One Child's Fever

The child's mother held out a ration slip and a proof of labor together. She asked for treatment, but she did not beg for charity.

She laid down beside them a sheet recording the hours her family had worked at the mill and the amount of essence they had never received. Yoan Seren took the two papers in his hands.

Even miracles were bound to procedure and resources. Not everyone was treated; only those who held proof could stand in line.

That fact had always weighed on Yoan, but today it was that procedure that had let this child reach the front of the line.

The mother's hands did not tremble. They were the hands of a woman who had already lost one child once.

Standing before her second, she seemed to have resolved not to weep. Instead of weeping she counted, and instead of pleading she brought proof.

Those hands made Yoan think of Mara. The mothers of this city were giving up the habit of clinging to the Light and learning instead how to bill it.

Whether that was a good change or a sad one, Yoan could not judge. He only knew that in front of those hands, he could not offer easy comfort.

The child was burning with fever. The small chest rose and fell fast, and the lips were dry.

Yoan checked the essence stores. The strike had cut them down.

There was enough left to save one child. As he prepared the healing rite, he thought of the old clause of cost disclosure.

That clause was the passage that announced, before any healing, whose what this Light was borrowing. It was long, slow, and inefficient.

Yoan skipped it. He chose the short, efficient form of the rite.

The child's condition was urgent, he told himself, and better to release one more mouthful of essence than to spend the time reciting a long clause.

The essence jar was half empty. What had been full until yesterday had been reduced by two hours of strike.

Weighing that diminished amount with his hand, Yoan knew that treating this one child meant drawing on the next child's share. When stores run low, a priest has to decide who gets saved first.

That was not a weight a priest should carry, but the weight always landed on the priest. He looked once more at the proof of labor the mother had held out.

Those with proof come first. Whether that rule was cruel or fair, today again he could not decide.

But he half understood the real reason he had skipped that clause. It was the passage that spoke the cost aloud, and to speak the cost was to reveal what this healing was paid for with.

Yoan did not want to say it. Not in front of the mother, not in front of a dying child.

It was not the first time he had skipped it. Since last winter he had been trimming the passage a little at a time.

First one line, then two. Each time he trimmed it the rite grew shorter, and the shorter it grew the more people he could treat.

Efficiency looked like mercy. But time was not the only thing that had been cut.

With every line removed, one obligation to tell someone something had gone with it. Only today did Yoan see clearly what he had been burying in the name of efficiency.

He recited the passage once, inside his mouth. Without letting it make a sound.

Riu was at the door of the treatment room. He had come on his limping leg to help with the essence line, and he heard Yoan's rite.

He was a man who had learned work rhythm in his body all his life. That rite had always carried one particular phrase with it.

A phrase as familiar as a beat. Today that phrase was empty.

Riu felt the blank with his ears. Like one bar missing from a song.

He did not know what it meant, but he knew for certain that something had been left out.

Riu tried filling the empty phrase in his head. One bar of the old tune the workers used to keep time by while turning the mill, and the missing phrase of that rite, somehow resembled each other.

He did not say the resemblance out loud. He only tapped the floor quietly with the tip of his foot, marking out the missing beat for himself.

It was a steady beat. The same beat he tapped even half asleep.

Yoan saw out of the corner of his eye that Riu was tapping the floor, but he did not ask what it was. The two of them were feeling their own blanks, each in his own way.

The white essence dissolved in water. Dissolved, it drew a brief white spiral and vanished, and while that spiral turned Yoan held his breath.

He had seen the Light turn hundreds of times, but today was the first time he watched it while conscious of where it had come from. Yoan wet the child's lips with that water.

A moment later the child's breathing slowed and deepened. The risen fever settled.

Color came slowly back into the dry lips. The child slowly opened her eyes.

The mother took her child's hand. The hand was still tepid with the last of the fever.

Yoan did not hurry that moment. The mother calling her child's name, the child recognizing her mother, the two of them holding hands a long while: he let all of it run without cutting it short.

The miracle might be a lie, but this child coming back to life was not a lie. Yoan did not stint on the reward of that one affirmation.

It was also the reason he remained a priest.

The moment she revived, the child asked for water. Her mother drew well water and gave it to her.

The child drank it and made a face.

"It's lukewarm."

the child said. A young mouth knows nothing of lying.

That winter well water was lukewarm was said first, and most honestly, by a child. Yoan did not let those two words pass.

Grown people had learned how to see lukewarm water and not ask, but the child simply said what she felt. That honesty pricked a corner of Yoan's chest.

A prayer of thanks went up. The mother knelt and gave thanks to the Light.

At that exact moment, a commotion broke out on the stairs below the altar. Two workers had collapsed and were carried out on litters.

Their faces were pale, their hands hanging slack. Yoan saw it.

Before anyone could ask, he said first that the two had no direct connection to the essence he had just released. Saying it with his mouth, he could not meet the mother's eyes, or the eyes on the litters.

His gaze went to the floor. One healing and two collapses had happened at the same hour, in the same building.

Whether that was coincidence or cause, Yoan did not declare. Not being able to declare it was the shape his guilt took.

One of the two on the litters was a face Yoan knew. A worker he had personally blessed last month.

That man had been healthy then. Yoan meant to ask why he had been below the altar, then realized he already knew the answer.

Below the altar, someone was always pressing a treadle. For every healing performed, that much more treadle work had to turn, and faster.

When the Light was released above, someone below drew harder for breath. Yoan had never once tried to see the above and the below as a single picture.

Today, two litters unrolled that picture in front of his eyes by force.

The mother did not see the litters. Her back was turned while she gave thanks for her child's recovery.

Yoan thought that was a mercy, and then was ashamed of the thought itself. A structure in which one side's gratitude turns its back so it cannot see the other side's collapse.

He had not designed that structure, but he was the one conducting rites inside it. He said nothing to the mother.

He had neither the courage to tell the truth nor the gall to invent a lie.

Yoan went out to the well where the healing water had been drawn. The well keeper hauled up the bucket and complained.

"The water tastes different. And strangely enough, it's winter, but it's lukewarm."

Yoan put his hand into the well. It really was lukewarm.

Midwinter well water, unfrozen, tepid as a person's body. He felt he knew what that meant, and at the same time he did not want to know.

If the Light used in the healing had borrowed heat from somewhere, then the place it was borrowed from had grown colder while somewhere else had grown warmer. A lukewarm well could be the trace of that borrowing.

The well keeper said the water had been on the verge of freezing a few days ago. Then, from the night of the big healing at the cathedral, it had turned lukewarm.

He took it for a grace of the Light.

"The essence must have warmed the well too."

he said, laughing. Yoan could not laugh with him.

What was grace to the well keeper looked to Yoan like a receipt for a debt. Somewhere near this warmed well, there had to be a place that had grown just as cold.

At the thought that the place might be a human body, he set the bucket down.

A small essence bowl slipped from Yoan's hand. It fell on the stone paving by the well and broke.

White powder scattered across the snow. He stood there a long while, unable to pick it up.

Between the lukewarm well water and the broken bowl, he thought of the one clause he had skipped today. The clause that disclosed the cost.

Perhaps the price of leaving that clause out was this tepid water and the two men on the litters. Yoan could not follow the thought all the way through.

To follow it was to face what the Light he had served all his life actually was. He gathered the broken shards into his palm.

The white powder seeped lukewarm between the lines of his hand.

The white powder scattered on the snow did not melt right away. On winter snow, that powder alone gave off a faint steam.

Yoan watched the steam. Borrowed heat remained in the essence as well.

He set the powder in his palm gently down on the stone beside the well. To gather it up and use it again, he had seen too much today.

He left the broken bowl where it was and went back to the cathedral. Behind him came the sound of the well keeper lowering the bucket again.

Someone would cook a meal with that well water and call its lukewarmness a grace. Yoan did not yet have the words to stop them calling it that.