City of Grey Faces

#On the Name Withheld

The city has a name, as cities do, and the public files decline to print it. The Bureau of Festivals sealed the municipal identity. The profession supplied a replacement. Festival Chorus-Masters call it the City of Grey Faces, usually lowering their voices on the second word, as though the faces in question might overhear and file a complaint.

What may be said is this: it is a forward heartland city, it was administered by the Church in the ordinary manner, and for eleven months its festivals were conducted with perfect correctness. The reader hoping for walls, a river, a cathedral spire or a neighbouring bastion will find none here. I do not survey its stones. The stones are irrelevant. The city survives in the codex as a case file, and a case file has no skyline.

#On the Misread Certification

The Pure Conductors are an authorised subdivision of the Chorus-Master corps. They are licensed, examined, sashed and paid like their colleagues. Their tendency carries an internal faction mark so that circuit offices can pair them sensibly with Mercy Maestros and keep any district from being fed by one hand alone.

A provincial clerk read that mark as a safety certification.

I confess some sympathy for the man. A mark meaning this conductor removes risk looks, to a tired eye at the end of a long column, very like a mark meaning this conductor is safe. The clerk assigned accordingly. The forward heartland city received Pure Conductors and only Pure Conductors for one full festival cycle. Nobody had planned it, ordered it or proposed it as an experiment. It was an error of reading, the most common sin in any office that runs on ink, and it held for eleven months because nothing in the ledgers looked wrong.

That was the trouble with it. The Pure method is subtraction. The unsafe note goes, then the regional rhythm, then the local joke, the sentimental stanza and the improvised blessing. Everything the Bureau of Doctrine might question is cut before it can be questioned. Bells certifies the intervals. The audience kneels on the beat. Applied once, the method is a purgative. Applied every week for a cycle, it becomes a diet.

#On the Songs That Disappeared

The account records four absences in sequence. I give them in its order, because the order is the evidence.

After the fourth month there were no wedding songs. The account does not say the weddings stopped, and I see no reason to suppose they did; banns were presumably read, vows exchanged, the registers kept. What went was the song. A wedding song is how a street tells itself that two households have become one entry, with the rude verse about the groom's uncle and the soft verse about the bride's dead mother. Neither verse survives a Pure script. Perhaps by the fourth month nobody saw the point of singing them unofficially either.

After the fifth month there was no market fool. The Prescribed Ovation Index lists removal of the local fool among its remedies for excess, which tells us what the Bureau thinks fools are for. The account does not say whether this one was removed, reassigned, retired or simply stopped turning up. It says he was absent. A fool who knows how the magistrate walks is a civic instrument of some delicacy. He lets a town mock its masters in small, harmless doses. When he goes, the mockery goes somewhere less harmless.

By winter there were no children's clapping games. No edict forbade them. I have searched for one, and the absence of such an edict disturbs me more than an edict would. Children learn rhythm from adults the way they learn swearing, by listening when they are not meant to. The adults had stopped giving them anything to listen to.

During the thaw there were no tavern choruses. In any heartland town the thaw is when doors open, benches go out and men who have been indoors since autumn rediscover their lungs. In this one the benches went out. The account records no chorus.

#On Exceptional Stability

Here are the findings as the account reports them.

There were no riots. Attendance stayed high because attendance was compulsory. Applause stayed exact because the Attendance Auditors counted it aloud. Sermon retention improved. Confession volume doubled. Knife assaults tripled.

The public account gives no baseline figures, no population and no method of assessment, so I will not invent any. The ratios are enough. A Pure Conductor reading this list stops at the third item and smiles. A Mercy Maestro reads to the end and reaches for a drink. The Bureau's provincial office stopped where the Pure Conductor did, added up the columns and found everything satisfactory.

Look at the confessionals. Twice the traffic, and nobody in the district office asked what was being confessed or why so many more people needed to kneel behind the screen. Look at the knives. Three times the cuttings, in a city where nobody rioted, because a riot needs a song and a man with a blade needs only a grievance and a dark lane. The crowd in the square applauded to the second. The crowd in the lanes settled its arithmetic privately.

#On the First Comic Interlude

The error was eventually discovered. The account does not say who discovered it, and I will not give the honour to anyone undeserving. Mercy Maestros were restored to the circuit.

The first authorised comic interlude followed. The Index grants seven seconds of applause for an approved comic interlude, palms only, no stamping. The City of Grey Faces gave forty-three seconds of applause, and it was applause, the figure being recorded in seconds of palms. I have seen no measure of how long the laughter ran beneath it.

There were eight arrests. Two auditors fainted. One old woman laughed until she vomited into her shawl.

The account gives no name for the arresting authority, no charges and no sentences, and I supply none. It gives no name for the woman. She survives in the record as an elderly body, a shawl and an involuntary response that exceeded the Index by a margin no column was built to receive. The two auditors are luckier, having at least a profession. I assume the fainting was caused by the arithmetic.

Both factions submitted readings. The Pure Conductors cited the eight arrests as proof that eleven months of subtraction had protected the city from exactly this disorder. The Mercy Maestros cited the woman as a sacrament: a body that had been starved of laughter so long it rejected the first meal, then kept it down on the second. Each faction read the evidence it had brought.

Both reports reached Strasbourg. Mine reached it as well, better bound and better punctuated, and was read with appropriate gratitude.

The record does not say whether the wedding songs came back, whether the fool returned or whether the children took up their clapping again. It records one interlude, forty-three seconds and a soiled shawl. Anyone claiming the city recovered is writing a different file.

#On the Continuing Warning

As of A.S. 201, the City of Grey Faces is cited whenever a circuit office proposes economy. Pure Conductors remain indispensable after mutiny scares, crush events and any district where laughter has started to keep time. The Festival Conservatory of Strasbourg continues to produce them, red-inked and punctual, and their instructors continue to love them.

The current classification says they are never to be the sole morale provision for longer than one cycle without review. Mixed circuits are preferred. The Pure stop the crowd from discovering its hands. The Maestros stop the crowd from forgetting it has them. The two factions despise each other, which is the arrangement working as designed.

I record that the warning does not condemn the Pure method. Every hymn in that city was sung correctly and every kneel fell on its beat. The ledgers from those eleven months are some of the most beautiful the provincial office ever bound. They sit on a shelf in a city that has no public name, beside a report reclassified in another hand. It may be that they are still consulted. It may be that they are only dusted.