Every district of Britannia knows the Afflicted, and almost none of them can say exactly what the word means. In law it is a finding made against a person. In the pulpit it is a sentence passed by Christ on the blood of the old world's servants. In the street it is a scale on the wrist, a second thumb, a child who once moved a pin without touching it, and the long reach of whatever follows from being seen.
“The marked may be sinner, sufferer, servant, threat, neighbour, or several of these before the road is done.”
Canon Beatrice Anne Hales, School Notes for Foreign Readers, Lambeth, 4618 A.C.
The common teaching of the Church is simple and hard. When the Apocalypse broke the old world, those who had served Antichrist, or had sinned with his servants, were cursed in their blood, and the curse runs on in their descendants. An Afflicted person is therefore cursed by definition: not a sick man to be pitied first, but the visible remainder of a judgement. Harsh preachers say Antichristic blood outright; gentler ones speak of an inherited burden to be borne in penance.
Not everyone holds the doctrine whole. Reforming priests, charitable women and several London and Cambridge physicians argue that a mark may be an affliction to study, treat or pity, and that a small untaught power is a condition rather than a proof of damnation. Blight is another explanation the country gives, and many hold both at once. The Cambridge Guarantor Rooms refuse to say where any affliction comes from; Oxford has its doctrine ready; Sarrum has never troubled to form one.
II
Two Signs in One Column
How a person comes to be Afflicted
There are two ways into the category, and the realm records them as one. The first is the body: scales, an extra digit or eye, a limb or joint that should not be, growths that cannot be hidden. The second is a capacity: a small thing done that nobody taught, such as wax softened, a colour changed or a pin moved across a table. A person with a perfectly ordinary body becomes Afflicted on the day such a capacity is established against them.
The second kind is the commoner and the less visible. Most of the people on the exclusion roll, in the Cambridge ledgers and in the enclaves are not marked at all. They are men and women who were once seen, by the wrong person, nudging a small thing an inch.
III
Afflicted, Malformed, Touched
The names they are given, and the names they choose
Afflicted is the broad public and legal word. Malformed is the crueller one, used to reduce a person to the mark, and the Cursed is what preachers and frightened neighbours say. Touched is heard among the Afflicted themselves, above all in London, and turns the accusation around: touched by suffering, by God's testing, by the wound of the world. Those without the mark are sometimes called the Untouched, plainly by some and bitterly by others.
None of these words is used everywhere. A company that calls a stranger Touched in an Oxfordshire village will be taken for a sympathiser, and one that says Malformed in an underbridge room will not be let in a second time.
