Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

by Walter Michael Miller, Jr.

  “I know. That’s why I won’t tell them to do anything, until they get over that idea of ownership.”

  Nimmy had no trouble recruiting a bodyguard for the cardinal. They all wanted to come.

  “We can’t have that,” he told them. “We’ll be traveling with forged papers. Whoever comes will have to hide his weapons in a bedroll and wear a cassock.”

  Wooshin had told him Qum-Do was the best warrior among them, but he chose Weh-Geh, the smallest, whose skin was almost light brown. Only his eyes distinguished him from the local population.

  By the time the cardinal’s sealed papers and a letter from the Pope arrived, Brownpony was ready to leave the monastery and travel east to the Province and then to Hannegan City. The letter told him very little about Hultor’s raid, except that it had happened and the Pope was being blamed. The cardinal penned a reply, begging the Pope not to think of abandoning the papacy until Brownpony returned from the Imperial Court. The message was posted in Sanly Bowitts, along with the abbey’s mail, which was picked up by a messenger every ten days.

  Then the three men, dressed as monks, left for the Province.

  Soon after their departure, two more travelers arrived at Leibowitz Abbey. One was an old Jew on his way to the Mesa of Last Resort; he was leading two young nanny goats with blue heads, full udders, and swollen abdomens. Accompanying him was a young woman with bright blond hair, only a little less pregnant than the goats. The old Jew would accept no hospitality beyond a drink of water, a few biscuits, and some cold young mutton. The girl had escaped from captivity by her family, and demanded to see the father of her unborn child.

  “They left two days ago. He told the cardinal you were dead,” said Olshuen.

  “He thinks I’m dead, but the cardinal knows better.”

  The abbot gritted his teeth and offered grudging hospitality, although the guesthouse was half full of alien warriors and a gunrunner; there were no separate facilities for women, and the monk she was seeking had departed.

  “You can stay in a locked cell,” he told her, “with a night pot. You’ll be safe enough.”

  “Who keeps the key?”

  Olshuen thought for a moment. Might she not come out and molest the men, as well as the other way around?

  “Oh, well, I’ll keep it myself,” he said at last.

  “Locked in by you?” She glanced up at three monks regarding her curiously from the top of the parapet wall. Grinning wickedly, she pulled up the front of her leather skirt to waist level. Under it she wore nothing. With her swollen abdomen and her bright blond beaver, she did a bump and grind just for a horrified abbot, dropped the skirt, turned on her heel, and marched away with a wiggling ass toward Sanly Bowitts. Someone cheered. The abbot glared up at the parapet, but the three monks had vanished. Soon a man with a mule and a wagonload of sheep manure stopped to give her a ride. Some minutes later he picked up the old Jew, and went on with the goats tied behind the tailgate.

  “Blacktooth, Blacktooth,” Olshuen muttered in disgust, and retired to the chapel, where he fell on his knees and tested his pulse before praying. A monk who began to pray, without first quieting heart and mind, prayed badly. He said a rapid paternoster with a rapid pulse and went back to his office.

  The journey from Leibowitz Abbey to the eastern boundary of Jackrabbit territory would take nearly two months. Önmu Kun had provided the cardinal with a list of Churches whose pastors and their flocks were of mostly Nomad ancestry, and to whom Kun had sold guns. Some of them were also on the cardinal’s list of correspondents with SEEC. As long as they visited only such Churches, their identity was secure. But the cardinal wanted to pass through settlements close to the telegraph line, so that he might pick up news from Valana and Hannegan City. They traveled far enough north so that the Bay Ghost River could be forded without swimming the horses, and also without passing an imperial checkpoint. Their journey thereafter was plotted on a map from Church to Church, settlement to settlement. It was grim dry land, for they traveled mostly to the north of fertile hill country.

  It was at one such settlement at the old town of Yellow that Brownpony learned the extent of the offenses of War Sharf Bråm against the Qæsach dri Vørdar, and of the former’s ritual death. He had never met Eltür Bråm (Demon Light), who was said to be Hultor’s fraternal twin, younger by two hours. A Jackrabbit priest named Steps-on-Snake who knew the Grasshopper family told the cardinal that Eltür was less belligerent, less impulsive, but perhaps more cunning than his twin, whom he had worshiped. His election by the grandmothers surprised Steps-on-Snake, who said Eltür would certainly avenge his brother.

  From the Grasshopper, Filpeo Harq had demanded the surrender as criminals of all warriors involved in the massacre, and the surrender too of fifty Grasshopper children to be held as hostages insuring against future raids, and the payment of half the Grasshopper’s total wealth in cattle and horses. The alternative was said to be total war. But the Imperial Mayor’s forces at present lacked logistics to support a dug-in infantry force on the open Plains, although Texark was working on it. Filpeo could only send out his cavalry to harass and be decimated. He would be ready to fight when he could occupy and hold territory. It was his continued occupation and holding of Grasshopper lands that left him little to spare for enlarging his lands in the west. If Texark’s fighters had lost sixty-six out of ninety-nine men in a battle, the survivors would not celebrate. “It took dirty, heathen Nomads to act thus,” the priest said wryly. For the foreseeable future the war against the Grasshopper was going to be fitful and opportunistic, but cruel.

  The Province south of the Nady Ann was ruled by a proconsul commanding an army of police whose obvious and age-old job was to protect the property of the rich from the greed of the Jackrabbit poor. Blacktooth thought of the guns Önmu Kun was bringing into the territory. Lest some of them fall into Texark hands, they were not the most advanced weapons in the New Jerusalem arsenal, and it seemed to him doubtful that the Jackrabbit was yet capable of revolution, although he had heard talk in Yellow of Jackrabbit bandits, motherless ones, in the hill country far to the south. “Bandit” was a Texark political term.

  One fact to Filpeo’s advantage was that the Lord of the Three Hordes, Holy Little Bear Madness, was pressing the new Grasshopper sharf to avoid battle. The only permissible attack was a counterattack. Whether Demon Light was more loyal to his lord, the Sharf of Sharfs, than his brother had been was an open question. News of Bråm’s raid had caused exultation in the Province, coupled with rage at the Grasshopper grandmothers for his ritual death.

  All these things Brownpony learned from the Jackrabbit priest at Yellow, where there was an interesting crater nearly as large as Meldown, but inhabited by living things. Steps-on-Snake was in close touch with a Grasshopper Nomad who lived nearby with the family of his Jackrabbit wife. News from his own family and the horde this husband picked up from a man who lived on the Nady Ann and watched Grasshopper and Wilddog signalmen on hilltops beyond the river. The signals were whole-body movements, many rhythmic, and the movements included those of his closely reined mount; such signals were broad enough to be seen and understood at great distance. After such a broadcast, Grasshopper news took several days to reach Yellow.

  And so Brownpony’s host, Father Steps-on-Snake, was in touch with the Grasshopper, and also with a Texark sergeant who overheard all the official news at a nearby telegraph terminal, and apparently decided for himself as to the sensitivity of information.

  “How can you trust the sergeant?” the cardinal wondered.

  “His girlfriend is one of my parishioners, and she brings him to my Church every Sunday. I trust her because she likes him less than he likes her. He is too simple to dissemble. But no, I am not prepared to believe him always and every time.”

  “Is there any way you can get a message to the Pope in Valana?”

  “No,” said Steps-on-Snake, but hesitated. “It would be a dangerous thing to try.”

  “I need to try danger
ous things.”

  “It would put a parishioner in danger.”

  “The girl?”

  “Yes, and the corporal, and myself.”

  “But you know a way?”

  “She sent a message once to a relative in the west by coding it and getting the boyfriend to inject it anonymously into the stream of traffic.”

  “And she could do it again?”

  “Don’t press me about it tonight,” Father Steps-on-Snake answered crossly. “I’ll see what can be done.”

  “The Pope must be persuaded not to resign.”

  “And a message from Your Eminence would persuade him?”

  “I can’t promise it.”

  “Neither can I, but I’ll talk to her.”

  In three days, the message was sent. Although it said only, “Do nothing until I see Filpeo Harq,” this tiny nugget was concealed somehow in a few hundred words of schoolgirl correspondence, and Brownpony had no idea how the addressee was identified or what the method of delivery would be.

  “All I can say is that it’s better than not trying” was all he could say.

  He was reluctant to hurry away from the town of Yellow, because this was as close as their journey would take them to the Nady Ann River, across which came news of events on the Plains to the north. Father Steps-on-Snake was a man knowledgeable about the ongoing interaction between civilization and the Nomadic societies of the great grasslands. He had been born during the conquest, and remembered when his father had gone to join rebels in the hill country to the south. When his father was killed, he, like Brownpony more than a generation later, found himself in the custody of nuns for schooling. Later, as a young man, he had gone north with a Wilddog friend, but he lacked the talents of warrior and herdsman, and thus found no family willing to adopt him. He considered joining a band of the motherless ones, but the nuns had given him a sense of sin, so he returned to the Province and became a priest.

  Now he was delighted to accept Cardinal Brownpony as his spiritual leader instead of Cardinal Benefez, and his sense of sin did not object to allowing his parishioners to acquire forbidden firearms from Önmu Kun. He even promised to encourage the development of a secret local militia among those he knew to be loyal both to the Church and to a Nomad heritage.

  Probably he knew little more about Nomad culture than did Blacktooth and Brownpony, but he was seventy-five years old and saw things from a different viewpoint, which seemed global and almost detached from the passion of his Jackrabbit loyalty.

  Father Steps-on-Snake had the most comprehensive view of the Nomad situation any of his three guests had ever heard. Much of it they already knew, in fragments. But the septuagenarian pastor put the fragments together in a larger picture. He was very disturbed by the raid of Hultor Bråm, and not just for the moral reasons of a priest.

  The dead sharf was not stupid. He had believed in his own imminent death, for the Weejus had prophesied it to him after his ordeal in the pit. His raid, according to this Jackrabbit priest, was a message to none other than Cardinal Brownpony himself, right here in this rectory, to Brownpony whom Bråm had recognized as the significant figure of power in the Church at Valana.

  The cardinal shook his head in apparent discomfort with the idea, but Nimmy noticed he made no denial. “The Grasshopper is always at war,” he murmured instead.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It’s just something one of his warriors said to me when we rode south from Meldown to meet the Pope.”

  Steps-on-Snake insisted that Bråm took the war party all the way to the gates of Rome to show the cardinal (and, of course, the Pope) that the brunt of any war would be borne by the Grasshopper, not the Wilddog, and that the Valana papacy was wasting its energy in courting Chür Ösle Høngan. The “success” of the raid was also a demonstration to Filpeo Harq that his opening to the west was more apparent than real, given certain advantages possessed by the Grasshopper. As he listened to this provincial Jackrabbit father, Blacktooth began to admire the late Grasshopper sharf for his bravery and steadfastness of purpose, in spite of his murderous bent. Again, Nimmy wondered if Bråm might be his remote relative.

  Steps-on-Snake summarized the military, cultural, and historical situation as he saw it:

  One advantage which the Nomad warrior had over the Texark cavalryman was that, as everyone knew, the warrior had grown up on horseback. It is commonplace that a tribe with no previous experience of horses, upon first seeing mounted warriors of an alien nation, see the horse and rider together as a single strange animal. Then they learn to see the phenomenon as two. But if the warriors of the alien nation happened to be Plains Nomads, the first impression would be the correct one. The Nomad horse and the Nomad rider together are one. When at work or at war, a mounted man is not called by his own name, but by the name of his horse, and on formal occasions by the name of his horse and the name of his horse’s breeder, often the man’s wife’s mother. The man was, after all, only the controller of the horse, in war or at work with cattle.

  Among the things one first noticed about a Nomad encampment, temporary or permanent, was that there were more females to be seen than males, unless one happened to come on a feast day when most of the warrior herdsmen returned from the open plains, where they usually lived with the half-wild cattle. When the herdsmen came home, they appeared almost as wild strangers in their own camp or village, where the old men, young boys, the maimed or disabled lived and sometimes worked with the women. At least the boys worked. Older boys became horse wranglers. Younger boys tended the remuda and tried to ride the partly broken horses. The old men tended to feel that their deeds of past glory entitled them to nonproductive retirement in comfort while the boys and women cooked, cleaned, carried water, mended, made clay pots, and tended the horses. Occasionally, a Weejus woman would use her supernatural powers to induce a retired old warrior to work, as long as the task was not demeaning, but the veterans were a lazy lot, usually protected in their retirement by multiple affiliations to the Bear Spirit. Sometimes they redeemed themselves by offering bursts of healing wisdom when the young men were split in angry controversy.

  The average herdsman-warrior north of the Nady Ann was still illiterate, and spoke only the dialect of his horde, but his mother was Weejus, or his grandmother, and was probably learning to read herself, and might even be teaching his younger brothers and sisters. Although lacking in letters or a second language, the average Nomad now imagined in his mind a much larger world than his great-granduncle had imagined. He knew that the Earth did not drop off beyond the mountains, and that there were people who lived beyond the Great River to the east, and that they were just as dangerous and despicable as the human herbivores that lived on this side of the river. He even suspected that the great breeding pit of the Wild Horse Woman was not really the Navel of the World at all, and that his own grandmother’s breeding pit, if she had one, was not necessarily lethal to a male human who dared enter it, although staying out of it was probably better for one’s luck. He was not quite as much a Nomadic purist as his oldest uncles. He used the tools of citizens, wore citizen’s cloth, drank citizen’s liquor, and often ate the citizen’s beans and corn if he didn’t have to grow his own, as Steps-on-Snake remarked with a chuckle.

  The Earth was made for growing grass, for cattle and deer and antelope and rabbits and prairie dogs and horses to live on, in turn to be lived on by men and wilddogs and several kinds of cats and buzzards. The animal hierarchy of the Plains was ruled by three overlords in a predatory partnership: men, horses, and dogs. Also by their women, mares, and bitches. Things were much simpler on the Plains than in the country of the growers of corn and beans. One might feel sorrow for farmers, as one felt sorrow for one’s own prey, for the Nomad could see that the farmers were actually the prey of other men: soldiers, police, priests, and tax collectors. They were bound to one piece of land, while the Nomad owned the whole world beneath Empty Sky. That indeed was one of the Nomad’s ancient names for himself:
the Nephew of the Empty Sky. Empty Sky, of course, was a person, but also he was just-look-up-at-it: empty sky. Nowhere but on the Plains from the back of a horse can a man see the Earth’s vastness, unless it be from the masthead of an ocean schooner, but the Nomad was not sure he believed in oceans. He knew things came in opposites, so where he was surrounded by a semi-arid ocean of grass, to imagine an ocean of water was just a natural thought. But not all natural thoughts were real. Since his defeat of his great uncles by the second Hannegan’s soldiers and the Hannegan’s diseased cattle, this new Nomad had become a skeptic. He did not believe everything his uncles or his Weejus woman told him, unless he was getting ready to be a Bear Spirit man. But the average Nomad did not become a Bear Spirit man, and was skeptical of their powers. Among the Wilddog Horde, it was not a rare occurrence for a sick Nomad to visit a mountain town to find a doctor of a different tradition, especially for surgery. Usually the sick ones were young, but sometimes a half-willing older patient would be dragged to a mountain doctor by her younger kin. More than a few Bear Spirit men had worked for a time in the hospitals of the Church or the Empire, learning as much as they could of this different kind of healing. They learned to wash their hands. They learned which drugs to steal for use at home.

  Then there were the myths of origin, of the birth of this grassy Earth and its true People, out of an ancient cataclysm.

  During the primordial time of the great death, there was fire and ice. A few animals and a few men arose out of that terrible death. Then, after that primordial time, came the Old Time. In the Old Time, there arose a conspiracy among man, dog, and horse to rule the furry, ungoverned cattle that ranged freely on the Plains, that holy country of Empty Sky and the Sacred Mare. The alliance, the Man-Horse-Dog-Thing, controlled the furry herd to the herd’s advantage, usually against the herd’s will, driving them to where men knew the grass grew greener. The cattle got something from their predators in return for their flesh and hide and bone; they got Man-Horse-Dog’s protection against wolves and large cats, but they remained Man-Horse-Dog’s freely running prey, shot down from horseback, and the horses were superior horses.