A hundred and twenty million in 1890. The pole the other eight blocs measure their distance from. Seven internal States, nine climates, and no single physical type — which, on a continent where everyone else has a face, is itself the distinguishing feature.
1. The body
Male average: 167 cm. A spread of ten centimetres, and the spread is the whole story.
There is no clerical body. There are three, and all three call themselves Roman.
The valley body — Vallia Sacra, Aurum Romana, Maritima Coronata
Peasants and smallholders. 168-170 cm. Oil, bread, cheese, watered wine, meat on Sundays and feast days — a diet poor in protein but constant, and it is the constancy that builds bone. Skin that darkens at harvest and pales in winter. Broad hands, from the hoe handle and the pruning hook.
What gives him away: the neck. Decades of summer sun on a bent nape leave the skin cross-hatched, and a sixty-year-old peasant of Vallia Sacra has a map on the back of his neck.
The city body — Aurum Roma, Schola Coronata
Middle class, civil service, clergy, trade. 170-172 cm for those with a surname, 165-167 for those without.
Aurum Roma holds eight hundred thousand people and city water: typhus in July, scarlet fever among the children. The difference between a canon's son and a stevedore's son on the Aurum is not adult height — it is how many of their brothers survived. Half the workers of Aurum Roma have buried two.
The urban body is paler, narrower in the shoulder, and ages more slowly in the face and faster in the lung.
The mining village body — Ferrum Alpina, Sal Pradelica
162 cm. The shortest in the bloc, and among the shortest on the western continent.
Twelve-hour shifts, down the gallery at eleven years old, company housing, a counted ration. These men are small because they were put to work before they had finished growing — and the gallery, which employs whoever fits inside it, selects the small ones again in every generation.
Their own marks, and they are canonical:
- Arc-eye. Years of direct exposure to living Hashmalite — lightning caught in stone — leave an opaque halo around the edge of the cornea. The centre of the vision stays; the periphery clouds. A miner of twenty years underground turns his whole head to look sideways, and you can see it from across a room.
- Stone cough. Gallery dust. It kills at forty-five.
- The spiral. A fine spiral burn on the fingers that touched living mineral without a glove. It does not hurt. It does not come off.
The most beautiful colour in the world is made by men who are going blind from the edges in.
The lightning-gold that is the accent of everything the Order signs comes out of the hands of men of a metre sixty-two who cough stone. Not one Hashmalite window in any cathedral on this continent was paid for any other way.
The marks of service — the consecrated bodies
| Who | What shows |
|---|---|
| WhoPurifier (11,000 in the world) | What showsa fine permanent tremor in the hands, which he hides by holding something. A face ten years older than his age |
| WhoIlluminate cleric (fewer than 400) | What showschronic insomnia, pain in daylight, three to seven years of life left. He thins in a way nobody can arrest |
| WhoWhite Medium (3,000) | What showsa pupil that does not answer light · a veil worn for pain · involuntary writing on the hands · feet used to cold stone · no mark of metal anywhere on the body |
| WhoKnight of the Seal | What showsthe right shoulder set higher — the armoured one. Deaf on one side. No family name |
| WhoHospitaller | What showsthe cleanest hands on the continent, and cracked to bleeding because of it |
How you recognise a discharged White in the street: by her feet and her neck. She walks like someone expecting cold stone underfoot, and she carries no mark of chain, medal or buckle — the only bare neck in Christendom.
2. Civil dress
Clergy — a hierarchy readable at a distance
| Rank | Dress |
|---|---|
| RankParish Liturgical | Dressblack cassock, white collar, cloth belt. No ornament |
| RankCanon | Dressred cassock, black sash |
| RankCardinal-of-State | Dressblood-red mantle, gold lining, a visible ring |
| RankThe One | Dresswhite throughout. The only person on the continent who does not wear red |
The inversion at the top. The whole Order climbs from black to red to gold — and at the summit the red disappears and what remains is white.
The explanation from the pulpit is purity. The Reformed read it otherwise: the One wears the colour of the Whites, and he is the only man on the continent permitted to. Two cardinals wrote about it; both texts are in a sealed archive.
Laity
- Urban middle class — Italianate Victorian. Three-piece suit, frock coat, medium top hat, polished black shoes. Women: ankle-length dress, moderate corset, veiled hat. Never a strong colour: in Aurum Roma a layman wearing red is being insolent, and everybody knows it.
- Workers — white shirt, waistcoat, dark trousers, cap. On Sunday: the same, clean.
- Peasants of Vallia Sacra — linen and raw wool, straw hat in summer, clogs. A cloth sash at the waist, its colour set by the village.
- Miners — outside the gallery, indistinguishable from a factory worker. Inside: leather, a lamp, and no loose metal — a safety rule that turned into superstition.
- The Veherenic diaspora — they dress like their neighbours, and that is the point. The only marker left is the three-knot ribbon worn in mourning. Those who know, know; those who do not, see a ribbon.
3. Military uniform
The silhouette at a hundred metres
Bone-white, high collar, black boots to the knee, a closed dark helmet with two round red lenses. It is the most recognisable silhouette on the continent and it resembles nothing else: this is the only army in the world that fights in white.
| Rank | Uniform |
|---|---|
| RankRanker | Uniformbone-white in winter, steel-grey in the field. Closed dark helmet, red lenses, Choir-Cross on the brow. High-collared coat buttoned at the side, down to mid-thigh. Wide black leather belt, Choir-Iron buckle. An oval plate on the chest: number, House, rank |
| RankOfficer | Uniformbone-white with blood-red. A double collar embroidered in gold — the amount of embroidery is the rank. Red cloak lined with gold. A Choir-Iron sword with a Hashmalite hilt, received at ordination |
| RankCommissar | Uniformblack to the ankle, wide-brimmed hat, cloak lined in red, pistol always visible, whip at the belt. May execute in the field without trial |
| RankKnight of the Seal | UniformChoir-Iron armour over the uniform, red mantle, the Choir-Cross with the House numeral on the left shoulder — see the table below |
| RankWhite Swords | Uniformwhite throughout, black veil over the helmet. Platoons of six |
| RankNavy | Uniformnavy blue instead of white. The insignia of Maritima Coronata |
The seven Houses — numeral, Seal and lining
| Numeral | House | Seal | Lining | Strength |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NumeralI | HouseSolar — "the one that holds the spine" | SealSolar Range | Lininggranite | Strength21,000 |
| NumeralII | HouseTwilight — "the one that works at night" | SealTwilight Range | Liningdamp grey | Strength24,000 |
| NumeralIII | HouseLava — "the Lava Guard" | SealSouthern Range | Liningcinnabar | Strength12,000 |
| NumeralIV | HousePit — "the one that waits ten years" | SealOpen Sea | Liningdeep blue | Strength6,000 |
| NumeralV | HouseCold | SealSeptentrional Massif | Liningblue-white | Strength1,400 — a political fiction |
| NumeralVI | HouseInsular | SealArchipelago | Liningmoss green | Strength600 — a political fiction |
| NumeralVII | HouseLimes — "the one that counts the days" | SealDeep East | Liningblack, no lining | Strength45,000 |
What the numbering does, without anyone having designed it that way.
House I is the senior and House VII is the one that fights. Prestige and war sit at opposite ends of the list, and both Houses know it.
And the two phantom Houses — Cold and Insular — are not at the end of the numbering: they are in the middle. Dissolving House V or House VI would open a hole between the Pit and the Limes that every knight on the continent would see on every shoulder.
You cannot erase an empty place that stands in the middle of the line. It is the same mechanism as the two candles kept in reserve at Aurum Roma and the two dead bands on the flag of Vykhradia — and none of the three was designed with the others in mind.
The lining of the Limes is black, and there is no lining — the only House whose colour is the absence of one. Forty-five thousand men on the one front that never stops, and the inside of the mantle has nothing on it.
What the look does, and what it costs
White in the field is tactical suicide outside snow, and the Order knows it. It was kept because the uniform is not camouflage: it is a declaration. A white regiment on a hilltop is telling the Limbus that it came, and that it is not hiding.
The steel-grey field uniform has a date and a cause: 1848, the Massacre of the Iron Line. Three troop trains are caught between two cut sections of track, in the dark, and what gives them away all night long is the white. The field order goes out four months later. Every staff officer has preferred it since. White remains the colour of parade, of photography and of the religious orders — and that is why the whole continent pictures the army of the Order in white when, on the front, in 1890, almost all of it is in grey.
The image the world holds of the Order is forty years old. That, too, is the Stagnation.
4. Flag and heraldry
A Choir-Cross in gold on a blood-red field, in a circle of seven points, with no numeral. Proportion 2:3. Never fringed, never tasselled — the Order thinks that Vykhradian.
- House standard: the same flag with the numeral at the centre of the cross. Seven Houses, seven numerals, and two of them — Cold and Insular — parade with a standard and no army, because those Houses are political fictions.
- Pontifical standard: white with the Choir-Cross in gold. It comes out three times a year.
- Frontier pennant: plain red, no cross. Raised when a post of the Limes is given up for lost and has not been retaken. In 1890 eleven are flying.
5. Architecture, in one image
Liturgical baroque over an industrial bone. Dome and pediment in pale stone, and behind them cast iron, brick and glass without asking permission. The Cathedral of the Choir — an enormous dome, seven pinnacles, a Lumen lantern lit on each of them every night since 1888 — and Central Station are the same building with two briefs: both are cathedrals, and both were made so that whoever walks in feels small.
Materials: travertine, beaten gold, red velvet, Lumen glass, dark iron. Holy Ash in the mortar of church, fortress and cemetery — the floor a pact does not like.
6. Sensory signature
| Smell | incense, wax, ozone, bread coming out of the oven, wet stone |
| Sound | a village bell on the hour · Latin murmured by many people at once · a printing press · a train in the distance |
| Touch | cold marble, heavy velvet, paper that folds stiffly |
| Temperature | cold. The nave of a church is always colder than the street, and that is deliberate |
| Weight | the door is heavier than what it guards |
| Taste | bread, oil, watered wine, wax on the host |