Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter Michael Miller, Jr.

  Her mouth agape, Buldyrk permitted herself to be escorted to the stage. There was a mutter of astonishment from the cardinals, and even a few muffled cries of outrage, for Corvany was not even a member of the Sacred College, and the expression on the face of the president of the seminary was one of complete surprise.

  “See? What did I tell you,” Aberlott whispered to the monk. “I’ll bet a copper that seat was for Cardinal Ri.”

  The abbess was seated between Jarad and the Dominican, to the delight of neither, and Corvany thus established himself as the most liberal and gallant of all the prelates. He resumed his beaming smile and introduced to the audience a learned member of his own Order of Saint Ignatz to speak in his stead. This was Urik Thon Yordin, S.I., who was a clergyman but also a professor of history at the secular university at Texark. He was a lean, gray, bespectacled man in his fifties, and apparently another member of Archbishop Benefez’s advance party. His manner of address was that of the lecture hall rather than the pulpit.

  “What has not been well understood about the frequent condition of schism in the Church,” he said, “is that it reflects a natural schism in the continent. There have always been two Churches, if I may say so, Eminent Lords: one Church in the East, the other in the West. While that pope inhabited New Rome near the Great River, he was living as far from this region and the far west as if New Rome were on the Atlantic. Since the papacy has come here to the foot of the mountains, there has been a great healing of the Church in the West, whose problems are now better understood. This has been made plain to us by events in the Oregon area.”

  Blacktooth saw two Western bishops leaning together to whisper. It was strange to hear one of Urion Benefez’s men begin by admitting the truth of an argument some Westerners used in favor of continuing the Valanan papacy. The approach seemed conciliatory at first.

  “And to understand the cause of the Western problem,” Thon Yordin went on, “we have only to consider the route which messengers used to take before the establishment of peace in the Province. At the beginning of this millennium, a man foolish enough to travel alone from New Rome to the far West might take a route such as this: south through forest trails, skirting the Valley of the Misborn, then to the Gulf, and, paralleling the coast, on to the Brave River. Crossing the river, he would find the royal road leading west across the desert protected by soldiers of a king; arriving in the far West, he moved north again. A lone traveler coming eastward might make a similar detour. Why?”

  He held up a sheaf of papers. “I have here a copy, dated one century and forty-eight years ago last month, of the military regulations for the Papal Guard in escorting the Pope’s legates and other ambassadors directly across the High Plains by the most direct routes at that time. Do not be alarmed. I shall not read them to you, although anyone who wishes to examine them may do so. These rules call for forty heavily armed cavalrymen under the command of a captain, and a party of twenty archers in light armor with swords, and halberds to be packed with them and carried by mule. The regulations specify certain permissible routes, all riverbeds, and regularly scheduled crossings are forbidden. When a party was ready to leave, its departure was delayed until one man, the captain of the guard, decided to go. Can you guess why?

  “Now, there were occasionally men in those days foolhardy enough to make such a trip alone, or in smaller armed groups. But this was like going to sea in a rowboat. Even if no one at all had lived on that great ocean of grass—tall grass at first, as one moves west, then short grass, then desert grass in the south until one reaches the mountains—if no one at all lived there, the journey would be dangerous enough. This continent itself exists in a natural state of schism, Eminent Lords. It is divided by nature. The open plain is a place of horrid winds and torrid or frigid weather, even today. There is nothing out there but earth, sky, grass, and wind. There is nowhere to hide. Everywhere he looks, a man is surrounded by a far horizon. The grass billows in the wind. That is the great grass ocean.

  “In earlier days, there dwelt there upon that grassland those cruel, piratical herdsmen with their woolly wild cattle, and they took delight in torture, and they flayed messengers alive and ate their organ meats, or made them slaves. Some of you who have just crossed the Plains in coming here, in relative safety, I might add—although I sympathize with the hardships you still endured—you have seen the descendants of those cannibals. And unless you encountered an outlaw band, you were not molested. But the forebears of these people were the reason for these extraordinary regulations I hold in my hand.

  “Wild they are still, these herdsmen, and cruel, but they let you pass now without harassment. While the Church in the West has, we all admit, rendered fealty to the one true vicar of Christ who traditionally resides east of the Plains, it has always gone its independent way in matters of faith, morals, and doctrine, as we learn from the history of the Oregonians. I refer you to the works of Duren, if you have any doubts about this.”

  Blacktooth looked suddenly at Abbot Jarad and regretted it immediately. His former ruler was watching him with a faint triumphant smile. Some cardinals in the abbot’s vicinity were also murmuring among themselves.

  Aberlott noticed Blacktooth’s restlessness and turned toward him to whisper. “Nimmy, did you know the Oregonians used leavened bread at Easter Mass?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Blacktooth whispered back. “Neither did Duren. Now hush.”

  “Oh, yes. Instead of ‘Behold the Lamb of God,’ when the priest held up the bread, he would say, ‘Behold He is risen.’”

  Blacktooth kicked his anklebone. His lips shaped an ooo.

  “Transportation was simply too hard between the East and the West for the Pope to be in constant communication with all his flock and their bishops in those days,” the professor continued. “But now we have relative peace on the High Plains and the Prairie, except for outlaw bands. And in the South, for most of your venerable lifetimes it has been possible for a man to travel alone, or in a small unarmed party as some of you from the Southeast have just done, to come from east of the Great River here to mountains with no more danger than you might encounter on the roads in your home diocese. Why? Because the southern horde has been pacified, and the Province is well governed, and those north of the Province are, if not pacified, then at least aware that robbery, rape, and murder of us ‘grass-eaters’ will bring swift retribution. Thus with travel and communication restored, the imagined advantages to the west of a papacy here in exile are no longer real.”

  Abbot Jarad had risen to his feet, but the speaker seemed not to notice at first.

  “I am not a military man,” the professor continued, “but—” He stopped because the audience was looking to his right, and he glanced around to see Jarad standing. “Yes? Your Eminence?—”

  “Perhaps the advantages of exile are imaginary, as you say. I pray for a return to New Rome, under the right conditions, for the exile is a scandal and an abomination. But I would remind the learned speaker that the Treaty of the Sacred Mare predates the conquest, that the military regulations which the learned speaker quotes predated that treaty, and that the treaty was negotiated peacefully with the Church as mediator, and that while crossing the High Plains is never without danger, Church messengers have been doing it for at least a century, with no help from the Texark military.” Jarad sat down, his face bright red, looking around for a murmur of approval. None came.

  “Thank you. As I was saying, I am not a military man, but it has been explained to me that the mission of Texark troops which just happen to be in the vicinity of New Rome has nothing to do with New Rome or the papacy. They were sent there without any thought whatever of provoking or intimidating the Pope. The Hannegan of that time was as astonished by the Pope’s flight to Valana, as was the rest of the country. The troops were sent not to outflank the Holy City, but to protect the farmers settling in the timberlands between the Great River and the treeless prairie. The farms were threatened from the west and the north by the ea
stern horde, the one they call Grasshopper. The troops are there as a peacekeeping force only, as most inhabitants of New Rome now recognize. The herdsmen were penetrating the farmlands, stealing the stock, and kidnapping little boys.

  “Nomads give birth to more girls than boys, you know. Something hereditary, I’m told. Anyway, the return of the papacy to New Rome would be protected, not threatened, by the troops in the—”

  “Just a minute.” Cardinal Brownpony’s voice came over the room loud and clear. Blacktooth looked around, as did many others, but no one on the floor was standing. “Just a minute, if I may.”

  Eyes followed the voice upward and to the rear. Brownpony was standing in the choir loft, with the Axe seated on one side and the Reverend Amen Specklebird, O.D.D., on the other. Blacktooth and Aberlott had been refused admittance to the gallery, but the guards had evidently opened it to latecomers to avoid people wandering down the main aisle after the meeting began.

  “I am a descendant of these cannibals, as you call them. My mother, I was told by the sisters who raised me, bore the family name of ‘the Brown Pony.’ I never met her, but the family was Wilddog, the sisters said, and she was the young widow of a Jackrabbit husband who had escaped a Texark jail, but was killed by Texark bullets. She was raped by one of your Texark peacekeepers when she went south to visit her dead husband’s people. I am the child of that violent union. The sisters who raised me in your province let me keep the name she gave them.”

  Blacktooth looked up at Wooshin with wide eyes, and his surprise was reflected by the warrior’s. Neither of them ever mentioned Brownpony’s origins to others, judging it a taboo subject. Now the Red Deacon was announcing his mysterious bastardy to the world, which already knew of it in whispers. And yet he himself knew little or nothing of it, according to the file the monk had seen at the Secretariat.

  “And there is my secretary,” said Brownpony, looking down at Blacktooth. “His ancestors were Grasshopper refugees from your Texark pacification. They lost all their cattle to Hannegan’s diseased animals. His parents died without horses, farming another’s land. From him, I know something of the Grasshopper people and their history. For centuries they have pastured their animals on the land of which you speak, among their other lands. That region was called ‘Iowa’ on the ancient maps, I believe, but it is nearly treeless, and yet fertile enough for the farmers to covet it. And the Grasshopper has always gathered wood for poles, stakes, arrows, and spears from the thinly forested lands north and south of that area. If the farmers are there now, they’ve settled there since Hannegan’s slaughter. You paint the Texark forces as protectors. You want the Pope back in New Rome, in the midst of his protectors. I too want the Pope back in New Rome, in spite of his protectors, in the midst of his enemies, among whom you have just counted yourself. You have been sent here to draw fire away from your master. Now the Cardinal Archbishop of Texark, who we all know has sent you, must either underwrite your views, or denounce your slander against the people of the Plains.”

  There was an astonished silence, followed by brief applause and cheering from two Westerners. Father General Corvany ominously lost his smile again, and came to his feet. The applause quickly subsided. Brownpony sat down smiling. Cardinals were looking over their shoulders at him. On the stage, Jarad’s jaw dropped. Brownpony was known as a diplomat, always courteous, a peacemaker who rarely took sides. His tone had been calm, but he had just declared war, and it had to be premeditated.

  Before Corvany could speak, a sputtering archbishop from the delta of the Great River, now part of the Texark Empire, arose in a huff to defend the speaker’s thesis concerning the protective role of past Hannegans in the Midwest, and to deplore the interruptions. He pointed a finger toward the balcony and began to say something about Brownpony, but the Dean of the Sacred College arose and roared, “God’s peace! God’s peace!”

  The seminar was about to become a verbal melee, and few in the audience noticed the student who wandered down the center aisle. He was staggering slightly. Aberlott suddenly clutched Blacktooth’s arm and pointed. The man in the aisle was Jæsis, uncombed and un-shaved, his face livid but with red blotches. He stopped in the middle of the cardinals’ section and pulled something out of his half-buttoned cassock. He croaked Yordin’s name and a curse. There was an explosion and a burst of smoke. Thon Yordin put his hand to his chest, looked down, but there was no blood. Instead, one of the men seated behind the podium fell from his chair. It was the Father General of the Order of Saint Ignatz himself who lay bleeding. The assailant in the aisle waved a Texark cavalry pistol aloft, yelled again at Thon Yordin, fired the other barrel toward the ceiling, and collapsed in the aisle. The audience was on its feet and roaring.

  “Assassin! Texark assassin! Hannegan’s agents!”

  Blacktooth looked around for the source of this irrational voice, but saw only a fist waving in the surging crowd.

  Men swarmed over the fallen student, and from the platform came cries for a physician. Blacktooth and Aberlott were seized by police as they hurried out of the building.

  There followed eight hours of questioning at the Valana police barracks, but Cardinal Brownpony quickly appeared on their behalf. There had been no brutality. The police learned from the college that Jæsis was from Texark, had attended Thon Yordin’s classes at the university there, had failed his tests and then transferred to Saint Ston’s. A physician stated that even now he was delirious with fever. The police released Blacktooth and Aberlott just past midnight; they walked home by the light of the Pascal moon. Jæsis died that night in custody.

  While the city slept, the Reverend Urik Thon Yordin sent a rider galloping toward the telegraph terminal at the final outpost on the road to the Province. The message he carried was addressed to Urion Cardinal Benefez and, with a copy to the Emperor, would reach Hannegan City by Good Friday’s sunrise:

  FATHER CORVANY WAS KILLED TODAY BY A STUDENT ROOMMATE OF BROWNPONY’S NOMAD SECRETARY. THE SECRETARY WAS QUESTIONED BUT RELEASED AFTER BROWNPONY INTERVENED. KILLER DIED IN POLICE CUSTODY. DETAILS FOLLOW. I AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

  YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT IN CHRIST,

  YORDIN.

  CHAPTER 10

  Let a man consider that God is

  always looking at him from heaven,

  that his actions are everywhere visible

  to the divine eyes and are I constantly

  being reported to God by the Angels.

  —Saint Benedict’s Rule, Chapter 7

  IN VALANA ON SUNDAY THE 17TH OF APRIL 3244, Blacktooth arose before dawn and watched the moon, now past full, settle behind the mountains, then washed his teeth with ashes and boiled water, relieved himself in the outhouse, got dressed, and then spent in prayer the short time it took for the sun to come up. Without eating anything prior to receiving the Eucharist, he left the house. On the way to Mass in the early-morning chill, he sensed someone following him. Turning, he saw only a man talking to an open window a stone’s throw away, and someone wandering in the other direction. The window’s occupant, if any, was not visible. The man talking to the window was the same man Blacktooth had seen begging on the same street the day before Jæsis shot Corvany. Probably a denizen of the neighborhood. The feeling of being followed was an illusion caused by shame, the monk decided. He kept walking toward the Cathedral of Saint John-in-Exile. It was Easter morning.

  With hundreds of cardinals participating, the Mass of the Resurrection was spectacular in the Pope’s own Church, even without a pope. Blacktooth had come early enough to be assigned a spot to stand with room enough to kneel, but most latecomers waited in crowds outside the nave and outside the cathedral itself. Getting out of the building after Mass was worse than getting in, because many of those pouring outside paused to talk to acquaintances and blocked the way. It was a perfect situation for murder. Blacktooth felt the dagger pierce his side as the arm holding it darted between two other worshipers, who immediately fell back in dismay. Blacktooth clutched his side and
faced his attacker. It was the man who talked to empty windows, the beggar. Feeling people moving back, he looked around. There were three of them, dirty and shabbily dressed, two with knives, one with a chain. They fought there on the great ascent of cathedral steps which had no landings, and two of them were thrown sprawling to the bottom by a victim with unexpected skills. Someone was screaming for the constable, others for the Papal Guard. The original attacker, the beggar, now cut the monk’s face and might have gone on to kill him, but the blast of a constable’s horn sent the three of them fleeing.

  His wounds were cleaned and dressed at the police station, and he was interrogated by an irritable lieutenant who insisted on believing that he, Jæsis, Aberlott, and Crumily were conspirators in some larger scheme. Blacktooth’s relationship with the cardinal provided him with a secure identity in which he dared feel immune to intimidation in the face of anything short of violence. He told the lieutenant what he needed to know and tried to ignore what he wanted to know, based on a wrong assumption.

  “No common hoodlums would try to rob a poor monk.”

  “They weren’t out to rob me, just kill me.”

  “Exactly! and why? They must have some reason to hate you.”

  “Well, they seemed to be common hoodlums, they had no reason to hate me, so they must have been hired.”