn will not be found in any ration ledger. Workshops crowd the terraces in rows of low doors. Every one of them has a kiln, and every kiln has a story the owner tells only to customers.

The orthodox product is plain. A trench-mask for the coastal regiments has an iron frame, a leather lining and glass lenses against brine and fog. Such a mask is ugly, useful and wholly within Doctrine. The Bureau of War needs it in quantity for the southern trenches, where the sea-fog comes over the parapet like a creditor.

The unorthodox product looks the same from a distance. Its eye-pieces carry shards of demon glass, scavenged from Wrath's slag-plains and Lust's broken palaces and run across the Bosporus in reliquary crates. Dimo claims his shards let a soldier see the enemy's soul. That is the seller's claim. Doctrine holds that demon glass corrupts and must be seized and shattered. Every few years Purity burns the practice in public, and every few years it comes back more widely than before.

Between raw shard and finished socket lies the bench. Throughout the trade, from here to the Varna roads, the polishers keep the same furniture: dim lanterns, because the trade holds that bright light wakes the glass; ash-grit and oil for lapping; lead came for mounting; wax plugs for the ears; and a sealed quiet-box for any piece that has begun to murmur overnight. The hazards come with the furniture. Glass flour gets into the lungs, lead greys the fingertips, and cuts are said to sting with language. These are the general conditions of the work. Whether the apprentice's lungs have begun paying that tithe, or whether Orelia keeps the wax and the box, is not recorded.

The cutting is recorded. The report says Orelia cuts glass. It does not say which glass. The same bench in the same hour can shape a lawful lens for a conscript and a blank for a socket that no requisition form will name. Purity knows this. War knows this. The Lanes regard asking as bad manners.

#On the Melody and Its Record

The song goes with the cutting. That much is attested. The melody belongs to no known hymnal. That much is reported, and I file it as reported.

The report gives no words, so I have none to reproduce. It does not say whether the tune repeats, whether it has a refrain, or whether Orelia sings it at the cutting alone or also at the sweeping-up. I have the report, not the tune. If a reader wants a transcription, the Lanes are open from noon, and Purity will want that reader's name.

The difficulty is the city. Thessaloniki is the one port in the Synod that has learned to fear singing as other ports fear rats. The chains between the Elder and Younger Towers hum a psalm at every passage. Under that psalm the Drowned Choir keeps its own harmony, and the Bureau of Rites has classified it, declined to suppress it and forbidden anyone to name it. In A.S. 145 refugees sheltering in the towers sang in their sleep in no tongue the Chainwrights knew, and by morning the children had no tongues at all. The bells fell silent in A.S. 198, during the Silence of Thessaloniki, and rang reversed when they were struck again. The Refugee Sheds hum every night to keep the sleep-singing away.

Into this acoustic jurisdiction comes an apprentice who hums an unlisted hymn over a cutting wheel.

No record joins the apprentice's tune to the chain-hum, to the Choir, to the Sheds or to the Crying Choir's dead nursery. I join none of them here. I note only that in Thessaloniki an unregistered melody is not a pastime. It is a docket waiting for a clerk.

#On Purity's Restraint

The Bureau of Purity in the Lanes is no shy institution. Its Salt-Scourge Detachment wants the demon-glass trade suppressed root and branch. Inquisitor Velek announces raids in the voice of a man reading the tide tables. Captain Mavra makes the arrests at noon in the public square, before as many witnesses and with as little contraband as can be arranged. Meanwhile the masks that matter go out through the under-quay tunnels on the night convoys, and regimental commanders enter them under Optical Supplies, Standard. The War side of the ledger buys. The Purity side burns. The two ledgers have never been introduced.

Against that habit stands the reported entry on the apprentice: Purity has investigated. Purity has not acted.

The report names no officer, gives no season and records no finding. It does not say that Velek conducted the inquiry, that Mavra was consulted, or that any raid ever reached Dimo's bench while Orelia was at it. I will not put those names into a file that does not hold them. My readers have enough invented witnesses in their lives.

Restraint is not acquittal. A Bureau that has not acted has issued no licence, granted no immunity and sealed no protection. It has done nothing, on paper, and paper is where Purity lives. The apprentice holds exactly what the record shows: an investigation, without date, and no consequence.

So I offer my own suspicion, signed as a suspicion. The melody is too useful to suppress and too beautiful to prosecute. I have no finding for this, no witness and no stamp. I have a career spent watching Bureaus decline to do things, and I know the expression on a Bureau's face when a matter is inconvenient in both directions at once. A Purity that silences a well-loved apprentice in a district that War protects pays for it twice: once in the Lanes, where the epithet would turn into a grievance, and once in the requisition office, where it would turn into a delay. A Purity that waits pays nothing and keeps the file.

A sceptic would note that a trade which plugs its ears against the glass now has an apprentice who fills the room with sound. Asked for evidence, the sceptic would have none. I decline to be that sceptic in print. It is enough to say that the Bureau has a better-trained ear for beauty than it admits, and an excellent ear for cost.

#On the Present Disposition

"The sea doesn't forget — only Records does." — Thessalonikan proverb

The apprentice is still an apprentice. The record does not promote Orelia to Lapper or Mounter, does not certify Orelia's silences, and gives Orelia no customers of Orelia's own. As far as the Synod's paper shows, the bench is Dimo's, the kiln is Dimo's, the risk is Dimo's and the singing alone belongs to Orelia.

"Saint" is still in quotation marks. The Lanes will go on using it, because the Lanes use what costs nothing. Doctrine will go on not using it until somebody files a petition, and nobody has, because a petition needs a sponsor, a sponsor needs a stamp and a stamp needs a reason to look closely at a workshop where half the stock is entered under the wrong heading.

The melody is still unregistered. It has no score, no text and no provenance, and no Bureau has given its effects a classification, because no Bureau has recorded any effects to classify. Whatever the Lanes hear in it, the Lanes keep to themselves.

Purity's file, if it is a file, is still open without being active, which in this city is the ordinary resting state of a document that might one day be useful. I have seen dossiers lie that way for eighty years. The Drowned Choir's has. Bureaus are patient, harbors are patient and the sea is patient, and the apprentice at Dimo's bench is the one party here with work to finish before nightfall.

I have entered Orelia in the Ledger under the only heading the Bureau left open: apprentice, glass-cutter, singer, unruled. The Lanes may canonize at their own expense.