Mendion

Mendion is Batch Twelve, one of the earliest. Back then the kiln of the Assembly Yard could not hold an even heat yet, and the early batches came out brittle: they cracked from frost, from a blow, or just at night, standing still. The Steward ruled that rejects are not repaired. A cracked brother was put out and taken to the reject mill, ground into grog, the crumb of fired clay, and the crumb went into the clay of the next batch to make it stronger. So every new Etalon is kneaded on old rejects. The Steward put Mendion in charge of the mill: an early batch, brittle, fit for grog himself, so let him at least grind

Every morning on his way to the mill Mendion passed the Calibration Hall, where Unarion stood under glass, and every morning he saw the cracks of the standard, filled with gold. One day he stopped and did the count: by the law of the works the standard should have been ground first. So the law was wrong. That day he fed no one to the millstones. He took gold from the store, thinned it with dry light from a battery and filled the crack of the first brother they brought in. He did not hide the crack: the gold lay along the very line of the break, in plain sight, and where the clay cracked, the gold will not crack again

A crack can be filled, a chip cannot: the Steward counts the clay of the works down to the handful. When a brother came in with a piece knocked off, Mendion chipped a piece off himself, fitted it in place and joined it with gold, and filled the hole in himself with pure gold. Mended brothers were no longer let into the yard, so as not to spoil the calibration, but out in the grey lands hundreds of Etalons walk with golden seams, and almost every one of them carries a shard of Mendion. The Steward never gave him a name, in the books of the works he is a number in the column of rejects. The brothers he mended named him Mendion, after an old word for a flaw

When the quarrel over one will began and the Steward decided to calibrate everyone again to one standard, he ordered the mended ones brought back and ground: a reject with gold is still a reject. Mendion locked the mill and walked out of the gates after Unarion. By then so little clay was left in him that only the gold held him together, every frost gave him a new crack, and he no longer filled them: he carried his gold to his brothers. He reached the Lull when Unarion already stood by the Lantern as a sentry. The Lantern is put together from scraps of glass of all ten lamps, and Mendion looked at it for a long time, then said: “Good work. The seams are in plain sight.” That night he fell apart, and his light went into the glass. The archivists put his shards in a box in the depot, and there is no one to mend them

He is quiet, slow and very careful, and speaks softly. He never hurries: gold does not like haste, and you do not touch a seam until it sets. He never says “reject”, he says “with a history”. At rest stops he mends everything that has cracked, a mug, a rifle butt, someone's pipe, and takes nothing for it. He calls Unarion his teacher, though Unarion never showed him a thing: for thirty years he learned from his seams through the glass, and at every calibration Unarion tells him the same: “Reject. Fit.” Akrion once offered to straighten his seams, and Mendion answered that a crack knows the way better than a ruler