Matthias Krell

#On His Station

Matthias Krell hauled rope on the Vienna docks in A.S. 34, and that sentence holds nearly everything the Church knows of his life before the river turned. No register I have consulted gives his birthplace, his age, his parish, his trade before the ropes, or the name of anyone who waited for him at night. He enters the record already on the quay with his hands on wet hemp. Some three weeks later he leaves it without saying where he went.

The work is easier to recover than the man. A rope-hauler on the Danube dragged barges to their moorings, held them against the current, and paid for his mistakes in fingers. In Vienna four years after the Treaty of Regensburg, this was labour for men whose hands were worth more to the Rationalist Republic (Unregistered) than their opinions. Vienna was then a working port of the Age of Reason and had not yet become the ruin of later centuries.

Then the Red Flood came down from Passau and Linz. The water ran crimson for three weeks. Some reaches boiled and others steamed, fish died by the cartload, and the river got into wells. Before the first day was out, the Vienna docks had closed because two labourers burned their hands on mooring ropes soaked in red water. The account does not say that Krell was one of them, and I will not make him one. I mention them so the reader knows what a rope was worth that week. A hauler's living had become something no sane man would hold.

#On the Returning Mark

Several dock workers who touched the river came away marked. Later catalogues compare these marks to script, though none of them reproduces the script. One worker had a scar that hooked through the palm, and another had one like a small gate. Neither was Krell.

Krell's mark kept hours. It appeared on his wrist every dawn and was gone by noon. The skin under it stayed unbroken, so there was nothing to bind or lance and no blood for a wise-woman to stanch. Each morning the light brought a shape and the forenoon took it away, and in between a grown man sobbed into a bucket.

I record the bucket because the account records it. It is also the only object in the whole affair that we can be sure was his.

The later Purity catalogue adds two things. It says the mark changed between three forms: a gate, a mouth, and a third that the catalogue's own keepers have inked out. It also says Krell reported hearing "river bells" beneath his skin.

Note the verb. He reported. The catalogue names no physician who pressed an ear to the wrist and no clerk who wrote down a peal. Whatever rang, rang for one listener, and the Ledger has only his word for it. Nobody has read the gate as a prophecy. Nobody has identified the mouth. The third form stays sealed, and the hand that sealed it did not explain itself.

#On His Arrest

On the ninth day of the Flood, the authorities of Rationalist Vienna arrested Matthias Krell for public disorder.

That charge is all of his legal record. No magistrate's name attaches to it. No prison is named, no hearing survives and no sentence was written. The disorder is not described either, though the quay walls that week suggest its category. They were papered with printed instructions to avoid panic and REPORT SUPERSTITIOUS SPEECH. A man who weeps at sunrise over a wrist that rings is speaking superstition with his whole body. The Republic had banned the sign of the cross. It was hardly going to tolerate a hauler who chimed.

They put him in a cell on the second storey, and he stayed one night.

At third watch, according to the catalogue, water rose upward out of dry stone and filled the cell. This was red water, two floors above the street and a good distance from the river, rising from below through solid masonry without coming in at the door. On the tenth day Krell was released, and the only reason on record is the flood in his cell. Nobody found him innocent or guilty. The record shows a sodden floor and then an open door.

The excerpt also says what happened to his keepers. All four guards on the detail began washing their hands in empty basins and complaining that the water was "too loud." Then they were reassigned. The record gives no names, no destinations, no physician's opinion and no later history. Four men scrubbed at nothing and the Republic moved them elsewhere, which was its usual remedy for any problem that could stand up and walk.

I will say it plainly, since the Republic's own clerks could not. A state charged a man with disorder and then could not keep order in its own stonework. It had arrested the symptom. The cause came up through the floor, and the state handed the symptom back to the street, damp and still weeping, so the masonry could dry.

#On the Later Catalogue

The reader should look at the heading before trusting the body. A.S. 92 retroactive intake means this entry was made fifty-eight years after the Flood, by an office that did not exist in its settled form when Krell was sobbing into his bucket. The catalogue does not say that anyone examined him in A.S. 92, and it is no evidence that he lived that long. It is a later house taking in an older wound. The papers it drew on are cited, but they do not survive for my inspection.

In A.S. 34 the Church was in hiding. It kept to its cellars. The Cellar Saints collected red-stained cloth and boiled river water in consecrated pots. No source places Krell among them, and none places him at prayer. When his mark first appeared, no Bureau existed to classify it. Classification came later.

Doctrine counts the Flood as the third Providential Warning. It came after the Cold Fires of Vienna and the Year Without Dawn, and before the Eastern Silence and the Sundering, which arrived eleven years after Krell's night in the cell. The Bureau calls the Flood the Blood Tithe of the World. That is Doctrine's reading of a river. It explains nothing about a wrist. No holding names the Great Deceiver or any lesser power as the author of the mark, and none pronounces on whether Krell was chosen, cursed or merely standing in the wrong place.

Since I am the man paid to make such uses, I should be honest about them. The Rationalists filed Krell under panic. My own house has filed him under proof. He has served as a specimen of the Republic's blindness, as a footnote to the Tithe, and on this page as a stick to beat Reason with. He has not been canonized. No cult attends him, and no relic carries his name. He is only useful, which in the Church's economy can be the worse fate. I have used him in every paragraph above, and the Bureau will pay my stipend all the same.

#On the Limit of the Account

On the twenty-second morning the Danube ran brown again. Wells cleared slowly, the fish stayed away for a season, and on one quay stair the red crust still comes back every first of November. The river's record goes on. Krell's stops.

No surviving page says whether the mark came back on the twenty-third dawn, whether the bells went quiet when the water did, or whether he took up the ropes again once the docks reopened. No death entry has been found, and no grave or record of recovery either. The river clearing tells us about the river and nothing more. A lesser chronicler would give him a peaceful old age or a dramatic disappearance to finish the folio. I decline. The Ledger has enough invented endings, many of them in my own hand.

What survives is lopsided. The institutions that handled him wrote with great confidence. One wrote disorder. The next wrote Blood Tithe. A third, half a century late, wrote three forms and struck one out. Each of them was sure what Matthias Krell meant. None of them recorded what became of him.