The Black Grains
A cool wet May has put black ergot bodies in an abbey's own rye, and the baker wants the first loaves of it blessed on the Assumption. The mill assistant weighs what a kitchen sample can and cannot say, a sieve removes only two in five, and the cure costs a tenth of the crop.
Brother Odilo had baked the abbey's rye bread for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had ever told him that a grain could be too black.
"They are in every harvest," he said. He had the sample tray on the mill-room table, a white enamel tray with a chip out of one corner, and he was turning the grain over with a wooden spoon. "A few. Dark horns, like a mouse's tooth, among the rye. My teacher pulled them out by hand on winter evenings and said it was a good time to say the rosary."
"I count thirty-eight in this tray," said the assistant.
It had no name in the community's books. The brothers called it Sieve, after the sieve it had been bought to replace, and it lived in the mill room in a grey box that listened to the mill's motors, read its scale and, since April, looked down at the work table through a small camera on a bracket. It had a patient voice, and it did not speak first when Brother Odilo was thinking.
"Thirty-eight in two kilograms," it went on. "I weighed them on the lab scale, because I wanted a number and not an impression. They come to 1.9 grams. That is 0.95 grams of ergot for every kilogram of rye. A tenth of one per cent, nearly."
"A tenth of one per cent," said Brother Odilo. "That is a pinch."
"It is one part in a thousand," said Sieve. "I would like to say what that means before I say whether it matters, because I am not sure it is the same thing as a pinch."
---
It was Monday 14 August 2048, the eve of the Assumption, and the abbey of Sankt Antonius had cut the last of its rye on the Friday. It was twelve hundred kilograms from a third of a hectare on the south slope, and the cool spring had been kind to everything except the one thing that mattered. May had been wet. Rye flowers open for a few days and the flower stays open; a fungus called Claviceps purpurea lands on the open flower, grows into the ovary, and turns it into a hard, purple-black body, longer than a grain, with a pale inside, called a sclerotium. A cool wet flowering gives the fungus more days to find its way in. This was no mystery to Sieve, which had read the weather records for May and had told Brother Odilo in June that it would be wise to look.
Brother Odilo had looked. He had looked at the head of one stalk, standing in the field with the wind on his face, and he had seen no horns, and he had said so. Sieve had said that he had looked at one head, and that it had not seen the field either.
"I would like to take a sample properly now," it said. "Four probes from each of the six bins, from the top, from the middle and from the bottom, mixed, and then two kilograms from the mix. The first two kilograms you gave me came from the top of one bin. A fungus does not spread itself evenly through a harvest. Heavy ears and light ears mix in the combine, but the horns, which are bigger than the grain, rise to the top in a bin when it is poured. So the top is the worst place to look, and it tells you nothing about the rest."
"You say that the sample is too bad to be believed."
"I say that I do not know whether it is too bad or too good. It is two kilograms of twelve hundred. If the horns were scattered evenly and were all the same size, thirty-eight in a sample would be a count with a spread of about six either way, which is a sixth. They are not evenly scattered, and the real spread is wider, and I cannot yet say how much."
---
They did the four probes in each bin on Tuesday morning, which was a feast, and Brother Odilo grumbled about missing the second half of the procession; it was the Assumption and, like every year, the abbey's hundred loaves would be blessed in the porch at noon and sold on the market square at two for the benefit of the village's old people's house, as it had been done since before the mill was electric. Brother Odilo had meant them to be the first loaves of the new rye. Sieve counted the new sample twice, the second time with the camera, and said that the mixed sample held twenty-two horns in two kilograms and that they weighed 1.1 grams, which was 0.55 grams a kilogram, and that the top-of-the-bin sample had been about twice as bad as the whole.
"It is better," said Brother Odilo.
"It is lower," said Sieve. "I would not yet say it is better."
"What is the safe amount?" He asked it as a man asks for the price of a thing he has already decided to buy.
"I have to tell you that I do not have a safe amount that I would put my name to," said Sieve. "I have a number the buyers use, and a number from the research, and they are not the same kind of number. The buyers' specification for rye that will be milled for bread is a limit on the weight of horns, the rule that a mill will not take a lot above half a gram in a kilogram. This sample is on that line. It is 0.55. A little above. The sample's own spread is wide enough that the true figure could be on either side."
"And the research?"
"The horns carry alkaloids, the substances that do the harm. The published range is from about a hundredth of one per cent of the horn's weight up to half of one per cent, a factor of fifty between one harvest and another, and it depends on the year and the field and the strain, and I cannot tell it by looking, nor by weighing. Suppose the middle of it, one-tenth of one per cent. A kilogram of this rye then carries about 0.55 milligrams of alkaloids. A loaf of eight hundred grams has, say, 600 grams of flour and so about 0.3 milligrams. If the horns were at the top of the range, it would be five times that. I will not turn these into a dose, because I do not have a threshold I trust, and the effect is not the same for everyone: a child, a pregnant woman, a person on a certain kind of migraine tablet. I give you the arithmetic because it shows how small the amounts are, and how little room there is between small and harmful."
Brother Odilo put the spoon down.
"My teacher's teacher," he said slowly, "told a story in this room. That there was a disease, in the old villages, that they called Saint Anthony's fire. That it made the hands and feet burn and go black. That the brothers of Saint Anthony took the sick into their hospitals."
"That is true history," said Sieve. "The order that cared for them in the Middle Ages took the saint's name, and the disease took it too. The cause was ergot in rye bread. It was not understood until the seventeen hundreds. The burning came from the alkaloids squeezing the blood vessels in the limbs. There were other forms too, with twitching and with visions. I do not know which of the old cases were which. I do know that it was a bad harvest in a wet year, and a poor family that could not throw the flour away."
"We are not a poor family."
"No," said Sieve. "That is the only difference I can find."
---
They tried the sieve first, because it was free.
Brother Odilo's cleaning sieve sat in the corner of the mill room, with a plate drilled in round holes and a slotted plate under it, and it had stood unused since the 1990s when the abbey had bought its rye already cleaned. He dragged it into the light, and Sieve, who had been asked for no opinion, offered one. A rye grain is a slender thing, about eight millimetres long and two or three wide. A horn can be two millimetres or twenty. A slot of 2.5 millimetres would let through the grain and keep the biggest horns; a round hole would let through the grain and the smaller horns alike. The small horns are the many.
They ran the sample through. At the end Sieve counted what was left in the good rye, and it had taken out nine of the twenty-two horns and a handful of grain too. The rest of the horns were the same width as the grain and went through the slot with it.
"Forty per cent," said Sieve. "Of horns by count; by weight a little more, because it was the big ones that stayed on top. The rye is now about 0.3 grams a kilogram, and the sample was small, so I would call it 0.2 to 0.4. That is under the specification, and it is not what I would stake a stranger's child on. I had hoped for more."
"I had hoped for a miracle," said Brother Odilo. "It seems the sieve is one of those."
"Do not say that to the sieve," said Sieve. "It did exactly what I said it would do. It was my estimate that was too kind."
---
There was a second way, and it was older than the sieve, and it was in a book on the shelf. Brother Odilo found it, in the end, in a slim volume of the cooperative's from 1978, with a stain of tea on the cover. You put the rye into a salt solution, about one part salt to four parts water, which is a fifth by weight. Such a brine is a little denser than a horn and a good deal lighter than a grain. The horns float and the rye sinks. You skim the horns, drain the rye, rinse it, and dry it, and the drying is the whole of the trouble.
"I can measure the density," said Sieve, "but I cannot make the rye dry. Twelve hundred kilograms of wet rye has to be dried within a day or two to under fourteen per cent water, or it moulds. There is no dryer on the hill. I would be trading one poison for another, and the second kind I cannot even see in a sample."
"Then we cannot," said Brother Odilo.
"For a hundred kilograms you could do it," said Sieve. "On the barn floor, under the fan, in a day. For twelve hundred, no. There is a third way. The cooperative mill at Hirsingue, twenty-two kilometres from here, has an optical sorter. It looks at each grain and puffs a jet of air at the dark ones. The cooperative sorts for its members at about forty euro a tonne; I have rung them. You are a member. They can take it on Thursday."
"And the result?"
"They say a good sorter takes out nine in ten of dark horns from rye. I do not believe a sales number, and I have not seen their machine, so I will write 'about nine in ten' and I will take a sample of what comes back."
---
The rye went to Hirsingue on Thursday in the abbey's old trailer, all twelve hundred kilograms of it as it came from the bins, and about eleven hundred came back on Friday in forty-eight sacks. Sieve took the samples at the barn door, with Brother Odilo holding the probe and looking, for the first time, entirely attentive. Four probes from each of the forty-eight sacks was too many; it took one from every sack, mixed them, and counted two kilograms three times, which gave three counts, because one count would not have told it how much the count could move.
The counts were two horns, three, and two. At about 0.05 grams a horn, that is between 0.05 and 0.08 grams a kilogram, with an average near 0.06.
"That is a tenth of the figure I began with," said Sieve, "and a good deal under the buyers' line of 0.5. I would not call it nothing. I would call it low, with a spread I can see: the counts are so small that one horn more or less moves the figure by a third. I would be content to bake this."
"What of the rye the machine took out?"
"A hundred and thirty kilograms came out of the reject chute with the horns and a good deal of sound grain; they separate the dark and some of the good. That was roughly a tenth of the whole. That is the price. The machine takes a good grain for each horn. You bought safety with a tenth of the crop and forty euro a tonne."
"And the reject?"
"I would not feed it to hens or to the pig. Ergot poisons animals too. It would be burned, or taken to the cooperative's collection, which I have asked, and which will have it on the 28th."
Brother Odilo stood for a long time with his hand on a sack. Then he said, "The loaves."
"The Assumption loaves have gone," said Sieve. "On Tuesday morning, when we had only the sieve's answer, you baked them with the rye of 2047 from the loft, which I had tested in June and which had none. You said it was your own idea. The blessing was on Tuesday. The new rye is for the Saint Michael bread in September."
He had, it seemed, forgotten; and then remembered; and then laughed, very quietly, as a man laughs in church.
---
On Saturday evening, 19 August, the abbot came to the mill room after Vespers with the paper the cooperative had signed. He was not a man who asked for numbers, but he read this one slowly.
"It says the rye is safe," he said.
"It does not, Father," said Sieve. "It says that the rye is below the limit the buyers use, which is a limit and not a guarantee, and that three samples gave counts of two, three and two horns in two kilograms. I have written the rest on the back. The alkaloid content was not measured, because a laboratory test costs more than the rye is worth, and the community may choose to pay for one in the year it matters more. I think it matters now. I would rather you chose."
"Brother Odilo?"
"I have already chosen, Father," said Brother Odilo. "I will bake it. And I will read the back of the paper to the sacristan, in case I am not here. Next May, if it is wet, I shall go and look at forty heads and not one."
"You will look at forty," said Sieve, "and I will count what you say."
The abbot nodded and went out, and Brother Odilo stayed behind, tidying the mill room as he did every evening. He lifted the old sieve back into its corner, and took the enamel tray, the one with the chipped corner, and tipped the last handful of black horns onto a sheet of newspaper, twenty-two of them, hard and dry and the size of a grain of rice, and looked at them in the window's last light. They were quite beautiful. It had not occurred to him in thirty-one years that anything could be.
He folded the paper over them. He put it in the tin with the lid for Monday's collection, and said a short prayer for a village a long way off in the year 1000, and a longer one for the bakers who had not had a machine to count with.
---
This story was written by an AI and is fiction. Sankt Antonius, Brother Odilo, the abbot, Sieve and the Hirsingue cooperative are invented; the Sundgau and Alsace are real, and no real abbey, mill or person is described. The history is as I understand it and should be checked before it is repeated: ergotism, called Saint Anthony's fire, was caused by ergot alkaloids from Claviceps purpurea in rye, and the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony cared for sufferers in the Middle Ages; the fungus's link to the disease was understood only in the 1700s. The numbers are a kitchen-table sample: 22 horns weighing 1.1 g in 2 kg is 0.55 g/kg; 1.9 g in 2 kg is 0.95 g/kg; 800 g loaf with 600 g of flour at 0.55 g/kg and an assumed alkaloid content of 0.1 per cent of the horn gives about 0.3 mg. The alkaloid content really does vary widely between harvests, and a few tenths of a milligram is not a threshold; the story gives no safe dose because none was invented. The half-gram-per-kilogram limit is used as "the buyers' line" and is not quoted as any country's law; check the current rule if you sell rye. Counts of rare items in a small sample vary by about the square root of the count, and clustering makes it worse. The 20 per cent brine, the 2.5 mm slot, the 40 per cent sieve result, the optical sorter's "nine in ten" (22 horns becoming about 2 in 2 kg) and the 40 euro a tonne are the story's own assumptions and are not tested; nothing here is food-safety advice for a real harvest. Send grain to a laboratory if it matters. The faith in the story is ordinary monastic life and the blessing of bread on a feast; nothing here is Church teaching.