Ash-Baths

#On the Baths Mistaken for Mercy

The Ash-Baths of Toledo are a treatment. The Bureau of Mercy insists on the word. It is printed on the intake chit and repeated to families at the door, gently and firmly, the way a coffin lid is closed. Fevered patients are lowered into troughs of hot ash on the principle that corruption, properly encouraged, will sweat out through the skin. Few survive longer than an hour. Those who do are wrapped in unbleached linen and walked through the streets as "living reliquaries," with their skin cracked and smoking. Some collapse before the procession reaches its last chapel. Mercy records those deaths as "graduated cures."

I have read that phrase in eleven registers and three sermons. It has never once drawn an erratum.

No founding charter has reached my desk, and I have asked with the particular politeness that makes junior archivists weep. The Baths arose after Toledo had learned to read ash as law, sometime in the decades of Mercy custody that followed the city's reconstruction. The Bureau's custody is documented. The Baths' birth is not. In Toledo this is ordinary. Half the city's institutions predate their paperwork, and the other half have learned to pretend they do.

#On the Ash Borrowed from Law

Toledo already had a rite of ash before anyone thought to heat a trough. In the rebuilt cathedral forecourt, the Cinder Trials bury the condemned in warm ash by hymned increments until Ninth Bell. Then a Doctrine ash-reader taps the crust and reads the cracks as a verdict. The ash there is said, officially, to come from the reliquaries of Saint Isidore. The Bureau of Engineering says it is pumice with a pinch of relic dust. Records keeps both claims on file.

The Ash-Baths borrow all of that authority and reject its purpose. A heretic kneeling in the forecourt knows the ash is accusing him. A fever patient in the Baths is told the ash means care. The Cinder Trials are honest enough to accuse. The Ash-Baths call the accusation treatment and charge for linen.

The borrowing goes deeper than method. This is the city where Father Clemente de los Rios spoke the Psalm of Consuming in the burning tower. The Relic of Saint Iago became cinder there, and the siege of A.S. 15 left behind a population that treats ash as a sacrament. Mercy did not invent that reverence. It rented it. A fevered labourer from the tanneries hears the word ash and thinks of martyrs. The attendant hears the same word and thinks of her fuel allotment.

#On the Procedure

Intake begins at the fever-ward desk, where a Ward-Sister in a grey apron and white sleeve wraps takes the patient's papers before she takes the patient's pulse. During bell-hours she wears a mask. She keeps a string-tied ledger and a wax stamp. The intake tags are Mercy's usual set of treat, hold, isolate, transfer, release and ossuary. The Toledo desk adds a seventh, marked with a grey thumbprint. Attendants call it sending down.

Confession comes next, since Mercy cannot sweat out a corruption until it has named one. Most fevered patients confess to whatever is suggested. Delirium is agreeable.

The troughs sit in vaulted rooms below the wards, where the stone sweats in every season. The ash is sieved, warmed in copper pans, and ladled in to a depth marked on the trough wall in notches. Mercy is fond of measuring with ladles. Feet first, then trunk, then up to the collarbone. The face stays uncovered. The Bureau regards this as the humane refinement. The Cinder Trials cover the throat only by special warrant, and Mercy is proud of doing better than a court.

An attendant stands at each trough with a sandglass and a slate. She records colour, sweat, speech and stillness at every turning of the glass. At the hour she scrapes back the ash. If the patient can stand, the patient has survived. If the patient cannot stand, the slate records it, and the patient goes to the ossuary tag.

The bill arrives within three days, whatever the outcome. Families of the dead pay for the ash as well. Mercy says the ash worked. The patient simply finished early.

#On Living Reliquaries

Survivors leave the vaults by the east stair, stiff and grey, with the crust splitting at their elbows and knees. Heat still rises off them in the morning air. Attendants walk at their sides with ledgers open. The route runs uphill toward the cathedral precinct, where the Relic's empty silver setting sits behind glass and a smoking body can be displayed under good light.

Pilgrims kneel as the procession passes. Some touch the linen. The touching is priced. The Bureau of Tithes enters the coins as devotional receipts. Families who can afford it lease an extended peal from the Bell-Market of Toledo, so that their survivor walks under sound. Families who cannot afford it walk in silence. Toledo understands exactly what that silence tells the crowd.

The Bureau of Relics declines to authenticate living persons. It is the most sensible position that office has taken in a century. The pilgrims ignore it. A reliquary, to the faithful, is anything holy that has been through fire and is still in one piece.

These mid-procession collapses are the graduated cures. The Bureau of Records files them under Mercy outcomes and leaves them out of the mortality figures. Mercy wrote the columns, and Records only keeps them. The family receives a certificate with a grey border and a line of scripture chosen from an approved list of nine. The certificate is also billed.

#On Alaricus and the Famine Shadow

The famine of A.S. 185 exposed a flaw in the diagnosis. Harvests failed, caravans stalled, and the Tithes schedule held firm while Toledo's queues lengthened. The fever-ward desks began admitting patients whose delirium had a plain cause. They had not eaten. Their corruption could be diagnosed by counting ribs. Mercy sent them down all the same. Hunger does not appear on the tag list, but fever does, and a starving body runs hot enough to satisfy the form.

Governor-Praelate Alaricus opened the Granaries of Saint Benedict without waiting for Strasbourg's leave. The fever wards received the second allotment of loaves, after the children. Admissions to the Baths fell within the fortnight. Mercy called this a seasonal variation. I call it bread. It is the only cure in Toledo that nobody has thought to parade.

He did not close the Baths. He could not have closed them. They are Mercy's institution, pilgrims pay to see them, and Toledo has built part of its virtue around attending them. Alaricus tolerates the Baths the same way he tolerates the forecourt pit. He moved ration disputes out of the ash docket and into a side hall with benches and water, and he left the older cruelties where tradition keeps them. The Bureau of Tithes objected to the water.

#On the Present Steam

As of A.S. 201, the Ash-Baths continue under Mercy custody. The troughs are warmed at dawn. Mothers from upriver villages come down the Tagus with children burning in their arms, because a medical circular is no use to someone who cannot read. They pay the witness toll at the quay and are directed uphill. The Ward-Sister at the desk takes their papers and then their children. The processions run on schedule. The certificates are printed in batches of two hundred.

Toledo remains loyal and profitable. On certain mornings the east stair is still steaming at noon.